Jan 14, 2026 | By Joseph Yu BF ’28

When was the last time you uttered the word “friend”? I can guarantee it was at some point today. “Oh, he’s a friend from class,” you might’ve said, when in reality you’ve only met twice. “I’ve got a friend who works there — she can help,” when you’ve only connected on LinkedIn and have never met in person. Or someone might’ve told you, “Let’s be friends,” a fragile compromise suggesting the two of you can barely tolerate each other.

Jan 14, 2026 | By Emma Ventresca BF ’26

An old friend came to visit campus and brought his girlfriend along to visit Yale for the first time. He asked if I would give her a tour, and of course, I obliged. We started in Sterling Memorial Library first, the cathedral-turned-bohemoth library in the center of campus. While I walked through the front doors and beelined it to show her my favorite reading room, my friend and his girlfriend remained at the front entrance staring up at the ceiling. Then I realized—my tour of Yale was not a standard admissions tour. For me, the highlights of Yale were not its architectural wonders, but the people who inhabited them.

Jan 14, 2026 | By Nicolas Wyszkowski MY ’26

The great minds that developed modern physics were in near unanimous agreement that physical law (and the universe more broadly) was not the result of a Creator, at least not one interested in human affairs. Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner remarks in his famous essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences that, “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious… there is no rational explanation for [it].” What Wigner is saying here is very deep: the beauty, rationality, and simplicity of physical law evidenced in its ability to be mathematically well-approximated does not have a rational explanation.

Jan 14, 2026 | By Isaac Oberman DC ’26

You can’t have more than one best friend; superlative comparisons do not allow for two people to be ‘best.’ If I do not consider a person to be my best friend, but they consider me their best friend, then categorically, we are not best friends. I am their best friend. We cannot enter into a unity of best friendship; can I remain their best friend?