102022

College Student Shot Near 65th and Stony Island

By NOAH GLASGOW | Senior News Reporter

An undergraduate student was shot and injured around 10:30 p.m. Wednes day, October 12, during an attempted armed robbery near East 65th Street and South Stony Island Avenue, accord ing to an email sent Thursday, October 13, by Associate Vice President for Safe ty and Security Eric Heath and Dean of Students in the University Michele Ras mussen. The University was made aware of the incident Thursday morning.

The student sustained an injury that was “not life-threatening,” Heath and Rasmussen wrote. The student was brought to the University of Chicago Medical Center for treatment.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) will investigate the incident while the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) offered to assist, per the email. The shooting occurred a block south of UCPD’s authorized patrol

Booth Professor Diamond Wins Nobel Prize in Economics for Seminal Work in Finance Research

By NOAH GLASGOW | Senior News Reporter

A bolt of Swedish excitement struck campus Monday morning when Douglas Di amond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Univer sity of Chicago Booth School of Business, was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2022.

Diamond received the prize jointly with Philip Dybvig of Washington University in St. Louis and former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, for research in the 1980s that modeled the role of banks in financial crises.

University President Paul Alivisatos joined Diamond and Booth School Dean

Madhav Rajan for a press conference at the Rubenstein Forum on Monday, October 10.

“Today, we are all delighted—and I am especially so—to see [Diamond] celebrated on the world stage for his amazing scholarly contributions,” Alivisatos told the assem bled press. “This Nobel is a richly deserved honor.”

Diamond took his speaking time at the conference to thank the University of Chica go colleagues, including previous Nobel lau reates Eugene Fama and Merton Miller, who helped him develop and refine his research.

“My work was subjected to very care

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area, the southeast corner of which is at East 64th Street and South Stony Island Avenue.

University staff “are in contact with the student and their family and will en sure that they have access to the support services and resources they need,” per the email.

“Unfortunately, robberies are a per sistent challenge citywide, and have continued to increase in Chicago and in cities across the U.S. over the last year,” the email stated. The Department

of Safety and Security’s “safety tips” for students traveling in the city included that they “keep valuables out of sight” and “travel in groups of two or more when possible.”

Incident data issued by CPD con firmed that in the past week, there were four shootings and 15 robberies in CPD District 03, where Wednesday’s shoot ing took place. The district includes the Woodlawn and South Shore neighbor hoods immediately south of campus.

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NEWS: Uncommon Interview with Incoming IOP Director and Heidi Heitkamp

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“ [His] groundbreaking ideas literally created modern banking theory.”

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ful and detailed comments by all of my colleagues, and it forced me to really think clearly about what I was doing and whether it made any sense,” Diamond said.

He added that sharing the business school offices in Rosenwald Hall with col leagues like Fama, whose background was in empirical research, helped to challenge his own focus on theory. He said that the di versity of academic perspectives made the University of Chicago an ideal place for his research.

At Monday’s press conference, Rajan reflected on the influence of Diamond’s re search.

“His research agenda for the past 40 years has been to explain what banks do, why they do it, and the consequences of those arrangements,” Rajan said. “[His] groundbreaking ideas literally created mod ern banking theory.”

Diamond has researched and taught at the Booth School, formerly the University of Chicago School of Business, since 1979. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale

University in 1980.

The Nobel Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences cited two of Diamond’s papers as the basis for this year’s award. “Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring,” published in 1984, arose from Diamond’s doctoral research at Yale.

“Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Li quidity,” published with Nobel co-laureate Dybvig in 1983, proposed a highly influen tial model for understanding what leads to and produces bank runs. The model is now known as the Diamond–Dybvig model.

Diamond was asked on Monday if he harbored any bad feelings about the nearly 40-year gap between the publication of the recognized papers and the Nobel Commit tee’s decision.

“You don’t want to win it too young, right?” Diamond joked. “It sort of goes to your head and things like that. So I’m just glad they didn’t wait until I was well past my last sale date.”

Jenkins, Lu, Angel, Dasgupta, Montiel Elected Class of 2026 College Council Representatives

By MICHAEL McCLURE | News Editor

Elijah Jenkins, Tim Lu, Juan Simon Angel, Meera Dasgupta, and Luz Ma ria Montiel were elected to be the five College Council (CC) representatives for the Class of 2026 on Wednesday, October 12. CC, a board composed of five members from each class and one nonvoting chair, votes on legislation that concerns the undergraduate stu dent body.

Fifteen first-years ran in the elec tion, held from October 10 to October 12, to fill the five open seats. Students from the Class of 2026 cast 476 total ballots, which included 17 abstentions and several votes for write-in candi dates.

Of the winning candidates, Jenkins received 227 votes, Lu 183, Angel 172, Dasgupta 121, and Montiel 99. They will

serve on CC for the 2022–23 academic year and receive their committee as signments within Undergraduate Stu dent Government (USG) in the coming weeks, USG Executive Vice President Jefferson Lind said when the results were announced Wednesday afternoon.

