Issue 17

THE AMHERST

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 17 l WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2018

Men’s Basketball Tops Polar Bears in Quarterfinal See Sports, Page 10 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU

Former Marine Discusses War and Journalism Sehee Park ’20 Staff Writer

Photo courtesy of Alura Chung-Mehdi ’19

The Office of Accessibility Services released changes to housing accommodations policies on Feb. 14 that allow students using housing accommodations to enter Early Room Selection with friends.

College Pilots Early Room Selection Emma Swislow ’20 Managing News Editor For the first time, students with housing accommodations will be able to enter Early Room Draw, an effort by the Office of Residential Life and the Office of Accessibility Services to allow students with accommodations enter Room Draw with friends, an option that was not previously available. The update was announced in an email on Feb. 14 from Director of Accessibility Services Jodi Foley to students previously using housing accommodations.

In previous years, students who had documented housing accommodations submitted their top three dorm choices to Foley. They would then be placed in housing based on accommodations needs and preferences (such as substance-free or single-gender floor).

This year, ResLife is trying out a program called Early Room Selection. The goal of the system is to create “an ethical and transparent process of room selection for students who choose to use approved housing accommodations for their documented disability(ies)” that provides students with housing accommodations “the opportunity to choose a friend or friends who would live in the same residence hall with the student who has housing ac-

commodations,” according to a document sent by Foley to students with housing accommodations.

Under the new system, students with accommodations will receive a lottery number based on their class year and will have the option to bring one or two friends to participate in Early Room Selection. This new system makes it possible for students with single-room accommodations to have friends live on the same floor as them.

These changes come after recommendations from Roosevelt @ Amherst, a branch of the Roosevelt Institute, which brings students together to research policy. Last March students in the group published an article in The Student that outlined their suggestions for how to improve life for students living with disabilities on campus. One of these suggestions was to create a “Buddy System” for students with housing accommodations, much like the one introduced this year.

The process of securing Early Room Selection was not easy, according to Annika Ariel ’19, the current president of Roosevelt @ Amherst.

After meeting with a variety of administrators in in October 2016, Roosevelt @ Amherst created a survey to research students’ satisfaction with housing accommodations. However, the survey never reached the student body, according to Ariel.

“When two of us [from Roosevelt] brought

this up at a Presidential Task Force on Accessibility and Inclusion meeting, we were told Accessibility Services and ResLife didn’t feel there needed to be a survey,” Ariel said. “So Joshua Ferrer ’18E and I posted on Facebook about everything that had transpired, [and] AAS wrote a letter in support.

Shortly afterwards, according to [Chief Student Affairs Officer] Suzanne Coffey, [President] Biddy [Martin] convened a meeting of staff to talk about changing this. And then the policy was finally implemented.”

Though Ariel said the accommodations changes are “satisfactory,” she felt that student input was overlooked during the creation of the policy.

“The new system finally provides most of the same opportunities non-disabled students have to disabled students,” Ariel said. “I think the process is what Roosevelt @ Amherst is more concerned about. Student voices were ignored and only deemed relevant after a Facebook post. While the end result is wonderful, the process is worrisome.”

“Other colleges have been doing this for years,” Ariel added. “Hundreds of students have missed out on the opportunity to live with friends, which is disappointing. Speaking personally, I missed out on two years of living with my friends because I’m

Continued on Page 3

The college hosted a conversation between Marine Corps veteran and investigative reporter Thomas Brennan and Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen on Feb. 15 in Stirn Auditorium.

Dean of Faculty Catherine Epstein, host of the event, introduced Brennan and Cullen.

Brennan is a retired Marine Corps sergeant who served in Iraq during the Battle of Fallujah and was also a squad leader with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. He was medically retired in 2012 and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. After his retirement, he turned toward journalism, and in 2016, he founded The War Horse, a nonprofit investigative newsroom focused on the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs. He spoke at Amherst about his new book, “Shooting Ghosts,” which he co-authored with war photographer Finbarr O’Reilly.

Cullen has written for The Boston Globe since 1985 and has been part of the Spotlight Team, the Globe’s group of investigative journalists, several time in his career. In 1988, along with other journalists, he helped uncover that mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was an FBI agent. Cullen was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the Boston Marathon bombings in 2014.

Brennan and Cullen were invited to Amherst College by the President’s Office. Events Assistant Davis Bannister said that Cullen Murphy, chairman of the Board of Trustees, helped bring the two to campus. Murphy worked with Brennan during his time as editor-at-large of Vanity Fair.

The talk was preceded by a short video produced by Vanity Fair in partnership with The War Horse, which detailed the recovery process of Marine veteran Kyle Carpenter after he lost an eye and most of his teeth and shattered his jaw and right arm when he threw himself on a grenade, saving a fellow Marine in Afghanistan. Carpenter received a Medal of Honor for his service and sacrifice.

Cullen started the talk by welcoming the audience, thanking the veterans in the audience for their service and presence and asking Brennan to describe how he joined the Marine Corps.

Brennan said that after graduating from high school, he joined the Marine Corps in 2003 because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with

Continued on Page 3

Amherst Receives Grant to Support Minorities in Academia Emily Young ’20 Staff Writer The college has been awarded a $500,000 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program grant. The grant was gifted to the college by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and will help fund an initiative to help underrepresented groups pursue graduate studies in the humanities.

According to the college website, the MMUF Program was established in 1988 by the Mellon Foundation with select colleges in order to help underrepresented groups work towards doctorates in the humanities. The MMUF Program currently includes 50 member colleges in the United States and South Africa. Administrators and faculty members at each of the colleges are responsible for

selecting the fellows to participate in the program.

Students selected must demonstrate strong intellectual ability and motivation to attain a doctoral degree in a humanities program. Students are usually selected their sophomore year.

According to an email from Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Norm Jones sent to the college community on Wednesday, Feb. 14, Rosemary Effiom will serve as coordinator for the MMUF program at Amherst. Prior to joining the Amherst community, Effiom spent the past nine years coordinating the MMUF program at Bowdoin.

Marisa Parham, a MMUF alumna and Amherst professor of English and faculty diversity and inclusion officer, and Allen J. Hart, chair of the psychology department and a faculty diversity and inclusion officer, will be mainly responsible for

planning MMUF programs for Amherst fellows.

Additional professors from black studies, English and sexuality, women’s and gender studies have signed on to help as well.

A second email was sent out to the class of 2020 on Tuesday, Feb. 20 further explaining the program and the requirements to apply. Students are encouraged to apply in the spring of their sophomore year.

Students must have at least 3.0 GPA and be a U.S. citizen or have permanent resident visa status in the United States. Students must also “possess intellectual and academic promise” and come from traditionally marginalized groups.

Fellows selected for the program are encouraged to conduct individual research with a faculty mentor and will receive support and an en-

vironment conducive to a high level of academic achievement. Fellows will also participate in programming scheduled by Amherst faculty in charge of the MMUF program.

The two conditions of the program are that the fellows are expected to apply to a doctoral program in a Mellon-designated field of study within 39 months of graduation and pursue a doctoral degree in one of the approved areas of study.

Jones said in an email interview that it is an honor to be able to work with the Mellon Foundation and with MMUF in particular.

“Amherst students have a powerful influence on academic discourse in the humanities and social sciences, and I’m excited that those contributions, through this program, will also strengthen the faculty pipeline,” he added.

News

Michael Cohen Fresh Faculty

Feb. 12, 2018 - Feb. 19, 2018

>>Feb. 12, 2018 6:19 p.m., Jenkins Dormitory An officer investigated a smoke detector sounding in a second-floor room and found it was activated by use of a candle, which is prohibited. Student Affairs was notified.

cabinet had been smashed.

>>Feb. 13, 2018 12:43 a.m., Wieland Dormitory An officer responded to a complaint about the odor of marijuana on the second floor. Nothing was found.

11:55 p.m., Gym Loop Road An officer discovered an unattended 30-pack of beer on the ground. It was disposed of.

10:59 a.m., Williston Hall An officer investigated a smoke detector sounding on the first floor and found it activated when popcorn was burned in a microwave in the lounge. >>Feb. 14, 2018 6:28 p.m., Tyler House Officers investigated a smoke detector sounding on the second floor and found it was caused when the resident smoked marijuana. The matter was referred to Student Affairs.

6:38 p.m., Tyler House While investigating a smoke detector sounding in a second-floor room, officers confiscated marijuana and a grinder used to grind marijuana. The matter was referred to Student Affairs. >>Feb. 16, 2018 12:22 a.m., Hitchcock Hall An officer encountered two students on a bench outside the building. One student had a lit marijuana cigarette.

They were identified, and the matter was referred to Student Affairs.

9:10 p.m., Taplin House An officer encountered a student with an unlicensed keg.

It was confiscated. >>Feb. 17, 2018 12:54 a.m., Moore Dormitory An officer responded to a report of vandalism and found a glass door in a stairway

1:42 a.m., Wieland Dormitory An officer responded to a complaint about the odor of marijuana on the second floor. An odor was detected, but the origin could not be identified.

>>Feb. 18, 2018 12:07 a.m., Chapman House An officer discovered an unauthorized party and shut it down.

12:20 a.m., Hitchcock Hall Officers discovered an unauthorized party with approximately 75 people in the common room. It was shut down.

12:30 a.m., Hitchcock Hall While in the building, an officer discovered several students and drug activity in a third-floor common room.

8:22 a.m., Smith House Officers investigated an intrusion alarm and found it was accidentally set off by an employee.

9:11 a.m., Charles Pratt Dormitory Officers investigated a smoke detector sounding in a first-floor room and discovered it activated when a resident used a smoking vaporizer.

11:14 a.m., North College Dormitory A resident reported she let two males, whom she did not recognize, enter the building after her. Officers checked the building, but the men were not located. >>Feb. 19, 2018 2:02 a.m., Hitchcock House An officer encountered an unauthorized party and shut it down. Alcohol was disposed of.

Interested in having your voice heard on this campus?

e h t n i o J ! n o i t c e s s w e n If you want to write for us, email schen20@amherst.edu or eswislow20@amherst.edu.

Department of Psychology

Michael Cohen is an assistant professor of psychology. He holds a B.A. from Tufts University and a Ph.D from Harvard University.

Q: How did you gain interest in psychology?

A: When I was an undergrad, I was actually a philosophy major. I think I only took one psych class as an undergrad. I was really interested in the philosophy of mind with a lot of big, heavy questions like “What is consciousness?” or “What is the self?” I really enjoyed that, but after a while, I started getting frustrated because there are obviously no answers that you can give that are going to be satisfactory. So I kind of just for fun started reading psych studies, just going into the stacks of the library and picking them off, and I started enjoying those.

When it came time to graduate, I talked myself into a lab at Harvard Medical School where I was a research assistant for a few years, and I really liked that. When my contract was coming up, I decided to apply to graduate school, and I got in and here I am.

