Dance Floor

TIME TO MIX AND MINGLE

EARTH TO EVANSTON

How a tiny, Evanston-based radio station reached the world.

DAN ROSENZWEIG-ZIFF

WORLD ON HIS SHOULDERS

Professor John C. Hudson has been the sole lead on the geography department for 31 years.

CLAIRE BUGOS

NITESKOOL LIVES AGAIN

How one student brought an organization back to life.

CARTER MOHS

ALL STATE, NO FANS

With the stadium 45 minutes away, fans of the men’s basketball team have struggled to show up.

DUNCAN AGNEW

SEWING MY SELVES

A writer on the challenges of embracing vulnerability.

LILA REYNOLDS

PAINTINGS FOR POSTERITY

Northwestern faculty team up with the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate classic works.

AMANDA GORDON

THE STORY OF THE SILOS, AS TOLD THROUGH EXPLOSIONS

A detailed history of Chicago’s Damen Silos.

EMMA KUMER

WHAT THE HELL ARE THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES?

Let’s figure this out once and for all.

MILAN POLK

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID There’s an abandoned warehouse beside the Damen grain elevators, a necessary stop before venturing over to the main attraction. “If you’re feeling adventurous, you can climb onto the second floor to get a better view of the silos,” Emma Kumer says. “There’s this crumbling staircase with half the stairs missing ... you’ve got to take it just because you know every mother in the world would tell you not to.” PHOTO BY LETA DICKINSON 13

HOW A LOCAL RADIO STATION REACHED THE WORLD

WRITTEN BY DAN ROSENZWEIG-ZIFF DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER and EMMA KUMER

In 1206, two Viking warriors, Torstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukk, donned birch-bark leggings to ski through the silent Norwegian winter and rescue the kingdom’s child prince. In doing so, they imprinted their names on history: They were the Birkebeiners, Norwegian for “birch bark leggings.”

Some 750 years later, Birkebeiner descendents in Hayward, Wisconsin paid tribute to their heritage and created the American Birkebeiner, a 34-mile cross country ski race. And people around the world, from Wisconsin to Oslo, could hear about it thanks to a unique new radio station.

Michael Poulos, a lawyer and journalist from Evanston, shared the story of the American Birkebeiner with the world in his report “Birkie Fever.” Poulos described it as “a state of mind where you compete, instead, with yourself, just to impress yourself.” This broadcast typified a new, intriguing way to broadcast on shortwave radio. This was Radio Earth.

The show was the brainchild of Poulos and three aspiring media entrepreneurs: Jeff White (president), John Freberg (chief engineer), and John Beebe (marketing consultant). Traditional FM radio can only broadcast locally due to shorter wave frequencies, but in the late 1970s, shortwave radio – a form of broadcast that could transmit across continents and over oceans because of higher wave frequencies – attracted about 200 million daily listeners worldwide. But it was dominated by propaganda and God-speak. The Radio Earth team saw an opening in the waves during the tail end of the Cold War: There was a need for unbiased, worldwide radio news. Someone had to step up.

“We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the earth?” Poulos says.

The concept of Radio Earth began at Northern Illinois University in the late 1970s, where Beebe, White and Freberg worked on a public radio program together. Beebe and White decided to create an international shortwave radio station after meeting with Beebe’s father, a media advertiser, who affirmed the idea’s viability. As multinational companies expanded, he explained, so too would the international advertising market.

They founded Radio Earth, promising “objective news, information, music, and feature reports to … the world community, on the shortwave bands.” White says the program attracted broadcasters from state-run stations in search of free reign and creative opportunity.

“We had segments from people from all over the world,” White says, “some of whom worked in government stations but felt really stifled with the programming they were allowed to do there.”

“We had a point of view, but our point of view was to not have a point of view,” Poulos says. “There were people here in Evanston reaching out to a world that was still very much divided. Climbing over the walls and climbing over the Iron Curtain. Touching people and showing them that there is a way to live where you’re not opposed to other people. Instead, you’re in it together.”

Preparations for the first broadcast began in the early 1980s. In his spare bedroom, Freberg spent his nights working past 2 a.m. building a portable studio that followed Radio Earth around the world, and eventually returned to Sherman Avenue. There, the Pouloses continued recording until the early 1990s.

There was just one problem: The FCC prohibited U.S.-based shortwave radio stations to broadcast to the U.S. They had to find a different home.

Radio Earth’s vision finally came to fruition when a Hilton opened its doors on a Caribbean island called Curacao, and they subsequently received financial support from the minister of finance and tourism organizations (An airline flew the tapes to Santa Domingo for transmission in exchange for promotional opportunities). Freberg then sent broadcasting equipment to Curacao, where White oversaw assembly of a recording studio inside the Hilton.

“All the work we were putting in in advance of getting this thing on the air, it all seemed kind of nebulous, sort of surreal in a way,” Freberg says.

On June 1, 1983, two weeks after the first shipment of equipment to Curacao, Freberg tuned into shortwave radio and heard White’s voice on the other end, along with fellow Northern Illinois graduate Matt Bell.

There was Radio Moscow. There was Voice of America. There was religious radio. And now, there was Radio Earth. Broadcasts opened with, “Radio Earth presents: the world.”

Radio Earth told human interest stories and even ad-libbed their broadcasts, a far cry from scripted state-run stations. “It gave it a very live feel,” says Suzanne Poulos, the secretary treasurer of the company. Still, the founders weren’t certain of this new method’s impact. Two weeks after that first broadcast, though, the hotel secretary called them into her office; she had something important to show them.

