Hairy Business - Third Place, Wallace Prize for Nonfiction

You Are a Princess! - Second Place, Wallace Prize for Nonfiction

One Christmas eve, the pager attached to Dick Beattie’s hip erupted: pediatric intensive care unit. Beattie arrived within minutes and scanned the ward for his patient. It was a newborn, so small and brittle and blue, swathed in a tangle of tubes and encased in glass. Beattie baptized the infant quickly — sprinkled holy water, murmured a line of prayer.

I wasn’t prepared for the firebombs.

Cracking the Golden Egg

Art For Whose Sake?

If Wooster Street pizza is the stuff of legend, Pepe’s is its hero. Yet as the family leaves the family business, the pizzeria is struggling to reconcile its unique history with its future.

Homeless advocate Edward Mattison is fighting to keep the city’s sole winter overflow shelter running through the cold, bitter months. But does he need help?

Some call it a sidewalk; others call it art. Walk down Chapel Street, turn right on Orange, look down, and you’ll find the New Haven Path of Stars: a two-block line of eight-pointed stars nestled in the Ninth Square. Every 15 feet, a star announces the name of a past local “celebrity.”

For two years, Megan Danna ’08 had been dutifully swallowing her birth control pill at the same time every day. The daily dose of estrogen and progestin in Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo helped keep her severe premenstrual symptoms at bay. Even better, it was dirt cheap. She remembers paying as little as four to eight dollars for four months worth of her pill of choice when her prescription began.
Then October rolled around, and the price jumped.

Giving up a full-time career performing with legends like Baryshnikov, Emily Coates is bringing dance to the Ivies.

Every morning, two kinds of students file into New Haven public high schools. One group is spread among the city’s magnet schools, where the first class of the day is boat building, or interpretive dancing, or organismal biology. At the seven interdistrict magnet schools — the largest of which has 400 students — New Haven natives and North Haven commuters can investigate salt-water filtration, or soil science, or the ethics of entrepreneurship.

Safe in the sturdy branches of an oak tree, the first bald eagle nest in the recorded history of the Quinnipiac River hangs 75 feet above ground, overlooking a stretch of marshland by the riverbank.

The regulars, alums with tufts of grey hair pulled back behind Yale insignia sweatbands and varicose veins peeking out of their tube socks, seem a little befuddled by the noise coming from the courts. Above the familiar smack of a hard, black squash ball, the squeals of 33 New Haven middle-school students in their fourth week of squash lessons ricochet off the walls.

Golfing as the sun inches over the horizon instantly conjures up poetic images. Golfers who make the rounds as the sun rises are known as dew-sweepers, since they’re the only ones each day to see and feel the pleasure of early-morning droplets of water trickling upward from the turf after a well-struck shot.

On a Thursday night at six o’clock, the Catwalk Club is virtually empty. Four middle-aged bald men stare with thin smiles at the naked girl twirling around the pole. Maya, a 28 year-old stripper, evaluates them from her perch on a barstool.

Nobody expects college students to sleep, but Yalies are taking sleep deprivation and idiosyncratic schedules to a new level. What happens after the sun goes down?

Since the 1990s, tens of thousands of Latin Americans have streamed into the Northeast. While many communities fail to reach out to these newcomers, the Elm City has embraced them.

The role-playing game community is well-known for its ability to play make-believe, but how much can it teach us about real life? A gaming convention in Connecticut helps bring both worlds into perspective.

One writer takes a train across the country in search of the last vestiges of railway romance. Long after the heyday of the Pullman car, is there any beauty left on the tracks?