Exclusively for the Yale Herald, the New York entrepreneur Ari Goldman, the CEO of the “Choice Collectibles,” a real-estate investor and a regular on “Giuliana & Bill,” reveals his secrets to successful decision-making. He insists that in business and life, there’ll always be another deal. Could that mean a career in politics?

It’s 10 am and the snow is covering the streets of Manhattan. What’s Upper about Upper East? I ask myself while the porter hails me a cab to get me just a few blocks away to meet a real-estate investor and the CEO of Choice Collectibles, Ari Goldman. The Starbucks on the corner of 75^th and 1^st is oddly overcrowded for a Saturday morning. 10 minutes past 10 a.m., in a bespoke black cashmere coat, Ari Goldman enters.

“Sorry that I’m late. I had an important business call with L.A.,” he excuses himself immediately in an effortlessly charming fashion.

To the wider American public Goldman is known for his regular appearances on the reality TV show Giuliana & Bill. His friendship with Bill Rancic rolls for twelve years now, and Goldman is one of the investors of the soon to be open, Chicago restaurant RPM Italian. Diverse in his entrepreneurial endeavors, Goldman manages many businesses simultaneously. Last march, he with his partners bought a group of buildings in the Bronx that many considered a risky venture given their number of existing city violations. Despite a general disbelief, they managed to reduce the city violations by eighty five percent in only ten months, making it a worthwhile investment which also improved people’s quality of life within the buildings.

Goldman is also the President of Choice Collectables, a New York and New Jersey based vintage animation art gallery that specializes in providing unique vintage pop-art. The most talked about sale to date, is a piece of animation art that was sold over one hundred thousands of dollars in just one transaction.

From a career that spans arts, real-estate, sports and finance Goldman has some valuable entrepreneurial advice he’s willing to share with Yalies.

YH: How do you approach business relationships?

AG: I look at my decision-making in every part of my life and try to think of how that decision feels, sounds or looks from the other person’s perspective. If I tell someone: here’s how I want you to approach this client now, Do It, that is different from me saying: this client owns this, this, this and that in his collection, and I think it would be meaningful for this client to add this to his collection. So I offer why. Because when you look at this collection it has a missing hole not covering this specific area or this specific subject. And that’s why I think it would be good to offer it to this client. Giving an explanation for my suggestion, giving an explanation which one can understand makes people catch the ball more easily than if I were just throwing them a ball and saying Catch It! and go. The same thing I find in business relationships. I was on the phone with this guy I am doing a business with when he told me he’s looking for someone to factor his invoices. I asked: Why you want to do this, you are going to give away ten percent of your money. When are your open receivable invoices due? It is due in February, he said. Well, we are in January it’s not that far, it’s not June. But he said: I need the money now, I have more orders and I have things to pay. So I told him: why don’t you go to your vendors with your invoices and say: here’s my situation, here are my invoices, I work with those companies, they all pay on time. I need better terms from you and here’s why. Make them your partner. Make them understand why you need better terms. Don’t just accept what they said two weeks ago when they hung up the phone. Talk to them. Market is not always empathetic, that’s true. But it’s often a human. And as such sometimes you can effectively change the terms of deals by communicating your needs.

YH: What are your strategies for successful decision-making?

AG: Every business has a certain capacity to make wrong decisions. How big this capacity is depends upon how big a business it is and how profitable they are. Every time I make a decision in my company I always look at how much money could I lose? I am calculating the risk. If I buy such and such piece of art and can’t sell it can I a) afford to carry on this piece of art with me b) can I afford to take a loss on it? In real-estate I do the same-always looking at the downside. Can I take the loss if I buy this building, put this much of money and take this kind of mortgage? You have to look at your thresh-hold of loss all the time.

YH: How do you make sure that everyone is accountable?

AG: It’s very simple. Not to oversimplify but there are decisions that everyone make. Where you are within that hierarchy of decision-making makes your decision have more impact. Years ago, there was this trader in London who made a series of wrong decisions and trades that in turn destroyed the whole company. One guy. There were not enough checks and balances to control what he was doing. In my company, the checks and balances are me. I don’t have investors so I don’t need to answer to anybody. I own my own company. If I make bad decisions it hurts me which in turn makes me much more cautious.

