Issue 5

THE AMHERST

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT VOLUME CXLVIII, ISSUE 5 l WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2018

Women’s Tennis Impresses at ITA Regionals See Sports, Page 9 AMHERSTSTUDENT.COM

Loeb Unevenly Allots Resources

by Career Natalie De Rosa ’21 Assistant News Editor

Photo courtesy of Sylvie Palmer ’22

The Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Massachusetts, Jay Gonzalez, has proposed a state tax on private colleges with endowments exceeding $1 billion. Such a proposal could cost Amherst as much as $33 million each year.

Proposed Plan Could Tax College’s Endowment Audrey Cheng ’20 and Jacob Gendelman ’20 Staff Writers Jay Gonzalez, the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, announced a proposal this month to impose a state tax on non-profit colleges and universities with endowments exceeding $1 billion, which would include Amherst. Gonzalez is running against Republican incumbent Charlie Baker in the Nov. 6 election.

Gonzalez’s platform includes expansive plans for transportation and education initiatives, and this tax is a part of his method for funding these initiatives. If enacted, the tax will affect a total of nine institutions in the state: Amherst, Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Smith, Tufts, Wellesley College and Williams.

“He’s under a lot of pressure to explain to Republicans how he’s going to fund all of his initiatives and [the tax is] his response to that,” said Hayley Fleming ’21, a member of the Amherst College Democrats. “So it’s definitely him bowing to political pressures.”

Gonzalez said to MassLive.com, “I think it is fair to ask those institutions, who have accumulated huge wealth as a result of exemption from taxation, to pay what is a modest tax. We need them to step up ... and help make sure we’ve got an

economy that’s working for everyone.”

Fleming acknowledged that the notion of taking from the rich and giving to the poor seems like a leading issue for the Democratic party. “It’s definitely an issue where Amherst College has this much money and then you have UMass Boston which definitely doesn’t have this much money,” she said. However, she noted that the ways in which wealthy institutions spend their money must also be taken into account. “The policy isn’t [Democratic] in a sense that you’re taking away from wealthy institutions that use this money to fund financial aid packages for lower- and middleincome students.”

In an interview, Dean of Financial Aid Gail Holt expressed agreement with Gonzalez’s sentiment that institutions such as Amherst should be paying it forward to the economy. However, like Fleming, she argued that Amherst already does its part by providing the best need-blind financial aid in the country to its students, who will contribute to the Massachusetts economy after graduation.

“The fact that Amherst is awarding $57 million of Amherst money in financial aid proves that [we are paying it forward] every year,” she said. “The incoming class that has just entered Amherst is incredibly diverse from an economic standpoint.

Seventy to 75 percent of our graduating seniors graduate with no loan debt at all. That’s going to

place them on a solid footing to contribute to Massachusetts’ or others’ economies.”

Holt also stated that as of now, the effect that the proposal would have on the total budget and financial aid is still unclear. “We try to take things as they come. Whenever there’s a change in how the college needs to expend resources, there has to be an overall assessment on what impact it would have on the budget,” she said. Such assessment has not yet been undertaken.

Kevin Weinman, chief financial officer of the college, said that 52 percent of Amherst’s annual operating budget comes from the endowment.

The rest of the budget is made up of net tuition, the annual fund and other sources such as summer camps and walk-up meals at the dining hall.

He also said that paying the tax would be difficult as the school cannot use gifts given for other purposes to pay taxes. “It’s become much more prevalent for gifts to be restricted over say the last 10 or 15 years,” Weinman added.

“What’s interesting is that the policy itself is not generally in line with any similar Democratic policies. It’s actually more similar to a recent policy passed by the Republican congress,” Fleming noted. “In a way he’s taking a Republican idea and applying it to Massachusetts. It varies from other

Continued on Page 3

Despite launching a new online platform for career guidance services, the Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning has and continues to draw criticism from students seeking guidance in industries outside of business and finance.

The center’s new job recruitment platform, Handshake, allows students to sign up for appointments with industry advisers in seven fields: arts and communication, business and finance, education, government and non-profit, science and technology, health and law.

However, the availability of these appointments varies drastically by industry. While Handshake shows at least one, usually multiple business and finance slots available each day, other industries, like education, only have slots open two or three times a week. Overall, business and finance and health appointments are the most widely available, while government and nonprofit and law appointments are the least. There are six available slots in the entire month of October for government and nonprofit appointments. For appointments with a pre-law adviser, there are only three available slots for the rest of the semester.

Emily Griffen, director of the Loeb Center, noted that this disparity reflects the student demand for business and finance advising.

“The fact of the matter is that a very large percentage of our student body in relation to the other areas is pursuing finance and consulting,” she said. Last year, 37 percent of graduating seniors pursued careers in finance and consulting.

In contrast, about 17 percent of seniors pursued education, and 3 percent of seniors pursued law.

Unlike other disciplines, which open their applications in the spring, the fall semester is the height of finance recruiting season, which requires the center to tailor its services heavily in that direction in the fall semester.

Finance culture and “the way recruiting works in this industry” adds to its perceived dominance on campus, according to Griffen. Since finance and consulting companies can afford to recruit directly on campus, their presence on campus

Continued on Page 3

New Technologies Expand Pedagogies in the Classroom Ryan Yu ’22 Staff Writer In a push for increased student engagement, some faculty members are embracing new technologies as a potential solution to problems with traditional methods of teaching. The effort comes in the midst of several technology-centered initiatives to “develop a better understanding of how best to educate [students] in a full range of media,” as part of the college’s strategic plan.

According to Jaya Kannan, the director of Technology for Curriculum and Research, the new technologies encompass a broad range of tools and devices meant to combat many different obstacles in pedagogy — examples include the use of virtual reality, video games and podcasts, as well as the increased application of long-standing technologies like Moodle or other online interaction platforms.

“If you took just virtual reality as a case study to show these innovative practices, I think what is interesting is that every discipline is different in how they use it, and every pedagogical angle is different,” said Kannan.

In neuroscience professor Josef Trapani’s neurophysiology class, students have used virtual reality to simulate stressful environments and measured their physiological responses to the fabricated situations. The point, he said, was to acquaint students with basic lab techniques in an engaging manner.

“It was a neat way to start off the semester, yet it still had a lot of great pedagogical outcomes,” Trapani said. “My career is built on doing experiments like this, and something like this is much more enjoyable than more basic, routine experiments. Learning doesn’t have to be this arduous thing.”

“Student learning is my ultimate goal,” he

added. “I don’t do it for the sake of technology. I want to do it if it’s actually impacting the learning.

I want students to learn things through it. Everything I do in the class is around that actual point.”

Religion professor Andrew Dole also worked with virtual reality to improve the student experience, creating a distraction-free environment where students could read and mark up long-form digital texts as if they were physical copies.

Currently, this technology has not been used by students due to what Dole described as “ergonomic limitations in the hardware and mobility issues,” but he does hope to refine the tool when he is given the chance.

Dole sees this use of virtual reality as a way to counter some of the negative effects of current technologies, noting the double-edged nature inherent in many new innovations.

“Technology — it makes certain things possible and it makes certain things difficult,” he said.

“New technology has not been good for the skills and practices that classically go into a humanistic education, which involve being able to focus for a long time on lengthy texts that contain complex thoughts.”

Though the response to new technologies has been mostly positive, students also share Dole’s mixed view of technology.

Emily Park ’19 took a class on video games with English professor Marisa Parham last year and agreed on the importance of connecting new technologies with relevant classroom material.

“This was a video games course, so students had to play video games on consoles and such, which isn’t all that common in most classes,” she said. “However, the topic matter of the course lent itself nicely to thinking about a commonly-used technology in a different way.”

Continued on Page 3

News

Julia Scarborough Fresh Faculty

Sept. 24, 2018 - Sept. 30, 2018

>>Sept 24. 2018 9:37 a.m., Scott House An individual accidentally dialed 911, but there was no emergency.

12:56 p.m., Northampton Road The Amherst Police Department charged someone with operating a vehicle while under the influence of drugs.

1:29 p.m., Mill Lane The Amherst Police Department charged an individual for operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

1:40 p.m., Tyler Place The Amherst Police Department charged an individual that was under the age of 21 and in possession of alcohol.

off by an employee.

2:45 p.m., Off Campus Locations Officers responded to two individuals found on a piece of equipment that was not intended for climbing.

9:56 p.m., Observatory Lot Officers addressed a group of individuals overcrowding a vehicle under the influence of drugs. >>Sept. 29, 2018 12:30 a.m., Hitchcock Hall Officers discovered a large unregistered party with a large amount of alcohol and vomit left in the hallways.

1:15 a.m., College Hall Officers stood by to assist the Amherst Police Department in a motor vehicle stop.

1:54 p.m., Northampton Road The Amherst Police Department charged an individual that was under the age of 21 and in possession of alcohol.

2:40 a.m., Barrett Hill Drive An officer responded to a request for a well-being check of an unknown individual. The individual was gone on arrival of the officer.

8:33 p.m., Lipton House An officer confiscated an item that was prohibited from the residence hall.

2:57 p.m., Campus Grounds A golf cart malfunctioned and caused issues with the battery. The issue was rendered safe.

>>Sept. 25, 2018 3:13 a.m., Fayerweather Lot Road A boot was placed on a vehicle for being parked in violation of parking regulations multiple times. >>Sept. 26, 2018 8:09 p.m., 271 S. Pleasant Street Officers found a number of items improperly placed in an open area. >>Sept. 27, 2018 11:25 p.m., Hitchcock Hall Officer responded to a report of an unauthorized party that had alcohol. >>Sept 28, 2018 12:19 a.m., Mead Art Museum Officers responded to alarms that sounded accidentally.

12:37 a.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory An officer responded to an accidental emergency phone call.

5:46 p.m., Alumni Lot An officer responded to a report of a minor motor vehicle accident with no injuries.

10:34 p.m., Ford Hall Officers responded to an emergency call button that was set off accidentally.

11:29 p.m., Mayo-Smith Hall Dispatch placed a call to the sponsor of a registered party after a noise complaint.

There were no issues after the call was placed. >>Sept. 30, 2018 1:06 a.m., Hitchcock Hall Officers assisted in clearing a registered party where guests did not leave when asked by the host.

1:18 a.m., Hitchcock Hall An officer responded to a report of vandalism that resulted from attendees at a registered party.

1:32 a.m., Cohan Dormitory Officers discovered an un8:07 a.m., Wilson Admisregistered party occurred sions with a number of party An officer responded to repolicy violations including set an alarm accidentally set large amounts of alcohol. off by an employee.

3:02 p.m., Frost Library 8:17 a.m., Churchill House Officers responded to a reAn officer responded to request for someone stuck in set an alarm accidentally set an elevator.

Department of Classics

Julia Scarborough is a visiting assistant professor of classics. She received a B.A. in classics from Oxford University, an M.A. in art history from Courtauld Institute of Art and a Ph.D. in classical philology from Harvard University.

Q: What attracted you to classics?

A: My father started teaching me Latin when I was quite young, and it was appealing in the same way that a lot of other things were appealing at that age.

I liked playing with puzzles and Latin really presents you with puzzles. What really made me want to study it further was reading “The Odyssey” in Fitzgerald’s translation, which really had a great effect on me, and I found it so powerful and so beautiful but at the same time it’s really far away and so alien. I was lucky enough to be at a high school that taught Ancient Greek, and I had very small classes. There were two of us the first year and one of me the next year because my classmate had gone on to college. I was lucky enough to be at a high school that offered ancient Greek, and I got to do Greek in a very intimate way with my teacher.

