Issue 19

THE AMHERST

THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT VOLUME CXLIV, ISSUE 19 l WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2015

Men’s Hockey Wins NESCAC Championships See Sports, Page 9

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Elaine Scarry Speaks on Nuclear Weapons Elaine Jeon ’17 Managing News Editor

Olivia Tarantino ‘15 Photography Editor

Amherst College has been selected to exhibit Shakespeare’s First Folio in April 2016. Archives and Special Collections plans to hold events for the campus community, the Five Colleges and local residents.

Amherst to Exhibit First Folio Dan Ahn ’17 Managing News Editor Amherst College has been chosen to host an exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio in April 2016. The First Folio is a document that contains some of the earliest transcriptions of many of Shakespeare’s best known plays, including “Julius Caesar,” “Twelfth Night” and “Macbeth.” The original Folios were written down by actors who had worked alongside Shakespeare. The First Folio is still widely used today on stage, as many consider it to be the closest to Shakespeare’s original stage instructions.

Of the original 750 prints of the Folio, about a third are currently held at the Folger Shakespeare

Library. Selected copies will be exhibited in each of the 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C, over the course of 2016. The exhibitions are a joint effort involving the library, the American Library Association and the Cincinnati Museum Center, and intend to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Peter Nelson, an archivist at the College, described the project as “ambitious,” citing the absence of precedent for such an exhibition on a national scale.

The college was chosen as the exhibition site for Massachusetts after an application process.

“Our selection is the product of extraordinary collaboration between the English Department and Robert Frost Library, the Mead Art Museum, the Center for Community Engagement, the

Office of Public Affairs and other campus programs and centers,” said Professor of English Anston Bosman. “We all sat together at planning meetings and wrote different parts of the application documents together. It was a true partnership.”

Campus-wide plans for the exhibition will be announced in the coming months.

“The details of the programming are very sketchy right now,” Nelson said, “but we have expressed an interest in hosting a symposium on Shakespeare, book culture and the publication history of Renaissance books. We’ll probably bring a … scholarly speaker to talk about the

Continued on Page 3

Elaine Scarry, a professor of English and American literature at Harvard, spoke in Beneski’s Paino Lecture Hall on March 5. The respected scholar attracted a crowd of Amherst College community members as well as local and national peace activists. Scarry’s lecture, entitled “The Abolition of Nuclear Weapons,” argued that that nuclear weapons may violate constitutional rights and undermine democracy.

The lecture is a part of several events that the Peace and Planet Mobilization campaign will hold this spring, leading up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference in New York City in April. The Peace and Planet initiative has representatives from multiple international organizations, and its website states that its aim is to work towards a nuclear-free and peaceful global environment.

The event was organized as part of the Nuclear Weapon Abolition Movement’s Pioneer Valley Spring Campaign. The American Friends Service Committee of Western Massachusetts, a group that advocates for pacifistic and social justice causes, collaborated with Ben Walker ‘16, a member of the Green Amherst Project, in order to bring Scarry to campus.

Scarry is well known for her seminal book “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.” The March 5 talk was guided by another of her books, “Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom,” in which she suggests that nuclear weapons are fundamentally at odds with the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of other democratic nations.

In her lecture, Scarry discussed the ongoing threat of nuclear proliferation and raised concerns about the civil violations brought about by nuclear weapons.

“Everyone knows about the physical deformations brought about by nuclear

Continued on Page 3

Native American Students Organization Revitalized Eli Mansbach ’18

Staff Writer

Two first-year students have set out to revitalize Native American Students Organization. Co-chairs Lehua Matsumoto ‘18 and William Harvey ‘18, are collaborating this semester to reach out to a wider audience on campus and establish a more active community for the club.

Founded in 2013, the Native American Students Organization is the first and the only club associated with Native American students on campus.

Native American Students Organization provides a space to discuss cultures and issues pertaining to American indigenous peoples.

According to the group’s mission statement found on the Amherst College website, the scope of the group includes, but is not limited to, “American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians (or other Pacific Islanders, Indigenous Mexicans, Pueblos Orginarios de

Abya Yala and First Nations people.”

“The purpose of the club, in my eyes, is to be an open space for students who are native and who are not native to talk about native issues,” Matsumoto said. “I don’t think there is a lot of open space for that necessarily on campus.”

Both Matsumoto and Harvey said their current focus is to recruit more members for the organization. The club has 40 to 50 people on its email list, but there have been only seven or eight people at the first two meetings of this semester.

“We are still relatively a new club,” Harvey said. “There are a lot of people who are like, ‘I want to join this club and I want to learn,’ but then of course you have to work around their schedules and work around our schedules to get everything off the ground.”

Harvey also said that in order to introduce issues specific to the Amherst College community consistently in the long run, the club needs to draw in more members.

The Native American Students Organization

has members extending from beyond the mainland United States. Matsumoto identifies as native Hawaiian and Harvey is one-sixteenth Pequot or Narragansett.

So far, the group has had discussions about how Native Americans are perceived in the media, micro-aggression on campus and the debate over blood quota, a measure used to determine tribal membership.

“With Native American tribes, you have to be a certain amount of blood of that tribe to be included in that tribe,” Matsumoto said.

“Different tribes have different [quotas], like you have to be half or have to be full to be included in the tribe.”

Matsumoto said this topic was interesting for her because in Hawaii, it would be difficult to find someone who is one fourth native Hawaiian, but said that another girl who attended the meeting said that in her tribe, one has to be at least half to be included and live on the reservation.

One of the biggest initiatives taken by Native American Students Organization was the

Native American outreach program as part of the Diversity Open House last semester. Seven students participated in activities focusing on Native American scholarships and student life. The students toured the Special Archives, focusing on the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Collection and were introduced to the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Program.

“We took [the participants] around [Amherst] for the whole day and talked to them about the school and I know that a few of them want to come to Amherst, and we are hoping that that will help expand the amount of people [who are native],” Harvey said.

According to Matsumoto and Harvey, Native American Students Organization does not have any major events coming up in the near future, but is in discussions with other student groups, such as the International Student Association, to plan joint events. The club has had two meetings so far this semester and meets every other week in the Multicultural Resource Center.

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News

Nicholas Cowan March 2, 2015 - March 8, 2015

>>March 2, 2015 11:23 a.m., Amherst College Police Two Springfield youths were issued written no-trespass orders as a result of their involvement in an incident at Mead Art museum on Feb. 10, 2015. >>March 3, 2015 8:32 a.m., Amherst College Police A no-trespass order was issued to a man due to his involvement in an incident at Stone Dormitory in December.

2:24 p.m., Off Campus Locations A no-trespass order was issued to a Five College student after he was involved in an incident with a woman in Frost Library. >>March 4, 2015 11:51 a.m., 79 South Pleasant St. A car was damaged by snow and ice falling from a building roof. >>March 5, 2015 2:28 a.m., Amherst Police Department A female Amherst College officer was called to assist the town police with the arrest of a woman.

2:44 p.m., Frost Library An officer investigated a fire alarm and found it was accidentally set off by construction work.

9:51 p.m., Stone Dormitory An officer encountered an unauthorized gathering with alcohol and a beer pong table. The alcohol was confiscated, and the event ended.

10:00 p.m., Alumni Gym A student reported the theft of a speaker valued at $300. >>March 6, 2015 5:58 p.m., Smith House Officers investigated an intrusion alarm and found it was accidentally set off by an employee.

7:39 p.m., Amherst College Police An employee reported the theft of a college-owned iPad while out of state.

11:20 p.m., Garman House Officers responded to a noise complaint at a registered party and found hard alcohol present, which is a violation. The event was ended, and the alcohol was disposed of. >>March 7, 2015 2:05 a.m., Lipton House Officers responded to a noise complaint and issued a warning at a registered party.

9:14 a.m., Coolidge Dormitory An officer responded to a complaint of loud music and issued a warning to a second floor resident.

2:06 p.m., Jenkins Dormitory An officer investigated a report of two males with a keg going into

Fresh Faculty

the building. After an investigation, the unlicensed keg was confiscated and one student was fined $100.

4:47 p.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory A caller reported two unknown men were loitering near the building entrance and then they entered after someone exited.

Officers located the men in a second-floor room and determined they were invited guests.

5:25 p.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory While at a second-floor room speaking with the resident, an officer confiscated alcohol as the resident was under age. The matter was referred to Student Affairs.

5:26 p.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory While in the building, an officer detected the odor of burning marijuana and traced it to a secondfloor room. The resident admitted smoking marijuana in his room.

A small amount of marijuana was confiscated and the student was fined $100 for a smoking violation.

The matter was referred to Student Affairs.

11:05 p.m., Moore Dormitory Officers encountered an unauthorized party with alcohol and a beer pong table in the third-floor common room. The gathering was closed down.

11:28 p.m., Powerhouse An officer discovered beer, wine, and several bottles of hard alcohol hidden in the snow outside the Powerhouse. It was confiscated.

11:33 p.m., East Drive A woman reported being verbally harassed by several men near Crossett. The responding officers located eight men, who had no association with the college. They were identified and all denied the allegation. They were directed to leave campus, which they did. >>March 8, 2015 12:14 a.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory Officers responded to a noise complaint for a registered party in the first-floor common room.

The event was shut down because unattended alcohol was available, as well as a supply of juice containing alcohol.

12:15 a.m., Powerhouse An officer responded to a report from Student Security that there was a disturbance at an event and it appeared a fight was about to take place. The officer spoke with several students and non students who decided to part ways. No further assistance was necessary.

4:12 a.m., South Pleasant St. An officer discovered two people asleep in a running car near a college-owned building on South Pleasant St. It was discovered they had been drinking, and arrangements were made for them to leave by taxi.

Department of Astronomy

Nicholas Cowan is an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College. His wife is Assistant Professor of Astronomy Daryl Haggard, and both Haggard and Cowan came to the college this academic year. Cowan attended McGill University for his bachelor’s degree in physics and the University of Washington for his doctorate in astronomy, and completed his post-doc at Northwestern University before coming to Amherst. His academic specialty is in exoplanets.