“There was a big, gigantic mailbag there, and she said, ‘All these letters here are for you,’” White says. “Everybody loved [our programming], we had letters from all over the world. And so [we knew] the concept worked.”

From the tiny island in the Caribbean, the group’s soundwaves rippled across the blue waters of the Atlantic. At its peak, according to a Chicago Tribune article, Radio Earth attracted over 600,000 listeners weekly. A 1984 Review of International Broadcasting study concluded that its lead program “The World” had the number two daily program behind “BBC World News.”

Freberg and White note that these numbers, were hard to quantify to advertisers, and were a key reason for Radio Earth’s eventual decline. A lack of Arbitron ratings (think Nieman ratings for radio) scared ad agencies away. Despite the interest of major companies, there wasn’t enough market research to ensure profitability.

“Advertising is a business where advertisers want to understand the value they’re getting from the advertisements,” Freberg says. “It was clear we were not getting the advertising response we needed. At a certain point, it was like ‘we’re all paying for this out of our own pockets.’”

Despite financial struggles, the programming had tremendous reach. The team received letters from British naval officers at sea, where Radio Earth was the only station they could pick up. Poulos, who ran for Illinois State Representative in 1984, remembers going door-to-door in Evanston, where voters recognized his voice from the broadcasts.

“From the get go, it was casting a broad net,” Poulos says. “You didn’t have a concentrated audience. What happened was the program immediately had an impact on the international broadcasting community.”

Listeners could tune in to hear about life thousands of miles away from recognizable broadcasters who weren’t trying to convince them to support Communism or believe in God. Instead, these broadcasters enthusiastically reported on issues and events that moved them, which in turn moved listeners.

The international community realized the importance of audience relationships as listeners. Radio Sweden even ran a formal study that concluded it needed to produce more broadcasting like Radio Earth’s.

“Radio Earth, even though it was not a financial success, really did give my wife and me a chance to reach out and touch people everywhere,” Poulos says. Once White and Bell moved on from Radio Earth, the Pouloses took over production and broadcasting responsibilities, setting up the portable studio in a small room of their legal office.

In 2018, Radio Earth no longer broadcasts on shortwave, though a couple posts survive on YouTube. The other founders moved on over the decades, but the Pouloses still work in the office on Sherman Avenue, nestled into an unassuming office space that still dons the Radio Earth sign.

While the original team remembers Radio Earth as a representation of all that is possible in youth, it is perhaps Poulos’ conclusion at the end of “Birkie Fever” that best sums up Radio Earth’s goal of letting both the Earth, and its people, speak for themselves.

“It is a race where its total is greater than the sum of its parts, but where the final meaning is found in the individual,” Poulos said at the time. “With determination and inner strength, everybody can win the Birkie, regardless of ability. Perhaps the final lesson of the Birkebeiner is with that same determination and inner strength, everybody can also win at life.”

What the heck is a shortwave radio?

Shortwave radio, unlike FM radio, broadcasts over higher frequency waves, meaning waves that occur more frequently.

These frequencies can bounce off the upper atmosphere, called the ionosphere. This lets them travel farther than local FM radio across continents and over oceans.

Antennas for shortwave radios, which can be the size of football fields, often cost more than $50,000.

After 31 years as the only geography professor, John C. Hudson’s imminent retirement may put his long-lived program to bed.

WRITTEN and PHOTOGRAPHED BY CLAIRE BUGOS DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

It’s a Tuesday evening, and Professor John C. Hudson sits at his desk. To his back is a row of filing cabinets, a broken Dell computer and a globe. The houseturned-office space at 515 Clark, which has been vacated save Hudson’s office and an assortment of junk from past occupants, is quiet. Hudson looks up from his work, past a poster featuring corn varieties grown in North Dakota and through the window, where he watches the day turn to dusk. After a moment, he turns back to grading his students’ assignments on the geography of Chicago. When he’s finished, he’ll pack his things into a brown leather briefcase, slide a canvas jacket over his signature plaid button-down shirt and drive home. Before falling asleep tonight, he will write out every word of tomorrow’s lecture. He knows the content better than anyone, but it is challenging to retain all that knowledge, even after 52 years.

Hudson has been the captain of the geography program since 1987, when the department shut down. Throughout this time, he has led students through geography: the study of the physical features of the earth and how it is affected by, and affects, human populations. Although the 76-year-old professor dreads the day when he must give up the routine of teaching for retirement, his departure is imminent. When he goes, the program he sustained for so long will surely go with him.

After reaching a peak in the early 1970s, the following decade saw a decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in geography. This trend was visible at Northwestern too: faculty began to leave their positions and the number of geography majors dwindled. By 1973, five of the eight geography faculty had departed for other universities or jobs.

In 1986, only two tenured faculty and a handful of assistant professors remained. Under the direction of University President Arnold Weber, the dean of Weinberg shut down the department without consulting the geography team.

Although no surprise to Hudson, the announcement shocked many students and faculty. Even several years after losing its department status, the importance of geography remained hotly contested. In a 1990 letter to the editor, Chemistry Professor Mark Ratner applauded Weber’s decision to axe the geography and dental hygiene departments, as they “are simply inappropriate at a private research university, especially in a time of extremely tight budgeting.”

Hudson retorted with a barb of his own the following week: “It strikes me as inappropriate to have the chairman of one of our leading departments cast aspersions on one of our smallest programs in the course of praising the University’s president.”

After his geography counterpart, Michael Dacey, broke off to begin the Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences program, Hudson became the University’s sole geographer. He was a tenured professor, and thus allowed to continue teaching, bearing the weight of the program on his own.

“I started talking to the dean and said ‘I want a program in geography,’ and he said ‘You can have [it], but it has to depend on just you,” Hudson says. “Thirty-one years later I’m still doing the same thing.”

