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Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes well beyond music: He also parlayed the power of his loyal community into a business empire.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How American democracy fell so far behind How telling people to die became normal A DeSantis speech too dangerous to teach in Florida You already got into Yale. Now prepare to be rejected.

A Distinctly American Figure

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure.” Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and better” active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents—even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol.” (As it happened, Paumgarten’s article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet—and also thoroughly capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett’s Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, “came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Related:

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Today’s News

All the defendants in the election-interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, have now pleaded not guilty. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, after being convicted for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021, attack. Senator Mitch McConnell released a letter from Congress’s attending physician stating that evaluations ruled out a stroke or seizure, after McConnell visibly froze on camera on two recent occasions.

Evening

Vivian Maier / Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

By Rafaela Bassili

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom.

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P.S.

Tom here, peeking in after reading Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s last public appearance was just up the way from me here at a venue in Rhode Island, and when I heard he’d died, I was on my way to a nearby beach. I reminisced with my wife a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t appreciate Buffett when I was growing up, mostly because “Margaritaville” was overplayed when I was a teenager. Also, I didn’t really get that whole Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I was raised near the mountains) doesn’t seem like Jimmy Buffett’s natural environment: The beach is far, the water’s cold, and the first snows come soon after the last beach day.

But when I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer at the beach and the Newport bars, where Buffett’s music was everywhere. One day, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The beach wasn’t really the point. The palm trees and tropical nights and steel drums? Those were just the decor. That day in Newport, I realized that you didn’t need a beach to love Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so kind, so American, and so fun. The next day, I went to the local record store and bought my first Buffet CD. After that, no matter where I lived, I always had a beach and a friend.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom. The Bell Jar, with its sneering descriptions of ski trips to the Adirondacks and boys who ran cross-country, offered me permission to write a certain way: intensely, cuttingly, in English. It also provided an emotional context for the East Coast culture I found so alluring, and that I’d been trying to figure out. But my teenage self missed part of the novel’s project: its effort to tear down the veneer of complacent satisfaction that enveloped the American suburban lifestyle.  

The Bell Jar first appeared in England 60 years ago, a month before the author’s suicide, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After a copyright battle, it was finally published in the United States in 1971 with Plath’s name on the cover. The novel begins when Esther leaves her small town in Massachusetts for New York City, having won a coveted spot for a summer job at Ladies’ Day magazine (a fictionalized version of Mademoiselle). The glitz and artifice of the fashion world shock and repel her; upon her return to the cloistered suburbs, she comes undone. The plot culminates with her suicide attempt and her stay at a mental institution, based on Plath’s own experience at the renowned McLean Hospital.

Today, the novel is seen as a poignant account of the stifling oppression of the Eisenhower years, particularly as experienced by young women. In the introduction to her recent biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark writes that The Bell Jar “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even ‘the best minds’ of a generation crazy.” In life, Plath had trouble squaring her idea of herself as an ambitious writer with the expectations held for a girl like her—to marry young and start producing children. Some of the impact of her poetry emerged from this misalignment. Oft-quoted lines from her poem “Edge” read: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” Clark, parsing the image, notes, “Only a dead woman is ‘perfected.’ Not perfect, perfected––like … something controlled, without agency.”

The Bell Jar’s achievement, in turn, was to paint a portrait of America full of jagged inconsistencies. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther declares in the first couple of pages. Described as “drinking martinis … in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures,” she embodies the mid-century’s ideal of an accomplished, educated girl—but only up to a point. At Ladies’ Day, Esther, an aspiring poet, hopes to discuss literature with her editor; instead, her goals are treated with condescension. On campus, her sense of achievement is limited to four years of pseudo-freedom that are supposed to climax in marriage to a respectable Yale medical student, for whom she is expected to “flatten out … like Mrs. Willard’s [her would-be mother-in-law] kitchen mat.” This prospect––which would assure a secure, suburban life––is an urgent threat to someone who desires the tumult of experience; it makes Esther feel “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

[Read: Why Sylvia Plath still haunts American culture]

Pitted against her decaying sense of self, the overdone polish of the Northeast becomes sinister. Taut prose elucidates this feeling: Swimming far from the shore, Esther considers drowning before admitting to a self-preservation instinct (“I knew when I was beaten”). Longer, more rambling sentences describe the off-kilter beauty of the landscape, and how it corresponds to Esther’s mood: Driving to the Adirondacks, “the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.”

Writing about the novel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the pleasures and sentiments of youth––wanting to be invited to the Yale prom, losing your virginity––are rather unreal in a scenario of disintegration, anger, and a perverse love of the horrible.” As a teen eager to understand these signifiers of American adolescence, I was drawn to that sense of unreality, even as I responded to Esther’s frustrations with her codified environment. From the writing, I understood that the purportedly joyful rituals of growing up were attended by rage, but Plath was also gesturing at a source for this rage: the culture that created these rituals in the first place.  

