Volume 109, Issue 15

The Spectator The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper

OPINIONS

A&E

The Democrats Must Collapse

Sad Boi Hour

Junior Alex Annenberg explains how the Democrats should make use of a common rhetorical tactic to achieve electoral success.

The Arts & Entertainment department and Sports editor Ahmed Hussein share their favorite sad songs, accompanied by personifications of their sentiments.

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Volume 109 No. 15

“The Pulse of the Student Body”

see page 14

May 10, 2019

stuyspec.com

Hanna Hones In on Two New History Electives

NEWSBEAT Senior Milan Haiman was named to an International Math Olympic team, the Hungarian National Team, and became the first Stuyvesant student to do so in 20 years.

Juniors Hana Kim and Christy Guan won first place, junior Aditi Haman won second place, and juniors Anna Xia, Penny Wang, and Sarah Leung won second place for their respective projects at the Cooperstown Competition.

The Black Students League, ASPIRA, and the Counseling Department hosted their second Talking Circle Around Race discussion on May 6.

The 138 Latin students at Stuyvesant won 185 prizes and certificates this year in five national contests: Classical Etymology, National Latin Exam, Latin Vocabulary, Roman Civilization, and Mythology. Junior Julia Hart won a prize in all five contests.

Sophomore Sammi Lin, seniors Yajaira Rodriguez, Taylor Woo, and Summer Jiang, and freshman Yuqing Wu will be representing Manhattan at the State Championships as New York City’s first place Envirothon team.

Assistant Principal of Chemistry and Physics Scott Thomas has been nominated by the Civil Aid Services of New York as 2019 Educator of the Year.

Stuyvesant’s MUN team competed at The Dalton School last month.

Juniors Zeynep Bromberg and Ahmed Sultan won Outstanding Delegate awards for representing Colombia in the Disarmament & International Security Committee.

Juniors Vishwaa Sofat and Julian Bedolis won Honorable Mentions.

By KATIE NG, STEPHY CHEN and IAN LAU

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

At the New York State NHD Cooperstown Competition, Stuyvesant won 15 medals and will be sending seven students to Nationals.

By KAREN ZHANG, JESSICA JIANG and JAMES LEE History teacher David Hanna will teach two new one-semester history electives next school year.

In the fall, he will teach a course on the Middle Ages, and in the spring, he will teach a course on the Spanish Civil War. Both electives will only be open to juniors and seniors and will be discussion-oriented.

The Middle Ages elective will cover history from the fall of the Roman Empire up until the War of the Roses (1455-1487 CE). It will serve as a “prequel” to AP European History, which Hanna currently teaches. Students will also examine art in the Middle Ages, such as illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows, and architecture, like the cathedrals, because these are valuable primary sources, particularly for a course centered on the Middle Ages.

Hanna’s interest in the Middle Ages began when he was only five years old. “The Middle Ages was my first love for history,” he said. “My father took our family to England when I was five years old for the summer and we trav-

eled all around, and I saw so many castles, cathedrals, and ruins. And I was passionate about it all my life.”

Unlike the Middle Ages elective, which will primarily focus on the cultural significance of the Middle Ages, the Spanish Civil War elective will cover the war itself (1936-1939), the historical context showing why the war occurred, and the unresolved issues from the war that still persist, such as the periodic rise of authoritarian and far-right governments.

This course will also feature different mediums: visual art, such as contemporary propaganda; journalism; poetry; fiction; and film.

Currently, Hanna teaches about the Spanish Civil War in both his AP European History class and his AP US History class.

This new elective will allow him to cover the material in depth. “It was something that I was teaching, but not nearly as much as I would hope,” he said. “In the AP European History course, I can maybe only do two lessons on the Spanish Civil War, but now I can spend months and go really deep.”

Some students want to take Hanna’s electives because of this and are excited for the chance to

further explore the topics. “I was really excited for AP European History partly because I thought it would cover [the Middle Ages].

I was actually disappointed at the beginning of AP European History because the course starts at the Renaissance, so I’m really glad that I can now take a course that focuses on the period before the Renaissance,” junior Alex Nobert said in an e-mail interview.

Sophomore Carter Ley agreed, expressing interest in the Spanish Civil War course. “Dedicating an entire semester to a three-year period is unusual for social studies electives at Stuyvesant, so it should be a thorough and detailed course,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Knowing Mr. Hanna, I am confident he will integrate his extensive knowledge of historical trends, facts, and anecdotes, making the class a truly insightful experience.”

Unlike the two AP classes that Hanna teaches, students will not have to write essays, nor will his tests be multiple-choice orientated. “There is never going to be multiple choice because I loathe it. It doesn’t demonstrate any real knowledge or understanding of history; it’s just regurgitation,” he said.

Instead, Hanna will be administering short-answer tests.

“Sometimes it will be analyzing documents, sometimes expository. I think it is a very effective way to evaluate people’s knowledge of history,” Hanna said.

Additionally, due to Stuyvesant’s location in the heart of New York, Hanna and his students will have unique access to valuable resources and opportunities. These will include such primary sources from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at New York University for the Spanish Civil War elective. For the Middle Ages elective, students will be able to visit the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. “There is an advantage of being in New York and teaching those topics.

The experience is more enriching for students,” Hanna said.

Hanna hopes the students who choose to take one of his new electives are passionate and dedicated. “[I am looking for] students [who] are generally interested in the historical topic, whether it is the Middle Ages or the Spanish Civil War. I would hope that the subject matter is what would spur students to want to take the class,” he said.

Environmental Club Hosts Annual Earth Day [the] Earth. It was nice seeing posters that showed examples of situations where waste is having a detrimental effect on the environment as well as possible activities in that individuals could do to lessen this impact,” freshman Jason Jiang said.

Poster boards were not the only feature presented at the fair.

At one station, students played a game that involved landing a hoop onto bowling pins. At another booth, students painted suncatchers, which were made of clear hardened plastic. Once they dried, the suncatchers were delivered to the students’ respective homerooms to adorn the windows.

Many staff members also participated in activities. Pedrick, Colon, and Maggio participated in a recycling game. The staff were split into teams, where Pedrick and Colon constituted one team, and Maggio the other. The objective of the game was to sort recyclables, including paper, cartons, and food waste, into their correct boxes. Pedrick and Colon finished first, but they had sorted one item

Matt Melucci/ The Spectator

The Stuyvesant Environmental Club hosted its annual Earth Day Fair on April 18. This year’s theme was recycling. The various table booths stationed around the cafeteria highlighted the importance of acknowledging current environmental issues, such as pollution, and encouraged students to take action by actively recycling.

Students could also participate in other educational activities, such as games and painting.

The fair was coordinated by the cabinet members of the Environmental Club and biology teacher Marissa Maggio. “The fair took about a month to coordinate. We had less time to prepare this year, because SING! ended so late. Our club members came to meetings twice a week at first, then almost every day during the last week so that they could work on decorating their poster boards.

Ms. Maggio was a huge driving force behind the planning of the fair; she obtained the permits for us to use the cafeteria and helped

us purchase supplies. Ms. Maggio was also the reason why we got Principal Eric Contreras, Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick, and SPARK counselor Colon to attend,” both senior and President Kenny Wong and junior and Vice President Julia Hart said in a joint statement via e-mail.

Members of the Environmental Club designed posters for the event. Topics included the history of recycling, how various countries around the world recycle, future methods of recycling, and Stuyvesant’s current recycling plan. “Each group spent about a half-dozen afternoons putting their presentation together. Because we were on an especially tight schedule this year, it was hectic at times, but our commitment paid off with our great presentations,” sophomore Jonathan Chen said.

Students who attended the fair described it as a valuable experience. “I learned how to live more sustainably and how to properly handle the waste I produce to reduce my negative impact on

in the wrong recycling bin. Maggio finished second, with all items in their correct bins. The winner of the game was ultimately undeclared.

Recycling has become one of the easiest and most accessible methods of combating pollution. However, not everyone knows how to recycle properly.

The Environmental Club hopes to increase awareness about these issues through more fairs in the

future.“It’s important for students to learn about recycling because proper education is the only way to an efficient waste-management system. If students don’t know how to recycle the right way, their recyclables have a pretty good chance of ending up in the landfill,” Hart said. “Events like the Earth Day Fair teach people to care about where their waste should go and how they can make sure it gets there.”

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

News Student Union: A Year in Review

By MADDY ANDERSEN, JAKOB GORISEK-GAZZE, ERIN LEE, and NEIL SARKAR

STUDENT UNION

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

FRESHMAN CAUCUS

While running, Freshman Caucus Co-Presidents Emma Wong and Cynthia Tan promised policies allowing students to come back into school during the middle of the period; they also promised PSAL free periods to student athletes, which was proposed in collaboration with the SU. In addition, they proposed a modified bell system, more printing spaces, better WiFi access, and in-school activities for freshmen.

Unfortunately, the caucus has not been able to fulfill many of the promises of their platform. “A lot of the things we wanted to do weren’t actually possible; they were just things that the SU in general had been working on for a long time,” Tan said. However, Freshman Caucus has been attempting to coordinate multiple events, including a locker decoration contest and a glow-themed dance to help freshmen feel more comfortable at Stuyvesant.

Some difficulties with executing their campaign promises have included conflicts with SING! schedules and event planning, as well as the setback of the PSAL proposal.

Additionally, while the Freshman Caucus promised a bell system with differentiating sounds, it had to come to terms that “the DOE won’t fund a new bell system unless it breaks,” Tan said. These issues have stemmed from their lack of experience, as they were unaware of the feasibility of their platform’s policies and initiatives when running.

The caucus has been able to contribute to their grade in other ways, though. Its accomplishments include the list of elective descriptions that Wong and Tan have recently published on Facebook to assist freshmen who are completing their course selections. As the end of the year approaches, Wong and Tan have started to plan the annual Semi-Formal in collaboration with Sophomore Caucus.

Wong and Tan have yet to make headway on many of their goals, but they are hopeful that tangible success will be forthcoming as they gradually become more experienced within the SU.

Student Union (SU) President William Wang and Vice President Vishwaa Sofat did not run on a platform, since they ran uncontested. However, that did not stop the pair from passionately pursuing policy and initiatives during their term. In addition to attending Student Leadership Team (SLT) and Borough Student Advisory Council (BSAC) meetings, Wang and Sofat have been able to work with administration and businesses to institute policies and provide resources for the student body.

Last summer, the SU failed to secure its partnership with CitiBike over the summer due to legal issues with working with a for-profit organization and liability issues regarding student safety. However, another summer project, StuyActivities, an online chartering system for the many clubs and publications at Stuyvesant, was fully implemented during the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year. Created to allow students to manage the logistics of their clubs with more convenience, it has allowed the SU to effectively communicate with these clubs.

In order to combat nepotism and exclusivity within the SU, Wang and Sofat administered blind applications for appointed officials during the summer, and they enforced blind applications for all caucuses the following school year.

They also reformed the SU Constitution in October by redistributing the votes of cabinet members.

In December, the SU attempted to pass a PSAL free proposal with the Junior Caucus, which would have provided student athletes with a free period instead of a gym period to help them better manage their workload during their seasons. The SLT voted to discontinue the discussion; however, the administration organized a subcommittee to further develop this policy. However, it is not clear how much progress has been made on this proposal since the subcommittee was created.

The Wang-Sofat administration passed an updated cell phone policy in February with more leniency for cell phone use in collaboration with the SLT. They are currently working with a subcommittee for a more strictly enforced homework policy and the creation of a student feedback form where students can anonymously report habitual, excessive assignments from specific teachers.

Meanwhile, the External Affairs department introduced its online Civic Engagement Course, which consists of biweekly newsletters to educate the Stuyvesant community about youth activism, city and state government, and opportunities for students to involve themselves in their communities as young citizens. In addition, the department organized seminars regarding sexual harassment for freshman bio push-ins in order to prevent and spread awareness about sexual misconduct.

The Budget/Finance department has reintroduced StuyVantage, an initiative that provides Stuyvesant students with discounts at local businesses. While the department has secured discounts from PokeGreen, Shake Shack, Terry’s, Artichoke Basille’s Pizza, and Downtown Yogurt, it is looking to expand these opportunities. Within the school, the SU has partnered with Teas’ Tea, setting up a vending machine outside the SU room. However, the machine has become an issue with the DOE due to the Chancellor’s Regulations, which state that vending machines must be from a central vendor. The SU has been working with SchoolFoods and the DOE through BSAC connections to combat this problem.

The SU has maintained its transparency through financial reports published in The Spectator and newsletters; however, it fell through with its biweekly videos. Sofat said that videos are an ineffective and time-consuming means of communicating with the student body, especially considering other more convenient resources already available, such as Parent Coordinator Dina Ingram’s weekly newsletter.

Currently, the SU is undergoing its yearly elections, and Wang and Sofat are working to ensure that the upcoming exchange in power is smooth and amiable.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

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News Student Union: A Year in Review JUNIOR CAUCUS

Sophomore Caucus President Katerina Corr and Vice President Ayala Sela’s campaign focused heavily on increasing communication, promising the addition of homeroom representatives to the SU, and releasing regular e-mail updates. They have also continued developing their pen pal program for AP Spanish students with Assistant Principal of World Languages Francesca McAuliffe and their lecture series.

This year, Corr and Sela have hosted three diverse lectures: Wounded Warriors Project representative Jennifer Mackinday; New York City-based artist, filmmaker, and professor Madeline Schwartzman; and licensed creative arts therapist and music therapist Tom Biglin. They have faced obstacles when scheduling, because access to the auditorium has been limited for all caucuses.

While Mackinday presented in one of the two lecture halls, Schwartzman presented in the library, and Biglin presented in a classroom. The caucus has also worked with the Alumni Association to organize research talks for biology classes. However, communication with the administration and the biology department has been challenging, and these biology lectures have yet to be instituted.

The pen pal program has been successful, with batches of letters being sent and received by AP Spanish students. Corr, Sela, and McAuliffe aim to expand the program to Mandarin and French students next year, as well as to Spanish students in lower levels. “We hope that the program continues and can eventually spread to the other language levels in the future,” Sela said.

“Finally seeing it go through was very nice, and it was a huge relief.”

One challenge for the caucus has been the appointment of homeroom representatives. Time constraints—like receiving report cards or completing surveys during the already infrequent homeroom periods—have made it difficult for the homeroom representatives to present updates to their peers.

Because of this setback, Sophomore Caucus has looked for alternative methods to keep sophomores updated. They have been successful in maintaining communication with the student body, especially on their Instagram page.

Sophomore Caucus has also introduced their “So you want to be…” newsletters, which provide information about certain job fields, a list of Stuyvesant classes in the respective field, and interviews with people who currently work in the field.

The caucus chose not to pursue a dance this winter, which is usually dubbed the Snow-Ball, due to poor attendance the previous year. However, the Events department is beginning to plan their end-of-year Semi-Formal

Junior Caucus Co-Presidents Eve Wening and Zeynep Bromberg campaigned on increased communication with the student body, revisions to the school cell phone policy, implementation of PSAL frees, an escalator monitoring system, and the organization of more events for students. In addition, they proposed sponsorship opportunities, more gym uniform options, homeroom representatives, and increased diversity of caucus members. While they also proposed a policy allowing students to come back into school 20 minutes before the warning bell, they did not pursue this and allowed Freshman Caucus to do so.

The caucus made due on their promise of blind applications for cabinet positions, which has proven to be very beneficial. “The majority of our directors had [or have] not been involved in caucus or have never been directors before,” Bromberg said. The Junior Caucus cabinet is more diverse in experience than it was in previous years, which has opened up opportunities for students who were not previously involved in student government.

In terms of communication with the student body, the Junior Caucus sends out a monthly newsletter containing information pertaining specifically to juniors, rather than general information that can be accessed through Dina Ingram’s weekly newsletter or the SU monthly newsletter. However, the last newsletter was sent out three months ago in January.

The student body also got to attend successful Junior Caucus-run events such as a movie night, bake sales, and Pi Day. The caucus is also currently planning for Junior Prom. The Junior Caucus has also been able to secure sponsorship opportunities with organizations that provide gift cards to raffle off at these events.

Other proposals of the Wening-Bromberg platform did not go as successfully. The caucus decided not to pursue student artwork in the school because juniors lack a designated area within the building, unlike other grades. They also did not wish to intrude on the senior tradition of creating a mural. The caucus also did not pursue homeroom representatives, as the process was deemed unnecessary bureaucracy. The proposed escalator monitoring system, called Apollo, existed under the Sofat-Wening administration; however, the SU was unsure of how to advertise the website to the student body. Furthermore, with the current escalator issues, Apollo is not as necessary nor useful.

Bromberg acknowledged how downsizing could be beneficial for the organization and how long it takes to make headway in an initiative. Success with proposals is a slow process for a caucus, according to Bromberg. Getting responses and making progress can be difficult but doing so is something the caucus will always pursue.

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

SOPHOMORE CAUCUS

Senior CAUCUS

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

Senior Caucus Co-Presidents Amit Narang and Hanah Jun ran on a platform dubbed PACT: Projects, Academic Aid, Communication, and Traditions. Over the last year, they have tried to achieve some of their platform’s goals.

Narang and Jun wished to host a post-college-result celebration event and add board games to the Senior Atrium. However, the caucus was unable to find a way to fund these ideas and was forced to focus on the more conventional aspects of their platform. They initially also advocated for the creation of a spreadsheet with administration statistics, rankings, locations, and other information for a variety of colleges, with the spreadsheet being available to all seniors. After exploring the idea with the College Office, they were advised not to pursue this endeavor because such a spreadsheet’s efficacy would be limited. Each individual student has their own needs, meaning the spreadsheet would have to be personalized for each student.

The Senior Caucus also worked toward making a website to increase interactions between alumni and students. The website would be oriented toward alumni willing to mentor students about college and career choices. The caucus, however, ran into obstacles with this initiative as well, as members of the Senior Caucus were swamped with the college application process. “The website is really hard to launch because we rely on volunteers to make the website, who obviously have other priorities,” Jun said.

The caucus has also made changes to how senior dues are collected. “We began by sending out monthly newsletters, but we realized that most of the information we needed to convey was more specific regarding senior dues and graduation. As such, we streamlined the system for collecting senior dues, turning it into a single form online and automating e-mails to students who hadn’t paid.”

Additionally, this past fall, Narang and Jun hosted a pep rally, and “are currently working on the logistics of graduation and prom,” Jun said. In addition, they have sent out e-mails to graduation speakers such as Trevor Noah, host of “The Daily Show”; Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York; and Barack Obama, our former president.

Ultimately, the success of this caucus will be determined at prom and graduation, which Narang and Jun both hope will run smoothly.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 6

News WORLDBEAT Japanese Emperor Naruhito assumed the throne on May 1 following his father, Emperor Akihito’s abdication.

A small group of the Bolivarian National Armed Force attempted a failed coup led by Leopoldo López and Juan Guaidó.

The United Nations has announced that one million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex welcomed their first child, a boy.

Student Union Hosts Career Fair at Stuyvesant

By AIDAN NG, LAKSHYA RAJORIA, NEIL SARKAR and IAN LAU The Student Union (SU) and Junior Caucus hosted the Career Fair, where the Alumni Association and the Parents’ Association came together to give their advice to Stuyvesant students looking for guidance on their prospective careers on April 18.

Their years of experience and work in a specific field enabled the alumni and parents to give thoughtful advice to students, many of whom were still unsure of their prospective majors.

With experienced professionals in fields such as computer science, healthcare, law, business, engineering, government, and education, Stuyvesant students were able to gain insight on the careers they were interested in pursuing.

At the start of the session, there was a general introduction with five keynote speakers. Then, the professionals introduced themselves and gave their career advice. Following this were two smaller sessions, where students could go to any of the designated rooms and learn from individuals in a specific field, such as computers and technology, healthcare, science, and engineering. Afterward, students could meet people from those respective fields and network with them as well.

The Career Fair this year expanded on last year’s. Last year’s event was tailored primarily toward juniors and seniors, while this year’s catered to both underand upperclassmen. The SU also added a snack and mingle session for presenters and students to develop connections and explore possible internship opportunities.

The SU also expanded on the Career Fair in other ways. Last year, the Career Fair did not have jobs oriented toward the arts and humanities fields. The complaints about a lack of humanities representation were partially addressed as there were sessions in communications, education, and government.

There was a turnout of about 100 students to the event, down from last year’s event, which hosted 300 people. Sofat attributed the decline in turnout to the date of the event as it was right before spring break, which was the only option due to conflicts with SING! and AP exam season.

The alumni had various points of advice for the Career Fair attendees. “I’ve worked at one company for three years and I don’t know what I want to do in the future necessarily, but what I’ve done so far in finance, I’ve taken skills and training along the way to figure out what I don’t want to do and that’ll get me a step closer,” Isabelle Ng (‘12), a Finance Associate at JP Morgan Chase, said.

“Focus on what interests you and getting in that general direction,

but [know] that any job you have, you don’t have to do for the rest of your life; you’re allowed to switch around.”

SU Vice President Vishwaa Sofat also stressed the importance of flexibility when making college and career decisions. “You’re not stuck with what you decide to do.

We don’t know what life is gonna bring,” he said.

“You’re allowed to make changes, even if you don’t know what field you want to pursue; go somewhere [where] you can learn new skills and even apply them in your future endeavors,” Ng said.

Chris Gazze, a keynote speaker at the event, transitioned from being enlisted in the military and working at Primafuel (a technology provider for biofuel companies), to where he is right now, working for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“I applied for an Air Force ROTC scholarship in high school even though I had no connections to the military or real desire to be in the military. This was how I learned about the IAEA. I never even knew that the IAEA existed until I was in my 20s,” Gazze said.

“The work I was doing [in the military] just happened to support the IAEA work in Iraq and North Korea. [...] My previous work was what allowed me to get this initial job at IAEA and also equipped me with some of the skills I needed to do well there.”

Through hearing about these experiences and gaining more knowledge of potential careers, students found the Career Fair to be productive and informative.

