Defend public health includes over 3,000 public health professionals, scientists, clinicians, legal experts, students and advocates. According to Gonsalves, the group seeks to respond to growing political interference in public health infrastructure, including proposed cuts to Medicaid, changes to scientific leadership and shifts in federal research priorities. While the coalition is based at Yale, it includes members from across the country and is focused on broad issues ranging from vaccine policy, reproductive healthcare, biomedical research funding to health equity. 

“We’re all doing this on our own time, and the passion and commitment of so many people in the moment gives me hope,” Gonsalves wrote to the News.

Defend Public Health publishes and promotes op-eds and hosts tele-conferences with union leaders and representatives in order to raise awareness about the threats facing public health, among other initiatives. Additionally, they wrote an open letter opposing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Gonsalves hopes to work and collaborate with diverse groups, and encourages  students to get involved. This past Sunday, Defend Public Health’s student caucus held their first meeting, involving undergraduate and graduate students from around the country.

“I cannot think of a time in American history when the voice, skill and ingenuity of students was more needed,” Gonsalves said.

Caitlin Ryus, professor of Emergency Medicine at the School of Medicine, became involved with Defend Public Health in November. 

Ryus felt that her background with science research and clinical work would allow her to participate in the organization’s advocacy efforts. 

“We’re seeing public health infrastructure, which was built over decades, being threatened, whether that’s through funding cuts, politicized leadership changes or anti-science rhetoric,” Ryus said.

She believes it is important for experts to communicate clearly with the population about public health.

Clear communication, Ryus told the News, prevents trust from further being eroded and public health information from being misinterpreted.

“I think that’s one of the great things about Defend Public Health,” Ryus said. “They are trying to bring science out of the ivory tower, through op-eds, social media usage, and grassroots partnerships.”

Ryus also believes protecting public health is particularly important right now. During the COVID-19 pandemic, society relied on “well-funded and nimble scientific infrastructure.” Even now, these qualities are important in fighting seasonal viruses and facilitating research on vaccines and infectious disease treatment.

Ryus has been personally impacted by political attacks on science infrastructure. As a researcher, she relied on grants from the NIH, but had her funding cut. 

“One of the grants supporting my work, which was looking at mental health impacts of different types of homeless shelters, was just terminated less than a week ago,” Ryus said. “We were told it no longer aligned with NIH priorities. That sends a troubling message that research is being deprioritized for vulnerable communities.”

Defend Public Health has taken public stances against figures within the Trump administration.

Mindy Jane Roseman, director of International Law Programs and director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights at the Yale Law School, signed the open letter from Defend Public Health opposing Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

Roseman’s work focuses on how international human rights norms and laws improve health outcomes, particularly regarding sexual and reproductive health. While funding for her work does not depend on US government support directly, she is still concerned that the Trump administration wants to remove the voices of underrepresented patients from public health policy, including women and non-gender-conforming patients.

“One size does not fit all,” Roseman said. “It’s important to have diverse representation when doing any kind of health research, because each person’s lived experience really matters.”

By signing the open letter, Roseman hoped to demonstrate she is part of a community who is worried about public health policy. The letter was a “basic exercise of first-amendment rights,” she said, and participating in it is a “fundamental act of democracy.”

Roseman said she hoped the students and younger generations would be energized to stand up for what they believe in and to prevent the federal government from taking further destructive measures.

“Is voicing your dissent going to change policy?” Roseman asked. “We’ll see. But there have already been rollbacks and modifications to some Trump administration policies, and it is all because people have spoken up.”

As of April 14, 2025, Defend Public Health has 7.7k followers on Blue Sky.

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The pop-up exhibition, co-hosted by the Program in Jewish Studies and the Chaplain’s Office, and curated by professor Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Jewish Studies librarian Konstanze Kunst, displayed haggadot — the traditional book read at Passover — from across many centuries and countries, showcasing Jewish history and tradition in advance of the holiday of Passover.

“I wanted to bring people together around a shared topic of learning, so that people would be able to come together and each learn something new that they didn’t know when they walked in,” Gribetz said. “How do you create a community around learning and books and holidays?”

Gribetz began planning this event a few months ago, after attending a meeting with various student groups and the chaplain’s office about the upcoming holiday of Passover.

