HERALD 100 2013 by The Yale Herald

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Are you reading this Herald instead of doing your work right

be daunting. We’ve broken it down for you so as to make it

now? We’re sorry. That’s the worst, right? Only the tip of the ice-

not only useful but also especially conducive to time-wasting.

berg. Everything’s the worst, really. Finals pressure’s ramping up

(Sorry.) On the following pages, you’ll find our guide to the very

in a big way. Do you really need to pay attention to this, at the

best People, Places, Things, and Ideas. We sing the praises of

expense of every other concern?

a pretty comprehensive range of stuff. Read it. Savor it. It’s well

Yes. Yes, you do. You really, really, need to—we promise, this

worth neglecting a million mundane things for this 100.

is an issue you do not want to miss. Every week, the Herald tells

This issue comes with special thanks to Zack Schiller, BR ’15,

you what you need to know and ought to consider about Yale and

who took our painstakingly written words and put them all on the

New Haven. Occasionally, that can manifest itself in a negative

page. We’re so amped to present it to our readers. It was fun to

tone or attitude. (As we said before, everything’s the worst.)

make; we hope that reading it will be not only entertaining but

This week, like every week, we’re giving you what you’ve got to

also helpful. Soon, there will be free time again to explore every-

know—but our approach is a little different. It’s our annual Her-

thing great here (and complain about what’s the worst, maybe).

ald 100 special issue, and we’re presenting the best that Yale,

For now, live vicariously through this.

New Haven, and the world can offer. Not only is it infinitely more

Keep it 100,

fun to read than whatever is University-sanctioned or professor-

Maude Tisch

recommended, but you might just learn a thing or 99.

Editor-in-Chief

One hundred is fun, but the sheer volume of good stuff might

The Yale Herald Volume LIV, Number 12 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Dec. 6, 2013

EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Maude Tisch Managing Editors: Micah Rodman, Olivia Rosenthal Senior Editors: Sophie Grais, Eli Mandel, Emily Rappaport, Emma Schindler, John Stillman Culture Editors: Austin Bryniarski, Katy Osborn Features Editors: Kohler Bruno, Alisha Jarwala, Lara Sokoloff Opinion Editor: Andrew Wagner Reviews Editor: Kevin Su Voices Editor: Jake Orbison Design Editors: Madeline Butler, Julia Kittle-Kamp, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Photo Editor: Rebecca Wolenski BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Shreya Ghei, Joe Giammittorio Director of Advertising: Steve Jozkowski Director of Development: Thomas Marano Director of Finance: Aleesha Melwani Executive Director of Business: Stephanie Kan Senior Business Adviser: Evan Walker-Wells ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Colin Groundwater Bullblog Editor-in-chief: Micah Rodman and Jack Schlossberg Bullblog Associate Editors: Kohler Bruno, Austin Bryniarski, Navy Encinias, Carly Lovejoy, Larry Milstein, Lara Sokoloff, Jessica Sykes

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2013-2014 academic year for 65 dollars. Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: maude.tisch@yale.edu Web: www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Cover by Christine Mi YH Staff Inside Cover by Julia Kittle-Kamp and Christine Mi YH Staff

BEST CAMPUS REP Grace Lindsey At home, I drink about eight liters of seltzer a day. This is in part because I think I probably have a pretty serious issue with acid reflux but also because there is nothing more delicious or refreshing than carbonated water. (I can also tell the difference between different brands based on a blind test, so if you are looking for some fun hit me up ;D). For this reason, I am SO MAD that I was not invited to the Seltzer Lovers Association’s Official SodaStream party. For those of you who are unaware, a SodaStream is an at-home seltzer maker; you can use flavor packets if you are the worst, but otherwise it is the perfect way to have constant carbonation. According to Joey Yagoda, “co-founder” of the Yale Seltzer Lover Association (not a recognized Yale student organization, although they do have a panlist), they won a SodaStream from HouseParty.com in order to hold a SodaStream themed party! The Seltzer Lovers were all over social media promoting their SodaStream, making everyone who follows them crave seltzer like nothing else. Way to be the best campus rep, but next time hit me up with an invitation.

BEST CRUSH

BEST BARISTA Andrew Wagner I want to come to the defense of the Book Trader baristas. Everyone I know seems to love to rag on them, and I just don’t get why. I think they’re great. Maybe it’s because they’ve recently started greeting me by my name, and the mere acknowledgement of my personhood is enough for me to like someone. But I also think they’re way better than New Haven’s other baristas: JoJo’s are meaner, Blue State more apathetic, and Woodland Coffee’s are way more depressing. Sure, the Book Trader baristas are sometimes going to be rude to you—but you know what? Maybe you deserve it. They’re also not afraid to make you feel bad about coming twice in one day, which is good for me because otherwise I would eat every single meal there (don’t think that I haven’t). One time I even saw a Book Trader barista at Target. We just silently stared at each other, confident that no words were needed to express the very special relationship that is the one between the barista and her baristee. At the end of the day, I guess the Book Trader baristas are sort of like my extended family at Yale. No matter what happens to me, I know that they’ll always be there, waiting for me to buy whatever vegan crap they’re offering today.

Herald Crush.

BEST GIFT Larry Milstein

Ugh, not The Poopetrator. Seriously, any prank besides The Poopetrator. Sure, the Harvard student giving the fake tour got some national buzz, but the jokes were pretty lame. The Nutella slathered clothing line? Gag. The true winner has to go to a different Pundit tomfoolery: their YSO ticket scam. A little past midnight on October 16, students received an email from yalesymphonyorchestra2013@gmail.com alerting them, “Vendini tickets had an error in its system.” As someone who even bought one of those DVDs just to ensure my spot in the Halloween concert, my heart dropped when I received the message. YSO decided to void all online ticket orders? Oh, hell to the no. So I did what any rational person would do: I forced a friend to camp out Black-Friday-style at 7:00 a.m. to secure me a new ticket. Does that make me a bad person? Probably. Does that make this a successful prank? Definitely.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST CULT OF PERSONALITY Eli Rivkin.

BEST FACIAL HAIR Leland Whitehouse No such thing. But. Here’s the secret to maximizing your set-up. Golden rule of facial hair: know thyself. There’s no one-size-fits-all, Categorical Imperative-style credo when it comes to growing and curating the hairs that sprout on your face. You can really only sow the plot you’re given. Some dudes hit puberty like freight trains and wind up with rowdy whisker growth by age 16. Other dudes are dealt a relatively hair-free genetic hand. You gotta play to your strengths. If you’ve got a five o’clock shadow by lunchtime, and the Beard World is your oyster, experiment. I recently met this badass geezer who was wearing a bolo tie and had what I think might accurately be described as a Chin Strap / Lip Strap combo—thin strip of hair along his jaw, one inch cleanshaven gap, and then another thin strip that ran from one sideburn, along the upper lip to the other sideburn. Smoke ‘em if you got em. If you’re a little less hirsute in the face department, consider picking your favorite whisker and growing it as long as possible. Three-incher at the corner of the mouth? Golden.

BEST DJ Tess McCann

Rewind to suite hunting, spring 2013. My suitemates and I visit our current suite in Saybrook. Being one of the people who was going to live in the suite’s only double, I pop my head in to check out my future room. Not bad; small, but not bad. “Don’t get too excited,” the girl who lives there says. “You can hear everything through the firedoor.” Camp Yale, 2013. We’re in our new suite. It’s 7:30 a.m., the morning after my birthday, and suddenly, I start hearing strains of P!nk in the air. Am I dreaming? “Blow me one last kiss.” I must be fucking dreaming. The music changes to Avril Lavigne. I sit up. I grab my computer and immediately look on Yale Facebook for the girl who lives adjacent to me. She’s a well-known DJ on campus. I AmazonPrime search for sound studio insulation to glue to the firedoor. Late Sept. 2013. I occasionally hear strains of what my neighbor is working on—cool remixes, dubstep, occasionally. The unfortunate part is that I hear her new work when I’m trying to get to bed. I pull out my notebook and under “TO DO,” I write: “Walgreens. Earplugs.” Present day. Over the past two months, I’ve become more used to the situation. Her music is actually really good, when you sit back and listen to it. It makes Top 40 bearable. It’s going right now, actually—I find myself tapping my foot a little. I could imagine dancing to this—maybe at Mistletoads; maybe at battle of the DJs; maybe at the Jack Wills opening party. I keep a set of earplugs by my bed, but now I mostly use them when my suitemates are watching Scandal and I’m an episode behind. My DJ neighbor and I got off to a rough start. But it turns out buying that sound studio insulator was great. Now I know the newest beats before they hit Soundcloud. The newest one is really good. Think “Wrecking Ball,” but with a sort of techno beat under it. Coming to a Spring Fling stage near you next semester.

BEST FAMILY BONDING Maude Tisch Last spring, my younger brother and I enrolled in SCIE 141b (Science and Pseudoscience) together. We’d never been in a class with each other. The seminar was pretty small, but the unreal thing was that the three profs teamteaching the thing never seemed to figure out that we happened to be related. Which was especially comedic when one of them kept discussing evolution in terms of common ancestry—“Some of us,” he would say, “have a closer common ancestor than others.” I swear he had NO idea just how many common ancestors Joe and I have in common. It was unreal. The course was worth it a little for the science credit but mostly because of how happy it made my mother. I don’t know if the family that takes science-for-non-science-major classes together sticks together, but I can tell you that parents LOVE it. Pseudoscience, but real fun for the whole family.

BEST FRIEND MAKING STRATEGY David Rossler In the months leading up to my first semester of college, people—adults mostly—told me not to worry about making friends, because it would just happen. That’s a lie. Making friends requires small talk, and small talk is a skill, one I’m not very good at. Since arriving on campus, though, I’ve begun to notice some of the many friend-making alternatives to small talk. Here are some tips I’ve picked up these last few months, mostly in my common room, in no particular order: 1. Hug. Save that handshake for an interview or something. If you’re not sure how it’ll go over, ask, “Are you a hugger?” No one ever says no, but sometimes they need a little warning. 2. Describe a recent STD test. Really breaks the ice. Make ’em squirm a little with a gonorrhea diagnosis before screaming “FAKE OUT!” 3. Buy a ping pong table to entertain your new friends, because God forbid you should play beer pong on a regular table without a net. 4. Buy a poker table when that net proves problematic, because God forbid you should play poker on a regular table not covered in leather and felt. 5. Advertise your weekly rager on the freshman class Facebook page. That’s literally what it’s there for. 6. When you’re having new friends over, always say “yes” when they ask if they can pee in your shower/sink. Aaaand that should just about do the trick. Personally, I’ve just bucked up and forced small talk. I have about six friends, so it’s all good.

BEST SECRET Andrea Villena The long trek to 246 Church Street can be one full of joy (paycheck day!) or one of deep despair (you need a loan, again). Because in addition to the Student Employment Office, the building also houses the Yale Financial Aid Office, where the poors go to sign some forms. Chances are that if you find yourself in that office, your life is in a bad place. As wonderful and caring as that staff is, every time I’ve made that journey past TD has been one of dread. But at the end of the long, dark tunnel of financial instability is a pinprick of hope, in the form of my favorite financial aid office receptionist. I do not know his name, but he is beautiful. Few students go there, so he is rarely seen by the general Yale population. He has really nice dark hair, perfect amount of scruff, and wears these really cute plaid shirts. He is my J. Crew Boyfriend. He always has the biggest smile on my face and one time, I made a joke and he laughed. There’s another receptionist there who complimented my backpack but J. Crew Boyfriend and I could have a life together. There are no good reasons to find yourself making the walk to YFAO but know that if you’re lucky, this perfect man will be there to make it all okay.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST FRESHMAN BONDING EXPERIENCE Azeezat Adeleke They leave their stuff strewn all over the common room. Their annoying friends seemingly never leave. Their alarm goes off every morning at some god-forsaken hour—just, it seems, for the sake of taunting you. They apparently cannot define the term “personal space.” They leave you sexiled. When they aren’t around, you and your other suitemates discuss their recent bad behavior and predict their future shenanigans. Common phrases in such conversations include: “Seriously?” “I can’t believe she did that” and “Who does he even think he is?” They are the Odd Suitemate Out (OSO). The odds may not always be in your favor for freshman housing assignments, but every cloud has a silver lining. In my experience, the best way to bond with other people is to turn against someone else. This is why having an OSO isn’t so bad after all. Is there a lull in conversation with one of your other suitemates? Bring up something the OSO did recently! Did you do or say something that was ill-conceived? Just say, “Jeez, I’m turning into [insert name of OSO].” Everyone will laugh and your transgression will be forgiven. Just like that, your suite becomes very tight-knit. That is, with the exception of the OSO, but some things just can’t be helped.

BEST HAIRCUT Joe Giammittorio The adjustments we make when coming to college are many in number, and finding a new hairdresser is maybe top three. At home I go to a Japanese salon that brews green tea and offers kimono dressing. New Haven doesn’t have that, but what it does have is Joe Moscato, and he would probably wrap you in a kimono if you wanted him to, anyway. Joe cuts hair at JoBella Salon, where he has a pretty firm grasp on the High Σtreet market. We all have our own Moscato stories, but I can trace some common themes: he gives a great more-European-than-you-were-going-for haircut, most likely while dressing someone else’s scalp, too, and his unsolicited eyebrow waxings are a surprise the first time. No matter how well you know Joe, he’ll raise the level of conversation with some no-bullshit relationship advice prefaced by his classic lead-in, “Are you dating?” Joe usually does some sharing of his own, too, and if you can get him to pull out his iPhone, he’ll show you his new house (it has an indoor pool!) and his Venezuelan husband (he has a PhD!). The man’s cuts are an experience—I’ve heard rumors of at least one guy making a Metro North trip into New Haven just to see him. No matter how you come in, you’re gonna leave feeling happier, better looking, and slightly less sure of your sexual orientation. I will take that over a shaggy ‘do any day of the week.