Q: Why did you decide to study astronomy? Other than that, the small campus is great; I A: Well, I think in high school — maybe even get to meet a lot of different professors who before high school — I thought being an aren’t all astronomers and physicists, which astronaut was cool, which got me interested is different from every other career stage in space, and I read a lot of science fiction. I’ve been at. Here, the college is so small The combination of those two things got me that when I sit down for lunch, I can talk to generally interested in the physical sciences. historians and economists and people who When I was in college to study physics [and] study different stuff. And the students here graduated with a bachelor’s in physics, I have been a lot of fun to work with as well knew that I wanted to use physics, but not do because everyone seems interested. The fact particle physics, specifically. Then, someone that no one is forced to take [certain] classes pointed out to me that there were these is lovely because it means that when there are planets being discovered around other stars, students in your class, you know that they and that it would be kind of cool to study actually want to learn this material. And that’s those, so I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, that sounds very different from most places where I’ve pretty awesome.’ So I applied to graduate taught previously. school — some programs to do exoplanet science. And the school I got accepted to was Q: Are you currently in the publication the University of Washington, so that’s how I process, or alternatively, what have you ended up in astronomy. So it was kind of a published? process of elimination, I guess, because as an A: I’ve published a lot of things. In the last undergrad, I tried lots of different research month, I was the first author on a big report projects in different that was funded by areas of physics and NASA. NASA wanted a lot of them either I thought being an astronaut was to know what research I didn’t like the cool, which got me interested in we could do in the research or I thought space, and I read a lot of science next decade, studying it was boring or too fiction. The combination of those the atmospheres of hard to understand two things got me generally exoplanets, so I was in or whatever, so that’s interested in the physical sciences. charge of this NASA how I ended up in committee to figure astronomy. this out. It took a year and a half of meetings and workshops to Q: What is your favorite topic or subtopic come to fruition, so I wrote that up mostly last in astronomy? I know you talked about summer, and I spent a lot of time this past fall exoplanets, but I didn’t know if that became working on this ... because we were trying to your favorite. present sort of a consensus view of what our A: Ideally, you end up doing research on field looks like so that we could give a strong something that you think is pretty cool, so recommendation to NASA. That paper’s going in my case, yeah, the reason I do research to be published this month, finally. in exoplanets is because I think it’s cool, and that’s the thing that gets me the most excited Q: What classes are you teaching at Amherst, in astronomy right now. It’s a very biased and can you give a brief description of each? opinion because once you become an expert A: Right now, I’m teaching Alien Worlds, in some field, it’s easier to do research in that which is a big class that has no prerequisites. field than to switch or change direction, right? It’s sort of an introduction to exoplanets: how But certainly for now, this is the aspect to we detect them, how planets form, how we astronomy that I’m most excited about. characterize the atmospheres of these planets, the biosignatures on these planets and which Q: What made you decide to become a fraction could be classified as habitable. It professor? Specifically, why Amherst? has a decent amount of math, which has been A: I’m part of a two-body astronomy couple. an interesting learning process for everyone My wife is the other astronomy professor here. involved: the students have been learning Daryl Haggard was offered professorship here math, I’ve been learning how to teach the ... and she told the college she was married math, how to do office hours once I realized to another astronomer, and so they made a the gap between what I was asking the second job for me. So that’s sort of how we students to do and what they knew how to do. ended up out here — because Amherst was willing to offer us both jobs, which is actually Q: In your spare time, what do you like to very hard to find in academia, especially two do? astronomy jobs.

A: Rock climbing, skiing, hiking and bicycling.

I have a five-year-old son named Henry Q: What are some of your favorite aspects and we hang out a lot, and I try as much as of Amherst? possible to do those activities with Henry. So A: The outdoors — that’s definitely my we go bicycling together, we go rock- limbing favorite. Moving out here from Chicago was together, we go skiing together. We try to do like moving to paradise because Chicago is a lot of activities and sometimes we just goof very flat, though it’s a nice city. We would off at home and play board games and do kid have to drive four hours or more to go rock- stuff. And if I find the free time, I like to cook climbing, to go skiing, or anything like that. and make cocktails with my wife.

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— Jingwen Zhang ’18

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

News

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Amherst to Host Shakespeare First Folio in 2016 Continued from Page 1

First Folio and Shakespeare in general. The Mead will host an event that will attract families, getting kids interested.”

The college’s historic partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library was another deciding factor in the selection. The library was founded by Henry Clay Folger, a member of Amherst’s class of 1874. Folger’s interest in Shakespeare was sparked during his time at the college, when he attended a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Following the lecture, Emerson encouraged him to further pursue Shakespeare’s works, and Folger developed a lifelong passion for Shakespeare. Following his rise to wealth and national prominence, Folger began collecting Shakespeare’s works.

“The Folio gives material form to an intellectual bond,” Bosman said. “This exhibition reaffirms our relationship with our sibling institution, the Folger Shakespeare Library.”

One stated goal for the exhibition at Amherst is to involve the Five Colleges as well as local and regional residents.

“We will have tie-ins with other local libraries, like the Jones Library in Amherst and the Renaissance Center at UMass, so it’s going to be a wide partnership with other museums and libraries,” Nelson said. “This is an opportunity to allow people from small towns to come by, develop programming that will invite local communities — not just the Amherst College community — to learn about Shakespeare, to see the book up close, and to learn the context of Shakespeare and his work.” Nelson said that the Pioneer Valley is a good location for the

Olivia Tarantino ‘15 Photography Editor

Archives and Special Collections will collaborate with the Folger Shakespeare Library to bring the Folio to Amherst. exhibition because it allows Shakespeare’s work to be exposed to a regional community that has never interacted with these works in a tactile fashion.

Bosman also plans to integrate the exhibition and related programming into his course on Shakespeare, which is held each spring.

“I want to involve as many visiting scholars from the Folger and other colleges and libraries

in the Shakespeare course as possible,” he said.

Other courses at Amherst, across various disciplines in the humanities, are also planned to take advantage of the First Folio’s visit.

“This is not going to be closed event for specialists, but an outreach opportunity both locally and regionally,” Bosman said. “One of my plans is to get faculty and staff who don’t normally work on Shakespeare but feel inspired

by him to join the conversation in whatever form they practice.”

“I hope the exhibition will be a lightning rod for debate on campus,” Bosman said.

“Shakespeare has inspired many of the world’s greatest artists and thinkers — from John Keats to Duke Ellington, from Maya Angelou to Mumford & Sons — and many Amherst students and faculty are Shakespeare fans.”

Elaine Scarry Speaks on Nuclear Disarmament Continued from Page 1

weapons, but I want to address the civil deformations,” Scarry said. “For one, with the threat of nuclear weapons, we have lost the right to self-defense, which is at the core of all other rights. Also, nuclear weapons eliminate the right to mutual aid, as hospitals and caregivers are simply unable to provide help in the event of a nuclear disaster.”

Scarry also suggested that the United States’ possession of nuclear weapons is robbing citizens of civil rights. She said that the general concerns about nuclear weapons are focused either on the weapons’ susceptibility to accidents or their potential to be seized by terrorist organizations. However, Scarry said that the main issue, in her opinion, is that “nuclear weapons are antithetical to the values of civil society because they wrestle power away from the people and place it in the hands of a few. If we have lost all say over what our

military does, we have lost our civil stature.”

In her argument against nuclear proliferation, Scarry cited international laws that are designed to prevent large-scale injury brought about by nuclear weapons. Scarry said that the United States has continuously argued that its nuclear arsenal is not in violation of any international law.

Scarry stressed her fear that the American populace has become complacent about nuclear weapons, and “infantilized to the point where we have effectively given up on the push to eliminate nuclear weapons.” She also argued against the notion that the precedent of the Cuban Missile Crises, in which President Kennedy famously averted nuclear war, would necessarily carry through in the future. She also said that “eight of the United States’ 14 Ohio Class submarines — each of which is capable of producing the damage of 4,000 Hiroshima blasts — were built after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

In addition to drawing on the work of various nuclear disarmament proponents, the talk also touched on the role of nuclear disarmament in generating an environmentally sustainable planet. According to Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, “every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on clean renewable energy and one more spent on making the world a comparatively dirtier and a more dangerous place.”

Junior Ben Walker, who was involved in the Green Amherst Project’s initiative to push the college to divest from fossil fuels, spoke in an interview after the event on the relationship between sound environmental policy and reduction in nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear power presents an environmental worry because of issues with waste disposal.

Nuclear waste lasts on time scales that exceed the human imagination,” Walker said.

In the Q&A following the talk, attendees

AAS Introduces Spirit Scavenger Hunt Sophie Chung ’17 Managing News Editor The Association of Amherst Students introduced the 2015 Amherst Spirit Scavenger Hunt this week, part of an effort to encourage community members to attend more events, performances and games on campus. The AAS announced this initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday.

Participants in the scavenger hunt must attend three events from each of three event categories between this week and May 7. The three categories include club events, student performances and sports games. The email to the community included that students must take “selfies” at the events they attend and send them in a message to the 2015 Amherst Spirit Scavenger Hunt Facebook page in order to confirm their attendance.

To encourage all students to take part in the scavenger hunt, the AAS said that all participants will receive a long sleeve Amherst

College shirt and will be entered in a raffle for an iPad mini.

AAS President Tomi Williams ’16 said this program was an effort to specifically encourage students who would not normally attend certain events to participate and develop interest in unfamiliar student groups and teams.

“As friends and classmates and neighbors, it is our role to validate these efforts with our presence,” Williams said. “Simple demonstrations of support and small sacrifices of time, though seemingly insignificant, are at the foundation of any strong community.”

After reaching out to various student groups and teams on campus, the AAS compiled a list of future events under the three categories (club events, performances and sports games) with names, dates, times and locations of the events. The list includes events from organizations such as Peer Advocates, the Pokemon-Digimon Club, To Write Love on Her Arms and the Military Support Group as well as performances from various a cap-

pella and dance groups, WAMH and Marsh Coffee Haus. Under the sports category, various games for sports such as lacrosse, softball, baseball, tennis, rugby and crew are listed.

The list is not exhaustive, and additional clubs or teams with upcoming events before May 7 can ask to be put on the event list.

The AAS said that the Facebook page for the Scavenger Hunt would post updates about the scavenger hunt, including the “selfies” that students send from the various events they attend.

Williams said that he hopes the scavenger hunt will be a fun competition that can helpstudents to become invested in the whole community and show that they care through the support of attendance.

“I hope to see the scavenger hunt bring people together both physically and communally. Events are a great way to bring students who may not know each other very well into the same space for a common cause — to support one another,” Williams said.

asked questions and shared opinions.. Francis Crowe, a peace activist who has been at the helm of many local and national peace movements, was one of the people who spoke at the Q&A session.

“Once people believed in slavery, not any more. Once people believed in discriminating, not any more. I hope that the younger people will one day say, once ‘people believed in war, not any more,’” Crowe said.

Several local activists also brought up Vincent J. Intondi’s new book, “African Americans Against the Atomic Bomb,” during the Q&A session. In the book, Intondi suggests that African American activists have argued for nuclear disarmament in part because of its connection with civil rights.

The discussion ended on the topic of protest.

“I think we need to reassert our own right to govern, and that requires us to do things that are uncomfortable, like standing in the street,” Scarry concluded.

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Opinion A Look at Theme Houses Editorial

It’s a widely held opinion on campus that theme houses work. Out of the various articles and focus groups recently devoted to loneliness, students have worried about their place in the overarching community, the lack of tradition, and the athlete/non-athlete divide. Almost universally, however, it seems that students find their place in the smaller communities of theme houses. Especially for sophomores who want singles with a good community, these houses are a godsend.

Within the wave of great change that residential life is initiating with their neighborhoods program, students want theme houses to stay.

Yet, by definition, not all students can be included in theme houses. For starters, these spaces are created explicitly for students with specific interests. For example, the fact that only students who speak Spanish or French can be a part of Newport is self-evidently clear and accepted. The unfortunate downside of the common ground that these communities rest on is the fact that there are students who just don’t fit into any theme house community. Yet, despite the repeated proof that these programs work, residential life hasn’t been actively promoting the program. A proposal for an LGBTQ theme house has been floating in the ether for about a year, recently having been pushed back until next room draw. Wesleyan, our sister school in the Little Three has a Jewish house, an environmental sustainability house and a writing house. If theme houses work as well as their residents claim they do,

Amherst should be expanding the program.

It’s also a problem that there’s no administrative or student-based oversight system that looks at theme house admission processes or determines whether the houses are completing their missions. Right now, there is no transparency in the admissions process. Applicants go into interviews and are judged on the impression they convey to their peers after 30 minutes. House presidents, current residents and Resident Counselors are inevitably friends with some applicants and have heard vague rumors about others. While all houses have faculty advisers from departments they supposedly represent, the advisers don’t have a role in the process for non-language houses. In other words, it’s hard for students to know how admission to theme houses is determined. Furthermore, there is no way of holding theme houses accountable to make sure they are pursuing their intended mission. This is a perfect opportunity for theme houses to reassess and ask whether they are truly diverse groups of people who have bonded over similar interests, or whether they are just groups of friends who all decided to apply for the same housing.

