Volume 44, Issue 5

The New Journal

Volume 44, No. 5

Spring 2012

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

Spring 2012

The Pardoners pg. 22 Rebuilt & Recultured pg. 30 Flying the Stars pg. 39 1

Publisher Whitney Schumacher Editors-in-Chief Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Managing Editors Benjamin Mueller, Cindy Ok Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Senior Editors Nicholas Geiser, Helen Knight, Nikita Lalwani, Sanjena Sathian Associate Editor Eric Boodman, Sophia Nguyen Copy Editors Cassie DaCosta, Justine Yan Staff Writer Caroline Durlacher Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, 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 O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, 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

Cover: Susannah Shattuck, Brianne Bowen 2

The New Journal

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

Vol. 44, No. 5 Spring 2012 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

and New Haven

FEATURES 22 The Pardoners

America’s prisoners attempt to reenter a society that doesn’t want them back.

by Nikita Lalwani

30 Rebuilt & Recultured A mixed-income housing development now stands on the site of New Haven’s oldest project. How can the spirit of the old community help us evaluate the change?

by Catherine Osborn

39 Flying the Stars

A feng shui consultant converts one skeptic along with her apartment.

by Jacque Feldman

STANDARDS 4 Points of Departure 12 Snapshot We Started the Fire

by Vlad Chituc

18 Snapshot Making Cents of Space

by Benjamin Mueller

45 Endnote A Conversation with Sarah Stillman

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 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor 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, $18. Two years, $32. 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.

Spring 2012

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE The Yale Type

Susannah Shattuck

Last November, Yale University Printer John Gambell stood before a group of twenty-five employees, spreading the gospel of the Yale Typeface. He politely explained why the academic departments whose communications they designed were no longer allowed to have unique logos set in their favorite font. Instead, their publications had to use the eightyear-old typeface and the classic Yale Blue. Over the course of several years, Gambell oversaw the creation of the Yale Typeface and designed a new, consistent campus signage system in order to standardize the University’s brand. But it wasn’t the experience of years or even decades, but rather centuries, that produced the Yale Typeface.

In many ways, the Typeface fits right in amongst Yale’s icons.

It aspires to resemble a centuriesold European artifact but is in fact relatively new—much like Yale’s neogothic architecture. The Typeface is based heavily on the font used in

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Pietro Bembo’s De Ætna, an esoteric Venetian manuscript printed in 1495.

The text’s inventive typography makes it one of the most important works in the history of the printed word.

The story of the De Ætna type begins with Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius, who wanted to spread knowledge by printing portable and affordable versions of classical texts. To do this, he hired a master typographer named Francesco Griffo.

Griffo made a tremendous mark on the history of printing and punctuation. It was the De Ætna typeface that popularized the use of crisp and unornamented Roman characters in printing, replacing the archaic blackletter script introduced

by Gutenberg. While Griffo was carving the De Ætna type, Manutius asked him to devise a way to separate interdependent clauses. Griffo solved the problem by inventing the first semicolon. A few years later, Griffo developed another innovation: a typeface fashioned after cursive handwriting. He called it Italic type, after the name of his homeland.

Despite Griffo’s ingenuity, it was Manutius whose star continued

to rise. Dissatisfied with his relative anonymity, Griffo left Manutius in 1503 and crafted a set of Italic type for another Venetian publisher. Outraged, Manutius somehow convinced the Pope to decree that only the Manutius publishing house was permitted to use Italic type. Yet the Papal decree proved difficult to enforce, and the Italic style quickly spread throughout Europe.

Meanwhile, Griffo was ruined.

He only appears in the historical records once more, in 1516, when he was executed for murdering his son-in-law with an iron bar (which he probably used for carving type).

The Yale Typeface is not the first to take inspiration from De Ætna.

Typographer Stanley Morrison’s 1929 facsimile, named Bembo, quickly became one of the most admired typefaces of the twentieth century.

However, when attempts were made to digitize Bembo decades later, something went terribly wrong. As the Yale Typeface website describes, “Unfortunately, the more recent photocomposition and digital versions of Bembo lack the vigor, weight, and formal integrity of either the De Ætna face or the original Monotype version of Bembo.”

Designers around the world posted on bulletin boards lamenting the loss of a classic typeface. Rather than using a font lacking in formal integrity, Yale hired the world-famous typographer Matthew Carter, responsible for classics such as Georgia and Verdana, to design a private copy of the famed 1495 original.

To understand De Ætna’s charm, I went to view Yale’s copy of the text in the Beinecke. The book was tiny and beautiful. While the librarians weren’t looking, I brushed my finger against the world’s first semicolon; it was strangely satisfying. I compared the actual book to the printed specimens of the Yale Typface and Bembo that I had spread out on the desk. With both The New Journal

the legibility of Bembo and the gravity and crisp lines of the De Aetna face, the Yale Typeface was the cleanest and most attractive of the three.

Most students don’t know that they can use the Yale Typeface, but awareness of its charm is growing on campus. Gambell has his own theory about why administrators have received it so well: it is something private that the members of the Yale community can all share among themselves. “It’s not as silly as a secret handshake, but it has a little bit of that cachet.”

Gambell cheerfully reports that so far it doesn’t seem like anyone outside the university is attempting to use the font.

“Wait—they’re not allowed to?”

I asked.

“No, they’re not allowed to.

They’d probably just get a letter from General Counsel saying ‘puh-lease.’”

Like Manutius centuries ago, the University is willing to prosecute in order to protect its license, although a letter from Yale’s lawyers is probably less potent than a Papal mandate. I’m already preparing myself for the day when I’m no longer allowed to use the Typeface, only several months ahead.

– Brandon Jackson

Eagle Eyes “I like to know the names of things,” David Heiser tells me, and his office proves it. The table where we sit is covered with piles of framed and labeled insects with a jewellike turquoise beetle at the very top.

Behind him is an enormous, pastelcolored model of a flower’s insides, which looks vaguely pornographic.

And near my hand, the tip of a hairy leg is just visible through the crack in a pouch marked “Tarantula.” As Head of Education and Outreach at Spring 2012

the Peabody Museum, Heiser, along with other Peabody employees and the Yale Office of Sustainability, leads an initiative to create a body of citizen scientists, laypeople who collect data and report it to professionals. The team behind this project hopes to harness the simple observational skills of Yale’s students, faculty, and staff to contribute to the evaluation of the University’s urban ecology.

To many people, the term “citizen scientist” seems like an oxymoron. It’s easy to imagine citizen historians—historical societies are full of them. And self-proclaimed citizen philosophers are a dime a dozen. But citizen scientists? To take part in the scientific endeavor, you must need a degree, not to mention funding, a working knowledge of statistics, a command of jargon, and a lab—right?

Not necessarily. In 2007, Dutch schoolteacher and citizen scientist Hanny van Arkel discovered a green blot in the Leo Minor constellation.

She had been spending her free time poring over images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as part of the Galaxy Zoo project which uses laypeople to help classify galaxies.

This green spot didn’t match any of the categories van Arkel had learned to recognize—and it wasn’t only laypeople like her who were perplexed.

Now known as Hanny’s Voorwerp (“object” in Dutch), the blot is as big as the Milky Way and contains a hole stretching over ten thousand light years. Astrophysicists are still trying to figure out what it is.

“You too can make this kind of discovery,” Heiser tells me and about thirty-five other volunteers gathered in the Peabody auditorium on March 26. Our task is simple. We are instructed to regularly walk a route around campus and make note of the birds we see. We will then enter our names, the species of birds we’ve seen, and the times and locations of our sightings into a database.

The hardest part, of course, is knowing what we’re seeing. Most students hardly know a hawk from a handsaw, let alone an ovenbird from a thrush. Just as van Arkel had to brush up on her galaxy types before joining the Galaxy Zoo project, we will need to review our bird identification.

To start the learning process, the Peabody organizes bird walks to help beginners learn how to identify their sightings. Heiser adds that we are currently sitting only a few steps away from the Peabody’s hall of Connecticut birds, which is a sort of “3-D field guide.”

The very next day, I tour that hall with Jim Sirch, Public Education Coordinator at the Peabody and one of the leaders of the museum’s bird walks. He appears out of place in the faint blue light of the exhibit, as though he would be more at home up to his waist in brush, or crouching on a riverbank. Walking from glass case to glass case, he points out the different plumages of warblers and the difference in size between the Cooper’s hawk and the sharp-shinned hawk. When I ask him about the redtailed hawk I had seen several times perched on the gargoyles of Harkness Tower, he uses the stuffed birds to show me that the juveniles have a stripy tail instead of the russet that gives the bird its English name.

I am an avid birdwatcher, so I am interested in the details that Sirch points out: the number of wing-bars, the color of eye-rings. I have spent hours staring at far-off shorebirds, hoping to catch a glimpse of rarities. I have gotten up at the crack of dawn to watch geese take off from a flooded field. I love swamps. But I struggled to see the urgency of birdwatching around the quiet, paved Yale campus.

The Yale Office of Sustainability thinks differently. The citizen science program was the office’s idea, and the program is part of its 2010 strategic plan to make Yale greener.

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Clare Randt

“Where do the birds fit in?

They’re an indicator for understanding land use,” said Julie Newman, the office’s director. The fluctuation in bird populations on campus can help us understand what Yale is doing right and what it’s doing wrong when it comes to New Haven’s urban ecology.

Heiser refers to the information we will be collecting as “baseline data,” a large body of statistics that will allow the Peabody to look for anomalies.

After all, you can’t know if something is wrong in the environment unless you know what’s normal.

Using citizen scientists to produce baseline data is nothing new. Thoreau meticulously observed the asters in his garden in Concord, Massachusetts, between 1851 and 1858, and wrote down when each flower bloomed, noting changes each year. When a team of scientists discovered Thoreau’s unpublished records, they realized they were full of valuable baseline climate data—the timing of plant flowering is closely tied to temperature. In a February 2012 article in the journal BioScience, this team showed that plants are now flowering ten days earlier in Concord than they were in Thoreau’s time.

They used his data to suggest that the temperature in Concord increased by 4.32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Aside from leading bird walks, Sirch is also organizing and participating in the Peabody’s FrogWatch program, which has citizen scientists collect baseline data on frog populations. You arrive at your designated wetland a half hour after sunset, wait for two minutes so that the frogs aren’t frightened by any noise you might have made, and then spend three minutes listening. You can hear the spring peeper’s chirp, “the threeminute-long high trill of the American toad, the snore of the pickerel frog,” Sirch told me. The idea is that the frog watcher has some fun while helping scientists establish normal figures for 6

local frog populations and habitat health.

But “normal” can’t accurately describe a lot of ecological systems today. When Heiser asked if anyone had seen any spring warblers last year, a lady in the front row raised her hand. “Dead,” she said. “That itself is important information to know,” Heiser said. While there are many similarities between the hordes of self-trained naturalists of the nineteenth-century and the boom in citizen science today, the pressures of the environment have intensified.

The university is “exploding campus with all these new buildings,” Julie Newman says. So, she poses, how can we make an argument for green space and prove that we need it? One argument could draw strong evidence from the large number of warblers that stop here on their migratory routes. Although Heiser insists that theirs is not an advocacy mission, he acknowledges that the research could have a great ecological impact. Many of these species can act as a campus bellwether, helping the university understand what it is doing to the ecosystems within which it is located.

Besides informing the administration’s expansion effort, the citizen science research program

has other benefits. It opens a door to experiencing wonder in the natural world. As E. O. Wilson wrote in his 1984 book Biophilia: To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.

Citizen science may work as a data-collecting tool, but it also builds connections between man and other species. And isn’t learning the name of the blackburnian warbler or a yellow-bellied sapsucker the first step to caring whether it lives or dies?