BEST LANDLORD Jordi Gassó

BEST HERALD INTERVIEW Alisha Jarwala This Halloween, I had the opportunity to interview one of the Herald’s favorite admins, Dean Mary Miller (hereafter DMM), following a surprisingly low number of badgering emails (on my part)/security screenings (on hers). If you’ve never hung out in DMM’s office, that sucks for you, because the couches there are even nicer than the ones in the Park Street apartments belonging to various Herald editors (not me, I’m enjoying on-campus futon life). But I digress. Her office is in SSS. Anyway, when I went in and sat down on the world’s nicest couch, DMM seemed to panic and hurriedly told me to close my eyes. When I opened them again, she was wearing a bright blue Mohawk wig. “I haven’t forgotten to wear this for any meeting today,” she confided. “Can you please pretend I was wearing it when you walked in?” Anything for you, DMM. When our interview was complete, I asked her what she was dressed up as (my guess: Yale College Dean With Blue Wig). “It’s not for Halloween,” she told me sternly. “It’s for Day of the Dead. I’m going to go set up some marigolds after this.”

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

These were my mother’s words when she first toured my house on Lynwood Place: “I didn’t raise you to live in a place like this.” Well mamá, you were w-r-o-n-g! My landlord, Pike International, has made great strides toward ensuring I get the most seamless and formative off-campus experience possible. Pike helps me appreciate good design. Faulty windows provide easy access for friends and complete strangers alike. The wonky staircase is just a reminder that my house is literally sinking, like Venice—it’s so romantic. Pike puts me in contact with the local fauna. The mice and I have developed a secret game in which they hide inside the stovetops every time I walk into the kitchen. Those cheeky mice! And now, a fly infestation has completely cemented that feeling of oneness with nature. Pike brings friends together. When the heating broke down right before the Nemo snowstorm, it was a privilege to triple-spoon for warmth with my housemates. That’s classic Pike. You just can’t recreate that kind of quality time inside other, lesser properties. Some people think “slumlords” when they hear “Pike” but you know what I say? Martyrs. Don’t believe everything you’re told. Cover your ears! Ignor

BEST PARTY TRICK We’re all adults here. The days of Mentos and Diet Coke are long gone. No one wants to see you do a handstand either. Who cares how long you can hold your breath. IDGAF if you can fit your whole fist in your mouth. Seriously? You think I’m impressed because you can open a bottle with your teeth? I’m supposed to stop traffic if you’re double jointed? You’re not the first and you sure as hell won’t be the last person I hear burp the “ABCs.” You’ve got a third nipple? So does Chandler Bing. Big whoop, I can name all the state capitals too. You want me to punch you in the abs so I can see how strong you are? I’m not going to because that’s how Harry Houdini died. Hate to break it to you, but balancing a book on your head isn’t what it used to be. Your origami swan is sick, I won’t fight you on that, but tying cherry stem in a knot in your mouth is child’s play. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone karate chop a wooden board in two. The best party trick is none other than a convincing Matthew McConaughey impression. You do a scene from Magic Mike or Fool’s Gold, and I can guarantee you that you’ll have the whole room eating treats out of your hand. Don’t get cocky, because this is no small feat. It’s not just affecting a southern accent or taking your shirt off. It’s both.

BEST SNAPCHATTER Kevin Su The more I think about it, the more I realize that Snapchat is actually just a reality television show starring my friends, in that it’s really just people forcing me to be interested in things they do that I have no real reason to be interested in. Everyone becomes a sort of character over time— the one who only snaps while drunk, the one who does art, the one who just wants to remind everyone how good they look, the one who takes selfies with people in MRI machines in the background. But I think my favorite character has got to be gahsicles (AKA Christine Mi IRL). First of all, her drawings are always on point (big fan of her animal portraits). Secondly, her pop cultural references speak to me (I mean her shout-outs to Avatar: The Last Airbender and Lumpy Space Princess). Lastly, she just has a knack for finding ridiculous shit (i.e. the unicorn slippers she got on Black Friday). Gahsicles belongs to the special class of Snapchatters who I feel actually care about me and my entertainment, and not just about reminding everyone of their faces/cats/drinking problems.

BEST PET Tess McCann Lizzie’s phone starts ringing on a cold October day last year. “We’re at a Petco,” I can hear Mel through the phone, “and there are dwarf hamsters for sale.” Half an hour later, Mel and Laura walk through the door. Laura’s holding a big hamster cage under one arm. Mel has a small cardboard box with holes cut in it. And suddenly, we’re pet owners. Like the origins of WWI, there is still a debate raging about who is responsible for this purchase. Mia was charming; about three-inches long, she would hop right into your hand and sort of cuddle up in a little ball, and pee on you. But you’d forgive her because she was so cute. Her cage was called Hamsterdam, and we kept it on a shelf in the common room. The day when she learned how to scurry up the tube that led to the Hamptons (the small compartment that stuck up out of the cage) we drank André in celebration. We were like new parents—everything our little newborn did was exciting and new and cute and fun. Well after she learned her way around the cage, and grew to about 3.5 inches, her cuteness became less pronounced. At night, she would run on her hamster wheel—did you know that hamsters are nocturnal?—which would squeak throughout the suite. We bought a vat of vegetable oil to grease the wheel, which worked for a while; until we forgot to grease it and the squeaking came back. We divided the suite into “Team Hamster” and “non-Team Hamster,” which basically meant that only the people who supported the purchase had to clean the cage. Because she was more mobile now, she would leave little poops everywhere—in her wheel, in Hamsterdam, even in the Hamptons. Now, when we would stick our hands in the cage to pick her up, she would be expecting food, and would greedily nip at our fingers. We soon learned first-hand the expression “biting the hand that feeds you,” and have since been very nice to the Saybrook dining hall staff. Mia was, though often a cause for tension in our suite, often one of great bonding. Val (non-Team Hamster) bought Laura (Team Hamster), a little running wheel for Mia that was attached to a yellow hot rod car. Mia would zoom around the suite in her little car and leave little poops in the wheel, which we would then have to clean. We set up a chart for feeding her and refilling her water—we were very responsible, and cared deeply for her, even though she bit us, kept us up at night with her squeaky wheel, bit the cage with her teeth, and was, for the most part, very unpleasant. I won’t go into the nature of her death. It was around the end of spring semester, when we had to decide who was going to take her for the summer, that she died. Lizzie made a Facebook event for the funeral. It was very lovely, and everyone who was part of Mia’s life made an appearance. As taps played, and the setting sun reflected off of the windows in Saybrook, and all those who loved Mia in life surrounded her, we lowered her casket into the ground, and thanked our precious hamster for the six months of noisy, smelly, poopfilled happiness she gave us.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST BAR Jessica Sykes A position I’m constantly in is not being drunk enough as I walk to Zeta. They say that the cold air will make you think that you’re sober-er than you really are, but I genuinely believe that the walk from anywhere to Zeta will sober you up in the real chemical way. That’s why Amigo’s exists. El Amigo Felix is a bar whose main purpose is to get you shitfaced in transit (don’t stay too long or you’ll get sucked in like a freshman girl at SigEp). If you and your best girlfriend like drinking all the types of alcohol at the same time, pitchers of Crunk Juice and Hannah Montanas are for you. Don’t even get cups (they’re basically the size of Dixie cups anyway), just get two straws. You’ll ready for Zeta nice and soon. But don’t worry if you’re not into Zeta. You can still go to Amigo’s. Get there at 8 p.m. for a late dinner of their Mexican “food,” and get some pitchers of margs for the table. Before you know it, it’ll be 2 a.m., you’ll have to leave, you’ll be drunk hungry, have to go to Brick Oven/Popeye’s, and then go to Zeta for late night. Oh fuck, I thought option two didn’t end at Zeta! If you can make it out alive from the no windows, casino-like time warp that is El Amigo Felix, you will officially be considered cool by me and the men’s and women’s basketball teams.

BEST SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE Jessica Sykes Everyone knows that my biggest college regret is not being in Theta. The only thing keeping me from rushing Theta (besides repeatedly being told I can’t rush as a secondsemester senior) is the fact that I follow PiPhi House Probs (@PiPhiHouseProbs) on Twitter and honestly relate. I have such similar probs that sometimes I’m like “maybe I should reconsider my Theta step-sisterhood, and become a PiPhi (they would for sure let me rush second semester senior year).” Here are some things that they’ve tweeted and I’ve thought independently, and then read their Twitter and been like “NO WAY! ME TOO!” “Hot chocolate + Love Actually > #studying” Totally feel this because I also hate studying, but also hate Love Actually, but also don’t remember if that’s the greater than or less than symbol, so never mind. “Shit I’m already drunk I told you I’ve only eaten froyo today!” I’m basically constantly always eating froyo and forgetting to eat Little Salad Shop and getting drunker than I intended. What’s really fun and in the PPL spirit is donating blood and then drinking. “girl, put yo wedges on” I hate capital letters (unless the sentence in question is in all caps in which case I LOVE NOTHING MORE THAN CAPITAL LETTERS). But I’m also tall, so I like when girls put yo wedges on because then I feel more average in height.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST UNDERRATED LECTURER Maude Tisch Lots of Yale students keep with these lists of must-take, bucket list lectures, seeking out the packed halls graced by the presence of David Blight, John Gaddis, Jay Winter, and crew. My FORMAC (Formation of Modern American Culture, for those not in the know) lecture with Jean-Christophe Agnew is not one of those classes. There are maybe 30 students—tops—in the class. Plus a solid pack of retirees. We’re all hanging on Agnew’s every word. Until I took this class, I didn’t know that the late 19th century was interesting at all. In his Oct. 9 lecture, Professor Agnew executed what I would have previously deemed unfathomable. In one deft roller-coaster of an hour and fifteen minutes, Prof. Agnew managed to draw significant links between football, Andrew Carnegie, and Hannah Arendt. Check my notes if you don’t buy it. And then come learn about the underpinnings of American culture as we continue to know it. The old woman I sat behind today who smelled strongly of mothballs isn’t about the hype. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. I’m just trying to furiously type up all the things Agnew says.

BEST WAY TO GET RID OF PEOPLE Kai Takahahi Have you ever been in a really nice conversation with someone after dinner? You know, your plate is mostly empty besides the vegan ravioli (does anyone ever get that on purpose?). Neither of you has a place to be, so you’ve been sitting there awhile, and this is someone (let’s call her Mildred) who you don’t see all the time. But you do enjoy her company and often think, “I should hang out with Mildred more. She has a weird name but she’s actually pretty cool.” Have you ever been in this situation? Have you ever been in this situation and realized that your bowels were about to explode? You’re really enjoying this conversation, but your digestive tract is really not enjoying what you ate for dinner. You need to escape the situation in a way that shows you’re reluctant to leave, and you don’t want to lie. You have two options here: tell Mildred you hate to leave this conversation, but you have a shitload of work that you need to get to (not a lie), or bite the bullet and tell Mildred you desperately need to visit the restroom, but would love to continue the conversation another time, and how does dinner next week sound? Girls love a guy who can take care of his business. hangover. Sour power.

BEST CAMPUS JOB Austin Bryniarski

Jobs are my favorite. All types of jobs. But the one I have is veritably the best job—Bursary Assistant at the Yale Law School Dean’s Office. I still don’t know what “bursary” means, but I’m kind of assuming it’s Italian for “basically being a Jack Wills Seasonnaire during the academic semester.” Now, I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t talk about the nasty stuff, but I can tell you about the crazy stuff. Twice a week, I saunter into the Law School to a small desk and complete the tasks that have been assigned to me for the day—a photocopy here, a delivery there. Sometimes, I’ll get to bump shoulders with law students themselves (hot and smart) as I enter the basement to archive files. Like any Yale tech startup out of my wildest dreams, this job includes an unlimited supply of Diet Coke, which me and my four boss ladies (self-monikered as “the divas”) consume on the regular and exclusively refer to as “DC” because we think it’s cuter that way. Wait—did I tell you I took a selfie with Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton/Stephen Colbert because of this job? No, no I didn’t—because it’s actually no biggie. Also Hillary told me she’s not running so everyone can stop talking about it.

BEST BATHROOM Rachel Lipstein Going to the bathroom is a pretty special experience that you want to get right. The best bathroom for you really has to be tailored to you. If you’re looking for privacy, don’t fall for tempting single-serves like the WLH handicap or the LC first floor. Yale students with their damaged, digestive systems and entitled bowels will come knocking. They cannot tolerate gluten and they will not tolerate waits. If you’re feeling explosive after a two-hour slog through James Joyce, head instead to the secluded two-stall in Dwight Hall. It has a low traffic, a musty smell, and an unlocked utility closet. It seems pretty clean, too. If you want to clock some social time while dropping a p, the risqué partitions of Bass row will let you pick out all your friends. Showcase your shoe and sock coordination. For those looking to cruise, there’s excellent calf access. If you’re willing to travel long distances for that platinum member experience, try the muggy single at Kroon hall. Always thinking sustainably, Kroon cycles their sewage system between the bathroom and the koi fish pond, and the water is safe for the toilet bowl and the hardy Japanese omnivores. So you can reduce your poop footprint and have indoor and outdoor options. If the diarrhea gets real bad, Yale Health bathrooms smell really fresh and condoms are abundant. No matter what you’re looking for, Yale has you covered.