It’s clear that Residential Life and the student body need to take a hard look at theme houses both for their many successes and their occasional failures. We should have a conversation to create more transparent processes for applying to theme houses and be frank about the need to explore more interests.

Preaching to the Choir Obinna Ukogu ’18 Staff Writer Dialogue has long been hailed as the solution to most, if not all, of our problems. Our society looks down on the war-monger and hails the diplomat. In short, we have become a world of talkers. It is all the more shocking, then, to see that dialogue doesn’t always succeed. Channels of communication often break down and diplomatic relationships deteriorate. Even in our communities, when we try to use dialogue as a tool for social change, success is not guaranteed. If dialogue really is the golden goose, why do we still have so many problems despite finding ourselves talking so much? In short, why does talking fail us? I will consider just one out of many reasons.

Recently, one of my professors told me about a conference she attended abroad. It was a conference about business ethics, and as speaker after speaker came forward and the conference drew to a close, it became clear that everyone already thought the same thing: Businesses should be ethical. Many of us have been in similar situations, at conferences or other gatherings, where everyone seems to agree. After all, no one really wants a dissenter at his conference. Some of us may also have experienced that “Aha” moment that only comes from consensus. However, one thing we might not have experienced is the complete resolution of the problem we had just discussed, but after our discussion. What I mean is that our actual discussion results in nothing

other than our self-gratification. I am not implying that conferences are useless or that the feeling of self-gratification is bad. What I am saying is that, as in the case of my professor’s conference, there wasn’t a single financial agent (be it banker, economist or hedge fund manager) present at the conference. I am talking about is the seemingly unavoidable problem of “preaching to the choir.”

A few weeks ago, I accidentally walked in on a discussion session about the “gray area” in sexual relationships in the Women’s and Gender Center. Prior to my being there, I had no idea what the “gray area” was, so at first, I was a little lost. But eventually I understood that it refers to that instance when an individual gives verbal sexual consent but not physical consent. I also noticed that everyone else in the room besides three other guys already knew what it was. Unfortunately, this is a trend that repeats itself a lot, both here at Amherst and in the world at large.

Oftentimes, the people who attend conferences or discussion sessions are people who already know what the topic of discussion is about (the core). The more troubling situation is when they already have the same opinions. This creates a situation where the members of the discussion end up talking to each other about the values that they already have. Furthermore, it begs the question of why the people who need to be at these discussions — ignorant or opinionated outsiders like myself — are never there.

Granted, this situation does not

discredit the members of the choir, and it is not a problem that they create, but one that they must constantly grapple with. How do you get people to attend your event? How do you get people to educate themselves? Here, we must be careful not to demonize the outsider. I didn’t make a conscious attempt to attend the Women’s and Gender Center talk because I wasn’t aware of it. By this, I am not implying bad advertising, but simply my own ignorance.

This is not an experience that is unique to me. We go to talks because we are interested in them, or maybe because we want to know more or because we know a lot about the topic being discussed. We rarely really ever attend discussions of whose subject matter we have absolutely no notion. That doesn’t make us bad people; we’re just human, and we have a tendency to stick with comfort and familiarity. And so we find ourselves with this circular problem: There are a lot of discussions about how to solve social problems on campus, but because these discussions constantly take place among people who are already aware of these problems and not among the ignorant, they are made that much harder to solve, whether intentionally or not.

I am not trying to say that discussions of this nature are doomed to fail. I acknowledge that the purpose of a discussion isn’t always to actively solve a problem, but sometimes to share experiences. However, I worry that the fact that we find ourselves in discussion sessions constantly talking to the same peo-

ple about the same issues indicates a problem somewhere. The intuitive solution to this problem would then be to force less involved or educated individuals to attend these discussions, like athletic coaches often do with their athletes. But in doing so, we run the risk of filling these discussions with disinterested people and maybe even rendering the discussions ineffective. Although mandatory events are not ideal, I believe they hold some merit and value, and would think it wise to keep them a viable option.

Fortunately, one idea that might work would be to take discussions out of the places where they usually happen and into the places where they don’t. Why don’t we get the Green Amherst Project or the women’s volleyball team to talk about the gray area during one of their meetings? Why don’t we get professors to randomly dedicate one of their classes to a discussion on racial issues on campus? It might sound weird, but it could be very effective. We would be taking these issues away from of their usual hashing grounds and into places where they would get a wider audience. We would be getting to less-involved people and solving a problem.

In conclusion, while the term “preaching to the choir” might offend some people, it should be noted that it isn’t offensive. It is neither the fault of the people who find themselves in these situations nor the fault of the outsiders, but it is just the way things usually pan out. What matters is that we recognize that it is a problem that we need to solve.

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The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

Opinion

5

Lost in Translation: The Complicated World of Texting and Online Communication Julia Pretsfelder ’18 Staff Writer I am terrible at hellos. Even with my friends, I sometimes hesitate to say hi out loud. It wouldn’t even be that embarrassing if they didn’t hear me, but I still usually give this kind of weird big-eyed, teeth-gritting smile. I have a love-hate relationship with those ridiculous conversations, analyzing these interactions with acquaintances, thinking, “I said hi, but do they even remember me? Now I seem creepy” or “I just should’ve said hi, now I seem rude, but we, like, barely made eye contact.” I often think that texting or messaging exacerbates these pretty stupid concerns.

Even beyond the instances of texting or not texting someone you want to hook up with based on the composite wisdom of friends with more text game, how does this unnecessary stress surrounding communication translate when it gets virtual? Am I just overanalyzing basic human interaction? Definitely, but I think there are layers to what makes me feel bewildered about messaging.

Hopefully writing this different, longer kind of text can help me sort some of it out, lol. (Or should I have said Haha?)

I usually talk too much. No time or place is safe: I do it in class, at practice, occasionally to some poor friend of a friend I meet at the lunch

table. I have won “Most Talkative” at multiple summer programs, which is not even an award or compliment but, rather, a description of a personality trait generally considered irritating. Case in point, I ramble.

Strangely, I rarely start conversations online. I tend to use texting just to make plans. I also completely forget to respond sometimes.

I space out a lot in person, but my virtual failures to say “hey” are more acute. Aside from not wanting to say something stupid or come off as desperate, or subtly adhering to gender norms by not texting someone I may be interested in, I wonder why it does not occur to me to talk to people over text. I know I should message my friends and family from home, even though we are all busy.

I usually only occasionally say, “Oh, I saw this and thought of you.” My parents get annoyed when I pointblank ask for something instead of beginning with a “Hi” and “Miss you,” which I assume are implied but which I would say out loud if I were talking to them in person. Luckily, I can get a fuller picture of “How are you?” with FaceTime or Snapchat.

The obvious insufficiencies of reading rather than seeing or hearing should and could simply be fixed by me getting over myself and my being dramatically “sooo busy” and making a phone call. However, I cannot really FaceTime with people I do not

know very well.

And that is where “hey” comes in.

No three letters, seriously not even “God,” can be so polarizing depending on who it comes from, when and why. I recently found an old Facebook chat about a Facebook chat from my junior year of high school that went like this: “i think i may have lead him on” “no!!! he probably just thought you were being nice” “ya well he fb IMed me hey.” “Hey” can either be an “I remember you exist,” “I want you,” “I am so bored,” “I am drunk,” or an annoyingly circuitous way to “Let’s hang out.” I need to remember that having these conversations is not a chore. Saying hi is a perfectly innocuous, friendly, normal thing to do. I think that part of what stresses me out is that when I am usually inevitably asked, “What’s up?” I never really feel like anything interesting is. In person, I would still talk about English class or complain about the printer jamming, which is not a great alternative to “nothing much, you?” In allowing for this articulacy, messaging should be a relief. I can eliminate the extraneous, ignorant “likes” and “literally”s I say, often enough that I am unaware of them. The shrillness that gets in my voice when I get heated is absent. I am finally chill, articulate, even aloof, relative to my usual rants.

But then the problem of being dull arises. Even though I kind of hate

how much, how fast and how loudly I talk, I still prefer it to the shy version of myself that I sometimes offer in person and almost always do over text. I want to maintain that image of a hey-worthy impression but with a few “likes” and “literally”s thrown in.

If I can recognize that the technological messenger is not the real version of me or of the person who I am speaking to, why do I still care?

Why do I feel nervously flattered, unresponsively neglected or gratified? It is sad and funny how we can read into everything, or nothing, too much. “Hey” does just mean “hi,” even if it has two y’s, and I guess it is really easy to forget that. Messaging can make us fill what could be simple and direct with implications because of the faceless contact, the spacing of time or the projection of some inflection onto another person’s statement. What may be most contradictorily debilitating or liberating is that texting allows us to say exactly what we want to. I also think that my tendency to overthink a message to some acquaintance, or even an email to my professor, is partially related to the fact that I want my writing to be perfect as my only means of streamlining my voice aside from sentences that wind like this one does. Part of what becomes irksome about messages is that the records of what words may have been too cold, too entreating or generally too awkward

are retrievable. I don’t choose to reread chats, but you have a simple conversation that can be followed by the, “What did they say? Let me read it,” from a friend. Thank god for Delete and Archive.

I am not yearning for calling cards, love letters and taking a carriage to a friend’s house here. It is good that the Internet or your service provider facilitate communication. I have had natural, satisfying, flirty conversations over text, while I might make terrible small talk in real life. I have exchanged cathartic, essay-long messages where I almost feel like I am talking to my friend all the way in Miami in person. I appreciate GroupMe likes. I just think that it is often hard to divorce the awareness of how casual and distant messages are from the way you normally communicate, due to the anxiety induced by both receiving attention and the opportunity to offer a readable impression of yourself.

I may not be of passing significance to you just because I momentarily crossed your mind with a “hey.” If I ever boldly just say “hey” online, I may be too temporarily shy for a “What’s up” in person. And even after all this absurd angst surrounding a little ping or a vibration in my pocket and bunches of letters I will likely forget by next week, I am still kind of scared no one will message me after this article. Lol.

“Onism”: Or, the Awareness of How Little of the World You Will Experience Mohamed Ramy ’18 Staff Writer Is there a reason why we waste time? We are all familiar with the phrase “You should be doing something useful with your life!” While studying in Keefe Science Library, I often stop my work and watch an episode of “How I Met Your Mother” or just a few YouTube videos. Sure, I get my work done, but I do wander. As travelers in search of signification, we tend to some studies and readings as more momentous; indeed, anything now and then seems more interesting than that chapter of chemistry reading!

At all times, one must be doing something — homework or extracurricular activities — in order to climb the ladder of success. However, there is a desire in us to explore the world more often. Confined by walls and time, we reach out to a medium that offers the expansion of our horizons. Aside from time spent talking to friends or doing some leisure reading, I would say we mostly waste our time on — drumroll, please — the Internet. But why?

“Onism” is a brilliant word coined

by John Koenig, author of “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” and YouTube personality in charge of a channel that goes by the same name, to delineate the awareness of how lit-

tle of the world we will experience.

Depressing, is it not? In the rest of the article, I will explore a few other terms of Koenig’s.

Oleka: The Awareness of How Few Days Are Memorable Unfortunately, few of our days on this earth are memorable. For that reason, it would seem that life belongs in the background. With the imagination humans possess, dormant fantasies remind us of how little of the world we are experiencing — a morose thought, indeed.

So why do we waste time, knowing that there are countless experiences to be sought out? Stuck in one body in one place at a time, we (mostly) roam the Internet to connect with other parts of the world through that “global brain.” After asking several people how they “wasted” their time, I noted that the most common answer was (not surprisingly) on Facebook. We check Facebook hourly, or every so often, because there is a fear of missing out on a status or a happening elsewhere on the globe.

Unconsciously paranoid, we crave to be involved, to be a contributing member of a greater community.