In the exhibit, by using historical materials from Jewish communities around the world, including Italy, Amsterdam, North Africa and Russia, she hoped visitors would engage with a diverse set of traditions.

“There’s something very powerful about seeing and coming into direct contact with artifacts from the past,” Gribetz said. “There’s something different about seeing a medieval manuscript or rare book in person, rather than seeing it on a computer screen or in a printed book. That’s why the amazing resources at the library can be very powerful for sparking academic interest and curiosity.”

Gribetz found the partnership between faculty, librarians and graduate students meaningful while she was assembling the exhibit. The collaborative atmosphere, where different groups are encouraged to participate and contribute to projects such as this one, creates an inclusive community that she values.

Ruth Foster GRD ’30, a first-year doctoral student seeking a religious studies degree, presented information for visitors about two modern “art haggadot” from Israel at the exhibit. The pages were full of richly colored art depicting the Passover story.

“Even though, historically and geographically, there are different interpretations of the Exodus story, there’s also an inherent intertextuality to all of [the haggadot], because they’re telling the same story and using the same images,” Foster said, “even if one is from Amsterdam in the 18th century and one is from Haifa in the 21st century.”

Foster finds the haggadot interesting to compare, because each of them is responding to the moment in which they were created, reflecting various traditions and ideologies.

Among the other haggadot in the room were ones from 18th-century Amsterdam, Communist Russia and one created by Holocaust survivors.

On the other side of the room, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library curator Agnieszka Rec showed visitors a Latin medieval manuscript. Not a haggadah like many of the artifacts in the room, this book told Christian medieval communities how to calculate the date of Easter depending on the date of Passover.

The manuscript showcased the interaction between different religious communities in the medieval era.

“A lot of medieval Latin manuscripts talk about Judaism in extremely negative terms,” Rec said. However, this manuscript demonstrates the constructive ways that Christian communities interacted with Judaism, which she values.

Daniel Dumontet ’28 came to the exhibit because he took a class with Gribetz last semester.

“A lot of the time, it seems like the holidays and religious texts in Judaism are insurmountable in their tradition,” Dumontet said, “and yet something like [this exhibit] shows that it’s actually a very alive religion that we can all make our own and draw historical lessons from.”

The haggadah created by Holocaust survivors stood out to Dumontet. He found the expressive drawings in the book very meaningful and thought they evoked emotions similar to those of the ancient Israelites fleeing Egypt in the Passover story.

Gribetz thinks that over time, Passover has become a family holiday, with traditions unique to each group that celebrates it. At the same time, she said, it has a communal dimension.

“[Displaying the haggadot] creates a bridge between home, family and community, as well as learning and culture,” Gribetz said.

Passover begins April 12 at sundown.

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Anna and Tom live in Berlin, having moved there from their backwater, boring unnamed Southern European home. As digital nomads, nothing ties them down — so long as they have internet connection, they can build a life. So they are drawn to Berlin, which is young and lively, full of art and clubs and other young foreigners like themselves, with whom they can speak slightly skewed English and German.

Like many of my friends at Yale, I sometimes dream about living in another country. I wonder what it would be like to uproot my existence and transplant myself into a totally unknown place. I imagine the thrill of discovering that the world is larger and more interesting than the slice of the Northeast I have always called home. The grass is always greener, as the saying goes, and part of me truly believes the grass would be greener across the ocean.

In Latronico’s Berlin, Anna and Tom furnish a simple, sophisticated, humble and comfortable home. With plants and Scandinavian chairs and artistic, colorful magazines dotting the rooms, it sounds, again, like the fantasy life I have described to my friends. This apartment is not clinically clean, though. Uncluttered, yet homey nonetheless, it represents a perfection that somehow seems down-to-earth, because I can imagine myself picking out the herbs that grow on the windowsill in the kitchen and the “reproduction print of a British wartime poster” that hangs on the wall. It has shelves of blue and white enamel dishes, along with “mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices.” This is an attainable level of perfection.

It’s not perfect, though. Anna and Tom are unmoored: because they aren’t constrained by any community, by any working environment, they find themselves somewhat adrift in Berlin after a couple of years. Nothing keeps them tethered, and they miss that sense of responsibility, of obligation. Undeniably, Latronico has a good point. Without any sort of commitment or intentionality, without a path forward, life feels frustratingly aimless. It’s a rude awakening to read, hearing that the dream life I’ve always envisioned might just be a dream, might not be feasible — if I want to be truly happy. 