BEST BASTARDIZED CHINESE FOOD Lucas Sin Consider the most accessible and therefore most popular candidate for late night American Chinese raids: Ivy Noodle. Honestly, the establishment’s been there for too long, and they’d have no chance at gold unless there was a category for the best fried bean curd in hot oil, in which case the award would go to their fried bean curd in hot oil. Of course, there’s Taste of China and Chao Chao. Both excellent, and blood-red spicy when you ask for it that way. Unfortunately, they’re too authentic and not quite bastardized enough to be a satisfying post-midnight treat. On the other hand, the likes of Basil and Dee Asian Kitchen, while delicious and thoroughly butchered by the mass American palate, are simply not Chinese. Orange Kitchen is disqualified—what kind of Chinese joint serves such a good bacon, egg, and cheese? And Great Wall? They’re opening a second floor, installing a sushi bar, and setting up a kebab corner; bridging the gaps between ethnic cuisines, soaking in the mixing pot of expansionist commercialism. The American dream! But, eh, too far. Eh, they don’t deliver. So it comes down to this: Blessings II Go, China King, and Main Garden. But think about it: you’re sitting on your dorm room floor using splintered chopsticks to pick at sweet, greasy, deep-fried, carbo-loaded chicken over rice. Does it really matter whose nuggets are soggiest and whose sauce is sauciest?

BEST TA STORY Lara Sokoloff My friend found our TA on Tinder. Well, technically, I guess it was his doppleganger. He had the same distinctive mouth, and his eyes were the exact right distance apart. It’s just his name that was different. But is it so inconceivable that he could change his name to avoid situations exactly like this? To be honest, I’m not all that familiar with the dating app scene (I think I probably should be), so maybe name changes are impossible and I’m talking nonsense. But seriously, I swear it was him. My friend swiped right. Obviously.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST COMMUTE Lara Sokoloff

I’m completely and unabashedly addicted to SoulCycle. So when I was trapped in Elm Shitty for 10 interminable weeks this summer, literally my only chance at survival was to cycle the shit out of my soul. My roommates similarly felt that this city was likely in the process of consuming our souls, and so we all decided to journey down to good old soulful Greenwich for some serious soul searching. The day finally arrived. (Yes, I was counting down. And no, I don’t care if you judge me for it, because God knows that if you were going to judge me for any of this you most definitely already have, or you’ve simply stopped reading. Either way, I was counting down.) It was raining that day. We were rolling southward down I-95 at 12 miles per hour. Our chances at an on-time arrival were looking scary slim. I was in the worst mood ever. So bad I couldn’t even listen to music in the car because the voices of others only intensified my headache. Shit was real. My stomach was hurting, and my heart was pounding. We can’t miss this, we can’t miss this, I absolutely refuse to miss this. Who else is trying to get from New Haven to Greenwich at 4:45 p.m. on a Tuesday? Apparently everyone and their fucking mother is who. I immediately cursed myself for wearing gray. Who wears gray to a workout class anyways? Apparently me, and I hated myself for it. Obviously I was already anxiously sweating and I knew it would not be long before it was visible all over my precious Lululemon tank. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that this sounds like the worst and that you will never be making the trek down to Greenwich’s SoulCycle. But this is where you are very, very wrong. When we waltzed into the grapefruitscented, blindingly white studio at 6:01 for our 6:00 class, I knew we had arrived at the only earthly resemblance of Heaven. I sweated through my shirt entirely, but the out-of-thesaddle sprints and tap-backs were so beyond worth it. Namaste.

BEST INJURY Leland Whitehouse

I imagine that I’ve been given the honor choosing the most impressive way to hurt yourself because, like a truly dumb piece of shit, I managed to fall off of my own fire escape last year. I wish I’d hurt in an apple picking accident instead, because that would have been way more raw. It seems to me there are two really kick-ass ways of getting hurt while involved in an apple-picking incident. First, you could be cruising around an idyllic Western Connecticut orchard, staring longingly into your lover’s eyes, inhaling steamy half-rotten apple vapors and generally getting woozy on all the romance, then break an ankle or a clavicle or walk face first into a ladder. Awesome. OR, you could be cruising around outside of the Yale Bookstore, minding your own business, talking to your grandmother on the phone when WHAM! Some bandit on a kid-size bicycle scoots by you, snatches your iPhone, slaps you in the face and rocks on down the line to apple-pick somebody else. Awesome.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST DAYTIME STUDY SPOT Aaron Berman The Saybrook library is the best library to go to between the hours of 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. Chances are that if you’re intent on going to a library this early in the day, you already mean business—you’re probably skipping at least one class or section and you’ve forgone your daily midday nap to squeeze in a few extra hours of studying or paper-writing before your midnight deadline. Fortunately, you’ll find the Saybrary replete with its trademark study rooms and individual nooks (all empty at this time of day), which provide a perfect setting for the inevitable adrenaline-fueled bender that will take you all the way to dinnertime—before you return, dining hall coffee mug in hand, for round two. Other libraries might present themselves as appealing options for daytime study, but ultimately pale in comparison. Bass (Café)? Too central, and too many afternoon grad student-faculty meetings. Stacks? Save that kind of isolation for later in the night, when your desperation peaks and you just need to get away from it all. So cancel all your GCal appointments for the day, take that final swig of your 20-ounce four-shot espresso from Blue State, and settle into the Saybrary for a dose of the daytime study blues.

BEST HANGOVER CURE Leland Whitehouse Patricia’s, on Whalley right next to El Amigo Felix, hands down. When, after one or another too-long beer-soaked romp-stomping night with my degenerate friends, I wake up with an upside-down stomach, squinty eyes and the conviction that God and Joy are forever dead, it’s Patricia’s or Bust. I groan my way out of bed, stumble to the family-size bottle of Advil we keep in the bathroom, then try my best to make it through the door and down the street to Patty’s. Patricia’s is an old school, no-frills breakfast diner with the sort of beautifully simple menu that even a whiskey-pickled brain can navigate. Eggs, bacon, sausage, home fries, pancakes, coffee and orange juice - that’s about it. The waitstaff/management (Betsy and Nico) are quick and friendly. They’ve been tenderly guiding haggard Yalies through the Valley of the Shadow of Death for years, and they know what they’re doing. It’s cash only, but a twenty dollar bill will get you two doses. Easy on your wallet, tough on your hangover. Go for Patty’s.

BEST EVENT AT WHICH TO GET LAID Navy Encinias By no means am I a master at getting laid. When I’m feeling sad about that, I remember that “Yale cranks that wasteland,” cf. Emma Schindler’s Twitter. I realize the meaning of that phrase isn’t immediately clear. It’s really worth explaining. There’s no lack of resources at Yale, but sexually speaking, this place is dry and dusty. Some of you may be shaking your head because you’re having sex here, but I’ll bet you’re in a committed relationship. If you’ve been to the YUAG with the parents of the person you’re fucking, you’re not getting laid; you’re having emotionally responsible sex. I’ve also found the “hook-up culture” thing to be a complete myth. A culture is comprised of a set of human customs, regarded collectively. We’re not doing anything collectively here besides waiting on line at Blue State and getting timed out of our session on Classesv2. Yale cranks that wasteland— because there’s a huge group of us who should be having happy sex here, but aren’t. Instead, we’re going to Peg’s class on Fridays at 6, putting on sheer tank tops and deodorant, getting drunk, and going home alone to an all-white-everything bed we made before yoga class, in hopes of bringing someone home to it. It’s bleak. At this point, I’ve made peace with it all. That doesn’t mean I’m not on the prowl, in a subtler way. If you see me at a Master’s Tea, it’s because I’m trying to get laid. If you see me at a talk in the Art School or Law School, it’s because I’m trying to get laid. Forget Pi Phi Crush, forget Spring Fling––the best event to get laid at here is any event where there’s a cheese tray. If my Dean emails me about it, if it appears to be organized and sponsored, chances are I’ll go, in hopes of getting laid. Panels are especially sexy, because who doesn’t wanna fuck a panelist? Going to events like these has all been in vain, but I have faith that attending them makes me a better person. Someday that’ll get me in someone’s bed.

BEST DINING HALL DESSERT Dalia Wolfson Once, in an attempt to stump me, my twin brother asked for the definition of “cookie.” A montage of confections swirled through my head: thin mints, almond biscotti, shortbread, macaroons, jelly thumbprints, and all the hearty products of Pepperidge Farm. Overwhelmed, my sugar-powdered neurons failed to form a coherent Webster’s-worthy meaning in time. My brother snickered, and I hung my head in shame. A decade later, I find that my mental pantry has narrowed down to a single, classic candidate: the Slifka cookie. In an age when dining halls serve up new concoctions daily, the Slifka cookie stands its ground with a sterling attendance record. Mostly of the chocolate chip variety but occasionally studded with raisins or cranberries, it won’t pull any stunts. Between Bluebooking and browsing the weekly calendar, there are so many choices to be made at Yale. But the Slifka cookie is Chosen and, really, the only choice for dessert. And hey, maybe there’s something comforting about that reliable, leavened circularity. The wonderful Grace Paley wrote a collection of stories called “The Little Disturbances of Man,” and one of them was named “An Irrevocable Diameter.” My brain is all out of collegiate literary insights, so instead I’m going to bead those two titles on a string like a preschool crafts project: Man, there are many little disturbances in life, and sometimes you just need the perfect Slifka cookie, all irrevocable diameter and baked goodness, to make things sweet.

BEST ON-CAMPUS DATE Dipika Gawande

BEST LATE NIGHT SNACK Colin Groundwater he competition in this category is stiff. For years, the Wenzel reigned supreme, only occasionally challenged by another industry insider like GHeav’s Bacon Egg and Cheese. With scandal disqualifying the BE&C and Crunchbutton leveling the playing field the Wenzel once dominated, however, the field is open for anyone to take home the gold. It’s a year for the dark horse. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Yorkside milkshake. “Psshh!” you may say. “This fool doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Think again. Yorkside makes the best milkshake in town, and the milkshake is exactly what you need just before midnight, whether you know it or not. A good late night snack isn’t about keeping you focused on a paper or sobering you up; it’s about taking a second to indulge. Whether you’re up late working or partying, a little liquid ice cream is the perfect way to enjoy yourself. Plus you have options—from chocolate to moose tracks to you weird people who like berry flavored things, Yorkside has you covered.

We’ve unearthed a pearl for you and your boo. Pick any hour of the week, really, and do yourselves an indulgence: Split a bowl of soup at Bass Café! For just $5.75, you can bursar a cozy two ounces of room-temp, zero-salt chicken noodle elixir. Its delectably buoyant chunks tug you closer with every lukewarm slurp, from which you’ll both emerge punch-drunk (and possibly holding hands), waxing poetic about the truly pleasant things that can happen in bathwater. The ambience of this quirky eatery will arouse you two in all the right ways. The (albeit hella dreamy) 360o virtual tour just doesn’t hit on Bass Café’s sexy penitentiary vibe. Sharing a capful of bursared broth amidst the wall-to-wall black metal lockers, double-entry wind draft, and angst of fellow inmates suggests all the sketchy intimacy of a conjugal visitation. (For a more authentic experience, try making do with just one plastic spoon.) And if y’all feel adventurous, you can always mingle with the literal homeless people at the publicaccess computer cluster! It’s among the more clandestine of this delightful café’s offerings; because the notecard advertising that they even have soup is often knocked over behind the Pop-tarts, this invigorating yet sensual (not to mention pragmatic!) opportunity for amorous tête-à-tête remains unmarred by predictability. Do it before it’s #done!

I’m sure you doubt me. But you’re going to try it (you already know it, don’t resist). And you’ll be glad you did. Only one downside—no malts.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST GLUTEN FREE ALTERNATIVE Emma Schindler First, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who’s had to sit through a definitively uninteresting explanation of my autoimmune disease and pretend it’s interesting. Second, I’d also like to take this opportunity to do some consciousness-raising and ask you to please think twice before categorically ridiculing gluten-free diets. Because, as I’ve told many a hater, I have an autoimmune disease, sir. And while the world at-large seems to be up to its ears in celiac-friendly products, New Haven is decidedly slow to the good-tasting gluten-free grind. Admittedly, I used to cave to the peanut butter cookie in Blue State, or the weird little loaves on the counter at Book Trader, or those many-dollar cupcakes at Atticus. Every time, without fail, they tasted like s-h-i-t. Or c-h-a-l-k. And other things I don’t know how to spell. Every time, without fail, I ended up feeling like a serious loser. But finally, I’ve grown up. These days, I’m less impulsive—instead, I make dinner plans! Never have I ever felt like a loser after getting gluten-free pizza at Kitchen Zinc. Not even when I take part of my pizza to go and then eat it while walking down Chapel Street. Because you know what? I’m worth it, too. Maybe I don’t use L’Oréal, and maybe Pepe’s doesn’t give a flying hoot about me, but I, too, deserve Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Bread Covered in Sauce and Cheese.e $1.75 tomorrow. Or Saturday. Promise.

BEST G. HEAV ALTERNATIVE Olivia Rosenthal Sometimes things get off to a rocky start. Mad Men and Real Housewives of New York totally didn’t fully pick up until season two. It took a while for J&B to gain its stride, it had obstacles to overcome: namely, smelling like shit. More specifically, smelling like poop that had been sprayed in Lysol. I don’t ask questions, but I do know that my home away from home, J&B 2.0, now smells lovely. If their offerings—red bean mochi cakes, a constant supply of Dentyne fire, and a weird brand of multigrain rice cakes whose surprising aftertaste I think I might hate but it keeps me on my toes—are not enough of an incentive for you to join J&B’s fan club, lemme break it down for you. Do you like devoted fathers? J&B was named after the two daughters of the owner, John. Do you like unpredictability? The great thing about J&B is that its hours have a mind of their own. Once I was walking to Starbucks at 6 a.m. (RIP econ final), and there he was: John, smiling at the counter, ready to offer me treats galore! Last week, John decided to shut down shop at 4:37 p.m. on a Wednesday. John, you keep me young! Now, like any healthy relationship, John and I have had our ups and downs. More specifically, John’s wife and I didn’t start off on the right foot. Ok, if you put out free Japanese gummies, I am sorry but I am going to help myself to a nice handful. I understand what you were saying though—I shouldn’t have filled my wallet with them. You’re right: it just wasn’t fair to everyone else. And me and the credit card limit? Oh man, we have had our ups and downs. But a lil secret from me to you: if you prove your loyalty to Johnny Boy, well, he may just make you a little back-room deal. Buying a $1.75 fizzy pomegranate drink and only have a card? Sometimes, when Johnny’s feeling the holiday spirit, he’ll make you a little tab. I promise I’ll bring the $1.75 tomorrow. Or Saturday. Promise.

