101513 Chicago Maroon

TUESDAY • OCTOBER 15, 2013

CHICAGOMAROON.COM

ISSUE 4 • VOLUME 125

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SINCE 1892

Academic teams frustrated with funding Sarah Miller News Staff

University of Chicago professors Eugene Fama (left) and Lars Peter Hansen received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday morning.

PETER TANG | THE CHICAGO MAROON

Econ professors nab Nobel Prize Marina Fang News Editor At 5 a.m. Monday morning , Professor Eugene Fama (M.B.A. ’63, Ph.D. ’64) was preparing for the day when he got a

phone call from Sweden.

A couple hours later, the newly-minted Nobel laureate was where he would be on any other day, teaching his Theory of Financial Decisions class at the Booth School of

Business.

Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, both University economics professors, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics for their research on the predictability of asset

prices Monday. They share the award with Robert Shiller of Yale University.

Fama and Hansen are the 27th and 28th University affiliates to NOBEL continued on page 2

Every spring, a committee of representatives from the five biggest academic teams on campus sit down at the negotiating table and vie for money. Student Government (SG) provides the committee—called the Council of Academic Teams (CAT), which is made up of Debate, Mock Trial, Model UN, College Bowl, and Chess Club—with an overall funding level, but largely leaves it up to the teams themselves to decide individual allocation. No one can leave until a decision is reached.

Tensions over the process have become exacerbated in recent years as steadily increasing membership in the RSOs and stagnant SG funding have placed tighter financial constraints on members of the committee.

This year’s process ended with Mock Trial formally and unsuccessfully appealing the council’s decision to the SG Assembly.

“Sometimes we debate

diplomatically, sometimes angrily,” Mock Trial vice president of finance and thirdyear Peter Tang said. “An RSO will [say they] deserve this amount of money or need this amount of money to cover travel costs, while the other RSOs are saying they are already getting too much. Very slowly, we make compromises.”

Tang is not a fan of the process. “[CAT] is a big mess; it’s supposed to have structure, but it usually collapses [at the allocations meeting],” he said. Tang said that because the members of CAT are responsible for dividing the allocation among themselves, they are always vying to increase their budgets at the expense of other CAT members.

The process starts in earlyto mid-May, when each RSO in CAT submits a budget for auditing to the council about a week before the annual allocations meeting.

During the meetings, a representative from each RSO explains their budget CAT continued on page 3

Admin Building named New hub to dish out $20 mil for startups for past Univ. president Linda Qiu News Editor

Alex Hays Associate News Editor The Administration Building now bears the name of the University president famously locked out of it during the turbulent student protests of the 1960s.

The University rededicated the Admin Building at 5801 South Ellis

Avenue after former Law School Dean, Provost, and University President Edward Levi (A.B. ’32, J.D. ’35) in a special ceremony Monday evening.

Levi, who also graduated from the Laboratory Schools, has a long history at UChicago, starting from when his grandfather was appointed a faculty member at the Divinity School in 1892.

A UChicago entrepreneurial hub opening in late 2014 will hatch ideas into fledgling businesses, University officials announced last Friday.

The new Chicago Innovation

Exchange (CIE), located on East 53rd Street and South Harper Avenue, will provide workspace, collaborative opportunities, and financial support for entrepreneurs across the University and the city. “[The CIE] will create a hub for University faculty, students, alumni,

and researchers as well as external businesses who want to be located near all this talent and energy. The exchange will give them access to programming and expertise, venture capital and, perhaps most importantly, access to each other,” INNOVATION continued on page 3

ADMIN continued on page 3

Two fashion boutiques open on 53rd Street Andrew Fry Maroon Contributor Hyde Park is about to get a lot more fashionable.

In the past month, the neighborhood welcomed clothing boutiques Independence and Sir & Madame into the

Harper Court and 53rd Street development.

Independence, which will be located in Harper Court, is the brainchild of owner and founder George Vlagos. Vlagos, the son of a Greek immigrant cobbler, originally conceived of BOUTIQUE continued on page 2

Mayor Rahm Emanuel discusses the beneficial impact the Chicago Innovation Exchange will have on Hyde Park and the city as a whole.

JAMIE MANLEY | THE CHICAGO MAROON

IN VIEWPOINTS

IN ARTS

IN SPORTS

In the face of Goliath » Page 4

On TV in Norway: So you think you can watch paint dry? » Page 8

First seed Tang finishes third at Small College Championships » Back Page

At Riviera, Impala can’t be tamed »

Athletes of the week » Page 11

Letter: Institutionalizing Input »

Page 6

Page 9

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | October 15, 2013

Sir & Madame may find permanent home in Hyde Park after six-month trial period BOUTIQUE continued from front

Native Hyde Parkers Autumn and Brian Merritt brought their Ukrainian Village boutique Sir & Madame back to Hyde Park as a pop-up shop.

STEPHANIE KOCH | MAROON CONTRIBUTOR

University’s Nobel laureate count now 89 NOBEL continued from front

win the Nobel Prize in Economics and bring the total number of Universityaffiliated Nobel laureates to 89. At a press conference Monday morning at the Booth School, University President Robert Zimmer noted that of the eight current faculty members who are Nobel laureates, six teach economics.

Fama thanked the University for providing the intellectual environment for his research. “ The interaction that you get from your colleag ues is so influential in building your work that you cannot understand the impact,” he said. “I know I spent two years away from the University visiting another countr y, and when I came back, I had 16 written papers. And I showed them to [former Booth professor and 1990 Nobel laureate] Merton Miller, and he said, ‘junk, junk, junk, junk, junk.’… But had I been here, I would have avoided all the junk, junk, junk, junks.”

Fama, 74, discovered that asset prices are difficult to predict in the short term because markets quickly and efficiently incorporate all information about an asset.

Fama’s colleague, finance professor John Heaton, praised Fama’s dedication to his work.

“He wakes up and gets a Nobel Prize.

Great day. What does he work on?

Teaching. He taught his class today.

The seriousness with which he takes ever y academic endeavor and how he really enriches the lives of his students and his colleag ues is just phenomenal,” he said.

Hansen, who is also the research director of the Becker Friedman Institute at the University, developed and utilized statistical methods to test observations about asset prices.

Hansen said he was surprised by the news, which he found out while preparing to take his dog out for a walk early this morning.

“A couple years ago, my two mentors, [Christopher] Sims and [Thomas] Sargent, got the Nobel Prize at Princeton, and in their press conference, they both happened to mention me. So I figured, ‘Wow, that’s it. It’s good. I got my attention,’” he said.

Calling Hansen, 60, “the youngster of the group,” economics department Chair John List stressed the significance of his

colleague’s research in helping fellow economists as well as other academics.

“Lars’ work is instrumental in testing the advanced propositions put forth by [Fama] and Bob Shiller,” he said. “The tools that Lars has developed are widely used by all social scientists.”

Like Fama, Hansen thanked his University colleagues and mentors, including fellow Nobel laureate Gary Becker (A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’55), and discussed the way that they had influenced his work. Hansen also recognized the collaboration of his students, quipping that “most of my best students are more than happy to tell me where I’m wrong.”

When asked about the meaning of Hansen’s and Fama’s research, Becker noted the practical implications it has on the stock market.

“What their research, in a very simple way, shows is that stock markets work pretty well, so it’s very hard for you or me to pick stocks that will be better than the average of all stocks over time,” said Becker, who attended the press conference along with several other Nobel laureates.

“I think that’s the most practical thing and something really significant that both of them have shown in different ways,” he told the Maroon.

Fama, Hansen, and Shiller all worked independently on their research, but taken as a whole, their findings paint a complex picture of the ways in which both market and behavioral forces drive asset prices.

Shiller, an economics professor at Yale and a specialist in behavioral economics, found that stock prices take on patterns over several years and that irrational, human choices can greatly alter market conditions.

In announcing the award Monday morning , the Nobel committee noted that Fama’s and Shiller’s findings are “surprising and contradictory,” but together, their efforts “have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices.” They explain, for example, how housing prices became exorbitantly high in the late ’90s and early 2000s, leading to the housing bubble, which significantly contributed to the most recent financial crisis.

In addition to the Economics Nobel, UChicago scientists also contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson, which won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced last week.

Independence as a physical outlet for his shoemaking business, Oak Street Bootmakers, which up until that point had only done business online. The original store is located in the Near North Side neighborhood.

Vlagos said that when he decided to open a new store on East 53rd Street and South Harper Avenue, he “definitely had students and faculty in mind.” As a result, he purchased an entirely new assortment of products for the store that are more tailored to the tastes of college students. He plans to hire student workers to help staff his store.

Everything in his store, Vlagos claims, is both of extremely high quality and made in America.

He admitted that these traits come at a price as his stores’ items often cost substantially more than comparable items at

other stores. However, Vlagos believes that the benefit of the higher quality of his products far outweighs the additional cost. “It’s just a really well made product. You don’t have to worry about it going in and out of style. It’s just classic and iconic,” Vlagos said.

Adjacent to Independence, vintage-inspired Sir & Madame has called the Ukrainian Village home for the past six years, and for the next six months it’ll also feature in Hyde Park. Autumn and Brian Merritt, natives to the neighborhood, plan to set up shop as a pop-up, but if the months go well, they may consider making the branch permanent.

“Hopefully everything works out so that we can stay in Hyde Park,” Autumn told the University’s 53rd Street blog.

“We definitely see Hyde Park as a viable market.”

ER may come to UCMC garage Jeevna Sheth Maroon Contributor An emergency room for the new $700 million Center for Care and Discovery is one of the possibilities for the currently empty ground floor of the University of Chicago Medical Center’s (UCMC) new parking structure.

The preliminary idea for an emergency room will be integrated into plans of an 1,800-space parking garage that is currently under construction for the new center and would have to be approved by the Illinois Department of Public Health and the hospital’s Board of Trustees.

Medical School Dean Kenneth Polonsky told DNAinfo.com that building a new ER in the empty space on the ground floor is “certainly a strong consideration.”

Although there have been no formal discussions to open an ER in the parking garage, the UCMC

has “built in additional space to be used at some point in the future,” UCMC spokesperson Lorna Wong wrote in an e-mail to the Maroon.

“That decision will be made after additional analysis of hospital resources and the needs of patients and their families,” Wong wrote.

Currently, the adult and child emergency rooms at UCMC serve about 75,000 patients from the South Side. However, Wong admitted that the UCMC experiences persistent congestion in its emergency rooms.

