Volume 46 - Issue 5 by The New Journal at Yale

THE NEW JOURNAL The magazine of Yale & New Haven

LOADED QUESTIONS A reporter learns to shoot from the people protesting Connecticut’s newest gun laws • page 20

Volume 46 • Issue 5 • April 2014

staff publisher Briton Park editors-in-chief Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni executive editor Ike Swetlitz managing editor Maya Averbuch senior editors Katy Osborn Noah Remnick Ezra Ritchin A. Grace Steig associate editors Ashley Dalton Emily Efland Caroline Sydney Isabelle Taft copy editors Adrian Cheim Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Douglas Plume staff writers Gideon Broshy Ashley Dalton

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

design editors Annie Schweikert Hanh Nguyen Edward Wang Madeleine Witt

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 2014 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. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50. 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.

the new journal

the new journal Volume 46, Issue 5 April 2014 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

features

Loaded Questions

The X-Ray and the Eye

Connecticut gun owners are suing their state over new gun laws. A reporter meets them at the shooting range. by Isabelle Taft

Scientists and art historians disagree about the right way to look at art. by Julia Rothchild

standards 4

poetry by Eli Mandel

8 snapshot Painted Prayers

interview with Leslie Jamison

essay 12 personal Trying to Transcend

poetry by Sarah Gilbert and Sophia Weissmann

points of departure by various authors

by Angelica Calabrese

by Margaret Shultz

snapshot Behind Bars by Noah Remnick

Cover Image by Edward Wang, design by Madeleine Witt april 2014

Hanh Nguyen

points of departure

When the Dinosaurs Come Out

t the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, glass cases around an exhibition hall hold fossilized, 75-million-year-old dinosaur eggs. But three eggs, under incubator lamps and the watchful eyes of Peabody staff, are not like the others. While the others lie still, as they have for millions of years, these speckled blue eggs wobble and shake in their enclosure. They contain the stars of this special exhibition, Tiny Titans: Dinosaur Eggs and Babies: three baby emus. On March 15, as the Peabody shut its doors for the day, the first baby emu poked through its shell. By the time the museum opened the next morning, the three fuzzy-bodied chicks had fully hatched. Crowds gathered, and even more joined in online via livestream as the chicks took their first long-toed steps only a few feet from their unborn Mesozoic ancestors. A sign at the opening of the exhibit proclaims: Birds are living dinosaurs. With interactive games and painted artwork, the exhibit explains this relationship, highlighting the unexpected evolutionary connections between dinosaurs and birds. The baby emus drive the point home. Human understanding of the connections

between dinosaurs and birds dates back almost a century. Richard Prum, professor of ornithology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale and a head curator at the Peabody, said that researchers have worked to understand the link between dinosaurs and modern birds since the discovery of the first dinosaur egg in the Gobi Desert in 1923. But certain questions about the dinosaurs’ own lives remained: Scientists didn’t quite understand the relationship between dinosaur parents and their children. Conventional wisdom dictated that dinosaurs laid eggs and left their babies to fend for themselves, but a 1958 discovery of a fossilized dinosaur nest in Montana led scientists to the revelation that instead of simply laying eggs and leaving, dinosaurs lavished attention on their offspring. The evidence indicates that dinosaurs actively parented their young— providing nourishment, shelter, and protection against predators—much like birds do today. The connection between birds and dinosaurs involves not only genetics but also shared behavior. “Birds have obligatory parental care— they don’t just litter eggs and leave them in the sand,” Prum said. “It turns out now we have great fossil evidence that this capacity is actually deeply dinosaurian. At dinosaur nests, there are individuals that have been fossilized in the act of at least protecting if not incubating their eggs, and this implies that aspects of bird biology are actually dinosaur biology.” Of all birds, emus are among those most closely related to dinosaurs. This closeness manifests itself in behavior as well as appearance. Females lay the eggs, but males watch over them and then care for the young. This behavior was previously believed to be exclusive to emus and other flightless birds such as ostriches and kiwis. But paleontologists have concluded that these birds raise their young in the same way as theropod dinosaurs, such as the T-Rex, did. Because of these similarities, emus really are the most scientifically appropriate way to bring dinosaur behavior to life. “When kids see dinosaur eggs and then see live emus running round, they won’t forget that birds are dinosaurs,” said Richard Kissel, director of public programs. the new journal

Space constraints prevented the Peabody from hosting an emu dad to fully demonstrate dinosaur-parenting behavior, so the babies had to put up with a human father. Jim Sirch, the museum’s education coordinator, rotated the eggs in the incubator, as their father would have done. Two weeks after they hatched, the emus returned to their original home in Massachusetts. In about two years, when they have reached sexual maturity, they too will be ready to coddle their chicks, just like their dinosaur ancestors. But with every bird circling the New Haven sky, we’re reminded that dinosaurs are more than the monsters in the movies—they’re also our familiar neighbors.

—Jasmine Horsey

Blueprints Go Green

april 2014

Hanh Nguyen

he Dynamic Augmented Living Environment (DALE) is a long name for a small house. The structure looks more like a robot, or an especially large computer. Its sides and roof are covered with solar panels, and its large windows let the light shine into the minimalist interior. The two modules can slide apart to create an outdoor space for entertaining guests, grilling hamburgers in the open air, or enjoying a starry night. DALE demands a second glance. This strange looking structure, and other buildings like it, might be at the forefront of a new design movement. That’s what the house’s creators, students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture and California Institute of Technology, were hoping when they entered and won the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2013 Solar Decathlon, a biennial contest that invites aspiring engineers, architects, and environmentalists to create their own sustainable houses. Kate McMillan ’16 and Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon ’16 are now embarking upon the same challenge: designing and building an elegant, energy efficient home. Leading a team of twenty-nine Yalies, they have spent months drafting budgets, securing funding, and making blueprints for the competition deadline in October

2015. Yale will compete in the Solar Decathlon for the first time since the competition was initiated in 2002. The requirements are daunting. Entries are judged and scored in ten categories, including market appeal, home entertainment, and energy balance. The house must have all the amenities of a normal home, including a dishwasher, television, and stereo system, but it must run entirely on solar energy. With an eye toward the future, the Department of Energy also requires that the house be capable of charging an electric car—all in a building that does not exceed a thousand square feet. The team is now working about twenty hours a week, preparing to build a prototype of the house at Yale’s West Campus. Their current design includes a communal space, and two bedrooms with a bathroom in between, to imitate a house for roommates post-graduation. “It’s an architecture thing: your house has to have a story,” said Robert Loweth ’16, who specializes in engineering. “We thought that was what we could most easily relate to.” McMillan expressed a similar sentiment, saying that they were going to focus on a theme and not just “cherry pick” the best features and technologies. There’s a catch: new technology often comes at a high price. In an effort to curb expenses, the competition awards full points in the affordability category only if the construc-

tion costs less than $250,000. The DOE only provides $50,000, so the rest must be raised through donations. McMillan says raising the rest of the money was one of the most challenging parts of the project. These funds came from a variety of Yale-affiliated institutions as well as for-profit companies. “There were people who said we were a little crazy when we told them what we needed,” McMillan added. The house could be cheaper if solar power were already an efficient technology, but as Loweth pointed out, “you need a fairly big surface area of panels to be generating a significant amount of energy.” The competition requires that the houses run on solar power, but Loweth believes that the design should focus on reducing overall energy usage instead of just touting solar panels as “the energy solution of the future.” Current strategies include installing lowenergy lights and heating the house through water pipes in the floor rather than through the standard air ducts. Michelle D. Addington, a Yale professor of sustainable architecture design, and Michael Oristaglio, the executive director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, are advising the team. But the undergraduates have spearheaded the team and will remain responsible for seeing their project to completion. They have set the standards high. “We want a house that is seamless in design,” Ponce de Leon said. But, at the same time, it’s an experiment. Ponce de Leon emphasizes that the team is seeking innovation over perfection. “People are often reluctant to take risks,” he explained. “But if we want success, it’s something we need to take.” The Solar Decathlon team hopes that the house will inspire architects, engineers, and homeowners to “reëxamine the way we live, and to strive toward a more sustainable future,” said Thaddeus Lee ’17, another team member. They are searching for a unified design precisely to encourage the expansion of solar housing. Some houses will be auctioned off while others will return to their home schools. Even with dozens of innovative and creative models to choose from, it remains difficult to convince the public to reconsider what makes a home. Our suburbs are sprawling and our

streets are lined with identical colonials. But as energy costs rise, our architecture and infrastructure might begin looking more like something out of “The Jetsons.” Green architects are working to meet modern challenges, designing smaller houses that are energy efficient and able to withstand extreme storms. The DOE’s competition page states that the Solar Decathlon seeks to prepare students to participate in the nation’s clean-energy workforce, and to show the public that “green” houses can be comfortable and affordable. “If I were building a house on my own twenty years down the line, this is what I’d be trying to do,” Loweth said. Though passionate about their project, the students know that sustainable design has a long way to go. Even after the blueprint is perfected and the model is built, convincing a society to rethink its conception of a home will be a difficult task. But the eighteen houses that began as blueprints could be the path to a greener future.

