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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · VOL. CXLVIII, NO. 14 · yaledailynews.com · @yaledailynews
Professors’ dollars go to Democrats BY JAEHA JANG STAFF REPORTER
Alex Hong, Staff Photographer
M L K D AY
Marching on in 2026 STORY ON PAGE 5
In 2025, Yale professors made 1,099 donations to federal political campaigns and partisan groups reflected in fundraising disclosures. Not one of the recipients was Republican. The News analyzed data from more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 for which the employer was listed as Yale. Of 1,099 filings that included “professor” in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups. This data is consistent with conservative criticism that university professors are not representative of the country’s political spread — one rationale used by the Trump administration for its threats to universities’ funding in the past year.
After a December report by the Buckley Institute found that 82.3 percent of 1,666 examined Yale faculty members were registered Democrats or primarily supported Democratic candidates, several conservative media outlets and figures — including Elon Musk, a former advisor to President Donald Trump — expressed outrage about a perceived lack of political diversity at the University. The eruption of criticism appeared to prompt an unsigned Dec. 23 statement by the University, saying that “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views.” When asked about the data on professors’ 2025 political donations, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Steven Wilkinson referred the News to the University’s statement. Professors who donated to Democrats in 2025 described this
overwhelming tilt as an unsurprising result of a Republican administration’s assault on elite higher education, including pressures on research and certain academic departments, slashes to research funding and an increased SEE DONATIONS PAGE 4 Independent Candidates or Groups $3038
Democratic $123,533 2025 Political Contributions by Yale Professors Aiden Zhou, Data Editor
Amid budget pressure, Yale cuts graduate student spots the total students in humanities and social sciences programs by around 13 percent and those in STEM programs by 5 percent, University spokesperson Karen Peart wrote to the News. The cuts come as a part of recent budget tightening as the University anticipates a hike in the tax to its endowment investment income set to begin in July. While three directors of graduate student programs told the News that this reduction did not come as a surprise to them in consideration of the University’s
BY ISOBEL MCCLURE AND JAEHA JANG STAFF REPORTERS In recent years, Yale admitted two graduate students to its medieval studies program, but this admission cycle, the program will only be allowed to accept only one, according to Director of Graduate Studies Emily Thornbury. The reduction is a part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ three-year plan to decrease enrollment, which includes reducing
financial constraints, they said it could have several negative effects on graduate and undergraduate student experiences. Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Steven Wilkinson wrote in an email to the News that “given that our graduate school is heavily dependent on endowment income, and the endowment is now subject to an increased tax, we have to make reductions to Zoe Berg
SEE ENROLLMENT PAGE 4
Yale, city reach police oversight agreement ment public at its upcoming meeting” scheduled for Jan. 26. “This agreement not only formalizes mutual expectations but also symbolizes and strengthens our shared commitment to collaboration for the betterment of the Yale and New Haven communities,” Lovello wrote in a statement provided by Yale’s central communications office. Although a 2019 city ordinance required the Civilian Review Board to “develop a memorandum of understanding” with the Yale Police Department, progress on the agreement was slow-moving. In 2024, the Yale Police Advisory Board, meant to review civilian complaints against the Yale Police Department, was discontinued without an announcement to the city or University. Its successor, the Public Safety Advisory Board, took shape in the fall of 2025 and was filled with its first members in late November. The newly formed board’s charter does not mention civilian complaints.
BY ADELE HAEG STAFF REPORTER New Haven officials and Yale administrators have operated for years without a formalized agreement on how to manage oversight of the University’s police department. Now, nearly six years after a new Civilian Review Board was formed to monitor police in New Haven, that board and Yale’s new Public Safety Advisory Board have agreed on a legal framework for processing civilian complaints against the Yale Police Department. The review board’s former administrator said a memorandum of understanding, which has not been previously disclosed or reported, went into effect on Jan. 1 — before the chiefs of both the Yale and New Haven police departments left their jobs. The document has not been made publicly available, and the nature and scope of the review board’s oversight role for the Yale police remained unclear. According to Duane Lovello, Yale’s head of public safety, the Civilian Review Board “plans to make the agree-
SEE POLICE PAGE 5 Adrian Kulesza
Ellie Park, Senior Photographer
Campus security still boosted, but library limits loosened BY REETI MALHOTRA STAFF REPORTER As students returned to classes this week, Yale largely maintained an amplified security presence that was initially prompted by the deadly shootings last month at Brown University and in Sydney, Australia. In a Monday email to the University community, Head of Public Safety Duane Lovello wrote that while there is “no indication of any credible threat to campus,” increased public safety measures first implemented in December
will remain in place through the start of the semester. A Yale identification card will still be required to enter most buildings, and Yale Public Safety officials will provide “increased, high visibility security coverage” throughout campus, Lovello wrote in his December email when the heightened safety measures were initially implemented. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications did not immediately respond on Tuesday to the News’ inquiry about how long these measures would last.
Lovello, in an email statement provided by the office on Tuesday night, instead reaffirmed the lack of a present threat to Yale’s campus and the “increased police and security presence at high-visibility locations across campus.” “The safety and security of our community remain of utmost importance,” Lovello wrote. The measures were put in place after a gunman shot and killed two students at Brown and two gunmen killed 15 people during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. SEE SECURITY PAGE 5
Inside The News
PAGE 3 OPINION
As formals approach, many Yalies are hoping to find a date. Cue the matchmaking.
PAGE 6 NEWS
app geared at minimizing screen time.
PAGE 8 SCITECH
PROTESTING ICE In response to a federal agent’s
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PAGE 9 ARTS PAGE 14 SPORTS
SCROLL TOLL Three undergraduates developed an PAGE 8 SCITECH
killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, local activist groups organized a rally calling for ICE officers to leave New Haven. PAGE 12 NEWS
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
BULLETIN This Day in Yale History, 1979 January 16, 1979 / Fire extinguisher abuse hits peak By Andy Perkins Students unnecessarily discharged more than 1,000 fire extinguishers last term, costing the University about $35,000 and prompting threats of withdrawal of coverage from Aetna, Yale’s insurance company. In response to the problem, the Council of Masters and Yale College Executive Committee have increased the fine for the misuse of fire extinguishers from $25 to $100, and tightened up the enforcement of the regulation. This misuse is the worst in the last nine years, Fire Marshall Edmund Sterniak said yesterday. The University must now employ two men full time at $25,000 a year each, just to refill the extinguishers used in student water battles.
Behind the Headline As a sophomore, I noticed last year that matchmaking had quietly become part of campus culture. Over winter break I saw a similar discourse occurring on Fizz and I became curious about why this trend had lasted and how students across different class years were experiencing it. I then reached out to Anayah, a freshman with experience covering Yale’s social scene to inquire further. By Olivia Cyrus As a first-year, my dormmates and I have been in conversation about our ideal blind date for the formal together for weeks. Together, Olivia and I went to Old Campus and street-interviewed both under- and upperclassmen about their experiences with matchmaking culture and how they see it fitting into Yale’s dating world. This story acts as a brief cultural snapshot of a growing trend that reflects something simple but universal in that everyone just wants to find love. By Anayah Accilien Read “As class formals near, students keep eyes out for blind datess” on PAGE 11.
Puzzles
YOLANDA WANG
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
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OPINION S TA F F C O L U M N I S T
S TA F F C O L U M N I S T
RICHIE GEORGE
MANU BOSTEELS
Fight U.S. Empire
Musk, Yale and truly outrageous bigotry
We are coming of age in turbulent times. Two weeks ago, I scrolled through X and saw bombings in Caracas. One week ago, I scrolled through X and watched Renée Nicole Good’s death. In Venezuela, a U.S. military operation to capture President Nicolás Maduro left 100 people dead, according to Venezuela’s interior ministry, and so-called “international law” in shambles. In Minnesota, a mother lay dead at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020. A symphony of violence plays without end in front of our eyes. It all becomes noise. Politics is, in part, the means to obtain information from noise. Statements are read. Bombs are dropped. People are killed. Political acts always end with a big fat period. What we have learned from the Trump administration is that it does not wait for public consensus. They will claim the U.S. “will run” Venezuela. They will accuse Good of being a domestic terrorist by virtue of witnessing their violence. They will hide her murderer Jonathan Ross from prosecution if it means they rule with impunity. That’s because they have to get their agenda done. It means the destruction of communities at home and abroad, to remake Venezuela and Minnesota in their image. Make no mistake: we can’t distance ourselves from these crises, however distant we are from the Midwest or Latin America. Yale has its part to play in this sordid tale. Its jobseeking graduates are channelled into war-making careers. Our hawkish and Machiavellian Vice President, J.D. Vance LAW ’13 is Yale’s most problematic alumnus in recent memory. But the function of the university exceeds elite reproduction. The future of the university is vested in war, surveillance and climate catastrophe. Yale’s endowment is invested in natural gas, arms manufacturers and Palantir’s surveillance programs, at home and abroad. Meanwhile, New Haven activists fight for a fully funded city, where children and working families can thrive, where safe schools and union jobs are rights instead of privileges. The invasion of Venezuela, the occupation of Minnesota, and the deprivation of New Haven are bound up by a cruel logic, through which elites have hoarded the power to decide humanity’s fate and chuck the “rules-based international order” in the bin of history. So it’s not just about oil. Soon after the president’s press conference, the Trump administration posted memes that echoed the Monroe Doctrine, President Theodore R o o s e ve l t ’s “Big Stick Diplomacy,” and the apocalyptic threat of a small, communist-
run island called Cuba. And, apparently, Greenland is on the list for capture too. Remember to bring your winter jacket when Inuit territory is parceled and sold at homesteader prices. Let’s be clear. This administration has revived a long forgotten — or more accurately, a long repressed — history. It is the history of imperial war and racial terror, inflicted on far-flung territories, against peoples from whom all we care to know is their capacity for submission. Are these the actions of a president sworn to peace, democracy and humanitarianism? There is no obvious future for the lands to which Trump has laid waste. Maduro, a brutal dictator in his own right, has been deposed, but his subordinates run Venezuela in his absence, while paramilitaries roam neighborhoods to take up whatever space is left in the power vacuum. Families mourn those lost in the attack. Their cries ring with the cries of Minnesotans mourning Renée, Los Angelenos mourning Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve, and the millions mourning the losses that abound and do not measure against the losses that will continue under this regime. Yet all we have heard from the White House are more statements that suggest it will occupy Venezuela, Minnesota and wherever it chooses, through either violent or nonviolent means. We don’t know which. In the absence of information, all we have left is noise. But what we have learnt so far is that, by witnessing the two faces of empire, within and outside our country and our Yale, is that this crisis cannot end until the rule of its elites also ends. They desire a world that runs on bombs, bodies and barrels of oil — and that world is unjust and unlivable. Mathematician Claude S h a n n o n o n ce sa i d t h a t uncertainty makes information possible. Our future will always be uncertain, from now onwards, yet it is, at once, overdetermined by the powers that made this crisis possible. As inheritors of injustice, we must now decide if we will yield to a darker world, or build a brighter world for ourselves and future generations. We, too, can capture the future’s uncertainty to build that future. It could be a world where everyone lives with dignity, where our Earth is not burned, bombed, and bled dry, and where justice and abundance coexist in our communities. It would mean a future beyond empire. That is a future worth fighting for. RICHIE GEORGE is a junior in Grace Hopper College studying history and philosophy. They are the Editor-in-Chief of DOWN Magazine and can be reached at richard.george@yale.edu.
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The Buckley Institute recently published its annual report on Yale faculty members’ political affiliations. The report found that, across all Yale departments, 82.1 percent of faculty “were identified” as Democrats, 15.5 percent as independents and just 2.4 percent as Republicans. In 27 of the largest departments, the report identified no Republicans among the faculty. On Dec. 22, responding to a New York Post article on the matter, Elon Musk wrote on X, “Literally zero Republicans in 30 Yale departments when half the country is Republican is truly outrageous bigotry!” The Buckley Institute’s founder and executive director, Lauren Noble ’11, made a similar, if more measured, claim: “Yale has committed repeatedly over decades to fostering an environment conducive to open debate and discussion but has all but excluded diversity of opinion through its hiring process.” One of the many problems with using these statistics — which primarily measured party registration — to argue that conservative thought is silenced in universities is that it places faculty party makeup in isolation from the shifting platform of the Republican party. This argument ignores how the GOP has chosen to distance itself from and attack academia. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Vice President JD Vance LAW ’13 quoted Richard Nixon in his speech’s title, “The Universities are the Enemy,” and spoke about the need to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance decried the control that universities have on truth and knowledge. Vance was right: Universities do have an incredible amount of control over truth and knowledge in this country. That is because American universities are engines of research, investigation, discourse and peerreview. The confrontation between universities and the Republican party stems from the fact that the leaders of the GOP today have chosen to reject truth and the academic community. Most economists agree that President Donald Trump’s tariff policies are bad for consumers and for industry. Trump falsely claims that windmills make whales go
“loco.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is changing vaccination requirements and issuing warnings on the link between Tylenol and autism despite a lack of support from leading medical professionals. Under Trump’s directive, the National Park Service has been removing plaques and exhibits that highlight the inconsistencies in current Republicans’ particular version of American history. This is part of an overall political scheme that defends whatever position Trump or his Cabinet decide to take, whether or not it is true. As a political strategy, that’s just fine — but since universities are designed to investigate truth and knowledge, this strategy inevitably creates confrontation between the GOP and institutions of higher education. Freedom of speech permits Republicans to question universities, question expert opinions and even endorse scientifically discredited positions. But choosing to denounce, criticize and attack academia naturally alienates the people who work in academia. To reiterate, there is nothing inherently objectionable about the Republican party choosing to turn its back on academia. For one, it’s a pragmatic choice: Voters without a college education continue to be among the GOP’s strongest electoral demographics. The contradiction arises when Republicans want academia to itself accept and support the rejection of academia. Thus, any claim of conservative silencing in academia requires discussion of the context of the directed conservative attack on institutions of higher education and the Trumpist tactic of rejecting the knowledge and expertise academia is designed to espouse. Moreover, Musk’s expectation that Yale and other top universities match the political composition of the general public is statistically dubious. For starters, Musk is already wrong to claim that half of the country is Republican, at least not in the sense that the Buckley Institute’s methodology, which primarily used party registration, would identify as Republican. Per the institute’s quoted numbers, around 30 percent
of Americans are Republicans, and in Connecticut, that number drops to around 21 percent. Nor is Yale’s faculty made up of only American citizens. How did the institute classify the roughly 13 percent of professors at Yale who are international, who are neither Republican nor Democrat and for whom the “independent” label would be misleading? More importantly, it doesn’t make much sense in the first place to compare statistics of the average American with Yale faculty demographics. Yale professors are not plucked from the general population at random. To be a professor at Yale, you must have a doctorate or an equivalent terminal degree; there is a persistent and increasing tendency for those with more education to hold more liberal political beliefs, and the correlation gets stronger with more education. Is it utterly implausible that Yale, selecting the most elite, educated individuals from the U.S. and the world, ends up with a faculty that models this demographic tendency at its extreme? And even as Noble faults Yale’s hiring process for preventing diversity of opinion, the institute’s report does nothing to investigate the process or flesh out which part of the complicated procedure is at fault. In fact, for all we know, that process is meritocratic — something today’s GOP celebrates. What makes conservative academics fail this meritocratic test? And what do Musk and Noble envision to solve this ideological sorting, then? Affirmative action for conservative academics? These are all factors and questions that one must address to make any compelling argument about bigotry toward conservatives in higher education, and all are left unaddressed in the institute’s report. It may well be that Musk and the Buckley Institute are correct, but they don’t provide the evidence or the arguments to prove it. Unsupported opinion might suffice for politics. In academia, however, not so much. MANU BOSTEELS is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College studying Philosophy and Math. His column “Student and Citizen” runs biweekly. He can be reached at manu.bosteels@yale.
