Volume 53 - Issue 5

VOL 53 / ISS 5 / MAY 2021

THE NEW JOURNAL

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

SAFE

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Editors-In-Chief Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Executive Editor Jack Delaney Managing Editor Eli Mennerick Associate Editors Nicole Dirks Jesse Goodman Rose Horowitch Caroleine James Noa Rosinplotz Dereen Shirnekhi Will Sutherland JD Wright Katherine Yao Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Madison Hahamy

Copy Editors Meg Buzbee Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum Kaylee Walsh Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Brian Chang Ada Griffin Ally Soong Illustrators Alice Mao Sydney Zoehrer

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2021 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. One thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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T HE NEW JOUR NAL

53 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 5 N E W MAY 2021 JOURNAL

THE M AGA ZINE AB OU T YA L E & NE W H AVE N

Zachary Groz

Jack Tripp

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cover SAFE AS HOUSES Between bidding wars and evictions, Connecticut’s housing market has never been more distorted. feature

BY THE BOOK What The Ethical Investor, Yale’s investing Bible, means for divestment.

STANDARDS

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Noa Rosinplotz Kaylee Walsh

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Nicole Dirks Frank Lukens Lillian Yuan

8 12 16

points of departure EYE CANDY FREE MARKET

snapshots A PLACE TO LINGER OLD WORLD, NEW HAVEN ACTS OF SERVICE

Avik Sarkar

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poem PARTING

Kanyinsola Anifowoshe

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critical angle SCHOOL WAS THE LAST THING ON MY MIND

Beasie Goddu Abraham Keita

35 38

essays IMAGINING MYSELF ON GIANTS’ SHOULDERS

Eli Mennerick

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endnote JUICY DETAILS

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POINT OF DEPARTURE

EYE CANDY Food Instagrams and the politics of what we eat.

Instagram chile oil isn’t too spicy, Instagram birria is vegetarian, and Instagram paletas don’t melt. On the social media accounts of chefs, restaurants, and food magazines, food exists in a hyper-distilled form—smellless, taste-less, free, and in quantities greater than any person could ever eat at once. It can be consumed visually over and over again, with captions that evoke taste by flagrantly overusing adjectives: A scallion dressing is “scalliony,” pudding is “milky,” bread is “pillowy.” Bizarre combinations don’t sound too bad at all: a dense, floaty, chocolatey, cardamom-inflected stew.

A snacky tangle of sugar-dusted cabbage and sweet-sour yogurt.

The best food pictures are messy in a way that suggests abundance: overflowing sandwiches or tall scoops of ice cream dripping a little down the cone, but not enough to make your fingers sticky. You can eat breakfast and 4

lunch and dinner from five different restaurants, because you never get full when you’re eating on Instagram. Nonetheless, even in pictures, food carries a heavy cultural weight. The things we eat can’t be separated from their history and politics, even when stripped of their physical form.

The things we eat can’t be separated from their history and politics, even when stripped of their physical form.

As Annie Cheng ’20, who now works as a cook and researcher in upstate New York, pointed out, Instagram can be an important equalizer for new and small

businesses. “Instagram and social media has been a very democratic place for chefs, who don’t have investors, to have a voice,” she said. Not everyone can buy a multi-million dollar restaurant space, but a camera and some good lighting are pretty easy to come by, and new restaurants can advertise on social media for a fraction of the cost of a TV spot.

Cheng also discussed additional pressures placed on chefs of color, including the implicit assumption that their food will be cheap, or will recreate some kind of photo-friendly street food experience. “People say their food should be two dollars,” she said.

“White chefs don’t get docked for experimentation.”

For better or worse, social media imposes a new kind of structure. Almost any food that makes it to the platform is palatable to the eyes, which generally means it’s been aesthetically flattened, placed in front of an art T HE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

BY NOA ROSINPLOTZ

“White chefs don’t get docked for experimentation.” wall or held up against a skyline.

In Restaurant Business’s 2020 article “Easing Into Ethnic Eating,” a guide for “getting customers on board with emerging cuisines,” the first tip is to make the food “visually appealing.” The author quotes the owner of a Balkan restaurant who has learned to take a “visual-first” approach, plating dishes alongside colorful sides and posting pictures on Instagram. “The city has a lot of traditional mom-and-pop Balkan restaurants, but I wanted to give the food a contemporary spin— make it inviting while keeping the integrity of the dishes,” Loryn Nalic told the publication.

Her St. Louis restaurant, Balkan Treat Box, regularly posts pictures of their flatbreads on beautiful wooden boards, and has an astounding fourteen thousand followers.

While the internet has no shortage of cappuccino pictures, most online food content features what’s traditionally called ethnic

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food in the United States—food that’s often cooked by immigrants and their children. An informal survey by Chef’s Pencil in February showed that the top food hashtag on Instagram is #JapaneseFood, followed by #ItalianFood, with #IndianFood, #KoreanFood, and #Thaifood coming in third, fourth, and fifth.

The prevalence of ethnic food on Instagram implies a need to reassure white American customers that something that sounds different can still be delicious, a sort of visual verification of the unfamiliar.

In addition to her work, Cheng runs her own Instagram, @achg.kitchen, which has a loyal following of Yale students and food professionals. Although she posted stand-alone pictures of food fairly frequently before the pandemic, on March 18, 2020, she debuted a new kind of post, focused on food history and critical analysis. The first slide is a picture of crispy, roasted okra next to two lemon slices. Four screenshots of her Notes app follow, which taught me that okra has been traced as far back as twelfth century Ethiopia and was brought to the Americas by enslaved people. In the post, Cheng explains how fat politics and race intersect in traditional Southern cooking, which often incorporates okra. As she points out, the “‘health-oriented’ food shaming” associated with Southern food like fried chicken is rarely applied to food from other cuisines with similar nutritional content, such as Eggplant Parmesan. Other posts reckon with the history of takeout and the presence of anti-Blackness in Asian immigrant-owned restaurants, rice cultivation and climate change, and “the mid-2000s bacon obsession.” By putting

the description front and center instead of relegating it to a caption or the comments, Cheng makes it clear that food is inseparable from its roots, connotations, history, and production.

What we actually eat is layered behind pictures and captions. “A huge proportion of Americans are related to the food industry,” she said. “And we all eat.”

The scoops of edible cookie dough on my feed were scooped by someone, and the sugarcane for the sugar inside it was also harvested by someone, and that sugarcane plant was brought from Southeast Asia to China to Portugal and then to Brazil and finally Louisiana, where indigenous and African people were enslaved in order to produce the “white gold” that, years later, ended up inside the edible cookie dough that never goes bad on Instagram.

— Noa Rosinplotz is a junior in Ezra Stiles College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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POINT OF DEPARTURE

FREE MARKET Buy Nothing New Haven offers an alternative to the market economy and a lifeline during the pandemic.

BY KAYLEE WALSH Looking around my room, I find it is full of things I don’t need anymore: the shoes I recently bought online that are just a little too tight, the stack of books I’ve read and probably will never pick-up again, the hair accessories that don’t mesh well with my new haircut. Some of these items certainly might be more useful to someone else. But where is the best place that they could go?

For many New Haven residents, the answer to this question is simple. The Buy Nothing New Haven group on Facebook, with over a thousand members, offers community members an opportunity to give away items they no longer need. Members can also ask for items or services that they want—a plant-sitter, dog food, children’s clothes. The group, run by admins Rai Darwinsdottir and Catherine McGuinness, is a part of a global project, with chapters across the United States and beyond.

door in a few days—this group aims to prove that there are other, more sustainable ways to give and receive. And unlike thrift stores or online markets like Facebook Marketplace, no one involved in Buy Nothing makes any money.

In the words of Alexa Carey, a Buy Nothing Global Team Member, the gift-exchanging project is “revolutionary.”

“Gratitude is really the antidote to that. It tells us that we have enough.

And that we have to give.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has both limited

Buy Nothing’s in-person gift exchanges and provoked a greater need for those gifts. “We really didn’t know how to respond,” Carey told me. She called the Buy Nothing group a “lifeline” for people struggling financially.

“Because [Buy Nothing groups] are gift economies, they were essential to people,” she said.

In a statement on the Buy Nothing Project website from March 2020, co-founders Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller required that all local groups adhere to the government guidelines in their area.

When gift giving was not possible, they encouraged more “gifts of self,” like checking in on fellow group members, especially those who might live alone, over the phone or video chat. “We know

At the core of the project is a push to prevent people from purchasing new items or throwing away unwanted, but still functional, ones. In a world where people tend to over-consume— with websites like Amazon whereone can purchase almost anything and expect it at their 6

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how important it is for us to stay connected to each other, to look out for each other, in as many safe ways as possible,” they wrote.

Still, local groups had to determine if they would allow contactless sharing of essential items, and how they would change their restrictions over time. In New Haven, Darwinsdottir explained that they have transitioned entirely to porch pick-up, with no face-to-face contact. While this change has limited the ability of members of the community to interact with one another, she is grateful that the project can continue. “I don’t think it has changed the core of the resulting project, but [face-to-face interaction] is something that we would

“Her friendship is something that I value more than the French press.” like to do again once this is over,” she told me.

Looking back on the project before the pandemic, Carey fondly remembered her first gift exchange, back when she was starting her own group in 2015, in South Windsor, Connecticut.

She received a French press, but to Carey, the material gain of a new appliance was not the most important part of the interaction.

“I went in, and then I met her kids, and I met her cat, and they were asking me all these questions and it was just really fun,” she recalled.

“We’re friends to this day. And I guess that her friendship is something that I value more than the French press.”

Darwinsdottir similarly recalled one of her first exchanges, in which she gave away a baby toy to another community member.

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community and support others.

“I remember that a mom asked for it, and then she sent me a picture of her baby playing with the toy,” she explained. Given the joy she felt when she was able to see her gift put to good use, Darwinsdottir encourages members in her group to make “gratitude posts’’ upon receiving a gift. “It’s always nice to go to the page again and say thank you, and maybe tell a story of why it helps you, or why you were happy with it.”

In addition to these tangible gifts, people can give other, non-material gifts, which Darwinsdottir categorized as “the gift of self, the gift of talent, and the gift of time.” One example she mentioned was a community member offering to take care of someone else’s plants while they were on vacation. To her, the project is much more than just a place to give and receive items, but a place to engage with one’s

“Our interactions and our guests are grounded in people, and they’re grounded in narrative,” Carey emphasized. “They’re not grounded in things, or in money… It’s wonderful, but it’s also really messy.” She recalled an instance in the South Windsor group when a woman who had just undergone a mastectomy was giving away her bras. “The story of this woman as a survivor is so much more important than the material of a bra,” she noted.

In her eyes, the Buy Nothing Project challenges modern-day consumerism, centering gratitude rather than material items. “Consumerism is really predicated on this idea that we have very little, and that we always need more, so it’s about constantly filling this emptiness,” she said. “Gratitude is really the antidote to that. It tells us that we have enough. And that we have to give.”

— Kaylee Walsh is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College and a Copy Editor of The New Journal.

DESIGN BY BRIAN CHANG 7

SNAPSHOT

A PL ACE TO LINGER

The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s new drop-in center aims to centralize homelessness resources in New Haven.

BY NICOLE DIRKS On a mellow afternoon in early April, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen’s new drop-in center hosted its soft opening.

A sign in an archetypal Homegoods-Mom style hung above my head, fiercely combining both Comic Sans and cursive: COFFEE, PRAYER & CONVERSATION Always welcome here.

And it was right, minus the prayer: coffee and conversation dominated the space. Even though clients came for a variety of reasons—food, outlets, Wi-Fi, the bathroom—everyone, it seemed, ended up moving from a water-hungry Keurig to seating areas where other peers and volunteers perched.

The space was smaller than I expected—more a room than a floor. It was cozier than antici-

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pated, too, in part due to its furnishings: orange chairs tucked into green-marbled tables, red brick walls, blue-grey-tiled floors interspersed with red-painted support columns, a satisfyingly full bookshelf, and stacked boxes of board games. There was no immediate evidence that the room was formerly home to a dog grooming salon, a (human) hair salon, and a businessmen’s lunch club at various points in time.