– Eric Boodman

Apocalypse Now? A painting of a dark apocalyptic landscape, John Martin’s 1835 Destruction of the Cities of the Plain, hangs in Michael Coe’s East Rock living room. The Yale professor emeritus of anthropology, still sprightly in his eighties, blinked up at it.

The bright-eyed, gray-haired professor pulled from one bookshelf an 1827 print of Paradise Lost illustrated with Martin’s mezzotints. “You could buy these for a song back in the sixties,” he said. Images of the apocalypse recur in Coe’s life. “I went to a church school and I’ve read through the Bible twice, including the Book of Revelations,” he said. “I don’t believe any of it now, but that certainly influenced me.” He laughed, but then added, “The Maya probably thought in very similar ways.”

Coe was the first to suggest that the ancient Mesoamerican civilization had predicted that the world would end in 2012. His analysis ignited a The New Journal

Spring 2012

Clare Randt

continuing debate in academic circles and provided popular culture with a new fixation. In his seminal book The Maya, published in 1966, he directed attention to Monument 6, a stone in Tortuguero, Mexico, whose face is marked with a Mayan noun, a verb, a subject, and a date. Monument 6 describes the prophecy and its appointed date of fulfillment—Dec. 23, 2012.

The noun on Monument 6 is the name of a god. The deity also appears on a vase that depicts all the Mayan gods meeting in darkness at the creation of the current world, which makes Coe think it is has something to do with the end of the world. “I think this god is associated with cataclysm,” he says. Though the verb isn’t entirely legible, Coe maintains that it translates to “will descend.”

“The Mayans would have been worried!” Coe said, smiling earnestly.

The Mayans believed that the world had been created and destroyed multiple times. Violent Mayan myths of creation and destruction tell how past worlds have been destroyed by giant jaguars, wind, fire, and flood.

Their calendar starts on Aug. 13, 3114 B.C.E., when, according to Mayan tradition, this world was first created.

Since then, twelve cycles of roughly four hundred years, or b’ak’tuns, have passed. December 23 is the final day of the thirteenth and current b’ak’tun.

But Coe’s reading of the monument is not universally accepted by his fellow academic Mayanists. Gerardo Aldana, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies Mayan hieroglyphic history and Mesoamerican art, said that he doesn’t believe the Mayans thought the end of every thirteenth b’ak’tun would be a cataclysmic event. He agreed with Judith Maxwell, an anthropologist at Tulane University, who said that twenty b’ak’tuns—which constitute a piktun, a larger cycle—must pass

before the cycle begins again. This December 23 will mark the end of a single b’ak’tun, but not a piktun, she said.

And, Maxwell added, some Mayan descendants who have revived their ancestors’ calendar will actually spend December 23 celebrating the end of the b’ak’tun. All of which raises the question: is fear of the Mayan Apocalypse even Mayan at all—or is it American?

Books, movies, and late-night television have all capitalized on the Mayan Apocalypse. “First, the Mayan calendar predicted it. Now, science has confirmed it. But we never imagined it could really happen,” ran the tagline for the Sony/Columbia movie 2012 (released in 2009), which grossed almost $800 million worldwide. The film was inspired by British writer Graham Hancock’s 1995 book The Fingerprints of the Gods, which draws on ancient Mayan myth and astronomy to predict a coming global environmental catastrophe. The Fingerprints of the Gods has been translated into twenty-seven languages and has sold about three

million copies worldwide. The idea that 2012 might spell doom has found a home in the popular American consciousness.

Coe points out that Americans have long been preoccupied with the apocalypse. Themes of mass death and earthly destruction can be found in the theology of religious sects like the Millerites, who eventually became the Seventh Day Adventists, and events like 2011’s “rapture hour,” when an American Christian radio host’s end-of-world prediction went viral. Apocalypse anxieties also underlined Cold War nuclear threats and fears of global environmental collapse. “I think it’s in the American mind,” Coe said.

If he is right, then the debate over this December 23 does not say as much about Mayan culture as it does about our own.

– Caroline Durlacher

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Clare Randt

Crossing Streams As I walked through Dwight, a largely residential neighborhood west of downtown New Haven, I saw trash and recycling bins crammed into alleys between buildings and, occasionally, waiting out at the curb. Pickup for most residents was still two days away, but many of the bins were already brimming.

The recycling waiting inside those bins, or toters, has recently become a major focus for the city in recent years. In late 2009, the Board of Aldermen authorized a new single stream recycling policy that the Office of Sustainability, partly established to create this policy, implemented citywide by the end of last year. Single stream recycling means that residents no longer need to sort their items into glass, paper, and plastic. Instead, the city’s Department of Public Works picks up the mixed recyclables and exports them to Willimantic Waste in Norwich, Connecticut, where they are processed by a machine and their remains bundled into large bales to be resold.

The city distributed blue ninetysix-gallon toters for recyclables and brown forty-eight-gallon ones for trash to every home in New Haven, free of charge. Most of the toters that I saw along the streets and alleyways of Dwight seemed to have items sorted properly -- recyclables in the blue and trash in the brown.

Although data shows that recycling rates have tripled overall, and in every neighborhood, not all districts recycle equally. Currently, most neighborhoods report rates between 21 and 28 percent, and there is significant room for growth.

Areas such as Dwight which haven’t consistently recycled in the past have shown limited increases since the policy has been implemented, 8

especially compared to areas like East Rock with historically higher recycling rates. Despite the city’s efforts, which include new toters, educational campaigns, and mobilization of community management teams, certain neighborhoods still lag behind.

Why are some residents so resistant? It seems that the city could hardly make it easier to recycle: its bins are bigger, its instructions clearer, and, more importantly, the process has been drastically simplified. But there’s only so much that the city can accomplish through policy. An important factor seems to be the example of other residents; if residents recycle, it’s likely

does not imply causation.

Neighborhoods with higher rates of turnover also have lower recycling rates, said Justin Elicker, Ward 10 alderman and chair of the City Services and Environmental Policy committee. Immediately following the distribution of new bins, recycling rates increased significantly, he said.

But as educational campaigns were completed, the message didn’t get out to people who had moved, which was a particular problem in the neighborhoods with more turnover.

To meet the city’s ambitious recycling goals—30 percent of household waste recycled by the end of 2012 and 58

their neighbors will too.

To Christine Tang, director of New Haven’s Office of Sustainability, the increase in recycling rates isn’t enough. “Recycling isn’t optional,” said Tang. “It’s a state law and it’s a requirement in the city of New Haven.” Tang said that neighborhoods with higher rates of rental occupancy and greater population density usually have lower recycling rates, though she was quick to note that correlation

percent by 2020—all neighborhoods need to participate.

Tang has considered implementing certain “enforcement mechanisms,” although no decisions have been made. Though the Office of Sustainability would rather maintain a friendly relationship with city residents than apply the proverbial big stick in dealing with “serial noncompliers,” Tang said that fines, though unpopular, could be an option. The The New Journal

Department of Public Works, which directly handles recycling and trash pickup, sometimes refuses to pick up trash “contaminated” with recyclables.

But Tang is also looking ahead.

Eventually, the office hopes to create a bulk citywide composting program, a goal even more ambitious than raising recycling rates. Currently, no facility exists in Connecticut to handle bulk composting, but the more daunting task is getting residents on board.

Progress still needs to be made in the recycling program. While the service’s rates have risen, many residents didn’t seem aware of the single stream policy, much less that compliance was a law. Come garbage pick-up day, some will put out both of their toters, recyclables and trash waiting separately. But most won’t. In neighborhoods like Dwight, the city’s encouragement alone may not be enough to effect the change it wants to see.

– Julia Calagiovanni

Pulling Back the Curtain It’s the dead of night. Most of Yale is fast asleep. A handful of students sneak around, using chalk and fliers to “rename” a few residential colleges. They put up signs on Jonathan Edwards College that read “Titus X College,” renaming the seventy-six year old college after one of Edwards’ slaves. On Cross Campus, they chalk the phrase “Emancipate Yale.” Students wake up to these messages the next morning, more confused than angry. Who took the time and energy to do this? And why?

Founded in 2002, the Undergraduate Organizing Committee was one of the most influential student activist groups on campus for most of the past decade. With a stated mission to Spring 2012

fight for racial, social, and economic justice in Yale and New Haven, the group frequently made campus headlines, whether for its 2009 protest of the names of some of the residential colleges or for its less recent 2005 sitins in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to protest financial aid policies, which led to financial aid reform. Perhaps the group’s most noteworthy activity was its 2008 sit-in in Yale’s Investments Office to protest the University’s investment in HEI Hotels & Resorts, a company that allegedly supported poor working conditions. Ben Crosby ’13, a former UOC member who currently serves as co-chair of Ward 1 in New Haven, said that UOC drove the campaign that led Yale to divest from HEI. “It played a significant role. Or certainly the UOC pressure as part of a broader student movement in colleges across the country.”

Despite its success, the UOC deliberately remained small and concealed over the years. “The UOC often made a strategic choice during campaigns to put the issue out front rather than the organization,” said Mac Herring ’12, an active member for three years starting in the fall of 2008. “The focus was to make change, not to recruit students.” Herring explained that a group challenging Yale on such important issues couldn’t afford to be self-aggrandizing. But the UOC’s limited membership and lack of visibility also contributed to its reputation as a radical, self-righteous group. After nearly a decade of activism, the UOC gradually dissolved in the fall of 2011. Why did a group so confident in its goals and methods come to such a sudden end? Yale’s history with student activism may help illuminate the answer.

History professor Jay Gitlin ’71 witnessed the heyday of New Haven political protests during his junior year, when a variety of New Haven trials involving members of the Black

Panthers brought radicals and liberals from across the country to campus.

Gitlin called the atmosphere “chaotic,” “bizarre,” and “tumultuous,” and he was struck by the visible nature of the protest. “You would see people hang banners with some sort of political content,” he said. “Political unrest was more public.” This meant that students were generally more knowledgeable about the important issues, even if they weren’t necessarily participating in the protests.

Both Gitlin and another history professor, Gaddis Smith ’54, have watched open political protest disappear from the undergraduate community. Smith recalls a sit-in during the first couple of years of the Iraq War, in which a panel of teachers and about forty students occupied the second floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies to protest the war. When Smith asked how many of the protestors were undergraduates, only two raised their hands. “My general impression was that Yale undergraduates were not as politically attuned or ready to take action as they had been in the sixties, seventies, eighties, even in the nineties,” he said.

The UOC dissolved because students wanted to reverse this trend and make student activism visible once again. During the aldermanic elections last fall, more than fifty students— some who were longtime members of UOC and others who were involved in political activism for the first time— began canvassing and doing campaign work for Sarah Eidelson ’12, a UOC member who shared the group’s interest in labor reform. The canvassing efforts contributed to bringing a record number of students to the polls in the Ward 1 aldermanic race and propelled Eidelson to victory. Students were more excited and informed than Eidelson’s team expected, Herring said.

After members of the UOC saw the power of broader participation, it no longer made sense for them to 9

members, canvassers from the fall elections, and students without a connection to either.

“Having an insular group is the absolute last thing that we want,” SUN member Yoni Greenwood ’15 said.

SUN has similar goals to UOC but aims to achieve them by making political activism a more visible component of Yale life. SUN’s efforts thus far have focused on recruiting

new students, publicizing various local marches and protests, and surveying students to learn their stances on various issues relevant to Yale and New Haven life.

“It is a new day all across the city,” SUN member Sarah Cox ’14 said. “And I think it’s a new day for students in the way we’re involved on campus and in the city.”

Or, if you believe Gitlin and Smith, perhaps it’s a nod to an older time.

– Zachary Schloss

Clare Randt

fight for change as a small, insular group—especially with evidence of so many others interested in joining the cause. “The election brought a lot of people together from all parts of campus,” Eidelson said. “It left many of them wanting to build something bigger than either the campaign or the UOC.” Students Unite Now formed after the dissolution of the UOC in early 2012, and includes former UOC

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The New Journal

Spring 2012

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Brianne Bowen

WE STARTED 12

The New Journal

SNAPSHOT

A small band of eccentric academics tries to use the methods of cognitive science to address questions of classical philosophy—are they crazy, or just cutting edge?

