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Here’s What You Need to Know About the 2022 Midterm Races in Illinois

By PETER MAHERAS | Senior News Reporter

On November 8, voters in Illinois will decide who will represent them in govern ment over the next few years. Voters will also decide on a ballot measure that could determine the future of labor organizing in the state. Here is a summary of the major candidates running to represent Hyde Park and of the Workers’ Rights Amendment.

Governor

The governor’s race pits incumbent Democrat J. B. Pritzker against Illinois Sen ator Darren Bailey. Recent polling suggests Pritzker enjoys a significant lead over Bailey. Despite the seemingly uncompetitive nature of the race, both sides have spent significant amounts of money.

Pritzker is a billionaire businessman and a member of the family that owns the Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corporation. In 1998, Pritzker ran for the House of Repre sentatives in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District but finished third. He later served as the national co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. According to the Chicago Tribune, Pritzker has spent $152 million on his own campaign since winning the governor’s office in 2018. Forbes esti mates Pritzker’s net worth at $3.6 billion.

Bailey is the owner of Bailey Family Farm in Xenia, Illinois. In 2018, Bailey won a seat in the Illinois House of Representa tives for the 109th District before moving to the Illinois Senate in 2020. He easily won a six-person Republican primary with 57 per cent of the vote. Bailey has raised almost $14 million during his candidacy, including $10 million from billionaire Richard Uihlein.

Pritzker’s campaign has largely focused on raising awareness of his first-term record. During a recent debate, Pritzker listed pro viding $1.8 billion in tax relief, raising the minimum wage, legalizing cannabis, and

NEWS: Organizers Demand Affordable Housing,Transpar ency at Woodlawn Meeting

passing a major state infrastructure bill as some of his accomplishments.

Pritzker has recently increased his focus on attacking Bailey’s position on abortion. In a 2017 video posted on Bailey’s Facebook page, Bailey compared abortion to the Ho locaust.

“The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn’t even compare to a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion since its legalization,” Bailey said.

Bailey has spent the closing months of the campaign attacking Pritzker over crime, taxes, and education. Bailey supports repeal ing the recently passed SAFE-T Act, which abolished cash bail for several criminal of fenses, including second-degree murder and aggravated battery.

Senate

At the federal level, incumbent Dem ocratic senator Tammy Duckworth faces a challenge from Republican Kathy Salvi. Election experts, including the non-parti san Cook Political Report and UVA Center for Politics, expect Duckworth to be reelect ed comfortably. The most recent publicly available poll, conducted by Emerson Col lege, showed Duckworth with a 19 percent margin of victory.

Duckworth is a U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient who served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot during the Iraq War, in which she lost both legs when her helicopter was attacked by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2004. After leaving the Army, she became the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and then the assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs during the Obama administration. Duckworth was then elected to the House of Representatives in 2012, serving for two terms before unseating Republican senator

Mark Kirk in 2016.

Salvi is an attorney who served as a law clerk in Illinois’s Second Appellate District and as an assistant public defender in Lake County. She then entered private law prac tice as a personal injury lawyer. In 2006, Salvi ran for the Republican nomination for Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District but lost in the primary. Salvi defeated a sev en-candidate field in the Republican prima ry to win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote.

In her reelection campaign, Duckworth has touted the passage of recent bills includ

ing the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bi partisan Infrastructure Law.

Duckworth has criticized Salvi’s position on abortion. Salvi supported the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the constitu tional right to an abortion and said in a re cent debate that the issue of abortion access should be made at the state level.

In the same debate, Salvi attempted to characterize Duckworth as a “rubber stamp” for President Biden’s “socialist, left ist agenda.” Salvi has also focused on tying Duckworth to inflation and crime, which re

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cent polling suggests are two of the most im portant issues for Illinois voters. According to Salvi’s website, she prioritizes increasing domestic energy production, limiting federal spending, securing the southern border, and expanding police resources.

House of Representatives

Representative Bobby Rush’s announce ment that he would retire after nearly 30 years in Congress created a rare open seat in Illinois’s First Congressional District, which covers almost all of Hyde Park.

The Republican nominee is Eric Carlson, who won the Republican primary by fewer than 400 votes. The Democratic primary featured 17 candidates hoping to replace Rush. Jonathan Jackson received 28 percent of the primary vote and will face Carlson in the general election. Cook Political Report finds that the district favors Democrats by 20 percent.

Jackson is the son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and activist Jacque line Jackson. After graduating from business school, Jackson worked as an investment analyst before starting several of his own businesses. Jackson is running on a pro gressive platform, supporting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and stricter gun laws. He has been endorsed by a number of

high-profile politicians and organizations, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep resentative Jesús “Chuy” García, and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Carlson was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman in 1995. He was released after spending only six years behind bars. Per his website, Carl son’s top political priorities include fighting crime and lowering inflation. His most re cent financial disclosure shows he has spent less than $5,000 on his campaign.

Amendment 1

Illinois voters will also determine whether the Illinois Constitution should be amended to guarantee employees the right to organize and to collective bargaining. If adopted, Amendment 1, also known as the Workers’ Rights Amendment, would pro hibit the Illinois legislature from passing legislation that interferes with the rights of employees to form unions.

Proponents of the measure, primarily union leaders and Democratic politicians, argue that the law will strengthen unions’ ability to bargain for better working condi tions. The law would also bar the legislature from passing right-to-work laws, which pre vent unions and companies from requiring employees to join the union when hired.

“Corporations are much more powerful

than an individual worker who wants to go in and bargain for their own wages,” Pritzker said in the gubernatorial debate. “Workers ought to be able to get together and go in together to try to get a better wage, a safer workplace, and benefits. That’s what we’re trying to guarantee.”

Opponents of the amendment claim it in terferes with an individual’s ability to choose whether to join a union and decreases the government’s control over public services,

such as schools.

“There’s no limit on what government leaders can be forced to give away because of the powerful strikes that we will see,” Mailee Smith, director of labor policy at the liber tarian Illinois Policy Institute, told WBEZ. “It’s going to drive up the cost of government, and who’s going to be forced to pay for that? That’s the taxpayers.”

IOP Staff Sent Home Following Bomb Threat

By NIKHIL JAISWAL | News Editor and EMMA JANSSEN | Deputy News Editor

The University of Chicago Institute of Politics (IOP) told student staff not to enter the building Tuesday afternoon after the institute received a bomb threat this morn ing over a panelist for an event on protests in Iran. The panelist, Negar Mortazavi, has been accused of having connections to the Iranian government despite criticizing it in the media. Multiple sources at the IOP familiar with the situation informed The Maroon that the closure was due to safety concerns.