I volunteered on the fifth day of operation at the new Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) location at 266 State Street. It was my first day there. Before, in the few days since opening, only two or three people had wandered in, my supervisor told me––but today, seven or eight clients gradually gathered in the space.

After showing me a series of

adorable cat TikToks on his phone, one client, seated by himself with a French vanilla roast from the Keurig, invited me to ask him questions. He provided an answer before I asked any.

“It’s hard to find a place to be,” he said. “I’ve been homeless for twenty-five years. I think that’s the hardest thing.”

“It’s hard to find a place to be.”

The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen has provided food assistance out of the basement of the Parish House of Center Church on Temple Street (steps from the Green) since 1987, born from an era of welfare cutbacks that caused a soup kitchen resurgence T HE NEW JOUR NAL

not seen since the Great Depression. While the church is still in a convenient location for the population it serves, the space is both cramped and hard to access, a set of stairs being the only entrance to the underground dining space.

When the doors open at mealtimes, clients tend to grab their food and go—there is little lingering, according Steve Werlin, DESK’s Executive Director. This makes it even harder for service workers, like mental health counsellors, to connect with clients in an already-crowded space. The Parish House location will continue to serve meals to clients, but the new space on State Street will supplement it outside of mealtimes with designated floors for both basic and higher-level services.

Restaurants, studios, and boutiques are generally not ideal neighbors, according to Werlin, because of their dependence on people walking around between stores, who may be deterred by the presence of clients at a place like DESK. The 266 State Street location is advantageous because it has no neighbours across the street; instead, there’s a park.

ShowOff Ink Artistry mainly serves repeating customers, less so roaming pedestrians, and Café Nine serves customers in the evenings when DESK’s doors are closed.

“We want to be good neighbors,” said Werlin. “We want to ensure that this is a service that is a net gain for them, for the neighborhood and for the community.” Werlin cited bathrooms as an example. “All these businesses that don’t want people who are on the street coming in to use the bathroom. Well, here’s a solution for that.”

The drop-in center’s first floor has been designed precisely to provide a place to be for its clients. It will be an air-conditioned haven in hot summers, a heated one in the winters, and a host year-round for restrooms, showers, food, beverages, Wi-Fi, and social interaction.

Soon, a second floor will open that will provide designated spaces for mental health counselling, health care, meetings with caseworkers, and other support from New Haven organizations,

DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

The new location is only two blocks from the Green, nestled between Café Nine and a tattoo

parlor, ShowOff Ink Artistry.

While looking for a building to buy, in addition to securing a spot on prime real estate in proximity to the Green, DESK’s leadership had looked for neighbors who would not feel hindered by the presence of the drop-in center.

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including Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, Connecticut Mental Health Center, United Way of Greater New Haven, the Sex Workers and Allies Network, Columbus House, and Liberty Community Services.

The roles of the two floors will be intertwined. While the first floor is designed to be welcoming—and to fulfill basic needs outside of mealtimes—the second will connect clients with a web of higher-level services that otherwise are not centralized in any one place in New Haven.

By creating an initial space that is casual, there is greater incentive—or, rather, fewer obstacles—to engage with services upstairs. The combination of the two floors aims to weaken deterrents to seeking help, from inconvenience factors—such as having to locate services individually—to stigma against homelessness, mental health issues, and sex work.

James Adu is a program manager for Connecticut Mental Health Center who helps with the street psychiatry team as well as street outreach services. Members of the street psychiatry team will be hosted on DESK’s second floor on State Street. From a mental health perspective, simply having a confidential space will help mental health counsellors help clients, Adu says. On top of privacy, a welcoming first floor— where clients are inclined to stay awhile—will create an environment that might help counsellors develop new connections casually.

“Our role is just being there, engaging with the individuals and not forcing our services on people,” said Adu. “I think we

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can provide linkages, so it’s not that mental health is necessarily the be-all and end-all. It’s just ‘Oh, okay. Well, you’ve identified these [issues]. We can help you with that. But if you’re not ready, that’s fine too.’ We can still engage. We can still meet downstairs, we can sit, have a coffee where you see your peers.”

Executive Director Steve Werlin is overseeing much of the new center’s opening. He talked to me over Zoom from the third floor of the State Street building—though we later met at DESK, where we had one of those clumsy computer-screen-to-reality moments of recognition. Planning began in 2018, but it wasn’t until Decem-

“It definitely doesn’t solve the entire network, the centralization of homeless services, but it’s a start.

And it’s a very important start.”

ber of 2020 that the building could be purchased, thanks to pandemic-induced lower real estate prices.

“We started thinking about, well, if we were designing something from scratch what would it look like?” said Werlin of the brainstorm phase. “It would be street level. It would be highly visible, forward-facing, with windows easily visible if you’re walking down the street, easy to find, close to the Green—meeting people where they are both literally in terms of location, as well as physically in terms of everyone’s

accessibility.”

While few linger at Center Church, it is the main activity in the new location. Most ask for no more than a cup of coffee before they sit down and start sipping slowly. One client just asks if it would be possible for him to get water, then more water, then three more refills. He also asks for help setting up an email account.

He tells me he has been homeless for a year and four months, but he has slept in a hotel with designated rooms converted into two-person shelter spaces during the pandemic. It was his first time visiting DESK’s new space.

“I like this place,” he said, looking past my head at the freshly painted walls behind me. “I don’t have to worry about a roommate here. It’s nice because with a roommate, maybe we don’t get along, or they’re coming in and out, or they’re using.”

Columbus House, a New Haven shelter, will have outreach workers connect with clients on DESK’s first floor. Many shelters, Columbus House included, have moved clients into hotel rooms due to the incompatibility between their usual congregate living arrangements and current public health demands.

But during the day, clients must clear from hotels for them to be cleaned, forcing them to seek help elsewhere. Helpful resources, however, are not centralized cohesively in shelters, let alone hotels, let alone New Haven.

One clear-eyed client spoke to me with great enthusiasm about DESK’s new space. He was looking forward to a second floor that could provide services so close to a first floor where he could hang out. He then asked me if there

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might also be a place to sleep. I had to tell him no.

While the drop-in center’s decor is friendly, the center is also welcoming at a functional level.

The center ensures there are as few requirements as possible for those who come to DESK; this includes a policy of not taking down names of clients who visit the center and not limiting services based on apparent sobriety.

With a mirror on the wall to the right of my station, I could see the area behind me by slightly turning my head. Its purpose is to reflect the bathroom door.

Although DESK is not a safe injection site or a medical facility qualified to monitor substance use on-site, there are procedures in place to respond to, in the words of Werlin, “the realities on the

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ground.” Prior to clients’ arrival, both my supervisor and a handout sheet instruct me to knock on the bathroom door if a client is inside for more than three minutes, at which point, if there is no response, I should use a code word to ask a staff member to call an ambulance. There is Naloxone behind the snack table, should a client become unresponsive.

According to Werlin, it is difficult to say whether DESK’s drop-in center embodies an “ideal” model for providing services to people experiencing homelessness—because DESK is a small organization, because there aren’t enough workers conducting street outreach, because of the fluidity of the lives of those experiencing homelessness, and because of the systemic nature of homelessness in America.

“I think it’s a piece of the puzzle,” said Adu. “It definitely doesn’t solve the entire network, the centralization of homeless services, but it’s a start. And it’s a very important start.”

— Nicole Dirks is a sophomore in Branford College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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SNAPSHOT

OLD WORLD, NEW HAVEN

New Haven’s Italian American community grapples with Americanization and urban renewal.

BY FRANK LUKENS 12

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hree-quarters of the way down Wooster Street, past Sally’s Apizza and Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, sits Zeneli Pizzeria e Cucina Napoletana, a small, one-story storefront with a streetside cabin for outdoor seating during the pandemic.

I walked into the restaurant at 10:00 a.m., just as Gazmir Zeneli, the master pizza chef, arrived to start rolling dough for the day.

“Espresso or cappuccino?” asked his brother, Aleko, whose hospitality made me feel immediately comfortable, as though I were a regular. With a warm cappuccino in hand, I watched Gazmir, a jolly, thirty-or-so yearold man with dark hair and a wide smile, roll the fresh mass of dough into sizable spheres, one for each pie. “We make pizzas one size only—personal. That’s the way it was invented.”

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Old-fashioned. Original. Neapolitan. That is how Zeneli bakes its pizzas and distinguishes itself from the rest of the pizza joints on Wooster Street. Gazmir and Aleko, along with their two other brothers Jetmir and Jeshar, are originally from Albania. In the early nineteen-nineties, when communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, the Zeneli brothers emigrated across the Adriatic Sea to the Naples area of Italy, where they spent their childhoods learning to craft the perfect pizza napoletana. Twenty-two years later, three of the brothers emigrated again, this time to the United States. “After ten years in New York, we took the opportunity to move to Wooster Street, New Haven—the epicenter of pizza,” Gazmir explained as he started heating up their enormous, gold-plated wood fire oven. “I bake the pizza, my

brother Jeshar is the master cheese maker, and my brother Aleko is the people’s person.” Gazmir, who was the previous executive pizza chef at Eataly NY and twotime world champion pizzaiolo, narrated the history of pizza and the experience he and his brothers provide for their patrons: “In 1889, Queen Margherita of Savoy went to Napoli and wanted to see how poor people ate. She was given a pie with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and basil. She loved it. What she ate is what we now call Pizza Margherita, and it is the pizza I bake everyday.”

Growing up in suburban Florida, many of the pizzerias around me were American chains like Domino’s or Papa John’s. The Italian food we think of in the United States is vastly different from the kind of food the Zeneli brothers grew up eating

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“Wooster Street... it’s the only visible vestige of the Italian American heritage.” in Naples. Recently, I became curious to learn how Americanization and modernization have impacted the Italian American community in New Haven.

Everyone I talked to emphasized two historical developments that have threatened the community: the construction of highways that physically ripped through New Haven’s Italian neighborhoods, and the nationwide Americanization of traditional Italian cuisine.

like Wooster Square, which was the heart of the Italian American community in New Haven.

Forced out, Italians scattered across various suburbs, weakening the tight-knit community they’d been building for decades.

“I remember my mother telling me Franklin Street, where I was born, was destroyed, along with everything else,” Ed Surato, a 65-year old librarian at the New Haven Museum, told me. “People to this day are very upset with Mayor Lee and New Haven redevelopment. I can tell how much has drastically changed by looking at photos and maps. There are buildings still standing [in the affected areas], but they’re in much disrepair.” According to Anthony Riccio, New Haven historian and self-proclaimed “people archaeologist,” Wooster Square “triggers nostalgia, a certain feeling for history.

DESIGN BY BRIAN CHANG

The two most common routes for a driver into New Haven are interstates I-95 and I-91. Ten lanes each at their widest point, these superhighways converge

at an intricate network of ramps, bridges, and overpasses, connecting motorists traveling to and from the Elm City. In the Long Wharf area, these highways stand along monumental structures built to the scale of the American superhighway. The striking, familiar, blue-and-yellow IKEA sits next to the gray, concrete Pirelli Tire Building, now under renovation. Looming above is the maroon Knights of Columbus tower, Downtown’s tallest building. Eighty years ago, however, this location would be unrecognizable. The colossal scale of the interstates and modern buildings are a product of New Haven’s “urban renewal” campaign led by Mayor Richard C. Lee in the mid-nineteen fifties.

It was the age of the automobile, and cities around the country responded with the construction of mega-highways like I-91 and I-95, tearing into neighborhoods

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All the other neighborhoods are destroyed and changed. Everyone moved to East Haven, North Haven, Guilford, and other suburbs. There aren’t many people from the original neighborhood left. But everyone comes back to Wooster Street, because it’s the only visible vestige of the Italian American heritage.”

Suburbanization in response to urban renewal was not the only factor that diluted the traditional Italian community in New Haven. “Everything changed,” Riccio emphasized, his dog barking in the background of the Zoom call, “when American corporations became involved in hijacking Italian food, reprocessing and feeding it to Americans.” Riccio, author of The Italian American Experience in New Haven, grew up in New Haven in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies . He told his own family history and discussed how his grandparents’ meager diet differed greatly from the conglomerates—like Papa John’s or Olive Garden—most Americans today associate with Italian food.