BEST LECTURE HALL Charlotte Weiner LC 102 was the first lecture hall I ever entered at Yale. On my first day of college, FOOT leaders dressed in various degrees of tutus and farmer outfits herded me inside when it started to rain. The high-ceilinged room was warm and dry— and maybe it was the slight shock of finally being at college, along with watching the FOOT support crew happily perform a skit next to the lectern about what would happen if we forgot to wear our whistles or drink copious amounts of water (imminent death by bear attack; pee the color of Gatorade, respectively)—but I felt almost serene as I leaned back into my cushioned seat along with my fellow t-shirt-clad FOOTies. Now, of course, I’ve learned that LC 102 isn’t just a forum for giving wilderness survival tips to damp prefrosh. It’s conveniently located near the center of campus, with entrances from both High Street and Old Campus, and seats about 180. Small enough to feel cozy (having its own fireplace doesn’t hurt either), LC 102 lacks the cold, cavernous, anonymous-masses feel of SSS 114. The faces of famous thinkers, from Dante to Kant, gaze magnanimously down from ten reliefs that ring the room, giving the feeling that you’ve been endowed with some sort of philosophic wisdom merely by entering the lecture hall. The Tiffany stained-glass window on the westward-facing wall even has its own Wikipedia page. If that doesn’t complete a perfect lecture hall, I don’t know what does.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST HIDE-AND-SEEK SPOT Jake Orbison The thing about this blurb is that I’m going to tell you about the “closest-to-best” hide-and-seek spot because I am currently in the best hide-and-seek spot writing this, and you can never catch me even if you stay here to earn a PhD, you Sterling Professor you. And more still, I know the spot I choose to shine a light on will be ruined for millions of readers. Oh well. First, work out for a couple weeks so you open the doors to the Woolsey rotunda. Once inside, you have an option: you can either take the elevator across from “Uncommon,” the ugly cousin of Durfee’s, or hike up the stairs. Either way, you should ascend to the highest possible floor, the fourth. The layout of this floor mimics the circular first with a ballroom in the middle, opposite a number of doors. One leads to the auditorium, two is a closet, the last is a trap, but three is what you are looking for: the gateway to dark wood balcony of Commons. You’re welcome—it’s much roomier than you might think, and when since Bulldog Days have you noticed anything but the stir-fry line? If that’s taken and worst comes to worst, there’s always the lactation room at 305 Crown.

BEST PLACE TO FIND LOVE Andrea Villena Oy. If you’ve been following my Yale Daily News op-eds, you know that I write a lot about things I don’t know anything about, but here you go. Like all things at Yale, it’s best to think of love-friendly places as a spectrum. Too much lust and you end up with the heady atmosphere of the Yale Health waiting room (your nose won’t be the only thing dripping there). Go too heavy on the intellectual stimulation and you’ll find yourself with some major blue balls against the wall in the basement of Sig Chi. You need the right mix of slut acceptance and display of well-breeding that will give birth to a beautiful double-legacy union. This is why a finance or consulting information session is the best place to find love at Yale. Every guy looks good in a suit and girls get creative with some tasteful cleavage. I looked like a goddamn harlot at the Goldman Sachs info session. It’s a date paid for by Fortune 500 companies: you’re encouraged to mix over nice food you might not be willing to shell out for under other circumstances. “But, Andrea,” you whine as you furiously jack off for the sixth time today because you still haven’t found a significant other. “Isn’t everyone at those things a giant douchebag?” Not really. At the very least you’ll be guaranteed financial stability and someone respectable enough to bring home to your parents.

BEST NIGHTTIME STUDY SPOT Olivia Rosenthal

BEST NAMES FOR THE NEW RESIDENTIAL COLEGES Caleb Moran

Peter Salovey College We may not have another opportunity to name a college after Yale’s 23rd President so I think we should just take a gamble that everything will go smoothly during his time in charge and name one of the new colleges after him. Salovey also slaps the bass harder than Anne and Robert Bass themselves; this alone makes him a great choice. Charles B. Johnson College Do I really need to explain this one? We all really appreciate the 250 million dollar gift, but part of me thinks that he’s trying too hard. Therefore we should not name one of the colleges after him but rather give one of them a name that comes very close, i.e. Charles C. Johnston College. Stone Phillips College Phillips received a BA as a member of the class of 1977 and went on to leave Americans spellbound as the anchor of Dateline. He is a good choice simply because of his name. Nothing says power like the name, Stone Phillips. Even if he were in no way associated with Yale, he would still be the right choice. The Fonz College If there are two things that I know they are that everybody loves the Fonz (Henry Winkler) and that everybody hates Chris. Henry Winkler, DRA ’70, deserves nothing less than to have one of the new colleges named after him after all that he gave to us through his acting. That or we can name a cubicle in Bass after him.

BEST OFF-CAMPUS DATE Andrew Wagner

I don’t need to sell you on studying at the Study. You know all the free perks that come from studying in the laps of luxury. You’ve heard it before. Cookies and apples, they say! Coffee and tea in the morning! Comfy chairs! But let’s be real. I haven’t liked ginger snaps since a particularly traumatic experience in the first grade. Those green apples ain’t no honeycrisps. The outlets are really difficult to find. What keeps me going back to the Study, is well, a little different. The Study has a computer and printer setup. Most of the young hotel-staying folk bring their own laptops. So the computer clientele tends to be the +70 crowd. The computer is a daunting device to this fun-loving crowd. Now, as I tend to camp out in the chair next to the computer, these elder folk, in their frustration with the Internet often look to me. The shyer ones wait until I offer to help them navigate cyberspace, while others just demand it. Before I know it, I am leading a computer tutorial. A woman named Marilyn walks across the lobby to ask me what it means to “back it up,” you know, so she wouldn’t lose documents. Irv doesn’t understand how to load paper in the printer. I feel like an employee of the hotel (see, Mom! A job!) and a computer whiz. Now who doesn’t want a legitimate excuse not to do your homework? I leave my Study tutorials feeling refreshed, young, tech-savvy, and alive!

Hey there. You. Yeah, you. I’m talking to you. You’re beautiful. Do you want to go on a date? Do you want to go get dinner? I think we’d have a lot to talk about. I know the perfect place to go to: the IKEA food court. Have you been to IKEA before? You have? I think IKEA is amazing. Did you know that the biggest IKEA in the world is in Sweden? Yeah, I guess it is kind of obvious that’s where it would be. I want to go there one day. I think IKEA is really magical. They have anything you could ever really want. The food is delicious. And everything is so cheap. For starters, we could get the Chunky Vegetable Soup—I wonder what those chunks are! Or you could get the Open Prawn Sandwich. Do you think they catch them locally? I bet they do. For my entrée, I’ll probably get the Seasonal Vegetarian Ravioli with Mushroom Sauce. And you could get their Hot Smoked Salmon and Bean Salad. I bet you really love beans. Then I can show you my special Ikea soda fountain secret: you take a cup and mix half Mountain Dew, half “Lingonberry Soda”. The combo is out of this world. For dessert, we can share their Rosehip Panna Cotta. And, can you believe this, the entire meal only costs about 10 dollars. Afterwards, I know of a little corner in the rugs section where we can be secluded. How does that sound? Do you want to go?

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST OUT-OF-TOWN MEAL Lauren Miller, Annie Mullen, Carolina Trombetta (chewhaven.com)

BEST PLACE FOR A RUN-IN Will Adams

Tailgate season might be over, but you don’t have to wait until next fall for another drunken school bus ride. This August, Chew Haven and our groupies took the best commute for a meal of 2013 to The Place in Guilford, Conn. Getting there was half the fun—what better way to bring 22 girls to a town 20 minutes away than on a big yellow school bus? As we boarded the bus and got a whiff of that familiar smell of diesel, we felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. What for? For our childhood? No. For tailgates. Once we got to our destination we knew the fun had only just begun. Music was blasting, people were dancing, and a group of old guys were playing beer pong at a table in the back. The Place is prides itself on its laidback feel, where diners put their “rump on a stump” in lieu of chairs. A singular, hand-painted menu looms over the massive grill where everything is prepared. Like any good tailgate experience, there was plenty of food to be devoured. We’ll always love Saybrook’s tent and the Ay! Arepa cart, but nothing compares to this exquisite BBQ fare. We ended up trying everything on the menu and can say with certainty that it’s all ridiculously good. The roasted corn, barbeque chicken, roast clam special, and lobster were truly showstoppers, so don’t skip those if you make the trek. The Place is so cool that they even let you BYO sides, tablecloths and candles (!), and BYOB is, of course, encouraged. The restaurant only operates in the outdoors, which means they’re only open from April to Oct., which is actually the perfect time to get your fix of outdoor play during the tailgate off season.young, tech-savvy, and alive!

There is no better place to bump into your crush, suitemate, Intro Micro TA from two years ago, FOOT leader, or senior friend who’s in a society you hope to get tapped for than the fitness center at Payne Whitney Gym. It’s an effortless way to both seem like you’re super buff and like you care about their health. To make the most of your run-in, follow these helpful tips! Once you see that special someone from across the room, douse yourself in water to make it look like you’ve been sweating a lot and working hard. Feel free to say hi to the person, but keep it brief so it looks like you’re way too busy with squats. When lifting weights, make sure to grunt loudly so everyone around you knows you’re exerting yourself to the max. The more you sound like a dying buffalo, the better! If you’re listening to music, make sure you only play Dirty Projectors and turn up the volume really loud so it bleeds through the headphones. That way, when you walk by your person of interest, they’ll overhear and think, “Wow, he/she listens the Dirty Projectors! What a cool band to listen to!” Finally, make sure you don’t actually sweat, or else you’ll smell gross.

BEST PLACE TO POOP Poo Haven forever.

BEST PLACE TO CRY Olivia Rosenthal

BEST PLACE TO GET A FAKE ID Jenny Allen

Where did you first do it? Cubicle? The stacks? In public? Oh man, you dog, you! You’re going to earn a real rep with that sorta behavior! I regret my first time. My first tears in college came when I was in line at Claire’s with my mom. I was all settled in. Bed made. Books unpacked. Clothes folded. I was drinking my 9 dollar smoothie and I just started weeping. (The woman behind me for sure decided to go for the iced tea.) You see, choosing a destination to let your waterworks flow ain’t an easy task. In theory, wouldn’t you just want to curl up in your cozy common room with your loving/understanding suitemates? In reality, your room is on the fourth floor and your suitemate is, like, a total bitch. Bass cubicle? Not soundproof and come on, you really wanna be that kid? Bathroom stall—are you kidding me? A&A? Please, I get enough judgmental glares just for eating my seaweed in peace. I have the solution. Just hear me out. Down in the basement in A&A, sandwiched between the two lecture halls, there is a majestic place. Okay, so it is maybe a maintenance closet or some weird larger-thancloset, smaller-than-room situation, filled with broken chairs, but it is a gem. Who will ever interrupt your cry in the land of broken chairs? No one. Except for maybe the kid who has a thing for chocolate almond Kashi bars and thinks it is fun to leave the wrappers on the floor. There is a garbage can in the room. Let me and the chairs break down in peace!

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

DISCLAIMER: In order to protect The Herald’s journalistic standing and my future political career as Hilary Clinton’s best friend, everything that’s being printed is hearsay, hushhush, off-the-record, and on the DL. That being said, if you, hypothetically, have a strong desire to get underage drunk, a tight budget, and/or a lax attitude towards identity theft, then boy, does the Herald have news for you. Reliable anonymous sources have let us in on New Haven’s dirty-little-secret way to procure a foolproof free fake I.D. Step 1: Show up at a certain mainstay of New Haven nightlife the morning after a wild night out and tell them you lost your driver’s license. Step 2: Watch in amazement as they bring out a box of previously lost IDs and allow you to peruse it at your leisure. Step 3: Simply pick the one that looks the most like you. (Bonus points if you’re a minority—thank God for racial profiling.) Step 4: Waltz out and proceed to get white-girl-wasted at every available opportunity. Remember, the Herald would never condone underage drinking, but our commitment to investigative reporting forces us to report on any underground activities that might be relevant to the readership’s wellbeing. So enjoy people, but remember, you didn’t hear it from us. You must be 21 to drink alcohol in the state of Connecticut.

148 York Street New Haven, CT 06511 203-776-8644 www.zaroka.com Catering for all occasions

Fine Indian Cuisine “Amid elegance, a variety of Indian dishes” - New York Times “A treat for the senses” - Hartford Courant Lunch Mon - Sat: 11:30 am - 3:00 pm Sun: 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm Dinner Sun - Thu: 5:00 pm - 10:30 pm Fri - Sat: 5:00 pm - 11:00 pm Every Day Lunch Buffet Sunday special brunch with North and South Indian food

BEST PLACE TO WATCH TV BEST SALAD Navy Encinias There’s decent food in New Haven. Yale may be a college campus with only one bike lane and no student center, but there’s five places where I’ll happily pay $11 for a sandwich, and for that, I’m extremely grateful. There’s so much decent food, in fact, that rarely do I find myself hankering for something I can’t have. For a while, I had trouble finding what I described as “a quick salad,” but even that’s resolved now. I’m no Little Salad Slut, though, so don’t get excited. The best salad in New Haven comes from somewhere unexpected. When I go to York Street Noodle, I still manage to spend $11 on my lunch, because I get a Wide Wok Noodle and the Best Salad in New Haven. At $2.95, the Green Salad with Baked Snow Pea Crisp is priced just right, and is large enough to feed both me and my roommate. It’s not gluten free, but neither am I. It keeps it simple and that’s the way a salad should be––its three ingredients are baked snow pea crisps, mesclun mix, and avocado dressing. The dressing is creamy, so it’s good. The greens are just fresh enough. And “baked snow pea crisp” is a euphemism for “green potato chips.” It’s like eating a bag of Lays with a side of dressed salad. It’s so good.

