Chess players have to study an array of openings to win. Popular ones include the Sicilian, the Caro-Kann and the Reti. But there is one opening that stands out to me like none other: the Queen’s Gambit. 

The Queen’s Gambit can only be used against beginner and intermediate players since most advanced players know how to defend it right away. Here’s how it goes: white moves their pawn to d4, black moves their pawn to d5 and then white moves a second pawn to c4. In doing so, white is offering up a pawn that can be captured with no collateral in return. When black accepts the Queen’s Gambit, they capture white’s pawn and automatically edge one point up in the game. 

When really digging into the opening, though, the Queen’s Gambit is a sacrifice that white makes to better their chances down the line. It’s a purposeful sacrifice; an intentional, thought-out one. It’s not a mistake to move that second pawn to d4. It’s a smart offering that allows for better positioning. All sorts of items will fall into place because of the sacrifice: white’s bishop diagonals become more successful and their attack on black’s kingside flank is improved. 

Success, to me, is a lot like the Queen’s Gambit. Yalies are ambitious. Half want to be president of the United States one day and the other half want to either run a private equity firm or be some laureate in physics and math in 20 years. But if you want to accomplish any of those things, you have to play life like you would the Queen’s Gambit. You have to make sacrifices. 

The biggest sacrifice successful people make is misery. Success takes hard work, and much hard work is incredibly, twistedly miserable. 

I got into Yale because I was a track star in high school. Then female, I was training for the women’s indoor two-mile, and my coaches made me do a painful workout: mile repeats. Mile repeats include five or six miles run only one minute apart from each other, and each mile should be run approximately one minute slower than your target mile race time. It was rainy and wet and miserable, and I ran the first repeat in six minutes. The second was at 5:55, then 5:50, 5:50, 5:45 and the last was 5:40. My coaches were yelling down my throat, and I threw up after. But I did at least 30 other workouts in that year that were just as brutal. 

Weeks later I clocked a 10:49 two-mile on an indoor track and became the third fastest two-mile runner in the state of Virginia. I graced Yale’s heavenly, Ivy-clad gates because of that time. Here’s the thing: misery — and I mean horrible, grand, sweeping misery — pays off in the long run. Misery is what builds success. Happiness doesn’t. But misery is an emotional sacrifice, just like the Queen’s Gambit. 

Scientists have long studied the dynamic between short-term and long-term rewards. The 1972 Stanford marshmallow experiment showed that children who were able to wait 15 minutes for a second marshmallow without eating the first ended up with higher SAT scores in later years. In 2011, researchers in the British Journal of Psychology found that a subject’s willingness to postpone receiving an immediate reward in exchange for future benefits was closely linked to their “health, wealth, and happiness.” Delayed gratification is so profound and well received that it has seeped into popular culture where self-help gurus like Tony Robbins push its philosophy onto audiences. 

Indeed, sacrificing short term happiness for longer term gains is what makes people successful. 

This might seem intuitively obvious to most readers. But this isn’t apparent in post graduate life: tales of mid-tier managers running amok on strip club benders and stories of bosses succumbing to pyramid schemes abound. 

My addition to the delayed gratification field of academia is that misery – and I mean the pure, unadulterated, uninhibited kind – is actually beneficial over the course of many years and produces ecstatic, happy emotions once done in repeat.

Accomplishments don’t come from happy times or joyful memories. They come from desolate work sessions and strategic planning, just like the kind you find in chess. 

So, next time you think about achieving a goal, remember the Queen’s Gambit. Move your pawn to c4. 

You won’t regret it. 

ISAAC AMEND graduated in 2017 from Timothy Dwight College. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. In his free time, he is a columnist for the Washington Blade. He also serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com. 

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Anyone who passes through Yale’s Ivy gates should understand the different kinds of intellects on the market. As someone who is mildly intelligent, I like to study the art of intelligence myself. 

First, there are mathematicians. Math fanatics look at sheets of paper and computers and chalk boards and write numbers down. They mull over equations and make new ones if they excel at their craft. They marvel at the way a line slopes in the xy-coordinate plane or in planes more multidimensional than that. Top-tier mathematicians compete to solve puzzles and problems with no answer in sight. But when one lucky person finds the answer to that puzzle — maybe at Princeton, or maybe at Brown — they win a Nobel prize. Despite all of their brilliance, mathematicians rarely have to look at the world around them to be good at their craft. Occasionally, they will witness mathematical problems in nature around them — in the curvature of a seashell, for instance, or in the speed of light. But for the most part, a prize-winning mathematician can be the best in the world without having to worry about human suffering. They don’t have to care about culture. 