Facebook permits us to try to formulate a memorable profile while we endeavor to keep up with the news of our friends and campus. It is an innovation that reminds us of who

we were and allows us to conjure a vision of whom we wish to become: an aware, successful and memorable member of humanity.

In addition, YouTube is a time-consuming machine that occupies most of our time with either random videos or ones that address our passions. Honestly, whenever I visit YouTube I either listen to song playlists or watch “Shots of Awe” videos; occasionally I use it to find explanatory videos. Yet, I regularly do digress, sometimes for many hours, then forgetting what I had set out to do. I have a longing to be emotionally moved by videos or to be lost in a different realm, one that transcends my biological limitation. YouTube presents multifarious perspectives to this baffling world and permits us to engage the faraway mind. On another note, it would seem that perhaps people spend hours on BuzzFeed because of our demanding society’s requirement to have an opinion on nearly everything (while still keeping listening to as many different opinions as possible). One ends up reading articles and taking quizzes — “What Kind Of Garbage Are You?” — in order to formulate an opinion about oneself as well as to have something “interesting” to tell one’s friends: “I got ‘kidney’ for that ‘What Kind of Internal Organ Are You?’ quiz!” The reason why we

waste so much time, especially on the Internet, is a result of Oleka.

Yú Yi: The Desire to Feel Intensely Again Ultimately, it is the banality of tasks that drives us to occupy the background and digress (procrastinate?), sometimes for up to a couple of hours a day; it is impatience with lived life. To feel emotive transcendence is rare but coveted, and some people fear that they will only feel lesser versions of the same emotions (watch “Her” if you want to fully un-

derstand). Numbed by doing homework, “wasting time” provides us an opportunity to engage the senses, calm the mind or find the motivation to do work. We sometimes protect ourselves by tuning out the world, but then the tide rises and the desire to feel intensely again manifests itself; Yú Yi invades our thoughts. It is “wasting time” that offers that escapism. There is a thrust of tides in our hearts in need of subsiding. As Jane Austen wrote, “…none of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.” What can I say … carpe diem?

Obituary: Peter Batura Ruben Valera ’17 Contributing Writer Amherst College has recently lost a vital member of the community, Peter “Pete” Batura. Pete was an important figure in Charles Pratt Dormitory, acting as a custodian, father figure, mentor and, most importantly, a friend. If you have ever seen his smiling face, then you know how warm of individual he was. Peter was first and foremost a family man, always raving about his two daughters. He was always a pillar of support for us residents of Charles Pratt and helped us place our issues into perspective. We could have been crying about finals, breakups or room draw — whatever it was, he was always there offering a helping hand and words of wisdom. Outside of Charles Pratt, Pete brought a smile to the faces of everyone in the shop and the committees he was a part of. He was a friendly person who brought much-needed cheer to the service center and Charles Pratt. Pete will be truly missed, and this community will not be the same without his smiling face.

Arts&Living

Image courtesy of Amherst College

Lola Fadula ’17 (center) played the character of Destiny, alongside an ensemble of seven, including Douglass Jamison ‘16 and Amir Hall ’17 (above).

Thesis Spotlight: Daejione Jones Discusses Her Project, “Destiny” Paola Garcia-Prieto ’18

Staff Writer

Sitting on a small patch of grass against the wall of the dark studio, audiences waited to see the senior thesis show, “Destiny.” Written and directed by senior Daejione Jones, “Destiny” tells the story of a young girl who goes from the being homeless in California to attending Amherst College.

Before the show started, the audience watched the cast play childhood games like hopscotch and Double Dutch, setting the stage for the life story of the main character, Destiny.

The small studio allowed for an intimate theater experience, and the patches of grass and green steps on the far side of the room gave the feeling that viewers were sitting in someone’s front lawn, watching children play.

The collection of monologues gives the viewers a clear idea of where Destiny is coming from — a place where teenagers mess around with little hope for their futures — and the expectations placed on her upon making it to Amherst College.

Destiny’s story is told by those around her: her neighbors back home, her mother and her friends at school. They talk about how worried they are for Destiny upon discovering that her family is homeless. She stays on campus for four whole years and pulls away from her friends. None of them know how to help her, and they critique the resources that are supposed to be available to students. In the end everyone is conflicted on what to do about Destiny. The play ends with Destiny being found back in her hometown — no one knows

what happened to her.

I talked to Daejione Jones about the experience of creating, writing and directing this show.

Q: What was the inspiration behind Destiny?

A: I’ve known I had to write a thesis since I became a theater and dance major. I had no idea what I wanted to write about — I decided to do a writing and directing thesis. I took a special topics course with one of my advisers, Connie Congdon, where we read a play called “Jack” by David Greensband, and I did writing exercises where I copied the play’s format. I wrote three monologues based on “Jack” that ended up being in “Destiny.” My adviser really clung to that idea and we worked on developing those monologues into a full-fleshed story, which became my thesis.

I feel like “Destiny” tells a story that is common on campuses across the country, but it doesn’t get talked about because of things like class issues. It was an idea I had when writing my first piece, “And Destiny was homeless,” so when writing anything afterwards that’s the idea I kept.

Q: What was the idea behind the play’s heartbreaking ending?

A: I didn’t want to do an uplifting and hopeful ending because then people would walk out feeling happy, and it would take away from the ultimate message I wanted, which was for people to reflect on their role in other people’s lives — especially on small campuses like ours.

I wanted people to walk away thinking, “Woah, what could we have done to help someone like Destiny? Do I know anyone going through

similar troubles? What could I do now? Whose job is it to help?”

Quite honestly, we don’t know who the people represented by Destiny are and where they end up, often they end up slipping through the cracks. As long as they go through the motions of going to class and passing those classes, people don’t notice that anything is wrong because all the school cares about is getting you your degree. Which is the function of a college, so you can’t even fault them really. So what happens once individuals have completed their responsibilities? The question is what is their responsibility, and is there more that they should be doing now?

Q: What was the most challenging aspect of writing and creating this play?

A: The biggest challenge was getting started writing. We’d been talking about what we wanted to do for our theses since our junior spring, and this was not at all what I planned on doing. We all changed our theses by the time fall came around. The hardest part was getting something on paper. I could not think of what to write — I spent my entire summer trying to write this thesis and ended up with nothing.

But once I got back on campus, the special topic course I took with Connie put pressure on me to start writing and meet her deadlines.

I didn’t have to think about it in terms of my thesis, I just had to write. And then she told me she thought it should be my thesis. From there it was much easier because I had something to go off of.

The process of doing a creative thesis is very very draining. I think often times people

assume that creative arts don’t work as hard as science or other majors do in terms of creating a thesis, but it’s just as hard. We have to put in so much time, so many hours, just like they do.

And the creative process is physically and emotionally draining. Right now, I am exhausted.

The exhaustion from the last two months of rehearsals just dropped on me today. Thank God spring break is next week; it’s a wellneeded break.

Q: What did you look for in your actors when you cast the play?

A: On my casting call I specifically said: only actors that identify as black or brown. I really only wanted black or brown bodies on the stage because when you think of Amherst College you see white, affluent students and that’s not the case for a lot of students here. And we never see ourselves reflected in the media on the grand scheme of things, and even less so on our own campus. It was very important to me to only work with those actors. And the biggest worry was how to put that casting call out without hurting white students’ feelings. But I very much wanted to work with these actors and have them be a part of my production.

Casting was very fun — a lot of people came out and were wonderful. Making the decision of who was right for the project and who wasn’t was the hardest part for me as a director. I ended up with a great cast of seven wonderful people. I knew I wanted Lola to play Destiny and the other actors, labeled as ensemble, doubled as many different characters in the play. I’m grateful I found seven great actors who helped me put it all together.

Amherst Ensembles Perform Joint Rendition of Mozart’s Great Mass Darya Bor ‘18 Staff Writer The Amherst Symphony Orchestra and the Amherst College Choral Society performed a joint rendition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor, K.427 in Buckley Concert Hall on Saturday, March 7. The concert featured the Glee Club, Women’s Chorus, the Concert Choir, and the Amherst Symphony Orchestra. Mark Lane Swanson conducted, and six guest vocal soloists from the UMass vocal program were also present.

The evening was noteworthy both for the number of organizations and people involved and for the difficulty of the piece itself.

Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor was written in 1783 and premiered at St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg. Left incomplete at the time of Mozart’s death in 1791, with two missing por-

tions, the piece is about one hour long.

On Buckley’s brightly lit stage stood 160 involved people — 30 from Concert Choir, 40 from Women’s Chorus, 30 from Glee Club, 52 orchestra performers, six soloists, and the two directors of the Choral Society and orchestra — Mallorie Chernin and Mark Swanson, respectively. Altogether, this group constitutes about 8 percent of Amherst College’s student body.

The preparation for this concert began during interterm, with each group practicing on its own. The choral societies began practicing together a few weeks before the concert, and spent the last few rehearsals with all four groups practicing together — voices and instrumental music combined. This was the part that most of the performers found most rewarding.

“I had been listening to the music on YouTube,” Takudzwa Tapfuma ’17, vice presi-

dent of the Glee Club, said in an interview. “But we had never heard our orchestra perform live.

On our first combined rehearsal, we walked in and heard the orchestra playing the same music I’d been listening to on YouTube. Wow! They sounded so good! It felt really good to be performing alongside people so talented. It was an honor to part of that.”

Singing at the concert were UMass soloists Corinne Byrne, Liana Ginetis, Maki Matsui and Eun Byoul Song, all sopranos; Brendan Buckley, a tenor and Matthew Chastain, a baritone. All six are professional-track soloists.

“This was the most amazing thing we’ve done all year and I wish we could do it for every concert,” said Lumi Youm ’18, a member of the Women’s Chorus. While such a large-scale collaboration may not happen for every concert, the Choral Society does collaborate once with other musical groups on campus every year,

most often in the spring semester. This last concert is a continuation of the trend and a follow-up to last year’s collaboration with the jazz band.

“Imagine working on something for three months, and after one night, it’s over. It’s done.

You won’t get a chance to sing the same music with the same people ever again,” Tapfuma said.

Members of all the performing collectives credited the directors, Mark Swanson and Mallorie Chernin, for their patience as the groups worked through the difficult music.

Swanson and Chernin received a loud round of applause from both the audience and the Choral Society at the conclusion of the concert.

“She knew what she wanted us to sound like after three months, and I cannot imagine the patience it took to hear us in those first few weeks,” Tapfuma said of Chernin.

Arts & Living 7

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

How to Get Creative at Val: Midterm Breakfast Edition Olivia Tarantino ’15 Staff Writer With spring break rapidly approaching and your workload undesirably mounting until the end of the year, it is crucial for you to get in the most important meal of the day: breakfast. The only way to balance those metabolism-defeating allnighters is by consuming a nutritiously balanced breakfast. Below are a few recipes to spruce up your mornings and give you energy to keep up all your groundbreaking discoveries (or your history paper).

Southwestern Breakfast Burrito • 1 large spoonful of scrambled eggs or egg whites • 2 sausage links, cubed, or 4 pieces of bacon, also cubed • 1 whole wheat tortilla • Black beans • Red onions (optional: cubed) • 2 slices cheddar cheese, shredded (or ¼ cup of shredded mozzarella)

• • • •

3 slices of jalapenos, cubed 1 spoonful salsa (optional) A few dashes of Cholula Salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika to taste Instructions: In a small container, stir a spoonful of salsa with a few healthy dashes of Cholula. Pour/grind equal amounts of freshly ground pepper, salt, garlic powder and paprika into a salad bowl and mix. Add scrambled eggs or egg whites to the bowl to combine with spice mixture. After cubing the sausage, onions, jalapenos, and cheddar cheese, mix these ingredients with the eggs, black beans and spicy salsa (this can also be used as a dip instead). Once the filling has been prepared, spoon the mix in a line slightly off-center on the wrap. Wrap the burrito by folding the sides across the line of filling so they nearly touch. Then, once the sides are folded in, bring the short side (bottom) of the tortilla that is closest to the filling up and over the sides while making sure to tuck in the ends. Roll the bottom of the tortilla up as tightly as you

• Cup of mangoes • ½ cup peaches • ½ cup of pineapple • 1 banana • ½ a cup of rice or soy milk • Splash of orange juice • Tablespoon of honey • 1-2 spoonfuls of flax seed Instructions: Add all ingredients together and blend on high for 20-30 seconds, adding extra liquid as needed.