I also took two Latin APs in high school, so I was in a strong position to think about just focusing on classics in college. I wanted the opportunity to dig deeply into classics, and I thought about some American colleges without distribution requirements, but in the end, the appeal of the unknown was irresistible, so I went to Oxford for classics.

Q: You have a master’s degree in art history — what made you want to pursue that after studying classics?

A: I would go home during long vacations while at Oxford, and I spent a lot of time at in the Washington D.C. area wandering in the National Gallery of Art. One thing I realized was that there were certain types of art, certain periods, that I was really drawn to instinctually and some that I found much more challenging. As a classicist, I realized that the way you develop the ability to enjoy and appreciate works of art is by learning more about them, learning about the context and learning about what they’re doing that’s part of a tradition or that’s innovative, so I decided really on a whim during my Christmas vacation in my last year of college that what I really wanted to do was a master’s in art history. I did this one-year master’s at the Courtauld Institute. I chose somewhat strategically, as well as based on personal preference, to apply for the 15th century Florentine course. I found it challenging to switch from primarily verbal to the primarily visual. Although it was a wonderful change of pace to think about the visual, what I really enjoyed about the Courtauld, what was really a revelation, was writing a dissertation, a thesis, which I found immensely exciting and energizing.

Q: Do you feel like that experience has influenced the way that you teach here at Amherst?

A: I think that art history is tremendously useful for a classicist in terms of understanding reception and how classics has survived in traditions and the imagination. I also think that the process of seeing how a motif can evolve, like the dragon for instance, and how artists can take... something that’s traditional and use it to exercise their imaginations, really transfers quite well into understanding literature in the classical world, particularly poetry. The way that someone like Ovid plays with love poetry ,for instance, is not that different from the way that a Florentine artist might be quite eccentric, so I think that in that sense, it’s influenced the way that I think about and therefore teach literature.

Q: Do you feel like you incorporate discovery and the synthesis of new ideas into your courses here because of the fascination with research you had during your dissertation?

A: Oh certainly, seeing how things connect is essential, and I think constantly teaching literature one is seeing and making connections and, of course, students often make suggestions that make you see things in a new way, and that’s one of the things that’s fun about teaching, especially students who are engaged and excited about the material. At Amherst, I’ve been struck by the sense that students are really intrinsically interested in the material they’re studying. I think that’s clearly true in the classics department, and it’s been a big change teaching at Amherst compared to some of the previous environments in which I’ve taught which have had a language requirement. With a language requirement you have maybe twentyfour students in a class of whom maybe six or eight really want to be there reading Catullus and many want to be there to get the language requirement out of the way. I’ve definitely not encountered any of that at Amherst.

Q: Your research in pastoral imagery in classical poetry seems fascinating. Can you talk about how that relates to what you’ve studied with art and poetry?

A: What I’m interested in about pastoral imagery is actually when it’s used in non-pastoral contexts.

In “The Iliad,” there’s a scene where Agamemnon realizes the Trojan army is well positioned to destroy the Greeks completely in the next days fighting and he looks out at the Trojans camped on the plain. He sees their fires and is amazed by all these fires and he’s compared to a shepherd who sees all the stars in the sky on a clear night. It’s such a stunning contrast between the peace and awe of natural beauty and Agamemnon who is looking out at fires that doom his army after nine years of fighting. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that, in fact, that’s what pastoral imagery always seems to be doing in Greek tragedy, and this was really exciting to me because nobody had written about this. So, I thought it was really interesting that these idyllic images had come from Greek tragedy and were originally created as a way to set up tragic irony, and I argued that when you see a shepherd appear on stage in Greek tragedy, something is about to go badly wrong.

Q: Which courses are you teaching this semester and why?

A: I am currently teaching Introductory Latin and Catullus and the Lyric Spirit. I’m very much enjoying both courses, and [the Catullus course] actually just had a poetry workshop on Monday.

Next semester I’m teaching a much bigger course, I imagine, Roman Civilization, which I was told once peaked at 140 students. I’m also teaching Horace’s Odes next semester which I’ve really enjoyed teaching to graduate students, but I’ve never taught to undergraduates.

Q: What do you do when you’re not studying ancient languages?

A: I think Book and Plow Farm is a really wonderful resource to have that escape available on campus, and I’ve actually joined the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). I’m enjoying picking the cherry tomatoes. I also love going to art museums, reading fiction, going for long walks and writing creatively. I’m really excited about the fall in the mountains, and I love the pastoral of Pioneer Valley.

—Sam Grondin ’21

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

News

3

Loeb Appointments Appear to Favor Finance Careers

Handshake, Loeb Center’s new online platform for career advising, shows an abundance of appointments for business and finance industries. Education (left), for example, only makes appointments available on three days of the week while business and finance (right) has slots available for five days each week.

Continued from Page 1 makes the demand appear more visible, she said.

The fact that students applying for jobs in business and finance are required to wear suits to interviews also adds a greater awareness of its presence on campus as well, Griffen added.

“The actual appointment blocks don’t tell the whole story,” she said.

Students whose schedules do not accommodate Handshake availabilities can privately email advisors for meetings, according to Griffen, although that information is not advertised on the Handshake website.

Though finance and consulting appear better resourced than other professional disciplines in the center, Griffen said that ample resources are available for students regardless of their interests.

All of the career advisers are full time, but not all of them focus solely on industry advising.

Business and finance, arts and communications and education professions each have a full-time advisor, while health professions has two fulltime advisors. But other fields, particularly those

with the least availability in appointments, don’t have advisers working full-time on industry advising. The government and non-profit industry is overseen by Laura Litwiller, associate director of advising, who only spends a portion of her time on industry advising, and the pre-law adviser is currently remote and working part-time, though there is an ongoing search process to hire a full-time replacement.

The center is working on better supporting the government and nonprofit and law industries, Griffen said, noting that one component of the college’s Promise fundraising campaign includes increasing the number of full-time advisors in the center to meet student needs in these industries.

Despite these efforts, students noted the lack of resources available for their specific interests.

Derek Schneider ’20, who went to the Loeb Center last year in search of biology research opportunities for the summer, felt that there was not enough guidance for his area of interest.

“When it came down to applying to these internships, I wanted support from the career center, but found that none of the Loeb advisors had

any expertise in what I was interested in, [since] I was not applying to medical research programs,” Schneider said in an email interview.

After making an appointment with a generalist advisor instead, where only the grammar rather than the content of his resume was reviewed, Schneider ultimately relied on his academic advisor to help him apply for internships.

“I was very frustrated as I felt like I had no support from the career center in applying to my internships over the summer,” he said.

While Olivia Luntz ’21 found her appointments with a peer career advisor helpful, she also struggled to find internships in the nonprofit field.

“I spent a while looking through Quest, and it was frustrating because a lot of the internships on the website were finance-based,” she said. Ultimately, she was able to apply to four internships through the portal.

Jeremy Thomas ’21, who had a law internship this past summer, said that although his experience at the Loeb was not terrible, it could have been better.

“At the start of last year, I went to the pre-law advisor, and told her that I wanted to go to law school,” he said. “She more or less told me to take the LSAT and get good grades.”

In response to student concerns about resourcing, the center hired a communications director, Emily Klamm, last year in an attempt to better publicize its resources and opportunities through targeted emails, newsletters and advertising on the screens in Val. “My plan is to know more about the students and what they want,” Klamm said. “If more students are saying that they’re interested in a certain industry that we don’t have a lot of employers come in for, we then use that information to then target them.”

Griffen echoed this sentiment, adding that the center is always looking for ways to make their resources accessible.

“We really want to make [our resources] more visible on campus,” she said. “We are always talking internally how do we better communicate that we have a range of resources that no matter what your career path is.”

Gubernatorial Candidate Faculty Experiment With New to Tax College $33 Million Innovations to Assist Learning Continued from Page 1 Democratic policies because Democrats traditionally want to pour as much money into education as they can.”

The Republican federal tax bill was passed by Congress last December and institutions, including the college, became subject to a 1.4 percent excise tax on investment income from their endowments. The tax comes into effect this fiscal year and has not been yet been paid out.

Holt emphasized that this federal tax differs in nature from the proposed state tax. “The difference is that it is 1.4 [percent] on the earnings of the endowment, not the endowment itself. So you’re talking in the range of a million dollars versus 25 million dollars [for the state tax], and that’s a big difference.”

“We are tax-exempt in our core mission, but to the extent that we have business activities that are deemed to be unrelated, we owe taxes on that,” Weinman said. “One example might be summer

camps.”

He also noted that the college contributes money to the town of Amherst outside of formal taxes. “We make voluntary payments to the town in recognition of the services that the town provides back to the college, for example emergency response services and so forth.”

“That’s a big selling point to donors, who know when they give to the college that money won’t be taxed,” he added.

In a statement to The Student, President Biddy Martin denounced the proposition. “The proposed tax would make it impossible to do what Amherst is committed to doing — providing the best possible undergraduate education to talented students regardless of means,” she said.

“Roughly a quarter of our students come from the lowest income groups in the country … The tax proposed by gubernatorial candidate Gonzalez would deal a blow not only to the commonwealth’s colleges and universities, but to those families least able to pay,” she added.

Continued from Page 1 On the other hand, Aahnix Bathurst ’19, who is taking one of Trapani’s courses with virtual reality, expressed ambivalence over these projects, saying that “it’s amazing for visual learners, but for more tactile learners, it’s not too good.”

In a broader sense, he noted that “virtual reality, while incredible at delivering experiences for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to participate due to lack of resources, cannot compensate for the act of actually doing whatever is simulated.”

Trapani also observed that the structure of his use of virtual reality is “very visual,” which could pose problems, especially with students who are visually impaired. “With every bit of technology, there’s going to come some limitations. Being aware of them — being aware of who your learners are, and how those limitations your different learners is key,” he said. “I’m still learning about better ways to teach, especially for methods so that I can reach all students in the classroom.”

For new technologies outside of virtual reality, many of the same attitudes seem to apply in the minds of students and faculty. In a general sense, Kannan noted that “when faculty members do bring in technology, it’s a very clear and meaningful application — they have a clear pedagogical purpose,” in accordance with faculty responses to virtual reality.

For both Trapani and Dole, more development, investment and innovation in virtual reality would allow them to use technology more broadly in their teaching. Trapani would hope to expand his virtual reality experiment “into a multi-week lab,” he said, and Dole would use his reading tool more generally across his classes.

Still, Kannan said students and faculty should not lose sight of the fundamental goals involved with the use of technology in education.

“One thing we are worried about now is ensuring equal access. And not all tools are accessible,” she said. “We must be mindful of that when working with faculty.”

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Opinion Youth is No Excuse for Assault

THE AMHERST

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

In its season premiere this past weekend, “Saturday Night Live” ran a sketch called “80’s Party” that moves through a frat party reminiscent of a John Hughes film, pausing on characters at the party to highlight how their actions from that night haunted them in their current-day careers. It was a silly and spoofy sketch, but underlying its facetious plot is a genuine question that has recently arisen for many college students: how will the actions we make today affect our lives and careers later in adulthood?