The field of candidates was slightly smaller than in past years, with 18 run ning last year from the Class of 2025 and 19 running in the fall of 2020 from the Class of 2024.

Lind noted that candidates who didn’t earn places in CC could still serve on USG’s committees.

“I want to encourage people to ap ply for committees if they haven’t yet. There are a lot of ways to get involved in student government, and that’s another good way to do it,” Lind told The Ma roon after the results were announced.

“We have a lot of promising candidates, and I’m even more excited about the new year.”

Five UChicago Professors Awarded 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship

By ANU VASHIST | Deputy News Editor

Studying how we pay attention. Us ing computer science to develop inter active technology. Developing chemical tools to ease the process of developing drugs. This is the sort of research that the five 2022 Sloan Research Fellows from the University of Chicago are tackling.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards fellowships to early-career schol ars who specialize in STEM and social sciences across the U.S. and Canada. This past spring, the foundation announced that 118 academics had been awarded fel lowships that come with a $75,000 grant that can be used over a two-year term to offset research expenses.

Monica Rosenberg

Assistant professor in the Department of Psychology Monica Rosenberg studies memory and attention.

Rosenberg has led the University’s Cognition, Attention, and Brain (CAB) Lab since coming to campus in 2019. CAB researches fluctuations in attentional states and how changes in focus inter act with other mental processes, such as memory and learning.

“Big picture, my lab is interested in how we pay attention,” Rosenberg told The Maroon. “We can all appreciate that. At some moments, even when we mean to focus, we’re distracted or we’re

mind wandering, [but] other times, it feels relatively effortless to focus.”

To perform this type of research, Rosenberg employs a variety of tech niques, including behavioral experi ments, functional MRIs (fMRI), and ma chine learning. Behavioral experiments, Rosenberg said, are “where people come into the lab or do studies online to assess how attention changes over time [and] what consequences attention might have for other cognitive processes.”

When the pandemic started and bringing study participants into the lab was no longer feasible, her lab pivoted to the studies focused on data collection.

“We started running some online be havioral tasks asking about how fluctu

ations in attention impact learning, and I think it was an opportunity to explore this other area, collecting data from hun dreds of participants online,” Rosenberg said.

Now that the CAB Lab can collect data in person again, Rosenberg’s team has resumed performing fMRI studies. They obtain fMRI data using the same type of machine as in clinical settings to take structural images, allowing the sci entists to observe blood flow in the brain and giving them insight beyond what they could gain from behavioral study. “This allows us to relate brain activity to on going behavior and cognitive processes,” Rosenberg said.

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In one such project, a Ph.D. student analyzed existing fMRI data collected from participants watching the first ep isode of the BBC show Sherlock. The data enabled the student to visualize how brain activity had changed over the du ration of the episode.

With the aid of the fellowship, Rosen berg hopes to expand upon her existing research on the interactions between at tention and learning while also explor ing other topics, such as comparing the effects of visual and auditory stimuli on attention changes.

She emphasized that the fellowship is a recognition of not only her advancement of psychology research but also the con tributions of her entire team.

“It’s never a single person that does the work. It’s a team effort,” she said. “I’m grateful that this allows my research team—Ph.D. students, master’s students, undergraduate students, postdocs, a fulltime research assistant—to continue their work as well, and so I really see it as an honor to the research team.”

Mark Levin

Associate professor in the Depart ment of Chemistry Mark Levin leads an organic chemistry lab that seeks to streamline the synthesis, or develop ment, of medications.

According to Levin, a modern drug compound is “a molecule that’s been trained for a very specific job: It has to hit the target in your body…but it also has to not hit any of the other things that keep you alive.”

Chemists work with these constraints by modifying the structure of the mole cule. Normally, drug development in volves iteratively resynthesizing a com pound to change its structure, but this can be inefficient because scientists must often begin from scratch for every mod ification.

Levin and his lab, however, seek to use the power of organic chemistry to make modifying molecules more efficient.

“Our job in my lab is to develop the chemical tools that the chemists use to get from one compound to another,”

Levin said. “Things would be a lot simpler if you could get from one drug molecule candidate to the next one in a direct fash ion, [but] most of the chemical reactions that you would want in order to do that don’t exist. So that’s what we do: We try to make them exist, we try to find those reactions that allow you to take a given lead compound and convert it to the next compound.”

Levin referred to the Sloan fellowship as “a really phenomenal vote of confi dence” in his lab’s research.

“It comes with a small research grant that you’re free to use on whatever as pect of your research you want. That is also pretty liberating because you can use it to further risks, and I think high-risk, high-reward science is what people want to be doing.”

Pedro Lopes

Pedro Lopes is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the head of the Human-Computer Integration Lab. His research focuses on engineering equipment that conveys information by directly interacting with the user’s body.

“In the traditional computer inter faces, like the ones we have today, there’s more unidirectional communication,” Lopes said. “It’s very rare that the com puter helps me understand the physical actions.”

