It has been too long since Yale beat Harvard. We hope for a victory on Saturday, but we are also ready to give Tom Williams some time.

The Freshman Class Council has finally resolved its T-shirt troubles, substituting a generic anti-Harvard logo for a problematic F. Scott Fitzgerald line calling Harvard men sissies.

Writers from Thucydides to George Orwell have observed that, in political disputes, the meaning of words is often the first casualty.

A pair of recent News pieces begin to outline the tensions plaguing post-9/11 American-Muslim relations.

As a student worker at Yale Recycling, the agency that coordinates recycling on campus, I’ve recycled everything from solo cups to furniture. But the piano was a first.

I am Connecticut Limo — the incompetent taxi service familiar to all Nutmeggers and Yalies who travel. Transporting people is my vocation; it’s all I am asked to do and yet I fail miserably.

Poor Barack Obama. Whether or not you support him, our president has been dealt a pretty tough hand.

I do not know Jen Ivers ’10, still less do I bear her any ill-will, and I am comfortably committed to the principle that the sexual lives of others are none of my business. There’s nothing remarkable about a woman who flouts traditional notions of gender on a campus where masculine women and effeminate men are too common for comment. This is Yale, after all; the gender-transgressive we will always have with us.

Last month, on this page, John Scrudato ’11 praised the candidacy of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman for New York’s 23rd Congressional seat (Politics of revenge, Oct. 29). He wrote, “The hope is that Hoffman’s success will encourage voters across the country to stop looking at politics as red versus blue and take a chance on something truly different.”

Gridiron glory is so last century. Today, the real battlefield is Google, and the weapon is autocomplete, which attempts to predict your search by proposing commonly used terms to complete your query. The cooler the school, the more flattering the autocomplete.
Below, real Harvard and Yale-themed searches face off is one for the ages. The school with the better autocomplete gets the points. The typed-in portions are in bold; Google took over from there.

I wish to protest the News’ headline “For some Yalies, split allegiances” (Nov. 17). There are and can be no split allegiances among Yalies. A person split between Yale and Harvard is with Harvard. At Yale students are taught to know where they stand.

Steven Smith
Nov. 17
<i>The writer is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and the Master of Branford College.</I>

Yedidya Schwartz’s column (“Sabotaging the secular state,” Nov. 16) about the Jewish boy denied admission to the Jews’ Free School in London aroused my interest for several reasons.

America has a storied history of fighting for right and freedom “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” We have shed blood and spent treasure to ensure that people around the world could be free. As a nation, we are especially concerned with ensuring the safety and prosperity of those who have been oppressed by their governments.

Behind the verbal dexterity and endearing moderateness that have earned him 30-plus-comment praise on the News’ Web site, Matthew Shaffer (“Going rogue,” Nov. 16) is secretly a tool of the vast right wing conspiracy — and so are we.

The Yale University Press’s publication of Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy In Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935” has sparked debate about whether the practical implications and historical context of a philosophic work should color our view of the work and, if so, whether it should be removed from philosophy departments. But, is this a discussion we want to be having? And, what is it about Heidegger’s work that we really fear?

We all know one when we see one. We all hate one when we see one. We know what they look like, what they dress like, what they sound like, what they smell like.

James Cersonsky raised several ideas for Dwight Hall to become more active in promoting community service and social justice (“Step it up, Dwight Hall,” Nov. 13), Our experience is that a passion for making the world a better place is thriving at Yale.

What is gray and blue and a senior and freshman at the same time?
This Eli Whitney student at Yale.

Re: “Standing up for religion” (Nov. 13). When I read Joe Carlsmith’s column about the recent shooting carried out by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, I thought it was great. And then I read the comments on the News’ Web site.

On the eve of the release of Sarah Palin’s new book, the consensus is that she’s a nut.
I have a dirty secret. I’ve tried to hide it, tried to keep it in. But now I have to let it out.
I like Sarah Palin.