—Victoria Bentley

No God, No Problem?

ohn Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, and Timothy Dwight are now the names of residential colleges where Yale undergraduates live. But when these early leaders of Yale’s community were alive, they envisioned the University as an academy for aspiring Congregationalist ministers. Needless to say, the niche for faith at Yale has undergone a radical change over the centuries. Religion on campus is no longer the focus of a Yale education. Instead, it has become a peripheral resource to many and a community for some. The University Chaplain’s Office exists to accommodate the needs of students for whom religion remains important. The office seeks to foster “respect and mutual understanding among people of different faiths and cultures,” says Muslim Chaplain Omer Bajwa. But last semester, questions were raised about the office’s commitment to inclusiveness. In October, the Yale Humanist Commuthe new journal

april 2014

lain, the YHC plans to continue teaching Yale students about humanism. On March 5, they hosted primatologist Frans de Waal to discuss his new book The Bonobo and the Atheist, in which he sets up a conversation between a Central African ape and a staunch atheist. The bonobo advises the atheist “to not get worked up about the absence of something, especially not something as open to interpretation as God.” One wonders what the bonobo would say about the rejection of the YHC. Chiariello takes the ape’s advice and remains calm. “A large part of our mission is to foster a positive image of atheists and humanists,” he explained. “This rejection can actually be used as a kind of teaching tool.” The words “teaching tool” suggest an amicable parting of the ways between the YHC and the Chaplain’s Office. The future for humanism at Yale is bright. On the week of April 7, they hosted a Humanism Week with events such as an “Ask an Atheist” panel and “Atheism, Storytelling, and Advice for Christians.” Soon, perhaps the YHC will offer even more handson options for students to interact with humanism. Something like Shabbat dinner at the Slifka Center, but without God, faith, or a connection to the Chaplain’s Office.

—Nate Steinberg

Hanh Nguyen

nity (YHC) applied to become a member of the Yale Religious Ministries (YRM), the committee that brings together religious groups at Yale. Humanism encompasses many schools of thought, such as atheism and agnosticism, and is based on the idea of a rational system of ethics, according to the website of the YHC. Its members do not believe in God, but through their meetings and activities seek many of the same goals as people of faith. The YHC wanted to be a member of the YRM to have its own University chaplain, to use University space, and to receive University funds. Yet University Chaplain Sharon Kugler, who oversees the YRM, did not feel it would be appropriate to have an official YRM-approved humanist chaplain. She denied the YHC’s request for membership, writing that “the nonreligious nature of the YHC does not fit with membership in a group with an explicitly religious self-definition.” The coordinators of the YHC were hardly taken aback by the decision—they are, after all, an explicitly non-believing group—but they remained disappointed. The YHC’s leadership is largely composed of Harvard humanists who hope to bring Harvard’s inclusive attitude toward humanism to Yale. Harvard has had a vibrant humanist chaplaincy since 1991. “Humanist students should be a part of interfaith conversations and have access to the same resources,” says Chris Stedman, head of the YHC. With his large white ear-gauges and a nose piercing, he hardly looks like your average member of the clergy, but behind his movie-star smile is a desire to ask hard questions. A former evangelical Christian, Stedman is now the assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard, where he helps humanist students develop ethics based on rationality rather than divinity. Paul Chiariello, the YHC’s director of operations, believes that the YRM’s unfamiliarity with humanist principles played a chief role in the rejection. He and other leaders of the YHC insist that non-theistic lifestyles are compatible with virtues frequently associated with religious morality, such as compassion, honesty, and charity. Even if Yale does not have a humanist chap-

snapshot

Painted Prayers

photo by Angelica Calabrese

A Buddhist artistic practice develops a following in New Haven by Angelica Calabrese 8

the new journal

aren Burgess sits on the floor of her living room, a stretched canvas in her lap. Strings tied to the frame extend to a hook on the drywall behind her, holding her painting-in-progress upright. A loose gray braid drapes over her black sweatshirt. She leans carefully into the canvas and adds short, precise, sky-blue brush strokes. The sky surrounds her pencil sketch of the Eight Auspicious Symbols, a collection of Buddhist images that includes an umbrella, a conch shell, a wheel, and a lotus flower. Lama Tsondru Sangpo, a Buddhist born in Tibet but raised in northern India’s community of Tibetan exiles, squats next to her, peering at her work though small, wire-frame glasses. He wears khakis and a yellow button-down shirt, and a string of prayer beads hangs around his neck. His dark hair, thinning at the temples, sits wrapped into a tiny knot at the crown of his head. Through the room’s window, I watch Tibetan prayer flags wave in the wind, rising above the white clapboard homes of suburban Hamden. Burgess, an art therapist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, is one of Lama Tsondru Sangpo’s newest students. She joins him in his home for thangka painting classes every Sunday. Thangkas, pronounced ton-kas, are devotional paintings originating in the Himalayas. They are intended to help Buddhists visualize their meditative texts. They are not just depictions of Buddhist deities, but interactive, physical manifestations of the gods themselves; being near the thangkas means being in the presence of the deities, which brings good karma both to the painter and the viewer. Burgess is not Buddhist, but here in Lama Tsondru’s living room, she works under his guidance in what she considers both a spiritual and aesthetic practice. She has crafted a conglomerate religion for herself, incorporating elements of Buddhism as well as other faiths. Thangka painting is one part of that spiritual practice. Lama Tsondru has been teaching thangka painting classes out of his house since he moved to New Haven in 1999. His students pay a fee of sixty dollars per class. These funds support the Gonjang Samten Choepuk Monastery he started in Rangbull, India back in 1976. With his teaching, he works to maintain an artistic april 2014

and spiritual tradition. Recently, the circle of devoted painters has been shrinking, and commercial tourist imitations have proliferated. Lama Tsondru said that many artisans in India and Nepal have chosen to forgo the arduous training process. Some circumvent the recitation of mantras, the meditation, and the consecration that traditionally granted the thangkas their power to bring karmic benefit. Instead, they copy and trace old thangkas, often losing the original proportions of the deities, as written in the texts. These mass-produced thangkas Lama Tsondru sees back at home concern him. “They are really diminishing or destroying our very precious thangka tradition,” he said. In Lama Tonsdru’s monastery in Rangbull, the small staff and thirteen students spend six years in training, memorizing the Buddhist texts and mantras, the proportions, measurements, and angles with which each deity must be drawn, and practicing their painting technique. Lama Tsondru has exhibited paintings in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. By bringing this threatened art form to the U.S., he intends to partially fund the monastery back home. Though the paintings his Hamden students produce may not be of the same technical quality as those of his monastery students, he asks that his four American students follow traditional practices. They recite the mantras before they begin painting, and they draw the deities in their correct proportions. They learn to work in a specific order: first the eyes, then the face, then the body. It can take years before a student is ready to begin drawing on canvas. In traditional thangkas, each detail is measured, precisely and geometrically. “Without following the text, without doing the important proportions and measurements, that thangka is not considered like a thangka,” Lama Tsondru said. Even small errors might invalidate the thangka as a religious object, an embodied artwork. This sometimes causes stress among his Hamden students, who don’t practice their technique as often as his students in India. “Everyone else is doing deities,” Burgess laughs. “I

photo by Angelica Calabrese

The Buddhist art form has developed a following in New Haven. think Lama Tsondru…doesn’t want me to start on a deity and then ruin it.”

o begin the class, Lama Tsondru leads students in a mantra to Manjushri, the deity of knowledge and wisdom. Lama Tsondru, sitting cross-legged on the floor, begins to chant in a deep voice, and his two students follow along, reading softly from a transliterated version. Each settles into a spot on his living room floor and begins to paint. He kneels next to Bobby Banquer, a student who has been studying with him for eight years. Lama Tsondru offers quiet corrections, pointing to small modifications that must be made. Banquer brushes her graying bangs away and peers through electric-blue glasses, carefully tapping her brush to the canvas. Banquer, a New Haven local like Burgess, started taking classes eight years ago,

after becoming increasingly interested in Asian art through her yoga practice. Once he finishes correcting Banquer’s small error, the lama pulls out a large black art case and begins flipping through a file of a student’s work. He points out pages filled with precisely proportioned eyes, ink swirls of clouds and folding fabrics, and intricately measured sketches of the face of the Buddha, the body of the Buddha, the bodies of other deities, each measured in its precise geometric proportions. But some, he says, are not quite right. “This face is not so good,” he says, putting two drawings of Tara, a female deity revered for compassion and action, side by side. I can barely tell the difference between the two—the eyes of one deity are slightly more narrow, the breasts more round, the waist more tilted—but Lama Tsondru knows which one is correct. “This one,” he says, pointing to the other. “This one is better, improved.” Out of Lama Tsondru’s four regular students in Hamden, three are Buddhist. Each student aside from Banquer heard about the center through word of mouth and became intrigued by the merging of spiritual and artistic practices. Burgess and Sue MacClain, another student, had both studied art prior to Lama Tsondru’s classes. Initially, they were attracted to the aesthetics of the thangkas, but continued their study for the art’s spiritual aspect. “The actual time spent working on it is very meditative,” said MacClain, who has been studying thangka painting with Lama Tsondru for almost three years. “It’s a way to become really mindful about what you’re doing. You have to be really present, really look, really see, in order to be so precise about it.” The attention to detail and tradition required to paint thangkas aligns the practice with other elements of Buddhism. In 2007, Lama Tsondru formally founded his own center for Buddhist teaching, called the Thupten Ling Dharma Center. While there are just four students who regularly attend Lama Tsondru’s thangka painting classes, there are now about twenty members of the sangha, the Buddhist term for community of practice. Aside from Lama Tsondru’s wife and children, the majorthe new journal

ity of the sangha members are Americans, some of whom have been practicing Buddhism for decades, and others who only recently took their commitment vows. Lama Tonsdru does not require his thangka painting students to join the sangha. Burgess, who is neither a member of the sangha nor a fully practicing Buddhist, values the meditative elements of the disciplined adherence to the rules of thangka painting. “This is my church,” she tells me, referring to the process of painting. She has an altar at home that is “partially Buddhist” though mixing and matching from different religions can get complicated, Burgess believes that if she follows the rules that Lama Tsondru has laid out for her, even her thangka can create good karma. “If it’s done correctly and with the right attitude, it has benefit for whoever looks at it.”

ama Tsondru’s class is much more than a Sunday hobby; the students who come in who listen to his methodical instructions enter a tradition, even while they adapt it to their New Haven routines. The paintings that hang in their homes might not be as perfect as those produced in Rangbull, but even as the practice has crossed overseas, the artisans back in the monastery continue their work. And in Hamden, the students and those who observe their artwork all benefit from the deities conjured on canvas.