The noise surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings has become the most prominent reminder of this question. Of course, the discussion centers on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of Kavanaugh’s alleged assault on her when they both were in high school. But since then, Deborah Ramirez has come forward to share a story of her time at Yale University, when Kavanaugh allegedly forced her to touch his exposed penis without her consent at a dorm party.

Added to all of this is a statement from Kavanaugh’s first-year roommate, James Roche, who describes college-aged Kavanaugh as a frequent drinker who could become “incoherently drunk,” according to the Washington Post. These are further corroborated by high school acquaintance Julie Swetnick’s reports of a belligerently drunk Kavanaugh exhibiting “abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls” at high school house parties in the early 1980s.

Central to these claims is the fact that all these acts in question happened over 30 years ago. Even if we assume that every woman’s testimony is the truth — which is a whole separate discussion in itself — the question still remains of whether it should matter 30 years later.

As the Editorial Board, but even moreso as college students, we believes that yes, these actions still do matter.

Living on such a close-knit campus, nearly every Amherst student has seen the immediate effects of sexual assault, whether it happened to a friend, was committed by an acquaintance or is experienced firsthand. We know the psychological toll sexual assault can have on young people, causing them to withdraw socially or disengage academically. We know that sexual assault can spur depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts. We’ve seen it, and we’ve lived it. This is no small matter.

And, it is no small matter whether it happened today, yesterday, five, 10 or even 30 years ago. The effects that sexaul assault had on Dr. Ford have followed her well into adulthood, appearing in her couples therapy in 2012 and still a visibly upsetting subject for her to revisit in 2018. It is a feeling that Caitlin Flanagan expounds eloquently in an essay for The Atlantic, which chronicles her heartbreaking story of sexual assault, its consequences on mental health and how it has stayed with her into adulthood. She writes: “By Ford’s account, Kavanaugh’s acts did cause lasting damage, and he has done nothing at all to try to make that right. And that is why the mistake of a 17-year-old kid still matters.” Unlike high school or college, there is no graduation date for sexual assault and its consequences.

If this is the case for the victims of sexual assault, it must also be true for the perpetrators. Ruling out accusations of sexual misconduct simply because they are 30 years old is out of the question. It sends a message to college and high school students that what they do now does not matter in the long run — that immaturity and age somehow excuse acts of violence.

It negates the seriousness of sexual assault on campus.

Young, careless high school and college kids need to know that their actions now do have enduring effects — for both the victims and perpetrators of assault.

The Case for Self-Driving Cars Harith Khawaja ’19 Contributing Writer In February of 2006, Laura Gorman got into a car with her best friend, Jessica Rasdall. It was her last car ride ever.

According to a 2009 news story on ABC, Laura and Jessica had been working their restaurant shift. Then, they decided to go to a club. A few drinks and lots of dancing later, as Jessica sped down Florida Interstate 275 with her blood alcohol level 1.5 times the legal limit, she lost control of the car. Only a mile from their dorm, the vehicle skidded off the highway and crashed into a tree. Laura died on the spot. Jessica survived, but needed facial reconstruction. Several years after the drunken driving accident, the Gorman’s have not since spoken to the Rasdall’s.

Drunk driving accidents are frequent in the United States. Driver education company Aceable reports that Driving Under the Influence (DUI) is the leading cause of fatal crashes, contributing to almost one-third of all road deaths. Yet, not only are such accidents easily preventable — at the individual level, don’t drink and drive! But the vast majority of fatal traffic incidents in the US occur due to human error. Driving over the speed limit, the second leading cause of road deaths, contributes 31 percent of all victims, and distracted driving (using your phone) is responsible for 16 percent of deaths, according to Aceable. In short, a whopping four out of five people would still be alive today had it not been for avoidable mistakes.

Surprisingly, laws against drunk and distracted driving do not work; despite heavy penalties, the past 50 years have seen a massive increase in

the proportion of traffic accidents due to human negligence. Jessica Cicchino, a vice president of research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, notes that “laws against distracted driving do not reduce crashes.”

So why do laws against distracted driving not reduce crashes? Why aren’t human drivers thwarted by the potential repercussions - legal and likely, existential - of driving and texting? My view is that biology is the culprit. Humans simply aren’t wired to focus for hours on end on something as dull as the Mass Turnpike. In fact, as Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman pointed out, it’s hard for our brains to constantly consciously focus to begin with, let alone to focus on an insipid highway. The road is tedious and mostly uneventful; after all, accidents only occur once every 165,000 miles. That is why we play music and talk to the passengers when we drive.

The dopamine rush of a Facebook notification or of a Snapchat from an ex will always be more thrilling than making sure you’re driving in your own lane. Conscious policing is hard, practically impossible — and so, humans will always relapse into errors.

Regardless of how much legislation is passed, there will always be people who think they’re sober enough to drive. By nature, humans are imperfect drivers; they are careless and rule-breaking and dangerous, irresponsible, and wholly unfit to pilot vehicles. The question isn’t whether or not we need non-human drivers now - we’ve always needed them. The only uncertainty in the driver equation has been with whom to replace them. Until recent years, we only had tools that alerted humans when they made a mistake (e.g.

cruise control and blind-spot lights). Today, fully autonomous, self-driving cars provide a viable alternative.

Self-driving cars (also known as Level Five cars) are vehicles that, powered with sensors, radars, lidars and an intelligent decision-making program, can navigate between places without any active human intervention. They’re hard to visualize: self-driving cars have no steering wheels, nor pedals. They do not have any rear-view mirrors, nor any gear boxes. They need not have headlights or rear-view lights, handbrakes or blinkers either.

In fact, it is physically impossible for the humans in the car to influence the car’s trajectory — we lose the notion of a driver. With enough self-driving cars on the road, autonomous vehicles will communicate directly amongst themselves to coordinate traffic maneuvers. Lanes will become irrelevant. Speeding tickets will become archaic.

And most importantly, we will have drivers that are perfect and error-free; drivers that will not drive under influence or text and drive - drivers that are inhuman.

Of course, we are far from this reality. Level Five has not yet been achieved: Google has been developing the Google Car since 2009, and efforts will continue into the next decade too. Lyft, Ford, General Motors and Tesla are working on their own self-driving iterations. Moreover, the failures of autonomous vehicles have become highly popular. In March 2018, a self-driving Uber Volvo struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona resulting in the suspension of Level Five research

Continued on Page 5

Editors-in-Chief Nate Quigley Isabel Tessier Managing News Shawna Chen Emma Swislow Assistant News Natalie De Rosa Managing Opinion Kelly Chian Diane Lee Managing Arts and Living Olivia Gieger Seoyeon Kim Managing Sports Connor Haugh Henry Newton S TA F F Head Publishers Joseph Centeno, Mark Nathin, Emmy Sohn Design Katie Boback, Zehra Madhavan, Maria Mejia, Julia Shea Digital Director Dylan Momplaisir

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The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Self-Driving Cars Are a Future We Can Trust Continued from Page 4 and development at Uber. Yet, prospects for the self-driving industry have never looked brighter: billions of dollars are pouring into Silicon Valley startups and well-established companies focusing on autonomous vehicles. Most recently in August, Toyota invested $500 million in Uber’s self-driving outfit. Ford has committed to invest $4 billion dollars in autonomous vehicles by 2023. In Las Vegas, Lyft has partnered with Aptiv; if you’re lucky, you could be picked up by a self-driving car with a human conductor.

Computers are also getting smarter by the day.

As self-driving cars drive more miles, they generate more data to learn from. The data is then fed back into the decision-making algorithms, allowing autonomous vehicles to learn from their

mistakes. Waymo, Google’s self-driving arm, for instance, has data on 8,000,000 fully autonomous miles. This is in addition to data on five billion miles its self-driving cars have driven in simulations. So even though our computer systems do not display the intellectual maturity they need to fully replace humans yet, it is only a matter of time until their decision-making systems consistently exceed legal standards for safety. Our best drivers will then no longer be subject to biological constraints like faltering concentration. As machines, they will be perfect. So, when functional self-driving comes around, it will be our moral responsibility to adopt it. We owe safety to others, and to ourselves.

Nonetheless, skeptics have raised concerns about the effect of self-driving cars on jobs. Millions of truck and taxi drivers, chauffeurs and highway patrol officers find their employment at

risk with the advent and mass adoption of autonomous vehicles. However, self-driving is poised to contribute up to $7 trillion dollars to the US economy, according to analysts at Intel and Strategy Analytics. Although the boon will primarily affect the tech sector, a reinvigoration of several adjacent industries like mechanics is also expected.

Since autonomous vehicles are likely going to be deployed, at least initially, as part of ride-hailing services, white-collar jobs in the services industry are predicted to rise. And a spike in ride-sharing will correspond to a reduction of vehicles on the road, something likely to boost the construction industry: because there will be lesser traffic to handle, we’ll rebuild our cities around humans and no longer around parking lots or highways.

Thus, our Luddite intuitions are likely wrong; self-driving vehicles will create a net displacement of jobs across the same skill-level, in addition to a

Opinion

5

net creation in the tech sector.

More serious challenges to functioning self-driving are ethical ones. Should an autonomous vehicle swerve, crash and kill its passenger or run over a child who unexpectedly sprints into its path? Should a car strike an 80-year-old or a teenager, given that a collision is inevitable?

And by corollary, should a car always prioritize the safety of its passenger to that of pedestrians or should car purchasers be given a choice? Resolving such ethical quandaries raise complicated questions on human moral intuitions. And yet, philosophers like Nicholas Evans at UMass Lowell are working with engineers to build algorithms according to specific ethical frameworks. Though answers to such problems might exhort deeper questioning of the self than of code, like technical ones, moral questions, too, will be resolved in due course.

On Passing the Climate Action Plan Julian Brubaker ’20 Anna Dalton ’19, Kelly Missett ’19 and Allison Tennant ’19 Contributing Writers Many of us, especially those from disadvantaged and exploited communities, are already feeling the effects of climate change and the unjust fossil fuel economy. The science and policy implications are clear — we must reduce carbon emissions immediately to avoid even more devastating future impacts.

Amherst has drafted a plan to curb its carbon emissions, called the Climate Action Plan (CAP). Last spring, Laura Draucker, director of the Office of Environmental Sustainability, explained the CAP at a town hall that over 60 students attended, hosted by the Direct Action Coordinating Committee. Her presenta-

tion laid out a path to achieve campus carbon neutrality by 2035, a date 25 years after the baseline data used from 2010, decided on by the CAP task force based on benchmarks from peer institutions. While steps have been taken toward this goal — last semester, Amherst invested in a solar project in Maine that will cover 45 percent of our purchased electricity needs when finished — the remaining 55 percent, as well as our gas heating infrastructure, still runs on fossil fuels. Fortunately, consultants hired by Amherst have determined that a shift from gas to renewable ground-source energy could be both technically and financially feasible.

Although the draft of the CAP exists, the administration still has not formally agreed to this investment. Carbon neutrality pledges

are increasingly becoming the norm among universities. Even in 2008, 575 colleges had already signed a CAP, and many more have been implemented since. But the Amherst administration’s inertia and ostensible disinterest to prioritize the CAP has led to its stagnation.

As students, we have the power to show the administration that it must prioritize carbon neutrality as Amherst College enters its third century. The best “Promise” Amherst can make to its current, future and past students is to invest part of its enormous fundraising campaign and even larger endowment in the infrastructural changes necessary to become fossil fuel-free.