In the early twentieth century, Riccio’s grandparents immigrated from southern Italy to the Annex neighborhood of New Haven. The area was mostly rural at the time with “open land for farming,” according to Riccio.

In addition to their manufacturing day jobs, Riccio’s grandparents were farmers. “They needed food on the table,” Riccio explains. “They didn’t make money in the nineteen-twenties or nineteen-thirties. They grew their own tomatoes, made their own wine, hung their own sausage, and made their own lard in the cellar… You didn’t waste anything, because what you

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grew is what you ate. My own diet growing up was old-world, plant-based, and Mediterranean —food with greens, beans, and lentils.”

By contrast, Italian food in the U.S. transitioned in the mid-twentieth century to Americanized cuisine built on convenience, variety, and capacity for mass production. Canned ravioli, frozen pizza, prepared tomato soup, and other ready-made food products introduced at the time shaped Americans’ conception of Italian cuisine. Riccio insists that the Americanization of Italian

“Everything changed when American corporations became involved.” food, specifically brands like Chef Boyardee, became much more popular than the simple Mediterranean diet he was used to eating at home. “Those processed foods that everyone eats now is not what we ate. Simplicity… simple flavors are the best for you and taste the best. Now, it’s a mania.”

“In America, you have to think big,” said Aleko Zeneli. That’s posed a challenge to their standard of serving the finest, original Neapolitan pie. “Everyone here is used to so many options, so much advertising, that people lose the taste for simplicity.” The Zeneli brothers insist that their customers try their pizza as it appears on the menu, without extra toppings, to taste the authentic Neapolitan flavor. “If they really want to sprinkle parmesan or red pepper flakes, like they do here in the U.S., at least make them try the pizza as it is to see if they like the flavor of our pies,” said Aleko.

With all the change Italian cuisine has faced in the U.S. in the past century, Zeneli is all about preserving the old-fashioned, Neapolitan pizza tradition, just the way Queen Margherita tried it in 1889. “If you haven’t tried this pizza, you haven’t tried pizza,” Gazmir chuckled, as he pointed behind me toward an elderly man sipping red wine with a friend.

“Just ask him,” Gazmir told me.

“He comes in every morning.”

The man’s name was Bill Iovanne, 88-years old and the long-time owner of Iovanne Funeral Home on Wooster Place.

Even though the business is now run by his son, Bill has chosen to remain in Wooster Square.

Sipping his wine, he radiated with nostalgia as he told me how much he loved growing up in the neighborhood. “Wooster Street to me is unbelievable,” he said.

Bill was born in 1933 in Fair Haven, but soon after, his family moved to Wooster Square.

“I thought everyone was Italian here. The shops, the churches, the schools, all of them.”

“People moved out gradually, to East Haven, North Haven, Branford, all over. But this street, Wooster Street, has stayed the same.” No matter how far away the descendants of New Haven’s Italian immigrants may have moved, Wooster Street still serves as the meeting point for families and friends to gather and eat classic New Haven food. “I’ll never leave here,” Bill reassured me. “I just love it.”

— Frank Lukens is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

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SNAPSHOT

ACTS OF SERVICE The rise and fall of faith-based activism in New Haven.

First thing in the morning, I braced myself for another rejection. But by some miracle, today was different than the last ten days; today, an operator finally picked up. After a week and a half of making groggy 8:00 a.m. phone calls, staring at “no appointments available” messages, and listening to the locust drone of busy signals across various vaccine hotlines, I was starting to think I’d never find an appointment for Sam, a jovial older man from Guilford. Sam was my first client for the Vaccine Buddies volunteer program, a joint initiative between the Connecticut Agency on Aging and Interfaith Volunteer Care Givers (IVCG) to help seniors secure COVID-19 vaccines.

Vaccines became generally available to New Haven residents 16

75 and older on January 18, 2021.

Just four days later, I received a Vaccine Buddies invitation email from Jane Ferrall, the executive director of IVCG. At the end of the email, she urged: “Right now is a historic time for us to rally round and help our seniors when and where they need it most… and if not now, when?” I wouldn’t meet Jane until months later, but her passion for service resonated through her writing.

By the end of March, Vaccine Buddies and other IVCG volunteers had made over 150 appointments for seniors aged 65+ and provided medical transportation to over 750 clients, highlighting not only the power of volunteerism but also that of faithbased organizations to provide vital social services in times of need. Though it is no longer an

explicit faith-based organization, IVCG has its roots in religious practice that still informs many of its volunteers and staff, including Jane herself. The “Interfaith” in IVCG’s moniker pays homage to IVCG’s parent organization, Interfaith Cooperative Ministries (ICM), through which many present-day social service organizations in New Haven received their initial seed funding and institutional backing. Columbus House, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, and the Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund, which has funded development for over 2,500 housing units in New Haven, are just a few of such organizations.

Despite its far reach, I had never heard of ICM until Jane mentioned it to me. First established in 1970 as “Downtown T HE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ADA GRIFFIN

BY LILLIAN YUAN

Cooperative Ministries” by a couple of mainline churches, ICM formally closed its doors in 2015.

Since then, Jane lamented, very few people seem to be interested in learning about its “fascinating” history.

“In the late seventies and eighties, people were very concerned about what was happening to New Haven,” Jane told me. A former lawyer, she spoke with deliberate pauses, giving her words an air of gravitas. “There was already this huge problem with homelessness. There was a terrible divide between Black and white. There was this huge economic divide.

The problems that New Haven has today are the problems they were having back in the nineteen-eighties.”

Churches, especially those on the New Haven Green, were experiencing these issues first-hand, and the original members of ICM felt called to do something about it. Some church members felt that it was not only their civic responsibility but also their religious calling to help the city, so they decided to create an interfaith ministry that, at least in the early years, was entirely selffunded and operated.

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Like many other social service organizations, ICM was born out of a specific time with specific needs. “The nineteen-sixties were, as some will remember, a traumatic period for making everyone, including churches, face up to the highly sharpened liberation issues which were

beginning to emerge in terms of housing in neighborhoods, job discrimination, et cetera,” the late Reverend Dr. Samuel N. Slie, a previous ICM coordinator and prominent New Haven faith leader, said in a 1999 interview

about ICM’s history. While the post-war rise in poverty was not unique to New Haven, few other cities had such an overwhelming response by the church.

Downtown Cooperative Ministries changed its name to Interfaith Cooperative Ministries in 1995 to welcome organizations of other non-Christian faiths. ICM’s early initiatives included committees to address poverty, politics, and racism. Throughout the late twentieth century, ICM also funded over twenty other organizations that served the community financially.

A look at their annual reports demonstrates their remarkable sensitivity to and flexibility for responding to various needs. In 2008, for example, ICM and affiliate organizations responded rapidly to the economic crisis, raising $150,000 to keep an overflow shelter open until May 2009 despite the city’s budget cuts.

“The DCM established a pattern,” Slie said in his 1999 interview, “which persists today, of sticking its neck out where there is a need, [and] asking the churches to help fund an outreach...[to] be able to develop a board, incorporate, acquire a staff, and find fed-

17

eral, foundation or private funds to help meet the needs.”

ICM declined in financial and political influence in the twenty-tens until its formal dissolution in 2015. Some attribute its decline to obsolescence, as its affiliate organizations became self-sufficient, while others point to deeper organizational and ideological issues. Since 2015, no new interfaith organizations have come to the fore. According to IVCG Director Jane Ferrall, New Haven may be unlikely to see another major interfaith force in the future because of increasing secularization, fewer permanent residents with deep roots in the city, and the current trend towards churches “going their own way,” particularly in nondenominational institutions. Furthermore, the mainline churches that have been the strongest supporters of ICM are now struggling to care for their own. “I know this because I’m a part of one of these churches,” Ferrall said with resignation.

Still, Ferrall argues that what current faith-based organizations are doing is no less impactful.

“Faith communities, if you would look at the cumulative impact… it’s profound,” she said. “There is no way that the government could meet the need. There’s no way they could be nimble enough, [or] non-bureaucratic enough to meet the need.” The evidence is close to home in ICM’s history and even today through programs like Vaccine Buddies. IVCG’s small size and autonomy, as well as their perceived faith affiliation that may appeal to potential volunteers, allowed them to mobilize a volunteer force as early as January. A similar vaccine program organized by the New Haven

18

Board of Alders (led by Alder Eli Sabin), on the other hand, did not launch until March 13. Where government programs struggle, faith-based services help fill in crucial gaps.

Today, many faith-based communities work not only to provide social services but to do so in a way that is sensitive to the needs of different groups. In New Haven, where racial segregation and opportunity disparities run deep, this often includes activism that goes beyond providing specific charitable services, which certain church leaders have found profoundly lacking. The Revd.

Doctor Samuel T. Ross-Lee, the lead pastor at the Black church Immanuel Missionary Baptist, has not seen much faith-based activ-

“The DCM established a pattern which persists today, of sticking its neck out where there is a need.” ism in his twenty years in New Haven. Ross said that while there is much “blanket support” from other faith communities, there has been a frustrating lack of political activism.

In both their failures and successes, faith-based social organizations are ultimately more similar to their secular counterparts than they are different. In New Haven in particular, the lines between the two have become increasingly blurred, with some formally religious institutions like IVCG becoming secular in legal status, though not in ideology or leadership, and some secular institutions shifting to faith-based frameworks because of their lead-

ing members’ faith. Still, there is something to be said about the differentiating factor of faith itself.

Faith may provide a motivation for social work, where there otherwise may not be one internally, or give community members a hope that nurtures perseverance even when things aren’t going well. It is this hope that inspires many faith-based service organizations and community advocates to serve the city with joy. And it’s the same hope that concluded the 1974 ICM Annual Report, laid out on its own page in a prayer: “If we are divided into separate camps, Make us see at last The folly of our division and be sorry for it, So that we may no longer be content to continue in this situation, But think and act In the light of your future, your promise To make everything new, No matter how.”

— Lillian Yuan is a senior in Pierson College.

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POEM

Parting

By Avik Sarkar Barishal, Bangladesh, during the Partition of India, 1947 It is monsoon when they part, when the water lilies sprout like tiles, painting mosaics of rose and jade beneath my grandmother’s feet. She sings prayers, words erupting like gasps under her breath.

Stretching her veil up and over, scouring the market, venerating the rain—sheets of glass, particles reflecting the sweet limes heaped on each other in pyramids—she recalls the emerald beads her sister gave her before her parting, searches her neck for their indent.

She bows to choose a lime as a child wrenches a lily from the water. Droplets explode, drench my grandmother’s veil, clasped to her face, and she drowns in a cry—remembering it was monsoon when her sister parted, wrested from fragile arms—and then a wail.

Up at her the child stares, turns to leave, face streaked with glassy rain—my grandmother recalls her sister’s voice, in fragments, remnants of mosaics—and under her breath she whispers Come back, come back. But the lilies float on, apart.

— Avik Sarkar is a sophomore in Davenport College.

Collage by Annli Nakayama Source: Library of Congress

CRITICAL ANGLE

SCHOOL WAS THE LAST THING ON MY MIND The pandemic forced caregiving roles onto many students.

Supporting them can help us reimagine Yale.

BY KANYINSOLA ANIFOWOSHE All names marked with an asterisk are pseudonyms.

a frantic rush to catch up on her work, and on her father’s. She’d be helping him send emails, type, and sort papers, like she’d been doing for the past eight months as his Parkinson’s Disease pro-

“It was back to normal, but not for me.” gressed and made fine motor skills difficult.

Margaret’s parents are in their late 70s, and throughout high school she had balanced academic obligations with helping

DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

For a moment, Margaret’s* room shuddered in flickering, yellow light, then—darkness. The power in her small New England town went out with the crackle of an October thunderstorm.

Without Internet access at home, she hopped into her sister’s small brown Volkswagen, drove twenty minutes down the road into the next town, and parked on the side of the road. She logged onto her French class as rain drummed against the roof of her car. In the past year, Margaret, a sophomore at Yale, had gotten used to making

adaptations like these—almost.

