Yale Daily News - Week of Feb. 11, 2022

T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · VOL. CXLIV, NO. 12 · yaledailynews.com

All is golden for Nathan Chen ’24

SEARCH FOR NEW DEAN

Salovey forms committee for Chun successor

BY SARAH COOK AND ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTERS

Quad King ends Beijing Olympics run with a flourish

The search for Yale College’s next dean is officially underway.

University President Peter Salovey announced the members of the nine-person search committee for Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun’s replacement in a Wednesday afternoon email to Yale College community members. The update comes two weeks after the Jan. 27 announcement that Chun — who served as Yale College dean for one five-year term — would step down at the end of the academic year to return to full-time teaching and research. The search committee includes two University administrators and one undergraduate student, as well as six Yale College faculty members, many of whom have experience in various administrative posts. Head of Trumbull College and psychology profes-

BY HAMERA SHABBIR STAFF REPORTER Nathan Chen ’24 is golden.

Taking to the ice last in the men’s singles figure skating competition Thursday at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, the statistics and data science major proved himself to be the Quad King, three-time world champion and now, Olympic gold medal winner.

Chen capped off his record-breaking Olympic run with a gold medal in men’s singles skating, adding to a silver medal won in the team event. He first took to the ice in Beijing by lifting his team to the top of the men’s singles short program while setting a personal best of 111.71. Not satisfied with that result, Chen proceeded to break the world record in the men’s singles short program, recording yet another personal best at 113.97. On Thursday, Chen capped off his Olympic run by earning 218.63 points in the free skate, launching himself to a combined score of 332.60 and first-place finish.

“I mean it’s a whirlwind right now — everything is happening so fast,” Chen said to NBC after his gold medal winning performance. “That program is really fun to skate. At the end I really just had a blast out there and I am really grateful. When I finished the last jump, I thought I was pretty close [to the win].”

Skating to a medley from the Elton John biopic “Rocketman” and wearing his nebulous Vera Wang costume, Chen opened his performance

SEE DEAN PAGE 4

WEEKEND COURTESY OF U.S. FIGURE SKATING

Chen capped off his record-breaking Olympic run with a gold medal in men’s singles skating. with his noted quad jumps. He strung together a quad lutz followed by a quad toe loop-euler-single flip followed by a triple axel and triple lutz, triple toe-loop combination. Chen established his proficiency at jumps before launching into an artistic dance break, a smile painted wide across

ADMISSIONS

his face as the crowd cheered. He ended the performance at the center of the rink as delegations across the stadium leapt out of their seats into a standing ovation.

The Love Issue

Read the extra-long edition of our weekly culture insert for articles about long-distancing, the trials of dating apps and the history of love at Yale.

SEE WKND PAGE B1

SEE CHEN PAGE 4

COVID-19

Suit likely to accuse Yale Cracks emerge in isolation policy of need-aware admissions

BY LUCY HODGMAN STAFF REPORTER

Students who test positive for COVID-19 and live in single bedrooms have been asked to isolate in their rooms as Yale approaches isolation capacity, Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd announced in a Feb. 9 email to students. The enactment of the policy, however, has not been seamless — two students who tested positive on Feb. 10 and live in double bedrooms told the News that they were asked to isolate in place with their COVID-negative roomates.

On Jan. 13, the University announced the possibility of the isolate-in-place policy as a contingency plan should isoSEE ISOLATION PAGE 5

iso

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS JESSIE CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

To win the case, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the schools in question considered need in admissions.

BY JORDAN FITZGERALD STAFF REPORTER Plaintiffs in an ongoing suit alleging that 16 major universities colluded to limit financial aid are likely to argue in an updated complaint set to be filed on Feb. 15 that Yale has considered applicants’ financial status in the admissions process, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

The 568 Presidents Group is a consortium of 16 elite universities, including Yale, that works together to determine formu-

Cross Campus

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1976.

A Silliman College junior, Sam Betchelder, drafts a proposal suggesting the installation of a digital card/key system for opening gates and doors on campus.

The University also considers hiring undergraduates to work as security guards.

las used to calculate need-based financial aid packages for students. On Jan. 9, five alumni of the universities filed a lawsuit accusing the group of violating antitrust law by breaching Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits activity that constrains competition.

“Under a true need-blind admissions system, all students would be admitted without regard to the financial circumstances of the student or student’s family,” SEE ADMISSIONS PAGE 4

Inside The News RESIDENTS PROTEST METHADONE CLINIC PROPOSAL PAGE 13 UNIVERSITY

U. weighs structure of YSPH

BY SARAH COOK STAFF REPORTER

With University officials currently weighing whether the Yale School of Public Health should remain under the financial and administrative purview of the School of Medicine, new data from the school’s reaccreditation process reveals that it has expanded significantly over the last four years.

The School of Public Health reaccreditation is currently pending and follows a seven-year review process that shows

a growth in faculty and student population at the school as well as an increase in faculty productivity and teaching quality. The data shows a 105 percent growth in students from the 2017-18 school year to the 2021-22 school year. It also shows a 23 percent increase in faculty and 42 percent increase in staff over the same time frame. The findings come as community members continue to call for SPH’s financial and administrative autonomy from the School of Medicine — a possibility SEE PUBLIC HEALTH PAGE 5

GOOD LIFE

BLACK HOLE

HEDGEHOG

PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY

PAGE 6 SCITECH

PAGE 7 ARTS

Silliman Head of College Laurie Santos announced her decision to take a one-year leave to address burnout.

Yale researchers discovered early black holes which could explain the gaps in myriad current theories about the formation of the universe.

Yale Cabaret opened its first spring play “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” on Thursday.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 2

OPINION

E

GUEST COLUMNIST SARAH FENG

GUE ST COLUMNIST LAUREL TURNER

Making new fairytales

Life after

very year the snow falls over campus, and every year we tell ourselves we are the first to see it, like children stepping into the world of a fairytale forest. At night, during the snowstorm, my friend cooks us Korean soup for Lunar New Year, bowls steaming with slivers of seaweed. His suitemate plays the electric piano. “Somebody Like You,” someone is the first to suggest, and the romance of it is drowned out by the chatter of ice cubes clinking against cocktails. It should be a perfect day. It should be a perfect week.

One girl leans forward, gazing at the piano –– her smile reminds me of a slice of pomegranate. In this room, sometimes you catch falsity in others, the strained plastic of interactions, and you wonder why it is that you feel so small when others’ eyes float past you. It’s because when we feel replaceable, we feel impermanent –– we are thrown from our shells of unique existence and told that so many of us exist that each of us are fleeting to others around us.

It’s natural to want to feel unique, like there is nobody quite like us in the world. We’ve been told it since we were children, and in high school, Gladwell’s theory that talent is a self-fulfilling prophecy held true for many of us. We realized a small spark existed with a handful of subjects, and we continued to nurture it, cupping our hands around it and looking at the light. Especially as creatives, we convince ourselves by arbitrary measures of external validation that what we have to say is truly special.

There’s always that doubt that what you write is a parroting of the texts you’ve read before and that moments of inspiration you’ve felt are only brief moments of desperation, disillusionment and tears.

Walter Benjamin writes it best in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Consider a photograph, right when it was invented — glossy, beautiful, but easily reproducible, accessible to those who were not there when it was created, in reach for anyone who desires it. Copies can spring up easily, and even the possibility of copies that mimic the original deprive it of that aura, as Benjamin calls it, that follows an object and its natural history. Pried from its aura, the object loses the perception of authenticity, becomes a mimicry of itself. Individuality, Benjamin writes, is permanence — and reproducibility is transience. Why clutch a printed photograph so closely to your chest and prize it behind a glass case when its true self resides in dusty pixels of the camera?

It’s a sequence of how to become close to people at Yale: to match them, to coax them out of their world and into the liquid membrane of yours. In that process, I often find myself emulating others. I like to think there is a concrete Sarah, but in reality there’s very little of me that no one else can have. So much of writing is bleeding together all the texts that you’ve read in your mind and fus-

ing them together in your sleep, then writing as you wake up. Isn’t the same true for people? Should I be surprised that I’m nothing unique?

I ask myself this sitting in my dorm room at 2 a.m., staring at an illustrated book of botany that my best friend gave me for my 18th birthday, the fungi and lichens spreading their buttery-white webs beneath the stems of the red toadstools. I think about the lengths we go to in order to feel like a part of something and what it means to be unique. This past Halloween, my friends and I Ubered to an address of a Halloween night market and accidentally found ourselves in a church full of Freemasons, monkey skulls and brains floating in jars of yellowed formaldehyde. As we were leaving, they gave us flyers about joining the organization. The three things required of us were shockingly minimal: a will to volunteer, a belief in something — anything, regardless of religion — and the desire to be part of a brotherhood. I was shocked at how much I empathized with the desire to feel like a part of something.

Despite how hard I try to convince myself that being one of hundreds at Yale is liberating, it’s disillusioning to think that there are others exactly like you but better— glossy and intelligent, a knife curvier and sharper than you can ever be.

I look at that open botanical book by my bed. Whoever illustrated these pages knew that their time painstakingly spent etching out the grooves of the bird’s nest fungus – like a cluster of blueberries inside of a deformed lemon-like lid – understood that very few people would see these drawings, yet their delight and precision in capturing the fine details are what lend the plants such fairytale-like beauty. The concept of diagramming nature isn’t new; biology textbooks have always done this, and yet the ones in these artistic books seem to be filled with a devotion that is rare: transcending the desire to be seen.

They’re illustrating the same undergrowth of a forest, yet they can twist it into something magical, infusing past knowledge with evident joy.

Uniqueness doesn’t arise when you consciously try to be unique.

Uniqueness arises from seeing the world and the people who populate it as unique, from finding authenticity in each of your actions. It comes from seeing without cynicism, without flattening people and ideas into patterns, without seeing other paths as templates to follow or subvert. Perhaps uniqueness is a construct that is perpetuated by our can-do mentality, painted as a label to acquire rather than an identity to grow into. When I write, not many people may read it, and I’m using the same words others have used before me, but everything I place on the page is a breadcrumb that leads me home to what I really mean — and that’s enough.

SARAH FENG is a first year in Trumbull College. Contact her at sarah.feng@yale.edu.

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COPYRIGHT 2022 — VOL. CXLIV, NO. 12

Content warning: This article contains references to suicide.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.

Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support.

To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7 and confidential.

To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session online. On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290.

Students who are interested in taking a medical withdrawal should reach out to their residential college dean.

Additional resources are available in a guide compiled by the Yale College Council here.

T

he Yale Daily News recently published two op-eds railing against Yale’s arrival quarantine measures. Each was born out of a shortsighted misunderstanding of Yale’s policies, and neither merits much refutation, as the criticisms made in each became largely irrelevant after classes resumed in person this Monday. The hyper-privileged disdain for immunocompromised students and faculty found in these articles is a familiar sentiment at Yale. What is novel, and what made the latter of these two articles particularly disturbing to much of Yale’s campus, is that the News allowed the invoking of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum’s suicide to agitate for policies which would jeopardize the safety of immunocompromised students and faculty.

I am a disabled Yale student and a survivor of suicide. I am a trans woman; for years I have been friends with and mentored young trans people, both at Yale and beyond, who have struggled with suicidal ideation. I believe these two op-eds betray a fundamental misunderstanding of community health, mental health and suicide at Yale.

Yale’s mental health difficulties have very little to do with two-week quarantines and everything to do with structural problems at Yale Mental Health & Counseling.

THOUGH NOT EXPLICITLY WRITTEN INTO THE UNDERGRADUATE REGULATIONS, IT IS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD AMONG THE AFFECTED STUDENTS I COME ACROSS THAT YALE’S POLICY SURROUNDING SEVERELY MENTALLY ILL STUDENTS IS TO FORCE THEM TO WITHDRAW. Though not explicitly written into the Undergraduate Regulations, it is almost universally understood among the affected students I come across that Yale’s policy surrounding severely mentally ill students is to force them to withdraw. Anyone who attempts suicide is forced to withdraw automatically — as I was, though I ultimately withdrew voluntarily. Those who get close are pressured to do so, regardless of the student’s financial, familial and medical security. The criticism of this policy has been central to the activism surrounding Rachael’s death; it has not yet meaningfully changed. Across experiences, this policy severely damages students’ ability to access

adequate care and, as I know from my own experience, from speaking with other suicidal Yale students, and from reflecting on the activism surrounding Rachael’s death, can drive students closer to suicide.

The University’s public denial of these realities rings hollow for students struggling with suicidal ideation, who must reckon with several cruel Catch-22’s: those who rely on financial aid to give them health insurance cannot disclose their suicidal ideation without risking losing their access to health care, those who are forced to withdraw must pay for two college credits without any financial aid before they are able to return to Yale, and those with chronic mental health issues who are forced to withdraw more than once are all but barred from the institution. Those who remain are forced to deal with Yale Mental Health & Counseling, which has a fraction of the funding and resources needed to be effective. Melanie Boyd once stipulated that involuntary withdrawals were “exceedingly rare” — I suspect this to be, in part, because the students who would be forced to withdraw involuntarily are too terrified to disclose their suicidality, continuing on without receiving adequate care.

I know students who face this reality every day.

I sometimes wonder if I did not have parents who were able to afford a therapist and psychiatrist outside Yale Health if I would still be alive.

Before my attempt, I was not taken seriously by the Yale administration. My parents, not long before my attempt, contacted the administration expressing their concern and were told there was nothing they could do short of calling the police.

Since my attempt, the administration has treated me with grace. They respond to my emails quickly; they don’t argue with me when I ask for accommodations. The subtext — please, please don’t kill yourself. I am thankful for this attitude. It has allowed me to access the resources I need. I only wish I was treated with this attitude beforehand. This discernment is only human and not unique to Yale; I was not taken seriously by my psychiatrist before my attempt, either. But I suspect that on a policy level this is pragmatic — thousands of debilitatingly depressed students generate less bad press than one dead one.

I do not mean to belittle, for any student on this campus, the trauma of the death of a peer or to discount that every person at this University is at serious risk of developing severe mental illness. But the “Yale Experience” crowd is simply not the vulnerable population at Yale when it comes to mental health. It is the immunocompromised students who have to fear serious injury or death when they realize the boy in a quarter-zip sitting next to them in lecture has his mask beneath his nose. It is first-generation, low-income students who know that they cannot get adequate mental health care without risking being kicked out of Yale. Only students who are massively institutionally supported

by Yale and completely unaware of it could think that two weeks of Zoom classes for the sake of their peers amounts to oppression.

When Sapre writes, “And what lies on the other side of the scale?

Happiness. The Yale Experience,” half of campus rolls its eyes. When Schorr deadpans, “Don’t be selfish, they tell us, you have a responsibility to protect the immunocompromised and the community,” half of campus flinches.

Yale’s arrival quarantine measures were critically important for both the community’s physical and mental health. On Jan. 14, the first day students returned to campus, Connecticut had 8,783 new cases — four times as many cases as the initial spike in 2020. On Feb. 4, Connecticut had 1,269 new cases, approximately the same as early December last year. Even though Yale’s policies are among the most aggressive in the nation, they still put disabled and immunocompromised students at risk. The crowded, unmasked dining halls with inconsistent carry-out options terrify high-risk students, who cannot be treated as an anomaly — between 19 to 50 percent of non-elderly Americans have some type of pre-existing medical condition. Even for healthy students, risks remain. Death is not the only consequence of infection — healthy, vaccinated friends of mine with no prior immunological prob-

lems have developed debilitatingly intense long-COVID-19 symptoms with no clear end date after an infection. Were Yale to open in person two weeks earlier, with eight times the cases, this might be the fate of a small swath of the class. It is nothing short of cruel that students are not willing to spend two weeks with mild restrictions to avoid this.

As we near the anniversary of Rachael’s death and brace ourselves for its grief — all of us, including the Yale administration — and as we enter the third year of a global pandemic, I urge each of us to take on the grace of my failed suicide. In the moment the doctor pulls back the curtain and tells you you’re not going to die, you are given an ultimatum.

You are too weak and too contemptuous in the moment to realize it has been given to you, to realize the command — dissolve — but it has already begun, however many years it may take. In the stale fluorescent light of the room, in the weight of the blankets, you are caught. It is easy to sink into the bed, to sink into yourself; it is easier to fall asleep. But to sleep only as much as you need, and to wake up afterwards, requires a profound dissolution of self. You cannot leave that room as yourself, so you must leave as someone else. Do not hide from this; there is strength in this. There is strength in the ability to admit when we have entrenched ourselves in ways of being which do not serve us.