S TA F F C O L U M N I S T S H AY E K I R M A N
Be quick, don’t hurry Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who won 10 college championships in 12 years, used to tell his players to “be quick, but don’t hurry.” At first, it may be hard to make sense of his cryptic advice: if you’re not hurrying, how could you possibly be quick? It sounds as contradictory as “chug gracefully” or “panic calmly.” But the paradox disappears when we hear Wooden’s explanation: “I want quickness under control.” Wooden wasn’t warning against speed itself, but against speed without control. Wooden’s lesson doesn’t stop at the sidelines; it shapes how we study, choose commitments and move through college. We often equate speed with efficiency, but in practice it is smoothness, not sheer speed, that wins the day. Take studying. Every semester starts the same way: fresh pens, a color-coded calendar and a vow to “stay ahead this time.” That’s quickness: anticipating, organizing, creating early momentum. But then midterms hit, and “quick” mutates into “hurry”: cramming an entire textbook overnight while whispering “just one more page” like an incantation. Quickness is reviewing notes weekly; hurrying is finishing problem sets at 3 a.m. Both are movement, but only one is in control. Quickness isn’t just about how you start, but about how you sustain momentum. We’ve all opened a document a week early, typed a clever title and rewarded ourselves with two hours of YouTube because “the hard part is done.” Spoiler: it’s not. To be
quick is to write a messy draft early, let it breathe and revise. To hurry is to shout ideas onto the page the night before, fueled by caffeine and panic. The same rules apply to other parts of college life. Speaking up in class and choosing a major are moments that reward students who have thought ahead just enough to act decisively when the window opens. In the sports arena, athletes try to live in the narrow zone between hesitation and rushing. A quick jab step to make a defender commit, then drive — that’s control. Rush into traffic without creating the opening, and you’re likely to hit a wall. Reaction times have to be fast or the opportunity disappears, but rushing often brings bad form and mistakes. The only way to play well is to move quickly without rushing, to trust preparation rather than force the moment. When that balance clicks, the game feels effortless. Time slows. Decisions arrive before you consciously make them. Psychologists call this “flow,” a state of deep focus where action and judgment align. But flow isn’t accidental, it’s earned. It comes from preparation, repetition and calm attention, so that when speed is required, panic doesn’t take over. Wooden’s principle also applies to decision-making more generally. Our obsession with efficiency sometimes makes us inefficient. In one picture book I loved as a child, Phyllis Krasilovsky’s “The Man Who Tried to Save Time,” a man adopts a number of extreme efficiency hacks; for example, he sleeps in his suit to save
time dressing, only to wake up with it wrinkled and for his boss to comment on his dishevelled appearance. We too can over-optimize ourselves into dysfunction. We pack our calendars to the brim, skim readings and cram study sessions, then spend even more time undoing our own shortcuts. Skimming leads to re-reading; cramming leads to burnout. We save minutes and lose hours. There is, of course, a tension between moving fast and avoiding mistakes. Mark Zuckerberg loves to say, “Move fast and break things.” Yet the Navy SEALs say, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Both are right. It just depends on how expensive failure is. When the cost of “breaking something” is low — a brainstorming session, a returnable purchase or a messy first draft — speed beats perfection. But when the stakes are high — a midterm, a job interview or a friendship — hurrying becomes costly. That is when Wooden’s version of quickness matters most: anticipate early, prepare steadily, revise continually before panic sets in. As the new semester begins, fueled by hopeful New Year’s resolutions, that’s the game plan I’m bringing. Urgency matters, but control matters more. Together, they win championships — in sports, in school and in life. SHAYE KIRMAN is a sophomore in Trumbull College studying Ethics, Politics and Economics. He can be reached at shaye.kirman@yale.edu.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com · @yaledailynews
FROM THE FRONT
“Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.” FORREST GUMP FORREST GUMP
In 2025, faculty donations skewed heavily to Democrats DONATIONS FROM PAGE 1 tax on endowment investment returns that has led to a series of budget cuts. “Professors tend to support political parties and policies that align with their interests, such as open research, institutional autonomy, and financial aid,” Italian Studies senior lector Michael Farina, who donated three times to a Democratic candidate in 2025, wrote in an email to the News. “If the Republican Party evolved to support policies like those, more faculty would be financially supportive of Republicans, but, instead, the Republican Party just cut Yale’s budget by $300 million annually,” he added, referring to the projected cost of the endowment tax hike that will go into effect this year. In January 2024 — one year before President Donald Trump’s second term began — the News reported that 98.4 percent of Yale professors’ donations in 2023 were directed to Democratic candidates and groups. 7.5 percent of Yale employees’ donations and 2.4 percent of Yale professors’ donations reported in the FEC filings went to independent candidates and public action committees, which advocate for specific initiatives or industries by supporting both Democrats and Republicans. While 17 people who listed Yale as their employer donated to Republican candidates or groups, none of them listed professor as their occupation. ‘No surprise’ History professor Mark Peterson, who made 56 donations
to Democratic groups in 2025, wrote in an email to the News that there is no “great mystery” about the fact that Yale professors’ donations lean overwhelmingly Democratic. Going back to the days of President Richard Nixon, Republicans have attacked intellectuals and institutions of higher education, “calling them enemies, trying to defund them, limit their freedom,” Peterson wrote. “Would it be surprising if labor unions overwhelmingly favored the party that supports them against their union-busting opponents?” he added. “If environmentalists support the party that promotes environmental protection against a party that attacks it?” On the other hand, Farina wrote, the Democratic Party has been more supportive of public funding for higher education, research and financial aid. He wrote that professors who support Democrats are not “ideologically biased” but are simply supporting those causes. Political science professor Steven Smith said in a phone interview that the overwhelming support for the Democratic Party among faculty is “characteristic” of standard demographic trends. “That’s old news,” he said. “That’s no surprise. It’s true, generally across the culture, not just in universities, on the whole, in the country, educated people vote Democrat.” Harold Attridge, a professor emeritus of divinity who made 10 donations to Democratic groups in 2025, wrote in an email to the News that he is “happy to have pro-
vided some modest support in the last several years to politicians who stand for the fundamental principles of our democracy.” Attridge wrote that Trump’s administration has committed actions that contradict the nation’s founding democratic principles, such as claiming “dictatorial powers for the president,” killing civilians as if they were military combatants and imposing tariffs without authorization from Congress. “If other members of the faculty recognize the problem that this nation is facing, I am not surprised,” he wrote. Robert King, an emeritus professor at the Yale School of Medicine who made 28 donations to Democratic groups in 2025, said in a phone interview that, as a child psychiatrist and physician, he is concerned about factors like poverty, biomedical research, access to education and affordable healthcare. If Republicans expressed more support for issues that university professors tend to prioritize — such as advancing public health and having free intellectual discourse — King added that he is “sure they would have more support amongst the faculty.” Questions about intellectual diversity The overwhelming Democratic tilt among faculty donations is consistent with the Buckley Institute report, released last month, that found that professors at Yale are predominantly Democrats in terms of party registration and donations. Carlos Eire, a history and religious studies professor who described himself as “a conservative in the traditional mold,” expressed pessimism about this imbalance. “It’s true, there is very very, very little intellectual diversity at Yale and at most institutions of higher learning when it comes to politics,” Eire wrote in an email to the News. “Academics in the US, Canada and Europe have been leaning left for the past three or four generations. And this is something that shows no signs of being corrected or correcting itself anytime soon.” The presence of the Buckley Institute and right-leaning parties in the Yale Political Union, Eire added, indicates that “there is less of a drastic imbalance among undergraduate students than among faculty.”
But Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said in a Monday interview with the News that the vast majority of professors teach subjects, such as physics, in which political views are minimally relevant. Even in classes where politics is more relevant, he noted, professors want students to understand various perspectives of subject matter, and he doesn’t think the professors’ party affiliation affects that goal. “I think at the moment, there’s a lot of tension between some of the more conservative elements in our society and our universities, and that probably is affecting how university professors vote,” Lewis said. “But I don’t think it’s affecting how they teach.” Smith also said that there is “probably about zero” way in which professors’ Democratic tilt in donations translates into the classroom. While it’s important to strive for diversity of thought in universities, Smith said, setting litmus tests on prospective professors’ political views will not achieve that goal. “Are we going to ask people for a job interview what candidates they support and who they give money to as a criterion for hiring them? I mean, are you serious?” he said. “The only way to offset the tendency towards monoculture is by giving students a broader and richer historical sense of the basic problems that we’re facing.” Lewis said the University recognizes that professors at Yale and beyond tend to lean Democratic, adding that administrators and campus groups try to compensate for the imbalance “to some extent” by inviting Republican and conservative speakers.
Independent PACs For some professors, independent political action committees, or PACs, provide a more effective donation option to support specific fields and issues. Caroline Nelson, a dermatology professor at the Yale School of Medicine, wrote in an email to the News that her contributions to an independent PAC are consistent with her interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath to “provide the highest quality care for all patients, regardless of party affiliation.” According to Nelson, the American Academy of Dermatology Association PAC, to which she donates, contributes to individual congressional campaigns based on each recipient’s understanding and record on issues related to dermatology. “So, whatever is best for all of my dermatology patients, is what I support,” she wrote. “That’s how I interpret my oath.” King, however, noted that while he also donates to professional organizations like the Academy of Child Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association, it can be more effective to “choose directly” whom to donate to when it comes to influencing “the actual makeup of the legislature or the administration.” ActBlue, the popular Democratic political action committee, received the most donations from Yale professors last year, totaling $23,266. Olivia Woo contributed reporting. Contact JAEHA JANG at jaeha.jang@yale.edu.
Graduate enrollment set to decrease over three years ENROLLMENT FROM PAGE 1 safeguard the long-term health of our graduate programs.” The targets for the reduction were first reported in a Yale Alumni Magazine article in its January/February edition. The News reported in September that graduate studies directors were briefed about an upcoming 12 percent reduction in graduate student enrollment in humanities and social sciences programs but were not specifically told about reduced enrollment in STEM programs. Since the announcement of the impending endowment tax hike, Yale has implemented several cost-saving measures, including a 5 percent reduction in non-salary expenses and a retirement incentive program for managerial and professional staff. University leaders stated in a December email that “layoffs may be necessary” as they look to downsize the staff due to budget constraints. The increased tax is predicted to cost Yale approximately $300 million per year. The heightened tax rate has also diminished the graduate school’s budget, Peart wrote in a Monday email to the News. The statement noted that 93 percent of the budget is dedicated to supporting graduate students, with Yale providing “full financial support” to doctoral students, and that the enrollment reductions allow the University “to continue to fund and invest in its excellent graduate education in the decades to come.” Per the statement, the disparity between the roughly 13 percent and the 5 percent reductions in enrollment can be attributed to a difference in funding. Graduate student funding for STEM programs comes from both the University endowment and “substantial” federal and private funding, while that for the humanities and social sciences relies “entirely” on
endowment investment returns, the statement reads. Kevin van Bladel, the director of graduate studies for Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, said in a Zoom interview that the decision to reduce STEM enrollment to a lesser extent “makes sense,” considering the different sources of funding. He reaffirmed that supporting doctoral candidates is “not inexpensive” because the University funds the students’ tuition, healthcare and “generous stipend” for six years. Jonathan Kramnick, the director of graduate studies for English, wrote that the difference “seemed reasonable, if somewhat narrow.” “Yale is one university, and we’re all in this together,” he wrote. “We can hope that in the long term the administration keeps in mind the role the humanities have played in making Yale a world class university.” No surprises, mixed sentiments According to Kramnick and Thornbury, directors of graduate studies were told before the fall semester that there would be some form of reduction to enrollment targets in this year’s cycle. On Aug. 25, Stephen Murphy, the University’s vice president for finance and chief financial officer, gave a presentation on the enrollment cuts to directors of graduate studies across departments, the News previously reported. “We were told just before the start of the term at a meeting for all Directors of Graduate Studies,” Kramnick wrote. “The decision was already made, so far as I know, without faculty input.” According to Peart’s statement, in anticipation of the endowment tax hike, administrators had “thoughtful discussions and consultation with a faculty working group and with each department chair and director of
graduate study” to decide on the next three years’ enrollment targets. “Early on, we were told that there would be across-the-board cuts, and that they would try to impose them based on program numbers rather than on perceived program strength, success, etc. –– in other words, that cuts would not be used to reward or punish,” Thornbury wrote. “Right now, I think GSAS’ leadership is doing their best to cope as fairly as possible with a major financial shift that couldn’t be planned for.” Alexey Fedorov, the director of graduate studies for earth and planetary sciences, expressed disapproval regarding the enrollment cuts in an email to the News. Fedorov described graduate students as “vital to a research university such as Yale” and pointed to alternative measures to save costs, such as setting “stricter limits on time to graduation” and decreasing “administrative expenses across the university.” Van Bladel said that he was unsurprised and, if anything, “a little relieved” when he learned about his program’s new target number. He thought there could have been “much, much sharper cuts,” he said, because many peer institutions have implemented more drastic cuts to graduate student enrollment. Last semester, Harvard announced that it would reduce doctoral candidate enrollment by 50 percent in its science division, by 60 percent in its arts and humanities division and by between 50 and 70 percent in its social sciences division, according to the Harvard Crimson. Meanwhile, the University of Chicago’s arts and humanities division froze all new doctoral student admissions across all but two programs for the next academic year, according to Inside Higher Ed.
“Some of them have stopped taking students this year,” Van Bladel said. “We’re not stopping admissions entirely, so that’s good news. A cut is bad news, but the good news is that we are still moving along.” Kramnick similarly wrote that he was “not particularly surprised” by his program’s new target numbers, given the impending endowment tax hike and the “overall climate in higher education.” He had also been worried that the cuts might be worse, he added. Impacts on graduate, undergraduate learning Thornbury wrote that “smaller programs were always going to be hit harder with any cuts” since enrollment only operates in whole numbers, adding that a continued 50 percent reduction for her “tiny” program is “clearly not equitable or sustainable.” She also noted that with fewer graduate students, departments may need to offer fewer and larger discussion sections for undergraduate courses. “My hope is that we will be able to admit two students again next cycle or the one after,” she wrote. “I hope they will revisit their projections this coming fall, instead of simply locking in this year’s numbers for the next three years.” Kramnick wrote that while his program has had an annual target class of six or seven students in recent years, it was given a target class of four this year. This decrease will have a “compounding effect” of reducing the number of students in coursework over the next two years, he wrote. “We are in uncharted territory here but will work hard to maintain our culture of intellectual exchange and cohort energy as we design a curriculum and events for fewer students,” Kramnick wrote.
“I expect us to band together and meet this challenge.” Jay Emerson, the co-director of graduate studies for statistics and data science, wrote in an email to the News that his program will likely matriculate one or two fewer doctoral students this year, and that it is “fortunate to have very healthy recent cohorts.” While Van Bladel did not specify his program’s usual or new target admission numbers, he said that the reduction in graduate student enrollment may lead to fewer graduate courses being offered in his program. While this decrease could mean that more undergraduate courses are available, fewer teaching assistants would be available to support fulltime faculty in those courses, he said. Wilkinson wrote that administrators are “working closely with the graduate school and the college to understand how these changes will affect our teaching mission.” Van Bladel said he is “pleased” that the administration has prioritized support for “the people already at Yale” instead of admitting “a lot of new people” and cutting resources from the programs and people already in place. “They have prioritized compassion for our students, so our approach is aligned. When we have a student, we do the best we can to take care of them,” he said. “ It remains to be seen what the long-term ramifications will be, but I’m personally optimistic. This is not a drastic cut. Nobody wants this to happen, right?” The GSAS offers degrees in 73 departments and programs, per Yale’s website. Contact ISOBEL MCCLURE at isobel.mcclure@yale.edu and JAEHA JANG at jaeha.jang@yale.edu.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com · @yaledailynews
FROM THE FRONT
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“As if!” CHER CLUELESS
Marching on King’s birthday, residents stress ‘resilience’ BY SABRINA THALER STAFF REPORTER East Rock’s Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church is where Hamden native Briona Jenkins, 35, said she learned how to “be a human being.” For roughly 30 years, Jenkins has participated in Shiloh Missionary’s Love March, an annual celebration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on Jan. 15 — and a “family tradition” for Jenkins. On Thursday morning, she joined about 50 other churchgoers, community members and city leaders in the 56th iteration of the march, starting out at the church and taking a route along Whitney Avenue and Lawrence, Edwards and State Streets. “I do a lot of community work, and I learned that in this church,” Jenkins, whose godfather is Shiloh Missionary pastor Kennedy Hampton Sr., said in an interview. “We were taught very young to take up space. Especially like a young Black girl growing up, it was always like, ‘You can be in any room you want to be in.’ This is where I learned how to be a public speaker, how to be an advocate, how to give back.” According to its website, Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church opened in Dixwell in 1965, three years before King’s assassination in April 1968. In 1971, the Rev. George Hampton Sr. — Rev. Kennedy Hampton’s father — led the church’s first Love March. The march has taken place on King’s birthday each year since then. “Marching is a public display of a unity in a community. It’s visible,” Kennedy Hampton told a crowd in the church before Thursday’s march. “That's why we here today, because we want to let them know that we gotta teach this younger generation, this new generation, and every generation — that this is not about retreat. It's about resilience.” Yanketia Wise, 41, said she has attended the Love March every year of her life. A granddaughter of George Hampton Sr., Wise pointed out her sisters and cousin at the front of the crowd, leading chants.“This march, to me, is legacy,” Wise said in an interview at the march. “Rain, sleet or snow, we would have marched. The things that’s going on today, from mental health to racism to what's going on in the White House right now, this march is definitely necessary.” From the earliest days of his second presidential term, Pres-
ident Donald Trump has signed numerous executive orders chipping away at diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in federal agencies, universities and state and local governments, including programs designed to benefit Black Americans and other minority groups. Trump criticized the Smithsonian Museum in an August Truth Social post, according to CNN, for focusing on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” rather than “success” and “ brightness.” In December, the Trump administration shortened a list of federal holidays on which visitors can park at U.S. national parks for free in 2026, striking Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the list. For Laura Fawcett, who said she has participated in the Love March “on and off” for about 20 years, current events loomed large in her choice to attend this year’s event. “We're just really going backwards fast,” Fawcett said in an interview during the march, adding that it’s important to show up at events like the Love March “even if you are scared.” Mayor Justin Elicker attended the march, alongside state Sen. Gary Winfield, Ward 9 Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, acting New Haven Police Chief David Zannelli and Fire Chief John Alston Jr. In an interview after the march, Elicker, a Democrat, said that though “we’re at a tough moment in time,” he finds inspiration in hearing from the march’s oldest participants, who witnessed periods of severe inequity in American history. “I do this march every year,” Elicker said. “But this year in particular, it’s important, because when we see what's going on in Washington, where our president is trying to divide us and highlight our differences as something negative, we here in New Haven are demonstrating the true words of Martin Luther King that brings us together, that he had a dream that he shared with our whole country about people of all kinds of differences being able to live together.” Martin Luther King Jr. Day will be celebrated on Monday, Jan. 19. Contact SABRINA THALER at sabrina.thaler@yale.edu.