We came to college to receive the education that will help us face the future; however,

at a school that depends on exploitation and environmental degradation to keep its lights on, we receive that education at the cost of other people’s quality of life and the very future for which we prepare.

Community building in a place that directly contributes to the destruction of the homes and lives of some of its members seems impossible. Ties on campus and with the Pioneer Valley will only be strengthened when we transition away from fossil fuels; reliance on fossil fuels inherently destroys communities, as evidenced by the recent gas explosions in Eastern Massachusetts and the proposed expansion of local Columbia Gas pipelines.

Indeed, adopting and investing in the Climate Action Plan is a necessary step toward a more sustainable and compassionate future.

If I May: Trying to Understand Astrology Jake May ’19 Columnist I have always made fun of astrology, and by extension, those who are invested in it.

It seemed to me that it was completely arbitrary; each set of qualities could probably be applied to anyone, especially if they were directly told that those qualities are supposed to apply to them. Furthermore, I recently found out that everyone has at least three signs — maybe more, I don’t know at this point. And all of them have different qualities! So, of course amongst those three you’re going to find things that are pertinent to how you see yourself.

To any astrology fans reading this (which I know is at least one because my editor loves this stuff): Yes, I know that the three differ-

ent signs represent different things. For those who don’t know, your sun sign, the one you’re probably familiar with, is the supposed core of your being — your ego. Your rising sign is how you come across to others, and your moon sign is what you are likely to see yourself as.

However, the more buzzword descriptors that are in play, the likelier it is that these will apply to you. This is not a problem; rather, it is just a bit of a conundrum for me. How can this stuff be significant or poignant in any way if it is so broad? Why bother looking into it at all?

I asked some friends who I was sitting with as I wrote this — coincidentally casual astrology fans — for their thoughts on why they enjoy it. Julia Pike ’19 said, “I love any opportunity to hear about myself.” Esther Isaac ’19 said, “Astrology is so fake but I love it. I love any opportunity to have thoughts I had about

myself affirmed.” These explanations were very fair; however, both Pike and Isaac do not ascribe too much meaning to astrology signs. So I pressed on, looking for someone who was a little more serious about the stars Lindsay Turner ’19, another astrology enthusiast, said, “I just think that having an explanation for why people act the way that they do is interesting and fun.” She added: “It’s feasible that the positioning of stars and planets have an impact on how a person behaves and feels.”

Personally, I am not one that believes or wants to believe in destiny or fate. However, I can certainly sympathize with someone who does, especially when it comes to how you are as a person, which is something that is theoretically out of your control. Furthermore, I often hear conversations about astrology in relation

to social or romantic endeavors. Here again, I can see the appeal of wanting to attribute occurrences to fate or the stars. Navigating social life, especially in college, can be difficult and stressful. Chalking bad dates, messy break-ups or even odd encounters up to the stars certainly is a way to help with this navigation.

Finally, a slight digression: I used to (and pretty much still do) think that astrology is likely meaningless. For a while, I wondered how people could possibly care about something that I found so utterly inconsequential.

But then I remembered that I am a huge sports fan. I spend hours on end thinking, talking and sometimes writing about sports.

But when you think about it, sports, too, are pretty much completely meaningless, and certainly largely inconsequential. So who am I to say not to care deeply about the stars?

A Call for Individual Accountability in Dorm Damage Jae Yun Ham ’22 Contributing Writer It has only been a month since the start of the school year, but dorm damage is already a widespread problem. As a first-floor resident, I have not been immune to the threat of collective punishment. Recently, someone smashed both soap dispensers in our men’s restroom.

Yet due to the threat of a floor-wide-fee, I hesitated to notify my Resident Counselor (RC) of the damage. What if I was punished for damage that I did not cause? Would reporting the damage only hurt me financially in the long run?

Only the dark splatters of blood on the bathroom wall convinced me to report the damage I saw. After hearing my peer’s complaints, it was clear that this incident far from an isolated one.

Take the recent infamous “Appleton Fire-Extinguisher Fiasco,” for example. On a busy weekend, someone discharged a fire extinguisher on the third floor. Immediately, Residential Life notified all Appleton residents of their financial culpability. In a mandatory

meeting, Amherst College Police Department officers and RCs encouraged the perpetrator to come forward. Yet to this day, the perpetrator of the damage has not confessed to their actions. As such, the residents of Appleton are now responsible for the damage caused by one offender.

This scenario is not the only one with such a terrible ending. Under a system of collective punishment, students have no incentive to take responsibility for their own actions. Why take accountability for your mistakes and pay the price when one can spread the blame around?

Under the unjust system of collective punishment, accountability is a non-existent notion.

Simply put, collective punishment fails to increase accountability and often only punishes innocent students.

Furthermore, collective punishment fails to account for the possibility that students who don’t reside in the damaged dorms may actually be causing damage. In the Appleton incident, it is probable that another first-year student living in a completely different dorm

caused the damage in question. Moreover, with such a lax security policy on guests, there still lies the possibility that an upperclassman or even a non-Amherst student caused the damage. Regardless of the possibilities, students in Appleton were still forced to pay up. To a first generation, low-income student like myself, dorm damage charges are not small expenses.

Amherst should not be punishing students for damage that they have not caused. It is clear that collective punishment is not a just and reasonable solution to fixing the problem of property damage.

As of now, the only way Residential Life removes damage charges from student accounts is through a strict appeal process. Students are only given a seven-day window to appeal to Residential Life. Furthermore, when appealing, declaring one’s innocence is not enough. A student must either a) substantiate being away from campus on the date of incident or b) know who is responsible and have the perpetrator agree to take responsibility in writing. This unreasonable standard makes it difficult for in-

nocent students to object to charges. Were you studying in Frost while the damage was being caused? Were you working a late campus job while your dorm was being trashed? In both cases, Amherst would still hold students accountable for such damage.

Amherst can begin the improvement process by increasing student accountability on campus through simple security measures. To hold dormitories more accountable, the administration should begin by increasing security in dorms so that students are deterred from causing further damage. By increasing dorm security, Residential Life and the ACPD would be able to identify suspects and charge them for the damage caused, absolving innocent students in the process. Imagine if Appleton had installed cameras to record the students who had discharged the fire extinguisher: students in Appleton, and in other dorms, would have been free from both moral and financial responsibility. To increase trust, security, and responsibility on campus, Amherst must take the first step to affect change on this unjust policy.

Arts&Living

Confluences Creates a Space for Celebration of Multilingualism

Photo courtesy of confluences.wordpresss.amherst.edu

Founded in April 2018, the new campus publication Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation is a literary magazine dedicated to the celebration of multilingualism.

Seoyeon Kim ’21 Managing Arts and Living Editor Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation, founded in April 2018 by Hapshiba Kwon ’20, Aqiil Gopee ’20 and Emily Merriman, a Writing Center associate and advisor, is a new magazine that celebrates multilingualism.

Featuring articles and translations by students, staff and faculty who have multilingual experiences, the magazine aims to recognize that the Amherst campus is a space where a multitude of languages converge to create experiences, subjectivities and worldviews.

Speaking to this, one of the magazine’s main goals is to “decenter English as the normative language of power.”

Kwon, an editor for the magazine, says her personal background was integral in the decision to work on Confluences. As a Korean-American English major, she says being bilingual “seems to operate under the radar.”

“I only experience [the] significance [of being bilingual] when I hear others around me speaking Korean or when I visit home and communicate with my parents,” she said.

“When I hear the familiar sounds, the auditory recognition fills an absence I didn’t realize I possessed.”

She describes this recognition as “homefeeling,” and says that questioning aspects of her Korean-American identity has further led her to consider how easily she disregards

other languages simply because they sound unfamiliar. For Kwon, working on Confluences has been integral in heightening her awareness of the various modes of communication that exist on our campus and in the greater community.

Merriman, a staff editor of Confluences, notes that an especially valuable feature of Confluences is the “Translator’s Note,” in which each translator discusses their particular challenges and pleasures while moving a text from one language to another.

Hikari Yoshida ’19, who is taking on co-founder Gopee’s editorial responsibilities while he studies abroad this semester, describes his work on Confluences last semester as mostly spreading awareness of the magazine through word of mouth.

This semester, he says, the magazine is catering to a wider audience and plans to host events related to multilingual experiences on campus.

As the editors of Confluences receive story submissions, they choose the ones they want to publish, then find translators. “We try to pair [stories] up with translators who are relevant to ... the experience of the writer,” Yoshida said.

Kwon remembers publishing “The Rise and Fall of Urdu Language and Literature,” a piece by Harith Khawaja ’19 which was first submitted in Urdu then translated by the author into English, as a notable experience.

She was surprised to learn that Urdu is leftaligned and felt nervous about formatting Khawaja’s work on the website.

“It’s often in these small moments of tension between learning and non-understanding that I develop a greater awareness and appreciation for multilingualism in my life,” she said.

Merriman said the development of linguistic understanding — of one’s own languages, of the languages of other people and of how language participates in the shaping of our lives — is “an integral part of the kind of liberal arts education that Amherst College provides.”

While this kind of learning can happen in classrooms, she notes that Confluences provides students and other members of the Amherst community with a venue for focusing creatively on the importance of multilingualism on our campus and beyond.

“The magazine and the people involved in it are working to enable cross-cultural collaboration and community-building,” Merriman added.

Throughout my own life, I’ve felt stuck in my bilingualism. Being fluent in both Korean and English presented a strange duality for me — speaking only Korean with my family and only English with everyone else. The two worlds never intersected, as the languages were unable to coexist peacefully in my mind.

Because of this distinction, being bilin-

gual became another aspect of my identity that I never gave much thought to. Now, being on campus and thousands of miles away from home, I rarely get the chance to read, write or even speak Korean — sometimes I get scared that I’m losing my fluency day by day.

Reading some of the articles in Confluences, in particular “Becoming Bilingual” by Dr. Min Cheng, a staff therapist in Amherst’s Counseling Center, was a reminder to me that my multilingualism is something to be celebrated. For those of us who are multilingual or attempting to become multilingual, Confluences is a reminder not to take our home languages for granted; even in an English-centric environment, all of our languages are worthy of thought and exploration.

Merriman hopes that in the future, Confluences will continue to publish more stimulating pieces. “[The website] is set up so that users can switch back and forth between languages for all the articles,” she said. “We would love for [more] students to do translation work so that we can expand this feature to many more languages.” Currently, the editorial staff plans on publishing once a semester.

Students can read Confluences by going to https://confluences.wordpress.amherst. edu and send in submissions or inquiries about being a translator to confluences@amherst.edu.

Photo courtesy of confluences.wordpresss.amherst.edu

Students can reach Confluences: Lost & Found in Translation on its new website, which can be read in French, Korean, Spanish and Urdu translations.

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Arts & Living 7

Monique Truong Explores Immigration and Hunger in New Novel

Photo courtesy of amherst.edu

In a reading at Amherst Books last Wednesday, critically-acclaimed author Monique Truong presented an excerpt from her upcoming novel.

Paige Reddington ’21 Contributing Writer On Sept. 26, faculty, students and booklovers alike gathered at Amherst Books to see Monique Truong, author of the awardwinning “The Book of Salt,” read an excerpt from her forthcoming novel “The Sweetest Fruits.” Part of the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series, a series of book events sponsored by the college’s Creative Writing Center, Truong’s reading kicked off the Fall 2018 lineup. The event was open to the public and refreshments followed the conclusion of Truong’s reading.