Let’s move on to scientists. Some scientists work to cure society’s ills through groundbreaking cancer drugs and treatments to rare diseases. But most of a scientist’s time is dedicated to being good with microscopes, knowing a few coding languages and excelling in laboratory settings. The best scientists on the market pose questions about the world around them; they formulate new hypotheses and try to evaluate these with experiments. Top scientists are curious and have superior spatial reasoning skills: they seek to answer their curiosity with action in hospitals and labs and research centers. But at the end of the day, scientists don’t incorporate systemic discrimination, heartbreak or politics into their work. 

Let’s look at literature and writers. A literary intellect is different from all other intellects. Scientists code and understand how particles collide with each other, and mathematicians look at sheets of variables. But writers need to observe the world around them and communicate the suffering they see onto paper. The finest writing — the kind of lines that get passed down from generation to generation — communicates suffering. Only bad writing talks about rainbows and butterflies and Valentine’s Day chocolates and rose petals. Many Americans don’t want to read heavy topics. They want “Fifty Shades of Grey” on the beach. And I don’t blame them. 

The greatest novels are studded with tales of fine tuned suffering, both in America and beyond. One of my favorite books of all time, “Middlesex,” written by Jeffrey Eugenides, explored the life of an intersex girl in Detroit, long before writing about trans topics was trendy. I read Middlesex when I was 13, before I changed genders. It induced such a visceral reaction in my body that it made my stomach sick. I was fearful of what was to come. But because Eugenides did such a stellar job of conveying the nuances of intersex life, he won a Pulitzer. Many in the trans community don’t think a cisgender white male author should’ve garnered a prize for writing about this topic. I disagree, but that’s a story for another day. 

Novelists need to hone a very fine grasp on human suffering. An award-winning novelist looks at the life around them and plucks one issue out of thin air to write about. Eugenides wrote about gender bending. Toni Morrison wrote about racism and Black community. Kafka wrote about people who think they are monsters but are really not. Dostoevsky wrote about what it was like to be utterly deranged. You can argue — and this is a tepid argument at best — that J.K. Rowling taught children good versus evil, only until she became, with all the Hogwartsian irony in the world, a second reincarnation of Voldemort after kicking trans women in the dirt. 

While top writers need to care about the pain ebbing through their daily surroundings, they also must carry a special intimacy with the English language that often cannot be taught in the classroom. The question of how quality writing can be instilled in students is one I mull over on a weekly basis. In one interview, Salman Rushdie — winner of a Booker Prize and author of the utterly glorious “Satanic Verses” — reiterated the thought that English professors cannot, despite their efforts, induce a unique affinity for words in their students. Professors can teach other things: themes, dialogue and to some extent, style. But talent must abound as well. And talent, fortunately or unfortunately, comes from within. 

This is why the literary intellect is so important and so unique. Don’t get me wrong. All fields at Yale should be treasured. But society should always cherish literary intelligence. We are the tellers of your own suffering, after all. 

ISAAC AMEND graduated in 2017 from Timothy Dwight College. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. In his free time, he is a columnist for the Washington Blade. He also serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com

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Eight years later, I believe, with deep fervency, that Yale needs to teach more Toni Morrison classes. Currently, there is only one class entirely dedicated to the Pulitzer prize winning author “Toni Morrison & the Matter of Black Life,” which is a seminar offered by Professor Daphne Brooks. Perhaps — and I could stand corrected — just one or two other classes cover Morrison, including, but not limited to, “Literature of the Black South.” But one seminar is not enough. Yale is sorely lacking a lecture class that covers all of the author’s work and doesn’t skip out on the major milestones of her literary career. 

Toni Morrison was, by hundreds of leaps and bounds, one of the most influential authors of all time — far more influential than Shakespeare, Camus and Hemingway combined. 

According to the Yale course catalog, it is my understanding that 12 English classes are teaching Shakespeare this semester, of which five classes are exclusively dedicated to the British playwright’s work. But crusty, dead, white male authors like Shakespeare no longer address the contemporary issues we face in society. These issues include, but are not limited to: racism, transphobia, homophobia, the indiscriminate shelling of Gaza, American imperialism through reckless war mongering, declining life expectancies and global warming. 

Sure, some might argue that Shakespeare addresses the universal issues people have faced since the dawn of time: love, jealousy, hatred, family and friendship. But these topics are now cliche, and have been hackneyed time and time again by other authors — most of them also dead, crusty, white men. 

