I woke up on Monday, April 7^th full of sadness. The previous night, I had learned of Minghui Yu’s death. Mr. Yu was doctoral student at GSAS who was killed within a block of my school. His death was shocking and impossible for me rationalize. Usually, being able to make sense of things comforts me. In this instance, I felt like there was no way for me to reconcile the sheer senselessness of his death, the loss of a talented statistics scholar, or the pain placed on a family that had lost its only son. I had not known him, but it didn’t not keep me from feeling the loss.

As I walked down 121st St and turned the corner there was nothing that made the median between 121st St and 122nd St look any different than it did on any other day I had hurriedly walked past it–nothing to distinguish it except the ardent sense of anger and loss I felt welling up in me.

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This weekend saw an unexampled instance of botched Ivy Legue hackery. Like, fuck, where to begin here: you’ve got the Ivy League, sex, America’s paper of record, prudes, religious nutjobs, nymphomania and Fair Harvard, all of them coalescing into one mighty, hurricane-force journalistic shitstorm. But before I pick apart this bothersome off-campus hack-job, a brief comment on a topic even more sensitive than Harvard, the New York Times, religion, sex and feminism. Which eliminates almost everything but…

Race. Today Spec newsie Scott Levi filed what could be the most interesting community coalition meeting report ever to grace our grey lady’s pages: a succinct and surprisingly thorough profile of a community staring down a potentially disastrous rezoning. The article gives you a good sense of what things are like a little farther up Amsterdam–and it raises some fascinating questions about the direction our city is going in.

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