After returning home, Margaret spent the next twenty-two hours with her family in their candle-lit living room waiting for the power to return. Her father’s tremors, most of the time localized in his hands, were spreading that night, occasionally reaching his face. He was getting stressed.

Which would lead to Margaret’s mother getting stressed. Which would lead to Margaret’s sister getting stressed. Which, in this deeply-felt interdependence, would lead to Margaret getting stressed. She tried to remain calm, but she knew that when the power returned there would be

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them apply for Social Security benefits and working part-time to cover medical bills. But when she returned home after the closing of Yale’s campus in March 2020, she learned that her father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and took on new responsibilities to support him. In the spring semester, the college’s switch to Pass/Fail grading helped her manage some of the burden of trying to get a handle on the initial diagnosis. But by the time Yale returned to A-F classes in the fall, her dad’s symptoms had progressed, making it difficult for him to type and sometimes to speak. As Margaret put it, “It was back to normal, but not for me.” She found herself helping her father with work, driving him to and from offices, preparing food, making sure he was taking his medications, scheduling doctor’s appointments, keeping a watchful eye on the progression of his symptoms, and working a restaurant job to support her family’s income, all while keeping up with the demands of extracurriculars and classes—demands like her history course’s weekly paper, which, by the time the power returned the day after the storm, was due in a few hours. She knew that she wouldn’t have enough time to help her dad and complete the assignment. Her family depends on her father’s income for stability, so there wasn’t much of a choice to make.

In testimony to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, caregiving advocate and former First Lady Rossalyn Carter said, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who need caregiving.” The coronaMAY 2021

virus pandemic has brought the marginalized work of caregiving, and our collective dependence on caregivers—in nursing homes, schools and hospitals, within families and communities—into greater public awareness. Yet students who serve as family caregivers continue to be underserved by their academic institutions, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

“Yale is not the world.”

Embedded in relationships spanning geographical and generational communities, student caregivers defy many colleges’ aspirational models of campus as a bubble devoted solely to intellectual pursuits among 18-22 year olds. These relationships remind students like Margaret of what one might forget while in the campus bubble: “Yale is not the world.” Responding to the challenges faced by student caregivers is not only crucial for supporting a growing segment of college students, but also for creating a higher education culture which recognizes all students as full people with needs, responsibilities and relations that reach beyond the scope of a college campus.

“Professors would say, ‘People who perform best are people who go to office hours regularly,’” recalled Danielle, a Yale senior who worked 19 hours a week throughout her four years to support her family and pay her student income contribution (the amount that the university expects students on financial aid to contribute to their education).

She remembered thinking with

frustration, “Well, I just don’t have that time during the day. It’s not that I don’t care.” Struggling in her sophomore year General Chemistry course, she desperately needed to attend a review session for the midterm, but they were only offered at 3 p.m. each day of the week—precisely during her work hours at an off-campus childcare center. “No matter what, I just lose,” she said, sighing. “Professors don’t realize that a lot of students are unfortunately not just full time students—we don’t actually just sit there all day and get to study.”

As Margaret attended classes from home in the spring and fall of 2020, she felt like Yale expected being a student to be her sole priority. But in reality, she was a sister, daughter, caregiver, income contributor, and more. She woke up early to take timed midterms before her familial responsibilities started, and she stayed up late to do homework after everyone had gone to bed. “In hindsight,” she reflects, “I know I wasn’t doing my best work.” She watched lectures in 15-minute chunks in between preparing meals, and she avoided synchronous classes, knowing that, “at any moment, someone could knock on my door and ask for my help with something—and I would [help them].” It would be a mistake to presume that these responsibilities end when student caregivers leave home. Danielle spent the summer after freshman year in Paris, thousands of miles from her family in Indiana, but she continued sending money back to her family. She still felt tethered to her caregiving responsibilities: “Half of my brain was Yale things, and then the other half was ‘My parents can’t afford the electric bill this month, and I’m in 21

Paris.’ I felt so guilty being in this place of so much opulence. My brain was exploding.”

All three of the student caregivers I interviewed spoke of the dissonance between the concerns Yale expected them to have and those that dominated their dayto-day thoughts. Naomi, who used income from her off-campus job to pay her family’s bills when the pandemic began, while also helping her younger brother with technology needs for his online classes, expressed frankly, “School was the last thing on [her] mind.”

Caregiving responsibilities took priority over grades, internships, and what Margaret described as the general pressure to “constantly over-achieve” that feels inescapable on Yale’s campus. As I heard these remarks, I recalled how frequently peers across Yale have voiced frustrations with the college’s high-pressure culture— and how rarely they are able to extricate themselves from it. For Margaret, the past months of caring for her father have been the primary exception to the “competitive extracurricular and leadership culture” that she was immersed in during high school and her freshman year at Yale.

While caregiving involved sometimes overwhelming stressors, it also offered students a sense of identity beyond productivity or “success” as a Yale student. Student caregivers found new priorities: staying grounded, being intentional about their behavior towards friends and family, and improving themselves “beyond Yale’s strict definitions,” in Margaret’s words. Care deepened the quality of their lives in many ways. Rather than viewing caregiving as an obstacle to their success, they sought to affirm their roles as caregivers, while lessen 22

ing the burdens they carried as students.

Huddling with her family in their living room as the power flickered back on, Margaret jumped up to plug in her laptop and email her residential college dean to ask for help in receiving an extension. “I sent her a newspaper article about the power outage,” Margaret said. Though the dean had not requested proof, she felt like she “had to do that.”

With the email sent, she and her sister gathered at her father’s desk, a small wooden table with barely enough room for their bulking computer, a mouse, and two hard-backed chairs. The two daughters spent the remainder of the evening helping their dad talk through and type up the contents of emails and documents.

Margaret credits her relationship with her dean, who eventually helped her get an extension on that paper, as being a major source of academic support over the past few semesters. Leading research on student caregivers’ experiences echoes this, finding that strong advising relationships are crucial to these students’ success. According to a 2017 paper by University of Iowa researcher Lisa Schumacher, caregivers at earlier stages in their academic careers, or who lack the social resources to establish advising relationships, are left at an even greater risk of falling behind. Though the advising relationships were valuable to Margaret, they still felt limited to her capacity to perform for Yale: “It was more so, ‘How can we make time for you to complete these assignments?’ than, ‘How can we make this less stressful and ease this burden for you?’” After receiving the extension, concerns about her father’s condition still made it difficult for Margaret to

concentrate on the paper. She was able to find resources to navigate the logistical challenges, but not the emotional dimensions of caregiving.

Yale’s sole institutional resource directed at student caregivers is Dwight Hall’s Family Support Fellowship, which offers stipends and opportunities for community building to students supporting their families through the COVID-19 pandemic. When I spoke with Mark Fopeano, the fellowship’s administrator, about the origin of the program, he confessed that a conversation with a student last spring revealed to him the limitations of his knowledge about students’ experiences, and left him “[feeling] silly that I had made this assumption that just because a student was 20, that they didn’t know what it was like to have to work with young children around.” That conversation and further dialogue with students and administrators shaped the fellowship, which launched in the fall and provides 34 students with stipends between $318.75 and $1,275 per semester.

The application process is short— students enter their names and addresses then select one of the following types of family support they provide: 1. Supporting the academics and social emotional development of school-aged family members 2. Providing basic needs support to at-risk family members, 3. Extending care for family members recovering from COVID-19, or 4. Other Fopeano stressed how important it was that students can access the fellowship’s resources without having to divulge sensitive inforT HE NEW JOUR NAL

mation about their experiences— both lessening the burden on already overwhelmed students, and limiting administrators’ role in deciding which student caregivers are “most deserving” of support. In its most recent round, all of the applicants received the fellowship, though the future of the program remains unclear as Yale plans for a return to a fully in-person campus in the fall.

The fellowship is a first step in acknowledging the variety and complexity of students’ experiences and responsibilities. A further step would be to fulfill the demands of Students Unite Now (SUN)—echoed by all three interviewees—to eliminate the student income contribution, which intensifies the burden of students who financially contribute to their families’ needs. SUN is also fighting to diversify and strengthen Yale’s Mental Health and Counseling Resources, which could help connect students with socioemotional support as they navigate caregiving responsibili-

MAY 2021

ties. Danielle also suggested that Yale professors increase flexibility in scheduling office hours and offer recordings of lectures to accommodate students who work long hours. Professors and administrators could implement these policies without demanding that students divulge sensitive information regarding their personal circumstances. These improvements would help remedy Yale’s unrealistic demand that, as Danielle says, “students keep going no matter what. There’s no space to grieve, mourn, or be human; you’re expected to first and foremost be a Yale student, when first and foremost we are people.” Institution-wide reforms to financial aid, mental healthcare, and teaching policy could move to honor the wide range of identities and responsibilities among student caregivers, and in doing so, transform our campus into a place where all students are supported as their full selves.

favorite memories of the time spent with her family over the past year. She laughed and reminisced about watching Antiques Roadshow with her parents. As the night darkened after a long workday, they would gather in the family room and climb onto the couch. “We’d watch on the TV, which is so old; it belonged to my grandparents actually, so it just turns off at random times.”

Nestled among her family as they laughed and shared reactions to the show, Margaret felt herself relax: “It was just good to talk with them about things in my life and in the world beyond the context of Yale.”

— Kanyinsola Anifowoshe is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Margaret about her

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B

K O O B E H T Y What The Ethical Investor, Yale’s investing Bible, means for divestment.

By Jack Tripp

Collage and design by Annli Nakayama

Images Source: Library of Congress

T

he first and only Harvard-Yale game I attended was among the most eventful ever played. In 2019, not only did Yale overcome Harvard’s double-digit lead to win by a touchdown in double overtime, but halftime was prolonged by hundreds of activists from both schools, who stormed the field in support of divestment from fossil fuels. It was a dramatic introduction to the debates, sit-ins, demands, and complexities that characterize the push-and-pull over how Yale makes money through investment—investments which were valued at $31.2 billion as of July 2020, according to Yale’s Investments Office.

In early December, I attended an open meeting with Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, where various student leaders spoke in support of divestment from fossil fuel companies. It wasn’t a conversation in any recognizable sense, and the underlying assumptions of the two sides (student-activists and committee members) were so different it could barely be called a debate—more like successive presentations. The students— undergraduate organizers, members of the Yale College Council, and graduate students—presented an argument focused on the urgency of the climate crisis and our moral obligation to preserve ourselves and our planet. Members of the committee referred repeatedly to the limitations on divestment outlined in The Ethical Investor, the almost 50-year-old text which defines how and when Yale should exercise its power as an investor to foment social change.

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Later that week, I ordered a hard copy of The Ethical Investor from a small used bookstore in Connecticut. It arrived three weeks late, delayed in a shipping facility somewhere between New Jersey and Springfield, MA. With a view over the woods outside my bedroom window, I sat down to read it. It wasn’t easy.

Written by John Simon, Charles Powers, and Jon Gunnemann, The Ethical Investor is relatively short, only 178 pages, but only the final seven of those pages actually lay out any policy recommendations for how a university should invest with social obligations in mind. The other 171 explore a wide-ranging defense of those recommendations, discussing the responsibilities of corporations and shareholders, the questions at stake for the university as an investor, and the legal justification for a socially responsible investment policy.

The book was written in 1972 to explore and define the university’s role as a socially conscious investor. At the time, students on college campuses across the country were concerned with the complicity of higher education in the war in Vietnam and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

For administrators, on the other hand, Senator Joe McCarthy’s demagogic anti-communist campaign was still in recent memory, and leaders feared wading into what they viewed as political battles. I spoke over Zoom with one of the three co-authors of The Ethical Investor, Jon Gunnemann DIV ’75, who had helped to write the text while at the Divinity School. Today, he’s a smiling, white-haired professor emeritus of social ethics at Emory.