IN THIS PROFOUND TRAUMA, IN ITS TOTALIZING FRAGILITY, IS THE SAME POWER TO DISSOLVE ONESELF GRANTED

BY ACTUALLY SURVIVING A SUICIDE — THE WILL TO REJECT THE “YALE EXPERIENCE,” FOR BOTH THE BOY WITH HIS MASK BENEATH HIS NOSE AND FOR THE YALE ADMINISTRATION, TO TURN AWAY FROM WHAT IS STALE AND COMFORTABLE AND TO BUILD SOMETHING COMPASSIONATE AND NEW. I believe that, for the able-bodied students for whom the phrase “The Yale Experience” does not immediately elicit a cringe, the terror instilled by confronting a student’s suicide is genuinely novel.

The natural impulse of such a student, when so violently forced to confront that their sphere of comfort and privilege is a farce, is to cling to what they have known, to dig their feet into the ground. But in this profound trauma, in its totalizing fragility, is the same power to dissolve oneself granted by actually surviving a suicide — the will to reject the “Yale Experience,” for both the boy with his mask beneath his nose and for the Yale Administration, to turn away from what is stale and comfortable and to build something compassionate and new.

LAUREL TURNER (she/they/he) is sophomore in Silliman College majoring in English and math. Her email is laurel.turner@yale.edu.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

NEWS

“When I have bad days, I just eat lots of chocolate ice cream and dance to the ‘Lion King’ soundtrack. It’s really odd, but it’s true.” BLAKE LIVELY AMERICAN ACTRESS

Salovey unveils committee to assess Yale’s gift policy

COURTESY OF ROBBIE SHORT

Salovey detailed the make-up of new committee, which will review current gift procedures and suggest amendments.

BY SARAH COOK, PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH AND ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTERS University President Peter Salovey announced on Friday the formation of a committee to review Yale’s gift policy and suggest reforms to safeguard academic freedom.

The committee is made up of five faculty members and three senior administrative officials. It will be chaired by Julia Adams, a

professor of sociology, and will complete its work by the end of the spring semester, according to Salovey. According to Salovey’s email, the committee will be charged with reviewing Yale’s current gift acceptance procedures and recommending potential modifications to them. He noted that the committee will make recommendations as to how to communicate relevant policies to the faculty as well as to how a faculty member can voice con-

cerns about specific gifts. Still, it is not clear whether the committee will have the power to alter Yale’s policy.

Adams will be joined by two colleagues from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Paul Turner, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Julie Zimmerman, professor of chemical and environmental engineering, environment and epidemiology. Also on the committee are two faculty from professional

schools: Amy Wrzesniewski, professor of management, and Erica Herzog, professor of medicine and pathology. The three administrators are Cynthia Carr, the University’s deputy general counsel, Lloyd Suttle, vice provost for academic resources, and Eugénie Gentry, associate vice president and campaign director for development.

“As I wrote to you last October, academic freedom is fundamental to this university and to me, and I want to make sure that Yale is as clear as possible about this bedrock principle in its engagement with donors,” Salovey wrote in the Feb. 4 email to faculty. “This committee provides us an opportunity to ensure that our practices concerning gifts align completely with our unequivocal commitment to the free inquiry of the faculty.”

The committee’s formation comes three months after history professor Beverly Gage resigned as director of the Grand Strategy program due to donor influence in the program’s curriculum.

Gage’s resignation prompted faculty to voice concerns about academic freedom on campus, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate issued a resolution later that month calling on Salovey and campus administrators to form a temporary committee of faculty and administrators to evaluate the issue.

Chair of the FAS Senate Valerie Horsley praised the committee’s formation and said that Adams would make an “excellent chair.”

“I am very excited about the composition of the committee,” Horsley wrote in an email to the News. “Several of the members are colleagues that I have deep respect for their work and their sound perspectives on University policy.”

Still, the committee does not include any members of the FAS Senate, nor any professors

from Yale Law School, nor from the history department, where recent concerns about academic freedom arose.

In a subsequent email to the News, Salovey elaborated on the composition of the committee, including his decision to select Adams to serve as its chair.

“This is a university-wide committee and the committee’s composition reflects that,” Salovey wrote. “Second, I wanted a relatively small committee so that it could meet as frequently as necessary to get the work done this semester given the importance of the issue.”

He added that he asked Adams to chair the group for a series of reasons, including her experience as a researcher and educator, her time spent in the provost’s office and the support she has from the FAS Senate, whose leadership nominated her to the committee.

Salovey previously told the News that the committee will not be responsible for overseeing individual gifts to the University, but rather will provide clarity on the University’s policies. Like Horsley, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Gendler praised the new committee’s membership.

“President Salovey has appointed an outstanding committee from across the university to advise him on this important question,” Gendler wrote. “Its members are wise, experienced university citizens with deep integrity and wide-ranging expertise.”

The University’s last report on academic freedom, the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale, more commonly known as the Woodward Report, was issued in 1974.

Contact SARAH COOK at sarah.cook@yale.edu , PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH at philip.mousavizadeh@yale.edu and ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@yale.edu .

Silliman HOC Laurie Santos to take one-year leave

BY LUCY HODGMAN AND EVAN GORELICK STAFF REPORTERS Laurie Santos is practicing what she preaches.

The head of Silliman College, whose tremendously popular course “Psychology and the Good Life” focuses on making decisions to meaningfully improve individual wellbeing, will take a one-year leave from Yale to address her own feelings of burnout.

Santos will step away from her roles as psychology professor and Head of Silliman College on July 1, according to a Monday afternoon email she sent to the Silliman community. For the 2022-23 academic year, Arielle Baskin-Sommers, a Silliman faculty fellow, college adviser and a professor of psychology, will serve as acting Head of College.

“I teach my students about the importance of time affluence — feeling like you have some free time — and I simply wasn’t prioritizing that in my own life,” Santos told the News. “If one of my Sillimanders had told me that they were feeling as time famished as I have been these days, I would have demanded that they take something off their plate ASAP. It felt hypocritical not to follow the same advice myself, even though I know I’ll miss Silliman and all my students terribly while I’m away next year.”

Santos will continue serving as Head through the remainder of this academic year, and will return from her leave in May 2023 to celebrate the class of 2023’s commencement.

“Psychology and the Good Life” is the University’s most popular course in its over 300year history. Santos also founded the Good Life Center in her time at Yale, a wellness space which she does not directly oversee and which will continue to operate in its Silliman College and Schwarzman Center locations.

Outside of Yale, Santos’ podcast, “The Happiness Lab,” has reached 65 million downloads, and she appeared last year in a campaign for Chanel.

In a Monday email to the Silliman community following San-

tos’ initial announcement, University President Peter Salovey and Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun wished Santos well on her leave and announced that Baskin-Sommers would step in as acting Head for the 2022-23 academic year.

“I am so excited about serving as the acting HoC in Silliman for the upcoming academic year,” Baskin-Sommers told the News. “I look forward to continuing the great work of HoC Santos and contributing to the vitality of the College.”

In a second email to Silliman students following the announcement that Baskin-Sommers would take over, Santos commended the choice, writing that she “honestly couldn’t imagine” someone better suited to take care of the Silliman community during her absence.

In the email announcing her departure, Santos explained that the biggest commitment she made to herself when she agreed to become Silliman head in 2016 was to serve as a role model for students in the Silliman community. Although Santos stressed the difficulty of her decision, she told the News that she knew the scientific signs of burnout too well not to recognize them in herself.

“Honestly, it’s a decision I’ve been thinking about for a while,” Santos said. “I actually approached President Salovey and Dean Chun at the end of the Fall 2019 semester about taking a leave during the following 202021 academic year. Which they approved at the time. But then March 2020 hit. And it no longer felt like the 2020-21 academic year was the right time to take a break from my responsibilities to the Silliman community.”

Now, Santos said, she feels ready to temporarily step away, emphasizing how important it is that she “practice what [she] preach” as someone whose work focuses on the science of wellbeing.

The News spoke to five Silliman students, all of whom voiced their support for Santos’ decision.

“I was caught totally by surprise by the email, but I stand by her decision to do what she

needs to do,” said Shandra Ahsan ’24, co-president of the Silliman Activities and Administration Council. “She spreads the message of self-care and self-compassion in her classes and her podcast, and she’s doing exactly what she tells her students and audience to do when they are feeling burnt out.”

Alex Williams ’25 also told the News that while he supported Santos’ decision, he would miss her during her time away.

Williams recalled how Santos greeted him by name the day he moved in, which immediately relieved his “inhibitions and anxieties” about leaving Tennessee for Connecticut.

“I do not think there is anything more honorable than knowing when the time has come to take a step back, delegate and then return when you are both ready and able to devote the necessary time and attention,” Williams said.

Francisco Gonzalez ’25, who is in Silliman and enrolled in Santos’ “Psychology and the Good Life” course this semester, told the News that it was “encouraging” to see Santos practice strategies she taught in class in her own life.

Gonzalez added that while he admired her decision, he felt sad that he would not be able to spend his sophomore year with Santos.

“Laurie Santos was definitely a big part of my Silliman experience — from the way she memorized all of our names for our move in day, to how accessible she made herself as we managed our first year,” Madelyn Dawson ’25 said. “But I think it is so admirable of her to prioritize her mental health and wellbeing and take the advice she constantly offered to us, and take the time she needs for herself. Silliman won’t be the same without her, but I am excited to get to know Dr. Arielle Baskin-Sommers.”

In her time away from Yale, Santos wrote in her email, she hopes to focus on the upcoming seasons of “The Happiness Lab,” continue to work on expanding the evidence-based wellbeing strategies she researches to low-income high school students

YALE NEWS

Santos announced on Monday that she will take a one-year leave from Yale to address her own sense of overwork. and parents and launch a currently unannounced “media venture for promoting the science of happiness” on a larger scale.

While Santos intends to stay somewhat busy, she explained in her email that she hopes her projects while away from Yale will allow her enough free time for her to return to Yale revitalized in fall 2023.

“The science shows that taking a break from work when you need one can allow you to be more pro-

ductive, more creative, and more available for the people you care about after you return,” Santos wrote in an email to the News.

“I hope to bring all that renewed energy and creativity back into my role as Silliman HoC.” Silliman Dean Leanna Barlow will stay on in her current position.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu and EVAN GORELICK at evan.gorelick@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“Ice is my life!” KRISTOFF BJORGMAN DISNEY CHARACTER

Nathan Chen '24 wins gold after dominant run CHEN FROM PAGE 1 With Thursday’s majestic performance, Chen has finally secured the gold medal that has eluded him since the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. At the age of 18, Chen entered the Games as a medal favorite but came up short, leaving Korea with only a team bronze and fifth place individual ranking. Multiple errors in the short program knocked him down to 17th, but he rebounded in the free skate with a history-making attempt at six quads, five of which were successful.

After falling short at Pyeongchang, Chen maintained worldclass showings through titles and new records. Just one month after his fifth-place finish, he won the first of his three World Figure Skating Championships.

He went on to claim his second of three Grand Prix Final titles in December 2018 and maintained his fine form since as the U.S. National Champion.

Chen’s biggest challenge entering the Beijing Games was his peers from Japan. Yuzuru Hanyu, 27, is a two-time Olympic champion and prefaced the competition declaring his intent to land a quadruple axel — a feat that has never been successfully landed in competition.

Hanyu attempted the jump twice in the free skate, but was unable to stick the landing either time and ultimately settled for fourth. Yuma Kagiyama of Japan earned silver with a combined score of 310.05 while fellow countryman Shoma Uno secured bronze with a combined score of 293.

“You can’t imagine how it feels,” Chen said of his Olympic-winning moment in a post-skate press conference. “This means the world to me. I have the family connection [to Beijing]. It’s amazing to have this opportunity to do it here.”

Nathan Chen is a student in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact HAMERA SHABBIR at hamera.shabbir@yale.edu .

It was a Nathan Chen ’24 masterclass as he won silver with Team USA and finished with a flourish to win gold.

YALE NEWS

Committee to begin search for new College Dean CHUN FROM PAGE 1 sor Margaret Clark will chair the committee, which will gather student and professor feedback and deliberate over the next semester.

“I am grateful to Dean Chun for positioning Yale College for continued excellence in the years ahead,” Salovey wrote. “We will identify a successor who can build

on all that he has contributed to the life and success of our undergraduate community.”

The President’s Office has not yet announced a date by which the next dean will be appointed. Dean’s search committees in the past have submitted lists of eight to fifteen candidates, which typically remain confidential. The past four deans have been drawn from Yale’s leader-

YALE NEWS

Chun, the College's first Asian-American dean, served one term and will step down after the academic year and return to teaching and research.

ship ranks and were all department chairs or heads of colleges.

In all, the committee will have six faculty. The committee that selected Chun as dean in 2017 had 13 total members, while this new committee contains only 9.

“It’s an excellent committee, representing a wide range of perspectives and experiences,” Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Tamar Gendler wrote to the News.

The humanities have three representatives, all of whom currently hold various administrative positions: anthropology professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the African American Studies department Aimee Cox, art history lecturer and Jonathan Edwards Dean Christina Ferando, and Head of Pauli Murray College and Chinese literature professor Tina Lu. Also on the committee is Alan Gerber, professor of political science, public health and economics who previously served as divisional dean of the social sciences. Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology David Vasseur is the only professor from the science or engineering departments to sit on the committee.

Two University leaders — Joseph Gordon, former dean of undergraduate education, and Susan Gibbons, chief of staff to President Salovey — will also sit on the committee.

Maayan Schoen ’23 will serve as the student representative on the committee; past searches for Yale College deans have included either one or two student representatives.

“I am excited and grateful to be named to the committee,” Schoen wrote to the News. “I truly feel so privileged and can’t wait to work with everyone.”

Several committee members, including Lu and Vasseur, noted that the committee has not met yet and declined to comment for this story.

Salovey wrote in his Feb. 9 announcement that members of the search advisory committee will consult with the Yale College community and create a list of recommendations for people who will meet the “essential qualities” that they define the next dean should have. He also wrote that the committee is looking for recommendations from community members on ideas for the future of Yale College and the next dean, and students can submit recommendations.

The makeup of this committee mirrors that of the 2017 search committee, which was led by Enrique De La Cruz, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. It included the heads of Grace Hopper and Morse Colleges, Julia Adams and Catherine Panter-Brick, along with the dean of Silliman College, Jessie Hill. It also in cluded seven faculty members across multiple departments, one undergraduate student and the University chaplain and director of administrative affairs for the University president.

The search committee this time around similarly includes two heads of colleges, faculty members from various departments and an undergraduate student.

Chun led the 2014 search committee that chose his predecessor, Jonathan Holloway as Yale College Dean. Chun served as head of Berkeley College from 2007 to 2016 and was the first Asian American dean of Yale College.

Contact SARAH COOK at sarah.cook@yale.edu and ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@yale.edu .

Need-aware accusation in lawsuit could include Yale ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1 the suit alleges. “Far from following this practice, at least nine Defendants for many years have favored wealthy applicants in the admissions process.”

Section 568 of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act provides an exemption to the standard antitrust law by allowing universities to share principles for assessing financial need, so long as it is not considered during the admission process.

The lawsuit alleges that the Group violated Section 568, and therefore the Sherman Act, by sharing financial aid methodology despite nine of the universities considering students’ ability to pay in the admissions process. The schools in question were specifically accused of considering financial need in their admissions process by favoring children of wealthy donors for admission. The lawsuit also alleges that the subset of schools considers applicants’ finances when admitting them off the waitlist.

The nine schools include Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Notre Dame University, the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University.

Brown University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Emory University, Rice University and Yale were implicated in the suit as members of the Group, but were not originally

accused of violating need-blind requirements. This may change next week when the plaintiffs file their updated complaint.

When the lawsuit was initially filed on Jan. 10, University spokesperson Karen Peart told the News that “Yale’s financial aid policy is 100% compliant with all applicable laws.”

This is not the first time Yale has been accused of violating antitrust law in its financial aid practices.

The Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against the Ivy Overlap Group — a partnership composed of the eight Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — in 1991 for fixing financial aid offers. The Ivies all settled. MIT agreed to a settlement after the district court of Philadelphia ruled in the government’s favor.

Gregory Day, assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Georgia and visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, explained that in a competitive world, universities would attract students by lowering tuition and increasing quality. But the lawsuit alleges the 568 Presidents Group colluded to maintain artificially high prices, meaning students ostensibly pay more than they would in a competitive setting.

Experts agreed that deciding the case will be difficult, describing it as “technical,” “problematic” and “impossible to predict.”