The bomb threat was received via email, according to a source that communicated with The Maroon

Another source told The Maroon that

law enforcement had searched the IOP’s house on South Woodlawn Avenue with bomb-sniffing dogs. The source also said that people had been coming into the Insti tute throughout the day falsely claiming to know IOP staffers.

The IOP had been receiving calls criti cal of Mortazavi since last week in regard to “Taking it to the Streets: the Power of Irani an Women Now,” an event scheduled for this afternoon at 3:30 p.m. that was shifted from in person to virtual Tuesday morning in con sultation with the University. Another IOP event scheduled for today, a seminar with IOP fellow Laura Dove, moved to a building across the street.

The Maroon obtained an email sent to IOP interns on Monday, October 17, that con firmed that the IOP had been receiving calls since this past weekend. House interns were instructed to take down the information of those that called and were specifically told not to give out their personal information or information regarding the whereabouts of an IOP employee whose contact informa tion was included in the announcement of the event.

The Maroon also obtained an internal IOP spreadsheet used to track calls related to the event and discovered that, as of this afternoon, the IOP had received more than 100 calls about the event.

The event, which focused on recent widespread protests in Iran, has spurred controversy because of the allegation that

Mortazavi is connected to the Iranian gov ernment via her involvement with the Na tional Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, D.C., which she joined as the Director of Persian & New Media in early 2014. NIAC states that it does not receive funding from either the Iranian or the U.S. governments.

Mortazavi, who has been critical of the Iranian government’s crackdown on pro tests, responded to the controversy sur rounding her on Twitter and labeled the attacks on her as “smears.”

In 2020, U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (RAR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Mike Braun (R-IN) alleged that the NIAC and its sister organization, NIAC Action, were in violation

“Workers ought to be able to get together and go in together to try to get a better wage, a safer workplace, and benefits”

The Illinois General Assembly. courtesy of daniel schwen

“These accused ties with the regime are absolutely false and quite dangerous”

of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In re sponse, dozens of prominent organizations and individuals signed a letter in support of the NIAC.

In response to The Maroon’s request for comment on the bomb threat, IOP Di

rector of Communications Koran Addo said, “Our event ‘Taking it to the Streets: The Power of Iranian Women Now’ elicited strong online reactions from people who ob jected to one of our guests. In consultation with the University, the IOP decided to close normal building operations today out of an

abundance of caution.”

In response to the criticism surrounding her inclusion in the IOP’s event, Mortazavi sent The Maroon the following statement. “These accused ties with the regime are ab solutely false and quite dangerous. I have lived in exile from the regime since 2009 be

cause of my work, and endured harassment and pressure on myself and my family. I have worked with prominent American and Eu ropean media outlets over the years and have a long track record of professional and nuanced work on Iran and US-Iran affairs.”

Judge Denies Motion to Dismiss Financial Aid Collusion Lawsuit Against UChicago and Others

By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter

A federal judge has denied a motion that would have dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against 17 elite universities, including the University of Chicago. The initial lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and alleged that a group of universities coordinated the amounts of financial aid they offered.

According to the Amended Class Ac tion Complaint, the plaintiffs allege that the defendants have “participated and are participating in a price-fixing cartel that is designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid as a locus of competition, and [have] artifi cially inflated the net price of attendance for students receiving financial aid.”

The universities argue that they are ex empt from antitrust laws because of the 568 Exemption. The 568 Exemption creates an exception to the Sherman Antitrust Act, which allows universities to collaborate on financial aid package formulas–which

would otherwise be illegal—if students are admitted on a need-blind basis. A group of universities that qualify for the 568 Exemp tion, such as Yale University and Columbia University, are members of an interest group known as the 568 Presidents Group.

The members of the Group produced a formula—the “Consensus Methodology”— which would cap financial aid awards at a certain value, meaning that students seeking aid would receive similar offers from mul tiple universities. This tactic, the plaintiffs argue, has inflated the price of attending uni versity across the country and overcharged students millions of dollars.

The Plaintiffs argue that the Group’s members have violated the 568 Exemp tion and fail to admit students on a truly need-blind basis by favoring the students of wealthy families in the admissions process.

On August 15, 2022, the court determined

that the Group members were not protected by the exemption and are still liable to the suit alleged against them.

The University of Chicago had filed a sep arate motion against the lawsuit on the basis that it had withdrawn from the 568 Group in 2014. U.S District Judge Matthew F. Ken nelly’s opinion also denied this motion.

“The Court concludes that [Chicago is] not entitled to the dismissal of the claims made against [it], as the complaint does not establish their withdrawal from the claimed conspiracy,” wrote Kennelly, “The amended complaint states that some of the defendants have claimed to withdraw, but this does not amount to a concession that they did, in fact, withdraw.”

Kennelly wrote that the University must “take affirmative acts to disavow the conspiracy and its goals” in order to truly withdraw from the 568 Group.

The antitrust exemption was part of the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994

and expired on September 30, 2022. The universities that were part of the exemption are now required to abide by the same anti trust laws that outlaw price fixing.

“Congress rightly concluded that the Section 568 antitrust exemption should not be renewed. Defendant universities never complied with the congressional mandate that they be need-blind regarding all stu dents and all families in admitting students. Instead, for decades they exploited the ex emption to favor wealthy applicants and families, and to disfavor applicants from middle and working-class families,” Robert D. Gilbert of Gilbert Litigators & Counsel ors of the Plaintiffs’ Counsel commented to The Maroon, “Moreover, by agreeing not to compete, they overcharged these applicants and families, and forced them to bear unnec essarily high debt. Now defendants do not have any excuse for their collusion, which must end.”

Meeting

By NOAH GLASGOW | Senior News Reporter

In the early 1980s, Patricia Tatum, a nurse at University of Chicago Medicine system, decided to look for housing in the Hyde Park and Woodlawn neighbor hoods. The University provided her with a list of available housing options nearby, but when Tatum, a Black woman, went to

look at these properties, not a single prop erty manager would show her an apart ment for rent.

“Everything I looked at or went to vis it, all of a sudden they were rented out or they didn’t have any vacancies anymore,” Tatum said.

Tatum recalled that a white cowork er later asked to see the list of addresses, believing that many of the buildings had available units.

“When he came back, he told me that almost every one of them that he went to, they showed him a unit when they never showed me anything,” Tatum said. She says her unsuccessful search for housing

was a common experience among Black employees. “I still hear stories like that about employees of the University.”

Forty years after this incident, and following a decades-long career with the University, Tatum is now a Wood lawn homeowner and a supporter of the UChicago reparations campaign. This co

alition of community-organizing groups demands reparations from the University for its history of racism toward Black em ployees and Southsiders.

“The call for reparations isn’t some thing that can be downplayed,” Tatum said in her conversation with The Ma roon. “It’s something that needs to be ad dressed and needs to be addressed now.”