“University of Chicago Medicine, like so many other hospitals nationwide, experiences chronic overuse and overcrowding in the ER,” Wong said, a problem that is mainly driven by the volume of patients who come to the emergency room for non– life threatening emergencies.

The Center for Care and Discovery added 38 new in-patient beds and, according to Wong, lack of available nearby parking is one of the top complaints of patients.

Price of campus printing increases Anton Yu Maroon Contributor Prices for photocopying and printing in the University residence halls and campus libraries increased on August 1 to help the University meet costs.

The price for black-and-white copying or printing on 8.5 by 11–inchpages increased from 10 cents to 13 cents per page, while color copying and printing on pages of the same size increased from 15 cents to 18 cents per page. Prices for scanning and faxes have remained the same at two cents and 25 cents respectively per 8.5 by 11–inch page.

According to David Borycz, the library’s director of budget and facilities, the recent price increases are intended solely to cover the costs of providing copying and printing to students and faculty in the libraries and residence halls.

“Because of decreases in the volume of printing

NEWS IN BRIEF Researchers simulate stimulation No monkey business about it: UChicago scientists may have found a way to give amputees a second chance at touch.

Assistant Professor Sliman Bensmaia of the department of organismal biology and anatomy and his co-authors connected electrodes to the brains of monkeys wearing prosthetic limbs, using the electric current to mimic the brain activity associated with

and photocopying, the fees collected haven’t been covering the cost of the system as laid out in our contract,” Borycz said. “The price increase was made to bring revenue back to meeting costs.”

The University has contracted with Canon Unified Printing to provide integrated copying, faxing, printing, and scanning services in the libraries and residence halls.

This is the first change in prices for copying and printing since the University began contracting with Canon four years ago. Under the University’s previous contract with a different vendor, which ended in 2009, the prices were eight cents per 8.5 by 11–inch page for black-and-white copying or printing and 50 cents per page of the same size for color copying and printing.

The University switched from free printing to a pay-for-printing system at the beginning of winter quarter in 2004 following a rise in the volume of student printing.

sensation. They found that the animals responded to stimulation the same way they had been trained to respond to contact with their natural hand. Since monkeys and people have similar sensory systems, the results could pave the way for human prosthetics sensitive to touch.

The research is part of Revolutionizing Prosthetics, a project associated with the U.S. Department of Defense aimed at creating an artificial arm that can simulate natural muscular function and sensitivity.

—Celia Bever

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | October 15, 2013

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John Levi: Admin building is “perfect” for Dad CIE may churn out next GrubHub, Braintree ADMIN continued from front

Levi was the first faculty member of the University to become provost and oversaw the construction of the Regenstein Library during his term as University president from 1968 until 1975, when he left Chicago to become attorney general under President Ford.

In January of 1969, when Levi was president, 400 students staged a sit-in at the Administration Building in protest of the University’s decision to not reappoint Marlene Dixon, a popular sociology professor and known Marxist-Leninist.

A month later, protestors barricaded Levi and other administrators in the Quadrangle Club and also demonstrated at Levi’s home until a student broke a window. Nonetheless, Levi refused to resort to force and call city police.

Levi’s family believes that the Adminstration Building is “the perfect place” to recognize and honor him, according to his son John Levi.

“It was, after all, here in 1969 that he and a group of courageous and dedicated administrators, faculty, and trustees so skillfully defended this great university from the protests of that turbulent time in our country,” he said.

President Robert Zimmer and John Levi unveiled the new sign for the hall and formally announced the rededication to a crowd of distinguished guests and university administrators, including past University Presidents Hanna Gray and Hugo Sonnenschein.

John Levi spoke about his father’s close connection to UChicago and his humble personality, saying that if he were here today to see the rededication he would be amused to see so many people coming out for an event in his honor.

Current Dean of the Law School Michael Schill spoke before the dedication about Levi’s contributions to the University and especially to the Law School.

“I know Edward Levi because a day doesn’t go by that I’m not reminded by an alumnus, a faculty member, or friend that I am merely the current occupant of the Dean’s office at the law school; Edward Levi is the owner of that office,” Schill said.

Levi’s signature course, Elements of the Law, is still taught to first-year Law students to this day.

The rededication comes after summer renovations on the building that saw the completion of an open-air passageway designed to better connect the west end of campus to the Quad. Construction continues on the east side of campus in attempts to improve connections between important parts of the University.

“As we rededicate this space,” Zimmer said after the unveiling, “it is our hope, that everyone of us who works in this building, that all who come here in service of the University of Chicago and what it stands for, and that all who pass through are inspired by Edward Levi’s unfailing dedication to the University.”

President Zimmer (left) and John Levi unveil the new name of the Administration Building. The building was renamed Edward H. Levi Hall, after the former University of Chicago president and United States attorney general.

PETER TANG | THE CHICAGO MAROON

CAT received 5.56 percent increase in funding CAT continued from front

and any proposed changes, and each RSO has the opportunity to question each other’s budgets, according to Tang. CAT members then sit down and decide on funding amounts for each other. The meeting is not adjourned until the members are able to come to an agreement.

“It’s an interesting organization because the teams are auditing each other, asking how many people they sent to competitions, how much it cost, how much they spent per person, which SG wouldn’t do,” said vice president of Debate and fourth-year Brad Cohn.

Tang said that RSOs will usually strategically overshoot their budgets, in hopes that they will receive their targeted budget after negotiations.

Last spring, Mock Trial’s vice president of finance Naomi Jacobs (A.B. ’13) gave an impassioned plea to the SG Assembly for more money, citing that both Debate and Model UN were spending overwhelmingly more per person than the members of Mock Trial. She also said that in order to stay within the confines of their budget, Mock Trial members traveled in 15-person passenger vans to tournaments, which are extremely unsafe.

In defense of the allocation process, CAT president and Debate president fourth-year Kyle Painter said that CAT tries to distribute funds evenly. Every RSO had an increase in their budget this year, Painter said, and no single RSO received more than a third of the additional $10,000 of SG funding that was provided for this school year.

“The representatives of CAT most understand the needs of the teams and have a good sense of what the other teams are doing,” he said.

Painter said that funding to CAT has been fairly flat—with allocation increases in the single digits—whereas all of the RSOs in CAT have seen double-digit increases in membership over the past few years. Mock Trial, Debate, and Model UN have especially had huge spikes in membership, Painter said.

For this school year, CAT received $190,000, a 5.56 percent increase from the 2012–2013 academic year.

However, even with the annual increase in allocation, College Bowl, Chess Club, and Model UN ran deficits last year, while Mock Trial and Debate both managed to break even, according to Tang. One of the key determining factors in determining how the SG funding will be meted out is the relative financial responsibility of each RSO and whether or not it was able to spend within its budget. “[CAT members] are requesting more money because they are going over their budgets. The system is designed to reward RSOs that are fundraising and spending within their budgets,” Tang said. “But the end result of the votes is padding budgets of the RSOs that are unable to break even.”

ChoMUN Team president Eric Wessan could not be reached for comment on this article.

Editor’s Note: Peter Tang is an Associate Photo Editor for the Maroon.

INNOVATION continued from front

University President Robert Zimmer said at the announcement.

Drawing from a privately sourced, philanthropic investment of $20 million, the CIE will incubate five to 10 businesses annually, making an average investment of $50,000 to $100,000 per business, according to CIE Executive Director John Flavin.

The Center differs from existing venture creation initiatives such as the Booth School of Business’s Polsky Center—which is one of CIE’s partners—in that the Exchange provides opportunities at an earlier stage.

“The CIE will be a source for new ventures that require resources that aren’t readily available from the University…[and] gives us the chance to cast a wider net,” Flavin said in an interview. “The most likely ventures [at the Center] will be near stage zero and just getting started.”

This “wider net” means investing in ideas across multiple different industries.

Flavin, a former science and technology venture capitalist, pointed out that the word “exchange” is befitting to the CIE, as the Center aims to serve as the nucleus of a network of interconnected University institutes and affiliates, ranging from medicine to education.

The Center’s combined 21,000 squarefeet spread between two buildings will also house the offices of the Institute of Molecular Engineering’s water research initiative and the offices of Argonne National Laboratory’s energy storage hub, bringing Argonne to Chicago for the first time.

Through its multidisciplinary approach, the Center will continue the University’s tradition of groundbreaking scientific research and combine it with its more recent success in launching businesses, Zimmer said. Since its inception in 2003, the Polsky Center and its “venture challenges” have led to the creation of more than 90 startups, including GrubHub, Braintree, and Kip Solutions.

Despite the fame and success of some UChicago startups, the University still lags behind nearby institutions in revenue from intellectual property. The University grossed $82.6 million from 2002 to 2011, compared to University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign’s $99.2 million and Northwestern University’s $1.48 billion, according to Crain’s Chicago Business. However, Flavin, who formerly directed a similar initiative, Chicago Innovation Mentors, emphasizes that the Center “looks beyond competition.”

“What we’re trying to create here is a Chicago innovation ecosystem, of which the Chicago Innovation Exchange and the University of Chicago is just a part,” he said.

Nonetheless, Flavin said the CIE is unique in its approach and scope and will be “a major driver of how one university is helping take the game to the next level.”

Zimmer echoed this sentiment. “The University of Chicago’s unique strengths in research mean that the CIE will make an impact quickly,” he said. “All of this we believe is part of the mission of a great urban research university, to bring our intellectual strengths to bear on challenges of great importance in partnerships with our city.”

This year, the CIE will pilot a Student Associates program for graduate and College students. Associates working in teams of 15 will be responsible for evaluation and assessment of business ideas as well as the operations and logistics of the Center’s programming, according to Flavin.

The CIE will be located primarily on the second floor in the historic building currently home to Harper Theater and future home to chef Matthias Merges’ upscale European restaurant A10. Renovations are expected to complete by next fall, according to University Commercial Development Manager John Dennis.

Beyond the 15,000 square feet in the Harper building, the CIE’s conference space will also occupy 6,000 square feet in Harper Court across the street. At a community meeting less than two months ago, Dennis said that the University had no additional plans for the Harper Court building, reported the Hyde Park Herald.

At the announcement on Friday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel congratulated the University and compared the center to digital start-up incubator 1871. State Senator Kwame Raoul, state representatives Barbara Flynn Currie (A.B ’68, A.M. ’73) and Christian Mitchell (A.B. ’08) and Fifth ward Alderman Leslie Hairston were also in attendance.