“If suppliers collude to raise the price of peanut butter, all actual and potential peanut butter purchasers are injured – some pay more, and some don’t buy,” John Lopatka, professor of law at Penn

State Law School in University Park, wrote in an email. “If universities agree to restrain competition in the provision of financial aid, not all students are injured.

That should at least be a relevant difference in analyzing the financial aid agreement.”

To win the case, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the schools in question considered need in admissions decisions. Day said that there are “perhaps no prior antitrust cases on 568,” meaning there is no precedent that will guide the court in this decision.

Daniel Rubinfeld, professor emeritus of law and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said the courts will need more information — about the Presidents Group’s agreement, about their exchange and about the schools’ specific admissions policies — before making a decision.

The case will hinge on technical aspects of the law, rather than on moral beliefs about financial aid, Georgetown Law School professor Howard Shelanski explained. Shelanski has worked as an antitrust lawyer, economist, a faculty member at the Yale School of Management, the Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission and senior regulatory official in the Obama White House.

“This is going to be a challenging case for the plaintiffs to win, especially because they’re dealing with universities who are giving a lot of financial aid and trying to make it easier for a lot of students to attend,” Shelanski said. “They’re sympathetic defendants.”

If the 568 Presidents Group wins the case, its members may continue to collaborate while the Section 568 antitrust exemption remains in effect. If they lose, the universities face the potential of

paying damages and returning to a more competitive financial aid model, which could also incur large costs. It is likely they will settle if the case seems like it will end in the plaintiffs’ favor, Carstensen said.

In fact, collusion can work in consumers’ — in this case, students’ — favors, Shelanski and Rubinfeld explained. Shelanski said that sharing a common financial aid system enables financial aid packages to be “more readily compared and predicted, and it allows universities to more evenly share their financial aid.”

The case was filed in the Northern District of Illinois federal court, and further scheduling for the trial has not yet been publicly released.

Section 568, which grants an exemption to antitrust law, is set to expire on Sept. 30, 2022.

Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

This is not the first time Yale has been accused of violating antitrust law in its financial aid practices.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“Ice ice baby.” VANILLA ICE HIP-HOP ARTIST

University announces new isolation policy ISOLATION FROM PAGE 1 Now, Boyd wrote in her email, demand for isolation housing “is reaching capacity.” Beginning Wednesday night, students in single bedrooms have been directed to remain in their residences upon testing positive for COVID19, leaving their rooms only to use the bathroom, attend medical appointments and spend brief periods outdoors in their residential college courtyards.

Boyd wrote in her email that the University contact tracing team had not yet seen evidence of transmission in classrooms or dining halls, adding that new cases had largely been traced to social gatherings held over the weekend where participants had not worn masks.

“One tiny advantage of a contingency plan is that we don’t anticipate any isolation housing problems if we have this plan, because, by definition, the capacity is the number of residents we have on campus,” Dean of Yale College Dean Marvin Chun told the News in an interview when the contingency plan was announced. “It will help us deal with a big constraint and make it more feasible to resume in-person operations and learning and campus activities.”

Officially, the isolate-in-place policy only applies to students in single bedrooms — and students with roommates should be guaranteed beds in isolation housing.

“If a student in a double bedroom tests positive, they move into isolation housing as soon as possible,” Boyd told the News. “If the test result comes back very late at night, the student will sometimes wait until morning to move; in that case, the other student is advised to sleep in the common room or with a friend.”

But two students who tested positive for COVID-19 on Feb. 10, the day after the isolate-in-place policy went into effect, told the News that they were instructed to isolate in their residential colleges in rooms where one roomate was COVID-positive and the other COVID-negative.

Pia Baldwin Edwards ’25, who is also a staff reporter for the News, said that her roommate received a call on Thursday morn-

ing from Yale Health, instructing her to isolate in their room.

“My roommate was told to stay in the room, I could still go to class, and I did not have to quarantine because I was vaccinated and boosted,” Baldwin Edwards told the News. “They told my roommate that isolation housing was completely full.”

Students isolating in their residences must wear residential college-provided facemasks whenever they are not in their bedrooms and eat their meals in their rooms, where they will be delivered. They will still be permitted to use communal bathrooms, although Boyd wrote that they would receive additional information as to how to minimize the “already low” risk of transmission in shared bathrooms.

According to the COVID-19 dashboard, 76 percent of isolation housing is currently available. This statistic, however, has remained unchanged since at least Jan. 28.

Shortly before winter break, the University began assigning students living in isolation housing roommates to maximize the space.

Students also reported bunk beds installed in isolation housing common rooms to accommodate additional students should isolation housing reach capacity.

Baldwin Edwards’ room, she said, is large enough that it is possible for her to remain socially distanced from her roommate. Their room is also wheelchair accessible, so they have an additional bathroom attached to the suite. The Yale Health official who contacted her roommate, Baldwin Edwards told the News, seemed to know these details already, referencing the floor plan of her suite.

The person who contacted Baldwin Edwards’s roommate, she said, did not ask if Baldwin Edwards had previously been infected with COVID-19.

But Kristina Yang ’25, who also tested positive on Thursday morning, was told that she would be asked to quarantine in her room only after she clarified that her roommate had already had COVID-19 a few weeks prior.

Although Baldwin Edwards’ roommate was asked if Baldwin Edwards was comfortable with

her staying in the room, Yang said that there was no opportunity for her roommates or suitemates to give consent.

If she had the option, Yang said, she would have gone to isolation housing instead of remaining in her room.

“I personally would have chosen to go somewhere else because I feel like I’m put in a very uncomfortable situation with my friends and the people on my floor,” Yang said. “The only thing I can really do is apologize, because there’s nothing I can do. I can’t not go to the bathroom or not use the shower, and obviously the people on my floor have to be accommodating. They can’t kick me out of here, and so I don't think Yale should put any of us in a situation like this.”

Boyd, as well as Richard Martinello, medical director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health and a member of the public health committee which advises University COVID-19 coordinator Stephanie Spangler, confirmed that the direction these students received was a mistake that ran counter to the isolate-in-place policy.

“This is not part of the protocol at all — it needs to be corrected,” Boyd wrote in a text to the News the evening of Feb. 10. “And corrected tonight.”

But later in the evening, Boyd wrote that she had looked through the records of students isolating in place and “did not believe there are any students in shared bedrooms,” excepting a few situations which she planned to confirm with residential college heads and deans.

“The only condition in which an isolating student would share a bedroom with another student is if they are both positive, or very recently so,” Boyd wrote. “Otherwise, no-one in isolation should be sharing a bedroom. The isolation assignments are based on the information students provide the Yale Health Care Team about their housing configuration.

If an isolating student is however sharing a bedroom, they should call Isolation Housing (203-432-4020) right away to be moved to Arnold or McClellan. If a student is concerned that their roommate is isolating in place, they should contact their dean, head of college, or me.”

In the past two weeks, the University has begun relaxing several of the COVID-19 restrictions imposed when students returned to campus from winter recess. Dining halls, which had previously been operating on a grab-and-go basis, reopened for in-person service on Jan. 31, and classes resumed in person on Feb. 7. The same day, the University also shifted its COVID-19 alert level from orange, which signifies “moderate” risk, to yellow, which signifies “low to moderate” risk.

With the alert level shift, Boyd announced that the campus-wide quarantine which was originally slated to end Feb. 7, would lift two days early, and intimated that restrictions on gatherings and events policies would also loosen in the coming weeks. Currently, both in-person gatherings and campus visitors are prohibited without prior approval.

In the seven-day period between Feb. 1 and Feb. 7, Yale has seen 119 positive COVID-19 tests, according to the University COVID-19 dashboard. Of these, 47 were among students living on-campus. Current case counts mark a dramatic decrease from the height of the Omicron spike in earlier January, when cases peaked at 167 in a single day.

Now, in Arnold Hall, Eliza Lord ’24 told the News that some of the bunk beds have been put to use. But student distribution across rooms, Lord said, is not always equal — although

she has a large double to herself, the room across the hall “is a tiny double with bunk beds, and they’ve been putting two people in there at a time.”

Lord told the News that around noon each day, she received lunch for that day, a frozen dinner for that night and “a muffin or oatmeal or something” for breakfast the next day. Lord added that while she generally had enough food to last through the day, many other students in isolation had been ordering in their meals.

Students sent to isolation housing should bring their own bedding, Lord said, warning that the bedding provided by the University was uncomfortable and inadequately warm.

But Lord said that isolation housing felt populated — a departure from student reports in January of isolation housing as “eerily silent.”

“I have a suitemate,” Lord said.

“It’s pretty crowded. I see people in the bathrooms and stuff, and people tried to throw, like, a ‘Quarantoads’ tonight.”

Although Lord did not attend the event, she told the News that she appreciated having other people around in isolation housing, adding that she did not feel lonely.

Booster shots are currently required for students on campus.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu .

that Dean of the School of Public Health Sten Vermund said University leaders would assess and might “entertain.”

“I was stunned by the results of that review,” Vermund said. “I’m really, really amazed and super proud of the faculty, staff and students and we’ve grown considerably.”

Vermund said that the increase in faculty productivity is “staggering,” with the number of published papers increasing more than two-fold, and that the teaching quality has “improved massively.”

Vermund said that in recent years, three SPH faculty members have won top paper of the year for three

different journals. Throughout the pandemic, Vermund said that SPH has provided assistance to Connecticut and New Haven, schools and arts organizations in California, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York.

Vermund noted that in addition to the reaccreditation process, there is an ongoing University evaluation into whether SPH current structure of operating within the medical school should continue. SPH operates under the School of Medicine despite the fact that it is one of the University’s self-supporting schools; associate professor of epidemiology Gregg Gonsalves previously told the News that SPH is the country’s sole public health school

that operates under the administration of a medical school.

School community members have expressed concerns that the current structure limits the extent to which SPH can be seen as a leader in public health, and that it means that the school is overseen by medical school administrators who are not trained in public health. The University is currently evaluating the future of this structure, but this evaluation is not related to the re-accreditation process.

“The provost is studying this intensively and will be consulting with the Dean of the School of Medicine,” Vermund said.

One consideration is whether the school can survive financially

GIOVANNA TRUONG/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

New data from the school’s reaccreditation process reveals that it has expanded significantly over the last four years.

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YALE DAILY NEWS

Students who test positive for COVID-19 and live in single bedrooms have been asked to isolate in their rooms instead of in designated housing.

With future in limbo, SPH seeks reaccreditation PUBLIC HEALTH FROM PAGE 1

m

without the medical school’s aid.

Vermund noted that SPH struggled financially in the 2020-21 school year, limiting the financial aid available to its students.

Many students were not able to afford to come, he said. Due to these issues, Vermund said that SPH received about $2.5 million in extra funding from the University last year — and also that the School of Medicine “routinely helps” SPH with funding.

“I think he’s just doing his due diligence to assure this is thought and measured,” Vermund said about the Provost’s assessment. “There’s no point in the School of Public Health being independent from the medical school if it doesn’t have the business model to sustain it.”

According to SPH Director of Academic Affairs Mike Honsberger, the Council on Education for Public Health had granted SPH “fully accredited status” until the end of 2021 — which is why the school was just now up for reaccreditation. Vermund said that the reaccreditation process happens every seven years.

Honsberger said that the CEPH visited the school on Sept.

23 and 24, 2021 to meet with SPH community members and gain clarification on any questions they had. Prior to this site review, Honsberger said, the school went through a self-study process in which it reviewed its status for various defined criteria published by the CEPH. SPH drafted responses to each of the criteria, which covered topics ranging from curriculum content to staffing to physical resources.

“The accreditation process requires commitment from administrators, faculty, staff, students and other constituents,” executive director of CEPH Laura Rasar King said. “The council recognizes the efforts of Yale University School of Public Health to make ongoing improvements to ensure that students receive a high-quality education that advances them toward their career goals.”

Honsberger explained in his email statement that SPH convened an ad hoc accreditation advisory committee in 2020 that oversaw the completion of the final self-report, and this committee was composed of faculty, staff, student, alumni and community representatives.

According to Honsberger, SPH currently uses a collection of student evaluations, Education Committee reviews, classroom observations and peer reviews to assess teaching quality.

Vermund explained that this growth of student and faculty population and research has been facilitated by funding to SPH. When he started at SPH in 2017, his goals were supported by a “startup” financial package to enhance strengths and address needs at SPH. He wrote that in addition to assistance to SPH from the University, the school has acquired outside funding from organizations including the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Agency for International Development. “ Reaccreditation is about whether we are managing the curriculum of the school, such that we are approved by the accrediting body, and they know perfectly well our status with the medical school,” Vermund said. “They also know that at the end of the year, if we have a [budget] deficit the medical school will support us.”

Vermund also wrote that SPH has worked on other initiatives that have helped facilitate the progress seen in the reaccreditation data such as focusing on “team science,” gaining program projects and training grants and revitalizing their research centers to communicate and “expand their engagement” across the University.

The School of Public Health was founded in 1915.

Contact SARAH COOK at sarah.cook@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Yale researchers unravel cosmic mysteries by discovering primordial black holes

BY MARIA KOROLIK STAFF REPORTER Yale astrophysicists, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Miami and the European Space Agency, are currently using the James Webb Space Telescope to research the potential key to understanding the origins of dark matter.

The study advances a theory proposed by physicists Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr in the 1970s, which suggests that after the Big Bang, fluctuations throughout the universe would cause certain areas to carry a higher mass and collapse into primordial black holes, which are remnants of the Big Bang. Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, University of Miami assistant professor of physics Nico Cappellutti and European Space Agency Director of Science Günther Hasinger led the study and the research on how primordial black holes could potentially account for all dark matter in the universe today.

“With the beginning of the operations of the [James Webb Space Telescope] in the coming months, we will start to peek into the cosmic darkness of the very early Universe,” Fabio Pacucci, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, wrote in a email. “Then, we might find clues that primordial black holes exist and, maybe, play a very remarkable role in our Universe.”

According to Natarajan, dark matter is thought to account for the majority of matter throughout the universe, but very little about it is known. Black holes, however, have provided a slew of discoveries in the last century. These points in space, often found in the center of galaxies, have such densely-assembled matter that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

In previous studies, researchers had attempted to propose new hypothetical particles — such as axions or sterile

neutrinos — as the source of dark matter. According to Cappelluti, Hasinger and Natarajan’s paper, “[those] efforts have all come up empty.”

Natarajan and her colleagues began to hypothesize that knowing approximately when the early universe underwent phase transitions would allow them to predict a function for the initial mass of primordial black holes.

“This theory is easily tested as in a universe in which all dark matter is from primordial black holes, galaxies would form earlier,” Natarajan said.

“Because of this, the [James Webb Space Telescope] will detect many more galaxies.”

In addition, they speculated that these primordial black holes would cause galaxies and all other cosmic

CECILIA LEE/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

This model allowed them to discover that the majority of these black holes formed at 1.4 times the mass of the sun. The broadness of the birth mass in this model also corroborated that these primordial black holes could, in fact, account for dark matter.

events to occur faster than previously expected on the universe’s timeline.

The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, was launched on Dec. 25, 2021, after decades of development and delays. Over six times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope — launched

in 1990 — the JWST is designed for near-infrared astronomy in order to better detect colder and higher redshift objects, which are typically older and farther away.

These unique features are well-suited to corroborate the findings of the study, according to Natarajan. Primordial black holes would have caused myriad stars and galaxies to form around them in the beginnings of the universe, which is the period the JWST can observe. In the next several years, when Natarajan and other researchers gather data from the JWST, they will be able to observe whether the spectra that the JWST produces confirms their theory.

“All kinds of new discovery space opens up with new technologies,” emphasized Natarajan.

Primordial black holes can not only explain the source of dark matter, but also several other cosmic mysteries.

According to Natarajan, earlier models failed to explain why there was relatively little time between the formation of the first stars and the subsequent formation of quasars — extremely bright regions at the centers of galaxies. The presence of primordial black holes suggests that every cosmic event is shifted earlier onto the universe’s timeline.

Moreover, radiation from outer space comes in the form of a diffuse fog in both infrared and X-ray radiation.

While models of star formation suggest that not all of this fog can be composed of stellar radiation, it was difficult to conclusively point to another source.

Primordial black holes, however, can explain this issue as well; black holes emit very similar radiation to stars, and can thus account for much of this diffuse fog of radiation.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most sensitive telescope made to date, observing wavelengths from 0.6 to 28.3 microns, according to NASA. Contact MARIA KOROLIK at maria.korolik@yale.edu .