Photo courtesy of Olivia Tarantino ’15

Southwestern Breakfast Burrito can, squeezing the roll back towards you as you go, trying to curve the rest of the tortilla around the wrap so it stays in place. Put on the panini grill for four to six minutes. “(Vitamin)-C-ing Green” Smoothie • Spoonful of ice • A heaping bunch of spinach

Ham & Swiss Croissant • 1 croissant (white or whole wheat) • 1 slice of Swiss cheese, cut in half • 3-4 pieces of ham • Teaspoonful of dijion mustard (optional) Instructions: Cut the croissant lengthwise. Spread a thin layer of Dijon mustard on both sides of the croissant (optional).

Rip the Swiss in half and put each half on both sides of the croissant, layering the ham on top. Put in the panini maker (gently! It’s only a croissant!) for 4-5 minutes or until the cheese begins to melt.

Father John Misty’s Latest Album Emanates Authenticity Rene Kooiker ’18 Staff Writer Boy sees girl in a parking lot. Boy falls in love with girl and says, “I’ve seen you around. What’s your name?” Girl falls in love with boy. They begin to spend every day together, getting high and making love.

They’re finding themselves in each other; their intimacy is becoming all there is to the universe.

It’s a classic story of falling in love. But the boy isn’t an ordinary boy — he’s Josh Tillman, self-proclaimed “sarcastic overcompensating asshole,” as he put it in an interview with Grantland. We see a profoundly changed Josh Tillman on this sophomore album, “I Love You, Honeybear.” Before meeting Emma —his “honeybear” — he was afraid of feeling normal (feelings), deflecting sympathy and sentimentality with irony. That’s the Tillman of “Fear Fun,” his first album as Father John Misty, an erudite, gregarious gadfly — he’s

casually name-dropping Heidegger and Sartre, and singing about “writing a novel because it’s never been done before.”

In “I Love You, Honeybear” we see Tillman trying to reflect sincerely on his music and his emotions, trying to come to terms with the ways falling in love with Emma are changing him. His lyrics can teeter on the brink of the cliche — we hear “honeybear,” “tired of running” and “I love you as you are.” But Tillman is aware that he isn’t good at that yet, that his lyricism is trite at times.

He refers to his own line about running as “something dumb.”

In his best and most original lyrical moments, he’s his old sardonic self, going for a shocker, like with the track “ Chateau Lobby #4.” Here, Tillman really reminded me of Philip Roth, the libidinous bad boy of contemporary literature. In fact, Tillman references Roth’s novel “Everyman” on “Fear Fun”; there’s a song called “Everyman Needs a Companion.” Tillman owns a “heap of vinyl outstacked only by his Philip Roth novels,” Sean Fennessey notes in his

Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

“I Love You, Honeybear” is J. Tillman’s second album as Father John Misty, following his 2012 release of “Fear Fun.”

article and interview for Grantland.

Tillman is clearly not afraid to flaunt his bookish side. I understand how that might be irksome or come off as pretentious. But it does give us a window into his psyche.

We’ve all had the experience of reading and recognizing the perfect expression for something difficult to put into words.

Maybe precisely those moments — where an emotion is so personal that our vocabulary fails us — say the most about us. There, Tillman might feel the need to throw in an allusion or two. In any case, what I’m arguing is that you can let the references inform your reading of his lines and get a good grasp on what this album’s all about.

Besides Roth, Tillman references Shakespeare: “A rose by any other name,” he croons in “Holy Shit.” He’s alluding to the famous balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet,” where Juliet says: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” This song is about everything Tillman thinks love is not. Here, he’s anxious about saying “love,” because the word is so overused that it has become meaningless. Instead, he quotes some definition of love he’s heard — “Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity”— and negates it: “What I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.” The Shakespeare reference is exactly about those indescribable qualities of love. Tillman and the Bard tell us that it doesn’t matter how you define what love is or isn’t, because “By any other name,” it “would smell as sweet.”

“The Ideal Husband,” combines the timeless anxieties about love and relationships we see in literature with the particular anxieties of millennials. The title refers to Oscar Wilde’s play “An Ideal Husband.”

Both that play and this song deal with hypocrisy, past sins and forgiveness. But Tillman gives those themes a modern twist.

He’s anxious about privacy and getting found out: “Julian / He’s gonna take my files,” Tillman sings, a reference Julian Assange, priest of digital penance and absolution. But “now / Now it’s out,” and Tillman’s “finally succumbing.” He seeks forgiveness and ends ironically: “Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?”

More 21st-century angst ensues in “True Affection.” It’s a song about isolation. “I wrote it on tour while trying to woo someone with text message and email and trying to make a connection that way and the frustration of that. So that song had to be synthetic and inorganic,” Tillman told

Grantland. As far as I know, it’s the first electronic song on a folk-rock album. It’s something of a genre-bender. The song is also a reflection on electronic music itself.

Can it really convey true affection? I think Tillman would wholeheartedly say yes, and I’m with him, but it’s not the musical form that singer-songwriters typically choose.

In “I Love You, Honeybear” Tillman shows himself totally capable of writing beautiful songs. That’s partly due to Emma, partly due to the Fleet Foxes (he was the drummer for a while). He said she could sense that he wasn’t fully committing. “She told me that I needed to not be afraid to let the songs be beautiful,” instead of cloaking them in a “giant, deranged, impenetrable Disney-orchestra arrangement,” Tillman told Fennessey. There’s still some of that LSD-era Beatles stuff on “Holy Shit” and “I Love You, Honeybear.” But there’s also “I Went to the Store One Day,” with simple chords on an acoustic guitar and fluttering falsetto “oohs.”

Even there, he can’t help but be selfaware. One line from that song is “Insert here, a sentiment regarding golden years.”

You see him stepping out there. In Grantland’s interview he recalls that line, thinking: “Am I seriously writing a love song?

That awareness, I think, is a big part of what I do that helps me live with myself as an artist and as a human being.”

When you’re only looking at the lyrics, Tillman risks not sounding genuine or authentic. But his music is really convincing.

“Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow” is a song about being on the road and being jealous, and the vibe you get totally fits that. It’s like a classic blues or folk ballad. It actually invokes metaphors about trains and there’s an epic 50s-style electric guitar near the end. I can only think of a classic scene: Tillman sitting there, a lonely dude at the bar, strung out and shot down behind his bourbon.

The only real criticism I have is that he’s sometimes trying to say too much. The metrical somersaults he forces himself to make on songs like “I Love You, Honeybear” can detract from his flow and delivery. There, instead of skillfully toeing the line between Father John Misty as a sardonic nomad — as on “Fear Fun” — and the passionate, committed lover he proves himself to be on this record, he goes right over and loses me. That said, this is a brilliant album that may indicate the potential for folk rock’s development in the coming years.

Arts & Living 8

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

Big Sean’s Latest,“Dark Sky Paradise,” Takes on an Introspective Tone Evan Paul ’18 Arts & Living Managing Editor When Sean Michael Leonard Anderson, better known as Big Sean, came onto the music scene in 2007, he was met with general praise. Following the release of his first mixtape, “Finally Famous: The Mixtape,” Big Sean went on to gain mainstream success.

Although he did put out two albums before his most recent effort, “Dark Sky Paradise,” Big Sean is most known for his many collaborations with other artists, including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Kanye West.

Big Sean has become widely known for both his work and his troubles outside of music. Big Sean also had a public split with longtime girlfriend-turned-fiancee Naya Rivera, of Glee fame. Following his split with Rivera, Big Sean began a relationship with longtime collaborator and friend Ariana Grande.

Despite his quite public relationships and issues with the law, Big Sean’s music has always been consistently good. Fortunately, 2015’s “Dark Sky Paradise” does not stray from this trend. This new album is full of collaborations, just as his other albums have been. However, this album seems to be much more personal than his others. Whereas his 2013 album “Hall of Fame” was meant to inspire others, “Dark Sky Paradise” seems like it was meant to not only allow listeners to look inside the artist’s life, but also to serve as a meditative and reflective piece for Sean.

“Dark Sky Paradise” features sound clips from phone conversations Big Sean has had with his grandmother, as well as lyrics detailing his issues with money-hungry people from his hometown. Sean’s personal and biting lyrics, coupled with verses that are anything but boring and hooks by his many collaborators make “Dark Sky Paradise” a truly great album. While most albums with heavy collaboration are usually either debuts or comebacks, and usually show the artist’s inability to carry an entire album by

themselves, the collaborations on “Dark Sky Paradise” actually show how influential and well-loved Big Sean has become in the music industry. I can almost say for sure that Kanye West would never put his name on anything that wasn’t amazing, and Kanye doesn’t just rap on this album — he produced a couple of tracks as well. The album also features guest spots from Drake, E-40, Lil Wayne and John Legend.

Best Tracks on the Album: “Dark Sky (Skyscrapers)”: In this track, which is the opener for the entire album, Big Sean sets the record straight. That is to say that he tells all his haters, all those people who think he was an “overnight success” that that isn’t the case. Big Sean touts himself not only as someone who has worked hard for their success but also as someone who “don’t owe nobody in the whole world no favors” since he “started from the basement, made it to the skyscrapers.” As far as opening tracks go, “Dark Sky (Skyscrapers)” is a strong one.

Big Sean is frank with his lyrics right from the start, and on this track he barely even takes a breath. He shoves every ounce of what he has to say about making it big into this track, and ultimately it works quite well.

“I Don’t F*ck With You”: Written in part by both Big Sean, Kanye West and produced in part by both West and DJ Mustard, the album’s lead single was released in September 2014 and quickly became everyone’s favorite song to sing along to. There’s no doubt that the song’s lyrics are pretty harsh, even mean, but that doesn’t mean the song isn’t fun to jam out to. Even better than just listening to the song, however, is watching its music video. Set in a world in which Big Sean is a big time football player, the video features many celebrities, including Kanye West, Teyana Taylor and radio personality Big Boy to name a few. Overall, this track is the perfect party song.

“One Man Can Change the World”: “Think about it, close your eyes, dream

Image courtesy of hiphopdx.com

Rapper Big Sean gives listeners an insight into his life in his most recent album, “Dark Sky Paradise.” about it/ Success is on the way.” Those are the lyrics that Big Sean spits out on this slower track that features Kanye West doing his new favorite thing, singing. While this song does focus on the commonplace dreams of “a hundred million dollars and a bad chick,” its overall meaning seems to be more than that — Big Sean tells his fans to take their one shot before they miss it. Enter John Legend’s soothing voice crooning out the song’s hook and you’re sure to feel newly inspired after each listen. Really, how much more inspirational can a song get?

“Research”: I usually don’t go for couple collaborations, especially since once the couple breaks up the song kind of gets lost in the mix, but this collaboration with Ariana Grande, a bonus track on the album, is amazing. It’s catchy, it’s fast paced, and it’s fun.

Focused on a slightly misogynistic claim that all women do “research” on their boyfriends, the song is a less serious addition to the otherwise introspective album. It’s also nice to hear Ariana Grande stray away from her usual riff-heavy and unintelligible lyrics.