CORRECTION » The October 11 photo titled “Big meets small: Lab School launches expansion for youngest students” was incorrectly credited. The photographer is Luke White.

VIEWPOINTS

Editorial & Op-Ed OCTOBER 15, 2013

Global innovation, local innovators University’s entrepreneurship initiative should incorporate community organizations as a resource

The student newspaper of the University of Chicago since 1892 REBECCA GUTERMAN Editor-in-Chief SAM LEVINE Editor-in-Chief EMILY WANG Managing Editor

CELIA BEVER Senior Editor VICENTE FERNANDEZ Senior Editor MATTHEW SCHAEFER Senior Editor MADHU SRIKANTHA Senior Editor MARINA FANG News Editor ANKIT JAIN News Editor LINDA QIU News Editor KRISTIN LIN Viewpoints Editor EMMA BRODER Arts Editor WILL DART Arts Editor LAUREN GURLEY Arts Editor SARAH LANGS Sports Editor JAKE WALERIUS Sports Editor SONIA DHAWAN Head Designer KEVIN WANG Online Editor MARA MCCOLLOM Social Media Editor CONNOR CUNNINGHAM Head Copy Editor CECELIA JIANG Head Copy Editor JEN XIA Head Copy Editor BEN ZIGTERMAN Head Copy Editor JAMIE MANLEY Photo Editor TIFFANY TAN Photo Editor COLIN BRADLEY Grey City Editor

The Chicago Innovation Exchange (CIE), announced last Friday, is the latest addition to the University’s growing list of collaborations, and will act as a business incubator for entrepreneurship and start-ups. To be located in multiple spaces in and near Harper Court next year, the CIE will provide mentoring, access to resources, programming, and will eventually provide a fund of $20 million for start-up ideas.

Branches from all edges of the University’s network are participating, from the Argonne National Laboratory to the Urban Education Institute (UEI) to the Booth School of Business, in order to address a “variety of economic and social challenges.” Although there are many other business incuba-

tors on the South Side, the CIE’s unique value lies in the University’s willingness to contribute its academic and financial resources to the project. To live up to its potential of producing “solutions to difficult societal problems,” the CIE must take full advantage of its location on the South Side and socially-minded organizations at its disposal.

There is no doubt that the CIE will pool together a plethora of University resources to the benefit of many students and faculty.

Providing a space for both grads and undergrads to collaborate is useful, but with an already long list of programs available to students interested in business, the CIE should avoid merely adopting that niche, and should instead strive to

fill a void by opening its resources up to the South Side in particular. It is admirable to open up the long list of UChicago collaborators to the city at large, but the CIE must make sure to allow room for smaller, community-based organizations to have a role in shaping its direction. The UEI, which already works with schools in the area, is a perfect example of the type of organization that the CIE can use as a springboard for local engagement.

The University’s choice of executive director for the CIE also seems appropriate for the type of collaboration it has promised to deliver.

John Flavin has been an entrepreneur and mentor in Chicago for over 20 years, working as the head of life science start-ups and as the

head of Chicago Innovation Mentors, which similarly connected entrepreneurs from universities and local areas with corporate mentors. He is unquestionably qualified to lead the CIE effort, but the University must work with Flavin to emphasize the “local” part of his experience—to actively engage community organizations and include them as resources for start-ups involved in the incubator.

University Vice President of Civic Engagement Derek Douglas told the Sun-Times that the CIE will provide a “much-needed link between the South Side and the city’s growing innovation network.” This should not be merely a geographic connection for the Chicago entrepreneurship community, but should translate to

true engagement with the issues of our geographic area.

Douglas’s involvement is already a positive sign, but his presence in the development of the CIE should continue to be more than nominal.

In recent years, the University has set its sights broadly—to the M.B.A. program in Asia, the Center in Beijing, collaborations with the U.S. Department of Energy, and Ben Gurion University in Israel—but not all world-changing projects have to span the globe when they begin. Some of the most meaningful projects can start up right here, at the incubator space on 53rd Street.

The Editorial Board consists of the Editors-inChief and the Viewpoints Editors.

HARINI JAGANATHAN Assoc. News Editor

In the face of Goliath

STEPHANIE XIAO Assoc. News Editor

An international symbol, Nobel Peace Prize nominee reveals challenges of grassroots activism

JOY CRANE Grey City Editor THOMAS CHOI Assoc. News Editor ALEX HAYS Assoc. News Editor

ELEANOR HYUN Assoc. Viewpoints Editor LIAM LEDDY Assoc. Viewpoints Editor ANNA HILL Assoc. Arts Editor TATIANA FIELDS Assoc. Sports Editor SAM ZACHER Assoc. Sports Editor PETER TANG Assoc. Photo Editor FRANK YAN Assoc. Photo Editor

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The opinions expressed in the Viewpoints section are not necessarily those of the Maroon. © 2013 The Chicago Maroon, Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Editor-in-Chief Phone: 773.834.1611 Newsroom Phone: 773.702.1403 Business Phone: 773.702.9555 Fax: 773.702.3032 CONTACT News: News@ChicagoMaroon.com Viewpoints: Viewpoints@ChicagoMaroon.com Arts: Arts@ChicagoMaroon.com Sports: Sports@ChicagoMaroon.com Photography: Photo@ChicagoMaroon.com Design: Design@ChicagoMaroon.com Copy: CopyEditors@ChicagoMaroon.com Advertising: Ads@ChicagoMaroon.com

By Kamil Ahsan Viewpoints Columnist Few biblical parables have as much contemporary staying power as the tale of David and Goliath, the classic story of an underdog humbling a seemingly invincible oppressor. That concept of heroism is so powerful that few recognize how ruling elites, fascist oppressors, or even society at large can willfully obscure and twist it into a monolithic image of who among us is qualified to be David. Luckily for the real world, heroism has no face easily defined by Hollywood. Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani girl, was shot in the head by a Talib in Swat, Pakistan while fighting for girls’ right to education. She survived and, in a recent interview with Kamila Shamsie in the Guardian, displays all the signs of a saintly and poised David but none of the self-righteousness assigned to him by society.

Referring to the shooter who entered the bus and identified her before shooting her in the head, Yousafzai said: “He was young, in his 20s … he was quite young, we may call him a boy. And it’s hard to have a gun and kill people. Maybe that’s why his hand was shaking. Maybe he didn’t know if he could do it.”

Yousafzai is a defiant and infinitely brave young woman, of that there can be no doubt. Nor can there be any doubt that she represents the epitome of a feminist backlash against repressive Taliban policies that decree that cloistered, burqa-clad girls be prevented from seeing the inside of a school.

Regardless, there is a distinct impression that Yousafzai, who blogged for BBC Urdu at the age of 12 about life under the Taliban regime, is nervous about her new mantle—not that of the responsibility she is meant to assume, but the person she is meant to be and the things she is meant to say. At a speech at the U.N. General Assembly she began with, “I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say.”

It is understandable that she insistently shies away from subverting her original cause: the fight for the right to education of girls and people, everywhere, regardless of prevailing political and religious circumstances. She is, in essence, today’s best advocate for universal education. And she leaves it there, because that’s enough of an agenda to occupy many lifetimes.

In my native Pakistan, what Yousafzai represents is a polarizing matter: There are those who laud her ideals, her bravery, and her representation as a strong, willful young girl determined to cut away at barriers against the right to education; and there are those who fear another representation, that the cause of Yousafzai has been subverted and subsumed, that she has been put on a pedestal ruled entirely by Western standards, and indeed is now more of a reflection of a broader criticism of Pakistan.

The full gamut of what Yousafzai is emblematic of, not just for people in Pakistan, but globally, is difficult to describe. Following Yousafzai’s surgery, calls of “I am Malala” were ubiquitous: schoolgirls in New Delhi wore “I am Malala” masks as part of education drives in India. She was presented the International Children’s Peace Prize in The Hague. She was the youngest person to ever be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Obscured by the titles and accolades, Yousafzai represents the downtrodden,

and not just of young girls in Talibancontrolled areas, but also—because of the interactions between class relations and access to education—of people everywhere. For instance, Pakistan is one of the countries that invests the least in its education (according to the Guardian, successive governments have allocated around 2 percent of G.D.P. to the education budget). More than a Taliban stronghold in some choice areas influences educational access.

Interestingly, Shamsie describes Yousafzai’s dismay that in the UK, she finds girls taking their education for granted, not “‘Aladdin’s lamp… the doorway to a magical world’ as it was for girls in Swat,” but a privilege granted by origin and birth. Perceptively, Yousafzai may be striking on the often-depressing realization that rights acquired through decades of historic struggle by grassroots activists and women can be forgotten so easily by future generations who reap the benefits. Women all over the Western world fail to connect the historical narrative with their current struggle against institutionalized sexism merely because it seems so much better now than it used to be. In a hypothetical Swat many years from now when girls no longer feel threatened to go to school and they can finally freely open up their books to sap up all the world’s knowledge, one hopes that we won’t find the vitality lost, the memory faded, the history forgotten.

Strip away the obvious sentiments of inspiration her bravery cultivates and be even more surprised at the likelihood that a young girl from no privilege or wealth, in what the world considers a backwater, can be so courageous. It is heartening, but it is also disheartening that we don’t see it more often. It serves as a powerful reminder of the importance not merely of individuals like Yousafzai, who at best can shine a light on the

most oppressive of oppressors, but of grassroots activism targeted to improving the educational access of the poor underbelly of the United States and the cloistered girls of Swat, Pakistan and all the other places in the world where the only differences are those of scale. When undermining fundamental rights, there are no injustices not grievous enough.

In reality, David rarely defeats Goliath. Yousafzai’s noble attempts to stand up to her oppressors have not yet borne fruit: The Taliban are still very much present, running roughshod over many numbers of promising young girls in want of an education. Protest movements fighting for equality of access to opportunity and education often amount to nothing more than street banter, police suppression, and the scattering of a once-motivated movement to listless and dispirited people. One would not be amiss to link the futility of the David-Goliath struggle to the Chicago Teachers Union strikes last year, for instance. Grassroots activism is often predicated upon, and qualified to supporters as a long, winding, often pointless exercise that may one day be able to see the light of day. Look close enough, and real-world examples of the David-Goliath trope begin to resemble more closely the drop-in-the-ocean trope, a reminder that the classic battle between man and beast typically takes the form of generations of people combating a Goliath with many guises and even more strategies to subvert or divide the cause.

An extended version available online at chicagomaroon.com Kamil Ahsan is a second-year graduate student in the biological sciences division .