Lopes and his lab members are work ing to do just that. One such device teach es users to play simple guitar chords by moving their individual fingers. Such technology could be applied, for exam ple, to teaching sign language, Lopes said.

Lopes’s work also deals with educa tion through virtual experiences. “We could also learn how to do things in vir tualized environments, but that virtual environment is only going to be useful if it matches with the real world,” Lopes said.

Lopes’s lab is interested in engineer ing the sensations that virtual reality technology is currently lacking, which include touch, temperature, and tingling. One such project the lab has previously designed is a device that mimics skin sen sations. It has channels through which

chemicals can touch the human skin and simulate real-world perceptions. For ex ample, mint or methanol could stimulate a sudden cold sensation.

As interest in virtual reality increases, Lopes credits some of his lab’s success to the unique learning environment of the University. Whereas most research on simulating reality takes place in insti tutions specifically focused on electri cal engineering, the UChicago students involved with this research come from a variety of academic backgrounds.

“I think the specialty of having this different mindset of UChicago is that people aren’t thinking of the technology first,” he said.

According to Lopes, this diversity in backgrounds increases student research ers’ creativity, enabling them to take on multifaceted projects. The lab plans to continue on the foundation it has already established by using the fellowship mon ey to increase student learning.

Chao Gao

Assistant professor in the Depart ment of Statistics Chao Gao studies a wide range of mathematical topics, including nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics, network analysis, and Bayes’s theorem.

Gao’s previous honors include the 2021 Tweedie New Research Award, an honor the Institute of Mathematical Statistics gives in honor of statistician Richard Lewis Tweedie. Additionally, he is a reviewer for Bernoulli and the Elec tronic Journal of Statistics, two journals published by the International Statisti cal Institute and the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability.

He is now the site director at UChica go for the Institute for Data, Economics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL). Orig inally founded in 2019, IDEAL is a col laboration between Chicago institutions involved in the study of data science and related areas like machine learning under the direction of researchers in mathemat ics, electrical engineering, economics, law, and social sciences.

This past summer, the National Sci ence Foundation (NSF) awarded IDEAL

with the “Harnessing the Data Revolu tion” grant, which provided the program with $10 million so that it could expand and be renewed for the next five years.

Speaking about the Sloan Research Fellowship, Gao told The Maroon in an email, “This grant is a recognition of our work on mathematical statistics. It will facilitate future exciting research ideas on the interface between statistics and many other areas.”

Peter Ganong

Associate professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Peter Ganong per forms research in economics that exam ines the effect of federal public policies on individuals facing financial strain. He has conducted research on the foreclosure crisis; on the role of unemployment ben efits in supporting unemployed workers; and most recently on the effects of Eco nomic Impact Payments and unemploy ment benefits administered during the pandemic via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

Speaking of the effectiveness and im plications of the CARES Act in a Harris press release, Ganong said, “The pandem ic demonstrated the potential of govern ment policy to protect households from poverty in the face of unprecedented eco nomic disruption. However, the design of the payments was constrained by histor ic disinvestment in the tax-and-transfer system.”

Bruce Meyer, the McCormick Foun dation Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and the person who nomi nated Ganong, praised Ganong’s contri butions in the Harris press release.

“Peter has done breakthrough re search that not only informs government policy but makes us rethink how house holds make fundamental choices such as how much to spend and whether to pay their mortgage.”

Ganong intends to use the Sloan fel lowship to study the effects of racial wealth inequality and high liquidity on the American economy, according to the Harris press release.

“According to Lopes, this diversity in backgrounds increases student researchers’ creativity, enabling them to take on multifaceted projects.”

Uncommon Interview: Incoming IOP Director and Former Senator Heidi Heitkamp

By ERIC FANG | News Editor and MICHAEL Mc CLURE | News Editor

On January 3, 2013, Heidi Heitkamp made history by becoming the first elected female senator from North Dakota to take office. Exactly 10 years later, Heitkamp will achieve another milestone: She will become the second-ever director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics (IOP), succeed ing founder David Axelrod, who announced he was stepping down as director of the IOP on February 15, 2022.

“I’m not intimidated. In fact, I’m grate ful for David’s involvement and for the op portunity to lead this institute to the next chapter,” Heitkamp tells The Maroon in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, October 11, the day she was announced as Axelrod’s successor.

Growing up, Heitkamp envisioned a much different career path—one that would have kept her out of the political limelight.

“I always thought that I would be the person who ran campaigns for other candi dates, not the candidate,” Heitkamp says. “I was convinced to run for office by then tax commissioner, now former senator Kent Conrad, who is still my mentor. So at the age of 28, I ran for statewide office. I ran for state auditor, and that really began my lifelong en gagement in electoral politics.”

Heitkamp, running as a member of the North Dakota Democratic–Nonpartisan League Party, lost to Robert Peterson, a Re publican incumbent. But two years later, on his accession from tax commissioner to the Senate, Conrad chose Heitkamp as his re placement. She served in the post until 1992, when she ran for attorney general and won.