Angelica Calabrese is a senior in Morse College. april 2014

personal essay

Trying to Transcend A Yale student attempts commercialized meditation by Margaret Shultz

“A

im, aim, aim.” I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room, eyes closed, chanting this word over and over in my head. I’m trying to practice Transcendental Meditation, which, among meditators, is known for being especially simple. But it doesn’t feel simple. Am I breathing correctly? Is my posture right? How will I know if I’m meditating? I worry that worrying about the best way to meditate is getting in the way of meditating, which is exactly the kind of paralyzing overanalyzing that caused me to consider meditating to begin with. I shouldn’t have done this alone, I think. In theory, I’m not supposed to. Official Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice begins with a lengthy interview with a certified TM teacher. The teacher assigns the meditator a personal word, or mantra. Next, the meditator attends an introductory lecture and four classes. The total cost: $960. I don’t have that kind of cash, so I turned to the Internet to soothe my soul. I found a website called www.tm.org, which calls itself the “Official Website” of TM. There, I found a chart of personalized mantras determined by age and gender. For men aged 35–40, the mantra is “shring,” for women, it’s “shrim.” But for me—a woman between 15 and 30—it’s “aim.” I’ve been feeling especially anxious lately, full of a nervous, manic energy that makes it hard to concentrate. My hands shake, and I wake in the middle of the night with the afterimages of vivid dreams. My hope is that experimenting with meditation could bring me some sense of calm and a more restful mind. I’ve decided to try TM because of its simplicity: as far as I can tell, it’s meditation for dummies, a

minimalist practice. All I have to do is sit for twenty minutes twice a day silently repeating a single word. TM practitioners claim that it offers significant benefits, such as unity of being, heightened awareness, and self-control. That’s certainly appealing. What’s more, TM stresses that it’s not a religion. It doesn’t ask practitioners to change the structure of their lives in any significant way. No work. Just the word. TM began in the late 1950s as the brainchild of Indian spiritual figure Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. By the 1960s, Yogi was serving as the spiritual advisor to the Beatles. Despite its unconventionality, TM has lasted into the twentyfirst century largely because it has made itself into an institution—building schools, training teachers, and perfecting its publicity tactics. I’m suspicious of this system. But I’m also intrigued by the way TM instructors have taken a solitary, silent practice and turned it into something collective—an experience that is both private and, because of the formal TM training, shared by countless others. I read dozens of online testimonials, and find myself overwhelmed. They all use the same words: “stillness,” “unity,” “rest.” The rhetoric has a certain seductive, chatty quality; it combines subjective experience and supposedly objective science, and it constantly treads the line between earnest enthusiasm and syrupy kitsch. I’m fascinated by the sheer mass of personal success stories. Celebrities are particularly enthusiastic. Russell Brand, a comedian, former heroin addict, and ex-husband of Katy Perry, gives a testimonial on the website for the David Lynch Foundation for ConsciousnessBased Education and World Peace: “I find TM the new journal

Madeleine Witt

very relaxing—it’s like a shower for your brain.” A shower for my brain sounds nice. So does reduced cortisol (“the stress hormone”), increased self-control, lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and a greater sense of companionship with my fellow human beings. According to what I read online, TM can make miracles happen. It could help me achieve everything from self-actualization to world peace: “the Maharishi effect,” part quantum physics and part social theory, claims that the “unified field of consciousness,” which TM creates, can calm violent communities. If one percent of the population in any given area practices TM, crime rates will, supposedly, fall dramatically. This seems fuzzy and far-fetched, and I dislike how enlightenment has been turned into a commodity. But I’m willing to give TM a try. The TM center closest to me is in Hamden, a few bus stops up Whitney Avenue. It is run by Richard and Gail Dalby, a friendly, middleaged pair who offer introductory lectures on Wednesday nights and more advanced classes april 2014

every couple of weeks. They insist that the $960 fee is not exclusive, but actually democratizing: that money funds TM centers around the globe. TM, Gail Dolby tells me, “is a worldwide phenomenon; an established organization with millions of practitioners.” Part of what they’re selling is a connection to a larger network, but they create the network by selling you the concept of the network. This is how any successful large organization—from church to corporation—works. But this collective experience also brings individual benefits. Judson Brewer, a Yale professor whose research is largely focused on the neuroscience of meditation, confirms that this kind of spiritual experience causes observable changes in the brain. At Yale, Dr. Brewer ran studies using functional MRI technology to map what goes on in the someone’s mind while he or she is in a meditative state. What Russell Brand can describe only vaguely, Brewer can illustrate via color-coded graphs and articulate in scientific language. In layman’s terms, the area

of my brain associated with anxiety, depression, cravings, and lying, was probably deactivated while I meditated. This happens in the brains of novices and experienced meditators alike. “After a few tries,” he says, “there was very little difference in brain function between those who had just started and those who had been meditating for years.” Brewer himself is a longtime meditator, following a Buddhist breath-based system that he was introduced to in college. He undertakes scientific study of meditation, he tells me, because, “cynically speaking, science is the new religion of the West. If we can develop a science of meditation, we can develop some faith for people who wouldn’t otherwise be open to it.” Like Richard and Gail Dalby, he sees the potential for creating institutions to help make an individual practice communal; in 2012, he helped start a Yale meditation group, YMindful, that still meets twice a week. Meditation, advocates say, can be useful in confronting many of life’s difficulties. New Haven’s New Horizons High School—an alternative school for students with academic or behavioral difficulties—has introduced its students to meditation. Maureen Bransfield, the school’s principal, says that the techniques helps students “calm down, be more aware of their emotions.” Support systems that teach and encourage meditation, Brewer believes, can also improve the lives of those suffering from addiction and chronic pain. When he ran the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, he worked with recovering smokers who used meditation and mindfulness to fight nicotine cravings. “It doesn’t matter what type of meditation you do,” he says. “Any type of mindfulness or breath-awareness will help focus the mind away from destructive self-referential processes.” Large institutions like the TM machine aren’t necessary; small, grassroots groups like YMindful can also help people achieve the same results. A few minutes into one of my meditation sessions, my thoughts slowly become less frantic, less self-aware. There’s a subtle shift, a detachment. Instead of dwelling on the day’s

anxieties, I begin to passively observe my emotions. I drift in and out of thinking about “aim,” but focusing even a small part of my brain on this three-letter pattern keeps me from being obsessed with self-reflection. I begin to feel my breath. I begin to incorporate that physical sensation into the progress of my thoughts. Once, I have a powerful urge to open my eyes and check the timer on my phone. I think about how my back and neck hurt, the floor is uncomfortable, and my hands are sweaty. What if I forgot to set the timer? I am just about to quit when it occurs to me that I don’t have to. What else would I do? I let the boredom fill me. I consider it from all angles. The moment passes. Eventually, I breathe deeper and slower. The silent chant of “aim” has aligned itself with the rhythm of my breath. I feel the breath pulling me, starting lower in my stomach, expanding my diaphragm, and traveling up my chest. When I exhale, I feel air rolling out of me, my chest deflating, my shoulders rolling backward. I am very still. My arms and head feel simultaneously very heavy and very light. For a moment, I almost feel the blood moving through my body. I think, “Is this meditating? Am I meditating now?” The moment passes. I open my eyes and reach to turn off the timer, with hands a little less shaky, mind a little quieter.

Margaret Shultz is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

the new journal

snapshot

Behind Bars

A Jamaican immigrant becomes the voice of some detained by the Department of Homeland Security

by Noah Remnick

n a cool November evening in 2012, Mark Reid finished his final supper as Inmate Number 141754. After three years at the Brooklyn Correctional Institution in Connecticut, Reid was scheduled for release the following morning. The past three years had been some of the most trying of his life, but as he leafed through the small trove of letters and photographs beside his bed, the 48-year-old Reid was reminded of all that he had to look forward to. Thanksgiving was just about a week away, and after all the time he had spent in a jail cell, he felt especially thankful for the chance to sit down to dinner with his family. He was the father of two children, a son who planned to enlist in the Navy, and a daughter in high school. He had led the comfortable life of a real estate broker, with a modest salary and a sense of stability. His most recent conviction, for the sale of narcotics and burglary in the third degree, had taken that away.

eid’s release from prison should have been a fresh start, a classic American story of new beginnings. During his three-year incarceration, Reid’s attitude toward life changed. He sought out spiritual and psychological counseling. He woke up at four o’clock each morning to study for a paralegal certification. He imagined a better future for himself and his family. But as Reid was packing, a prison official cut short his second chance. He would not be heading home the next morning, the official told him. Instead, he would be taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforce-

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ment (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, and held in a detention facility. Just as he was about to leave the criminal justice system, Reid was forced into another of the nation’s most controversial institutions: the immigration detention system. Reid came to the United States at 14 to reunite with his mother, who had left Jamaica years earlier to send money back home to her family. Years later, an Army recruiter promised Reid that time spent in the reserves would grant him citizenship. He did not know he had to apply. Nor did he know that if he broke the law, his green card could be revoked.

t the Franklin County Jail in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Reid found that he was one of nearly one hundred noncitizens who had been detained after some interaction with a government agency. Many, like Reid, had been charged with violating the terms of their visas or green cards by breaking the law. Every year, more than 400,000 non-citizen detainees are locked up in one of the 250 immigration detention centers in the United States. In 2012, ICE detained a record 478,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The vast majority of them were from Latin American countries, with nearly seventy percent coming from Mexico alone. Only 0.4 percent of those held were from Jamaica, Reid’s country of birth. Franklin, where Reid was confined, is contracted to house detainees for ICE. Homeland Security’s so-called “bed mandate” requires