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | October 15, 2013

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Desperately seeking reelection

Wait your turn

Anticipation of reelection looms over Republicans’ negotiations

Government shutdown in part a result of gerrymandering

By Anastasia Golovashkina Viewpoints Columnist There’s been a lot of confusion about what, exactly, is motivating the Republican Party’s marathon of ultra-conservative madness. It’s certainly a valid topic for bewilderment, not the least bit because it seems that even Republicans themselves are no longer sure about what they’re hoping to accomplish here.

Their demands are, individually, becoming ever more muddled and, as a movement, increasingly more inconsistent.

Reopen the government, some say; don’t reopen the government. Raise the debt ceiling; don’t raise the debt ceiling. It’s about the Affordable Care Act (ACA)… except when it’s not.

The conservative Heritage Foundation’s mega-influential Heritage Action group, which spent some $100 million on pro-shutdown TV ads in the six months leading up to October 1, went from being one of the most vocal opponents of raising the debt ceiling to, just a few days ago, a born-again proponent of the very opposite.

The same applied to the Koch Brothers, the band of rolling-in-the-money brothers responsible for pumping billions into powerful conservative groups like Heritage Action (including tens of millions for those proshutdown ads alone). Last week, they backed down from their original position of being uncompromisingly pro-shutdown to suddenly announcing that “they have not taken a position on the legislative tactic”—going so far as to pen a letter to the United States Senate in which they affirm their sudden lack of a stance.

Is it even about the Affordable Care Act anymore? Heritage and Koch say it is; Americans for Prosperity say it’s not. In his letter to House Speaker John Boehner, which got 81 House Republicans’ signatures and played a make-or-break role in starting the shutdown, freshman House Republican Mark Meadows insisted on “defund[ing] the implementation and enforcement of Obamacare in any relevant appropriations bill”—until last week, that is, when he totally reversed his stance.

Messages that differ from person to person and day to day make any attempt to decipher the Republican Party’s goals or draw out a single, cohesive game plan akin to reading tea leaves. It would make for a great intro to probability problem to see how many different combinations of flip-floppery these various groups and politicians can achieve.

It’s worth noting that, throughout all of this, President Obama and Democrats in both houses of Congress have been clear and consistent about the details of their demands.

Long before the shutdown began, Democrats had made it crystal clear that they would not back any measure that doesn’t fully reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling without stonewalling the ACA. But if not about a consistent message, what, then, is this all about?

It’s certainly not about “compromise.” In addition to the fact that the Affordable Care Act was itself a compromise (RIP single-payer), Senate Democrats have made 19 distinct attempts—all of them rebuffed—to compromise with Republican leadership. Democrats have even agreed to fund the government at Republican levels as early as September 30—the same day the GOP voted to amend House rules so that only Majority Leader Eric Cantor or Speaker John Boehner could call a clean budget resolution up for a vote.

This whole shutdown fiasco could have been over before it even began.

Even now, President Obama has made repeated attempts to reach out to House Republicans, cancelling foreign trips and rescheduling countless engagements to try to work out a deal with Boehner’s party. Last week, he even invited all 232 House Republicans to discuss the budget at the White House. Eighteen showed up.

Nor is any of this really about the national debt.

If it were, House Republicans would not have had zero qualms about wasting 110 hours and nearly $70 million ($1.45 million per vote) in federal funding to hold 46 symbolic, doomed-from-the-beginning votes to repeal the ACA, a piece of legislation that will, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), reduce the federal deficit by $200 billion in its first 10 years of operation and over $1 trillion over the course of its first 20. Repealing the ACA, on the other hand, would add a projected net $109 billion to our national debt (again, according to the CBO).

Meanwhile, each day of the shutdown costs our government a net loss of $300 million, for a grand running total of $4.5 billion.

Because it’s ultimately not about compromise, or the debt, or about any of those things. Rather, it’s about House Republicans’ fear of being out-righted by a more conservative opponent in the 2014 primaries. It’s the exact same motivation as the one that inspired Mitt Romney to work so damn hard to distance himself from Romneycare in 2012, going so far as to make repealing the ACA on his first day in office one of the defining promises of his presidential campaign (never mind that the ACA was based on Romneycare).

It’s about wanting to get re-elected.

Towards the beginning of this crisis, the public and the news media divided blame pretty equally between the two parties and the president. But, by now, it’s pretty clear that blame should fall only on one side of the aisle. Polls consistently show Republican approval and favorability ratings are at recordbreaking lows, and the public is blaming the GOP for the shutdown by a 22-point margin.

It’s time for the Republican Party to stop holding the government for ransom and to start taking responsibility for the completely unnecessary crisis it has single-handedly manufactured by passing a clean budget and a long-term increase to the debt ceiling.

Maybe then it can start taking the first steps towards forging some semblance of a new beginning and pulling themselves back out of the political grave in which its suicide mission of a statement has left them.

Anastasia Golovashkina is a third-year in the College majoring in economics.

By David Grossman Viewpoints Columnist When I woke up this morning, I lazily checked isthegovernmentstillshutdown. com. Written on an otherwise blank page was one word: “Yup.” It’s quite possible that unless you planned to visit a national park or expected tweets from NASA’s @MarsCuriosity you haven’t really been affected—yet. While it’s reassuring to know that the sky doesn’t start falling during a government shutdown, it’s only a matter of time before it fills up with petrochemical smog. During the shutdown, the EPA has suspended monitoring of air pollution and pesticide use, the Labor Department no longer enforces occupational safety standards or minimum wage laws, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will stop oversight of the derivatives market.

Wall Street is going to have some fun with that one. While key parts of the government like the military, FDA food inspection, and entitlement checks will for the most part continue, it’s clear that a long-term government shutdown could result in a level of deregulation that would shake consumer confidence and significantly reduce growth.

Now, government shutdown is bad, OK? The important question is how and why it closed in the first place. One of Congress’ jobs is to fund the government and—because they tend to spend trillions more than they get in tax revenue—raise the debt limit.

In the old days, Congress was responsible and passed annual budgets like they were supposed to, but that hasn’t happened since 1997, back when the first Harry Potter book was released. In recent years, the political monkeys in Washington have realized that separation of powers allows for massive leverage for the minority to prevent everyone else from doing anything. So, people who didn’t like budgets only agreed to vote for omnibus bills that were filled with porkbarrel spending for their constituents, and people who didn’t get enough pork in the omnibus bills only agreed to vote for “minibus” bills. So here we are, funding government a couple months at a time.

When the government operates under the constant threat of shutdown, departments that hope to operate with any semblance of efficiency have absolutely no idea what their funding will be throughout the fiscal year.

This flickering on-off switch of millions of jobs creates massive volatility in the economy. At the end of last year just the possibility of shutdown caused billions of dollars in the stock market to disappear. This time around, the markets are remarkably calm, but if Capitol Hill goes a step further and doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, say “hello” to Recession 2.0.

Apparently, the House Republicans are prepared to risk it. Frustrated with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through the House and Senate, the re-election of Obama on the platform of Obam-

acare, and the unsuccessful effort to challenge it on constitutional grounds, the House Republicans are especially irate at the Democrats’ attitude that somehow these successes give them the right to fully implement the law.

Initially, the more conservative House Republicans were quite pleased with themselves—Michele Bachmann (R-MN) commented that the shutdown was “exactly what we wanted, and we got it.” In comments that were later appropriately retracted, Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) told The Washington Examiner the essence of the current Republican sentiment: “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

While shutting down the government was considered a good idea by some, the American public is unconvinced. The polls are showing that although the majority of people don’t support Obamacare in its current form, the vast majority disapproves of using a government shutdown or a debt default as a bargaining chip.

So Republicans, what gives? It turns out that the same gerrymandering process that allowed Republicans to hold 234 of the 435 seats in the House with only 48.5 percent of the popular vote in the most recent election also allowed them to take many of their districts with overwhelming majorities. To put gerrymandering in perspective, the average House GOP seat was 6.59 percent more Republican than the national average in 1995.

Today, the average GOP seat is 11.12 percent more GOP. As a result, House Republicans have nothing to fear from a Democrat challenger, but because they now find themselves in an even more conservative district they are at a greater risk of being primaried by a more extreme conservative.

This redistricting has resulted in House Republicans having little fear of losing their seats. Consequently, the slim majority of one house of one branch of government, elected by a minority of the popular vote, has become politically invincible enough to shut down the whole government in what equates to a temper tantrum.

Still, while gerrymandering has left almost all House representatives politically invincible regardless of party affiliation, it’s not like the Democrats introduced legislation repealing the Second Amendment and banning importation of non-organic foodstuffs; the Republicans are the only ones who have gone mad with power. Despite the massive unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, shutting down the government and risking a credit default on $16 trillion of debt simply isn’t worth it. If Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, using their gerrymandered house majority as leverage to get whatever they want isn’t going to cut it. Their only real option is doing it the old-fashioned way: by winning electoral maj orities and passing a law of their own. Easier said than done, but waiting for Obama’s signature health care bill to turn out as bad as they’ve been prophesizing would be a good start, and if that happens, putting forth a workable alternative would be a better finish.

David Grossman is a first-year in the College.

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | October 15, 2013

Letter: Institutionalizing Input

LONG LIVE

University’s process of receiving input is inherently biased As the Editorial Board rightly pointed out in last Tuesday’s issue of the Maroon (“Every step of the way,” Oct. 8), including student input in the process of changing campus and student life is necessary for the University to best serve its students.

However, the process by which that input is solicited is just as important as the input itself.

Currently, committees are convened, appointed, and consulted at the will of University administrators. Often, students either apply or are asked by administrators to serve in positions that advise various parts of Campus and Student Life. But it is important to remember that these admin and staff are not objective actors, and relying on them to fill committees of students that advise their efforts compromises the integrity of the process.

The goals administrators have for these advisory boards are often reactive in nature; that is to say, they are used to quell immediate concerns rather than focus on more long-term and values-based issues that are in the interest of the students serving on them.

Take, for example, the Vice President’s Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion, of which I am a member. You may remember that it was formed at the end of the last academic year, in response to a series of incidents involving racism, classism, and homophobia on campus. Appointed by Karen Warren Coleman, VP for Campus and Student Life, it was supposed to be “[relied] heavily [upon] to advise and help to shape key diversity initiatives, review existing programs, and provide student perspectives.” Despite plans for conference calls during the summer and its continued use during this academic year, I have yet to hear anything about its future and have yet to receive a list of its members and their contact information, even when I asked for it. During our first (and only) meeting in May, ideas for a new poster campaign were presented to us while more proactive input from students was rebuffed.