Good literature is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted. When reading Shakespeare’s plays, I don’t feel either comforted or disturbed. Instead, I feel like I’m reading a fool’s language and that opening one of his verses is an utter waste of time. It is also an act in comedy, no pun intended. His books need to be put in a far away cupboard or thrown into the nearest trash bin around Timothy Dwight and lit on fire after being soaked in leftover beer from DKE. 

But when reading Morrison, I feel disturbed when a Black mother kills her two-year-old daughter so her child doesn’t have to live in slavery. This feeling of discomfort is good for the reader and prods them to feel all sorts of difficult emotions, which is, indeed, literature’s job at the end of the day. 

As someone who has studied Morrison extensively in my free time, I still dedicate many hours to watching her interviews online, despite having held jobs in the defense sector and other fields not related to English. Watching and rewatching her interviews is just as paramount to reading her novels, since we can glean some cues from her speech with television personalities like Charlie Rose. I study the intonation of Morrison’s voice when Charlie asks her a tough question on race. I study her mannerisms when she gets defensive of her characters. I still buy obscure books both by and about Morrison, ones in which she is critiquing novels and not writing them. I also try to pair watching her interviews with reading about her personal background: her father, her mother, her hometown, her schooling as a kid. 

When Morrison’s father was 15 years old, he witnessed the lynching of two African American businessmen on his street. When she was two years old, her family’s landlord set fire to their house because her parents could not afford to pay rent. 

I believe that Morrison was driven by a deserved vengeance towards the cruelty white people have inflicted on black folk for centuries and still inflict today. I believe that Morrison channeled this vengeance into her writing and used it as a force for good when all of her characters were black and not white. This flips the script on the oppressor and makes white people feel like they are the minority. I believe that part of Morrison was perpetually angry —  very angry, at that. I believe she channeled a silent rage in her writing that bent the reader so they absorbed the depth and breadth of the Black experience. 

Writing an imitation Toni Morrison novel that mimics her style while pitting a minority against an oppressor — a trans community against a society of cis people who taunt and kill — is an alluring idea for a writer like me. But the day any human being would be able to precisely echo Morrison’s style is a day Jesus would walk on water again: it would take a miracle for such a feat to happen, due to the unparalleled strength of her wise cadence and magical realism that abounds in her Nobel-winning lines. 

Because of her books, I now believe that vengeance can be a tool for good, spurring the masses into worlds where people who have been trashed for centuries can still have rich inner lives. It can take people on a quest for identity and belonging, like Milkman repeatedly does in “Song of Solomon,” to the tune of a bag of gold and a flight across Virginia mountains. Trans people feel vengeance on a daily basis — we just need a healthy way to channel it. 

So, to the Yale English department: it’s time to teach more of Morrison. Add two to three more classes on the famed author, ones that are solely dedicated to her work. 

Shakespeare is of the past. Morrison’s voice is of the present. 

ISAAC AMEND graduated in 2017 from Timothy Dwight College. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. Isaac has two poetry books out, “Lost in the Desert” and “When the Sky Was a Canvas to Make Fun Of.” In his free time he is a columnist for the Washington Blade. You can follow him on Instagram at: @literatipapi and contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com.

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At Yale, it is all too common to find students using big, multisyllabic words, some niche, others distinct, to describe common phenomena we experience with sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, discrimination and other things. In the women’s and gender studies classes I took at Yale, as well as in other classes on food politics and human rights, students were quick to mutter things like “social constructionism,” “queer analysand,” and my favorite: “transference-countertransference.” 

What in the world does that mean?

After graduating in 2017, I learned that most Americans can’t understand these big words at all, and these words do, in fact, act as gatekeepers for the rest of non-Ivy-educated America to understand the progressive topics we are playing around with on campus. 

Only 42 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree. That’s less than half the country. Out of these Americans, an overwhelming majority are white: white people constitute 72 percent of college degree holders, but Black people only constitute 9 percent of graduates. Moreover, Asians make up 8 percent of this pie, and Latinx people make up 8 percent as well. 

Post-graduation, many Yalies will flock to McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, or they’ll get doctoral degrees at more Ivy-clad schools, and they’ll socialize in the same woke, big-worded circles. But many Yalies won’t do that as well. You might matriculate into the security sector. Or the intelligence sector. Or work at a middle school in an urban downtown, or, for all I know, fly to Jordan and read tarot cards in the Bedouin desert. 

The most effective language is simple. The best presidential orators of our time did not use large words in their speeches: in fact, they spoke simply and colloquially. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan’s vocabulary matched the vocabulary of an average American, and that wasn’t a coincidence. Their speechwriters wanted their easy verbage to be a tool for citizens to access the more complex topics they were dealing with in the White House. 