“Many alumni hammered home some viewpoints that I already had, such as [the importance of] making connections with the people you meet and going the extra mile to meet with people,” senior Raunak Chowdhury said in an e-mail interview. “Someone you meet there might become more relevant later down the line.”

Chowdhury also expressed interest in coming back as an alumnus to help give back to the Stuyvesant community.

“It was an opportunity to learn more about a field I am interested in, business and finance.

It also allowed me to meet professionals from this field who are Stuy alumni,” sophomore Erica Sugimura said.

Overall, the event was rewarding for the students who chose to attend the event. The Career Fair provided the opportunity for students to learn more about careers they were interested in and create a network of alumni who they could reach out to for advice.

“I made some great connections there and I feel like the event overall was a success,” Chowdhury said.

Noor Al-Stuy Places Second at MIST Regionals

By SUBYETA CHOWDHURY Every year, Stuyvesant’s Muslim Student Association’s 60-person team Noor-Al Stuy (“Light of Stuy”) takes part in the annual competition Muslim Inter-Scholastic Tournament (MIST). Noor Al-Stuy has always placed either first or second at MIST regionals. This streak has been continued with Noor Al-Stuy’s recent second-place win.

MIST started with a single high-schooler in Texas in 2002 and has expanded into a national tournament. This year, regionals for MIST New York took place at The City College of New York on March 30 to 31 from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. each day, while the Awards Ceremony took place at Hunter College on April 6 from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Forty-one schools competed at MIST New York Regionals. Brooklyn Tech secured first place, followed by Stuyvesant in second, and Townsend Harris in third. Competitors who placed at regionals will advance to MIST Nationals, which will take place in Baltimore, Maryland on July 17 to 19. Last year, Noor-Al Stuy placed first at regionals and third at Nationals.

Anyone can take part in MIST. It is an event designed to display an individual’s talent, regardless of whether or not said individual is Muslim. MIST organizers encourage non-Muslims to participate, and a “Diversity Award” is given to the school with the most diverse competitors. During MIST, students compete in a multitude of competitions. The competitions are Arts (2D Art, 3D Art, Graphic Design, Photography, Fashion Design, Culinary Arts), Brackets (Debate, MIST Bowl, Math Olympics, Brothers/ Sisters Improv), Group Projects (Business Venture, Science Fair, Humanitarian Service, Social Media, Short Film, Brothers/Sisters Nasheed), Writing & Oratory (Extemporaneous Essay, Extemporaneous Speaking, Original Oratory, Spoken Word), and Knowledge & Quran.

During the weeks leading up to the tournament, Noor-Al Stuy diligently prepared for the competition. “[Preparations were]

very nerve-wracking. A lot of the time, we stayed after school or at Whole Foods until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., working on our competitions,” senior and Stuyvesant MSA President Mohammad Haque said. “[The seniors and MSA Board] have to constantly check in with the other competitions to make sure that they are keeping up with their tasks. It can be tolling, but it can be really worth it to see at the Award Ceremony everyone cheering and screaming for those that placed.”

When asked about how Stuyvesant managed to continue the 10-year streak, Haque responded, “I think it’s a lot of sheer determination and will on the part of the board and the members to bring in their A-game for MIST. One of the things MIST does is that it brings people together, and having that kind of team solidarity, especially at Stuy, it does help out a lot. Going into MIST, we know that [we] are a single unit, we are one team, and we are in this together.”

Continuing the legacy required the current leaders to mentor underclassmen, just as past leaders mentored them. “It was a bit overwhelming because all these years, I’ve seen all these upperclassmen carry the team and now it’s my role to contribute to that. I was worried I was going to be unable to fill in their shoes, but I think we did a pretty good job.

It was a matter of upholding the pride,” senior and Vice President Zaakirah Rahman said.

While placing first last year at MIST Regionals, Noor-Al Stuy was still happy with their secondplace win. “Of course, you would want to do better. You would want to bring home the championship every year, but you have to be thankful that we were able to keep up the streak for 10 years,” Haque said.

“I’m definitely really proud of us because in the beginning it didn’t seem like we were going to place at all. Second place is still, in my heart, a big accomplishment.

With that being said, I do understand that we are Stuy and our place is to be first place and hopefully, next year, those [who] are remaining at Stuy will work harder.

There are some things that you cannot control. So we did have

a lot of negative experiences this year leading to us placing second, but I think it’s best to put those aside and work harder,” senior Anika Hashem, who also qualified for Nationals for Humanitarian Service and Short Fiction, said.

The competitors are even discussing plans on how to perform better at Nationals and next year.

“If we just grind in the next couple months, we should be able to do well. I feel like because we are up against more competition, it might motivate us to work even harder,” Rahman said.

Hashem agreed. “One of the biggest challenges I had this year was controlling Humanitarian Service and making sure everyone had a voice and that it went as smoothly as possible. So, my plan for Nationals is making sure that everyone is on board and knows what they are doing. I felt like we didn’t communicate at times, and that may have caused us some problems. Also, working on our presentation skills because we did everything we could logistics wise, but I feel like our presentation could be improved,” she said.

During the competition, while everyone was concerned about their competition and the final placings, there were moments when they enjoyed themselves and had a chance to have fun with their friends. Most people looked forward to the massive Chant War toward the end of the tournament, where everyone screamed various chants from their school.

Stuyvesant students chanted “345 Chambers Street, Noor-Al Stuy will bring the heat!”; “S-T-U-Y, we will leave you miSTUYfied!”; and “Noor Al-Stuy Noor Noor Al-Stuy!”

The biggest takeaways from MIST are the relationships and memories formed during the weekend rather than the placings.

“When you talk to alumni who have been doing MIST for years, they say that they don’t really remember the actual placings and the trophies that they won. They remember cheering and the laughs and jokes they had with their members,” Haque said. “MIST’s main goal is to bring people together, and once it’s done that, it’s done its job.”

ory as a career prospect. Mr. Biglin definitely opened up another door,” sophomore Cynthia Or said.

To demonstrate the effect of music on one’s frame of mind and behavior, Biglin asked the students to recall two songs: one that they loved, and one that they hated. He proceeded to explain that by linking certain songs to past experiences, music held the power to evoke powerful emotions regarding those associated memories, hence why people feel so strongly for or against certain songs.

Biglin further displayed this psychological connection between music and emotion by directly playing a guitar piece for the students. They were told not to interpret the technicalities and musical qualities of the song, but rather to feel the sentiment interlaced within the melody.

“Music therapy [is] about forming personal connections, not just between the therapist and the patient, but also patients to other patients. [It] helps patients become relaxed and more confident in themselves, [as it] encourages social interactions,” Or explained.

This lecture is part of an ongoing lecture series coordinated

by the Sophomore Caucus. The caucus previously held an art lecture with guest speaker Madeline Schwartzman and recognized the importance of hosting more humanities-based events at Stuyvesant.

Sophomore and Events Department member Saarah Elsayed contacted Biglin through a recommendation from Kenneth Aigen, a music therapist and associate professor of music therapy at New York University. Aigen also mentioned that Biglin was a Stuyvesant alumnus and noted that he might be able to incorporate his experience at Stuyvesant to connect with students on a more personal level.

Sophomore Caucus’s Chief of Staff Eric Han expressed that the lecture was successful for all parties involved. “We [the Sophomore Caucus] were really surprised, as we didn’t expect turnout to be this significant. We had over 70 students attending this lecture in a small classroom. Mr. Biglin was really great. He talked about his career and how students could learn from him and possibly pursue a career in music therapy. It was really educational and fun for everyone [who] attended,” Han said.

Sophomore Caucus Hosts Music Therapy Lecture with Tom Biglin

By KATIE NG and STEPHY CHEN

Over 70 students came to room 235 on April 12 for the Sophomore Caucus’s newest lecture on music therapy featuring Tom Biglin (‘85), a licensed creative arts therapist and board-certified music therapist.

Biglin introduced music therapy as “the use of music to improve one’s quality of life.”

He discussed his involvement in hospitals and the healthcare community, especially with veterans or trauma patients. The use of music as a therapeutic medium considers the client’s emotional health, communication ability, interests, and goals. Biglin’s role as a music therapist is to understand a patient’s personal experience with music to determine which type of music can best induce a happy, safe, and calming atmosphere for his patient.

Students who attended the lecture found Biglin’s profession to be new and interesting. “When I first heard about this lecture, I thought it would teach us about how to involve music therapy more in our daily lives, more of an extracurricular or a volunteer experience. I didn’t expect to be encouraged to pursue music the-

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Features

A Hidden Korean Gem

By LEWIS WOLOCH The Korean food truck is an enigma: a unique, fast, and delicious lunch option far removed from the McDonalds, Subways, and Starbucks that surround Stuyvesant. The truck resides a little too far down on Greenwich Street, far enough that the average Stuyvesant student would not notice it while walking to the train station, but close enough that it is a worthwhile lunchtime commute. I’ve been eating from the Korean cart at least once a week since freshman year (I am a junior now), and it has never disappointed.

The man behind the counter, Joseph, has even remembered my order this year, never failing to confirm that I still want brown rice, barbeque chicken, and spicy mayonnaise. He works as a cashier of sorts, taking the

orders and relaying them to his partner who cooks the meat.

The most comforting aspect of the truck is that these two guys are always cheerful and happy to prepare food. Joseph greets me with a “Hey, brother!” every time I show up, and never forgets to wish me a good weekend or happy holidays.

Joseph is laid-back, friendly, and personable, but does not say much besides conversation related to his food. When I asked if I could interview him, he seemed a bit thrown off by my question but still responded as politely as he could. “Yeah, uh, sure… sometime,” he tentatively replied. I felt embarrassed for putting him on the spot, so I quickly changed the subject, paid for my lunch, and bid him a nice day. I realized that I needed to interview him at a less busy time, as he seemed preoccupied with the

usual lunch rush.

I went back to the cart a few days later around 4:00 p.m., and this time Joseph seemed more excited about an interview.

How have the students from Stuyvesant, my high school, affected your business?

“Very good, they’re good for my business.”

Joseph was comfortable with the question, but did not seem to have much to say on the matter.

I tried to get some more out of him.

What is the most popular dish for kids my age?

“Spicy chicken!”

He said this with a big smile.

Why did you increase the price of pork dishes earlier this year?

“We had to. The pork cost more money this year.”

Why didn’t you have to

raise the price of chicken too?

“Oh I can’t do that, you guys love to eat it so much!”

He seemed more comfortable with me now, and it was easy to see that he was passionate about the environment he was creating for high schoolers who loved to eat his food.

What did you do before opening this food truck?

“I was a trader; I did import and export.”

I was not expecting that answer. Joseph carried himself like a man who had worked in the food industry all his life, and his food was as good as any of the Korean restaurants I had been to.

How long have you had your truck?

“Only four years.”

Joseph ended the interview himself, thanking me before I could even thank him and asking me what my name was. I

thought to myself, “Wow. I’ve never thought to ask him what his name was in all the times I’ve come here.” Only after two years did we learn each other’s names.

It was rainy and cold the day after my interview, but I had not had my fix of Korean food that week. Pulling my hood over my head, I jogged the three blocks to the truck and was greeted by the same face that had greeted me so many times before. “How [are] you doing, Lewis?” It was Lewis now, not just brother. He began to recite my last order, but I told him that I wanted to try something new today. I ordered barbecue pork with white rice instead of brown rice. He was working alone today, but my food was still ready within minutes.

“Spicy mayo, right?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied with a smile.

When Students Grade Teachers: Teacher Perception Surveys

By THIBAUD ROY You are in your third-period class and five minutes before the warning bell your teacher abruptly stands up, announces there will be a survey distributed, and walks out of the classroom. In walks another faculty member who distributes the two-sided Department of Education (DOE) Student Perception Surveys and large envelopes. After a short frenzy of bubbling to finish before the period ends, you remove the envelope seal and stack the envelope to be whisked away, never to be seen again.

Where do these short surveys go? Have they departed for eternity into the void that is the DOE? Was that a wasted ten minutes of my time that could have been used to finish homework for your next period class?

The short answer is that they return back to Stuyvesant and are intended to be a helpful tool in evaluating faculty. However, the process in which the surveys are administered and their ultimate efficacy as an evaluative tool have been brought into question by Stuyvesant faculty and students alike.

“The city tells us to administer the surveys,” Assistant Principal of Mathematics Eric Smith said. “So we administer them.” The Student Perception Survey was implemented in the 2015-2016 school year to give teachers “insight and understanding about students’ overall attitudes and perceptions of their own teaching practices,” according to the New York City (NYC) DOE website.

Every NYC sixth through twelfth grade teacher is required to have at least one class take the survey about his or her teaching. While there are strong

parameters around who can take the survey, the process of when the survey is administered and by whom is less uniform.

“Two years ago when I administered the survey, we were told we should try to give it third period even if it wasn’t my best class. This year, I feel they were a little more lenient about that,” social studies teacher Martina Madden explained. With the rules being more lax, it is easier to choose what period the survey is administered and “that may impact our scores if we cherry-pick our classes,” Madden said. This does raise the question of whether the voluntary choosing of classes impacts survey results.

“The survey is not consistent across the board, which is problematic,” Smith said.

A member of the administration commented that Stuyvesant does attempt to adhere to all of the “best practices” advised by the NYC DOE, which include requiring Stuyvesant teachers to have a colleague fill in when students are taking the survey, as well as setting third period as the time for students to take the survey.

While Stuyvesant has made strides to make the survey as unbiased and uniform as possible, inconsistencies have appeared in recent surveys. “One thing I want to note—and my Union representative wanted to address it—is that my survey said that 37 kids took the [survey], but I only have 34 kids in my class and only 33 of them were there, so there’s the possibility that there are flaws,” Madden commented. While the reason behind the inconsistencies is still under investigation by the DOE, a member of the administration stated that it might be attributed to acci-

dental report of blank forms.

Another point of contention is the questions asked by the survey itself. “In response to the surveys as a whole, I would say that the wording of the questions is problematic because even when they give us the results we can see the specific questions that resulted in the overall grade. In terms of basic survey design, some of the questions are problematic,” Smith said. The survey uses a one through five range to gauge student’s perception on the teacher and classroom environment. The survey is designed to evaluate five topics: pedagogical effectiveness, classroom climate, classroom rigorous expectations, classroom engagement, and classroom teacher-student relationships. The most contested topic, pedagogical (teaching) effectiveness, is meant to evaluate student perceptions of the quality of teaching and the amount of learning students get from a particular teacher.

When answering the Student Perception Survey, students may have difficulty answering such open-ended questions with a somewhat unclear scaling system. “I was told nothing about the survey,” senior Dylan Blake said, who remembers coming late to class and only having a few minutes to do the survey. He found that “the questions were confusing. [One question] was about how much the teacher knew about the subject. Like, I don’t know,” he said.

Questions such as, “How much does this teacher know about the topic of his or her class?” have raised contention among teachers as well.

“How are you as a student able to gauge the teacher’s content knowledge if you are in the class, sort of by defini-

tion, because you don’t know the class’s knowledge,” Smith explained. “Do you know how much precalculus your teacher knows? No, of course not. And yet you are asked to rate them on something you haven’t even fully learned yet. In terms of a survey question, it is stupid.”

Math teacher Ashvin Jaishankar found issue with the question “How connected do you feel to your teacher in this class?” Jaishankar responded, “It’s a loaded question. How connected are you supposed to feel? Too close or too distant, neither of which are good.

The question is not clear.”

Another question on the survey asks, “When you’re not in class how much do you think about the class?” Madden shrugged with a smile and added, “It is a lot to ask a student who is taking multiple APs and extracurriculars to constantly be talking about our class. Even if they find it interesting and care, they don’t want to be perceived as awkward or too nerdy. It is a strange way to evaluate how we’re performing as teachers.”

Regardless of the questions, Madden humbly noted that she was proud of her ratings, which she deemed to be a “passionate response.” Madden was glad to see that she had performed better than she had in previous years and was on an upward trend. Indeed, Stuyvesant students are not the only ones who always strive to be the best at what they do. “We all want to be the best teachers we can be,” Madden said. When asked about the impact of the results in the years to come, Madden responded that “[she] thinks it’s ok but at some point, it has to plateau. You just [have] to do your best and that is all,” she said.

While the NYCDOE did

at one point intend for the Student Perception Surveys to play a small percentage in the teachers’ overall evaluation and therefore impact their career, “this never came into fruition” and “now it is purely informational,” Smith said.

Given the discrepancy in past surveys and lack of uniformity, this is probably for the best.

The sentiment that the surveys serve no purpose is shared by some in the student body. “I honestly don’t know what happens with the surveys. Probably nothing,” Blake said. While the current state of the Student Perception Surveys has led some to discredit its value, student perception is still an asset to teachers and students. “Some teachers at the end of the semester will have their students write out if there was anything that they could have improved on, so teachers should do that instead,” Blake said.

Madden also uses alternative assessments to plan or gauge her teaching. “At the beginning of the year I send out a Google Form to see how my students learn best.

From that, I try to vary how I teach. It helps, but you can’t satisfy everyone,” she said.

With class sizes of upwards of 34 students, Stuyvesant students may struggle to find an effective way to share their thoughts on the way they are being taught. The Student Perception Survey does attempt to help combat this, but its lack of uniformity and opaque questions lead many to dismiss the survey as a valuable evaluative survey. Teachers and faculty may need to find a new tool to make sure students’ voices are heard throughout both the classroom and the entire school.

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Features

By CHRISTINE CHANG Ever since Stuyvesant’s establishment in 1904, hundreds of thousands of students have come and gone. As alumni, these students achieve higher levels of education and accomplish new goals in different walks of life.

Whether directly after graduation or 50 years later, many alumni pay tribute to the high school that influenced and enabled them to do incredible things. Some achieve this by donating money and delievering a speech at Stuyvesant; others do this by volunteering at events. However, a certain few come back to Stuyvesant as teachers who influence the next generation of students.

One such teacher is technology teacher Joseph Blay (‘09). As a more recent graduate, he is very familiar with Stuyvesant’s culture.

“It’s competitive, a lot of people trying to do well, a lot of people are very smart, and it’s kind of awesome to have that in your peers, to have all your friends just crazy smart,” he explained.

Regarding Stuyvesant’s culture, English teacher Annie Thoms (‘93) added, “In any room that you’re in, you are probably not the smartest person in the room. I think that is very humbling in a positive way.”

By ANTA NOOR

Eleonora Srugo (‘04) Eleonora Srugo was four days into her sophomore year at the time of the attack. She was in German class, on the fifth floor facing south, right outside the Foreign Language Assistant Principal’s office. She initially just heard rumblings of some sort, so her teacher did not interrupt instruction. She explained, “We were unaware at the time of how devastating the impact of the first plane was

English teacher Maura Dwyer (‘04) finds similarities between her current students and peers at the school during her time as a student. “I have so many students who remind me of friends of mine from Stuyvesant in sort of eerie ways,” she said.

Every student goes through the process of adapting to a new school. Biology teacher Dr. Maria Nedwidek-Moore’s (‘98) initial experience with high school was similar to many others’ experiences. Dr. Nedwidek-Moore wrote in an email interview: “The entrance exam was terrifying, and the first day was welcoming.

My middle school experience was difficult. I was with students who struggled academically there.

This made friendships more challenging. Stuyvesant was comfortable and people were friendly.

That was easy to adjust to!”

Thoms, too, has fond memories of her first few months as a student. “[Stuyvesant] was still a school full of nerds, which was great. I came from a junior high where I was one of the biggest nerds. I came here, and I was no longer one of the biggest nerds,” she said.

For many of these teachers, Stuyvesant offered opportunities for growth in fields in which they currently specialize and teach.

lems students face is receiving a low grade. When Dwyer encounters a student in that situation, she tries to remind them one grade does not define them. “When a student comes in crying, upset about a test having gone badly or thinking a test has gone badly, [I tell them,] ‘You can still be a successful, happy person even if you get a 50 on your math test,’” she said. “‘Those moments aren’t what define you as a person or as a student even if it feels that way.’”

Many teachers feel that when they were a student, they did not appreciate the various opportunities available for students at Stuyvesant. “The number one thing I missed out on when I was a student was the real value of all the different things that you get to learn at Stuy[vesant].

You get to really go in depth in so many subjects, and if you’re really interested in something you can pursue it,” Blay said. “I feel like if I could do it all over again, I could have […] taken away more of knowledge and be a more well-rounded person.”

One thing students may not plan for is life after high school and college. Though high school may seem like the most important aspect of life, Dr. NedwidekMoore advised, “Don’t lose sight of your future. You cannot con-

trol it by what college you get into. You control it by being your best person and looking for good relationships and caring for your family and yourself. These are valuable attributes. A diploma helps you get a career. Moral character helps you live a good life.”

Focusing on academics should also remain a priority, as important life skills are learned through academic practices.

“Learning how to manage workload is vital,” Thoms said. “The workload here can feel very overwhelming. Figuring out how to plot it out for yourself [is important], and a lot of that does also mean turning off social media and actually concentrating on one thing at a time. Doing your own work is important on both an academic level and a moral level.”

Overall, one idea was emphasized by each of the teachers: Stuyvesant’s student body may change every year, but the nature of Stuyvesant students will stay the same—each year brings in a new crop of students who are eager and ready to learn.

“Stuy[vesant] students make up the school,” Dwyer said. “They are the most important part of the school. People who are in charge can come and go, but it’s the students who make up the character and personality of the school.”

A Day To Be Remembered Srugo remembers stepping onto the West Side highway and seeing people covered in soot.

“There was a horrific smell in the air, and people were all running north. I did the same until I was far enough away and looked back. My surrounding area was an image I will never forget. All I saw was literally a cloud of dust and smoke. Towers were just gone,” she recalled. Srugo remembers feeling “numb” the rest of the day. The events seemed surreal and inexplicable. Everyone was confused and everything was in shambles.

For Srugo, the impact of the attack had both short-term and long-term effects. She lived in an area in downtown Manhattan where people needed passes to enter the area. Her most vivid memory is the smell in the air.

She recalled, “The smell was a stench that just did not go away and I still wonder if it has or if I just got used to the smell.”