BEST SANDWICH Elliah Heifetz A good sandwich is like a Eugene O’Neill play, or a masterwork of 16th century Renaissance painting, or the view of the valley at end of an Alpine hike. It’s fucking breathtaking. So obviously, choosing the Best Sandwich was some serious business. At first it was incredibly tempting to pick some kind of underdog, a dark-horse winner that you’ve for sure never heard of. But this is a sandwich we’re talking about, not some insubstantial bullshit, so this year, we’re sticking with the pros. And damn the pros can get it. At campus mainstay and bastion of fine sandwichcraft Atticus Bookstore and Café, you’ll find our winner: the humbly and accurately titled “Roast Beef & Kimchi” sandwich. Atticus’ menu says that it’s made of “roast beef, kimchi, sriracha mayo, and sharp cheddar cheese,” but let me tell you what it’s really like. It’s like a fresh jungle rain over a steamy canopy. It’s like a punch to the gut and a kiss to the cheek at the same time. It’s tangy, hearty, rich, and gives a clean bite. The beef is strong like a mountain, and tender like a lover. The kimchi is like your spunky best friend. The cheese is sharp like a longsword. The sandwich is so long they cut it into three fucking slices the last time I ate one. This is the real deal—the kingpin of sandwiches, the ninja assassin of food between bread, the Boss. Raw as hell (well, medium-rare). Don’t be afraid of the mainstream: these babies are works of art.

The score’s distinctive opening notes pump through your headphones, and a moment later, a silky smooth voice is speaking. “Good morning, Upper East Siders,” Kristen Bell greets you. For a moment, you’re one of them, totally immersed in the television world. “Gossip Girl here—your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite.” Another episode of Gossip Girl, and you’re still in the same old, lame old library. Conventional librarygoers judge you when you’re not there to crank out a few more pages or finish a pset or apply for fellowships or do something that’s not this. So where are you to go if you just wanna watch TV? Our favorite venue to loaf and watch is one that’s every bit as exclusive as Blair and Serena’s beloved Upper East Side. It’s an isolated area; you may see fewer Louboutins and more undereye crcles, and the douchebags here aren’t as hot as Nate—or even as dorky-cute as Season 1 Dan— but watching TV downstairs at the Law Library is, shockingly, nonjudgmental enough that the trade-off is fair. I’ll let you try to make your own way there. That’s part of the fun. But once you get there, you’ll see mostly shelves and shelves of forbidding tomes that you’d never open. But among the hardcover case reporters—directly behind the conference table you definitely wanna snag if possible—is one of the best things you’ll ever find at Yale: a huge-ass fishtank. The tropical fish add just enough novelty to spice the place up without distracting you from complicated plot twists. (Bonus: the setup makes the tank a great Snapchat backdrop.) But that’s not even the best part of the situation! For some reason that I don’t seem to understand but don’t mind, the area is officially called the “Upper East Side.” If it’s good enough for Gossip Girl, we can for sure deal. As GG herself said—in a totally different context—“Careful, Bass. Once you’re a big fish there are a lot more sharks in this pond.” Leave Bass for social hour. When we want to watch some serious TV, there’s nowhere better than the Upper East Side.

BEST USE OF A LECTURE HALL The Bullblog Taking Con Law with Akhil Reed Amar in the Law School Library. Just think about it, doing well in this class, and going to office hours once or twice just might get you into a better law school than you might have otherwise attended. We’re just fucking with you. The best use of a lecture hall is obviously jacking off in one, because fuck the establishment! Literally, fuck it! Spill your seed on its pine wood floor! Finger yourself in its pews! Get deep in there! And where’s a better place to do this type of fucking yourself than in the hallowed halls of Battel Chapel! We really don’t think this needs to be justified any further. Otherwise, what do you like? Lectures in LC 101? Movies in York 212? Study breaks in WLH 204? C’mon. Be human. Do human things. Take back Yale by masturbating on/in it!

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST USE OF A MEAL SWIPE Katy Osborn No one gets the concept of “eating down the pantry” quite like Durfee’s Sweet Shoppe. Just six days into December, its shelves already look like a Zimbabwean grocery store circa 2009. The avocados might as well have ingrown hairs, the daily half-gallon of eggnog I’d planned my finals around is gone with the cold-frickin’-reading-week-wind, and the $5.35 Mango Kombucha I bought and consumed today (maybe ‘tis the season to start aging backwards?) expired on 11/19/2013. I think I’d probably rather eat cash next time. Fret not—I know it’s been a rough week, and I’m not about to leave you running laps around the Great Dorito Wall (GDW) in search of good grub. I will, however, suggest that you open yourself to the creative possibilities of the Pantry Challenge. A few categorized favorites—since, if my drinking expired Kombucha is any indication, not all Yalies are created equal: If you’re veggie: hit up the freezers—a pint of CHBC (for those uninitiated, Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch) slides just under the mark at $6.25. Grab a spoon for the road—it’s also an unbeatable way to get down with your bad self as you make your way through Cross Campus. For my vegan and gluten-free friends with a possible nut allergy: I’m not 100% sure, but a swipe might even get you two coconut caramel apples. Double fisting! Into meat, or think you could be? Giant Slim Jims reside on the south side of GDW, five for $6.45. These are more than just a blast from the past: if you think about it, they’re also the passive-aggressive (or better yet, aggressive-aggressive) toy you’ve been missing in seminars all these years. Happy Pantry Challenge! human things. Take back Yale by masturbating on/in it!

BEST RETAIL THERAPY Carly Lovejoy “Total’s $6.50.” “Uh, I’ll add two of these miniature packs of Orbit gum.” “OK it’s $7.88.” “Eff, okay, one lollipop please. Or uh, I’ll take away one water bottle and one pack of gum, and I’ll have this Chobani.” “Eight dollars.” Shwiing! Victory is mine. And you bet your butt I’m gonna prance outta Durfee’s Sweet Shoppe with an extra pep in my step, because I just used EVERY last dollar of my lunch swipe. There is downright nothing more therapeutic than fitting honey mustard pretzel bites, a Yale brand bottle of water, and a betchy lowfat yogurt all in the same swipe. It’s like a weird psychological grocery game, where the emotional reward of bargain hunting matches the physical reward of the cutest fucking pack of gum you’ve ever seen! Perusing the weird mugs and phone cases at Urban Outfitters just doesn’t come close. If I do end up buying anything, I immediately regret it. Example 1: I bought a flask for 18 dollarsthere. REGRET. You may think 18 bucks isn’t that much, cause it’s an inoffensive even digit in the teens- but 18 is really two less than 20, people! Jacksons should get you more than that flimsy metal thing with a shitty taped-on design. And the boutiques along Chapel Street? Well, I’ve never been in one so… So I’ll stick with the sick sense of success I glean from a petite grocery list just under eight bucks at the local Sweet Shoppe.

BEST STUDY SPOT TO AVOID PEOPLE Emily Rappaport

BEST CLASS TITLE In the salad days of my youth, I considered a Special Divisional Major comprised entirely of classes whose titles used the Oxford comma—the greatest grammatical convention known to mankind. (Right? Right. Are you listening, YDN?) That’s why I can’t help but love last spring’s ANTH 013, “Feminism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.” What it lacks in creativity it makes up for in honesty. What you see is what you get, and how could you not like what you see? If only everything in life were spelled out this clearly. There’s no time to waste when you’ve got, admittedly, a pretty ambitious subject (or four) to tackle. A second favorite? “Anthropological Approaches to Capitalism.” A professor of mine recently said, “you can prove anything with anthropology.” You might not be able to prove anything about capitalism, but at least you can, you know, approach it. A chance for EP&E majors to get in touch with their softer side, aspiring i-bankers to reconsider that JP Morgan offer, and anthro majors to try out some math, maybe? Here’s to the economic system we love to hate and hate to love. Get at me, invisible hand.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

In the first semester of my freshman year, my Intro Pysch professor taught me about this thing called the Pavlov effect, where dogs reflectively salivate not just at the smell of food but also at the sound of the bell that indicates that they are going to be fed. Well, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got a little Pavlovian situation going on with the Yale libraries, where I get sad/unproductive just being in the places where I once felt so sad/unproductive, i.e. the Yale libraries. I didn’t get a good grade in Intro Psych so that’s probably totally wrong, but the bottom line is that I’m retired from Yale libraries. You know the drill: A&A if you want to run into Jimmy, Starr if you want to run into Jane, Classics if you want to run into Jessica and Claire’s if you want to run into a bunch of other people who also don’t want to run into anybody. Libraries are distracting, and a lot of the bathroom door stalls don’t close; coffee shops are distracting, and the coffee generally tastes really bad. The Divinity School library is generally empty and admittedly very lovely on a non-winter’s day, but it’s literally at the very top of Science Hill. The YCBA study room is filled with more light than people, but they make you carry your pencils and computer charger up by hand and leave your backpack at the front desk. Woodland was a good option until I accidentally ate a salt packet covered in ketchup thinking it was a piece of scrambled egg white, and now—Pavlov?—I can’t go back. Trust me, I’ve made the rounds, and there’s only one solution: my apartment. I can take TV breaks, and there’s always reduced-fat cream cheese, and I never have to walk home in the cold from the library since I’m already home. Best of all, it’s just me, myself, and I (and my roommates), so there ain’t no small talk about “what I’m working on.”

BEST AWARD Austin Bryniarski There is an infrastructure crisis in the United States, so when I found out my FroCo won the Rhodes Scholarship last year, I feared the worst for her car’s tires. I then did some research, and I found out Cecil Rhodes was actually more of a trains type of guy—fetishes are cool! But in all seriousness, apparently winning the Rhodes means you get to spend a few years studying at the Oxford, which I totally love because a) all of Theta lives there, b) it’s right by SigEp (hay Vinay) and c) High Street is generally my scene. And shit, the Oxford is expensive compared to other offcampus abodes so sign me up for some free rent because Lord knows my Starbucks Gold Card isn’t going to reload itself. Imagine that—the likes of Bill Clinton reading about Chinese State Capitalism, eating Fro-Yo World sorbet (he’s vegan now), and then heading over to a frat for some blow. Maybe he actually did one of those when he was a student at Oxford and Yale Law. Maybe not. Speaking of SAE, call me a sheltered, white, moneyed male at Yale University, but does the Rhodes have anything to do with the “street smarts” that people are always talking about? Like, congrats, Suzanna, Vinay, and Isabel. You earned it, I guess.

BEST BATHROOM MUSTHAVE Jack Schlossberg In an age in which instantaneous communication allows us to gather data from a seemingly infinite number of sources; an age in which globalism threatens to alter the power dynamic between nations; an age in which the price of oil is skyrocketing and a renewable energy economy seems beyond our reach, it’s easy to feel scared sometimes. It’s okay to feel scared sometimes. But remember, we’re all in this together. And we must remember that sometimes all we need, all we really have to do, is put on a shower cap. Shower caps are fantastic and they are an absolute musthave bathroom item. Should your sponge-bath-giver be out of town and should you find that your body itself is intensely dirty but that your hair is actually quite clean and, come to think of it, that it looks pretty good, then all you need to do is loosen up that elastic band, put your shower cap on, and hop on in the shower! My dad once told me this joke: “Going out with wet hair: the Jewish adventure.” But good news! Shower caps work for gentiles too.

BEST WIRELESS NETWORK

BEST TREAT WE’RE ANTICIPATING Maude Tisch We at the Herald are pretty unambiguously against the strip mall-ification of the Elm City. It would suck to go to school, to work, to live, among only chain stores of the kind that seem to taking over Chapel Street. It’s also kind of evident that New Haven has more than enough places that sell frozen yogurt. From FroyoWorld to Flavors, Ashley’s to Polar Delight, and the further away but worth it GoGreenly (they have taro!), our froyo cup runneth over. The numbers speak louder than words: we just don’t need any more DIY dairy and toppings here. So you might think it makes no sense at all that we’re amped for the imminent arrival of America’s millionth Pinkberry in our very own New Haven, in the former space of some independent boutique that we’ve already forgotten. Theoretically, we’re against it. But in actuality? Pinkberry holds the trump card: it offers delivery. New Haven does not have enough food service insititutions willing to bring me treats in the comfort of my own home; by offering to make Pinkberry happen where the rest of our lives happen, the froyo behemoth has won our business—if not our hearts.

BEST WAY TO ENTERTAIN VISITING FRIENDS Noah Remnick No one has higher expectations than visiting friends. They’ve just spent four hours sitting on a Megabusnext to a guy eating Panda Express, and now it’s on you to show them the night of their lives. So where are you gonna take em, hot shot? Toad’s will let them know you’re a beautiful little social butterfly, but there are few things crueler than forcing your friends to endure the musical stylings of DJ Action in a room of complete strangers. Rudy’s would give you a chance to catch up on some conversation if it weren’t the loudest place in the entire universe, but it is, so that’s a no. Frat house? Too crowded. Apartment party? Not enough booze. The truth is that it’s impossible to show your friends a amazing time, so you might as well show them a weird one and no place on campus is weirder than Chabad. It has free food, drunk rabbis, and some of the worst toasts you will ever hear. Best of all, your mother will be speechless when word gets back that you go to Shabbat dinner every Friday. L’chaim to that.

BEST CAKE Ashley’s Ice Cream.