As leaders of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church led a crowd through the streets of East Rock, they continued a community tradition and raised morale at what one attendee called a moment when the country was “really going backwards fast.” / Alex Hong, Staff Photographer
No present threat, Yale official says Accord, not released, fulfills 2019 city law
SECURITY FROM PAGE 1
New signage posted outside the Schwartzman Center doors on the corner of Grove and College Streets on Tuesday afternoon informed members of the public that though the building is “generally accessible to the public” through business hours, a Yale ID could occasionally be required for access. Yale Public Safety officials could be seen on Monday and Tuesday in heavily trafficked areas, such as the crosswalk between Silliman College and Hillhouse Avenue. They were also present outside large-capacity lectures boasting over 250 registered students, including “Intermediate Macroeconomics” and “The Rise of China.” After the Brown shooting, Yale’s previously public list of final exam locations and times was locked behind the Central Authentication Service login. A Friday email from the University Registrar’s Office also announced that Yale Course Search would now require a CAS login to view course locations. CourseTable, a popular student-made alternative to the University’s provided bluebooking system, features a banner disclaimer that course locations on the website were only accurate as of December 2025 following the CAS login change. Libraries reopen to public after December limits Certain Yale libraries are open to the public during allotted vis-
iting hours, a return to the usual policy after access was briefly restricted in December following the mass shootings at Brown and in Sydney. Alongside increased public safety measures implemented by Yale Public Safety in December, the University’s library website featured new guidelines limiting entry for people without Yale identification cards at popular libraries, including Sterling Memorial Library. The shift corresponded with new Yale ID swipe requirements to access Sterling and Bass implemented for “several days at the end of last semester,” according to Patricia Carey, a Yale Library spokesperson. Carey wrote in an email to the News on Wednesday that the public access restrictions still visible on the website on Tuesday were by then incorrect. Sterling and Bass again require Yale IDs for entry only after 6 p.m., and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is accessible to the public when open — policies now reflected on the library webpage. Nevertheless, libraries located inside buildings requiring Yale ID for entry — such as the Haas Arts Library in the Loria Center and Marx Science and Social Science Library in Kline Tower — will remain closed to the public for the moment. “I think that closing them off at 6 is smart, just so that students have time after school to study,” Nana Kyei ’28 said of public visiting hours. “But I
think that especially with the presence of security, I don’t mind the public having access.” Other Ivy League institutions, including Columbia University, require ID for entry to libraries. Public visitors who present IDs may access Columbia’s Butler Library during business hours. Brown requires ID access to all libraries. Following the December shooting that left two students dead, over 1,000 individuals signed a petition demanding “ID card swipes for all Brown University buildings regardless of time of day.” In early January, Brown officials announced expanded ID card access requirements to Brown buildings, alongside a slew of measures to bolster security. Yale spokespeople have not clarified how long the increased public safety measures would last, nor how long the library restrictions were in place before public access was partly reinstated this semester. Yasmin Rodriguez ’29 said public access to libraries sometimes proves irritating. “Sometimes when I’m studying I see people passing by and it is sometimes disruptive,” Rodriguez said. Sterling Memorial Library first opened in 1931. Jerry Gao, Angel Hu and Kalina Brookfield contributed reporting. Contact REETI MALHOTRA at reeti.malhotra@yale.edu.
POLICE FROM PAGE 1 As of Jan. 1 of this year, “all policing agencies that are operating within city boundaries have some kind of citizen-led review process for complaints,” former Civilian Review Board administrator Alyson Heimer said in a phone interview, describing the board’s agreement with Yale as “a big success.” “We should be really proud that we actually have something in paper, a written agreement, to have reporting and transparency between the agencies. I think it’s really important,” Heimer said. The review board has been negotiating with Yale for a new memorandum of understanding since an August town hall meeting with former police chiefs Anthony Campbell of Yale and Karl Jacobson of New Haven. Members of the review board left the meeting feeling hopeful that an agreement was near and that they could soon start officially addressing complaints. “I was very encouraged and very happy that he came and the way he spoke that they were very interested in getting this together,” review board member Sam Fawcett said of Campbell’s presence at the meeting in a September phone interview. Since the August meeting, both Jacobson and Campbell have left their positions in their respective departments. Jacobson abruptly retired last week and is now the subject of an
ongoing investigation related to allegations that he stole money from a department fund for confidential informants; Mayor Justin Elicker said Jacobson had admitted to taking $10,000. Campbell decamped to the Harvard University Police Department earlier this month, a move announced in November. Heimer said Jacobson “was very helpful in liaising and getting everyone to the table so that we could have that agreement.” As for the memorandum of understanding, Heimer said “it addressed all of our concerns about making sure that data was going to be available to the public, making sure that the meetings were going to be open and that a member of the Civilian Review Board would be able to go to those public meetings” of the Yale Public Safety Advisory Board. Lovello so far has been “very responsive and open to ideas and all with an eye of accountability and helping to keep our community safe,” Heimer said. “We’re pleased to have come to agreement with the City of New Haven, and we want to thank our colleagues in New Haven for their partnership in finalizing this Memorandum of Understanding,” Lovello wrote in his statement. Civilian Review Board meetings are usually held on the fourth Monday of every month. Contact ADELE HAEG at adele.haeg@yale.edu.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
NEWS
“There’s no place like home.” DOROTHY GALE THE WIZARD OF OZ
Suit disputing how Yale picks trustees could reach state Supreme Court BY SARA AGRAWAL STAFF REPORTER
A candidate once nominated to serve on Yale’s board of trustees and his former classmate have been pursuing legal action against the Yale Corporation since 2022. They’re now trying to bring the case to the Connecticut Supreme Court. Victor Ashe ’67, along with Donald Glascoff ’67, is suing Yale for changing the nomination process by which alumni are elected to the University’s board of trustees. Since filing their initial complaint in 2022, Ashe and Glascoff ’s case has travelled through Connecticut’s district and appellate courts. O n D e c . 1 9, t h e p l a i n tiffs filed a petition for certification to the Connecticut Supreme Court. If the Court grants this petition, the Court will hear the case. The petition argues that the district a n d a p p e l l a te c o u r ts we re m i s ta ke n a f te r b o t h r u l e d against Ashe and Glascoff in February 2024 and December 2025. Yale has until Jan. 28 to file a response to the petition. I n a p h o n e i n te rv i ew o n Tuesday, Ashe said he believes it is undemocratic for Yale not to allow alumni petitions for nominations, a change that occurred in 2021. “What was done was fundamentally undemocratic. Yale stands for lux et veritas. Light and truth. There’s no light if the nominating process is abolished,” Ashe said. In response to Ashe’s allegations and the court proceedings, University spokesperson Karen Peart affirmed support for the rulings of the court. “We are pleased that both o f t h e co u r ts — t h e S u p erior Court and the Court of Appeals — that have reviewed the case, filed by two alumni re ga rd i n g t h e p ro c e s s fo r electing Alumni Fellows to the Yale board of trustees, have found the university’s actions l e ga l ly a p p ro p r i a te ,” Pea r t wrote in an email statement to the News on Wednesday. Ashe qualified as a candidate for the 2021 election to the Yale Corporation through a petitioning campaign, which required him to attain at least 4,394 signatures from other alumni. Glascoff intended to petition for nomination, but
was prevented from doing so by the changes in the nomination process, according to the 2022 complaint. Be fo re 2 0 2 2 , a n a l u m n u s could petition for a nomination to the board beginning a year before the election. They needed 3 percent of eligible a l u m n i s i g n a t u re s to q u a lify. The more common route to a nomination was through t h e Ya l e A l u m n i A s s o c i a tion’s nominating committee, which is made up primarily of “volunteer alumni leaders,” according to the committee’s website. Per tradition, these nominated candidates do not campaign ahead of the final election, in which alumni who have held degrees for at least five years can vote for nominated candidates. During Ashe’s 2020 campaign for the 2021 election, he called for reform in the elect i o n sys te m — s p e c i f i ca l ly, that there should be more discussion between candidates and more transparency in the board’s meetings. While Ashe earned a nomination through petitioning, he lost the final election to the board. In May 2021, the Yale Corporation announced that it was terminating the petitioning route to qualify for nomination. Catharine Bond Hill GRD ’84 ’85, a former senior trustee, wrote in a message to alumni at the time that the petitioning process “no longer serves the best interests of the university.” She reasoned that the petitioning process, which was initiated in 1929, was scarcely used until recently, when candidates began running on “issue-based candidacies.” The last petition candidate to successfully be elected was in 1965. Bond Hill claimed that recent petition candidacies cost money and time that might prevent qualified alumni from pursuing election. A trustee should be a “pers o n e l e c te d w i t h o u t a n y agenda other than to bring independent judgment to the va r i e d a n d co m p l ex i ss u e s facing the university,” Bond Hill wrote. Bond H ill’s announcement was met with outrage from alumni, the News reported at the time. O n M a rc h 7, 2 0 2 2 , A s h e and Glascoff filed their first co m p l a i n t a ga i n s t Ya l e fo r
YULIN ZHEN / PHOTO EDITOR
Victor Ashe’67 and Donald Glascoff ’67 sued Yale in 2022 after the Yale Corporation changed the nomination process for electing alumni to the board of trustees. Now, the case may be argued for a third time.
unilaterally eliminating the p e t i t i o n i n g p ro c e s s. T h e i r co m p l a i n t s ta te d t h a t Ya l e had violated the Connecticut Revised Nonstock Corporation Act — which allows members of a nonstock corporation to challenge actions done beyond the corporation’s power. In their suit, Ashe and Glascoff argued that because alumni can vote other alumni to the board, they count as members of the corporation under the law. A s h e a n d G l a sco f f a l so argued that Yale had committed a breach of contract of the 1872 amendment of the University Charter. The amendment reads that graduates of five years may “cast their votes, under such regulations as the president and fellows may prescribe, for six persons to be chosen from among such graduates.” Ashe and Glascoff ’s 2022 complaint claimed that while the amendment allows the Yale Corporation to regulate “voting procedure,” it does not allow the Corporation “to restrict or regulate who alumni may vote for or who may put themselves up as a candidate.” “The Corporation is engaging in the most obvious form o f vo te r s u p p re s s i o n a n d denial of rights of free expression of opinion,” Eric Henzy,
Ashe and Glascoff ’s lawyer, wrote in the 2022 complaint. On Sept. 19, 2022, plaintiffs Ashe and Glascoff argued their case in the Hartford district court of the Connecticut Superior Court. On Feb. 26, 2024, Judge John Burns Farley ruled in favor of Yale, saying that the University is entitled to run alumni elections as it pleases and that Ashe was not entitled to sue; he was neither a member of the Yale Corporation under the Connecticut Revised Nonstock Corporation Act nor a third-party beneficiary of the University Charter. Ashe and Glascoff appealed t h e r u l i n g . A f te r a n a rg u ment on Sept. 16, 2025, the Connecticut Appellate Court u n a n i m o u s ly a f f i r m e d t h e district court ruling on Dec. 2 and denied the plaintiffs’ petition for summary judgment. On Dec. 19, the plaintiffs then filed a petition for certification to the Connecticut Supreme Court against the appeals court’s ruling. The petition states, “the 1 8 7 2 A m e n d m e n t re q u i re s direct ballot access, meaning direct nominations, as existed for 150 years, and what they seek on the merits is a restoration of meaningful, independent choice in the election of
Alumni Fellows through restoration of direct nominations.” T h e p e t i t i o n a l so a rg u e s that alumni are members of Yale and that, as members, they have the right to challenge Yale’s actions. Yale had to file a statement in opposition to the petition by Dec. 29 but moved to push that deadline to Jan. 28, 2026, due to the holidays. The court granted the extension. Ashe declined to comment on why he thought the district and appellate courts ruled in favor of Yale. As Yale’s deadline of Jan. 28 to file an opposition to t h e p e t i t i o n a p p roa c h e s, i t remains unclear whether the case will make it to the Connecticut Supreme Court. According to Alex Taubes LAW ’15, a New Haven-based lawyer, “ based on my evaluation of everything so far the plaintiffs have a long shot at success. But in the law you can never say never.” Through a form, Yale gradu a te s c a n n o m i n a te o t h e r alumni for the consideration o f t h e Ya l e A l u m n i Fe l l ow Nominating Committee to be placed on the election docket. Contact SARA AGRAWAL at sara.agrawal@yale.edu.
Buckley report on liberal faculty gains traction, and Yale responds BY ARIA LYNN-SKOV STAFF REPORTER
A Buckley Institute report last month on the predominance of Democrats on the Yale faculty sparked criticism from conservatives about political imbalances in higher education — and prompted an apparent response from Yale. On Dec. 1, the organization released its Yale Faculty Political Diversity Report, which reported that 82.3 percent of the 1,666 faculty members examined are registered Democrats or primarily support Democratic candidates. Of the remaining faculty, 2.3 percent were found to be Republicans with the remaining 15.4 percent not affiliated with either major party. Of 43 departments that grant undergraduate degrees, 27 had no Republican faculty members at all,
according to the report. “As the data in this report demonstrates, Yale provides its students with a faculty whose ideological and political outlook falls well short of the diversity of the American public,” the introduction to the report reads. The 58-page report landed at the end of the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, when universities came under intense political pressure, often grounded in the claim that elite higher education excludes conservatives. The Buckley Institute, an independent nonprofit that promotes itself as a counterbalance to Yale’s liberal tilt, has been cited by University President Maurie McInnis as a possible factor in Yale’s having avoided the direct threats from the Trump administration faced by most of its Ivy League peers.
ELLIE PARK / SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
The report released last month by the Buckley Institute counted 27 Yale departments without any Republican professors. It prompted criticism from conservatives including Elon Musk.
On Dec. 23, after the Buckley Institute report had been covered by several news outlets and received widespread attention online, Yale News released an unsigned “Statement regarding faculty political affiliations.” While it did not specifically mention the Buckley Institute or its report, the statement addressed many of the concerns that arose from the release of the report earlier that month. “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views,” the statement reads. “Yale does not track or comment on the political affiliations of individual faculty members. The university is, however, deeply committed to fostering open debate, preserving freedom of expression, and creating an environment in which a wide range of ideas can be expressed and heard civilly.” The statement also defended Yale’s commitments to “academic freedom,” “free expression” and “constructive dialogue across differences,” citing initiatives and policies including the 1975 Woodward Report on freedom of expression, the Yale Center for Civic Thought, the Committee on Institutional Voice, the Law School’s Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech and student groups that represent diverse viewpoints, like the Yale Political Union. The Buckley Institute report took account of faculty members across the Law School, the School of Management and what it described as 43 “undergraduate degree-
granting departments” at Yale. The institute used L2 Voter Data, a database of all registered voters in the United States, to determine each faculty member’s political affiliation, according to the report. For individuals whose affiliation was unavailable or unaffiliated, the institute used the Federal Election Commission’s campaign donation database. Faculty members whose affiliations were not accessible — 331 of the 1666 faculty members — were not accounted for in the final percentages. Several conservative-leaning outlets, including Fox News, The New York Post and Campus Reform, which is described on its website as “a conservative watchdog in the nation’s higher education system,” covered the report’s findings. Outrage about the low percentage of Republican professors and lack of political diversity circulated on social media. “Literally zero Republicans in 30 Yale departments when half the country is Republican is truly outrageous bigotry!” the billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who previously led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort, wrote in a post on X. Musk, who owns the platform, has 231.9 million followers, and his post about the Buckley report has nearly 20 million views. The response to his post was representative of the broader online reactions — a mix of similar disapproval and rebuttals to the criticism of Yale, including some arguing that the conservative push for more Republicans to be hired
was inconsistent with the right’s opposition to affirmative action. Tori Cook ’27, the new president of the undergraduate William F. Buckley, Jr. Program’s Student Leadership Board, told the News she hopes the report can help students see the importance of conversations including perspectives that “perhaps we’re missing in class.” “I have great confidence in our professors and I’m sure that many of them are doing their best to present both sides of issues,” she said. Cook hopes “realizing that some of those perspectives may be lacking” will encourage students to realize the importance of “having conversations in spaces like Buckley or the YPU,” Cook added, referring to the Yale Political Union. Manu Anpalagan ’26, the president of the Yale College Republicans, expressed his frustration with the pattern shown in the report’s findings, which he called “very disappointing but not at all surprising.” “It’s a known fact, year after year, that Yale’s faculty is not politically diverse,” he wrote to the News. “A politically diverse faculty represents an intellectually diverse faculty. And an intellectually diverse faculty is essential for an open exchange of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge, both of which are core missions of the university.” The Buckley Institute is named after William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, a former chairman of the News. Contact ARIA LYNN-SKOV at aria.lynn-skov@yale.edu.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
NEWS
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“You can’t handle the truth!” NATHAN JESSEP A FEW GOOD MEN
Heads of Saybrook, Morse and Berkeley to step down this year BY OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTER Three heads of college will be stepping down from their roles at the end of the 2025-26 academic year, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis announced in a Monday afternoon email to undergraduates. Upon completing their terms, all three heads will have served in their positions for over a decade — Thomas Near of Saybrook and Catherine Panter-Brick of Morse will have served for the maximum 11 years, and David Evans ’92, head of Berkeley College, for 10. “My time as HoC has reinforced my belief that education happens not just in classrooms, but in the daily rhythms of shared meals, latenight discussions, and the informal interactions that make college life transformative,” Near wrote in an email to the News on Monday. Ten years ago, the maximum number of years a head could serve was 10 years, or two five-year terms, Lewis said in a Monday interview with the News. Five years later, however, heads who had led their residential colleges through the pandemic, which Lewis said was “not the norm” for the role, became eligible to extend their tenures by one year. Lewis said that the three heads all built “very, very strong communities in their colleges.” “When they came in, it was a somewhat difficult time around campus, and they then had COVID to deal with. So I’ve been very impressed with the way that they kept the residential culture community, not only going, but also very healthy and vibrant,” Lewis said. In an email to the Morse community on Monday morning, Panter-Brick, an anthropology professor, wrote that she had extended her time serving as head of college out of love for the Morse community. “I am deeply attached to Morse, having lived here with Associate Head Mark Eggerman and our sons for eleven years,” Panter-Brick
wrote in the email. “I love this college and its lack of right angles, which feels like apt preparation for stepping into the future, with no guarantee of straight paths.” Panter-Brick also currently serves as chair of the Council of Heads of College, which meets approximately eight times per year to consider “matters relevant to all colleges,” according to its website. The council also includes four standing committees, which meet on an ad hoc basis to manage matters such as college finances and the selection of Community and Performing Arts awards. Lewis told the News that he will choose a new chair upon the recommendations of all of the sitting heads and hopes to name that chair around spring break. Saybrook head Thomas Near, an Ecology & Evolutionary Biology professor, reminded students that he would be stepping down from the role of head at the end of this academic year in an email to the Saybrook community on Monday morning. Near noted that he had first announced last spring that the 2025-26 academic year would be his last as head. Near wrote to the News that during his time as head, he has learned that leading a residential college “isn’t about directing from above.” Instead, leaders must be “present for the small moments and major milestones alike.” Berkeley head David Evans, an Earth & Planetary Sciences professor, wrote in an email to the News that his time as head has shown him the “extremely real diversity of life experiences of the current Yale student body.” “Ten years ago I thought I was being progressively respectful of diverse backgrounds when I made it a point to refer to that early Fall weekend as “Family Weekend” because some students might have lost their parents; and then quickly discovered that we have students among us who have also lost their entire families,” Evans wrote. “Take nothing for granted behind the mask of calmness — some
YALE NEWS AND YALE DAILY NEWS
After having served for a decade or longer as heads of college, professors Thomas Near, Catherine Panter-Brick and David Evans will reach the end of their terms in May. students, to their great testament and fortitude, are dealing daily with crises almost unimaginable.” Near, Panter-Brick and Evans are the last sitting heads of college to have held the role of master — the naming switch from “master” to “head of college” occurred an hour after Evans was named Berkeley master. Near and Panter-Brick’s inaugural semester as heads of college in the fall of 2015 coincided with advocacy for greater racial inclusivity that swept across campus. Near wrote in his email to the News that the title change “reflected important conversations about language and inclusivity.” “If anything, I’ve seen the role evolve to be even more collaborative and student-centered,” Near wrote. “The fundamentals of being present, listening, and fostering community haven’t changed, but we always have to adapt our approaches to meet students where they are.”