In hindsight, Hudson says he felt somewhat relieved when the department was downsized. “I can’t tell you how long I tried to keep a sinking ship afloat.”

After the department’s dissolution, the geography program became part of the anthropology department as an adjunct major. Although technically a professor of anthropology, Hudson’s focus is entirely on geography, and he works independently, without help from teaching assistants or other faculty apart from visiting lecturer Michael Ribant, who teaches Geographic Information Systems.

Unlike some professors who take leaves of absence to focus on research, Hudson works on projects throughout the school year. He has six books to his name and hopes to complete another this year on the geography of Illinois. Despite his long career, he only elected to take time off when he recieved a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988.

Through all of it, Hudson has managed to teach five lecture courses per year, on topics from economic geography to principles of cartography. One of his courses on North American geography has been offered by Northwestern every spring for the past 47 years.

“The fact that this has existed in a very stable situation for over 30 years – I wouldn’t have predicted that,” he says.

Though he updates his facts and figures, Hudson’s teaching is traditional. “Geography is really not sexy,” he says. He studies maps and data. He teaches his students global trends in the production of industrial roundwood. And yet, he scoffs at the idea of trying to appeal to students with flashy course titles.

“Teach geography, call it geography, and students will be interested and take it,” he says.

It seems, however, that the students who most enjoy his classes are drawn by his persona.

“He always has a smile on his face... He’s never really in a bad mood,” says Sagaar Jagetia, who double majors in geography and economics. “The reason I chose geography is because of him and how interesting he makes it.”

This year, Hudson is teaching around 250 students and eight geography majors. Most study economics, environmental science and policy, anthropology and journalism. When leafing through old photos or membership lists for Gamma Theta Upsilon, the geography honors fraternity, he chuckles as he recalls past students. He speaks fondly of those in his classes, remarking, “he’s a good guy” or “she’s an excellent student.”

In the nearly half century that Hudson has taught at Northwestern, he has witnessed sweeping changes in campus culture and society. And yet the trajectory of the geography program and his own approach to teaching has changed remarkably little. He still crafts maps using a 1994 Dell computer running Windows 2000 and doesn’t publish his courses to Canvas.

It is his passion for the subject and for the routine of teaching that compels him to return, year after year, to the blackboard.

“Why do I do all this?” he muses. “Mostly because it’s fun.”

As he looks forward to his 77th birthday, Hudson’s retirement looms large. When he finally takes his leave, the last remnant of what was once a fundamental discipline and thriving department will also depart.

“As long as I’m here, geography is here,” Hudson says. “When I go, who knows?”

The floorboards creak beneath him as he switches his desk lamp off and walks toward the door, past world maps and shelves of geography dissertations from the 1950s.

For now, though, he doesn’t seem bothered about the future. The professor has another lecture to prepare.

Niteskool Lives Again

On a brisk Sunday morning in a dark back room of Louis Hall, something magical happens. It is the rebirth of Niteskool Productions, a Northwestern student group that has made music videos since the ‘80s. The group closed up shop in 2015, but Bienen sophomore Erica Bank is resurrecting Niteskool in her own vision. And, behold, it is very good.

A group of about 20 students fill the room, each with their own expertise in various aspects of production. A legal committee representative is on standby to make sure there are no problems with copyrights or contracts. From the back of the room, Bank leads it all, looking on with calm resolve. She may run the show, but she still has time to take it all in. She even pauses to capture the scene on Snapchat.

The group is gathered in the set room of Louis for One Takes, a new initiative launched by Bank last December. In the past, Niteskool Productions focused on producing a single large-scale music video for a student band, but the new Niteskool has a different approach. In an ode to the NPR Tiny Desk Concert, a popular live music series shot in an intimate setting, Niteskool plans to release a series of casual concerts recorded with high-quality audio and visuals in a single take. This quarter the groups consist of Prom D8, Unpopular Opinion and Thunk Acapella.

“We are just focusing on Northwestern student musicians right now because we really want to highlight the talent that Northwestern has,” Bank says. “Being in the music school and WNUR, I’m surrounded by very impressive undergraduates every single day and I think a lot of students don’t have the same ability I do to be exposed to that level of talent.”

Bank says she wanted to get involved in the group before even starting her freshman year, only to learn that Niteskool had been shut down two years earlier. Instead of giving up on the club, though, the ad hoc music business major saw an opportunity to build her resume and pursue a passion.

“I’m not really taking any music business classes, so Niteskool is the first real, hands-on experience I’ve gotten because it’s my own little business,” Bank says. “I got to bridge my passion and knowledge of music and dive into this passion project.”

Niteskool has experienced faculty advisors to assist with operations, including RTVF Professor Jacob Smith and Gregg Latterman, a Kellogg innovation and entrepreneurship faculty member. Smith first heard about the group just before he started teaching at Northwestern five years ago and wanted to get involved. When he heard Bank was trying to restart the club, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

“The big ideas have really been coming from the students, and I think that’s the way it should be,” Smith says. “[Bank] had this vision and idea about how it could be rebooted and restarted, but immediately when she spread this idea around, it sounded like many students were getting on board and wanting to be involved.”

Smith and Latterman both have extensive background in the music industry. Smith played bass on the doubleplatinum album How to Save a Life by The Fray, which Latterman was managing at the time. Together, the two are a dynamic duo: Smith helps with the recording and Latterman offers advice on the business aspects of Niteskool.

“We’ll be able to get big artists here once Niteskool is able to prove they’ll be able to capture, make it sound good and look good,” Latterman says. “There’s a way to build something that’s not being done at other places.”

