December 2012
Volume 45 Number 3

Yalies study less popular languages against the trends.

In Navajo, the phrase “I want to weigh you” translates directly from English into “I want to hang you.” Some elderly members of the Navajo tribe still laugh about the old misunderstanding, but for Chris Brown ‘15, it represents the need for doctors that speak the Native American language.  When he was younger, Brown witnessed the poor healthcare his relatives, especially his grandmother, received on the reservation from doctors who did not speak the language. He resolved to return to a Navajo reservation as a. . . Read more

The “missed connections” section of the New Haven Craigslist page—in free verse.

The Have Cave has always been a city of connection, since even before its Puritan times. People pair up here constantly—for the night, for a year, and, not infrequently, for their lives. It can happen in a freshman entryway or at Toad’s, and in Claire’s Corner Copia or on the Green. But these can also be, and often are, momentary couplings. The following poems are entries on the “missed connections” section of the New Haven Craigslist page from November, with added line breaks and titled. . . Read more

A public health official dances to “infect” New Haven with good health.

On a Saturday evening in late June, a man dressed in fluorescent tie-dye presses his thumbs together and curls over his fingers to form a flying heart. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are playing “Cornbread and Butterbeans” to sunburned picnickers who skip and swing feverishly on the New Haven Green. Eric Triffin, with his tightly sprung coils, a receded hairline, and full white beard, dances alone to the left of the stage. He wears a tie-dye T-shirt featuring a giant pink heart that cushions the rainbow. . . Read more

For Yale kids, home is a public place.

Eight-year-old Yaqub Bajwa is, on average, a foot shorter than his friends and ten to fourteen years younger than them. Their stature gives them a bit of an advantage over him in volleyball, but he is their equal in games of Risk. Sometimes they talk about basic chemistry and other times they talk about Madagascar 3. As a kid growing up at Yale, Yaqub regularly interacts with a world he is too young to fully participate in—or understand—but that doesn’t keep him from trying. At. . . Read more

Artists throw a going-away party for a dying press.

The New Haven Register press building is full of ghosts. Half of the New Haven Register press building, still occupied by the newspaper’s reporters and administrative staff, hums with florescent lights and muffled typing. But in the printing area, the rooms are gapingly empty. The building was a Gant shirt factory before being purchased by the newspaper in 1981. One room holds rows and rows of the Register’s characteristic red curbside newspaper dispensers. Arranged in tight lines, they stand like grave-markers. The two presses loom. . . Read more

A photographer helps capture the true picture of a contaminated plant.

Chunks of metal lie like carcasses on the grimy floor, and rust grows like mold on pipes in English Station, a non-operational coal and oil power plant sitting on a man-made dredge island in the middle of the Mill River. On October 2, New Haven resident Chris Randall ventured into its depths and returned with photographic evidence of a surreal landscape. “It’s kind of like a ghost,” Randall said. While exploring the site, he imagined what it would have been like for people to work. . . Read more

A fence between Hamden and New Haven traps the city’s poor, exposing 21st-century prejudice.

Pale-barked branches dip over the fence between Hamden and New Haven like old arms reaching to gather bickering boys in an embrace. Separating Hamden, a working-class suburb, from three public housing projects in the neighboring city of New Haven, there is a 12-foot tall fence. Five-inch long silvery, bolted strips link sections of the fence. Its thick metal grating fractures views of neighbors’ homes ten paces away. Added-on pieces of fence drop into vacant spaces among tree roots, screening even squirrels’ holes. The projects are. . . Read more