Yale-developed saliva test offered at two New Haven sites

BY GIRI VISWANATHAN AND YASH ROY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER AND STAFF REPORTER SalivaDirect, a COVID-19 test pioneered at the Yale School of Public Health, is now being used at the New Haven Green and Long Wharf testing sites. Walk-in PCR testing is available at both locations all days except Friday, with results being available within 24-48 hours.

The saliva-based COVID-19 testing method was developed

by Yale epidemiology researchers Anne Wyllie and Nathan Grubaugh. It received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration on Aug. 15.

On Jan. 3, the state of Connecticut reached out to Yale School of Public Health officials looking to use the technology at testing sites in New Haven. While funding for the two New Haven SalivaDirect sites are provided by the state government, city officials are responsible for its operation. The Yale-developed saliva-based PCR tests were administered beginning Jan. 19.

“Early a n d f re q u e n t testing is one of the cornerstones of how we’re responding to the pandemic,” New Haven’s Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said in an interview. “I’m so excited that it’s been developed in our community. And now it’s available to everyone in the community. I just applaud SalivaDirect and the Yale component of it.”

Wyllie first began working on SalivaDirect in April 2020. Compared to traditional nasal swabs used in COVID-19 tests, SalivaDirect provides a highly accurate, accessible and less invasive method to identify COVID-19.

Saliva-based tests also are not required to be administered by trained medical personnel, making them an effective means of conducting community COVID19 surveillance.

“SalivaDirect is a PCR testing procedure that is a faster, easier, cheaper, and more user-friendly approach to COVID-19 screening and diagnosis,” Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten H. Vermund wrote in an email. “We are so pleased to see it available to the New Haven community.”

The tests, ana-

lyz e d a t Yale Pathology Labs, identified the first case of the Omicron variant in New Haven. The lab continues to genetically sequence approximately 30 percent of positive results to identify potential new strains of the COVID-19 virus, according to professor Chen Liu, the chief of pathology at Yale New Haven Hospital. During the Omicron surge, the lab was sequencing every sample collected.

“What my team has done is stepped up to help manage and oversee these sites and serve as a sort of collection team for samples in the community,” Wyllie said. “So labs do their testing and collections and are responsible for that. My team is responsible at the moment for running the site, getting collection materials and getting the samples to YPL who does the testing.”

Her team continues to be involved in SalivaDirect as its usage expands into New Haven.

According to Rick Fontana, the director of emergency services for the city of New Haven, SalivaDirect is the fourth organization to provide testing at the Long Wharf a n d

N e w Haven Green sites through a state program that has provided free PCR testing in Meriden, New Haven, Old Saybrook and Middletown for Connecticut residents.

Prior to the partnership with SalivaDirect, Connecticut partnered with three organizations for testing in New Haven: Cambridge Innovation Center Health, Transformative Healthcare and Wren Laboratories. Fontana said that these three companies carried out traditional nasopharyngeal tests whereas SalivaDirect is a “more accessible” saliva test.

Wyllie’s team works closely with 166 labs across 41 states as SalivaDirect has grown. Although the testing method is free and open source, each lab has to be licensed and verified under SalivaDirect’s FDA emergency use authorization. Labs looking to use the technology must agree to report data to the SalivaDirect team and to the Food and Drug Administration. The labs are then responsible for administering and distributing tests in communities nationwide.

“We’re constantly meeting with labs

and p a r t ner groups,” Wyllie said. “So it’s a no-cost license, but it’s just that they obviously have [FDA regulations] that they need to abide by.”

Liu estimated that approximately 165,000 tests have been administered to date.

In New Haven, roughly 300 tests have been administered at the two SalivaDirect sites since Jan. 19. New Haven Director of Public Health Maritza Bond wrote that the centers have the capacity to carry out 1,000 tests per day.

“The new service demonstrated what collaboration between this city, state and university can look like,” Mayor Justin Elicker said.

“And, what excites me most is the absence of a line at the facility right now, along with how the facility can expand capacity for the city. We saw during the last spike in demand just how vital it is that we continue to have the testing capacity.”

New Haven identified its first COVID-19 case on March 14, 2020.

Contact GIRI VISWANATHAN at giri.viswanathan@yale.edu and YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale.edu .

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

ARTS Yale Cabaret stages its first spring play “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma”

BY TAMAKI KUNO STAFF REPORTER The Yale Cabaret returns with its first in-person production of the semester, “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” written by Harry Davis and directed by Cooper Bruhns DRA ’24 and Lucas Iverson DRA ’24.

The play explores the themes of queerness and struggles in human relationships through interactions between two queer characters, both of whom are performed by the directors. The show is the Yale Cabaret’s first production of the spring season and will be open only to fully-vaccinated Yale community members.

“One of my goals as an artist is to be unapologetically queer and to not shy away from being loud and proud,” Bruhns said. “I think about my younger self and how much more of a difference it would have made to see myself represented on stage.”

Bruhns grew up in a “very, very small town” in Northern California that they felt was homophobic and transphobic. It was not until a trip to San Francisco and a visit to drag-themed bar “Hamburger Mary’s” with friends that Bruhns felt that there was a place for them in the world.

“Because of where I grew up, it is still taking me a long time to undo a lot of the self-hatred or internalized homophobia and transphobia … [Through productions], I hope to show the humanness of queer people and destigmatize [queer sex],” Bruhns said.

Harry Davis wrote the play’s original script when he was an undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara. It was initially about a relationship between a man and a woman, yet as Bruhns “fell in love” with the play, the directors adapted the plot into a story between two queer characters. For example, one of the play’s original scenes about a pregnancy scare was replaced by a scene about an HIV scare in hopes of “bringing

these issues into the conversation and making them less taboo.”

Iverson joined Bruhns in directing the show because he was “drawn to the

ship between the characters in the play. It references a real phenomenon in which two hedgehogs try to huddle together under cold weather yet must remain apart

COURTESY OF YALE CABARET

nature of the [play’s] relationship,” which he described as “a case study between two specific human beings who are desperately seeking ‘big love’ in their life yet have no clue how to go about that.”

The show’s title “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” is a metaphor for the relation-

to avoid hurting one another with their sharp spines.

“I think it’s so beautiful that these 19-year-olds are trying to find themselves in the world, despite a complicated mess of what relationships can be like when they’re trying their best and some-

times say the wrong thing,” Bruhns said.

Due to University COVID-19 restrictions, a number of changes were made to the show’s initial plan.

According to Yale Cabaret artistic director Sarah Cain DRA ’22, “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” was initially supposed to open in mid-January, but was postponed when COVID-19 cases began to spike in December. Cain noted, however, that in the end the change was beneficial not just in public health terms, but also because it allowed the production team more time to “build the world of the play.”

While the show is running, the Cabaret will not serve food and drinks as it typically does, and the performers will be masked throughout the performance.

Despite these abnormalities, the team came up with ways to ensure a high production quality. Because the show is set entirely in a dorm room, the team placed seats on three sides of the stage to create a sense of intimacy while also reducing audience capacity.

Iverson added that “we obey the University’s COVID-19 restrictions, but we put the audience as close as possible to the set so that they can see the details of the scenes — so there’s almost a film-like quality.”

Cain added that performing with masks on for a show defined by its intimate moments can be challenging, but the directors did “a fantastic job” of creating palpable chemistry despite the face coverings.

“We spent all of the previous school year on Zoom, so there was just this eagerness and hunger to do a show,” Bruhns said, reflecting on the rehearsals.

“At the end of the day, we’re just really, really grateful to finally be doing a show live with other people and share the experience with you.”

“The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” is being staged from Feb. 10-12.

Contact TAMAKI KUNO at tamaki.kuno@yale.edu .

Professor Jing Tsu doubles as NBC commentator at Beijing Olympics

BY ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTER As Yalies take to the ice at the Winter Olympics, a professor is standing on the sidelines, offering fans context on the Games’ cultural and political significance.

Jing Tsu, John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures and Comparative Literature, is serving as cultural commentator for NBC Olympics in Beijing. Olympic fans in the United States met Tsu last Friday night during the Games’ opening ceremony, a dazzling and politically-weighty spectacle that drew on ancient and modern Chinese symbols. The professor, a specialist on Sinophone culture and literature and a 2016 Guggenheim fellow, filled in the ceremony’s details that might not have been obvious to the average American fan. The ceremony opened, for example, with a countdown from 24.

“China has traditionally used a mix of lunar and solar calendars,” Tsu told the network’s 14 million U.S. viewers. “The four seasons are

subdivided into 24 divisions with spring at the start — each division here is presented in the context of a poem or a story. That number was chosen here because of its auspicious coincidence because these are, after all, the 24th Winter Olympic Games.”

Over the course of Saturday’s two-hour ceremony, Tsu conversed with fellow hosts Andrew Browne, another China scholar, and NBC Sports anchor Mike Tirico. They were among the few reporting on the ground from Beijing: NBC kept the majority of its broadcast teams in Stamford, Connecticut due to COVID-19 concerns. The trio’s discussion engaged in the Beijing Games’ political meanings amid rising tensions in Eastern Europe as well as China’s repression of its Uyghur minority. The professor’s expertise, however, was called in for the cultural background of the Beijing Olympics.

The order of countries in the ceremonial procession, Tsu explained, was determined by the number of strokes required to write the one character in the country’s Chinese name.

Tsu also commented on the historical significance of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and on the repeal of China’s one-child policy and ensuing struggle to boost birth rates.

At Yale, Tsu has taught numerous graduate seminars and an undergraduate lecture, “China in the World.” She joined Yale’s faculty in 2006 as an assistant professor, and chaired the Council on East Asian Studies between 2014 and 2021.

East Asian Languages & Literature department chair Aaron Gerow said that faculty in his department were “pleasantly surprised” by the announcement of Tsu’s Beijing post.

He applauded NBC’s decision of having Tsu, a humanist, as cultural commentator, noting that political science and international relations scholars generally fill the role.

“I hope people watching the Olympics get a broader fuller sense of: what is China, and what do these games mean?” Gerow said.

“We’re just so happy not only that Jing was selected, but that someone from the humanities is talking about something so crucial.”

Tsu also chaired the Council on East Asian Studies between 2014 and 2021, and became an affiliate scholar of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs last year. She has now authored and co-edited four books, delving into literature, nationalism and globalization. Tsu’s latest book, “Kingdom of Characters”, appeared on the front page of the New York Times’ Book Review on Sunday. Published on Jan. 18, her book tells the stories of the pioneer linguists and scholars who radically transformed Chinese script and language in the 20th century, and thereby transformed China itself.

Pericles Lewis, vice president for Global Strategy, called Tsu an “outstanding scholar”.

“It is great to have our faculty reach broader audiences through traditional and social media — [it] gives them a chance to elevate popular discourse on important topics,” Lewis wrote in an email to the News.

The 2022 Olympic Games began on Feb. 4.

Contact ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

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PAGE 9

“The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It’s been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.” AL GORE 45TH VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Residents protest the move of controversial methadone clinic to Newhallville

BY SYLVAN LEBRUN AND HANNAH QU STAFF REPORTERS Holding signs and passing around petitions, a crowd of over 50 elected officials, activists and Newhallville residents gathered at 794 Dixwell Ave. on a cold Saturday afternoon to send a message — the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic will not be welcomed in their neighborhood.

The protest took place outside the planned site for the methadone clinic, a building that once housed Elm City College Preparatory Middle School. The APT Foundation, which currently operates two outpatient methadone clinics in Long Wharf and the Hill district, purchased the building in December 2021 with plans to relocate services from their Long Wharf location to Newhallville.

Until the New Haven Independent reported that the clinic was moving in January, the residents of Newhallville — including Ward 20 Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith — were not informed of the purchase. In the month since, the community has organized to prevent the APT Foundation from moving into their neighborhood, citing concerns for public safety based on the foundation’s tumultuous track record in the Hill neighborhood, where the clinic became a hotspot for violence and public drug use and solicitation.

“We are sympathetic to the needs of those who are in need of some type of assistance,” Imam Saladin Hasan from Newhallville’s Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center said during his speech at the press conference.

“But we don’t want our children living under conditions where everyone they see or deal with needs some type of help. You’re interfering with progress. Trauma is real and our youth continually are traumatized…You do not set up trauma sites in communities that are traumatized.”

Community says “Stop APT” Plans for the new clinic involve the transfer of almost 400 patients to Newhallville to receive their methadone, a substitute drug used to treat morphine and heroin addiction. The 15 speakers at Saturday’s gathering attacked the APT Foundation for their failure to give the community prior notice and their history of being a “bad neighbor” in the Hill, accompanied by cheers of “Stop APT” from the crowd.

Imam Hasan said that the APT Foundation will ensure the high quality of treatment and care inside their own property, but “once it leaves this building they could care less…it’s the community’s problem, it’s our babies’ problem.”

He shared concerns that the clinic would also lower the property value in the historically Black residential neighborhood, providing a list of alternative non-residential New Haven locations that the APT Foundation could consider relocating to instead.

Saturday’s gathering, which lasted over an hour, was attended by local residents as well as three state senators and representatives. Both New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett were in attendance, as the proposed clinic would sit near the border of the two towns. Over a dozen cars were parked around the block honking their horns in support, carrying elderly and immunocompromised residents who did not want to join the crowd.

Jeanette Sykes, Newhallville resident and founder of the leadership nonprofit The Perfect Blend, emphasized at the start of the event that the opposition to the APT Foundation is not about an opposition to drug addiction treatment, but rather about “a lack of respect for our community…and we want to demand the respect for our community.”

“Newhallville is a historic neighborhood in the city of New Haven,” Avshalom-Smith said in an interview with the News. “It has even today some of the highest rates of Black homeownership. And I asked Lynn from APT if she did any research on our neighborhood before deciding to purchase a

SYLVAN LEBRUN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The APT Foundation’s methadone clinic on the Hill was pointed to as evidence of the crime and “trauma” that they would bring to Newhallville. building there, and she said no, they did not ‘characterize the neighborhood’...know the history of where you’re going, or have the common decency to speak to the tax-paying residents there and inform them of what your plans are.”

He added that the APT Foundation’s proposed location is in a neighborhood where the residents are primarily elderly people who “don’t even lock their doors.”

Newhallville resident and senior citizen Mary Gates, who was introduced at the press conference as a “matriarch in our community,” shared her fears that the new clinic would bring an influx of crime as it has in the Hill, threatening the safety of elderly people and children.

“Elderly people like myself…we won’t be able to come out here and sit on our porches like we used to, entertain each other from across the street,” Gates said. “What’s going to happen is when we come home from work at 11 or 12 o’clock at night, we got to worry if we have to duck and dodge a bullet, or if there’s somebody out here in our streets lurking to rob us.”

Lossie Gorham, who has lived on Basset Street in Newhallville for 30 years, told the News that she already feels “imprisoned in her home” due to the pandemic and the threat of gun violence in the community, and said that the new clinic would only bring more fear to her life.

Pat Solomon and Katurah Bryant, members of the steering committee for the movement against the APT Foundation, shared that their work had begun the day after the news came out in a Zoom meeting with over 200 participants. Committee meetings have continued every Saturday since.

According to Ward 20 Co-Chair Barbara Vereen, the petition to stop the clinic’s move has already gathered 700 signatures — copies were available for signing at the protest as well. The movement has also involved letter-writing campaigns and phone calls to local authorities.

State Rep. Robyn Porter, who attended the protest along with Rep. Toni Walker and Sen. Gary Winfield, shared that she had been told on Friday that the APT Foundation would have to obtain a new license in order to move from Long Wharf from Newhallville, and go through the Board of Zoning Appeals in the process.

This was news to Porter and the organizers, who had originally been told that the license would simply transfer. Porter told the crowd that in light of this, they had the opportunity to “make sure that we’ve got players on our team and we’re doing what we need to do to shut it down.”

Elicker delivered a speech about the need for compromise

with the APT Foundation, but he was met with hostility and shouts of “shut it down,” “Black people aren’t experiments” and “stand up for the people, Justin!” from the crowd.

“I want to be real with people because you know, I’m not going to stand up here and give promises I can’t deliver on,” Elicker said.

“The city can’t just decide to put it somewhere else…I can stand up here as a politician and say ‘we’re gonna stop this thing,’ I could do that. But in reality, I legally cannot do that.”

He emphasized that the APT Foundation had “control of their property” after purchasing it, after which a resident retorted, “you have control of the city!”

In the end, Elicker promised to work with the APT Foundation and the steering committee to find a solution, noting that Lynn Madden, APT Foundation CEO, had not submitted paperwork to the city yet, which he took as a sign of her willingness to work with the residents.

Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett spoke immediately after Elicker and shared that she had written a letter of concern to the state commissioner of public health, promising to “stand with [the community] and fight.” Her speech was received with cheers, and a call of “that’s what leadership looks like.”

With no clear end in sight to the conflict, Remedy Sharif, a New Haven Rising organizer and director of outreach for Ice The Beef, encouraged the community to keep their resistance to the clinic going, noting that “consistency is the key.”

“Mr. Mayor, we respect you and appreciate you for just showing up,” Sharif said. “Now we need to see you as a man, as a father, not as the Mayor of New Haven but as the father I watch carrying his children on his shoulders when you come to events…It is your responsibility to tell these people hell no. Because you’re a father, because you care. Because our children have been traumatized for too long by the colonizers of this country and the colonizers of our community.”

Paul Joudrey, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and a Yale Drug Use, Addiction, and HIV Research Scholar, said that the issue of methadone clinic location stems partially from the fact that methadone treatment for opioid addiction is segregated from the rest of the healthcare system.

“People’s understanding of methadone is still … old view of addiction that was more punitive…criminal issue.” Joudrey said. “From a public health perspective…in a different health-

care system, where methadone treatment was allowed to occur in the same clinics and other health care treatment is delivered, you wouldn’t have this question about where to locate methadone clinics, because all clinics would be methadone clinics.”

What Happened in the Hill Neighborhood The Foundation’s Legion Clinic on Congress Avenue is a regional clinic that serves people from New Haven and nearby counties.

At Saturday’s protest, Hill North Community Management Team Chair Howard Boyd said that Madden and the APT Foundation team “never stepped out of the door and asked, what can we do to help?” with crime outside the clinic, as the local police department and fire department had to “work overtime” in the area.

“I can’t get kids or parents to walk down their street because of the trash, the syringes, picking up syringes every day,” Boyd said. “Our kids have enough stuff in their minds, enough trauma… they seem to give [methadone clinic patients] the treatment to help them and they put them right out the door.”

“The APT Foundation does a great job with their treatment.”

Jose DeJesus, treasurer of the Hill North Management Team, said.

“But the problem is that it always brings secondary problems. You have problems with people loitering…drug dealing, drug use… dirty needles around the school… fights… stabbings… shootings.

And all of this is attributed to the crowd of folks that are not necessarily APT foundation patients, but they run in those same circles.”

According to DeJesus, there are 20 to 30 people in the corner of Davenport Avenue Baldwin Street at 5:30 a.m. using drugs and drinking. The New Haven Independent reported that a man was stabbed 16 times outside the clinic in 2017.

DeJesus said that he is not against the clinic, but that the problem is that it is regional, and therefore will attract people from outside the community. He urged the APT Foundation to open more clinics in other counties so that each area had its own.

“The neighborhood will be better if other cities and towns in Connecticut would put a methadone clinic in their town,” DeJesus said. “We’re not anti-treatment, we want more treatment. And we need more treatment in the areas where these people live, so they don’t have to commute to Congress Avenue.”

Angela Hatley, who has lived in the Hill for over 30 years, agreed with DeJesus. Hatley told the News that a few years ago, she

called an ambulance for a woman who did not live in Hill, but the woman collapsed three houses down from her house and started taking off her clothes and “doing drug scratch.”

“I would wholeheartedly support Newhallville to keep them out.” Hatley said. “It should not all be one city to take care of an entire region’s problems.”

APT Response In response to concerns about crime levels in the Hill neighborhood, Madden said they have made a number of operational changes, including changing hours of operation so that the surrounding area is less congested when school buses and others may be present. Additionally, APT has built another clinic outside of New Haven, it has transferred some patients to another program and, at the request of the city, it has paid for a police officer to be stationed near the clinic.

In an email to the News, Hill North and Hill South District Manager Justin Marshall wrote that in his time leading the neighborhood, he has “developed a great relationship” with Kathy Eggart, director of the APT foundation.

“I understand that she is trying to help people with substance abuse problems and she is doing everything in her power to get those people the help they need,” Marshall added.

The New Haven Independent reported on Feb. 14, 2018 that the APT Foundation has been paying for an off-duty New Haven police officer to be stationed outside of its primary methadone dispensary at the clinic in Hill, from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Monday through Friday.

DeJesus and Hatley both acknowledged that APT is trying to address the crime brought by the clinic. However, Hatley told the News that the increase of security around the clinic only pushed those activities from the clinic and deeper into the neighborhood.

Madden also told the News that the building on Long Wharf will be mostly used for administrative offices, and only less than half of the space will be used for patient care.

“I live in New Haven and there is drug dealing in my neighborhood, without a drug treatment program being located here.” Madden said.

“So the idea that somehow drug treatment programs are the cause of drug dealing, I think is an unfair inference.”

The APT Foundation purchased the building at 794 Dixwell Ave. for $2.45 million.

Contact SYLVAN LEBRUN at sylvan.lebrun@yale.edu and HANNAH QU at hannah.qu@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“Rob Manfred and the owners are walking back on their word...AGAIN. The fans do not deserve this. So I’ll say it one more time, tell us when and where.” MAX SCHERZER NEW YORK METS STARTING PITCHER

Two Yale alumni on Team USA roster

COURTESY OF USA HOCKEY

Caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption caption.

MEN'S HOCKEY FROM PAGE 12 The scrimmage was also crucial for building chemistry as a team as head coach David Quinn noted.

“In these situations, we’ve been together for a week,” Quinn said to USA Hockey following the scrimmage. “It seems like a month — and it’s certainly good to see another opponent.”

Despite the relaxed nature of the scrimmage, the match against Canada will likely be more indicative of the rest of the tournament for the U.S., rather than the opening game against China.

The U.S. will be playing round robin-style at the preliminary rounds in Group A with China, Canada and Germany. The later games to come against Canada and Germany — the 2018 bronze and silver medalists, respectively — will truly show just how strong this 2022 U.S. team will be.

From team selection to the first scrimmage, the style of play the U.S. will look to adopt seems to come down to one word: speed.

No NHL players have competed in the last two Olympic games, making the team selection process more important for

the team general manager and head coach. For the 2018 Olympics, from which O’Neill is the only returning player for the Americans, the U.S. leaned on experience, preferring former NHL players with lots of experience over younger, more inexperienced players.

For Beijing, first-time general manager John Vanbiesbrouck decided to opt for a nearly opposite strategy. The squad he built is the youngest U.S. team since 1994 — before professional players were allowed at the Olympic Games — and is filled with speed on all four lines.

“I really liked our speed, and I thought we did a lot of good things from that end of it,” Quinn said to USA Hockey in an interview. “When we stayed on top of them, I thought we were successful. When we backed off, we got ourselves in a little bit of trouble. But overall it was a pretty good effort.”

The U.S. and China faced off on Feb. 10 at 8:10 a.m. EST, 9:10 p.m. China Standard Time.

Contact SPENCER KING at spencer.king@yale.edu .

Hockey makes comback victory WOMEN'S HOCKEY FROM PAGE 12 tling into the goal, displacing the pipes off-center. The play was declared a no-goal upon video review. After twenty minutes, the Bulldogs outshot the Dutchwomen 12–5, but the scoreboard still showed zeros.

Union was the first to score after taking advantage of a crosschecking penalty called on Kaitlyn Rippon ’23. Five minutes later, the Dutchwomen got lucky again and dug a 2–0 hole for the Bulldogs.

“When you miss your chances early, it can come back to bite you,” head coach Mark Bolding said. “We haven’t come back from two before this year.”

The two-goal deficit did not last long as just 29 seconds after the center ice faceoff, Charlotte Welch ’23 fed the puck to Rebecca Vanstone ’23, who shot it in from the backdoor.

As time was expiring in the second period, the Elis bombarded netminder Matsoukas.

Emma Seitz ’23 found an opening and made it through, beating the goalie but not the buzzer.

Midway through the third, Vita Poniatovskaia ’25 fed the puck to Hartje from the corner, who shot a one-timer past the goaltender from the slot to tie the score at two.

With just over three minutes remaining in regulation, a boarding minor from Emily

K ing gave the Bulldogs an opportunity to secure the victory. Despite converting on three of five power plays last Saturday, the Bulldogs were unsuccessful across four advantages. The final minute of evenstrength play showed desperation on both sides as they were looking to collect three points and avoid overtime.

Hartje put a shot on net while Claire Dalton ’23 and Grace Lee ’24 got to work crashing the net and battling to get past Matsoukas. It was Lee who had the lucky poke to put the Elis ahead 3–2 with 26.3 seconds remaining in the game.

“Luckily it was headed toward the net and I got a piece of it,” Lee told Yale Athletics. “It was not our best game, but we had [the] resilience and came through at the end.”

The victory set the Yale squad up in a favorable position going into the last few games of the regular season, catapulting them over No. 9 Clarkson and No. 6 Harvard and into first place in the ECAC. Tuesday night’s 13th conference win also tied a season-best for the Bulldogs.

Lee’s goal was the team’s 97th, breaking a program record for most goals in one season.

Besides scoring the game-tying goal, Hartje’s assist on the Lee tally was her 29th on the year, giving her sole possession of the program’s single-season assist

MELANIE HELLER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Spectator guidelines loosen FANS FROM PAGE 12

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTS.COM

Women’s golf will tee off its season with three competitions in the South, beginning with the Columbia Classic.

we are playing tournaments further away from Connecticut, but I am looking forward to meeting new players and stepping foot onto courses I am not the most familiar with!”

In addition to three states in the South, the Bulldogs will travel to Rockville, Maryland to play the Hoya Invitational during the weekend of April 9 before capping off the season the two weeks later in Ringoes, New Jersey for the Ivy League Championship. Sophie Simon '25 expressed her excitement at the opportunity to play at the Hoya Invitational, hosted by Georgetown, as it marks a return to her home course — Woodmont Country Club — and an opportunity for friends and family to support the Bulldogs.

Simon also echoed a goal raised by Chao to play with less stress this season. Meanwhile, Alexis Kim '25 hopes to incorporate new elements into her mental game.

“This is my first northeast winter and one of my first times practicing only indoors for a long period of time,” Kim said. “We are all so excited to travel so that we can get back on the golf course and play at our first tournament of the season!”

While the squad is practicing indoors due to inclement weather, the Yale Golf Course is due for a renovation led by Gil Hanse. The course is expected to be closed for 22 to 24 months once restoration begins.

This spring will also present the first spring season for the sophomores and first years

Contact MELANIE HELLER at melanie.heller@yale.edu .

Two unlucky plays were not enough to stop No. 7 Yale from beating Union 3–2 Tuesday night.

Golf spring season begins

WOMEN'S GOLF FROM PAGE 12

record. With 29 apples over 24 games played, Hartje is currently ranked third in the country for assists per game.

This weekend, Yale will remain at Ingalls rink to play No. 9 Clarkson (21–6–3, 12–5– 1) and St. Lawrence (14–10–5, 10–5–2). During the first half of the season, the Bulldogs traveled to New York to face the Saints and the Golden Knights, coming home with four of six possible points.

A five-minute period of t h re e - o n - t h re e ove r t i m e couldn’t settle the score in Canton, New York as the Yale team skated off the ice in a 4–4 draw.

The next day, the Bulldogs came hungry, collecting a 4–2 victory over the Golden Knights.

Last weekend, Clarkson suffered an overtime loss to Quinnipiac, who shares the No. 9 national ranking with the Golden Knights. They ended the weekend on a high note after walloping Princeton 7–1.

St. Lawrence has won seven of its eight games, including backto-back victories over Quinnipiac last weekend.

In its last home games of the regular season, Yale will face off against Clarkson on Friday, Feb. 11 at 6:00 p.m. and against St. Lawrence on Saturday, Feb. 12 at 3:00 p.m.

on the team, and the first complete season for juniors who did not experience complete competition during the second half of the 2019–20 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bulldogs competed at the Dr. Donnis Thompson Invitational in Kaneohe, Hawaii before other events were canceled.

“I am really excited about this weekend since we will get a chance to see a lot of the top schools in the country,” team captain Ami Gianchandani ’23 said.

“All our tournaments are going to be pretty high level this spring.”

Both of Yale’s golf teams will end their seasons at the Ivy League Championship during the weekend of April 22.

Contact HAMERA SHABBIR at hamera.shabbir@yale.edu .

“What basketball does and what sports do, they galvanize a community, and tonight we were galvanized, we won, and that’s when it’s really special. I think that all of Yale, all the kids here, they felt like they were part of that win, and they were.”

Along with pushing up Yale College attendance at games, policies such as limiting attendance to Yale community members and limiting capacity to 50 percent are now only in place through Feb. 11, when they were originally scheduled to be enforced until Feb. 21.

Starting Friday, Feb. 11, indoor arenas — such as Ingalls Rink and John J. Lee Amphitheater — opened up to 75 percent capacity and welcomed general community members, not just those with Yale affiliations. Vaccinated fans between the ages of five and 11 will

be admitted to indoor games for the first time this season.

At outdoor venues like Bush Field and Reese Stadium, guidelines are the same as they were in the fall. All fans can attend games and those who are unvaccinated must be masked for the duration of the competition.

Concession stands will also make their return in time for springtime events. These guidelines went into effect just in time for the Yale men’s lacrosse team’s first official game against Villanova on Sunday, Feb. 13.

The first home game under the updated fan guidelines was a women’s hockey match against Clarkson at Ingalls Rink on Friday, Feb. 11 at 6:00 p.m.

William McCormack contributed reporting.

Contact MELANIE HELLER at melanie.heller@yale.edu .

LILY DORSTEWITZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

According to the latest Yale Athletics protocol, undergraduates are now allowed to attend home games.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

THROUGH THE LENS

I

f you didn’t come to Yale for neuroscience, then I’d assume you haven’t thought too much about the gray mass resting between your ears. However, without the brain, we’d be a mass of inactive nerves and immobile flesh — an inanimate object.

To put it simply, the brain controls everything.

Even as you read these words, the phonological awareness that allows you to put meaning to the words is governed by a complex synchronization between your auditory and visual cortices that has developed since you began learning to read. Beyond mechanical operations such as reading, however, the neurobiological foundations of more abstract concepts like qualia, consciousness, and dreams are still a mystery. For this reason, we can remain confident that our existence won’t be reduced to a Turing machine and that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world — at least in this lifetime.

But even if you’re not interested in the science behind this critical organ, it’s interesting to know that Yale and its alumni have been instrumental in shaping our understanding of the human brain.

S

ome of Yale’s contributions can be found at the Cushing Center in the Harvey Cushing and John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Here you’ll find the donated collections of brains and several other unique artifacts from three pioneers in the field of neuroscience, including Dr. Harvey Cushing — a Yale graduate. Seeing a brain in person can have a genuine impact on your perspective of human essence. It promotes an appreciation for the fact that the most indisputably complex circuit system of limitless cognitive biases, trillions of synaptic connection and more is confined to a roughly 75 cubic inch space within you. So If you head over to 333 Cedar Street to admire the organ that you’ve utilized to pilot your journey to Yales.

JOSHUA BAEHRING reports.

M BASKETBALL Cornell 88 Columbia 75

W BASKETBALL Brown 70 Dartmouth 56

SPORTS

WRESTLING Cornell 20 Penn 12

W SQUASH Penn 6 Cornell 3

W SWIM & DIVE Columbia 171.5 Dartmouth 100.5

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

W BASKETBALL BULLDOGS SPLIT WEEKEND The Yale women’s basketball team opened its weekend on the road in dominant fashion with a 48–33 win over Dartmouth but fell narrowly to Harvard the next day.

TRACK AND FIELD RECORDS FALL IN BOSTON Yale’s women’s squad brought home six new Yale all-times, six new personal bests and a one new school record, while the men’s team brought home a victory and a new Yale record.

U.S. to start Olympic tournament MEN'S HOCKEY

“Our team has a lot to build on from this weekend and the losses give us more motivation... to prepare for an exciting week ahead” CAROLINE DUNLEAVY ’22 WOMEN’S TENNIS CAPTAIN

Elis complete Union sweep on Tuesday

BY MELANIE HELLER SPORTS EDITOR The No. 7 Bulldogs learned the parameters of the 20-minute period in a Tuesday night matchup against Union.

WOMEN'S HOCKEY Last time the Elis (19–5– 1, 13–4–1 ECAC) took on the Dutchwomen (4–25–1, 1–17–0) was in Schenectady, New York last Saturday, where the Blue and White froze the home team solid, winning 7–0.