Book Trader’s Apple-specific one. No kidding.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST DEAL Jake Dawe

Anna Meixler

I’m gonna be honest with you: I’m cheap. I’m really cheap. Twenty-five cents can sway my decision at any restaurant. I’ve opted out of a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s (blessed be its holy name) after I debated whether or not I was thirsty enough to pay for a Coke. Why fork over 75 cents more when I can just get the Big Mac sandwich and I dunno, lick the sweat from my arm? The nutritional benefits are pretty similar and that’s about the cost of a hefty dollop of cookie dough in any residential college buttery. So you’ll understand my elation when I wandered into the lounge at the Study to wait for a friend and her mother for lunch and was approached by a hotel staff member politely asking if I wanted coffee or tea. Apparently it’s complimentary for guests and I looked like one. I accepted. I wasn’t tired, but who knows when a fit of narcolepsy will pop up and threaten to ruin a classic Heirloom sourdough grilled cheese and spring water? A few weeks later I was strolling down Chapel and happened to be wearing slacks and a tucked-in Oxford. I decided to try my luck, wandered in, and played the role of hotel guest. I lazily draped myself over a couch in the lounge and stared out the window with feigned disinterest. “Excuse me, sir. Would you like a complimentary coffee as a guest of the hotel?” Of course I would, garçon. Of course. maybe? Here’s to the economic system we love to hate and hate to love. Get at me, invisible hand.

The Yale Center for British Art houses serious paintings. They range from military scenes to stormy seascapes to my personal favorite, a naked, screaming man gripping a live snake. After viewing the museum’s work, I often want to make something soft and pastel colored and kitten-themed. But Lisa Frank stickers and crayons are hard to find in New Haven, and I forgot to haul my craft materials back to campus after Thanksgiving break. There’s a scarcity of childhood art supplies on campus, unless you attend Cookies and Coloring at the Chaplain’s office, but I feel bad feigning religiosity for Crayolas. It’s only logical that any and every Yale student would, at some point, need to finger paint or make a tailgating headpiece or construct critters out of pom-poms. You probably didn’t know that the YCBA possesses googly eyes and pipe cleaners along with priceless oil paintings of European battles, but they do. Its docent room is secretly stocked with every DIY material you desire. If you haven’t befriended the museum’s educational directors yet, you’re doing something wrong, and are probably slacking on Pinterest projects. Never again will you go to Hull’s and spend upwards of $50 on art supplies, only to settle for metallic Sharpies in lieu of glitter pens and abandon dreams of animal-shaped foam stickers. YCBA cabinets are stuffed with everything from stickers to stencils, perfect for any studio art project/ bedazzled garb/catharsis after viewing intimidating British art.

BEST DINING HALL BREAKFAST

BEST CLASS TITLE

Charolette Weiner I brought a Tupperware container filled with oatmeal and vegetarian sausage to school almost every morning of senior year. My classmates were disturbed by either the sight of the lumpy, grayish oats, or the scent of the processed soy cylinders, and they complained a lot. After that year of persecution, I was overjoyed to arrive at college and find oatmeal in abundance. Once a lonely oatmeal crusader, I have even met others who understand its subtle magic. Oatmeal is consistent. It’s available every single day in every single dining hall, so it will never let you down (except for when they serve cream of wheat instead, and that isn’t oatmeal’s fault). It’s relatively healthy, so you’ll feel like a better person just because you ate breakfast. And best of all, oatmeal facilitates mental escape. You can pretend it’s a crisp fall day on your farm in rural New England and top it with chopped apples, walnuts, and cinnamon. Or you can pretend that the freshman 15 is not a thing and top it with chocolate chips, walnuts, Nutella, whipped cream, and maybe even some scrambled eggs, because oatmeal is the greatest hostess of the breakfast world—warm and comforting, she’ll bring her guests together and make sure everyone has a good time. Especially you. maybe? Here’s to the economic system we love to hate and hate to love. Get at me, invisible hand.

BEST YALE GALLERY SECRET

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

In the salad days of my youth, I considered a Special Divisional Major comprised entirely of classes whose titles used the Oxford comma—the greatest grammatical convention known to mankind. (Right? Right. Are you listening, YDN?) That’s why I can’t help but love last spring’s ANTH 013, “Feminism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.” What it lacks in creativity it makes up for in honesty. What you see is what you get, and how could you not like what you see? If only everything in life were spelled out this clearly. There’s no time to waste when you’ve got, admittedly, a pretty ambitious subject (or four) to tackle. A second favorite? “Anthropological Approaches to Capitalism.” A professor of mine recently said, “you can prove anything with anthropology.” You might not be able to prove anything about capitalism, but at least you can, you know, approach it. A chance for EP&E majors to get in touch with their softer side, aspiring i-bankers to reconsider that JP Morgan offer, and anthro majors to try out some math, maybe? Here’s to the economic system we love to hate and hate to love. Get at me, invisible hand.

BEST FUTURE PURCHASE BEST DINING HALL FRUIT Cody Kahoe FRUITS! They satisfy your hunger and promote healthy bowel movements. They do it all! We’ve got all the regulars: cantaloupe slices soaking in their own sweet juices, green pears and brown pears frolicking in fruit-racial harmony, bananas that, for one brief moment, like a butterfly emerging from its bright green chrysalis, don a delicious shade of yellow before turning brown faster than Nazis turn to skeletons in an Indiana Jones movie. Old, trusty, familiar fruits. But this is not enough for the Herald 100. I think other articles have given this category short shrift. I think it’s high time we start rating our fruit with the same liberality with which the dining halls prepare it while still calling it fruit. (I mean, we’ve got fruit of all different creeds, colors, and national origins. Blueberry sour cream rings? Orange almond cupcakes? That’s Warren Court fruit.) By this liberal standard, I believe we cannot exclude the inimitable squash (plural: squish). It’s versatile. It’s multipurpose. It’s adaptable. What even is it? Wikipedia says it’s a Cucurbita, a genus of the gourd family that is technically a fruit. I like to think of it as a fruit-potato. (Say, are potatoes fruits? They’re tubers, right? Are tubers fruits? A discussion for another time I suppose.) My point is: these squish can do anything. Baked Acorn Squash. Creamy Butternut Squash Soup. Squash Curry with Tofu. If it exists, it exists in squash. Just take a look at “Olney’s Squash Gratin.” What the hell even IS gratin?? Squash is mystery. Squash is now.

Herald pocket tees. Tiny little pockets! TYHFFE.

BEST EMAIL SIGN-OFF Austin Bryniarski Always being wary of how you’re presenting yourself is important if you’re looking to be authentic, and one’s e-mail sign-off says it all. Like a Mountain School sweatshirt (mine’s in the mail) or a messy up-do, I automatically know what you’re trying to say when you, in fact, ain’t sayin’ nothin’. But the e-mail sign-off is perhaps the most salient of these external representations of identity, and should be constructed with care and love. I’m craving a smoothie of humor, lightheartedness, maybe a shot of emotion and a foam of irony (wheatgerm & whey protein, too, tho). “XOXO” is okay, but I’m more of the persuasion that the OC was the OG and the west coast is the best coast (congrats Leighton and Adam!). ”XOXOXOXOXO” is something my grandma writes on the “FOR” line of my checks, bless her heart, so that won’t really work. “Kisses” isn’t obviously chill enough. “Besos” might be problematic to some. “Hugs” isn’t intimate enough. “Mwah” — do I look like I’ve ever read Proust? Yawn. These are old. Stale. I need to pull a Kelly Rowland, come out of Beyonce’s shadow, and blaze a trail for myself in the e-mail sign-off game…wait! That’s it! Kisses down low, Austin Bryniarski

BEST FREEZER STAPLE Cindy Ok It’s a hard and scary world out there and sometimes what you need is a frozen treat to sip on to remind you that all cold things eventually melt, including the frozen hearts and walls all over this town. Eating so much sweetener and artificial flavoring every day can’t be good for me, you might think if you tend to think inside the box. Think again: the path to health is paved with frozen grapes. Mother Nature’s very own, cheap and organic popsicle of purple, green, and red varieties. They’re gluten-free, dairy-free, shellfish-free nut-free, soy-free, and perfect as a breakfast, brunch, lunch, linner, brinner, or dinner addition. And once you’re the one who has frozen grapes stocked every hour of every season, you’re also automatically the one everyone’s texting when their apartments are overheated or their candy jar’s run out. The best thing to keep in your freezerturns out to also be the best way to make and keep friends. Who told you that you can’t have it all, that rich white old dude? Sound like he missed the memo on these delicacies—humble indulgences is the name of the game.

BEST GCHAT TRICK Julia Calagiovanni The twenty-something’s favored mode of low-stakes communication has more to offer than you think. I’m talking, of course, about the formidable collection of “hidden” gchat emoticons. Obviously, you know about the heart and the cute animated smilies. But have you encountered the crab? V.v.V The monkey? ( :( | ) The devil? The PILE OF FECES?!?! Consider the possibilities: easy-way-out breakup? The broken heart. </3 Casual invitation to Miya’s? The (smiling) piggy. Celebrating Movember? The mustache. :{ For the nights when you straight-up DGAF? The aptly titled “indifferent”: :-|Need to confess that you’re the Poopetrator? You know what to do: ~@~ Your late-night confessionals and lecturetime convos will never be the same. (Gchat me maybe?)

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST WINTER BUY Humidifier.

Caleb Moran

BEST SCIENCE FOR NON SCIENCE MAJORS Cindy Ok “Brain and Thought: Introduction to the Human Brain with Amy Arnsten.” Sure, it may not be a “gut” science credit—it’s not what your average English major would call an easy A and it’s not technically of the “science for non-sciencemajors” bracket at all. If you love vomiting (what you’ve mindlessly memorized about the cell membrane or the carbon cycle onto a test), go for that easy, boring A elsewhere. This is a class for regurgitation haters—you who are genuinely looking to learn the neuroscience behind memory, sleep, and language, behind PTSD, autism, and Alzheimer’s, all with lots of art and literature metaphors (the lecture’s in LC, after all). It’s also for you who want to get to senior year and finally be able to tell your parents the name of a class you’ve taken during your $220,000 college education without their mocking you (as much as I stand by taking “Beatles & Dylan” and “Perspectives on Human Nature”). So, it’s not your typical science for-non-science, but then again, writing a one-act about a dinner party with six characters and their six rare brain disorders isn’t typically an option for the final term paper of most science classes, is it? End scene.

BEST SPLURGE Thomas Yabroff You’ve earned it. You’ve burned calories left and right trudging amuck from Bingham to Broadway. You’ve earned your keep shelving books, monitoring phones, and letting the School of Management do tests on you. You need it, 6.7 credits and a graduate seminar on the ornithological implications of industrial psychoanalysis requires much work and little sleep. 20 ounce iced Blue State coffee twice daily. Get it. At around six dollars a day, this splurge may set you back over $1,600 over a year, but again, could you survive without it? This jet drink of caffeinated bliss may be cheap for the occasional TF meeting or club get-together, but a true aficionado and anti-Scrooge will splurge bi-daily on his or her cup of choice. What to pick? Irrelevant. Ethiopian French Roast? Italian Sumatran blend? Blonde roast with bleached highlights? It’s besides the point. You have your Blue State card and your brain demands tribute to the C8H10N4O2 gods. Splurge and slurp it up. No questions asked.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST GYM ACTIVITY It’s getting to be that time of year again, the time to talk about how badly you need to go to the gym while never actually going. Maybe you do in fact go to the gym but when you get there you just walk around looking slightly confused as if you are looking for a small child who could be hiding behind one of Joe Manganiello’s enormous biceps, rather than picking up a weight yourself. People who say that the gym is only for getting a nice burn on are kidding themselves and everyone around them. The best way to spend your time at the gym these days is by cleaning your dirty laundry with the bottles of sanitizing solution conveniently located around Payne-Whitney. Lets face it; no one is actually using the sanitizing solution to wipe down their machine, especially not that sweaty guy who used the elliptical before you. Also, just because it’s the holiday season, we can’t just assume that the poopetrator is no longer at large and go cleaning our laundry anywhere while visions of sugarplums dance in our heads. Doing your laundry at the gym gives you the opportunity to tell people you went to the gym while keeping your laundry free of human and/or animal waste, win win!

BEST INAUGURATION ACCESSORY Jin Ai Yap No, not a fake moustache (pronounced, by the way, “moo-STASH” by the man himself). Unlike those weak approximations of Pete’s mourned, once-bushy facial growth, the best inaugural accessory has not yet been vulgarized by Urban Outfitters (though look out for a limited-edition Inaugural Playset, complete with Salovey cutout, coming soon to a Campus Customs near you). At this inauguration, Yale University’s “academic regalia”– the “President’s Collar” and the “University Mace” (topped with a minute pinecone)–were the ultimate accessories of the season. That’s right: for those of you who were too busy nursing hangovers and bluegrass mosh pit injuries to witness the actual ceremony, Yale literally has a set of crown jewels. Once every 23 years or so, Yale’s not-so-secret aspirations to its English brethren emerge from a façade of an allAmerican egalitarian culture, resulting in an approximation of a coronation, complete with crown jewels, to remind us of our colonial roots. These regalia, like the moustache, mark a dated but important traditional show of misplaced masculinity, but with a far richer history and association with colonial imperialism. And like monarchy or any other trendy fad, Yale’s crown jewels are better because they’re exclusive to only the most celebrated of old white men—God save Peter Salovey.

BEST INVESTMENT MOST TRIUMPHANT RETURN Andrew Wagner Elsewhere in this very issue, I’ve described why Book Trader’s baristas are better than Blue State’s in every single way. But the one thing they don’t have that Blue State does is the Vegan Tempeh Reuben Sandwich. For those of you not in the know, tempeh is a meat substitute that’s kind of like tofu but less squishy and off-putting. Blue State debuted their mad-scientist food creation last winter, only to mysteriously take it off the menu. Well, now it’s back and better than ever. It’s actually been so long since I’ve eaten an actual Reuben Sandwich that I have no idea whether Blue State’s freak combination of soy substitutions actually approximates a real Reuben. But I don’t care, because something very magical happens when you mix fake meat, fake cheese, fake thousand island dressing, some sauerkraut, and toss it in all in a sandwich wrap. If the idea of eating fake meat weirds you out, consider that it’s probably less artificial than the “meat” you’re already willing to consume from questionable restaurants on a daily basis. And trust me, once you get on the fake meat wagon, you won’t want to get off. Come ride with me!