Truong began the event speaking about the underlying theme of hunger within her novels. She spoke about the inspiration for her novels through the language of food, explaining that her goal is for her novels to be rich in food but also rich in hunger. Truong

started reading cookbooks as a child after her family immigrated from Vietnam to the United States.

Living in a town in North Carolina with no other Asian families, she began to cook using American cookbooks in order to fit in with her community. Eventually, reading cookbooks soon became a lifelong passion, with Truoung confessing that she now reads cookbooks as if they are novels.

Truong’s interest in food translates to her fiction novels beyond simply their titles. In her talk, she especially emphasized that one cannot value food without also experiencing the lack of it. She points out that food is especially valuable to the immigrant.

“Food is really a metaphor for so many of the things that interest me as a person and as a writer: a sense of home, a sense of belonging, the idea of nurture, the idea of labor,” Truong explained. “The immigrant food

writer is particularly hungry. That food for an immigrant is often the strongest transportive drug, in the sense that if you taste something that reminds you of home it brings you back to that place. For an immigrant, there is that longing.”

Truong’s previous two novels, “The Book of Salt” and “Bitter in the Mouth,” tie the story of immigrants finding their place in a world unfamiliar to them to the motif of food.

Sticking with the trend, Truong’s forthcoming novel, “The Sweetest Fruits,” is centered around famous writer Lafcadio Hearn and was actually inspired by a cookbook that Hearn created. Hearn sparked Truong’s interest thanks to his story of migrating from the West to the East (country to country) and ultimately choosing the East, a relatively uncommon narrative in literature. Hearn’s position as an immigrant food writer captivated Truong and allowed her to craft a compelling story of his life.

However, Truong cautioned that Hearn’s voice is never the narrator at an any point in “The Sweetest Fruits.” Instead, the novel focuses on the points of view of three women in his life: his mother, his first wife, who was African American, and his second wife, who was Japanese — calling attention to the women in his life that did not get the recognition they deserved.

“I’m not a historian, so my project was not to find facts or documents that would support a different story for them, but I am a fiction writer so I can imagine in between the facts,” Truong said. “I don’t change the facts, but if there’s a fact A and a fact B, then I work within the area between. That’s where the fiction happens. It’s about a famous man, but from the point of view of women.”

Truong’s advice for aspiring writers in college is simple. “Read,” she said. “Read and when I say that, read widely. Be experimental in your reading. I know it’s really hard when you have your assigned readings and you can hardly keep up with that. But use your summers to explore, because I know this is how I learned how to write.”

Her second piece of wisdom for writers is to travel as much as possible. “Really I think the importance of traveling is learning about yourself. Your limits, your capacity for empathy or your lack thereof, all of that. And it’s because when you take yourself out of a place and a setting that is comfortable then that’s when this self knowledge begins,” Truong added.

The next event in the Fall 2018 visiting writers series will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 16 at 8 p.m. Jordy Rosenburg, writer and UMass professor, will read an excerpt from his first novel, “Confessions of the Fox.”

Photo courtesy of monique-truong.com

Both of Monique Truong’s novels — “The Book of Salt” (above) and “Bitter in the Mouth” (below) — reflect her fascination with food writing, both in their titles and their content.

Her forthcoming book, “The Sweetest Fruits,“ continues that trend.

Photo courtesy of monique-truong.com

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Arts & Living 8

Demon in Red: Panos Cosmatos’ Film “Mandy” Fails to Please

Photo courtesy of flickr.com

Director Panos Cosmatos’ film“Mandy,” starring Nicholas Cage, disappoints its audience with excess, graphic violence and very little plot.

Youngkwang Shin ’19 Staff Writer Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) lives in the mountains with his artist-wife Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), hidden from the rest of society in deep and enduring love.

However, hints of the dangerous nature of their relationship surface: Red is a recov-

ering alcoholic, and Mandy’s fantastical art sketches out the abstract contours of some undisclosed trauma.

On a regular day in the Shadow Mountains, they are visited by a dangerous cult that calls itself Children of the New Dawn — a gang of demonic bikers hungry for humans and hallucinogens led by one Jeremiah Sand (Linus William Roache).

This encounter soon leads Red to witness a tragedy that banishes all hope of recovery from his alcoholism, and soon he finds himself riding on the avenger’s path that is lined with the colors of hell.

There is little to recap in “Mandy,” director Panos Cosmatos’ alleged breakthrough and Cage’s alleged return to form. It certainly provides something: garish, neon and gruesome violence, reminiscent of the ‘80s and the aesthetic of excess attributed to that decade.

The plot, as a vessel for this throwback excess, is ironically simplistic: a man wants vengeance for being wronged, and he’ll brave hell and back for satisfaction. The lack of correspondence between form and substance appears to be the central conceit of the entire film, in which the threadbare plot draws attention to the almost undue overflow of apocalyptic imagery and thematic grandstanding.

Unfortunately, the appearance of mismatch between form and substance is all the film manages; every juncture of the movie strictly avoids any depth. In presenting one man’s life so comically and cosmically torn apart by a single event, the premise of the movie has the potential for a number of possibilities.

Is the ensuing violence traceable to some selfishness that causes Red to view his life as more central to the universe than others?

Can we call it selfishness if the cause of this violence was not one event, but a history of suppressed suffering activated by a moment?

Amidst this (lack of ) choice between an instant’s offense and a resurfacing horror, where is the place for Red’s agency? Where is Mandy, who in her scarce presence throughout the movie, emphasizes its ill-fitting title?

These are the questions Red’s warpath meticulously avoids.

Then, there is the issue of the warpath itself: how it is, how it looks, how it sounds.

The film makes the curious choice in sound design to invert the background and the foreground. The wind whistling through the trees, the draining drone of electronica, the buzzing of satanic circles, the wailing of chainsaws: their collective wheeze swallows the dialogue whenever and wherever.

One might be tempted to find some clever excuse for such an intentional decision — the possibility of genuine connection and communication swallowed whole by the radiation of wrath and rancor.

But upon closer inspection, the muffled dialogue with a vaguely biblical sense of foreboding contains little of value. It is the film in microcosm: an empty aesthetic drowned out by boisterous noise.

The only aspect of filmmaking that flourishes is the aesthetic, but even this impresses for only the first two-thirds of the movie, at which point the elapsed time makes painfully clear the diminishing returns of the color red.

The color red is the primary mask for the film’s general emptiness, and the character of Red proves to be similarly disappointing. Cage stands out in virtue of everything else standing back. Riseborough’s Mandy shines her witchy visage from here and there, and the demonic bikers steal the scene when they are not obscured by the aforementioned flood of color.

Cage unleashes a character performance that can only be described as himself, or at least a knowing parody of the public’s idea of Nicholas Cage: unabashedly emotional, unfailingly intense and unwittingly hilarious. Cage has always been a canny actor, whose oft-cited vice for melodrama disguises the virtue of a tremendous emotional scope that is on display in films like “Adaptation” and “Left Behind.”

The character of Red Miller allows Cage to flaunt his underrated emotional range. When he kills demons from hell, he does it with glee that oversaturates everything in the room and briefly transforms the film into a comedy.

When he sobs over the unending stretch of despair that is his life, the world seems to stand still in courtesy.

In a thinly-scripted film like “Mandy,” there is little buffer between actor and character. Unfortunately, the mindful depth of the former finds no transference in the latter, as the actor’s performance is unable to save the movie’s character.

Beneath the glee and the sobs, Red has no substance — no legible source of supposed trauma, no comprehensible psychological purpose to fulfill or fail.

He, like his eponymous color, conquers the scene without any intent to govern. Twothirds in, everything dies under red and Red. One can only repeat at this point the pointlessness of this movie’s venture, whose only structuring insight is the basic, ironic mismatch between the what and the how, and the ignorance of the why. Unsurprisingly, the substance is trite, the method tired and the reason truant. Only the questions of when, where and who can be answered for this nothing-film: never, nowhere and for no one.

Travis Scott Shines from the Backseat in Recent “Astroworld”

Photo courtesy of flickr.com

On his album “Astroworld,” Travis Scott collaborates with an exhaustive list of accomplished artists, skillfully using their talents to strengthen his own work.

Jack Klein ’20 Staff Writer Travis Scott is known more for his skills as a curator than as a musician. Usually, the featured artists on his albums are the stars of the show. Scott is content to sit back and let them leave their mark on each song. His newest album — or more accurately, music collection —“Astroworld,” is no exception. With features from Drake, James Blake, Frank Ocean, Swae Lee, The Weeknd and more, “Astroworld” is a who’s-who of contemporary music. While Scott’s rapping lacks on some songs, usually he complements his supporting cast and adds another element to the production of the music.

“Coffee Bean” and “Houstonfornication” contain Travis’s verses, and it’s not a coincidence that they both lack features. On the former, he

raps about his relationship with his girlfriend (“Your family told you I’m a bad move / Plus I’m already a black dude”) over a relaxed string and electronic beat. In the latter, he utilizes a signature psychedelic trap beat, over which he dishes out high energy, autotuned verses about his activities in Houston.

Scott’s fellow musicians tend to overshadow him and push him out of his comfort zone when they occupy the same song. On “NC-17” he groans the catchy but dismal chorus “Me and my b**ch I swear we like the same sex / F**k with all my chains on, let’s have chain sex.”

What Scott lacks in creativity, 21 Savage makes up for with his deadpan bars on the back half of the song that cut right through the beat.

On “Stop Trying to Be God,” James Blake’s melodious crooning and Stevie Wonder’s harmonica sample make the listener forget that

they’re listening to a Travis Scott album. Depite Scott’s verses occasionally lacking a punch, they’re still infectiously catchy. “Cause they did not create commandments / If you hustle always make it fancy … Cause air traffic controls the landing” sticks in your mind and won’t let go.

Because the song “Butterfly Effect” was released far in advance of the album, it doesn’t feel like a part of the larger album and is more like a single that was slapped onto the album to boost streaming numbers. The track itself, a favorite at both college parties and gyms, is fun and catchy enough and does deserve a place on the album. It would, however, be interesting to see the public reaction to the song had it not been a single first.

Scott deserves credit for assembling his colleagues into a cohesive supporting cast to make

enjoyable music. It takes more than a strong cast of artists to make a successful work of art — just ask the studio that commissioned “Suicide Squad.” Travis not only convinces all of these musicians to be a part of his album but helps them all work together. Like a great sports coach, most of Travis’s work is done behind the scenes, and he won’t get all of the credit for it.

He doesn’t seem to care, though, and the fact that he can put his ego aside is what makes him an incredible artist.

As a curator, Scott is second only to Kanye West. His impressive guest ensembles are the main attraction of his theme park of an album, and they dazzle as intended. “Astroworld” is worth a listen top to bottom for that reason alone. Come for the lineup, but stay for the lush production, the impressive sound and a good time.

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Sports

9

Jackie Buzkin ’22 Claims Singles Women’s Cross Country Claims Title at Women’s Tennis ITAs 21st at Paul Short Brown Race Connor Haugh ’21 Managing Sports Editor

This past weekend, the women’s tennis team competed at the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) New England Regional Championships, hosted by rival Williams in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Over the course of the weekend, the Mammoths faced competition in singles and doubles brackets from 10 other teams and walked away with the individual champion and a doubles bracket finalist.

Several of Amherst’s singles and doubles pairs were seeded going into the tournament.