“I think that it’s important that we have a short-term memory and not to underestimate a good Union team that

will be hungry to get three points and some redemption,” Tess Dettling ’22 told the News ahead of Tuesday’s game.

The second leg of the homeand-home series proved more difficult than the first, with Yale edging ahead of Union 3–2 despite a 37–15 shot advantage.

Midway through the first frame, Elle Hartje ’24 dangled through traffic in the slot to set up a rebound for Dettling. As goalie Sophie Matsoukas made the second save, Hartje dove to finally knock it home. As the puck was making its way through the crease, a Union defender checked DetSEE WOMEN'S HOCKEY PAGE 10

COURTESY OF USA HOCKEY

The U.S. men’s hockey team began Olympic play against China on Thursday.

BY SPENCER KING STAFF REPORTER The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team began its pursuit of the gold medal on Thursday in a game against China. The team features two former Bulldogs, with forwards Brian O’Neill ’12 and Kenny Agostino ’14 donning the red, white and blue for the U.S. The U.S. hoped to get off to a hot start against a Chinese team that many project to be worst in the field. While the men’s hockey tournament includes 12 teams, China is currently ranked 32nd in the world by the Interna-

tional Ice Hockey Federation, or IIHF, and is only playing in the Olympics due to the automatic qualification it was granted as the host nation.

Despite the automatic qualification, there was a long debate by the IIHF as to whether China should be allowed to compete in the Olympics while a team such as Norway, ranked 11th in the world, would not be.

“Watching a team being beaten 15–0 is not good for anyone,” IIHF President Luc Tardif said to Agence France-Presse. “Not for China or for ice hockey.”

For the Americans, the goal was to get their feet under them in a

first game that projects to be their easiest of the tournament.

To prepare for the opener, the U.S. held a controlled scrimmage against Canada on Monday that allowed the two teams to adjust to the high speed of Olympic games.

The scrimmage’s lineup from head coach David Quinn pointed the spotlight firmly on the two former Bulldogs. O’Neill and Agostino played the wings on the top line for the U.S., with Andy Miele, Agostino’s teammate with Nizhny Novgorod Torpedo of the Kontinental Hockey League, centering the Yalies.

Bulldogs tee off spring season this Sunday

SEE MEN'S HOCKEY PAGE 10

Undergrads return to the stands

BY MELANIE HELLER SPORTS EDITOR Students packed the stands against Harvard on Saturday, marking one of the first times undergraduates were allowed to attend home games this semester after fan attendance restrictions were loosened early.

FANS RETURN

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS.COM

The Yale’s women’s golf team will begin its season this weekend in Florida before traveling to South Carolina and Tennessee in March.

BY HAMERA SHABBIR STAFF REPORTER The Yale’s women’s golf team will tee off its season with three competitions in the South, beginning with the Columbia Classic in Melbourne, FL this weekend.

WOMEN'S GOLF After ending the fall season with a consistent presence at each tournament, the women’s team will open its spring season on Sunday, Feb. 13 at the Duran Golf Club. The Columbia Classic will end Monday, Feb. 14, but the Bulldogs will travel south again — to South Carolina and Tennessee — in the next month. In the fall, the Blue and White earned

first-place during their opener at the Boston College Intercollegiate, placed fourth at the Princeton Invitational, tied for second at the Yale Invitational and finished sixth at the abbreviated St. John’s Invitational. The Columbia Classic will allow the team to move out of indoor work and play in weather warmer than New Haven's frosty highs of 50 degrees.

“I am excited to see how the courses and players will differ in the South,” rookie Daphne Chao ’25 said. “It is most definitely warmer down there right now, so weather wise I am glad that we are traveling south. That also entails that our travel times will be longer because SEE WOMEN'S GOLF PAGE 10

STAT OF THE WEEK

7

MELANIE HELLER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A shot from Emma Seitz '23 crossed the goal line just after time ran out in the second period, nullifying the tally.

Originally, undergraduates were barred from attending games until Feb. 7, in line with the resumption of in-person learning. On Friday, an email from Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd announced that students were able to attend athletic events starting Saturday, provided that they have completed their phaseone quarantine.

“I’m excited to be able to come back to games,” John Klinger ’22 said.

During the 48 hours of early fan attendance, many Yale teams played crucial games at home. The men’s lacrosse team opened up its season with two scrimmages against Hobart and Fairfield on Saturday. Men’s hockey took on Clarkson at the Whale on Saturday night, and the gymnastics team pulled out its first victory of the season against Southern Connecticut State at the John J. Lee Amphitheater on Sunday.

Perhaps the most anticipated matchup of the weekend was the men’s basketball game against Harvard on Saturday night.

While Netanel Crispe ’25 and his friends were originally

headed to the men’s hockey game, it was the timeless rivalry between the Blue and White and the Crimson that led them to basketball. Crispe conceded that this was his first-ever Yale basketball game and it was an “incredible experience.”

The Bulldogs donned their blue uniforms, usually reserved for road games, while spectators dressed in a black-out theme.

“I was trying to figure out what a theme could be, we were wearing blue, Harvard was wearing white, so I thought black out would be perfect. I sent it to my friends, put it on social media, said send it to everybody,” forward EJ Jarvis ’23 said. “I really didn’t know how many students would turn out, but it was great to see everybody come out like they did, just looking at the crowd and seeing it all the way packed to the top...

After playing three games with no fans, it’s great to see that many come out to one game.”

John J. Lee Amphitheater holds 2,532 fans with the bleachers unfolded and a whopping 1,104 came out to support the Bulldogs on Saturday. With the current 50 percent capacity protocol, 87 percent of the available seats were accounted for.

Fan attendance certainly played a role on the court, with constant cheering for the Blue and White and chirps at the Crimson players. With the crowd on their side, the Bulldogs were able to maintain a lead over Harvard for the vast majority of the game and held on for a 58–55 victory.

“Tonight was special,” head coach James Jones said at the postgame press conference.

SEE FANS PAGE 10

TIM TAI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Students crowded into the bleachers of John J. Lee Amphitheater to cheer on the Bulldogs and heckle the Crimson.

THE NUMBER OF UNDER ARMOUR ALL-AMERICA FIRST YEARS ON YALE’S LACROSSE TEAM.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022

WEEKEND

// DORA GUO

FROM SEVEN SISTER SCHOOLS TO SEXTING:

A History of Love, Sex and Dating at Yale

// BY MAYA WELDON-LAGRIMAS Mildred, Maude and Mabel Were sitting at a table Down at the Taft Hotel Working on a plan to Catch themselves a man to Satisfy their minds a spell.

For twenty years and then some They’d been showin’ men some Tricks that made their motors fail, But though they’d all had squeezes From lots of PhD’ses They’re saving themselves for Yale.

Hail, hail, hail to the boys down at Yale Saving Ourselves for Yale

At Yale, we love love. And nowhere loves love more than the WKND desk of the Yale Daily News. We love to write about it.

We love to think about it. We love to do it, whatever “it” means.

Love, sex and dating are eternally emportant. However, what is less eternal are the rituals, traditions and unspoken rules of courting.

In fact, dating has changed dramatically over the past 50 years.

Seven Sister Schools, Strict Rules In his senior year, Raymond Crystal’s ’60 roommate gave him the number of a Sarah Lawrence student named Laura Barr. After carrying her number around in

his pocket for a while, Raymond asked Laura to see Yale face-off with Columbia. Yale would wait a decade before letting women into the college, therefore the standard courting practice was for a man to invite a date to take the train into New Haven for a football game. Unfortunately, Laura turned him down because she already had a date for the night.

Instead, she invited him to her home in Mount Vernon for the afternoon where they discussed The Republic. Laura was smitten and called off her previously scheduled date for the evening.

Within the year the couple was engaged on East Rock. When Raymond went to medical school,

they eloped in a Harvard chapel.

Raymond and Laura Crystal have been married for sixty years.

When I met them on a Zoom call, they sat close together, thick as thieves, ready to tell me about their romantic history on Yale’s campus. To me, their story seemed like a Disney fantasy, but Mrs. Crystal insisted that Yale was “180 degrees different from what it is today.”

Austere. Testosterone. Academe. These words she used to describe campus. The woman a Yale student dated was “not allowed to participate in life at Yale.”

Dating structured around the football season. Women would

come up on the train from various women’s colleges including “The Seven Sisters” which consisted of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Radcliffe, Vassar and Wellesley. “It was like an exodus on Fridays,” Mrs. Crystal said. “We’d all get on the trains with our little suitcases. We would say ‘Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going?’ … We’d all get off at the train station. We’d all share taxis to Phelps Gate. We’d go our separate ways.” Women couldn’t stay in the residential colleges so men would get them rooms at the Taft Hotel or the Old Park Plaza Hotel (now the Cont. on page B2

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND AFTER

ALL THESE YEARS A Brief History of Love, Sex, and Dating

Cont. from page B1 Omni Hotel).

Men could also check women into guest rooms in the Head of College House. Secret societies would put women up, although this was not looked on as “the thing to do.” Strict parietal rules, enforced by small police stations at residential college entryways, regulated the sexual relation-

would come down on the train to meet a Yale man and go to a football game, followed by dinner and a mixer with a keg. He described that on a Saturday night you would walk down Elm street and hear live music playing at every college. The social season culminated in the Yale Prom where Gitlin, a professional musician,

// RAYMOND CRYSTAL

Raymond Crystal ’61 and Laura Barr becoming engaged on East Rock. 1961.

ships at Yale. According to Mrs. Crystal, women couldn’t just come and go. A guard had to take a woman’s name, ask where she was going and escort her there.

The door had to remain open and women had to sit in a chair. If they sat on a bed, one foot had to be on the ground. Guards went around to make sure couples were behaving. “You could not have sex in a residential college,” she said.

While broken rules could result in expulsion, some couples still took their chances. Mr. and Mrs. Crystal jointly recalled that one couple snuck past the guards by hiding the woman under a trench coat, fedora and varsity scarf.

Mrs. Crystal also recalls other strange rituals to acknowledge the rare presence of women on campus. For example, men were required to wear sports jackets to the dining halls and bring their silverware. “If a woman entered the dining hall everyone would take out their forks and pound on the table.” she said. “Relationships between men and women were very unnatural” and “women changed [the culture] a lot very quickly” after coeducation.

Coeducation Splits a Dating Culture According to Professor Jay Gitlin ’71, up until coeducation, life at Yale “was like living in a monastery.” When the first women arrived, however, the monkish lifestyle dragged on.

Gitlin described a sense of “duty to be gentlemen and treat them like sisters.” While there wasn’t much dating between the new coeds, relationships with women from sister schools persisted.

My conversation with Professor Gitlin painted an idyllic picture of a warm, predictable and romantic dating cycle. Women

remembers Wilson Pickett playing the hit song, Mustang Sally.

“Dancing was very important.” Gitlin said. “Dancing was as close as you got.” In an era of first-base, second-base and so on, “there was absolutely no assumption whatsoever that you were going to be rounding the base paths,” he said.

“By the time you held hands,” Gitlin added, “that was damn exciting … If you wound up kissing that evening it was like: Wow, how great was that!? … Then you went back to your class on Monday.”

The dating cycle reserved for weekends and football games only allowed Yale men to see a woman they were interested in a handful of times a semester, but Gitlin said that this did not prevent real connections from being made. “It was romantic!” He said. “Anticipation has something to do with romance.”

Harvard men were stereotyped as stuck up, and Princeton men were seen as nerdy. Yale men, on the other hand, were seen as the best dates. “We were good boyfriend material.” Gitlin said. He told me he wondered if “there were any good guys around here for you all.”

When I asked him about the free-love movement of the 60s and 70s Gitlin assured me Yale culture was a far cry from Woodstock and that he didn’t believe there was a heavy drug or hookup culture. However, Dr. Dori Zaleznik ’71, a transfer student into the first class of women at Yale and the first woman on the masthead of the Yale Daily News, described a completely different picture. “Oh, there were drugs.” she said. “My sense was coeds didn’t do much dating … while there were certainly women in our class who

WKND RECOMMENDS Hugh Grant movies

met their now husbands at Yale … the majority of women didn’t formally date in that kind of dressup-and-get-taken-out-to-xyz way.” Zaleznik said.

She also deviated from Professor Gitlin in her conception of Yale’s sexual culture. “The whole sense of ‘you’ll get expelled when you let a woman in a room’ dissipated after we got there,” she said.

As a result, the concept of hooking up was born on Yale’s campus.

Zaleznik emphasized that there were many strands to social life, among which existed a big cultural divide. Traditional social scenes that prioritized drinking were challenged by new social groups whose congregational sacraments were marijuana and other drugs. Zaleznik, who participated in the latter, knew about the prom but did not go. As for movies and football games, she mostly attended those with her friend groups.

But beneath the rapidly evolving social scene, a bigger obstacle was hidden for Yale’s first women. As a stark minority in a deeply gendered culture, they were much more preoccupied with finding equal footing with their male classmates. Zaleznik recalled her first morning at Yale. When she went to breakfast, the number of women in the dining hall was so small that the only seats available were with large groups of all men. “One guy hopped up, nearly knocking over my tray to pull out my chair,” she remembers. “There were a number of men who didn’t know what to make of all of us.”

She remembered another experience, of going to a football game with a potential date.

“Having grown up with a brother who was into sports, I knew a lot about football. I was sitting there at the game and the Yale team got punted. We got a good runback but then there was a flag.”

Zaleznik quickly identified that the flag was a penalty for clipping, now known as “block in the back.”

“The guy that I was with looked at me like I had five heads. It was clear that I was not supposed to be a sophisticated observer,” she said. “Needless to say I did not go out with that guy again.”

Unfortunately, up until this point in history, the overwhelming number of visible love stories were those between a man and a woman. What Zalzenik and Gitlin did agree on was that any sexual minorities were not visible.

“It was still not an environment where people were very comfortable coming out.” Zalenik said.

She guessed that this changed over the next five to 10 years.

Dealing with Diversity By the 1980s there was much

Image from Yale Prom Book, 1970

greater acceptance of LGBTQA+ identities. According to Dr. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas ’90, a youth culture specialist and Chair of Ethnicity, Race and Migration, many students were in the process of coming out in college.

Professor Ramos-Zayas was not queer herself, but she recalled that “There was a queer dating scene,” and in her circles there was a strong Latinx queer dating scene. The AIDS epidemic also had an effect on sexual culture.

She said that while people did hookup, “there was this t-shirt that said ‘Sex kills. Go to Yale and live forever.’”

Besides, there were also socioeconomic, ethnic and racial determinants of dating. The way people dated, commented Ramos-Zayas, “varies by class.

[It also] varies by race and ethnicity, how emotionally ready you are.” As a Puerto Rican immigrant who was heavily involved in the cultural houses, she remembers that everyone in her friend group was busy at Yale. They were balancing multiple jobs, culture shock and homesickness. “It was kind of survival mode,” She said.“I think for us it felt like Yale was a lot of opportunity. There was opportunity to play volleyball. There were opportunities to go to political events. There were mentorship programs with the kids from Wilbur Cross Elementary School. There was so much to do,” she said.

When I asked her about what actions she would take in the presence of romantic feelings, she said, “We had crushes on people all the time. We talked about it with our girlfriends endlessly.”

But those talks were less about romantic relationships. Instead, “it was a bonding experience with girlfriends,” she said, “rather than a serious source of desire.” While she could recall a handful of couples, she said that “there was not that sense that this is where I will meet the love of my life.” ~Modern~ Dating On the surface, the sentiment that you won’t find true love at Yale seems popular. Casual sex and disposable dating app matches are common. Under this surface, however, many students feel a heaviness in modern dating life. According to Tyler Brown ’23, “If you’re looking for a relationship — which not everyone is, people are preoccupied with the emotional support and growth aspects of it. […] The trauma dump is a Yale tradition. […] Everyone is talking about their attachment style. […] There is an emotional tinge to everything. […] The Yale personality is very nerdy about dating.”

In a culture where TikTok

influencers promote pop-psychology, it’s clear that “the world has learned more about psychological health, and it’s been distilled and people hear these little phrases. People rely on that to understand their romantic attraction,” Brown says.

However, for the subset of Yale that isn’t looking for a relationship, dating apps and a casual culture surrounding sex “provides a cheap rush of dopamine,” according to Brown. He says the dynamic of “I value you for this moment right now but I don’t value you for any other moment is pervasive. It manifests itself in romantic and non romantic settings.”