THE FIRE

By Vlad Chituc

Spring 2012

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J

oshua Knobe isn’t forty yet, but he already has a discovery named after him. Imagine that a chairman of a large company is deciding whether or not to implement a new—and very lucrative—green initiative. The chairman thinks about it for a minute and says, “I actually don’t care about the environment at all. I just want to make as much money as I can.” He implements the policy, the air gets cleaner, and the chairman gets a new house in the Hamptons.

Would you say he intentionally helped the environment? If you’re like most of Joshua Knobe’s subjects, you answered no, any environmentally friendly by-product was coincidental, not intentional. In his 2003 survey, only 23 percent of Knobe’s subjects answered yes.

Now consider a slightly different scenario. This time, the program would harm the environment. All other factors are constant. The chairman still doesn’t care about the environment, only wants money, and goes ahead with the policy.

The environment was harmed, but did he harm it intentionally?

This time, you probably said, along with 82 percent of Knobe’s subjects, that the chairman did intentionally harm the environment.

The only difference is here is morality. But should a decision’s ethical status have nothing to do with whether its side-effects were intentionally produced? The difference between the 82 and 23 percent is sometimes called the side-effect-effect, or the Knobe effect.

Clearly this finding has some 14

psychological relevance, but Knobe first published it in a philosophical journal. Knobe is an associate professor of both philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, and he helped found a movement that is blurring the lines between philosophy and psychology. This new approach, called experimental philosophy, aims to apply the practical tools and findings of the cognitive sciences to philosophical problems.

“I want to know the way the fucking mind works,” Mandelbaum told me.

At first, the term doesn’t make sense: a philosopher is supposed to ponder deep truths in an armchair, not administer studies in a lab coat, clipboard in hand. But experimental philosophers claim to follow a deeper philosophical tradition that predates twentieth century philosophy. Plato hypothesized on the structure of the mind, Hume and Adam Smith

considered moral judgments and empathy, and Descartes tried to find the seat of the soul (he settled on the pineal gland, a small endocrinesecreting organ in the center of the brain). But the questions philosophers ask now tend to be more abstract: What does it mean for something to mean something? Is a liquid that looks and tastes just like water but has a different chemical structure still water? Are actions good because of their consequences or the kind of action they are?

Experimental philosophers want to return to the questions that attracted philosophers centuries ago, but with new tools informed by the cognitive sciences. They investigate topics such as the way the mind works and how morality, rationality, and emotion interact, using techniques ranging from fMRI scans to paper and pencil surveys.

I first heard of experimental philosophy roughly two years ago as a sophomore psychology major. I had just grown out of thinking of philosophy as its worst stereotype: speculative nonsense that engages little, if at all, with reality.

My advisor suggested that I take a class called “Philosophy and Science of Human Nature,” taught by Knobe at the time. In each lecture, we addressed readings in classical philosophy by authors like Plato, Schopenhauer, and Marx, then turned to modern scientific research, often from the last decade, that addressed the same questions.

The class left me conflicted.

Though it kindled my personal interest The New Journal

in philosophy, I still doubted whether experimental philosophy could meaningfully be called philosophy at all. Experimental philosophers like Knobe argue that keeping big questions out of labs and away from data confines the discipline to a narrow space. The debate about experimental philosophy deals with these questions: what is philosophy, what should it be, and who are these people who think they can change it?

I

made my way into a dimly lit seminar room, choosing a seat out of the way and in the corner. I had come to visit Knobe’s lab meeting, and I was late. A graduate student with a faint southern drawl was presenting at the front of the room. Someone from the back called out a suggestion about research methods, another disagreed, and the discussion grew somewhat heated before Knobe calmed them down, laughing.

“Friends, I’m afraid we must move on,” he said soothingly. His voice was high-pitched and fluid, and seemed to invite me along to discover deep truths along with him. Knobe’s hair is dark and shaggy, and he wore a striped gray t-shirt with faded brown corduroy pants.

As the lab meeting came to a close, I approached Knobe, hoping to hear more about experimental philosophy and its place at Yale.

“Sure.” he said. “Do you want to grab a burrito?” I did. I was starving, and I love burritos.

If experimental philosophy is a revolution, then it’s a “very mildmannered” one, Knobe assured me as we ate at Moe’s Southwest Grill on Whitney Avenue (his choice).

I find it hard to imagine Knobe Spring 2012

as a revolutionary but, then again, the symbol of his movement is a flaming armchair. It serves as an omen, suggesting that neuroscience and psychology could replace the introspection in answering questions about human nature.

In 2006, Slate magazine profiled recent work in experimental philosophy. The article went largely unnoticed by the average reader, but it caused some controversy in the world of academic philosophy. David Velleman, a philosopher at New York University, responded in a blog post, arguing that experimental philosophy has no bearing on any philosophical problems. Other philosophers rushed to defend Knobe and his colleagues, and the sudden attention led Oxford University Press to approach the Yale professor in a matter of days, asking him to co-edit a volume of research in the field. “A bunch of people at the same time were doing the same kind of thing,” he explained. “There was this convergence.”

Knobe came to Yale when a faculty position opened in the cognitive science program, which proved particularly well-suited to Knobe’s interdisciplinary work. Knobe has written papers on varied topics, including free will and cosmology, and a recent paper he co-authored with Yale psychologist Paul Bloom explored how people’s clothes influence what we think about their capability to feel pain or plan ahead. If it weren’t for Knobe’s hiring, Yale’s small band of experimental philosophers might not exist today, and certainly wouldn’t exist in its current capacity.

After a brief stint travelling through Europe to translate “really terrible” Russian poetry, Jonathan

Phillips, a graduate student pursuing a joint PhD in psychology and philosophy followed Knobe to Yale, working first as the professor’s lab manager, then as his graduate student.

Phillips studied philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when Knobe was still a professor there. He had begun to feel disillusioned with modern philosophy (“I thought, ‘This is just all bullshit’”), and so was relieved to discover that Knobe shared some of his concerns.

“I had already actually started the process to switch to take extra time in college to go to medical school— basically to do something useful with my life,” he said, laughing. Knobe convinced him to pursue experimental philosophy instead.

Eric Mandelbaum, a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Yale’s philosophy department, also moved with Knobe from Chapel Hill to Yale. Though Mandelbaum considers himself more of a theoretical psychologist than an experimental philosopher, he shares an interest in the fundamental questions of human nature.

“I want to know the way the fucking mind works,” Mandelbaum told me in the basement of Anna Liffey’s, in between sips of Guinness.

He had invited me to have drinks after one of Knobe’s lab meetings.

Mandelbaum wore a collared shirt under a tight black hoodie, and he glowed with what I think of as the endearing and somehow earnest cynicism of an artist. He was, indeed, a writer and used to play music. His face lit red every so often as the LED at the end of his electronic cigarette flared up, and he mentioned that he’d recently quit smoking after seventeen years. I laughed, and mentioned 15

that he was either way older than he looked, or he started smoking when he was a baby. “A little bit of both,” he replied, grinning. I imagined him as a skinny-jeaned fifteen year-old with shaggy hair, taking a smoke break from band practice behind his friend’s garage. It seemed plausible.

For a brief period, Mandelbaum had also pursued a PhD in psychology, but he found that philosophy provided him more time and freedom to pursue his interests, as he no longer needed to spend his time collecting data.

“Anyone can collect the data,” he told me, grinning some more.

As a waitress took Mandelbaum’s order, he mentioned that as a graduate student in the department where Knobe had his first job, he was in a privileged position to observe Knobe’s career. Mandelbaum and another graduate student had rallied to get him hired at Chapel Hill. The academics have since become friends.

“When his book came out, he suckered me into opening for his wife in a split indie rock/academic talk setting,” Mandelbaum said. Knobe’s wife, an indie singer-songwriter, played a set, and Mandelbaum, he admitted, “got a little bit tipsy and gave a talk called ‘Why is everyone such an asshole?’”

Yale’s community of experimental philosophers is somewhat unique.

Outside of Harvard, where Mandelbaum will work next year, and a handful of smaller philosophy programs such as City University of New York and the University of Arizona, philosophy departments with an interest in cognitive sciences are few and far between. “In my depressed moods, it makes me just wanna go open a record store,” 16

The New Journal

Join the distinguished ranks of TNJ alumni: Mandelbaum said, laughing. But he noted that cognitive science centers were beginning to be more common in Europe. “Sad to think that that might be where the future is, because the structures here are just not set up to move easily.” It seems that not many universities may be open to philosophical revolutions.

N

ot everyone at Yale is convinced that experimental philosophy can provide answers to the eternal questions of philosophy. Clark Professor of Philosophy Shelly Kagan expressed skepticism that experimental philosophy would be any more successful than previous, ultimately failed philosophical revolutions. Yet Kagan embraced the project nonetheless. It’s difficult to tell in advance which philosophical projects will pay off.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Kagan told me.

Whether or not experimental philosophy makes significant contributions to the philosophical canon, Kagan sees it at as relevant for the cognitive sciences. “I’m personally inclined to think that this stuff is primarily a subfield of psychology,” he added. And I realized that, consciously or not, I had also been treating the research coming from experimental philosophy as part of psychology.

I found myself still in a strange place—I was interested in philosophy the way Kagan and other modern philosophers understood it, but also as Knobe and other experimental philosophers understood it. I had trouble clearly locating my interests in philosophy or psychology, and I still couldn’t precisely define philosophy.

But perhaps it didn’t and doesn’t really Spring 2012

matter. Knobe told me, “I think it would be great if we could just go after questions with everything we can, and not worry about distinctions.” I think he’s right.

A few weeks later I sat in a leather sofa across from Professor Bloom, whose psychological research touches on philosophical issues. Floor-toceiling bookshelves peppered with a few bits of cognitive esoterica stood behind us. His arm swung casually over the edge of his chair while a colorful and rectangular clay mug stood on the floor at the other side of the room.

Bloom represents the psychologist who deals in deep questions of human nature without being too concerned about calling it philosophy. He was a great admirer of thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith and sees philosophers like Knobe as following in their footsteps.

Sitting up in his chair and smiling, Bloom added, “If Ada­m Smith was around today he’d have a lab.” He seemed clearly delighted by the idea, and I think I was, too.

Daniel Yergin Pulitzer Prize winner James Bennet Editor-in-Chief The Atlantic Jay Carney White House Press Secretary Andy Court Producer 60 Minutes Richard Bradley Editor-in-Chief Worth Magazine Dana Goodyear Staff Writer The New Yorker Emily Bazelon Senior Editor Slate Magazine Daniel Kurtz-Phelan Senior Editor Foreign Affairs

TNJ

Vlad Chituc is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.

Steven Weisman Chief International Economics Correspondent The New York Times www.thenewjournalatyale.com 17

SNAPSHOT

Making Cents of Space Google Map Maker provides mappers with the tools to chart their own communities, but the corporation’s restrictive policies may limit the scope of these efforts.

By Benjamin Mueller

T

he Peru that Yale librarian Daniel Mugaburu left with his family at age thirteen was a broken country. On August 8, 1990, the night before his departure, the price of gasoline had risen by 3,000 percent. The highway into Lima, once bustling with street vendors and microbuses from the seventies, was lined with mounds of rotting garbage. Terrorist bombings had forced Mugaburu to do his homework by candlelight for weeks at a time. But through the chaos, Mugaburu had always understood his city. Sitting on 18

the back of his father’s motorcycle rushing over dirt roads as a child, Mugaburu pointed out the way to his father, every street corner familiar to him.

That familiarity changed when Mugaburu landed in the US. “I was stunned by the immensity of lights!” he later wrote in a letter to a friend.