For now, though, Bank wants to keep the vision simple. She says she’ll be happy if Niteskool can record One Takes in campus locations such as Deering Library or Morty’s office. She just wants to see how well the group can do on its own.

“When I got the mastered audio from the first recording, that fully made my day,” Bank says. “I’ve been learning so much and I’ve been through so many challenges. Just seeing the final product, especially after a hard production day, is super rewarding.”

All State, No Fans

Without Welsh-Ryan, Northwestern Men’s Basketball didn’t live up to the hype.

WRITTEN BY DUNCAN AGNEW and DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

You know the smell. The pungent odor of Natural Light in Elder. Consuming this nectar of the gods was the best way to ease the pain of the coming trek: the journey to Allstate Arena.

The alcohol also blunted the trauma that awaited me, and all Northwestern basketball fans, at home games this winter. After capturing an NCAA tournament bid for the first time in school history last season, NU’s basketball team kicked off its encore season at No. 19. Nothing could hold the Wildcats back —except construction.

Welsh-Ryan Arena, where students stormed the court after the historic victory over Michigan that sent the ‘Cats to the Big Dance, was out of commission this winter. The $110 million renovation will offer new amenities like a nutrition center and enhanced lighting, but the construction has thrown the basketball program into limbo for much of the past year. The team was practicing on campus at Blomquist Gym — yes, a Big Ten college basketball team practiced at Blom — and playing home games at Allstate Arena in Rosemont. Instead of the casual 15-minute walk or five-minute shuttle to Welsh- Ryan, Wildcat fans faced a daunting hourlong bus ride to the stadium.

Andrew Jacobs, a former Northwestern football manager and self-proclaimed sports fanatic, bristled when describing his experience in the student section at Allstate. The typically exuberant senior looked ready to sink into fetal position.

“It doesn’t feel like home,” Jacobs says. “It very much feels like an away game.”

But his face lit up at the mere mention of last season, as he recalled the electric environment in Evanston during Northwestern’s magical run to the tournament.

“The students were engaged. It was bumpin’,” Jacobs says. “Last year was the peak, and it was absolutely fantastic.”

To its credit, the athletic department did everything in its power to get students to Rosemont. Emails about free shuttles, promotional giveaways and catered food from Chick-fil-A, Culver’s and Papa John’s flooded student inboxes. Wildside even offered shuttle-riders a $15 meal voucher for concessions at Allstate.

Desperation was hardly a good look, but things soon took a controversial turn: Before a matchup with Penn State, walk-on Charlie Hall announced that the fraternity boasting the largest attendance would receive $1,000 and free Under Armour shirts. And, for a bout with Michigan on February 6, the athletic department pledged $10 to Cradles to Crayons for every Dance Marathon participant who attended. Even at these larger games, students struggled to fill the risers behind the basket; without the pep band, fans only filled a few rows.

“There’s enough people there that it doesn’t feel empty, but the student section is 50 people instead of hundreds,” Jacobs says. “It’s significantly smaller. It doesn’t feel as loud.”

Despite a meager student section, my time at Rosemont was wild and wonderful. After walking to Blom to catch a shuttle for the showdown against Illinois, I grabbed a free Culver’s cheeseburger and geared up for a lively night. A sketchy bottle of rum and Coke made its way up the aisles of the bus during our long trek. When we finally pulled into the vast abyss that is the Allstate parking lot, Wildside representatives greeted us with the prized $15 concessions vouchers. My traveling companions were quick to point out that a 24 ounce can of beer was, quite conveniently, $13.

Filled with liquid courage, a group of boisterous freshmen led the small but mighty Northwestern crowd in trash talking the overwhelming number of Illinois fans in attendance. Each foul was met with ecstatic chants of “bullshit!” Perhaps the highlight of the night was the student section frenzy in response to Steve Aoki’s “Turbulence” blaring over the PA system. But nothing could truly compare to the satisfaction of Bryant McIntosh and company conquering the Illini in overtime — a rare Big Ten win for the good guys.

Still, it would be hard not to call the season a flop. Maybe last winter was a fluke. Playing in a new arena certainly didn’t help. And some athletes have been skeptical since the announcement of renovations, none more so than senior forward Gavin Skelly.

“It sucks,” he said during a preseason media day. “Playing at Allstate is going to be really weird.”

And weird it was. In the end, we had no choice but to drink our Natty to the return of Welsh-Ryan next fall. But now, Allstate, I bid you farewell. I hope we never meet again.

Sewing my Selves

How I learned to be open with the world, my family and myself in the #MeToo era.

WRITTEN BY LILA REYNOLDS and DESIGNED BY SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

Acts of sharing defined my childhood. When I was young, I brought extra rice cakes to school because I knew my friend liked them. On my birthday, I made sure my sister received a party favor so she wouldn’t feel left out on my special day. At one point, I even shared a journal with my best friend and alternated writing story chapters with her.

Though I became an expert at sharing things, I never learned how to share myself. In retrospect, this seems strange, because my parents had no such problems; I heard plenty of stories about my mom’s childhood, and when I was older my dad regaled me with some choice highlights from his college fraternity days. But my parents sharing intangible stories always seemed separate from my small acts of generosity.

Of course, when I was 7 and my most important life event was my hamster escaping and lodging herself inside a wall during show-and-tell, being open with family members didn’t seem all that important. But as the world got a little tougher and my problems grew more nebulous, my capacity to share became increasingly elusive.

I didn’t learn what I was willing to share until that decision was taken from me. During my sophomore spring at Northwestern, a man I considered a friend raped me. I was made to share my body – a person’s most intimate possession – with someone who never asked. I suddenly felt very isolated from the communities and friends I had built over the past two years. I felt myself needing support in a way I was only comfortable providing, not receiving.