Upon stepping down from their roles, all heads and associate heads of college are appointed for life as fellows in their respective residential college communities, according to the Council of the Heads of College’s website. Lewis said that his office is “just at the very beginning” of the process for finding replacements for the three departing heads. During the selection process, applications for the position will be reviewed by committees made up of students and faculty affiliated with each of the three residential colleges. “We’ve asked the faculty members to serve on the committee and we will be asking students in this coming week or so,” Lewis said. “Each college will have roughly four students on the committee, and the students’ job is to get student input on what the college is looking for in a head.” Lewis said that by the end of February, each of the three committees will have created
a shortlist of applicants which he will then personally interview. He hopes to have made final decisions on the three replacements by late March or early April this year. In his email to the News, Evans recounted several fond memories from his decade serving as head, including the time “when a firstyear showed up in L-Dub with two rare individuals of an endangered species of aquatic newts.” “Obligated to enforce rules about pets on campus, my family took them into our house, including keeping a jar full of live earthworms in our fridge to feed them,” Evans wrote. At the end of the 2021-22 school year, three heads of college resigned from their posts, the same number that will resign at the end of this year.from their posts, the same number that will resign at the end of this year. Contact OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu.
Yale offering new study-abroad programs in Europe and Africa BY OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTER For the first time, Yale will offer summer programs in Florence on painting basics and in London on threats to democracy for students looking to take their learning overseas. According to Study Abroad Director Kelly McLaughlin, the launching of this year’s new programming — which includes four completely new programs and one to be relaunched in a new location — “is on the higher end of change” often seen in Yale’s study-abroad offerings. This announcement of new programs comes after a controversial change to non-competitive funding for international experiences. Administrators announced in November that the International
Study Award and Summer Experience Awards will be replaced by the Summer Experience Grant in summer 2027. With the change, eligible students will be prohibited from using need-based grants on non-Yale study-abroad programs. “New programs come out of a mix of faculty and their departments reaching out to us with their ideas, often culminating in completion of a formal proposal, and our reaching out to particular faculty and departments when we might have an idea for a new program,” McLaughlin wrote in a Tuesday email to the News. “So, great ideas for programs can come from any direction, really.” Applications for Yale Summer Session study-abroad programs are due on Tuesday, according to the Yale Study Abroad website. Students may apply to only one Yale-run study-
abroad program. If students wish to use their Summer Experience Grant on a Yale studyabroad program, they will receive funding in proportion to the financial aid percentage they receive during the academic year, according to the Yale Fellowships and Funding website. As a result, Yale Study Abroad expects an increase in applications to Yale-run programs offered in 2027, McLaughlin said in the email, though he specified that the plans for expanding the programs taking place this summer began before the Summer Experience Grant was announced. According to the per-student costs listed on the Yale Study Abroad website, the tuition and fees of attending one of these five programs amount, on average, to $14,404 per student for summer 2026. Maria de Los Angeles, who is
teaching a Yale program called “Painting Basics in Florence” this year, said in a Tuesday phone interview that the course has been in the works for nearly 15 months. According to de Los Angeles, the Florence program is the first study-abroad painting course to be offered by Yale in almost a decade. “It’s being put together from scratch, but I think what’s cool is that it’s not only a studio course abroad, where you’re in the classroom and doing those types of things, but also there are some fun activities,” de Los Angeles said. Spanish professors MariaLourdes Sabé Colom and María de la Paz García wrote in an email to the News that the idea for “Catalonia in Modern Spain,” which will take place in Barcelona, originated from Sabé, who is a native of Catalonia.
ALEX HONG / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
This summer, students will be able to travel to Florence, Stockholm, London, Cape Town and Barcelona for Yale study-abroad programs.
Sabé and García added that the course will be similar to other L5 courses offered at Yale but specifically focuses on topics relevant to the Catalan region. Bonnie Weir, an assistant dean at the Jackson School for Global Affairs, will be teaching “Challenges to Democracy in Contemporary Europe” in London this summer. She wrote in an email to the News that while the course is one that can be taught in New Haven, “holding it in London will present exceptional - and, frankly, fun - learning opportunities.” “We can talk first-hand with and challenge diplomats and leaders from the U.K. and other European countries on the nature of threats to democracy and their various responses to those,” Weir wrote.“We can immerse ourselves in day-today dynamics in Britain, which can help us to better understand the truly astounding surge in support for policy platforms appealing to radical right and populist sentiments there.” The course is a “direct response” to current politics worldwide, according to Weir, but will specifically address the “increasingly pressing” challenges to democracy taking place in Europe. In addition to these three new courses, students are able to apply to take “Writing in Stockholm” with English professor Jake Halpern, whose description of the program exhorts students, “pack your hiking shoes; we’ll be walking everywhere.” “Visual Approaches to Global Health,” a program taught by Yale School of Medicine professor Jonathan Smith, combines epidemiological methodology and hands-on filmmaking to tackle global health issues. This year, the course will be offered in Cape Town, South Africa for the first time. Previously, it has taken place in Johannesburg and in Mbabane, Eswatini. Students will receive their admissions decisions for all Yale Summer Session study-abroad programs in early March, according to the Yale Study Abroad website. Contact OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu.
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SCI-TECH
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
“You had me at hello.” DOROTHY BOYD, JERRY MACGUIRE
Insulin rationing persists despite policy changes, Yale study finds BY EDIS MESIC AND KALINA BROOKFIELD STAFF REPORTERS A recent study from the Yale School of Medicine found that, despite policy changes, insulin rationing continues to persist and threaten the lives of patients with diabetes. The study, conducted at the Yale Diabetes Center, followed up on a previous 2017 study that examined the rates of insulin rationing due to cost. The team sought to determine if rates of cost-related insulin rationing had changed in the years since the original study, while also exploring other causes of insulin rationing not related to cost. “We asked additional questions to get at rationing for other reasons, and we looked specifically at insurance delays and pharmacy shortages, because those have been increasingly barriers for patients,” Kasia Lipska, senior author and associate professor of medicine in endocrinology at the School of Medicine, said in an interview with the News. The researchers discovered that insulin rationing due to cost concerns and broader access barriers continue to affect patients. Lipska said her initial inspiration for exploring the topic of insulin access and rationing stemmed from her experiences as an endocrinologist. According to Lipska, prices of insulin had skyrocketed between the 1990s and the mid-2010s, and she began increasingly to hear stories from her patients about the difficulties of obtaining the life-saving drug. “I was starting to notice more and more that people with diabetes were beginning to have trouble affording their medications, and specifically insulin. And I began to kind of ask about why that’s the case,” Lipska said. Why ration insulin? Campbell Mitchell SPH ’31, a doctoral student in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at nine years old. Mitchell recalled having had to ration insulin throughout his life. A s M i tc h e l l ex p l a i n e d , Type 1 diabetes destroys insulin-producing beta cells, which means the body needs additional insulin to survive. Without insulin, the body is unable to convert sugar in the bloodstream into energy, leading to hyperglycemia — excessively high blood sugar levels. Mitchell likened the experience to simultaneously feeling exhausted and at a sugar high.
Since a lack of insulin means the body cannot use glucose, the body begins to break down fat, causing a buildup of ketones — acids which serve as backup fuel — in the blood. According to Mitchell, the process causes severe aches, blood pH changes, stomach acidity changes, heartburn, nausea and deep, rapid breathing and, if left untreated, death. “This is how people die,” Mitchell told the News in an interview. “Knowing that I can’t know what it’s going to cost, and there might be factors that I might have no control over, with insurance, with policy, with my job, whether they have it in stock at the pharmacy, I’m going to make darn sure that I’m not down to my last vial.” Mitchell and many others with diabetes end up taking lower doses of insulin, despite the resulting elevated blood sugar and longterm health consequences, to avoid the possibility of completely running out. When asked why anticipatory rationing persists, Mitchell explained that some patients cannot escape the underlying uncertainty surrounding consistent access to insulin. For instance, one issue Mitchell has run into is that the insulin prescribed by his doctors is not the same as the insulin covered by his insurance, to which he is allergic. Without consistent regulations saying medically necessary insulin is going to be covered, diabetes patients like Mitchell have to prepare for insurance issues that could prevent access to the lifesaving drug. “Dying will take place in three to six hours without insulin. This is not something where you can have a 180-day appeal timeline,” Mitchell said. As the head of the Yale chapter of The Diabetes Link, Mitchell has also worked with students with diabetes, many of whom don’t have reliable access to refrigeration. Without refrigeration, insulin goes bad in roughly 30 days, and even a few days’ delay in pharmacy re-stocking or insurance approval could be life-threatening. Kristen Whitney Daniels, a d i s a b i l i ty a dvo c a te i n Connecticut, was diagnosed with diabetes at 16. When she aged off of her parents’ insurance plan, she suddenly faced exorbitant prices for medication and equipment that she was unable to afford, leading her to ration her insulin. “I was on my very last drops. I remember going through the trash can looking for empty vials of insulin to see if there was any more insulin that I could draw out of it,” Daniels said. “I knew
that without insulin, I was going to die within 24 hours.” At one point, Daniels was charged $2,400 for a three-month supply of insulin. According to Daniels, the estimated cost of production for a vial of insulin ranges from $3 to $6. Even assuming the higher end of insulin dosage, at six vials a month, the cost of production for the threemonth supply could not have exceeded $104. In a last-ditch effort, Daniels was able to enroll in a community health center’s 340B program and obtained the medication for $14. The experience required a day off to navigate enrollment, physician visits and pharmacy delays. As a part of the Connecticut chapter of #insulin4all, Daniels helped push for state legislation passed in 2020 to cap monthly out-of-pocket costs for insulin and diabetes supplies and establish an emergency insulin access provision, allowing pharmacists to dispense insulin when prescriptions lapse. However, Daniels cautioned against the growing narrative that the insulin pricing crisis has been resolved, noting that many recent affordability measures rely on voluntary manufacturer programs that can change or disappear without notice. According to Daniels, patient assistance programs often come with strict annual limits, meaning patients whose insulin needs exceed those caps are left to cover the remaining costs themselves. She added that manufacturers can also discontinue lower-cost insulin options and force patients to pay for more expensive formulations. “Patients are really susceptible to the winds of the market,” Daniels said. “It’s just unacceptable that patients have to jump through hoops to obtain this medication that costs between $3 and $6 to manufacture.” Problem continues eight years later The team’s 2017 study, which surveyed Yale Diabetes Center patients with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes who were prescribed insulin, found that one in four patients underuse insulin because of cost. According to Sefia Khan, a postgraduate research fellow and the first author of the recently published study, the 2017 study inspired several policies that have since passed that address the growing cost-related barriers to insulin use. In 2020, Connecticut passed House Bill 6003, which capped out-of-pocket costs for a 30-day supply of insulin and other diabetes supplies at $25 and $100,
KIMBERLY ANGELES / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and diabetes advocates are concerned about the lingering health problem. respectively. Additionally, the federal Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, capped out-ofpocket insulin costs at $35 per month for people enrolled in Medicare Part D. Despite the passed legislation, the message of the team’s new study is “relatively simple” for Lipska: policy changes have not solved the issue. The follow-up study revealed that one in four patients were found to ration insulin due to high costs in 2024 — the same results found in 2017. Additionally, the follow-up study found that one-third of surveyed patients reported rationing due to broader access barriers, such as insurance delays and shortages. “We’re not done and we can’t just focus on cost. We have to really think about how to make these insulins more accessible in other ways as well,” Lipska said. Lipska highlighted that while insulin prices have recently gone down, insulin products are not always available at pharmacies because the companies that make insulin are prioritizing the production of more profitable medications, like Ozempic or Mounjaro. Laura Nally, an assistant professor of pediatrics and the third author of the recent study, described the cumbersome process of acquiring medications and supplies to manage diabetes as an additional barrier to access. According to Nally, any given person with Type 1 diabetes could need separate prescriptions for two types of insulin — long-acting and s h o r t - a c t i n g — a g l u cose meter, glucose test strips, a lancing device, lancets, insulin pen needles or syringes and glucagon. If they use a glucose sensor, they will also need a separate prescription. If they use an insulin pump, they may
have separate prescriptions for the tubing and the pump reservoir — up to a dozen s e p a ra te p re s c r i p t i o n s to manage one condition. “Many people have limited access to transportation, or work multiple jobs, making it difficult to get to the pharmacy for all of these prescriptions every month,” said Nally. “It’s especially challenging, because each of the prescriptions could be ready on a different day, requiring numerous trips each month.” Lipska also noted that prior authorizations by insurance companies for the approval of prescriptions can unexpectedly delay access to insulin. Looking ahead, Lipska believes that there remains more research to be done to better understand why people are still rationing insulin despite policies that have capped out-of-pocket costs. “I think having just more research or more policies actually look into those barriers, like the pharmacy shortages, the delays, I think that would be a very understudied topic and would definitely be somewhere that I think legislation should focus on,” Khan added in an interview. In light of persisting barriers to access, the team hopes to bring to policymakers’ attention that there exist issues beyond cost that need to be solved. The paper discusses the public production of insulin in the state of Connecticut as a potential solution that could address many of the issues associated with price and distribution control. T h e s t u dy wa s p u b l i s h e d i n t h e Jo u r n a l o f G e n e ra l Internal Medicine. Contact EDIS MESIC at edis.mesic@yale.edu and KALINA BROOKFIELD at kalina.brookfield@yale.edu.
Scroll or donate: Yalies offer new screen time minimizer BY ANYA GEIST STAFF REPORTER Three Yale students have launched a new app called Scroll Toll for minimizing screen time usage — while encouraging users to donate to charity. Founded in November by Asher Barondes ’26, Benjamin Siegel ’29 and Chase Reynders ’26, Scroll Toll allows users to set limits on apps on their phone. When users exceed the limits they have set, Scroll Toll prompts them to donate to one of the app’s selected charities. This creates a financial incentive against screen time usage and encourages a donation to a small charity. “We wanted to add more friction to really get people off their phones,” Barondes, who works on the app’s interface and marketing, told the News. “We recognized that one way to do so is by having some money tied to it. But at least if you did exceed your screen time limit, you would be contributing to some social good.” When users download the app, they set time limits on apps of their choosing and select an amount to donate to a certain charity for each time they exceed their limit. For example, a user could choose to donate 25 cents for every extra five minutes of Instagram usage, Reynders said. After selecting donation amounts, the app then asks users whether they would like to “enable scheduled fulfillment,” which means they would auto-donate to their charity
as needed, or whether they want to donate manually. In this way, Barondes said, users can postpone their donation if necessary. “The only way to actually change behavior is if people have this balance they have to find between money and time,” Siegel said, comparing Scroll Toll’s effect to congestion pricing in cities and on highways. Siegel and Barondes were independently working on similar screen-time minimizing apps in 2024 and met, while Siegel was on a gap year before attending Yale, because their brothers were friends. They decided to collaborate and soon brought Reynders onboard as well. During his gap year, Siegel and a few of his friends created an Instagram and TikTok account called @boys.with.the.bus, where they documented themselves going on various adventures and building various vehicles and rafts. Their Instagram account currently has two million followers. The experience transformed how Siegel approached screen time, he said. “I would look at the stats on the phone after I posted something on it,” Siegel said. “You’re like, holy crap. I just wasted 100 years of people’s lives in this few-second video I just posted.” Siegel hoped his content was motivational and inspiring to viewers, but regardless he said many people have an unhealthy relationship with their phones. A little bit of social media can be “a good thing,” he said,
but overall, it is destructive. Through Scroll Toll, he hopes that he can provide users with structure and discipline for screen time and social media usage. The trio announced their app to the Yale community in November. Even among the small number of initial users in November, Barondes said the team was seeing results. “What we’re seeing just from these 65 users, while it’s a low sample size, is an average reduction of 20 percent to 30 percent in screen time,” Barondes said. Now, in January, Scroll Toll has 130 users. The team has incorporated feedback from users, developing a weekly report about screen time usage. Evan Daneker ’26 lives in a suite with Reynders and has been donating to American Forests, a non-profit focused on forest restoration. Daneker, who has used other screen time apps like Opal, said he appreciated how Scroll Toll did not force users to go “cold turkey” on apps they limited. Daneker said that when a screen time minimizer shuts down an app completely, the user is likely to just delete the app blocker and return to using social media, rendering the blocker ineffective. Because he was allowed to set and override his own limits on Scroll Toll, Daneker felt the app was more approachable. “I sort of appreciated that Scroll Toll was a little more permissive but still incentivized you to gradually reduce your screen time usage to a healthier
amount,” Daneker told the News. Sofia Jacobson ’26, who knows Barondes, had never used an app blocker before. Using Scroll Toll, she learned how to set feasible screen time limits, so that she wasn’t frequently requesting more time. Scroll Toll made her think more about her phone usage, particularly when she was “mindlessly scrolling” and kept getting notifications to extend her screen time. The trio behind the app is still working on ways to improve their project. In particular, they seek to work more closely with their partner charities and create monthly challenges, such as emphasizing charities related to breast cancer during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
The founders understand that not all users want to create a financial incentive against phone usage — even if they are only donating $6 or $7 per month. However, they believe they will find an audience. “At the end of the day, you can always delete the app, and while we would love them to stick with it, we’re really trying to be intentional about our audience,” Reynders said. “We know this isn’t for everybody, but we also believe the people it is for, it really is for.” Breast Cancer Awareness Month is October. Contact ANYA GEIST at anya.geist@yale.edu.