“Automatic doors?

Ridiculous.

Electric escalators? Holy shit!!!”

Mugaburu’s new home in Hartford, Connecticut, was a strange land where classmates dumped heaps of food in the trash and storefronts kept their

doors closed even when they were open.

Mugaburu started drawing maps by hand in order to understand his new home. He sketched outlines of the United States, searching for the home state he could barely pronounce.

“Mapping was a way to familiarize myself with my whereabouts,” Mugaburu recalled. “It was about finding whether I belong here or not.”

Mugaburu drew the streets that others only walked. When he could afford it, he went to a local convenience store and bought a professional map to The New Journal

check his work.

Mugaburu’s mapping project gained a global platform when Google released a program called Map Maker in 2008. Google Map Maker is an editing tool that allows ordinary people to shape, revise, and detail public maps of their communities online. Citizen mappers have put countries like Kazakhstan and Romania on the map and have kept maps of US cities current using satellite imagery, local knowledge, and GPS devices. With their help, Google Maps has become the most popular internet map, garnering 71 percent of online US map traffic in February and over two hundred million installations on mobile phones worldwide.

But as surely as Google has torn down the old hierarchy in mapping, it has built up a new one, restricting access to its data, allowing politics to influence its choices, and using free labor to turn a profit. Google has left behind a movement of citizen mappers eager to chart their communities but fearful that the spirit of independent cartography will be corrupted.

When Mugaburu first took stock of Peru’s status on Google Maps in 2008, he was dismayed by what he saw. “There were only a couple of cities and they were only half done.”

Armed with his local knowledge of Lima, satellite images, and college credits in Geographic Information Systems, Mugaburu intended to equip Peruvians with the geographic data he’d thirsted for himself in Hartford.

He wanted to put Peru on the map.

Mugaburu was drawn in particular to a blank spot that he knew to be Pachacutec, a slum of 200,000 residents north of Lima that the government refused to recognize. Peru didn’t have the money or political will to expend resources on Pachacutec’s displaced people, so it left the slum off of maps. The map’s blankness, in turn, justified the government’s assertion that there was Spring 2012

no official settlement in Pachacutec.

The result was a wasteland of a city with no running water, no electricity, no roads, and no health services.

Using Map Maker, Mugaburu drew the shoreline bordering the slum and all the roads that ran through it.

When his edits were added to Google Maps, people in Pachacutec noticed and added street names, schools, hospitals, and a technical college.

Now, Mugaburu said, “in the event of a disaster emergency personnel can get to places.” But maps have more than practical power, he explained.

“We’re giving people who live in shantytowns some sense of place.”

In his excitement, Mugaburu’s accent became more pronounced. He spoke for Pachacutec’s citizens: “Yes, this is where we are. We are on the map. This is where my business is. Come visit, just follow the driving directions.”

When he’s not working at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Mugaburu now travels to Google conferences to speak about mapping as a Google Map Maker Advocate.

Mappers like Mugaburu from around the world have been charting their hometowns, working to empower communities often lacking a common geographic currency.

Kyril Negoda, who has made over twenty thousand edits on Map Maker, grew up in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, before moving to Minnesota at age fifteen. Karaganda, a mining town that once generated energy for much of the Soviet Union, withered during Negoda’s youth as energy technology changed and jobs vanished. As a boy, Negoda was a winner of the Kazakhstani State Olympics in geography, and he watched with a cartographer’s eye as population loss reshaped the town’s physical landscape. But no records were made.

“Kazakhstan was going through all the political and economic changes after the Soviet Union. The importance of mapping fell by the wayside,” Negoda

said. A town struggling to adapt to changing economic and demographic realities still relied on maps from the Soviet era to get around.

“I wanted to capture that changing landscape in my town,” Negoda explained. Giving people public access to their geographic data changed the way they related to their community. They took out their smart phones and traced Karaganda on Google Maps. When Negoda made a mistake, they logged into Map Maker themselves and fixed it.

Karaganda was now known to the world—or at least could become known—and the investment that Negoda first made in his hometown “trickled down from top to bottom.”

Karaganda’s cartographic presence also helped its business community recruit customers and bring back some of the jobs lost during Negoda’s youth. Mapped businesses are each assigned short Google Maps pages, where users can rate and comment on them, encouraging more hits and more customers, Negoda explained.

Negoda and Map Maker have helped give Karagandans a voice in remaking their community.

Anas Qtiesh ushered his hometown of As Suwayda, Syria, through a similar transition. Before Qtiesh took to Map Maker, locals relied on their own memory for direction, streets were unnamed, and the official map was oriented with North to the left. State censorship kept citizens from acquiring the tools they needed to formalize their geography; Syria banned GPS devices, satellite images, and smart phones.

“It’s a policy of keeping people in the dark,” said Qtiesh, who now blogs and maps from San Francisco. For Qtiesh, mapping is a tool of resistance against an apathy that impairs people’s personal sense of place and their commitment to political change.

“Providing maps is a way of fighting back against that,” Qtiesh said. “It’s 19

about people finding their place in a country.”

But the Google Map Maker revolution goes further. Mapping in all times and all places has given people tools to understand their space. But for the first time ordinary people, rather than governments or corporations, are drawing the lines. They’ll draw the lines not to snatch territory from neighboring states or to make a profit but simply because people deserve to know their way around. As Mugaburu puts it: “It can shift the power balance. It’s done by us, not by big governments. We know our countries best, our neighborhoods, and we have the power to change that.”

Google Map Maker claims to be part of a democratic revolution in how information gets produced.

When communities generate the knowledge, communities can ensure that corporate or political interests don’t shape the way they get mapped.

As Google said in a 2011 press release, “You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map.” Map Maker positions itself as a project by citizens, for

citizens, which has garnered positive responses. In January 2012, the World Bank announced it would begin a partnership with Map Maker in its grassroots endeavor. Google may be a profit-seeking corporation, but volunteer mappers put in hundreds of hours of unpaid labor because they want to be part of a movement overturning the traditional hierarchy in mapping.

However, the project may be less democratic than it seems.

Rhetorically, Map Maker latches on to the Wikipedia model of bottomup knowledge production. In practice, Bill Rankin, professor of history of cartography at Yale, says Map Maker falls short of that vision. “It’s more like last.fm and Amazon where people provide information to a company and they don’t have a voice in how it gets used,” he said. “It’s less about people coming together to determine how their knowledge will be used and more about people providing free labor to Google.”

Negoda, who spent five hundred unpaid hours over two years mapping Kazakhstan, feels betrayed by the restrictions Google places around its mapping data. “Google needs to

recognize its place as a partner to the community and become a good steward of the geographic treasure it is entrusted with. Until then, Map Maker represents little more than an elaborate front in a grand extortion scheme.” Earlier this year, Negoda dropped his affiliation with Google in protest over its policies.

Even Mugaburu, at first unerringly positive, acknowledged that cracks were beginning to form in his loyalty. “I started mapping in the good faith that Google will do the right thing. I don’t know other people’s threshold for good and ethical conduct, but they’re getting close to my threshold.”

When first joining Map Maker, mappers must hand over all legal claims to the data they will produce.

Mappers can’t participate in decisions about how the data is used, receive no guarantees that it will live on should something happen to Google Maps, and surrender the right to share the data outside of Map Maker. Negoda and Mugaburu give over their data, trusting that Google will handle it in the best interests of the mapping community.

Rather than make freely available

Above are three maps of Gaza: one by Google (far left), one by the wiki alternative, Open Street Maps (middle), and a Google satellite image of the region (far right).

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The New Journal

the data it freely acquired, Google places strict limits around the use of its mapping data. OpenStreetMap, an alternative to Map Maker that has a weaker global presence but is growing in popularity, allows people to use its data for whatever purpose and on whatever platform they see fit. Google, on the other hand, restricts access to its data in order to maximize profits.

Under the Google Map Maker License Agreement, mappers are prohibited from using non-profit open source tools, like OpenStreetMap, to work with data introduced on Map Maker, killing the possibility of collaboration in what is billed as a collective, citizencentered project. Another stipulation in the License Agreement prevents for-profit groups from displaying Map Maker data, jeopardizing Google Maps’ capacity to build small business in developing nations.

Mappers like Mugaburu are willing to accept these limitations so long as Google doesn’t ask customers to pay high prices for the product they’ve helped produce for free. But prices for Google Maps services are rising. In October of 2011, Google announced that independent web developers whose sites feature Google Maps must pay four dollars for every thousand Maps views over twenty five thousand. Though larger Web sites have always been subject to fees, the price hikes prompted Apple and FourSquare, a social media service, to switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap for parts of their applications. Negoda may sound like a man with a grudge when he calls Map Maker a “grand extortion scheme.” But as long as Google continues to recruit free labor under the banner of bottom-up citizen mapping, it can’t guard its data for ever-steeper profits without mappers and viewers questioning its motives.

Representatives from Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its pricing and other Spring 2012

policies.

With final decision-making power concentrated in a group of executives, dubbed the “Google gods” by Mugaburu, data for politically sensitive locations is often ignored. Active edits to the map of Cyprus were suppressed and the country was left blank because Google feared offending the Turks or Greeks with their use of one language over the other. Map Maker has closed editing in Gaza, where people lack access to basic geographic data, even as they face threats of violence. In contrast, during the Gaza War of 2009, OpenStreetMap issued a call for contacts familiar with Gaza’s geography to fill its online map. “Information is our most powerful tool towards peace and understanding,” Mikel Maron, a Board Member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, wrote on his blog at the time. “Let’s work towards openness and freedom.” OpenStreetMap now features a detailed map of roads and public services in Gaza. Asked by e-mail why he thought Google refused to open Map Maker to Gaza, Maron responded in a few terse sentences. “There is nothing political or financial to gain from opening up in Gaza,” he wrote. He speculated that “Google also has a substantial Israel presence.” Google is likely concerned about political spam, but to Maron there’s no defense for prioritizing corporate anxieties over equal access to information.

The combination of Google’s price hikes and restrictive policies have sucked the spirit from Mugaburu’s mapping efforts in the United States, though he plans to continue mapping in Peru. With mappers discouraged from voicing their concerns, Negoda and Mugaburu hope that consumer pressure will lead to reform. Pressure from activists recently compelled the World Bank to revise its relationship with Map Maker—“if the public helps to collect or create map data, the

public should be able to access, use, and re-use that data freely,” a March 2012 press release from the World Bank said—but a more widespread boycott remains unlikely.

A geography teacher at St. Thomas Elementary School in New Haven recently asked Mugaburu to speak to his class about mapmaking.

Mugaburu began developing ideas for demonstrations and activities and asked his supervisor at Google, Jessica, if she could provide stickers and other props. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to do this,” she told him. Mugaburu was discouraged; he’d been excited to share his mapmaking efforts with a new generation of cartographers. Jessica explained that an internet protection law prohibits anybody under the age of thirteen from having an e-mail account. She didn’t see why Mugaburu would want to promote mapmaking among kids too young to sign up for Google. As Mugaburu understood her, “if they can’t map, what are they good for?”

Mugaburu wants to give others a glimpse of the power of mapmaking, of the personal and political transformation that becomes possible when people get together to chart their world. He wants Google to recognize its obligation to the mappers who have offered their service under this ideal. And above all he wants to grant the next generation the gift of knowing that there’s a tool as powerful as words or songs or dances to understand its place and tell its stories. Google, on the other hand, just wants more mappers.

TNJ

Benjamin Mueller is a sophomore in Berkeley College and a Managing Editor of The New Journal.

21

THE PARDONERS

America’s prisoners attempt to reenter a society that doesn’t want them back.

Photo by Joy Shan

By Nikita Lalwani

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The New Journal

Spring 2012

23

V

irginia Downing, 61, can legally say she’s never committed a crime.