Gunnemann and his Divinity

School classmate, Charles Powers, first became interested in ethical investing through their South Africa Studies Group, a collection of socially-conscious students who wanted to leverage Yale’s influence to contribute to the end of Apartheid. Although they doubted their individual ability to make a significant difference, they saw Yale—and the Corporation (Yale’s governing Board of Trustees)—as an institution capable of forcing change.

Powers and Gunnemann wrote an article for the journal The Christian Century on pressuring the South African regime through socially responsible investing, hoping to catch the eye of J. Irwin Miller, a devout progressive Christian and member of the Corporation. They were successful—with some help from Yale’s Chaplain, who recommended the article to Miller. Powers and Gunnemann organized a meeting with Kingman Brewster Jr., Yale’s president at the time; Miller; and the rest of the Corporation at the Century Association, which was then an all-male social club in New York City.

John Simon LAW ’53, who had advocated for socially responsible investing in the nonprofit world, also joined the meeting, providing the legal expertise to back up the ideas Powers and Gunnemann had already been tackling. At that Century Association meeting, Miller sat silent until Brewster asked for his opinion. As Gunnemann recalls, Miller said, “I can’t see anything wrong with accountability.” And the question became not “if” but “how” Yale would institute a policy for socially responsible investing.

The answer was a year-long seminar in the 1969-70 term at

25

the Law School, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Students from the Law School, Divinity School, School of Forestry, and College formed teams to explore the legal, economic, and ethical ramifications of various possible policies. They examined wide-ranging case studies and drew on expert knowledge, seeking a set of policies that could address not only the issue of Apartheid but social harm in any form. The product of these hours of research, conversation, and debate was The Ethical Investor, written for Yale by members of the Yale community and adopted as University policy by vote of the Corporation in April of 1972.

It was a powerful statement that Yale would not claim blindness or profess neutrality when its investments were perpetuating social harm.

The Ethical Investor differentiates between negative injunctions (i.e., the avoidance of harm) and affirmative duties (the promotion of good), stating “that all citizens, individual and institutional, are equally subject to the negative injunction against social injury”—a principle they term as the “moral minimum.” The text expects that Yale’s Investments Office will generally seek maximum economic return in selecting where they invest the University’s resources. “Nonprofit factors” are those considerations, like moral culpability, which are not primarily concerned with profit-seeking. They come into play when a company is found to be committing “social injury,” such as the perpetuation of Apartheid or the pollution of air and water. In such cases, the text recommends that Yale pursue shareholder actions—measures aimed at changing a company’s practices 26

while still holding shares in it.

The text instructs that divestment should be the last resort, a step only taken if, (1) the exercise of shareholder rights are unlikely to effectively change the company’s behavior, (2) elimination of the socially injurious behavior would make investment in the company unprofitable, or (3) the university expects to sell its shares before any shareholder action initiated by the university could be finished. Activists at Yale have recently argued that the past practices of fossil fuel companies demonstrate that they are resolved in their resistance to change. According to the guide-

“...the other big question [is], who has the power...”

lines of The Ethical Investor, this would make divestment justified.

The text also recommends that a “University Investments Council”—now the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR)—be established to recommend policies to the trustees in response to requests from members of the Yale community. In the fall of 2020, President Peter Salovey established the parallel Committee on Fossil Fuel Investment Principles (CFFIP) to inform Yale’s fossil fuel investment policy specifically. Both the ACIR and the CFFIP advise the Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, which

guides the full Board in directing the policies of the Investments Office. In mid-April, the CFFIP produced guidelines recommending that Yale divest from individual fossil fuel producers that most contribute to climate change and seem least likely to change their practices. The ACIR is now tasked with interpreting these policies, investigating the practices of individual fossil fuel companies, and making recommendations for divestment to the Investments Office on a case-bycase basis. The Investments Office currently estimates that Yale has $800 million invested in fossil fuels.

In his capacity as chair of both the ACIR and the CFFIP, Jonathan Macey LAW ’82, Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law at Yale Law School, explained to me the importance of standards like The Ethical Investor in guiding Yale’s investment policy. Yale is a fiduciary—meaning its trustees are obligated to maximize returns. Because the University generally has a responsibility to maximize the profits of its investment, guidelines like The Ethical Investor and the CFFIP’s report are necessary for when the University takes non-profit factors into account.

The authors of The Ethical Investor anticipate and preempt numerous legal objections to their investment policy. One such defense is the “Education-Climate Rationale,” a rebuttal which seems especially well-suited to the present moment. The authors indicate that there may be instances in which friction between students and university leadership grows so incurable that the functioning of the academic community

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

is disrupted—stemming from “a weakening of the fabric of trust and confidence among members of the university population.” In these cases, the university would be justified in a measured acceptance of student demands. They compare any potential loss of profits to a business’s provision of “stock options, pension benefits, and trips to Florida”—expenditures that ease conflict and contribute to the long-term wellbeing of an environment in which the organization’s mandate is better fulfilled.

Nevertheless, while the book values a university that demonstrates its receptivity to students’ social concerns, in seeking remedies to those concerns, The Ethical Investor aims to balance moral purity and effectiveness— how can the university actually encourage change with its investments, while recognizing that sometimes it is necessary to cut ties with a company altogether?

In the end, the book emphasizes change from the inside (to an excessive degree, some might argue), accomplished while fossil fuel stock is still held by the Yales of the world—institutions that are aware of their impact and actively seeking to change the behavior of the corporations with which they are associated. Meanwhile, it does expect that the university as a shareholder will hold companies accountable in an oversight capacity, relying on shareholder action when necessary.

Many student activists today, however, argue that the “morally pure” choice (divestment) is also the most effective and necessary one—that Yale’s influence is so great and the climate crisis so grave that a decision to divest sets a needed precedent for others to follow.

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In that seminar in which the first draft of The Ethical Investor was penned, students found that divestment depressed the stock price of the company in question for twenty-four hours, after which it bounced back as other (assumedly less responsible) investors took advantage of the lower price. And so the policy they developed positioned divestment as a last resort—one which evoked “the war movies in which the beleaguered infantry-man, having exhausted his ammunition, finally hurls his rifle at the advancing hordes.” It was the final step when there was no hope for changing a company’s practices through engagement with it. When I spoke with him in early April—before the release of the updated divestment guidelines—Gunnemann said he had supported divestment from fossil fuels for the past three years.

And with the CFFIP report, it seems that Yale is adopting policies that align more closely with Gunnemann’s judgment and the consensus among numerous student activists.

As my conversation with Gunnemann wrapped up, he emphasized one thing he learned when writing The Ethical Investor: “How you frame an issue becomes really decisive… and, of course, the other big question [is], who has the power to frame issues?” He was referring specifically to fossil fuel companies, which he feels have exerted disproportionate influence on discussions of the environment. My impression was that students conveyed a similar sentiment concerning the fossil fuel debate at Yale—that the very way in which the conversation is framed limits their ability to engage.

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“We need to think about not just divesting as a political act

This semester, the main conversations around fossil fuel divestment took place in two listening sessions with the CFFIP attended by student leaders and activists.

Elaine Louden MPH ’22, a member of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, told me, “In [The Ethical Investor] itself, I don’t see a lot of problems. I think it’s more about how people interpret what is in the book.” Before the release of the CFFIP report, she expressed dissatisfaction with how student concerns had been received—as did Jordi Bertrán Ramírez ’24, a YCC Senator and Sustainable Policy Co-Chair who was also present at the listening sessions. Louden, who first engaged in the divestment debate at Yale in this session, found it to be a disappointing introduction.

She felt that there was an absence of voices who could speak to the impact of climate change from a public health perspective. When I asked Macey about the students’ characterizations of the listening sessions, he admitted that the committee had not communicated as openly as they should have at the initial meeting. “They may not feel heard,” Macey said.

“I feel horrible about that—but they changed my mind about a couple of issues.” He hoped that when students read the commit-

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tee’s report, however, they would see their arguments reflected and addressed in the text.

Bertrán Ramírez said, “Upon reading the report, a lot of what was enclosed in that document were near-direct quotes of what students had said in our meeting with the CFFIP, which was surprising, to say the least.” He referred specifically to the portions which emphasized the producer’s responsibility in limiting the availability of fossil fuels, when in the past the committee had often argued that it was the duty of consumers to limit their consumption and the job of the government to regulate. He conveyed the sense of empowerment that comes with seeing the real outcomes of student activism. He also expressed hope that students might have a say in the implementation of the CFFIP principles—especially when it comes to selecting the specific companies from which the University will divest. This is a possibility that depends largely on the receptivity of the administration.

Even before the release of the CFFIP report and its adoption into Yale’s investment policy by the Corporation, activists at Yale had their next steps planned. Scott Gigante GRD ’23 organized the Yale Forward campaign to elect

a Yale alum to the Corporation.

The campaign’s candidate, Maggie Thomas ENV ’15, suspended her run in accordance with White House ethics rules in order to become Chief of Staff of the Office of Domestic Foreign Policy earlier this year. Yale Forward is still pushing for a more diverse Corporation, however, which might utilize the University’s platform to encourage broader social change.

When I spoke with Gigante, he skipped the customary talkingpoints of divestment almost entirely. “We need to think about not just divesting as a political act but investing as a political act,” he said. Such social impact investing would step beyond the socially responsible investing policy enumerated in The Ethical Investor, taking into consideration not just the prevention of harm but the promotion of good. He cited the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Gates Foundation, both of which have earmarked small percentages of their endowments for social impact investing. Macey, however, expressed doubts about social impact investing, wondering if a measure like that would limit the University’s ability to provide financial aid or hire new faculty.

Gigante takes issue not only T HE NEW JOUR NAL

but investing as a political act.” with the limited guidelines in The Ethical Investor but also with their execution: “In terms of the ACIR, I see not just an accessibility problem or a disincentive to participate, but actually a lack of accountability and a lack of mandate.” The ACIR—the main vehicle for student input—conducts private conversations and issues nonbinding recommendations which may or may not be made public. For this reason, in many instances, students may not see the results of their advocacy.

Macey made clear to me that he wants his committees to be transparent and communicative.

Although it does not argue that investment decisions should be predicated on popular opinion, The Ethical Investor tasks the ACIR with making recommendations to the Corporation in response to “requests from members of the university community,” a mandate which is founded on the ability of the committee to mediate between students and trustees.

Gigante and Bertrán Ramírez— the two activists with whom I followed up after the release of the CFFIP report—expressed differing degrees of satisfaction.

Bertrán Ramírez’s anticipation especially came across: “We are at the cusp of something.” Earlier, he and Gigante had spoken MAY 2021

of their engagement with The Ethical Investor as necessary to communicate with Yale’s powers-that-be. At the time, they did not feel heard by the Yale administration. Although those emotions may have changed with the release of the report, which Bertrán Ramírez describes as a win brought about by nearly a decade of student activism, Gigante still worries that the efficacy of the CFFIP’s principles will be limited by the decision-making structure. He sees a pattern emerging of an institution slow to respond to valid demands for change, a “now-typical ten year timespan for the Corporation to respond to concerns of investor responsibility, as has been the case in both Apartheid divestment and fossil fuel divestment.” It is an issue which both he and Bertrán Ramírez feel may be remedied by more direct student engagement with the Corporation and clearer conversations with the administration on questions regarding both divestment and investment.

At the very beginning of my first conversation with Jonathan Macey he referred to The Ethical Investor as the Bible of Yale’s investment policy—not solely for its importance but also for its endless debatability. Gunnemann later analogized it to the Consti-

tution, emphasizing that it is not a text which one should interpret with an originalist mindset. He hopes that the document encourages evolving conversations about the difficulties of investing responsibly.

The Ethical Investor is no longer a young document—2022 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. As may occur with any statement of principles, over time a changing context has rendered parts of its content insufficient. Activists will continue to pose important questions. Should students be named to the Corporation? The ACIR disbanded in favor of more direct access to trustees? Does The Ethical Investor frame the conversation in a way that fosters engagement? Perhaps it is time for a repeat of that 196970 seminar at the Law School, to respond to these proposals and many more. In whatever forum they take place, however, ongoing conversations will have to recognize the validity of such questions, the limitations of the current system, and the necessity of self-critical examination.