Q: Can you describe some of the research you have done?

A: I study the limits of human perception.

What that basically means is I’m trying to understand how much of the world you actually see when you look out in the world, how much of the world you actually remember and why you don’t see or remember more of it. A very common thing that happens, for example, when people get into a car wreck is they’ll actually say to a policeman, “I’m sorry officer, I just didn’t see the sign, the pothole, the kid.” They think, “I just didn’t see it,” because they were spacing out or their attention was elsewhere. So that’s an example of the capacities of your visual system, that you weren’t able to process all of the information and sometimes it leads to an accident. What I study is trying to understand why you can’t process all of that information, what causes you to miss certain things and not others, why do certain things reach perceptual awareness and other things not [and] why are some things able to stick around in memory while other things fade away.

Q: What brought you to Amherst?

A: There’s the generic: I really enjoy the balance of teaching and research, and I heard that Amherst students are great and I wanted to be part of a liberal arts environment. But I feel like that’s not informative, even if it’s not necessarily accurate. The real answer is that I could’ve either gone in the direction of doing research and nothing but research and run a big lab, or I could have gone this direction and do[ne] a lot more teaching. I personally really like teaching and just enjoy it in general. Amherst is a good school, so when they said, “Hey, do you want to be this teacher-person here at this good school?” I said sure.

Q: What drew you away from doing research full-time?

A: It’s just a personal preference. I have some friends who I have been working with for years and who love research and personally don’t like teaching that much. If you were to ask them what drew them towards big research and not teaching, they’d probably also say it was personal preference.

Q: What do you hope to contribute here?

A: First of all, what I got hired to do was bring

an element of human neuroscience to the college. There’s a bunch of great professors on campus who do studies in neuroscience, but they do it at a much smaller scale. They talk about individual neurons or individual chemicals and so on. My speciality is at the human, macro kind-of level, so I’m hoping to bring that to the college. More broadly, I personally am obsessed with this idea that, going forward in the 21st century, the majority of jobs that Amherst students are going to take are going to have a data component to [them]. If you’re working in a law firm, you have to figure out billing plans.

If you’re working in a dental practice, you have to figure out which treatments are effective, and you need to get data on those things and get quantitative assessments of it. One thing I really want to focus on in my classes is even if we’re talking about psychology or neuroscience, we’re also talking about data, numbers in general, how to use numbers to answer questions, how to ask questions you can answer with numbers and how to evaluate the results you get. That’s a skill that I think is going to be super important in the 21st-century economy almost regardless of what your position is.

Q: What classes are you teaching this semester?

A: I teach Psych 100, which is Introduction to Psychology. The goal of that course, at least for me when I teach, is largely to get people excited about psychological science, to give people a foundation to what psychological science is and to convey to them how psychologists perform experiments. The other class I’m teaching is a seminar called the Conscious Brain. There, what we’re focusing on is conscious experience and how the brain and the neuroscience of the brain lead to conscious experience. We talk about things like the differences in your brain when you’re asleep versus when you’re awake versus when you’re anesthetized. We talk about different types of perceptual illusions and what causes those. We talk about subliminal processing and whether or not your brain can process information unconsciously, which it can. We’re talking about how much can your brain process unconsciously without you even realizing it.

Q: What do you do in your spare time?

A: I’ll be really honest with you. For most first-year faculty, we don’t have a tremendous amount of free time. What students don’t realize is to come up with an 80-minute lecture takes way more than 80 minutes to prepare.

As of yet, free time is not something I have in a major abundance. Beyond that, I’m a pretty boring person. I like superhero movies; I like “Rick and Morty”; I like Netflix and nature documentaries. I actually sometimes get disappointed when I don’t have students ready and eager to talk about those things with me before, after or during class.

—Natalie De Rosa ’21

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

News

3

Veteran and Journalist Thomas Brennan Speaks on War Experience Continued from Page 1 his life — he wanted to continue his education but lacked the financial means.

“The first four months of my deployment were very anticlimactic,” he said. “And then, Fallujah happened.” He remembers being dropped into the city on Nov. 10, 2004, the Marine Corps’ birthday, with “Marines’ Hymn” playing in the background.

Fallujah was “pretty bad,” Brennan said. He was 19 at the time, and working as an infantry assaultman meant that his “speciality was demolitions and rockets. So I made big holes in stuff that normally didn’t have holes in it before.”

Cullen then asked how Brennan met his coauthor for his new book.

Brennan met O’Reilly after being deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and sent to a different base in Kunjak, where he saw “this gaunt man sitting in the corner on this cot.” Brennan was initially skeptical of the man, O’Reilly, after finding out he was a photojournalist from Reuters. “At that point, I definitely thought that war and journalism didn’t mix,” Brennan said.

O’Reilly quickly earned Brennan’s trust — the next day, O’Reilly was with the squad when they were pinned down in an alleyway, under fire from two insurgents. “Being under fire with another person — you quickly bond with those people when there’s a risk you’re going to have your brains splattered across the wall,” Brennan said.

On Nov. 1, 2010, Brennan’s squad was advancing into Nabu Agha with the intention of setting up an Afghan base in the city when an Afghan National Police officer fired a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) towards Brennan. He lost consciousness and had to be medically evacuated. Following the blast, Brennan spent 15 days in a field hospital.

Doctors cleared him for duty and Brennan was sent back into combat, but he knew something was wrong. He was having trouble remembering things and would frequently get migraines.

These problems continued throughout the rest of his deployment and his return home. “When I started coming home, I just wanted to isolate [myself] completely,” Brennan said.

“Every little thing that I couldn’t remember would just send my anger through the roof, and I just became really really isolated. I knew I wasn’t mentally the same Marine that I was before. I didn’t think that I was broken, but I knew I was cracking and beginning to fall apart.”

Brennan recounted the time he broke down after seeing an amputee in a diner. “I lost it, my mind, and I was begging my wife in my truck that night — ‘I just want a gun, help me find a gun, I just want to kill myself,’” he said.

Some of Brennan’s peers were supportive when he sought help, but others were not. Brennan felt abandoned at a time when he “needed the support of [his] peers more than ever. It was a very demoralizing experience.”

Cullen commented that Brennan’s experience was “par for the course for the military.”

“They tell you to get help, but [if you do] you’re diminished as a soldier,” Cullen said. “They tell you to be a whistleblower for wrong things and then if you are a whistleblower, you’re punished for it — there’s always an asterisk next to your name.”

The conversation moved from Brennan’s injury to his transition from a Marine to a journalist.

Brennan started writing in a notebook that a social worker had given him during therapy as a way to express his feelings. Writing in the notebook, Brennan said, gave him a “voice and the ability to explain what [he] was going through.”

The transition wasn’t always smooth, however. After starting The War Horse, Brennan felt at times like he was “violating the brotherhood and sisterhood of being in the military.”

“A lot of people said I was airing dirty laundry that didn’t need to get aired,” he added. “It caused me to really look really hard at myself and figure out what purpose I wanted to pursue.”

Amid the doubts, Brennan received a call one day from a Marine who had been contemplating suicide. The Marine told Brennan that he had decided to live after reading Brennan’s article, in which he talked about his own suicide attempt.

“Knowing on a truly micro level, that I made an impact for a single human being — that was enough,” Brennan said. “I know I’m on this course

Photo courtesy of Alura Chung-Mehdi ’19

The college hosted former Marine and reporter Thomas Brennan for a conversation with journalist Kevin Cullen about Brennan’s new book and the trials of war. for the long haul.”

Brennan talked about how he got the inspiration to start The War Horse while he was in graduate school. “It wasn’t that military newsrooms were doing it wrong, I just thought that military newsrooms could do it better,” Brennan said.

Compared to typical news reports, which are “always about the next battle,” the goal of The War Horse is to tell veterans’ stories. “The veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — we’re not old news,” he said. “I mean, [the war] is still going on.”

“I want to use The War Horse as a means to restore faith in the news … and in military and veteran affairs,” he added.

The conversation ended with Brennan talking about how his book. “Shooting Ghosts” was an attempt to find closure for his time in the Marine Corps and a way to connect with fellow veterans.

“That was me, taking this jumbled mess of memories and letters and feelings and putting it all in one organized place,” he said. “For me, the book is a success if one person connects with the deepest, darkest stuff I put in there.”

The two journalists then participated in a Q&A session, during which Brennan talked about the nature of traumatic brain injuries and how The

War Horse got its name. A veteran of the Vietnam War in the audience also shared his story.

Epstein, in an interview after the event, said the college is “very interested in bringing to students other viewpoints, other perspectives, other experiences than the ones that they’ve usually had.”

In a separate interview, Cullen elaborated on his relationship with Brennan and his personal motivation for participating in talks such as the conversation hosted at Amherst.

“Tom always says I helped him get in the business, and I mean, he’s paying it back, he’s paying it forward … and I love helping [veterans] because I think we owe them so much, especially the ones who have done multiple tours,” Cullen said.

“Timmy [Cullen’s nephew] will never be recorded in the official death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq but [he] was wounded in Iraq and he died as a result of his wounds, and it’s something that our family lives with every day,” Cullen added.

“When I think about all the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, Afghan people who have suffered through these wars for the last decade and a half, that’s why it was important for us to come here tonight and talk about it.”

New Policy Allows Students with Accommodations to Live with Friends Continued from Page 1 blind. Saying I ‘chose’ to use housing accommodations and not enter room draw is like saying I chose to be blind.”

The process of implementing accommodations changes is not the only ResLife action to come under question. ResLife also announced changes to the general Room Draw system on Feb. 7.

Under the new policy, each student in a class year would be randomly assigned a number; 1-500 for rising seniors, 501-1,000 for rising juniors and 1,001-1,500 for rising sophomores. After receiving their number, students would form room groups — the average of their numbers would determine when they could pick rooms.

Previously, all rising seniors were assigned the number five, all rising juniors were threes and all rising sophomores were ones. A room group’s average would then be randomly sorted within all the other groups of the same average.

Justin Lee ’19, a member of the Student Housing Advisory Committee (SHAC), spoke during the Feb. 12 Amherst Association of Students town hall on the lack of communication between ResLife and SHAC this year.

After the town hall, however, SHAC did meet with members of ResLife, including Director of Residential Life Andrea Cadyma, who was receptive to the committee’s feedback on the new policy, according to Lee. While he admits that the current Living Unit

Value (LUV) system is not perfect, he pointed out some of the disadvantages to the proposed change.

“It has the potential to split up friend groups where there may be a even divide between those with high numbers and those with low numbers,” Lee said. “We think this potentially would be exacerbated when coming to rising sophomores whose friendships may not have been fully solidified yet.

These groups are the ones most vulnerable to split, causing the campus to fragment even further.”