Anna and Tom — do they end up happy? After bouncing around to Lisbon, to Italy, in search of a new digital nomadic lifestyle, they are saved, ironically, by the family they’ve left behind. Anna inherits a rambling estate from a deceased uncle, which they decide to turn into a bed and breakfast. They find purpose in running the property, in crafting a curated, delightful image of life for their visitors, so that when guests come to stay, they believe they have found perfection. 

But this conclusion, to me, is tinged with a cynical undertone. Is this meaningful commitment? Or are Anna and Tom simply perpetuating the fantastical delusions that they’ve been caught in for years, now passing them onto others? In a way, it feels like they’re only going in circles, that they will never be free from reaching for an unattainably perfect future.

I reflect on my own expat dreams, which have, at various points, included studio apartments in Paris or evening bike rides along the canals of Copenhagen. But I haven’t chosen those cities for any particular reason, just like Anna and Tom didn’t choose Berlin for any reason. Berlin merely represented an exciting, exotic, new environment, a pool into which they could plunge headfirst and never emerge to the surface.

In reality, they — and I — will always emerge to the surface. The thrill of novel surroundings will diminish, and reality will take over. Then, the question is, do I like what I find at the surface? Anna and Tom did not. They found nothing. So I want to find something — meaning, intentionality — at the surface.

After all, my intentional connections and commitments center my life right now. Watching new movies with friends, attending College Teas in the afternoons, settling down at Book Trader Cafe with a vegan chai and an essay to write — my life is enriched by these things. Instead of being carried away by the unreachable depths of my surroundings, I want to bask in the meaning that I create in my life. And there, perhaps, is perfection.

The post What is perfection? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In five amazing books, “The Penderwicks” series tells the story of a family in Massachusetts. Originally, it began as a modern-day riff on Lousia May Alcott’s “Little Women”; four daughters — Rosalind, Skye, Jane and Batty — live with their father, Mr. Penderwick, after their mother dies when they are young. In the first book, on a summer vacation in Western Massachusetts, they meet Jeffrey, a boy who lives next door with his mean and strict mother. Jeffrey, like Alcott’s Laurie, becomes close to the Penderwick sisters and accompanies them on various adventures, sneaking into attics and making up games as they pass a playful summer. “The Penderwicks” expands beyond “Little Women,” though, and it finds its true stride in the following books. The sisters go to school, play soccer, swap homework assignments with disastrous results and go trick-or-treating with their across-the-street-neighbors — developing the characters beyond Alcott’s archetypes into fully-fledged people.

In “The Penderwicks in Spring,” Mr. Penderwick has remarried, and their family has expanded with two little siblings. Rereading it as a college student, it brought me the same joy as when I was 11. The characters jump out of the page — Batty’s new obsession with singing, two-year-old Lydia’s refusal to sleep in a “big-girl bed” and Skye’s relentless pursuit of math, doing homework at the dining hall, tugging her hair in all directions. I know these people — I’ve watched them grow up, watched them live a mundane life that Birdsall makes novel and exciting. 

Birdsall weaves together scenes of controlled chaos, like a moment preparing for Skye’s birthday party. Older siblings cook quesadillas in the kitchen; younger siblings swipe licks of cake batter and frosting; high-school-aged friends scavenge for pretzels in the pantry. I look around, in the kitchen with them, hearing the overlapping conversations. I can practically smell the cheese melting in the tortillas and see batter spilled on the kitchen floor tiles.

These scenes remind me of the best parts of everyday life, easily-forgotten moments when I just exist, my guard down. I recall childhood family gatherings, with various aunts, uncles and cousins descending on plates of snacks and hor d’oeuvres; evenings with my parents in our kitchen, the radio warbling in the background, as I do homework at the table and one of my parents puts on rice or chops broccoli; afternoons my friends and I spent imagining that the bushes in front of our houses were secret bases in complex spy games. Reading “The Penderwicks,” I am thrown back into these memories, comforted by my literary family.