School was closed for the next few weeks, so it felt like students had an “extended” vaca-

“It was an image I will never forget. It was literally a cloud of dust and smoke.

Towers were just gone.” —Eleonora Srugo (‘04) and that classmates on higher floors and further west could see more clearly as we could just barely make out the towers from our room.” Former Principal Stanley Teitel informed the students of what was happening over the intercom and told them to stay in class for now, but to stay tuned for updates.

Students became worried when the television and lights went out. As soon as the power came back on, Principal Teitel went on the intercom and advised students to immediately go to their homerooms, authorizing a formal emergency evacuation.

“I never would have become an academic scientist without this type of immersive environment,” Dr. Nedwidek-Moore stated. “I was exposed deeply to fields and subjects that were special and new. This gave me the intellectual tools to pick biology as a career and to love all science and math.”

Other teachers share similar experiences. Thoms recalled, “My writer’s workshop class changed my life. The teacher there was Judith Kocela. [She] was just amazing.”

Advancements in technology account for differences between the experiences of teachers when they were students and the experiences of current students. “My students now don’t sleep. [There is] too much internet,” Dr. Nedwidek-Moore said.

Dwyer’s take on technology was similar: “You guys have so much more technology in your lives than I did when I was a student. Facebook was started the year I graduated. So I didn’t have Facebook, or Instagram, or really social media at all when I was a student and that has really changed this for the student experience at Stuy[vesant],” she explained.

As alumni, these teachers have the experience and knowledge that current students have yet to discover. One of the many prob-

tion, she said. Though the environment of their get-togethers changed completely, Srugo and her friends continued to see each other almost every day.

After a few weeks, Eleonora and the rest of the Stuyvesant students continued classes at Brooklyn Technical High School, but they were convened at one p.m. and ended at six p.m. The students did not have homework during that time, so they had the liberty to hang out after school. “The aftermath of 9/11 was a strange time because socially we were actually enjoying that time while there was devas-

tation all around us,” Srugo said.

Once students returned to Stuyvesant, everything slowly returned to normal. For Srugo, Stuyvesant was the dream. It was the high school experience Srugo always dreamed of and 9/11 is now part of that story. “9/11 is a stain on what was otherwise a magical experience,” she explained.

When asked if she envisioned her high school experience differently, Srugo immediately responded, “no.” She never would have thought that something as drastic as 9/11 would occur during her time, but it was a time of bonding, growing, and learning. She reflected, “Almost 17 years later I view that day as the first moment of real adulthood, we all lost our innocence that day. Childhood ended.”

Wen Gu (‘04) Wen Gu was also enjoying his first few days back as a sophomore when 9/11 occurred. The time was 8:45 a.m. and Gu was in band. He recalls that the first reaction that people had when they heard that the twin towers were hit was laughter. He had heard students say, “What idiot hit the biggest towers in the world?

Who the hell would hit the two biggest buildings in NYC?” Then, he went to his computer science computer and his teacher had turned the radio on. It was not until the second tower was hit that he realized the events were not a joke and were actually something sinister.

Students began evacuating the school when the first tower fell.

“People in business suits [were] running away and the unusualness of the situation was magnified,” he said. “It is not every day you see people in business suits running.” There was no transit service; all the trains, buses, and shuttle services were closed, so it took Gu three and a half hours to get home.

Looking back, Gu recalled “The attack was a moment of realization for me because I learned that the adults were

Sophia Zhao / The Spectator

For all current Stuyvesant students, 9/11 is a day in history that we know to mourn.

We have not experienced nor dealt with the emotional trauma so many endured, but we remember the day each year with a moment of silence. However, in 2001, many Stuyvesant alumni who were then students witnessed the chaotic events play out in front of their eyes.

Here are some of their stories about that life-changing day:

Back to Their Roots

just as lost as us.” Gu just remembers feeling very scared thinking, “Holy crap, no one [knows] what they [are] doing.”

Students relocated to Brooklyn Technical High School because the air downtown smelled awful even though the students were constantly reassured that the air quality was safe. Gu recalls the smell as “acidic, like burning metal for many days, many months.”

Spending time with his friends really helped Gu deal with the situation and grasp what actually happened because the experience was something only the people who were a part of could relate to. The support and relationships he found after 9/11 became Gu’s defining moments at Stuyvesant.

Michael Loebl (‘05) At the time of the attack, Michael Loebl was a freshman. He was in biology class.

At first, all Lobel heard was a loud bang. The classroom faced south towards the towers, but he was sitting in the back of the room behind the windows.

When another student looked out the window and first noticed that the towers were hit, everyone rushed to the window and saw a “huge, flaming hole in the top of the tower,” he said. The first plane hit the

side facing Stuyvesant. One moment Loebl recalls vividly is when his biology teacher tried to seat and calm the students and Loebl asked, “Do you have any idea how many people must have just died?” His biology teacher replied, “This is biology, let us focus on the living.”

His next class was on the other side of the building, so he was unable to see what was occuring outside, but he does recall experiencing a brief, “sinking,” feeling, similar to one that he experiences when going down a roller coaster. When he got out of the building, all he saw was smoke, which stretched across the sky “covering buildings in its path,” he said. Loebl walked home that day and remembers watching fighter jets patrolling the skies above New York.

The only other thing Loebl remembers about 9/11 was something his father told him: “You might not realize now, but you were just a part of history.”

Loebl continued, “I did not appreciate his comment at the time, but he was 100 percent right.”

After the attack, Loebl suffered from symptoms of severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for many years. “[I have] tears in my eyes as I still carry continued on page 9

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Features A Day To Be Remembered

continued from page 8

some of the scars with me.

For years, I could not stand the sound of low flying planes.

I avoided any thoughts about 9/11 for over a decade,” he said.

Yet, Loebl had an amazing time in high school. Instead of breaking him, 9/11 strengthened his ties to Stuyvesant. “It was such a formative part of my life that I continue to serve the school, and am currently on the board of directors of the Alumni Association,” he commented.

Michael Moy (‘03) Moy was a junior during the time of the attack. He was in his double-period physics class.

Moy realized that the first plane crashed after everyone ran to the window. Watching the crash was very surreal, to the point where it seemed like a movie to him. After the first crash, his teacher closed all the blinds so that students could not see anymore. Some time later, there was an announcement for everyone to go to their homerooms. As Moy was walking to his classroom, he saw people

crying in the hallways. “That is when it hit me that the crash that just happened was not some big special effects, but something severely wrong,” he recalled.

Students were soon evacuated from the school and told to go north, up the West Side highway. As he was walking, Moy noticed a lot of confusion and rumors of more planes circling other sites. He searched for his friends to try to regain some sense of stability in the chaos.

Eventually, they made it to midtown and took the train home.

The rest of the day was a

constant daze for Moy. “I was moving and interacting with everyone around me, but not fully grasping the reality of what was going on,” he said.

After the attacks, the Tribeca area was not safe to return to. Because Moy did not want to stay at home all day, he decided to volunteer with the Red Cross. They set up cots and food stations at Shea Stadium for firemen, police officers, and anyone who needed a break from the search and rescue operations. He recalled his experience at Brooklyn Techni-

cal High School, “Everything was a mess since no one knew where any of the classrooms were and all the classes lasted [for] what felt like minutes.”

It took time for everything to feel like ordinary after the attack, but Moy eventually felt normal again. Everyone wanted to return to life before the attack to show that the Stuyvesant community is strong and will not hide in the shadows of 9/11. “I think the only major difference the following year was that we had a moment of silence,” he said.

Dr. Horenstein: From the Stage to the Classroom and Back

By AMANDA YAGERMAN Stuyvesant students know him as their Advanced Topics (AT) in Biology or Forensics teacher, but they probably do not know that biology teacher Dr. Jeffrey Horenstein finds passion in areas outside of biology. In fact, he spends his free time acting, reading, writing, and sampling delicious cuisines. As a child, he participated in competitive swimming and tennis.

He explored several career options before becoming a teacher.

Dr. Horenstein grew up in a small, middle-class suburb in central New Jersey. Ever since he was a young child, he has had a strong interest in both the arts and sports. He joined the local swim team and played tennis, competing in both sports throughout high school.

Dr. Horenstein also began to dabble in the arts at a young age. “I wrote really bad poetry,” he said. “My fifth grade teacher always told me how wonderful it was, but I look back now and cringe.” He also experimented with music through his band, which he created with a few friends. He was the pianist, but admittedly, “we spent more time deciding what the name should be than we spent practicing, and

we never had a gig,” he said. He had his first experience with acting when he was 12 years old at a summer camp for the performing and fine arts. There, he quickly developed a passion for acting that would remain with him through adulthood.

High school was a difficult time for Dr. Horenstein—his father had died when he was 12 years old. This loss was challenging for him to overcome and had a significant impact on his adolescence. “Before I was 12, school had been the center of my life; after I was 12, I lost some interest in school,” he said. However, Dr. Horenstein stayed active in his school community by joining his high school’s tennis and swim teams and participating in theater. He would only discover his interest in biology toward the end of college; chemistry was his passion in high school.

Dr. Horenstein initially attended college at The Juilliard School, a performing arts conservatory located in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on the Upper West Side. He was accepted to the acting program there, but quickly found that Juilliard was a “bad fit” for him and dropped out after his first year. After leaving Juilliard, he stopped acting altogether.

He transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, which he fondly remembered as “a very special place [because] you could be yourself there.” At Sarah Lawrence, one of Dr. Horenstein’s favorite classes was an intensive fiction writing class, which he described as “an adventure,” he said. He also became interested in biology and biochemistry during his later years there.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Dr. Horenstein took classes at Hunter College while working part-time as a waiter.

The following year, he was a teacher’s assistant (TA) at Hunter College. Following his year as a TA, Dr. Horenstein briefly considered medical school, but decided against it because he could not stand the sight of blood.

This led him to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia. “During my postdoctoral work I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was, ‘I don’t think research is right for me,’” he recalled. Next, he explored biotechnology and business for four years, but these fields did not feel right to him, either. He asked himself, “What am I going to do?” and, recalling his time spent as a TA for a freshman biology class at Hunter College, decided that teaching was a good option. “I really loved those kids.

Hunter was filled with ‘hungry’ kids. I was so impressed by their dedication, their eagerness, that I can’t believe that hasn’t affected me becoming a teacher,” he said.

Dr. Horenstein worked as a substitute teacher for one year and then spent three years teaching in other New York City schools before hearing about an opening at Stuyvesant. He applied for a position and has now been teaching at Stuyvesant for seven years. He currently teaches two sections of AT Biology (also known as “freshman bio”) and two sections of Forensics, a class comprised mostly of seniors.

“It’s very interesting to teach seniors and freshmen and almost nothing in between. I see you coming in and leaving. And what a huge difference [between freshmen and seniors],” he observed.

Dr. Horenstein’s favorite part about teaching at Stuyvesant is his students. “I find students endlessly engaging. The changes they’re going through are so profound. I feel, almost, an honor to witness this, and to play a role in their education. It’s such a huge time of growth,” he explained. He noted that the teenagers at Stuyvesant are especially mature for their age group, a noticeable trait he has appreciated since he began working

here. “These students tend to be very congenial, and they work hard, and they’re really smart, and there are so many lovely things about teaching here. It’s almost surreal. It’s quite an extraordinary place,” he noted.

In recent years, Dr. Horenstein has rekindled his love for theater and has begun to incorporate this interest into his work at Stuyvesant. Four or five years ago, he began taking acting classes for the first time in over 30 years. These classes inspired him to apply his favorite elements of theater to the school setting. He explained, “Improv, for me, is so liberating, like getting out of my own head, where I can get very trapped. Stuyvesant students, I have a feeling, are also trapped in their own heads.” This thought inspired Dr. Horenstein to write a grant and find an improv teacher, who now meets with Stuyvesant students every Monday for weekly improv classes.

Underneath Dr. Horenstein’s love for biology is a myriad of interests. Perhaps most admirable about Dr. Horenstein is not only his dedication to both his work and his favorite pastimes, but also his willingness to spread the joy he gets from acting to the students he sees every day.

Catching Up With Fletcher

By ARPITA SAHA and AFLAHA FATEHA When hearing English teacher Katherine Fletcher talk about her life, it seems as if her destiny was to be an English teacher; her parents met at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her father was an English professor. As a child, she was not allowed to watch a lot of television. Instead, she spent the majority of her time reading, which is one of her favorite hobbies. However, Fletcher did not always know that she wanted to be an English teacher.

Fletcher received an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Bryn Mawr College, a small women’s college just outside of Philadelphia. As an upperclassman, Fletcher began considering a career as a teacher. She found that her college English class discussions did not mirror those that she preferred. Because of this dissatisfaction, Fletcher was inclined

to become a teacher and foster an environment in which all her students would be engrossed in the discussions. Another push to becoming an English teacher was that she never found the English teacher of her dreams. “I wanted to be inspired by my teachers and I wanted to have that really special English teacher, and I sort of never did,” Fletcher said. “I think part of me wanted to become the kind of English teacher who I would have liked to have as a student.”

After college, Fletcher recalls feeling aimless; she transitioned between various jobs, such as one at a publishing company and another at Whole Foods. However, after some time, she finally decided to get a teaching certificate, describing this decision as “a leap of faith.” There are expenses accompanying a teaching degree and certification, and one must have both talent and a true love for teaching in order to be successful. Fletcher, though, immediately knew she

made the correct decision: “I just got really lucky that I knew really early on that it was the right thing for me to be doing,” she said.

Fletcher attended the Teachers College at Columbia University to get a Master’s Degree in English.

After graduating, she worked at Stuyvesant for the first time as a student-teacher under former Assistant Principal of the English Department, Dr. Steven Shapiro. After a year at Stuyvesant, Fletcher taught at a middle school in Long Island. The following school year, Dr. Shapiro offered her a job, and Fletcher is proud to say she has been here ever since.

“Being a Stuyvesant teacher, in particular, is such an integral part of my identity,” Fletcher explained. “I have grown up in so many ways at Stuyvesant. I think that it has made me more empathetic.” Teaching, she says, brings out the best qualities in her, including her patience, warmth, and humor, all of which are integral

parts of her success as a teacher.

One of Fletcher’s greatest imprints on the Stuyvesant English department is her startup of the Writing Center. The idea was introduced in a meeting with members of the department.

“We were having a conversation about how helpful it is for students to work one-on-one with other people in the context of revising their writing. And someone in the room—I think it was a former English teacher named Colette Brown, who doesn’t teach here anymore—said, ‘You know what the school needs? We need a writing center.’ And in that moment I thought: that is something I can do,” Fletcher recalled.

For Fletcher, the most important aspect of student English is reading. She wishes for all of her students to be lifelong readers and to find books that they genuinely love and are passionate about. The lure of the Internet and social media can be tempting, but Fletcher

hopes that this temptation does not transform her students into non-readers. “Please read,” she advised. “Reading makes you a more interesting person.”

While it is clear that Fletcher’s journey to becoming an English teacher was greatly influenced by her childhood, Fletcher’s decision to become a teacher was the result of giving herself time to explore different options. Despite going through a period of uncertainty, she eventually discovered her passion: teaching. For Fletcher, teaching has been an extremely rewarding experience, and she believes that it has shaped her identity tremendously. From starting the Writing Center to teaching three different English classes, Fletcher has had a profound impact on Stuyvesant. Outside of this community, Fletcher loves to bake and knit. She spends her summers with her family on the coast of Maine, where she goes sailing and exploring.

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Features Behind the Microscope: Talking with Stuyvesant’s Student Scientists

By YASMINE CHOKRANE Stuyvesant is known for being a STEM school, offering a wide variety of science, technology, engineering, and math programs and classes. While the school offers many resources, some students have supplemented them with courses of study outside of school. Here is a look at some of Stuyvesant’s very own student scientists.

Kristoff Misquitta

Elizabeth Doss Junior Elizabeth Doss had never expressed much interest in science before coming to Stuyvesant. She had taken basic courses, such as Earth Science, in middle school, but did not discover her passion until freshman year at Stuyvesant. After taking Modern Biology with biology teacher Marissa Maggio during her first semester, and Quenzer during her second, Doss developed a newfound interest in biology.

As a result of that interest, she found herself participating in several programs at and outside of Stuyvesant. Last year, Doss took part in the Urban Barcode Research Program, in which she aided in research at Mount Sinai Hospital at the Icahn School of Medicine, trying to detect a mutation in one sequence in a gene and identify a difference between cancer cells and normal cells. “I learned a whole bunch of cool techniques,” Doss explained. “I [worked on] PCRs and cultured cells.”

Last summer, Doss participated in a research program at Stuyvesant led by biology teacher Jerry Citron. Students completed a variety of experiments, such as testing the fountain water to measure how much lead was in them, as well as collecting water from the Hudson River after it rained to measure its acidity. Doss is also the president of stuyMAPS (Modelling a Protein Story), where members pursue biology outside of the classroom by using a series of software programs, like Jmol, to examine different protein structures.

Doss has taken Urban Ecology, Research Biology, and is currently taking AP Computer Science. She hopes to take AP Biology and AP Environmental Science next year.

“There’s a huge variety of courses you can take,” she said. “For me, in particular, there [are] so many different biology courses that we offer. But also, if you’re a researcher for chemistry, you can take Advanced Chem Lab and all those different courses. [Stuyvesant] caters to whatever science you go into.”

This accommodation has been extremely beneficial for Doss, who is interested in both biology and computer science. She has also expressed interest in mathematics and has dedicated time to her job at the Museum of Math. “It’s nerdy, but it’s a lot of fun,” Doss said.

Ultimately, Doss is interested in the general fields of STEM. “For both computer science and math, I love that feeling when you solve a problem that you’ve been struggling over for a really long time and then you finally get it and it’s the best feeling in the world,” she elaborated.

Her long-term goals, though, lie in the realm of biology—more specifically, between biology and medicine. However, she is certain that she wants to become a research scientist, delving into diseases, especially cancer. She said, “It’s cheesy, but I just want to help as many people as possible.”

Kasey Chan / The Spectator

Being a student scientist is “loving science and not stopping there. It means pursuing it, [and] actually looking at how you can apply science to the world,” sophomore Kristoff Misquitta defined.

Misquitta, whose interest in experimentation began with a third-grade science project about solar panels, applies science to the world in a multitude of ways. For one, he takes advantages of the many science electives at Stuyvesant, as he is currently taking Molecular Biology and participates in Stuyvesant’s numerous biology-related clubs. For example, Misquitta is a member of the Biology Division of Science Olympiad and the leadership board for the Research Club, as well as a member of Science Bowl, stuyMAPS (Modeling a Protein Story), and the SIGMA Magazine. Misquitta also pursues science outside of school by meticulously looking through scientific journals and reading them on his train rides, at home, or whenever he has a free moment.

Reading journals helped Misquitta come up with an idea for the Genes in Space competition, a nation-wide contest that looks for ideas that overcome limitations present in space explorations. It honors applicants from across the country who reject the notion that the sky is the limit. Misquitta received an Honorable Mention in the competition last year.

“My proposal [sought to] quantify the amount of microRNA-31 present in the body and space and use that as a biomarker and indicator of bone mineral density loss in space,” he explained. To get to the point of formulating an experiment, Misquitta spent arduous hours at Barnes & Noble’s, researching “until [his] guest Wi-Fi pass ran out,” he said. The smell of coffee and the sound of the blender created the background for his scientific journey.

Occasionally, frustration accompanies this journey. “One of the biggest obstacles I face is finding inspiration,” Misquitta admitted. “Sometimes you have to look through a lot of articles to find something you can relate to. Often, I’ve spent a whole day just reading article after article and at the next day I get up, it’s all gone. I forget every single thing I read and that’s really frustrating.”

To clear his head, Misquitta admires and observes nature as he takes walks in the park by his house. “[This] sounds like something that wouldn’t technically be very interesting, but nothing fosters more imagination in me than just looking at nature because it’s simple.

It’s pure. And that’s ultimately what science is: it’s a pure field and you have to be in sync with it in order to be inspired,” Misquitta professed.

Misquitta continues to be engrossed in this field of study that has captivated both him and his brother, who is a chemical engineer. In order to foster that interest, Misquitta plans on taking several Stuyvesant’s biology electives, including Regeneron Biology and Cancer Research. As for his ultimate ambition, Misquitta aspires to “use science in some way to

Liza Reizis

Junior Liza Reizis’s interest in science began during middle school when her class visited different scientific laboratories and conducted chemistry experiments. Similar to Misquitta, Reizis’s family, who is involved in science, inspired her to pursue the field. As a child, Reizis was interested in environmental studies and ecology, but currently is more focused on molecular biology.

Reizis also competed in Genes in Space. She won first place two years ago as a freshman, for her experiment on the compromised immune systems of astronauts who returned from space, regarding T-cells, the cells that mediate the immune response. She used the polymerase chain reaction semi-quantitative method to observe mouse blood over a series of time and see whether it helped indicate immunodeficiency development.

The competition was introduced to her by biology teacher Jessica Quenzer, who encouraged all of her research biology classes to participate. Quenzer played an active part in Reizis’s project, having attended the first International Space Station conference and the launch of Reizis’s experiment with Reizis.

Reizis was inspired to participate in Genes in Space by a previous winner of the competition. Winning the competition “was also really awesome because the year prior to me, Julian Rubinfien (‘17), who is also from Stuy, won,” Reizis said. “The whole time, I [had] been looking at him as a role model and it was very fulfilling to see myself in the same place as him.”

Stuyvesant, Reizis explained, helps her develop her own scientific career because of the multitude of opportunities it offers for anyone who wishes to further their interest in science. “The teachers of [the] biology department are also super, super supportive and will encourage questioning and further research,” Reizis elaborated.

Reizis has already taken Molecular Biology, Advanced Placement (AP) Bio-Psychology, and Regeneron Biology. In addition to these classes, Reizis has been making progress outside of school as well. In the past, she has taken care of cephalopods at a marine biology lab and interned at the International School of Biology. This summer she will work at the prestigious Rockefeller University with Dr. Howard Hang.