In 2012, as Conrad planned to vacate his Senate seat, Heitkamp ran to replace her mentor for the second time and won the election by less than 1 percent of the vote. She served as senator alongside John Hoeven, to whom she had lost the 2000 North Dakota gubernatorial election.

Representing the Democratic Party, Heitkamp was known for developing healthcare and economic policies that appealed to both North Dakotans, many of whom leaned to the right, and Democrats nation wide. Heitkamp’s positions on energy and the environment, such as her support for

the Keystone XL pipeline, even led Donald Trump to consider her for Secretary of Agri culture in 2016. Though she was not chosen for that role, she broke with the Democratic caucus on several occasions to vote in favor of Trump nominees for federal cabinet po sitions.

After losing her reelection bid to Kev in Cramer in 2018, Heitkamp founded the One Country Project, which aims to help Democrats connect more effectively with rural voters. She also became a contributor for CNBC and ABC and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.

“If you looked at my history, [my career] really started out with grassroots organiz ing, mainly around environmental and women’s issues,” Heitkamp says, “but I saw that none of those issues have permanency unless you really engage politically as well. It’s not enough to be engaged on issues. In America, you’ve got to be willing to help people get elected who can adapt or write the narrative.”

Her mission of engaging people, not just debating ideas, is central to her political ap proach. In her new post as director of the IOP, Heitkamp will oversee the IOP’s pro gramming and institutional vision while interacting with national political figures and students eager to learn from them.

In winter 2021, Heitkamp was a Pritzker Fellow at the IOP, where she held a seminar series titled “Forming a More Perfect Union: Policies & Politics to Heal America’s Region al Divide.” She was also a member of the IOP’s senior advisory board. That involve ment, Heitkamp says, gave her a unique tie to the IOP and a greater appreciation of its work.

“I don’t take anything away from the other institutions that I participated in. I thought that this one was the most practi cal, hands-on kind of voting experience that students could have. Plus, I just marveled at the quality of the students who were part of the IOP and their sophistication in terms of what they know,” Heitkamp says.

“I helped David brainstorm some future potential IOP directors and had a lot of con

versations about that. Eventually, he just decided that I was the right person. So after a lot of discussion about where I am in my personal life, I said yes.”

Heitkamp’s tenure as director will be gin January 3, 2023, but her connection to UChicago goes back nearly two decades. Her daughter, technology policy analyst Alethea Lange, graduated from the College in 2008, and Heitkamp calls herself a “big fan” of the institution. UChicago’s reputation for crit ical inquiry, she says, makes it the perfect place for the IOP, which is focused on build ing the next generation of political leaders.

“My husband and I spend a lot of time on campus, spend a lot of time marveling at the quality of education that [Lange] re ceived. I am very grateful for the kind of critical-thinking skills that she expanded and enhanced at the University of Chicago,” Heitkamp says.

“Sometimes the University of Chicago underestimates its national reputation. It clearly has a national reputation for engage ment, for critical thinking, for free expres sion, which I think is absolutely critical.… I think that in the [IOP] programs that I’ve seen, student engagement has been high, but I think in terms of practical leadership, there’s probably a broader openness to stu dent leadership in Chicago.”

Having served on the IOP’s senior advi sory board, Heitkamp understands the value of the institute’s various offerings, from the speaker series to student internships. At the same time, the variety in student back grounds at UChicago especially appeals to Heitkamp, who grew up in the tiny North Dakotan town of Mantador—a starkly differ ent upbringing from her primarily urbanite peers.

“Of the top institutions in the country, you probably have the most diverse incom ing freshman group. They are committed to not just recruiting out of the big schools and prep schools but looking at communities like the one I grew up in and finding those people who will go back to their rural community, go back to a much smaller place, and provide leadership.

“It was particularly important to me that I’d be affiliated with a great academic insti tution that really demonstrates, through its admission policy and its work, that they be

lieve that diversity is critically important.”

The IOP, a nonprofit, relies on funding from a variety of donors, including the ad ministration, to sustain itself. While secur ing that money remains a core challenge for the “viability and sustainability” of the IOP, Heitkamp admits it’s in “damn good shape right now” as Axelrod concludes his tenure.

“David started this thing from whole cloth, using his personal connections to raise money. It’s amazing what he has done in 10 years. He got it to probably its adolescence, which I’m grateful for because no one wants to raise adolescents! But now we’re in that spot where we really are in an era of matu rity.”

Part of that maturity is taking the IOP’s message and mission beyond the space it currently occupies on campus.

“I hope the IOP can be a bridge to the broader Chicago community,” Heitkamp says. “Having an institute that is located in Chicago presents an incredible learning opportunity for students to expand their understanding of what’s happening, cer tainly in urban communities today, and to brainstorm with the community and work with the community to address some of the issues that we see in the South Chicago area.”