The proposed changes to Hallowed Grounds

are being handled by the Committee on Activity and Advising Centers. However, this committee was selected by ORCSA—the very office which proposed those changes in the first place. Furthermore, some students were solicited by ORCSA to sit on the committee. This compromises the integrity of the committee as both an independent body and a good faith effort to engage with the student body. Meeting minutes are not publicly available, and meetings are not open to the public.

Just this week, I was invited to a discussion with Assistant VP for Student Life Eleanor Daugherty regarding dissent and protest on campus. The e-mail stated, “Students are being invited to this meeting because you have either demonstrated interest in the topic of free expression or serve in a broad leadership role.”

But students shouldn’t have to rely on a special invitation from administrators in order to have their voice heard through one of the few mechanisms of giving that input.

At issue is that the modes of input shouldn’t be controlled by administrators, who, even with good intentions, serve what they see as the institutional interest. From the proposed changes in Hallowed Grounds to the restructuring of the University Community Service Center (UCSC), this “institutional interest” has sometimes differed from the interests of the students on whose behalf decisions are being made. For this reason, in instances where student input is necessary, it follows that it should be solicited from a body that directly represents students: Student Government (SG). As the institution which is most directly accountable to the students, SG is the fairest arbiter when convening and appointing committees. Being independent from the short-term focus of the administration, advisory committees operated through SG would have the long-term focus that current bodies lack.

During SG elections, students decide who will represent them, and for administrators to circumvent that process by controlling committees under-

mines the effectiveness of SG as a democratic institution. During spring elections, students voted by an overwhelming majority to support a slate that campaigned on a platform of representing all students in decision-making processes.

For this reason, as SG Community and Government Liaison, I urge administrators to engage with SG as we work to create more effective advisory boards that represent the interests of all students, starting with the UCSC. I find the fact that no students were meaningfully consulted prior to the restructuring of the office deeply troubling, and symptomatic of a process which excludes students from the making of decisions that most directly affect them.

First-years, particularly those of you who are interested in serving in SG, take note. Over the next four years, you’ll have the opportunity to shape your institution’s legacy, and expanding student involvement in its decision-making processes is crucial if it is to best serve its students.

LONG-FORM. DESIGN, PHOTOGRAPH, OR ILLUSTRATE FOR GREY CITY. INTERESTED IN GETTING INVOLVED WITH OUR FALL/WINTER ISSUE? DROP US A LINE AT EDITOR@ CHICAGOMAROON.COM

—Tyler Kissinger

SUBMISSIONS The Chicago Maroon welcomes opinions and responses from its readers. Send op-ed submissions and letters to: The Chicago Maroon attn: Viewpoints 1212 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: Viewpoints@ChicagoMaroon.com The editors reserve the right to edit materials for clarity and space. Letters to the editor should be limited to 400 words.

Op-ed submissions, 800 words.

SSA’S 2013 SOCIAL JUSTICE ADDRESS:

CAN WE BUILD A SUPER MOVEMENT TO SAVE US IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

ROCKEFELLER CHAPEL 6:30 PM, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 Featuring

WILLIAM UPSKI WIMSATT Lab ‘90, social entrepreneur, philanthropic consultant, journalist, and political organizer.

I was raised in 1980s Hyde Park in two worlds – private school and public school; the academe and hip-hop (um... sorry if I spray-painted your garage).

I married an incredible political organizer from the U of C. Our baby daughter is six months old and if she’s lucky, she could live to see 2100. Like most parents, I’m scared about the world she’s inheriting.

I’ve spent the past 18 years connecting the dots of the progressive landscape – across issues, geography, race and even organizational egos.

My parent’s generation created all these movements – from civil rights to environmentalism to feminism.

What’s exciting now is that these movements are starting to re-invent themselves and cross-pollinate.

I believe within the next 20 years - with new technologies and emerging demographic majorities - we can create an unprecedented Super Movement and build Super majorities to address the Super Challenges of the 21st Century.

General admission: Doors open at 6:00 pm Following the Social Justice Address, SSA alumni who graduated prior to 2004 will receive their convocation hoods during the Alumni “Retro” Hooding Ceremony from 7:30-8:30 pm.

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | ADVERTISEMENTS | October 15, 2013

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Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

A Salon Evening with Nicholas Phan and Friends

Bach: Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 Britten: Cello Suite No. 1, Op. 72 (1964) Kodaly: Sonata in B Minor, Op. 8 LOGAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS PERFORMANCE HALL, 915 East 60th Street “Jean-Guihen Queyras was the elegant cello soloist, his tones urbane and mellow, his articulation sparkling.”

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6:30 PM Pre-concert lecture: Dan Wang Britten: Folksongs, Canticle III (Still Falls the Rain) (1954) and Canticle V (Death of Saint Narcissus) (1974) Schubert: Auf dem Strom; Frühlingsglaube; Im Frühling; Der Musensohn MANDEL HALL, 1131 East 57th Street “One of the public’s most visible and talented advocates for Britten’s vocal music.” —Boston Globe

$25-35/$5 students with valid ID For tickets call 773.702.ARTS or visit chicagopresents.uchicago.edu

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THE LUMEN CHRISTI INSTITUTE and The Program in Poetry & Poetics present

FRESH.

FAST. TASTY.

A Poetry Reading by

Da na Gioi a THURSDAY OCTOBER 17 7:00 PM Swift Hall Third Floor 1025 E. 58th St.

Dana Gioia – award-winning poet and critic – served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2002-2009 and is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. His poetry collection Interrogations at Noon won the 2002 American Book Award. He has just published his fourth volume of poems, Pity the Beautiful.

FREAKY FAST

DELIVERY! ©2011 JIMMY JOHN’S FRANCHISE, LLC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This lecture is free and open the public.

Please visit www.lumenchristi.org or contact info@lumenchristi.org for more information.

ARTS

Heartlandia OCTOBER 15, 2013

Lyric’s Otello strikes all the right chords MJ Chen Maroon Contributor The Lyric Opera has a gorgeous auditorium—but I also had a really, really good seat. Ninth row, orchestra seating. You could hear and see everything, and there was a lot to see. The Lyric does this wonderful thing with student-priced tickets through its NExT program: $20 for some of the best seats in the house. It’s a purchase you won’t regret if you use it to see the Lyric’s current production of Otello.

The Lyric’s production of the opera stars tenor Johan Botha as the title character, baritone Falk Struckmann as Iago, and soprano Ana María Martínez as Desdemona. The performance is supported

by Verdi’s rich, gripping music—the closest thing the opera has to a narrator because Verdi hides his characters’ traits in his harmonies. For example, Iago’s music can be suave or joking or courteous, but there is always a sense of discomfort, a touch of bass strings betraying his hidden evil. Here, Struckmann plays a twofaced and subtle villain, able to match his sound perfectly with his character.

He has a velvet voice for Otello, a sort of “public sound,” but a terrible and oppressive private sound for his rage soliloquies and arias. His Act II power aria, “Credo in un Dio crudel,” (“I believe in a cruel God”) had me in shivers.

Verdi’s Otello cuts away a good deal of the original Shakespeare to make room for all of the singing. Gone are the first act and the finer details; all that remains is the central drama among the

characters Otello, Iago, and Otello’s wife, Desdemona. Otello is the Moorish governor of Cyprus, victorious in battle with the Turks. Iago is his treacherous ensign, passed over for promotion in favor of Cassio, another soldier. In revenge, he convinces Otello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair. Otello becomes consumed with jealousy and kills his wife. When her corpse is discovered, Iago’s plot is revealed, and Otello commits suicide.

OTELLO Lyric Opera of Chicago Through November 2

Botha certainly has a gorgeous voice; it’s a lovely, glowing sound with some volume behind it. I can hear Otello the statesman, the genteel governor, but not Otello the warrior. His entrance in Act I is a soaring declaration of victory— beautiful, but no bite. However, Botha expresses Otello’s softer side perfectly.

His duet with Desdemona, in which they recount how they fell in love, is sweet and sentimental. His voice becomes more strident as jealousy sets in, and grim as he tells Desdemona she must die. Otello the husband has a perfect moment in Act III. At first he is courteous to Desdemona, the orchestra playing a love theme—then, suddenly, he reels on her, and the music becomes almost hysterical.

Martínez plays a fine Desdemona, with a sweet voice to sing her melodies

and the good sense to not overplay her anguish. Her Desdemona is sympathetic, a soft creature destroyed by forces beyond her control. I loved her Act IV “Ave Maria” prayer song the best. It’s beautiful and sincere. The orchestra maintains excellent control throughout the opera, but it truly shines in this scene. It’s all shimmering strings and serenity up to a certain point when suddenly the music shifts to the low bass strings, resulting in a dark, chilling effect.

The staging was solid, brought forward some few hundred years to the 19th century (me, I don’t mind a few top hats and morning coats here and there).

I loved the set, especially the use of real fire during the bonfire scene because it makes the celebration that much more believable. The swordfight in Act I was also done really, really well—and I have seen my fair share of terrible swordfight scenes. And the white curtains covering the set in Act IV made for a tremendous effect for Otello’s entry, with his giant, menacing shadow, knife in hand, projected against the backdrop.

What would a tragedy be without the final scene when everyone (important) dies? The witnesses are brought onstage and all is revealed. Botha’s Otello, desperate with grief, stabs himself with a hidden dagger. Before he dies, the familiar love-melody is heard one last time—tender, nostalgic, even hopeful. He kisses Desdemona for the last time and promises to meet her in heaven. For all its rage and jealousy, the opera closes softly in the strings, one shimmering chord. Curtain.

Tenor Johan Botha stars opposite Ana María Martínez as Otello.

COURTESY OF LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

On TV in Norway: So you think you can watch paint dry?

Stay tuned to Norwegian slow TV as this man tries to survive No-Knit November.

COURTESY OF HOUSEOFHUMBLE.COM

Will Dart Arts Editor In November 2009, when the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Bergen Line railway with a live broadcast of the train’s eight-hour journey from Bergen to Oslo, audiences were surprisingly riveted: About a million Norwegians tuned in to watch the train

speed along a snowy track. Sensing an unusual hit on its hands, the NRK followed up with two more train broadcasts in 2010, each met with further acclaim.