COURTESY OF BENJAMIN SIEGEL
Created by three Yalies, Scroll Toll asks users to donate to a nonprofit when they request extra time on restricted apps.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
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“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” RICK BLAINE, CASABLANCA
Summer course in Sweden aims to inspire through environment BY ANGEL HU STAFF REPORTER Yale will offer a new studyabroad program in Sweden this summer for students to read and write young adult literature inspired by the landscape, architecture, culture and history of Stockholm. According to the program description, students will take trips to landmarks such as the Birka Viking Village, the Vaxholm Fortress and the Gamla Stan — Old Town. The program will run from June 13 to July 11, and upon completion, students will receive two Yale credits. The program will be taught by Jake Halpern ’97, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. At Yale, Halpern teaches the course “Young Adult Writing,” in which he incorporates “experiential activities” into the writing process. “I want the students to reconnect with the 12-year-old inside of them. I want them to feel wonder and joy and excitement and curiosity because that’s what I want them to channel into the writing,” Halpern said. When teaching in New Haven, Halpern’s class activities have included trips to Yale’s Peabody Museum and Horse Island, blindfolded walks through the Buddhist Shrine in Branford College and games of Jenga, in which each student tells a sentence of a story as they add a block onto the tower. Through these writing exercises, Halpern encourages his students to think of his class as “a space in which you can be creative.” “That was my thinking of getting us overseas, which is out of Yale, out of the classroom, in some sort of setting, that allowed us to basically have an extended, month
long field trip, and to really see this, not as a class, but as an experience, because I think that will help them take more risks and be more creative,” Halpern said. In the past, Yale has offered many study-abroad opportunities across Europe, especially in France, Spain and Italy, but they had “always thought about starting a program in Sweden,” according to Halpern. Halpern noted that its “Nordic legends, Viking history and beautiful landscapes” could be potential inspirations for writing. “Jake Halpern has put together a terrific program, and I’m confident that students who study with him in Stockholm will have an amazing – if not a transformational – experience,” wrote Director of Study Abroad Kelly McLaughlin in an email to the News. Over the past summer, Halpern traveled to Stockholm with Angela Kuhne, the senior associate director and director of special initiatives for Yale’s study abroad office, to scout out the city and find potential places he could take his students. In an email to the News, Kuhne described Halpern as a “great faculty partner” whose “enthusiasm for working with students is infectious.” “He will provide students with an academically challenging experience, create a supportive community, and help students build upon existing writing skills or develop new ones,” Kuhne wrote. Halpern noted that a particular highlight of their trip was Birka, a former Viking island west of Stockholm. “There were Viking mounds as far as the eye could see, and there was not a soul in sight. I’m not someone who believes in ghosts
COURTESY OF JAKE HALPERN
This summer, students will have the opportunity to study young adult writing in Stockholm, Sweden. exactly, but it’s as close as I ever felt. Goosebumps rippled up my arm, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m taking my students here,’” Halpern described. Additional activities will include a bonfire in the woods, a ghost tour of the old town and potentially a visit to a defunct nuclear reactor, according to Halpern. He also hopes to do something with Sweden’s refugee population so that his students can witness “a different way that people are experienc-
ing Sweden.” Ultimately, Halpern said he hopes that the study abroad experience will create long-lasting bonds that extend beyond the course. “I want them to indulge the fantasy that maybe they have a life, a creative future of creating whatever it is the stories that they want to tell. But I also want to forge a strong sense of community among the students, that they feel supported by one another and that they feel encouraged by one
another,” Halpern said. Total billed expenses for the program will amount to $13,170, and students receiving Yale financial aid will be able to request the International Study Award to cover costs proportional to their financial need. The application deadline is Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. Contact ANGEL HU at angel.hu@yale.edu.
J. Press, founded at Yale, plans brick-and-mortar expansion BY RISHI GURUDEVAN AND LAURENTIA WOO STAFF REPORTERS J. Press, the clothing retailer founded at Yale over a century ago, has announced plans to expand its customer base to a national scale. Per an October strategy document authored by Onward Holdings, the Japan-based parent company of J. Press, the brand aims to increase its revenue to $100 million by the 2030 fiscal year, a “tenfold” increase from the $10 million brought in during the 2024 fiscal year. To accomplish this growth, J. Press will pursue the “aggressive opening of brick-and-mortar stores,” from just three in 2024 — including one on New Haven’s Elm Street — to 20 in the US by 2030, per the document. The vision is centered around Jack Carlson, a former member of the U.S. National Rowing Team who took over as J. Press’ creative director and president in the fall.
“This role feels like coming home in many ways,” Carlson wrote in an email to the News, adding that many of his first suits, shirts, ties and belts came from J. Press. When asked about the brand impact of the business’s scaling, Carlson wrote in a statement to the News that maintaining the tradition of J. Press is his primary goal. The “best way to make the brand resonate with new audiences and with younger generations is, in my opinion, by staying as authentic and true to the brand’s history as possible,” he wrote. “That’s what makes it cool.” Carlson wrote that, in addition to planning to grow the business, he “has brought the brand more in-line with its DNA.” He wrote that J. Press is producing more clothing in the U.S. and that its campaigns have a renewed focus on traditional “Ivy style.” Carlson said he prefers “Ivy style” over the term “preppy,” which he said came into use in the 1970s and was popularized
by the 1980 publication of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a satirical book. “To some people, the word is synonymous with J. Press, but to others it evokes brands like Vineyard Vines or Southern Tide. Some people think that any jacket and tie combination is ‘preppy,’” Carlson wrote. “There’s a bizarre movement on TikTok to redefine the word to mean neon pink, sparkles, Lululemon, and Stanley water bottles.” Matthew Longcore GRD ’18, editor of the fashion blog Ivy Style, wrote in an email to the News that, as the “preppy aesthetic” has grown to include more than “old money WASPs,” J. Press has adapted to represent a more diverse cohort. “J. Press is democratizing preppy style by featuring models who are ethnically diverse and by hosting popular events at its New York City store that attract young people,” Longcore wrote. “It is very much an ‘if you build it, they will come’ strategy, and
ALEX HONG / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
The brand has targeted $100 million in revenue by 2030 under the leadership of Creative Director and President Jack Carlson, who started in the fall.
from what I can see it is working.” Carlson also contrasted J. Press, with its Yale roots, to the menswear brand Brooks Brothers. “Brooks Brothers was founded in New York, and it has always been more mainstream and more business-oriented,” he wrote. “Most people probably think that the historic American presidents always wore Brooks Brothers. And a lot of them did.” “But many — especially the ones who went to Yale and Harvard — wore J. Press,” Carlson wrote. “J. Press traditionally is more genteel, tweedier, more academic and more intellectual, and sportier than any of its rivals. A bit more British in style and inspiration — and a bit more of a sense of humor. In all of these ways, J. Press derives much of its character from Yale, its home.” As much as J. Press derives its character from Yale, it is also inspired by global textile t ra d i t i o n s, sa i d K a t h l e e n Quaintance GRD ’28, a doctoral
candidate researching craft and material culture in Yale’s art history department. She pointed to fabrics like Madras plaid, which J. Press and other similar clothing brands helped popularize in the U.S. The fabric, named for the city of Madras — now Chennai — in India, has been woven for centuries using natural dyes that early European manufacturers often attempted to replicate. Vignesh Harikrishnan ARC ’22, who has researched Madras plaid, the “bleeding Madras” — as it was often called due to its tendency to create a unique, faded look upon being washed — was imported into the United States in the mid20th century and became a staple of Ivy style. The New Haven location of J. Press is at 262 Elm St. Contact RISHI GURUDEVAN at rishi.gurudevan@yale.edu and LAURENTIA WOO at laurentia.woo@yale.edu.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
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“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” DEAD POETS SOCIETY BY JOHN KEATING
FOOTBALL: Montana State squad that foiled Yale goes on to win playoffs BY BRODY GILKISON STAFF REPORTER L a s t Mo n d ay, t h e No. 2-seeded Montana State Bobcats (14–2, 8–0 Big Sky) took down the unseeded Illinois State Redbirds (12-5, 5–3 MVFC) in breathtaking fashion to win the Football Championship Subdivision national championship, the Bobcats’ fourth in program history. Many Yale faithful may remember the Bobcats’ first game of their playoff run at home in Bozeman, Montana, where the Bulldogs held their own in their second-round matchup in the inaugural year of Ivy League participation in the postseason tournament. “Yale is the one team I wouldn’t want the Bobcats to have to play again,” one Bobcat fan wrote on X. “That’s a salty bunch of physical dudes that are well coached.” Montana State entered the matchup being favored by nearly 30 points before the game against an unseeded Yale football team. However, the Bulldogs fought tooth and nail down to the final seconds of the game before coming one score short of tying it up.
Throughout the Bobcats’ 14-game win streak that eventually ended with their hoisting the hardware, the Yale game has been called one of Montana State’s toughest. The Bobcats only beat the Elis by eight points and secured victories in each of their next two playoff games with a greater margin of victory. After beating Yale, the Bobcats went on to dismantle SF Austin 44-28 in the next round, before spanking the Montana Grizzlies 48-23 in their semifinal matchup. Three straight postseason victories brought Montana State to Nashville for the national championship game, which they won in jaw-dropping fashion, with quarterback Justin Lamson connecting with Taco Dowler in overtime for a game-winning touchdown. The Bobcats’ 35-34 win over the Redbirds brought the 202526 FCS season to a close. Yale still holds the most college football national championships of all time with 18, and is the only team in history to go 16–0 in a season, which it did in 1894. LIZA KAUFMAN / PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Contact BRODY GILKISON at brody.gilkison@yale.edu.
Last week, the Montana State Bobcats defeated the Illinois State Redbirds in Nashville to win the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs — to which Yale had earned the Ivy League’s first automatic bid.
SQUASH: Yale to open Ivy League play against Princeton and Penn BY RACHEL MAK STAFF REPORTER This Saturday, the women’s (1–1, 0–0 Ivy) and men’s (2–1, 0–0 Ivy) squash teams will face Princeton in their first Ivy League games of the season. Then, on Sunday, the teams will square off against a highly touted Penn squad. The No. 8 nationally ranked women’s team will take on No. 4 Princeton (4–1, 0–0 Ivy), a team that the Elis haven’t beaten since 2014. In their last matchup, the Tigers had a near-perfect performance, only dropping two games in their 9-0 victory. Sophomore Meha Shah ’28 was one of the two Bulldogs to take a game off of her opponent, and she will return this year in the third position. On Sunday, Shah and her teammates will take the court against No. 2 Penn (7–0, 0–0 Ivy), a squad that has only dropped three matches this season. Two of those were at the hands of the University of Virginia (6–3, 0–0 MASC), a team that beat Yale on Nov. 16.
In the Bulldogs’ lone regular season matchup against the Quakers last year, Yale lost 8-1, with Whitney Taylor ’26 securing the Bulldogs’ only win. Taylor returns this season as the captain of this year’s squad, and she is looking to rally her teammates around the challenge of facing two fierce opponents. “Our team is excited by the opportunity to compete against two top programs and fight through every rally,” Taylor wrote to the News. “That mentality has been our standard, and it’s what we’ll bring to every match this season.” Meanwhile, the No. 5 Yale men’s team will face No. 8 Princeton (2–2, 0–0 Ivy) on Saturday. The two teams have traded wins since the 2017 season, with Yale emerging victorious in their most recent matchup in Philadelphia last year to advance to the College Squash Association National Championship. The Bulldogs had a 5-4 loss to the Tigers in the 2024-25 regular season but exacted their revenge when it mattered most
in postseason play. In Yale’s 6-3 victory on March 8, Tad Carney ’26, Lachlan Sutton ’27, Rohan Arya Gondi ’28 and Rishi Srivastava ’28 took down their opponents and will all be back in action for the Bulldogs this weekend. Sunday’s opponent, No. 1 ranked Penn (7–0, 0–0 Ivy), has started the season off hot, having won five of their seven matches this season 9–0. Last season, Yale and Penn met twice, with the Quakers coming out on top both times. Despite losing 8-1 in their first matchup at the beginning of the season, the Bulldogs fought back hard when the teams faced each other in the national championship. Although Yale ended up falling 6-3, the team put up a good fight and showed growth, ending the season with their best finish since 2016. Now, after putting in hours of work on the practice courts over winter break and coming off a 9-0 victory over MIT on Jan. 13, the Bulldogs will look to snap Penn’s undefeated streak. “We feel very ready following
YALE ATHLETICS
This weekend, the women’s and men’s squash teams will take on Princeton and Penn at home. our training camp and match with MIT earlier this week,” Carney wrote to the News. “This is one of our biggest weekends of the regular season, and we can’t wait to start Ivy League play against Princeton on Saturday.”
Yale will host Princeton in the Brady Squash Center on Saturday at 12 p.m. Contact RACHEL MAK at rachel.mak@yale.edu .
MEN’S TENNIS: Yale to open spring season against Notre Dame BY REMI CLARK-REDSTAR STAFF REPORTER T h e Ya l e m e n ’s te n n i s team will hit the courts at the University of Notre Dame on Friday for their first competition of the spring season. With a record of zero wins to one loss against Notre Dame, the
Elis are looking to claw out victory against the Fighting Irish in what will be a heated competition to kick off the season. The Bulldogs’ spring season opener will also mark the transition to team-based scores instead of individual scores and rankings. Last semester, the Elis competed in an individual
format, and each win or loss affected individual players’ or doubles teams’ NCAA rankings. Going into the spring half of the season, wins shift to affecting overall team rankings. “Now in the spring, all our matches are team matches,” team captain Eric Li ’26 said. “Although we play our own matches, we
YALE ATHLETICS
The team is optimistic about the upcoming spring season and is aiming for a championship run.
are focusing on staying together, sharing the energy in between courts and competing consistently throughout the entire match.” Evening the score In the first match in program history against Notre Dame last year, Yale fell in a tight 3-4 loss. The Bulldogs won two out of three doubles matches and three of seven singles matches. Still, the Bulldogs managed to notch notable wins, with Vignesh Gogineni ’26 defeating the then No. 28-ranked player in singles, and Gogineni and Edward Liao ’28 beating the then No. 78-ranked doubles team. Jim Ji ’27 and Jason Shuler ’27 also clinched victory in straight sets over another Notre Dame doubles team. “Notre Dame is a good ACC team that is consistently ranked in the top 50 nationally,” interim head coach Eduardo Ugalde wrote in an email to the News. “We lost a close match to them at their facility last year, so this year we are looking to take the win in our home courts. We will need to compete really hard and have great focus on all matches.” A victory for the Bulldogs on Friday would not only even the record to 1-1 but would also place the total wins to losses ratio in the Bulldogs’ favor. Looking ahead This spring, the men’s tennis team will play 24 different events between now and May, with the most important matchups — those
against Ivy League teams and the NCAA championship — occurring at the end. The team has been preparing for tournament play since the fall, paying particular attention to doubles. The doubles lineup has been fluid thus far, with different players being paired with each other from tournament to tournament. Strategically, emphasis was placed on playing aggressively and making use of net play and volleying. “We want to get out to fast starts in doubles,” Li said. “We worked a lot on doubles in the fall and are looking forward to seeing the work pay off.” Ugalde and Li identified Liao and Ethan Chung ’29 as particular players to keep an eye on. Both had strong showings last semester. Liao reached the semifinals in the Ivy League tournament and Chung debuted undefeated in singles and doubles at the Yale Invitational. Seniors Gogineni and Li both made it to the finals of the New England Regional Tournament this past season — Gogineni in singles, Li in doubles. Gogineni qualified for the NCAA singles championship, and Li qualified for the ITA sectional championship. The season opener against Notre Dame will take place at the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center on Friday. Contact REMI CLARK-REDSTAR at remi.clark-redstar@yale.edu .
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
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“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” JAWS BOBBY PICKETT
As class formals near, students keep eyes out for blind dates BY OLIVIA CYRUS AND ANAYAH ACCILIEN STAFF REPORTERS Shogo O’Connor ’29 says that during the fall of his freshman year, he had a “really big crush on this one girl.” O’Connor knew that he wanted to get to know her more, but he was repeatedly asking himself, “How?” Fortunately for him, a friend of his, who is also an acquaintance of his crush, offered to set the two of them up for the First Year Formal. Every year, the First Year Formal spurs a wave of first years yearning to be set up by their peers on blind dates for the special night. Yet, as first years returned to campus for the spring semester, with the formal approaching in February, many described a feeling of pressure to pair up with a date. Those who had not yet been paired lamented that they had not found a date. Similarly, next weekend’s Sophomore Formal organizers are attempting to formalize matchmaking culture by using a randomized form to pair up sophomores for the occasion. “There is nothing to lose,” O’Connor said. “There’s so many people on campus that it can sometimes feel hard to approach them on your own. Let’s say you see someone you think is really attractive. You’re not going to run to them naturally. It might not happen because there’s so many people. Matchmaking culture allows you to close the gap.” First-year Cheizyn Montizor ’29 said that “everyone’s talking about it” and is asking their friends for “cute” peers to go formal with.