After many students’ responded negatively to the new changes, especially at the AAS Town Hall on Party Policy, ResLife announced that the new system would not be implemented for this year’s room draw and would instead remain as it had in past years.

In a joint statement compiled by Senior Associate Dean of Students Dean Gendron, Foley and Cadyma, they said that more time to implement the changes would have incited stronger student support.

“If we had had time to make the proposed HSNs [Housing Selection Numbers] known to the community sooner, we believe that students would have had a better chance to understand and appreciate this simplified approach,” the statement said.

“Since the first student voices about the HSNs produced anxiety and confusion for others ... we decided to maintain the LUVs for another cycle so we can continue to collect student input and focus on an extended information campaign for 2019,” the administrators wrote.

Hitchcock Fellowship The Department of Physical Education and Athletics invites applications for the Hitchcock Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The Hitchcock Fellowship is awarded to a graduating senior who wishes to pursue a career in the field of athletics, primarily teaching and coaching. The Hitchcock Fellow will be an Assistant Coach in at least two intercollegiate programs and may be assigned/elect other duties. Individuals interested in the position should send a letter of application and current resume no later than February 16, 2018 to: Jen Hughes Assistant Athletic Director

Opinion

THE AMHERST

Forging Your Own Path

STUDENT E X E C U T I V E B OA R D

There are these well-trodden paths that a typical Amherst student follows. Try to avoid them. Don’t go through life like you do on the path to Val from your dorm — mindlessly following pre-determined trails. Amherst can feel like a funneling system, one that takes our passions and dreams and sucks them into a hole where we feel a need to do what others are doing. After college, most people will end up in New York, San Francisco or Boston in fields like finance or medicine. Instead of passively following this path, think carefully about the road you take. Explore and expand the possibilities of your time here at Amherst. Doing so will not only result in personal enrichment, but will also be useful in addressing multifaceted global issues that are in need of innovation, fresh ideas and various perspectives. The rapidly growing science of artificial intelligence is bound to eliminate jobs and demand new ones, some that are probably yet to be conceived. By immersing ourselves in the plurality of activities, disciplines and possibilities at Amherst, we prepare for the spontaneity of the future.

We embrace the liberal arts education mantra of exposing ourselves to different ways of thinking. Yet, this doesn’t seem to always apply to how we take on the world outside of academics. We stay close to our select friends and groups without straying far. We comfortably adopt a certain role—athlete or math major. How often will we be talking to people outside of our social standing or our normal spheres? Will we reevaluate the assumptions we grew up with by

exposing ourselves to uncomfortable situations? We must be able to learn in different settings, cultures and dynamics if we are to tackle the complex issues of our world. As conflicts become more global and changes happen more rapidly, we need more people to not just take a stance but mediate between two different point of views.

You can do this by taking advantage of what Amherst has to offer and customizing your own Amherst experience so that you don’t feel stuck on a certain path. Believe that the Amherst experience can positively transform you, or at least figure out why it doesn’t. Avoid a sense of entitlement towards the college because Amherst staff, faculty and alumni invest in us students. In 2015, the amount the college spent on each student excluding financial aid was $95,600 — more than full tuition.

If you feel like you’re wasting your time at Amherst, creatively utilize the resources available. Start a new club, talk to professors about how the class material intersects with your interests or get funding from AAS to do something you, and possibly others, would enjoy.

Come out of Amherst with a clear understanding of why you live the life you do and what you want to change along the way. It’s okay to not know what exactly you want in five or 10 years, but don’t fight the feeling of being lost by narrowing your path — instead, think of it as a time to expand your possibilities. An Amherst education should entail an opening of doors to different frontiers of discovery and growth, so go on and explore.

If I May: A Tribute to Harris Wittels Jake May ’19 Columnist On Feb. 19, 2015, Harris Wittels, a comedy writer best known for his work on “Parks & Recreation,” passed away from a heroin overdose. He was only 30 years old. In his short life, he managed to become one of the most sought-after joke writers in Hollywood.

In addition to “Parks & Rec,” Wittels was a writer for HBO’s “Eastbound and Down” as well as for the popular Funnyordie.com series “Between Two Ferns.”

Harris Wittels is, even after his death, one of my biggest influences not only in comedic writing, but in creativity in general. He was a unique voice; after his death, many of his peers (including Amy Poehler and Sarah Silverman) discussed stories about how they could always tell when a joke was written

by Harris because his style was so recognizable. This uniqueness is very admirable and something that all writers – comedic or not – should strive for.

However, Wittels’ voice was not only

unique, but profoundly weird, in the absolute best way possible. He didn’t write jokes with traditional set-ups and punchlines, nor did he tell long personal stories with big payoffs. Instead, he created his own structures for jokes. For example, here is a joke he told on stage during a live performance of the “Comedy Bang! Bang!” podcast, on which he was a frequent guest: “I’ve said ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again’ before, but I’ll say ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again’ again.”

Honestly, as I write it out, I realize I don’t know if I can even call it a joke. It’s just a funny idea. That is the kind of mind Harris Wittels was. He didn’t operate with the same preconceived notions of what is funny and what is not. But by trusting his own voice, he convinced the rest of us to see the hilarity in the silliness and absurdity he created.

When he read the joke above, the audience responded with a huge laugh. Here’s another example of a Harris Wittels original: “If someone is being egregious – call them eg-Regis Philbin.” Personally, I giggled even typing that out.

As I mentioned above, Wittels was a beloved guest on the podcast “Comedy Bang!

Bang!” which is an improvised comedy podcast hosted by Scott Aukerman. Harris would often go on the show to read drafts of his jokes or just funny ideas that he had. Fortunately for his fans, these recordings act as a reservoir of purely Harris material. Obviously, as a writer on a network sitcom, we had access to something he helped create, but the sitcom is really more of a collaborative creation, with the writers’ collective voice coming through rather than those of individuals.

However, in Harris’ “Comedy Bang! Bang!” appearances, we get to experience a comedic mind at work, one that was never able to reach its full potential. If you have never listened to any of these appearances before (which I assume you have not), please consider doing so. There is a great compilation video on YouTube. Simply search “Harris Wittels Tribute.” It’s just some of the most delightful, carefree, fun comedy that exists.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but rest in peace, Harris.

Editors-in-Chief Nate Quigley Isabel Tessier Executive Adviser Jingwen Zhang Managing News Shawna Chen Emma Swislow Managing Opinion Kelly Chian Daniel Delgado Managing Arts and Living Olivia Gieger Managing Sports Connor Haugh Henry Newton Julia Turner Managing Design Justin Barry Design Editors Julia Shea Katie Boback Zehra Madhavan Head Publishers Nico Langlois Mark Nathin

Letters Policy The opinion pages of The Amherst Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community.

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The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Opinion

5

Gun Violence: It Is Time For More Than Just Reflection Khyla Haddock ’20 Contributing Writer In light of recent events in Florida once again sparking brief concern about the issue of gun safety, I think that we should all reflect on the events and public apathy that have led to this current environment. 17 people were killed last week in a shooting at a Florida high school, and there have since been rallying cries across the nation for increased laws regulating access to guns, such as mandatory background checks before the purchase of a firearm. But these cries have occurred before, and we often find ourselves wondering how this can happen again and again. After the Charleston church shooting, we thought it would change, and we thought so again after the shooting in the Pulse nightclub, and we thought so for all the

shootings before, after and in-between, but we were wrong. The fact of the matter is that the public outcry following a shooting is shortlived, and though the events will stay with the people involved for the rest of their lives, the rest of us are only too quick to forget because it’s harder to remember and know that all of the work that we might put into something could be for naught.

The problem is two-fold, then. According to the Washington Post, studies have shown that conservatives are generally more afraid for their physical safety. Because they are more afraid, they are more politically active since fear is the greatest motivator for humans. It’s easy to rile conservatives up based on the fear that they will no longer be able to protect themselves — the fear that they will lose their guns. Perhaps the problem then is that liber-

als are not afraid enough. The direct victims of gun violence are more active on behalf of reform because of their experience — because they are afraid. The rest of the country is only outraged. The rest of us should realize that this can happen to anyone at any time, and we shouldn’t just be outraged, we should be afraid as well.

The other half of the problem comes from the fact that we are not attentive enough to the issues which grow in our own country.

Every time a mass shooting occurs, the news digs through the shooter’s past and uncovers many things, analyzing every aspect of their personality. But this only occurs in hindsight.

The people surrounding them might see the signs, like torturing animals, violence against women or sometimes self-harm, but reports are ignored until it’s too late. The FBI received

tips on the shooter in Florida, but they didn’t act. The people around him noticed his behavior and realized that he was displaying warning signs. We live in a time where most people’s lives are up on the internet for the taking.

Why then do we have such trouble acting on what’s right in front of us? Why can we not admit that these people are of our own creation?

It’s easy to see people focusing on the issue of terrorism in our society on the global scale.

The president and his followers seem especially concerned with it, but they are focusing on something external, trying to keep a problem from coming in. But, when the violence is perpetrated by our own citizens, we are quick to label it as unfixable and ignore its underlying causes, as if this is something that just happens. I think we should all admit that the poison is already inside us.

Oh SNAP: Federal Budget Reveals Need For Activism Ellen von zur Muehlen ’20 Contributing Writer On Sunday, Feb. 11, representatives from every environmentally-focused group and organization on campus, including the Office of Environmental Sustainability, congregated in the McCaffrey Room in Keefe. Each representative explained the work their group is involved in, some noting a desire to be more active or fielding ideas for upcoming projects. The meeting also marked the inception of the Food Justice League, a new group that will address social and environmental issues centered around one of our most basic needs.

Both overdue and timely, the congregation served to inject some energy into environmental justice movements at Amherst and catalyse a new semester of organizing and activism.

The birth of the Food Justice League comes at an especially opportune moment, given the content of the 2019 federal budget. One of the budget’s most drastic changes relates to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamps Program. The changes outlined not only reduce federal funding for SNAP by almost 30 percent, shift a large part of the financial burden onto states and tighten eligibility, they

also fundamentally restructure the program to resemble war-time rationing. Currently, SNAP operates by issuing an Electronic Benefit Credit card to recipients that can be used to purchase food at participating grocery stores.

Under the new proposal, households that receive more than $90 in credit per month will receive a portion of that as a pre-selected package of “shelf-stable” foods. Leftover credit will still be available for use at approved grocery retailers. Essentially, instead of enjoying the basic ability to choose fresh foods for one’s family, SNAP recipients will be presented with a box of canned food and dried goods that will be “100 percent American grown.”

Although the budget claims the changes will “improve the nutritional value of the benefit,” a comprehensive study conducted by the University of California, Davis Food Science and Technology Department that compares relative nutrition between fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, disagrees. This study corroborates the results of many others, indicating that the canning process degrades nutrients in fruits and vegetables, especially water soluble nutrients like vitamin C. Since the only fruits and vegetables in the SNAP box will be canned, the government would be limiting the nutrition of recipients who may otherwise have used the SNAP credit to purchase

fresh produce.