Herald Staff Would you rather eat a nibble of your own shit every day or eat a whole cake once every five years? This is the dilemma tens of millions of sexually active women in this country are having as we speak, including on this campus (realistically like five people on this campus). And believe it or not, more of you are nibbling your own shit every day. Okay, you’re nibbling some estrogen tablets, but I think we can agree we all feel a lot like shit when we gain 15 pounds and get yelled at every day by your phone’s alarm that goes off at the same time, the one you named “TAKE IT RIGHT NOW OR YOU WILL FORGET AND HAVE TO USE CONDOMS AND THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF BEING ON THE PILL????” Let me share a little gospel called the IUD. That’s right, shoutout to my favorite whole cake in the world, the Mirena. It’s a tiny piece of plastic that goes up your vag when you’re sedated with Valium and costs about how much five months on the pill costs but lasts five years but you can get it taken out whenever. It’s covered by insurance, as effective as tying your tubes, makes your period lighter by 90 to 100 percent, and if STIs aren’t a concern you quite literally never have to think about birth control again. That kind of a cake is what I like to call freedom.

BEST MIYA’S MENU ITEM BEST QR CLASS I might not identify as a “math person,” but I liked a bunch of things about my high school math classes. For example, one of my teachers was named Mr. Hu, which could be fun. (Who? Get it?) Enter MATH 190: Fractal Geometry, one of the greatest blessings to my freshman fall and the closest I’ve come to a mechanical pencil in the past two years. Fractal Geometry allowed me to make use of some of my greatest skills. I drew straight lines, and even boxes. I appreciated rainbow-colored pictures. I laughed at funny stories, and pondered over the serious ones. One time Professor Frame asked us, “What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?” and I knew the answer. “Carrot,” I said, with confidence, my voice surprising even me from where I sat at the back of the lecture. Heads turned, and I knew what everyone was thinking: “Who is that girl?” I am. I am that girl. And I love Fractal Geometry. Antiderivatives may be so far in my past that I had to Google “calculus” to remember the name of something I don’t remember, but I do know what a cat looks like when iterated into a gasket, and if that doesn’t count for something, then I don’t know what I’m doing here. #Frame4evr

Alessandra Roubini Forget the canned shit that most Japanese restaurants serve. Miya’s miso soup is not only homemade, but they literally dive for their own seaweed. As in they put on wet suits and dive down to pick their own local seaweed. It’s probs not the cleanest stuff, but dang that’s cool. And if you’re feeling super pumped about the holidays, definitely check out their pumpkin miso soup. It literally tastes like pizza so you can’t go wrong.

BEST SAUCE We’re at an impasse: Rudy’s samurai sauce vs. Rudy’s curry ketchup.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST PROCRASTINATION ACTIVITY Kohler Bruno

BEST FOMO Christine Mi I never miss out on anything. Just kidding, I go to Wednesday Toad’s like twice a semester and spend most of my weekend watching Adventure Time and tumblring. But regardless, we all know FOMO is very real on this campus. FOMO over naked parties you weren’t invited to (what are you trying to imply? Huh? Huh???), FOMO over not-so-secret societies, FOMO from being denied entry for the eighth time at GPSCY, FOMO over blurry Instagrams from a craazyyy night @ Box, FOMO over the fact people actually date in college, basically FOMO everywhere. But no FOMO beats the FOMO of studying abroad. I’m all about breaking out of your comfort zone and immersing yourself in a foreign country to broaden your horizons, but going abroad definitely comes with some opportunity costs. Missing an entire semester’s worth of Yale experiences—late nights in A+A (hah jk closes at 6 today!), memorable nights out, potential friendships, and all the other up and downs that define our bright college years—can be a little difficult to digest. But ultimately the experience is worth all the FOMO in the world, because when else will you be able to live in Sao Paolo or Seoul or Copenhagen for months without any other pressing responsibilities? It is almost guaranteed that you will have the time of your life meeting total strangers and eating great food and learning about a new culture. Sure you won’t be able to bond with new besties over the ghastly state of Sig Nu’s bathroom or hook up with that one hot (and graduating) senior, but in the end studying abroad is where it’s at, because the FOMO of not doing it far outweighs any other FOMO you’ll experience at Yale.

BEST THING ON YOUTUBE Ava Kofman Good evening America. It has recently come to my attention that I love Chloe Sevigny Parodies. I was lounging on a furry couch eating cold cucumber shaved ice when a brown-haired friend of mine who lost his last name in the war exclaimed, “Why Ava, have you seen ‘The Chloe Videos’?” Suddenly everything I had ever wanted to do with my life flashed before my eyes. It’s really better that you see it for yourself––here is the link to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/combine13/videos?shelf_ id=1&sort=dd&view=46&tag_id=UCmpA12VldRgqj2H7TaG IOSw.3.chloe I hope, for your sake, its holistic brilliance does not similarly devastate your dreams.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

Horrible news: it’s about to be finals week and I just discovered QuizUp. For those of you yet uninitiated, QuizUp is an iPhone app that allows you to challenge your friends— or strangers—to a series of short quizzes. You earn points for correctly answering bite-size multiple-choice questions as the clock at the top of the screen ticks down from ten seconds for each of the six rounds. I downloaded it two days before Thanksgiving and by the time the turkey was served the app had notified me that I’d played 100 games. Good for you, Kohler. Now that I’m back at Yale I’m like an evil ambassador for QuizUp (not that I’m the first one; it launched on Nov. 7 and had 3 million users by Dec. 2). Look, download it at your own risk. Each quiz only lasts about 40 seconds, but the app’s basically a black hole, especially when you’re someone like me who’s not very good at getting the right answers, but who nevertheless continues to challenge everyone he loses to in order to win enough so that his overall record becomes positive. In gambling that’s called chasing your losses, but I’m not addicted to QuizUp. Seriously, I’m not. I just like it a lot but if I wanted to stop I totally could stop, like, it’s just a fun thing that I enjoy as a release, but, like, I’m in complete control. Seriously I promise I’m in control.

BEST RIVAL PUBLICATION Navy Encinias I gave up having rivals in the ninth grade, more or less. Relationships with a competitive edge really pique my anxiety, and I’ll say it again here: I’m a lover, not a fighter. Of course, a good rivalry isn’t always a bad thing. Competitions can bring out the best in us, and there are times when I skim through campus publications with an eye to what I can do better, in my own journalistic pursuits. Yale is a place where we learn not only from our professors, but also from each other, and I take that to heart at all times. The Herald’s best rival publication can be found not in your nearest dining hall, not at a zine release party, not at clothing stores in London and Paris, but at its very own website. It’s best accessed through Classes*v2, when applying to Writing Classes. It’s called the English 454 Reader and right now you can access ten of the publication’s back issues––as far back as 2002. There you’ll find some of the best student writing by some of the biggest names in journalism. It’s a complete gem. When I’m having trouble hearing my journalistic voice, or figuring out my piece’s structure, I turn to the Reader. It’s all about Longform, it’s all about the Reader. Skim it while it’s hot.

BEST SPECTATOR SPORT BEST DIETARY RESTRICTION Austin Bryniarski Dietary restrictions are my bread-and-butter. That is, the bread-and-butter I cannot eat, because as of last May, I no longer eat carbohydrates and have been rewarded with the no-sugar-added fruits of my labor. But if we’re talking laborious ways of eating, then freeganism takes the flourlesschocolate-cake (4g carbs per serving) because it is literally dumpster diving for food. A portmanteau of free and veganism, the golden rule is that you cannot pay for the food you eat—veganism is irrelevant. In the same vein, New Haven’s Free Skool of fun, alternative and free (ducking fuh) courses recently offered “Freeganism 101” which dished out how to get the biggest bang for no bucks. It’s exactly like that episode of Portlandia, except you are limited to study breaks, Yale Farm pizza, garbage pails behind New Haven’s finest restaurants, and anything you steal. Did you run out of allowance for brunch at the Study? Stay out of the red and pick up some post-10 p.m. bread from Atty D’s ($0) and comb through the trash behind Caseus for a smellier-than-before hunk of stilton (also $0)—et voila—you are a card-carrying freegan. Pass the pâté—it’s just a couple of ants!

Joe Giammittorio On a Friday night in the fall, you can typically find my suitemates consuming a few Anheuser-Busch products and catching the v-ball game over at Payne-Whitney. That’s a lot of hyphens and fun, but this year I discovered another sport that I also don’t understand but that nevertheless strikes my fancy. I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with keeled cocky, and they play it on a giant blue field surrounded by water guns. Field hockey is great mostly because the girls are not significantly taller than me, but also because it reminds me of the co-ed high school experience I never had. The crowd is small, there’s no tailgate anxiety, and you can almost imagine yourself plopping down on those bleachers with your AP Bio textbook. Best of all, girls’ dads show up every game, wearing hats with their daughters’ numbers on them and unleashing on refs the pent-up aggression that non-field hockey dads let loose through pick-up basketball. At one game I went to, the heckling got so vicious that one player stood up from the bench and told her dad to stop. Unless your parents live in New Haven or something, this is the homiest experience you’re gonna get at Yale. Embrace it.

BEST STATUS SYMBOL Austin Bryniarski

BEST PRANK Larry Milstein Ugh, not The Poopetrator. Seriously, any prank besides The Poopetrator. Sure, the Harvard student giving the fake tour got some national buzz, but the jokes were pretty lame. The Nutella slathered clothing line? Gag. The true winner has to go to a different Pundit tomfoolery: their YSO ticket scam. A little past midnight on October 16, students received an email from yalesymphonyorchestra2013@gmail.com alerting them, “Vendini tickets had an error in its system.” As someone who even bought one of those DVDs just to ensure my spot in the Halloween concert, my heart dropped when I received the message. YSO decided to void all online ticket orders? Oh, hell to the no. So I did what any rational person would do: I forced a friend to camp out Black-Friday-style at 7 a.m. to secure me a new ticket. Does that make me a bad person? Probably. Does that make this a successful prank? Definitely.

Twenty-six people. One sex scandal. Four bad haircuts. Two siblings. Too many people that are pre-med or obsessed with public health. I’m not talking about “Survivor: Madgascar”; I’m talking about the 26 Most Impressive Students at Yale Right Now according to BusinessInsider.com. Where else on Yale’s campus could I find an exclusive group of Yale’s most influential movers and shakers? You guessed it: nowhere. It took a newsblog that I’ve never heard of to bring together this one big room full of bad bitches. But my question is why didn’t that kid that’s always slacklining make it? Or that Asian girl who can pound mad voddie tonnies without turning red? Maybe these deserving heroes will not be immortalized on BI but they shall never be forgotten. That’s not to say my 26 new besties aren’t any less impressive. Noah Remnick’s photo is absolutely stunning, and I heard Joey Yagoda submitted himself but whatever, it’s chill, because he made it in anyway. In all seriousness I should be on this list because I’m so so so so single but so so so so so attractive and that’s impressive. THAT KIND OF LUX IS FOR YOU, 26 MOST IMPRESSIVE STUDENTS. YOU ARE ALL #ROYALS. Bound.

BEST EGO BOOST BEST SPAM YDN Weekend emails.

If you’re like me, you relish the arbitrary things that don’t mean much: retweets, compliments on your sweater, that sort of thing. The little things make the day, am I right? Chief among these are that essential part of everyone’s Yale education: the A in the gut class. The GPA boost from Natty D, the proud look in your parents’ eyes when you tell them you killed it in Intro IR. Petty? Perhaps. Who cares, you deserve it.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST ABBREVIATION Austin Bryniarski

BEST CONSPIRACY THEORY Micah Rodman There have been different versions of this rumor going around Yale for what I would imagine to be for as far back as Yale students have had stomach problems. If you haven’t heard it explicitly, you’ve definitely felt it. Here’s the long and the short of it: Yale dining adds laxatives to the food to keep us healthy and clean. Like any valid truly great conspiracy theory, it’s hard to fully confirm or deny. Or we could just ask the dining hall director if they do it. But he’d probably say no, and the state of our stomachs just might beg to differ. Ugh.

BEST SMOKING BREAK SUBSTITUTE Cindy Ok The worst break is what’s commonly called a smoking break. The concept was invented in the ’50s by Don Draper but for some reason the average smoker today still takes one about one to five times an hour. These breaks last around 10 minutes, so by my calculation smokers who smoke at work actually work about 17 to 83 percent less than non-smokers who work at work, and worst of all, get paid the same as the smokers. There is an enormous, silent wage gap between these two groups. Well, consider it silent no longer. It’s 2013 and I’m here to tell you that it’s time to close that gap, to fight for our constitutional right to get our vitamin D and hang with co-workers throughout our 9 to 5s. Let’s remember the sacrifices our ancestors made so we could complain about our office chairs, and once and for all make this game we call America a fair one. Apple breaks, everybody. The best break for the non-smoker and the equality-loving. Bring one hundred apples to work every day to take that 17 to 83 percent back. Why not take an unwinding saunter while you’re at it? Or pick up your dry cleaning so you can be home in time to catch that Gilmore Girls rerun? It’s called self-care in the name of Lilly Ledbetter, in the name of Rosa DeLauro, in the name of democracy.