ICE to fill an average of 34,000 beds in detenImmigration and Naturalization Act and the tion centers each day. The imprisoned include Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment of victims of torture, asylum seekers, families with the U.S., both of which protect the defendant’s young children, veterans, mentally and physiright to challenge their detention and prohibit cally disabled people, and lawful permanent the government from arbitrarily incarcerating residents, like Reid, who face deportation bethem. Prior court cases have set the limit for cause of criminal convictions. The system a “reasonable” length of detention without a comes at a hefty price, costing taxpayers $122 to bond hearing at six months. $164 to hold a detainee each day, adding up to Immigration officials have little to say on $2 billion a year. the matter. Daniel Modricker, a spokesman for Immigration lawyers estimate that dozthe Department of Homeland Security, released ens of the detainees are men and women this statement: “While we cannot comment on who believed that they were made U.S. citiongoing litigation, ICE is committed to smart, zens simply by serving in the U.S. military. effective immigration enforcement that focuses Like Reid, they failed to grasp that citizenfirst on convicted criminal aliens, and those apship was not automatically conferred. Their prehended at the border while attempting to numbers may be small, but their situations are unlawfully enter the United States.” particularly distressing since these men and But detaining people so excessively is diswomen risked their lives for a country now proportionate to the offense, insisted Nicole pressing to expel them. Hallett, a clinical teachMark Reid was not giving fellow at the Yale Law en a chance to tell a judge or Every year, more than 400,000 School who specializes in hearing officer that he had immigration law. She exnon-citizen detainees are served in the military for six pressed outrage at the curlocked up in one of the 250 years and that the recruiter rent state of detention. immigration detention centers promised he would receive “You can’t just detain his citizenship in return. He people indefinitely,” Hallett in the United States. didn’t have a chance to talk told me. “It’s not punishabout how he had worked ment like in prison—it’s imto improve himself during migration detention. These his recent time in jail. He never had the chance people have already served their time, so this to tell an official that he had a place to live and is civil detention—not unlike Guantanamo.” Of a family ready to help him back in New Haven course, Guantanamo has garnered a decade of because, like many noncitizen detainees, Reid media attention. Immigration detention issues, was denied an individual bond hearing. This though, remain in the shadows. would have allowed him to plead for the opportunity to live in the community while his deporong before he ever saw the inside of a jail tation case was adjudicated. cell, Mark Reid was an aimless 20-year-old Noncitizen detainees are first brought beembarking upon his future in America. It was fore a judge, and there an official declares that 1984, and he had left his troubled childhood in the government has reason to deport them. Kingston behind several years earlier. He had They are then incarcerated until their cases are moved to town to town, before moving to New heard and their immigration status finalized. At Haven to work for his uncle’s construction that point, they are either deported or allowed business. to return to their homes in the U.S. Often they While he was accompanying his cousin to a are locked up for months, even years, until they meeting about formalizing his cousin’s citizenget any such resolution. This practice defies preship papers, Reid met an Army recruiter who vious judicial decisions, which found that such told him about the benefits of military service: lengthy pre-trial confinements violate both the honor, discipline, and, most importantly, the

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guarantee of United States citizenship. A few months later, Reid signed up for the Army Reserves. Just before leaving for boot camp, Reid said that he called his recruiter to ensure that everything was in order with his citizenship. “You’ll be taken care of,” he recalls the recruiter telling him. Upon returning from boot camp in Springfield, Massachusetts, later that year, he began to stray. He started hanging out with a few new friends from outside of his church circle. “They had the new cars, the new sneakers. They were the most popular people in the street and I wanted to be a part of that,” Reid explained. He was brought up in a family of devout Seventh Day Adventists, and the world of drugs was entirely new to him. Reid quickly discovered that drugs could fund the life he envied. Soon enough, he was passing his time on the streets, selling and eventually using a variety of narcotics. He still spent some weekends in Springfield, training with the reserves. By the time he was honorably discharged in 1990, he had already had several confrontations with the police.

eid’s first encounter with the law came in 1986. Still a fresh face on the corner, he wanted to establish his street credentials. That meant accumulating an arrest record. One day, his pockets filled with drugs, Reid intentionally circled a police cruiser until he was stopped and searched. After discovering that Reid had no prior arrests, the officer confiscated the drugs and released Reid with a warning. But Reid was determined to get arrested, and before long, he landed in jail. His sixty-day sentence would be the first of several over the course of the next two decades, mostly for various minor drug offenses. Reid’s life was in turmoil, but he barely noticed, he told me. In his world, it seemed normal. “During that time, being incarcerated was just another part of being in the streets,” he said. “You’d know the majority of people locked up. There was nothing telling you that things needed to change. I went in and out with the same mentality.” By the time he was due to be released from april 2014

his most recent sentence, in November 2012, immigration officials had determined that it was too late to change. ICE had decided that Reid, a veteran and legal permanent resident with no history of terrorist activity, was a “dangerous criminal actor,” and that he should be deported. Reid is among the growing number of detainees who have been caught up under a program called “Secure Communities.” Established in 2008, Secure Communities requires the FBI to share its database of prisoner fingerprints with immigration authorities. If ICE officials find a match with someone who is in the country illegally, they can ask local prisons to detain them. According to ICE, the program prioritizes the deportation proceedings of the most “dangerous criminal aliens,” those who pose public safety risks. This program was created by ICE, rather than Congress; as a result, ICE has complete discretion over who is detained. Communities, politicians, and academics have objected to the program’s premise and scope, but they have little power to make changes. One of the most vocal local critics of Secure Communities is Michael Wishnie, a professor at the Yale Law School. “ICE has not backed down on Secure Communities,” Wishnie told me. “They’ve managed to force it on the entire country over the objections of mayors and local leaders. They promised that they’d only go after violent offenders, but all of the data suggest the opposite. The program is sweeping up exactly the people [ICE says] are not highlevel targets.” Wishnie also warned that Secure Communities leads to ineffective policing: fear of deportation erodes trust between local police and New Haven’s immigrant community. Detainees face more than just the erosion of their constitutional rights. Several newspapers and community organizations have released reports describing human rights abuses in immigration detention centers, from inadequate medical attention to meager meals to sexual abuse. For Reid, the physical conditions in the detention center were humane, but he said that the experience was emotionally grueling. Each day, he found himself surrounded

Madeleine Witt

by throngs of people enduring extraordinary psychological stress as they faced possible deportation at any time. They were also coping with separation from their families, as well as financial ruin. Reid knew several people who attempted suicide. He even contemplated taking his own life as he struggled to handle the prospect of returning to Jamaica. “Families were separated, children constantly crying, people yelling, screaming, worrying,” Reid said. “It was a devastating environment.” Reid’s future looked bleak, but a few New Haven organizations heard about his case and saw in him symbolic power as a plaintiff. For decades, savvy lawyers have gone to great lengths to find complainants who could serve as effective figureheads for their causes, from Rosa Parks to Edie Windsor. In this case, Reid fit the bill. He was a veteran, a property owner, and a father with strong community ties. He had made bad choices, but he had changed for the better. Students from Yale Law School’s Veterans’ Legal Services Clinic were among the first

to take note, and the provided Reid with initial support and advising. They were then joined by fellow Yale law students from the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC). Both groups are part of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, which allows law students to represent local clients and gain courtroom experience under the guidance of professors. On July 1, 2013, after Reid had been held in detention for nearly eight months without the opportunity to argue for his release on bond, the Yale law students helped Reid file a writ of habeas corpus, which required that he be brought to court. Guards shackled his hands, waist, and feet when he appeared at hearings— another violation of his constitutional rights, according to his lawyers. Reid also filed a class action lawsuit in federal court. The lawsuit argued that the government unlawfully trapped not only him and other noncitizens in the ICE system for too long without allowing the bond hearing they were legally entitled to. Six months later, in Januthe new journal

ary of 2014, Judge Michael Ponsor first ruled in Reid’s favor. Ponsor found that the government had attempted to defend its detention practice based on a “dubious interpretation” of immigration law and had offered “irrelevant” and “flawed” arguments. A month later, Judge Ponsor ruled that Reid was not alone, but that he was indeed one in a “class” of people suffering similar injustice, who were all entitled to file a class action lawsuit. Judge Ponsor’s ruling relates only to detainees in Massachusetts, where ICE confines most noncitizens from Connecticut slated for deportation, but immigration activists around the country are looking to this case as a bellwether for similar situations in other jurisdictions. “Every story is unique, but people don’t realize just how common this is and how disruptive it can be for people in the community,” said Conchita Cruz, a Yale law student who is part of the WIRAC team. Deportation may be a civil offense, but it feels like criminal punishment for all parties involved.

“They promised that they’d only go after violent offenders, but all of the data suggest the opposite.”

drove to the jail to embrace him as he walked out of the prison gates. Then, they brought him home. As he waits for resolution of his case, Mark Reid recognizes that he is fortunate compared to most noncitizens facing potential deportation. Eighty-four percent of people in immigration detention lack legal representation—a particular problem for noncitizens, who often speak little English, and cannot understand the charges and proceedings against them. Reid, again at home in New Haven, spends his days visiting with friends and family and working with his lawyers. Since his release, he has spoken on behalf of other detainees in immigration court. He is currently working to receive proper certification to represent detainees in an official capacity. Thousands of other noncitizens are still held in detention centers around the country. Some detainees now look to Reid as the face of a class action suit that they hope might soon bring them some relief. But the legal battle will have to intensify for long-term results. “In the vacuum of federal action,” Wishnie said, “local leaders have had to do it, but eventually it’s going to have to happen on a federal level.”

Noah Remnick is a junior in Ezra Stiles College and a senior editor of the New Journal.