When I forced myself to ask for help from those I was closest to, I was met with more support than I could have anticipated. Slowly, as I learned to incorporate being a survivor into my working identity, my small circle of support expanded to include more peers.

I didn’t know how to bring my parents into the drama that had taken place more than 2,000 miles away. So I didn’t. I planned on it remaining a lifelong secret to my family members. The fact that it was common knowledge among most of my Northwestern friends did not matter.

Around the time I left for college, I started to place my past trauma into a friend’s palms and trust them to treat it with love and care.

I quickly realized upon arriving to Northwestern that home had at least one luxury (not including being able to shower without shoes on) that school did not: time. Years of coexistence helped my family understand me. Over time, we had unwittingly practiced the art of showing and not telling.

It became clear that I wasn’t going to make friends without a new approach. That’s when I started unlearning the rehearsed responses that had filled every conversation I’d had for as long as I could remember. I learned that sometimes telling is as powerful as showing.

Weeks of small talk morphed into a race to know as much about one another as possible. Conversations became a version of trading: in exchange for revealing a personal and painful part of myself, I expected and received the same in return. Within a few weeks, my friends knew stories that I wouldn’t dare share with my family.

I was comfortable, and I got the support I needed when I needed it. But when I saw how my friends reacted to my experiences, I could not imagine the trauma it would cause my family.

The #MeToos that dotted – and then flooded – my Facebook newsfeed in October started to smudge the line between school and home. Much like when I was assaulted, I felt forced into a public and uncomfortable form of vulnerability. By posting on Facebook, every person in my life could hear my story, whether in Amherst or Evanston. Even though I would normally be the first person to share, I ultimately decided against it. But I felt like avoiding the Facebook trend risked discrediting me as a survivor, advocate and ally.

While the pressure caused me to retreat back into silence, it pushed many others to break theirs – including my mother. When she shared her story of assault for the first time, it leveled the mountains and valleys that until then had kept home and school separate.

Since that conversation, I’ve felt a tension growing in my definition of self that I didn’t realize had been changing steadily over the past three years. A person can’t understand me at this moment without knowing my life story – and I’m living in a world where many of the people most important to me don’t.

I want to get to a point where everyone in my life knows this version of me. But I’m still working to find a way to stitch together my two homes in a way that doesn’t cause them to unravel every time I board the plane. Each time I return to my hometown, it grows more difficult for me to shut down free-flowing, talkative Lila in exchange for the practiced, careful self I’ve rehearsed foryears.

Up until recently, most of the times I’ve been capitalv-Vulnerable have been at breaking points. My vulnerability has felt forced: my first visit with a therapist in 10th grade resulted from of a friend worrying for my safety, and my anxiety disorder became decidedly more public after my thirdsocial-event-related panic attack as a sophomore in college.

A need to seek help, more often than not, leaves me feeling damaged and weak. I wonder whether I was wrong to wait to get help as long as I did or wrong to seek it at all. Each of these splinters brings me closer to collapse, but I often find comfort and healing in my friends’ voluntary openness. I am starting to understand why sharing has been painful by recognizing the times when doing so can be both powerful and positive. My mom, after all, didn’t open up to me because she needed to; she treated her experiences as an invitation to trade stories with me and my sister. I just neglected to RSVP.

This is why I now choose vulnerability. Not because I need to, but because I want to. Though I didn’t do this in the public way that the #MeToo campaign offered, this essay will dismantle the privacy I have cultivated for as long as I can remember. By the time this piece is published, I will have shared my longoverdue story with my family. Hopefully, this will be the first step in sharing with them the woman I have become.

“I’m still working to find a way to stitch together my two homes in a way that doesn’t cause them to unravel every time I board the plane.”

Paintings for Posterity

Northwestern faculty team up with the Art Institute of Chicago to investigate classic works.

Georgia O’Keeffe once described Cerro Pedernal, a volcanic mesa nestled in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, as her private possession. Looking at the cool turquoise and warm pastel hues in her 1941 painting Pedernal, you sense her intimacy with the desert landscape. If you look a little closer, the colorful oil painting reveals its age. Bits of discoloration and small protrusions puncture the canvas's surface like acne on an otherwise smooth visage.

These deformations are not unique to O’Keeffe. If you visit Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art, you can see them on the surface of Roman-Egyptian funerary portraits. They form when heavy metal ions in pigments react with fatty acids in the oil binding of the paint, producing pus-like bumps on the painting’s surface.

Marc Walton, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, saw these deformations when he visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe back in 2015. The museum’s head of conservation, Dale Kronkright, contacted Walton and his team at NU-ACCESS, the Northwestern University and Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, to evaluate the O’Keeffe collection as part of an ongoing research project.

“We’re trying to understand the basic chemistry of how soaps form, why they form and whether we can model them,” Walton says.

In December, Walton received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research within the emerging fields of technical art history and conservation science. The grant allows Walton and other scientists at NU-ACCESS to investigate soap bubble deformations and develop digital tools to evaluate paintings and diagnose their condition.

Oliver Cossairt, who teaches electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern, is working with Walton to develop a technique called photometric stereo. This technology will allow museums to monitor individual works of art by capturing a series of photographs with a controlled light source.

In his office overlooking the Shakespeare Garden, Cossairt scoots away from his desk to explain the technique.

“Imagine a basketball in front of you and your eye is the camera,” he says. “Fix the point on the basketball that you’re looking at.” He moves his hand in front of his face. “When I move the light over here, that gets dimmer.” If conservators know where a light source is when taking a photograph, they can examine brightness values for individual pixels in the image. This can be used to determine the underlying surface of the painting at the pixel location.