BEST HEALTH/FINANCE TIP Gheav Boycott.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

Ashes 2 ashes, dust 2 dust. Ash—short for Anna-Sophie Harling—is the best abbreviation without a doubt, because any parent who bestows upon their child a hyphenated first name has to come up with a contingency plan. I’ve met Ash formally once and we’ve bumped into each other a few times around campus (fellowship meetings, corner of High and Elm, Blue State, etc.), but we’re friends on Facebook and she has a buttload of pretty pictures that I’m no-so-secretly really jealous of. Word on the street is that she’s super into journalism, which is cool because I’m super into bacon so we have the great fortune of sharing an interest in something that was once alive but is now dead. Ash is a Renaissance (Brearley) woman; her artistry and intellect find her athleticism good company: she runs for Yale’s track and field team, Yale’s track and field team does not run her. Her name may be abbrev’d, but she embodies an unabridged whole of a person. Ash is the phoenix that rises from a pile of herself; she is perpetually awesome.

BEST EXCUSE Alex Saeedy Excuses are everywhere at Yale, and I really mean everywhere. Among them, I’ve only heard one that is not absolutely worthless. We pass the hours reflecting on the content of our days, filled with meetings we could possibly skip or seminars we should visit at least once this month. Eavesdrop a bit during midterms or finals, and Yale’s average conversation sounds somewhere between “The Greatest Hits of G-Cal” and your freshman year “to-do” dry-erase board. Finding the reasons why we fail to accomplish these tasks is therefore pretty damn easy. “UGH I HAD THREE TEN-HOUR REHEARSALS PLUS A FILM SCREENING AND A RECRUITING INTERVIEW LAST NIGHT, PROFESSOR! THERE’S NO WAY I COULD DO MY PRESENTATION ON RECYCLING INITIATIVES IN BERLIN TODAY.” But let’s be real. We’re just fucking around on Facebook or Buzzfeed half of the time that we do anything, so just find the goddamn time! Only one time has an in-class excuse really merited attention. After a holiday, a student came in and said: “I get really lonely at airports. I just couldn’t do my take-home exam.” Needless to say, the class was a bit baffled. So you’re alone, with no sincere obligation other than to wait, and you really couldn’t make time? No, he couldn’t. Sometimes it’s more than okay (and probably necessary) to step outside our obsessively crafted string of obligations, and be alright with not having done something. So try to be a bit less masochistic, Yale—he didn’t have to turn it in until the week after.

BEST DINING HALL FRUIT Leland Whitehouse

BEST SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION Maude Tisch Feeling like you’ve just hit the limit? Does your brain just feel fried? Have you maxed out your self control? You may feel like you hate everything, but science has your back. Ego depletion is the idea that when you use self-control or willpower, you’re actually drawing on a finite store that can be used up. Simple, but also incredibly comforting when finals season rolls around and you feel, well, depleted. Established and respected scientific research explains why you feel this way! You’re not just being lame and petty when you say that you cannotcannotcannot spend another moment staring at an empty Word document or a mindboggling review sheet. Everything is substantiated. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

BEST TIME SAVER

More options than meet the brain at first mental glance, truth be told. Whine all you like, snobs, but possibilities friggin’ abound around here. Classics: the banana, the granny smith and red delicious apples, the orange, the grapefruit. Sneak attacks: cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, frozen blueberries. Wildcard: mandarin oranges. A couple of them get peeled off the list quickly and unceremoniously. The pears are unripe and generally foul. Same goes for the honeydew and cantaloupe. Red delicious apples are, objectively, the devil. A number of other ones are disqualified for just being reliably lackluster. Canned pineapple, frozen blueberries, granny smiths—gone. Oranges ride the fence: every once in a while there’s a winner stuck in there with all the fibrous, dried-up ne’er-do-wells. That poor baby’s gonna have to go out with the bathwater. So we’re down to three classics and one hell of an oriental maverick. Pure, unmitigated opinion? Grapefruits have cut through the greasy nauseous haze of many a Friday-morning hangover. Sour power.

BEST USE OF EMAIL Emily Rappaport

Sarah Holder Too busy to function? Stop going to class. Don’t worry, I’m not encouraging, like, blatantly disregarding academia. This time saver includes all of the learning but takes out the travel time and inconvenient necessity of putting on pants. Open Yale Courses has a list of 42 lectures that are available to watch online in their entirety. Just start hitting up YouTube instead of WLH sometimes and hours of multitasking possibilities will open up. Should you really skip breakfast, the most important meal of the whole fucking day, to go to that 9:30 class on early modern England? Especially when you can absorb the same material while eating a lightly toasted bagel and looking cute slash intellectual wearing headphones in the back of the dining hall? I haven’t physically attended any lectures on Human Emotion (all 58 of which are online, incidentally) but I can tell you that happiness is measured in bowls of Cheerios, not minutes spent trekking up Science Hill. Maybe you want to burn some calories (shouldn’t have eaten that bagel) but always feel like you should study or go to class instead. Don’t compromise. Just grab an empty Bass study cubicle, get on the floor, and plank to the sound of your MoFoPo professor’s dulcet tones. If you’re feeling ballsy, turn up the volume and run laps around the Saybrary. So many birds killed with this one convenient stone. For those who do end up feeling a compulsion to go to every lecture, Open Courses is still, objectively, the best. When you can open your laptop to a personal, pausable review session, while blow-drying your hair and finally folding your laundry, any hour becomes an office hour.

Email and I have really been through the ringer together. In seventh grade, I still had AOL (sn: Dumpling396), and I used it to send recaps of The O.C. and bar mitzvahs to my best friend who was living in Rome. In ninth grade, I got Yahoo!, which I used to send in my reviews of Survivor and Veronica Mars to my high school newspaper editor. When I was applying to colleges, I switched over to Gmail, which I now pretty much treat like my diary. College was an email explosion—obsessive link sharing, heartfelt gut spilling, weekly brainstorming threads for the Bullblog blacklist (you don’t want to know), screenshot sending (those HerCampus headlines—damn), you name it. But there can only be one best use of email, and the Oscar goes to notifications that my package has shipped. So far this semester I’ve ordered: Speedo goggles, a New Mexican cookbook, two-toned under-eye concealer, red velour track pants, a customized return address stamp, and honestly, other stuff too. Like you, I’ve loved getting mail since the Big Ol’ Bang, and yellow package slips at summer camp and Yale Station were my Golden Tickets. Freshman year of high school, a girl I knew only marginally sent me a package that contained candies that tasted like laundry soap, and I still have those candies on my night table at home because I really love that I received them in a package. I’ve always felt weird that in trying to come up with my own Sound of Music-esque list of favorite things, “brown paper packages tied up with string” is actually one of them. So there’s nothing like that email that tells me I’m about to

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST USE OF YALE FUNDING Alisha Jarwala

BEST SUPPLEMENTARY ACADEMIC ACTIVITY Micah Rodman Do you like tradition? Do you like community? Do you like Israel? Do you like Torah? Do you like the wisdom of the Sages? Do you like Tzadakah? Do you like Tzedek? Do you like ethics? Do you like friendship? Do you like connection? Do you like justice? Do you like this guy named Yevgeny? What about this other guy named Igal? If you like any, all, or none of these things, I’d say you’re a perfect candidate for the Hebrew Table. It meets at the Slivka Center. It’s $16 a plate if you are lucky enough to be in a position where you don’t have a meal plan. It meets five times a semester, and is worth a total of five percent of your Hebrew grade, and it’s all in Hebrew.

Every year, the YCC has a 10K challenge and my suggestions are ignored. Would it really cost more than 10K to build “Guildenstern Hall” next to Rosencrantz? Whatever, if you really want a bike-sharing program instead, fine. But anyway, I think we can all agree that the best use of Yale funding this year has been Yale’s bartending classes. While I have not personally taken them, I enjoy Garrett Fiddler’s sign-up emails, I enjoy the controversy the classes cause in mainstream media, and I enjoy the fact that Yale wants us to be cool mojito-makers and not lame suburban potluck-dinner attendees who only drink subpar wine. Furthermore, YaleStation offers a wealth of wisdom in its official drink recipes, including Whiskey Beer Sours (“You can use a lot more than 12oz whiskey and the lemonade will kill the taste,” the website boasts), Margaritas (“Usually just fruity booze smoothies,” it warns), and of course, Rusty Nails (“this stuff is an alcoholic’s candy,” it says, but I can’t figure out what it’s going for there). If you don’t believe me, Google “Yale bartending recipes.” You should be 21 to enjoy alcoholic’s candy in the state of Connecticut, but if lemonade kills the taste, who’s really going to know?

The best part about it is that all of the Hebrew classes sit together, Kibbutz style, and there are many more students in the L1 class than in the higher-level classes, so the conversation quickly revers to baby talk. Here are some highlights from conversations of Hebrew tables past, translated into English for all you Goys: Me: “Hi, my name is Micah. What is your name?” Hebrew Table Friend: “My name is Sam. Where are you from?” Me: “I’m Los Angeles, how about you?” HTF: “I’m from San Diego.” Me: “That’s near me. Do you like California?” Different Hebrew Table Friend Wearing a Kippah: “The latkes tonight taste really good.” Other Hebrew Table Friend: “Yes! I know! I think so too!” DHTFWK: “Dina gives so much homework!” Igal (the Hebrew table organizer): So what do you guys think of this Passover food? I could go on, but I don’t want to give too much away. So take Hebrew with me next semester. Slivka has really good cookies.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)

BEST PARTY THEME Rebecca Wolenski Let’s get real here for a minute. If you could go out and party every weekend in stretchy pants and sensible footwear, sans judgment, wouldn’t you? Maybe some of you already do this (sophomore slump, anyone??) but honestly, this is why “Loggers and Joggers” is literally the BEST party theme out there. Sure, it’s not as original as “Lumberjacks and Nice Racks” but let’s look at all the benefits. First of all, no. effort. required. Just throw on your gym clothes and you’re ready to rock. Second, you are totally and completely unrestricted in your dance moves now that you’ve donned some yoga pants and Asics. Do you realize how much easier it would be to make that ass clap with tennis shoes vs. pumps? Really effing easy. You don’t have to worry about your hair frizzing as the night goes on and the air of the 12 Pack gets damper than your pits, because you’ve already secured a really cute pony tail. Also, that hot freshman in the corner wont even know how much boob sweat you accumulated during that last Avicii song because your trusty Dri-FIT sports bra has already absorbed it all.

1. SPONGES. These are DISGUSTING!! 2. Lady Gaga haters. That’s so 2009. 3. People who delete their Facebooks during finals. 4. Restaurants that make you get a key to use the bathroom. 5. People who say “killing it” too much. 6. White people who listen to new rap music for phrases to add to their vocab 7. White people who get money but don’t spend it, or maybe they get money and buy a business. 8. White people. 9. The fact that next year’s freshmen are the Class of 2018. 10.Constantly seeing the same people around but never meeting them. 11.Right-handed privilege. 12.People who hate on Panera. 13.Graduate students, all of them. 14.The fact that five years from now most of us will be, or will have been, graduate students 15.When people who work (employment) at A&A come to do work (school) at A&A. This is very unsettling. 16.Flip flops. 17.Google. 18.The tension between FOMO and DGAF. 19.Societal norms. 20.The fact that Tikkaway is so far from my apartment. 21.The YDN WEEKEND Twitter account. 22.Washing our faces so much that they get dry. 23.Tying shoes while sitting in a chair. 24.Stains that won’t come out. 25.Not knowing how to use a fire extinguisher. 26.When debit cards get worn and kinda bent. 27.The comic book store next to Gag Jr.’s. 28.Back-to-back due dates. 29.Shortened Reading Week. 30.YDN joke issue. 31.Stickers on laptops. 32.Building relationships with hot athletes who have girlfriends. 33.People who are dumb and not even fun. 34.Having a million copies of every syllabus saved to our desktop. 35.Grand Strategy. 36.That it takes so long to read through a summary of an entire book on SparkNotes. 37.Buttery culture. 38.culture. 39.Food truck culture. 40.Bun Lai culture. 41.Slifka culture. 42.Grades. These actually make no sense! 43.Deep Springs College. 44.People who are “chill.” 45.People who are really into “sincerity.” 46.Sometimes reflexively puking a little bit in my mouth when I take shots. 47.Being sober. 48.HerCampus. 49.Magna Carta Holy Grail. 50.That we only make latkes once a year.

51.The new colleges. 52.The word “funemployment.” 53.Transcribing. 54.Lighting cigarettes backwards by/on accident. 55.Feeling underdressed. 56.Bad pens. 57.Things that you keep using even when they are broken. 58.Buzzfeed. 59.Upworthy. 60.The lady in Jojo’s watching Modern Family right now. 61.Built-in bras. 62.People who hate the Kardashians but have never seen an episode of KUWTK. 63.Theater people. 64.Page-shaming. (“How many pages do you have?”) 65.The fact that we’ve been in school since we were two. 66.The fact that we still don’t understand whether a curve is a good or bad thing. 67.Having peaked in seventh grade. 68.East Coast superiority complexes. 69.Unpaid internships. 70.Sitting in seminar with 18 people who haven’t showered. 71.Books on 24 hour reserve fuck fuck fuck. 72.No longer being wise beyond our years. 73.Mealy apples. 74.Bloating. 75.Ham. 76.The Yale Club of New York. 77 Being jealous of other people’s handwriting. 78.When you know your picture was taken but then never actually see it. 79.Closed-mouth smiles as you pass people. 80.THE HOTEL DUNCAN. 81.L’Occitane. 82.Bacteria. 83.Unrequited friendship. 84.When our bedrooms are too hot. 85.Uninspired essay prompts. 86.Losing our sunglasses. 87.Never finding them. 88.The holy trifecta of Jack Wills, J Press, and Gant. 89.Senior dues stickers. 90.That condoms seem really weird when you think about them too hard. 91.Doing laundry. 92.The immense anxiety you get from the prospect of doing laundry after not doing it for a really really long time. 93.Self-awareness. 94.The “available updates” bar that pops up in Finder approximately every 3.5 minutes. 95.Nicotine. 96.FOMO. 97.Natural deodorant. 98.UCS newsletters. 99.Networking. 100.Anxiety about New Year’s Eve plans.

The Yale Herald (Dec. 6, 2012)