Michael Wishnie, Yale Law School Professor

fter Judge Ponsor’s ruling, ICE was forced to grant Reid a bond hearing. On February 3, 2014, a full sixteen months after Reid had been taken into custody by ICE, students from WIRAC represented him at the hearing. He was granted release on $25,000 bond until his case is resolved. He told his story in an oped in The Hartford Courant, and the publicity helped him raise the $25,000 he needed for the bond and his release. On February 25, he was released from Franklin. His lawyers from Yale april 2014

feature

Loaded Questions 20

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Connecticut gun owners are suing their state over new gun laws. A reporter meets them at the shooting range. by Isabelle Taft

Above: an AR-15 april 2014

e pull into the parking lot with a trunk full of guns. I have arrived at the Branford Gun Club along with Lenny Benedetto and his wife Virginia. Both are gun enthusiasts and active in the anti-gun control lobby. Lenny is the vice president of the Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League (CCDL), and his wife is the organization’s technology coordinator. They are out to show me that neither guns nor their owners are intrinsically scary, and today, they are going to teach me how to shoot. I have never shot a gun in my life, and I am jittery as we unload safety equipment and firearms. But before I pick up a gun, I need to use the bathroom. I ask where I can do that. A tall man with long dark hair—one of the couple’s friends chatting with us in the parking lot—crosses his arms and squints down at me, suddenly even taller. I was introduced to him as

a reporter from Yale, and he seems reluctant to tell me where the bathroom is. “I’m gonna need to read the article first,” he says. “Which side are you on?”

lmost every gun owner I interview asks some form of this question. They all want to know where I stand, because many of them believe the media have heaped praise on SB-1160— the Connecticut General Assembly’s response to the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012—while unfairly portraying gun owners who oppose the law as irrational, paranoid, and crazy. They think I am that media. Many people refused to talk to me because they assumed I would take their words out of context and turn them into caricatures of the redneck American prominent in the liberal imagination. Meanwhile, these gun owners see gun-control supporters—and often liberals in

general—as hopelessly ignorant and unfit to contribute to the dialogue because they, like me, have never even held a gun. The terms “grabber” (as in “gun grabber”) and “libtard” get tossed around a lot in reference to Democratic politicians and their supporters by members of CTGunTalk, an online forum where state gun owners discuss everything from politics to shooting competitions. If some of the forum posts confirm liberals’ stereotypes of gun owners, they also reveal how genuinely and deeply the state’s gun owners believe that they are under attack by reporters, by the legislature, and by their own friends and acquaintances who just don’t get it. On the other side, President Obama, Connecticut’s Governor Dan Malloy, and gun control activists across the nation have celebrated SB-1160, which gave Connecticut some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Signed into law last April, the legislation expands the ban on assault weapons to include dozens of additional models, tightly restricts the use of magazines (ammunition containers) that can hold more than ten bullets, and requires owners of such weapons and magazines to register them with the state. It requires background checks for all transfers of guns between owners, rather than only for purchases from gun shops. It also requires a permit to purchase long guns, which are braced against the shoulder. The law is jargon-laden and confusing in places, but clear in its intent. It exists to reduce the availability of the semi-automatic assault weapons often used in headline-grabbing mass murders: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and Sandy Hook. SB-1160’s supporters see the law as a model that other states should follow. But to the Benedettos and other gun owners who support CCDL, SB-1160 encroaches on the rights they hold dear. It is too early to tell if the law will work. Exact figures are hard to come by, but the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that there are 300,000 assault weapons in the state. Only fifty thousand were registered as of mid-March, according to Lieutenant Paul Vance, spokesman for Connecticut’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Pro-

tection (DESPP), which is handling the registration. Now that the registration deadline of January 1, 2014 has passed, there is no way for owners of illegal guns to comply with the law unless they surrender their weapons. This means that there are hundreds of thousands of newly illegal firearms all over Connecticut. And, due to a loophole that co-sponsor Senator Don Williams says was completely unintentional but unlikely to be closed with additional legislation, no one is required to register assault weapons manufactured before 1993, when Connecticut enacted its first and more limited ban on assault weapons. This also means that plenty of older, powerful weapons similar to those used in mass shootings can still be legally bought and sold in Connecticut without registration. “Every time the politicians squawk, I go buy more,” the long-haired bathroom guardian declares shortly after we arrived at the range. “You gotta go buy more,” agrees Lenny Benedetto. It’s considered a patriotic duty to flout the spirit of the law. Many CCDL members view SB-1160 as a violation of the Second Amendment. Chris and Cheryl Lemos, CCDL’s membership coordinator and blogger, call this amendment “the right that guarantees all other rights.” When I ask them if there is any gun control measure they support, they laugh. “Well, I don’t think people should have grenade launchers,” Cheryl Lemos says. Encroaching on gun ownership rights, CCDL members believe, could lead to the erosion of one right after the other, and they think gun control supporters are blind to this fact. “I’m sure the folks at Yale would be having all kinds of conniptions if they took out the First Amendment,” Cheryl Lemos says. Reverence for the Second Amendment leads these groups distrust America’s government. New Haven resident Carl Roehrich, who brought a group of novice shooters from his church to the Branford Gun Club the same day I was there, says he purchased six “pre-ban” assault weapons after he found out about their unintentional legality. “I wanted to make sure that I would have these rifles specifically because they did not the new journal

Photos courtesy of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League

Top: Benedetto at the 2013 Hartford rally Bottom: A gun owner at a 2010 CCDL event april 2014

want me or any Connecticut citizen to have rounding them, to view them apart from the them,” Roehrich says. conflicting visions of America. Particularly at Roehrich believes that one day—perhaps the Branford Gun Club, where members enjoy not in his lifetime, but not in the far-off future, target practice and trap shooting while eating either—the American people will be forced donuts together, I expect guns will be discussed revolt against their government, if the governprimarily as a hobby. But every interaction with ment does not first turn its guns against the a gun presents an opportunity to reflect on an people. When that happens, Roehrich is under element of the law. no illusion that his assault rifles could effectively The Benedettos are quick to emphasize counter the most powerful and technologically that guns can be used safely. When he picks me advanced military in the world. Roehrich does up on Chapel Street that morning, Lenny Benenot want to risk ceding his guns to the state, detto assures me that his SUV is “loaded up and he believes registering guns heightens the with guns.” Of course, the guns are not loaded. likelihood of eventual seizure. He laughs his distinctive belly laugh at the abDespite suspicion that registration could surdity of his own tough-guy talk. It is a twentylead to confiscation, the Benedettos and all othminute drive to the club. After we arrive, the er CCDL executive board members registered Benedettos start taking out “eyes and ears— their guns in compliance with SB-1160 to avoid glasses to improve visibility and provide ocular attracting negative attention protection, and oversized to their organization. While earmuffish contraptions to reluctantly adhering to the muffle the sound of gunLenny Benedetto tells me law’s requirements, they also shots. They give me a pair publicly and strenuously opof yellow glasses and a set the first rule of guns: “Never posed it. The CCDL board of red earmuffs. I look like point a gun at something filed a lawsuit, which was an army recruit undergoing you don’t want to destroy.” dismissed by a federal judge basic training sponsored by in January but which they McDonald’s. hope will go all the way to We go inside the range, the Supreme Court. They a squat building where sevhave endorsed two Republican gubernatorial eral people stand in a line to shoot at not-socandidates, Joe Visconti and Martha Dean, who distant targets. As he opens the first case and are “pro-Second Amendment.” They have held pulls out a .22 caliber Firestorm pistol, Lenny events like a March “Open-Carry Brunch” at Benedetto tells me the first rule of guns: “NevBagel King of Bridgeport, at which gun owners er point a gun at something you don’t want to were encouraged to proudly carry their weapdestroy.” The second rule: never put your finons. On April 5, a year and a day after the pasger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. sage of SB-1160, they held a rally outside the The third: always assume the gun is loaded. capitol building in Hartford, drawing thousands The implicit political point Benedetto is tryfrom all over the Northeast. CCDL’s online ing to make is that people who do bad things post to its members before the rally presented with guns are unlike the Benedettos and their these armed Americans as victims of an oppresfriends and acquaintances, who ought not be sive state, persecuted but proud, safe only in punished for the sins of those who refuse to renumbers: “We need every person there to make spect and understand their weapons. our voices heard.” As Lenny instructs me in basic gun safety, Virginia Benedetto, a soft-spoken Tennessee he gun issue is political, but a gun itself is native with impressive aim, shoots a round with a machine. In theory, one should be able to the Firestorm. The Benedettos selected this regard guns apolitically, to utilize them without gun, which Virginia says she hasn’t shot in years, wading into the turgid partisan whirlpool surspecifically for my instruction: it’s small, rela-

T 24

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Fairy Tale Eli Mandel My daughter sleeps for days in a blue room through which daylight filters in a sequence of bars. On the fourth day, she wakes. There is a vase filled with fuchsias next to her. I watch her gaze move up the fluted glass, up the stems—so I snap off a flower and place it in her palm. “This has a mouth,” she says, “tear it up.” Then she opens wide and eats it. She does not remember eating the flower. Months and years pass, and it’s like that to this day: now she is grown up, very tall and slender, like a stalk.

tively harmless looking, decorated with a pink camouflage plastic covering near the handle, and can no longer be legally bought or sold in the state of Connecticut. When it’s my turn to handle the Firestorm, loading the magazine—a surprisingly difficult task that requires overcoming my fear that the gun will explode in my hand if I am too forceful—calls to mind SB-1160’s ban on the sale of magazines that can hold more than ten bullets. The Benedettos are concerned that many people who carry guns for self-defense on a regular basis do not know that their magazines, which often hold seventeen bullets, can no longer be filled to capacity except at home and inside gun ranges. All high-capacity magazines must be completely empty unless they are inside a gun, and the Benedettos can imagine a police officer with a hatred for guns slipping a bullet inside april 2014

an empty magazine to incriminate a law-abiding gun owner. They also don’t buy the argument that it was generous of the legislature to allow gun owners to keep their high-capacity magazines instead of surrendering them to the state, and they think the politicians will keep pushing for more regulation. “They are, I believe, trying to wipe out the next generation with this law,” Lenny Benedetto says, lamenting the fact that nobody in the future will be able to own high-capacity magazines and newly banned guns. “They are crushing the next generation. It’s incremental. They nibble away a little at a time.”