The reparations campaign brings to gether student and community groups, including UChicago Against Displace ment (UCAD) and the Obama Commu nity Benefits Agreement (CBA) Coalition, which directed Tatum to the reparations group.

At an October 1 community meet ing at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Woodlawn’s 64th Street, the campaign unveiled a new set of demands for the University, including a $1 billion affordable housing grant and a reified agreement not to expand campus south of East 61st Street. On October 25, the campaign will hold an on-campus “edu cational town hall” at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture to present the new aims to University fac

ulty and students.

“Students have a part to play in all of this, since our presence here necessarily furthers this gentrification and therefore students have a responsibility to stop the institution’s continued expansion,” a stu dent organizer with UCAD told The Ma roon in an emailed statement.

Organizers of the reparations cam paign cite more than a century of racist University history as the impetus behind its calls for affordable housing and insti tutional transparency. At their meeting on October 1, the campaign said that this history dates back to the founding of the original University of Chicago in 1856, on land donated by Illinois politician Ste phen A. Douglas, who held a significant ownership stake in a Mississippi planta tion.

Although the present University ad ministration has officially challenged accusations of a connection to the “old” University, academics and activists have insisted on a lasting financial connection between the institutions.

At the October meeting and in fol low-up communications with The Ma roon, organizers with the campaign ex

plained that their demands seek redress for the University’s historical support of segregated housing covenants and its sponsorship of urban renewal policies that have displaced South Side residents.

“There’s no reason for [the Universi ty] to ignore demands,” Tatum said. “We can historically give an account of how the University was built on the back of slaves and on the backs of Black people.”

Some controversy at the October 1 meeting emerged over the campaign’s use of the term “reparations,” which multiple members of the Woodlawn community believed signaled a project with a nation wide scope, not one focused on the Uni versity alone. Among those who vocally objected to the term at the meeting was Andre Smith, a Woodlawn activist who has run multiple times for the position of 20th Ward alderman.

Reparations campaign organizers told The Maroon that they did not intend to adjust the name of their campaign. They added that Smith “disrupted” the meet ing because of the reparations campaign’s lasting partnership with sitting 20th Ward Alderman Jeanette Taylor, Smith’s political adversary.

Linda Jennings, a South Shore resi dent present at the meeting and an activ ist with the Obama Center CBA, defended graduate student organizers’ use of the term “reparations” in an interview with The Maroon.

“I think the students should be ag gressive and use ‘reparations’ Because that’s what you’re asking the University for. They […] knowingly did damage to a community, so knowingly you need to say what it is—reparations—and not be afraid of the word. We can’t be afraid,” Jennings said. “I think the grad students are taking on a gargantuan challenge. And I believe that they’re built for the fight.”

Tatum said she was glad to see that students were working arm in arm with community members and involving local residents in the conversation.

“For too long, people who live out side of Woodlawn have been the voice of Woodlawn,” Tatum said. “This is really the point at which we really need to tie into the voice of the community.”

The town hall open to students will be held Tuesday, October 25, at 5733 South University Avenue, home to the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

Southeast Side to Vote on Expanding Mental Health Resources for Underinsured Residents

By SOPHIA KANG | News Reporter

Voters in Kenwood, Woodlawn, South Shore, and Hyde Park will vote on a binding referendum that could re store mental health services for low-in come, underinsured communities on the Southeast Side. The referendum will also ask voters if the property tax in these neighborhoods should be raised by 0.025 percent to fund an Expanded Mental Health Services Program (EM HSP), a mental health clinic that would provide free mental health services for uninsured residents. The vote will take

place on November 8, during the 2022 midterm elections.

The Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers, a nonprofit that advo cates for EMHSPs across Chicago, was founded in 1991 in response to former mayor Richard M. Daley’s closing of seven of the city’s public mental health clinics. In 2011, organizers at the coali tion led the effort to pass the Commu nity Mental Health Services Act, which empowers communities to petition for and create a self-funded EMHSP.

Calls to restore affordable mental health services for low-income, under insured communities come after a series of budget cuts during Daley’s term that planned to close most of the city’s pub lic 19 mental health clinics by 2011. In 2012, then mayor Rahm Emanuel closed six out of the city’s 12 remaining public clinics. Today, only five of these clinics remain.

If voters approve the referendum on November 8, local organizations like the coalition will nominate commu nity members to serve on a governing commission that will lead the EMHSP

for Southeast Side communities. The commission will consist of nine mem bers, five of them appointed by Gover nor J. B. Pritzker and four by Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The commission’s goal is to manage the EMHSP’s funds and mold the program’s services to meet the needs of the communities it serves.

Coalition organizer Rapheal Arte berry and his team spent the last two summers collecting signatures in sup port of getting the referendum on the ballot.

Arteberry hopes to eliminate the

“The call for reparations isn’t something that can be downplayed.… It’s something that needs to be addressed and needs to be addressed now”

stigmatization of mental illness in com munities across Chicago.

“When I first heard of this initiative, I was like, ‘This is definitely a no-brain er. Of course I’ll get involved,’” Arte berry said. “People like you and I—that is mental health. That is what mental health looks like—people that are out here that are just dealing with things on the regular.”

Jeanette Jones, a South Shore res ident who joined the coalition as a volunteer in 2021, says that access to affordable mental health resources is especially urgent in her community.

“I was surprised that there were so many people who, when I stopped them and told them about the referendum,

they said, ‘Yes! We need this! I wish I had the money [to seek mental health sup port]’ or ‘I wish I’d known where to go when my son was going through a men tal health crisis last year.’ I received a lot of encouraging feedback from people when I asked them to sign the petition to have the referendum placed on the ballot,” Jones said.

Not all Southeast Side residents, however, approve of the proposed prop erty tax increase that would fund the EMHSP.

Woodlawn resident Pam Smith says that she doesn’t think the property tax increase is necessary, although she sup ports the expansion of mental health services for Southeast Side communi ties.

“There’s no need to do anything spe cial or extraordinary to expand mental health resources,” Smith said. “Check the budgets. Mental health always ac counted for a drop in the bucket com pared to other city stuff.”

Kenwood resident and mental health professional Dorothy Valin believes that property taxes should be raised across Cook County, not just for Southeast Side communities, to fund the EMHSP.

“The problem with the [proposed property tax increase] is that, in this proposal, the residents of Southeast Chicago, with a higher proportion of poorer people, would have their prop erty taxes raised,” Valin said. “I think that taxes should be raised throughout the county, and the community cen

ters [that then-mayor Rahm Emanuel] closed should be reopened. Then spread the increase throughout the county.”

But residents like Jones emphasize the need for affordable mental health services regardless of the source of funding.