The first-year pairing of Jackie Buzkin and Claire Evans was seeded fifth in the doubles bracket. Meanwhile, the Mammoths had three seeded players in the singles bracket: Buzkin (ninth), Evans (11th) and May Zhu ’22 (16th).

On the opening Friday, Buzkin breezed through her first two singles matches, downing unseeded opponents from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Middlebury with ease. Evans, meanwhile, also made her way past two opponents 6-0,6-1 and 6-4, 6-2 to reach the Round of 16. Anya Ramras ’22 made it to Saturday’s competition as well with two wins, despite not being seeded. Camila Trapness ’19, however, lost to her Wesleyan opponent in the round of 32 after being bested in a hardfought match that saw the first set need a tie-breaker.

Doubles action also went well for the Mammoths, with Evans and Buzkin working together to defeat a Brandeis College team, 8-4. Things didn’t go as well for the pairings

of Trapness and Zhou or Ramras and Maggie Owensby ’22, both of which failed to make it past the first round.

On the second day, Buzkin continued to excel. The first-year phenom stormed past Elena Pellegrini of Trinity by a score of 6-3, 6-0, and followed up the singles rout with a win alongside Evans in the doubles bracket.

Evans, however, did not fare well in the singles bracket, falling to the tournament’s top seed, Victoria Yu of Wesleyan, 6-1, 6-1.

Ramras picked up a win over MIT’s Ashley Teng, 7-6(5), 6-4, in a match which tested both players’ endurances.

However, this enormous expenditure of energy hindered Ramras’ abilities, and Yu took advantage of Ramras’ exhaustion to knock off her second-straight Amherst opponent.

In Sunday action, Buzkin emerged as the last woman standing in the singles tournament, after booking her ticket to the finals with a 6-3, 6-1 win over Tufts’ Caroline Garrido. In the finals, Buzkin bested Wesleyan’s Venia Yeung in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, clinching the individual crown without dropping a single set. In the doubles bracket, Evans and Buzkin made it to the finals but fell to Wesleyan’s sibling pairing of Victoria and Kristina Yu, who took home doubles gold.

The strong showing by first years is a promising sign for the Mammoths, who didn’t even have their talented junior class on hand to compete, with all four members of the Class of 2020 studying abroad this semester. The Mammoths begin to wrap up their fall season with a home match against Williams on Saturday, Oct. 6 at 1 p.m.

Jamie Mazzola ’21 Staff Writer

At the annual Paul Short Run hosted by Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Amherst women’s cross country team placed 21st in the multi-divisional Brown race, scoring 564 points. Siena College, a Division I program, claimed the team title with 109 points.

The University of Rochester was the top finishing Division III team, placing fourth overall with 301 points.

A total of approximately 6,000 athletes from nearly 450 colleges and high schools competed at the Paul Short Run, the nation’s biggest intercollegiate cross country race.

While the Goodman Campus Cross Country Course is known to be one of the faster courses in the nation, wet surfaces made for poor footing and a more challenging race.

The nine competing Mammoths raced against a field of 363 runners in the Brown division race.

Pacing the Amherst harriers from start to finish, sophomore Olivia Polischeck ran a lifetime-best 22:37 over the 6k course to place

34th.

Senior captain Lela Walter (22:53) finished next for the Mammoths in 52nd, followed by junior Kristin Ratliff (23:28) in 97th.

Sophomore Sarah Gayer (24:20) placed 193rd, trailed closely by first-years Eline Laurent (24:30) and Julia Doubson (24:30) in 214th and 216th, respectively.

Junior Olivia Moehl (25:40, 312th), junior Jenny Mazzella (25:50, 321st) and sophomore Katie Crum (26:20, 336th) rounded out the competing Mammoths.

“Our team’s biggest goals this season have been to stay positive during the race, start conservatively, and pick off women (by passing) in the latter miles of the race,” said Polischeck.

“For the most part, we moved really well from the first mile through the end of the race,” head coach Cassie Funke-Harris added.

“We knew this course had some deceptively tough parts, and I think the women came in mentally ready to attack it,” added FunkeHarris.

Next up, the Mammoths will travel to Harkness Memorial Park to compete in the Conn. College Invitational on Saturday, Oct. 13.

Football Uses Dominant Running Game to Trample Bowdoin, 24-14

Field Hockey Suffers OT Loss to Tufts, But Beats Conn. College Rose Mroczka ’21 Staff Writer After 71 minutes of back and forth play, the Amherst field hockey team suffered a heartbreaking overtime loss to Tufts on Saturday afternoon. Neither side showed signs of giving up at any point in the bout, constantly attacking each other for the duration of the contest. Though the Mammoths never trailed in regulation, the Jumbos ended up scoring the all-important overtime goal to claim a 3-2 win. With the result, Tufts advanced to 7-0 on the season, while the Mammoths fell to 4-3.

The Mammoths got off to a quick start during their fourth away game of the season.

Just 12 minutes into the first frame, defender Kendall Codey ’19 found the back of the net, putting the Mammoths up 1-0. Off of a penalty corner, Codey ripped a shot past the Jumbos’ netminder for her fifth goal of the season.

With just 38 seconds left to play in the half, however, Tufts forward Rachel Hamilton netted an equalizer. Midfielder Sophie Shoeni dished a clean pass to Hamilton who tapped the ball past Amherst netminder Katie Savage ’19. The Mammoths and the Jumbos entered halftime tied 1-1.

10 minutes into the second half, Amherst once again took the lead. The scoring play started when Laura Schwartzman ’20 picked the pocket of a Tufts defender and dished a pass to Natalie Hobbs ’22. Hobbs then sent a quick pass to Franny Daniels ’21 on the right side of the field. Daniels finished the tic-tactoe play off by rifling a shot past the Tufts netminder for her fifth goal of the season. However, the Jumbos were again quick to respond.

Less than five minutes later, Tufts’ forward Gigi Tutoni tipped a rogue high-flying ball past Savage to tie the game.

Deadlocked at two goals apiece after 70 minutes of play, the Mammoths and the Jumbos headed into overtime. Just a minute into the overtime frame, the Jumbos manufactured a two-on-one offensive rush. Though Sav-

age was able to turn away an initial shot from Hamilton, Tutoni picked up the rebound and easily fired home the winning goal.

While the Mammoths once again found themselves on the losing end of a hard-fought battle, the loss wasn’t for a lack of effort. Taking advantage of its chances, Amherst’s offense netted two goals on two shots. Likewise, Amherst’s defense stood strong, with midfielder Anna Agathis ’21 playing notably well on the defensive end. Gritting through an injury, Agathis helped Amherst hold the Jumbos to just 10 shots on net on 28 total shots. Savage also stood strong in net, making seven saves on 10 shots.

Despite the tough loss, Agathis remained optimistic.“We came out with great morale and really capitalized on our chances,” the midfielder said. “We are really on an upward slope and we are improving something about our game every day.”

Amherst is looking to rebound on the road against Conn. College and Keene State College this week. The Mammoths then took on the Camels on Tuesday, Oct 2 under the lights.

Amherst dominated the game from the opening whistle, with an explosive first half seeing the Mammoths take nine shots to the Camels’ two. However, Amhest was only able to tally one goal during the period, with Daniels driving home a rebound off the Connecticut goalie in the 22nd minute of play.

The second half saw more parity between the squads; however, Amherst was able to add to their lead on another goal from Daniels, this time on a backhanded shot in close to the net.

Daniels then finished off her hat-trick ten minutes later, scoring off a pass from Sophia Kaplan ’22 to put the Mammoths up 3-0.

The Camels were able to claw one goal back late in the second half, but it was not enough, as Amherst rolled to a 3-1 victory behind Daniels’ hat trick.

The Mammoths next face the Keene State Owls on Thursday, Oct 4 at 6:30 p.m.

Photo courtesy of Taylor Thomas ‘22

Quarterback Ollie Eberth ’20 produced 329 all-purpose yards in Saturday’s win over Bowdoin, throwing for 251 and adding another 78 on the ground.

Matthew Sparrow ’21 Staff Writer For a moment, it seemed as if nothing could stop the Bowdoin offense. For the opening five minutes of the first quarter, the Mammoth defense didn’t have any answers as quarterback Austin McCrum and running back Nate Richam methodically drove the Polar Bears all the way down to the Amherst 1-yard line.

Everything changed following an impressive goal-line stand by the Mammoths that saw the visitors force a Bowdoin fumble on fourth-and-goal, which was recovered by Matt Durborow ’21 to keep Bowdoin off the board on the first drive of the game.

After exchanging three-and-outs following the turnover, Amherst got on the board first thanks to a 22-yard touchdown connection from quarterback Ollie Eberth ’20 to senior running back Jack Hickey.

Hickey also rushed for 25 yards on the drive, as the Mammoths marched 81 yards in just 2:32 to take a 7-0 lead.

The defense stepped up once again on the next Bowdoin possession as Ricky Goodson ’21, filling in for the injured Nate Tyrell ’19, snagged his first collegiate interception.

“It’s a team game. When Nate went down against Hamilton, I was the next man up,” Goodson said. “The coaches and my teammates believed in me, so I knew I had to step up and play well for the team. The excitement and love from my teammates and coaches was the best part of it all!”

After Amherst added a 41-yard field goal from Andrew Ferrero ’19 to start the

second quarter, Bowdoin responded with a touchdown to trim the Mammoths lead to 107.

Eberth then engineered 10-play drive, going 4-5 with 64 yards and a 12-yard touchdown pass to Justin Berry ’20 to reclaim the double-digit lead, 17-7, headed into the locker rooms.

The start of the second half was defined by the kicking game with the two teams combining for five punts and a missed 33-yard field goal by Ferrero.

Amherst finally put the game on ice midway through the fourth quarter on a drive that started at its own 4-yard line.

Eberth found Bo Berluti ’19 from 12 yards out to put the Mammoths up by 17, and though Bowdoin managed a late garbage-time score, Amherst left the field with a comfortable 24-14 victory.

Eberth dominated offensively, throwing for 251 yards and three touchdowns, while adding 78 yards on the ground.

Berluti similarly shone after pulling down eight catches for 97 yards and a touchdown.

Perhaps most impressively, the Mammoths out-rushed the Polar Bears 212-6 on the day.

On the defensive side, Andrew Yamin ’19 recorded two tackles for loss, one of which doubles as his second sack on the season, while Goodson recorded the only interception of the game.

With the victory, Amherst improved to 3-0 on the year and remains in a three-way tie with Tufts and Williams for first place in the NESCAC. The Mammoths will travel to Vermont on Saturday to face off against 2-1 Middlebury at 1:30 p.m.

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Sports

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Men’s Soccer Rebounds from Tufts Loss with Victory Against Bates

Photo courtesy of Matai Curzon

Amherst utilized Bryce Johnson ’21’s flip throw to score its first goal against Bates less than five minutes after the Bobcats opened the game’s scoring.

Jordan Rhodeman ’21 Staff Writer The Amherst men’s soccer team fell to No. 3 Tufts, 2-1, on Saturday, Sept. 29, but rallied for a comeback 2-1 win over Bates the next day. With the weekend’s results, the Mammoths now stand at 4-3-0 on the season and 2-3-0 in NESCAC play.