ast spring, the Benedettos joined other gun owners in testifying against SB-1160 before members of the state legislature. Gun control bills had not made it to the General Assembly’s

floor since 1993, but things had changed. The Benedettos weren’t surprised when their efforts failed. Twenty-eight people, including twenty children too young to be named in the matterof-fact autopsy reports released by the state, lay dead in the small, affluent community of Newtown. Twenty-six died of wounds inflicted by a young man armed with a Bushmaster XM15E2S semi-automatic rifle legally purchased by his mother. She herself had been killed with a .22 caliber Savage MK II-F rifle. He ended his own life with a Glock 20SF pistol. On the afternoon of the shooting on December 14, 2012, the CCDL issued a press release expressing grief and horror at the massacre, acknowledging that the discussion had already turned to gun control, and reminding everyone that aberrations like Newtown have nothing to do with organizations like theirs. “There have been many statements condemning firearms and gun owners as a result of this tragedy,” CCDL president Scott Wilson said in the press release. “This was an act of deranged behavior from a mentally ill individual, not of decent and law abiding people that own guns and respect life.” The next day, Don Williams, president pro tempore of the state Senate, spoke with Senate minority leader and current gubernatorial candidate John McKinney, who represents Newtown. They agreed to create a special bipartisan process to craft the legislative response to the tragedy. Working with leaders from both parties, Williams and McKinney established three bipartisan task forces. One task force addressed school security, another focused on mental health, and the third dealt with guns. Each task force comprised eight Democrats and eight Republicans, and each met for several weeks of hearings and debate. As this planning took place, the CCDL condemned the gun control measures they foresaw. They issued another press release and published a message to members on their blog, exhorting gun owners to mobilize at the capitol when the time came. On January 28, 2013, at the largest of the task forces’ public hearings, hundreds of gun owners testified from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. Several weeks later, the gun task force approved

the new restrictions and an eighty-seven-page bill moved to the General Assembly. Because the bill was emergency certified—a distinction usually granted to measures responding to natural disasters or facing a tight deadline—SB-1160 went directly to a floor vote instead of passing through standing committees. It passed the Senate with 26-10 and the House of Representatives 105-44. Gov. Malloy signed the bill into law on April 4. Yet the Benedettos and many other gun advocates who testified are convinced that their concerns were not properly considered in part because the vote took place just a few hours after the legislature received the bill. “There was no deliberation,” says John Sturmer, the owner of JJ Firearms Training, who testified at the capitol hearing. “There was dictation.” Scott Bennett, who also testified, claims that the language of the bill largely came from gun control advocacy groups such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “What process?” Bennett says. “This stuff was prewritten and they just put it all together and rammed it through.”

oni Boucher, Sturmer’s state senator, was the Republican co-chair of the school security committee. She called the entire process “tense and contentious.” But Boucher believes that people on both sides of the aisle made serious compromises. When the negotiations started, some Democratic legislators supported banning all magazines that could hold more than a single bullet. Republican involvement, Boucher says, prevented the most restrictive laws from being passed. “It was remarkable that on issues that sometimes can be so divisive in our national politics, we were able to have all four leaders of both parties co-sponsor and support that legislation,” Don Williams says. Sturmer and Bennett agree that the effort was bipartisan, and do not reserve their anger for Democrats alone. Both recognize that most Democrats in the legislature support gun control more than their Republican counterparts. Both feel betrayed by the Republican leadership the new journal

Courtesy of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League

But for now, SB-1160 is here to stay. In January, Connecticut district court judge Alfred Covello ruled that the law is necessary to protect the safety of the public, but the CCDL is currently appealing its case. So far, SB-1160 seems to effectively toe the line of constitutionality. The Supreme Court has affirmed the right of individuals to own firearms for “traditionally lawful purposes” such as self-defense in the home. SB-1160 imposes additional regulations on gun owners but clearly allows them to continue using their guns for shooting practice and self-defense as they have in the past. For those who choose to comply with all the regulations, after they pay fees for registration and permitting, the biggest change is the number of bullets they can leave in their gun for the drive from home to the shooting range. Connecticut’s gun laws have traditionally been stricter than those in other states. In 2011, prior to the passage of SB-1160, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence ranked Connecticut’s laws fifth-strictest in the nation, and the state had the sixth-lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. “Smart gun laws work,” says Ron Pinciaro, the executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence (CAGV).

that allowed Democrats to claim Republican support for their proposals. Neither buys the claim, advanced by Republicans like Boucher and McKinney, that Republican presence at the negotiating table improved the outcome for gun owners. In fact, Sturmer wishes Republicans had allowed Democrats to pass a law authorizing confiscation of assault weapons, which would have been easier to challenge in court. The highly restrictive laws Democrats would have passed without Republican resistance would have been unconstitutional, Strumer said, and therefore easy to tear down. “This legislation is the worst-case scenario,” Sturmer says. april 2014

he other side can point to facts and numbers, too. It’s true that Connecticut has the sixth-lowest rate of gun deaths in the nation when suicide deaths are included, but most gun owners I talk to do not think gun suicides should count towards the statistics—these deaths would occur with or without guns. In addition, tighter gun laws do not necessarily reduce gun violence. According to the Brady Campaign, of the twenty-one states that had lower rates of firearm homicides than Connecticut in 2011, only Massachusetts had stricter gun laws. In the debate over gun control, objective truth is elusive, even when it comes to hard numbers. Some elements of the law are just coming into effect, and it will be years before anyone can assess the impact. Statistics can be massaged and cherry-picked, and causation

does not follow from correlation. Plus, even ons. So, theoretically, DESPP could cross referdefining seemingly simple words such as “vioence those records with the registration forms lence,” can be difficult. Is it violence, Sturmer they received. asks, when a police officer shoots a criminal in “We’re not even stepping in that direction,” the act of fleeing or committing a crime? Yes, DESPP spokesman Paul Vance says. I tell him. Sturmer tells me I need to learn the The records of background checks and pistrue definition of violence, which he thinks retol permit applications could have allowed the quires an action to be undertaken with the instate to directly notify gun owners of the new tention of hurting another out of selfishness. requirement to register. Boucher says she conFurthermore, the opposing sides frequently tacted DESPP in August to ask the department employ the same analogies and thought experito do that. It didn’t, but individual legislators ments to reach completely different conclupublicized the law heavily. sions. I ask Pinciaro whether any of the eleStill, some people may have fallen through ments of SB-1160, as it has been implemented the cracks. Benedetto says he has met several so far, would have prevented the actions at Sanpeople who didn’t register simply because they dy Hook. He says this question misses the point didn’t hear about the changes. He is concerned because not all violence is preventable, but that that unwitting gun owners might be charged does not mean we should not pass laws against with a class D felony while being questioned violent acts. about a lesser offense. Da“There’s laws against vid Hartman, media liaison murder and people are gofor the New Haven Police “Take away guns, ing to commit murders,” Department, says it would people use knives.” Pinciaro says. “There are be unfeasible to go door to always people who are going door to track down weap—Cheryl Lemos, blogger for to break the law.” ons, so picking up gun ownthe Connecticut Citizens’ Cheryl Lemos of the ers in the course of routine Defense League CCDL makes the same claim police work is exactly what to explain her opposition to will happen. SB-1160: even banning guns Can a law be considered would not end murder, so we should not restrict effective if it is not truly enforced? Pinciaro and guns in an attempt to reduce violence. Williams say yes, because the ban and registra“The gun is a tool,” Lemos says. “Take away tion requirement together will reduce the likeliguns, people use knives.” hood of assault weapons falling into the illegal gun trade, and some paper trail is better than no major issue facing the success of the law is paper trail at all. But if the state won’t expend its enforceability. Though everyone I met resources to enforce the law, just how important at the Branford Gun Club said they had regisdoes it really consider that paper trail? Actively tered their guns, most owners of assault weapsearching for weapons and arresting offenders ons haven’t. Yet Connecticut’s Department might be politically unpalatable, but refusing to of Emergency Services and Public Protection do so sends a strong message that it doesn’t ac(DESPP), which oversees the state police force tually matter whether the law achieves its aim, and keeps records of firearm registration and lending credibility to gun owners’ arguments pistol permitting, has not announced any plans that SB-1160 was just a political show. to confiscate guns or prosecute those who failed Most gun owners I spoke to have maintained to register their guns. SB-1160 made possession skepticism about the state’s intentions, but of an unregistered assault weapon a Class D they are steeling themselves for the crackdown felony, punishable by one to ten years in prison. that may or may not come. The CCDL’s The state keeps records of people who undergo membership has grown from about 1,500 background checks to purchase assault weapmembers to 13,000 over the last two years,

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and they are ready to resist.