As a Pritzker fellow, Heitkamp met neu roscience major Adam Zabner (A.B. ’21), who was interning with One Country Project at the time. He has since won the Democratic primary for District 90 in Iowa’s House of Representatives, which covers the south eastern part of Davenport at the Quad Cit ies region on the Illinois-Iowa border. With a platform focused on health-care reform and slowing the drain of young Iowans to bigger cities in other states, the unopposed Zabner is set to ascend to the seat after the general election on November 8.

Zabner’s story, Heitkamp says, exempli fies how UChicago students can tackle politi cal campaigns or electoral politics no matter their academic and personal backgrounds.

“He brought so much wisdom from the work that he did on previous campaigns to the campus,” Heitkamp says of Zabner. “I could go through all the students who now are engaged politically, not just on [polit ical] issues. So the politics is part of it, and we can never forget that. This is the Chicago

Institute of Politics. That was practical ex perience on polling, on messaging, on devel oping skills so that no matter what political party you’re part of, no matter what kind of policy issues you’re taking on, we’re helping develop and hone those skills.”

For Heitkamp, the IOP’s mission doesn’t end at learning from the experts of today. Heitkamp believes the organization has a mandate to foster collaboration between the “future leaders” on campus—even those students not interested in politics.

“My sincere wish is that we see a collab oration across ideology of future leaders, whether they’re conservative or liberal or libertarian or green—whatever stripe they identify with. That we see an opportunity to gather people together and have civil dis course on the problems of today,” Heitkamp says.

“I would imagine [myself] meeting and visiting with a lot of student groups, who may have not always engaged with the IOP, invite them in, find out what those students would find most helpful as they develop their careers going forward. The one thing that I will tell you—and I say this to any student—I always say, ‘Well, you don’t like politics. I get it. But none of you will have a job where pub lic policy is not critically important to that job. Whether it’s in healthcare, whether it’s in finance, you got to understand politics, and you’ve got to understand policy.’

“I have a young woman who’s getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry who wants to talk about sustainability of biofuels. You already have it in the University. You have people who are looking at careers, whether it’s in hard sciences or in education, but they’re also understanding, as they come to this programming, the value of learning about and engaging with the political community.”

In addition to training future leaders, Heitkamp also considers the IOP an essen tial breeding ground for solutions to future political issues—the exact challenges that as piring politicians from UChicago will have to tackle once they leave the IOP behind.

“I have a thing that I used to do with my staff in the Senate. They would come in with

a list of issues of the day, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, those are important, and we’ll get to them, but look up. What’s on the horizon that will challenge us moving forward?’… It has al ways been a continuation of, ‘Let’s not just solve today’s problems. Let’s prepare our selves to solve problems that you’re going to confront 10 years from now [with which] we can proceed today.’ I can imagine and envi sion dialogue on a lot of those systemic issues that I think will confront and do confront this country,” Heitkamp says.

“What I hope—and I think that the ad ministration shares this—is that the IOP in Chicago can be a place where every idea is embraced in dialogue and discussed. That we don’t just, as I call it, chase the bright, shiny object. That we really look strategical

ly about the problem for the future and how we can provide additional input on those problems, maybe beyond just the campus.

“What I hope is that, at the end of the day, everybody on campus said, ‘There was some thing at the IOP for me, there was a way that I could express my opinion, there was a place where I could learn what I needed to know, to become a better future leader.’”

Such intellectual discovery represents one of the most joyful parts of the IOP for Heitkamp. Another, she says, is the commu nity that the IOP’s atmosphere can cultivate, encouraging staff and students to become the most successful and satisfied versions of themselves.

“To me, in every job I’ve ever had, the fundamental beginning is, ‘Who is the team

and how can I be helpful and help these enor mously talented people be successful in what they do every day?’ Because if you build that right, if you provide a lot of opportunity for leadership with good people, you’re going to get great results. The first short-term goal is getting to meet people on the campus,” Heitkamp says.

“One of the most important things that you can do as a leader is make the workplace fun, make the workplace a community. They don’t have to be a family. I’m not big into the workplace replacing your family, but it has to be a place where you come every day with a level of excitement, and that doesn’t happen if it’s serious and boring all the time. We’re hoping we can have a lot of fun at the IOP.”

“In her new post as director of the IOP, Heitkamp will oversee the IOP’s programming and institutional vision while interacting with national political figures and students eager to learn from them.”

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Heidi Heitkamp will begin her tenure as IOP director on January 3, 2023. courtesy of the university of chicago institute of Politics

VIEWPOINTS

A Student’s Guide to Growing Ripe

By ANNIE DHAL

Consider the aisle of this gro cery store, the one of your choice— Trader Joe’s (snacks, premade meals, questionable naming prac tices), Whole Foods (pretension, alternative options, whatever ca shew-based egg replacement is in vogue), Hyde Park Produce (aisles of fresh fruit you might buy but will probably not get around to eating), etc.—and you will, unin tentionally, be looking down the barrel of your future.