“I see it in my community—the need for these services—because of gun vio lence and the trauma from gun violence and death,” she said. “And there are peo ple dealing with racism and depression. Where do they go? The first thing you’ll hear in my community is ‘I’m not crazy’ or ‘There’s nobody crazy here.’ But it’s not about being crazy. It’s about main taining or reestablishing a good mental perspective on life.”

Panelists Discuss Women’s Rights, Regime Change at IOP Event on Iran

By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter

At an Institute of Politics (IOP) event on October 18, assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Saeid Gol kar and Iranian-American journalist Negar Mortazavi discussed the pro tests sparked by the death of 22-yearold Mahsa Amini. The event, titled “Taking it to the Streets: The Power of Iranian Women Now,” was moderated by IOP Speaker Series director Jennifer Steinhauer.

Amini was detained and killed by the Iranian morality police in Septem ber for allegedly violating Iran’s dress code, which stipulates that women wear a head covering and loose clothing over their arms and legs in public.

Mortazavi’s invitation to the IOP at tracted controversy online, with thou sands of comments on the IOP’s social media pages saying that Mortazavi “was not [their] voice.” Members of the Ira nian diaspora allege that Mortazavi has ties to the government, an allegation she forcibly denies, noting that she has lived in exile from the regime since 2009.

The event was switched to a virtual format Tuesday morning because of se

curity concerns, according to IOP com munications director Koran Addo. IOP Pritzker fellow Rana Ayyub, who was originally scheduled to speak alongside Mortazavi, withdrew after receiving “numerous antagonistic online messag es related to the event,” Addo told The Maroon.

“This is a continuation of past rounds of mass protests against the system. This time around, we’re seeing an in tersectionality of the different commu nities,” Mortazavi said. “But at the core of this is essentially feminist uprising, a women’s uprising against years of op pression, discrimination, discriminato ry laws against women, and the violent enforcement of these laws.”

Mortazavi emphasized the history of discrimination against women in Iran.

“When I talk about this system [of] repression and discrimination against women, it is rooted not only in just the law and state-sanctioned regulation. It’s also rooted in religion, tradition, and patriarchy that have been imposed on women for centuries.”

Golkar explained that human rights in Iran have worsened from the Islamic

Republic’s conception in 1979, leading to the protests seen this fall. According to Amnesty International, the Iranian government applies the death penalty for crimes such as the consumption of alcohol and other drugs and same-sex relations. In 2021, at least 132 people were sentenced to death on account of drug offenses in Iran. The Iranian gov ernment also killed approximately 304 protestors and arrested thousands be tween November 15 and 18 of 2019, as part of a crackdown against nationwide protests.

“The Islamic Republic… gradually became a more repressive regime com pared to the past. What we’re seeing now in 2022 is huge dissatisfaction, a huge resentment of the Iranians against the Islamic Republic,” Golkar said. “They want to have a regime change…but also, they want to change the social struc ture.” He added that those structures are not just about women’s freedom, as evidenced by the most recent protest, but also environmental, political, social, and economic rights.

Mortazavi detailed the differences in the extent of protesters’ demands.

“Some protestors want an end [to the regime], a system change, and don’t see

any avenue for change in the system. But we’re also hearing smaller, concrete de mands, such as the abolishment of the morality police.”

Golkar claimed, however, that re form would not be enough to address citizens’ concerns.

“The Islamic Republic is unreform able structurally, and I don’t have hope for any meaningful reform in Iran in the years to come,” Golkar said. “Even if you want the morality police to go or have the freedom of choosing your clothes, you cannot have that under the Islamic Republic.”

Mortazavi expressed the uncertain ty of the future of the protests. Prior to 2022, there have been significant move ments protesting the Islamic Republic for economic, social, and political rea sons in 1999, 2009, 2018, and 2019.

“If a regime change does happen, what’s next? [The protests] are from a generation who has seen the impacts from the 1979 Revolution. What was promised then versus what material ized was very different, and this worries a lot of Iranians,” Mortazavi said. “The protests are very incredible and unique, but [the violence] could get worse. It’s a messy situation.”

“That is what mental health looks like—people that are out here that are just dealing with things on the regular”

Dispatches From a Fishless Lake

By NICK ROMMEL | Grey City Reporter

If you, like me, have an itch to uncover our city’s piscine history, go to the Chica go History Museum’s online photo archive and type “smelt fishing” into the search bar. About 40 images will appear, black and white photos from the ’60s and ’70s. All are taken at night, when artificial light sources can be used to lure smelt, a small migra tory fish, towards the surface. There, they are easily netted, or “dipped.” The dippers’ windbreakers and wool hats attest to the month, April—its chilly but increasingly warming nights cuing the smelt into their yearly migration up to the Great Lakes trib utary rivers in which they spawn.

On that April 22, 1976—the day most of the photos were taken—fishing groups stretched all the way down the North Av enue pier in Lincoln Park. A broad slice of humanity is on display. One group has built a bonfire out of those flimsy wooden fences you can still find on all the Chicago beaches. Four young children sit beside it on a wall, framed by the skyline, pay ing rapt attention to a story being told by a standing man. Another group divides their labor between netting the smelt and immediately charcoal-grilling them, the latter job belonging to a modest-looking pair while their grinning friend, dapper in his white-trimmed leather jacket and sea captain’s hat, commands the former.

In another image, a father and his sons run down the pier with buckets in their hands, faces giddy. Apart from the rest, a small group of three sit by the light of only one lantern, casting long shadows over the pier. Two of them, one silhouetted and one drenched in the lantern’s white light, sit and face the third, who is the picture

of concentration as he crouches over some small tool or implement. Two lines extend off the pier and into the water that blends into blackness with the sky. The thawing waves lap, and the smelt flit and turn below, while the lights on the edge of the city twin kle coldly and far away.

As it did on this night, fishing has sig nified community, sustenance, and ritual to generations of Chicagoans. A lived con nection to the lake endured even as sky scrapers surged into the sky and concrete choked the marshy shore. But beneath the waves, an ecocidal drama played itself out. Its initiator was commerce and progress, its characters are obscure aquatic species, and its conclusion is a lake left barren. That’s what we have left today.

Lake Michigan, before settling into its current basin, was cyclically pushed south ward and pulled northward by the oscillat ing continental glaciers of successive Ice Ages. Over thousands of years, the lake be came populated by the “hardy fish and oth er aquatic species that had been dwelling in the melted waters just beyond the glacier’s reach,” journalist Dan Egan writes in his 2017 book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And when the most recent of the gla ciers receded about 4,000 years ago, these species came to constitute the ecosystem of Lake Michigan as well as the Great Lakes at large. Cut off from the Atlantic Ocean by the rapid currents and steep ledges of Niagara Falls, the lakes’ ecosystem was protected from any incursions by oceanic species.

