Cersonsky: On privilege at Yale
Disagreeing with someone who has given you a lot makes for some tough love.
Cersonsky: Two New Havens
At 1:50 yesterday afternoon, Assistant Chief of Yale Police Ronnell Higgins finally sent students something they, and their newspaper, wanted: a campus-wide email stating what many already knew. “There was a serious incident involving gunfire on College Street between Crown and George early Sunday morning.”
Cersonsky: Why I should’ve chosen Yale
If you want to hear angry groans from either side of the Yale Political Union, just stop halfway through a speech and tell the body that the topic at hand is really “a question for social science.”
Bronstein, Cersonsky, Crosby and Eidelson: For financial aid reform
This month, 1,940 students will decide whether to accept their offers of admission to Yale. On Monday, many will come for Bulldog Days. They’ll attend lectures by Shelly Kagan, Marvin Chun and David Blight. They’ll eat s’mores in courtyards; braving the chaos of the extracurricular bazaar, they’ll each sign up for 25 student organizations.
Cersonsky: Life, death and scholarship
Over spring break, I headed downtown from my Baltimore hotel for the International Conference on Infant Studies where I’d be presenting a poster on my summer monkey research. A few minutes en route, the drizzly mid-morning was pierced by collective chants emanating mysteriously from behind a skyscraper.
Cersonsky: Saintly values
All Possible Words
In the midst of a reading response or an essay, I have a bad habit of clicking to ESPN.com and checking sports statistics. No matter my timetable, the mesmerizing stream of box scores is hard to resist. There’s no meaning to it; it’s a compulsion — a game.
Cersonsky: Democracy in New Haven
All Possible Worlds
The local fruits of a $16 billion dollar endowment and of innovations in social policy are worthy of praise. Yet fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what Yale does, or what City Hall does. If we want to rebuild, diversify and make desirable our private sector and our neighborhoods, our governance must come not from government but from communities.
Cersonsky: The end of the end of ideology
Last year in The Wall Street Journal, Sen. Joe Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67 lamented the ideological fall of what was once an “unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American” Democratic Party (“Democrats and Our Enemies,” May 21).
Cersonsky: Rogue, reconsidered
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.
Cersonsky: Step it up, Dwight Hall
At 8:15 on Sunday morning, the Party of the Left concluded its inaugural 12-hour charity debate-a-thon. For me, the appeal of the event was obvious — besides the average sleep-deprived revelry that you’d expect, ample donations were collected for Shelter Now, an organization for which I served as co-director and whose work, I believe, is critical to the homeless of New Haven.
Cersonsky: Summer, rewritten, rethought
The words are easily accessible via the Internet but what they represent is less so, distorted in the process of recording. When I sat at my desk at the Caribbean Primate Research Center, what I typed became a new memory — a modified version of the “real” one. I don’t remember the latter, at least not consciously.
Cersonsky: The persistence of change
Thirty-Seven Howe St. lies fittingly at the crossroads of Yale and the rest of the world. My first visit occurred during the summer of 2007, when a high school friend invited me to see a screening of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” at this place called the New Haven Peoples Center. I was excited to see the film; staunchly in favor of universal health care, I wanted to be able to argue for it.
Cersonsky: Remember those who matter
Last Monday Mayor John DeStefano Jr. spoke to the Yale College Democrats about education reform, discussing, among much else, the city’s relationship with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the reconstitution of stagnant schools and the looming fulfillment of the New Haven Promise, the city’s program to help local students pay for college.
Cersonsky: Get addicted to goodwill
Consider this: There’s a Democratic primary for the Ward 22 aldermanic election on Sept. 15, and you live in one of the four residential colleges located in the ward. If you want to vote, you have to re-register from your home district to New Haven. But, as a student, you ask yourself: Am I qualified to make decisions about the future of a place where I only kind of live?
Cersonsky: Confront the other at Yale
I wish there were more homeless people for me to run into in front of Gourmet Heaven at 3 a.m. asking me to buy them hamburgers. Really, I do. It’d be great. More people homeless, requesting hamburgers.
Cersonsky: Ideology and conscience at play
The conscience of a conservative, as Barry Goldwater wrote, revolves around a single, seemingly elegant question: “Are we maximizing freedom?”
Cersonsky: The state of our city
DeStefanomania? DeStefanation? John the Vote? The name of our Commander in Chief makes for much better portmanteaux and calls to action. But, as I learned at this year’s State of the City address, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. sure knows how to Barack a crowd.
Cersonsky: Effect change together
In the fall, the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project and a host of other campus organizations joined together to raise over $30,000 to help keep the New Haven Overflow Shelter open just a few months longer over the winter.