Today’s New York Times blog article on weeding out excessive Facebook friends is just the thing to cure yourself in the new February month of Valentines and ice-slicked streets: better to be close to the ones you truly love than to be bogged down by a host of peripheral acquaintances.
The other night I attended a [...]

There is something to be said for being trapped in a library for hours on end. It can lead to agonizing forms of procrastination and exquisitely OCD behavioral patterns. Whenever I arrive in the pristine art & architecture library, I retrieve my stack of enormous books from my shelf, spread them across an empty table, [...]

During yet another pilgrimage to Manhattan from New Haven, I had a surreal extended tea time with the famous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer, Jonathan Becker. His two-storey Sutton Place studio is a converted doctor’s office with exquisite wood paneling, linen screens, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and shell-shaped folding doors reminiscent of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre [...]

New Haven’s Duncan Hotel is a vision in authentic outdated suicide aesthetic. My glorious coucou troubadour friends took a trip to picturesque New Haven to visit me in my collegiate glory. The evening was filled with the following things (not necessarily in this order): sipping wine, examining Slim Aarons photography for senior essay research, dancing [...]

I am very much in love with one of my professors. A friend came to me desperately in the Art Library today with a similar predicament, asking, “What should I do? What can I do?” I am thinking it over and will get back to her with a more detailed plan. I have done the [...]

It is a labor to forget those once loved. My Parisian friend asked me, “Is love possible? And not in a friendship?” I had to tell her, “I don’t think so.” A friend of mine is struggling in his marriage—the problem being that his wife is “emotionally checked out of the relationship” and is satisfied [...]

There’s nothing like a shot of two beautiful semi-foreign souls to purge oneself of a mid-January existential crisis. The Parisian love of my life is on her annual winter visit to Manhattan. Decked out in various fur garments (including an old-fashioned muff that most New Yorkers have only read about in Tolstoy novels, and black [...]

I am overwhelmed by the prospect of spending a solid two months buried under a pile of books in the Art & Architecture Library. Luckily, the interior is recently renovated to glamourous mod good looks, and library intrigues always abound. Just this afternoon I was innocently making my way to the ladies’ room, when a [...]

“Shopping Period” is the decadent time during the first two weeks of every Yale semester when students can enter and exit classes as the mood strikes them. For indecisive undergraduates torn between studying “Biophysical Spectroscopy” and the “History of the Opera Libretto,” Shopping Period seems like a necessary luxury. But for faculty, it can be [...]

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve is a beautifully atmospheric look at two weeks in a young woman’s life as she suffers from paranoia and sexual trauma. The rape and murder scenes turned me onto Roman Polanski’s directing for the first time. Deneuve is perfect as she creeps around her dark London apartment in her [...]