YH: On what basis do you choose your business partners?

AG: The first question I  ask myself when  deciding whether to do a business with someone is Can I trust them? You have to relay on yourself and you have to trust your instincts. Then, a history of this person  can tell you a lot. So it’s usually wise to know a little of something about the person you’re sitting down with in advance. If your instincts feel good then you can go forward. If you feel you can trust somebody then the next step is everything else. If you feel you can’t trust the person no matter how good idea is, no matter how good an executor you think this person is, it’s irrelevant. If you cannot trust them, you cannot do business with them.

YH: While you’ve done very well for yourself, you are constantly surrounded by equally successful people. How one overcomes the problem when someone else is making a deal and he’s not?

AG: If you have a hang up that someone is more successful than you and can’t deal with it, you have to hang that up. You cannot roll with that. You have to really hang up your hang ups. You are never going to have the most money. You are never going to have the best education. You are never going to have the most friends. There will always be someone who has more of everything: bigger house, new car, bigger jet. If you are 27 years old it’s unlikely that you will catch up with Mark Zuckerberg. However, I’m not saying not to try. He is who he is. And finally, if someone gives you an opportunity, you got to give back opportunities when they come your way .What comes around really does go around. There’ll always be another deal.

For all Yalies who would like to ask Goldman for business-related advice can email their questions to ksenija.pavlovic@yale.edu.

This morning, IvyGate reported on the past writings of Anthony Esolen, a professor of English at Providence College who will present “The Person as a Gift” this Monday as part of Undergraduates for a Better Yale’s True Love Week.  In 2006, Esolen penned what he calls “Ten Arguments for Sanity,” which, upon reading, may prove a questionable title for this vitriolic and often outrageous work.  IvyGate does a good job of breaking down Professor Esolen’s ten rationalizations for opposing gay marriage, but I’d like to include a few of my favorite points here:

Accepting homosexuality means the end of platonic friendships between males.

• “Now the condonement of homosexuality prevents [men] from publicly preferring the company of their own sex…Confess, reader: if you come upon two teenage boys in a pond skinny-dipping, it is the first thing you will think, and you will think it despite the obvious fact that before bathing suits were invented it was the only way two boys could ever be found swimming.”

4. Play With Your Playlist: Talk with Suki Dunham, Founder of OhMiBod Musical Vibrators

3. Immigrant Sex Lives, Practices, and Erotic Imaginations

2. A Tantric Toolbox of Personal Enlightenment, Interpersonal Intimacy and Humanitarian Aid

1. Peg-Ass-Us: A Fairy-Tale with a (Very) Happy Ending

In case you’ve been living in a hole, the Susan G. Kormen foundation, one of the largest women’s health advoacy groups in the U.S., decided to cut its funding for Planned Parenthood, one of the other largest women’s health advoacy groups in the U.S., to provide breast cancer screenings. The petition is somewhere on your News Feed. Sign it.

OUTGOING: The Rumpus 50 Most Beautiful People Contest on Facebook

That picture of the Dwight Schrute look-a-like, and all the other creepily earnest glamour shots on the Rumpus Facebook page, are mercifully no longer on our News Feeds. May they never come back.

It’s only a few days in, but February is killing it. The weather is balmy, midterms haven’t happened yet, and football is going down if that’s your jam. Sex Week is in the air, prospective EP&E majors are writing op-eds about striking out at Toad’s, and Yale men are trying to get better at sex. There is nothing about any of this that is not delightful. Sure, the first Feb Club party got broken up by the cops and the second was hosted at DKE, but there are 27 more nights to go. It can only get better from there. And best of all, it’s a leap year.

D: Alexander Nemerov

In an interview earlier this week, celebrity art history professor Alexander Nemerov told the YDN that he may be leaving us for Stanford next year. I am told that this is bad news, even after Nemerov decided to cap his lecture, leaving out the 200 students who were too normal to sign up for a section less than two minutes after the registration went online. But for all the sadness Nemerov’s departure may bring, let us remember the innumerable gifts he has given us—most notably, the best graduate student meltdown in recent memory. One of the TFs in his course was recently relieved of her TF duties after she sent a series of bizarre emails to the Assistant Dean of the Graduate School, detailing the discrimination against her catholicism from Nemerov’s other TFs. Of course, this wouldn’t matter if those emails weren’t public for us to enjoy, but she was kind enough to post them on her blog—along with other gems like her dissertation draft. So check online if you want to read about the Satanic Freemason conspiracy to infiltrate and destroy the Catholic Church by arranging for priests to rape and sacrifice young children. It’s some heavy-hitting scholarship.