Upon reflection, many of my favorite childhood books pay homage to mundane life. In Madeleine L’Engle’s, “The Austin Family Chronicles,” the titular Austin family lives in a rambling house — also perhaps in Massachusetts … or perhaps my Massachusetts origins bias me — with cozy bedrooms and a small office for their scientist parents. The siblings argue, learn and grow together, and just as with “The Penderwicks,” the quiet moments of shared dinners and conversations between characters feel realistic, inviting me into their lives. Sydney Taylor’s “All of a Kind Family” features young siblings in early 20th century Jewish New York. My eight-year-old self wanted to live with them, to celebrate Shabbat with their parents, sneak candy in bed and check too many books out from the library. Even when they got scarlet fever, their lives were interesting.

Perhaps in these books I overly romanticize childhood and family life. Not every day is blissful; no family is perfect. These stories depict only a slice of what growing up looks like. And yet I find them compelling and comforting, and not in a trite way.  The characters show us how they create a home — and they remind me how lucky I am to have one.

So over spring break I lay on the blue couch in my living room, the same room where I watched hours of “Parks and Rec,” where my friends and I played endless rounds of cards, where I built toy train tracks with my younger cousins. Outside, the weather crept into the 50s, March slowly trudged towards April and the grass, previously withered and yellow, turned green again. I was at home.

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The panelists, from the Nature Conservancy, the School of Drama, the Peabody Museum and the School of the Environment, discussed how to make climate change a more relatable issue for various audiences, including the value in creating a narrative arc about climate change, remaining optimistic about the climate and encouraging substantive engagement with nature.

“Climate change is so all-encompassing that it actually touches all of us in every single possible way,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, panel moderator and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “Food you’re eating is related to climate change. If your kid has asthma, you should care about climate change. If you like chocolate, you should care about climate change. If you’re a person of faith, you should care about climate change.”

Leiserowitz works to make climate change universally understandable, so that a wide range of people understand how it affects their lives. As part of this, he hosts Climate Connections, a daily radio program broadcast across the country.

On Climate Connections, he incorporates stories about climate change from all sections of society, listening to the perspectives of Democrats, Republicans, politicians, scientists and more. He hopes this will help them appreciate the enormity and impact of climate change, without the influence of political discourse.

“How do we help people see that this is not an issue we need to care about only because of politics?” Leiserowitz asked at the panel. “The climate system doesn’t care whether you’re Democratic or Republican.”

Emily Sorensen, a doctoral candidate at the School of Drama, also spoke at the panel. She studies ecodramaturgy, which includes combining theater and drama with ecological topics. 

In the past, she has worked with kids, helping them to explore and engage with nature. She acknowledged that sometimes it is challenging to remain optimistic, when information about climate change is typically disheartening.

“It’s so important to follow up saying ‘this is bad,’ with ‘this is what people are doing about it,’” Sorensen said. “So you can leave feeling that even though things are bad, we can work on it.”

It is important, Sorensen said, that the audience does not become discouraged but leaves feeling empowered.

Another panelist, Susan Butts, is the director of collections and research at the Peabody Museum. She explained that, in the Peabody’s exhibits, she and her colleagues try to tell a story, weaving together positive and negative parts of history to create a nuanced conversation.

For example, she said, “Let’s tell a story of corn. Let’s give this full-bodied story that looks at the history of corn, and then let’s also talk about conservation at the same time. So we learn that we’re affecting life on Earth in different ways, but we also learn how we’re protecting life on Earth.”

Butts and her colleagues seek to create a narrative that engages the audience, instead of alienating them, tying together many pieces of information to create a balanced presentation.

Additionally, panelist Susan Wollschlager, director of marketing and communications for the Nature Conservancy in Connecticut, explained that her organization encourages people to get out in nature. She referenced the Farmington River, one of Connecticut’s endangered rivers, which has been harmed by an outdated hydroelectric dam.

“Our hope is for people to think, ‘How is this ecosystem and habitat being affected? What could it look like if that whole area was restored?’” she said. “We want people that are hiking at the river to feel connected to that river, to want to protect it and learn more.”

Wollschlager aims to instill a sense of commitment and responsibility in her audience.

Furthermore, Leiserowitz said, spreading a message of love is crucial.

“At the heart of [our work against climate change] is love. We love certain things,” Leiserowitz said. “Even if you didn’t know about a creature in a documentary until you finally saw it, learning about it could inspire something in you to care about that creature, or that ecosystem, or that landscape, or those people, in a way that you didn’t fully appreciate before.”