But while language can act as a tool to inform and spur the masses, it is also a huge gatekeeper. In using words like “social constructionism” and even “heteronormative,” we are preventing most Americans from accessing our cause and sympathizing with it. Many Americans mean well, even towards transgender people and others who are oppressed. A majority of people we come across are generally supportive. But the truth is, many Americans just really don’t know what “heteronormative” means, and they feel embarrassed or left out of our conversations despite harboring goodwill. 

Why are Yalies taking the time to gatekeep these people with overly impressive words? It’s all too common to find students on campus throwing niche words around to gain the favor of a TA and show their credibility as top learners. But doing this out of college will not gain you any points in the workplace or with friends. In fact, it’ll lose you brownie points. 

The moment you step outside of New Haven’s city limits to enter the world as a Yale alum, I encourage you to watch your language. Trust me: it’ll do you some good. 

ISAAC AMEND is a former YDN columnist and 2017 Yale College graduate, having majored in Political Science. As a transgender man, Isaac was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. He is now a writer based in the DC area. You can reach him on Instagram and Twitter at: @isaacamend 

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SHARE is available to all members of the Yale community who are dealing with sexual misconduct of any kind, including sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, intimate partner violence and more. Counselors are available any time, day or night, at the 24/7 hotline: (203) 432-2000. 

It was the winter of 2017 and the News was putting on a gala. As a columnist, I sat beside other members of the Opinion desk. The featured guests at the gala were the journalists behind the inspiration for the film “Spotlight.” “Spotlight” is a complicated and heavy movie. Set in Boston, it explores an epidemic of child abuse inflicted by Catholic clergy on a large scale. The movie is often hard to watch: there are scenes of victims with needle marks in their arms and clips where older priests admit to doing wrong. 

“Spotlight” witnesses many heroic scenes, but my favorite takes place towards the end of the movie, when a journalist interviews an older man with a successful career who was abused as a child. The older man went to the same high school as the journalist, but he never confided the abuse to his wife, children or anyone else. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told,” he says. 

The scene in “Spotlight” begs a much larger question to ask: has the Me Too movement encompassed enough men’s voices? The short answer is no. Very few men have come forward with their experiences of abuse: among them are Terry Crews, Michael Gaston and Alex Winter. Far more women have come forward, and for good reason: women’s voices — and those of other genders — deserve to be heard, because they have been silenced for decades and centuries, and have faced the cruel brunt of sexism for that long of a time as well. 

When men, or anyone, don’t address their history of abuse, that unaddressed trauma can lead them to self sabotage in relationships and engage in addictions. It can also lead many men into incarceration. College campuses need to encourage men to speak up about their experiences as soon as possible. This is a public health crisis that needs fixing right away. 

As someone who has experienced sexual trauma, and also as someone who has lived as both a woman and a man, I feel as if men are socialized to internalize abuse differently than women. Of course, anyone who experiences sexual trauma will share many of the same intense feelings of guilt and shame associated with their traumatic events. But there is an acute epidemic of silence among men who have been abused that needs to be addressed immediately. 

Statistics show that one in six men have been either sexually assaulted or harassed in their lifetime, yet studies show that men are far less likely to report abuse than women. So what accounts for the difference in reporting statistics? 

From a young age, boys are taught to show strength and power. Any event that trespasses their bodies is viewed as an incident of vulnerability and weakness. Men and women do not internalize sexual assault in different ways because they were born with opposite chromosomes. It’s not a biological phenomenon. Men internalize it differently because of the way they were socialized growing up. Being abused, as a man, can be embarrassing. And there is heightened stigma around it as well. Some women are taught to seek strength in others, while men are taught to preserve their own strength and rarely seek help. 

People who subscribe to looking and acting like a typical male presenting person are suddenly faced with a new image that society prescribes: stoic, often reserved, unemotional, strong in their stature and avoidant of admitting weaknesses. Often they feel as if they have to cave to this image. But caving to this image heightens feelings of shame and embarrassment when something like a sexual violation “ruins” their reputation.

While I was an undergraduate student at Yale, I heard horrible stories about female students being violated in all sorts of ways. These stories filled my stomach with disgust. There was the notorious DKE chant that took place in October 2010, where fraternity brothers changed “no means yes, and yes means anal.” There was a whisper network, mostly of women, at Yale, during my time there, who spoke of potential aggressors behind closed doors in an effort to prevent rape from happening. And rightly so. Yet I felt that this whisper network was not spread enough among potential male victims. Or other genders. I didn’t hear enough men’s stories. But I’m sure that their stories existed too. 