I, of course, don’t mean this literally. If you buy your hum mus from Trader Joe’s today, it probably doesn’t mean you’ll be sentenced to a lifetime of the same. What I do want to discuss is the cosmic ritual of shopping for yourself, what this breakaway into adult responsibility implies, and how it might hit you like a ton of bricks between frozen foods and international snacks that nothing will ever be the same as it once was.

In previous columns, I’ve discussed the inevitable conse quences of change and how col lege is perhaps the final boss of coming of age. The threat of this— the need to produce and survive in the realm of adulthood—looms so large in my mind that perhaps I can’t help but write about it, over and over. What answer or com fort I’m searching for remains to be seen, but recently, in my shift from the dorms to off-campus living, I have come across a little seed of truth. In college, at UChi cago, I want to draw attention to the one thousand minute ways we’re all growing up and how,

despite the yawning cavern of our futures, we may be more pre pared than we let ourselves think.

I come to this conclusion searching for broccoli at Whole Foods. The stems are hardly diffi cult to find, but it strikes me, sud denly, that I have become the sort of person who makes a beeline for broccoli on a shopping trip. From here I take the long way around, past carrots and off-season nec tarines. I wonder at what point I began to prioritize vegetables and worry about scurvy and how eventually, I will have been to more grocery stores alone than in the back seat of my father’s car. More than anything, what is pressing to me is that I have not noticed this subtle change at all. It has come upon me like a silent wave, and I am now standing drenched and safe on the shore.

This is the strange thing about college, the rapid shift of environ ments. You might have moved to Hyde Park from a Chicago suburb or halfway across the world, but you relocated nevertheless. You changed support networks and geography and your daily sched ule. You entered a world that, while inevitably still influenced by your childhood, is largely yours for the taking. The sheer poten tial of this statement is enormous and, consequently, burdensome.

Broken down, however, the re ality is this: Every day that you wake up here, you are faced with little choices—say, what grocery store to make edible, healthy, and fiscally responsible meals from— and your ability to make them is the most fundamental building block to your future whether or

EVA M c CORD

not you immediately see the ef fects.

I complain frequently about the difficulty of the University of Chicago, but now I recognize that somehow I have made it past the midpoint, into my third year—an incomplete feat, perhaps, but one that the sobbing first-year in her twin bed could hardly think to fathom. For each week that pass es, I urge you to think about how

you have survived—the big mo ments, sure, but the little ones as well. Maybe you woke up to go on a run or tried a new RSO. Maybe you got past a disagreement with your roommates and cleaned your room and said no when you needed to say no. Maybe you made a good decision or a bad one, but my point is: You made it prin cipally, vitally, by yourself.

If college is meant to be a

period of reinvention or discov ery, if it is meant to be a period of increased independence and important life events, let it also be a playing field for the eventual buildup of a million inconsequen tial choices. Let yourself relish in how far you’ve come—from your first day, from yesterday, from this morning—and recognize

As students at the University of Chicago go through their daily lives, the small, seemingly inconsequential choices they make prepare them for their futures.

what an incredible thing that is.

On Wednesday, I have a friend over to finish off the detritus of that Whole Foods trip. We make

salmon omelets for dinner. I burn the fish. We scrape the pan clean and settle for scrambled eggs. This is my little life, made up of smaller days and a thousand rain-

soaked, sunlit moments. Some times you burn the fish and learn to do better next time. Sometimes you keep burning the fish, you buy too many apples, you keep

calling your ex, you keep failing calculus. Somewhere in those tiny decisions, little lessons, you grow up. You figure out how to face the world. You get up and greet

it, your full and beautiful future, with open arms.

Annie Dhal is a third-year in the College.

ARTS

Steppenwolf’s Miz Martha is a Feverish, Elaborate, and Infuriatingly Didactic Production

By ZACHARY LEITER | Associate Arts Editor

Shown this fall at Steppenwolf Theatre, James Ijames’s The Most Spectacularly Lam entable Trial of Miz Martha Washington is a grotesque, dark, darkly humorous, and en ergetic exploration of America’s original sin: slavery. On a stage ringed by cotton fields, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ijames depicts Miz Martha Washington’s feverish final mo ments in bed. When she dies, her hundreds of slaves will be freed by George Washing ton’s will. As Miz Martha lies in her death bed, caught between terrible dreams and an even more frightening present, the play focuses on whether the widow will willingly free her slaves before they kill her.

I say Miz Martha because the character is not intended to be true to life but rather a personification of America. At one point, she even states, “I am the mother of America.” At another point, a dream figure says to her, “You are America. … And I am here to ex amine America.” The result of the play’s cul tural trial for America’s original sin is never up for question here: This is an unabashed ly didactic play, but perhaps that is the only way to treat the material at hand safely. And so my challenge is to evaluate a play lacking almost entirely in contemplation but with abundant humor, bright performances, and sharp technical execution. On to the action.