The Environmental Film Festival takes place April 1-5.

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After services, each grade split off to a different room. We sat around a single table, shared our highs and lows from the week, attacked a loaf of sliced challah and downed the cup of apple juice our teacher poured. Before we went to play Gagaball — a cherished game that involves trying to hit your competitors’ legs with a kickball rolled on the ground — we practiced reading Hebrew, learned about the Jewish holidays and talked about the Jewish values that Reform Judaism sought to instill — kindness, compassion, charity.

My classmates and I understood each other, having been in class together since we were about seven. Within the Hebrew school walls, we were a unit. Our small class size allowed me to form more personal connections with my classmates and teachers, but simultaneously, I missed the opportunity to form a larger community. At Hebrew school, I felt cramped.

Outside of Hebrew school, I valued Jewish celebrations with friends and family — Passover seders at our friends’ house, folding tables laid out end to end so that the kids always ended up sitting in the front hall; or family seders in my grandparents’ townhouse, all twenty of us stuffed into the living room while we read the Haggadah. We passed around plates of crumbly matzo, scooped sweet haroset onto our plates and enjoyed homemade macaroons and flourless chocolate cake. Later, the kids went upstairs to play games, and the adults’ conversation echoed from below. But these celebrations and gatherings were small, too. I longed for a larger community.

From fourth to eighth grade, I attended a Jewish sleepaway camp in the Berkshires. Here, surrounded by other Jewish campers from the Northeast, I found a new form of community. The counselors and camp administration folded Judaism into everyday life and infused Jewish traditions with energy and enthusiasm. We enjoyed singing at services each morning and creating hand gestures to accompany the prayers before and after our meals. Compared to the sleepier Jewish energy of my home synagogue, camp was a pulsing hub of Jewish life. My fellow campers were “my people” — we all came from similar backgrounds, understood why we referred to the dining hall as “chadar ochel” and knew all the same Jewish songs.

Yet I didn’t always feel at home at camp. While my bunkmates were nice, they were different from my friends at temple back home, and outside of Judaism, I felt we shared little in common. Despite the camp’s welcoming Jewish environment, I felt alienated around my peers. 

I didn’t want my Jewish identity to feel fragmented, experiencing a larger Jewish community at camp but only feeling at home in Worcester. Throughout high school, I continued going to Hebrew school — though now it was Hebrew high school — where our population shrunk further, until there were only ten or so of us meeting every two weeks at our temple. I loved our hodge-podge of cultural activities, like playing Jewish Jeopardy or making baskets of Passover-friendly food to send to the Jewish assisted-care home near us; and I always had fun with our Jewish cooking projects, making pickles or shakshuka — but more than ever I sought a more expansive community. I wanted to meet more Jewish people, to learn about their experiences and connect with them — both as Jews and as friends on a deeper level. 

Yale has allowed me to merge the disparate parts of my Jewish identity — a desire to feel at home and to exist within a larger group. At Slifka, I encounter people studying in the library or the lobby; on Fridays at Shabbat dinner, the dining hall is packed with friends, peers, and people I have yet to meet. Going to speaker events, joining Jewish clubs, just spending afternoons working at the high-top tables in the lobby — all of this has allowed me to become part of a Jewish community where I feel at home.

The post Searching for Jewish community appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Kimmel’s research explores the intersection of revenge, violence and addiction. “The Science of Revenge” seeks to merge several academic fields: evolution and brain biology, criminology and psychology and addiction. 

“The Science of Revenge,” Kimmel explained, will serve as a non-violence toolkit. By distributing this information, he intends to inform policy makers, educators, parents, mental health professionals and the criminal justice system about violent and non-violent revenge seeking behavior.

“It’s based on the research of more than 60 neuroscientists at universities around the world, and I’ve been able to bring it all together with other research that talks about the role of revenge in violence and put that all together with all of the addiction research that exists,” Kimmel said.

Kimmel’s previous work has attempted to prevent and treat violent tendencies.

In the past, Kimmel launched the website SavingCain.org in an attempt to prevent homicides and mass shootings. SavingCain, modeled after suicide prevention websites, speaks directly to prospective killers before they strike. The site includes a page titled “Warning Signs of a Revenge Attack” based on popular public health campaigns for heart attacks. 