F: True love

There’s a bittersweet tragedy to True Love Week, the Undergraduates for a Better Yale College’s alternative to Sex Week. It’s partially because their events, such as “Person as a Gift,” consist of one part unnerving objectification and two parts adorable. But mostly it’s because the Disney-like love they’re trying to capture, complete with happy endings and anthropomorphized animals that dance and sing around princesses, is ultimately just a nostalgic fiction. It hearkens back to that romantic time when we were 15, and, like, totally just got love, you know? It’s the type of love our moms could never understand, because we were made for each other and everything happens for a reason and love is an unbreakable connection that only death can sever. Or something.

I must be desperate. I must be desperate because I’m really reading—and not even thinking about deleting—my junk mail. I must be desperate because I like the security of knowing that a message from Tarot.com arrives every day around 4 p.m. I crave that little red one next to the mail icon—even though I know it might very well be from The Princeton Review, a holdover from high school days gone by.

I’m self-aware enough to understand that this clinging-on-for-dear-life is kind of a problem. I’m rational enough to know I should really just unsubscribe. I’m smart enough to know that these meaningless messages are just really pathetic stand-ins for the constant stream of information that zips through a Herald editor-in-chief’s inbox: elaborate lies writers tell to get out of doing what they said they were going to do, fan mail from some flounder (thanks, Mom), and every now and then, a conspiracy theory. Or two. Or 25.

Or maybe I’m not. It’s hard to let go.

For many in this place filled with deranged geniuses and overachievers, there comes a time for the inevitable adjustment when commitments end and suddenly, shockingly, there is nothing to do anymore (schoolwork doesn’t count). For three years, we run from the e-board meeting in the Athenaeum Room, to the Branford Mendell Room for drinks with the Prince of Siam, and then back to the Athenaeum Room to run the mock trial tournament and thereby determine the fate of the world. These days, the extent of my daily sojourns consist of bedroom to bathroom to classroom and back again.

I know this isn’t something to complain about, really. There’s plenty of time to watch crap like Hart of Dixie, to play Temple Run, to eat lunch without an open laptop, to go to a movie on a Tuesday evening, to get rid of dust bunnies, to play MarioKart on the Nintendo 64 someone’s brother got for his 10th birthday. And theoretically, I really like the consequence-less do-nothingness. It should be the best thing that could ever happen to anyone ever.

A dearth of a certain kind of communication comes along with these mini and easy-to-forget luxuries. There is no more meeting-scheduling; there is no more cyber-arguing; there is no more urgent Gchatting. All quiet on the stressful front. Of course, none of this is to say that I think anything I was doing was tremendously important in the grand scheme of importance. I had perspective: As a college student working for college newspaper, a typo maybe isn’t the end of the world. No one has ever died from a misplaced modifier. If I didn’t respond to someone’s question quite as quickly, it could wait. Couldn’t it?

But it doesn’t matter that my extracurricular didn’t keep the world spinning on its axis. I had chosen to focus on this here spunky publication and for that reason alone my compulsiveness was valid. Responding to an email, however stupid, however infuriating, was immediately gratifying. I know I was on the low end of the microecon curve (I like humanities, okay?) but I can tell you this much: productivity = receiving an input + responding with output. Or something like that. I was never more connected, in the strict sense of the word, than when a gaggle of contributing reporters (take that and shove it, YDN) were demanding answers to burning questions.

Over the course of a winter break, I went from feeling pretty important to acting like the girl who looks at her phone every five seconds to see if a certain so-and-so has texted her back. Except that I was the girl who looked at her phone every five seconds to see if there was a nerdy little problem I could solve, a more embarrassing version of a time-old tale. But there were no longer any “urgent” messages sitting impatiently for my reply; no one called me anymore to double-check if we had changed this and that to something else. I could finally relax, even though I wasn’t really ready to.

