LASMAN: Poetry, not politics
Beartrap
I can’t read German, but it’s hard to imagine that Günter Grass’ “What Must Be Said” constitutes striking lyricism in any language.
LASMAN: Next year in space
Beartrap
On this year's Passover, I plan to remind myself of an alternative approach: striving forward while reconciling myself to the imperfection of exile.
LASMAN: Dangerous games
The Hunger Games simultaneously condemns and celebrates violence, the inherent perversity of the Battle Royale-like plot and the emotional demises of certain characters coexisting uneasily with writing that shows its true muscle in scenes of bloodshed. No one is reading these books for a revelatory look at teenage love – they are there for the action.
LASMAN: The age of historical ignorance
Beartrap
Yale so venerates written words and old stone that it’s hard to imagine a world that does not accord respect to such relics. Yet cathedral-shaped Sterling would have offered a tempting target to the most determined and destructive attackers Anglophone culture has ever seen.
LASMAN: Acting, nationally
Beartrap
Most of us support free speech and artistic expression. As enlightened, creative and (largely) liberal young people, we value the right of artists to produce whatever they want. Should this prove awful, objectionable, even offensive, we trust that wider cultural forces will react accordingly, contesting bad art and relegating it to obscurity or infamy.
LASMAN: The real, complex Iran
Beartrap
Whenever I tell people that I’m studying Persian the response is often some variation on the same question: Does studying Iran’s language and culture give you a different perspective on what’s happening there now?
LASMAN: The Periwinkler’s Dilemma
Beartrap
Despite unseasonably warm weather, the water temperature in the Essex marshes was hovering just above freezing, and slivers of ice floated out with the tide. I had just finished Michael Pollan’s food-sourcing bible, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and had been inspired to go on a local foraging expedition of my own.
Across enemy lines and back
This is shocking, so brace yourself.
LASMAN: The social engineering network
Until recently, it was quite easy to declare your public endorsement of rape jokes. You had only to log onto Facebook, navigate to fan pages like “We’re gonna have sex tonight. Why? Because im stronger than you are,” and click “like.” Your risible lack of taste was then broadcast to your entire social network, and you publicly joined the ranks – which reached the hundreds of thousands – of those incapable of distinguishing humor from violence against women.
LASMAN: Revolutions and pacifism
Given the nation’s political divisions and the less than explicit platform of the movement, it seems that such national solidarity reflects less a sea change of public opinion and more the growth of an inchoate malaise.
The Copper-Penis Owl WILL Get You!
Given that this was more or less the only traumatic thing I had to deal with as a small suburban child, I invested quite a lot of worry in it.
LASMAN: Political guitar heroes
For many of us, the tag “socially conscious artist” conjures up images of guitar-strumming prophets, crusading documentary filmmakers, and courageous novelists.
LASMAN: New Year’s narratives
Beartrap
The Jewish High Holidays, which began this week and will end in ten days after The Day of Atonement, have always fascinated me — they reverse the trite formula of the New Year’s Resolution, based on regret and recommitment.
9/11 Reflection: Sam Lasman
I am not qualified to write about the personal dimension of 9/11.
Lasman: Seeking the burrito of destiny
I have a confession to make.
LASMAN: Losing power
Beartrap
In the past few weeks, the East Coast has experienced a sort of miniature End of Days – an earthquake that caused up to $300 million of damage from Georgia to Ontario, followed by a hurricane that claimed over 40 lives and is likely to rank as one of the costliest (if far from the deadliest) natural disasters in US history.
Lasman: Lies et Veritas
Beartrap
At the end of the year, the temptation to pass judgment on a calendar’s worth of successes and disappointments becomes hard to resist. We feel the need to distill a year of experiences into an unambiguous truth. But as we yearn to find closure and move forward, perhaps we should resist the urge to simplify.
Lasman: From Bieber to Al Weiwei
Beartrap
It’s been a bad week for artist-government relationships. First came China’s reactive detention of the artist Ai Weiwei for “economic crimes,” a euphemism for anti-regime agitation.
Lasman: It’s lonely (and wet, and cold) at the top
While huddled under an archway this past Tuesday night, thoroughly wind-blown and sodden, some of my fellow juniors and I had a conversation with a police officer who had been posted under that archway, presumably to deter people like us from doing anything much crazier than standing there and looking silly.
Lasman: Violent delights and violent ends
Beartrap
Romeo and Juliet is not about the ability of love to transcend divisions and violence.