Kimmel also created The Nonjustice System, a “12-step program” to recover from revenge addiction, an unseen brain biological addiction triggered by a grievance, and the related Miracle Court App. This mental practice puts one’s mind inside an imaginary, or virtual, courtroom with the wrongdoer on trial. In this court, the wronged individual plays prosecutor, victim, judge and jury. This process, Kimmel elaborated, is intended to enable forgiveness while releasing revenge cravings and honoring that human desire for accountability. 

Human violence, Kimmel mentioned, is primarily a consequence of revenge addiction. Kimmel hopes this newfound understanding of revenge related behavior will demonstrate why we harm other people, but also provide pathways for solution. 

Jessica Stern, a professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies who has taught classes on counter-terrorism and the history of terrorism, finds Kimmel’s discussion of revenge as an addiction powerful.

“Kimmel demonstrates that emerging neuroscientific and behavioral research indicates that retaliatory impulses from perceived injustices stimulate the same neural reward pathways as those activated in substance dependence,” Stern wrote to The News.

Kimmel argues that society should address revenge in the same way it addresses behavior addiction, which Stern finds compelling. 

Dr. Michael Norko DIV ’10, a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, is a forensic psychiatrist who worked in the state’s mental health system for years. Norko was intrigued by Kimmel’s work. 

“These concepts of harm that people do to one another, and then the outcomes of those, is something I have a lot of experience with from a different perspective,” said Norko. “So Kimmel’s work resonates with me.”

Norko was impressed with the accessible writing of Kimmel’s book, and found its narrative style to be engaging and interesting.

By telling his own personal stories and presenting his information in a storytelling framework, Norko believes that Kimmel can reach a broad audience, which could be powerful in helping people to think about how society addresses revenge, including in the news and media.

“I think it can potentially have a profound effect on efforts to mitigate those effects in our lives,” Norko said. 

“The Science of Revenge” will be released on May 27.

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But more than that, it brings back the spring of 2020.

It disorients me to associate spring, something so invigorating, with the suffocation of COVID-19. That spring, I spent hours sitting at my desk in my room. My orange walls and ceiling light created an artificial brightness and boxed me in. The pictures and posters on my walls, which I loved, became tall and looming. But at my desk, doing random schoolwork that my teachers probably didn’t grade and writing short stories and poems to keep myself occupied, at least I could sit in front of an open window. Pollen lightly dusted the surface of my desk after a couple weeks, but it was worth it, for the moist freshness of spring to drift in.

It reminded me that there was more to the world than my computer — which was now propped up on a Torah commentary I received for my Bat Mitzvah because my desk was too low. Earth expanded beyond the confines of my house, beyond my kitchen where my mom and I sat in the morning, beyond the living room where we set up a card table to do puzzles (we finished pictures of Cuba, Paris and Shakespearean England).

I went for long walks during COVID-19, but even as I roamed my suburban neighborhood, watching the trees grow greener and flowers start to bloom, I was trapped, distanced by the “six feet” we all knew so well. Breathing the clean air in deeply, I escaped just a little bit, to somewhere I could spread my arms without knocking into a wall.

COVID-19 isn’t my only association with spring, though. In high school, I began to connect it with the tennis season. Beginning in mid-March, we trekked down the hill to the courts after school. Though sometimes we were still shivering and bundled up, the sun hit us and we quickly shed our layers and started debating whose sock tan line would be the worst of the season.

Tennis freed me, allowed me to burn off the frustrations of the school day while laughing with my teammates about the balls that the boys’ team — mostly by accident — launched into the woods behind our courts. Tucked behind the school baseball field, we existed in our own world, complete with just five green courts lined up next to each other.

As the days got longer, we played longer, until the sun started to set. The sky grew orange, then bruised and purple. Our voices echoed against the courts, our shoes squeaked and a sweet breeze rustled the trees around us. I breathed in and knew I could spread my arms without crashing into any walls.

And when I start to feel spring at Yale now, in my freshman year, it reminds me of just last April, when I visited for Bulldog Days. For a few hectic days and nights, I rushed around with whichever new people I just met, everyone grabbing the cliche but quintessential picture of spring blossoms against some Gothic building. So much was new and exciting — spring held fervor and energy.