— Jack Tripp is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

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SAFE as HOUSES Between bidding wars and evictions, Connecticut’s housing market has never been more distorted.

BY ZACHARY GROZ

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Image sources: CT Department of Housing, transformed from original. “many more condo-for-sale signs posted in lake oswego - DSC01710,” by sean dreilinger, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, transformed from original.

“House,” by Brandon Blahnik, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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n Hartford this past February, at the headquarters of Aquiline Drones, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont spoke of the state’s buoyant economic mood. Businesses like Aquiline were starting to reverse the drift of the last decade, where companies threatened to leave the state whenever the legislature proposed new taxes, and then did so anyway, regardless of whether the bills passed or died in committee.

Then, like everyone everywhere, he talked about the real estate market. For years, Connecticut’s population had been flowing out, and now, finally, it was beginning to flow in. New Yorkers and Bostonians were converting to the exurbs, spurred by COVID-19’s indefinite pause on cosmopolitanism. More people, by choice or circumstance, were, in his words, “rediscovering the Connecticut lifestyle.”

If in parts of Connecticut home prices were already astronomical, in recent months they’ve become solar: dialed in “hot,” “red-hot,” “white hot,” and “hot hot” in the breathless language of real estate.

According to the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA), the median sales price of a home in Greenwich went from $935,000 to $1,371,250 in 2020.

Westport values hit $1,267,500.

New Canaan: $1,377,000. Prices in New Haven went up 18.9 percent. Redding: 76.9 percent.

Sharon: 141.6 percent. Sprague: 930.8 percent.

For twenty years, the CHFA has meticulously recorded each peak, valley, boom, and bust of the state’s home sales prices. The graph trends like a manic EKG: line sharply up, sharply down, flat, and repeat. The ride up has been good before, but the marMAY 2021

ket has never sustained this much bounce. Between February 2020 and February 2021, the average home sale price in the state was up 38.7 percent, by far a single-year record. An April article from the real estate site Rocket Homes asks the Hamletian question that these trends beg: “Rosy or Bleak?” How far can this kind of growth go before the market snaps?

“These markets are driven by narratives,” Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, and the author, most recently, of Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, told me.

One narrative says that the current housing market—Connecticut’s and the country’s, both up double-digit percentages in valuation since last March—is importantly unlike the bubble that burst in 2008-9, that the panic over home prices and scarcity will eventually soothe itself: Urbanites simply realized Connecticut had a trove of houses, and they had the money to spend on them. The market’s bullishness has gotten many people in the state hooked on the hope of a renaissance.

“The Great Recession…was really driven by the real estate market,” said Tammy Felestein, the president-elect of the Connecticut Association of Realtors. But, she told me, “In this case, I think real estate is going to be a big part of what’s going to pull us out of the COVID devastation.”

Housing supply in the state is caught in a net of interlocking market forces, tangled further by the bull market. Judging by Zillow’s monthly data on metro area housing inventories, the scramble for Connecticut real estate really began in late September of

last year. September was when the New Haven, Hartford, and Stamford metro areas went on a selling tear and, over the next six months, lost over 37 percent of their inventories. The shortage in supply juiced the base prices of whatever homes happened to be left on the market.

To cope, buyers are marketing themselves to sellers like high school seniors before college admissions tribunals: writing personal letters to sellers to prove their worth, paying sums far above the asking price, and waiving inspections. At open houses, some prospective buyers don hospital scrubs at the seller’s request, and the cars pile into the twenties and thirties. Seeing a dozen offers in a day on a single house—all cash, no questions—is commonplace now.

Also commonplace is an appetite for room, which has dramatically changed the number and kind of building permits being issued by the state. In September, the state issued 649 residential building permits, according to Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development, and from there the number has steadily declined each month. In February, the last month of reported data, there were only 240. In 2020, just under 60 percent of those permits had been issued for building multifamily units, the format that tends to be most affordable in the state. Between September 30 and February 28, that figure dipped below 43 percent. In January and February of this year, close to 70 percent of permits issued were for single-family homes—the big ones endemic to the area. Buyers want to buy large and builders want to build large.

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Big single-family homes are profitable for builders—more than enough to compensate for super-charged lumber and steel prices—and have never been more in demand. New economics also means sacrificing chic: Fewer homes have been built to the buyer’s specifications this past year than the norm, according to Jim Perras, CEO of the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Connecticut. People aren’t sculpting dream houses; they’re just buying. Even more at odds with prior expectation, Perras told me, has been the “increased interest in single-family built for rent, which has historically been a very small subset of the market.”

Demand for buying and demand for rentals have almost always been inversely related: When one gets more intense, the other stagnates or shrinks. Not now.

So there’s more high-end rental and single-family construction, less construction overall, more buying, lower inventory, higher prices, fewer sellers, more bids, less paperwork, more cash, fewer questions. Marcus Smith, Director of Research, Marketing and Outreach at the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, a public-private mortgage lender in the state prioritizing low-income borrowers, said the organization has been closely monitoring “the use of cash to buy homes” that’s been squeezing out first-time buyers.

Applying and being approved for a mortgage eats up months, and in that time, you’re liable to being scooped by someone who can pay up-front. Low-income buyers don’t stand a chance. The state’s now polarized, more than ever before, between a class that owns and a class that can’t even entertain the idea.

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That polarity happens to coincide with a balanced budget in Hartford: The state is enjoying a 245 million dollar surplus, sustained by new income tax revenue and federal aid. But the State Assembly’s legislative docket gives some indication of how unevenly that balance is being felt, especially at the local level where funding deficits are either desperate or nonexistent, nowhere in between. Five bills have been introduced since January to address the state’s byzantine revenue collection and allocation methods. One, SB 742,

“BUYERS ARE MARKETING THEMSELVES TO SELLERS LIKE HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS BEFORE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS TRIBUNALS.” fully funds the state’s municipal revenue sharing account, which pools sales taxes and distributes them as grants to municipalities; in the last six years, the system has failed to deliver the hundreds of millions of dollars it pledged upon inception and let cities buckle under untenable debts. Another, SB 821, creates a child tax credit, removes the current fifteen million dollar cap on estate taxes, and raises the property tax credit to four hundred dollars—policies meant to redistribute wealth without injecting liquidity into a market with persistent inflation fears.

Money is sitting in the state’s accounts. Now it’s a matter of moving and raising more steady streams of it. At the day-long public hearing on SB 821 back in mid-March, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker took aim at one of the state’s more adamantine problems: “Our overemphasis on hyper-local property tax funding desperately needs reform, if we want to move our state forward and make it more equitable and a more just place.” Connecticut is now the only state besides Rhode Island that has no formal county government, and, therefore, no way to tax real estate collectively across towns. Since the county system was abolished by the Democratic majority in 1960—what Republicans predictably called an attempt at “dictatorial rule”—only the wealthiest of the state’s 169 towns have been able to adequately provide basic services, like housing, education, and infrastructure. The state ended up not with a tyranny of the legislature, but a dictatorship of the towns. Towns without a large property tax base, like New Haven, simply have not been able to raise the funds others have in spades.

Now state Democrats are trying to restore a collective mode of taxation, and Republicans are calling that dictatorship, too. Debates on new taxes can range in tone from bedtime meditation to Civil War march, and lately both have been playing in the state. Two proposals in particular have had people waxing wroth: SB 171 and SB 172, drafted by the President Pro Tempore of the State Senate, New Haven’s Martin Looney (D-11), which would impose a state-wide property assessment and tax. The response from thousands across the state was acrid, T HE NEW JOUR NAL

COLLAGES BY ZACHARY GROZ DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA Image sources: “picket fence,” by Mr Thinktank, licensed under CC BY 2.0. “McMansion,”

by FunnyBiz, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, transformed from original.

and broke party lines: petitions sprung up in defense of “home rule,” against “big government dictating” and “usurping the power of ‘We the People.’” The debate is no longer strictly factional; it’s the old collision of court, country, and city, the sectional interests that divert attention from the source of social pain: greed.

“In Connecticut, we have 169 jealously self-protective municipal fiefdoms,” Looney told me, using the feudal analogy he often deploys when talking about the state. “There’s this strong tradition of local control here that’s politically toxic to disturb.”

SB 1024, the “DesegregateCT” bill, named after the activist group that’s been pushing for zoning reform in the state, disturbed that same tradition. The bill proposes loosening local zoning restrictions to increase housing stock, naturally deflating the cost of buying and renting throughout the state, and alleviating both its affordability crisis and its glaring racial inequities.

“We’ve been focused on transit-oriented development. That’s a strategy that was just adopted in Massachusetts, nearly unanimously by the state legislature,” said Sara Bronin, the organizaMAY 2021

tion’s founder. “Those reforms passed on a bipartisan basis. You look at the discourse here, and it’s just completely bizarre and totally puzzling.”

DesegregateCT’s plans for transit-oriented development, which, in the first iteration of the bill, gave developers license to build multifamily housing within half a mile of a city’s main transport hub without “minimum parking requirements,” were stricken entirely in the revision that got out of committee, undercutting the bill’s intent. The “minimum parking requirements” that local zoning authorities now impose up and down the Gold Coast have made building affordable housing mathematically crazy: If developers are compelled by law to carve out three parking spots for every studio apartment they build, the

apartment’s base price is bound to shoot up. The unspoken upshots of requirements like these are less diverse communities and more exclusive prosperity.

Beyond parking, towns have a varied arsenal of caveats and conditions to pull from: deliberate limitations on the extent of sewage systems, minimum acreages for construction, excessive rounds of land-use applications and appeals. These have persisted even with legislative updates to decades-old affordable housing 33

mandates. “The only thing that’ll work,” said Anika Singh Lemar, a clinical professor at Yale Law School who specializes in affordable housing, “is a much firmer stance from the state that the kinds of misbehavior and lack of action that we see at the local level are unacceptable and are undermining not just the lives of low-income people but the state’s economy.”

Opponents of even a watereddown version of the DesegregateCT bill have called it an affront to a way of life. “The global trend for three thousand years is increased density,” said Greenwich State Representative Harry Arora (R-151), who’s become the face of the opposition. “We all come together. We build cities. The good news is Connecticut is not that. If you think about Connecticut, we are different from many other states in our country. We do not have two big cities which have all the people and everything. Our large cities are about 5 percent of our population. We have a really good model, which has evolved over centuries, and there is no need to do a drastic surgery.”

The Connecticut model has always been good at concealing the quiet desperation below its surface with loud politics. Not only its towns, but the state’s whole economy is now segregated: between those in a recession and those not. Rent, and the inability to pay it, is a good measure of a dire economy, since people choose to pay rent before anything else—food included—when a choice is exacted upon them.

At least 19 percent of renters in the state (over 226,000 people) were behind on rent in March of this year compared to 15 per-

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cent nationally, Daniel Threet, a research analyst at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), told me. Since September, when the state loosened its moratorium, the number of eviction lawsuits has risen rapidly: from 198 in September 2020 to 882 in March 2021, according to data from the Connecticut Fair Housing Center. “These evictions do so much more down-stream damage than just losing the housing,” said Darren Pruslow, a supervising attorney at Connecticut Veteran Legal Services. They tear at a person’s ability to live.

In response, on top of the porous moratorium, the state has implemented a rental assistance program called UniteCT: an exclusively online portal where tenants and landlords can apply for a piece of $235 million in federal aid. The program amounts to callousness on a grand scale: a quarter of low-income people in the state don’t own a computer, according to Dalio Education’s 2020 year-end report. UniteCT’s remedy has been to send a bus full of computers on a 6-days-aweek tour of the state. Of course, to get to the bus, you need know it exists, you need to look online to find out where it will be on a specific day, you need to travel to it, most likely to another town or a far off part of the state, have all your paperwork in hand, have your taxes filed, and have time off from work to spare. The program has gotten 2,200 applications, as of April 7—1 percent of people who are already behind on rent.

All the funds from the program have to be committed by September 30 of this year and paid out

by December 30. The leftovers go back to the Treasury.

the prominent economist and best-selling author of The Origin of Financial Crises, what he made of this M.C. Escher-like economy and its seemingly endless imagination for new obscenities, he told me that our territory was uncharted and the endgame unknown: “The COVID lockdown has been the most bizarre period economically in human history.” Bizarre, yes. And cruel.

