Oldest College Daily:

The Yale College term bill will increase by 3.8 percent, from $69,430 to $72,100, for the 2019–20 academic year, the University announced last Monday.

Tuition will rise from $53,430 to $55,500, and the cost of on-campus room and board will jump from $16,000 to $16,600. Over the past two decades, the term bill has increased at a rate similar to this year’s. According to the press release announcing the change, the level of the student effort — the amount of money students on financial aid are expected to contribute to their education — will remain constant for the fourth straight year.

“Although the cost of a Yale education changes each year, students receiving financial aid can rest assured that their Yale financial aid award will continue to meet their full demonstrated financial need,” said Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid Scott Wallace-Juedes.

For the 2000–01 academic year, at $32,880, Yale’s term bill was 55 percent lower in absolute terms than that of the coming school year, though inflation has accounted for the bulk of the difference. Tuition as well as room and board have been consistently increasing by roughly 4 percent annually since then, even through the 2008 financial crisis, which slashed the University’s endowment by 25 percent. Yale has said that it increases tuition and room and board to keep pace with inflation and University expenses.

Obscene, outrageous, absolutely appalling. But the top elite schools have a natural monopoly as gatekeepers to the International Ruling Class and every year more people are lining up trying to get in.

Yale cost $3000 a year when I was a freshman back in 1966.

espaces-atypiques:

This magnificent boat sailing 25 meters/82 feet, is moored in one of the most sought after areas of the Latin Quarter. Classified of heritage interest, it has a roof of 16m/52.5′ long under which take place all the comfort of a beautiful apartment.

The wheelhouse, entirely preserved in exceptional condition, gives access to an unusual reception. Its proportions allow it to host a lounge area with its cozy fireplace and a dining room that will turn into a billiard room if necessary.

At the same level, at the stern, under the wheelhouse is a first cabin separated from the living room by an office area and kitchen. On the other side, at the bow are two cabins, one with a bathtub overlooking the Seine.

At the bow level, a terrace of 15m2/49 sq. ft., will allow you to appreciate the exceptional view of the Louvre and the Ile de la Cité, in the tranquility typical of the small arm of the Seine.

The authentic fittings, its look and its benefits give it an undeniable charm.

Anneau: 1500 € ($1690.50) quarter

1 050 000 € ($1,183,350)

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me.

–Taxman, the Beatles.

NY Post:

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy is poised to sign a “rain tax” bill passed by the state legislature Jan. 31 — and Republicans and lots of taxpayers are howling with rage.

“Every time you think there’s nothing left to tax, we come up with something else,” Assemblyman Hal Wirths (R-Morris-Sussex) exploded during a debate on the measure.

“It’s just never-ending down here.”

The law allows each of the state’s 565 municipalities to set up its own public stormwater utility. The new bureaucracies will build and manage sewer systems to treat pollutant-filled stormwater runoff.

The infrastructure could cost billions, state authorities say. Under the law, the utilities can levy steep fees on properties with large parking lots, long driveways, or big buildings — which create the most runoff.

The state would scoop up 5 percent of the proceeds.

The idea for the new fee goes back to 2010, when President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency ordered states whose rivers and streams flow into the Chesapeake Bay to drastically cut sediment pollution.

Maryland was the first to fall into line, with a 2012 law that charged cleanup costs to property owners — and sparked taxpayer fury. Republican Larry Hogan’s promise to repeal the “rain tax” helped sweep him into the governor’s mansion in 2014.

“the narrative that Stonehenge has been ruined by mass tourism goes back a long way. Even Samuel Pepys complained of being ripped off by shepherds and innkeepers.”

Viewing Stonehenge is currently disrupted by the roar of traffic and the glare of headlights after dusk, but moving the road north or south has issues and putting it underneath the site in a tunnel has been found to be too expensive.

Even celebratory ceremonies always seem to go wrong.

The Guardian looks at the plethora of controversies currently raging round the landmark.

To celebrate the millennium, an ill-fated project, funded with £100,000 from the national lottery, attempted to re-enact the fetching of a single three-tonne dolerite bluestone from Wales to Wiltshire. The original plan was for volunteers, some 40 a day, to wear “‘appropriate clothing’ of skins and furs”. But that had to be abandoned for safety reasons, according to Mike Pitts’ book Hengeworld – and many of the volunteers drifted away, disenchanted by the awful task. After eventually loading the boulder on to a boat at Milford Haven, from where it was meant to travel up the Bristol channel, a frisky wind saw it tumble into the sea. At this point it was rescued, using the un-neolithic technology of a crane, and transported on a flatbed truck to the botanical gardens in Carmarthenshire, 140 miles from Stonehenge, where it remains. As a spokesman for Pembrokeshire council remarked at the time: “Stone-age man never had the health-and-safety people looking over his shoulder.”

RTWT

Isis Davis-Marks

Yalies, if you see this Jonathan Edwards senior looking at you and fingering her smart phone, be careful what you do or say. She’s making a list, and checking it twice, and if you are ever nominated for an important political job requiring Senate confirmation, decades down the road, she may be gunning for you.

Yale Daily News:

Everyone knows a white boy with shiny brown hair and a saccharine smile that conceals his great ambitions. He could be in Grand Strategy or the Yale Political Union. Maybe he’s the editor-in-chief of the News. He takes his classes. He networks. And, when it comes time for graduation, he wins all the awards.