In 2011, it embarked on its boldest project yet, “Hurtigruten—Minute by Minute,” which tracked the five-day voyage of the M.S. Nordnorge as it plodded through the North Sea. Eleven on-board cameras focused here and there on a nearby fjord or a flock of seabirds, occasionally

shifting to the interior deck, where crewmembers could be heard talking casually, laughing, and answering the phone. Two and a half million people—half of Norway’s population—watched the ship pull into port, breaking records and ushering in the era of slow TV. Other “slow” broadcasts followed, such as the recent 18–hour special on salmon swimming upstream (audiences complained that it was too short). A five-

hour knitting marathon will premiere on November 1. “A Day in the Life of a Snail” remains in development. And while I was hypnotized by the Bergen Line, and Hurtigruten left me touched and awestruck, none of the NRK’s offerings so intrigued me as the best-loved of Norwegian marathon programs, last February’s “National Firewood Night.”

Mmm. Even the name sounds great, right? Of course, “National Firewood Night” is not actually an entire night of firewood—that would be insane. Really it’s just four hours of “light programming” (this consists of mixed poetryreading and wood-chopping segments), followed by eight hours of a fire burning in a farmhouse hearth, uninterrupted and usually unaccompanied, though sometimes overlaid with chill music or, best of all, with a sort of running commentary on the state of the fire. I could not look away.

But even with the thrill and intrigue inherent in watching a smoldering log on TV for eight hours, I get the sense that the Nordic fixation with the program, and with the budding genre as a whole, goes deeper than mere entertainment value. It’s been said these marathon shows are a quiet response to an increasingly loud, violent, and unpredictable world, and even helping to heal the country after the horror of the Utøya shooting. That might be part of it. But I tend to think that, at heart, “National Firewood Night,” “Bergensbanen,” and “Hurtigruten” are about the joy of community, about sitting down with your extended family (all Norwegians are first cousins) to simply marvel at the mundane realities

of life—trains, ferry boats, the fire in the hearth. It’s the stuff that fond memories are made of.

Thankfully, slow TV has been making inroads in the US for years, mainly on public-access. Dirt-dull gardening and housekeeping shows abound here, PBS’s This Old House being the standout (it’s just three guys performing routine home maintenance). Antiques Roadshow has long been touted as a snooze-fest of the highest order, though its winning combination of rosewood armoires and old people is marred by the thrill of antique appraisal. Bob Ross did it best: His show, The Joy of Painting, was a study in transcendent, sublime boredom, honest and pure. His was a world of muted audio and spare set design, a world where there were no mistakes, just happy little accidents. If there was any suspense at all, it was only in finding out whether Bob was making a happy little forest or another serene mountain range. And it always turned out OK in the end.

So what if it’s boring? What else should TV be, if not boring? Our own riveting story lines are filled with enough explosions, enough car chases, enough stress and anxiety—we should hardly need to watch more of it when we go home at night. Even if it couldn’t bring us together in a big Scandinavian bonfire powwow sort of way, I still think that slow TV could help us slow down our lives a little and appreciate them for the mundane action movies that they are. I have never been so thrilled by the act of doing my laundry as I was after watching “National Firewood Night.”

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | ARTS | October 15, 2013

Philosophers move to take humanities back to the future Jon Catlin Maroon Contributor Sitting in Swift’s third floor lecture hall Friday afternoon waiting to hear two esteemed, multinational, multilingual, multidisciplinary humanists discuss a topic as broad as “the future of the humanities,” I had no idea what to expect, from the very language they would speak in, to where the conversation would lead. But as a throng of eager audience members piled in around me to sit on the floor and stand in the back of the packed space to hear such a deliberately open-ended discussion, the event’s tentative subject line seemed validated before the speakers had even opened their mouths.

Organized by the French Club and Alliance Française de Chicago, which webcast the event to locations across the Midwest, the star speaker at the event was Julia Kristeva, a feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher who teaches at the Université Paris Diderot and has authored nearly 20 books. Her conversant, Chicago’s own Arnold Davidson, is in a class of his own, being fluent in all the Romance languages and having appointments in five departments, including philosophy and the Divinity School. The two have crossed paths before; Davidson has taught in Paris, while Kristeva—who was educated in France—said that she was “adopted” in the early ’70s by American universities, which were more receptive to her progressive work than those of the more traditional French system. Kristeva was also the first recipient of the Holberg Prize, which has been described

as the Nobel Prize for the humanities.

Born in 1941 in communist Bulgaria, Kristeva admitted to being influenced by the catastrophic events of the 20th century in Europe—the Shoah, the Gulag—and framed her remarks on the future of the humanities, not as a defense of particular disciplines or institutions, as many American academics seem to, but rather toward a broader “crisis of civilization.” “I have witnessed the messianic return of a number of cults,” she said. “I see today a new awakening of religions— dogmatic, fundamentalist religions.”

The only way to resist these dangers, Kristeva said, is to reach back to our “cultural heritage,” though she qualified this: “I say cultural heritage, but I am not advocating some return to roots, or seeing sources as origins of absolute truth. Sources do not always speak to us as statements, but instead as questions. European culture, of which we are the heirs, is unique, as at its best moments, it has been able to turn every identity, whatever it may be, not into a cult but into a question,” she continued, noting question-oriented traditions from the Platonic dialogues to the Jewish practice of reading the Talmud. “We find this understanding in humanism, which is not the cult of man in the place of God, but an evolution of the philosophy of the last few centuries that raises a great question mark in the most serious of places—that is, the god’s place.”

Kristeva diagnosed our times as troubled by lack of belief, which is associated in psychoanalyti-

Arnold Davidson and Julia Kristeva, both polymaths, each advocated for a new approach to the humanities in their discussion Friday.

COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FRENCH CLUB

cal models with adolescents who have outgrown their childhood sense of curiosity. Adolescents look for something to latch onto, but when they lack outlets, it results in what she called an explosion of the death drive, noting the Muslim fundamentalist teenagers responsible for shootings in Toulouse, France and the Boston Marathon bombing. Citing the Psalms, “I believe, therefore I have spoken,” Kristeva defended the need for belief as fundamental, but resisted fundamentalism: “The jump humanism makes is asking questions also of what you believe.

“A devaluing of the humanities says, ‘We can do without the human,’” she went on. In what she called “the age of the death of the human,” people now see the

iPhone as an instruction manual for life, which results in a “narrowing of the psyche,” directing it outward in search of tools for its own instrumental use. “Violence, then, results from rushing to the toolbox in search of answers and rushing to the megamalls of extreme spiritualities also.” Kristeva’s form of humanism leads one in the opposite direction—inward, rather than outward: “The ego is in need of permanent reconstruction. It is a personal abyss that needs a safe harbor in order for one to learn how to open oneself to that interiority.”

In his response, Davidson defended Kristeva’s definition of humanism as refounding, from its association with the past uncritical, ideological humanisms that fueled racism and violence.

He also seconded her imperative: “If such questions don’t get asked, we end up in a world like the one Kristeva described, with all its catastrophic consequences,” he said, going on to advocate contemporary humanistic approaches, such as the French philosopher Pierre Hadot’s radical suggestion that reading classical texts is a spiritual exercise and that philosophy is a way of life.

In this spirit, he suggested that we “think of great advances in the humanities as moments in which profoundly new questions get asked,” even if those moments are characterized by disorientation.

“As long as we ask, ‘How should I live?’ there will be a future for the humanities,” he said. “The question of humanism is inevitable, not exhausted.”

At Riviera, Impala can’t be tamed Zane Burton Arts Staff Tame Impala, the recording project of Kevin Parker, sold out the Riviera Theater last Thursday night, marking its second sold-out show in Chicago during this year alone.

When the psychedelic rockers were here in March, they played at the Vic Theatre, a venue about half the size of the Riviera.

Thankfully, while the audience was bigger this time around, the band’s trademark sound was still present, making for an evening of good vibes both on stage and in the audience.

While four other musicians join Parker during his live performances as Tame Impala, the vast majority of the music on the band’s records has been his alone. This didn’t stop the band from having great rapport—Parker didn’t dominate the stage in the slightest. He joked with the audience, commenting that he was glad the people in the balcony were standing (apparently they usually don’t).

Most of the time, though, the band barely moved as it worked through the majority of its latest record, Lonerism, along with a few tracks from

Innerspeaker and the EP Tame Impala.

The visuals displayed behind the band were fitting , albeit a little lo-fi. Two projectors cast a set of intertwining green shapes that modulated in time with the music onto a screen behind the band. These images, which recall the iTunes visualizer, are not the type of thing you usually see from a band as popular as Tame Impala. The night had a decidedly no-frills approach to it, something that was refreshing to see.

Tame Impala’s live show is all about the music, and it sounded as great on as it does on their records. On record, the songs are expansive, and at the Riviera they had a chance to float around the room and bounce off the venue’s unique textures. The band’s sound is perhaps most famous for the way that it recalls the music of the ’60s and ’70s. The makeup of the crowd reflected this: There were more middle-aged men than at any show I’ve been to in recent memor y. For most of the night, the crowd was tame as the band’s laid-back groove ; however, several tracks really lit up the group. “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” spurned audience members to

sing along as they danced in time to the band’s most recent single.

Tame Impala’s stop in Chicago comes in the middle of a short tour organized around the band’s appearance at the two weekends of the Austin City Limits Music Festival. The first four dates of this mini-tour had them performing alongside fellow psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips—a treat that Chicago was unfortunately not privileged to.

Tame Impala has seen notable critical and, increasingly, commercial success behind Lonerism, especially in the band’s native Australia : The album was featured prominently in many critics’ polls for the best albums of 2012; it topped the lists of Filter and NME magazines, and also performed admirably in Pitchfork and the Chicago Sun-Times.

If its current successes are to be believed, Tame Impala will be back in Chicago before long , and might play an even bigger venue next time. With the ability to capture the attention of increasingly large crowds using a live setup that is little more than the bare essentials, the band emphasizes that it is here to stay.

DESIGN FOR THE MAROON.

DESIGN@CHICAGOMAROON.COM

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | ARTS | October 15, 2013

CIFF continued: Festival enjoys the silence Robert Sorrell Arts Staff The Chicago International Film Festival started with a bang last Thursday night at the Chicago Theatre and kept excitement high all weekend at the AMC River East. The weekend involved some high-caliber fare including 12 Years a Slave and Blue is The Warmest Color (winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this summer), for which moviegoers waited in rush lines for hours, but mainly involved films by little-known directors from across the globe. I was lucky enough to catch three screenings this weekend: Wild Duck and Stockholm Stories, which are both participating in the New Directors Competition, and Trucker and the Fox, which is in the Docufest Competition.