Besides its nutritional concerns, the proposed SNAP reorganization would take away the basic dignity of getting to choose one’s own food. For families with members who have allergies or other dietary restriction and preferences, a pre-packaged box of food presents serious obstacles. How could a distant, bureaucratic government know how to feed an individual or family better than they could themselves? SNAP recipients would be forced to deal with choices made by a detached entity that neither knows nor cares about their tastes. The plan is cruel and inconsiderate. Its design strips agency from people already in difficult circumstances, and it reveals the toxic notion that those in poverty deserve their condition and shouldn’t be given the same respect as the more affluent.

The limitations imposed by the proposed SNAP changes would also complicate local initiatives, such as the Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), a United States Department of Agriculture-funded Massachusetts program to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables among low-income households. HIP works by awarding participants a 100 percent price match for SNAP credit when used to buy fruits and vegetables at farmers markets and community-supported agriculture programs.

The purpose of HIP is to reduce the burden of eating healthy for families receiving SNAP benefits and encourage the kind of healthy eating Trump’s proposed changes would make difficult. The Amherst Winter Farmers Market participates in HIP, but could see a reduction in participation if the SNAP alterations go into effect and limit the amount of free SNAP credit families could spend there.

While Trump’s proposal to shake up SNAP is far from receiving congressional approval, it is emblematic of the overall unkindness of the 2019 budget proposal, which includes other reductions of social programs, tightens border control and immigration policy and reduces corporate regulations. It also serves as a call to action and engagement with social and environmental problems, a call the Food Justice League intends to answer. When the federal government’s proposals represent an affront to human dignity, grassroots activists must be ready to campaign against them and generate their own solutions to maintain the social safety net in their communities. This activism must be intersectional, combining the interests of social and environmental efforts to pursue a sustainable way of life that places humans within and not apart from the local ecology and reduces stress on both people and natural resources.

A Layman’s Guide to Spiritual Living John Kim ’20 Staff Writer Ever since I renounced Christianity in middle school, I was never interested in learning about other religions. But a year and a half into Amherst, with countless more books and writing assignments ahead, spiritual enlightenment sounded appetizing enough. I don’t plan on shaving my head and fasting anytime soon (my hair is a proud asset), but I have enrolled in the Buddhist Life Writing course here at Amherst to see what divine spirituality looks like, at least in theory. I quickly brought some of the theory down to the ground level, and began applying it in my own life. And so, I present to you my very own fast-food version of the Buddha’s teachings.

Patience, Young Grasshopper.

According to the canon “The Story of Got-

ama Buddha,” the Buddha, in one of his many reincarnations, showed no signs of anger when a king repeatedly whacked him with an axe as though he “were an inanimate thing.” Compared to this, the Val lunch line that stretches out the door doesn’t seem too horrendous, so try to keep this image in mind whenever you’re fuming.

ples more than anything? Letting go of attachments. Apparently, his strategy in being happy is not to fulfill all desires, but to have the least amount of desires possible. That way, you’ll be spared the disappointment and suffering that come with failure. And without desires, you’ll never get attached to anything and can live free as a bird. What a genius.

Dive into the Moment.

Perhaps one of his more well-known doctrines, being present is key to a happy and spiritual life. Whether you’re at a party or in class, quit worrying about that paper you have due in two days, or whether you’ll hear back from that internship you applied to. Commit to what’s happening in front of you, and you’ll have a jolly ol’ time.

Karma’s a Biscuit.

According to the Buddha, everything in the universe is connected in imperceivable chains of cause and effect. All things that occur in the universe are the effects and causes of many other things. This means, then, that all our actions have their causes, but more importantly, effects. What we do will have consequences that may elude our lifetime (ahem, climate change deniers), but they will confront us, in this life or the next. Performing good deeds is essential to storing good karmic energy so that

Let that Stuff Go. What does the Buddha stress to his disci-

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you aren’t reborn as a pitiful ant or some other lowly creature. Take heed, all you miscreants out there.

Indulge in an Omen or Two. I get it, you may never have believed in tarot card readings. But if the words “I have a good/ bad feeling about this” have ever taken hold of you, then you’re not so unlike the Buddha.

He took up the life of an ascetic monk after witnessing four omens of life: sickness, death, old age and monkhood. It’s not so silly once in a while to believe that something is a sign from the future that your life will go well. If you believe and act, your moment of optimism could translate into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pick anything, whether it be snow falling from a branch or a well polished writing assignment.

After all, the last omen really stuck with the Buddha, and he ended up creating his own religion. Talk about being superstitious.

If you want to write for us, email kchian20@ amherst.edu

Arts&Living

Q&A: Rebecca Ford ’18 on Writing a Sci-Fi Novel Capstone Project Olivia Luntz ’21 Staff Writer Rebecca Ford ’18 is a double major in Black Studies and English, concentrating in carceral studies and diasporic movements of resistance and revolution. Outside of class, she is a member of African and Carribean Student Union Dance and is an academic intern for the African American Dance Symposium this semester. She is also working on a play about the life of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther. For her Senior Capstone presentation she read two chapters from the book she has been writing as a special topics course.

Q: Describe the project you presented at the English Symposium.

A: For my senior English Capstone Presentation, I presented two chapters of the novel I’m writing, tentatively titled “Not Again.” The premise of the book is “Get Out” meets “Black Mirror.” It’s sci-fi, but it’s looking at the history of how we’ve dealt with black people in this country historically and imagining what the next cycle of that containment or control is going to look like.

It’s this creepy dystopian looking at the future and trying to imagine what’s going to happen next and then specifically focusing on mass incarceration and ideas of containment throughout history. In the novel, they’re redesigning the prison industrial complex, so they’re looking at a new way to imprison people, “they” being the antagonists. These two app designer dudes who get together and basically think to themselves, “OK, we’ve made this really cool app that looks at criminology in a very specific kind of scary way of making this giant database, let’s see what we can do if we wanted to join forces with a different organization to build a center.” They are the general antagonists, but it’s also a network of an engineer, an architect and other people.

Q: Could you expand on what the plot of the novel is?

A: We follow a character named Gabriel at the beginning and he gets arrested, but the evidence that leads to his arrest has been planted.

What’s interesting about him is that he’s representing the innocent that can’t afford a trial or just can’t afford to pay bail to get out — people who are innocent but are still incarcerated. He gets told by his lawyer that they don’t think he’s going to win so he should plead guilty and go to

this experimental facility that would give him a lot more freedom than he would have in the regular criminal justice system. So he takes the opportunity, because he’s been told he can see his family more, he would have his own place and where he’s going to be living is going to be modeled more like a town and less like a prison.

But the idea is that regular people can also come and visit this town and talk to people who have chosen to live in this community … kind of like “Westworld.” The whole idea is that they’re taking the criminals you once feared and making them the neighbors you know and love, so there’s this creepy paternalistic narrative around “we’re going to bring these people into this better place.”

That’s where we start, but I also wanted to show what’s going on with people who are not directly involved with this system, so the second story is that of a girl, AK, who is in a predominantly white high school, and she’s hearing buzz about this new place, tentatively titled “Carcertown” — as in “incarceration” — so she’s representing the outside world’s opinion on it. She decided to go check it out and that’s how their two stories meet, action happens in the town, and I think I’m going to leave the story on a cliffhanger of Gabriel having the opportunity to get out of the town.

Q: How did this first come into fruition?

Where did you get the idea, what inspired it and what here at Amherst allowed you to pursue this project?

A: I got the idea the day after the 2016 election … I didn’t feel like doing anything, so I choose to stay in bed and watch Netflix. But it felt really wrong to watch a show like “Friends,” so I found Ava DuVernay’s “13th” documentary which outlines the history of imprisonment and containment in this country of black individuals. It just seemed really cyclical. I was just saying to myself, “OK, so this keeps happening, so I wonder what will be next?” Now thinking about the new political climate, what will be the next form of this “correctional facility,” what’s the next mode? That’s how the idea came into my mind, and then I got into Professor Frank’s “Writing the Novella” class, and that’s where I started writing it. Well, I started writing it the summer before the class and kept working on it throughout her class in the fall, and then I told her I really didn’t think it was a novella, I thought it was a novel. She allowed me to take a special topics course this semester to keep writing it. I’m writing it now, and I’m about 140 pages in.

Q: What do you envision the end of this project being? Do you think you’re close to your goal?

A: I think I am close to it — I’m letting the story run where it wants to go right now, at least I’m trying to. I started out very structured with bringing two protagonists together and weaving their stories in and out. Now that they’ve met up in the creepy kind-of-prison town, I need to find out what’s going to happen next. But I do feel that I’m close to the end, it’s just figuring out what I want to leave the message as. So, I’m trying to figure out that and also the stakes of the story, but I feel that I’m getting closer to the end.

I’m probably three-fourths of the way done.

Q: You mentioned “Get Out” and “Black Mirror.” Are there any books that inspired this project?

A: When I was starting to write over the summer, I was also reading a lot. I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” for the first time, and I loved that.

Then I read “Fahrenheit 451” and Octavia Butler’s newest book, “Kindred,” and that was great. I was just trying to figure out what the sci-fi genre looks like and where I fit into it. I think there’s a lot of the book that sounds more dystopic and almost like “Hunger Games” with the language of the authority figures that sound really friendly but also creepy at the same time — that voice is coming through.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” was really great for getting me to think about an actual system being put in place, but right now, the way I’m framing it is that it’s still a private system, so it’s not the whole government [that] works this way. I’m almost taking a little bit of every big sci-fi novel and spinning it into this really weird new idea with all that I’m seeing and experiencing.

Q: You also mentioned that “Carcertown” is like an amusement park. I was thinking about Europe and America’s history of imprisoning and exhibiting native people from other countries. Was part of your inspiration human zoos?

A: Definitely. Essentially that’s exactly what I’m trying to play into, but I want to be more understated. The whole town is the attraction, which, geographically, is probably taking up four blocks in New York City and has the idea of “Oh we’re all going to go down and take a trip and check out the criminals” in this very much spending a day at the zoo vein. I took the class

“Animals in Contemporary Global Novels” last fall with visiting Professor Yu-ting Huang, and in it, I did a project on human zoos, and I thought, “Wow this really reminds me of the US prison system currently; how can I make that even more creepy and exaggerated, but understated at the same time?” So I finish that project, election happens, watch “13th” and I decided, OK this is happening, this is how I’m writing it.

Q:What was your process of writing this?