Saturday’s game against the Jumbos finished with both teams tied with 15 total shots. Tufts’ Mati Cano scored one goal in the first half, and the Jumbos managed to hold onto the lead heading into halftime Less than 15 minutes into the second half, the hosts managed to widen their lead to 2-0 with a goal from Travis Van Brewer. Amherst’s Sebastian Derby ’21 clawed one goal back for the visitors with a perfectly placed header in the 70th minute. Dane Lind ’20 took advantage of a dangerous free kick to swing in a perfect cross to the far post, where Derby expertly guided the ball past the goalkeeper’s fingertips.

The Mammoths continued to pepper the Jumbos’ net with shots, notching four attempts on target in the last 20 minutes as part of a desperate attempt to find the tying goal. However, the final whistle ultimately cut short these efforts, and Amherst left the field with three conference losses on the year, one more than the Mammoths suffered in the entirety of last season.

Looking to remedy these conference-play woes, the Mammoths returned to their home turf to play Bates on Sunday afternoon. The visiting Bobcats set the pace early on, with Peder Bakken scoring the first goal of the

game less than 10 minutes after the opening whistle. Amherst’s physical style of play, which saw the Mammoths accrue 12 fouls over the course of the game, came back to hurt the hosts, with Bates scoring off of a free kick.

The Bobcats’ Julien Willamson played the ball to Ciaran Bardong on the set piece, who proceeded to tee up Bakken for a miss-hit shot that dribbled unconvincingly through a scrum of Bobcats and Mammoths into the bottom left corner of the net.

Unfazed, Amherst immediately bounced back to tie the game just a minute later. Sean Fitzgerald ’19 scored the tying goal after a flip throw-in from the sideline by Bryce Johnson ’21.

First-year German Giammattei scored Amherst’s winning goal after the game had remained deadlocked at one goal apiece for almost 70 minutes. Giammattei’s third goal of the season came from a rebound after a shot

by Cutler Coleman that the Bates goalkeeper spilled. Giammattei pounced on the opportunity and slotted the ball home into the yawning mouth of the net.

“We have a great group of guys — that’s hard to bet against,” junior Jimmy McMillian said. “As we begin to click in all areas of the game, the most important thing is that we have all of the bullets in the gun and can be at 100 percent every time we hit the field.”

The Mammoths retake the field this Wednesday, Oct. 3 against New England College at 7:30 p.m. Following the midweek match-up, the team returns home to face off against NESCAC rival Hamilton on Saturday, Oct. 6 at 2:30 p.m.

Men’s Golf Fails to Qualify For NESCAC Championship in Spring Thomas Woodville ’21 Staff Writer The Amherst men’s golf team competed this past Saturday at the NESCAC Qualifier, which consisted of 10 teams and took place at the par-72 Lyman Orchards Golf Course in Middlefield, Connecticut.

Starting the tournament seeded in sixth place, the Mammoths ended up finishing the weekend still in sixth place, scoring 314 on the first day and 301 on the second for combined total of 615.

Amherst’s Cameron Clark ’20 led the team, shooting a score of 149 on the weekend, carding a 74 during the first day and shooting one stroke worse on the second. Sophomores Nicholas Kumamoto and Will Lonnquist shot matching 82s on Saturday and 74s on Sun-

day to finish off the tournament with scores of 156. Jack Burlison ’19 followed close behind the two sophomores, scoring 79 on the first day and 78 on the second for a combined total of 157. Burlison was the last Amherst team member to be on the scorecard.

Middlebury ended up winning the NESCAC Qualifier after carding a combined total of 587 strokes over the course of the weekend. With their sixth-place finish, the Mammoths failed to earn one of the top-four spots needed to qualify for the spring’s NESCAC Team Championship. However, Clark’s individual score, which earned him 11th on the weekend, qualified him to play in the spring’s individual championship.

Amherst will close out its season this coming weekend at the Elms Invitational in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT

Fran Daniels ’21

Cameron Clark ’20

Team: Field hockey Favorite Team Memory: Beating Williams in overtime my first year Favorite Pro Athlete: Brianna Stewart Dream Job: Working as a doctor for Doctors Without Borders Pet Peeve: When people chew with their mouths open Favorite Vacation Spot: Cape Cod Something on Your Bucket List: Travelling to South Africa Guilty Pleasure: Watching “Shameless” Favorite Food: Cheeseburgers Favorite Thing About Amherst: The Memorial Hill view How She Earned It: Daniels currently leads the Amherst field hockey team in points, goals and shooting percentage, having registered 16 points and eight goals thus far to go along with a 50 percent shooting conversion rate. Daniels dominated the Mammoths’ most recent game against Conn. College on Tuesday, scoring a natural hat trick en route to a 3-0 victory.

The Mammoths will next take the field against Keene State College on Oct. 4.

Team: Men’s golf Favorite Team Memory: Spring break in Hilton Head Favorite Pro Athlete: Tiger Woods Dream Job: Being on the PGA tour Favorite Vacation Spot: Norhthampton, Massachusetts Something on Your Bucket List: Win a NESCAC title Favorite Food: Grab & Go Favorite Thing About Amherst: Academics How He Earned It: Clark paced the Mammoths over the two-day NESCAC Qualifier tournament this past weekend. The sophomore shot a total of 149 strokes over the weekend, including shooting just two-overpar on Saturday. Sunday saw Clark shoot 75 on the day. Sadly, Amherst’s team performance did not place the team in high enough standing to qualify the Mammoths for the NESCAC Championships in the Spring, as the team tied for sixth place, outside the qualifying cutoff of the top four. Clark, however, finished inside the cutoff for the individual championship and will compete for the title come the spring.

Men’s Cross Country Takes 22nd at Lehigh’s Annual Paul Short Run Veronica Rocco ’19 Staff Writer This past weekend, the Amherst men’s cross country team embarked upon its annual trip to the Paul Short Run in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at which it placed 14th in the Open Race and 22nd in the Gold Race. Meet organizers limit the number of competitors for each team to 10 runners in the Gold Race, so the remaining 10 Amherst harriers competed in the Open Race.

The Paul Short Run is the largest collegiate cross country meet in the nation, drawing teams from around the nation to Lehigh University for the annual meet. This year, the 8k course ran slower than in years past, as recent rain made the grass muddier than usual.

The day began with the men’s open race, where the first Mammoth across the line was Billy Massey ’21, claiming 78th in his first race of the cross country season. Massey specializes in long-distance track events, and a strong spring track campaign seems to have prepared him well for this season.

“It was good to bust the rust, and the course was pretty slippery,” Massey said. “The training I’ve done in the recent weeks has been very effective.”

Senior Jack Malague crossed the finish line in 116th place, sprinting past several runners in the final straight-away. First-year Majd Rouhana wasn’t far behind Malague, placing 126th, while the sophomore duo of Chris Stone and Ralph Skinner took 148th and 176th, respectively.

To round out the Amherst harriers in the event, first-year Will Merhige made his Amherst debut, crossing the line just three seconds behind Skinner to finish 178th, while Jacob Silverman ’19 was the team’s seventh runner in 234th place. Owen Daily ’21 took 246th and fellow first-year Lev Robertson was 313th. Ermias Kebede was the final Mammoth across the line in the Open race, placing 380th.

In the Gold Race, the Mammoths competed in a field of mostly Division I teams, placing 22nd overall and fifth among Division III schools. Sitting in 38th place at the one-mile mark, the Amherst harriers worked together on the back half of the

course to climb through the field of experienced runners, finishing ahead of 16 Division I teams.

Senior Cosmo Brossy had his best race on the trails yet, placing 41st in the 359-runner field as the third Division III runner across the line. Brossy crossed the line just ahead of Clark Ricciardelli ’20E who placed 50th with a time of 25:15. While the duo ran slower times than they did on this course last year, with the mud played a significant factor, they both improved their finishing places by more than 50 runners. Brossy and Ricciardelli also passed an astounding 217 and 227 runners, respectively, from the one-mile mark to the finish line, demonstrating the Mammoths’ well-thought out game plan.

Tucker Meijer ’19 ran a great race as well, crossing the line in 112th place, while Braxton Schuldt ’21 was the team’s surprise fourth runner, Amherst’s the team’s scoring top five for the first time, placing 203rd.

Spencer Ferguson-Dryden ’20 was the team’s fifth runner, placing 204th to round out Amherst’s scoring. Estevan Velez ’20 made his season debut and just missed registering points for Amherst, placing right behind Ferguson-Dryden in 205th.

“It was definitely nice to be back on the course and racing for the team, and I’m happy to get my rust buster out of the way and I’m looking forward to races in the future,” said Velez. “We certainly have a lot to build with, but a long way to go.”

The next three harriers across the line for the Mammoths finished close together, as Matthew Bradley ’22 was 284th, and Kristian Sogaard ’19 and Ajay Sarathy ’21 were 286th and 287th, respectively. The final Mammoth in the race was Jamie Mazzola ’21, who placed 354th.

The Mammoths will take fall break off and return to action on Saturday, Oct. 13 at the Conn.

College Invitational, which will feature the top Division III programs from the East Coast, as teams seek to accumulate points for an at-large bid to nationals. This will be Amherst’s last regular season meet before the championship season begins with the NESCAC Championships on Saturday, Oct. 27.

The Amherst Student • October 3, 2018

Women’s Golf Takes Third at Williams Invitational Behind NYU and Williams Tyler Marshall ’21 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s golf team traveled to Williamstown, Massachusetts this weekend to compete in the 15-team Williams Fall Invitational. The Mammoths entered the weekend riding high after winning back-toback tournaments to start the fall season, but ended up falling to New York University and Williams to finish in third place.

After Saturday’s opening round, Amherst sat in fourth place behind NYU, Williams and Middlebury. Wellesley College, in fifth place, trailed the Mammoths by only five strokes. The Mammoths shot 323 as a team on Saturday, with Isabelle Ouyang ’21 leading the way after notching an opening round 78. Her strong showing on day one was good enough for fourth place overall.

Morgan Yurosek ’20 shot an 80, and India Gaume ’22 was one shot behind with an 81.

Jessica Jeong ’20 was the final Mammoth to contribute to the scoring with an 84 on Saturday.

Amherst played much better as a team on Sunday as the Mammoths combined to shoot 310 on the day, a 13-stroke improvement

from Saturday. Yurosek led the way for the Mammoths, as she shot a 71 to finish with a combined score of 151 for second place overall.

Gaume carded a 76 on Sunday to give her a 157 on the weekend, which tied her for ninth with Ouyang, who finished with a matching score of 157. Jeong demonstrated her consistency on the weekend, shooting a second consecutive 84 to finish with a combined score of 168.

The Mammoths had two juniors, one sophomore and one first year contribute to the team scoring this weekend, which illustrates the team’s youth and bodes well for the future of the program.

Although the Mammoths were unable to finish ahead of Williams, they did outperform fellow NESCAC opponents Middlebury, Hamilton, Bowdoin, Trinity and Bates.

Next up, the Mammoths will travel to Middlebury, Vermont this coming weekend to participate in the NESCAC Championships at Ralph Myhre Golf Course. Amherst will look to get revenge on archrival Williams at the championship match and claim the program’s first NESCAC crown in several years.

Men’s Tennis’ Sean Wei ’21 Finishes Second at ITA Singles Championship Connor Haugh ’21 Managing Sports Editor This past weekend, the Amherst men’s tennis team traveled to Williamstown, Massachusetts to face competition from around the northeast at the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s New England Regional Championships. Amherst had several players seeded in both the singles and doubles tournaments.