As in any healthy ecosystem, the food web of the lake was complex. Everything depended on algae-like phytoplankton and the tiny zooplankton that ate them. Small

fish ate this plankton, and bigger fish ate the smaller fish, but some larger fish also ate plankton. Some smaller fish preyed on the eggs and young of bigger fish, while a few focused on insects. Add mollusks and crustaceans to the mix, and you’ve got a tangled web of cohabitation, predation, and codependence featuring commonly known species like perch, bass, and musk ies; species like fatmucket, clam, and lake trout that have been decimated by the eco logical changes that humans have wrought; and species like burbots and sculpins that live on, hiding in the deep water’s obscurity.

But of all the lake’s species, lake trout was king. Trout, which still live in the lake, can grow up to 70 pounds and live for de cades. In years when food is scarce, they stop growing to save energy. In years of plenty, they resume devouring everything in their path, from plankton and insects to other fish. This incredible flexibility and longevity allowed the lake trout to form specialized colonies “uniquely adapted to thrive in the areas [they] colonized,” Egan writes. Bottom-dwelling trout developed eyes closer to the tops of their heads. Those near streams adapted to migrate upstream to spawn like salmon, while those in deep water grew more body fat to remain buoy ant near the lake’s floor. The region’s early European settlers gave these separate col onies names like yellow fins, buckskins, grease balls, and moss trout. Initially, the most effective method these men had for catching the trout was to let an angry hooked trout drag the boat around until it grew tired enough for the men to pull it out of the water. Native American tribes would net and spear the trout when they migrated to shallow water to spawn every fall, using the upcoming winter weather as a natural

storage mechanism. Even as commercial fishing took off and led to concerns about overharvesting, yields remained remark ably high—by Egan’s account, 8 million pounds of lake trout were being pulled out of Lake Michigan every year at the turn of the 20th century. But the lake’s diversity and bounty were tenuously protected by just one single geologic formation—Niaga ra Falls. Under the banner of progress, hu mans soon overcame this barrier, changing the lakes for good.

The first character in the ecocidal drama is not a fish but Canada’s Welland Canal. Built between St. Catherine’s and Port Colborne in the province of Ontario, it finally gave Lake Ontario and Lake Erie a connection by water other than the Niag ara River and its famous falls, impassable to ships. After the canal opened in 1829, it was enlarged and deepened throughout the following decades, allowing organisms native to the Atlantic Ocean, St. Lawrence River, and downstream Lake Ontario to use the artificial navigation channel to enter the remaining four Great Lakes’ isolated ecosystem.

The sea lamprey was the first truly de structive example of these Welland Canal invaders. With its eel-like body and per fectly round, perpetually open mouth lined with dozens of tiny teeth, it’s a scary fish. And it’s a real threat too: It uses this mouth to latch on to other fish and bleed them out until they die. In the Atlantic Ocean, it’s kept in check by larger predators like cod. But as soon as it got into Lake Erie, then Hu ron and Michigan, it was open season. What became of the resplendent, kingly lake trout? Lake Michigan’s catch decreased from 6.5 million pounds in 1944 to a mere

The fish of Lake Michigan and the people that once depended on them have become the victims of an underwater ecocide.

342,000 pounds in 1949 and none at all five years later, with the lamprey to blame.

The next character in the drama is a person: Vernon Applegate, a University of Michigan doctoral student. Applegate knew that most of a sea lamprey’s life is spent bur rowed into the bank of a stream, sucking tiny bits of food out of the water until it grows large enough to go out into the open water and feast on the blood of larger fish. So he camped out at one of these streams in northern Michigan, intent on finding a weakness in the invader’s life cycle that could be targeted, controlling the lam prey infestation. Egan writes that Apple gate would chase the parasites “up rivers through the night and into dawn with flash lights and a notebook” and that the scientist “built outdoor pens to watch them breed.”

Applegate was obsessive, “living on cigarettes and aspirin.” He tracked their migration schedule to the week and real ized that the most effective control would be a poison, a “lampricide” that would kill off the invaders in their streams before they ever got to the lake, leaving other fish unharmed. So the mad scientist started another multi-year project, this time at a remote research station on Michigan’s Lake Huron shoreline: testing thousands of chemicals, sent by chemical corporations all over the country, by mixing them into a fish tank containing two juvenile lampreys and two native fish. The 5,209th chemical was the one that finally killed the lampreys and spared the others. By 1967, the poison had driven the lamprey population to 1/10th of what it had been, and it remains at that level today thanks to a long-running lampricide program administered by the United States and Canada.

Enter the alewife. This fish had snuck in through the Welland Canal with the lam prey. Too small for the bloodsucker and completely unchecked by the decimated lake trout and whitefish, alewife popula tions exploded: Scientists estimated that they accounted for 90% of Lake Michigan’s fish mass in 1965. Great Lakes fishermen attempted to make an industry out of this new invader as East Coast fishermen had done for centuries, but the lake’s salinity proved too low to sustain the alewife in

the long-term. They came to shore anoth er way: foot-deep mats of decaying sludge washed up on the beaches of Lake Mich igan, including Chicago’s entire urban lakeshore. The city had to use bulldozers to dispose of them. Morale was low, and some park workers even quit in disgust.

Then came the salmon. Ignoring a fed eral project reintroducing lake trout to the now cleansed Lake Michigan, the State of Michigan’s Head of Fisheries Howard Tan ner brought salmon eggs from the Pacific Northwest and started stocking the lakes with these instead. He was focused on boosting recreational fishing and believed the non-native salmon provided a more in teresting fight when hooked than the trout did. The salmon would also gobble up what was left of the alewife, preventing anoth er beaching event. The stocking program proved highly successful, with the Pacific newcomers establishing their own runs up local rivers and filling up the empty lakes, overrunning the native holdouts that might have finally had a chance at post-lamprey resurgence. Tanner didn’t particularly care: By the 1970s, recreational fishing in Michigan had skyrocketed. Piers all along the state’s enormous coastline became, essentially, constant tailgates while lake side communities raked in the profits of tourism.

The act of environmental engineering didn’t stick. In the late ’80s, the salmon started declining. So did the alewife, though there were fewer salmon to eat them. So did all the native holdouts, though there were fewer alewives to prey on their eggs. The culprit was an invader that put the nail in the ecological coffin: zebra mussels.