The title of the novel, as readers might recall, is an image of Esther’s claustrophobia: Trapped by her surroundings and her depression alike, Esther feels as though she will always be “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air.” According to Clark’s biography, Plath considered an ending that would see Esther going to Europe, fleeing the brutality of the Northeast. It was what Plath did herself; she wrote her best work—The Bell Jar and Ariel, the poetry collection that propelled her to posthumous fame—while living in England. In this sense, The Bell Jar’s mistrust of suburban prosperity can be read as a precursor to later works that similarly explore the dark underside of small-town America; it is often paired with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, its influence deeply felt on the depiction of the Lisbon girls. And Esther’s description of the grimy hole in her mother’s basement, into which she crawls to attempt suicide, calls to mind the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the camera digs under an immaculate suburban lawn to reveal the rot lurking underneath.

Plath’s writing and biography seem to indicate that what she really wanted was freedom: to be herself and to wear her contradictions on her sleeve. But that aspiration was accompanied by an obsession with emphasizing the distance between herself and others—and, by the same token, stereotyping those she was defining herself against. As the writer Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman, her book about Plath’s legend and biographies, critics including Leon Wieseltier and Irving Howe have criticized Plath’s appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people in her poetry: Through her use of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy,” she equates her individual pain to the generational trauma caused by Nazism. And in The Bell Jar, as in poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” her fetishization of difference could be a myopic way to assert her distinction from those she seemed to see as beneath her.

As such, the novel occasionally enacts the overbearing homogeneity that characterized the America Plath supposedly held in contempt. Racist imagery pervades the text: the anti-Black sentiment that emerges in her description of a Black worker in the hospital where Esther is institutionalized is particularly unsettling. In the first few pages, Esther compares her pallor to the skin of a “Chinaman,” and my own home country is a symbol of faraway exoticism: On a humid day, the rain “wasn’t the nice kind … that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they have in Brazil.” The bell jar that descended over the suburbs seemed to come into focus for Plath only insofar as her entrapment went. She couldn’t quite look outside of herself to see how that bell jar might be suffocating for others.

[Read: The haunting last letters of Sylvia Plath]

When I first read The Bell Jar, New England was an abstract concept to me: a made-up place where the push and pull of conformity and subversion appeared to emerge in perfect clarity. Growing up in a country that idealized the American experience, I held Plath’s America at a remove. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, it stood still in time, immoveable, sentimental, and untrue. To revisit the book now, as an adult who has lived in the United States for almost a decade, is to see the idea of a romantic, preppy East Coast collapse under the harsh, more revealing light of experience. Plath’s novel didn’t materialize out of those beautiful images of coastal American adolescence; it was born of a thorny, damaging relationship with an environment that could be as cruel as it was rewarding.

In college, I fell in love with a boy from Massachusetts and went to see New England for myself. Everything looked just as I’d expected it to, even if, in the past 70 or so years, a lot had changed; not least of all the fact that, according to a University of Massachusetts at Boston report from 2020, the state is home to the second largest Brazilian population in the country. But the air in Massachusetts is thick with history, and its cunning appearance still compels. The sight of those colonial houses surrounded by maple and pine, their floors trod on by feet clad in G. H. Bass loafers, combined with the strange recognition of visiting a place I’d only ever imagined before, kept me tethered to Plath’s own descriptions. Still, as much as her legend insists that she was a prototypical all-American girl, Plath died a foreigner and an outsider. The last dinner party she ever attended, according to Clark’s biography, was at the English house of family friends from home.

It took me years to realize that no matter how diligently I studied the America I initially saw in Plath’s work, I would always be foremost a foreigner and an outsider—someone with a tormented predilection for a culture that excludes, confines, and punishes you for not fitting in. Still, I like to think that Plath wrote The Bell Jar for those who, like me and her, are seized and haunted by certain images and certain notions—even those that may, at any point, turn on us.

Arrow Zhang came to Yale last fall eager to try new things. In high school, she had spent most of her free time writing and practicing piano, but at Yale, she envisioned dividing her time between activities as disparate as finance and international relations. Zhang did not anticipate how competitive Yale’s clubs would be.

She quickly learned that, not unlike the admissions process to the university itself, entrance to student clubs often requires written applications and interviews. She filled her Google Calendar with hours of info sessions and application tasks. After more than a month of nonstop auditions, applications, interviews, and even tests, Zhang found herself rejected from multiple clubs, including ones that had no obvious reason to be selective. Most of the clubs she was able to join—The Yale Herald, a dance group, the clock-tower bell-ringers —involved skills she’d already honed in high school.