Search “Virginia Downing” on any database of court records, and you’ll get nothing. Her record is spotless, indistinguishable from that of the most average, law-abiding citizen.

Yet ask her, and she’ll tell you that she’s been arrested “three or four times” in Fair Haven. She began cooking and selling crack in the early 1990s, when she was bored and unemployed. Her friends would come to her apartment after work, begging her to supply them. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” she intones.

She sighs, accentuating the wrinkles on her weathered face.

The last time Downing was arrested, in 1998, the police officer said to her, “Mrs. Downing, could you please find something else to do?” That’s when she realized she’d had enough. “They never found any guns on me or anything. I didn’t open my house for that,” she says. “I just wanted company. But it just wasn’t worth it anymore.”

The secret to her clean public record? She was pardoned.

In 2008, Connecticut removed Downing’s criminal conviction records from public view. A previously convicted felon may apply for a Connecticut state-issued pardon five years after committing a felony or three years after a misdemeanor.

Downing spent the five years after her conviction getting clean, working at Krispy Kreme and Olive Garden, and volunteering at Mothers for Justice, an advocacy group for lowincome women. From her sobriety, employment, and community service work, she built a pardon application that stressed how the woman she had become was different from the one who once illegally sold drugs and alcohol.

To hear Downing tell it, the 24

pardon she received saved her life. “It means a wonder to have a pardon, it means I can start my life over with a clean slate,” she tells me over pizza.

“My son, my daughter, my four grandkids, they’re all so proud of me” It’s been easier to get jobs, too, since employers no longer reject her after completing a background check.

It’s been thirteen years since Downing stopped selling crack. She now works as a crossing guard in New Haven, and sells homemade pies on the side. In some ways, she says her pie-baking business fills the void left when she stopped selling drugs. She often sells pies to her friends when they stop by her house.

Downing seems to be proof that people really can change, and that makes me feel good. But then I ask her if having a pardon means she’ll never return to her criminal ways.

“I’m trying to stay away from that for sure. These days I do my baking, I belong to a church, I’m trying to straighten my life out,” she says. Then, she adds a surprising concession: “You know, sometimes I am tempted to go back into selling drugs. Hopefully I won’t, but hey, we all have our personal hang-ups.”

“What’s the sense in getting a pardon if you’ll go back on your word?” she adds, and I’m quick to agree. But perhaps the ease with which a pardon permits a felon to deceive explains why, despite how nice Downing seems, much of society may be uneasy with the notion of legal pardons. Criminal records serve a purpose: they provide warning signs to society to watch for recidivists. Some convicts who apply for pardons have physically assaulted people, and some have killed. Last year, the state of Connecticut pardoned four hundred three formerly convicted felons; that’s four hundred three people who can legally say they never committed the crime for which they once were found guilty.

T

irzah Kemp, who helps people like Downing apply for pardons, has three appointments scheduled before her lunch break. One is with a man who holds a double homicide conviction, and two are with men who were arrested for possession of a firearm. It’s the beginning of a typical Thursday morning.

Tirzah, known to her friends as “Tee,” works in a small office tucked away on the second floor of New Haven’s City Hall. There, she works for the city’s Prison Reentry Initiative, a program launched in 2008 to offer resources and advice to formerly incarcerated residents — “everything from where to buy bus passes to how to draft a resume,” Kemp likes to say. Kemp’s work puts her in a good position to help ease societal concerns about pardons.

Kemp is the typical social worker: friendly, motherly, efficient. She takes care to ask clients if they’ve spoken to their parents, if they have enough food stamps, whether or not they’re happy.

Her office is covered with posters that encourage felons to vote or apply for housing or claim their civil rights.

She grins when she tells me — as she often does — about clients of hers who have gone on to find gainful employment and turn their lives around.

In short, she seems born for this job. But until roughly a decade ago, she had never heard of it.

“I started working here after I got my felony,” she tells me the first time we meet. The public record will tell you that on September 6, 1999, she was convicted for assault in the second degree after stabbing her ex-boyfriend with a knife. She will add that it was the result of a short, tumultuous relationship that often turned violent.

Before her arrest, she’d never thought about felons or the lives they lead. But then came her charge and soon after, the three years on The New Journal

probation, the inevitable questions from her kids, the public stigma, the drawn-out job search. “But I always had a passion for helping people,” she’ll tell you. “I always tell people I didn’t choose to work with former offenders as a career path, it kind of chose me.”

A former felon herself, Kemp empathizes with her clients. But if Kemp stands at the pearly gates, helping some to get pardons and start anew, she also wants the chance to enter. For this reason, she decided in 2009 to begin her own pardon application.

W

hen I first contacted Amy Meek, Kemp’s colleague and the Reentry Initiative director, she did not want to talk to me about pardons.

“Advocates in the area of prisoner reentry really struggle with the press,” she told me over a phone call. “The fundamental issue is there is a lot of stigma associated with having a criminal conviction, sometimes with good reason, sometimes not.” Some reporters write about “ex-cons” or “felons,” unaware that these terms pigeonhole those trying to move on with their lives. Many don’t do background research. Most were probably brought up to believe that once someone becomes a criminal, they will always be one.

It is this perception that Amy fears. “The media too often stereotypes what someone looks like who has a criminal conviction. There’s an idea that they are a bunch of big, bad guys. But it’s estimated that nearly one in every four adults has a criminal conviction. So it’s not just about bad guys.”

She’s right: according to a March 2011 study by the National Employment Law Project, nearly sixty-five million Americans have some sort of criminal record. That’s about a fifth of the population of the United States.

Spring 2012

W

e’re on Kemp’s second appointment of the day, a twenty-eight-year-old black man named Smith Smith. He was convicted in 2009 for carrying a firearm and was released from jail this past January, on parole until this July. He’s here to work on his resume.

Kemp sees a lot of people like Smith, who ask about resumes and job searches. Getting a job is difficult for anyone in this recessed economy, but for a convicted felon, it is nearly impossible. On top of this, the advocacy non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch estimated that nearly 3.5 million Americans are ineligible for federal housing based on their criminal records.

Unsurprisingly, many are forced into homelessness and debilitating poverty — conditions that inspire some to return to a life of crime.

I ask Smith what he’ll do if his criminal conviction bars him from getting a job.

“I mean right now, I need money,” he says. “In the future I want to further my education and stuff. I don’t have much family support. I’ve never been a person who got into trouble, but I was caught at the wrong time. It’s always been hard to get jobs, but by having this big felony on me it’s going to be really hard. I know that.”

At this point Kemp interjects and asks me if I’ve read The New Jim Crow, a book by American Civil Liberties Union attorney Michelle Alexander. I haven’t.

“Read it. This is a perfect example of what she’s talking about,” she says gesturing towards Smith. “You have a black gentleman who made a very, very poor decision, no doubt. Rather than him getting an education or changing his behavior, he was incarcerated.

The warehouse of his mind was not cultivated. And he’s coming home with the same mental behavior, if not more angry, and now the system will 25

not allow him to right his wrong.”

Smith, who seems not to have thought about his conviction in those terms before, seems a bit taken aback.

He is straight out of jail, quick to laugh, still optimistic that he can get his life back. He keeps telling me that he’s sure he’ll get a job.

Kemp joins in. “I didn’t realize how difficult it would be when I got my felony either,” she says. She had a job at that point and maintained her employment. But then she had her second son and took some time off. When she began searching for a new job, things were different.

These days, employers can look up everything online, and even a cursory background check reveals her second-degree assault.

They saw her felony, she said, and assumed she was prone to violence. Kemp thinks that few looked past her criminal record.

She stops typing up his resume for a moment to do a quick Google search for job openings. She has a point to make. “Look, here’s one.” It’s for kitchen maintenance work, a dishwasher. “You must have some experience in the kitchen,” she reads.

“You must be able to pass a criminal background check.” She laughs at the requirement as if it were obviously absurd. For a moment, I wonder what’s so ludicrous: if I were working in a kitchen, I’d want some confidence that the dishwasher wasn’t a murderer.

But then I realize the sort of criminal record Kemp means is probably something like possessing marijuana fifteen years ago — not the kind of crime that would put me or anybody else in our kitchen at risk. New Haven’s Board of Alderman have recently been thinking along similar lines as Kemp, voting on April 2 to make it easier for former felons to obtain street vendor licenses from the city. The Collateral Consequences Ordinance should help the one in seven applicants for street

vendors licenses in New Haven who have been turned away because of their criminal records.

Kemp continues, it’s not that people with criminal records can’t get jobs. They can. They just have to know how to market themselves.

That’s where she can be of most help. There are certain tricks of the trade. She tells her clients that when an employer asks about their records, they should first explain that they regret their past actions and have learned from their mistakes. Then they should list all of the positive

changer. A valid driver’s license is the only requirement. She prints this out for him as well. We’re at the end of his appointment.

“Good luck,” I say to Smith as he puts his resume in his bag and gets up to leave.

“I need it,” he replies.

We’ve gone the whole conversation without bringing up one crucial fact: everything comes back to the pardon.

With a pardon, people like Smith don’t have to worry about employers conducting background checks. They don’t have to worry about being stopped at international borders.

They don’t have to hedge when someone asks their criminal history.

Pardons can sometimes seem like an elusive holy grail.

But where do they actually come from? While pardons can feel like the touch of Grace, gratuitous and redeeming, they are in fact doled out by the human hands of Connecticut state employees.

With a pardon, people like Derrick don’t have to hedge when someone asks their criminal history.

26

efforts they’ve made since then to reintegrate into the community. It’s a science: after they’ve established that they take full responsibility for their actions, they draw the employers’ attention away from their crimes and onto their progress.

Smith asks if she can write that down for him, and they both laugh.

Start studying tonight, she jokes. Then she’s serious again: “Right now your record outweighs your skills. But with the correct marketing, it can be the opposite. I feel frustrated when guys come to me and say no one’s going to hire me because of my record. I’ve been doing this ten years now, and I don’t believe that’s true.”

She prints out his completed resume and continues searching for jobs online. Voila! A Connecticut company is looking for a truck tire

O

nly a short distance from the Waterbury train station lies a large, gray circular building, home to the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles. Here, a board of eight reads and evaluates each pardon application. Here, the fate of people like Kemp and Smith hangs in the balance. Last year, nine hundred twenty-five people applied for pardons. Slightly more than one-third of these were granted.

On the fifth floor near the cubicles, Andrew Moseley, the official board manager, sits down at his desk.

He is a black man of average height, soft-spoken and serious. He speaks slowly, with deliberation. When I ask him what the board looks for in a successful pardon application, he says it varies based on factors like how many convictions a person has or what type of life they led before their The New Journal

arrest.

“Suitability trumps eligibility every time,” he says. “The board likes to see people doing community service, we look for things like education, good references. They also look for a person’s sincerity in the application process. We look for honestly. We’re not interested in people who deny the veracity of their conviction because we’re not rehashing a case, simply going over what has been done since then.”

The board also looks at things like whether or not applicants have kept up with child support payments, what their family history is like, and if they have a clean motor vehicle record. If the board decides not to grant a pardon, it might still grant a provisional pardon — a certificate exfelons can show employers that says the state deems them fit to work.

But Moseley acknowledges what I’ve often heard Kemp complain about: provisional pardons are not as effective as they could be because the certificate lists all the crimes for which a person was convicted. When employers see that list, the provisional pardon becomes a reason to reject an application rather than accept it.

Moseley said the board is working to create a provisional pardon that does not list criminal activity, but this may not happen for another year or two.

Spring 2012

Moseley sees his office as working with the Kemps and Smiths of the world rather than against them. He speaks with pride about Connecticut’s generous pardon system and believes strongly that pardons afford previously convicted felons a muchneeded chance to reintegrate back into society.

Pardons allow people to get a new start, a real new start,” he says. “You’re back. Despite the years that have gone by, you’re back to never having been convicted.”