A: This past summer, I was really disciplined because I was here at Amherst working for the orientation team. I had a routine where I would do my work, and then I would carve out the rest of my night to write, and I got almost 70 pages done in two months. Once the semester hit, everything was crazy, so I got to 100 by the end of first semester. This is while I was taking “Writing the Novella,” which was really good because I was able to workshop pieces, so none of the pages that I wrote over the summer are the same anymore. Right now, I have to give myself a whole day and just see how far I get, so I have to tell myself, “Today is a day I’m just going to work on this scene or think about this character’s motivations and just write about that for the majority of the day.” I also like working in coffee shops — right now my favorite coffee shop to work in is Black Sheep. I went to a reading at Amherst Books a couple days ago, and the writer told us one of his best pieces of advice is to every so often change one thing about your routine so you don’t get blocked or bogged down, so I’m trying to change up where I write frequently.

Q: If anyone reading this is inspired and wants to write a novel of their own, how do you recommend getting started?

A: If you have an idea you’re passionate about and you want to write it, you should definitely just go for it. For me the summer was really great, but also being able to build this into my curriculum through “Writing the Novella” and the special topics class was really helpful because working on the book was then doing my homework.

Q: When you do finish this, what do you think the next step is?

A. I would love to have a reading with friends, so they could all hear it and I could hear their thoughts, but after that I would love to send it to publishers.

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Arts & Living 7

Ram, BitCoen and the Hypocrisy of Internet-Age Advertising Milan Loewer ’21 Contributing Writer Like most Super Bowl viewers, I saw the Ram truck ad featuring a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, but I did not think much of it at the time. Going on Twitter the next day, though, I realized what should have been obvious if I had actually been paying attention — that it was a wildly hypocritical ad.

The commercial uses excerpts from King’s speech “Drum Major Instinct,” in which he decried capitalist mentalities of materialism.

He specifically criticizes the thought that “I got to drive this car because it’s something about this car that makes my car a little better than my neighbor’s car.”

On top of that, the commercial featured military symbolism, linking King’s idea of service to serving in the military. Of course, if anything remains of King’s legacy and ideals that has not been whitewashed over the past half century, it is his stern opposition to imperialism and the military-industrial complex.

The hypocrisy of this ad and the controversy surrounding it urged me to take a more critical view of advertising in general.

Last week an ad for “BitCoen” — a new cryptocurrency which complies with Jewish law — popped up as sponsored content in my Facebook feed.

The advertisement explains, among other things, that BitCoen will end the difficulties of making charitable donations to organizations within Israel and that 10 percent of the total BitCoens produced will be donated to Jewish organizations as charity. The advertisement also depicts BitCoens flying towards a crowd made up of both white people wearing kippahs and Arabic people of color, a scene supposed to represent BitCoen’s rewards system.

It seemed interesting to me that the ad used such multicultural advertising techniques when the actual product is made for Jews, by Jews.

The company itself is overseen by BitCoen’s “council of six,” which is composed of well-respected members of the Israeli Jewish

community. Despite its advertising targeted towards Jewish users, Angelika Sheshunova, COO of BitCoen, has said that there is no way to insure that only members of the Jewish community use BitCoen. However, she did note to “The Register” that the product’s “features are most appealing to members of the Jewish community.”

Given that one of the key advantages of using BitCoen is its anonymity, it seems to me that it will become a favored method for foreigners, especially those who would prefer to remain anonymous, to donate money to settlement communities in the West Bank, which are condemned under U.N. resolution 2334 as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Additionally, despite its claim of “typically responding within hours,” BitCoen read and did not respond to my message asking which specific Israeli organizations it planned to donate the 10 percent of BitCoens to.

Of course, it may be the case that BitCoen will never be used to donate to settlements,

and, despite not responding to my query, BitCoen is actually donating to Israeli charitable organizations. However, the obscurity surrounding the currency and its uses should raise red flags.

Finally, given the fact that the product was created by and for Jews, it seems interesting to me that the company featured Arab BitCoen users in their ad. Just like the Ram ad, BitCoen’s advertising technique mixes conflicting aims and messages, using multicultural images designed to appeal to a liberal audience.

Among my Jewish friends, I was not the only one who noticed this advertisement cropping up in their social media feed, and I suppose that BitCoen targets its advertising towards young Jews.

However, as Ram reminded us, advertisements can often be pernicious things, and we need to be careful to understand how a products messaging may be hypocritical, or even in conflict with the mission of the product itself.

2 Chainz Makes Rap an Old Man’s Game with Most Recent EP

Photo courtesy of wikimedia.org

Active as a hip hop artist since 1997, 2 Chainz proves that his age won’t hinder his art, in the release of his most recent EP, “The Play Don’t Care Who Make It.” Jack Klein ’20 Staff Writer In an early 2015 interview with “GQ,” Young Thug bashed older rappers by saying, “If you’re 30, 40 years old, you’re not getting listened to … I’m pretty sure Jay-Z don’t wanna rap right now.” After watching the critical acclaim pour in for Jay-Z’s “4:44” and 2 Chainz’ “Pretty Girls Like Trap Music,” he might want to consider issuing an apology.

Young artists invariably believe that their fame and money will last past their primes, and, spoiler alert, it doesn’t happen often.

Regardless of their profession, the savviest artists, athletes and businesspeople understand that an underrated attribute of a successful career is longevity. If an individual truly aspires to dominate and thrive in their field, they must continue to produce highquality work.

2 Chainz’ EP, “The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It,” which was released on Feb. 8, builds on the success of “Pretty Girls Like Trap Music” (“PGLTM”) and reinforces 2

Chainz’ spot in rap’s upper echelon. It opens with “OK BITCH,” which embraces the popular contemporary trap flute beat but features 2 Chainz’s signature piano beat as a twist. While the chorus offers little in the way of lyricism, the verses in between are classic 2 Chainz. Few other rappers could intersperse lines with other thematically unrelated lines, but he does it with ease: “Two double cups, make it look Weezy / Too much shrimp got me lookin’ queasy.”

On “PROUD,” the second song on the EP, 2 Chainz includes the storytelling of YG and Offset in an ode to their mothers. Despite the fact that the tone of the song wouldn’t be out of place on a gangster YG album, the motivation behind the song and its execution make it a touching tribute to the artists’ mothers. 2 Chainz raps: “I’m just tryna make my mama proud / I ain’t trying to let my mama down,” while Offset talks about how his mother imparted her street wisdom onto him: “Mama taught me how to get that bankroll / Yeah, vault up in my loft in case the bank close.”

“LAND OF THE FREAKS” might be the

top song on the album sound-wise. Over a relaxed trap beat, 2 Chainz unleashes his deadliest lyrics of the EP: “Alka-Seltzer Cold, your career started fizzin’ / You gon’ need four pair Cartier’s to see my vision.”

On the final track of the EP, “LAMBORGHINI TRUCK (ATLANTA S**T)” he references a multitude of musical and cultural icons such as Mike Will and Virgil Abloh, as well as fixtures of the Atlanta hip-hop community like Migos and Young Jeezy.

“LAMBORGHINI TRUCK” both reads like a hall of fame acceptance speech and feels almost like a farewell song due to its soulful beat, and if 2 Chains retired today, it would be a fitting final release.

Overall, “The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It” is more restrained and subdued than 2 Chainz’s early-career releases. Gone are the bass-rattling club anthems, replaced by the precision and creativity found on “PGLTM.” This subtle transformation was inevitable and necessary — 2 Chainz is now 40 years old. However, he has found a way to tone

down his sounds while still engaging his listeners.

“The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It” takes its name from a quote given by the college football head coach Jimbo Fisher, who now coaches at Texas A&M University after an incredibly successful run at Florida State University. Fisher meant that, regardless of whether you’re the star player or a backup buried at the bottom of the depth chart, you still have the ability and the duty to make the play.

This EP is the most aptly titled of any of 2 Chainz’ works, not only describing his musical mentality but also the current state of music.

Specifically, it means that regardless of his age or musical style, 2 Chainz can still release popular and enjoyable music.

Any artist can ascend to the top of the game thanks to the many platforms that can increase exposure, such as SoundCloud, YouTube and standard streaming services. For now, though, they all have to contend with 2 Chainz at the top.

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Arts & Living 8

Russian Cultural Center Exhibits “Varieties of Nonconformism”

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

The exhibit “Varieties of Nonconformism“ was on display the Russian Center Art Gallery before the art pieces were put on display individually at the Mead.

Younhkwang Shin ’19 Staff Writer The Russian Cultural Center, housed in a corner of Webster Hall, recently held an exhibition of early Soviet nonconformist art.

Put together by Alla Rosenfeld, Ph.D., curator of Russian and European art at the college’s Mead Art Museum, and made possible by the generous support of the David Pennock ’60 Russian Culture Fund and Julia A. Whitney Fund for Russian Art, the exhibit showcased several counterarguments against the pervasive stereotype of the Soviet Union as a successful destroyer of individuality.

Titled “Varieties of Nonconformism,” the exhibit illuminates the works of Soviet artists who rejected standards encouraged by the revolutionary government and searched for new means of self-expression. Pinned to the walls was proof of not just persevering, but prospering individuality.

The party line on artistic expression, often summarized as Socialist Realism, encouraged state-sponsored artists to celebrate proletarian dignity and spur on the revolutionary spirit in forms accessible to the working class. Complementarily, Soviet authorities regularly disparaged and censored works containing nega-

tive commentaries on Soviet government and society, religious or erotic imagery and ‘excessive’ commitment to formal ingenuity over revolutionary and proletarian subject matter.

Artists whose works were shown in this exhibit defied these commands in creative ways.

Oskar Rabin’s “Spring in Priluki” literally stands out. Just another oil painting with traditional tricks of shadow to imply the illusion of distance from the front, “Spring in Priluki” also contains pieces of paper that stand erect like hair follicles in the cold wind. Perhaps that wind blows in the winter depicted.

Coarse snow coats both the foreboding housing and the leaves of a houseplant seated on the windowsill. Through the window, viewers witness a landscape so estranged from the spring promised by its title. Is this what passes for the season of rebirth? Is this even Priluki?

The mastery of the painting confounds such basic questions. Then, even that mastery is challenged when the eye is inevitably drawn to the vase holding the plant. On the vase is a milk stamp, not painted but pasted. Cyan and peach throb against the background of dejected white and blue. The stamp does not even have the decency to curve around the vase; it is simply there, against perspective and propriety. Either of these subversions in

isolation would satisfy: one non-conformism or the other, either Cezanne or Warhol. But Rabin denies us the pleasure of easy classification, and with one act of political and artistic resistance, he brazenly houses two.

Now Rabin’s work hangs with comrades, and his oblique riot now collectively rebels against the administration that gave them rise.

Its neighbors include Ernst Neizvestny’s “Portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich,” a busted bust of Russia’s renowned 20th century composer.

More resembling Frankenstein’s monster than any artistic dignitary, Neizvestny’s work figures or disfigures bronze to approximate a man not quite himself. The left side of his face in a fragmented ‘L’ is a sad brown, and the rest gleams gray like stone or iron. The ruins of spectacles somehow hang somber upon his hairless brow, and his eyes ponder some blurry sadness past his crumpled nose and lips.