“Everyone would say, You don’t need any experience to apply,” she said. “But then everyone who gets in are already pros.”

Yale’s competitive-admission clubs include many that are notoriously exclusive but also more surprising entries, such as the community-service club. One of Zhang’s rejections came from the Existential Threats Initiative, which meets to discuss issues such as climate change and AI. Zhang was turned away for not having enough experience dealing with existential threats. Her rejection email encouraged her to listen to more podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours (tagline: “In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems”) or otherwise gain expertise in the field.

[Derek Thompson: The religion of workism is making Americans miserable]

Ben Snyder, a recent Yale grad who co-founded Existential Threats in 2022, told me the club is simply not for beginners.

“We wanted to be more selective so we could have more advanced conversations,” said Snyder, whose expertise in this subject includes having researched the risk potential of pandemics at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation last summer.

High barriers to entry are no longer just for historically elite groups on campus like secret societies and the acapella group the Whiffenpoofs, or even for club sports teams, which can field only so many players. The investing club turned away 236 people last year. The “teach kids to code” club turned away 20. The musical-improv group turned away several dozen, leaving its rejectees to find more loosely organized ways to burst into song. Half of the applicants to the magic club saw their hopes vanish into thin air.

Yale’s hyper-competitive club culture is not unique. At UCLA, application packages for coveted clubs routinely exceed 10 pages and are only the first step in multi-round processes that include formal interviews and informal coffee talks. The Voyager Consulting business club at UC Berkeley receives about 800 to 1,000 applications a cycle, and typically accepts six or seven. “It’s way harder to get into Voyager Consulting than to get into Berkeley,” Ethan Chien, a member, told me. Similar stories about the club scene abound at other highly selective universities, including Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell. At other schools, the rush process for sororities and fraternities can be just as competitive, with multiple rounds of interviews and mandatory events.

“There’s some kind of frenetic quality about it that goes way beyond rational competition, that is insanely over the top,” says David F. Labaree, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who has observed a competitive mania overtake higher education in recent years. “Anything that students come in second in, they think is a sign that they’re doomed: Oh my God. Maybe I’m a loser here.”

I just started my junior year at Yale, so I’ve experienced this frenzy myself. I fretted through applications and interviews, worried about getting rejected and having to tell my friends and parents that I wasn’t good enough. Things ended up well for me: I was admitted to the environmental-education club and landed a volunteer grant-writing position I applied for, and I started writing for student publications that have almost no barriers to entry. Still, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that this system is exhausting, absurd, and above all unnecessary. So many of these clubs are competitive for no good reason.

As I reported this story, one thing became clear: This culture is not wholly imposed by Yale as an institution. The faculty members I interviewed were perplexed that clubs are so competitive. Pericles Lewis, the dean of the college, told me he’d talked with club leaders about making the application process more humane, and they’d declined to implement significant changes. The students are doing this to themselves.

[Jerusalem Demsas: No one deserves to go to Harvard]

Yale is a place where everyone is a winner. Less than 5 percent of people who apply are offered a spot. You might think that this selectivity would make students feel confident and secure—if we had to beat out 95 percent of our peers to get in, we must be really special. But the opposite seems to be true: Students, fueled by insecurity, feel the need to over-justify their worthiness. And so they impose endless hierarchies on one another.

Many clubs on campus are open-entry, including the pizza society, the bridge club, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, the Pokémon GO club, Yale Outdoors, the anime society, and most student publications. To take part in the Dungeons & Dragons or Minecraft clubs, one need only log on to the respective Discord servers. But though welcoming enclaves exist, rejection is ubiquitous.

“College clubs are so unserious like why are you the same age as me and trying to gatekeep me from joining a social impact volunteer group,” one Yale student complained on the anonymous social-media app Fizz. The post received 1,600 upvotes.

Parents have feelings about all of this as well. A frustrated Yale mother posted on Facebook: “Most of the things my daughter wanted to do in college required a try-out … What was frustrating to us was that if you weren’t already good at something then you don’t get the opportunity to learn … She did cast that net wide. She tried out for evvvvvverything. Auditioned for Rent, MUN [Model United Nations], Mock trial, glee club, singing groups … and many more. Got rejected from all. Even volunteer groups. It was a huge hit to her self-esteem.”

[Read: The absurdity of college admissions]

Perhaps unaware that publicly discussing their children’s college activities may not be just a symptom but also a contributor to the culture they are maligning, other parents flocked to echo her comments: “My daughter had the same experience.” “My daughter tried out for the comedy groups and was told that she wasn’t funny enough.” “My first year has gotten turned down from everything—even simple volunteer opportunities that you wouldn’t think would be competitive!”