— Zachary Groz is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

When I asked George Cooper,

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

PERSONAL ESSAY

IMAGINING MYSELF Why I turned to fiction during the pandemic.

DESIGN AND COLLAGES BY ADA GRIFFIN

BY BEASIE GODDU

MAY 2021

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I

t’s April 7, 2020, and I am sitting in a tree in a park in what feels like the eye of the pandemic. The air is chilly and I can smell yesterday’s lingering rain, the only sign of spring beginning to creep out from hiding. New York City has just reached over three thousand deaths from COVID-19. Each day I have watched the numbers soar upwards on my phone and either resisted or succumbed to the impulse to call everyone I love and ensure that they are O.K. But now it is different and worse: today NYC COVID-19 deaths have surpassed the number of people who died on September 11, 2001—2,977. Anyone born before those attacks felt we had now descended to an unknown, unimaginably horrible circle of hell.

My tree sits at the top of a hill in Morningside Park, by 114th Street. One of the highest in Manhattan, this hill is my sentry point: a height from which I can keep track of everything that passes below. In front of me the ground falls away into Harlem, East Harlem, the East River, and Queens.

At my back is the Morningside branch of Mount Sinai Hospital. I know it is there, though I do not turn to look, because I grew up three blocks away. I also know because the wail of sirens drowns out the Rolling Stones’ “Emotional Rescue” playing in my headphones. Many think of the early pandemic period as silent, the moment the world went quiet. New York did not go quiet.

It was loud and shrill, filled with the ringing sirens that signalled another person so ill that they had reached their last resort. No one wanted to be in the infectious miasma of the hospital unless it

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was their only option. In this new aural landscape, I began to read, not to fill the silence, but to shut out the noise.

Over the next two months I would read twenty-nine books on this hill—roughly three and a half books a week. My close friend worked every night as an EMT, saving lives; I stayed at home reading. Going out in the world might have endangered others. Why I continued to read, even after the first burst, is more complicated. Books would give me the tools to reconstruct myself, clothed in the opportunity of escape.

What is fiction for? This question has been either written about or ignored by generations of writers and readers, and it forms the basis of people’s confusion at why I am an English major.

Fiction, many have argued, does not serve a greater purpose. But this assertion misses the point: whether it has a ‘purpose’ or not, it certainly has effects.

I have many friends for whom reading fiction is escapism. It’s a way of evading the problems that exist in your world and entering another one where you don’t have to deal with the complications

of being “you.” This, I think, is why kiosks in airports sell potboilers and romance novels. If you’re escaping daily life with a vacation, you want your reading to help you. In New York City in April 2020, escapism seemed understandable. But is escapism always frivolous?

I began with a desire to leave, go anywhere, since my life last spring was an unusually self-contained narrative. It was a story of isolation that did not spill over into others but remained within the structure it could itself produce—and under the circumstances it produced a soliloquy.

Through reading, I could break through that structure and engage with a multitude of narratives that interrogated and enriched my own. As I read, my soliloquy became a dialogue. Tayeb Salih and Zadie Smith, generations apart, exchanged diverse immigrant experiences. Sam Shepard and James Baldwin sparred cross-country over the enduring power of past loves. By leaving my own world behind I tumbled into several others.

Virginia Woolf writes of this fall into another world, this merging of the self and the other.

In a letter to her friend Ethel Smyth, Woolf explains that the novel “splits us into two parts as we read.” Through reading, we experience “complete elimination of the ego” and also “perpetual union” with the mind of another. Woolf’s language is a bit grandiose—I’m not sure if many readers can lay claim to a “complete elimination” or “perpetual union.” Yet the attempt is worth a shot. Like Woolf, I have found that to read a book as deeply as I can, I must nearly abandon myself on the first page. I must

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

first yield myself completely to listening—to understanding and picturing the author’s imagined world. Only through listening can I come close to the central truth of the story and then sustain it myself.

Once I stepped into the uncharted geographies of these texts, I became aware of what enabled me to keep travelling through them: my ability to observe. For me, this kind of observation can only follow a surrender to imagination. This pairing of imagination and observation ran through my every day.

I imagined entire worlds and noticed their contents as I moved through my own empty and familiar landscape. As I walked through a deserted New York, I lived in the worlds I read of and walked the paths I made through them. In Central Park, staring at the now perpetually empty Great Lawn, I gazed at J.M. Coetzee’s South African veldts. In the gardens of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, I strolled with Virginia Woolf through the verdant grounds of Oxford. Alone save for the cathedral guard who checked my temperature, I watched her firm stride, the germ of A Room of One’s Own newly fertile in her mind.

As the writer Hernán Diaz recently said in a lecture at Yale, it is not fiction that is the opposite of truth. Falsehood is. Fiction contains truth at its heart. And if imagination and observation are the tools we use to engage with novels, fiction and truth are their respective fruits. My life has been in large part composed of a plurality of these truths: truths that express themselves in fiction, but are not false. At their best, these truths express what

MAY 2021

it is to grow up differently than I did: the truth of growing up a boy, of being a wizard, of facing racism. I cannot truly know these truths, but by setting them alongside one another, I aim to see from more than just my own perspective. Our lives are a “process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-weare-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them,” writes Zadie Smith. Like Smith, I traverse several different countries of the imagination.

—

By April 10, New York lost about three thousand people every four days. While to my friends in other regions of the country, the pandemic still seemed remote, it moved much closer to me. Friends lost one grandparent, then both. My sister’s father got very sick. My friend’s father died. Every week I would walk to buy groceries for an 85-year-old relative, and on the way I’d pass the hospital behind my reading hill. A policewoman stopped me from crossing the street: bodies, one by one, were being carried in grey bags to a freezer truck across the street. After I delivered my groceries and sat ten feet away from my relative for a few hours, I went the long way around, back to my hill to read.

Devoid of the people and places that had populated my life before, I was filled with absence.

Exiled from Yale, unable to see friends and family, and almost done with the semester, I had no idea what I wanted. Reading about what other people usually do, I thought, would be a good place to start. And so I began: in Michael Cunningham’s West Village, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Berlin, and James Baldwin’s Harlem. I

began to reconstruct myself.

When people’s lives drastically change—a move, a death, a career change, a breakup—they often deal with it through action: doing new things and meeting new people.

Instead I read about new people doing new things, and delighted in the dialogue they engaged me in.

When you read, especially during a national emergency, you have to imagine the world into which you step. You have to imagine other people’s lives to fill the space, and in the process, you begin to imagine your own. Suddenly, you’re able to apply the same creative vision, the same perceptive alertness, to what you might want and who you might want to be.

What does this new life of mine look like? Unsurprisingly, it is filled with books. I want a life where I can think about books as much as I would like. To write, but also to read. I want, I realized, to be an editor—to take the compassion I’d learned through imagining so many unfamiliar lives, and turn it towards new stories, fledgling stories, that I could help release into the world. In my own writing, I want to think through diverse theories and possibilities of fiction. And to do this, I have to keep reading.

To read in this new way, I have to leave my world and step out into space, simply listening. I discovered how to yield completely without losing myself, which is, I think, the same thing as falling in love. I had learned to fall in love with other people’s stories, with the pen still poised to write my own.

— Beasie Goddu is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College and a Senior Editor of The New Journal.

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PERSONAL ESSAY

ON GIANTS’ SHOULDERS Reflections on individualism in Liberia and America.

BY ABRAHAM KEITA

Growing up in Liberia, every day was the same: clear and sunny, beaming with the fresh warmth of a hot summer day. In the scourging heat, I would play 38

soccer with friends, while adults occupied the kitchens, preparing the day’s only meal. There were families that would go weeks on end without food. That was the group to which my family belonged.

But when it was dusk—the sun sliding into solemn repose, the moon and stars beginning their nocturnal course—all families gathered. As the night unfolded, I would, like other kids, make my way to the open space where neighbors congregated. Some nights were chilly, with the thick and dry wind, larded with the smell of tropical orchids in bloom, beating against our fragile, often malnourished faces. When everyone had settled in a spot, the adults would begin telling stories.

Listening to stories was a daily chore. One story I frequently heard throughout my younger life was about “the land of the free.” That this phrase squirmed its way to my small slummy hometown, into the ears and onto the tongues of men, women and

children whose lives had been arrested by poverty is still befuddling. I became familiar with the phrase before I knew the country’s name. When the adults told the story, some pronounced it “Ar-marica,” or others, “Air-merica.” But I didn’t care about the correct name or pronunciation. Nor was I interested in the authenticity of the story, for I knew that the adults who narrated it had never been on a plane, let alone traveled to America.

As the adults would explain, America was a country of enormous wealth. There were no haves and have-nots. It was the best in everything, including education, health, infrastructure.

Sometimes, an adult would mutter that if there was an asphalt road connecting Africa to America, he would walk to enter America.

That, they said, was better than wallowing in abject poverty. And so, I came to believe that America T HE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA Images source: Wikimedia Commons

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iberia is the land of my birth. Tiny, with a population of about five million people, it was the first African nation to gain political independence. In Africa, some prefer to call it “small America,” others “the America in Africa.” Why? Because Liberia was founded by Black people from America, many of whom were formerly enslaved.

Indeed, there couldn’t be better monikers for a country whose first ten presidents were born on American soil. But to me, these labels are meaningless sounds, mere rhetoric meant to invoke good feelings in a people languishing in poverty’s depths. The difference between the two countries couldn’t be any wider. My country ranks in the pantheon of the world’s poorest nations, while America is the world’s biggest economy. Yet nowhere is the difference between both countries more apparent than in their conception of individualism.

was the land of milk and honey.

I was also told that America was the best place for the individual to rise out of mediocrity. Human flourishing, through individual self-actualization, was the modus operandi. One could do whatever, whenever and however she desired. Everything the individual wanted was readily available, so long as she could work at it.

It seemed to me that American society aided and uplifted its people towards the realization of their goals. This bit of the story glued me to those nightly conversations. It was how I came to understand American individualism, long before I could dream of coming to America.

Individualism is America’s mantra, the crux of the American dream and American life. The country was founded on the cult of the individual, the belief that the country could only thrive when the individual is left to herself, and that she should engage in acts which maximize her happiness and satisfaction. In this way, the individual attains a sense of self and asserts her true identity through the exercise of her freedom. Americans cling to that individualism as a kind of inheritance that can’t be denied.

Back home, the kind of individualism I learned was steeped in moderation and boundless kindness. It taught that, as an individual, I have my own goals and make my own decisions, but only with the understanding that whatever I do either helps or harms some other individual.

This is not a moralist perspective: I use “help” and “harm,” not “good” and “bad.” The true individual is one who helps another individual, not by necessarily giving or doing something for them, MAY 2021

but by refraining from that which would harm them. Even the “rugged” individualist does not want to be harmed. And to the extent that I do not harm someone, I contribute to society by allowing for peaceful coexistence. Hence, this individualism considered the common good as a collection of individual goods.

Since coming to America, my childhood view of American individualism has changed.

Recently, I went with a friend to get groceries from a store not far from Yale’s campus. He took several items, as did I, but he was short two dollars. Bearing in

“I came to believe that America was the land of milk and honey.”

mind that we are friends, I gave the two dollars to the cashier.

Once we left the store, I told my friend that he shouldn’t bother to repay me. I grew up understanding friendship this way: friends are supposed to assist each other, be there for one another, especially during times of uncertainty and when in dire need. Surprisingly, after about a week, this friend transferred me two dollars through Venmo. How he guessed my Venmo username, I cannot tell. But I was taken aback, and realized that it was a cultural difference about individualism. Back home, when someone does some-

thing for you and makes it clear that there are no strings attached, you don’t repay the person. And to return what one has given or rebuff what one has done out of goodwill is interpreted as a disregard for friendship.

It is this tendency to help others that distinguishes the individualism I grew up with from American individualism. This is not to posit that American individualism prevents compassion. Rather, it seems to discourage one from being at the receiving end of kindness. In this sense, American individualism turns the individual into a self-absorbing being, who brings his pride to every encounter. He finds it shameful to be assisted by another.

