Ex-Taliban can learn from Yale experience I was more than a little puzzled to see the self-satisfied mug of Rahmatullah Hashemi ’09 smiling at me from the front of the News on Monday. The last time I saw that Cheshire grin was in Michael Moore’s otherwise manipulative “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which, for all its demagoguery and factual errors, at least captured the...

Young, Out, and Gay—Not Queer There is one word that drives me nuts. It’s not a curse. Its timbre does not make me cringe. Rather, it is the way in which this particular word is used-often to describe me, and others like me, totally against my will-that I find to be so offensive. The word, if you have not guessed...

Allow Schiavo to die with dignity I thought “The Passion of The Christ” came out last year. Terri Schiavo, the 41-year-old Florida woman who has been in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) for some 15 years, may not bear a physical resemblance to Jesus. But the way in which a valued electoral constituency — the religious right — has portrayed these...

Michael Jackson is not the right focus for Larry Kramer Initiative With a two-day scholarly conference on Michael Jackson, Yale has taken one more step into the depths of academic nihilism. While I am hesitant to agree with this paper’s editorial board in its assertion yesterday that “scholarship shouldn’t be deemed irrelevant or unimportant solely because its subject is contemporary culture,” (“Value of Reflecting on the...