The fact that the play’s events happen at Christmastime is easy to forget but for a

tense and sad moment when Ann Dandridge (Nikki Crawford) reminds her son William (Victor Musoni) that their Christmas must be put aside to serve Miz Martha. As the lights go down at the play’s open, the fes tively lit facade of Mount Vernon at center stage rises into the rafters, never to return. The rest of the play takes place in Miz Mar tha’s sparsely decorated bedroom and in her mind. A smartly designed bed platform moves up and down stage, distinguishing between dream and reality. But as the play progresses, the distinction becomes less and less clear. Fewer of Miz Martha’s dreams are spectacular, and more and more of them take place at Mount Vernon, with her slaves in attendance.

The decor in Miz Martha’s bedroom, and Clint Ramos’s scenic design as a whole, is fantastic. The backdrops are simple yet evocative, the cotton fields cast haunting shadows across the stage, and the bedroom is eerily contemporary in design. Every thing feels intentional, and those inten tions are largely successful: This is a play in which nothing and no one feels out of place.

Everything fits right in—that is, except for the constant references to the 21st century.

Characters speak largely in more modern English. William tells Miz Martha the sto ry of the United States—a recounting that goes quite a few years past their own pres

ent. One dream sequence is of a lit-up game show, another of a contemporary courtroom where Miz Martha is put on trial. For the record, the latter montage is entertaining, whereas the former is overly silly. The effect of it all is to drive home that slavery’s legacy extends into the modern era. Miz Martha’s reckoning, if extreme, is one with which we must all contend for ourselves and for our nation.

Cindy Gold, as Miz Martha, does well to keep her character from becoming a cari cature; Miz Martha’s role within the play is to provide a starting point from which to explore national complicity. Again, the woman’s own complicity is never really up for debate, nor is the issue of whether she will realize her moral failures. Gold does well to bring depth of expression and a gen uinely comedic stage presence to a charac ter whose moral code is lacking. Another strong performance comes from Carl Clem ons-Hopkins as Davy. In various dream roles, including a velvet-adorned George Washington, Hopkins is always convinc ing and often quite humorous. Celeste M. Cooper as Doll and Sydney Charles as Pris cilla have an entrancing rapport—watching them together on stage, one actually be lieves they have spent their lives together. And overall, Steppenwolf’s ensemble comes through strongly. All seven of Miz Martha’s cast members move well together on stage, crafting what is at times a masterpiece of

mise-en-scène.

This is a showcase of miraculous tonal shifts, where the enslaved people go from faux reverence to unrestrained laughter in a matter of seconds and where the audi ence is led to believe, at the very end, that Miz Martha has maybe just been reformed. Sitting together with him on her bed, Miz Martha tells William a semi-biblical story of the future summertime, when she and he will walk hand in hand. “That time is a ways away,” he replies. This answer seems to soothe Miz Martha’s conscience back into complacency. She orders William to fetch her water; gone then is any change of heart that her fever dreams brought about, to in clude a vision of her being sold into slavery by a sparkly Uncle Sam. To be free, she says at one point, “is the most marvelous of feel ings.” To Miz Martha, freedom is freedom from responsibility.

And, I fear, that might be what freedom is for this play. Miz Martha renders judg ment on Miz Martha and on her nation, but it does not linger to explore that judgment’s consequences. The play’s brisk runtime (90 minutes without intermission) is a strength with regard to the sharp execution of vision, but it prevents the characters and the audi ence from dwelling long on the implications of Ijames’s premise. Miz Martha is a tre mendous artistic success, though perhaps a shallow one.

“Let yourself relish in how far you’ve come— from your first day, from yesterday, from this morning— and recognize what an incredible thing that is.’”

SPORTS

In Memoriam: The 2022 Chicago White Sox

By DHEERAJ DEVARAJAN | Sports Reporter

It’s finally over. The sitcom-esque will-they-or-won’t-they story arc that has characterized the 2022 Chicago White Sox is finally over, and we have our answer. They won’t. They won’t make the playoffs. Their superior tal ent won’t show out and dominate the American League Central. The season is over, and the World Series aspirations of the White Sox organization and its fans lie in the gutter. Who’s to blame? Pret ty much everyone. To understand the issues that have prevented the South siders from fulfilling their potential, let’s take a look at the problems that have plagued the team over the past six months.

On the offensive side of the ball, the White Sox’s 2022 stats looked great— that is, if baseball analytics hadn’t progressed past the 1980s. At the end of the season, the Sox rank fifth out of 30 in the major leagues in batting aver age, second in hits, and seventh lowest in strikeouts. Sounds great, right? Not quite. They rank 22nd in home runs, 29th in triples, 23rd in extra-base hit percentage, joint 24th in stolen bases, 18th in slugging percentage, and 29th in walks. Just abysmal for a team loaded with power.