Asking if the Me Too movement encompasses enough men’s voices might seem offensive to some, as women are statistically discriminated against more. It might also seem offensive to only speak of women’s and men’s voices, when all sorts of other genders exist. But the only reason I’m centering this piece on men is because I have only lived out a binary gender experience, and do believe that, whether we like it or not, stereotypical men are still socialized differently from women and nonbinary people. 

Make no mistake: the Me Too movement should flourish without limit. The women who confronted Harvey Weinstein and other monsters should be treated like heroes. Their speeches deserve plaques. But men speaking up and women speaking up and any other gender speaking up are not mutually exclusive in their benefit and power: in fact, they complement each other in unforeseen and beautiful ways. Men who have a past history of experiencing abuse can bond with women over this. The same goes for nonbinary people. 

More needs to be done on college campuses, including Yale, to get college-aged men to open up about their histories of assault. I’m not sure yet what dimension that would take. Having been removed several years from campus life, new groups have probably sprung up on campus that can address this issue. Consent educators are one avenue to engage in this conversation. But any extracurricular group can ask about trauma, and how to address pain. 

Returning to the touching scene in “Spotlight,” it is clear that men face an epidemic of silence around assault. It’s time that changes. Doing so will greatly improve the lives of victims but also drastically improve the lives of others as well. I know too many men who can’t speak up about their pain. 

ISAAC AMEND is a former YDN columnist and 2017 Yale College graduate, having majored in Political Science. As a transgender man, Isaac was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. He is now a writer based in the DC area. You can reach him on Instagram and Twitter at: @isaacamend 

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Let’s be clear: The Free Speech Bus is a disguise for a group that feels anxiety, disgust and hatred toward gender-variant individuals. The bus riders’ cisgender identities feel threatened by the notion that someone can feel different from the sex they were assigned at birth. CitizenGO’s Free Speech Bus cloaks antagonistic feelings toward marginalized individuals with the flimsy facade of the First Amendment.

Joseph Grabowski, the leader of the Free Speech Bus, believes that transgender people have a mental disorder and that bathroom-goers should alert business owners when they see a transgender person using a restroom of their preference. Grabowski also thinks transgender people threaten sexual societal norms, and that civil society should exclude transgender identities in public settings.

Unfortunately, the arrival of this tour coincides with other setbacks in the fight for transgender rights. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear Gavin Grimm’s case for bathroom accessibility to transgender high school students in Virginia. The Trump administration has also undone similar President Barack Obama-era policies that allow transgender students equal access to facilities under Title IX. Just yesterday, North Carolina repealed the “bathroom bill,” legislation granting municipalities the right to limit bathroom access in government and public buildings, which includes schools, post offices and courthouses.

While political liberty is a bedrock principle of the United States Constitution, the aggressive prejudice that it masks can incite physical violence and cause extreme emotional damage. Some of transgender individuals then rely on desperate acts of survival or self-harm to cope with a profound emotional burden. Look no further than the fatal fact that two out of five transgender individuals will have attempted suicide in their lifetime. This happens to our community because organizations like CitizenGO — comprised of people who treat our authentic identity as filth — marginalizes us to economic, political and social deprivation.

Personally, I am all too tempted to vandalize the Free Speech Bus. In New York City, protesters spray-painted its orange sides and dented its windshield. But that’s not what our movement is about. Inflicting harm onto others — even bigots like Grabowski — runs antithetical to our group goals. Meeting violence with violence fuels a twisted narrative claiming that the trans community stands on a bedrock of reckless irrationality. Instead, both trans individuals and their allies need to remember that the opposition is, at surface level, a bunch of foolish protesters who rally against people they’ve never met before. On a deeper level, however, these so-called “protesters” are raging cowards perpetuating a fatal message to thousands of vulnerable citizens.

Students of Yale and residents of New Haven have the capacity and moral imperative to stand against this destructive injustice. On Tuesday alone, more than a dozen groups, including Yale’s Luther House and Voke Spoken Word, stood in front of the New Haven courthouse, chanting poetry and affirmations of transgender rights into a megaphone. Today, Trans at Yale will host a Day of Visibility on Cross Campus from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The Free Speech Bus plans to park close to campus, so we will protest its presence in conjunction with local New Haven groups.

Ultimately, history will be the judge of CitizenGO’s pit stops along the East Coast. Until then, we’ll continue to spread messages of love and develop a grassroots organized machine that relentlessly pushes for rights at the state and national level. This entails establishing caucuses in congressional districts that vote against legislators who support transphobic policy. It also entails higher quality media campaigns and extensive donor lists that draw money from rich liberal elites and average-income citizens alike. Lastly, it entails building a network of caretakers who look after LGBTQ+ youth alienated from their families.