After getting into these clubs, many students are unable to fully participate. Han Choi, a senior majoring in political science who has thought about a career in law, was admitted to the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association (YULAA) but then found the club too competitive to allow him to truly contribute to advocacy and aid work.

“You have to apply to be a member of the club, and then you have to apply again to actually be on a service project,” Choi told me. “Even when I joined the club, I couldn’t do anything, because there’s a whole other super-competitive application process where you have to write about your experiences.”

YULAA was not always so selective. Yasmin Eriksson, who founded the club as an undergrad in 2016, told me the club had an application to gauge passion and commitment, but if someone was admitted, they were guaranteed placement on a service project.

“When the opportunity to volunteer is made super competitive, that sends a message to students that being interested and passionate about various issues isn’t enough. And then the question is: What is enough?” Eriksson said.

She thinks that the logical response to high group demand is to expand the opportunities available, not to turn more people away. YULAA’s leadership board has nearly doubled the number of projects offered in the past year, from about 10 to more than 20. Still, many volunteers remain who want to serve but cannot be accommodated.

Most clubs have the capacity to accept far larger cohorts or do away with entrance requirements altogether, but choose to maintain rigid admissions frameworks. The Asian American Students Alliance, for instance—the primary Asian American affiliation group, for which one would think the main requirement would be affiliation—currently requires an application.

“It’s strange to me how many student organizations decide to be selective when it’s students who completely control the system,” Mira Debs, the executive director of Yale’s education-studies program, told me. “I have often found it to be a puzzle. What force drives Yale students to be so competitive, and to construct all of these different categories that they’re applying for?”

Despite the pervasiveness of exclusivity and rejection on Yale’s campus, most of the students I spoke with didn’t feel that they were living in an end-stage meritocracy hellscape. “I am very glad I tried for as many clubs as I did,” Arrow Zhang said, “because of the incredible people I met along the way.”

Many of my peers accept the applications and interviews for clubs as the rules of the game they fought so hard to play. They embrace a million micro-meritocracies, and believe that if they aren’t willing to prove their worth at every turn, they don’t deserve full participation in campus life.

Labaree, the Stanford professor, sees the competitiveness as a result of being in an era when college is “becoming generic,” in that many American high-schoolers are expected to attend.

“If the issue is not just what education I get but how exclusive my education is, then every time access grows to that exclusive level, it’s watering down my advantage,” Labaree said, channeling the viewpoint of the educated class. “I have to find another way of establishing advantage. And I do it by stratifying.”

These dynamics are hardest on first-generation and low-income students, and students from underfunded public schools who have less specialized résumés. Vanesa Carrillo, a first-generation graduate, told me that she has never felt more stressed than during her first year at Georgetown, in part because of the pressures of club applications. She hears her undergraduate mentees describe similar feelings.

“They feel like they want to break down all the time, and I think it’s because freshman-year club culture is so insane—coming in as a 17- or 18-year-old and not knowing where to join, but knowing you have limited time,” Carrillo said.

Even some of the student leaders who enforce these norms feel queasy about it. Matthew Meyers, a senior, was the president of Yale Undergraduate Moot Court, a law club. The club’s travel expenses limit its size, which results in high selectivity. Meyers called the process of rejecting applicants “gut-wrenching.” Moot Court’s rejection email, he said, is not just a stock “We regret to inform you ...” message. It is long and delicate. Tony Ruan, a leader of the Asian American Students Alliance, is planning to make the group more accessible. “It’s strange to select based on merit, especially when the whole point of this organization is to give people an avenue to explore their interests and identity,” he told me.

Lewis, the dean, said he has spoken with student groups several times about holding tryouts later in the semester so that first-year students don’t experience so much competitive pressure in their first weeks on campus. (In Lewis’s words, this is “not a very fun way to start Yale.”) The student leaders declined, Lewis said, because they didn’t want to push back the entire semester’s events calendar. He added that Yale’s culture has a tendency to encourage an overflowing slate of activities, which he thinks stems from both university tradition and student psychology.

[From the April 2001 issue: The organization kid]

“Students have competed a lot to get into Yale. They’ve been president of their club in school. They’ve done very well in grades and sometimes in national competitions,” Lewis said. “So then they reproduce that when they get here.”

This fall, as a sophomore, Arrow Zhang will see the other side of club admissions. She will help supervise the five-week audition process for the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs, the bell-ringing club, which accepted eight of 31 applicants last year. She feels uncomfortable about becoming one of the gatekeepers she had to face just a year ago. “Now I have a say in the outcome of someone else’s audition,” she said. “I wish we could accept more people.”