In the future, Reizis hopes to find a field that she is dedicated to. She tentatively plans on majoring in biology but is aware that her scientific interests could change. “I’m just going to continue looking for new questions to pursue and answer,” she said.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 11

Editorials Stuyvesant Rules, But Its Rules Don’t Teenagers view rules as nothing more than chains holding them back from independence, creativity, or fun. Students are told that many rules exist to provide safety and security. Indeed, the school administration implements a variety of rules to create a productive environment for students and staff. However, while we believe that many of the rules at Stuyvesant are well-intentioned, some are clearly in need of reform.

Entering and Exiting the Building Throughout the day, many students have the privilege of spending their free or lunch periods outside. However, the predetermined blocks of time during which students are allowed to enter the building are a significant downside when choosing to leave the building and a major point of contention between students and the administration.

Currently, students are only allowed to return to the building during the last five minutes of a period. Administrators say that this rule enables the security staff to keep track of who enters the building more efficiently than if students streamed into the building throughout the entire period.

However, it could be argued that students entering in a steady stream would be easier to handle than students going in and out in 10-minute bursts. In addition, because students scan into the building, the administration has the technical capacity to monitor the entrance of students throughout the period.

As for making sure that intruders do not enter the building, security guards are stationed next to the bridge entrance throughout the whole day, monitoring incomers. Overall, the rule restricting entry throughout a period inconveniences students without having any practical benefits; the rule should be amended by allowing students to swipe in and out through the Tribeca Bridge during any time during the period.

Monitoring the entrance and exit of students throughout the period would not jeopardize the security and safety of students and the school, while also providing students with much-needed flexibility.

The ID Catastrophe From entering the school to checking out textbooks, students identification (ID) cards are their all-access keys to Stuyvesant. It is significantly more challenging for students to get through their everyday academic lives without their ID cards. As such, it is understandable that the administration places a $1 fee for temporary ID cards as an incentive for students to be more careful with such a vital resource. However, this is not a completely effective incentive because the value and utility of the ID card itself become the incentives students need to be more careful with misplacing their IDs. The fee is an added burden placed on students, especially on those who do very little to improve their track records regarding losing their ID cards.

Even after paying the $1, students still do not gain the benefits of a full ID. For example, they will often be refused entry to the library and not given school lunch when presenting the temporary ID. This creates a punitive system for losing your ID, and one in which even after you have ostensibly paid the price you continue to face difficulties. One practical solution would be to implement a strike system: students only need to pay the fine on their fourth time forgetting their ID. Furthermore, Stuyvesant should ensure that the temporary ID is fully functional.

Finally, Stuyvesant should reduce the cost of a temporary ID to a more reasonable price for a small slip of paper—25 or 50 cents.

Other Rules While the entry policy and the ID policy are the harshest rules at Stuyvesant, they are not the only ones. Many rules serve no clear

purpose, and the lives of students could be improved through reforming (or abolishing) such rules. One example is the ban on wearing hoodies and headphones when entering the building. Not only is it difficult to enforce, but it is also illogical given that hats and heavy overcoats are allowed under the same policy. If the reason behind this policy is to prevent students from carrying forbidden items into the building, prohibiting hoodies while permitting hats and large overcoats seem arbitrary. Therefore, as the cell phone policy has been made more flexible, the administration should consider relaxing other similarly strict rules: Stuyvesant should permit students to wear hoodies and headphones when entering the building.

In a somewhat related vein, the zero-tolerance policy on facial decoration is extreme. While students should be recognizable, requiring students to remove any type or minimal amount of face paint or decoration will further dampen school spirit, especially in cases like El Día de Los Muertos, where many students wear face paint in a fun and educational setting. Finally, another frankly absurd rule is the policy on locker trading. There is no reasonable explanation for banning locker trading entirely; students should be able to exchange lockers for mutual convenience.

Enforcement of rules varies tremendously from dean to dean and teacher to teacher. Therefore, even though a rule might seem reasonable on paper, in practice, its arbitrary enforcement makes it seem absurd, which only leads to confusion and discontent. Reforming many of these rules—or at least explaining why the rules are needed—and having more accountability for the figures responsible for enforcing the rules, would be early steps to making Stuyvesant a better place for students.

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R EC OR D

The Issue 13 article “Stuyvesant Introduces Sexual Misconduct Seminars” incorrectly named Theo Moss as the Student Union External Affairs Delegate. The correct name is Theo Kubovy-Weiss.

The “Steal Your Look” spread in Issue 14 is credited to Arts & Entertainment editor Jiahe Wang.

To All The “Girls in Math Team” I’ve Seen Before

By LORI LEU (‘18) My senior year at Stuyvesant, my ever-forgetful friend told me a story: “I was talking to someoneabout you, but somehow I forgot your name, and so instead of Lori I said, ‘You know, that girl who’sgood at math, that girl who’s on math team,’ and my friend was like, ‘Oh, Lori?’”

I supposed I could’ve felt some sort of pride for having this reputation, but I found the story rather sad. Had my friend said “that guy who’s good at math” or “that guy who’s on math team,” there’s no way one specific name would’ve popped into her friend’s mind. Even at a STEM school like Stuyvesant, there are so few girls in math that I’d become a special case, someone who could be identified by the intersection of the “girl” and “math team” labels.

But this is old news. Just last semester, The Spectator published an article titled “Where Are the Girls in Math Team?”, calling attention to the fact that from freshman to senior year, the number of girls in math team keeps dropping until there is just one left. You read about how

teachers and team members alike wish that there were more girls on the team. Though it was never explicitly written, the article was clearly meant to point out the imbalance of genders in math team in an effort to change the status quo. It isn’t alone in the world of published materials meant to encourage more girls to go into math, but there are unintended consequences of this effort.

Encouraging girls to join math team is rarely seen as a bad thing, but doing so actually creates pressure for the girls who are already on the team by making them feel that they are somehow obligated to stay. People talk all the time about the how being a girl on math team comes with advantages and disadvantages (e.g. making you stand out on college applications, feeling out of place, etc.), but the conversation never includes the question of why there always happens to be one girl who stays. We ask why there aren’t more girls and why they leave, but never why they stay.

The idealistic explanation is the one that I’d give if anyone asked me why I stayed: I loved math team, so I stayed. While this is true, reality is often not so sim-

ple: at a school like Stuyvesant, there are lots of factors like pressure from parents or pressure to stand out to colleges, but I argue that the consistency of this one girl per grade phenomenon is (at least partly) due to a different pressure: the pressure to stay because leaving would mean that there would be no girls in math team at all, that somehow you’ve let down your entire gender. In reality, this pressure isn’t at the forefront of our minds, which is why it’s rarely addressed, but it’s there.

As the one girl in my grade who stayed involved in math team through senior year, I got used to being the only girl on my team. I say I stopped noticing it, but I still inevitably do. Whenever we compete, I see other teams with barely any girls, and sometimes the winning teams have no girls at all. So whenever I see a team with a girl go on stage for an award, I feel a sense of pride that I hadn’t felt upon hearing my forgetful friend’s story—pride that comes from knowing that girls can contribute to good teams too, not pride for being “the girl on math team.” This idea that somehow female representation

is something to be proud of is part of what keeps that last girl from leaving. As you may know, there’s always more than one girl in the freshman math team classes—in fact, there’s usually more than 30 (around one-third of the students who are in math team freshman year). It’s easier to leave when there are other girls left, whether it’s because you felt out of place in an environment dominated by boys, because you lost interest in math team, or because you got tired of hearing and/or thinking that you only got opportunities because you were a girl.

But going from one girl to none at all is somehow more of a big deal than going from 30 to one, because whether there are 30 girls or one, they are a minority, but at least they’re still there.

As much as I would love to see more girls on math team, I’m not here to tell girls that they should join math team. In fact, I’m here to address the unintended consequences of that message for girls who are already on the team.

My message is simple: don’t stay in math team just because you’re “the girl who does math.” Stay in math team if you enjoy the problems, if you want to be part of

the community (which will probably be mostly boys) that learns, competes, and has fun together.

Don’t stay just because you don’t want math team to be an all-boys world. Don’t feel like you have the responsibility to represent girls, to prove that girls can do math too.

If you do choose to join/stay, don’t let it have anything to do with your gender. The push for there to be more girls in math team would be meaningless if girls just joined because they were girls. This issue will persist beyond your time at Stuyvesant—while competition math ends with high school, the feeling of being the special case won’t.

Of the 80 students in my math class (a freshman class targeting math majors), fewer than 15 are girls. When I attend talks hosted by the Undergraduate Math Society, I see an average of one other girl out of 20 to 25 people in attendance. I like to think that we’re all there because we want to be, not to represent girls, not to prove anything to anyone. While that may not always be the case, I hope that those of you who choose to stay feel that way too.

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Opinions The Democrats Must Collapse

By ALEX ANNENBERG “Collapsing” is a debate term that describes abandoning the vast majority of one’s argumentation in favor of hammering one point home as fiercely as possible. At first glance, it seems impractical. Why have one compelling argument at the end of a round rather than two or three?

The answer is simple.

Consider a nail. It’s sharp and would probably hurt to step

on. But stepping on 100 or 1000 nails is harmless. The force of each individual nail is applied over a large surface area, such that none of them can puncture the skin. This idea translates nicely to politics. While the flaws in a candidate or an economic plan might number in the thousands, the average voter has a short attention span. An adept politician knows which of their opponent’s flaws to present and which to ignore so as to convey a powerful message without overwhelming voters.

This strategy has been the modus operandi of the Conservative Party in Canada ever since they became the opposition party in 2015. Rather than attacking a large group of scandals all at once, they blow up one scandal after another, waiting for each one to play out before moving on. The latest and most jarring scandal to come out of Canadian politics reflects this: after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, alleged that he was being pressured by

Trudeau to drop bribery charges against construction giant SNC Lavalin, it seemed like every Canadian news organization and every Conservative MP zeroed in on the growing scandal, magnifying its impact on the voter base. In fact, with approval ratings falling in Quebec and Ontario, Trudeau’s once massively popular Liberals stand a chance of losing their next election. If it had been treated like a Trump scandal, it would have spent a month on the news cycle. But not all scandals have to carry this kind of weight to be political winners. Two years ago, the Conservatives in Ontario chose to get angry at a duck for political gain: after Ontario’s Liberal government signed off on a $120,000, six-story high rubber duck for Canada’s 150th anniversary, the Conservatives used the arguably excessive grant to frame the ruling party as wasteful and irresponsible. Maybe they didn’t achieve that for every scandal—they certainly didn’t with the duck—but they did do what every opposition party

Asian-Americans: Don’t Subscribe to the Myth of an American Meritocracy

By ANNA LU Tensions run high in the discussion about higher education and the brazen inequalities of who gets it and who doesn’t. Asian voices speaking on the issue have been making headlines more frequently since the Students for Fair Admissions, a collective of parents, students, and litigators, filed a lawsuit against Harvard University for intentionally discriminating against Asians in its admissions process. This has led to a heated debate over affirmative action, with many Asian-Americans taking the stance that admissions should be strictly merit-based.

However, despite their vehement opposition to race considerations in admissions, Asian-Americans have a lot to lose from the loss of affirmative action.

Historically, Asian-Americans have benefited enormously from affirmative action, and they still do. According to the Urban Institute, Asian-American enrollment at Harvard rose from four to 13 percent in the 1970s when affirmative action programs were first implemented. Since then, campus demographics have often reflected a disproportionate number of Asian-Americans in colleges compared to the demographics of the entire country. This disproportionate representation, combined with the success that has come from so many Asian-Americans being given the opportunity to reap the benefits of higher education, set the foundations for the model minority myth.

It is impossible to effectively discuss the status of Asian-Americans and their attitudes toward

affirmative action without considering the model minority myth, which presents high college enrollment and employment rates in the Asian community as shining examples of what marginalized groups can achieve if they work hard. This argument completely disregards the disadvantages that the black and Latinx communities suffer due to the long history of oppression and discrimination against them, instead shifting accountability for the lack of success to the oppressed who were consistently denied opportunities to flourish.

The most problematic aspect of the model minority myth is that most people don’t realize that it is a myth. Many Asian-Americans subscribe to the model minority concept and feel immense pressure to build up a successful record in school because it is what is expected of them. They embrace that pressure as a part of AsianAmerican culture and use it to justify their position on affirmative action and their overwhelming presence in institutions of higher education. They argue that affirmative action is unjust because it invalidates hard work. But merit cannot be measured solely by what is written on an application. If it were, many Asian-Americans would not be in the positions of privilege that they have occupied since the administration of affirmative action in the late 1900s.

Without consideration for diversity on campuses and in workplaces and having the disadvantage of being immigrants unfamiliar with the language and without good social networks, Asian-Americans would have been far less qualified on paper than their white counterparts.

The model minority myth also neglects the disparities in socioeconomic status within the many ethnicities conglomerated into the ambiguous “AsianAmerican” box. Pacific-Islander, Bhutanese-American, and Burmese-American students are just a few examples of AsianAmericans who benefit from affirmative action. Low-income Asian-Americans also benefit tremendously. Affirmative action isn’t the exclusion of highachieving students in favor of less fortunate and less deserving

students, as its opponents believe, but rather, it is the broadening of opportunities and the extent to which those opportunities can affect people and the world.

Asian-American opposition to race-conscious admissions policies is understandable because Asian applicants are discriminated against in the admission process.

The recently released Harvard admissions procedure revealed a “personal rating” method of gauging an applicant’s character that has been under fire for allegedly rating Asian-Americans much lower in the categories of personality, courage, and integrity.

Anti-affirmative action advocates have been calling this the “Asian penalty.” The generalization of Asians as a tiresomely studious and unsociable group, which unsurprisingly is another effect of the model minority myth, may have played into the decisions made in scoring Asian-Americans.

That is discrimination.

However, the fight against the discrimination of AsianAmericans and the fight for more diversity in academic and professional spaces are the same fight. The media exaggerates antiaffirmative action sentiments from Asian-Americans, galvanizing the community into further action against race-conscious admissions, while choosing to ignore arguments made by the 65 percent majority, according to a 2016 AAPI Data study. It is important that the Asian-American narrative written in the headlines is not the one we identify ourselves by, but rather one that we overcome.

Janelle Wong, an Asian-American professor at the University of Maryland, says, “Ending affirmative action will not have a big effect on Asian-American admission rates. But if opponents of such policies are successful, lack of diversity will create a worse learning environment for AsianAmerican students...and damage a multiracial civil-rights coalition that could protect Asian-Americans from discrimination into the future.” Rather than live under the illusion of acceptance, AsianAmericans should be in support of affirmative action if they want to taste real success as a group with an equal voice in society.

wants to do: erode the ruling party’s credibility and push their own narrative, and they did so more effectively by presenting a unified, focused message.

The Democratic message is the antithesis of this coordinated attack on the party in power.

Presented with a goldmine of issues to use to their advantage, the Democrats have opted to press on each one until the next one comes out the next day. The result is a scrambled, disjointed message, a bunch of responses to Trump’s scandals du jour rather than a coherent, whole response to the trainwreck that is his presidency. This peaked during the 2016 election, where the Clinton campaign spent so much time on Trump’s flaws as a candidate and a prospective president that it drowned out its own platform. It’s hard to pass up the latest scandal, especially since each one seems so damning, but to do that is to play into Trump’s hands. The tweets and the gaffes and the racist remarks are all bait, designed to provide bread and circuses to the base and

targets for liberal outrage while more insidious policies pass under the radar, such as when the Environmental Protection Agency altered key Endangered Species Act language three days after the debacle in Helsinki.

The Democratic Party needs to choose its issues, and choose them wisely. A recent Yale survey brought hopeful news on a huge potential winner in this regard: climate change. Seventy percent of Americans believe that it’s happening, and that number seems to get bigger every day.

But climate change doesn’t have to be the silver bullet. It could be healthcare, or voter suppression, or immigration (though I wouldn’t recommend that last one). We can’t afford to lose this needle in the haystack of lies and self-incrimination piling up on President Trump’s Twitter feed every day. The Democrats need to learn what the freshmen on Speech and Debate already know: that it never hurts to collapse.

End Our Addiction to the War on Drugs

By AARON VISSER

The U.S., whose prison system is often criticized for excessive punishments and crowded jails, contains only four percent of the world’s population, but boasts 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Of these, 45 percent are imprisoned for drug possession and dealing. Seventeen percent of prisoners have broken the law to obtain illicit substances.

It’s obvious that the U.S. is in desperate need of an overhaul of its prison system. The best way to start is to end the decades-long War on Drugs, which costs the country millions of dollars and destroys the lives of countless American citizens.

When a drug or substance is made illegal, those who sell it no longer have the law on their side and resort to criminal methods.

Violent gangs and mafias are financed by illegal drugs, and rise in power and wealth with each new violent and uninformed campaign against such substances.

During the Prohibition era of the 1920s, crime bosses like the infamous Al Capone made their money selling and transporting illegal alcohol all across the country. For years, violence and crime proliferated as organized drug cartels trafficked huge amounts of outlawed substances all over the country. But when the government repealed the Constitutional amendment that implemented Prohibition and lifted the ban on alcohol, gangs that sold it under-the-counter disappeared overnight.

America and its neighbors face a similar dilemma with the modern War on Drugs. In South America and Mexico, drug lords accumulate massive wealth and political influence, leveraging their advantages in manpower to gain power and spread their criminal empires. Drug gangs control vast swaths of land in Mexico and Columbia, where rape, murder, and violence are commonplace.

The cartels, like the mafia before them, cannot be stopped through sheer force or violence. Instead, America must take the right step and end its War on Drugs before the situation gets worse.

America must turn to the alternatives that have been tried

successfully elsewhere. In the 1990s, a similar epidemic ravaged Portugal. They had tried the “brute force” method of outlawing and actively combating drug use and failed miserably. The government began an innovative campaign to decrease drug use and drive down crime. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and ended the established process of punishing drug users with legal penalties. It also reallocated money spent on imprisoning and punishing drug users and addicts to funding rehabilitation centers and quality healthcare. Additionally, the Portuguese helped many drug addicts regain financial stability by paying part of their wage or providing loans to help them start their own businesses.

Switzerland adopted similar, yet more comprehensive policies to combat its own drug crisis.

The Swiss government, on top of decriminalizing all drugs, opened safe and regulated injection centers where addicts were allowed to use medically pure heroin. Under the Swiss system, any addict must have been dependent on heroin for over two years and must have tried the other recovery options available in the country. Under proper medical supervision, addicts who went to injection centers did not overdose and almost always voluntarily took a smaller dose of drugs than they would have otherwise.

The results of the decriminalization programs speak for themselves. In Switzerland, overdose deaths fell by 64 percent, HIV contraction rates by 84 percent, and armed robberies by 98 percent. These numbers are impossible to ignore. If the U.S. is to have any reasonable chance of combating organized drug cartels, decreasing drug use, and reforming an overcrowded and arcane prison system, the first step is to follow in the footsteps of Portugal and Spain. Opening safe injection clinics is a start.

Decriminalizing all drugs will be a long campaign, especially in a country where medical marijuana is still outlawed on the federal level, but the prize is worth it.

Let’s end the War on Drugs and take a meaningful step toward the future. The American people need it.

The Spectator ● May 10,2019

Page 13

Opinions Warren’s Problematic Policy Calculations

By ROHIT ROY On February 18, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren revealed a comprehensive proposal intended to provide free quality childcare to all parents with a household income under $50,000. The plan would also heavily subsidize healthcare for families outside that range, which would make medical bills far more affordable. According to Warren, the proposal would cost $700 billion over a decade, and would be funded by her much-publicized wealth tax on ultra-millionaires.

It should come as no surprise that her numbers were obtained through fraudulent accounting aimed at deceiving the American population and Democratic voters into believing that her sweeping proposal is more fiscally sound than it really is. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to provide universal affordable child care relies on dishonest and unsound strategies to create the impression that the plan, if implemented with the rest of her platform, would benefit the average American voter.

In common electoral practice, whenever a policy involv-

ing large amounts of funds is proposed by an aspiring politician, that candidate must present sound calculations to prove that his or her plan would be both beneficial and feasible. Warren’s proposal aims to create a network of child care facilities, subsidized and regulated by the government, for all children too young to attend school. In the speech announcing her childcare proposal, Warren said that, under her plan, “[f]amilies would only be charged based on their ability to pay.” Warren’s proposal involved two key estimates: the cost of the program and the projected governmental income raised by a “wealth tax.” Both happen to be wildly distorted and inaccurate.

In order to figure out how to pay for her childcare plan, Warren hired economists Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj.

Both Zandi and Koropeckyj are talented economists who provided with Warren with accurate numbers and projections. In order to create their projections, Zandi and Koropeckyj used a method of economic and financial analysis known as “dynamic scoring.”

Financial analysis on a dynamic basis exclusively accounts for the positive economic impacts of the given proposal, meaning that Warren purposely ignored many of the negative impacts her proposal would have on the economy.

This usage of dynamic scoring by itself may not seem unforgivable, given that Republicans have done the same when pushing their own fiscal agenda.

However, Warren undermines her entire plan’s fiscal legitimacy when she does not use a dynamic analysis on the economic projections on her wealth tax, despite knowing that dynamic

analysis of her wealth tax would show that taxing wealth would have a negative impact on investment decisions and thus stunt economic growth. Her inconsistencies regarding her economic projections are troubling.

Warren will do whatever it takes to further her own agenda, even going so far as to ignore the economic reality.

On top of the dishonest fiscal estimate used to procure her platform’s fiscal “proof,” Warren’s astronomically high wealth tax would force the rich to alter their spending, investment, and tax behaviors to a point where where industry would no longer grows, unemployment would rise drastically, and revenue collected by the federal government would, in fact, decrease significantly. A wealth tax would greatly limit the money consumers can spend and invest in the private sector, leading to a weakened economy and a government in economic turmoil. Another massive impact Warren neglects to account for is inflation: over time, inflation increases incomes to the point where the middle class is taxed by her tax, even though it was originally targeted for the “ultra-rich.” Her tax, just like any other massive tax recently proposed by the Democrats, shifts tremendous amounts of revenue from the private sector to the government. Numerous economic studies, including some done by Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Joseph Stiglitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have shown that a free market-based economy constitutes efficient investment and spending, while an economy excessively controlled by the government leads to a proliferation of special interest groups, an increase in taxpayerfunded electoral campaigns, and

more tax dollars squandered in the dark jungles of government bureaucracies.