At an exhibition visitor’s distance, the face of Shostakovich whispers an overriding melancholy that overpowers the stylistic hybridity of his music.

A nearby nameless sketch, paneled into quarters, features a strap-bound arm, a falling faceless angel, a goat-headed demon and geometric shapes in a web of Hebrew-seeming words that a passing Israeli professor identi-

fied as gibberish. Read from right to left in accordance with Jewish custom, however, the panels may spell a Jewish ritual of prayer, the fall of Lucifer, the rise of Satan and the stillmysterious geometric shapes.

But the interpretation swells when one looks beyond the frame, to the rest of the exhibition, brimming with such elementary yet enigmatic shapes, all communicating nothing while expressing something. Do these shapes symbolize the general project of non-conformism? Is the drawing damning the work as Satanic? Is it damning to be Satanic when an oppressive state acts as God? Is it liberating to briefly imagine oneself as a fearsome enemy of heaven? Or is it heartbreaking to witness the remaining hell? Is this what Shostakovich sees?

To speak further is to spoil the goods. But the great takeaway of this exhibit, now scattered throughout the Mead, is the possibility of narrative. Satanic or sad or neither, at least it can be said that there is the general project of nonconformism to consider. All these artists fought alone, but now, exhibited thus, they form a broken and whole face that can return the gaze of a new generation. That returned gaze, however, is for museum-goers to interpret.

Photo courtesy of artsy.net

Above: This nameless sketch evokes Satanic imagery that proves the point of the exhibit itself — unconforming expression in the face of the oppressive Soviet regime.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Left: Oskar Rabin’s “Spring in Priluki” depicts a snowy springtime scene, but what sticks out the most to viewers is the milk stamp covering the painting’s vase in the bottom left.

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Men’s Track and Field Finishes In Top Half With Strong Showing at DIII New Englands Veronica Rocco ’19 Staff Writer This past weekend, the Mammoths travelled north to Middlebury to compete at the Division III New England Championships and left with a 13th place finish among the best teams in New England.

All individual events at the meet had a qualifying standard, while relay events were open to any team that choses to enter. Many of the Mammoths who qualified for the meet competed, while others chose to train in preparation for more competitive meets over the next few weekends.

In the 60-meter hurdles, Yonas Shiferaw ’20 and Maxim Doiron ’19 placed back-toback once again with time of 9.00 and 9.05 seconds to place 25th and 26th overall, respectively.

After successful races last weekend at the banked track at Boston University, long sprinters Ryan Prenosil ’21 and Vernon Espinoza ’19 looked to challenge the 50-second barrier in the 400 meters once again, this time on the flat track at Middlebury. Prenosil completed the two-lap race in a time of 51.77 seconds, while Espinoza ran slightly faster with a time of 51.10 seconds.

Jordan Edwards ’20 earned the Mammoths’ their only points in the field events, scoring two points with his seventh-place finish in the triple jump. The sophomore jumped 13.65 meters (44’ 9.5”) to nearly match his season best from the Tufts Branwen SmithKing Invitational earlier in the season.

“This was a great way to end the indoor season,” Edwards said. “With many of us posting strong times at the meet, we should be in a good position in the beginning of the outdoor season.”

First-year Andrew Swenson ran another solid race in the 600 meters, clocking a time of 1:25.93. In his other three 600-meter races this season, the long sprinter also ran 1:25 and change, a remarkable display of consistency.

After a rocky first collegiate season, Este-

van Velez ’20 showed that his sophomore season holds much more promise with another 800-meter personal best, finishing in 1:57.17.

For the second weekend in a row, the sophomore set a personal best, beating the old time of 1:57.56 he posted at the banked and notoriously fast track at BU. Cosmo Brossy ’19 took another crack at the 3,000 meters, after a solid but physical race at Boston University.

However, the junior’s trademark kick wasn’t enough for the win, as Brossy came up .02 seconds short of Scott Mason of Conn.

College, who claimed first overall. However, Brossy’s time of 8:24.84 on the flat Middlebury track, after being converted to a banked track time, puts him 12th in Division III nationally.

Junior Tucker Meijer added two more points to the eight points Brossy had accrued, placing seventh with a season best of 15:13 in the 5,000 meters.

Both Mammoth relays added to the point total, as the 4x400-meter relay of David Ingraham ‘18, Prenosil, Swenson and Espinoza placed eighth with a time of 3:26.48 to earn one point. Espinoza, the team’s anchor, had to slow down to avoid running into spectators who rushed onto the track to celebrate, contributing to the Mammoths’ less than ideal showing in the relay.

The 4x800-meter relay also placed eighth, as Spencer Ferguson-Dryden ’20, Jack Malague ’19, Ermias Kebede ’19 and Velez teamed up to earn one point with a time of 8:05.94.

With Division III nationals being held on a banked track at the University of AlabamaBirmingham, all times run this season on a flat track will be converted to thier equivalent on the faster banked track.

In order to take advantage of the conversion, the Mammoths will be going back to Middlebury next weekend to compete at the Winter Track Carnival, a meet with challenging qualifying standards to allow for small and competitive fields with nationals qualifying times in sight.

Sports

9

Women’s Basketball Tramples over Trinity to Advance to NESCAC Tournament Semifinals

Photo courtesy of Amherst Athletics

Guard Hannah Fox ’20 posted 17 points in the Mammoths’ win over Trinity this weekend, despite shooting one-for-five from beyond the arc.

Kelly Karczwesci ’18 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s basketball team is heading to its 11th straight NESCAC semifinal after a win over Trinity this past weekend that brought the Mammoths’ overall record to 25-0.

The top-seeded Mammoths demolished the eighth-seeded Bantams in a 56-34 victory, that showcased Amherst’s versatility and complete confidence heading into the second round of the tournament.

Hannah Fox ’20 had a monster performance in the contest, leading the team in with 17 points while also snatching five steals. Fox had nine of her points in the first quarter, comprising most of Amherst’s scoring in the opening frame.

The Mammoths held a 13-11 advantage going into the second quarter and quickly took the opportunity to extend the lead, posting 10 consecutive points over a five-minute span to increase the margin to 13 points.

When the halftime whistle blew, Amherst led by a score of 28-18.

The Mammoths put the final nail in the Bantams’ coffin in the opening minutes of the third quarter, refusing to allow Trinity to score a single point in the first five minutes of the frame.

This tight Mammoth defense, along with

hot shooting, allowed Amherst to outscore the visitors in the quarter by a ridiculous 12-point margin, 17-5.

After the third quarter rout, the final frame was more subdued and ended up being even in scoring — both the Mammoths and Bantams tallied a total of 11 points.

However, the combination of Amherst’s insurmountable 22-point lead through three quarters and the team’s exceptional defense didn’t allow for a late Trinity comeback.

More standout Amherst play came from sophomore Cam Hendricks, who put up nine points, eight rebounds, two blocks and two steals for the Mammoths.

Senior captain Hannah Hackley had an excellent game as a distributor, finding six assists to go with her six points and two steals.

Emma McCarthy ’19 added eight points and collected seven boards.

With the win, the Mammoths maintained their undefeated record on the season and will host the remainder of the NESCAC tournament at home this coming weekend, with the semifinals taking place on Saturday against Wesleyan at 1 p.m.

The winner of that contest will go on to the championship match against either Bowdoin or Tufts the next day.

As the defending NESCAC champions, the Mammoths will look to defend their title this weekend.

Men’s Hockey Cements Third-Place Finish In NESCAC With Tie Delancey King ’18 Staff Writer The Amherst men’s hockey team concluded their regular season this past weekend with two NESCAC contests on the road.

Coming away with a loss and a tie, the Mammoths finished third in the conference standings with an overall record of 11-8-5.

On Saturday, the Mammoths took on archrival Williams.

The Ephs got off to a quick start, as Daniel Woolfenden notched the first goal of the matchup only 2:51 into the first period.

Less than five minutes later, Jack Fitzgerald ’19 tied things up with a one-timer into the bottom left corner of the Williams net.

The game remained even for a few minutes, but the hosts soon broke the game open.

The Ephs recorded two unanswered goals before the first intermission, before tallying three more goals in the second period to go up 6-1.

Down by five with one period to play, Amherst faced a daunting task Fortunately, Joey Lupo ’20 provided the spark that the Mammoths needed.

Lupo scored two goals in the opening nine minutes of the third period to keep Amherst in the game.

Building on the newfound momentum, senior captain Thomas Lindstrom capitalized on a power play to bring the Mammoths within two.

With three minutes remaining in regulation, Patrick Daly ’20 scored Amherst’s third

power play goal of the game, and the Mammoths looked poised to complete a remarkable comeback.

The visitors continued to put the Ephs under pressure until the final whistle, but unfortunately, their efforts were not enough.

Despite a valiant final push, Amherst walked away with a 6-5 loss.

The next day, the Mammoths traveled to Middlebury for another NESCAC matchup.

Lindstrom gave Amherst the first lead of the contest halfway through the first period.

Receiving a pass from Noah Gilreath ’20, Lindstrom went five-hole on Middlebury’s Stephen Klein.

The Panthers managed to tie things up before the first intermission.

Eric Jeremiah took advantage of a tussle in front of the Amherst net and snuck a shot over the goal line.

Fitzgerald, however, restored Amherst’s lead midway through the second stanza in dramtic fashions.

Racing down the ice on a three-on-two rush, Fitzgerald sent a wrist shot into the top corner of the Panther’s net.

The Mammoths held onto the lead until the final 23 seconds of the period, when Owen Powers scored on a Middlebury power play.

After a scoreless third period, the game went into overtime, before eventually resulting in a 2-2 tie.

Amherst will return to the ice on Saturday, Feb. 24, when the team will take on sixth-seeded Colby in the quarterfinals of the NESCAC tournament.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Joey Lupo ’20 asissted junior Jack Fitzgerald’s goal in the team’s tie against Middlebury, in what would be Lupo’s seventh of the season.

The Mammoths went 1-1 against the Mules earlier this season.

“We’re pretty excited to be able to play at home in the first round,” Lindstrom said.

“We have been playing some of our best hockey in the past few weeks, and we’re looking forward to carrying that momentum into the postseason.”

10

Sports

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Men’s Basketball Beats Bowdoin 71-70 to Reach NESCAC Semifinals

ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT

Thomas Lindstrom ’18

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Johnny McCarthy ’18 led the Mammoths with 22 points in the victory over Bowdoin that sent Amherst into the semifinals of the NESCAC tournament.

Katie Bergamesca ’18 Staff Writer This past Saturday, the top-seeded Amherst men’s basketball narrowly escaped an upset at the hands of the eighth-ranked Bowdoin Polar Bears in the quarterfinals of the NESCAC tournament.