It perplexes me that spring holds such contradictory meanings — simultaneously reminding me of claustrophobia, contentment and excitement. Emotions and memories wash over me as the days inch warmer and stay light a minute later, and I wonder what spring will mean to me in five years. Once I’ve graduated, and probably gone from New Haven, will I feel a spring breeze brush against me and think of these days in 2025? Will I think of rushed walks up Hillhouse Avenue, nearly late to Econ every week? Or late night walks back to my suite, looking up at the sky, scrubbing homework from my mind. 

Or maybe I’ll think of my fifth-floor shoebox bedroom with New Yorker covers and postcards plastered to the walls. Though my curtains are always closed to keep the light out, my window is already open. Each night, fresh air wafts in. I breathe deeply and wait to fall asleep, my head only inches away from the open and infinite spring night.

The post The multitudes of spring appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I am drifting through the mid-afternoon, desperately needing to create a mental break between the torrent of classes earlier in the day and the studying that awaits me later. Zipping up my purple Nike jacket and curling my hands into fists to keep them warm, I go for a run.

I started running only in my senior year of high school, but my route from Silliman College through the East Rock neighborhood is familiar now, after five or six months at school: it begins with a gentle incline up Prospect Street until the steep section of Science Hill slaps me. But I know it’ll level out around the Yale Farm, then the Divinity School — and then I’m out of Yale. As comforting as campus is, I feel free once I am taken out of my usual scenery and see houses and front lawns.

When I run, I forget any little problems that turn my mind in dizzy circles. Any stress from classes, friends, the laundry I haven’t done — gone, once I’m focused on the rhythm of my feet on the concrete. Sometimes I run on the treadmill, but it’s a cagey feeling. When I’m outdoors, I go at my own pace, speeding up as I remember that aggravating moment I had earlier, working through the frustration with every footstep. Wind brushes against my face, the air fresh, crisp and biting.

After a while, I turn onto Huntington Street, where East Rock always peeks through the trees — at this time of year, the branches are scraggly and it’s easy to see the prominent red cliff face, dusted with snow and glowing nobly in the afternoon light. I exhale and relax at the sight of it, and I know the downhill portion of the run is about to start. It’s all familiar to me now. 

This path is my own — it almost feels like my own neighborhood. The terrible intersection at the bottom of Huntington is mine, along with the nice houses of East Rock Road and the pedestrian-only road at the base of the rock itself, which canopied by trees and bordered by the river on one side. Orange Street, blessedly flat, is mine, with its cute triple-deckers, stores and apartment buildings. 

The sun sets as I go, and streams of cars pass me, commuters on their way home, their headlights matching the pink and orange of the fading sky. The colors are pale and raw, and the sky connects to something within me, something that aches to be clean and free of my daily troubles.

Couples take after-work walks around me, pushing strollers or corralling dogs on leashes, and grad students trek home from campus. I know I am a mere observer of their lives, watching cogs in a foreign system. But it’s beautiful. As opposed to the rhythm of my life at Yale — the swarm of people at the crosswalk outside the Schwarzman Center, the trickle from the Humanities Quadrangle at the end of classes — I see how a totally different swath of New Haven lives.

Sometimes I imagine I live in East Rock too. It’s refreshing to pretend that instead of going back to my dorm, with its standard couch, desk, and bed, I will finish my run by heading to my second-floor triple-decker apartment. Maybe I would pick up a coffee from the cafe at the corner, or some classy snacks from the little market nearby. It’s fun to imagine, as I wound my way across Church Street and Temple Street, eventually hauling open the Silliman courtyard door.

When I return from my run, I’m exhausted, refreshed. I stand in the courtyard for a moment, watching the end of the sunset hit the Chase Bank building behind Timothy Dwight College. Life’s issues are put into perspective, and it doesn’t matter whether I haven’t finished my readings for class tomorrow. I find myself distanced, zoomed out. As I trek up my five flights of stairs, I look forward to the sunset glow that I know will wash across my common room, to the music I’ll listen to in the shower. 

Maybe I’m not living out my fantasy as a grad student in East Rock. But Yale isn’t too bad either.

The post Running the afternoon away appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The company develops glasses that allow hearing-impaired users to engage with the world around them through closed captioning. An external microphone, like a phone microphone, picks up conversations, and the transcription is displayed in green letters on the glasses. Founder Madhav Lavakare ’25, who studies computer science, has been working on TranscribeGlass for upwards of seven years. 