Eden Hu ’29, a friend of Montizor, agreed and said that the desire to find a friend-suggested pairing for the night of Feb. 20 has even begun to show up in pleading posts on the anonymous social forum Fizz. Both Montizor and Hu said that they are not actively looking for a one-night date but that the culture of finding a formal date breeds pressure among first years to want a date. “Some people really think it’s important for them to be like everyone else and have a date,” Montizor said. “I feel like from what I’ve seen it’s a common struggle, and I’m not sure if I’ve heard of any successful matchmaking.” Montizor said that for those lucky enough to make it past the initial pairing stage, the likelihood of a later long-term relationship blossoming is low due to the “superficial” nature of matchmaking. Walker Prejean ’29 said that he has low hopes that he’ll be paired with a special someone come formal night. “I’m expecting the worst,” Prejean says. “My expectations are low and I’m excited to see what happens — if I even get matched at all.” Now a senior, Adaora Mobisson ’26 believes the tradition of matchmaking doesn’t end after formals in students’ early years at Yale. Instead, it persists throughout the entirety of one’s time at Yale, she said. “A lot of people jump into those really big connections and relationships, and it’s the same for your senior year too,” Mobisson said. “There’s the desire to get a partner before you graduate because there’s this huge idea at Yale where you want a Yale husband
or a Yale wife.” Emely Cardenas ’29 has a boyfriend, but said that, looking from the outside-in, her friends’ matchmaking processes seem like “innocent fun.” She said that since the spring semester’s start people have been on the prowl for a formal date as a means of reinventing themselves or trying something new. Cardenas believes that being set up at Yale makes it easier to meet people that “fit your vibe” that people might not have otherwise known. Mobisson added that while matchmaking culture isn’t exclusive to Yale, the smallness of the campus amplifies buzz around pairing up. “In a way, having someone else do that awkward part of asking them out for you makes it easier,” Cardenas said. “But there’s also another pressure in that now you’ve been set up and there’s eyes on you by people who want it to work out.” In an Instagram post published on Tuesday, the Sophomore Class Council invited the class to “Take a gamble…get randomly matched with another sophomore for SOCO formal,” which is casino night themed. Sophomore Formal attendees were asked to fill out a form by Jan.18 with their name, gender identity and the desired identity of their match, according to Sophomore Class Council Vice President Thy Luong ’28, and the latter two questions are optional. The matches are then randomly generated using an online generator or artificial intelligence. Submitters will later receive an email with a match’s contact information to begin mingling before formal. “We wanted to include a matchmaking component this year
MAIA WILSON / STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
First years are engaging in typical matchmaking ahead of First Year Formal, and the Sophomore Class Council introduced a form to formalize the matchmaking process for its class formal. because we saw an opportunity to both promote attendance, build up hype around the formal, and encourage opportunities for connection amongst the sophomore class,” Luong wrote in an email to the News. Prior to formalizing the matchmaking process, the council consulted Yale Communication and Consent Educators to create a safe and fun opportunity, according to Luong. During the formal, couples will also be able to get to know one another better with question cards, games, photo booths and film cameras. The council has also discussed continuing the tradition in
future years, similar to First Year Formal matchmaking traditions, Luong wrote. “In line with our Casino theme, we’re hoping that chance and luck might smile upon students and create space for a new connection (or the opportunity to develop an old connection!),” Luong wrote. The First Year Formal will be held in Commons on Feb. 20. Contact OLIVIA CYRUS at olivia.cyrus@yale.edu and ANAYAH ACCILIEN at anayah.accilien@yale.edu.
AI model built by Yale and Google team finds cancer treatment BY JONAS LOESEL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER When an artificial intelligence model suggested using a drug called Silmitasertib to help the human body locate cancerous tumors, Yale School of Medicine Professor David van Dijk said it was “surprising.” The model wasn’t relying on published literature it ingested in its training. In fact, no research had ever suggested that Silmitasertib could fight cancer in this way. But his lab’s custom AI model, called Cell2Sentence, hypothesized that the drug could increase antigen presentation — a process that helps the body’s immune system identify rogue cells, which in turn helps the body fight cancer. Soon enough, his lab at the Yale School of Medicine tested the hypothesis on human skin and pulmonary cells. His lab’s AI model was right. The van Dijk lab published its findings in a preprint paper in October in collaboration with Google’s top AI labs, Google DeepMind and Google Research. “This is the first time that LLMs have been used to model gene expression, like really cellular biology, and made a prediction about the effect of a drug that was then experimentally validated,” van Dijk, the lab’s director, said in a telephone interview. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote on X that the breakthrough was a “milestone” for AI in science.
SERINA YAN / STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
A new approach Researchers in Yale’s van Dijk lab have been working for years on a new approach to understanding the human cell. By analyzing single-cell RNA sequences, which show which genes are being expressed in each individual cell, the lab aims to understand the human body at a cellular level of detail. “Concretely, we’re trying to measure gene activity inside of cells,” Syed Rizvi GRD ’29, a computer science graduate student who was one of the lead authors in the October paper, said in a phone interview that month. He explained that if scientists figured out the genetic patterns within cells, they could easily identify which cells were “good or bad.” “Cells are ‘thinking,’ if you will, by expressing different genes,” van Dijk said. The researchers first turned to natural language processing, a branch of AI that teaches computers to understand human language, as a tool to decode the genomic activity. Single-cell RNA sequences are massive lists that count the amount of copies of each gene in a cell, but this numerical data was difficult for AI models to interpret, Rizvi said. By rendering the data as actual sentences, the lab found that the AI model quickly learned the biological patterns necessary to identify cells. For example, a cellular sentence might look like “Gene A Gene B Gene C Gene D,”
Collaborating with Google’s top AI labs, Yale researchers developed a large-language model that identified a new treatment for cancer.
continuing over the around 18,000 types of genes in the lab’s datasets, Rizvi explained. Their early models showed progress. In a paper published in October 2024, van Dijk’s team announced that they were able to produce a model that could consistently identify the type of cells when given a cell sentence and even produce “biologically valid” cell sentences given a cell type input. But their models were running on GPT-2, an older version of OpenAI’s large-language models, which was originally released in 2019. The model was smaller and less complex than newer models available, including GPT-4, which was released in March of 2023. Their model was initially limited in its ability to understand and reproduce these cell sentences. The GPT-2 model had around 774 million parameters, the adjustable weights that encode the model’s knowledge and behavior. GPT-4 had 1.76 trillion parameters, making it more than 2,000 times more complex than the older model. “The smaller models have a harder time picking up all the logic, the rules, the grammar, if you will, of this biological language,” van Dijk said. However, Rizvi said that the research computers available at Yale constrained them to using older, smaller models. Yale operates six high performance computing clusters for its researchers. Each cluster is comprised of dozens or hundreds of individual computers, which link together to process the immense amounts of data required for large-language model training. While these clusters are much more powerful than the average laptop, they pale in comparison to the clusters operated at large tech companies, where the number of computers ranges from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Rizvi said that although Yale’s computers were “pretty good” among academic institutions, they were unable to train the newest AI models. Google steps in In 2024, researchers from Google hosted an AI workshop at Yale. It was there, according to Google DeepMind scientist Shekoofeh Azizi, where staff at Google Research first met van Dijk’s research team.
“The collaboration grew organically,” Azizi wrote in a November email to the News. Google Research and Google DeepM ind are two of the company’s heavily-funded AI research laboratories. With the Google partnership, the research team gained access to the company’s massive computing resources, reportedly the largest of any company in the world — equivalent to more than a million of the type of GPUs in Yale’s clusters, according to Epoch AI, an AI research institute. “This type of research, unfortunately on the one hax=nd, you need this type of industry collaborator to be able to really scale, because that’s just the thing with LLMs, they need large scale” van Dijk explained. “Fortunately, we had this possibility to work with Google.” As well as training their new model on Google’s computers, the research team switched from a GPT-2 based model to Google’s AI model, Gemma-2, which allowed them to expand Cell2Sentence to 27 billion parameters and feed the model significantly more data. A key hypothesis with their G o og l e co l l a b o ra t i o n wa s whether the new large-language model would perform better than the smaller one did. By scaling its AI models with Google, the team found that they indeed became more capable, as they had hoped. “They become smarter at biology, understanding biology, generating biology, doing all sorts of different tasks,” van Dijk said. A breakthrough The model’s new scale allowed researchers to model the effects of drugs on human cells, what they called “perturbation response prediction.” Armed with this ability, the researchers asked their model to identify drugs that could amplify an immune signal when a protein that signals sickness was already present. The model identified Silmitaserib, traditionally used to inhibit cancer growth, and the researchers confirmed its hypothesis by testing the drug with human cells in a lab. The confirmation, Azizi wrote, showed that large-language models could successfully perform complex biological reasoning. “This type of biological hypothesis is a more advanced
form of biological reasoning, and shows the potential of largescale AI and LLM-based systems to decode context-dependent effects which can accelerate drug discovery,” she wrote. Van Dijk said that the drug’s developer, Senhwa Biosciences, is now studying this new feature of its product. In the future, Azizi and van Dijk said that their work will open the door to faster, cheaper drug development across medicine. A 2024 study estimated that the mean development cost for a new drug, including the cost of failures, was around $500 million, and major pharmaceutical companies regularly spend billions in research and development each year. “These pharma companies spend billions in doing preclinical research, and then it goes to trial and it fails. And then all this money is wasted,” van Dijk said. The researchers hope that their findings can help shortcut this pre-clinical phase, with AI models “guiding researchers to focus their laboratory efforts o n ex p e r i m e n ts w i t h t h e highest probability of success,” according to Azizi. B u t b e f o re t h a t v i s i o n comes true, AI models need to keep scaling up. “We got a c l ea r s i g n a l t h a t sca l i n g matters. So I want to keep on d o i n g t h a t ,” va n D i j k sa i d . Ultimately, he said, the goal is to use AI to completely model the human body. “Now imagine you have a virtual human that can simulate everything biologically about real humans, but it doesn’t complain. And it doesn’t, you know, suffer. And now you can test all these drugs, many more and much faster, and have a much better filter to figure out which drugs are actually going to work in humans and are going to be safe,” van Dijk said. “That is really the holy grail of drug development.” The lead authors on the October preprint were Yale’s R i z v i , Ya l e p o s td o c to ra l associate Daniel Levine, Aakash Patel GRD ’30, Shiyang Zhang GRD ’31, Curtis Jamison Perry MED ’18 GRD ’18 and Google DeepMind’s Eric Wang. Contact JONAS LOESEL at jonas.loesel@yale.edu.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” DON CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER
Hundreds protest against ICE after Minneapolis shooting BY ADELE HAEG STAFF REPORTER When asked why they came to the New Haven Green on Sunday afternoon, many protesters did not know where to start. “There are so many things that bring me here today,” protester Tisa Wenger said, including “the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, but overall, the climate of terror that ICE is perpetrating in cities across the country.” She held a sign that read, “Trump is a criminal.” Wenger was one of roughly 500 protesters who rallied on the Green to protest the Trump administration’s deportation campaign and demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers leave New Haven. The event was organized by members of the Connecticut chapter of the national 50501 protest movement and local Latino advocacy group Unidad Latina en Acción, as part of a nationwide “ICE Out for Good Weekend of Action.” The groups mobilized in response to an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old legal observer, in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, defended the shooting as an act of self defense, claiming that Good committed “an act of domestic terrorism,” which Minnesota officials disputed.
“All of a sudden, people are really, really mad,” said Alison Greenlaw, the Hartford County 50501 organizer. “People need to use that energy to get involved,” she added. Another 50501 representative, Gabriel Gonatice, said that the group usually requires a month to prepare for large-scale events, but organizers planned Sunday’s protest within a week. “This was a project, took some organizing, but it was made easier by the fact that so many people were inspired,” he said. Speakers led chants, including “not one more,” and “Impeach, convict, remove.” One read the names of every person killed by an ICE agent since the start of 2025. The last name he read was Renee Nicole Good’s. Sunday’s protest was preceded by a smaller rally outside of the New Haven courthouse on Thursday in reaction to three ICE arrests that occurred downtown that same day, according to the Connecticut Mirror. New Haven Police Department officers were informed of the arrests by ICE but were not involved in them, according to NHPD spokesperson Christian Bruckhart. ICE did not immediately respond to the News’ request for comment. Local activists have also protested at Tweed New Haven Airport since Avelo Airlines began operating deportation flights last April, in part
due to poor performance at Tweed. On Wednesday, however, Avelo announced that it would end its deportation flights. Compared to past months of anti-Trump advocacy, engagement with this week’s protests has been very high, according to Katherine Hinds, the leader of the Connecticut Visibility Brigade. Hinds said that Avelo’s decision to halt deportation flights has shown people that protesting is effective. During protests on highway overpasses, the group uses a clicker to tally how many honks, waves or other signs of acknowledgement they receive from passersby. Typically, the group gets about 500 “signs of engagement” per protest, Hinds estimated. Yesterday, Hinds said, about 2,500 people honked, waved or responded in other ways to their sign reading “ICE murders woman in MN.” Hinds believes that increased mobilization against ICE on the local level shows that “people are realizing that nobody is safe.” The protests in Connecticut have been peaceful, several organizers said. “You get the minor MAGA agitators who show up and swear at you,” Greenlaw said, but “nothing threatening.” Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26, who recently stepped down from his post as downtown’s Ward 7 alder, urged New Haven
WILLIAM QIAN / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
In response to a federal agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, local activist groups organized a rally calling for ICE officers to leave New Haven. officials to ensure immigrants’ safety as ICE remains in the city. Many protesters said they had previously heard reports of ICE agents in the area, but none interviewed by the News said they had seen an ICE agent. More than 2,000 ICE agents were present in the Twin Cities when Good was killed, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota.
Bruckhart wrote in a text to the News that he did not know how many ICE agents were in the city, but that “they’ve been here for years.” So far this year, three people have been shot observing immigration raids, including Good and two people in Portland on Jan. 8. Contact ADELE HAEG at adele.haeg@yale.edu.
Avelo stops ICE deportation flights after months of controversy BY ERIC SONG STAFF REPORTER After months of protests, Avelo Airlines will end its deportation flights for the Department of Homeland Security. Avelo CEO Andrew Levy
announced the end of Avelo’s work with the department in an email sent to employees last Tuesday and obtained by the News. The announcement coincided with the planned closure of three bases, including Avelo’s hub for deportation charter flights at the
ZOE BERG
The decision was announced in an email sent Tuesday to Avelo crewmembers. Avelo plans to lay off employees in the wake of further reductions in operations.
Mesa Gateway Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. These changes will come into effect after Jan. 26. “The program provided shortterm benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs,” Levy wrote. The company’s decision to end its collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security comes nine months after its original decision to begin deportation operations, announced in an internal email last April. Avelo began operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement the following month and has run hundreds of flights for ICE amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, leading to public backlash and calls for a boycott. In his email last Tuesday, Levy characterized the decision to begin deportation operations as a result of a “tough competitive environment in HVN,” referring to Avelo’s operations from Tweed
New Haven Airport. According to Levy, the program “promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy.” A n Ave l o s p o ke s p e rs o n did not respond to the News’ request for comment. Many organizations working in New Haven, including the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, Unidad Latina en Acción, Connecticut Students for a Dream and the Coalition to Stop Avelo formed last spring, organized frequent protests outside of Tweed to protest the contract. “Doing ICE’s dirty work doesn’t pay,” Anne Watkins, an organizer for the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, wrote in a statement to the News. “Avelo Airlines has finally caved and canceled its contract with ICE after months of pressure from New Haven Immigrants Coalition and allies around the country.” On Thursday, immigration advocacy organizations held a press conference at the New Haven County Courthouse, taking credit for the airline’s decision.
“We organized, we protested, we boycotted, and we said we would not stop until Avelo stopped being complicit in human suffering,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, said. The group also objected to the fatal shooting of Renee Good on Wednesday morning by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Avelo plans to refocus its passenger operations around fo u r a i r p o r ts : Twe e d New Haven Airport, Wilmington Airport in Delaware, ConcordPadgett Regional Airport in North Carolina, and Lakeland Linder International Airport in Florida. Levy also announced a round of layoffs due to the changes, resulting in a “smaller fleet and network.” CSI Aviation, the corporation contracting Avelo for ICE removal operations, made $660.6 million from federal contracts in fiscal year 2025. Contact ERIC SONG at e.song@yale.edu.
Union leaders, city officials tout public school teacher contract BY SABRINA THALER AND LEO NYBERG STAFF REPORTERS City officials and leaders of the New Haven teachers’ union announced a new contract at a Monday press conference, and the Board of Education voted unanimously to approve the contract on Monday night. The contract, which includes a 13.53 percent pay increase for teachers over three years and increased healthcare benefits, will cost the city around $20 million over the full three years, New Haven Public Schools superintendent Madeline Negrón said at the press conference. The teachers’ union held rallies during the negotiations calling for higher pay, better health coverage and a provision that would formally bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering schools. “Everyone here wants to pay our teachers even more and wants to provide even better benefits to our teachers,” Mayor Jusin Elicker said. “However, we’re in the condition of real financial constraints.” As district leaders craft their projected budget for the 2026-27 school year, they will factor in the necessary costs to fund the salary increase, New Haven Public Schools spokesperson Justin Harmon said in an interview. Whether NHPS can support the salary increase, Harmon explained, depends on support from beyond the school district. The city’s Board of
Education and the Board of Alders are responsible for approving the district’s budget, and the Board of Alders can set aside funding in its own annual budget to support NHPS. “We don’t have those dollars yet,” Harmon said. “That’s going to come through the process of presenting to the city and presenting to the state and trying to get other people to back us.” At the press conference, Elicker said the state government has not done its part to fund teachers. He said the foundation amount — the state’s contribution for each student’s education through its Education Cost Sharing, or ECS, formula — has remained stagnant since 2013. He called on the state to raise the foundation amount and index it to inflation. “We are doing our part. We are making the hard decisions,” Elicker said. “We need the state to do more so that we can provide our teachers with even better benefits and better salaries.” Negrón doubled down on the call to action. At Monday evening’s board meeting, she committed to “advocating aggressively” for increased funding at the state level, and said district leaders would collaborate with New Haven’s delegation in the state legislature. C o n n e c t i c u t ’s biennial budget for 2026 and 2027 included boosts in funding to early childhood and special education across the state, while continuing $11,525-per-student
payments for K-12 schools through the ECS formula. Leslie Blatteau ’97 GRD ’07, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said the union has worked to ensure that “respect isn’t just a slogan or a talking point, but something tangible that our members will actually see in their take home pay in the next three years.” Blatteau said this year’s bargaining team was the largest the teacher’s union had assembled for negotiations. She said the team distributed updates about negotiations to every member of the union. “This is a fair contract that will benefit all 1,175 members in the years that come,” Jenny Graves, the vice president of the New Haven Federation Teachers, said at the press conference. “We also know there is a lot of work to be done. Our students shouldn’t have to learn in buildings with no heat and leaky ceilings. Our educators shouldn’t have to dig into their own pockets to fund their classrooms.” Graves said the union and city agreed to table a review of student enrollment and class sizes until March 2028. While Blatteau said the teachers did not get the entire healthcare package they wanted, and Elicker said the teachers union “drove a hard bargain,” both sides celebrated the deal. Alder Sal Punzo, a longtime teacher and administrator in New Haven, said the deal was a success for both sides.