Neither team was able to build a substantial lead on the court, and there were 16 lead changes in the 40 minutes of action.

In the first half, Bowdoin junior forward Jack Simmonds was practically unstoppable. Simmonds put up 21 of his 25 total points before the halftime buzzer sounded. However, thanks to some impressive three-point shooting from Johnny McCarthy ’18 and Garret Day ’21 in the final minutes of the half, the Mammoths were able to enter the locker rooms with a slim one-point advantage over the visiting Polar Bears, 37-36.

Action in the second half closely mirrored that of the first 20 minutes of play, with the lead changing hands several times and both teams experiencing both scoring droughts and impressive runs.

With less than a minute left, senior Michael Riopel widened Amherst’s lead to four points by sinking to two clutch free throws. It seemed that the Mammoths would be able to hold off the relentless visitors, but Bowdoin was not ready to give up.

After Riopel’s crucial free throws, the Mammoths had a defensive breakdown on the other end of the court and left Bowdoin guard Liam Farley wide open on the edge of the arc. Farley launched the ball from the three-point line and his third three-pointer of the game cut the Mammoths lead to just one point.

On the next inbound, the Polar Bears quickly fouled Grant Robinson ’21. Since the Polar Bears were in the bonus, Robinson headed to the line

to shoot one and one. However, Robinson missed the first shot and Bowdoin collected the defensive rebound.

At the opposite end of the court, Polar Bears’ guard Zavier Rucker was fouled on a shot attempt.

Facing immense pressure, Rucker sunk both of his free throws to put Bowdoin on top by one point with just 14 seconds on the clock.

As the Mammoths charged up the court for one last offensive surge, Riopel tossed the ball to Josh Chery ’20, who drove to the hoop and released an off-balance layup that somehow dropped into the basket.

With three seconds remaining, Amherst was back on top 71-70. Bowdoin rushed down the court in a last-ditch effort to find a winning basket, but were unable to get off a good shot and the Mammoths emerged with the heart-stopping win.

McCarthy led the offense with 22 points and shot over 50 percent from beyond the three-point arc. The senior captain also dished out a team-high five assists, and was named NESCAC Athlete of the Week. Riopel was also solid, pacing the team with nine rebounds and putting up 14 points.

“The NESCAC was so even this year,” Riopel said. “We knew even though Bowdoin was coming in as the eighth seed, they were capable of playing at a high level. I am proud of the team for pushing through a lot of adversity and finding a way to prolong our season. We are looking forward to this weekend.”

With the win, the Mammoths punched their ticket to the semifinals of the tournament. As the top seed, Amherst will host both the semifinals and finals on Saturday and Sunday. The Mammoths will look to book a spot in the championship game against Wesleyan at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 24.

Women’s Track and Field Records Four Top-10 Finishes and Places 25th Julia Turner ’19 Managing Sports Editor The Amherst women’s track and field team competed at the competitive DIII New England Championships meet this weekend on Saturday, Feb. 17 at Springfield College. Although the Mammoths’ overall score placed the team in the bottom half of competitors, the women secured four individual top-10 finishes.

On the track, the Mammoths excelled in the distance and mid-distance events, with first-year Haley Greene recording an eighthplace finish in the 3,000-meter run with a time of 10:31.14. Meanwhile, classmate Olivia Polischeck claimed 17th in the 5,000-meters with a 18:52.75 finish.

Kristin Ratliff ’20 ran to a 13th-place finish in the one-mile run, while Paige Reddington ’21 and Adele Loomis ’18 finished back-toback in 19th and 20th places in the 1,000-meter run with times of 3:09.28 and 3:14.44, respectively.

Jenny Mazzella ’20 and Christina Scartelli

’19 finished 12th and 15th, respectively, in the 800-meter run with times of 2:24.70 and 2:25.62 to add to the Mammoth’s total score.

In addition to their individual performances, Mazzella and Scartelli helped the women’s 4x800-meter relay to an 11th-place finish with a 10:08.61 mark.

Amherst’s top finish of the day on the track came from standout first-year Ella Rossa, who placed third in her preliminary 60-meter hurdles heat to qualify for the finals, where she took eighth overall in just 9.09 seconds.

Finally, rounding out the meet for the Mammoths, senior Becki Golia continued her impressive final collegiate season, registering a 1.60-meter leap to place fifth in the field of 27 competitors. Sophomore Kaitlyn Siegel held her own in the high jump behind Golia, earning ninth overall.

The Mammoths return to the track this weekend on Saturday, Feb. 24, when the team will travel north to compete at the Maine State Open. This will be Amherst’s last meet before the Last Chance Qualifier and NCAA Indoor Championships in March.

Favorite Team Memory: Playing in the 2015 NCAA Frozen Four Favorite Pro Athlete: Christiano Ronaldo Dream Job: General manager of a professional sports team Pet Peeve: Slow walkers Favorite Vacation Spot: North Myrtle Beach, SC Something on Your Bucket List: Travel across Europe Guilty Pleasure: Antonio’s and “The Office” Favorite Food: Chicken parm Favorite Thing About Amherst: The open curriculum and the opportunity to pursue all of my academic interests How He Earned It: Lindstrom, in his final year at Amherst, has been a force on the offensive end of the ice for the Mammoths.

Lindstrom has recorded a point in each of his last five games, scoring eight points in those same contests. On the season, Lindstrom leads the team in points and assists with 23 and 13, respectively, while also being tied for the team lead in goals, with 10.

This is Lindstrom’s third consecutive season leading the Mammoths in points.

Stephanie Moriarty ’18 Favorite Team Memory: Training trip to Puerto Rico Favorite Pro Athlete: Roger Federer Dream Job: One of those people who gets paid to taste test food Pet Peeve: Long lines Favorite Vacation Spot: Somewhere warm but not too hot Something on Your Bucket List: Host a party that isn’t shut down by 11 p.m.

Guilty Pleasure: When your bagel comes out of the toaster perfectly toasted Favorite Food: Something with cheese Favorite Thing About Amherst: My team How She Earned It: Moriarty was instrumental in the Amherst women’s swim team capturing second place at the NESCAC Championships. Moriarty clinched an individual victory in the 200-yard backstroke, finishing with a time of 2:02.26. Moriarty also swam in six other events: the 400-yard freestyle relay, 100-yard backstroke, 200-yard medley relay, 400-yard medley relay, 50-yard backstroke, and 200-yard freestyle relay. Moriarty will next compete in Bowdoin’s February Invitational, follwed by her final collegiate meet at the NCAA Championships.

Women’s Squash Finishes Team Competition Ranked No. 16 Nationally Zoe Atoko ’21 Staff Writer This past weekend, the Amherst women’s squash team returned to the courts for the final few matches of team play at the CSA Team Championships, hosted by Harvard. The defending Walker Cup champions, the Mammoths had held a vicelike grip on the trophy recently, winning the crown in three of the last four years. However, thanks to their recent dominance and a strong regular season, Amherst moved up a division, competing this year for the Kurtz Cup in the Division II tournament.

The Mammoths’ began tournament play against a formidable opponent, top-seeded Drexel University, on Friday evening. The Dragons hit the ground running, quickly proving that their high seeding was no joke. At the top of the ladder, Kim Krayacich ’18 fell in straight games to Drexel’s Anna Hughes (4-11, 4-11, 7-11). Next, at the number two position, Haley McAtee ’18 also suffered a harsh straight-game defeat against Hayley Hughes, falling 6-11, 5-11, 0-11. This contest included one of two games in which a Drexel competitor shut out her Mammoth foe. The other came in firstyear Riddhi Sampat’s match​at the number four position, where the underdog fell 1-11, 2-11, 0-11.

In all, the Dragons didn’t yield a single match to the Mammoths, sweeping them 9-0 to advance to the semifinals.

The next day, Amherst moved on to the consolation bracket against George Washington University. Although a closer competition, the Colonials ultimately dealt the Mammoths a tough loss.

At the top, Krayacich and McAtee again suffered straight-game losses at the first and second positions, respectively. The closest match of the day though came on the third court where Rachel Ang ’19 forced a deciding fifth game, before ultimately losing. Madison Chen ’21, Margaret Werner ’21 and Pierson Klein ’20​also provided stiff competition, pushing their respective opponents to four games, but ultimately coming out on the losing

side. In the end, George Washington trounced the Mammoths to claim the 9-0 win.

The next day, in a match to determine 15th place, Amherst faced off against NESCAC rival Middlebury. The Panthers ultimately posted a 6-3 victory over the Mammoths, but the match was not without its highlights for losing side. Ang battled in another five-game contest at the third position, but this time, the back and forth ended in her favor as she left the court with a hard-fought win (9-11, 11-6, 11-8, 5-11, 11-8). Meanwhile, Caroline Conway ’20 dealt a swift three-game defeat to her opponent at the fourth position (11-5, 11-6, 11-8). Katy Correia ’20​posted Amherst’s last win of the day on the sixth court, notching a four-game victory (6-11, 11-3, 11-8, 13-11).

With the three losses, the Mammoths concluded their season ranked No. 16 in the nation.

Although the team-based portion of the schedule is now over, several Mammoths will go on to compete for individual accolades at the CSA Individual Championships that take place next weekend.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Kim Krayacich ’18 lost a tightly contested match against Middlebury 6-11, 10-12, 9-11.

The Amherst Student • February 21, 2018

Sports

Women’s Ice Hockey Splits Homeand-Home Series with Wesleyan Mary Grace Cronin ’18 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s ice hockey team battled it out against Little III rival Wesleyan in a pair of nail-biters this past weekend, emerging with both a win and a loss against the Cardinals.

In the teams’ first match, hosted by Wesleyan, the home team’s Alex Horton struck first, just nine minutes into the opening period on an unassisted tally. Despite a few power play opportunities in the first two periods and plenty of shots on goal, Amherst couldn’t find the tying goal and the Cardinals capitalized on the Mammoths’ profligacy, tallying a second goal to take a 2-0 lead into the final period of play.

However, Amherst came out with renewed offensive energy in the third and piled on the pressure. With just 2:34 remaining, first-year defenseman Mia DelRosso posted her third goal of the season on an impressive individual effort. DelRosso managed to wheel her way past several Wesleyan defenders and fire home a quick wrist shot to pull the Mammoths within one. Pulling their goalie for the man advantage, Amherst fired a barrage of shots on the Cardinal goal in the last two minutes, but were unable to find a second goal. Despite an edge in shots and the admirable last-ditch effort, Amherst ultimately fell 2-1. Senior goaltender Bailey Plaman recorded 17 saves in the loss.

Less than 24 hours later, the two teams travelled to Amherst for an equally exciting matchup.

With the home-ice advantage and the emotions of Senior Day in their favor, the Mammoths managed to pull out a 3-2 win. To open the scoring, forward Rose Mroczka ’21 lazered a shot at the Cardinal goalie’s pads, the rebound of which fellow first-year Eliza Laycock fired home for a 1-0 lead.