Zandi and Koropeckyj argued that the impact of high taxes on economic growth would be minimal: “Households with more than $50 million in assets will pay a two percent tax….

Households with more than $1 billion in assets will pay a three percent tax….They still will have plenty of money left over.” In the footnotes to their proposal, however, the economists noted that “One complication is that we have not evaluated the budget or economic implications of the senator’s wealth tax. As such, we instead assume that her child-care program is paid for by reforms to the estate tax sufficient to generate the needed tax revenue.” Essentially, Zandi and Koropeckyj admitted that their fiscal proof for Senator Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax considered all its potentially positive economic effects while ignoring all the drawbacks.

Warren claimed that her wealth tax would successfully fund her $700 billion childcare proposal. She herself claimed that a wealth tax would raise “four times more than the entire cost of my Universal Child Care [Plan] and Early Learning Plan”.

This could not be further from the truth, as a holistic analysis based on data from a variety of sources (including: the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances; the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans; and an analysis of investment patterns under various tax laws) shows that her wealth tax would only raise $700 billion over a decade. $700 billion is no small amount by any means, but it’s far - very far - from the estimated cost of Warren’s childcare plan over 1o years. In fact,

studies from economists at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania put the 10-year cost of her childcare plan at around $2.8 trillion.

In recent years and electoral cycles, fiscal irresponsibility has become a trend, especially among the progressive left. Newly unveiled liberal projects, including a federal jobs guarantee and the highly publicized Green New

Politicians should stop relying on fraudulent accounting to deceive the American people into supporting a misguided progressive agenda.

Deal, would require billions or even trillions of dollars to fund.

Politicians should stop relying on fraudulent accounting to deceive the American people into supporting a misguided progressive agenda. Instead, they should support pro-growth policies that have been proven to be effective. They should support policies that improve Americans’ economic conditions and don’t require deceptive fiscal practices. Doing so would foster a bipartisan movement pushing for lasting economic reforms, and would bring about to greater prosperity for decades to come.

Stopping the Negligence in Our Immigration Detention System

By JENNY HUANG “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] detention centers have some of the highest standards in the world,” said Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, in her testimony to Congress. Her words were a response to the deaths of undocumented immigrants in federal custody last year.

And yet, Roxana Hernandez, a transgender woman from Honduras, died while in ICE’s “care” in May 2018. Two Guatemalan children, Jakelin Caal Maquin and Felipe Gomez Alonzo, died on December 8 and 24 of 2018, respectively, both living in CBP custody at the time. These are only three of the 22 reported deaths that occurred in ICE or CBP custody over the past two years.

Though the exact causes of the victims’ deaths are unclear, their families accused the ICE and CBP detention centers of negligence and poor treatment of detainees. The deaths of the victims were preventable, but the subpar medical care and sanitation and the agencies’ lack of preparedness in addressing emergencies led to tragedies that should not have occurred.

Both Jakelin Caal Maquin and Felipe Gomez Alonzo’s deaths were preventable, but because of the lack of an emergency medical technician (EMT) on duty and a failure to meaningfully observe their conditions, both ultimately died in hospitals under CBP custody.

The lack of EMT personnel and failure to intervene earlier on CBP’s part indicated their lack of readiness in dealing with emergencies and pointed to the existence of an alarmingly low (and possibly nonexistent) standard of medical care.

ICE’s statement regarding Hernandez’s death stated that Hernandez was diagnosed with “untreated HIV, dehydration, starvation, and fever with cough” and died of cardiac arrest after admission to a hospital.

But nonprofit Transgender Law Center’s independent autopsy report revealed that Hernandez may have been a victim of abuse at the ICE detention center. The report stated that the autopsy “suggested that Ms. Hernandez was beaten with a baton or similar object while she was re-

strained by handcuffs.” ICE has yet to release an official autopsy result for Hernandez, yet has denied accusations of abuse.

Hernandez’s case isn’t just an isolated incident. Even if the Transgender Law Center’s claims of abuse have not been proven, there have been other deaths under ICE custody that are direct results of criminalization and abuse. Two detainees, Osmar Epifanio GonzalezGadba and Jeancarlo Jimenez Joseph, both died of suicide under ICE contracted private facilities in 2017. Efrain Romero De La Rosa ended his own life in Stewart Detention Center in 2018. All three of them died after being placed in solitary confinement.

According to former Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, immigrant detention centers are held to higher standards than even federal prisons. Yet, the numerous deaths in the system beg the question of whether these detention centers really are different from the prison systems designed to prosecute criminals. Why are common prison punishments such as solitary confinement enforced on undocumented detainees for minor violations if these centers are supposed to be held to a higher standard than prisons designed for criminal offenses?

There is systematic abuse and criminalization in our immigration detention system, and the deaths of Jimenez, De La

Rosa, and Gonzalez are proof of the lack of transparency in our detention systems. In terms of the deaths of Jimenez and De La Rosa, the detentions held medical records of their schizophrenia and suicidal tendencies, still sentencing them to solitary confinement despite knowing the consequences that such a punishment would have on their mental health. The detention system also readily punishes undocumented detainees harshly for relatively minor offenses, and sometimes for nothing at all. In a system that deals with undocumented individuals, who for the most part possess no criminal records, there is no reason to employ punishments intended for serious criminal offenders. However, the fact that our immigration detention system readily uses these punishments as enforcement shows that our system targets undocumented immigrants as dangerous, threatening individuals unfit to live peacefully in American society. In short, it’s a system in desperate need of humanitarian reform.

Overhauling and improving the immigration detention system is no easy task. Since the deaths of Hernández, Caal, and Alonzo, ICE and CBP have ordered mandatory medical examinations for every minor as well as every detainee in their custody. But ICE will have a difficult time providing responsible oversight, and previously documented abuses may well continue to

proliferate.

First, to address and prevent negligence under ICE and CBP custody, there must be fewer detainees. But as ICE arrests continue to skyrocket under the Trump administration, targets for detentions have shifted from felony-committing undocumented immigrants to any who can be deported.

Changing the focus back to targeting just undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records is crucial to decreasing the sheer number of detainees in the system.

Second, immigrant detentions modeled after criminal prisons must be abolished. These detentions not only brand undocumented immigrants as threats and criminals, but also subject undocumented immigrants to abusive and cruel practices.

Alternatives to detention, such as community service-based punishments, in which lowpriority aliens are allowed to live in a community-based setting before their hearing, are incredibly cost-effective and far more humanitarian than the current system.

Only by making our detention system more transparent and more humanitarian can the U.S. really begin to address the immigration debate. Time will tell if our government is up to the task.

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Arts and Entertainment

Arts and Entertainment

Welcome to the Sad Boi Hour

Culture

By THE ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT DEPARTMENT

A&E may be the most fun department, but that doesn’t mean our writers don’t get sad every now and then. This issue, we asked some of our writers to find the song that makes them the saddest and talk about it.

Listen to this issue’s Spotify playlist to be even more immersed in the mood.

Suah Chung - Lin -Manuel Miranda “It’s Quiet Uptown” On the subway home, I usually feel drained, brain dead, and/ or upset, so I listen to music. Music is a way for me to connect with my emotions without using words. When I first heard “It’s Quiet Uptown” a few years ago on a friend’s recommendation, I ugly-cried. It’s about a couple who is trying to recover from the death of their first son and recover their broken marriage.

Though I don’t relate to their exact situation, I can’t help but understand the lyrics, “The moments when you’re in so deep / It feels easier to just swim down.” The soft piano notes in the background soothe me until I stop crying when I’m upset. I really love how the harmonies of the violin and the viola completely blow me away. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s broken vocals are painful and heartbreaking. As I continued to listen to this song, I noticed it wasn’t narrated by the couple, but the people around the couple, and the meaning of the song grew from grief to empathizing with the feelings of other people.

Ahmed Hussein - Chance the Rapper “Same Drugs” Many times as I walk home because the transit system in Staten Island sucks, I find myself reminiscing about the past. No one recreates my feelings as well as Chance. A rapper by trade (surprise, surprise!), Chance went out of his comfort zone to make this song. The piano in the background sets the tone for the story of Chance’s relationships that failed because the two no longer did the “same drugs.” Chance uses these “drugs” to symbolize the differences they had developed over the years. The back-and-forth that Chance seems to have with the chorus creates an interesting conversational atmosphere that no other artist can replicate. There are no hard feelings between Chance and his partner; there’s just a nostalgia for the times that have passed. An ode to both the past and future, the song conveys hope, which is why I love it so much. Just like Chance, I try to focus on the good times I’ve had in the past, while acknowledging the pain. Sometimes, I want to go back to being a wide-eyed kid who hasn’t forgotten how to fly.

Andrea Huang/ The Spectator

Sabrina Chen / The Spectator

Laura Ilioaei Bad Bunny feat. Drake “Mia” As of the present, I do not believe love exists. This statement sounds contradictory coming from a hopeless romantic with a lover who wishes to convince me otherwise.

One evening, we were exchanging songs for the other to listen to. He mused that “Mia” would most likely be a mash-up of our drastically different musical tastes. My curiosity piqued. I pulled it up on YouTube and immediately had my heartstrings plucked by its sensuality and passion.

After looking up a translation of the song’s lyrics, I felt my heart ache with the song’s vision of amorous depth and eternal devotion, a concept I had once believed was not an idealized impossibility. To this day, “Mia” sends my emotions into an overwhelming tailspin.

Julie Grandchamp-Desraux Twenty One Pilots “Kitchen Sink” When I first listened to this song, I cried when it was over. It is so passionate and put my thoughts into words. I had been to a “college day” event at school and it made me nervous because I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with my life. The song captures that feeling really well.

“Kitchen Sink” tackles the difficulties of finding your purpose in life. It starts off really mellow, but then gets faster, and towards the end, it’s just pure screaming. It describes the band’s frontman, Tyler Joseph, who struggles to find purpose and meaning in his life and is really relatable.

This song shows a more emotional side to modern rap, as Xaviur Wulf raps about everything from his family situation to getting high in order to escape social pressure. He’s not afraid to go into the depths of his dark side and pull out something beautiful, which is something that most modern rappers lack the ability to do. Xaviur Wulf has crafted the perfect sad song, appropriate for rainy days and cloudy nights.

Adrianna Peng / The Spectator

Morris Raskin Xaviur Wulf “Thunder Man”

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Arts and Entertainment

Page 15

Arts and Entertainment

Welcome to the Sad Boi Hour

Culture

By THE ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT DEPARTMENT

Grace Goldstein The 1975 “Be My Mistake” This song’s narrative isn’t that relatable to me—the singer is in a love triangle, forcing himself to choose between two people he needs in his life in two different ways. Still, the lyrics are so raw and vulnerable that it effortlessly stirs up mixed feelings about all kinds of relationships and experiences. It has a slow, acoustic sound unlike most other The 1975 songs, which are more pop-oriented and heavy on the drums.

Rajhasree Paul / The Spectator

Matthew Wagman - Hippo Campus “Way it Goes” Hippo Campus is a talented band that managed to create a very well-executed song that pokes fun at their own odd nature and how critics view them. The song is also really fun to play on the guitar and its melancholy atmosphere not only helps drive home the band’s overall vibe, but also works so well on top of those chords.

Xi Lu - Pixies “All I Think About Now”

Delia Qiu / The Spectator

The lyrics talk about how “I always think about the past” and are ambiguous with what the listener is supposed to be thinking about: missed opportunities and lonely memories. On Friday nights, when everybody except for me is out somewhere doing something, I lie in bed and think of the things I once said, that I wish I could take back, or the things I once did and regretted, or opportunities that I let pass me by. Though the common convention is to not dwell on the past, this song prompts me to do just that. The vocals in this song are akin to rhythmic sighing, and they feed further into the melancholy nature of the song.

Jiahe Wang - Radiohead “Street Spirit” The summer after 8th grade, I moved from a quiet neighborhood in Los Angeles to New York. The city was overwhelming— New Yorkers are always so irritable, minding their own business; no one would even stop to ask if you were okay if you were crying on the street. Freshman year of high school was tougher than I had expected. I had no friends in this huge, unfamiliar city, and my only solace was my music. On my way home from school, I would often listen to my sad playlist, sulking about my loneliness. I have no idea how many times I cried to “Street Spirit.” Radiohead just seemed to understand all the nuances of my sadness so perfectly: “Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me.” The melancholy chords and Thom Yorke’s angsty falsetto helped me get through the seemingly endless gloom. Now, when I listen to this song, it reminds me of how strong I am and how far I’ve gotten.

On Friday nights, when I’m burrowed in my bed and have exhausted every possible rom-com movie on Netflix, “Best Part” is my go-to song. Though not necessarily a sad song, “Best Part” makes you think about the possibilities of being in a relationship with someone whose entire world revolves around you and your happiness. Normally, my Spotify playlist is constantly revamped with new songs, leaving everything at the bottom forgotten for weeks. However, even though “Best Part” is one of the first songs I ever added, I am constantly scrolling down to be comforted by the words of these two incredible artists. I listen to it when I need to fill a silent void, like during a walk to soccer practice after a tiring day at school, or when I finish watching “The Edge of Seventeen” and long for a hug. The comforting voices of Daniel Caesar and H.E.R. provide the perfect remedy for the nighttime blues, as they tell a story of effortless love.

Emma Donnelly / The Spectator

Susannah Ahnl / The Spectator

Shivali Korgaonkar Daniel Caesar ft. H.E.R “Best Part”

Jacqueline Thom - Son Lux “Dream State” I didn’t realize until the end of my first listen how sad and fearful this song is and how much it reminds me of myself. I always think about what I will be like when I am older, uglier, and wrinklier, when my bones ache and my hands shake. Will I remember the memories I have now? Will I be happier than I am now or just depressed?

I think of this song and how sad it will be when I finally wake up realizing I’m not invincible and that I won’t maintain my youth, my identity, or my life forever.

Frontman Ryan Lott’s quavering, earnest voice asks, “How do we feel in that photograph / And how do we feel it again?” It scares me how little life I truly have left and how forgetful of the good times I will be when I’m older. Am I just living in a dream state?

The lyrics talk about how “I always think about the past” and are ambiguous with what the listener is supposed to be thinking about: missed opportunities and lonely memories. On Friday nights, when everybody except for me is out somewhere doing something, I lie in bed and think of the things I once said, that I wish I could take back, or the things I once did and regretted, or opportunities that I let pass me by. Though the common convention is to not dwell on the past, this song prompts me to do just that. The vocals in this song are akin to rhythmic sighing, and they feed further into the melancholy nature of the song.

Sophie Poget / The Spectator

Xi Lu - Pixies “All I Think About Now”

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Arts and Entertainment music

By Theo Kubovy-Weiss In recent years, a number of young artists like Lorde and Dua Lipa have risen in prominence.

This is in large part because their music and experiences are uniquely resonant with a young, teenage audience. One such artist who embodies this relatability to an enormous extent is Billie Eilish who, at 16, amassed over one billion total streams on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Eilish rose to prominence with the 2016 release of “ocean eyes,” a soft, soothing, minimalistic love ballad. Similar to Taylor Swift (another artist whose fame came at an early age), Eilish became popular for sweet, sometimes mawkish love songs; the mood and feel of her early tracks was bright, melodic, and often unremarkable. Despite this, many of the tracks of her EP “dont smile at me,” (2017) like “&burn” and “bellyache,” had grim subject matter, with the latter mentioning her friends’ dead bodies lying in the back of her car. Yet Eilish was still held back by the generic indie-pop sound that was present in nearly all of her songs. At this point, she was thought to be not much more than yet another pop singer with a catchy song, a “one-hit wonder.” However, with “dont smile at me,” Eilish became enormously popular and remains so.

Eilish’s meteoric rise between 2017 and 2018 can be almost entirely attributed not to her music, but to her persona. In contrast to the superficial façade behind which many of today’s celebrities hide, Eilish is genuine, down-to-earth, and affable; she snickers at her own corny jokes and is admirably candid in

Inside the Artist: The Transformation of Billie Eilish interviews. Her relatable character is only augmented by her age, as she and her music can more directly resonate with a younger audience. While older artists often deem it unimportant or immature to discuss insecurities, high school relationships, etc., Eilish doesn’t have that same reluctance and is very outward and frank. In an interview with Genius, Eiliah discussed her self-consciousness, crushes, and childhood stories. In her songs, namely “idontwannabeyouanymore” and “party favor,” she does the same. Eilish’s age gives her a unique position to talk about these things, and she does this so effectively that her candor alone has truly allowed her to become so immensely successful.

On July 18, 2018, Eilish released “ y o u should see me in a crown.”

Sonically, the song was a stark contrast to what she had put out before that point. The single was dark, gritty, and eerie at times, with a roaring, bass-heavy chorus over a trap beat. It was confrontational, haunting, and distorted, including lyrics like, “Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now / Calling security, keepin’ my head held down / Bury the hatchet or bury a friend right now.”

While her other songs had had similarly grim lyrics, “you

culture

By AGATHA EDWARDS Summer is finally here! (Well, almost.) We don’t have to bundle up for a short walk to the train station or pay for our coffee with freezing hands, and we can finally stop seeing people wearing Canada Goose jackets in school. Now that it’s warm out, we can enjoy the weather and spend some time outside.

Although the weather gets unbearably hot in July and August, June is a great time to socialize and goof around with friends.

I picked out a few of the best things to do this month. Make sure to mark these dates down in your calendars, because you definitely won’t want to miss them!

PRIDE MARCH - JUNE 30 June is pride month! There are parades all over the city to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, but the one I’ll mention is in West Village, starting on the corner of 26th Street and 5th Avenue. The parade begins at noon on June 30 (and you can stay as long as you want), which is perfect timing since school will have ended by then. This is a great way to show your support for the queer community. Anyone is welcome, whether you’re LGBTQ+ or an ally. These parades create tight-knit communities and can be interesting events to learn from. It’s great to meet other people like yourself or to

help someone who may not be sure about their identity.

GOVERNORS BALL 2019 MAY 31 - JUNE 2 Looking for something fun to do over Memorial Day Weekend? Governors Ball is the perfect event, where you can jam

should see me in a crown” was truly the first time Eilish fully embraced this new, dark sound: a trend that is here to stay. While critics of Eilish had condemned her unoriginal and unremarkable songwriting in the past, this new sound is uniquely hers. This transformation of being a bright, mainstream popstar to more on the fringe is not something that Eilish is the only person to have undergone,

Sammi Chen / The Spectator

though; Taylor Swift underwent a similar change, rebranding herself as the “new Taylor,” with a darker, more grim vibe. At the time of the release of “you should see me in a crown,” many fans were disappointed to see the new direction in which Eilish had gone. Yet, just as Swift had hoped to do,

this shift was designed to give Eilish a unique sound, one that was easily recognizable. Her previous work blurred with that of other glossy, indie-pop singers, but this new identity is undeniably Eilish’s. Having a sound that was characteristically hers allowed for Eilish to solidify her place in mainstream music, almost creating her own genre of sorts.

If the switch from all lowercase to all uppercase (and use of punctuation!) in her new album is any indication of her transformation, Eilish’s release of “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?”(2019) marked the true transition into her new voice. The album cover depicts Eilish with whited-out eyes and a creepy smile, sitting atop a bed. Almost all of the songs have a creepy, grim feel to them, with a much greater emphasis on percussion and beats than in her early music. The song “all the good girls go to hell” embodies this well, with a rather dark title, driven by a bass-heavy beat.

Despite this, Eilish remains her honest, charming self with songs like “wish you were gay,” in which Billie humorously pleads with someone to attribute their disinterest in her to their sexuality and not their dislike towards her personally. While describing homosexuality in such a

Get Ready for Summer!

definitely worth it since they are outdoors, a nice switch up from a typical indoor concert. This year, there is a plethora of artists across different genres, including pop, country, hard rock, opera, and more. Soaking in the sun while listening to some tunes is definitely a great way to

(June is the best time to go due to smaller crowds) with shows starting at 8 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase, but with a little luck in the mobile lottery, it’s not hard to get a free ticket. I’ve gotten free tickets at least five times before before using apps like TodayTix; just

Now that it’s warm out, we can enjoy the weather and spend some time outside.

There’s just something magical about seeing a live performance of “Othello” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” outdoors in NYC, and for an opportunity for free tickets, this can’t be passed up.

along to your favorite artists (Tyler the Creator, Lil Wayne, and many more) during their live concerts, or rest peacefully on a blanket in the sun listening to them. The concerts take place all weekend at Randall’s Island, between Manhattan and Queens.

The price varies depending on who you want to see, but tickets should be no more than 100 or 200 bucks. These concerts are

transition into summer.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK - ALL JUNE AND SUMMER LONG ON WEEKDAYS What’s better than a nighttime performance on a Friday night after school? Shakespeare in the Park has been a tradition of Central Park since 1962, running from late May to August

make sure to keep trying. Don’t give up! There’s just something magical about seeing a live performance of “Othello” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” outdoors in New York City, and with an opportunity for free tickets, it can’t be passed up.

THE SCOOPER BOWL ICE CREAM FESTIVAL - JUNE 1-3

way is a rather risky, provocative move, it is simply a testament to Eilish’s nonchalance and honesty as a songwriter and public figure. Further, her response to criticism about the song upholds this characteristic, plainly reiterating—instead of tippy-toeing around the topic as many other celebrities do—that the meaning of the lyrics was not homophobic.

While some may not like it, the bright, beautiful harmonies in “dont smile at me” are no longer Eilish’s defining characteristic as an artist. Yet, as an homage to her past work, Billie placed the song “i love you” right before the outro of the album. An adorably sweet love song about a faux pas in a relationship, “i love you” is just as glowingly harmonic as “ocean eyes” and is one of the best songs on the album.