Wild Duck, by Yannis Sakaridis, tells the tale of Dimitris (Alexandros Logothetis), a disenchanted ex-telecommunications expert exploring a phone-hacking scandal and corporate corruption in Athens. Though it sounds like a paperback thriller, this film has a lot to say.

The film is simply beautiful, particularly when it has no interests in furthering the narrative or showcasing the wonderful original soundtrack by Greek composer Christos Papageorgiou, and when cinematographer Jan Vogel turns his sensitive lens on the landscapes of a lake in northern Greece, the seedier neighborhoods of Athens, or merely two people sitting together in silence.

It also unwinds in a complex series of interwoven scenes recalling cult classics such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento. But Wild Duck makes Memento seem like a film cut by trigger-happy teenagers. Duck handles its swirling, agitated storyline with a level of dexterity that couldn’t be more different from the dogmatic form of the latter.

Yet despite the sophisticated plot arc, many of my favorite moments in the film were shockingly quiet and modest: the soft lap of two kayaks skimming slowly across the surface of a still lake; the sound of Dimitris taking a drag on a cigarette and sipping a glass of ouzo; Dimitris and Panayiota fishing off a concrete dock, sharing the silence of an abandoned corner of Athens as the sun sets over the Mediterranean.

Wild Duck is screening again on Friday, October 18, at 3:30 p.m.

On Saturday, I managed to snag the last ticket for the world premiere of Karin Fahlén’s first feature-length film Stockholm Stories. The interwoven lives of five Stockholmites flit through Fahlén’s stunning debut, in a set-up not all too different from the rom-com staple Love, Actually. But, although Stockholm Stories does at times veer towards the cliché, it is a much more balanced, worldly film than the rom-coms clogging our Netflix queues. It is, in the words of its director, “a city story,” exploring the ways that individuals try and fail to connect with those around them in a time when most people seem connected to their e-mails, TVs, and laptops.

From the first shots, it is clear that the film is the work of a cinema insider. The production is phenomenal, and the opening scenes give off an air more akin to Lost in Translation than Love, Actually: City streets gleam in the night to fascinating synth music that sounds like a fusion of the My Neighbor Totoro soundtrack and LCD Soundsystem. It is no surprise then that Karin Fahlén had spent more than her fair share of time around film sets, working every job from make-up artist to actress, before finally directing her own fulllength feature. In a brief Q&A session after the film, she mentioned that she was tired of

Dimitris (Alexandros Logothetis) stars as an ex-telecom expert in Wild Duck.

COURTESY OF YANNIS SAKARIDIS

how many Swedish and Scandinavian films deal with police and crime, and that what she wanted to do was “make a relatable film.” She certainly accomplished that.

Last showing at the Festival is Wednesday, October 16, at 1:30 p.m.

Arash Lahooti’s documentary—which successfully resists the western documentary mainstays of voice-over narration, diagrams, or all-encompassing conclusions—follows Trucker and filmmaker Mahmood Kiyani Falavarjani through his various tasks, both mundane and strange. When not hauling cargo across Iran, Mahmoud spends his free time crafting 5–10 minute films at the pace of about one every two years. The reason for such a gap? Mahmood writes scripts full of drama, romance, and tragedy and then fills the leading roles with chickens, crows, and

his beloved foxes.

Lahooti’s documentary, Trucker and the Fox, is at times as strange and beautiful as Mahmood Falavarjani’s short films. Whether Mahmood is shooting from the perspective of a donkey, giving a fox a bath and then swaddling it in a towel, or sharing dinner with his pet crow, he proves an enigmatic and endlessly fascinating subject.

Trucker and the Fox is so refreshing because it is a documentary that finally takes advantage of its medium. It could not be a book or podcast. The story couldn’t be condensed into a long article for the Sunday edition of The New York Times, or a fact sheet to be posted on telephone poles or university notice boards. Trucker and the Fox does not tell you anything; it only shows.

The Festival’s last screening of Trucker and the Fox is tonight, October 15, at 7:15 p.m.

Frankie and Franz light the stage at Vic Theatre Ellen Rodnianski Arts Staff On Thursday, Lincoln Park’s Vic Theatre attracted a crowd of dance rock– loving people. The audience consisted of people of all ages and styles. The dance rock group that brought all these people together was the Scottish four-member band Franz Ferdinand.

Although the band released their latest album, Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions this past August, throughout the concert they played a number of songs from previous albums, which were particular hits with the audience. A few that stood out were “Do You Want To,” to which the audience enthusiastically sang along, and “Take Me Out,” which instigated a jumping craze that swept the entire venue. Although songs from previous albums were definitely more appreciated by the audience, “Evil Eye” and “Love Illumination,” both tracks from the recent album, were also very well received.

The Vic Theatre, which opened in 1912 as the Victoria Theatre, was a perfect location for the Franz Ferdinand concert, accommodating a maximum of 1,400 people.

Around seven, people started gathering around, and Frankie Rose, who was opening the show, started playing at half past seven.

While Frankie Rose and her band were playing, it was hard to decipher what the overall stage setup looked like because of the mellow lighting. But once Franz Ferdinand came onstage, one saw that there were a number of amplifiers stacked on top of each other on either side of the stage, and the freestanding amplifiers read, “Thoughts, Words, Actions,” in the album’s characteristic pink and black font. The stage lighting changed for every song, which is quite typical. But what is less usual for rock concerts was that even while every member of the band was playing his instrument, the lights would occasionally focus on an individual band member who was not performing a solo, leaving even the lead singer, Alex Kapranos, out of the spotlight on occasion.

The band members themselves kept the audience very entertained.

Kapranos did several of his famous “V-jumps” while playing the guitar, and Nick McCarthy, who plays the guitar and synth, sported an Elvis Presley

Thrilled by a full house, dance-rockers Franz Ferdinand performed V-jumps, body rolls, and partial stripteases.

ELLEN RODNIANSKI | THE CHICAGO MAROON

hairdo and occasionally broke into body rolls while on the synth. McCarthy and Kapranos were the two more active band members on stage. At one point both of them climbed a platform and stole the attention away completely from the other two band members (Paul Thomson

on the drums and Bob Hardy on the bass guitar).

Thomson unbuttoned his shirt at an early point in the concert, and Bob Hardy, who had significantly less stage presence than his fellow band members, invoked curiosity by his contrastingly calm behavior onstage.

Arguably the most exciting part of the concert occurred when all the band members started playing percussion. The audience members did not expect it, and it blew their minds!

It’s moments like these in a concert when you realize how accomplished a band is. Not only can they work

together while playing their separate instruments, but they can also create amazing rhythms while playing an instrument meant for only one person as a group. With this trick and with their overall stage presence and performance, Franz Ferdinand left the audience ecstatic.

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | SPORTS | October 15, 2013

Squad goes 2–2 over weekend

ATHLETES OF THE WEEK

Noah Hellermann Maroon Contributor

After its first loss since September 21, the team reflected on what had changed. “Our mentality was not as tough and aggressive as it has been in the past. We shouldn’t have let any of our five-set matches go that far,” Loe said.

Later that afternoon, against No. 1 Calvin College (22–0), the Maroons did not fare well.

They lost in straight sets against the Knights, 25– 11, 25–12, 25–16. “Calvin is a very strong team…with many returning players,” Loe said.

However, Walby isn’t going to dwell on Chicago’s losses. “We knew that this weekend was going to be a tough weekend of play,” she said.

Winning two out of four games this weekend is not an unimpressive feat considering the tough, outof-conference opponents they were up against, and the Maroons are viewing the games as a learning experience.

“We now have experience playing against a large, fast team,” Loe said.

The South Siders will try to take what they’ve learned this weekend into their next games this upcoming Saturday against Emory and NYU in the second UAA Round Robin tournament of the season.

VINCENT CORTINA, FOOTBALL Vincent Cortina is a fourth-year quarterback for the UChicago football team. Cortina set career highs with 354 yards passing and five touchdowns at Rhodes College on Saturday.

He was also named UAA Offensive Player of the Week on Monday.

Head coach Chris Wilkerson: “Vinny had a career day for the Maroons. His love for the game shows in his preparation and effort. He does everything with poise, passion, enthusiasm, and a sense of pride. He continues to think team first. He has done an exemplary job leading his team to a 4-1 start this fall.”

KATHRYN LA PORTE, WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

Prior to last weekend’s Midwest Challenge, the women’s volleyball team had only played five sets once in 19 games this season.

However, the competition was even and fierce. In three of four contests, No. 15 Chicago (16–5, 3–0 UAA) played through the fifth set.

The Maroons went 2–2 at the tournament. They came out on top in both of their matches on Friday, but lost twice against tougher competition on Saturday.

Chicago started the weekend against Heidelberg University (11–11). Even though Heidelberg dominated the first set, winning by a score of 25–12, the South Siders were unperturbed. They came back to win the next two sets 25–17 and 25–18.

The Student Princes didn’t give up though, winning the fourth set 25–18. In the final tiebreaker, the Maroons won by three points, 15–12, to secure the victory.

The next match against Bethany College (19–7) was remarkably similar.

The teams battled back and forth through five sets.

Chicago lost the first set by only two points, 25–23, but came back to take the

next two 25–19 and 25–22 before dropping the fourth by five points, 25–20. Both teams looked like they could win the deciding set, but the Maroons stole the match with a 15–13 victory.

Fourth-year setter Nikki DelZenero posted a seasonhigh 51 assists against Heidelberg, only to shatter that with a remarkable 58 assists in the five sets versus Bethany later in the day. Second-year outside hitter Maren Loe led the team with 20 kills in both matches.

Head coach Vanessa Walby was impressed by everyone who played over the course of the weekend, regardless of the numbers they put up. “No matter who we put on the floor, they made immediate impacts and made the level of play rise,” she said.

The first match on Saturday looked like it could go the same way as the previous two games.

Clarkson University (19–6) dragged the South Siders through five sets, and neither team went down easily. After Chicago won an arduous first set 28–26, the Golden Knights won the next two 25–15 and 25–18. The Maroons came back to seize a 25–19 victory in the fourth set but Clarkson took the match in the fifth set, 15–8.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

Volleyball

Kathryn La Porte is a first-year middle blocker for the Maroons volleyball team. Over the weekend, she helped UChicago go 3-0 at the UAA Round Robin in Cleveland, Ohio. La Porte averaged 1.6 kills and 0.9 blocks per set while recording a .387 hitting percentage.