Although it will be frustrating for trans people and our allies to watch this hateful troupe roll through our Elm City, we can take comfort in acknowledging the profound insignificance of this bigotry. This bus is an irritating setback in a larger movement for civil rights defined by unwavering resilience.

Isaac Amend is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at isaac.amend@yale.edu .

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And all around me, freed from the paradigmatic confines of high school, I was witnessing intellectual institutions’ addiction to the happiness craze. At Harvard, Tal Ben-Shahar taught “Positive Psychology” to 854 students. At our own local Barnes & Nobles, books by Daniel Gilbert, the Dalai Lama and Jonathan Haidt discuss “peace of mind,” adding to scores of self-help titles catering to an American readership thirsty for emotional enlightenment. My fellow students chatted about these ideas and pursued them on campus, from free yoga lessons to startups such as the Happiness Challenge — an eight-week series of activities eliciting mindfulness through healthy habits.

I’m glad I took English 114 during my first semester on this neo-Gothic campus. Its lessons about interpersonal connectivity and the pitfalls of social comparison primed me to better navigate Yale’s intense environment. But part of me has become acutely critical of the happiness craze — the craze that extends beyond necessary effort to combat issues like anxiety and depression.

For one, the craze can motivate unhealthy hedonistic and individualistic tendencies. Take, for instance, a student who embarks on a personal quest to be happier. After exploring modern literature on well-being, the student subscribes to the paleo diet, runs for two hours each day and deactivates Facebook, all the while neglecting phone time with family and skipping fast food meals with friends. In the process of enhancing his own well-being, the student forgets the well-being of others. He ignores the value of communal welfare.

The second flaw to the happiness craze is one of omission: Students of happiness forget the importance of a meaningful life.

What do I mean by this? In 340 B.C. Aristotle wrote “Nicomachean Ethics,” in which he established the concept of “eudaimonia”. Eudaimonia is human flourishing — it’s the highest aim of humanity; it’s living and doing things well. Eudaimonia draws a critical distinction from Aristotle’s “hedonia,” which signifies pleasure and cheerfulness. Eudaimonia entails meaningfulness; hedonia signals happiness.

Academics seized upon this distinction at Stanford’s School of Business, where they surveyed 397 adults on their definitions of happy and meaningful lives. They found important differences between the two concepts. First, happiness arises from the fulfillment of desires, while meaning is more complex, requiring an interpretation of circumstances across time according to abstract values. Moreover, the scholars found that happiness occurs in the present with positive effect while meanings materializes when people weave their past, present and future, albeit with more negative effect. Concerns over personal identity and self-expression also contributed to meaning but subtracted from overall mindfulness.

So why worry about meaning when it heightens stress and invites heavy questions that stray from the present moment?

For one, the Stanford academics found that people see happiness as an act of “taking,” while they view meaningfulness as an act of “giving.” To lead a meaningful life — be it through transgender activism, nursing in a refugee camp or teaching at an inner-city school — is to contribute to a cause greater than the self. Another reason to pursue meaning is because knowing your purpose and value in life helps during times of strife. Succumbing to the superficial happiness craze rarely alleviates suffering; finding meaning in community does.

A lot has happened since that English 114 class five years ago. At Yale, students have lost peers to suicide. We’ve seen a University committee uphold the name Calhoun — commemorating a man who recognized slavery as a “positive good”— until several months of protest led them to rename the college after Grace Hopper GRD ’34. Our gender nonconforming community has had to fight tooth and nail just to benefit from the smallest of incremental changes in identification and housing policy. We’re gripped to celebrity opportunities, boasting of progress in a National Geographic documentary, all while most of our gender nonconforming counterparts suffer from institutionalized disadvantage beyond Yale.

Our progress as a community cannot be measured by bursts of serotonin. Being happy doesn’t matter anymore — finding a consummate life does.

Isaac Amend is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. His column usually runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact him at isaac.amend@yale.edu .

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The nuance differentiating pravda from istina carries major implications for both national politics and campus culture.

To begin with, this distinction sheds light on the Trump administration’s behavior. On Jan. 21, President Trump boasted of enticing 1.5 million people to his inauguration when video footage and Metro statistics demonstrated otherwise (1.1 million riders attended Obama’s 2009 inauguration compared to 570,000 at Trump’s; 1 million took the Metro for the Women’s March). Following this debacle, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer stated that “these attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” thereby injecting negative affect into an otherwise objective question. Spicer has also doubled down on Trump’s claim that millions of citizens voted illegally in the 2016 election, contradicting the views of nonpartisan electoral experts.