Brown also highlighted a “weird power-play” that occurs over dating apps. “The problem with Yale Tinder is that we’re small enough to recognize [your matches],” he said. Some people have the confidence to swipe on friends while others don’t.

While Professor Ramos-Zayas says she didn’t notice much of a difference in approach to how people of different sexual orientations built relationships on campus, Tyler Brown ’23 suspects it’s “much easier for straight people to go out find someone [and] have sex with them.” Although Brown did meet his current boyfriend at a fraternity, he felt that this was “incredibly rare” for a gay couple.

“As a straight person you don’t have to worry about your presentation in the world,” he said. When it’s tricky to figure out if someone you meet is gay or not, Brown says there is a secret communication that occurs. “You let down your guard a little bit or use a different voice and see what the response is. […] I was once told I had a really gay Spotify because all of the music was strange and unbearable. […] Telling someone that you listen to Mitski is a big rainbow flag.”

The modern paradox of yearning for both fast and deep connection, both easy and fulfilling love, is a hard one to solve.

However, while I interviewed Yalies across generations this past week, it seemed as though love has always been a confusing, ever-evolving and eternally important pillar in our lives.

Most importantly, the alumni that I spoke to seemed to thoroughly enjoy reminiscing about the highs and lows, break ups and down bads, the hookups and honeymoon phases. So no matter what chapter of your romance story you’re in, perhaps it is wise to revel in it at full force. Soon it will all be history.

Contact MAYA WELDON-LAGRIMAS at maya.weldon-lagrimas@yale.edu .

// JAY GITLIN

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND RECONSIDERING

LDR: Long-Distance Reevaluated // BY JESSICA SANCHEZ I’ve thought a lot about how we fell for each other out of necessity. The conditions were too perfect: being unable to see anyone meant I lost touch with a ton of people, but those who remained in my life became essential. Playing Jackbox over Zoom and watching movies every weekend, FaceTiming between online classes, having picnics and taking walks and swimming. We’d been friends for three years, since our very first class together freshman year of high school, and it felt natural to be with him. In a way, it felt inevitable.

Past trauma with men left me scared to show affection. But with him, the pressure was off. I felt comfortable with him in a way I thought impossible for myself; I was surprised at how easy it was to be at his side. I loved being able to sleep next to him despite my aversion to naps. I loved having seasons of “Survivor” explained to me and the way he let me gush about movies. I loved seeing him listening to our playlists on Spotify. I loved the way he would let me warm my freezing cold hands against his back — although sometimes he hated it. I loved the way it felt to trust someone so much.

We were never the best at communication. There were a few moments throughout our relationship where one of us was silently fuming, too afraid to say anything that might break us. There were buildups and small eruptions, tense moments where we struggled to carefully put together the words to express how we felt. As August crept closer, a lot was left unsaid about our future. There wasn’t a moment we spent together when I wasn’t thinking, “What’s next?” But I didn’t want to break the bubble around us, delicate as glass.

I stated my case at the beginning of August, a few days before we’d be separated by 1,800 miles. Getting into this relationship halfway through my senior year of high school, in the middle of applying for my future, I felt committed to ending things just as the end of summer came. Only fools agree to long-distance relationships. High school relationships don’t survive. But the closer the time came for us to leave, the more I felt I couldn’t bring myself to let go of the first person who had ever made me feel truly safe. I didn’t realize that at some point I had abandoned my grudge against long-distance, that this decision to stay

together was taking hold of my heart. Why should we give up something so good?

We didn’t talk about it again. He took the bus to Austin, I drove up to New Haven and things changed almost immediately. For the first few weeks, I was miserable here, constantly and unavoidably alone and afraid.

And jealous.

A lot of our friends ended up at UT Austin, and he fit right into life there, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. While I was staring out of my window at Harkness Tower, my only thought being “Stick it out for one semester and then you can transfer,” he was drinking rum and playing Smash Bros in our friends’ dorm. The more I told him about how I was feeling, the less he revealed to me about his new life. Our calls became increasingly silent.

I was walking out of Sterling Memorial Library one night, and I called him to hear some updates, but all I heard was … nothing. I stared at my shoes, hoping to hear anything on the other line. A laugh. A comment on his day. A whisper. Breathing. God, please say something. This is awful. Please say something. When I looked back up, the crosswalk timer was over, and I’d missed my chance to cross Broadway. I told him I had to go. Okay, he said. I hung up.

I stopped giving him pieces of my day, of my new life: the weekly trips to Bowtie on Temple Street, the sun in the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library in the middle of the day, Grilled Cheese Wednesdays, the people I was meeting and the people I felt I had yet to meet. I hardly ever knew how or what he was doing. I was tired of all the silences, the disinterest. My jealousy, frustration, sadness kept festering.

I broke up with him the night before The Game, the day before we’d both be back in Dallas. I’d meant to do it weeks earlier, but with both of our midterm seasons approaching, I thought it would be best to wait. We’d been calling for about an hour — he had left a party he was at to talk to me — and I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” The silence that came after that was worse than all of the silences from all of our calls over the past couple months combined.

Immediately after hanging up, I felt how much of a coward I had been. How unfair the entire situation was. I had let my anger take the frontmost part of mind, and it was driving me desperate. I’d acted not impulsively — for all I could feel for two months was how miserable it made me to think about us — but irresponsibly.

Selfishly.

A few days later he asked if we could have lunch together back in Dallas. We talked about our relationship openly, candidly, maybe a little solemnly. It was the most honest we had been with each other since we’d left Dallas.

We talked about wanting to stay together a little longer, spending winter break together. We expressed how we didn’t want to go through long-distance again, that we were happy together at home but neither of us could handle the pressures of staying together while 1,800 miles apart. We would weather three weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break away from each other, then spend one last month together. Bittersweet plans.

Small things about our year-long relationship stand out to me as examples of how we weren’t the right fit, at least not long-term. When I first said those infamous three words —eight letters — he didn’t say them back until the last day of Thanksgiving break, over four months later. I became tired of hearing about what he was coding or how nightmarish his discrete math class was but knowing nothing about his social life at college. I was annoyed at how he seemed to think too much but never revealed what it was he was thinking about.

But when we were together, at home, we made each other feel a bit more whole.

Every moment had meaning. It meant so much to feel someone’s unconditional understanding. His presence was reassuring and warm.

I wrote him a letter the day before he left for Austin again after winter break. I told him to read it on the bus, make it cinematic.

I wrote that I don’t really believe in soulmates, but I do believe that sometimes two people who find themselves connected in a meaningful way can eventually find their way back to each other. I don’t mean that after seven more semesters and three more summers we’ll get back together. I don’t mean that we’ll never move on. I just think of the way we’ve grown together, learned about each other, in an unforgettable yet ineffable way. This relationship meant everything to me. It was my safe space, even when I dreaded it. It was home.

But if Yale has taught me anything, it’s that home can change. I can change. I’m slowly but surely finding my place here. I’m making this place mine. After all, what’s Valentine’s Day for if not falling in love all over again?

Contact JESSICA SANCHEZ at jessica.sanchez.jms469@yale.edu .

// ELIZABETH WATSON

Dating apps? No thanks, I’ll trust my wily, in-person charm // BY ANDREW CRAMER Is Love dead? Is Romance? What about Animalistic Sexual Passion? I dare say yes!

I’m talking, of course, about our cultural demise at the hand of dating apps.

Picture this. You match with someone on your dating app du jour after hours of mindless swiping, casually determining if other singles are physically worthy of your lust. You slide into a few chats and decide you want to meet for a sneaky link.

Now picture this. You’re at Toad’s Place, home of Love, Romance and Animalistic Sexual Passion. You meet someone you find cute. You’re yelling small talk at each other over the deafening roar of “I’ve Got a Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. Your arms graze, perhaps you break out a cute little pickup line, and lean in for a magical kiss.

Which do you prefer?

You might argue that the latter requires a little more effort, a little more courage. You’re right. But is Love not worth our effort? Can we not muster up that slight burst of courage? Have we really been reduced to nothing but fleshy, hormone-driven masses? Believe in Romance, I implore you!

My disdain for dating apps, I will admit, was not born out of some high-minded morality-based argument. The facts of my physical profile dictate my stance on the matter. Despite what my mom seems to believe, I am not the most handsome young boy on the block. I get the job done with my good old-fashioned wily charm.

A couple of pictures of me and a cheap one-liner in my bio aren’t going to woo the ladies.

There are things that a dating profile just can’t capture. You won’t hear my

infectious giggle. You won’t notice how tall I am. You won’t see my goofy dance moves. You won’t notice how tall I am.

You won’t get the full effect of my smile.

Again, I want to emphasize that I’m taller than you’d think from pictures. You won’t learn to love my self-deprecating sense of humor. Et cetera, et cetera.

Personality is my salvation, and that’s the main reason why I’m not on dating apps. But that’s not all. There’s something that would feel so deeply wrong about knowing that random people out there are deciding whether or not my looks are good enough for them.

If you’re going to spurn my affection, do it to my face. I’ll embrace my shame.

But the mass judgment from those anonymous connoisseurs of the human form is too much for my poor psyche to handle.

We’re better than this. We need not subject ourselves to the masses. As we approach our Day of Love — Oh, that glorious homage to St. Valentine! — I make this final plea to all the Yale students, parents, faculty, administrators and bored alumni reading this column.

Give Love a chance! Put some effort into Romance! Trust your Animalistic Sexual Passion! Swap out your couch-sitting sweatpants for your finest wooing attire and get out there. Because every time that one more person has the courage to flirt in-person, there’s hope that one day there will be someone for me.

Forever your comrade in Love, Andrew Contact ANDREW CRAMER at andrew.cramer@yale.edu . // NATHAN APFEL

WKND Recommends not texting him

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND PEOPLE

WATCHING

MARVIN, 20 [ONE MILE AWAY]

// BY AVA SAYLOR

I’ve never had a dating app. The entire concept scares me. However, I have been dating app adjacent for a good portion of my young adult years. I’ve had oversight on the order of profile photos, collaborated on flirty but nonthreatening bios and laughed at pickup lines of that somehow never hit. My experience — as second-hand as it is — is something that I am somewhat proud of. With Valentine’s Day barreling around the corner, curiosity got the best of me — it was time to leave my bystander status behind and get in on the action. Despite my eagerness, I couldn’t jump right in with my personal information — I needed to do a trial run. So, I combined my dating-app familiarity with my feverish love of MTV’s “Catfish” and created a profile that no Yale student could look past.

Marvin, age 20, lives just a mile away from you.

Maybe it wasn’t appropriate to use yassified photos of Dean Marvin Chun for personal gain. To be fair, his term is nearly over. After consulting some experts, I settled on a bio: “Looking for a Valentine’s Day lover. Well-endowed. Here for a good time, not a long time.”

Armed with the pickup line, “Step-

ping down from my position so I can try others,” I was ready to play the game.

Not ready enough, apparently. My first obstacle came with the fixed amount of swipes. I am diametrically opposed to limits on love; this was the first strike. Of many. After learning to navigate this dilemma and trusting it would be the last, I delved into the trenches of Tinder and discovered that Yale students are more down-bad than I ever imagined.

Here are the highlights: • Ya l e - N US s t u d e n t wh o offered to send me a database of student feet pics to keep the school open, starting with the line, “Please help us, daddy.”

• Man who listed six separate “favorite” philosophers. That was the whole bio.

• A concerning amount of toga photos. How else would you know they were in Directed Studies?

• “Peter Salivate.”

• Man that held up a knife in a mirror selfie. Slasher-style.

First photo. Get help.

• Woman whose entire “My

Top Spotify Songs” was Mitski’s new album. It had only been out for three hours.

I hope you’re okay.

• Person whose second photo was confirmation of their hackathon win. Why? What was the goal?

• Man who had a video of him singing a personal rendition of “Tokyo Drift.” I will admit, it was pretty good.

• Every STEM-related oneliner. Especially the chemistry major who said they “do it on the table periodically.”

• Man who showed off his 94 percent character-match to Scott Pilgrim. Self-explanatory.

• Every single Chun-related pickup line. It’s best not to elaborate.

After all of this, I think I’ve had my fair share of dating apps for a while. Even if I hadn’t, I got permanently banned from Tinder for catfishing. Who would’ve thought?

Best of luck out there to those in the field this Valentine’s season. You’ll need it; Yale students have no game.

Maybe try Bumble instead.

Contact AVA SAYLOR at ava.saylor@yale.edu .

// SOPHIE HENRY

“IN THESE PEOPLE, I HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED:”

a cheers to the friends of now // BY ANABEL MOORE What does care look like?

This battered camel cover protects blue scrawls, and my book bag protects my beloved journal. I carry this soft notebook with me every time I travel, taking care each night to spend time with my dear friend. This cahier extends grace and kindness to a heart that is much quicker to condemn itself than others, a comfort blankie I tote everywhere.

Like my journals, my good friends make it easy to point out what care looks like. The intimacy that comes with having a wonderful friend is invisible.

I can’t point out the moment someone started to become my friend, but I know when they proved that they were a good friend, cementing a future ease with which we could care for each other. I see friendship not as interdependency, but rather knowing someone will help you find the fortitude within yourself to do the right thing when life gets hard.

When you see friends every day, as is often the case in settings like Yale, the nuance to the scenery becomes less and less discernible. It becomes harder to pinpoint just why this person matters to you when you spend so much time taking that friendship for granted — hell, when you spend so much time with them to begin with. When I feel I matter and can’t quite say why, I start to effortlessly soak in the details of my surroundings; the world becomes more vivid, the internal chatter softer. Only in loneliness can I describe this belonging.

Nell calls me in the middle of her after-school run, panting as she takes her usual route down the river trail, and I spill about my day and thoughts on the burgeoning metaverse. It’s late here in New Haven, and my weariness fades as she describes her pottery project (baby goat figurines) and what it’s been like deleting social media (easier than expected?). I laugh when she asks if I still have

the jar of marjoram she gave me as a parting gift before college, aptly labeled by her neat hand “NOT WEED” such that I’m not apprehended by TSA. “It’s on my desk,” I tell her; how could I ever throw away this little aromatic herb, the one we bought at the overpriced grocery store one late-summer evening driving in circles around our hometown? She helps me fall back in love with my sport, with being an athlete after mental and physical struggles. She takes the time to respond to the texts I send with New York Times articles and quotes from Mary Oliver and the books I’m reading, the ones even my mom doesn’t “thumbs-up.”

Emma meets me at the boba shop wearing the exact same outfit, except the pants are different colors (hers are pink, mine are green — on-brand for our personalities and friendship).

She wears more jewelry than me, long blonde hair always neat and styled. We laugh under a maple tree on the river, moms and joggers and cyclists whizzing by until we drive back up opposite hills towards home. Her house feels safe; it’s where she got me ready for high-school dates and baked my favorite pumpkin spice mini-muffins. With this said, I remember a time where we both nearly broke each other’s noses playing fourth-grade basketball; her mom mopped up the blood on the court. I remember the clumsy box cake we baked on March 20, 2020, my 17th birthday and day 10 of pandemic lockdown. She would not let me feel alone on my special day.

Our friendship has had its rough patches, mostly predictable consequences of adolescence, but it is still her I text at 6:10 p.m. on a Monday: “thinking of you and missing you right now.”

Lizzie checks in on days that are hard, sends good luck texts before my big exams and picks me up when a soccer ball to the head gets the better of me at a game in Rhode Island. She messages me the next morning,

WKND Recommends publicly and dramatically professing your love for a YDN staffer

checks in at lunch and makes sure I’m okay. Her kindness soothes paralyzing stress. She reminds me of what it means to be content in myself and my ability, to be proud of who I am at a place where who I am feels smaller than it did back home.

My mom told me that it only takes one great friend at college to make the world feel as if it’s on its axis. Lizzie, I still don’t know how you holed up in the Branford library for so many consecutive hours before that chemistry exam, but thank you for being my personal East Rock.

My gals are all talented in ways I don’t understand. Nell cruises to the finish line of our 4x400m relay and beats our rivals as I huff and puff from an earlier leg; she wears effort like a uniform, so vital to the team yet something that fades into the background.

Emma dances the most gorgeous ballet, leaping and bending in ways that astound me every time I see her stretch her feet with an abominable contraption on her bedroom floor. Lizzie hands me the hilarious dog calendar at our club soccer mixer that now hangs on my common room wall and makes me laugh at dinner when she doesn’t know I’ve had a rough day. The wonderful thing about these friends is that I can be completely alone and know that they are with me. I can see their faces when they are most in their element, reminding me to reconnect with mine.