Overall, “Dark Sky Paradise” is a great junior effort from Big Sean. Despite its the many collaborations and perhaps an overload of slower tracks, it’s extremely easy to listen to without becoming bored. Additionally, Big Sean’s voice is not lost among the big names that accompany him on the album.

Finally, if you’re looking for something in the same vein yet still drastically different than Drake’s “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late,” then “Dark Sky Paradise” is the album for you. Even if you aren’t, you should still give it a listen. You won’t be sorry.

Measured Acting Makes up for Suspect Cinematography in “Still Alice” Claire Jia ’15 Staff Writer The heroine of “Still Alice,” in the months after she begins to lose her memory, quotes this Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art” to an audience of family, friends, and strangers. She gives the speech haltingly but with a sort of quiet confidence, highlighting each line she has read so that she does not repeat herself. Julianne Moore as the slowlydeteriorating Alice Howland delivers a quietly sympathetic performance — it’s no surprise that she won an Academy Award for it.

“Still Alice,” directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland and adapted from Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel, is about “the art of losing,” as Elizabeth Bishop puts it. The film focuses on the fictional Alice Howland, a world-renowned linguistics professor at Columbia who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. At the beginning, she forgets small things — the phrase “word stock,” an appointment or two — but as the months go on, her memory blurs and fades until she doesn’t recognize her youngest daughter. Julianne Moore plays this transformation subtly, manifesting every emotion from slight annoyance to deep anger in a restrained click of the tongue or a clenched fist.

Image courtesy of indiewire.com

Kristen Stewart (left) and Julianne Moore (right) play Lydia and Alice Howland, respectively. Moore received an Oscar for best actress for her performance.

There is one jolting point in the film at which she seems to deteriorate instantaneously. Beyond this single unnatural moment, we almost don’t notice her decline. Moore as Alice is not a one-dimensional victim of a disease. She is an incredibly successful woman who wants to shoulder the burden by herself and stubbornly refuses to let go of her ideal past self. She is flawed. She uses her illness as an excuse to force her children to do what she wants and to avoid social commitments. In the latter example, she misses an important dinner with her husband’s coworker. “I was at Pinkberry,” she says, shrugging. “I have Alzheimer’s.” It’s sad and simple and so funny.

The different ways in which Alice’s family members react to her disease are telling. Her eldest daughter, Anna (Kate Bosworth) is usually prim and composed, but flustered in the face of her mother’s Alzheimer’s. She — and the rest of the family — chooses to treat Alice as a patient. Alec Baldwin plays a frustratingly uncomprehending husband. He loves Alice, but ultimately ceases to recognize her without her veil of perfection. Only Alice’s youngest daughter, Lydia (in an honest, organic performance by Kristen Stewart) carries on as usual, fighting her mother about her future prospects and demanding that she respect her privacy.

She is the only one to ask Alice how she feels. To Lydia, her mother is still Alice. This is not a story about a hero who prevails over a disease despite all odds. It is a story about an ordinary person with a crippling illness. She makes mistakes. Her own disgust at her debilitation almost kills her. But she is a hero nonetheless — as ordinary people are.

The film itself plays a little like a made-for-TV drama, more focused on the story than on the more artistic aspects of cinema. I couldn’t help but think of “Memento,” Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller masterpiece, in which the unconventional chronological structure — one storyline moving

forward, one moving backwards in 15-minute increments — allows the viewer to experience the confusion and amnesia of the film’s leading character. “Still Alice” is roughly told through Alice’s point of view, but the cinematography itself doesn’t lend itself in any patterned way to her perspective.

A few shots do mimic her disorientation. My favorites were the three extreme close-ups of blurred Pinkberry yogurt toppings, which seem first like medicine pills, then like bacteria — we too are disoriented, until Baldwin’s voice brings us back to the very concrete present of the frozen yogurt shop.

On the whole, however, Glatzer and Westmoreland miss many an opportunity to ground the viewers themselves in the confusing reality of the disease.

Genova’s novel was written entirely in Alice’s perspective, and as her disease takes over, the reliability of her account falters. Without the camera depicting this inner turbulence in the film, however, it is difficult for us to comprehend the tangible emotions of losing. We watch Alice losing, but we ourselves lose little.

Still, despite its artistic misses, the strength of this movie lies in its acting and in the story it attempts to tell. The fact that director Richard Glatzer is fighting ALS makes “Still Alice” more powerful. His struggle echoes Alice’s desire to be involved, to live in the now, and to keep going despite the possibility of failure at any moment.

The message at times is almost too precious, but the actors’ measured performances reel the film back. Alice follows the Bishop poem by saying: “One thing I will try to hold on to is the memory of speaking here today. It will go, I know it will. It may be gone by tomorrow. But it means so much to be talking here, today.” She knows that she will lose more, and she does. In that ephemeral moment, however, the only thing that matters is her family in front of her, her brief lucidity, and the fact that she remembers everything.

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

Sports 9

Men’s Basketball Finishes Season in Second Round NCAA Tourney Jason Stein ’16 Assistant Editor After falling to the 20th-ranked St. John Fisher College this past Saturday, men’s basketball saw their fifth straight appearance in the NCAA tournament ended in the second round following a victory over Sage College in the opening round. Following their loss to St. John Fisher, Amherst was unable to secure a fifth consecutive trip to the Sweet 16 and finished the 2014-2015 season with a 21-8 overall record.

During NCAA first round play in Rochester, New York this past Friday, Amherst’s stellar shooting carried to the team to a convincing 91-67 victory over Sage College. The Jeffs shot an impressive 59 percent from the field and 42 percent from beyond the arc.

The Jeffs also dominated the glass, as Amherst held a 45-25 rebounding edge over the Gators in the game.

While the Gators would lead by as many as five points with a score of 12-7 early on, Amherst began to pull away midway through the first half. With the game knotted at 19 with 11:27 remaining, the Jeffs used a 12-4 run in just under three minutes to build a 3123 lead.

The Jeffs held a 43-34 lead heading into halftime and would continue to grow their lead by outscoring Sage 48-33 in the second half. After the Jeffs seemingly built an insurmountable lead early in the second half, the Gators narrowed the deficit to 9 points with 8:24 remaining in second half, with the score at 64-55. However, over the final stretch, Amherst’s impressive shooting enabled the team to comfortably close out the game as the Jeffs outscored the Gators 27-12 to advance with a 24-point win.

With the win on Friday, sophomore guard Reid Berman was the story. While Berman has demonstrated his strong court vision and

passing ability with his repeatedly high assist totals for most of the season, Berman exploded in the scoring department against the Gators. While his career high in points entering play on Friday was 11, Berman finished with a career-high and game-high 28 points and six assists. Berman’s 28 points came by way of 11-14 shooting and a 4-6 mark from beyond the arc in only 21 minutes of action.

After emerging in the overtime loss to Wesleyan, Eric Conklin ’17 continued to be an invaluable presence on Friday night with 18 points (on 9-11 shooting) and eight rebounds.

First-year guard Johnny McCarthy, the recently named NESCAC Rookie of the Year, also notched double figures with 11 points, while guard Jeff Racy ’17 had 10 points.

Junior captain and forward Ben Pollack had high praise for both of Amherst’s standouts during Friday night’s victory.

“Reid really stepped up,” Pollack said of Berman. “I was very happy for him because I know how hard he’s worked to get to this point in his career, and I know he’ll continue to work at that level.”

Pollack also had similar words to describe Conklin’s performance both during the NCAA first round and the NESCAC championship an overtime loss to Wesleyan).

“Eric has just been an overall beast lately,” Pollack said. “He’s really just coming into his own and finally feeling comfortable within our offense.”

After an encouraging victory on Friday, the Jeffs were back at it again the next day in Rochester on the home floor of St. John Fisher, Amherst’s opponent in the second round of NCAAs. While the Jeffs and Cardinals traded baskets early on and the Jeffs held a 13-12 lead about seven minutes into the game, the Cardinals began to pull away after 17-5 run to make the score 29-18 with 7:44 remaining.

St. John Fisher would continue their offensive momentum for the rest of the first half (heading into the halftime break with a 47-34 lead) and into the second half. With just under 13 minutes left, St. John Fisher had a 65-43 lead over the Jeffs, but the resilient Jeffs then mounted a comeback to narrow the deficit to 71-61 with 5:54 to go.

However, over the course of the game’s final six minutes, the Cardinals would rebuild the lead that the Jeffs had cut into and finish with an 87-70 victory over the Jeffs.

A pair of guards led the scoring for Amherst on Saturday. The sharpshooting Racy scored 18 points (while shooting 6-8 on 3-pointers), while McCarthy finished with 17 points. Junior Connor Green, a first team All-NESCAC honoree, also notched double figures, finishing with 10 points. In the rebounding department, forward David George ’17 led the way with eight rebounds, while McCarthy pulled down seven boards.

Although the Jeffs shot reasonably well from the field (almost 42 percent) and from beyond the arc (34 percent), and had more rebounds and second chance points than the Cardinals, the Amherst defense was unable to limit the offensive attack of St. John Fisher. Two Cardinals players finished with over 20 points, while the team shot impressively well overall, as St. John Fisher’s overall field goal percentage exceeded 50 percent.

Moreover, the Cardinals also converted 9-15 three-pointers and an impressive 22-23 free throws.

While the Jeffs were eliminated from play with the loss to St. John’s Fisher College (who will play Randolph-Macon in the Sweet Sixteen this Friday), next year’s squad will return a very strong and talented core of players, many of which made great strides and emerged as key contributors in 2015. With almost the entire roster coming back with another year of experience, the Jeffs will have

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

First-year contributor Jayde Dawson averages 8 points per game. the potential to make a deep postseason run in the 2015-2016 season.

“Almost everyone is coming back [next season], so clearly our vibe is that of excitement and optimism,” Pollack said. “We’re going to let this bad taste [of Saturday’s loss to St. John Fisher] resonate for a bit, but after that it’s about getting back to the grind.

We’re expecting nothing but perfection next year. Being that it is my last year, I won’t settle for anything less.”

Women’s Basketball Advances to NCAA At 4-0, Ninth-Ranked Men’s Sweet 16, Defeats Eastern and NYU Lacrosse Remains Undefeated

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Meredith Doswell ’17 had 13 points, 8 rebounds against NYU. Ashlyn Heller ’17 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s basketball team had a successful weekend as they traveled down to New York Univeristy to play for a spot in the Sweet 16. On Friday evening, the Jeffs faced off against Eastern University in the Jerome S. Coles gym. The Eagles came into the tournament led by the coach of the year, player of the year, and rookie of the year for match for the Jeffs. After defeating the Eagles, Amherst faced New York University the next day and was again victorious.

Friday’s game featured impeccable senior leadership as Megan Robertson ’15 led the team with 22 points, nine rebounds and five blocks. Joining her in double figures were

Cheyenne Pritchard ’16 and Hannah Peterson ’17 with 10 points each. Taylor Price of the Eagles (rookie of the year in the Freedom Conference) led Eastern with 11 points. She was the only Eagle to score in double digits.

The Eagles’ difficulty scoring reflected in the shooting percentages from the night, as they went just 28.6 percent from the floor and 21.4 percent from downtown. Amherst nearly doubled both of these figures, going 54 percent from inside and 43.8 percent from the arc. It was this outshooting, particularly in the first half, which earned the Jeffs a 68-51 victory and a spot in the round of 32 the following day.

Saturday’s game again featured strong senior leadership for Amherst, but this time Robertson was joined in double figures by the dynamic Doswell twins of the sophomore class. Robertson scored 13 and pulled down seven rebounds. Meredith Doswell matched Robertson’s 13 points and pulled down eight of her own rebounds while also dishing out five assists.