G

oing back is easier said than done. The pardon application is fourteen pages long, with three additional pages for references. Like a college application, it asks for personal background information, a list of community service activities, and a few essays on why you should be granted a pardon.

Kemp tells me it took her roughly seven months to compile her own pardon application, which required hunting down old job supervisors for recommendations, getting fingerprinted at the police station, and tracking down her written arrest record. “Putting the pardon package together and realizing how much I’d accomplished made me extremely proud of where I’ve come since the incident,” Kemp says.

She even asked her fourteen-yearold son to write a letter on her behalf (“Why should Mommy get a pardon?” she remembers asking him), adding that she left his letter unedited so that his voice “really comes through.” She chokes up as she remembers what he wrote: “My mother is a very good mom... she teaches me the way to grow up so my life can be better than hers.”

At this point, Kemp pulls out her own pardon application to show me.

It’s a huge packet, probably at least thirty pages long. As I read through, I am struck by the sincerity one passage in particular: “A pardon will allow me the opportunity to live life on a clean slate, claim my freedom, and peace of mind,” she writes in Section 13: Purpose of Application. “My mother has been by my side through my transformation and I would love to show her how I have moved on with my life for the good.”

For Kemp, the stakes are high.

If she loses her job, she might once again face hostile employers. When she decides it’s time for her family to move homes, she will once again have to apply for subsidized housing. More than these practicalities, a pardon would finally divorce her crime from her character.

“I made a bad choice and I had to 27

overcome it,” she says. For a moment, she is quiet. “I used to be extremely ashamed of myself. I couldn’t even talk about it without crying.

I want the understanding that my crime is something that happened to me personally, but it’s not who I am.”

Now, her resume is more impressive than any college applicant’s: she has worked for half a dozen community service organizations, raised two children and helped low-income families file their taxes. Everything backs up her claim that she has learned from her mistakes, that she has changed. If she’s not who Manager Moseley is looking for, then who is?

The board took six months to get back to her with a decision. All in all, the process had taken a year. The return envelope carried only a slip of paper: the board could not offer her a pardon at this time. Try again at a later date.

process and soon enough felt ready to teach again.

all seemed eager to win me over to their side. In some sense, I was their surrogate for the state, someone on whom they could test-drive their new identities. And in some ways I was an easier critic. I could forgive their offenses because, well, they seemed to be genuinely trying to be better law-abiding citizens. It probably helped that their crimes seemed to be isolated, true mistakes.

But then I was called up by a man who, thirty years ago, killed two people. He introduced himself as Michael Constantopoulos, one of Kemp’s clients. He’d heard I was writing an article about “people like me” and wanted to get involved.

We arrange to meet at dusk, the intersection of night and day, at a church on the corner of Wall and Orange. I decide to bring a friend.

On the way over, I am conflicted.

On the one hand, Constantopoulos had been polite and friendly on the phone, and I want to believe that the thirty years since his crime had made him someone other than a man who could kill two people. On the other, I can’t quite forget what his public record indicates: that he destroyed the lives of two people, two families, and probably countless friends. It seems appropriate that here is a slight chill in the evening breeze.

“Thank you so much for coming,” he says, holding the door to the church open for me. “I really appreciate what you’re doing.”

Constantopoulos has an open, honest face and is quick to bring up what I hesitate to ask. He was involved in a double homicide at the age of sixteen, then spent twenty-three years in prison. When I ask him for details, he says he doesn’t want to disrespect the victims by giving his side of the story. The public record reveals that Constantopoulos killed Reginald Hillyard and Chantel Grey after a car

For a while, Kemp felt ashamed to give pardon advice to her clients after having been denied herself.

The board stipulated that Kemp had not waited enough time to fully understand the seriousness of her offense. She disagrees. She says that unlike Downing, she would never even be tempted to reoffend.

“The day I got the denial letter was a Saturday morning,” she says, her eyes welling with tears as she recounts the memory. “I got the mail, opened the letter, read it, and I cried for 10 minutes. I wanted to give up. For a moment I was selfish and hurt, but then I woke up on Monday morning, got my kids dressed for school and went to work.” Unlike the hundreds of unemployed pardon-seekers in Connecticut, Kemp was lucky to find solace in her job.

For a while, Kemp felt ashamed to give pardon advice to her clients after having been denied herself. She participated in two training sessions to learn more about the application 28

As I get up to hand Kemp back her pardon application, I notice two placards that hang from her desk. One is a prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

The other, a quote from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself... Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

It strikes me that perhaps the tragedy of the pardon process is that self-transformation can’t change a person’s place in society.

W

hen does a crime become forgivable? And from whom is forgiveness sought?

From what I gathered from Downing, Kemp, and Smith, a pardon is more than a legal construct designed to give convicted felons back their full civil rights. It is also a vehicle for social absolution, an indication that the state — and perhaps society as well — has forgiven their crime.

Kemp, Smith, and the other pardon-seekers with whom I spoke

The New Journal

chase and altercation. He shot Hillyard five times.

“I came from a good family, but I chose the wrong friends and made the wrong decisions, trying to lead a life that wasn’t mine,” he says with a sad smile. “Some people call prison hell, but whatever you want to call it, it was a purification by fire. I went in as a boy and came out a man.”

In prison, he took a class in business education, trained as a tutor, and volunteered at a local hospital. Constantopoulos is quick to attribute his progress to the prison officers, counselors and nurses who worked with him in prison, all of whom believed he could change.

As he speaks, I am drawn to Constantopoulos in a way I didn’t expect. He is eloquent, clearly educated, and generous with his time and his responses.

Though only released from prison two weeks ago, Constantopoulos has already secured a job working as a peer mentor at South Central Behavioral Health Network — a group that works to stabilize people who abuse substances.

He hopes eventually to train to be a nurse but knows this will be nearly impossible with his record. A pardon might be too much to hope for, he adds.

When I ask Kemp about Constantopoulos, she agrees. But he should live as though he might one day get a pardon, she adds.

“I take full responsibility for my crime. I understand that there is nothing, nothing that will make amends for that, so I don’t expect to be pardoned outright,” Constantopoulos says. He looks straight at me. “I would hope that I receive some sort of recognition for amends I’ve tried to make since then. No matter what, I’ll always be deeply remorseful about my crime.”

Again, I am struck by how much

he seems to want my acceptance, my forgiveness. Perhaps what he seeks is not so much a state pardon as a human pardon, one that will allow him to live one step at a time, one civil right at a time, as a normal citizen.

As we stand up to leave, I ask him what changed. When did he stop being the Michael who killed two people and start being the one who volunteers at hospitals?

police background information. Then she’ll wait, hoping, praying that the state will finally recognize her as more than her crime.

Once, I asked Kemp if she felt that a pardon would diminish the seriousness of her assault. She looked down at her pardon application before answering.

“I think the seriousness of my offense has been diminished by the work I’ve done in the community,” she said. “So yes, my offense was extremely serious, but now I’ve given back as well. There comes a time when everyone deserves a chance to show that they have paid their debt back to society.

It takes a person to diminish the seriousness of an offense, it took me to do that.”

Perhaps unknowingly, Kemp has hit upon what’s really at stake.

The pardon is not so much about the state, or really even about the restoration of legal rights. The process is about us ­— about whether or not we as a society can accept that a person can change — and whether or not we can truly forgive those who err.

Pardons restore economic power, they help convicts free themselves from the shackles of their guilt, and they give people social absolution.

Can we, as members of society, face up to that final challenge to forgive, to allow someone who has paid her dues to reenter society, and to treat her as we would any law-abiding citizen?

We are all the pardoners.

I ask him what changed.

When did he stop being the Michael who killed two people?

Spring 2012

He says it happened one day in 1993 as he walked down a prison hallway, four years into his sentence.

He was done being angry, done blaming others for his time. Reality had set in: he was going to be here a while. He found God, befriended his fellow inmates, and decided to get his life “back on track.”

F

ive months later, Smith has secured a job at ShopRite, a local supermarket, while Constantopoulos now works at the New Life Corporation, a New Haven non-profit that helps lower income families become financially secure. Soon, Tee will move on from her job at City Hall to become the coordinator of community partnerships at BOOST!, which aims to reduce the achievement gap in New Haven’s public schools.

All the while, Kemp has begun the process of reapplying for a pardon.

She should be done within the next two months, she says, after she compiles fingerprints and her state

TNJ

Nikita Lalwani is a junior in Morse College and a Senior Editor of the New Journal.

29

Photos by Brianne Bowen

Rebuilt & Recultured 30

The New Journal

An empty storefront on Dixwell Avenue reflects the manicured homes of Monterey Place across the street.

By Catherine Osborn

T

he offer of a tour of several New Haven neighborhoods by a self-described “exhustler” was hard to turn down for two reasons.

The first is that I study cities, specifically housing policy, and have written many a story and paper about what happens to communities when the government changes the type of buildings in a neighborhood and the rules about who is allowed to stay.

The second is that I know this game. For three years now, every week Spring 2012

I have walked visitors through Yale and explained the place to them as a Yale tour guide. I talk about what goes on inside the buildings and what kind of community we have here.

In short, we have a complicated community. It’s hard to sum it all up in an hour and a half, so the version that goes out to visitors ends up being each guide’s imagined version of the school rather than the Complete Truth, which expands and collapses in different places at different moments and is knit daily of a thousand interactions, 31

transactions, and relationships. We tend to veer toward what we value in the place, in the hope that others will see that as well.

I met Hugh “HG” Gallman and Darrell Allick through a fellow student who got to know them while researching the New Haven rap scene.

Through their tour, Allick wanted to show me what they valued in the Dixwell area of New Haven, known to them as The Tribe, and how it had changed since they grew up there. Eager to hear their perspective, I got in the back of their sedan.

“T

he Tribe” refers to the community that grew up in the Elm Haven housing project on Dixwell Avenue between Webster and Bristol Streets.

At the time of its demolition, the Elm Haven was the oldest public housing in New Haven.

It made way for a development called Monterey Place, a mixedincome housing community that abuts Yale’s campus just past the police station and health center. Like all mixed-income housing, Monterey Place is a social experiment; theoretically, interspersing market-rate homes with government-subsidized homes would dilute the culture itself of poverty and promote more positive values in the community.

After he picks me up on the northeast corner of Yale’s campus, Gallman doesn’t drive straight to the Tribe. To help me understand what his area used to be like, he is driving us to another part of town, heading east down Grand Avenue toward the neighborhood of Fair Haven. We turn left down Franklin Street and begin to encircle a group of red brick, threestory buildings called Farnam Courts.

At the front of the development, there is a busy playground of parents and children. At the back, there is a long 32

wooden fence and residents walking with their heads down.

“So this is called ‘the G,’ which is short for the Ghetto,” Allick begins.

“I couldn’t tell you why they call it that. But these are the worst projects in New Haven. Even though they remodeled them about four, five years ago, they are still projects. A lot of illegal activity still takes place around here.”

“Now, with the new project, it’s responsibility time.

You gotta go out there, get a job. You gotta step outside the box, and a lot of people can’t step outside the box.”

Allick would know. He says he is allowed over here because of his history of hustling. “I know everybody from everywhere. If we was talking on the phone, I could figure out where you at according to what projects you was in. ‘Oh, you was in the Hill? The Island? The Ville? The Tribe?’ ” The Tribe’s physical frame has been remodeled into Monterey Place for thirteen years now, time enough to check back in about the culture of the area. By spending time with Allick and Gallman, I hoped to find out what the culture had changed from, and what it was changing into.

“So our buildings were like this,

but worse,” Allick continues, pointing in the G. “Dirty, nasty, filthy. That’s how it was back in ’88, ’90. And our high-rises were twelve stories instead of three, like you see here. Remember this.”

When we are done in Fair Haven, we reverse course back toward downtown New Haven, pass it, and turn up Dixwell. The sign announcing “Monterey Place,” with a perky “y” styled to look like a musical note, appears freshly painted.