Lasman: The two faces of women in war
Beartrap
It’s far too early to say how Operation Odyssey Dawn will go down in history. But whether humanitarian triumph or interventionist debacle, the conflict in Libya has provided two prominent and conflicting images of women’s role in contemporary warfare.
OPINION | On rattlesnakes and rollercoasters
This spring break, I encountered both my first roller coaster and my first rattlesnake.
Lasman: The continuing trial
Beartrap
Finally. After 2,000 years of waiting for the official verdict, the Jewish people have at last been cleared of collective guilt in the death of Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict XVI’s “Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection,” the latest volume of his opus “Jesus of Nazareth,” instead offers a redemptive take on the mob’s infamous invocation in Matthew 27:25, “His blood be on us and on our children” — the so-called “blood curse.”
Lasman: The future of the future
Beartrap
In one of my improv group’s signature games, three lined-up players — one sitting, one kneeling, one standing, all flailing arms — purport to be a single omniscient being called the Oracle.
Lasman: Phishing for wodka
Whenever things get really sad, when the smog-blackened snow seeps into my socks and the wind blisters my face and G-Heav charges me a cruel extra dollar for my egg and jalapeño on a morning when I have an oral presentation on a movie I haven’t watched in a foreign language I don’t speak, I cheer myself up by imagining how things could be worse. I imagine that I could be someone who sends phishing emails.
Lasman: Man’s best friend… for now
Beartrap
For most of us outside the monkey labs, Yale is a strikingly animal-free place. Growing up across the street from a horse farm, in a house occupied by dogs, snakes, turtles, hedgehogs, and the occasional human, this was a significant transition for me. I missed their companionship, their silent indication of an existence larger than anthropocentric concerns.
Lasman: Words, both free and fair
Beartrap
It may have escaped the notice of all but a grab-bag of News online commenters, but two weeks ago The Huffington Post published an article by Greg Lukanioff titled “The 12 Worst Colleges For Free Speech.”
Lasman: Axis of ambivalence
Beartrap
Brasov does not forget its martyrs. Picturesque and cloistered by Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, the city exudes old-world charm with medieval walls and Habsburg edifices.
Lasman: Fighting words
Beartrap
“Threats and challenges.” So began the brief portion of the President’s State of the Union that was devoted to foreign policy.
Lasman: Pucking awesome
There’s nothing quite like a hockey game to make me realize how big Yale is. Here’s this giant stadium, this vast, seething mass of puffy-jacketed student life, and I know — maybe three of these people?
Lasman: Hug me, it’s my inauguration
Beartrap
As all civics nerds will know, yesterday, Jan. 20, is an important date for the nation.
Mid-Winter Woes
It’s that time again: The holiday season is nothing but a distant memory, and winter’s cold indifference weighs heavily on all our souls. WEEKEND got staff photographer Brianne Bowen to capture in images the ineffable sorrow of our time, then asked Sam Lasman and Peter Damrosch to write some heart-wrenchingly poetic captions. They gave us these instead.
Lasman: No country for old Westerns
Beartrap
‘True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ latest foray into bleak landscapes and bleaker psyches, is that rarest of cinematic phenomena — a critical and commercial success. Financially, it has far eclipsed the director/writer duo’s “No Country for Old Men,” which bagged a Best Picture Oscar in 2007 and earned over $110 million in three weeks.
Lasman: The path to the oasis
Shari’a, like most legal codes from the 7th century, is not well-suited to many aspects of life in a modern liberal democracy. Particularly notorious are the huduud, or “limits,” which detail offenses against God that require particularly severe punishment — these are the beheadings, severed hands and stonings the media is so keen to associate with Islamic law.
Lasman: Come on baby, light my shamus
Can people please stop apologizing for Chanukah?
Lasman: When thinking wasn’t a crime
Trap Door
Seventeen months since violent repressions extinguished the latest set of hopes for liberalization in Iran, two minor but resonant diplomatic victories have just been scored over the Islamic Republic. On Tuesday, UNESCO withdrew its endorsement of a World Philosophy Day to be held in Tehran, citing vague conditions that the host country had failed to meet.
Lasman: eats croissant, confronts 13-year-old self
Every year, around the post-midterm blues, I begin feeling like I’m in France.
Lasman: I would I were a careless child
A bright young man is seduced by a powerful ideology, appealing to his own cultural roots but manifested in an armed struggle in a remote country. The war pits native fighters against soldiers of a foreign empire, and is presented in his social circles as a spiritual battle of good against evil.
Lasman: The thylacine’s lesson
This past weekend, as I sat munching on Gourmet Heaven sushi and studying a YouTube video of a thylacine, I was struck by a connection between the two.