Yet these examples of Trump istina merely foreshadow larger problems to come. The White House has told more than 100 diplomats at the State Department to “get with the program or go,” responding to a dissent cable circulating in Foggy Bottom which opposes Trump’s executive order barring immigration from seven Muslim countries. The executive branch’s “my way or the highway” attitude is propagandist in that it forces well-meaning bureaucrats to either buy into Trumpism or leave government. It provides no room for reason; it provides no room for pravda.

Trump istina might persuade millions of American voters that Putin’s Kremlin is worthy of reduced economic sanctions and more cuddle sessions with Uncle Sam, all while ignoring the fact that Russian airplanes barrel-bombed thousands of Syrian children to death in besieged Aleppo.

While not as deadly, the distinction between pravda and istina spurs major repercussions for our neo-Gothic campus as well:

Academia has long been blamed for fostering a neurotic intellectual culture which ignores pravda’s practical benefits. Professors, albeit noble in intention, can develop brilliant speculative ideas that entail no real-world application. These ideas exemplify Solzhenitsyn’s philosophical istina — they merely exist in academic journals and earn prizes at international colloquiums.

For instance, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis makes grand projections for modern conflict yet not once cites concrete statistics. While academia’s fetishiziation of the theoretical is irritating at times, its real flaw lies in its inattention to pravda — to real problems entrenched in the community.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The more pernicious effect is that Yale ignores factual reality when it disjoins the student body from the local New Haven population. The University has yet to establish a community outreach curriculum which would connect students with New Haven organizations. A class in this program might focus on AIDS prevention, for instance, with half of the syllabus providing a comprehensive history of the disease’s urban impact and the other half spurring cooperation with the AIDS Project New Haven. For a final project, students might propose and execute a specific initiative, like PrEP distribution to low-income, at-risk residents.

Yale’s intellectual ambivalence to New Haven residents is a ludicrous disavowal of pravda and a subliminal nod to the perils of istina. At the end of the day, heeding palpable concerns as opposed to theoretical ambitions advances the public good.

Isaac Amend is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact him at isaac.amend@yale.edu .

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From the standpoint of this columnist, Obama retained a godlike status. In letters from his time at Columbia, our President appears frighteningly precocious, deeply engrossed in literary riffs and identity cross sections. He speaks of physical asceticism and political theory, hazarding challenges against a fatalism “born out of the relation between fertility and death.” Two decades later, on the campaign trail, Obama would personally write speeches that spurred ideological tides in cities from Berlin to Chicago. He put his own prose into action.

For many, the power of Obama’s persona has matched his political success. He rebounded the nation from a catastrophic recession, passed the Affordable Care Act, repealed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, reversed Bush-era torture policies, green-lighted the Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden and withdrew ground troops from Iraq. From 2008 to 2011, favorable opinion toward the United States rose in 10 of 15 countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with an average increase of 26 percent. And he was well-loved at home.

But in 2011, Syria plunged into a civil war that the Obama administration grossly mishandled. Obama did not deliver on his promise to instigate U.S. military action after Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas that killed 1,500 innocent civilians, including 400 children, in a suburb outside of Damascus. Obama also ignored genocide in Aleppo, where thousands of residents died from Russian barrel bomb attacks on hospitals, homes and schools.

Obama is not the first to fail in the face of genocide. Franklin Roosevelt ignored the Holocaust, Bill Clinton neglected Rwanda and George W. Bush sidelined Darfur. To understand why elected officials — let alone people — overlook mass slaughters, one must understand the psychology of large numbers and political isolationism.

During the mid-19th century, E. H. Weber and Gustav Fechner developed a psychophysical theory in which people’s ability to detect changes in a stimulus rapidly decreases as the magnitude of the stimulus increases — compassion fatigue, more or less. Known today as Weber’s law, this theory evidences itself in our mental representation of numbers. For example, doesn’t the value difference between one and two seems greater than the value difference between eight and nine?

This process, “psychological numbing”, can explain why people are more flustered by 10 deaths than 10,000. In 1997, Paul Slovic demonstrated that study respondents valued saving 9,000 lives in a smaller population more than saving 10 times as many lives in a larger population. Nature writer Annie Dillard touched upon this phenomenon, stating: “There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself — in all your singularity, importance, complexity and love — and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.” Nonprofits and rescue organizations avoid psychological numbing by asking for donations using a single-sufferer template instead of listing generic statistics. People donate more to one sick face than to one sick village.