The technique allows conservators and scientists to decouple the two-fold problem of soap formations: surface protrusions and discoloration, which were previously impossible to distinguish.

Cossairt and the cohort at NU- ACCESS plan to run a series of controlled experiments that accelerate the deterioration process of a sample in different conditions. This will allow computer scientists to create a digital reference and set of statistics modeling the decay. Conservators can then track the pace of soap bubble development for individual pieces of art and determine whether a painting’s surface is stable enough to transport.

The team hopes to develop a software that enables conservators to upload photos they have taken using the photometric stereo technique. The software would then generate statistics and predictions based on both the photos and the controlled experiments conducted at NU-ACCESS.

With access to this data, Cossairt says, conservators can be more confident in their ability to share art with cultural heritage institutions around the world.

Fifteen years ago, when Francesca Casadio came to the U.S. from Italy to work as a conservation scientist at the Art Institute, it became apparent that Chicago's largest museum needed more scientific resources to monitor its sprawling collection. Northwestern emerged as the solution, recruiting students and faculty from its material science, engineering, computer science and art history departments to collaborate with conservators at the Art Institute.

In 2012, the collaboration grew into a formalized research center through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The following year, Casadio hired Marc Walton as the lead scientist for NU-ACCESS.

“The beauty of doing this at NU is that you touch a synapse and then the surge of the signal goes in directions that you’re not able to anticipate,” she says. This academic ethos and new technology enables NU-ACCESS to be an invaluable resource for museums to monitor and assess the state of their collection.

“We used to need this much material to get answers,” Casadio says, picking up my coffee cup. “Now it’s this much material,” she says, pointing to a small crumb on the table.

With the expertise and resources of NU-ACCESS, paintings like O’Keeffe’s Pedernal can retain their color, and poignancy, for generations to come.

“Paintings, like us, are going to age,” Casadio says. “But you can do something to slow down the time.”

The Story of the Silos, as Told Through Explosions

After a century of destruction and construction, the Damen Grain Elevators remain.

WRITTEN and DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

YOU GET INTO THE DAMEN SILOS through a hole in the wall.

You’ll know you’ve found the right place when you spot the gaping entry, crumbling edges marking what was probably an explorer’s breach in the cement. What remains is a narrow entrance framed by plywood and concrete, a place that can only be accessed if you’re willing to abandon the outside world.

Your feet will land in dust, soft and thin as it clouds around your knees and settles at your ankles. Your shoes add their own imprints to the existing tesselation of soles. Since there’s no way for the wind to reach inside the tunnels, they’ll probably stay there forever like footprints on the moon.

If you go far enough, you’ll find them. In the farthest corner, against the back wall, cloaked in a chilly darkness that not even spiderwebs dare interrupt: a row of massive metal machines, a testament to the place this once was. With their various arms in eternal freeze frame, it’s difficult to imagine that these monstrous devices once rose to the silos’ peak. These steel pulleys are what makes the place an elevator. But before the Damen Silos became Michael Bay’s pyrotechnic playground or the first search result for “urban exploration in Chicago,” they were just the Santa Fe Grain Elevators.

explosion timeline

This was a different Chicago.

Without skyscrapers, the tallest structures in the city are these cylinders, 30 feet high. The people of the city are insanely proud of these primitive silos; what they hold might as well be gold. It’s only grain, but it’s the commodity that will define Chicago’s 19th century. The epicenter of agrarian America, the grain trade is the way to fortune. The way of the future.

The first iteration of the Damen grain elevators stands at an ideal intersection – round towers rising between the Illinois-Michigan Canal and the Santa Fe railway (which, ironically, can access virtually any big city except Santa Fe).

These aren’t the only grain elevators in the city, but they are among the largest. Even in the earliest stage of their development, they cover as much area as a five-story-high football field. There are hundreds of places like this scattered around the city, but Damen stands out: A towering symbol of Chicago’s prosperity like a firm punch on the skyline. A firm punch, with a 35-fingered knuckle.

This year, they catch on fire for the first time.

PHOTOS BY LETA DICKINSON

The 1832 fire inspired a new solution from grain industrialists: build new silos from concrete. They do, not realizing that the original container was not the cause of the earlier inferno. They won’t discover the truth until it blows up before their eyes 73 years later.

A spontaneous combustion roars on the bank of the Chicago River, the second explosion in a series of chain-smoking resurrections. A cloud of hot dust tears through layers of sheet iron, chunks of cement torn apart like ice cubes splintering on a kitchen floor. Within an hour, a million bushels of grain are aflame. Nothing remains. Several workers are dead.

If the composition of the structure isn’t fireproof, the industrialists assume that maybe architecture is the problem. To solve it, the railway hires an accomplished civil engineer. His name is John Metcalf, and he adds vents and windows. In the new silos, there’s a powerhouse, an elevator and 35 storage silos. There are driers and bleachers and oat clippers and cleaners and scourers and dust packers and boilers fed by water from the Chicago River. It can hold one million bushels of grain.

This is his Titanic, unburnable and incredible and inextinguishable. His goal is to build something that can last more than 30 years without catching on fire.

Instead, he builds something that will outlive the grain industry itself – despite constantly catching on fire.

After a couple decades of uninterrupted operation, the third explosion hits. John Metcalf’s design has failed, though he’s not upset. He has been dead for 20 years.

At this point, it’s time for industrialists to accept that grain silos will just blow up whether you want them to or not. The grain dust, when mixed with oxygen, creates a volatile gas that will explode at high temperatures. For the silo workers, there’s a constant fear that any dusty summer day could be their last.