Despite having transitioned into a new sound and type of music, Eilish has remained true to one thing: her honesty. Even on her new album, she maintains her candor and down-toearth character with songs like “xanny,” in which she condemns drug use, in contrast to many other popular artists today who glorify their use, like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD. She has built her entire career upon establishing an emotional connection with her fans and listeners by being open about her experiences, thoughts, and emotions, no matter how embarrassing. Regardless of whether Eilish continues to produce this dark, grim style of music or ventures off into another, new, sound, we can rest assured that we will always have the funny, honest, charming figure of Billie Eilish.

You know summer is right around the corner when you start hearing the ice cream trucks. But a cone from the truck is both overpriced and gone in a matter of minutes. Not at this festival!

At the Scooper Bowl Ice Cream Festival, located in Bryant Park, you can pay $20 for unlimited ice cream from June 1-3. Ice cream outside is a true sign of summer, and this festival allows you to release your inner child and eat as much as you want. Ice cream shops like Baskin-Robbins, Ben & Jerry’s, Wafels and Dinges, and more will be there to offer you their finest flavors.

CONEY ISLAND MERMAID PARADE - JUNE 22 This festival is designed to celebrate the start of summer, since it occurs the day after the season’s official beginning. Finals should be over by then, so it’s a perfect time to attend. It is completely free (unless you want to ride some awesome roller coasters and other things afterward in Luna Park) and you get to witness thousands of people dress up in their mermaid, pirate, and fish costumes. Snap a picture or two with your favorite character and march down the street with them, or dress up yourself! You can relax on the beach and swim in the ocean since the boardwalk is right next to the festival. This is the perfect event to start the summer off right.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Arts and Entertainment G.O.A.T. - Greatest of All Time Ever since hip-hop rose to prevalence back in the 1980s, countless rap artists have risen to the top of the charts and have been thrust into the spotlight for their eye-opening lyricism and flow. The general public has never decided on one artist to be the “greatest of all time” in any particular genre, but the battle for hip-hops’s top spot can generally be narrowed down to about 10 contestants: Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Nas, Lauryn Hill, J. Cole, and Andre 3000.

Arts and Entertainment

Who Is the Hip-hop G.O.A.T.?

music

By Morris Raskin

Page 17

being said, I’d have to give the title of Greatest Hip-hop Artist of All Time to both Kendrick Lamar and Eminem. Biggie Smalls deserves a shout-out as well. His influence stretched far and wide, and his music is still listened to today, even though he’s been dead since the ‘90s. He represented an entire American coast. Though he was tangled up in gang violence, he preached peace and his words were amplified through his music. Perhaps if he had lived longer, he would have clinched the number one spot. However, it is also possible that if he hadn’t died so young, he wouldn’t have such a powerful legacy, and he wouldn’t be the

unmatched lyricism, and no matter what he put out, always influenced people to talk about the subject matter.

Sharing the number one spot, Kendrick Lamar was born in Compton, California and rose to fame after releasing a series of mixtapes.

He was then noticed by Dr. Dre (he truly has a monopoly on discovering great rappers). Lamar then dropped a

rious B.I.G. came in third with 16 percent, and everyone else followed. The only rappers that received zero votes were André 3000 and Nas. Whey are both great, it appears that they just weren’t great enough, or, perhaps more likely, just weren’t popular enough.

Experts’ Opinion: There is no shortage of articles with people spewing their opinions on the G.O.A.T Hiphop MC. For this section, I decided to focus

Jason Lin / The Spectator

Qiao Ying (Emily) Tan / The Spectator

couple of all-time great albums like “good kid, m.A.A.d city” (2012) and “To Pimp A Butterfly,” (2015) each toting excellent beats, flows, and most importantly, lyrics. What makes Lamar truly special is his ability to connect with his audience through his words, and from his first mixtape until today, he’s been proving that he deserves the tie for the number one spot.

Personal Opinion It’s always tough to pick “bests.” There are dozens of factors to consider and no matter who I choose, somebody will inevitably disagree. That

runner up at all. Overall, when it comes to the first place slot, I’d have to have a tie between Eminem and Lamar.

Eminem started as an unknown kid, trying to make a living for his wife and daughter.

After being discovered by Dr. Dre, he was catapulted into international fame. One can say what they want about Eminem’s controversial past and present— that he’s getting old, that he’s riding trends to stay popular, etc.— but at the end of the day, at least in my opinion, his music from 1999 to 2013 was top-notch hip-hop. He had excellent flows,

Nostalgia Mixtape

By THE ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT DEPARTMENT Sometimes, to forget about the enormous amount of homework, tests, and studying that comes at the end of every school year, we need time to sit back, close our eyes, and think about the good times. This issue, A&E brings you the songs that still make us feel good even after all these years.

Too lazy to search up all these songs? Go to “user:spotify:spec.ae” to find our Nostalgia Mixtape.

We Are Young fun. feat. Janelle Monáe Indie Pop

Shut Up and Dance Walk the Moon Pop

Feel It Still Portugal. The Man Pop

Seven Nation Army The White Stripes Rock

Someone Like You Adele Pop

Surrender Bear Attack!

Pop

I Write Sins Not Tragedies Panic! At the Disco Alternative Rock

Saved Khalid R&B

Middle DJ Snake EDM

the top five, as both had similar influences on contemporary hiphop culture and strong legacies, created through their murders.

Eminem and Kendrick Lamar usually came out in the top three,

THE VERDICT: While there are hundreds of excellent rappers, I must take as objective a stance as possible for this article. By using a combination of public opinion, influence, number of classic albums, flow, lyricism, and production, I have deduced what I believe to be the greatest hip-hop artist of all time.

Winner: Eminem While this choice was not easy, Eminem has simply been around longer than Kendrick Lamar, and while they are comparable in talent, Eminem just has more quantity.

2nd Place: Kendrick Lamar 3rd Place (tie): The Notorious B.I.G. and Kanye West

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Daniel Berlinsky / The Spectator

Of course, there are countless other iconic hip-hop acts that aren’t included on this list (most notably Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Drake, and Lil Wayne), but after reviewing many professionally published lists and charts, I deduced that these 10 were generally the highest regarded.

Stuyvesant’s Opinion

I entered the 10 rappers’ names into a Google Form and released it into the Stuyvesant “Dear Incoming Class of …” Facebook Groups. Three days later, I tallied the results.

The opinion of the student body doesn’t stray too far from my verdict. The first place slot was a tie between Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, each with 20.5 percent of the vote. These are both respectable choices, and they make sense because these two rappers are probably the most popular at the moment (of the 10 that I selected).

Thus, they probably get more attention from the student body.

Kanye has released eight albums, and out of those, five industry classics. His hits have stretched from all genres, including R&B, rock, hip-hop, rap, and even trap.

Kanye is definitely one of the most influential musicians of all time, and his constant innovation of the genre allows for hiphop to progress.

Coming in second place in the poll is Eminem, with 18.1 percent of the vote. The Noto-

on reliable industry sources like the Rolling Stone. The lists usually included Biggie or Tupac in

which seems like a safe and logical choice for the writers of the articles. Other spots varied more, such as Kanye West, who could go from anywhere from a top five pick to absent from the list entirely. The placement of Canadian rapper Drake had a similar variation.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 18

Humor These articles are works of fiction. All quotes are libel and slander.

Mulling Over the Mueller Report

By JONATHAN XU The Justice Department announced on Friday, March 22, that special counsel Robert Mueller had completed his report on whether there was any collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and notorious shirtless male model Vladimir Putin. It’s a good thing Mueller didn’t finish it a week earlier on the Ides of March, otherwise our senators would be busting knives outta their togas and pulling a Brutus. How horrible that would have been—our nation wouldn’t survive such a bloody Caesar of power! Mueller first began his work on May 17, 2017, and it’s absolutely jarring how slow he’s been. Jeez, what more incentive does he need than a cushy Attorney General nomination when a Democrat inevitably becomes president in 2020? We should have brought out a carrot-on-astick for that stubborn mule.

At any rate, reactions to the announcement were mixed. The Spectator spoke to one of the president’s advisors, Kellyanne Conway, who always finds a way to con people named Kelly and Anne (white people names lol). “It’s about time. Finally, the witch hunt is over!” Conway exclaimed. “Sean Spicer and I can finally dress up for Halloween

(and Easter!) without looking suspicious! Of course, according to some alternative facts, we’re already witches, hehe.”

On the topic of witch hunts, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren [D-MA] also had something to say. Speaking to The Spectator, she cried, “You’re not out of the woods yet, Drumpf!

We’re gonna pull a Salem witch trial on you, and who else to lead the prosecution than Pocahontas?

I’m a native Massachusite American, and I’m so old I was at the OG Salem trials!”

We attempted to contact Don Trump’s office, but staff members declined to comment. However, an anonymous source has informed us that on March 21, President Trump was seen departing on Air Force One to Moscow.

There, he reportedly met Russian President Vladimir Putin and snuggled in for a teary night of Netflix & covfefe. In his absence, his daughter Ivanka Dump the Trump ordered the assassination of several key individuals in the presidential line of succession after learning that she wouldn’t become empress of America after her father’s death.

On a topic of less speculation, Robert Mueller has been under pressure to release his long-awaited report to Congress and to the general public. Crit-

ics say that by refusing to release it, Mueller is practically sleeping with Trump. I hope he at least has a choice. When asked to comment, Mueller’s office replied, “Everything you need to know about the report can be found by reading Barr’s publicly available report. No, not Roseanne Barr, though Will isn’t much better, eh?” Cheeky.

Right-wing critics say it is about time that Mueller released his report, so that, according to Rep. Steve King [R-IA], those “libs can face the fyre.” In an interview he gave with The Spectator, King repeatedly compared the Mueller report to the Fyre Festival. “Libs be like: ‘Lemme tell y’all—the Mueller Report gonna be the biggest, dopest, flyest report on planet earth.

You best not miss this report.

Get ready—we gonna blow yo minds,’” joked King. “And then those libs hear ‘bout the Mueller report and it’s just cheese sandwiches—not even grilled.”

Only time will tell what will come of this whole episode.

Editor’s Note—Trump had directed God Rosenstein to fire Mueller, but after he refused, Trump fired Rosenstein and tapped Rep. Steve King to serve as acting Deputy Attorney General. Mueller was quickly fired.

A Few Observations on the Subject of Native Advertising

By OLIVER STEWART Recently, there has been raging debate about whether native advertising is an acceptable or useful tool for journalistic publications to make use of. For those who don’t know, native advertising is when sponsored content, or advertising, is included alongside regular, non-advertising content, and it is not overwhelmingly clear that the sponsored content is advertising. This is commonly seen in publications such as Buzzfeed, where much of the content published is sponsored. Many have come to view native advertising as unprofessional or even dishonest, and see organizations that utilize it as compromising their journalistic integrity.

When weighing the pros and cons of native advertising in the modern age of journalism, there are several facters that must be

taken into acount. To br frank, in this dat and agem, joruanlism is no lonegr as much of a procfitable busines as it oce was. Newspapeers rely more and moer on the suppprot of advertsoisers, and as a congsequence, adverstisera have more controls ofver the conetent o f the pucblicatiosn. Is it nots a natursal stepg, thena, thatss the advertsing contentcs bec9ewmes omre integreatfed witd the reglar contens of rhe nesapaerp, as esen wuth natvei jorusnalism?

Oen the otsher hands, it asi easy to sie hwos natifee joraulsim cols eb sens a dishontes or a bterehwal og joranlisyc ntberity. Thoj hwu wios hardge tish, hwoeve&r, age nyegh ly opphenta og joruanlsim adaonyong t teh tdidgits aeh i wich wd ivd in. As sadveerois bedcme cmoeb ahjd m2ei ominprsent, joeuansim cand hyg ur gu foed str gasl beigd, by wathesj fshf aquices fh-

njhn o hcuve. Byetyf jsddhd kois cvzss ewuud znsSN ajs, journalists bncnsn enzn ncee cids sdsj oef gur kIs tr%dd. Nwio bwetee hdsdz jii dgds awoe FDN esj assf ndshds hurt mm. It us Mhuss dsafg ahsd krurru hjfds wwyuw mMemr, sndd ^dhd lahle bave fsdj ow crsh kisiks dhsasd.

Hfdnf jhnfd smeiu nativeq advertising sid fniu tes csie betwe integrity and disreputability.

On gd vontsgy, is chse newetr existence and obliteration, modernization and obsolescence. BEy reh hh yeuyd native advertising, uindiyusn risj dosung ths furtue ofd thd journalistic field and my sx etfn alwu gfhd eorue istefh. Aa diyrsnlus, we jhvn eow th yy native advertising yeurn jhdsn future fsfhj journalism, ad to preserve journalism we must adapt to native advertising rather than dismiss it out of hand.

France, hard hit by widespread protests over gas taxes and rampant inequality, was dealt another blow earlier this month when one of its most iconic and recognizable monuments was lightly toasted. The response from the international community was immediate and unequivocal: the world stood with France.

French billionaires in particular pledged millions to help the rebuilding effort, demonstrating their admirable commitment to fixing problems other than the widespread inequality which has led to months of protests in Paris. Samson Sivousplait, CEO of a company that probably makes baguettes or something, pledged approximately 50 million euros, and was quoted as saying, “I am glad to aid in rebuilding le Notre

Dame. As long as none of my money is going to le plebs, I am honored to be a part of this effort for all of France, or at least le rich half, to come together and give money to le Catholic Church.

Vive le France, oui?”

Across the pond, entertainment company Disney promised $5 million to help the rebuilding.

CEO Robert Iger told The Spectator, “It is truly a wonderful thing to see how the richest people in the world can come together and give some measly amount of our obscene wealth to fix a church (but not world hunger, of course).”

Iger refused to comment on why a 2018 survey found that some 68 percent of Disneyland employees did not have reliable access to adequate amounts of food.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has been praised by many for his handling of the cri-

By VICTOR KUANG and OLIVER STEWART The Spectator obtained an audio recording of an attempted kidnapping of Principal Eric Contreras from an anonymous source. We present an edited transcript of the recording to inform the student body of what the Fake News Media doesn’t want you to know. Names of students have been changed for anonymity.

Contreras: Ahh. Another hard day’s work accommodating the needs of the student body. I sure do love interacting positively with my babies—I mean, my students. [sounds of papers shuffling] Contreras: My schedule says that at this time I have no meetings.

Seems like a great opportunity to be relatable to the students!

[We believe the noises heard here are the sounds of Contreras taking a scooter around his office. Hardcore skater music can be heard in the background. What a cool guy.]

Contreras: Ya know, I oughta go around this school more.

[At this point, Contreras scoots out of his office and around the first floor. Two figures can be heard approaching him from behind.]

Contreras: Good afternoon, child!

Not Victor: Hello Mr. Contreras! Would you like to play a game of chess?

Contreras: Sure! Anything for my dear pupils!

[Chess noises can be heard at the senior bar. After a few moves are heard, the sounds of a scuffle become clear. We believe two students, who are not Humor editors, put a bag over Contreras’s head. His muffled cries can be heard as he is dragged to a room that is totally not the Spec Room.] [when released from the paper bag] Contreras: Is this the Spec Room?

Absolutely Not Omar: Uhh, no.

Couldn’t Be Olly: [happily] Oh hi Mr. Contrer—Oh wait.

[Here, the student clears their throat and puts on a fake deep voice.] Greetings, Principal.

Contreras: Good day to you, my beloved student! This room looks kinda ugly, doesn’t it? Don’t worry! I’ll just put some of my paycheck aside to renovate this room!

100 Percent Not Victor: [menacingly] It’s not that…

Totally Not Abdulla: [emotionlessly] We’re very angry…

Contreras: Oh no! You’re angry? Fear not, for our school is provided with some of the best guidance counselors— [A crashing sound is heard.]

Notre Damsel in Distress

By OLIVER STEWART

Leaked Recording of a Kidnapping Attempt on Principal Contreras

sis. He has promised to rebuild Notre Dame within five years, a promise only slightly less realistic than the idea of Macron being reelected in 2022. His swift response has gained him favor with many in France, and his approval ratings have risen drastically and are now hovering near the percentage of Disneyland employees who consistently ate three meals a day last year—32 percent.

Whether in France or not, we can all take inspiration from the remarkable solidarity that has been shown over the minor damage of this cathedral which was initially paid for by the Crusades, a famously proud moment in French history. Overall, the takeaway is clear: when in France, anti-Semitism and inequality are fine, but mess with any old buildings and you could get into trouble.

Definitely Not Olly: NO, NOT THAT. Completely Not Omar: Clearly you don’t understand why we’re doing this. See, we are super broke. You are very important, so we decided that we would kidnap you and hold you as hostage until we receive our ransom money of $100.

Abdulla, I Mean, Not Abdulla: It’s a pretty hard world, so we hope that you understand. It’s a living.

Contreras: Oh. Well, that’s kind of a pickle. But in the meantime, would you like to try some of this fragrant herbal tea? I stole it from that William Wang kid, but I don’t think he really cares about it.

Not Victor: [loudly] SILENCE! You will remain under our custody until we get our ransom money!

Someone Other Than Olly: Look, I don’t know about you, but this tea thing sounds pretty good to me.

A Person Who Isn’t Omar: I mean, it can’t hurt. continued on page 19

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 19

Humor These articles are works of fiction. All quotes are libel and slander.

Leaked Recording of a Kidnapping Attempt on Principal Contreras continued from page 18

[Tea is poured into cups. The sound of drinking can be heard.]

Anonymous Student, Not Victor: YOU BUFFOOOONS!!!!!

Contreras: [tea drinking noises] You’re not good at this kidnapping gig, are you?

Person Who We Have NO IDEA ABOUT, Except We Can Definitively State That It Isn’t Victor: You know what…

Un-Abdulla: Dang, so the SU has been hiding this stash of tea from us all this time? That’s so corrupt of them.

Kidnapper Who Is Not Omar: It is a very refreshing beverage.

Clearly Not Victor: [This person, who is definitely not Victor, is heard screaming at his lackeys’ incompetence.] Fools! Do I have to do everything myself around here?

Contreras: Don’t worry, future convict! I’ll just invest in an espionage elective in the future! This way, your incompetent assistants will learn about the history of such techniques and maybe pull this kidnapping off better next time!

[People can be heard entering the room, which is not the Spec Room.]

Sishwaa Vofat: Yo, ‘sup Principal.

Contreras: Oh hey Sishwaa! Wanna get me outta this room?

Sishwaa: Aight fam, just follow me.

Contreras: I would suspend you guys for such a bad effort at doing something, but you guys gave me so many ideas that I’m just gonna give you the $100 as a thank you! Ciao!

[Contreras and Sishwaa exit.]

Unquestionably Not Victor: WHAT JUST HAPPENED??

So Not Olly: Yo, chill. Drink this tea. It’s really good!

Really Honestly Not Abdulla, We Swear: [monotonous] I agree that it is splendid.

[A person who isn’t Victor can be heard sobbing. Here, the shocking recording ends. Unbelievable that some students, who are not our upstanding Humor editors, would do such a thing.]

Winter is Coming

By ANGÉLIQUE CHARLES-DAVIS AP season is coming up, something I definitely didn’t need to tell you. Shockingly, AP season is more exciting a season to cover than ping-pong season and golf season combined. It means that Whole Foods is about to have a spike in non-paying customers who sit upstairs for several hours to days, that the Stuy tears-perstudent ratio is about to rise dramatically, and that for the first time in hundreds of years, freshmen will have an actual reason to complain.

According to my extensive research, there are three sections of freshman AP Bio. If you multiply this by about 30, carry the one and the seven, you’ll get that there are about 90 freshman children scuttling around the school taking Advanced Placement Biology, which, based on my calcula-

tions, is exactly 90 too many.

Even though some parts of AP season have changed, other things remain completely the same. The upperclassmen buckle down and get ready to spend every weekend indoors, shades drawn, hunched over our Barron’s books like little ogres. It is important to remember, however, that, thank goodness for us, we can pick up a voucher at the scanners to support Key Club when we go to Barnes & Nobles to buy more books.

Sitting down to study APUSH, which has so much less to do with Hamilton the musical than we thought, it is impossible not to note that this, too, is a Great Depression. There’s the same utter lack of hope, the same deeply ingrained, internalized self-loathing we all share, the desire to get up and head north.

When we study for the CS test, we’ll wish that a random

number generator would just decide our grades, because it would give us a better chance of doing well than we already have. Besides, at this point we still don’t know how to write a random number generator. This is also the time of year when we realize that each of the Five Steps to a Five has 25 substeps, each of which also have 35 smaller substeps.

The juniors will sit in their English classes wishing their teachers had gone over the AP curriculum just once, while anyone with Nieves will wish he had done it only once, instead of a thousand times.

Some of us will end up only taking one AP at Stuy, while others will take more APs than I have fingers. At the end of the day, we can also appreciate that we forked over literally hundreds of dollars to make this beautiful journey possible. Inspirational.

I Was Not Bribed to Write This Article

By JASMINE WANG As a moral student of the greatly esteemed Stuyvesant High School, to hear such rumors about bribery in the Humor department pains me to the depths of my soul. I would never, ever take bribes for writing. Ever.

I can’t imagine anyone despicable enough to forcibly maximize the amount of words in their article in The Spectator to obtain a few extra pieces of currency. I mean, how low-quality would the articles appear to the reader? I would never worthlessly extrapolate my word count (aka the number of words in my article) just to gain a few quick bucks, which is slang for modern currency. And there is no chance that I was ever paid to write this article or any articles before this.

How unethical, immoral, dishonest, fraudulent, deceitful, crooked, underhanded, lazy, and boring would that be?

Apparently, people have been “reporting” that I’ve been taking

money from the Spec Humor editors in the Hudson staircase.

First of all, the Hudson staircase is too full of Juulers to do anything except for Juul in there (and you can’t even use discreet spots because of the couples who somehow navigated there to make out). Second of all, if I were to exchange money, it would be in a dark alleyway during third period—but that would never happen, because The Spectator is 100 percent corruption-free.

Fake news is a huge issue we have to deal with in today’s world, where anyone can bang out an article and have it published in a newspaper. Stamping out fake news begins with destroying any and all evidence of it, which I implore anyone who even thinks bribery is occuring to do.