In the second stanza, first-year Kaitlyn Hoang extended the underclassmen scoring streak, redi-

recting a pass from Anne Malloy ’20 and sending it into the back of the net. The Cardinals answered seven minutes later to cut the lead in half, but the hosts maintained their lead heading into the final period.

DelRosso scored Amherst’s third and final goal of the game on a power play opportunity after the Mammoths had strung together several nice passes. Although Wesleyan managed to score a goal with a minute left and its goalie pulled, again the visiting team came up just short, as Amherst skated off the ice with the win. Plaman notched nine saves for the Mammoths, while senior Sabrina Dobbins also made nine stops in relief..

Amherst will next take to the ice on Saturday, Feb. 24 in the quarterfinals of the NESCAC tournament against Williams. The Mammoths will host the Ephs in Orr Rink at 1 p.m.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Senior Sabrina Dobbins made nine saves in the third period on Saturday.

11

The Hot Corner Jack Malague ’19 Columnist Jack Malague examines doping by Olympic Russian athletes, and the International Olympic Committee’s reticence to punish athletes, potentially tainting the Olympic Games.

The New York Times reported on Sunday, Feb. 19 that Alexander Krushelnytsky, a curler from Russia who won a bronze medal in these 2018 Winter Olympics, has tested positive for meldonium — a banned heart medication — and may be stripped of his medal.

Krushelnytsky’s positive test is a deep source of embarrassment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which determined that he was “clean” before allowing him to compete under the Olympic flag. It revealed the inadequacies of pre-competition banned substance tests and showed the IOC’s soft treatment of Russia to be a misguided farce.

Russia loves its performance enhancers.

In the time since performance enhancing drug (PED) use became common, the IOC has stripped Russian athletes of a total of 41 medals. That is the most of any country in the world, and by a lot — the second highest total is a measly 10. In fact, more than a quarter of all stripped Olympic medals have been taken from Russian athletes. In recent years, various reports have exposed massive Russian statesponsored doping programs that would make a New Jersey politician’s stomach turn. These programs involve elaborate networks of payoffs and extortion that could fit right into a Martin Scorsese movie. Doping control officers themselves are in on the scam, receiving payouts sometimes valued north of half a million dollars in return for performing sleight of hand with a couple urine bottles. One even wonders how, with a huge doping scam to run, the Russian government can still find the time to meddle with foreign elections.

Russia also seems to be putting a pressure on its athletes that makes East German gymnastics look like intramural soccer. While in the United States, we often view PED use as the result of an athlete’s moral dissoluteness, in Russia, doping is required of athletes who wish to compete on an elite level. Jack Robertson, who investigated the Russian machinations for the World Anti-Doping Agency, said in December, “when a Russian athlete rose to the national level, he or she had no choice in the matter: It was either dope, or you’re done.”

That investigation, which included testimony from Russian athletes, asserted that 99 percent of Russian national team-level athletes are using performance enhancers. You would be hard-pressed to find another characteristic that 99 percent of any group shares.

When possible, the Russian sports ministries pump their athletes with PEDs without the athletes’ knowledge. Five blind power-lifters tested positive for PEDs the Paralympics, likely unwitting victims of Russia’s chemical training regimen. And, athletes as young as 15 have been forced to flood their veins with illicit drugs.

This is not as if Russia was requiring athletes to cut the course in a road race, either.

Doping is no run-of-the-mill form of cheating. Many of the substances that Russia forces its athletes to consume or inject pose severe health risks, and without proper or available record-keeping, athletes walk around unaware of the exact damage they might have done to their bodies.

Russia’s schemes were particularly brazen during the 2014 Olympics, hosted on home soil in Sochi. During the games, officials conducting on-site doping tests used a type of specimen container called the BEREG-KIT. The bottles were designed to seal when closed so that they would need to be broken if they were to be opened. Well, if anyone thought the Russians, on their home turf, were not going to find a way to pry those things open, they would have been sorely disappointed. What

few anti-doping officials the Russian government had not paid off or extorted were duped by these vanishing positive samples.

The IOC, with Russia’s chicanery now on full display, could not allow this brazen cheating to proceed unchecked. In a rare moment of swift decision-making, the organization banned Russia from participation at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It appeared, if only for the briefest of moments, that a governing body had sent a powerful message to countries that this type of institutionalized cheating would not be tolerated.

Of course, like with most responses to PED use, this swift and severe response quickly became diluted and reduced to a wishywashy imposition of mild inconvenience. It would be cruel, they said, to punish the “clean” athletes just because of the indiscretions of their “dirty” compatriots. So, any athletes who could pass a set of so-called “strict conditions” could compete under the Olympic flag as an “Olympic Athlete from Russia.”

As if an unwieldy title that sounds more like a handle for a talk radio caller than a national affiliation would prevent the Russian ministry from feeling any pride in the accomplishments of these Olympic Athletes from Russia. This is especially the case since there’s at least a small chance that the Athletes will be allowed to march under the Russian flag at the closing ceremonies.

We could forgive the IOC for all of this if we had some reason to believe that these purportedly clean athletes actually were clean. Yet Krushelnytsky’s positive test revealed what we all knew: 99 percent means 99 percent.

There’s something especially haunting about Krushelnytsky’s case of doping. He was competing in mixed doubles curling with his wife as his partner — admittedly a charming concept. This sounds like a delightful activity to do on a winter-themed cruise ship, certainly not a competition in which you would expect to encounter PED use. So intractable is Russia’s commitment to doping, that even in a sport like mixed doubles curling it cannot resist seeking a biochemical edge over the competition.

Of course, it is understandable that the IOC would be reluctant to ban athletes whom it could not prove to be using PEDs. It would indeed be a shame if an athlete who resisted the state’s coercion were punished as if they had gone along with the PED plan. This concern, however, misses the point. Punishment for cheating in sports should not be handled the same way we handle punishment for violating criminal law. We could never accept a justice system that would tolerate punishing innocent citizens. That is a central requirement of legitimacy in a legal system.

In sports, however, avoiding unjust punishment, though an admiral goal, is not of the utmost importance. Doping presents two threats that are more grave than wrongful conviction. The first, of course, is cheating.

A competition loses its meritocratic meaning when the outcome can be attributed to one competitor’s willingness to break the rules.

Second, sports become disconcerting when the contest is really a dangerous race to most perfectly manipulate an athlete’s biochemistry. Curling should be a game, not a science experiment.

The IOC needs to recognize the true significance of the threat that doping poses to sports. What Russia does to its athletes simply cannot be allowed to occur. The collateral damage of a hardline stance is a necessary price to pay for a clean, or at the very least, cleaner Olympics.

Sports

Photos courtesy of Clarus Studios

Senior Geralyn Lam started strong, leading the Mammoth quartet that claimed second place in the 200-yard freestyle relay with a total time of 1:34.28.

Women’s Swim and Dive Grabs Second Place in the NESCAC Championships Matthew Sparrow ’21 Staff Writer It was an outstanding weekend for the Amherst women’s swimming and diving team, as the team’s trip to Samuelson-Muir Pool at Williams ended in a second-place showing at the NESCAC Championships. In a grueling weekend of competition, the Mammoths scored the second most points on all three days en route to a final tally of 1615 points, behind only Williams’ 1971 and nearly 600 points clear of thirdplace finisher Conn. College.

Amherst started off strong on the first day of competition, with five top-three finishes. In the first event of the day, the 200-yard freestyle relay, the team of Geralyn Lam ’18, Ingrid Shu ’20, Natalie Rumpelt ’20 and Stephanie Moriarty ’18 notched a second-place result thanks to a time of 1:34.28. The second event of the day brought

GAME SCHE DULE

more success for Amherst, as Katie Smith ’19 used her time of 29.52 to claim third place in the 50-yard breaststroke, while fellow Mammoth Nina Fitzgerald ’21 took sixth with a time of 30.00.

The 50-yard butterfly led to two top-five finishes as Shu and Lam finished fourth and fifth, respectively. In the 200-yard individual medley, Bridgitte Kwong ’19 took fourth place with a time of 2:05.87, and Heather Grotzinger ’20 ended up in eighth with a time of 2:08.86.

The day ended on a high note as Lindsay Ruderman ’21 scored the Mammoths’ first win of the tournament with a score of 483.25 in the one-meter diving event, and teammate Jackie Palermo ’19 took second with a tally of 446.10.

Day two brought with it more success for the Mammoths, as they had swimmers in all eight of the event finals. Jayne Vogelzang ’19 impressed with a fifth-place showing in the

1,000-yard freestyle, a long and arduous event, finishing in 10:30.43. Julia Ruggiero ’21 wasn’t too far behind, finishing in seventh place with a time of 10:34.71. Kwong used her all-around expertise to take second place in the 400-yard individual medley, and Rumpelt continued her strong weekend showing with a third-place finish in the 200-yard freestyle.

Other performances of note included those of Livia Domenig ’19, who took sixth in the 200yard freestyle, and Fitzgerald, Smith and Shu, who finished third through fifth in the 100-yard breaststroke.

Once again, Amherst ended the day on a high, registering a second-place finish from Kwong, Sarah McDonald ’20, Domenig and Rumpelt in the 800-yard freestyle relay.

The Mammoths cemented their second-place finish with an excellent performance on the third and final day of the meet. Amherst came out of

FRI

SAT

Men’s Squash

Men’s Squash CSA Men’s Team Championship @ Trinity, TBD

Women’s Track & Field Maine State Open, TBD

Men’s Track & Field Maine State Open, TBD

Men’s Swim & Dive NESCAC Championships @ Bowdoin, 10 a.m.

CSA Men’s Team Championship @ Trinity, TBD Men’s Swim & Dive NESCAC Championships @ Bowdoin, 10 a.m.

Women’s Basketball vs. Wesleyan, 1 p.m.

Women’s Ice Hockey vs. Williams, 1 p.m.

Men’s Basketball vs. Wesleyan, 5:30 p.m.

the gates flying with a one-two finish in the 200yard backstroke by Moriarty and Kwong, with only .02 seconds separating the Mammoths.

Meanwhile, a time of 52.03 in the 100-yard freestyle helped propel Rumpelt to a third place finish.

Fitzgerald matched Rumpelt by claiming third in the 200-yard breaststroke, and Ruderman took home her second NESCAC title by winning the three-meter diving event with a score of 489.55.

For the Mammoths, the championship meet concluded with a second-place finish by Rumpelt, Domenig, Lam and Moriarty in the 400-yard freestyle relay.

This meet marked the end of conference competition for Amherst, but the team will travel to Maine next week to compete at the February Invitational, before concluding the season in March at the NCAA DIII Championships.

Men’s Hockey vs. Colby, 5:30 p.m.