For a while, the silos were lucrative despite constant reconstruction. Libby Mahoney, senior curator for the Chicago Historical Museum, emphasizes their importance. “A lot of people made fortunes off the grain industry,” Mahoney explains. “That’s where many of our city’s greatest fortunes were made.”

Since it’s the peak of Chicago’s grain reign, the site is rebuilt and expanded to hold twice as many bushels. It’s sold to the Stratton Grain Company after the reconstruction. From the flames come even better, stronger silos – a concrete phoenix rising from dusty ashes.

The fire took a lot of things away. But every time, the industry keeps roaring back.

The fourth explosion comes too late.

By 1977, self-destructing silos are enough reason for grain industrialists to give up. By this point, the interstate highway system has made Damen’s location little more than a convenience. Like the meat-packing industry, most agriculture has moved outside of Chicago. It’s not lucrative to rebuild the silos for a fifth time.

Instead, they are sold to the Department of Central Management, who will hold on until an investor buys the land. At this point, they don’t look completely destroyed – just defeated. There are scorch marks on concrete, but the place is still there. Bridges link the towers, staircases reach the ground and wooden slats form a functional dock on the riverbank that doesn’t yet overlap like piano keys.

This is the year the workers stop their machines and empty the grain reserve. Someone left the grinders, boilers, driers and bleachers at rest. They will never move again.

Thirty-five years after the death of the grain industry, the story has yet to end. The grain elevator is no longer a source of pride, little more than a backdrop to a city that has left it in the past. To some, it’s an eyesore, especially as it accumulates grime and graffiti. Yet Chicago’s undemolished trash is Hollywood’s treasure. Enter Michael Bay, stage right.

During location scouting for the fourth installment of the Transformers franchise, the crew is determined to turn the riverbank ruins into a movie set. The silos are supposed to look like they’re in China.

They replace the skulls and swear words with giant Mandarin characters. Michael Bay and Mark Wahlberg set foot on the site, the same place that marked the start of a glorious era of gluten. With a mixture of CGI and dynamite, the fifth explosion hits. For the first time in history, the silos blow up on purpose.

The next year, Transformers: Age of Extinction comes out. Anyone watching the movie assumes the Damen Silos truly are in China, which just goes to show that they were more talented at acting than the rest of the cast.

And just like that, the Damen Silos are alive again.

Perhaps all they needed was another explosion.

At this point, the Silos have breezed from industrial grain grinders to Hollywood actors, but despite the impressive resume, no one’s buying. The price drops almost 500 percent to $3.8 million while the Department of Central Management attempts to sell the place off. Northwestern History Professor Henry Binford explained that it’s a difficult sell, since you’re buying more than just the property. Not only do you have to buy the plot of land, you’ve also got to test the soil for chemicals.

“There are a lot of unpredictable costs that go into a place like that,” Binford says.

And so, the silos sit in varying stages of decay, waiting for the sixth explosion. The one that will mean the end.

Picking through the towers that remain, it’s obvious to you that the Damen Silos haven’t gone anywhere. Today, they belong to no one. But in another sense, they belong to everyone. For a hundred years, they’ve been here. They’ve been here longer than Willis Tower or Wrigley Field. They’ve suffered countless blasts. The city around them rises and falls and rises again, but the silos stand still. A point of convergence in a world of chaos.

To teenagers and explorers, they’re an urban playground. To Binford, they’re a “museum piece,” an artifact of a technological system long gone, a system that once made Chicago feel like it ruled the world. To Mahoney, they’re a symbol of the old city; a memorial to Chicago’s gold-hued heyday as the industrial capital of agrarian America.

A lot has changed. Grain is stored in truly fireproof containers now. Michael Bay is making a documentary on poaching elephants. The Transformers franchise is up to its seventh installation. The Santa Fe railroad still ships grain, but you probably know it as the Metra. The industrial world was born and replaced with something faster, something less flammable. The graffiti-torn ruins that stubble the south branch have become relics. Relics that have suffered through eras of film, factory and flame. Only ten floors remain standing.

Only ten floors – but countless stories.

What the Hell are the Digital Humanities?

Exploring future frontiers in the arts and sciences.

WRITTEN BY MILAN POLK DESIGNED BY ANDIE LINKER ILLUSTRATION BY EMMA SARAPPO

The bright reds, blues and greens of City Sounds appeared on a wall in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood in 1973. The mural, sponsored by the Community Arts Foundation and the Chicago Board of Education, depicts the haunting sirens of a fire truck, a construction worker handling a deafening jackhammer, a train whirring by and a woman – wide-eyed and open-mouthed – taking in the city’s commotion.

City Sounds is one of hundreds of murals catalogued by art historian Georg Stahl in the 1970s. Inspired by Stahl’s work, Northwestern Art and Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, who participated in the 2016 Kaplan Digital Humanities summer workshop, is digitizing murals across Chicago in the hopes of modernizing and expanding Stahl’s project.

In the first-year seminar she led last winter, Zorach created an interactive map detailing the Chicago murals. She codified Latinx murals in Pilsen, those depicting different phases of black power movements and even a few centered on children. Users can zoom in on pictures of each piece to view every paint stroke. She also had freshmen use the Knight Lab’s Story Map – where users can plot a point on a map, and add pictures, videos and text – to present each sites’ significance, and view locations and details on each mural. Zorach originally found the information via a detailed spreadsheet, but she thought she could do more with it.

“I knew if we could search, using the map, by artist, date, subject matter or keyword, that we could discover new patterns,” she says. With instruction from Kaplan’s Digital Humanities summer workshop, Zorach integrated her research into the classroom.