This mussel is native to Ukraine’s Dnieper River estuary, a region known for its oscillations in salinity. This made them well equipped to travel in the ballast tanks of ships, floating in the water that ships take in for balance. Oceangoing vessels did this in ports all over the world, then flushing and replacing the water at port in the Great Lakes. Once they made it over, zebra mus sels spread across Lake Michigan’s bottom like spilt water on a tabletop, eating up all the plankton and starving the fish further up the food web. The related quagga mus sel did the same thing 10 years later, even

spreading to deeper areas that had been in accessible to the zebra mussel. “Lake Mich igan,” University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences ecologist John Janssen tells me, “is basically just a giant mussel bed now.”

Go to the lakeshore, and you will see the traces. Washed up on the beaches—along with the driftwood, bottle caps, and plas tic straws—are snaking lines of the mussels’ tiny shells. Step in the water, and you’ll re mark how clear it is. That’s on account of the mussels filtering out all the microor ganisms that typically cloud fresh water. If you swim out to a buoy, a water intake station, or a pier, you’ll find them bristling across the surface, too small to harvest and eat but large enough to cut and pierce your skin. And if you notice any dead shorebirds, know that the new water clarity helps the growth of algae that deoxygenate Lake Michigan, creating ideal conditions for the proliferation of the avian botulism bacteria.

Various fishing traditions have suffered as the lake has become barren. Ojibwe and Winnebago fishermen sitting in birchbark canoes once speared fish by torchlight and wove nets out of nettle plants to catch a large part of their yearly sustenance. Even as settlers encroached and environmen tal problems mounted, tribes forcefully defended their treaty-stipulated fishing rights. Gone are the days when South Side steelworkers would take their skiffs out on weekends and fish to supplement their wages. Before World War II, most Chicago

fishing outfits belonged to this category. And if you go to Diversey Parkway bridge across the Chicago River, you won’t find fishing trawlers unloading their smelt by catch and frying it for passers-by in what one Chicagoan recalls as a stream of “gruff talk and jabs and winks.” Under combined pressure from environmental degradation and the recreational fishing lobby, the Illi nois Department of Conservation limited lake fishing licenses from 45 to just three, instituting a lottery for the coveted spots and driving many family operations out of business. Now, to the average University of Chicago student and most Chicagoans, Lake Michigan exists for recreational pur poses only, severed from our food system and economy by the waves of invasive spe cies that have left it empty.

There are always those who try to gath er something from the wreckage. Through all the ecological turbulence, a federal lake trout reintroduction program has been stubbornly running on Lake Michigan for decades. The fish is a draw for Chicago an glers, as any cursory glance at the bullishly alive Chicago fishing community on Reddit will reveal. Raising fish in hatcheries and releasing them for recreational anglers to catch is no replacement for a functioning ecosystem. But in 2001, Janssen was finally able to record the first evidence of natural lake trout reproduction in the lake, zebra mussels notwithstanding. He continues his lake trout monitoring to this day. He was

Calumet Fisheries, an old-fashioned smokehouse perched on the side of Calumet River. photo by nick rommel

“The sea lamprey was the first truly destructive example of these Welland Canal invaders.”

preparing to go on a multi-day boating trip to investigate potential trout spawning ar eas in Lake Superior when I spoke to him.

He explains that in a lake, this warped invasive species can have good conse quences too. One of the Great Lakes’ new arrivals is the round goby, native to the same European waters as zebra mussels, and a prodigious eater of the mollusks: It’s already succeeded in driving the scourge out of Wisconsin’s Green Bay. Unexpected ly, native bass really took to the gobies, so much so that bass fishing in Lake Michigan is on the up. Howard Tanner’s salmon still have their runs, too, and the Chicago SunTimes’ outdoors column reports on prize catches made by urban anglers throughout the summer.

Some commercial fishing operations have held on. Most are in Lake Superior, though one in Lake Michigan still fishes for the elusive burbot, a bottom-dwelling rela tive of cod that is barely researched due to its inaccessible habitat. The more common catches are familiar lake trout and white fish, battered but not beaten in northerly Lake Superior, where low calcium levels make zebra mussel growth difficult. A taste of these resilient fish—and a connection to

the lake that goes beyond wading in, decid ing it’s too cold, and wading back out—can be found just a few Metra stops south of campus at Calumet Fisheries, an old-fash ioned smokehouse perched on the side of Calumet River.

The place is surrounded by creaking old bridges, highway overpasses, and post-in dustrial junkyards, surviving with the same kind of tenacity that drives scientists like Janssen back to the lakes they’ve lived their lives by. Founded in the 1920s under a different name, Calumet Fisheries survived the deindustrialization of South Chicago that deprived it of steelworkers stopping for a bite after their shift; it has flourished in the 21st century despite the bleak, disused landscape that has set in around it. Part of that is thanks to a feature on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, but most of it has been on account of the place itself. The customers are loyal and have been coming for decades. It has deep local roots, embod ied by store manager Javier Magellanes, a young man only a couple years older than some of the students reading this newspa per. He started working at the smokehouse as an after-school job while growing up in the neighboring East Side neighborhood and rose through the ranks until the store

was entrusted to him. He takes me to see the main component of the store’s stubborn excellence: the smoking itself.

Great Lakes trout, whitefish, and smelt, along with imported shrimp and salmon, are brought on the previous afternoon in a small truck. Each fish sits in a secret brine overnight until the worker with the morning shift comes in at 5 a.m. to start the smoking process. The fish is sliced into what’s known as a “darne” shape at this point: The bones and organs taken out so that the cross-section of the fish resembles a tooth or a horseshoe. It’s hung from strings on metal rods near the top of the little brick smoking shack next to the shop (made from the “good” Chicago bricks of the early 20th century, Magellanes says). Oak logs are put on a movable grate sitting on the ground and pushed inside with the flame burning. The door is closed: This part is for heating up the inside of the smokehouse enough to cook the fish. Once it’s cooked, the worker dons heavy-duty work gloves and protec tive glasses to replace oak with the smokier cherry. It’s periodically pushed in and out of the smokehouse while the door is kept open, giving the fish its smoky taste after it’s been cooked through. I ask Javier if he can stand to eat fish in his free time any

more.

“Yes, I never get tired of our fish,” he says. “But bonfires are the real problem. I smell like smoke every single day. I do laun dry all the time. When a buddy invites me to a bonfire in his yard on the weekend, I just can’t bring myself to go. I can’t be smelling like smoke on the weekends too.”

Calumet Fisheries smokes up some de licious fish, but it’s paltry consolation for the cold, hard fact: The piscine history of Chicago is an ecological catastrophe. Think about it too much, and the waves start to lap with the silence of annihilation. The fisher men on the piers lose their idyllic sheen and seem more like Sisyphus than like Heming way’s Old Man. The stray birds probably eat more pizza crusts than they do fish. And the supermarket fish we eat for dinner—Alas kan salmon, Icelandic cod, Mississippi cat fish—is just faceless fillet, pastiche product.