Who’s to blame for this? Some say hitting coach Frank Menechino, but then again, he was around during the 2020 season, when the White Sox were third in the majors in homers and spray ing the ball all over the park. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the ire of the majority of fans is directed at one person—one person who wasn’t around in 2020, who steers away from talking about the team’s home run statistics, and who emphasizes making contact over making strong contact or making contact in critical situations. That one person is Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa. Baseball is much different now than it was even 11 years ago, when La Russa last managed and won a World Series. Sabermetric tools like Statcast

were not around back then, and the baseball community worshipped at the altar of old-school managers like La Russa. I am not discrediting any of his accomplishments and previous achievements when I say that the game has passed him by. His approach to hit ting is just the tip of the iceberg of the issues he has created and exacerbated on this team. On the 3rd of October, La Russa announced his retirement from management due to the same health issues that had kept him away from the team since the end of August, meaning that the White Sox now have the oppor tunity to bring in a forward-thinking, analytically minded manager who can adopt an aggressive mindset and guide hitters on how to maximize scoring.

To diagnose what went wrong with the 2022 White Sox offense, we can’t look at too many individual perfor mances; they don’t explain why the team, as a whole, did not perform well. Many have been quick to blame Yoán Moncada, Leury García, Yasmani Gran dal, and other underperforming play ers, but players have down seasons. It happens. What is more concerning is the overall lack of patience and pop at the plate from the entire team. With the exception of outfielder Eloy Jiménez, pretty much everyone else struggled to hit the ball in the air and manufacture runs, especially with runners in scoring position. A lot of that comes down to the fact that double plays have been boun tiful in critical situations for the 2022 White Sox; this team hit the ball on the ground far too often. Things need to change before 2023, and the improved offensive output during La Russa’s ab sence from the team over the past 40 days has shown us where the central problem may have lain.

The starting pitching was largely pretty great. Dylan Cease is a Cy Young Award candidate and has established himself as the team’s ace. Johnny Cue to, who was picked up off the scrap heap

after Lance Lynn got injured at the end of spring training, was absolutely fan tastic this season, going deeper into games than any other Sox pitcher did. Lynn didn’t start off well but had a 2.52 ERA and a 0.97 WHIP after the All-Star break. Michael Kopech, in his first sea son as a starter, did an admirable job of getting to almost 120 innings with an ERA in the mid-3s. Replacement starters like Davis Martin and Jimmy Lambert also showed flashes of ability in their short stints when other players got injured. The single most concerning issue with this team’s pitching staff is Lucas Giolito. After an offseason when he was a trendy Cy Young pick and put on almost 20 pounds to be able to go lat er into games, Giolito had an abysmal season, putting up a 4.90 ERA, a 1.44 WHIP and allowing a .272 batting av erage against his pitching. Giolito has only one more season until he hits free agency, so one would hope that he some how finds his form next season in the most critical year of his career.

Let’s now get to the bullpen. Gen eral Manager Rick Hahn made bullpen spending a priority, and the payroll is indicative of that. The White Sox have the second highest bullpen payroll in Major League Baseball, spending al most $40 million this season on reliev ers. Offseason signings Joe Kelly and Kendall Graveman, along with veteran closer Liam Hendriks, were meant to create one of the most fearsome sev enth-, eighth-, and ninth-inning tri umvirates in the majors. Instead, the White Sox bullpen sported a 4.00 ERA and a 1.30 WHIP. It has been one of the worst groups in the American League. Joe Kelly was awful, with a 5.75 ERA and 1.53 WHIP in 2022. He’s getting paid $7 million this year and $9 million the next. At the trade deadline, Hahn told reporters that he was looking to shore up the bullpen; the irony of this statement was not lost on White Sox fans. Hahn did not do a good enough job of finding cheap talent in the freeagent market to provide depth in the

bullpen, which is the reason the reliever statistics were as dismal as they were. Reynaldo López is perhaps the only encouraging story of the season, as he was outstanding in a variety of roles, whether it be long relief, short relief, or closing out games. The bullpen needs to be supplemented by talent from the minor leagues and cheap talent from the free-agent market. Spending 20 percent of your payroll on relievers is not a win ning formula for a World Series team, and that doesn’t even take into account how dismal those relievers performed for the White Sox this season.

Both the process that the White Sox organization employs to develop and sign talent and the approach of the play ers on the field need to change in the offseason. Another season in the short “World-Series-or-bust” window the White Sox opened up in 2019 has been wasted, and unless player recruitment and development improves drastical ly during the course of the offseason, nothing will change. The team does have its backbone for the future, with Andrew Vaughn, Jiménez, Luis Robert, Cease, and Kopech all under team con trol for at least the next three seasons. Add Tim Anderson, López, and Garrett Crochet to that group, and you have a solid core that can contend for cham pionships. The supplementary pieces need to improve, though, and the re sponsibility of hiring the right manag er for the future, finding the right free agents, and developing the minor league system lies on Hahn, Executive Vice President Kenny Williams, and owner Jerry Reinsdorf. We have finally come to the conclusion of one of the most dis appointing seasons in the history of the Chicago White Sox, and this organiza tion requires an overhaul for things to change in the near and distant future. If not, there will be no parades on the South Side for the foreseeable future.