I would never take money just to write articles. I love writing articles! Writing Humor articles is the best thing to ever happen to me, and it brings me sheer joy in life to cry as I tap out a draft 10 minutes before it’s due, drain-

ing my last two brain cells for all that they’re worth. I love it when I have to spend hours researching Elon Musk just to write an article that isn’t even remotely funny and doesn’t even make people exhale through their noses! Really, there’s nothing better than putting myself through all of that, and I would do it all again for the humble, humble price of $0.

And so what if I can afford to eat at Dirty Bird five days a week?

What does that mean? Nothing, because I haven’t been taking bribes and I just know that I like to eat in style. Don’t ask me about how I make my money, because you wouldn’t be able to comprehend it with your pea-sized, accusatory, conclusion-jumping-to mind. People these days make me sick with their bold accusations of bribery and corruption in The Spectator. This is all just slander against our good editors, who have done nothing, including not giving me $20 for every page I write. So keep that in mind, you small-minded folks.

Spec Roasts: The Rest of New York City

By THE HUMOR DEPARTMENT In one of our most recent issues we roasted Staten Island, and we’re *cough* deeply and *cough* truly sorry about that. And since Spec Humor is all about fairness, we’re now going to attack the other four boroughs. Throughout this article, we will go into a deep and accurate analysis of every borough that our dear peers come from, exposing the harsh truths and realities found there. In the past two weeks, we have sent our writers out to inspect each borough, and these are their findings:

Brooklyn • • • • • • • • • •

A borough filled with hipsters who judge you for the type of coffee roast you like. (What the heck is a Dark Brazilian Spanish with a little bit of self-actualization Roast?)

When you Google “Brooklyn Roasts,” instead of getting jokes to plagiarize borrow for a Spec Humor article, you get even more coffee.

They say that upstate NY gets more snow than NYC, but if you factored in the amount of $10 frozen yogurt, Brooklyn would take the prize.

The A train hates Brooklyn so much it goes express through almost the whole borough, and our few local trains are the F (Fuggedaboutit), R (Rarely), C (Crappy), and the Q (Questionable).

About 50 percent of our train stations are permanently under construction (I’m looking at you, N) or need fixing every other weekend. One really has to love it when a man from Florida jumps onto the tracks for no reason, which causes a train delay! Thanks, MTA! Nobody lives in your neighborhood. You can gather 20 Stuy kids in one room, and of the two who say “Brooklyn,” one’s going to be way off to the east and the other’s going to be living down south.

Brooklyn really should be called BROKE-lyn. Half of the neighborhoods are dilapidated and mossy and full of screeching broken-down jalopies, and the other half is so expensive a coffee costs more than mah rent.

People say Brooklyn has the best NYC-style pizza, but in reality it’s a gamble. You either get a perfect, piping hot slice that would get you mugged if you brought it outside, or a pile of ash so carcinogenic that even the rats won’t touch it. And we’ve seen rats eat the New York Post before.

We have the biggest tourist trap of all time: Coney Island. It’s fun for the first two minutes that you’re there until you start hearing needles and condom wrappers crunch under your sandals on the beach (true story!).

Speaking of Coney Island, if you live in Brooklyn, you’ll never see a Six Flags. Or a resort. Luna Park is the “nearest, cheapest option” and you will know only those rides.

Queens • • • •

• • • • • •

•

Sometimes it’s a faster trip to walk than to take the bus.

The only places that are relevant are Bayside and Flushing.

Like, what even is a “Woodside?”

Elmhurst doesn’t deserve a LIRR station.

It’s so frikkin huge. It takes an eternity to get from Little Neck to Astoria. We also guarantee you will get lost somehow. If you get stuck on a random street, we can’t help you; we’ll get lost too. aMaZoN Long Island City wasn’t even originally part of Queens, and it’s easy to see why.

The M train visits this borough twice. ‘Nuff said.

The elevated train tracks are so old, they’re literally falling apart. As in, they’re dropping screws and planks and stuff onto cars below.

They’re “replacing” the tracks which means it takes two hours to get to school instead of the usual hour and a half. Hooray.

The only borough where you can find a street, drive, road, place, and lane all with the same number, all right next to one another. Rumor has it the Google Maps truck is still stuck here…

There’s also a random desert between Queens and Brooklyn with zero train service, which I thought was important to bring up.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 20

Humor These articles are works of fiction. All quotes are libel and slander.

Spec Roasts: The Rest of New York City Bronx Manhattan • • • • • • •

The hordes of Yankees fans need to learn to chill out, like holy crap, no one else on the 4 train cares and you’re pissing everyone off.

It doesn’t allow “gentrifiers” to “price out poor people from the homes they’ve lived in for years.”

Like, the nerve! The audacity!

The only people from here in Stuy are, like, me and one person in freshman year.

Literally the only reason other people come here is because of the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Garden.

How the heck is there so much traffic? How many of you have cars? We live in NYC; we don’t need those.

The kids from Bronx Science just need to shut up.

We’re more lenient with this borough because no one lives or goes here. Talk about irrelevance!

• • • • • • • • • • • •

This is where Stuy is, and that in itself makes this borough awful.

So many people in suits everywhere. Don’t they have jobs?

Biggest city in the world, still has cops on horseback.

The tourists—oh God, THE TOURISTS. $3 water and $5 hot dogs? HECC NO. The endless number of tourist scammers in Times Square. Like chill, dude, you’re the sixth person who’s approached me today asking me to listen to your ~$10 donation~ free SoundCloud mixtape already.

If you think the income gap in Brooklyn is bad, try walking from the Lower West to East Side. Nowhere else in NYC can you see people and their designer Chihuahuas decked out in Gucci and Prada and a homeless encampment within three blocks of each other.

It costs an arm and a leg to rent an apartment big enough to fit an arm and a leg.

Fun Fact: There are more Whole Foods Markets in Manhattan than soup kitchens for the poor!

What’s the part of NYC with the highest crime rate? Not some dark corner of Queens, no…it’s Times Square.

Damn tourists.

The rich little white kids who need to learn that they can’t get everything they want! No, your nanny is not going to pay you to do your chores. This is why their parents end up having to bribe colleges.

The amount of bongs sold on the street would generate enough money for me to go to London, smoke a pipe, and come back.

The True Story of a Shake Shack Addict

By HELENA WILLIAMS I agreed to write this article because other students need to hear my dark, dark tale of misfortune.

Perhaps my trials and tribulations can serve as a warning for future generations of things never to do during your time at Stuyvesant.

It’s too late for me, anyway—I’ve got no future left.

It all began a few weeks ago, when I got back my report card and discovered that my five extracurriculars (robotics, SING!, debate, track, and SciOly) and 10 missed days of school due to said extracurriculars had dragged my average down by a number that embarasses me to this day…

1.337 percent. I was a complete disappointment to my parents, their parents, and probably every Homo sapiens in my family tree.

I’d spent the days leading up to report card day begging, pleading, and cajoling my teachers to

give me a slightly better grade, and to ignore that I’d fallen asleep in two periods of their class during the entire seven-week marking period.

But Stuyvesant is not a forgiving school, and I knew that when I came here. I was unable to salvage my grades in time, and even if these grades were just “letter grades” and “not on your transcript yet,” they launched me into a spiral of depression that eventually lead to serious substance abuse. And I’m not talking about JUULs, or Adderall, or any of those tame drugs the normies are doing. No, when I fell, I started indulging in the worst of the worst.

They say “bake sales” are a gateway drug, but I didn’t know how true that was until I was buying my seventh ice cream sandwich at the robotics bake sale and campaigning within the robotics team to adopt a biweekly

bake sale schedule, then a weekly schedule. When my requests failed, I began embezzling from the bake sale goods: a rock-hard cookie here, an over-sugary slice of cake there, until I was caught sticky-handed. At this point, my guidance counselor tried to put me into AT Rehab, but since it wasn’t an AP course, I refused to take it, and my addiction only grew worse.

However, bake sales can only keep a person going for so long.

I got in touch with the wrong crowd before long, including the people who became my new dealers: the Shake Shack cashiers.

They even started knowing my name (the few times they didn’t misspell it as “Hellen” or “Helina”)!

For the few of you who don’t know about Shake Shack, it’s a premium version of the popular McDonald’s drug. It costs a good deal more, but it’s all organic and

I thought it would be “healthier” than becoming a McDonald’s addict. That, however, was where I was wrong: Shake Shack’s $5 milkshakes ($6 with tax, and $7 for the Game of Thrones Dragonglass Shake with an exclusive limited-edition cup) became my brief trip to a more peaceful world, where I didn’t have a subpar average. It wasn’t long before I was going through life with a Shack Stack (the normal Shackburger not being enough to feed my addiction) in one hand and a black-and-white shake in the other. The Student Union’s 10 percent discount on Shake Shack only made it worse: before long, I was staring at the bottom of one too many shakes, along with the bottom of my wallet.

I overdosed one night, and woke up in the place most Stuy students see only when their blue cards go missing: the nurse’s office. Yes, this place does exist,

tucked into a tiny alcove near the third-floor gym. And while it would take a full-on heart attack, an escalator-related toe mishap, and a case of hypothermia from the outdoor 11th-floor pool for any student to admit they “might need a visit to the nurse’s office” (excluding second-term seniors, of course), I was in this mystery place because I’d drunk 19 shakes in a row while attempting to forget my 87.5 on a math test. I’ve been banned from both Shake Shacks in the Stuy area and have had to resort to the cheaper, less effective drug called Checkers.

Still, maybe some of you innocent children can learn something from my story. Don’t trust these reports on how drugs like “Jupioca” are harmless fun. They will destroy your grades and make you a wreck. Remember, kids: it only takes one black-and-white shake (with whipped cream) to ruin your life.

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The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 21

Sports Sports Editoral

Everything You Need to Know About the MLB Season So Far

By OWEN POTTER AND SAM LEVINE

pa Bay Rays are still a huge surprise.

The MLB season thus far has been nothing short of odd.

Some teams and players are living up to the hype and playing as they should be. But many aren’t, and that includes a few 2018 playoff teams. Some players are having breakout seasons, while the injury bug has hit a few teams earlier than usual. To break all of this down, let’s take a look at some of the surprises and the letdowns so far.

Seattle Mariners, T-1st, AL West Possibly an even bigger surprise than the Rays, the Mariners were supposed to be rebuilding this year after trading away star second baseman Robinson Cano to the Mets. However, they sit tied for first place in the AL West with the Astros, one of the best teams in the MLB. Despite trading their best offensive player, the Mariners’ offense has not lost its punch, as the team hit a home run in an MLB-record 20 straight games to start off the season. We’ll see if this power surge is just a hot start or the real deal, but as of right now, the Mariners are sitting pretty at 15-8 and are looking to make the playoffs for the first time since 2001.

Surprises: Tampa Bay Rays, First in AL East Wow. I don’t think anyone saw this coming. For a team in a division with the reigning world series champions and another with 100 wins last season, the fact that they’re in first place is astonishing. And it’s not like it’s close either. Not only are they in first in the AL East by 5.5 games as of April 19th, but they are also 14-5 with the best record in baseball. Led by CF Austin Meadows, who is hitting .364 for six homers so far, the team and its offense have been great, tallying 95 runs total, which is third in the American League.

But that’s nothing compared to their pitching. Led by Tyler Glasnow, who has almost a sub-1.00 ERA, and reigning AL Cy Young Blake Snell, the Rays have let up a measly 49 runs, the least in the MLB. They’re the only team in the MLB that hasn’t lost a series. Though it’s very unlikely that they can keep this pace up—they have a .737 winning percentage—the Tam-

Tim Anderson, SS, Chicago White Sox Tim Anderson isn’t the player that you would’ve tipped to be leading the American League. Nonetheless, here we are, with Anderson hitting a whopping .422. What makes this even more impressive is that he’s never hit above .285 in any of his first three seasons.

This also means that there is no way that he’ll be able to keep this pace up, as Anderson won’t end up having the best career batting average ever, but this is still a very big and pleasant surprise for White Sox fans.

Cody Bellinger, 1B/OF, Los Angeles Dodgers Cody Bellinger won NL

Rookie of the Year in 2017. He smashed 39 home runs and had 97 RBIs. However, it seemed as though he regressed in 2018, hitting for a lower average and 14 fewer homers and 21 fewer RBIs despite playing 30 more games. It felt as though he might’ve been a one season wonder. But Bellinger is proving all the doubters wrong this season. Hitting .432 and leading the NL in batting average, Bellinger has been nothing short of amazing. He’s second in the league in homers with 10, almost half of what he hit last year. Like Anderson, there’s no way that Bellinger will keep up this pace, but he has been a surprise for the Dodgers and a good one at that.

Letdowns: Boston Red Sox, 5th in AL East The reigning champs were drunk on success in 2018, but so far this season, they’re clearly suffering from a “World Series Hangover.” After winning 108 games, they currently sit at 7-13 and are in last place in a division where they were expected to compete for a title. Most scarily for the Red Sox, it’s the areas of the game that were thought of as their strengths that are letting them down; last year, they won the World Series behind a great starting pitching and an even better offense. However, this year, their pitching staff has the second worst E.R.A. in the majors, highlighted by ace Chris Sale’s 0-4 record and 8.50 E.R.A. The offense played by the Sox has been far from potent so far, as reigning league

MVP Mookie Betts is hitting just .216, well below his leagueleading .346 average from last year. While their bullpen is better than many expected, without their starting pitching or sluggers, the Red Sox are digging themselves into a hole in what figures to be a very competitive AL East.

Corey Kluber, P, Cleveland Indians Baseball fans over the past few years have appreciated Corey Kluber as the pitcher who rose from a nobody to winning two of the last five Cy Young awards. He had his first three All-Star appearances at ages 30, 31, and 32: seasons (2016-18). Kluber won the Cy Young in 2017 as he dominated the MLB to the tune of a 2.25 E.R.A. and only 1.6 walks per nine innings. Though he wasn’t quite as good in 2018, he still finished third in the Cy Young voting and led the American League in walks per nine with 1.4. However, this year, Kluber seems to have lost that patented control, as his walk rates have more than tripled from last year, up to 4.7 per nine innings. As a result, he is now in possession of a 6.16 E.R.A. and has fans of the Indians very worried. Is this just a bad start to a season or a 33-year-old pitcher starting to regress? Fans of the Indians will be praying it’s the former.

Those Doing as Expected: Christian Yelich, OF, Milwaukee Brewers Unlike Mookie Betts, the reigning NL MVP has not had trouble picking up where he

left off in 2018. Yelich, who hit .326 last season with 36 homers and made his first all star game, has gotten off to as hot a start as anyone for the second place Brewers. He’s hitting .350 and already has 13 home runs through 22 games, leading the MLB. To put that into perspective, the most home runs hit before May 1 ever is 14. Yelich has 10 more days to beat that.

If you thought last year was a fluke, think again. He’s driven in 29 of Milwaukee’s 109 runs, more than a quarter of what he drove in last year. Couple that with his strikeout rate per plate appearance down five percent from last year, and Yelich is on pace to win back-to-back MVPs. Houston Astros, T-1st AL West When the Astros went 2-5 to begin the season, it didn’t look so great for the 2017 World Series champs. But since then, they’ve won 11 out of their last 12 games, and they are sitting pretty atop the AL West, tied with the Mariners. This is what we’ve come to expect out of the Astros, who are being led by former MVP Jose Altuve, who is hitting .316 with eight home runs. He’s one of six Astros hitting .290 or better, which contributes to their more traditional way of scoring, rather than just home runs only. Their pitching has been superb as well, as they have only let up 58 runs, which is second to fewest in the AL. Expect the Astros to keep up this pace and stay atop the AL West for most of the season.

Sports Editoral

By BEN HAMEL In a draft class full of future stars, each prospect is vying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. NBA general managers are watching lastminute player footage and finalizing scout reports to make the best possible use of their draft picks. These picks could make or break a struggling team’s future or help an already accomplished team with a positional need (i.e. the Bucks needing a three and D wing). Whatever the case, the draft is essential to all NBA teams and will be closely followed by everyone associated with the NBA. Without further ado, here are the top six prospects for the 2019 NBA Draft: 1. Zion Williamson (Duke) - He is the most surefire number-one pick since LeBron James, and not much has to be said about this transcendent forward’s skill set. The recent Wooden Award winner has won a myriad of other awards and has been making headlines left and right.

Strengths: At 6 feet and

NBA Draft Preview

seven inches and weighing 285 pounds, his build is aweinspiring and makes defending against him nearly impossible.

His vertical jump is a highlight film on repeat, whether he’s snatching rebounds out of the sky or dunking over three defenders. He can get to the hoop at will and finish at the rim like Kawhi Leonard. Shooting 68 percent from the field, Williamson is unguardable and doesn’t hurt his team by missing shots.

Williamson will be the face of a franchise for a decade, possibly longer. Williamson also can take over games in the final few minutes, which is essential in a sport in which the last five minutes of the game are so crucial.

He also has a great personality and an attitude that would be a fit for any NBA team in any market.

Weaknesses: The one noticeable weakness about Williamson’s game is his inconsistency in his jump shot. With the way the NBA is evolving, the “space game” requires great jump shooters, and Williamson’s jump shot is very inconsistent, as he shot only 33 percent from beyond the arc with the

Blue Devils. Additionally, his 65 percent free throw percentage must improve.

Scout Grade: 97 NBA comparison: Literally none; he’s too unique.

Perfect fit: New York Knicks

2. Ja Morant (Murray State) - Any lackadaisical fanbase would be reinvigorated if its team acquired the talented Ja Morant.

Strengths: Morant can shoot the ball like a true shooter and has the ability to drive to the hoop and finish similar to Kyrie Irving. He can also cross people up and then make highlight dunks that would ignite a fanbase that may be rather disinterested in the game. Morant can pass the ball to perfection, as he was the first player to average 20 points and 10 assists in over a decade. In addition, he also has great all-around play, as he was the first player since 2012 to get a triple double in the NCAA tournament. Morant is a do-it-all point guard who can instantly transform an offense in need of a star. Morant is also the type of player to step up in

the last minutes of a game to help his team. For the cherry on top, Morant’s great personality, in victory or defeat, always shines through; for example, he gave his shoes to a young fan after his last ever game with Murray State.

Weaknesses: Similar to Russell Westbrook in the NBA, Morant has turnover problems that may handicap his team throughout a season. Additionally, some critics say that Morant has not played against great competition since he played in the Ohio Valley Conference and not a power conference, so his stats may be slightly inflated.

Scout Grade: 94 NBA comparison: Russell Westbrook Perfect fit: Phoenix Suns 3. RJ Barrett (Duke) - The best all-around scorer in the draft will be a steal at pick number three.

Strengths: The ever-sorare lefty shooter has just been transformed as Barrett has blasted onto the national scene after making the All-American First Team. Barrett can score in multiple ways, as his isola-

tion game is the best in this draft class; his spot up shooting is also terrific. Barrett has a beautiful floater and mid-range game, leaving defenders frozen in their attempts to guard him.

Barrett’s determination to score is immeasurable and would be a great fit for a team in need of a pure scorer.

Weaknesses: Despite resembling a walking bucket, Barrett’s scoring ability is balanced by his extremely slim frame. At 202 pounds, Barrett will struggle against bigger and stronger defenders in the NBA that may be able to out-muscle him and reduce his ability to score.

In addition, Barrett shoots 67 percent at the free throw line, which is just not good enough for the NBA. Lastly, Barrett often forces the issue on offense which leads to a bad three-point shooting percentage and some questionable shots.

Scout Grade: 89 NBA comparison: Andrew Wiggins Perfect fit: Cleveland Cavaliers Continued on Page 22

Page 22

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Sports Sports Editoral

NBA Draft Preview Continued from Page 21 4. DeAndre Hunter (Virginia) - The best two-way player in the draft, Hunter can help any NBA team on both ends of the floor.

Strengths: If the best defender in the draft falls to number four, that’s a steal. Hunter can guard all five positions. Not only is he 225 pounds, but he is also six feet and seven inches; he is adaptable to any position on the court at any time. Hunter shoots the three at a terrific 44 percent mark, which forces defenses to always guard Hunter on the perimeter, helping create space for his team in the paint.

What further boosts his resume is the fact that Hunter has experience on the big stage; he’s

played in the National Championships and has maintained a high level while under pressure, scoring 27 points. The majority of these points came in the last five minutes of the second half and overtime. Hunter is an intriguing prospect on both sides of the floor who can make a difference for all 48 minutes.

Weaknesses: Hunter has few weaknesses, as he is the most complete wing in the draft and can sometimes be predictable on offense. Hunter needs to work on creating his own shot, especially off the dribble. Additionally, Hunter needs to become a better ball handler in the NBA to further evolve his game.

Scout Grade: 87 NBA comparison: Kawhi Leonard Perfect fit: Atlanta Hawks

5. Jarrett Culver (Texas Tech) - A terrific player both on and off the ball will still be available with the fifth pick in the NBA draft.

Strengths: Culver can run an offense on his own and create his own shot with consistency. As a great shot-creating wing, he has terrific passing ability, which is an extremely rare combination.

Culver is also a terrific defender, able to guard positions 1-4; he complements his defense by being a solid rebounder. Culver has had experience in leading a team to success, as he did with the Red Raiders this past season.

Weaknesses: Culver is not a terrific three-point shooter, and hence, he really needs to work on his jumpshot. The player

weighs 195 pounds, which means he can easily get pushed around in the paint by stronger wings. Culver also needs to work on his handles with the basketball when he drives to the basket, as he’s prone to getting the ball stripped.

Scout Grade: 85 NBA comparison: Brandon Ingram Perfect fit: Chicago Bulls 6. Cam Reddish (Duke) - The best spot-up shooter in the draft will fall to number six and be a great player in today’s NBA. Strengths: There is no doubt that Cam Reddish may be the best shooter in the draft, as he’s already showcased his NBA range through his games.

Reddish also has an NBA-type

frame and does not seem out of place, playing anywhere from point guard to power forward.

Reddish can go on hot streaks and make three three-pointers in five minutes to lead his team to victory.