“The one thing you try not to do is to go to arbitration,” Punzo said. Graves highlighted the wealth gap between Yale and New Haven as she laid out potential goals for future negotiations. S h e s u g ge s te d t h a t t h e University’s increased support could help improve working conditions for teachers. “We know there is a $45 billion endowment that sits in the heart of the city, owned by an institution that continues to take over more and more property in our city, and the time is now for them to pay what they owe so that everyone in our city can thrive,” Graves said.
Through a six-year plan announced in 2021, Yale increased its annual voluntary contribution to New Haven’s budget in lieu of property taxes, amounting to over $135 million for the city. The University also sponsors a number of programs with local public schools, including the new Yale Teaching Fellowship and its Yale Pathways programs for local middle and high school students. The contract will go to the New Haven Board of Alders for final approval and is set to take effect July 1. Contact SABRINA THALER at sabrina.thaler@yale.edu and LEO NYBERG at leo.nyberg@yale.edu.
LEO NYBERG / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
The new contract for the city’s public school teachers gives teachers a raise and better healthcare coverage. Mayor Elicker said the teachers’ union “drove a hard bargain.”
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
“We’ve built a lot of momentum these past couple weekends as a team so I’m confident we can come out on top.” GRACIE GILKYSON ’26 HOCKEY
BASKETBALL: Yale to host Cornell in conference home opener BY BRODY GILKISON STAFF REPORTER The Yale men’s basketball team (12–3, 1–1 Ivy) will host the Cornell Big Red (7–8, 0–2 Ivy) on Saturday in the Bulldogs’ first home game of the new year. Yale enters the matchup having lost two of its past three games, while the Big Red have dropped three of their last four. After getting off to a blazing start to the season, the Yale offense has not been able to find its groove during the last couple of games. While ranked an impressive 38th in the nation in offensive output by the preeminent basketball statistic database, KenPom Ratings, the Bulldogs have recently fallen well below their impressive shooting splits from prior games this season. Over 15 games this year, the Bulldogs have averaged a 50 percent field goal percentage, 40 percent from beyond the arc and
77 percent from the charity stripe. However, in the past three games, the Elis have made just 40 percent of their shots from the field, 25 percent from downtown and 66 percent from the line. Despite the lower numbers, the Bulldogs will be eager to bounce back against a weaker Cornell defense, which has surrendered large quantities of points this season on many occasions. Indeed, Cornell has given up the most points against of any Ivy squad this season. “We know who we are, we have plenty of shooters and their time is coming,” junior point guard Trevor Mullin ’27 said in an interview. “Shots haven’t been falling lately, but we still have plenty of confidence in ourselves and know what we’re capable of.” On the defensive side of the ball, the Bulldogs will need to maintain their intensity as they move into the conference slate. Although KenPom ranks Yale a
mediocre 244 out of 365, primarily due to their opponents’ weaker offensive ratings, the Bulldogs have consistently put together strong defensive showings. Among the leaders of the Yale defense is third-year center Samson Aletan’ 26, who currently leads the Ivy League in blocks with an average of 1.9 per game. On the boards, Aletan ranks second in offensive rebounds and sixth in total rebounds, while teammate and team captain Nick Townsend ’26 ranks third in the league in total rebounds. With that pairing leading the stand, the Bulldogs have been able to use their size to their advantage around the rim, and they should continue to benefit from it against smaller Ivy League opponents. Saturday’s game will tip off at 2 p.m. at John J. Lee Amphitheater. Contact BRODY GILKISON at brody.gilkison@yale.edu.
YALE ATHLETICS
This weekend, the men’s basketball team will host Cornell on Saturday afternoon for the team’s third conference game and first home contest of 2026.
TRACK & FIELD: As competition picks up, Yale to host Dartmouth, Columbia
YALE ATHLETICS
After beginning their competitive season in December, Yale track and field will host a meet against Dartmouth and Columbia. BY INEZ CHUIDIAN STAFF REPORTER As the second semester begins, the track and field season continues, with competition already well underway. This Saturday, the Bulldogs will lace up their spikes against Dartmouth and Columbia in a meet at Coxe Cage. The Elis will be looking to carry over momentum gained in December into this Ivy League contest.
This weekend will mark the debut for many runners, throwers and jumpers who were sidelined by injuries or schedule conflicts in December, and the races on Saturday will thus provide a fuller picture of the team’s depth. Men’s team captain Andrew Farr ’26 expressed faith in the entire squad’s preparations for the weekend. “The team trained this fall with a real focus and purpose,” he wrote in a
text to the News. “The growth we’ve already seen in workouts reflects that commitment.” Additionally, Farr voiced optimism for the season ahead under the guidance of Director of Cross Country and Track & Field Courtney Jaworski. For Farr and his teammates, Jaworski has provided an extra layer of support and motivation. “With that came a renewed fire to transform the program
into something truly exceptional — and if played correctly, I think we have the pieces to be just that,” he said. Jaworski and his runners will look to build upon the team’s success last December, when its season officially opened. At the Yale, Penn and Boston University opener meets on the weekend of Dec. 5, several Bulldogs began their seasons with noteworthy performances. “This was one of the best season openers Yale Track has had in the past decade, and it was a great snapshot of where we are after a solid fall of training,” women’s captain Makayla White ’26 wrote in a message to the News. Seniors Owen Karas ’26 and Kenan Pala ’26 competed at Boston University, where Karas broke his own 5,000-meter school record by two seconds, finishing in 13 minutes and 51 seconds. On the women’s team, Claire Archer ’26 competed in the 5,000, where she positioned herself as fifth on Yale’s all-time list for the event with a time of 16 minutes and 19 seconds. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, multi-athletes Alyssa Anderson ’28 and Layni Kaase ’29 competed in the pentathlon. Kaase
finished fourth and Anderson followed in 13th. All other Yale track and field athletes remained in New Haven for the Yale Season Opener. Notable performances include Lucija Grd ’27 winning the 60-meter hurdles and Makayla Harris ’26 taking first in the weight throw. On the men’s side, Tanish Chettiar ’26 won the 1000-meter race and Brian Di Bassinga ’26 dominated the triple jump. Men’s team captain Andrew Farr ’26 set a personal record in the 60-meter dash, where his time of 6.69 seconds was just 0.01 seconds shy of the school record. White emphasized to the News that team unity has been a major priority for both her and Farr in their stints at captain. “Something Andrew and I have really tried to emphasize as co-captains is team-wide connection across event groups and across both the men’s and women’s teams,” she said. The Yale-Dartmouth-Columbia Meet will take place this Saturday. Field events will begin at 11 a.m., and track events at 2:30 p.m. Contact INEZ CHUIDIAN at inezchristina.chuidian@yale.edu.
WOMEN’S ICE HOCKEY: Elis hope to extend win streak in weekend series BY AUDREY KIM STAFF REPORTER The No. 11 ranked Yale women’s ice hockey team (14–7, 9–5 ECAC) will host a series of three games at home over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. The Elis will be looking to extend their six-game win streak. To do so, they will need to take down fearsome in-conference foes No. 14 Colgate (12–10–1, 7–4–1 ECAC) and No. 10 Cornell (11–6–2, 7–4–1 ECAC). “We may not have had the start we wanted to the season but the second half is a big opportunity for our team to improve in the rankings,” senior Gracie Gilkyson ’26 wrote to the News. “We’ve had a great start to 2026, especially with the win against Northeastern. I felt like we dominated that game, shutting out a number 6 ranked team at the time.” Gilkyson’s reference is to the team’s huge upset vic-
tory over Northeastern (16– 6, 12–1 Hockey East) on Jan. 6, when they earned not just a win but a 3-0 shutout against the then-No. 6 ranked team. The Bulldogs’ impressive victories have allowed them to climb the national rankings in the USA Hockey Women’s College Hockey Poll, and they’ll be looking to boost both their conference and national rankings with more wins this weekend. “Our games this weekend against two ranked opponents, Colgate and Cornell, are a huge opportunity for us to improve in the ECAC rankings. They should be two competitive games but we’ve built a lot of momentum these past couple weekends as a team so I’m confident we can come out on top,” Gilkyson wrote. Yale played both Colgate and Cornell earlier this season. The Bulldogs upset Colgate with a 5-4 overtime win on Nov. 1. However, the game against Cor-
Stat of the Week
nell ended in a frustrating 0-3 loss for the Elis. Even though Yale outshot the Big Red almost 2 to 1, the Bulldogs simply couldn’t find the back of the net. With the Bulldogs already having shown they can outplay both of these squads, the team’s improvement over recent weeks bodes well for a Yale sweep. A sweep would be massive for the Bulldogs because in addition to Colgate and Conrell both being ranked, they also each play in the ECAC conference with Yale, meaning that the outcome of these two games will have critical implications for Yale’s conference standing. The Elis currently sit second in the conference to Princeton (15–4, 10–2 ECAC), and Gilkyson and her teammates will be looking to continue their recent momentum and overtake the Tigers. To close out the weekend series, Yale will face off against Providence College (7–13–2,
YALE ATHLETICS
Over the long weekend, Yale will face off against ranked conference opponents Colgate and Cornell, as well as Providence College. 4–7–2 Hockey East) on Monday. Providence does not play in the ECAC, but a victory against the Friars will still be important for the Bulldogs’ standing in the national rankings.
Yale and Colgate will face each other at 6 p.m. on Friday at Ingalls Rink. Contact AUDREY KIM at audrey.kim.ajk234@yale.edu.
IN THE PAST THREE GAMES, THE MEN'S BASKETBALL TEAM HAS MADE JUST 40 PERCENT OF THEIR SHOTS FROM THE FIELD, 25 PERCENT FROM DOWNTOWN AND 66 PERCENT FROM THE LINE.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026
WEEKEND
looking din ner in the
fa c e be grateful for the food on your plate. // BY HANA TILKSEW
My dad once told me a story about Sara Gizaw, a 20th century Ethiopian princess. I’m not sure whether it’s true or just an urban legend, but the story goes that Sara was eating in the dining hall of Addis Ababa University when Emperor Haile Selassie entered. All students stood except Sara. Intrigued, the emperor approached her to ask why she remained seated. Sara responded that food ought to be esteemed even higher than a king. Haile Selassie was so impressed by this answer that he arranged a marriage between her and one of his sons, Prince Makonnen. We’ll never know if this is truly how Sara Gizaw came to marry Prince Makonnen, but this story stuck with me because it speaks to the old-world attitude that food is God’s gift and should not be taken for granted. In contrast, reverence towards food seems nonexistent in modern America, most likely because we have so much access to
it. We’re drowning in convenience store snacks and free bites at every professional and academic event. Globalization has made it possible to eat cheese made in France and seaweed shipped from Japan all from the comfort of my California home. Food is so ubiquitous for people in this country that not overeating sounds like a challenge. For most of human history, even the most powerful people didn’t have the abundance of food selection that we do. When I was a 12-year-old youth group attendee, I heard a priest say that, once upon a time, being a king meant you got the most meat and the biggest hut. There’s truth to what Victoria Ratliff said in “The White Lotus”: “No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have. Even the old kings and queens.” Last month, a first year told me, astonished, that he had seen someone eating alone in the dining hall without watching or reading something. The sight is an anomaly, but how many things can we really con-
sume at once? Our food, our shows, the reading we should have finished last night — we’re trying to combine things that should be digested on their own and paid due respect. And does our food not deserve our respect? We must think so in theory, or else we wouldn’t have compost bins set up in every dining hall on campus. But respecting food isn’t just about not wasting it. I remember being chewed out by my parents one Thanksgiving for goofing around at the table. To them, not taking a meal seriously — especially a meal that revolves around gratitude — was sacrilegious. Being properly grateful for food, which was once a luxury to our ancestors and is still a luxury in parts of the world — and in parts of this country — today, means taking food seriously. The only acceptable mid-meal stimulation was your company at the table. If you were eating alone, you were expected to put aside all distractions. It would be rude to your mashed potatoes if
you held your phone over them to catch up on unread texts. For much of my life, I thought my parents’ attitude was unnecessarily old-fashioned and provincial. But as someone who tends to scroll through dinner when I’m alone, I’ve realized how long it’s been since I’ve truly tasted a meal. As a child, my taste buds consciously received flavors. Now, I’m more focused on the funny TikTok I just saw. More than once, I’ve left a meal and realized I’m actually still hungry, but in my doomscrolling stupor, I failed to notice I hadn’t eaten enough to actually satisfy myself. I’m setting a resolution this semester: Any time I am eating alone, or waiting for someone to meet me in the dining hall, I’m going to pay attention to my food. I’m going to see it, smell it, and taste it the way I once did before I had a smartphone. For the first time in years, I’m going to look my dinner in the face. Contact HANA TILKSEW at hana.tilksew@yale.edu.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
WEEKEND ANTICIPATION CULTURE
Carpe Annum, Not Carpe Diem Why Make Resolutions on New Year’s Day? // BY PETER BURNS ILLUSTRATION BY JULIAN RAYMOND
When the ball dropped this past New Year’s, my dad and I were silent for a second that felt like an hour. We sighed. “And so the cycle continues,” I finally said, half-jokingly. I’d said the most cliché cynical thing about the start of a new calendar year. “You’re not exactly wrong,” he responded. We paused and stared at the TV screen. We’d spent the last hour watching Planet Fitness commercials and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which I’d quickly lost interest in after watching the Cotton Bowl. For us, New Year’s seemed like grating, corporate breadand-circuses with grown adult diapers in Times Square. New Year’s matters to a lot of people, I know. It always has. From the Roman pontifex praying to Janus, the god of thresholds and new beginnings, to celebrities singing on national television, this holiday has always marked a particularly special occasion. It’s a reason to start that thing that has been nagging at the soul for half a year or so, and take a deep breath and say to oneself, “it will be okay.” We collectively decide that it is time to change, and we remember that change is a normal and necessary part of living. In other words, we make resolutions. I accept this idea and I celebrate it. While I might’ve looked down on the televised celebrations, I do see value in the holiday. Like I assume many others did, I resolved to eat more responsibly, especially at breakfast. A daily $9 bagel from Glaze and Grind after the gym is neither a wise financial decision nor a dietary one. After falling victim to the sophomore slump last semester, I firmly committed to better my study habits. I am limiting my screen time and trying my best to wake up at a reasonable hour. But why do we focus on these personal commitments around this time of year? History and culture drive us to practice the custom of New Year’s resolutions. I don’t know exactly what about history drives us so, but it is tradition nonetheless. Setting goals and the start of a new calendar
year are practically synonymous at this point. Perhaps my question is better said thus: What stops us from setting and working toward goals at any other point during the year? If it is so natural to expect change from ourselves and others, why do we put it off until the bleak midwinter? When I pause and think for a second, my New Year’s resolutions are substantively no different from my general self-improvement goals. Eating a better breakfast is just a more specific detail from the umbrella category of staying fit and healthy. Improving my study habits and getting better sleep? I never had issues with studying and sleep before last semester’s slump. I want to be clear: I appreciate and respect everyone’s goals for the New Year, new or old. I sincerely hope that they come to fruition and that 2026 brings good things to us all. My cynical take on New Year’s stems from a lack of understanding of what makes the new year special. It is a time for community, for celebrating our lives and the time that we spend together. I’m glad we do this, but we should not limit these wonderful things to one holiday. As we move forward into 2026, treat every day like New Year’s. Make a mid-May resolution to reach out to your hometown friends or not to leave your laundry to the last minute. We should try to make every day a celebration of our time spent together. Let’s celebrate the small moments we keep to ourselves. Once they pass, they are gone. Let’s harvest those hours — make something of them. What we resolve to do one day guarantees nothing for the future. What we aim to do every day doesn’t either, but it does make us better.
As we move forward into 2026, treat every day like New Year’s.
Contact PETER BURNS at peter.burns@yale.edu.