The joy that Calumet Fisheries or a big salmon catch may bring is put in perspec tive by something called ecological baseline shift: What seems natural, healthy, and good to us is just a shadow of what there was as little as one lifetime ago. Gone are the days when European explorers wrote of catching 50 trout in a day, some “weighing half as much as man.” Perhaps we’ll never be able to speak of a true ecosystem in Lake Michigan again.

Is this a surprise? An ecosystem with humans in it reflects the needs of those humans. Native peoples and early settlers depended on the lake for survival, so they kept it resilient and plentiful. Later com mercial fishermen were feeding a booming nation; they pulled as many fish out as they could while the lake seemed to just keep on giving. We don’t need the lake’s ecosystem at all with our transnational trade networks and supermarket habits. So most people didn’t blink an eye when it went barren. The ones that were affected almost seem like relics, weird holdouts.

In the struggle between nihilism and hope about the fish of Lake Michigan, per haps it is fitting to end on these holdouts. One of them is an unidentified person in a red jacket, captured in a photo for the Chi cago Sun-Times outdoors column, walking along the grand embankment between Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. It’s nighttime, and the city skyline glim mers in the background. They’ve got quite

Fishing has signified community, sustenance, and ritual to generations of Chicagoans. photo by nick rommel

“Various fishing traditions have suffered as the lake has become barren.”

a setup: a picnic table, bags of food, fishing poles, buckets, a generator, and a grill. The photo was taken in April 2019. Is the wa ter below empty? Maybe. Does it support a healthy ecosystem, streams of springtime smelt? Unlikely, but year to year, who’s to say? It seems that the lake behaves in the

same ways this city does—always chang ing, always getting wiped clean just to be repopulated again. We have our fires and floods; the lake has its mussels and lam preys. Our riots and displacements are the lake’s disasters and die-offs. The smelt it self is an invasive species, one of the first, breaching the Welland Canal as early as the

1910s. That unsettling fact doesn’t bother the dippers; should it bother us? We mourn ecocide, but most of us are an invasive spe cies too, raising a palatial boomtown atop marginal Potawatomi hunting land, eras ing the prairie under a metastasizing array of smokestacks and roads, a needlework of billboards and apartment buildings. In

ARTS

By ZACHARY LEITER | Associate Arts Editor

This October at the Redtwist Theatre in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chi cago, the Three Crows ensemble theater company has crafted an intriguing, if im perfect, iteration of Shakespeare’s Macbeth Three Crows’s mission is accessibility and Redtwist’s is intimacy; together, the visions work well. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and the small black box theater seats only about 30 people for each of the show’s 15 nights. Sitting just feet from the stage, au dience members are splashed with fake blood as Macbeth dies in front of them. (I’m gonna spoil the play, sorry—it’s been around for 400 years.) Shakespeare’s lan guage remains the same, but the play has been cut substantially. The original play’s fascinating, sometimes infuriating plot persists intact, though the characters and their motives are fuzzier in this rendition than in most. This is not a particularly pol ished Macbeth, but it’s the rare theatrical performance with a real, palpable heart.

At the center of this Macbeth, as at the center of any good Macbeth, are the titu lar lord turned treacherous king and his

conniving wife, Lady Macbeth. They are played here by Steve Peebles and Selena Lopez, respectively, and strongly so. He is rageful where she is manipulative, and they are both convincingly power-hungry and bloodthirsty. Some of their development as characters is lost to the play’s shorter runtime, which is only 100 minutes, with many of those minutes taken up by action rather than dialogue. For instance, Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness is even more sudden than usual, and her husband is persuaded to kill his countrymen more easily than seems reasonable. But both ac tors are convincing nevertheless. Lopez, es pecially, communicates her character’s fear and fury with true fervor. To see her wring her hands, fall to the floor, and moan during her various deranged bouts…one glimpses something otherworldly in her horror at her sins. And Peebles’s delivery of Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy—“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow…”—after his wife’s death is, in a word, spectacular. Occa sionally, with lesser lines, Peebles mistakes loudness for passion, but as the play draws

to a close, he provides a perfect exploration of Macbeth’s existential disillusionment.

Also with strong performances were Stephen Dunn as Duncan, Alex Amery as Macduff, and Nathaniel Negrón as Banquo. In his few scenes before being brutally mur dered offstage, Dunn’s Duncan is an image of regal strength, and one with particular ly smooth and well-paced speech. Amery comes into his own as Macduff late in the play with a thunderous tirade against Mac beth, though early on Macduff is resigned to a strange ensemble status. And Negrón— particularly as Banquo’s ghost (a lot of peo ple die in this play)—was sophisticated and vibrant.

This play was carried by its cast. And, I think, with all the strangely-set, fantastical retellings of Shakespeare around—I once saw Macbeth with the three witches as KGB operatives—there’s a genuine appeal to producing Shakespeare in a black box theater. With minimal lighting, few props, and forced closeness, the attention is on the original script. And while this production does not shed any new light on Macbeth, it definitely illuminates the beautiful fourhundred-year-old script. This rendition is

their shadow, the artificial is disguised, the natural is muddled, and the smelt dippers will surely keep on dipping—two invasive species united in a primeval ritual. It’s ab surd, tragic, and beautiful, and in Chicago, it might be the best that we can get.

as close to what I’d call contemporary con versational English as Shakespeare gets. That is not to say that this Macbeth is entirely unembellished. Sound designer Samuel Fitzwater-Butchart puts the the ater’s small size to good use with knocking sounds that seem to come from everywhere at once. Another smart move from Fitz water-Butchart: As water spills out of the fountain constructed upstage center, where Macbeth and his wife frequently attempt to wash away their crimes, the water echoes as it splashes on the ground. That fountain is put to great effect twice: First, when two as sassins miraculously dump Banquo into it, at which point he miraculously disappears. And second, when he later reappears, rising as a green-lit ghost, drenched and dripping, from the fountain. These are, to be clear, real effects, rather than mere illusions, and Banquo does legitimately swim (out of the audience’s sight) off stage. To create these effects would be impressive in a much larger theater; to witness them from such a small company and in such an intimate setting is marvelous.

Again, this production has its faults. The

“What seems natural, healthy, and good to us is just a shadow of what there was as little as one lifetime ago.”

Three Crows’s Black Box Macbeth is Intimate, Accessible, and Full of Heart

Associate Arts Editor Zachary Leiter reviews Three Crows ensemble theater company’s abridged production of Macbeth, which exhibits great depth of passion despite minor flaws.