“[Our consumers] have been waiting, and I owe it to them to deliver something that is really good and is going to solve a lot of problems and change their lives,” Lavakare told the News.

In high school, about seven years ago, Lavakare became aware of how expensive hearing aids and cochlear implants can be. 

He also knew people who felt these devices were inaccessible. 

“That’s when I thought, what if we could take speech recognition, take the closed captions that already exist, just in a really inconvenient form, and put it in your field of view with smart glasses?”

Lavakare has been interested in building devices for a long time, and he started coding and playing around with hardware and electronics when he was young. Whenever he noticed a problem in his life, he wondered whether he could build something to fix it. As a kid, he remembers when his family told him that he couldn’t use the oven to make chocolate chip cookies, so he decided to make an aluminum, solar-powered oven instead.

When he started working on TranscribeGlass, he combined his knowledge of hardware, electronics, mechanical engineering and 3D printing to create a prototype. The hardest part was learning how the optics of the device would work.

“I took apart an old, small projector, and I kind of looked at the guts of it and tried to figure out, okay, what’s going on there,” Lavakare said. “I learned a little bit more about the imaging techniques and designed a very basic system.”

Lavakare took two gaps before entering Yale in order to work on TranscribeGlass. Over five years, he’s conducted field trials with over 500 deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the United States, Europe, Australia and India, and he’s created seven versions of the prototype.

Lavakare has worked with various advisors and collaborators throughout the inventing process, including various hardware founders. His team consisted of five or six people, who would rotate in and out. Currently, his Chief Technology Officer is Nirbhay Narang, who joined the team in August 2024. Narang works on the software for TranscribeGlass.

“We work with manufacturers who give us their hardware, and then we put our software on the glasses,” said Narang, “which is why software is particularly important.”

Narang has overcome some engineering challenges while working for TranscribeGlass, including making the glasses usable both online and offline. It was important to make sure that the transition was seamless between the online version, when the user has a Cloud connection, and the offline one, when they don’t.

Additionally, Narang and Lavakare have worked through communication difficulties.

“Because of the geographic differences, sometimes it’s hard for us to sync up. So we’ve become very disciplined in how we report progress to each other, because it’s very important for the other person to know what we’re doing.”

Narang is excited about the future software engineering opportunities that TranscribeGlass creates.

He believes there is room to make TranscribeGlass more complex, including using more AI features.

“One of the features that we’re working on adding right now is prosody, or tone of speech detection, which essentially tells you what the person who you’re talking to is feeling,” Narang said. “That has a lot of applications for people who have difficulty processing emotional responses, for example, people on the spectrum.”

Amy Husmann became a Beta-Tester for TranscribeGlass during summer 2024. Husmann, who is completely deaf in one ear and has significant hearing loss in the other, has difficulty understanding people in noisy environments, even with her cochlear implant and hearing aid.

With TranscribeGlass, Husmann said she is able to process speech much better in everyday situations, like going to church, having conversations at dinner and going to the theater. The transcription that appears on the glasses is very accurate, she said. She also appreciates how subtle the glasses are.

TranscribeGlass also connects via Bluetooth to an app, which allows users to control their settings.

“They look and feel pretty much like ordinary glasses and I can wear them for long periods of time without getting uncomfortable,” Hussman said.

Husmann also appreciates that TranscribeGlass strives to be financially accessible, since other hearing aids can be more expensive, or aren’t covered by insurance.

“There is amazing hearing assistive technology out there, but it is beyond the budgets of many people who could benefit from it,” Hussman said.

The glasses will be sold at $377 per pair, plus a $20 monthly subscription fee.

While there is a monthly subscription, which will cover the cost of transcription services that the glasses need, Hussman doesn’t think it’s cost-prohibitive.

Lavakare is excited to launch TranscribeGlass and continue working on the company in the future. 

While he wants to continue developing new inventions once he is satisfied with TranscribeGlass and the impact it has created, he feels extremely invested in it right now.

“I’ve spent almost 30 percent of my life working on this,” Lavakare said. “Right now, I’m very focused on getting to a stage where the people who need it can get it [accessibly]. That’s going to take a pretty long time, and I’m committed to this.”

1 in 8 people in the United States ages 12 or older has hearing loss in both ears.

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