Weaknesses: Despite his hot streaks, Reddish is way too inconsistent and can be a nonfactor in a game for a 10-minute stretch. His ability to get to the hoop and finish is also questionable, which makes him a less exciting prospect than the aforementioned five players. He also lacks good court vision and is sometimes unable to find his teammates in open areas.

Scout Grade: 84 NBA comparison: Danny Green Perfect fit: Washington Wizards

Sports Editoral

By MATT MELUCCI and LEWIS WOLOCH Playoffs often bring shocks, thrills, and excitement—the 2019 NBA Playoffs are underway and set to live up to that expectation. The Eastern Conference is loaded with teams that have the potential to make a deep run in this year’s postseason, but, of course, most pundits and experts can only see the Golden State Warriors winning the chip. While many of us would find it hard to bet against the Warriors, there is still plenty of debate about which team will take them on in the finals.

Western Conference (MM) 1 Seed: Golden State Warriors Prediction: NBA Finals Yet again, the Golden State Warriors are the team to beat out of the Western Conference.

An injury to DeMarcus Cousins might slow the Warriors a bit, but this squad will be tough to beat in a best-of-seven series. Led by the scoring trio of Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Steph Curry, Golden State is loaded with talent. Each of these three players was able to average more than 21 points per game this season. Curry led the Warriors in scoring, dropping 27.3 points per game. And don’t count out their role players.

Young forward Kevon Looney can stretch the floor with a dependable mid-range jump shot, and Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston deliver consistent, hard-nosed defensive performances night in and night out.

Look for Golden State to stick around for a while in the playoffs this season, as per usual, with a Finals appearance as our prediction for Steve Kerr’s squad.

2 Seed: Denver Nuggets Prediction: Western Conference Finals The young Denver Nuggets head into the postseason as the second-best team from the Western Conference. Despite

Who Will Lose to the Warriors this Time? their youth, this team has proven to have the potential to string together big wins this season, especially at home. The Nuggets have the best home record in the NBA this season, going 34-7 at home. This elite home form will help Denver as they maneuver through the Western Conference playoffs. Predictions for this Nuggets team see Denver taking out the Spurs and Trail Blazers. The latter matchup will be tight, as Damian Lillard is playing the best basketball of his life. However, the Blazers lack a strong defensive paint presence after the injury to Jusuf Nurkic, and will struggle to contain allstar center and triple-double machine Nikola Jokic. The Nuggets should scrape out a win because of this, but we predict them to lose to an experienced Warriors team in the Western Conference Finals.

3 Seed: Portland Trail Blazers Prediction: Western Conference Semifinals The Blazers proved themselves in the regular season, finishing in third place in a highly competitive Western Conference. The strong guard play of C.J. McCollum and Damian Lillard has been the driving force for the Blazers this season. McCollum averaged 21.0 points per game, while Lillard put up 25.8 points per game in the regular season. Despite this elite performance, the Blazers will have a difficult time coping with the absence of Jusuf Nurkic. The big man, who went down with a season-ending injury, will be a hard player to replace. Nurkic was averaging 15.6 points and 10.4 rebounds per game for the Blazers before his injury. Our prediction for the Blazers has Portland overcoming their obstacles and winning against the Thunder in round one before losing to the Nuggets.

4 Seed: Houston Rockets Prediction: Western Conference Semifinals The reigning MVP James

Harden has returned for another stellar season with the Houston Rockets. Harden led the league with an astounding 36.1 points per game and took the Rockets to a fourth-place finish in the Western Conference. This Rockets team has a great balance of elite shooters and athletic defenders. Perimeter players like Eric Gordon and Danuel House have been able to hit the three-ball at the 37 to 41 percent range all season. Center Clint Capela has also developed into a consistent threat on the pick-and-roll with guards James Harden and Chris Paul. Capela is putting up monster stats, averaging 16.6 points and 12.7 rebounds during the regular season. Unfortunately for the fourth-seeded Rockets, a meeting with the Warriors in the second round looks inevitable, leading to a Western Conference Semifinal exit for the Rockets. While James Harden is the most capable player in the NBA at single-handedly beating a team, he’ll need more consistent scoring from Chris Paul and Eric Gordon to even have a shot at knocking off the Dubs.

Eastern Conference (LW)

1 Seed: Milwaukee Bucks Prediction: Eastern Conference Semifinals The Bucks seem to have everything—a one-of-a-kind player in Giannis Antetokounmpo surrounded by pieces like Khris Middleton and Eric Bledsoe.

The stats don’t pop off the page for the latter two players, but Middleton was chosen to be in the All-Star game this year, and Bledsoe constantly wows with his scrappy athletic plays at key moments. Add in a bench with the most depth in the NBA, and you have a championship team.

They even have veterans like Pau Gasol who bring championship experience, and obviously a fantastic Coach of the Year candidate in Mike Budenholzer. The Bucks had the best record in the NBA this season and were

able to easily beat the Pistons.

However, they don’t have Kyrie Irving. The Bucks do not have a proven closer in the clutch, which will prove enough to hold them again from another championship run, falling short to the Boston Celtics in the second round.

2 Seed: Toronto Raptors Prediction: Eastern Conference Semifinals If you can believe it, the Toronto Raptors have made the playoffs for six straight years. There have been different coaches and different star players all those years, but always one constant: they’ve never made it far in the playoffs. The Cavaliers and LeBron James have been a menace to them for the past three years.

And even though James didn’t make the playoffs, their luck won’t change. Kawhi Leonard turned in another stellar season this year, with 27 points a game shooting 50 percent, but he doesn’t have enough chemistry with his new squad yet. Pascal Siakam is a huge bright spot for the Canadian squad, and these two players have been able to and will handle the Magic. The 76ers have too much firepower, though, and while we expect a seven-game series, we think Toronto will fall to a dangerous Joel Embiid-led Philadelphia team.

3 Seed: Philadelphia 76ers Prediction: Eastern Conference Finals After losing game one at home to the Nets, the 76ers regained momentum by taking the next four games. Brooklyn was scrappy (2020 champs, I’m calling it right now), but Philly was able to take care of business at home. The Raptors will prove to be a formidable test for the young team, but if Joel Embiid can stay healthy, Philly will have the upper hand. The starting lineup of Embiid, Ben Simmons, Tobias Harris, Jimmy Butler, and J.J. Redick have too

much firepower from beyond and within the arc, regardless of Simmons’s lack of a jump shot. Embiid averaged 27.5 points during the regular season despite battling with many injuries, which was good for fourth in the league. He also averaged the second most rebounds, with almost 14. Embiid is literally unstoppable when completely healthy, and the Sixers will succeed if he can make the most of his post opportunities. While we think the 76ers will win in a seven-game series (even with Drake cheering on his home team), it’ll be interesting to see what happens to Brett Brown following a loss either to the Raptors or the Celtics/Bucks.

4 Seed: Boston Celtics Prediction: NBA Finals Champion The Celtics are the team to dethrone the Warriors, because they can beat the Warriors both defensively and offensively.

Playing against the Bucks will be almost as hard of a test though.

The Celtics will struggle to guard Giannis, but they have much more offensive prowess than what they’ve shown at all this season. They can shoot the three one through five, and go nine deep without really giving up anything in terms of talent.

Marcus Smart, when he comes back from his injury, is a key player for the team’s matchup against the Bucks and ultimately, the Warriors. Gordon Hayward is also a huge component to a talented Celtics bench and has already delivered by pouring in 20 points toward a decisive win against the Indiana Pacers.

It will ultimately be up to Kyrie Irving to lead a young team, filled with tremendous young offensive and defensive talent in Jason Tatum and Jalen Brown, to close out the east and the Golden State Warriors, preventing the three-peat. We believe that the Warriors need to be dethroned, and the Celtics are the team to do it.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Page 23

Sports Sports Editorial

Athlete of the Issue

How the Beasts Serve Up An Interview with Kevin Mitchell and Scott Abramowitz: Kevin Mitchell and Scott Abramowitz are the senior captains of Stuyvesant’s boys’ volleyball team, the Beasts. The Beasts are currently second in their division with two games to go until playoffs, and they have a record of 7-1. Looking to keep their hold on the division as in previous years and advance further in playoffs, the Beasts are looking strong and coming in with energy to reflect on their journey in volleyball.

Kevin Mitchell Grade: Senior Height: 6’1” Eye color: Brown Hair color: Brown DOB: 4/20/2001 Scott Abramowitz Grade: Senior Height: 5’9’’ Eye color: Light brown/dirty brown Hair color: Brown DOB: 1/15/2001

1. When did you start playing volleyball?

SA: In freshman year, I first started playing in gym, and my teacher suggested I try out for the volleyball team, which I did.

KM: I played once in P.E. during the eighth grade. However, other than that, I didn’t play until freshman year tryouts for the team.

2. What are your goals for yourself this year?

KM: Just being a good leader for the team. I don’t really have a goal for myself in terms of stats; those aren’t really important to me. As long as I’m a good leader, that’s what matters. SA: Yeah, it’s more about how we lead the team, how we get the team ready to play for every single game.

Make sure to set a good example on the court, but part of that is improving our own game. I’m a setter, so every time I know I can set better, I can do things better.

It’s just the same approach as other sports: you just want to get better each game and make them learning experiences to improve for the next time.

3. What are your goals for the season and the team?

KM: We want to close out the season by winning the season and [having] a strong day at the Seward Park tournament. We haven’t had a strong showing at a tournament yet, and this would improve our seeding for playoffs. SA: Yeah, for me, I think it’s about playing to our potential. We know how good we can be and the work we have to do to get to that point. Putting the work in and playing together to get the best possible way we can play—that’s what I would be satisfied with, knowing we are playing to the highest level we can.

4. What are your respective positions on the team, and

what do you do there?

KM: I play middle; basically I have to call out where the setter is and the type of serve that’s coming before the play. During the play, it’s just mostly hitting and blocking. I don’t do a lot of digging unless the ball [is] intentionally passed short to me. SA: You also run away from me. KM: Right, I also want to make sure I don’t run into the setter; most of my job is being aware on the court and being in the right position so I can hit. SA: For me, I’m a setter, so I set the ball when it comes over the net. The ball gets passed to me; then, I sort of run the offense. I decide who to set to, who to pass to, what types of sets. I also call the types of plays on the court.

5. How do you deal with playing volleyball and your schoolwork, and do you have any tips?

KM: Sometimes, it would be hard; last year during second term of junior year, it [got] hard.

Most of it, though, is being on top of your homework by doing work during the day [and] not procrastinating when you get home. As long as you are good with time management, I think it’s not that bad. SA: Yeah, I agree. When I was a freshman, I would, no matter the time I get home, sort of finish homework at the same relative time. In a way, volleyball forced me to do my work on time as a freshman.

I knew I could not procrastinate, and it did get harder as you went into sophomore and junior year.

Like Kevin said, just do work during free periods and work on the train. If we have downtime during tournaments, we can do homework. Something helpful for our team is if you have trouble with a class or a teacher, you can ask the group chat, and we support each other with help and advice.

6. What have been your favorite memories or moments in volleyball, and what will you miss?

KM: My favorite memory is freshman year when I was working lines at the Grover Cleveland tournament. I don’t remember who was playing, but I do remember Midwood was one of the teams playing, and they had this really scary middle. Anyway, the ball got hit out, and the Midwood middle turned to me and yelled in. I got so scared that I called in even though it was way out, so one of the seniors on our team came to me and just took the flag from me. So that was it for me doing the lines.

SA: This isn’t directly related to volleyball, but we have this team bonding activity where you have to stand in a line and slap each other’s hands. The last person has to slap a water bottle at the end, so it gets super intense with [whoever] can do it the fastest.

It’s with your eyes closed, and some people are maybe cheating a little, so it becomes maybe the most intense moment of the year, and it’s not even volleyballrelated. It’s just so fun and gets

By ERIC KIM

Julian Giordano / The Spectator

By AKI YAMAGUCHI

His Legacy Continues: Tiger Woods

so crazy, but [it’s] also just what we will miss. I remember a lot of the seniors in the past have said that their main motivation for coming to school was volleyball.

You know you have to come to school to play in the games, so that’s what makes it the best. We have a great team environment; we are laughing during practices and always having fun. Just missing those small moments like that. KM: I definitely agree, more than any team I’ve ever been on.

The volleyball team is a family; there are no real cliques in the team, and we are all friends with each other. I’ll really miss that; I have not been on a team like this before.

7. Funniest moment or funniest player on the team?

SA: Ray [Jones, graduated senior] last year said it was me for the Spec article. I [think], for you, it’s when you got pantsed last year. KM: It was really funny; it was at West 50th, and no one knows this besides Scott because no one else saw besides him. I don’t know how but Nick Kim was playing middle and was rotating out, and Scott and I were at the end of the line, not paying attention. So Nick pantsed me in front of everyone but Scott because I got them up really quick.

SA: That was a highlight. This didn’t happen to me but during our freshman year, we had a rookie tournament, and it was really our first time getting game experience. So with Mitchell, a ball came, and he didn’t really know whether to go for it or not, so he lunged for it but he didn’t put his hands out. So he ended up digging the ball with his face and ended up an okay pass, but it was just really funny to see the ball bounce off his face.

KM Choice drink: Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda Favorite food: Veal Parm Quote to live by: If you doodoo on yourself Fun fact: My favorite candy is Reese’s Pieces.

SA Choice drink: Orange pineapple juice Favorite food: Chicken Parm Motto to live by: Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games Fun fact: I love pets; I once had a dog, two rabbits, and three guinea pigs all at the same time.

Tiger Woods has returned.

Wearing his trademark red shirt and black trousers, Woods showed up to the Masters looking like a winner. Woods showed why he is the G.O.A.T by winning the 2019 Masters Tournament, arguably the world’s most renowned golf tournament.

The news of his win shook the entire world: news sources are still busy reporting the event, while the people watching Woods on TV cannot forget the excitement. Even President Donald Trump congratulated Woods’s win by saying he would award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. One might wonder why everyone was so excited about his win at the Masters.

Before anything else, it’s the enormous charisma that Woods possesses. Viewers are attracted to his charm and gamesmanship, which can only be associated with Woods. Naturally, many patrons who came to the Augusta National Golf Club followed every shot taken by Woods. When his plays came alive, they also came alive. Ifhe was disheartened by his previous shot, they also grew dismayed. It was the same for the people watching him on TV, going through sleepless nights. If he birdied, they yelled alongside him.

Like always, the Masters venue, Augusta National Golf Club, was beautiful. Any scene of the club shown on TV was like a painting that could be put up in the Met. A clear fairway with no blemishes, a sparkling white bunker, lakes clear like a mirror, and a dense forest. The patrons calmly sitting around the green were reminiscent of flowers. At this magnificent place, Woods stayed focused, like a tiger looking for its prey.

81 PGA Tour wins, 15 major titles, and five Masters wins—this brilliant record is almost impossible for anyone else to achieve.

Woods is now one win away from tying Sam Snead’s 82 PGA wins, and he is three wins away from golf legend Jack Nicklaus’s 18 Major wins. It is unlikely that we will see another golfer chasing both of these records at the same time.

After his win at the Tour Championship in September 2018, many critics were quick to claim that Woods could not break these records. However, with his win at the Masters, many predict that Snead’s record will be broken, perhaps by the end of 2019. Breaking the 18 Major wins is not impossible. Three of the four Major Tournaments still remain for this season. During his prime in 2000, Woods was able to take home three of the Majors: U.S. Open, British Open, and the PGA Championship in the same year. The following year, he took home the Masters, achieving the “Tiger Slam,” winning all four Majors. But, he split up in two years.

When he three-peated the U.S. Amateur Championships and became a professional back in August of 1996, no one imagined that Woods would be accumulating such accolades.

However, just two months after

becoming a pro, he won the Las Vegas Invitational, his first PGA Tour win. The following April, he took home the Masters, becoming the youngest and the first black champion. He was only 21. Woods celebrated his win by giving his father, Earl Woods, a warm hug. Former President Bill Clinton called it “the best shot of the day.”

After that, Woods continued increasing his win count. Before this year’s Masters, Woods had 14 wins just in Majors: four in Masters, four in the British Open, two in the U.S. Open, and four in the PGA Championship.

Woods’s resume goes on: 12 wins in European, Japanese, and Australian Tours; 14 wins in ‘PGA Grand Slam of Golf ’; nine wins in the President’s Cup; and eight wins in the Ryder’s Cup. Woods was faced with his biggest crisis in 2008. He had to undergo ACL surgery. He was involved in a car accident along with a sex scandal in 2009, and in the following year, he divorced Elin Nordegren. He went through four back surgeries over the course of three years in 2014 and was even arrested for drug abuse in 2017. Not being able to walk or lie down properly, Woods was forced to consider quitting golf. He missed the Masters in 2014 and was cut in the second round of the Phoenix Open in February 2015 with an 11-over-par. People believed that he could not play golf anymore.

His world ranking dropped to 1199 in November of 2017.

However, Woods was able to come out of his slump, win the 2018 Tour Championship, and win the Masters seven months later. This is why everyone is so excited about his recent success.

Everyone believed that Woods would never be able to achieve similar successes from the past, but he came back with a bang.

With this Masters win, he increased both his PGA Tour wins and Majors win count; he made his first comeback at a Major (Woods was in sixth place as the third day ended). It has been 14 years since his last Masters win in 2005, and 11 years since his last Major win in 2008. He also reclaimed his Top 10 spot in the world rankings as the win placed him at sixth place. Going from 1199th to sixth in just a year and five months is something only Woods can do.

Former President Barack Obama congratulated him and said, “Congratulations, Tiger!

To come back and win the Masters after all the highs and lows is a testament to excellence, grit, and determination.” Jack Nicklaus also commented, “I am so happy for him and for the game of golf.”

The struggles Woods had to go through were clearly shown during his winner’s interview.

“Just to come back here and play as well as I did…means so much to me and my family. It’s something I’ll never ever forget,” Woods said.

Tiger Woods will continue to break new records in the future.

And with Woods back in the pack, the golf world just got a little more interesting.

The Spectator ● May 10, 2019

Girls’ Softball

Page 24

THE SPECTATOR SPORTS CALENDAR

Stuyvesant Softball Looking to Hunt Down Division Leaders After Hunter Victory

may

11 saturday

Baseball Stuyvesant vs. Beacon James Madison HS Field 12:00 p.m.

By ETHAN KIRSCHNER Stuyvesant’s softball team, the Renegades, has been on a rollercoaster ride at the start of this season. The year started with a 15-2 thrashing of Lab Museum High School, followed by a humbling 16-6 loss to Stevenson High School. They traveled to Lehman High School to pick up their second win of the season, but then fell at home in a close game to Fort Hamilton High School. Senior and co-captain Alexandra Lennard said it best, “We’ve had many high highs and a few low lows.” The team’s most recent outing against Hunter College High School seemed like a big indicator of the team’s realistic expectations for the rest of the season. Entering the game, the team had two options: either wallow in their last defeat or bounce back like they have time and time again. The team proved their resilience once again, with an emphatic 10-5 victory and improving the team’s record to 4-2 in league play.

Senior and co-captain Talia Kirshenbaum put on a solid pitching performance for the Renegades, surrendering five total runs, four of which were earned. In addition, she struck out two and walked seven players in her first complete game of the season. Kirschenbaum also led the way for Stuyvesant offensively, going 2-4 driving in three runs off a triple. Senior and shortstop Lili Boenigk also added three hits and drove in two runs.

The way this game and this season have gone thus far showcases the team’s true character.

Even after trailing 1-0 after the first inning and 4-0 after the second inning, the Renegades never gave up and continued to battle.

They chipped away at the lead in the third inning off of junior Eve Hausman’s hit, who was a home run away from hitting the cycle. The bats really started to heat up in the fourth with a sixrun inning, and the Renegades never relinquished their lead. The Renegades added three insurance runs in the sixth to put the game away for good. It has been a really hot start for the Renegades offensively this season. They have five players hitting over .380 this season; this showcases the team’s offensive firepower and potential.

This year’s group is driven and willing to analyze their mistakes in order to be better the next time they step on the field. There is no doubt that the girls are confident in their ability to smooth out their inconsistencies. “We have so much potential. I have never

worked alongside such a strong and dedicated group of players,” Lennard stated after their win.

They are an extremely tight-knit group, as most of the starters are seniors going into the last of four straight years of getting to know each other already. There is also a nice mix with a few freshmen having to step up and play crucial roles in this year’s team.

Though the season has not been smooth sailing thus far, the Renegades are hopeful that they are on the brink of a turnaround.

Lennard finished by saying that “We want this season to be the best yet, and though our journey has been a little bumpy thus far, I think we’re headed in the right direction. We will live up to this vision that we’ve constructed over the past three seasons as this last season being a sort of softball pinnacle for ourselves.”

16

14 tuesday

Baseball Stuyvesant vs.

Newtown Parade Grounds #2 4:15 p.m.

tuesday

Baseball Newtown vs.

Stuyvesant Newtown HS Field 4:30 p.m.

23

thursday

27

Cricket DeWitt Clinton vs.

Stuyvesant Van Cortlandt Park: Cricket 1 4:00 p.m.

thursday

Cricket Stuyvesant vs.

Bronx Science Kissena Park: Cricket 2 4:00 p.m.

WRAPUP • •

Zoe Oppenheimer / The Spectator

• • • •

Damian Lillard carries his Portland Trail Blazers past the Oklahoma City Thunder after sinking a three-pointer from 35 feet away to win Game Five.

Tiger Woods receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom after one of the greatest comeback stories in sports history that saw him fight through injury to win his fifth Masters title this year.

Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray was drafted first in the NFL draft by the Arizona Cardinals.

Ex-Real Madrid and current Porto goalkeeper Iker Casillas suffered a heart attack in training. He has since left the hospital in good condition. We wish him the best.

The race for the Premier League title is still hot with Manchester City topping the table, just one point ahead of Liverpool with one game to go.

Liverpool completed one of the greatest comebacks in Champions League history after winning 4-0 at Anfield to win 4-3 on aggregate in their tie against FC Barcelona