Head coach Vanessa Walby: “Katie La Porte is a very quick and versatile athlete. She is also a great teammate. She works hard every day, and you can always count on her to give her very best. This last weekend would be a great example of this. Katie stepped up, played in three conference matches and represented herself and her teammates extremely well. She stayed very poised and calm on the court. She was an awesome addition to our lineup, and I am looking forward to watching her grow and develop throughout the next four years!”

South Siders unable to break down Emory defense in first UAA loss Men’s Soccer

Third-year Kevin Matheny prepares to pass the ball during a game against Wheaton last year.

COURTESY OF JOHN BOOZ

David Gao Maroon Contributor Against a patient and unrelenting defense, the South Siders (6–1–3) suffered their first UAA loss against

Emory (8–3–1) in a 2–0 match on Saturday at home.

Coming off a conference win against Carnegie (8– 2–1), the No. 23 Maroons hosted the visiting Eagles.

Starting the game strong,

Emory put pressure on the South Siders and held control, putting the ball in first with a header. Chicago looked to respond but couldn’t convert a few good looks as Emory headed in another at the 75th

minute to seal the win.

From the beginning, the Maroons looked troubled.

“I think we struggled in the first 15 minutes,” said head coach Mike Babst. “We really want to try to set the tone in

the first 15 minutes to make them a little uncomfortable, but we didn’t win that portion of the game.”

In a unique style of play, the Eagles disrupted the Maroons’ offense by putting their entire team behind the ball to play behind the Chicago defense.

“They’re not running three to four guys at the ball to pressure it and run it right away. After they lose it, they’re comfortable sitting in their shape and waiting until we make mistakes, and then they can counter and get a quick ball in from behind,” Babst said.

As the first half progressed, the game slowly began settling down into a defensive battle.

Emory got on the scoreboard first off a header from a long throw-in 38 minutes into the game.

“I thought we defended it [the throw-in] well 95 percent of the time, but gave them too many opportunities with that. It’s something we practiced defending all week, and we did a good job with it every time but the one,” Babst said.

Undeterred, Chicago went out in the second

half looking to establish an offensive mindset. The game opened up as the South Side playmakers began generating more opportunities. Emory’s goalie also stepped up his performance, garnering a season-high five saves and making several close plays at the 0-1 mark.

In the 75th minute, Emory sent out a long cross against Chicago’s defense that was put in off a flick header. The Maroons continued pounding away at the Eagles’ defense, but were unable to find the back of the net as the clock expired.

Though they suffered a loss, their spirits haven’t dampened.

“We are just beginning our conference games, and have been ranked in the top 25 on and off throughout the season,” said fourth-year midfielder Sawyer Kisken.

“Hopefully, we can take care of business this weekend and get some wins.”

The Maroons look toward getting a shot against the top team in the UAA as they host Rochester at home this Friday, with the action starting at 5 p.m. on Stagg Field.

SPORTS

IN QUOTES “He’s supposed to be protect and serve. This son of a gun’s got his hands up! Help me, then cheer, fool!”

—Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter vents his frustration at one of the police officers at Fenway Park for Game 2 of the ALCS

Women 4th, men 7th in strong field at Lucian Rosa Invite Cross Country Samuel Zacher Associate Sports Editor In a field of unusually tough competition, Chicago held its own.

At the Lucian Rosa Invitational at UW–Parkside on Saturday, both the men’s and women’s teams competed against schools from all three divisions. The No. 6 women’s squad placed fourth out of 25 teams with a total of 152 points, and the No. 16 men’s team finished seventh out of 19 teams, also with 152 points.

However, both Chicago squads placed higher than any other DIII teams at the Invitational.

“Running against DI schools is always a treat,” said fourth-year Griffin Brunk . “The higher level of competition really encourages us to elevate our performance and push ourselves to the limit.”

On the women’s side, secondyear Catherine Young dazzled

the competition as usual, crossing the finish line third (out of 165 competitors) with a time of 17:51.1.

Other notable finishes on the women’s side included fourthyear Michaela Whitelaw taking 27th place with a time of 18:32.8, fourth-year Elise Wummer placing 35th with a time of 18:45.7, second-year Brianna Hickey finishing in 42nd with a time of 18:53.2, and second-year Maggie Cornelius crossing 49th with a time of 18:59.6.

For the men’s team, fourthyear Daniel Povitsky headed the Chicago pack, finishing 11th with a time of 25:38.2, thirdyear Renat Zalov placed 23rd with a time of 26:01.5, third-year Kevin On crossed the finish line 40th with a time of 26:22.2, and second-year Michael Frasco took 45th with a time of 26:24.5.

“Regarding team performance, it was hit or miss for people,”

said Brunk, who finished 53rd with a time of 26:30.4. “It was our first course with hills. It was kind of a shock for some of us.

However, I also feel that it was an excellent learning experience, and will really prep us for the hilly conference course in Pittsburgh.”

Brunk was referring to the UAA Championships in Pittsburgh on November 2. The No. 6 women will likely be the favorite in Pittsburgh, as they are nationally ranked nine spots higher than the next UAA team, No. 15 NYU. Three UAA teams are also ranked in the 20s.

For Brunk’s men’s team, the conference competition is more stingy: No. 3 Wash U and No. 8 NYU are both ahead of the No. 16 Maroons, who are closely followed by No. 20 Carnegie Mellon.

There is still more time for teams to improve and rankings

Second-year Catherine Young finished third at the Lucian Rosa Invitational this past weekend.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

to change, as both Chicago teams will be competing at the UW– Oshkosh Brooks Invitational

next weekend, where the Maroons look to tear up the track and further prepare for UAAs.

First seed Tang finishes third at Small College Championships Women’s Tennis Russell Mendelson Sports Staff

Third-year Megan Tang finished third at the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Small College Championships this past weekend.

COURTESY OF DAVE HILBERT

As the brisk autumn weather begins to settle over Chicago, one Maroon was able to soak up the last few rays of sun in Fort Myers, FL while competing in the ITA National Small College Championships.

Third-year Megan Tang represented the squad in the tournament, entering with the prestigious ranking of first seed.

As the first seed, Tang was granted the opportunity of facing an unseeded player, Megan Humphreys from UW– Whitewater. Tang took control of the match from the outset, winning in straight sets 6–1, 6–0.

“We had very long rallies, but I was able to win because I made more shots and used my forehand to set up the points,” Tang said on her match against Humphreys.

Tang also pointed out that Humphreys was a weaker player than Tang’s

second opponent, Michelle Satterfield from Emory University. Tang would go on to lose the match against the fourthseeded Satterfield 6–1, 6–1.

“Her shots were heavier,” Tang said of Satterfield’s play. “[S]he took control of the point whenever she could. I was not hitting the shots I wanted, and had some unforced errors due to the fact that I was trying to be on the offensive, as being on the defensive wasn’t working.”

As a result of the second-round loss, Tang was designated to compete in the third-place match against third seed Sofia Vega from Texas Lutheran.

“During my third match, especially when I was down 1–4 in the first set, I felt I had nothing to lose and started to go for my shots,” Tang said. “I had the mentality that I wanted the match to go my way, no matter what the outcome was, so I began moving my feet more and being more patient. This definitely helped me play better and boosted my confidence.”

The boost in confidence in her offensive approach showed as Tang came back to take the first set 7–5 and continued by winning the next set and the match with an overall line of 7–5, 6–3.

This final match was Tang’s biggest challenge of the weekend, playing the highest-ranked player she would face.

“I wasn’t moving my feet, setting up points, nor executing the shots I wanted to. Essentially, I was rushing points and not hitting enough penetrating shots,” Tang said. “However, once I started to do the things I wasn’t initially, as well as getting my first serve in, I was able to come back. When the season begins in January, I’ll remember this match and know that I can always turn things around in a match when they’re not going my way. It all begins with my footwork and first serves.”

The Maroons will start their next season after winter break on January 24 at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign.

Second half proves costly for Maroons in home loss to Eagles Women’s Soccer Tatiana Fields Associate Sports Editor This Saturday, the Maroons suffered their first conference loss against No. 8-ranked Emory.

Though the game was held to a tie through the first half, the Eagles (8–3–1) upped their offensive efforts in the second half to finish the game with a score of 2–0, bringing the South Siders (7–3–2) to a 0–1–1 record in the UAA. Though Emory came out of the game victorious, the entire first half was a fairly even contest with the Maroons getting off to an early offensive start. Fourth-year mid-

fielder Micaela Harms got a shot on goal in the fourth minute, but Emory’s goalie stopped it with a dive. Both teams had their fair share of opportunities throughout the first half, but neither could finish them off and get on the scoreboard.

At halftime, Emory led in the shots category 11–7, demonstrating a slight offensive advantage, but not by much. The second half was a different story, with the Eagles stepping up their offense and increasing their shot advantage over Chicago.

Emory capitalized on one of these scoring opportunities early

in the second half with a goal off a rebound shot in the fifty-second minute, grabbing the lead 1–0.

Chicago held them to one goal for much of the second half and had their chance to tie the game in the last few minutes, but the Eagles were able to stop the Maroons’ offensive runs and scored an insurance goal in the final seconds of the game, finishing off the game with a score of 2–0.

“The team really challenged Emory’s back line well,” secondyear forward Mary Bittner said.

“We exploited the outside space on the field and battled for fiftyfifty balls.”

Though the Maroons were able to hold the Eagles steady through the first half, the second half proved fatal for Chicago, with Emory outshooting the South Siders 17–3. Third-year goalkeeper Jacinda Reid kept the game fairly close with nine saves and two goals allowed.

Assistant coach Bannon Stroud saw strong performances from several Maroons.

“Some personal standout performers were [fourth-year] Katie Dana, [fourth-year] Beatrice Hobson, [second-year] Nicole Mullen, and [third-year] Sara Kwan,” Stroud said.

Putting the loss behind them, the team is focused on getting the wins they need to ensure they will continue into the postseason. With five conference games still left in the season, the Maroons need conference wins to ensure they earn a spot in the NCAA DIII tournament. Chicago will face Rochester and Case in their next two games this weekend, giving them a chance to improve their conference record.

“We have no margin [for] error going forward,” Stroud said. “We have to accrue wins.”

The team’s next game will be Friday against Rochester, at 2:30 p.m. at Stagg Field.