On Oct. 5, 2012, 60 Northwestern students and faculty crammed themselves into the narrow conference room at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities to listen to Gender Studies Professor Jillana Enteen and History Professor Michael Kramer speak about a growing field that would ultimately change how faculty worked with the humanities in the classroom and in research.

“Everyone wanted to figure out what it was,” says Enteen. She and Kramer provided recommended readings and links to blogs and essays on the subject to build on their presentation.

Digital humanities involves the integration of technological tools with traditional humanities research. Kramer and Enteen founded the Northwestern Digital Humanities Lab (NUDHL). NUDHL is a group effort involving faculty, graduate students, technologists and librarians to bring technology into the humanities. Faculty can take a two-week summer workshop with Digital Humanities Librarian Josh Honn to learn new ways to incorporate technology into their various disciplines. Year round, NUDHL is a place to share the work and incorporate new ideas into undergraduate classes. Enteen says the goal is to allow humanities scholars to change presentation and discussion of humanities research.

Six years later, NUDHL and the summer workshops inspire faculty members to bring digital tools into their undergraduate classrooms and research. The results dazzle: a digital walking tour of ancient Rome, an online exhibition of multiethnic poetry and Wildwords, a collaborative encyclopedia of Northwestern-centric dialect to explain words like Norbucks or Hobartian.

In a small classroom in Kresge this February, Enteen sits reading off bits of paper from her students’ exercise with Honn. The 10 or so students have written down what comes to mind when they see the word ‘cloud.’ A chuckle makes its way around the room when they hear Enteen say: “startup.” But that’s what Honn wanted; it’s a metaphor for the students to consider the language people use and the possible connections that exist among different ideas and words. He then flips to a slide with a picture of one of Apple’s iCloud farms: gray buildings covered in solar panels with pipes pumping out nothing close to white, marshmallow clouds. Enteen diligently takes notes on her computer in a document titled, “Josh Wisdom.”

Enteen’s research focuses on cultures of the internet (in the past she’s taught classes with titles like ‘CyberQueer’ and ‘Imagining the Internet’) and she likes to think she has worked on digital humanities since before the name existed. NUDHL’s co-founder Michael Kramer, has also worked heavily with technology and its relationship to the humanities.

In the past, the two talked with envy about what other institutions had done, like Loyola University Chicago, which has had a digital humanities master’s program since 2011. Enteen and Kramer wanted to bring the digital humanities to Northwestern. With encouragement from Northwestern’s graduate program, they created NUDHL.

“We started seeing in job applications that graduate students need digital humanities experience. There was no way for that experience to happen at Northwestern,” Enteen says.

Rather than leaving Northwestern with a history and English degree and only knowing how to write a paper, Enteen and Kramer pushed for humanities majors to learn how to create web projects from research. With the digital humanities, a paper on international Shakespeare performances and interpretations becomes “Shakespeare’s Circuit,” an interactive world map detailing each performance with an accompanying essay. The digital humanities breathes life into research and teaches students different ways to present materials.

Northwestern is one of six universities from the greater Chicago area involved in the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, an annual academic conference where professors share ideas and discuss new ways to combine digital tools with the humanities.

“Someone from Loyola came up here and made an effort and asked why are [we] all doing the same thing alone?” Enteen says.

The colloquium started in 2006, with each university rotating as host. Academics shuffle around conference rooms, listening to talks about individual projects. Each year, the host institution creates a website to present all of the discussion from before, during and after the event.

Enteen hopes the digital humanities will continue to grow at Northwestern. NUDHL’s speakers and events have long interested faculty and graduate students; even undergraduates now attend the events that go on during the academic year.

“I see a lot more opportunities every year for undergraduates. There are a lot more faculty and graduate students who are not scared of the digital humanities and want to share it,” Enteen says. She believes students have no excuse when it comes to incorporating technology into their learning experience.

After attending Kaplan’s workshop, Zorach learned new ways to approach material with her students, who eventually assisted with the interactive website for her Chicago murals project. The students surprised Zorach with their creativity, their ability to learn and use new technology and their general enthusiasm.

“My favorite part was working with students,” Zorach says, “I thought I knew the collection and the interface pretty well, but [the students] came up with ideas and approaches within the mural that I couldn’t have come up with.”

A step-by-step guide to painting The Rock, featuring New Student and Family Programs.

PHOTOS BY LETA DICKINSON and BRIAN QUISTBERG, DESIGNED BY EMMA KUMER

GUARD THE ROCK. (AS IF SOMEONE COULD STEAL IT.) Tradition holds that The Rock can only be painted in the dead of night, so for a full 24 hours, stand guard. And be sure to bring That One Tent that everybody rents from Norris.

MAKE LIKE A NAIL ARTIST AND START WITH A BASE COAT. The Rock (and surrounding wall, if you want to annoy Facilities) must be covered in a fresh coat of paint. Keep it thin or it’ll never dry.

INSERT YOUR CATCHY TITLE. The rock has been a canvas for birthday messages, jokes, student activism and promotions. SESP junior Isabel Hoffman says she painted The Rock to promote peer advisor applications. “We tried to come up with something simple, eyecatching and fun.”

ROCK AND ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES. Be ready to change your Rock painting plans. It probably won’t look like what you originally had in mind. More likely than not, you’ll have to make snap decisions — simplify the design here, change the color there.

CHECK IT OFF YOUR NORTHWESTERN BUCKET LIST. You did it! You made it through 24 hours and what was likely a tedious painting experience. Bonus points if it was winter. According to Hoffman, “that experience of being miserably cold, trying to avoid getting paint on ourselves, and creating some parts of the design on the spot really brought us closer together.”