So do the wood-paneled homes behind grassy lawns. They are all professionally landscaped.

If Farnam Courts is The Wire, Monterey Place is The Stepford Wives.

This car ride is a trip in a New Haven public housing time machine.

M

onterey Place was designed in the mid-nineties by the Housing Authority of the City of New Haven (HANH), the local arm of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The Elm Haven highrises had been demolished in 1991. It took seven years for the construction of low-rise, gardenstyle apartments and townhomes in their place. The majority of these homes are designed for one family. Only some are subsidized.

Management of the property was transferred to a private real estate firm, and Monterey Place was inaugurated.

The Housing Authority, which remains responsible for overseeing around three thousand housing units and over three thousand Section 8 Housing vouchers, offers rentassistance for low-income families.

HANH is the largest landlord in the city. It also has the tricky mandate of strategically adding or relocating government-subsidized housing units where it sees fit.

“Affordable housing is one The New Journal

of the last government benefits to remain geographically defined,” says Cynthia Horan, a professor of urban politics at Yale. “Most things the government provides you today are based on qualities that move with you when you move. Your family income, for example, is going to determine whether you get a welfare check or whether your children get free lunch at school.” Horan says subsidized housing is unique in that the government is pointing to a specific area on a map that it wants to improve. The Housing Authority has to consider how that area fits into and affects the city as a whole.

In making these choices, HANH is limited by what it can afford to build and refurbish. This makes for slow work. Because public housing developments have gone so famously wrong in the past, this work is also highly scrutinized by the neighbors.

Monterey Place was built fourteen years ago. Is it working today?

“It’s tricky to say whether public housing works or not, because there are no across-the-board metrics,” says Paul Bass, editor of the New Haven Independent. Having covered Connecticut for over thirty years, Bass has seen many New Haven projects come and go. As a first measure, he suggests comparing crime rates before and after a development is redone. Secondly, how has the appearance of the place changed?

And most difficult to measure, but of towering importance, is whether those theoretically transformative relationships between low- and highincome tenants is occurring: “Are neighbors friends if their backyards are connected?”

A 2003 Yale Law Review article pointed out that the Dixwell neighborhood had indeed become safer since the development of Monterey Place, and that there was a waiting list to live in both the marketrate and the subsidized units. Past Spring 2012

HANH head Robert Solomon is generally satisfied with the project, but he says there is has an important drawback to keep in mind. Because the project spread out the affordable units, they became fewer in number overall: “You’re always looking for ways to create more units. Always, when the need is so high.”

Putting aside the generally positive numerical indicators about the quality of life in Monterey Place, there has certainly been a change in the way residents relate to each other.

But it’s a little more complicated than whether neighbors become friends.

A

s Allick remembers it, Elm Haven began with the premise that “if you can’t get a job, you can always hustle in the projects, and everybody had your back.” Mentally, he says it was very hard to justify stepping out of this culture, and “the body follow the mind.” Now both Allick and Gallman have stepped out: they mentor juvenile offenders at the state-funded Juvenile Review Board, and Allick gives talks at Dixwell-area Hillhouse High School encouraging kids to choose alternative paths from joining the traffic.

Allick says the culture in his old neighborhood has changed in that “now, with the new project, it’s responsibility time. You gotta go out there, get a job. You gotta step outside the box, and a lot of people can’t step outside the box.” Because of their old habits, many of the residents of the Elm Haven were not allowed to move into new homes in Monterey Place.

There were several police inspections of Elm Haven homes right before its demolition, and “if your house got raided and they found drugs, you couldn’t come back and live over here,” Allick says. “It happened to a lot of people.”

This is when Allick and Gallman first point out a downside to the changes in the neighborhood: “It

broke everyone up,” says Allick.

“We’re not able to see each other like we used to see each other, like every day. Now they all claim to be from another project, and they act funny when they see each other.”

We drive by two closed buildings that the navigators point to as losses for the community. The first is their “hood club,” for which Allick gives me a different name depending on which year I ask him about: it was either Cardinals, the Dirty Bird, Butta J’s, or Red Café. It resembles a cement block. The second place is a community center called the Dixwell Q House, which Gallman says “was like a father figure to many.”

“They had sports there—football, basketball,” says Allick. “We could go there for recreation. There were arts and crafts and a ping-pong table, and dances at night for the community.

Now people are fighting for it to open back up. There is a petition, and even the alderman is on board.”

Most of all, Allick seems to miss knowing everyone. We drive into the neighborhood to the south and he explains that the Tribe was friends with the group in this community, called the Tre. These are neighborhood groups, not gangs, Allick maintains, but still “if you was from the Tre, and you shot someone from the Tribe, we would retaliate. If they shot one of our boys, we would go back and shoot one of their boys.”

Labels carry heavy weight in these situations. The New Haven Police Department has used the term “gang” in association with violence in the Tribe, but Allick maintains that these were simply personal beefs, and that current neighborhood groups are different from older New Haven gangs and national gangs like the Latin Kings that have been edging in recently. “Bloods and Grape Street— that’s not from here; that’s California stuff.”

We’re headed for the Tre now, 33

and Allick has a suggestion for a better route. “Turn up here, H., onto Edgewood.” He swivels backward to explain, “I memorized New Haven so much that I travel by the light. I memorized all of the quickest traffic lights. I’m impatient, so I will go the easiest route according to which light is going to change and which takes the longest.”

It’s not long before Allick recognizes someone at a home we pass and comments to Gallman, “Blizz be over here all the time—he always on the porch.”

“Well, I think he married one of them,” Gallman replies.

“It gotta be Ron G baby mother.

It gotta be the younger sister.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Alright—it can’t be the other one, because she live on the other side of the fence. I used to think ‘Why Blizz always on the porch?’ but you just confirmed it! He married one of them.”

Allick turns to me in the peanut gallery. “There are three sisters we know over here, and one of my boys married one of them.”

Back to Gallman: “I didn’t know…so he left Tash. Right?”

“Mm-hm.”

W

hen I give Yale tours, I explain our own comically overprivileged mixed-income housing system, the residential colleges, which I would argue does create diverse friendships. And just as Allick took close care to describe the community aspect of the Tribe, there is much talk on Yale tours about the general happiness and lack of competition among the student body here.

Does that generalization describe all Yalies, all of the time? Certainly not.

I don’t think 18 to 22-year-olds would really have formative experiences if they were happy and comfortable all of the time. The anxiety of navigating Yale is hardly comparable to the 34

anxieties of living in the old Elm Haven, but it is a tangible part of the tapestry of life here.

Darrel’s tour certainly paints the Tribe in a positive light. But must he acknowledge the darker moments between community members in the Tribe to be telling “the truth” about the place? He and I both deal in allusions—we will mention those moments if asked about them. But I see in Allick my own tendency to favor qualities I value in my community when recruiting new members, or explaining ourselves to visitors—I think it helps turn those values into realities. Allick and I aren’t going to bring up competition among students or the lure of a career in the drug traffic, because we believe in the power of narrative to shape a culture.

T

o hear a different voice from the inside of the Dixwell community, I walk into Monterey Place on a Sunday afternoon during holiday season. In the community resource center, a white-painted building next door to Wexler-Grant School on the north end of the development, the New Haven Police Department has funded a holiday party. Children emerge across the empty lawn, trailing parents with take-home baggies of fried chicken and Cheetos. Inside, two women are directing the takedown of decorations, which will be bundled in a lace tablecloth that tears off a little at the corner when you try to tie it. It’s kind of stiff and has a couple of hot sauce stains.

“Don’t worry about it, honey—I think that may be on its last leg.”

The lady in charge is Barbara Whitaker, president of the Residents’ Council of Monterey Place. She is “a senior citizen and proud of it,” with a buoyant Congresswoman hairdo and a floor-sweeping peacock wool coat.

She and fellow event coordinator Gloria Gray are gathering up the extra food and distributing it to those

making their way out. “If we leave it in the kitchen here, kids will just steal it.”

Finally, the only things left in the main front room are an empty table and a Christmas tree blinking a glow across the cement floor.

Whitaker has lived here since 1964, save a five-year period when her husband was in the military. She got a degree in social services and has been active in community leadership since the early eighties. “And she is related to everyone in New Haven,” says Gray, who at fifty has several grandchildren of her own. Whitaker’s job is to mediate between the residents of the subsidized Monterey Place units, the Housing Authority, HUD, and the private landlord Beacon Corcoran Jennison (BCJ). She can tell you all about the negotiations surrounding the planning of Monterey Place, when “they told us we were gonna have chandeliers, and then that went under the rug. Oh, and basements, which I wish we did have with all these storms and stuff.”

Today Whitaker’s biggest dayto-day work is navigating the “gray area” between the stipultions of the different agencies that supervise the low-income residents. HUD only comes to inspect their homes once a year, but BCJ requires four to five inspections a year, about which they give varying degrees of notice.

“It’s an aggravation. It got to the point where we got two lawyers from Legal Aid,” said Whitaker, “because the real estate company has some big time lawyers—money, honey—all the way in Washington D. C., so we got our lawyers to say to them, ‘The laws of Connecticut state if it’s not an emergency, they have no right to come into your home when you are not there.’ As a matter of fact, one girl moved out because of it. Oh god, what was her mother’s name? She comes home, and this maintenance guy is standing in the middle of her floor.

And she didn’t call for maintenance!”

The New Journal

“Oh, wow,” murmurs Gray.

“Oh, it’ll come to me. I think it was Renée’s niece—” “Renée?”

“Renée that passed.”

“Oh, okay. Okay. Shawna.”

“Yeah. It was her house. And really it was an invasion of privacy.”

Like Whitaker, Gray has lived here since the beginning. She says the biggest change in the community since it was redone is that people are “more to themselves. We have a lot of new people here, which is good, but they don’t socialize or interact as much.”

“When we first moved here,” Gray continues, “all of the parents got together, and we gave them respect. Everybody was our mom.

And you had better give them respect because if you did something wrong, everybody’s on the phone, and by the time you got home, Momma’s in the door. Today you don’t have that.”

Whitaker agrees. “At old Elm Haven, no matter what all our problems were, I’ll tell you point blank: we had a unity there. Maybe it’s because of the way the homes are situated now. It’s supposed to be less dense. Today you put up a poster for an event, and not that many people will come.”

Gray chimes in: “Used to be with events, you would know somebody who knows so-and-so, and everyone’s asking ‘are you going to the meeting tonight?’ Not anymore. Then again, a

lot of people don’t like the way it is here no more.”

“That’s because they have to follow rules and regulations, which is a good thing,” says Whitaker. They both agree the changes in the community are good on the whole. But they say young people’s involvement in crime is rising since its original drop in the early 2000s. “Back then, the guys who go to the Q House could leave at eleven or twelve o’clock and end up safe. My fear now is that another neighborhood may come driving by and shooting and things of that nature.”

“That’s my concern,” says Gray.

“You can have programs for the kids, but these kids are what they

Monterey Place homes opposite Wexler-Grant School on Foote Street frame Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

Spring 2012

35

Above: The headquarters of the Monterey Place Residents’ Council. Inside is the office of Barbara Whitaker, President of the Council. Right: Signs throughout the development like this one bear the logo of Monterey Place, directing residents ot the office.

Map courtesy of Alan Sage from Middleman.

Left: This map outlines different neighborhoods, or “turfs,” in New Haven. The red area outlines the Dixwell Neighborhood, known to the young people who live there as the home of “The Tribe.” Map data from Google.

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The New Journal

call ‘beefing’ with other groups for reasons I don’t know. As soon as you get the kids in, you’ve got innocent kids that’s being killed as well. You’ve already seen the newspaper. There’s like, what, thirty-something homicides already this year?”

