Yale students sign 'petition' to repeal the first amendment

America's best and brightest.

"Yale faculty member at center of protests will leave teaching role"

"Do you remember the Yale professor getting yelled at by a student because his wife, who also taught there, sent an email some students considered offensive? Well, she's "leaving her teaching role". Whatever that means."

Erika Christakis, the Yale faculty member who sent an email defending students’ rights to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes, such as turbans or blackface, as an expression of free speech, has decided to leave her teaching position.

“I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems,” she told The Washington Post .

Hundreds of members of the Yale community called for her resignation after her email, in which she wrote, “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience. Increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”

A Leg Of Lamb

Gigot d'agneau rôti à la Palladian

'Tis wond'rous strange, that I should be compelled to cook a leg of lamb, at this moment in my life. I lost a lot, a lot has gone wrong for me, with me, and through it all I have done my best to survive. In need of somewhere to sleep during the summer of 2013, I decided that it was only fair that I offer something, or some service, to sheltering friends in return for their kindness (and tolerance). So I decided to cook for my keep.

For these sheltering friends I have cooked meals great and small, familiar and revelatory. Often my cooking depends upon what I can find on offer at the supermarkets in small towns. Recently I decided to cook a special dinner, a feast of gratitude for my hosts, so I went to the local supermarket and searched for inspiration in the meat section. There were a lot of beasts and cuts of beasts available, but none seemed special enough to express my appreciation for my friends' hospitality. There were chickens, a bit too ordinary. Some frozen quail, but not enough. There were some thin, greying steaks with ridiculous prices, and some forlorn frozen turkeys with torn wrappings.

And then I saw, next to the overpriced organic beef and "Hundred Calorie" steaks (which looked to be rounds of beaten beef about the size of a large slice of pepperoni and half as appetizing), a leg of lamb. Lamb, in the small town where I was staying, is an unusual meat so stores usually carry little of it. I suspect that much of it reaches its "Sell By" date unsold. This was such a piece of lamb, its price reduced: 50% off. A very good buy, and not a bad leg at all, shrink-wrapped as it was, and from Australia. So I bought it. My feast of gratitude would feature lamb. A late-summer, shrink-wrapped, special-offer leg of lamb, from the other side of the earth to this rural American supermarket.