Relationships in America seem to embody a tension between one individual and another. In other words, individuals interact with one another with the presupposition that everyone comes to every encounter as equals, and therefore, no one must allow herself to be aided or ‘pitied’ by another person. Even when one asks for help she does so by offering something in return. The fear is that any acceptance of assistance—of whatever kind—means defeat; it amounts to an admittance of one’s weakness, one’s vulnerability, one’s loss of self.

But it is precisely this absorption into oneself that leads to selfishness. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns Americans that “individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues; but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” If unchecked, individualism instills in the individual an indifference to human suffering and vulnerability. He pays no 39

“Individualism is America’s mantra, the crux of the American dream and American life.” attention to anyone, he seeks no one’s help or opinions, and considers everyone an opponent to his agenda. In a word, the individual loses his sense of empathy.

This is the character of American individualism today. It has gone amok. Kindness and compassion have become bêtes noires in modern American society. The American individualist seems to disregard the interest of the community. We need not look to history books to know this is true.

The evidence is right before our eyes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the danger of American individualism. While doctors and healthcare workers risk their lives to save everyone’s, the simple act of wearing a mask—an act of kindness to protect all of us—has been politicized, dismissed, and construed as an infringement on individual rights. For all the stories I heard about America as a child growing up in another country, I never imagined that individuals would be so self-seeking that they would ignore the common good. They refuse to grasp that the common good is quintessentially the sum of individual goods and that the destruction of the common good is necessarily the destruction of each individual good.

But 40

staunch

proponents

of

American individualism or “rugged individualism” lament that this account doesn’t favor personal freedom, for what is the individual then, they say, if she cannot do as she pleases, but must conform to the collective interest?

They pontificate that the individual ought to be allowed to pursue her own desires independent of any external influence if she is to be truly free.

But the common interest does not exclude the individual interest. In 2014, Liberia experienced one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in recent memory. Many lives were lost. For a time, people claimed that the epidemic was a hoax and that health restrictions were counterproductive. Like some Americans of today, there were Liberians who refused to wash or sanitize their hands while in public spaces. Whole communities followed suit. But in those areas where individuals acted to protect themselves, thereby protecting others, the cases quickly dropped. Eventually, people followed health guidelines thoroughly. In every shop, store and supermarket I entered, and in every household, it became mandatory to wash your hands and maintain social distancing.

Community leaders, government officials and members of political parties went across the country raising public awareness about Ebola. Liberia eradicated Ebola because everyone started to live according to our conception of individualism: help everyone, do harm to no one. Because of the lessons of Ebola, Liberia’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is less than 2,200 in twelve months, compared to about eleven thousand Ebola cases in

fifteen months. For a poor country with congested cities and towns, Liberia was not expected to maintain such low COVID-19 infection rates.

Although I am saddened by the nearly ninety people who have died in Liberia from COVID-19, I find solace in the fact that things are not as awful as they were in 2014, because individual Liberians know the benefit of acting in the common interest. Liberian individualism is based on a sense of duty to community and humanity and the recognition that each person needs a giant’s shoulders on which to stand.

American individualism would benefit from learning the same.

— Abraham Keita is a first-year in Branford College

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

EDWARD B. BENNETT III MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP

Do you have a story that you want to tell about Yale or New Haven that requires indepth reporting beyond the Elm City? Then apply for the Edward B. Bennett III Memorial Fellowship! For an EBMF-supported article, think about the national implications of local stories. The Fellowship commemorates the late Edward “Edder” B. Bennett III, Yale College Class of 1983, who revived The New Journal after a period of dormancy and served as its publisher in the early nineteen-eighties. For an EBMF-supported article, think about the national implications of local stories. You might propose investigating how a particular issue pertinent to New Haven has been felt in other cities, or how Yale has influenced (or been influenced by) a far-away place like Singapore or Sitka.

Fellows are expected to publish their articles in The New Journal within six months of receiving the award. Applications for summer projects will be due by May 28, 2021. Please email them to editors@thenewjournalatyale.com. Please also feel free to reach out with any questions!

Your application, due to us by May 28, 2021, should include the following: 1. A one-page proposal for the article you would like to write. Please tell us: what the article is about, how the article relates to Yale or New Haven, what the overarching questions will be, why this article should be written now, and why you think it is nationally significant.

2. A writing sample, either journalistic or academic. (If you have it, journalism is highly preferred.)

3. A budget detailing likely reporting expenses—such as transportation, court document fees, translation fees, or anything else. Please describe in detail how travel would enhance your proposed story. We expect awards to be on average around $1,000—if you have a strong proposal that requires more support, please be specific in explaining why.

JOIN US!

The New Journal, founded in 1967, is a student-run magazine that publishes investigative journalism and creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven. We produce five issues a year that include both long-form and short features, profiles, essays, reviews, and poetry. Email us at editors@thenewjournalatyale.com to join our writers’ panlist and get updates on future ways to get involved. We’re always excited to welcome new writers to our community. You can check out past issues of The New Journal at our website http://www.thenewjournalatyale.com/.

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JUICY DETAILS

The Inner Citrus made two demands. One: I must not inquire into their identities. They would not reveal those identities, and I would not pry. Two: I must partake in a shower orange. That much, at least, I had expected.

So one evening while my family watched TV downstairs, I brought a plump navel orange into the shower. It felt odd to have it in there with me, sort of like being trapped in a room with a strange, harmless animal. Eventually I began to peel the orange. Its skin was surprisingly tough. The zest caught under my fingernails; the juice and pulp leaked down my arms; the peel came off in small, irregular chunks. Conveniently— and this is perhaps the most persuasive argument voiced by fans of the shower orange—the water washed all the mess away. I made a little pile of peel chunks on a shelf in my shower. Then I ate the orange.

It tasted like a standard supermarket orange, somewhere between fine and good. It smelled nice, but not noticeably nicer than an orange does outside of the shower. The shower felt like a 42

Inside Yale’s most illustrious secret society.

BY ELI MENNERICK

shower: hot, pleasant. Perhaps the twin novelties of eating an orange in an unfamiliar place and performing an unfamiliar act in the shower made me more mindful of each element—that is, perhaps I enjoyed both the shower and the orange slightly more than I would have if I’d experienced them separately—but I wouldn’t call it liberating, or a sensual reverie, or a moment of spiritual transcendence.

The members of the Yale Shower Orange Society would. YSOS is a secret group of shower orange enthusiasts who have vowed to “spread the zested message of the blessed shower orange,” as they assonantly describe their mission.

I planned to interview their senior members—the “Inner Citrus,” as they call themselves—later that night.

So I emerged from the shower, brought my orange debris to the trash, clothed myself, and opened the Zoom meeting. On the call was Kumquat, a lonely-looking orange with human eyes and a human mouth floating in front of an orange grove. Kumquat told me that others would soon arrive.

COLLAGE AND DESIGN BY ADA GRIFFIN

ENDNOTE

Soon, they did. Blood Orange, Jaffa Orange, Valencia Orange, Clementine, and Tangerine all joined Kumquat. Most of them had identical setups: the same digital orange-head in front of a digital orange grove. Blood Orange and Valencia Orange had phoned in together. Their camera was off, and in lieu of a profile picture their square displayed an edited version of Magritte’s “The Son of Man.” I’m sure you can guess what the green apple had been replaced with.

The subreddit r/ShowerOrange was created in April 2015, but the trend didn’t blow up on Reddit until the next year. A shower orange, in case it isn’t clear yet, is nothing more than an orange you eat in the shower. Members of r/ ShowerOrange have described eating a shower orange as “borderline euphoric,” “a religious experience,” “amazingly blissful,” and generally transcendent. By the early months of 2017, publications like Men’s Health, Pure Wow, Vice, and even NPR had published online articles about the trend. (NPR’s testers concluded that eating a shower orange was nice, but “not T HE NEW JOUR NAL

life-changing.”) Still, r/ShowerOrange is active today; it boasts over sixty-nine thousand members. The trend has had a resurgence on TikTok as well. Over eighty-seven thousand people have viewed the hashtag “#orangeinshower.”

On the Zoom call, Blood Orange maintained that YSOS had been around since 1921. In fact, the Inner Citrus had prepared a whole slideshow presentation about their society’s incredible history. Their Latin motto is “AVRANCIA IN BALNEIS CERTATIM MANDVCAMVS,” which Kumquat helpfully translated as, “We eat oranges in the shower with zest.” YSOS was founded, according to this presentation, by three Yale undergraduates: “Bill Gates, on the left, Clifford Buchanan, in the center, and Jeb Bush, on the right,” Blood Orange said, displaying a photograph that, I later discovered, is one of the top results if you search “1920s fashion men” on Google Images. They traced their apocryphal history through the decades: At first, YSOS had a tomb on Orange Street. (I asked where the tomb was, exactly. “That’s classified,” Kumquat said.) Warren G. Harding banned shower oranges in 1922, apparently out of sheer malice toward what Tangerine called their “daring counter-culture.” The ban forced YSOS underground. After the 1928 Florida hurricane wiped out most of the state’s orange groves, YSOS members turned in desperation to shower apples, marking “the lowest point in shower orange history,” according to Clementine.

During the free love movement of the Sixties, shower oranges became a popular group activity at Yale, which again attracted the ire of the authorities. Yale’s president at the time, Kingman Brewster Jr., condemned shower oranges. “YSOS MAY 2021

disbanded and gave up its tomb,” said Jaffa Orange.

There was then, according to this fantastic tale, a period of dormancy from the nineteen-sixties onward. YSOS reassembled (or assembled, one suspects, for the first time) in 2018, but it was a small, fragile, secret group. When the pandemic interrupted their initiation process, the young society was in danger of dying for lack of new initiates. The members of YSOS had to do something if they wanted to keep their group alive.

So they went public. In early March, YSOS created the Instagram account “shower.orange. yale.” They post various bits of shower orange content; a graphic from March 17 asks, in orange text on a blue background, “Where is your favorite place to eat an orange?” Swiping through the post reveals a few options (“Trumbull Shower? Saybrook Shower? Pauli Murray Shower? Payne Whitney Shower?”) along with a helpful photo of each. So far they’ve accrued 529 followers.

Entering the public sphere has had its downsides. While the Inner Citrus have seen plenty of positive feedback on their Instagram account, they’ve also received lewd direct messages, apparently provoked by the erotic overtones some detect in the shower orange.

Even worse, “We also have people coming at us saying things like, ‘Can I eat a charcuterie board in the shower?’” Clementine said.

“The answer is obviously no.”

Despite their bullies, YSOS believes in welcoming others. “At a place that is already dripping wet with pretentiousness,” Kumquat said, referring to Yale, “we try to accept any and all followers who resonate with our mission.”

Shower oranges continued to perplex me—I couldn’t wrap my head around the astonishing zeal of their admirers. The Inner Citrus, of course, had plenty of explanations.

Tangerine said the smell makes a shower orange special. “Where does the smell come most intensely to us?” Tangerine asked. “In a very warm and humid environment.

And the most handy would be the shower.” (To my disappointment, you’ll recall, I found the smell of a shower orange no more intense than a normal orange.)

“It’s helped me tune into my spirituality,” Jaffa Orange said.

“I would argue that partaking in a shower orange is actually an act of political protest,” Kumquat said. “We’re all naked and enjoying the juice running down our bodies—it’s a very humanizing act, and therefore is inherently democratic.”

Clementine decided a poem would best express their love for shower oranges: “Taking a shower with citrus / the juice running orange and viscous / I chomp and I gnash / till the fruit is a mash / for I only have God as my witness.”

“It’s a very old poem,” Clementine said.

—

A week later, I tried again with a Cara Cara orange—pink, heavy, sweet, cold. I’m not saying I saw the light. And maybe all the praise of the Inner Citrus had clouded my judgement. But, I admit, it was a pretty phenomenal orange. One of my better showers, too.

— Eli Mennerick is a senior in Ezra Stiles College and Managing Editor of The New Journal.

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