WKND’s “ins” for 2026: AI abstinence throw blankets sunglasses tic tac toe thesauruses iguanas
ILLUSTRATION BY JULIAN RAYMOND
HOROSCOPES // BY KIVA BANK
It’s time for the annual tradition of students flocking to the gym at 8 a.m., ready to seize the day and their GPA. Everyone may be on their new year grind for now, but don’t worry, that will die off when reality sets in and midterms start. T-minus 36 minutes. Although our balls have already dropped for New Year’s, this week is still a fresh start for many. Emphasis on fresh with the “fresh” looks that can be spotted across campus. Everyone has a new hairstyle or dye job, but at least there’s something for your 2026 bingo card. Bonus points if you spot bob, bang, and bleach blonde in the first week back to school. You may have thought 2026 will be different from 2025, and you’re right! It’s much worse. But, hey, at least 20/26 is still a passing grade. Here is what the year has in store for you: Aries You have been attempting to use arts and crafts to cope with your spiral into Stranger Things conformitygate theories. Oh, and the impending collapse of the world. Alas, DIYing punch cards makes you want to punch a wall. Try boxing instead to manage your internalized aggression. Taurus You don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions because you believe that you are perfect. There’s nothing you need to change about yourself. Definitely not your inability to clean up after yourself. Unfortunately, your closest friends disagree. They even have their own spring break group chat to plan a getaway vacation from you. Fix your cleaning habits before they leave you behind for good. Gemini You’ve told everyone that you are trying to be more adventurous this year, but the only reason you’re learning how to ski is to find a Yusband. Your dreams of a prosperous match and cozying up in a Vail cabin are slipping away on the ice faster than you tumble down the slopes. Fulfill your romantic fantasies with the upcoming season of Bridgerton instead. Cancer Each year you tell yourself that you will create a vision board, and it never happens. This year is the year. Or at least, that’s what you told yourself before you hot glued your hands together. Maybe 2026 just isn’t your time for self improvement. Try again next year. Leo For your vision board, you took an entirely different route. Your focus this year is finding your dream partner, so you decided to stitch magazine clippings of Zohran Mamdani’s face on Michael B. Jordan’s body with Jacob Elordi’s long legs. However, your ideal boyfriend will remain a delusion if your big move is awkward eye contact across the lecture hall. Virgo You spent the holidays enjoying rural life in your small hometown of Nowhere,
USA. Despite what was supposed to be an uneventful and restful vacation, you managed to see Yale opps at your local gas station. You think you just have bad karma, but maybe this will spark some introspection on why you have archnemeses in the first place. Libra All throughout the break you were enjoying time with family and friends. How shameful. You should have been applying to internships and gaining 500+ connections on LinkedIn. Any efforts to do so now are futile. You are competing with your Ivy peers who spent their entire break curing cancer and saving dalmatians from burning buildings and the vicious claws of Cruella de Vil. Scorpio You want to be in the best shape of your life in 2026, but every plan that guarantees just that costs $10,000, your dignity and your first born child — annually. The good news? Spiraling and crying in the stacks is free of charge. Sagittarius This year, you want to get in touch with your inner child. For most others, this is a good way to self reflect and heal past trauma. However, as a child, you bit people. Parents. Siblings. Strangers. The stray cat. You name it, you probably thought it looked like a tasty morsel at some point. To avoid a regression into this dark past, perhaps you should look to the future instead and try journaling. Capricorn You had your schedule perfectly laid out before you arrived on campus. Then suddenly, your 9:25 a.m. class was canceled for the entire semester four minutes before it was supposed to start. Now you are scrambling to find another class and you will inevitably end up in the wrong seminar room because Coursetable lied to you, and you have to make an awkward exit midway through. But hey, life isn’t always perfect. You’re going to have to find an equally corny saying to get you out of this mess. Aquarius It’s been hard for you to find a New Year’s resolution that you can adopt, because you’re so quirky and different and special. Luckily, you resonated with the viral buttons trend and you will now overuse the quote “hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.” Most of your habits are unexplainable anyway. Pisces You’ve been back in your old routine of sacrificing study sessions for late night group hang outs at Est Est Est, which are all fun and games until your grades start to decline again. Let’s try to change that this year, okay? Remember, friendships are temporary, but transcripts are forever. Contact KIVA BANK at kiva.bank@yale.edu.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026· yaledailynews.com
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WEEKEND THROWBACK COLUMN
Pappy’s Picks: How to party like it’s 2016 // BY ANNA PAPAKIRK Want a movie rec? Need a new hobby or activity? Craving a sweet treat? With so many decisions and too many options in this world, allow me to help you make your pick. Hi! My name is Anna “Pappy” Papakirk, although only a select few from back home actually call me “Pappy.” I’m a junior in Branford studying economics and history. When I’m not in class — or doing my favorite activity: writing for the WKND desk — you can find me exploring. I love trying new things, whether that be discovering new places on campus, feasting at the restaurants of New Haven or watching a binge-worthy show. And when I come across anything that I truly enjoy or find something that achieves can’tlive-without status, I want to share it with all of you. Trust me, I’m not gatekeeping any of my favorites. That’s why “Pappy’s Picks” will give you suggestions to help you maximize your days and find the little things that can bring you joy. Without further ado, take your pick. “‘Cause they say two thousand twenty-six Party over, oops out of time So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 2016” In his famous song “1999,” Prince made a bold statement, refusing to enter the new year at the turn of the millennium and instead to “party like it’s 1999.” And for those of you who haven’t heard, this new year, we are taking a lesson from the books of this legendary popstar and turning back the clocks — but this time to 2016. Snapchat’s dog filter is making a comeback, and so are Kylie Lip Kits. The internet is ringing in the new year by reviving decade-old trends rather than embracing a bleaker future. I didn’t mind 2016, but I wouldn’t want to go back to being 12 again. The teenage cultural references that Kylie Jenner keeps posting about online were far from my sixth grade experience. I had a full set of braces and was learning algebra for the first time. Sounds like a party, right? However, if you, like me, want to reclaim those notoriously awkward
middle school years then 2026 might be the year for you. Perhaps relive the sweeter side of life — when you may have not even been a teenager but rather a tween-ager — then 2026 is the year for you. The whole year is a party that your tween-age self was dying to go to. And
this time you’re actually invited — the link is on my Snapchat story. Here are my picks for how to party like it’s twozero-one-six. Acoustics and albums Like my dad always tells me, the key to a good party is music. For this bash honoring the year two-zero-one-six, here is the mix. The playlist is going to start with something a little unconventional. I don’t think I would play these songs at an actual function, but for my personal party, the Hamilton soundtrack is
taking center stage. I still remember early morning car rides to school, these tunes blasting from the speaker, with my favorite songs being the ballads of King George. What’s more fitting is that as the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial
this year, I’ll be brushing up on American history at just the right time — and in a very entertaining way. So yes, we are going back to 1776 too, I guess. Other albums I’ll be tuning into are Justin Bieber’s “Purpose,” with hits like “What Do You Mean?” and “Sorry.” Hello? I almost forgot about Adele’s album “25,” featuring the classic “Hello” and “Water Under the Bridge.”
theme here, this is the fit I’m rocking into the new year. My statement piece is going to be a bomber jacket. Full disclosure, I didn’t own one then, and I don’t own one now. Remember — 2016 was the beginning of my awkward middle school years, so I had no sense of style. However, since I’m reclaiming the year, I’m going to do it right by following the fashion trends of the time. What I did own plenty of was chokers, so that’s how we’ll accessorize. At my middle school, the black choker with a singular white pearl was the accessory to own. I probably made my mom go to seven different stores trying to find one because I just had to have it. It truly works well with any outfit. Activities and accoutrements If there was one type of party that defined 2016, it was the house party. This January, you’ll be the one … the one, the one impressing every party guest by crushing the bottle flip challenge while the speaker blasts Ultimate by Denzel Curry. After that, we’ll get the whole group involved with the mannequin challenge. Everyone will literally be frozen in time, reminiscing on the good ol’ days of 2016. As an homage to my sixth-grade self, we are whipping out the Elmer’s glue and laundry detergent for this party’s slime-making station. Back in 2016, my friends and I were so infatuated with this craft, our Instagram feeds were filled with slime ASMR and various tutorials. We even made bank selling slime to other sixth graders. And about a week after sky-rocketing revenues, slime was completely banned from my middle school. Nevertheless, it makes for a super fun — and somewhat therapeutic — arts and crafts project. Let’s not forget the best part of any party — the party favors! No one is leaving my party empty-handed, so I’m opting to give everyone a fidget spinner. You don’t always get the chance to relive your youth, so be sure to swipe up and RSVP. #YOLO
Apparel and accessories One of my favorite parts about going to any party is dressing up, especially if there’s a theme. And since 2k16 is the
Contact ANNA PAPAKIRK at anna.papakirk@yale.edu.
STYLE
In 2026, trends are trending down // BY FABEHA JAHRA Every December, fashion tries to tell us what’s coming next. Editors publish forecasts, brands release trend reports and social media asserts certainty about what we’ll all be wearing next year. The language is always confident — this silhouette, this shoe, this aesthetic. But living through 2025 made me skeptical of how much the calendar actually controls style these days. At the start of 2025, the predictions felt neat. Elevated basics. Statement outerwear. A return to polish after years of loungewear. And in some ways, they were right. Wool coats stayed long. Tailoring felt sharper. People cared again about how outfits came together, not just about how comfortable they were. But that isn’t the full story. What actually defined 2025 wasn’t one look; it was how fast looks came and went. Microtrends moved at internet speed. One month it was ballet flats, then Sambas, then suddenly polka dots were everywhere — on sheer tops, skirts, tights, even
accessories — before quietly fading back into the background. I’ll admit I was rooting for them. I’ve always been a fan of polka dots, the kind of print that feels playful without trying too hard, familiar but never boring. Watching them resurface felt less like a trend moment than a small personal win. By the time December rolled around, it was clear that consistency mattered less than adaptability. People weren’t committing to trends; they were sampling them. Wool coats stayed, how they were worn changed. Sneakers rotated. Prints appeared briefly, disappeared, then resurfaced and styled differently. Outfits became modular, built to be reinterpreted instead of replaced. To me, that’s why the 2026 style predictions feel different. Less about reinvention, more about refinement. The early signals point toward structure without stiffness, nostalgia without costume. Tailoring is back, but softer. Pants matter
again. Shoes are playful but grounded. Prints like polka dots don’t need to dominate to matter, they slip into outfits naturally and are part of a longer conversation with personal taste. If 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that style doesn't move linearly. Trends don’t just rise and fall, they loop, remix and overlap. A silhouette from 10 years ago comes back but is styled with different proportions. A familiar print reappears not as a headline, but as background texture. The calendar says it’s a new year, but styles don’t reset, they accumulate. So maybe 2026 won’t be defined by a single look at all. Maybe it’ll be about editing rather than chasing. Wearing things longer. Letting personal taste catch up to trend cycles that move too fast to follow anyway. Looking back, the most accurate predictions for 2025 weren’t specific items. They were about a mood: a shift toward intention
in clothes that feels chosen rather than accidental. If that continues into 2026, then trends won’t disappear, they’ll just matter less than how we wear them.
Contact FABEHA JAHRA at fabeha.jahra@yale.edu.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026 · yaledailynews.com
WEEKEND LUXURY PERSONAL ESSAY
Today is not a beach day // ESMERALDA VAZQUEZ-FERNANDEZ Almost every day in Southern California is a beautiful day. Except for this past winter break, when we got enough rainwater to fuel a couple AI generators. In California, there is a certain ease about not having to carry a puffer everywhere and never needing to open the weather app. As a SoCal resident, I’ve never known a real winter. However, I quickly learned what winter entails and it was at first a cultural shock. Every morning here in New Haven, I study the day’s weather forecast before going outside. Don’t get me started on wind chill and water pouring from the sky. I learned about the water cycle in eighth grade, but I had never seen it in action until now. Weather is an added stressor to my day-to-day schedule. I remember dropping my study guide into a puddle during a midterm season rainstorm. Torrential rain is harsher than sea spray. I longed for the days where I would take a beach trolley to work. Picking up my study guide made me wish it was still possible to get a sunburn — a comfort I didn’t appreciate until now. In general, outdoor activities are more of a rare occurrence in New Haven as the temperature declines. This is an unfamiliar phenomenon for those who grew up frolicking outside all year round. This time of year, there are no more hikes up East Rock with friends. Twin treadmills in the Morse
basement will have to do. In the peak ILLUSTRATION BY YOLANDA WANG of the cold, I wish I could just drink an iced matcha latte without my fingers suffering from hyperthermia. Maybe that’s why they invented gloves. There is a loss that comes with winter. In a literal sense, sunlight is robbed by the winter season, leaving room for seasonal depression to creep in. That impending loss is often compounded with dread and anticipation of the sunless season. I could be thinking about my life at home, where there’s sun and beach days all year round. Instead of dwelling on what I can not control, I choose to see the new experiences with the new season. The infectious joy of seeing people excited for the first snow. Feeling partly jealous of people’s beautiful Penny Lane coats. I have a newfound gratitude for the sunny hours in the afternoon. Winter can be romanticized, just like a tourist beach town in Orange County. New daily traditions, like waking up early in the morning to drink my iced latte inside of the the season, but either way it's a new Acorn instead of outside. Sleeping feeling. over at my friends dorms instead of I still long for the comfort and bracing a cold late night walk back to pleasure of SoCal’s undeniably great mine. Movie and game nights seem weather, but I never forget why I more appealing than wandering the moved across the country. I moved to streets. There is almost a child-like grow, experience the unfamiliar, and wholesomeness that comes with be in a city where I would likely never winter. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of
REVIEW
Contact ESMERALDA VAZQUEZFERNANDEZ at esmeralda.vasquez-fernandez@yale.edu.
SEX ON THE WEEKEND
Serving ego and ping-pong
in “MARTY SUPREME” // BY STEPHANIE ALSTCHUL The phrase “MARTY SUPREME CHRISTMAS DAY” was plastered across my social media for three weeks preceding the release of Josh Safdie’s newest project. Before I knew what the film was about, I associated it with traffic-cone orange, an exclusive bomber jacket that seemed to adorn every A-lister’s outfit and a blimp that flew over Tyler, The Creator’s set at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival in Southern California. The elaborate marketing scheme for “Marty Supreme” blurred the lines between promotion and performance; it promised me one of the best movies of the year, and I’m pleased to report that, in some respects, the film delivered just that. The film follows Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, as he hustles around ’50s Manhattan preparing for the International Table Tennis Championship. Marty sets the pace of the film, running in between scenes and falling through floors, emboldened by the notion that he has a superior purpose in life. He can accomplish anything he sets his mind to and hasn’t a shadow of a doubt that he will achieve his life’s singular goal. The camera loves Chalamet; he’s often center frame and is rarely out of the audience’s view. In this way, Safdie builds the setting around his title character. We see the gritty visuals of the ’50s Lower East Side and Brooklyn, but the soundtrack features ’80s standout tracks with textured synths from Bowie, Blondie and Tears for Fears. The characters, too, seem to be plucked out of a 1970’s “Godfather” version of New York. This disorienting collision of eras is at odds with Marty’s fierce sense of direction. As viewers, our North Star is an acne-scarred, unibrowed protagonist who, surprisingly, is an Olympic-level athlete on the ping pong table … and in bed. The hustle-mentality seems shared by actor and character, and in many ways Marty’s desire for stardom parallels Chalamet’s own exponential trajectory. Many view Chalamet’s Marty performance as a highlight of Chalamet’s career. The range demonstrated by Marty’s Machiavellian self-preservation — which is so at odds with boyish sensitivity of Chalamet’s Elio in “Call Me by Your Name” — is particularly striking. As a character, though, Marty fails in his simplicity. We see little of his backstory and rarely, if ever, see a different side of his neverending drive. He’s an antihero, at his best, and entirely dislikable at his worst. Marty’s idea of his “purpose” is perhaps intended to inspire audiences, but the numerous consequences of his ego, namely the iconic spanking scene in which Chalamet refused to have a butt-double, leave me
get the chance to live in. Winter is just a season, just as college is just one experience. Embrace it.
unconvinced. Many of the arthouse films A24 produces and distributes have incredible, intricate messages that can be illusive to the viewer on a first watch. Films like “Moonlight,” “The Florida Project” and “Lady Bird,” also starring Chalamet, are incredible examples of the studio’s most auteur-driven projects. “Marty Supreme,” boasting the slogan “Dream Big” as though it were a radical call-to-action felt a little more shallow than I would have liked. In fact, the film’s message seems most aligned with Chalamet’s co-star Odessa A’zion, who plays Rachel Mizler, Marty’s married girlfriend. She has the “big dreams” that A24 proposes: dreams for a better life and freedom from an emotionally abusive relationship. She has her own kind of hustle, but unlike Marty she seems to balance it with a healthy dose of empathy. She’s unafraid to admit fault, and even less afraid to stand strong behind her beliefs. Marty, unmoving and uncompromising, in turn highlights Rachel’s own humanity, but their dynamic is anything but mutualistic. Her absence on screen during the finale seems a consequence of Marty's egotistical selfpreservation and obsession with legacy. The camera, perhaps intentionally, mirrors these vices. Set in such a tumultuous time politically, “Marty Supreme” breathes life into its depiction of the Jewish experience in America and abroad. While visiting England to participate in the first Table Tennis Championship pictured in the film, Marty labels himself as “Hitler’s worst nightmare.” The film treats each Jewish experience uniquely, culminating in a wonderful display of reinvention, self-determination and pride in individual struggle. Wally, a supporting character played by Tyler Okonma, or Tyler, The Creator, introduces the Black struggle into the mix as well. His casual antisemitism seems to roll off the tongue, deflected by Marty’s casual racism in return. The two are a dynamic duo, with Wally being the one character who comes close to checking Marty’s inertia. As a whole, the film is a rollercoaster of plot twists, class clashes and a struggle for greatness against all odds. While it runs the risk of idealizing the selfcentered egoism that is precisely what our world needs less of, it ultimately presents several stories of humanity in the face of all sorts of hardship. In the end, the slogan “Dream Big” may be a reckoning with who is allowed to do so. Contact STEPHANIE ALTSCHUL at stephanie.altschul@yale.edu.
Back to Basics Pining after your FroCo? Dying to get on the orgy panlist? Sick of seeing khakis on men? You’re in luck! Welcome to Sex on the WKND, the Yale Daily News’s anonymous column dedicated to answering your burning questions about sex, love and anything in between. Obsessing over sex is a Yale tradition as old as the Oldest College Daily itself. Whether you have a seminar with a hookup-gone-wrong or accidentally sent a raunchy text to your chemistry study group, Sex on the WKND is ready to help. You’ve made it through a long and hard and messy semester. Too many failed threesomes, bisexual awakenings and hallway crushes that left you alone on Friday nights with your hand in your pants. Some of you left your dorms for winter break with an unopened Trojan condom in your desk and an itchy ingrown crotch you shaved for no damn reason. But don’t worry, it’s college. Somebody, somewhere, will be willing to bump uglies in the Sterling 6M stacks. You don’t need to be that desperate — unless you were dropped during fall Leo rush — but for all the sexually-interested goons gracing our campus this spring, here’s a guide to the possible experiences this campus has to offer. THE MARRIAGE PACT PARTNER: Whether it’s true love at first sight or a last ditch effort to avoid being single for a brutal New England winter, the two of you can shack up like a Discord moderator and his kitten until April. You can eat every meal together and do all the things that couples should. Are you sexually attracted to him? No. Is he consistent with the “good morning princess” texts? Hell yeah. THE HOT MESS: Emphasis on hot. You didn’t think she’d be that clingy when you asked her out, much less so when you shackled yourself to her with a bottle of champagne. You only figured out her attachment issues after Thanksgiving break, when you were stuffed with more “I miss you” texts than the turkey. She spends her days, and nights now, liking Instagram reels about yearning and exboyfriends. You might’ve missed her if she hadn’t plastered herself all over your Instagram feed with faux-hickeys that were a little too hard to miss. She’s hot though. When running it back this spring, proceed with caution and clear expectations. ABROAD PIECE OF ASS: You left this summer with experience, but it wasn’t in the classroom. You were too busy sexting, sucking, and jumping on that guy from your Econ 115 lecture that you reconnected with abroad at LSE. Is it still called crabs in England? If you’re not sure, ask your crotch and the nurses at Yale Health. THE GIGGLER: She giggled when you kissed for the first time. Cute. At your frat’s formal, you told her it was your favorite thing about her. Sweet. That changed when she couldn’t stop laughing before or after you put it in. Only her gay best friend knows why. The two of them will make eye contact with you from across the Berkeley dining hall. He will look at you with sympathy and a bit of pity, hard to tell. And she will giggle. Submit tips to Sex On The Weekend on yaledailynews.com.