FROM

9

fake blood was not particularly convincing. Lady Macbeth’s robes—one strangely seethrough and one oddly kimono-esque— were jarring and out of place. Some of the stage combat felt rote, or worse, comically

slow. And, agh, this is another Macbeth where the witches feel too human, where they seem to be trying to convince Mac beth rather than embracing the nuance of the script’s witches: that of being in ca hoots with Macbeth but then watching and

laughing as he fails to outsmart his fate.

But in the end, watching Banquo die and then return gloriously, watching Lady Macbeth before she kills herself, and then watching Macbeth mourn Lady Macbeth afterwards, one cannot help but be caught

SPORTS Talking About Fight Club

up in the bloody passion of it all.

Three Crows’s abridged production of Wil liam Shakespeare’s Macbeth was at the Redtwist Theatre through October 30.

By ADVAITA SOOD | Sports Reporter

I first set foot in Henry Crown Field House’s Green Room at 7 p.m. on a Thurs day. This is an odd time to choose to get your head bashed in (which is what I imagined would happen to me) and therefore seems appealing only to those truly committed to the sport. The sport of which I speak is, of course, boxing—the sweet science of swap ping fists and ducking blows; the game that gave us Muhammad Ali, Rocky, the phrase “below the belt,” and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Ro bots; and the great, gory spectacle that every one knows of but few partake in, whether out of fear, general regard for personal well-be ing, or sanity.

As I entered the Green Room that day, what I wanted out of boxing was simple: to take out life’s frustrations on someone or, in this case, have them beat out of me. More specifically, I wanted to know what it would be like to beat a man with my moderately cushioned hands and to look him in the eye and peer into his broken soul as it cowered fearfully before me. But I digress. And so I walked in, tingling with adrenaline, wearing a menacing air or as much of its counterfeit as I could manage, expecting to see great hulks annihilating punching bags; fighters brawl ing with bloody noses and clothes and gloves clotted with gore; and “regulars” standing around, getting ready, chewing on glass bot tles, and generally looking formidable. The scene I did walk into was a little different:

Punching bags were being annihilated, but in a manner that inspired awe rather than terror; there wasn’t a drop of blood or mal ice in sight, and those sitting around getting ready seemed genial but focused.

Within a few minutes, the boxing club’s leaders called for us to gather around and in troduced themselves. Like a ragtag group of protagonists in an underdog story, they were affable and lighthearted, yet with the excep tion of the occasional unit or two, they didn’t seem particularly intimidating. Still, any un suspecting newcomer foolish enough to step into the ring with any of these masters of the pugilistic arts would receive a hard lesson in the way of the fist and pay for it with a few of their teeth and a mild concussion. Behind their jocular exteriors lay beasts of signifi cant power and skill, each bred for a different martial art: some for boxing, Muay Thai, or kickboxing, and a few others for sanda or tae kwon do. These were experienced fighters with useful knowledge to dish out, and I was ready to receive it.

The session began with a few rounds of the track at Crown and a brief lesson in stretching. Following this, attendees were asked to divide themselves into groups based on self-assessed experience levels, and each was assigned to a club leader. I had boxed a little in my school days and was involved in a fair number of brawls with my classmates, so I placed myself in the experienced group.

Despite our “experience,” before we began training, our group leader asked that we ex ecute each fundamental boxing skill, prob ably in order to screen for at-risk charlatans such as myself. Of these skills, I had vague ideas of what the fighting stance, jab, and cross were but hadn’t the slightest clue about fighting movement or how to throw a hook or uppercut. Fortunately, I was able to make it to the training part of the session by imi tating the people around me and evading my group leader’s vision using a sidestep I had just copied. We then formed pairs within our group and took turns flinging our fists at each other. We simulated different fight scenarios and took turns playing the protagonist (that

is, the one who lands or dodges the punch) for minute-long rounds before switching to the opposing role. While throwing the punches, we were, of course, told to stop short of our partner’s face, and our partner was taught to defend themselves. In this manner I learnt the slip, parry, jab-slip, and overhand right, among other things.

The session concluded with a few games that were meant to help us hone our agil ity and precision. Both games were played in pairs: In the first, you had to try and tap your opponent’s shoulder or knee as many times as you could in a minute while evading their taps, and in the second, you attempted to step on your opponent’s foot while they

Upcoming Games

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Volleyball Carnegie Mellon Fri. Nov 4 Away

Football Lawrence Sat. Nov 5 Away

Men’s Soccer Washington Sat. Nov 5 Home

Women’s Soccer Washington Sat. Nov 5 Home Wrestling Albion Thu. Nov 10 Away

Men’s Basketball Lake Forest Sat. Oct 2 Away Cross Country Multiple Sat. Nov 12 Away Football Lake Forest Sat. Nov 12 Home

Men’s Basketball Albion Sat. Nov 12 Away Wrestling Multiple Sat. Nov 12 Away Men’s Basketball Mt. St. Joseph Sun. Nov 13 Away Women’s Basketball Benedictine (III.) Sun. Nov 13 Away

UChicago’s recently formed boxing RSO will free your mind without your having to fracture it.

“And while this production does not shed any new light on Macbeth, it definitely illuminates the beautiful four-hundred-year-old script. ”

“...those sitting around getting ready seemed genial but focused.”

tried to tap you. The games were fast-paced and fun—the kind of games that plaster a goofy smile on your face for the entire time you play them. And yet, as you play, you don’t realize your bovine countenance because while you see the game’s whimsy, you take it completely seriously. And only if you take it seriously can you be possessed by the sin gle-minded desire to tap and not get tapped,

and only then do you realize its joy. As my session progressed, I slipped deeper into this sort of single-minded joy. It is what makes the UChicago Boxing Club fun. I entered with the malicious (and large ly delusional) intention of using violence as a release and found myself reveling in the moments when it was simply me, my oppo nent, and the game—moments that existed in a vacuum, for I forgot about everything

outside them. Generally, combat sports are hailed as embodiments of courage, disci pline, strength, and perseverance. While this is all well and good, such ideals are largely the denizens of hardcore fighting gyms and professional rings that teach the best way to break the opponent. The UChicago Boxing Club, however, exists so students can simply have fun, perhaps forgetting about whatever drudgery happens to be weighing on them

CROSSWORD 48. Screening Agents

By PRAVAN CHAKRAVARTHY

outside of it. So, if you’d like to partake in this experience and meet new people, make your way to the bowels of Crown and look for the Green Room on Thursdays at 7 p.m. and Saturdays at 4 p.m. After all, there are few better ways to break the ice than by eating a punch from a stranger.

Hullaballoo

“Get ___ to a nunnery” (“Hamlet” quote)

Godly mother of Annabeth, in the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series

49. Move around, as in a tournament bracket 50. Art house?

Exclamation of surprise

Monthly payment, often

“Better Call ___” (TV series)

59. Date format on credit cards

62. Fastest times, colloquially 63. Place to get stuck