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Isabelle Taft is a freshman in Silliman College and an associate editor of the New Journal.

photo courtesy of Isabelle Taft

ingerly holding the pink camouflage Firestorm, I manage to slap the magazine into the gun. It’s time to shoot. Lenny tells me to form an isosceles triangle with my body. I’m not quite sure what this means, but the couple approves my stance: feet apart, arms straight out, elbows locked. Lenny tells me to lean forward. Point the sight where you want the gun to fire. Squeeze the trigger with the pad of your index finger. Wait for exactly the right second to fire before realizing that second won’t come. Fire. The moment is loud but anticlimactic, and mostly I feel relieved that I am capable of shooting a gun. I go through a few magazines, and several times I get pretty close to the bull’s-eye, which isn’t saying much because a helper moves the target close to where I’m standing. It still feels good, and the Benedettos are encouraging teachers. I smile when I quickly fire off a few shots that all nearly meet their mark. “Nice shot!” “You look like a fucking badass! Dead bad guys!” My target is designed so that when a bullet pierces the black paper, a neon pink, green, or orange ring appears around the hole. The rings look like Skittles. But a different kind of target sits on a table near the front of the range: a bullet-pocked plastic model of a pale human torso, smeared with red paint imitating rivulets of blood streaming down a chest. Perhaps a gun is not inherently a tool for evil, but despite gun owners’ assurances that shooting is a wholesome hobby, the bloody chest makes me think the gun’s capacity for violence is part of its appeal. I practice indoors for a while and then go outside to watch Virginia Benedetto shoot down bright flying orange discs called pigeons. After about four hours, the Benedettos drive me back to campus. I carry as souvenirs my pastel-dotted target and one of the pigeons I failed to hit with a shotgun. The Benedettos shrug off my thanks and say they’re always happy to take first-timers shooting. “You’re one of us now,” Lenny Benedetto says. “You got a gun in your hands, you pulled the trigger, and you smiled. You’re one of us now.”

I walk back to my dorm and pull the target sheet out of my purse. I toy with the idea of hanging it up, but the colorful rings would dominate the white wall like a trophy. Still, I intend to keep it.

The author tries her hand at shooting a gun. 29

feature

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Scientists and art historians disagree about the right way to look at art by Julia Rothchild

n a corner of an industrial building just outside of New Haven, a woman points a gun at a treasured painting. The weapon is loaded, and she is ready to fire. She aims carefully, focuses, and pulls the trigger. But this gun shoots X-rays, not bullets. As an X-ray strikes the canvas, it jumbles the electrons orbiting an atom of paint. The atom quickly reshuffles its particles in order to regain its former state of equilibrium. In doing so, the atom sends back another ray, which contains information about the painting. The gun swallows the ray and transmits the information to a laptop, which displays a graph cluttered with overlapping peaks of various heights. The woman shows me how the peaks correspond to elements: “Here, you see, this is copper, and here is lead. The lead is probably in a white pigment, called lead white.” No one, not even the painter himself, has ever known so much about this painting’s chemical composition. The woman behind the gun is a chemist named Anikó Bezur. She is the director of scientific research at the Yale Center for Conservation and Preservation (CCAP), a multimillion-dollar facility built in 2012 to house and care for the University’s vast art collection. Yale owns more than 200,000 pieces of art, from pristine Roman busts of Julius Caesar to paintings by Monet and Van Gogh. Bezur and her fellow conservators approach the works with extensive technological expertise. With the data obtained by scanners, lenses, lasers, and other instruments, the team generates scientific analyses that inform their approach to conservation. But despite the millions Yale has invested in the CCAP, the institution’s central philosophy—that scientific analysis should take the lead in informing conservation decisions—remains controversial, even among the curators at Yale. The first time I meet Bezur, she is working on a painting stored outside the CCAP, in a building called the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). Located in Hamden, Connecticut, a ten-minute drive from campus, the windowless industrial building stores books, art, and other objects belonging to various Yale collections. Bezur greets me with a wide smile and shakes

Graphic courtesy of Edward Wang april 2014

my hand. She leads me into a room filled with artwork placed on countertops and propped up on easels: the LSF’s conservation lab. Bezur is there to examine the painting in the far corner of the studio, the one with the X-ray gun pointed at its surface. Called The Education of the Virgin, it depicts the Virgin Mary’s mother, St. Anne, teaching her how to read. The young Mary, draped in a dusky red robe, occupies the center of the scene, with her parents on either side. For eighty years, the work was stored, unnoticed, in the basement of the Yale University Art Gallery. Without a signature or any other identifying features, it was one of many works of unknown origin. But in 2004, a junior curator named John Marciari unearthed it and showed it to his superiors. Convinced that the painting was the work of an identifiable artist, curators at the Gallery embarked on an international quest to authenticate it. Today, experts recognize the painting as a lost work by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez, one of the most important painters of the 17th century. Held upright in the LSF by a large wooden clamp, The Education of the Virgin is severely damaged. Gashes mar its surface, a missing corner leaves an angel headless at the top of the painting, and abrasion has worn down much of the paint, disrupting the delicate brushstrokes that define Velázquez’s work. Bezur is working on this painting alongside her colleague Carmen Albendea. Albendea worked on projects in Madrid, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Cambridge, England, before coming to Yale in 2012 specifically to determine how best to treat the Velázquez in its cracked and injured state. Her goal at the moment is to create a comprehensive picture of the chemicals that exist in the painting—the base coat, the paint, and the varnish—in order to treat the painting’s wounds. But she also wants to study Velazquez’s painting process. To do this, she uses another tool, an X-ray radiography machine, to scan the canvas. This machine can reveal materials hidden beneath the top layer of paint to help the scientists understand the artist’s drafts and

mistakes. A printout of that scan, around five feet tall and four feet wide, hangs on the wall. It looks like an X-ray you’d see in a doctor’s office: pearly white shadows outline Mary and St. Anne against a pitch-black background. The printed scan reveals a small table in the left-hand corner of the painting. The table is laden with bulky objects, invisible in the real painting. The original sketch was painted over, and is now obscured by the resting arm of Mary’s father. Armed with this kind of information, Albendea plans how best to repair the work. Some changes are scientific: She will choose a paint that can heal the cracks but is easily removable, in case a future conservator wishes to redo her work. Others are aesthetic: She will decide whether to repaint the angel’s missing head, or whether to leave it as a testament to the age of the painting. She will determine how best to replicate the delicacy of the brushstrokes that once covered the surface of the canvas. For now, Albendea is still gathering data to determine the next chapter in the painting’s story. But some at Yale place less stock in science’s ability to aid conservators. Among them is the Chief Curator of the Yale University Art Gallery, Laurence Kanter, who also works as a professor of early Italian art in Yale’s History of Art department. When we meet, he wears a brown suit jacket and speaks in a low tone, barely audible over the bustle of the gallery, where he has worked since 2002. Kanter previously curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He considers the data produced by scientific analysis to be decidedly secondary to the information that an expert eye can extract from a work of art. “Science isn’t a way to prove anything,” Kanter says. “It’s just more evidence, more data. The proof is in the interpretation.” Kanter strolls around the six galleries of early Italian art in the museum. He has played an important roll in acquiring the collection. We walk past ornate frames hung on walls of midnight blue. Mary, Jesus, and a collection of saints look back at us, their heads ringed by gold haloes. the new journal

Although the gold still shines, peeling wood on the frames and cracks in the paint reveal these works’ age: They were created by preRenaissance masters in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Over the past 700 years, many of these paintings have suffered significant wear. Exposure to harsh light has faded their colors; heat and moisture have warped the wood behind the paint; dust and dirt have settled in the cracks and yellowed the varnish that overlies the tempera. In some cases, the original works have been painted over by past conservators who thought they were improving or restoring the work. Caretakers must carefully consider which cracks to fill with modern paint and how to repair large swatches of lost color. Kanter argues that a historian, not a piece of equipment, must answer these questions. He is well versed in the history of art conservation at Yale. Walking from painting to painting in the gallery, he recounts the conservation decisions that have determined the way the works look now. “This is the problem,” he says. “Science and aesthetics are not compatible undertakings. They don’t need to be compatible. Nobody wants them to be compatible.” To illustrate this point, he stops in front of a pair of portraits hanging side-by-side, one of St. Peter and the other of St. John the Baptist. A single artist of unknown identity painted this pair in Siena, Italy around the year 1320. The portraits are extremely similar: the saints look directly at the viewer, wearing slightly worried expressions. Both saints sit on a backdrop of gold leaf. A thin circle—a halo—circumscribes their heads.

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Other patterns are impressed and inscribed between the halo and the head to alter the gold’s reflectivity. Just outside the halo is a concentric circle of triangular patterns composed of three small dots, punched into the gold to emphasize the contour of the halo. Although the artist created the backgrounds of the paintings in the same way, they look noticeably different today. St. John’s portrait looks much like it did 700 years ago, with patterns of distinct circles ringing the halo. But St. Peter’s halo is instead surrounded by dull triangles, the three dots blurred together. The difference was not an artist’s error, but a result of differing attitudes toward conservation. Yale conservators treated the painting of St. Peter, gouged with holes, in the sixties. They left the painting of St. John, with its pattern of delicate circles, untouched. The modifications to the former painting reflect a certain trend in art conservation in the sixties. “There was a lengthy moment in [the art gallery’s] history,” Kanter says, “when the institution felt that all of its conservation practice should be guided by scientific inquiry, producing particularly horrifying results.” In treating the painting of St. Peter, the 1960s conservator attempted to remove debris that had settled into each small hole punched in the pattern. Though he removed the dirt carefully, he also, inevitably, removed the tiny flakes of gold leaf that had kept the small holes separate and distinct. “All he was interested in was the materials, not the impression,” Kanter says. “The dirt enhances the original effect; it doesn’t obscure it.” The picture treated by conservators differs, too, in that its colors are stronger than those in