One day, I’ll turn on the television — or, who knows, maybe televisions will be obsolete by this point — and I’ll see him sitting down for his Senate confirmation hearing. Yes, he’ll be a bit older, with tiny wrinkles sprouting at the corners of his eyes and a couple of gray hairs jutting out of the top of his widow’s peak. But that smile, that characteristic saccharine smile, will remain the same.

When I’m watching the white boy — who is now a white man by this point — on CNN, I’ll remember a racist remark that he said, an unintentional utterance that he made when he had one drink too many at a frat party during sophomore year. I’ll recall a message that he accidentally left open on a computer when he forgot to log out of iMessage, where he likened a woman’s body to a particularly large animal. I’ll kick myself for forgetting to screenshot the evidence.

And, when I’m watching him smile that smile, I’ll think that I could have stopped it. …

This problem begins far before our classmates graduate, and we need to call them out on their transgressions — boldly and publicly. … We should make instances of sexual assault and harassment public knowledge. Whisper networks, which are known as private chains of information which pass along knowledge of sexual assault, are useful, but insufficient in spreading information about indiscretions.

I think that we need to continue to call our classmates out, but it’s still not enough. After all, it wasn’t enough to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the solution is. This expands beyond vocalizing problems about sexual assault: The core of this problem has to do with our values. The problem isn’t just the Yale administration; it’s Yale students. We allow things to skate by. We forget. We say, “No, he couldn’t have done that,” or, “But he’s so nice.” No questions are asked when our friends accept job offers from companies that manufacture weapons or contribute to gentrification in cities. We merely smile at them and wave as we walk across our residential college courtyards and do nothing. Thirty years later, we kick ourselves when it’s too late.

But I can’t do that anymore — I can’t let things slip by. I’m watching you, white boy. And this time, I’m taking the screenshot.

RTWT

A 30″ brown bear skull and an average Alaskan black bear skull. (photo: Phil Shoemaker.)

Filippo Thommaso Marinetti

Lord Ibelin

When Mats Steen, who had been living in a wheelchair in his parents’ basement for years, crippled by muscular dystrophy, died at 25, his parents suddenly heard from friends all over Europe who had grown close to Mats’ game persona in Warcraft. Denied pretty much entirely a life in the real world, the young man, in the last ten years of his life, had managed a pretty much full-time existence as Lord Ibelin Redmoore, a noted philanderer and detective in the planet of Azeroth, one home location in the enormously popular game World of Warcraft.

BBC:

Robert delivered his funeral eulogy for Mats in late 2014, in a chapel at the Norwegian capital’s Western Cemetery.

Among those who sat listening to his words – in-between relatives and a few people from the health service who knew Mats well – was a group of people the family didn’t know.

Only Robert had met them. And only once, the evening before.

Mats had barely left the basement flat underneath his family’s home in the last years of his life, so it was strange that people unknown to the family were present at the funeral.

Even stranger – Mats himself had also never met these people.

Before his death, these grieving visitors would not have thought of Mats as Mats – but instead as Ibelin, a nobleman by birth, a philanderer and a detective. Some of those paying their respects lived close by, but others had come from afar. They wept for their good friend.

Later in the funeral service one of them would speak, and tell the gathering that just now, all across Europe, people were lighting candles for Mats. …

Robert and Trude had received the news in May 1993, in a small office in the large brick building that houses Ulleval Hospital.

Mats’s parents learned why their boy kept falling off the swings and hurting himself, why he didn’t climb up the ladder on the slide at the nursery, even though he loved to slide down, why he supported himself on his knees like an old man when he rose from a sitting position and why he didn’t race the other children.

The doctors told Robert and Trude that Mats had Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare disorder that causes muscle degeneration – mostly in boys. Mats’s genes contained a coding error that would prevent his muscles from developing normally. And which would finally destroy them.

“After we put Mats to bed that evening we called the doctor. We had been given permission to do that. We could call any time, if we needed more information,” says Robert.

With Trude sitting by his side, Robert spoke on the phone for more than half-an-hour.

“I said to the doctor: ‘But at least he won’t die from this!’ The doctor on the other end of the line was silent for a moment, ‘no, but our experience is that these patients rarely live to be older than 20’.”

Robert pauses.

“He managed to make it to 25.”

At the family home in Ostensjo in south-east Oslo, Robert and Trude tried to take it all in.

Mats would not live what they considered a “normal life”. He would die young and be taken away from them – without having set his mark on the world.

They were so completely mistaken.

RTWT

The most popular Longreads article this week is an obituary for the California Dream.

In an essay at Curbed San Francisco, Diana Helmuth explores why so many young people have left California. It’s not normal, she writes, considering a dozen loved ones have moved away in the past two years.

We are witnessing two migrations. One is the continuation of the Californian dream, where young people flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds. The other is the migration of young people out of California, which seems to have affected everyone I know, but which I rarely hear examined. These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a house. But they can’t. There is no room here for those kinds of dreams anymore.

Eleanor, the twelfth person in Helmuth’s life that’s decided to leave, had moved back in with her parents a few years ago, to her little hometown of Stinson Beach. North of San Francisco, it had gradually become a getaway destination of Airbnbs for rich tourists and well-off city residents alike.

“Imagine working at Disneyland, then going home to your place in the back of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride while drunk frat grads puke into the water,” she told me.

To be clear, she loved her town and its bearing in the coastal California fantasy. She wanted to share it, brag about it, celebrate it. But selling bourgeoise yogurt crocks and $100 bottles of wine to people who didn’t see her as part of their shabby-chic fantasy was becoming difficult to bear.

I could support any of these three myself.

photo: Herbert van der Beek.

A couple more images here.

HT: Karen L. Myers.