Ali Doswell added a game-high 22 points and five assists. After a shaky start featuring three lead changes, the Jeffs finally took the lead for good after 13 minutes of play off of a three pointed by Ali Doswell. Amherst would not look back, eventually defeating the Violets 70-47.

“Last weekend we played our best games of basketball all season. Everyone clicked and everyone contributed in different ways,” Meredith Doswell said. “I’m so proud of my teammates and look forward to playing this weekend for a chance to make it to the Final Four.”

The women in purple move on to the Sweet 16 for the eighth season in a row. They will play Salisbury (27-2) in Montclair, New Jersey this Friday.

Nicole Yang ’16 Senior Editor The men’s lacrosse team rolled to two decisive wins this past week, remaining undefeated on the season at 4-0. On March 7, Amherst cruised to a 20-4 victory in front of a crowd of 275 for their home opener against Bowdoin.The Jeffs then traveled to Skidmore on March 10, where they came away with a 16-7 win.

Charlie Gill ’16 started things off early on Saturday, scoring the first goal of the game just 28 seconds into play. Under a minute later, fellow junior Dylan Park notched a goal of his own, and Quinn Moroney ’16 added one more to wrap up the first-quarter scoring.

Thanks to a goal from Kane Haffey ’16, Amherst increased their lead to 4-0 to start the second quarter. Bowdoin’s David Nemirov mounted a small comeback, scoring back-to-back goals, to bring the score to 4-2. However, that was as close as it would get, as Amherst would go on to score four unanswered, giving them an 8-2 cushion.

The two teams traded goals at the end of the half to leave the score at 9-3 heading into the intermission.

The Jeffs entered the third quarter firing on all cylinders, as they scored eight unanswered goals, including three from Haffey. Moroney also recorded a goal and three more assists to add to his growing point total. With a 17-3 advantage, a number of new Jeffs received playing time, as many first-years scored their first collegiate goals.

Sophomore goalkeeper Cody Tranbarger had 19 saves on the day, and Amherst routed the Polar Bears by a final score of 20-4.

On Tuesday, the Jeffs got off to a fast start, as Haffey led the way in the first quarter with three goals and two assists. Moroney dished three assists of his own, and Kevin Curry ’15 also had a goal and assist to give the Jeffs an 8-0 lead. Am-

herst would not relinquish its lead, maintaining at least a five-goal advantage for the remainder of the game. Tranbarger had 13 saves on the day, and Amherst won by a final score of 16-7.

Haffey now leads the NESCAC with 18 goals on the season, while Moroney leads the conference in both assists (19) and points (26). Amherst is off to a promising 4-0 start, and the team leads the NESCAC in total goals scored, ground balls and saves — demonstrating their talent on all sides of the ball.

Up next for the Jeffs is Endicott at home on Friday, March 13 before they leave for their spring break trip, where they will face Washington College and Hamilton.

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Quinn Moroney ’16 added 19 as- sists and 26 points in four games.

10

Sports

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

Men’s and Women’s Indoor Track Sends 10 to Compete in NCAAs Drew Kiley ’18 Staff Writer Men The men’s indoor track and field team won the 2015 ECAC Div. III indoor track and field championships last weekend. The purple and white scored 42 points in the two-day meet for first-place in the 56-team field.

A strong showing in the mid-distance events led Amherst to victory. Kevin Connors ‘17 claimed the only individual win of the meet for the Jeffs, winning the 1,500-meter run with a time of 3:59.33.

Senior captain Romey Sklar ran the 1,000 meters in a time of 2:29.04 to finish in second place while Brent Harrison ’16 finished the 800 meters in 1:53.80 to claim third place.

In the distance events, first-year Mohamed Hussein added another third place finish for the Jeffs in the 3,000 meters with a time of 8:36.36.

Craig Nelson ’18 and Raymond Meijer ’17 each claimed top-five finishes in the 5,000-meter run.

The team will return to action next week at NCAA Div. III Nationals, which will take place on Friday and Saturday in Winston-Salem, N.C. Five Jeffs will travel to North Carolina for the meet.

Turissini will also anchor Amherst’s national-record holding distance medley relay squad alongside Sklar, Harrison, and David Ingraham ’18. The team set an NCAA Div. III record at the NEICAAA Championships with a time of 9:48.61.

Sklar, Turissini and Harrison are all returning to the national meet as members of last year’s distance medley relay squad, while Ingraham and Hussein are making their first appearances at nationals.

ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT

Women The women’s indoor track and field team finished 12th overall of a 60-team field at the ECAC DivIII indoor track and field championships at the Armory Track & Field Center in New York City.

Four top-10 finishes highlighted the weekend for the Jeffs. Sprinter Karen Blake ’17 led the team, placing in the top five of both the 60-meter dash and the 200-meter dash. Blake ran a time of 7.75 seconds in the 60 meters to claim third place and a time of 25.22 seconds in the 200 meters to finish in fourth place.

Senior Olivia Tarantino also claimed third place in the 1,000-meter run with a mark of 3:02.31. She then returned in the 4 x 800- meter relay with Kelli Ellingson ‘15, Sarah Foster ‘16 and Hannah Herrera ‘17. The team ran a time of 9:45.30 to cross the line in sixth place.

Lizzie Briskin ’15 also competed last weekend at the Tufts Last Chance meet, where she finished second in the 3,000-meter run with a mark of 10:00.69.

The team will return to action March 13-14 at the 2015 NCAA Div. III indoor track and Field Championships in Winston-Salem, N.C. Five Jeffs, Briskin, Lexi Sinclair ’16, Blake, Savanna Gornisiewicz ’17 and Kiana Herold ’17, have qualified.

In the distance events, Sinclair and Briskin will compete in the 3,000-meter run as the 8th and 14th seeds, respectively, while Gornisiewicz enters the 5,000-meter run as the 12th seed.

Herold qualified for the high jump, leaping 1.69 meters at the Springfield College Meet, and enters NCAAs tied as the seventh seed.

Both Blake and Herold return for the second time to indoor nationals, while Sinclair, Briskin and Gornisiewicz will have their first appearances this weekend.

Andrew Fenwick ’15

Karen Blake ’17

Favorite Team Memory: Beating Wil-

Favorite Team Memory: Last year running

liams in the NESCAC championship this

and winning the 4x100-meter with my team-

past weekend

mates Taylor, Kiana and Naomi

Favorite Pro Athlete: Eddie Effinger ’12

Favorite Pro Athlete: I’ll go with Jonny

Dream Job: E.R. doctor

Weir, simply for his amazing style

Pet Peeve: Tyrannical Val renovations

Dream Job: I’m a sophomore, I have time!

Favorite Vacation Spot: Pond beach

Pet Peeve: N/A

Something on Your Bucket List: Sail

Favorite Vacation Spot: Florida

the Seven Seas

Something on Your Bucket List: Travel to

Guilty Pleasure: Pranking

Australia

Favorite Food: Seafood is tasty

Guilty Pleasure: Binge watching “Criminal

Favorite Thing About Amherst: Mike

Minds”

Cashman’s beard

Favorite Food: Any kind of bread

How He Earned It: Fenwick proved cru-

Favorite Thing About Amherst: The

cial to men’s ice hockey’s NESCAC cham-

people, it’s awesome to be surrounded by

pionship victory when he scored the lone

such amazingly smart and genuine people

goal of the game in the second period

How She Earned It: Blake equaled her

of the Jeffs’ win over Williams. Fenwick

personal best in the 60-meter race this past

also added a goal to propel the Jeffs in

weekend at the ECAC championships with a

their semifinal win against Tufts. The

time of 7.75 seconds, good enough for third

senior has been consistent all season,

place, and earning her a berth to the national

contributing 12 total points for Amherst

championships. She continued to dominate

this year. Fenwick earned NESCAC player

the shorter sprints, racing a very fast 25.22-

of the week honors for his exceptional

second 200-meter to finish in fourth place.

weekend. Fenwick and his team earned a

She was edged out of qualifying for nation-

first round bye in the NCAA tournament

als in the 200 on a rare tiebreak. Blake looks

and will compete again on Saturday,

to focus on the 60-meter, looking to improve

March 21 against the winner of Norwich

the 11th place finish she took at indoor

versus Plymouth State.

nationals last year.

Women’s Lacrosse Starts Season with Two Wins, Now 2-1 on the Season Lauren Tuiskula ’17 Managing Sports Editor

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

David Ingraham ’18 will head to the NCAA championships this weekend.

Photo courtesy of Peter Connolly ‘18

Taylor Summers ’16 continues to perform consistently for the Jeffs.

The Amherst College women’s lacrosse team began its season strong, providing high-scoring contests over its first stretch of games. The team now stands at 2-1 on the season.

Hosting Bates on Saturday, Feb. 28, the team gave fans a show in the season opener, beating the Bobcats by a 14-6 score.

Rachel Passarelli ’16 and Coco Kusiak ’17 provided the main spark for the Jeffs, scoring four goals each.

The game remained close throughout the first half, but Amherst edged their lead, scoring the first four goals of the second half.

The Bobcats eventually cut the deficit to seven, but could not claw back into the game.

Amherst held a 29-12 advantage in shots in the game, a 16-6 edge in draws and forced the Bobcats to turnover 14 times.

Christy Forrest ’16 earned the win in net, being credited with three saves.

Amherst traveled to Babson for another high scoring contest that following Wednesday.

The team was powered by seven second half goals, allowing them to earn and out of conference victory by a score of 12-5.

Returning to NESCAC play, Amherst fell

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Meghan Mills ’15 has 8 points so far this season. in their first loss of the season to Bowdoin.

The Polars Bears narrowly edged Amherst, 10-6. Turnovers hurt the Jeffs, as they had 17 in the contest.

The team will play again Thursday, March 12 hosting Springfield College for a nonconference game beginning at 6 p.m.

The Amherst Student • March 11, 2015

Sports

How Far Can the Thunder Ride Russell Westbrook?

11

Women’s Hockey Season Comes to a Close, Ends in NESCAC Semifinals

Chris’ Corner Chris Rigas ’16 Columnist

Russell Westbrook led his Oklahoma City Thunder to a 108-104 victory over Toronto on Sunday, putting up 30 points, 17 assists and 10 rebounds in the process. Amazingly, this type of performance has become just another day for Westbrook, who — in the absence of Kevin Durant — is averaging a triple-double since the all-star break: 34.3 points, 11.4 assists and 10.2 rebounds. His scoring is fueled by a historic usage rate of 38.5 percent, which is just a notch below Kobe Bryant’s record rate of 38.7 percent, achieved in 2005-2006. However, Westbrook is unique in the sheer amount of responsibility he tries to take upon himself; his extraordinary usage rate doesn’t even reflect his assists. He is shooting a historically high amount of the time, while still managing to average 8.3 assists per game, good for fifth in the league. In 2005-2006, Bryant averaged just 4.5 assists per game.

Derrick Rose’s 2010-2011 MVP season is, in some ways, a better comparison to Westbrook’s dominance this year. Rose averaged 7.4 assists that year, but in general both are point guards whose main duty is scoring, not passing. Both had to create the majority of their teams’ offense, because their teammates were less talented or more defensively focused. Both are incredible athletes who score more by driving than by shooting jump shots. Rose led a well-coached, cohesive team to the best record in a bad Eastern Conference. The Bulls were a young team on the rise, seemingly with their best years ahead of them. (Of course, we know now that this wasn’t true; Rose has suffered several serious injuries, and he and the Bulls haven’t reached the heights of 2011 in the last few years.) For all of the bad breaks he and the Bulls have had since then, in 2011 Rose was the NBA’s golden boy.