the unaltered picture. St. Peter’s shirt is a bright cerulean blue; the book he holds is a strong scarlet. In contrast, St. John wears robes of faded brown. This difference, like that of the haloes, arose because conservators cleaned off St. Peter, rubbing off the yellowed varnish with chemical solvent, but left St. John alone. “Is that more faithful to the original?” Kanter asks. “No. The only thing it’s faithful to is the original materials, not the original look or intention of the picture.” Anikó Bezur and her team at the CCAP have a different definition of intention. Located in a former pharmaceutical building on Yale’s West Campus, the CCAP’s squat industrial façade cuts a rather figure, especially on a rainy afternoon. I arrive sopping wet in the lobby where Jens Stenger, a physicist who works at the CCAP, greets me and invites me to hang up my rain jacket on the hook next to his desk. We walk into the first lab of many, a spotless room glittering with dozens of new machines. Stenger pauses before each piece of equipment to explain its function. One machine reveals which molecules resonate at different frequencies, while another sorts molecules by their size, determining, in a few minutes, exactly which elements an oil painting contains. Bezur joins us in a room housing an electron microscope, which is several feet tall and wide. We make small talk for a few moments before I ask her what she thinks about Kanter’s view of the relationship between science and conservation. She bursts out: “You talked to Larry?” Then she laughs. I ask her what’s so funny. “I just think he has a… very different perspective,” she says diplomatically. Bezur becomes more serious as she acknowledges the truth she sees in Kanter’s argument. She agrees that science has its limits. “There’s no scientific signature for Velázquez,” Bezur says. “It’s not like a unique DNA imprint, unless we were to find his hair and find a match; and short of that it’s very difficult to say that something was made by this person’s hand.” Stenger too recognizes that there are certain areas of art study in which science is not at all useful. “If you’re really interested in all the stories and the history, you cannot uncover who Botticelli was friends with by looking under the microscope,” he says. “So there’s this huge area to which I think you can really securely say that science has very little or nothing to contribute.” But Stenger and Bezur maintain that scientific analysis can and should be a large part of conservators’ decision making. Through analysis of pigments’ chemical structures, Stenger can determine how and from where

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an artist long ago acquired his materials, and how they were made. The chemical decomposition of a blue color tells him when the pigment was made, and a chemical analysis of the lacquer used in a varnish reveals the sap from which it was made. Bezur does not devalue Kanter’s expertise. She maintains, however, that technological analysis of artwork is the truly objective measure upon which museum directors and others requiring artistic analysis should rely. “For many, many centuries, people got along just fine without the scientists,” she says. She pauses, then continues sarcastically: “And I love going into storerooms and finding the half a million dollar mistake that was just based on a good eye and plenty of experience.” She laughs. “That’s all I have to say.” Kanter and other conservators who rely on their own eyes for interpretation are not exactly Luddites. “An artist like Velázquez is more complicated than any other artist,” Kanter concedes, “because his painting technique was so subtle and so complex that the more you can learn about it—including its elemental component materials— the better prepared you are to know how to overcome issues.” The knowledge gained from Albendea’s radiography scan of The Education of the Virgin can deepen art historians’ understanding of Velázquez’s painting process. The information is undoubtedly useful for certain kinds of research and analysis. But Kanter insists that this data remain secondary to expert opinion when it comes to restoration, because technology creates credulity: “People are willing to believe whatever an instrument with a needle on it will tell them, thinking that that is the answer, a Geiger counter.” He maintains that care must be taken to use scientific analysis only as supporting evidence, and never as a definitive answer. But the curator and the chemist often have a common goal: preservation. The master artists of the past conveyed their visions using fragile materials, and we’re left to deal with the decay. Bezur and Kanter are shuffling through the debris using different techniques, and each is wary of the jurisdiction of the other. Both are trying to speak up for artists long gone. If only the artists could speak for themselves.

Julia Rothchild is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. photos by Edward Wang april 2014

interview

Leslie Jamison A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Leslie Jamison is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, was published in 2011. A book of essays, The Empathy Exams, was released this month. It explores questions of pain through personal and journalistic writing. She sat down with The New Journal to discuss switching genres, teaching writing, and talking to strangers. The New Journal: How did you make the transition from writing fiction to writing nonfiction? Leslie Jamison: I had always thought of myself as a fiction writer, and that identity pretty much carried me through the entire course of my first novel. It was in the process of writing my sec-

Hanh Nguyen

ond novel that I started writing essays. It was really frustrating for me to kind of get a beat on it, get some sense of its pulse, so I found myself following little escape hatches into nonfiction projects. Also, nonfiction lends itself more easily to certain kinds of conversations. It feels like a beginning to a set of conversations rather than a transactional, “I’ve written this and now I gave it to you.” Do you think that you’re the same writer when you’re writing fiction as when you’re writing nonfiction? I feel like the same person when writing fiction and nonfiction. A lot of the same fixations and sites of interest come across. I’m really interested in how physical bodies shape experience— that’s all over my fiction and nonfiction. In my

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novel, there are dramas on the level of the body, like an eating disorder or an addiction. In my essays, I write about disease and empathy in a medical context. That attention to bodies is evident in craft too. When I’m writing nonfiction, I walk into a room and take the time to note all of these physical particulars, because I know that when I’m writing the scene two weeks later, I’ll be so frustrated if I can’t fill that scene with tangible details. I have to build my muscles as a nonfiction writer to satisfy the same aesthetic impulses that I carry over from fiction. There’s a part in the book’s title piece in which you think of saying to the people around you that your experience [in this case, as a medical actor] might appear in a book someday. As you have moved toward nonfiction, do you operate with that thought in mind? I do think that that sort of double vision, thinking about an experience in terms of how I might someday write about it, does creep up on me all the time. In that way it’s like being a traveler who’s constantly taking photographs, thinking about how to document the thing rather than just living inside of it. Sometimes that makes me feel a little bit sad, or claustrophobic, or like my experience is wrapped in this shroud of constant self-awareness. But there’s something productive in it. Left to my own devices, I would never talk to a stranger on a bus ride. But especially if I’m traveling and I’m like, I want to write about this place, I’m more likely to convince myself to start up a conversation with somebody. Because who knows where it will go or lead? Does a desire to create a public point affect how intensely you pursue a story, or do you just jump off the cliff and assume that something will show up? I guess I like to believe that any story that I’m interested in could potentially have a public point, because I believe that one person’s interest usually points to some deeper shared root system of interest. I usually have some sense of what I think the kernel of that point might be before I jump off the cliff. But not always. I

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think there can be something really satisfying about working your way towards a point. I’m working on a piece about a whale that scientists have been tracking for years. They call it the loneliest whale in the world, because it has a frequency that’s much higher than other blue whales. And whenever scientists track it, it’s alone. I had a sense that there was some more abstract point here that has to do with our relationship to loneliness, or why we project feelings onto animals, or how we try to make the natural world make emotional sense—but I didn’t have a clear sense of what the center was going to be. You’ve taught students in English 120, “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” and your parents were professors. What does your relationship to teaching feel like? The energy of teaching is so different from the energy of writing. I still get a little bit of an adrenaline rush before I walk into a classroom, I love that you have an experience that’s bounded in time, you’re hearing other people’s voices, and there’s a dynamism in responding to their ideas. All that is different from the process of sitting down to write in ways that feel very saving and energizing to me. That feeling of giving students permission to write stuff that feels thorny and tricky and unfigured-out is fun. It feels like I’m doing a service by granting them license to dig deeper into ideas they already have in inchoate form. I’ll remember those times when I hit my own conceptual tangle in a piece, and I can hear myself telling a student: “that’s a good sign, go deeper into it.” Interview conducted and condensed by Maya Averbuch and Julia Calagiovanni. Illustration by Hanh Nguyen.

poetry

How to Let Go Sarah Gilbert Ask her if you can pull the car over and pray. Your daughter says yeah, and you almost keep going because you’re expecting a no. You open the car door, and an exploded blue pen falls out onto the dirt road. Leave the car door open because it’s not a busy road but pick up the pen and put it in your pocket that’s already ink-stained. Your daughter watches out the car window at your back as you cut through the long grass and under one ash and a couple of cedar trees. Look up at the sky for a couple of seconds and then look down. And your glasses are about to slip off your face. Over your cream turtleneck you’re wearing a red and green Christmas sweater, But, yes it is still October, isn’t it.

It’ll only take a minute. Then, back in the car you go, saying something about the trees. Then you’re home, pulling up alongside the barn where your other daughter is bringing in the Haflinger for the night. She says, “Mamma watch” as she lets her go trotting into the stable without a lead. Let your daughter see you starting to go angry And then almost like you’re going to cry, And she’ll know it’s an answer. When you step into the kitchen and out of your boots you’ll say, “what does anybody want for dinner.” Empty a pocket on the table. Out comes a folded up piece of paper. You ripped it. Seem upset. Be ready for your daughter to say “that’s alright mamma we’ll fix it together.”

But just sort of leave, the ends of your socks hanging way off the tips of your toes. That daughter of yours wipes down the counter and flattens out the creases of the paper, sees it’s not even legible—not even English she doesn’t think, and that her mamma still has the other half, don’t you? She’ll slide it behind the jar of coins on the ledge beside the bowl of potatoes. They’re not good enough to eat, not bad enough to throw outside. She’ll climb up on that ledge, take down the dusty floral curtain, looking for a moment at the willow branch laying in the yard. When she makes a frustrated sound and you ask “what?” from your bed two rooms away she’ll say, “I stepped in the dog’s water dish.”

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Divination Sophia Weissmann I know many lovely girls who wait on beaches, I know turtles

at a time. These marks me a prophet- now give me a cave.

birth themselves by their egg’s nervous stirrings. They rock

I’ll take in some visitors, The muscled heroic ones

their little circles in the sand. The globe shakes itself too, but

strewn on my shores with their large ships in pieces.

it rests on no sand thus leaves no mark. I rose up

I’ll fill their palms then their lungs then I’ll flood them with

from the sand, I’ll admit. My skin a salt lick the sun

promises. Cast them back to the beaches and tell them to wait.

won’t even acknowledge. The waves threaten me daily with their animal shapes. I name each billow and roller And cry at their breakage. I own no bowls, and no spigot, but my mouth and my hands. I swallow the ocean one cup

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