Lasman: Dropping “r”s and packing heat
In modern moviedom, there are few consistent early indicators that tell the audience what will transpire in the rest of the movie. I’ll save wailing Arabic soundtracks and the presence of Michael Cera for later. Few filmgoers will miss the significance of working-class Boston accents.
Lasman: The murky parable of the wolf
Moving into an off-campus basement apartment this year brought with it a host of unexpected challenges: sinks unattached to walls, mysterious black gunk on windowsills, and an alarmingly vocal heating system, to name a few. But none were quite as visceral as my first encounters with Scutigera coleoptrata.
Lasman: Some issues are beyond debate
However liberal-leaning this campus may be, I like to think that Yalies prefer debates to sermons. We invite speakers like Karl Rove; we host controversially conservative conferences on anti-Semitism; we prefer engagement to denunciation. At an institution such as ours, these are crucial values.
Lasman: Rethinking hatred
Hate — one of the few emotions with a legal definition — has been all the rage lately. Commentators and columnists debate why “they” hate us, why we hate “them” and whether we should all unite in condemnation of some third entity, be it extremism or global warming. The tumult has found its way to this paper, where a levelheaded article “Yale groups combat anti-Muslim sentiment” (Sept. 7) was typhooned with an outpouring of anonymous online comments in which Islamophobia jostled with anti-Semitism, even letting Christian supremacism land the occasional blow.
Lasman: The Queen’s Singlish
For all its essential dryness, grammar is a deeply emotional subject. However little most of us would like to sit through a sixth-grade English class diagramming subjects and predicates, many people — especially at places like Yale — practically leap at the opportunity to splice any split infinitive that comes their way.
Lasman: Taking a backseat
In Sikkim, the little thumb of India that juts north into the Himalayan foothills between Nepal and Bhutan, there are no seatbelts. As it was explained to me on our winding drive up to the school one typically foggy morning, this is so that if the car falls off a cliff, the passengers have a split-second more to bail and cling desperately to the mountainside while the vehicle itself plummets the remaining thousand feet to the valley floor. In the Himalayas, any number of factors — the mist, a hairpin turn, a landslide — might cause a driver to lose control on the narrow roads, which coil up the mountains like dragons on a temple column.
Lasman: Our memory to bear
Trapdoor
If you spent Sunday as I did, basking in glorious sun on Cross Campus, you might have heard, undercutting the laughing conversations and whirring Frisbees, another sound. Names — hundreds of names, read in a steady monotone, hung on the breeze. Over the course of six hours, in half-hour shifts, two students sat at a small table outside of Calhoun, reading from a list that stretched across several thick packets.
Lasman: When the music stops
This past weekend, spurred by an enticing panlist invite, I went dancing. Overcoming my matzoh-induced weakness, I cavorted down the streets of New Haven with an impromptu gang of fellow revelers, a rollicking mix roaring from my headphones, dancing my proverbial heart out. United by the songs cued on our iPods, we waltzed across plazas and silently stormed courtyards. We felt like revolutionaries.
Lasman: Reacting to webcam wiretapping
Trapdoor
I try to keep a fairly well kempt online persona. My Facebook pictures don’t get a lot more incriminating than the odd Solo-cup-in-hand candid and a couple unflattering shots of my blindingly white belly basking on sunlit shores. With the exception of strangely undeletable Amazon reviews written in my prepubscence, I haven’t attached my name to many deeply embarrassing causes, message boards or (as yet) police reports. But thus far my vigilance hasn’t extended to my activities immediately offscreen. Perhaps, it should.
Lasman: Daring to dine
Trapdoor
Cody’s Diner, out on 95 Water St. — a brisk 20-minute walk from Yale — is a pint-sized place of Tom Waits-ian charms. With its matter-of-fact logo (a coffee cup on a saucer), undemanding prices and 24-hour service, it serves New Haven’s post-club crowd in much the same capacity as Gourmet Heaven serves undergraduates — a late-night mecca of extensive choice and greasy-spooned gratification. After a table frees up and the cop at the door ushers you in, past the squeaky barstools and Van Dome wristbands, it doesn’t take long to feel comfortable amid the all-night breakfast specials and wall-to-wall mirrors. And, if things get dicey, the cashier is packing a .40-caliber Colt.
Lasman: Creating controversy
Trapdoor
Engaging in meaningful intellectual debate with a terrorist, it turns out, is less palatable than comparing him vacuously to Al Gore or reiterating, as though we were unaware, that the arch-criminal is an unstable opportunist.
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