In the singles bracket, Sean Wei ’21 was seeded second, while classmate Kevin Ma was seeded fifth in the 64-man field. In the doubles bracket, Wei and Harris Foulkes ’22 were seeded fifth, while Zach Bessette ’19 and Jayson Fung ’20 were seeded first.

Wei and Foulkes fell out of the doubles bracket, while unseeded Fung lost after two matches in the singles on Friday.

All other Mammoth competitors, how-

ever, advancedto the second day of play. On Saturday, Ma fell in the semifinals to a Jerry Jiang of Bowdoin, and top-seeded Fung and Bessette fell in the quarterfinals to a rival Williams tandem.

Wei, however, battled past Oscar Yang of Bowdoin, 7-5, 6-3, and took down Tyler Barr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 6-1,7-5, move into the semifinals on Sunday.

On Sunday, Wei faced Boris Sorkin of Tufts in the semifinals. Wei easily took the first set, 6-1, but Sorkin nabbed the next set, 6-2.

The momentum Sorkin gained in the second set continued into the third, as the Jumbo won 6-1. With the loss, Wei ended the Mammoths’ run in the tournament.

Amherst will look to improve on its results at the tournament going into the Wallach Invite on Saturday, Oct. 6, at Bates College.

Sports

11

The Hot Corner Jack Malague ’19 Columnist The Chicago Cubs’ recent inability to reach the World Series after their 2016 triumph speaks to the difficult nature of consistent dominance in the modern era of Major League Baseball.

On Monday afternoon, the Chicago Cubs dropped the National League Central tie-breaker to the Milwaukee Brewers, losing by a score of 3-1. The loss cost the Cubs a chance to win their division for the third straight year and forces them into a win-orgo-home match against the Colorado Rockies in the National League Wild Card game.

Baseball playoff predictions are always a hazardous business, but one imagines that Cubs fans do not feel all too good about their team’s chances this month.

A light-hitting offense, uncertain bullpen situation and sloppy fielding do not make for a playoff juggernaut. 10 years ago, the statement “The Cubs probably won’t win the World Series” was about as bold as saying “The Jets probably won’t win the Super Bowl.”

After their 2016 win, however, the Cubs were proclaimed the new dynasty in Major League Baseball. They had a fleet of young stars — Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Joe Buck’s beloved Kyle Schwarber to name a few — who, to listen to most talking heads, were the next Mantle, Maris and Berra.

Their general manager, Theo Epstein, was baseball’s curse-breaker, having led the Boston Red Sox to their 2004 World Series victory that broke the Curse of the Bambino, heralded as a veritable genius capable of winning anywhere (so long as he was given a massive payroll and a couple years to tank).

Add in a bespectacled, unconventional, hipster manager in Joe Maddon, and the organization supposedly had the right feel for the new way of the game.

The Cubs were to be World Series heavyweights for years to come.

Instead, they’re a mostly forgotten 95-win team in the dumpster-fire National League, better resembling flotsam and jetsam than a new-age Murderers’ Row. Last year, Chicago was unceremoniously dispatched in the National League Championship Series, after edging past a Washington Nationals team that did everything in their

power to beat themselves.

This year it is difficult to imagine a much different fate after the Cubs choked away the five-game division lead they took into September.

Now, on the flip-side, Chicago certainly has the potential to both surprise its fans and embarrass columnists come the end of this month, but up against teams like the Red Sox, Houston Astros and New York Yankees, the Cubs are surely underdogs.

The Cubs aren’t the only team to go from juggernaut to little brother. The Cleveland Indians, who last year won an American League-best 102 games and set a new record for the longest winning streak in Major League history, squandered a 2-0 lead to the Yankees in the 2017 ALDS. The malaise from last year’s playoff disaster carried over to this campaign, in which they won a measly 91 games against truly awful divisional competition, despite boasting much of the same lineup of young, costcontrolled talent.

Last year, the Los Angeles Dodgers made a run at the 2001 Seattle Mariners’ record for wins in a 162-game season.

This year, they had to resort to a onegame playoff and a blockbuster trade for perennial all-star Manny Machado to even win their division.

The lesson in all of this is that baseball dynasties are hard. The Yankees and Atlanta Braves teams that dominated in the late ‘90s or the San Francisco Giants teams that won three World Series titles between 2010 and 2014 are far more the exception than the rule.

There is no “superteam” to be built in a sport where stars turn to stiffs (see, for example, the Orioles’ Chris Davis and his .168 batting average) and nobodies become folk heroes (see Blake Snell of the Tampa Bay Rays) on a dime.

Triumphs are fleeting and failure is inevitable. So when this year’s World Series winner is declared the future of the sport, we should all take it with a grain of salt.

Volleyball’s Best Start Since 2007 Halted by Wesleyan and Endicott Dan Papa ’20 Staff Writer A dominating team performance on Friday night against Conn. College pushed the volleyball team’s record to a decade-best 10-0 and 3-0 in the NESCAC. The momentum was not enough to carry the team through the rest of the weekend, however, as Amherst dropped both matches on Saturday to rival Wesleyan and non-conference opponent Endicott College, giving the Mammoths their first two losses of the year.

On Friday, Sept. 28, the Firedogs hosted the Camels, who entered the match 1-2 in league play. Amherst ran away with the first set of the night, taking the lead early and never looking back. Captain Hayes Honea ’19 had three service aces in the first set, culminating in a 25-10 win. In the second, the Camels took an early 5-4 lead, but Amherst responded with a 9-3 run, and eventually a 25-15 set win. In the third and final set, Amherst jumped out to a 10-4 lead and held off a Camel run that closed the gap to as close as 11-9. The Firedogs easily rebounded though to win the set 25-17. Emily Kolsky ’20 led all players with 18 kills, Skyleur Savage ’22 contributed 18 digs and Charlotte Duran ’20 finished with 41 assists. Jamie Dailey ’21 and Claire Dennis ’20 each had four blocks to pace Amherst.

Amherst hosted Wesleyan and Endicott in a round-robin the next day, Saturday, Sept.

29. In the highly-anticipated first match, Amherst sought to deal reigning NESCAC champion Wesleyan its first conference loss of the season. However, Wesleyan’s class and experience shone through, as the Cardinals walked away with a comfortable straight-set win. The Cardinals jumped out to an early first-set lead and, though the Firedogs kept it close, won 25-21. The second set was the most competitive of the match as Amherst fended off three straight set-points to tie the Cardinals at 24, but Wesleyan took over to win two straight points and the set, 26-24. After the heart-breaking loss in the second, it seemed Amherst’s spirit dropped, as the Cardinal easily took the third set, 25-13. Dailey and Kolsky each had 11 kills and Sophie Launsbach ’22 added seven kills in the match. Duran led Amherst with 35 assists and Candace Chung ’20 contributed 8 digs in the match.

In its second match of the day, Amherst looked to avenge its first loss of the season, but the Mammoths were slow out the gates. It was all Endicott in the first set, with the Gulls powering their way to a competitive 25-21 set victory. Amherst responded with an impressive 25-14 second set win to even the match at one apiece. The Firedogs missed several opportunities to take the lead from the Gulls in the third and dropped the frame 25-23. In

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Daria Kim-Percy ’21 has averaged over two kills per set this season for the Mammoths in addition to averaging more than three points scored per set. the fourth, another missed opportunity to take the lead resulted in a 26-24 set loss and, in turn, a 3-1 match loss. First years led the way for Amherst, as Launsbach finished with 15 kills and Savage led with 17 digs. Dennis also contributed five blocks for Amherst.

The Firedogs’ next match will be on Wednesday, Oct. 3 at 7 p.m. in LeFrak Gymnasium against Westfield State University.

Amherst will then hit the road to take on conference opponents Tufts on Friday night and Bowdoin on Saturday afternoon.

Sports

Photos courtesy of Clarus Studios

Junior Sloan Askins opened the scoring in Saturday’s 3-0 rout of Tufts, firing home her first goal of the season from well outside the 18-yard box.

Women’s Soccer Secures Two NESCAC Wins over Tufts and Bates Nat De Jonge ’21 Staff Writer The Mammoths were back in action this weekend for a fourth consecutive SaturadySunday double-header. Amherst faced two tough NESCAC opponents in Tufts and Bates on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Heading into the first game of the weekend, Amherst boasted a record of 5-1-1 and was ranked No. 20 in the nation, while the Jumbos were ranked two slots lower at No. 22.

Amherst started strong, dominating possession and creating a couple of chances.

This pressure paid off in the 24th minute, when Sloan Askins ’20 scored on a shot from well outside the 18-yard box that arced over the keeper’s outstretched hands and into the

GAME SCHE DULE

back of the net.

Six minutes later, the Mammoths found the back of the net again off a rebound that fell to the feet of first-year Ruby Hastie, who needed only to tap it into the bottom corner of the goal.

The final goal of the contest came, unassisted, off the foot of breakout first-year Alexa Juarez, who now has seven goals in her first nine games and is leading the team in goals, assists and total points. The 3-0 victory over the Jumbos gave Amherst its sixth shutout of the season and sophomore goalkeeper Antonia Tammaro her fifth clean sheet.

Less than 24 hours later, the Mammoths returned to the pitch, this time on the familiar Hitchcock Field, for their second NESCAC matchup of the weekend against the Bobcats.

Senior midfielder Caleigh Plaut, commenting on the back to back games, said, “We have played back to back games every weekend since the beginning of the school, so over time the double header weekends have gotten a lot easier. It is for sure a challenge both physically and mentally, but we have been able to produce a lot of success for ourselves.”

Once again, the Mammoths put on a show for the crowd of students, faculty and parents that filled the stands. Plaut got the scoring started in the 14th minute, firing a shot just under the crossbar after executing a skillful turn at the top of the box.

The next goal came off of a free kick taken by sophomore midfielder Natalie Landau, who beat the Bobcats goalkeeper with ease to widen the Amherst lead to 2-0.

WED

THU

FRI

SAT

Volleyball vs. Westfield State University, 7 p.m.

Field Hockey @ Keene State College, 6:30 p.m.

Volleyball @ Tufts, 7 p.m.

Men’s Tennis Wallach Invitational @ Bates, TBA

Men’s Soccer @ New England College, 7:30 p.m.

Women’s Golf NESCAC Championship @ Middlebury, 9 a.m.

Field Hockey vs. Hamilton, 11 a.m.

Just before halftime, the Bobcats were able to get one goal back, but the second half began with the Mammoths on the front foot once again.

The hosts’ pressure led directly to Maeve McNamara ’19 securing the third goal of the game in the 76th minute, which itself was followed seconds after by another Amherst goal, this time by Juarez.

By the end of the game, the stats reflected the Mammoths’ overwhelming dominance with Amherst registering a remarkable 23 shots to Bates’ four. Indeed, Tammaro had to make just a single save against the Bobcats, as the Amherst backline held fast.

With this weekend’s results, Amherst improved to 7-1-1 on the season and 3-1-1 in the NESCAC. The Mammoths next game is away at Hamilton on Saturday, Oct. 6.

Women’s Soccer vs. Hamilton, noon

Women’s Tennis vs. Williams, 1 p.m.

Men’s Golf Elms Invitational @ Elms College, 1 p.m.

Football @ Bowdoin, 1:30 p.m.

Volleyball @ Bowdoin, 1 p.m.

Men’s Soccer vs. Hamilton, 2:30 p.m.