After a month of veritable radio silence, I now realize that maybe the free time I’ve been using to decompress could be spent finding a kind of connectivity that has nothing to do with WiFi. This is the part of the transition that shouldn’t be challenging. All of a sudden, a spur-of-the-moment lunch or dinner with the long-lost friend (who could probably stand to stay long-lost) can be a reality. Going to sleep at the same time as my roommate, now THAT’S living. This new era of less responsibility is all about the reunion, the getting back in touch, the hi how are you it’s been so long it’s so good to see you let’s grab a meal sometime?

And so, all of the time I used to spend talking about what needed to get done and solving problems is now spent communicating about other, less time-sensitive but no less important quandaries: what to make for dinner, what to tell a friend in a time of need, whether we should see The Iron Lady even though it got really bad reviews. The time is spent doing things that won’t ever get me anywhere beyond my couch.
Sometimes I worry that my friends are getting annoyed. I’m too available, too accessible. They have their own lives to live. It’s enough already! I keep anticipating that they will eventually tell me to get a grip, to stop being in touch so frequently. But they never do.

With the help of my handy-dandy array of electronica, I was a resource just a vibrate away. Call me, beep me if you wanted to reach me. But communication isn’t about productivity anymore. It’s a lot harder to work through a personal dilemma over email than it is to explain that premed has a hyphen. For every 1,000 messages I get from Soul Cycle telling me how many calories I can burn off in one 45-minute session, there’s one that comes just to me.

YH: What sparked your career in the sustainable food movement?
MB: Strangely enough, my interest started while I was doing my undergraduate in physics, of all things. My whole family was actually involving in farming, historically back in England as well as more recently in Canada, but I was not interested in farming as a kid and teenager. It wasn’t until this physics professor of mine in a third-year mechanics class took us out to his farm to play around and do labs in real time that the interest sparked. You could take all of these pure science principles and apply them into something that was incredibly tangible and meaningful in society at large—that was the initial click. I saw I could do something that has a physical impact, and I realized that was exactly what I had been missing. When you’re in the realm of academia for a while and you’re dealing in the realm of the theoretical, you can start to wonder, what am I actually doing? And who cares?

YH: Wait, there’s physics in farming?
MB: Oh yes, but there’s not just physics in farming. There’s every discipline in farming, and that’s what makes it fascinating. This professor of mine actually did a lecture entitled “Physics and Pharming.” In this field that we would now call bioresource engineering, we were asking questions such as, how do we power this farm? How can we capture more solar energy? How much power is contained in all this chicken manure? At the basis of farming is the pure physical science. But in the classroom, you can’t really grasp those concepts. When you take it to a farm, though, you get to turn those concepts into a piece of the world. An invisible world starts to take on a very visible dimension. Once I got a taste of that, there was no going back.

YH: So there’s a place for the highly educated in farming?
MB: Yes, absolutely. We need to move to a different model of farming today. One of the biggest challenges we face right now is how we use energy in producing foods. We throw fossil fuels into our system to produce a relatively small amount of food energy—eight calories of energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. It’s a very, very inefficient system. Every step of the way there’s also some investment in capital that facilitates that use of energy. On an industrial farm, for example, that would be tractors, a fancy irrigation system, pesticides, etc. What we want in the future is to substitute capital-intensive agriculture for knowledge-intensive agriculture. This is not the old model of farming. So at a place like Yale, where we don’t have a traditional agricultural school, students can still make a huge contribution to a reformed food system. In some cases it’s not through being farmers, though many very good ones might come out of here. We also need people that can support a new system of producing and eating food. We need food-literate people in policy, health, and law—all of those places where the food system needs help the most.

YH: What do you view the role of the Yale Farm to be within the Yale community?
MB: The Yale Farm is a place where we can actually have engaged learning. To really learn, we need to be engaging head, hands, and heart. Really, it is an outdoor classroom. There’s physically not enough space, though, to engage all the students we could be engaging on the farm.

YH: What do you think explains the recent trend of college- age students becoming more and more interested in food sustainability and farming?
MB: This generation seems to be seeking out some kind of reconnection to shape their lives on. Food and agriculture seems to be the fertile ground, so to say, for this reconnection. Food is a foundation—it’s universal, it’s essential, and it’s not going to go away, regardless of what the fad may be at the time.