Unfortunately, psychological numbing is so innate that it contributes to government groupthink and constantly underlies humanitarian decisions. Combining this ubiquitous phenomenon with Obama’s political isolationism in the Middle East most likely yielded a timid policy in Syria that left the remaining citizens of Aleppo struggling for their lives.

At the end of the day, liberal elites at Yale have to accept that our Obama — an Obama who uplifted the marginalized in America and made change in our country believable — was the same Obama who let thousands of Syrian civilians die from missiles directed by Assad, Russia and Iran. Progressive circles are becoming sentimental toward our president’s achievements when we should be caustic to his mistakes. Doing so with nonpartisan clarity would teach us political lessons down the line, girding us for the worst atrocities Trump might let slide. It is our duty to be honest about how thousands died in besieged Aleppo.

Isaac Amend is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact him at isaac.amend@yale.edu .

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My sisters and I were fortunate to grow up in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Russia and Jordan. From Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we camped in the Sahara, from Islamabad, Pakistan, we vacationed in the mountains of Waziristan, from New Delhi, India, we threw ourselves around the Taj Mahal, and from Moscow, Russia, we toured Orthodox monasteries. The concept of “home” never really bothered me until I reached senior year of college, when a grueling physical and social transition from female to male left me pining for a household outside of New Haven.

During my last trip to Jordan, I savored the drive from Airport Road to Abdoun, where Westerners and wealthy Iraqi immigrants live in elaborate stucco houses. On the way to Amman proper, vendors and chipped minarets line the streets as men done with the workday smoke argileh, or hookah, from storefront pipes and schoolchildren play soccer. The American embassy, protected by a legion of tanks and security personnel, sits in the middle of Abdoun as a political fortress. Beyond its gated walls, however, lies a hybrid community of marine officers and midlevel diplomats working in a region they want to better understand.

The Middle East is indeed hard to understand: Israel violently subjugates Palestinian territory while propagating a form of political secularism that bashes Iranian authoritarianism. Iran finds a foe in Saudi Arabia, which bombs the Persian country’s Houthi allies in economically starved Yemen. The United States pays for missiles directed at Yemen and finds a close petro-friendship in Saudi Arabia — a kingdom that punishes homosexuality by death. Meanwhile, Gulf States such as Qatar and the UAE bask in historically high gross domestic products that nourish constant skyscraper projects and citizen opulence. Countries such as Jordan, however, do not enjoy the luxury of sunbathing in oil dollars, as they need to confront Islamic state forces raging in northern Iraq and eastern Syria that yield a cataclysmic refugee crisis.

From the standpoint of a foreigner, the Middle East’s political landscape is as complicated as its cultural one. Many Middle Eastern communities — such as the Bedouins in Jordan — wear hospitality on their right hand sleeve, as if it’s a God-given obligation to invite every passersby for a cup of Turkish coffee or mint tea. Yet trust — hospitality’s ultimate offshoot — is incredibly difficult to come by. Moreover, Middle Eastern culture denigrates liberal sexuality in any form, yet accepts homoerotic social gestures such as cheek-kisses and handholding among men.

In spite of this complexity, I’ve found solace in how the Middle East treats family. In America, “family” is an institution in constant flux and reinterpretation. Fortunately, this means that gay couples can adopt and women can receive abortions. Unfortunately, this means that “family” is an instrument of politics — another trite concept that both the Left and the Right can paint to suit their own party needs. In the Middle East, however, family is a sacred principle of quotidian existence, and to use it as a propagandist tool is nothing short of heresy. I have yet to experience another culture treat family with such utter seriousness as I have in the Middle East, and for that I am thankful.

As a transgender man, I have been semi-scarred from navigating the Middle East’s transphobia. I have instead tried to obsess over the French language or passionately scrutinize Scandinavian health care systems or fall in love with northeastern farming. Yet these affections only felt superficial and ill-serving. My affinity for the Middle East stems from an instinctive clutch to family and an intellectual curiosity that pursues beauty in multilayered geopolitical nuance.

When senior year started, I bought a fake Ottoman carpet from IKEA, hung a red keffiyeh next to my bed and nailed shirts from Jerusalem and Petra, Jordan, to a wall. I stuck magazine pictures of a teal minaret in tribal territory above my desk. Tomorrow I will buy a cable chord from Target so I can stream Al Jazeera as I labor over final papers.

Home can be strange, and it’s not always conventional. But it’s there to stay in reinforcing singularity.

Isaac Amend is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. His column runs on alternate Mondays. Contact him at isaac.amend@yale.edu .

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