The narrative of Westbrook’s career is more complicated: He has been the target of nearly constant criticism for shooting too much. He has generally played in Durant’s shadow; commentators often make the valid point that no one should be shooting more often than Durant and criticize Westbrook for doing so. But these criticisms are part of what makes his performance this year so fascinating; instead of taking his critics’ advice and passing more, Westbrook has defied them and shot even more. In this way, he is more similar to Bryant than Rose; both are completely deaf to their critics’ complaints about ball-hogging.

As I mentioned before, Westbrook’s astronomical usage rate this year is threatening Bryant’s record. But in 2005-2006, Kobe was playing on a Lakers team that had no realistic championship aspirations. His scoring was entertaining, and he managed to drag the Lakers to a first round playoff appearance, but the stakes with Westbrook are higher. The Thunder are struggling desperately to hang on to the eighth seed in the brutally tough Western Conference, while reigning MVP Kevin Durant misses significant time. If he can keep the Thunder in the playoffs and, even better, snag the seventh seed and avoid Golden State in the first round, Oklahoma City has a real chance to make a playoff run due to Durant’s return. Still, a healthy Thunder team might be the most dangerous eighth seed ever. This is another part of what makes Westbrook’s performance interesting: He is carrying a team that has legitimate title ambitions and still looks like a complete mess at times.

As entertaining as it is to watch, Westbrook’s historic run has a downside. It’s hard for his supporting cast to make any improvement or develop a more cohesive, fluid offense when Westbrook is on the floor. The deficiencies of the rest of the Thunder’s roster are real. They force Westbrook to dominate the ball in every game if he wants a chance to win. Westbrook’s critics don’t need to look any further than Oklahoma City’s performance without their point guard to prove this point. When Westbrook went down in the

first round of the 2013 playoffs, the Thunder fell quickly to the Grizzlies, 4-1. The problem is that Westbrook’s ball dominance creates a sort of vicious cycle: The more Westbrook shoots, the less his teammates are comfortable with creating their own shots, which means Westbrook has to shoot even more.

Westbrook’s numbers are remarkable because he is able to maintain good efficiency even while taking close to half of his team’s shots. However, the Thunder’s offense is good, not great, when Westbrook is on the floor; it doesn’t come close to the offenses of more complete teams, like the Warriors and Hawks. Serge Ibaka, easily Oklahoma City’s third best player, might be described as the best role player in the NBA. He leads the league in blocked shots and has developed into a proficient 3-point shooter, a valuable skill for a big man. Those traits make him a great player to have on the floor at the same time as stars — he doesn’t need the ball in his hands to make an impact — but ask him to create his own shot and the results will likely be ugly.

The Thunder acquired guard Dion Waiters at the trade deadline, in an effort to boost the team’s offense, which is anemic when Durant and Westbrook are on the bench. Waiters has played well enough since his arrival, but his style of play reveals something about the problems with the Thunder’s offense. Waiters is basically a less skilled version of Westbrook; he dominates the ball and takes contested shots, but he converts at a lower rate than Westbrook. It’s telling that, even without their stars on the court, the Thunder don’t have the ability to create good shots with set plays and passing. Instead, they just have to rely on more one-on-one play. This emphasis on one-on-one play probably isn’t something the Thunder can change before the playoffs. A less stagnant offense would probably require a significant change in personnel, and, to be honest, a coaching change.

Scott Brooks has had seven years to build a more fluid offense. If it hasn’t happened yet, it probably won’t happen in the next month.

The conventional wisdom in the NBA is that you need stars to win, a theory that gives the Thunder a chance in the playoffs, despite their regular season struggles. The idea is that, over a long series, defenses will have more time to prepare for the set plays and motion that characterize a more team-oriented offense, and therefore those offenses will struggle. On the other hand, one-on-one play is less susceptible to defensive gameplans; teams know exactly what Durant and Westbrook are going to do, they just can’t stop it.

Scoring goes down across the board in the playoffs, and proponents of the “stars win” argument say that it goes down more for teams that don’t have any stars.

This theory has at least a grain of truth, and it is certainly true that the vast majority of recent NBA championships have been won by teams with one of the best five players in the league. However, the Spurs won easily last year by employing an offense that focused more on passing than on one-onone play and without having an MVP candidate on the team. Furthermore, even if team-oriented offenses experience a little regression in the playoffs than one-on-one-oriented offenses do, teams like the Warriors are already so far ahead of the Thunder in terms of offensive efficiency that it is unlikely to matter.

For all those reasons, it’s more likely than not that Westbrook’s fearless brand of dominance comes to nothing and the Thunder exit the playoffs early. But there’s a small chance that Westbrook — and Durant — beat the odds and make a run that is based completely on their individual talent. If any two players can overcome their teammates’ and coaches’ severe shortcomings through individual brilliance, it’s Westbrook and Durant.

Photo courtesy of Claire Jia ‘15

Lynndy Smith ’17 posted the team’s lone goal in the semifinal game.

Photo courtesy of Claire Jia ‘15

Tori Salmon ’15 will graduate following an exceptional senior campaign.

Nell Patterson ’15 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s hockey team lost a tough game Saturday against Trinity in the NESCAC semifinals. The Jeffs fell to the Bantams 2-1 in a contest that lasted into overtime. With the win, Trinity moved on to face top-seeded Middlebury, whom they eventually beat in overtime to become NESCAC champions.

The Jeffs finished their season with a 10-33 record in the NESCAC and a 17-5-4 record overall. Amherst fought hard throughout the game putting up 34 shots on goal. Yuna Evans ’17 finished off the season strong in goal with 29 saves on the game. It was not enough, however, to finish off the talented Trinity team.

The Jeffs were prepared for the semifinal game against Trinity following a big win against Colby the week prior in the quarterfinals.

“We were excited to get the win in the quarterfinal matchup versus Colby and move on to the final four,” coach Jeffrey Matthews said. “As competitive as our league is now, there is no such thing as an easy game, especially in the playoffs.”

The team knew the game would be close and made sure to focus on executing throughout each period.

“Spirits were high, and we could not wait to travel up to Middlebury the following weekend to challenge Trinity in the semifinals,” said Lynndy Smith ’17, the Jeffs’ lone goal-scorer in the game. The first period was filled with opportunities for both teams, with each recording eight shots, but neither team was able to score.

The Jeffs went up on the board first with Smith’s unassisted goal.

“I felt mainly relived,” Smith said. “Not because I was the one that scored, but because we finally got a goal. The game seemed to drag on forever before either team scored, and I knew

the team was getting anxious.”

Moving into the third period with a 1-0 lead, the Jeffs knew they had to rely on their defense to push through. At the 14:48 mark, the Bantams got lucky as Jessica Stowell’s shot was tipped by Caroline Howell to tie the score at 1.

Both defenses were able to stay strong throughout the third period to force a suddendeath overtime situation. The Jeffs were enthusiastic about an opportunity to take the game away.

“It was so exciting, but in overtime, you have to remain focused and composed,” Matthews said.

Smith said that the team came out energized during the last period.

“The scoreboard may not have reflected it, but we were confident that game was ours for the taking,” she said.

Amherst did have a slew of chances with four shots on goal. However, Trinity beat them to the punch, scoring midway through overtime to end the game 2-1.

“The season was an exciting one,” Matthews said. “We feel like it went by so fast, and have the urge to get it going again as soon as possible, which I think is a great sign. “ The Jeffs finished among the top teams in the nation, narrowly missing an NCAA tournament bid.

“I would call our season a success,” Smith said. “We may not have made it as far as we wanted to go, but I believe our team should be very proud of all we have accomplished.”

Moving into the offseason, the Jeffs will lose five graduating seniors who were key to their success on the ice this season.

“I’m excited to spend the extra time we have now training and preparing for next season. I know many of us already have our eyes on next years NESCAC championship banner,” Smith said.

Sports

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

First-year David White was crucial to both NESCAC wins, adding an assist in Saturday’s contest. He was honored as the NESCAC rookie of the year.

NESCAC Champions! Men’s Hockey Defeats Williams, Advances to NCAAs Greg Williams ’16 Staff Writer The men’s ice hockey team dispatched archrival Williams to win the NESCAC championship this past weekend in Orr Rink.

To advance to the final, Amherst played the No. 8 seed Tufts on Saturday afternoon in the NESCAC semifinals. The Jumbos were looking for their second upset in as many weeks after knocking off No. 1 seed Trinity in their last game, but their efforts came to no avail.

Amherst came out strong in the first period and kept Tufts on the ropes all game.

Five minutes in, seniors Mike Rowbotham and Aaron Deutsch used their four years of chemistry to beat Tufts goaltender Mason Pulde and take a 1-0 lead. Tufts tied the game up 10 minutes later, just before the end of the period, after a solid offensive possession. Despite 12 shots in the first, the Jeffs were unable to break the tie before the end of the frame.

The second period was when the purple and white really took off. With just nine shots in the period, Amherst extended the lead by two goals. Andrew Fenwick ’15 scored off of assists from Deutsch and Patrick Arena ’16.

Six minutes later Conor Brown ’16 scored his 11th goal of the year from a pass from firstyear David White. Amherst killed off two power plays in the period, and Danny Vitale

’15 made seven more saves to send the Jeffs into the third period with a two-goal lead.

Halfway through the third the Jumbos showed some life, as they slipped the puck

by Vitale to close the gap down to one. But once more the Amherst defense showed that they are championship caliber, and they held Tufts scoreless for the remaining 10 minutes, sealing their spot in the finals. Vitale finished with 27 saves, 15 of which came in the third period.

Sunday afternoon provided a championship game to remember. The game was physical throughout, and both sides had a number of excellent scoring opportunities.

The Jeffs killed one penalty in the first, and neither team could find the back of the net.

The second period was equally competitive, and both teams spent the whole frame in five on five play. Both netminders had 12 saves in the period, and the game looked like it was surely overtime bound, despite the fact that only two periods had been played.

The third period was marked by a gamechanging play early on. Fenwick got the puck from Austin Ho ’17 and beat Williams goalie Sean Dougherty just three minutes into the period to give Amherst the one-goal edge, and it proved to be enough. The buzzer rang, and the crowd cheered as they beheld the top men’s ice hockey team in the NESCAC. With the victory, the team qualified for the NCAA tournament and also received a first

THURS FRI GAME SCHE DULE

Women’s Indoor Track and Field Women’s Basket@ NCAA DIII champion- ball vs. Salisbury, Women’s Lacrosse ship, TBA @ Montclair, NJ 5 p.m. vs. Springfield, 6 p.m.

Men’s Indoor Track Men’s Lacrosse and Field @ NCAA DIII champion- vs. Endicott, 6 p.m. ship, TBA

round bye in the process. The Jeffs will take on the winner of the Norwich University and Plymouth state game being held on Saturday, March 21, at a location to be announced. In addition to the NESCAC championship, four Jeffs were named to the all-conference team.

Senior captains Jake Turrin and White were

selected to the first team, while Rowbotham and Deutsch were named the second team.

White was also honored with the rookie of the year award, while Coach Jack Arena took home another coach of the year award after his 32nd season at the helm of the men’s ice hockey program.

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

SAT

Women’s Indoor Track and Field @ NCAA DIII championBaseball ship, TBA vs. Ripon Men’s Indoor Track @ Auburndale, Fla., 3:30 p.m. and Field @ NCAA DIII championship, TBA

SUN Baseball vs. Rutgers-Camden (DH) @ Auburndale, Fla., 3:30 Softball p.m. vs. Benedictine @ Winter Garden, FLA., Softball 3 p.m. vs. St. Thomas @ Winter Garden, FLA., 1 p.m.