YH: Is this phenomenon just a fad or is it something bigger than that?
MB: Yeah, you know, is it a question or is it a movement? I don’t know at what point you can say for sure—yes this is a movement. But it certainly seems to be more than a fad. It hasn’t shown any signs of slowing in the last 15 years. And I think typically fads only grab peoples’ attention for a year or two, and also only grab the attention of quite a limited subculture. Food system reform though has had a steady upwards increase in interest and has made it to policy discussions on Capitol Hill and municipal politics.

YH: How has this trend affected the Yale Sustainable Food Project?
MB: Well, just anecdotally, a weekly farming class offered this semester here at Yale had 160 people registered for what was meant to be a 30- or 40-person course. This kind of anecdote seems to be happening with increasing frequency within our program.

YH: Thoughts on the future of farming in America?
MB: Well, it’s not going to be either industrial or agrarian. There are as many different ways to produce and consume food as there are landscapes, communities, farmers and people. A sustainable food system is going to emphasize diversity in all of those areas. It will also be dynamic. Our food system evolved in an incredibly stable climate. That’s not what we’re going to have in the future. Regardless of what policies we adopt today regarding greenhouse gas emissions, there will be greater variability in climate. Farms have to be prepared to shift and adapt on short notice.

YH: A teacher once told me that “the moment you stop putting your hands in the dirt is the moment you lose your humanity.” What does this mean to you?
MB: Well, you could argue that farming is culture. The formation of society and agriculture go together in a fairly inextricable package. Farming is one of those fundamental touchstones of what it is to be human. It has not just defined humanity in the past. It defines humanity today and it will define it in the future.

YH: Favorite vegetable?
MB: My favorite vegetable changes with every season. I love the dynamic cascade from asparagus to the winter squash—and the progression of everything between them.

Albert Nobbs is, above all, uneven. Several of its scenes, like one of brief oral sex or another of a vaguely gay love affair, feel forcibly lifted from the short story by George Moore—they were once perhaps symbolically important in the text, but they seem superfluous on screen.

Can we take Albert Nobbs seriously? Yes, if only for the terrific acting. Glenn Close’s Botox-stoic Albert Nobbs is consistently, convincingly male; the hotel owner Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins) is infuriating; the impregnated maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska) is perfectly pitiable.
But that’s about all. The monstrous themes of gender, class, love, and freedom collide in the film, but instead of communicating, they strangle each other. Be prepared not to meditate upon gender, but simply to feel a bit man-hating afterwards.

In the first room of the gallery, “Outside Meditation” is penciled neatly in all caps next to a gridlock of photographic prints. From color-block geometry to divorce, vacant eyes to a Baptist church, the images here are sharp, saturated, and unsympathetic. The space is a timeworn tale of media desensitivity and jaded youth. In the next room (card number two), “Down to the Sunless Sea” is drawn in a small patch of sand, nearly destroyed with a rogue step. The rest of the room reminds one of the treasures left behind by grammar school ruffians in a childhood hideout: displaced photographs, a guillotined Barbie’s head, charred sticks, dead fish. Everything is nostalgic and kind of dirty. Set in the Mezzanine, the third and final room, “Distance of Paradise,” is a multi-screen video installation that hyperbolizes the cosmetic qualities of Los Angeles and, more panoramically, California. This set is equal parts poetry reading, patriotism, and saccharine montage à la O.C.

Set to run through Mon., Feb. 6, “Three Card Monte” is a kind of hipster sundae—sparse on toppings and obscure in flavors—but still worth a lick.

Shame is also a movie you’ve seen before. It unfolds like an encyclopedia of cinematic indices for alienation: the wordless and frustrated play of gazes on the subway, the disjointed reconstruction of a voyage to the end of the night, the almost geometrical framing of the protagonist against the windows of spare, steely rooms. And though Shame at its most graphic and disturbing will make you cringe, it will not provoke much care for any of its characters. The manipulative, stale tropes in careful succession mark it as a film that doesn’t have or seek much emotional or cathartic effect. Rather, banality is the order of the day—suffused with dread, slipping into boredom in the weaker scenes. You will leave Shame feeling numb, saturated with images that you know should have hit you in the gut, but which ring strangely dull. Indeed, Shame’s major success is the revelation that numbness is a crucial, difficult aspect of addiction.