Being useful

A few months ago, an email landed in my inbox from Alan Lazarus ’58. He and I have been chatting since March, when he wrote to YAM about our story “Reading the room” on AirCaps transcription glasses. (He has a pair, and thought we hadn’t sufficiently sung their praises.) This time, he was writing because he and his best friend had long shared a private joke: that neither would ever make it into this magazine until their obituaries. Could I somehow change that?

Here goes, my friend.

Alan’s note arrived at a moment when I’d been thinking hard about usefulness—what it means, why it matters, and what it has to do with this magazine. Let me explain.

I was diagnosed with an inner ear disease in my early thirties. During the hardest stretches—when violent vertigo strikes without warning, when every day is one long migraine, when my hearing dips so low the aids no longer help—I have been gripped by one specific fear: that I may no longer be useful. Not to my children, who need me to drive them places, hear what they say, respond. Not to my husband, sinking under household pressures. Not to my coworkers, nor any future readers, nor, crushingly, to my parents. Not even to my dogs, who just want me to take them out to the trails and don’t understand why I’m suddenly housebound, hanging onto the walls. 

Those dark chapters have served a purpose. They gave me common ground with fellow Ménière’s disease sufferers like Alan; I don’t know many of us, and I cherish every connection. They give me insight into the struggles of anyone with a chronic condition, and we are legion: three-quarters of American adults. They have helped me understand myself better.

All this is part of why, at one year in, this job electrifies me. Nowhere else have I felt such a sense of possibility as I do in conversation with Yale alumni, students, faculty, and staff. The Yale community is not uniformly minded—“put two Yalies in a room and you’ll have five opinions,” one alumna told me this week—but it is engaged to a degree I have never before encountered. People here want to dig in.

They want to talk it out. They’re comfortable with disagreement, and that disagreement doesn’t curdle into grandstanding or name-calling. It stays curious. It stays warm. It is, genuinely, the best intellectual community I have ever been part of. And all of that makes me tremendously excited, because it means the magazine has a real role to play in helping this global, consequential community stay connected and self-aware.

Yale Alumni Magazine was founded in 1891 by student newspaper editors to report on Yale for its alumni and to act as a bond between them, a dual charge we hew to still. The magazine’s mission is to “provide a continued sense of belonging” and to “inform and inspire, moving readers to remain intellectually engaged with the University.” It should “evoke Yale as it was in the past [and] in all its complexity today, and thoughtfully probe its opportunities and challenges.” 

We mail to 140,000 US alumni, plus paid subscribers abroad.

And we are asking for eight minutes of your time. 

This month, we’re launching a major all-alumni reader survey—the most comprehensive one we’ve ever conducted. We want to know how you read, what you value, what you’d change, and how you’d like to find us in a digital world. The results will be published in a future issue, because you deserve to know what we learned and what we plan to do about it. There are also some pretty neat prizes—see page 16—because we don’t take your time for granted.

The thing is, we can report and edit and fact check and design with all the skill and care we possibly can—and we do—but if we don’t know what you actually want, we’re guessing.

Alan Lazarus is 90 years old and almost deaf in his right ear. His mother’s parents left Poland right before the Holocaust; only two second cousins survived. He has been married twice, the second time for 43 years so far. At Yale, he felt like he was in over his head; his lowest moment came when he had to crawl out of a freshman constitutional law class thanks to a Ménière’s attack. He and Arnold Buchman ’58, ’61LLB, are still close after seven decades. He says he has “much too much to say” and I believe him, and I hope he keeps saying it.

He found us. I hope you will too.

Please click here to take our survey, and in so doing, grant us the enormous favor of allowing us to make this magazine as useful to you as it can be.