When I miss these friends, I don’t scan crowds looking for glimpses of black or blonde hair, for petite figures in neon-green Patagonia hats or Loyola Marymount University sweatshirts or for the Florida Elite slicker Lizzie dons to club soccer practice. I go on long walks alone, trying to find a feeling of company that is so warm I cannot help but fall into myself. I search through pictures of us together: Nell and I climbing Mt. Constitution in the San Juan Islands through feet of snow and freezing cold temperatures,

// ANABEL MOORE

Emma and I jumping into crystalline Bahamian water, Lizzie and I dancing to our hearts’ content at Sig Chi, the picture of us in the Branford basement in front of an inflatable cow wearing a Santa hat (!?). I love reading these “and I’s” when I go back through my journals. I carry all my friends with me, those who I see every day and the ones I meet for coffee every few months — in the pages of my journals. Both the books and the people within them serve as my constant companions.

There are no strings attached to these refreshingly real people who make every nuance of my surroundings clearer and brighter. I sometimes turn to my journals because they don’t offer some quip about an errant

thought or poorly-considered word choice, and understand that when I pause it is because my brain is whirring too fast to put thoughts into words. But I turn to my friends because they don’t do this either: we’re all on this unruly journey that is growing up together, giving each other the grace and kindness to figure out who we are with the understanding that none of us can do it alone. These are the friends of now, filling the space between the known and unknown, past and future. It is easy to forget guys and romance when you feel so whole: in these people, I have everything I need.

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

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND PREFERENCES

A LETTER TO MY LOVER: I WANT YOU BACK // BY JACQUELINE KASKEL To my love, As this second Monday in February draws nearer, I feel absolutely and completely overwhelmed. I’m drowning in couples that walk down the street holding hands with infatuation written across their faces. Every place I go is swarmed with people wearing their hearts on their sleeves, boasting anniversaries and declarations of love. And yet my own heart is beating a mile a minute as I sit here and reveal to you what is deeply embedded in my heart: my love for you and everything you’ve given me.

I find it prudent to begin, though, with a morsel of truth: it was you who left me, cold and alone across the street. Some days, I don’t know if I can ever forgive you. We were blessedly together in person for only a few months… was it our long-distance spring relationship that made you leave me?

It feels as if you’re twisting a knife in my chest when I see you over there with someone younger. Who knew that being class of twenty-four was considered old these days?

I am sulking here in Vanderbilt wondering what I did wrong, and what I could possibly do to make you a part of my life again. I go days without seeing you sometimes, without waking up by your side in the mornings.

I think you will find that I miss you terribly. I see you across the way, taunting me.

Deceivingly close, yet ever so far — if only you’d let me in through the front door. Each time I want to see you or just be with you, I have to use a side entrance as if we’re in some kind of clandestine relationship. I don’t want to sneak around when it comes to you. I long for the whole world to know how genuinely happy I am to be with you.

I have never been much of a believer in love at first sight, as you well know, yet thinking back to our first encounter, I am not so sure anymore. I remember precisely the first moment I saw you. Having arrived at night, you were shrouded in darkness, camouflaged in the night sky. The next morning, though, I saw your tower, standing there erect and gleaming in the soft sunlight. From afar, it was nothing short of magnificent, but as I got closer, the intricate detail on the individual sides was simply breathtaking. Even though we lived

together for a few months, I still find myself taking pictures of you each time I visit.

I realize that these have been tumultuous times, and that I haven’t been entirely faithful to you. Nevertheless, I knew you were leaving me before I found solace in someone else over the summer.

Someone slightly larger, I might add.

Someone with superior cooking skills whose breakfast never disappoints. Someone whose basement is much more polished.

Competing with Silliman, my love, is a tough endeavor, but don’t fret. You can never forget your first love. And though I can’t ignore my feelings for that summer love, nor for Vanderbilt, who I’ve been with for several months now, I implore you to understand that I will always love you.

I understand that some people are bothered by the carillon in your 216-feettall tower, by how loudly it rings sometimes. I admit, on occasion, it has roused me from a nap or rudely interrupted me during a meeting — in these rare moments, I am rife with hatred. But this feeling is more often than not short-lived. The twice-daily musical interludes are actually quite beautiful, and I know many would certainly agree. For those who don’t, it would be impossible for them to deny that you are by far the most beautiful. No one can even compare, especially not your neighbor: Saybrook.

What I am asking for is a blank slate, my love.

We’ve both made

our share of mistakes in this relationship — me with my Silliman affair and you with your class of twenty-five — but maybe we can move forward. Maybe we can have what we’ve both always wanted. A full year together. Maybe even two. Some hot breakfast options. A more open-concept basement. Maybe anything is possible, but only if my love is requited.

So, tell me, Branford, do you love me like I do?

Of course, I love your boundless beauty as it towers over all the rest in gothic perfection. But mostly, I love the little things about you, the quirks that make you … you.

The way the door to your library squeaks and creaks like a freight train, waking up every resident of Calliope courtyard and peeving everybody in the library.

How there’s an unspoken rule in the library that only one person and their friends can occupy a room. How the bees in the summer time are incapable of stinging you. How I still don’t know whether the stone benches exist for the sake of art or for convenience. How your back wall is actually a part of Saybrook, but we have the privilege of enjoying the view. How there is a water fountain at least somewhere in the building unlike some other dorms.

And how the family of squirrels can sometimes be a little too people-friendly.

You have a quaint gym, which, although

claustrophobic, is awfully convenient. As if you knew exactly what I needed, a boxing bag was installed this year, something for which I am forever grateful. A ping pong table lies in your basement game room, calling my name as of late and inspiring an abundance of procrastination. I have spent at least two dozen hours in your movie theater and whipped up a sundry of baked goods in your kitchen. The exposed pipes of the basement ceiling are no longer disturbing but quaint and whimsical. And then there are your piadinas: a hit or miss lately, if I’m being frank. But every once in a while, they can satisfy a specific hunger or add a little Italian spice to my plate.

It would be untoward of me to not mention at this point your people — my family — who make loving you worthwhile, who make the time I spend with you a joy and not a burden. I remember those warm September days when you, me, and our family would all lounge on the Adirondack chairs atop the fresh grass. We’d all bask in the sun and say in unison, “Harkness still doesn’t look real.” And to this day, I can barely believe it myself.

Our relationship was not perfect at the start and, as of right now, we seem to be teetering on the edge. I sincerely hope, from the bottom of my heart, that we can reconcile sometime in the future. Maybe not now.

Maybe not tomorrow. But by next year, if you still love me, we will find each other. I believe in you and I wholeheartedly believe in us.

Vanderbilt and Silliman will always be a part of me just as the class of twenty-five will always be attached to you. This we cannot change. We, however, can change our ways and devote time to each other as when we first met. Send me a thousand love letters. Let me run with a thousand squirrels in the main courtyard. Make me a thousand mugs in the ceramics studio. Just, please, Branford, tell me that you love me, too.

With love, Your devoted squirrel Contact JACQUELINE KASKEL at jacqueline.kaskel@yale.edu .

// JESSAI FLORES

Ranking Yale Men, from Best to Worst // BY PIPER JACKMAN

The Five Best, The Five Worst, and a few in the Middle 1. YDN Reporters In my entirely unbiased opinion, men who write for the one and only Yale Daily News are the best men on Yale’s campus.

Bonus points if they write for the WKND desk. Absolute Logan from Gilmore Girls vibes, always up late to text you back, will bring you coffee because they’re getting some for themselves too. Also, they know when cool things are happening on campus.

2. FOOT Leaders Ah, FOOT Leaders, the true salt of the Earth. Think of everything you want in a guy and I guarantee you, a FOOT leader has it. Athletic? You bet. Good listener?

Listened to ten children telling their life stories. Strong? A FOOT leader can and will carry you on his back if the occasion arises; hopefully, it won’t be because you broke your ankle while hiking. Will he sacrifice his life for you? I mean, he’s trained to fight a bear. Picture this: riding on his back around Central Park because your feet got tired on your day-long date in the city. Outdoorsy guys appreciate the little things in nature, so they will appreciate the little things about you. Plus you’ll have cute hiking photos for your Instagram!

3. Musicians What every woman wants most is a man who can listen. A man who remembers their Starbucks order, knows that they

don’t like to drive in the snow, or is able to bring up that one time they almost spilled an entire glass of water on Peter Salovey — this definitely did not happen to me. And who listens better than a musician, specifically a musician in an orchestra? — soloist musicians, unfortunately, can only listen to themselves. Dating a musician brings perks such as being serenaded with your favorite songs, stress-free tickets to the YSO Halloween show, or possibly having a song written for you. This definitely also applies to Acappella men who convince their group to sing a love song for you.

4. Buttery Workers A rare type of man: a man who can cook.

It may just be dino nuggets and quesadillas, but it’s the thought that counts. Of all the men that can cook, buttery workers are the best because they’ve got community spirit. They know everybody, and they can feed you while you girlboss your way through your CS psets. You’ve got to be a really nice and fun person to work in the buttery. Someone willing to put in the late-night time to be a great member of their resco will definitely put in the time to be a great boyfriend. A buttery worker is truly a breadwinner in both respects. …

16. Heavyweight crew boys from the UK 17. Skinny international students who subsist off cigarettes …

27. TFs (only the hot ones) …

32. The Big Football Players Riding their Scooters (if they beat H*rv*rd) …

85. Peter Salovey …

96. Econ Bros Do I really need to elaborate here? Have fun being talked down to constantly. It’s okay if you don’t understand what they’re saying because they don’t understand either. And they’re not necessarily right.

They’ll rat you out for stealing at the Bow Wow while they steal right from the stock market. They’ve sold out to the world of finance or consulting and would sell you out too. They will make lots of money but will only find joy in their annual tax evasion scheme. This can be nulled if they’re double majoring. You gotta make some money so that you can have somewhere to live while working on your novel.

97. YPU Debaters Do you really want to get into a relationship with a man who argues for fun?

YPU men may think they are cool but only because they have argued their way out of anyone trying to say otherwise. Good luck trying to order takeout together without three objections and a lengthy closing argument.

98. McKinsey Interns Joining the ranks are the men who cannot spell opportunity, who sold out as first years, and who think anyone has anything to gain by consulting them. At least wait until junior year to give in to the temp-

tation of consulting! That way, you’ll have some dignity restored. By the way, men who emailed in the chain clowning the McKinsey people are not excluded from this. A lot of them probably secretly applied anyway. Also, they broke my gmail.

99. The Mansplainers in Directed Studies If you are in DS, and your motivation is not to learn the secrets of the patriarchy so that you can then systematically dismantle it, what on Earth are you doing?

Defending Machiavelli? Saying Aristotle was right? Absolutely not. If you want to find some of the most pretentious men you have ever met, look no further than the DS men who say they like Aristotle. And if the phrase “well the advancing freedoms of women in this time was great, BUT” comes out of your mouth, don’t even bother saying anything else.

100. That suite of guys who inexplicably scream for an hour and a half on a random Monday night.

Yes, you. The WKND is over, buckle down and do some work like the rest of us, you know who you are. What can there possibly be to scream about on a Monday night? If you need to scream that badly, go find the YPU debaters from number 98.

Or one of the musicians from number 3, they’ll listen.

Contact PIPER JACKMAN at piper.jackman@yale.edu .

// JESSAI FLORES

Red Wine Ingredients: Red wine ;)

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND LETTERS

TO ALL THE BOYS

I WILL EVER LOVE // BY BRIAN ZHANG

To All the Boys I Will Ever Love: If you love me back – great! Treat me well, and treat my friends even better. Don’t forget the basic shit, like our anniversary or that I am super lactose intolerant. But even more importantly, don’t feel as though we need to figure everything out right away. I definitely won’t know what to do half of the time. And in the few cases when I do know what’s going on, I am still going to pretend that I don’t – just so we can figure it out together. We don’t have to know what to say every moment of every day either. Sometimes, I just want to hold your hand and sit in silence with you – in the back of the classroom, where I won’t get called on to talk about books I’ve never bothered to read.

I’m not an English major. I’m not like you.

down at my muddy sneakers because it’s hard to look at you. It is hard because it is the end of our little love game, but I need to accept that the two of us won’t be endgame. Maybe “game” is a horribly pessimistic word to describe who we once were. But the rain around us pitter-patters so loudly that I’m finding it hard to think or come up with the right words.

I’m not an English major. I’m not like you.

When I tell you that I really really like you for the last time, it might

when I am speaking. It is cold. Offer me your hoodie when that happens. I probably won’t take it, but it feels good knowing that you still care about my feelings.

You know I tried. You know I did. You know we tried. You know we did – but we will never be above biology. We can’t control who we will love next, when we fall out with someone. DNA changes her mind every other second. DNA tells me that I will never have the kind of eyes you like. DNA tells me not to worry, but I want nothing but for her t o

be in the backseat of your old Toyota because I want the last memory of us to smell like bubblegum, alcohol and gasoline all put together. It might be right after my film seminar because I am taking it in the same room where we had our very first bio class together. I wish I had never transferred into that bio class.

I wish that I had just stayed in that one really hard professor’s class that everyone warned me about, because grades can always be CRed. My feelings for you cannot.

When I tell you that I really really like you for the last time, I will be trembling

shut up. I want nothing but to do anything so I can be good enough for you.

Anything so I can be a little less me, a little more her. She’s really pretty, and I want to be pretty just like her. I hope you will take good care of her.

When I tell you that I really really like you for the last time, you will nod and walk away. I tell myself that it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. I’m okay.

But I’m not. I relapse. I might tell all my friends that I’ve moved on, but I’m lying. Instagram is lying. I want to tweet that I am currently exiting the Romanticism era and entering the Renaissance

*** If you don’t like me back – tell me that you don’t. Meet me somewhere or call me. Don’t make me feel e m b a r ra s s e d or stupid for liking you by se n d i n g m e a two-word reply on imessage. Make it clear that you don’t reciprocate my feelings. You need to trust me when I say that it is going to be much, much harder if I get attached to feelings that weren’t here. I’ll end up hurting myself, thinking I was loved when I wasn’t. I don’t want to be your “sometimes,” and I am not good at taking hints. I want a solid, confident “no,” cushioned by a strong hug and a promise that we will stay friends, even if we won’t stay friends.

I am not good at reading between the lines – it has never worked for Jane Austen, and it won’t work for you either.

I’m not an English major. I’m not like you. *** And, if you did feel the same way at one point – When I tell you that I really really like you for the last time, it might be on a rainy day in the middle of Old Campus. Near that statue you always waited for me. You waited for me there on our first date because I had forgotten where I put the only normal pair of pants I owned. I remember being so scared that you were going to think I was weird. Today, I am scared again.

When I tell you that I really really like you for the last time, I will be looking

period of goddamn individualism – but I would be lying. I think I really miss you, and I wish we’d never met. I hate you.

I don’t like you. I think I like you. I like you. I really like you, and I need to stop.

I might call you one random night when you are at a suite party down the street. It’s okay if you’re a little stoned or a little drunk. It’s okay if you’re 4 minutes and 33 seconds late, because I’ll be waiting for you. Waiting and listening to John Cage one more time. One last time.

What matters is that you still show up outside my dorm, reminding me that we will always stay friends.

But the promise doesn’t last. We won’t stay friends. Three weeks later, we’re two strangers sitting at opposite sides of the Murray dining hall, our memories contained in old Polaroid photos lost at the bottom of my backpack. Our memories are scattered on my messy common room table like empty Tylenol bottles – except pharmacies don’t make Tylenol for this type of fever.

Our memories feel like dried perspiration and warm skin on Stack floors, except I forgot which floor it was. And when the effect of my Tylenol finally goes away, so does all that’s left of us.

You’re the best – did I ever tell you? I don’t think I ever did. Instead, I write “thank you” over and over again in the margins of my Chem Lab notes, c h a s i n g a f te r memories that have already started fading. Dying. Memories that aren’t here anymore but still manage to hurt me.

I need to stop writing.

I want to stop writing, but I can’t. I can’t stop writing about you. It is a coping mechanism.

I want to keep writing.

I can’t keep writing about you. It’s breaking me – make it stop. Help me. Take my pen away from me and tell me to pass the paper forward. Time is up.

I need to put my pen down. It’s hard to put my pen down, because scribbling random words will always be easier than saying how I feel aloud.

I don’t want to think about you anymore. I need to put this pen down. I need to let you go.

I have to put this pen down.

I put my pen down.

I’m not an English major.

I’m not like you.

Contact BRIAN ZHANG at brian.zhang@yale.edu. // SOPHIE HENRY

WKND Recommends A nice Malbec