The end of 2011 marked a twenty-year high of thirty-four homicides in New Haven. Both city-led and grassroots initiatives have sprung up in response to this; the week I spoke to Whitaker there was a panel at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School called “Fighting Back” attended by two hundred people. Panelists included our own Allick, as well as Mayor John DeStefano, and Dixwell beat cop Shafiq Abdussabur. Abdussabur is a well-known youth advocate who runs a program educating young men about gun violence.

“I know Shafiq,” says Whitaker.

“I wish more people came to his programs, but they’re teenagers, and you know how they get. It’s like, ‘POLICE!’” She raises her eyebrows and shakes her hands on either side of her head. “I would like to see the kids who really need a role model come to the program—you really need to reach these fifteen-, sixteen-, fourteen-yearold guys out here. Their trust is not going to come easily, even with Shafiq.

Trust is earned. It’s not given.”

Whitaker says she doesn’t keep in close touch with old Elm Haven residents who moved away. She wishes more of those who stayed on at Monterey Place would be involved with the Residents’ Council. “People were very vocal during the transition process. But now they just sit back and say ‘OK, it’s done.’ But it’s not a done deal. People should still be concerned with the problems in the community, instead of only speaking up when there is a regulation that they have to fuss about.”

Although Whitaker would like residents to be more proactive about Spring 2012

setting a positive tone for young people, she thinks the changes to the current management of Monterey Place have made progress as far as setting a behavioral standard. She would agree with Allick that change starts in the mind, and praises the landlord for its policies. “Some people, you can take them out of the ghetto, but they still have that ghetto mentality. I’m glad BCJ is strict,” she says. “I got tired of living in the Wild, Wild West.”

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obert Solomon, who served HANH for a total of fourteen years as director, board member, and chairman of the board, was also a ten-year director of clinical studies at Yale Law School. Since 1994, Yale has operated an Employee Homebuyer Program that will pay employees thirty thousand dollars toward buying a home in certain areas of the city that include all of New Haven’s “Empowerment Zones”—neighborhoods designated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to receive special funding because of the “high unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, minimal access to business capital, and poverty.” Before the end of 2011, employees received $35,000 if they bought a house in the Dixwell zone. Yale has directly funded a mixed-income housing project downtown called the Residences at Ninth Square.

In other words, when you’re talking about making over New Haven by determining who settles down where, you have to talk about Yale.

The changes in the city over the last few decades would not have occurred without the influence of some minds from the university, whether they were crafting public policy or providing private support. On tours, I say that New Haven benefits from having Yale just as Yale benefits from being in New Haven—again, the kind of PR you say because you want it to be

true, not because it is unconditionally so. Yale has had problematic effects on the city as well, and the truth is that the two are so intertwined, it is worthless to speculate about what one would be like without the other.

This narrative of the university benefiting the city has become stronger—at least in the press— over the past few decades. In a sort of town-gown university dream, a March 2011 Wall Street Journal article said that downtown New Haven was undergoing a “renaissance—reversing a flight to the suburbs and bringing people back to the city” due in part to Yale real estate investments in the city.

Allick is not so quick to heap praise on the University. He says Yale wants to take all of the current residents of Monterey Place and move them out to a just-remodeled, mixedincome development in West Rock.

“Yale don’t want no violence next to their school, period. So if they could buy the property and move everybody out, they willing to do that,” he says with raised eyebrows. “Have you heard anything about that?”

I am appalled, but also skeptical. I haven’t heard. Where did he hear?

“There is a guy who lives out there in the Brookside”—one of the developments to get redone—“who used to come and tell us things. He would let us know what’s about to happen, but he don’t come no more.

You should check if it’s true.”

Robert Solomon says there is no legal way Yale could do that. “There are protections on the subsidies for many of those homes, which means there is a period of time in which they can only go to low-income renters. In Monterey Place, some of the protections last thirty years, some longer. Somehow there is always a rumor that Yale would want something like that, but they have no way of mandating it.”

I passed the information back to Allick, wondering whether the rumor reflected more widely-held stereotypes 37

in the neighborhood about Yale’s intentions with public housing in the city. Gallman and Allick’s offer to be tour guides to me was part of the community outreach projects they have been doing since they’ve “stepped outside of the box.” The first time I met them, they had come to eat lunch with some Yale students to explain pressures in youth growing up in New Haven. Allick wishes there could be more informal hanging out between Yale students and kids at high risk from “the street—from the real New Haven.”

Since our tour, Allick has continued this kind of work. He hopes to have his criminal record cleared soon. Depending on how you frame things, Gallman has poorer timing or graver past sins—on a phone call, Allick told me he had been “locked up” for three years. Gallamn had been fighting a sales of narcotics charge since January, 2010.

At the end of the day, regardless of Yale’s institutional aspirations, many New Haven residents measure its relationship with the city through the Yalies they know. Whitaker could care less whether Yale wants graduate students to live in Monterey eventually.

She remembers with fondness a program during the seventies through the nineties in which Yale students would come work with the kids and “show them the world outside of just this…It’s good to set them down and say, ‘you’re a man,’ you know, or ‘you’re a young lady.’ Fine. But teach me how to live in the world.”

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n Saturday, March 31, two events had been carefully planned that aimed to bring Yale and New Haven communities together. The first was a march to protest racial profiling in the wake of the February shooting of unarmed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer. The second was a rap showcase featuring Yale and New 38

Haven rappers cohosted by WYBC Yale Radio, the African-American Cultural Center at Yale, and a new Yale student organization called Middleman that aims to “improve conduits between the university and New Haven’s inner-city neighborhoods.”

Middleman’s founder, Alan Sage, was the one who had first introduced me to Gallman and Allick.

At noon on the 31st, an email went out to the WYBC Yale Radio DJs announcing the cancellation of the evening event due to security concerns from the Yale Police. An email from YPD Assistant Chief Michael Patten to the Yale Daily News cited “tensions we’ve seen between various groups in the city and recent incidents occurring outside events.”

The phrase “fear of gang activity” was used by the organizers as an explanation for its cancellation.

The march for Trayvon Martin took place at 4 p.m. with gusto. Over four hundred participants, roughly a quarter of them Yale students, gathered at the Q House and marched down Dixwell Street and through Yale’s campus on Elm Street, circling the New Haven Green and ending up on the steps of City Hall, where various community organizers gave speeches.

I saw several faces at the march that I might have expected to see at the rap showcase that evening, but more importantly, there were so many faces at the march. It was conceived by the political action chair of the Black Students Alliance at Yale, who worked with various other activist groups from Yale and New Haven such as NAACP chapters and community organizers from the Dixwell area. Also present was Dixwell-area alderwoman Jeannette Morrison, who is working with a group of Yale students and New Haven residents to advocate and fundraise for the re-opening of the Q House. There was the rogue speaker during comments who made sure to remind Yale students present

that their university was built on the back of slave labor, but several others commended so may Yale students for attending the event.

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allman, Allick, and I finished up the fall tour of New Haven driving by the colony of tents on the New Haven Green. “What are they doing?” Gallman had asked. I spoke to him briefly about Occupy Wall Street and dissatisfaction with the wealth distribution in the country. “Ohhhh,” Gallman intoned. “Were they the ones that got sprayed by the police?”

“I think so, in New York.”

He and Allick most certainly fall in the 99 percent, but they seemed a little bemused by the campers’ manifesto. The Occupiers didn’t have much hustle.

The Tribe, too, has lost some of its hustle since it became Monterey Place. The Q House and “hood club” are vacant, and it’s now “responsibility time” instead of everyone having your back. Neither City Hall nor the Tribe wants to return to the dense projects of the past, but I got the sense that the old soul of Elm Haven could perhaps be harnessed to strengthen Monterey Place. The fight to reopen the Q house is an example of this possibility. Gallman and Allick’s tour might be just one version of the story, but by holding up the qualities they value in their community, they showed me the importance of considering the souls of New Haven neighborhoods instead of just their statistics.

TNJ

Catherine Osborn is a senior in Pierson College.

The New Journal

FLYING THE STARS A feng shui consultant converts one skeptic along with her apartment.

By Jacque Feldman

Spring 2012

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M

y Four Pillars chart is weighted heavily toward Fire. Anyone schooled in feng shui would be alarmed at its extreme skew after performing the requisite set of calculations with my gender and date and time of birth. Fire is associated with red, green, triangles, and rectangles. These colors and shapes in my environment will bring out Fire. Being “born of Fire,” as it’s called, I am susceptible to ailments of the heart and tongue and might seek to improve my health by consuming mushrooms and apricots. I’m likely to become a great musician, artist, actor, or writer. I may also have a passion for antiques or electronics. However, experts consider a chart so consumed by one element to be undesirable and dangerous, and I should surround myself with representations of Water, Earth, Wood, and Metal for balance.

I learned some of this from special guidebooks and some of it from Gregg Nodelman, a feng shui consultant who says he has a karmic responsibility not to use his privileged knowledge to tell fortunes. He worries that people may unconsciously work to fulfill negative as well as positive prophecies and he would prefer not to mess around with that. He calculates Four Pillars charts, which are also called Pillars of Destiny, but applies them only to his clients’ physical surroundings. He used to do this by hand but now uses special software.

“The way I work is, I’m really literal,” Nodelman says.

Nodelman is a Metal, so his lungs, nose, and large intestine are prone to sickness. He is slim and tallish, with neat, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. When I first met Nodelman, he was wearing a forest-green shirt and striped button-down with skillfully matched dark green slacks. Nodelman strives for balance by surrounding himself with Earth tones like these. He does not smoke. He wears hexagonal spectacles with transitional lenses that 40

are clear inside and shaded outdoors so his eyes are at home anywhere.

Officially, Dancing Dragon Feng Shui is based in Nodelman’s home office in Branford, Connecticut.

There, he calculates Four Pillars charts, which determine clients’ mingua, or favorable directions independent of their domiciles. Feng shui is an ancient Chinese system for determining auspicious arrangements of manmade space. It deals not only with rooms, but also with their inhabitants, whose individual needs—as revealed by their Four Pillars charts—require differently arranged environments.

Nodelman also can pin down lucky spots in a particular building using its location and age, a process he calls “flying the stars.”

Most of Nodelman’s work happens on-site, at homes and businesses to which people have summoned him. He shuffles around seats at businesses—a town hall, a hair salon—to manipulate the firms’ power dynamics. He has found that people who ask him to rearrange their homes often have bigger problems they wish he would solve. Clients break down.

They tell him about infidelities and impending foreclosures. Nodelman was once asked to rearrange a family’s home and wound up intuiting that one son had a drug problem. He later found the son’s stash in the ceiling of his bedroom.

Nodelman always asks clients for their specific goals in seeking his services. When I asked him to view my apartment, I wasn’t entirely sure what to tell him. I was curious to hear his recommendations but couldn’t rationally conceive of a problem that flown stars could solve. I don’t believe in feng shui—or even, really, in interior decorating. I have a high clutter threshold. I never unpack suitcases and tend to leave papers and jackets and plates strewn about my space.

After my parents divorced, I grew up stuffing clothes into a navy blue duffel

bag in one temporary bedroom on Friday evenings and emptying them onto the floor of another, even more temporary bedroom, only to restuff them two days later. Nodelman wonders of his clients, “Does their room look like this as a manifestation of their life, or is their life like this because of the way their room is arranged?” I think, “I just live here.”

But this was no reason not to see what Nodelman would do to my apartment. I gave him my time, date, and place of birth, as he requested.

I managed to come up with a worry about my future career. He said that was enough to go on. “The feng shui leaves people with their own to-do lists,” he added. “Whatever changes I suggest would have to be done by you. I’m not going to move your desk.” It’s sometimes necessary to move desks because poorly placed objects can affect the energy, or chi, of a space. A few days before he visited my apartment, as Nodelman and I were taking a walk around the New Haven Green, he stopped and told me to point my pen at my eye.

I maneuvered my pen and looked at him.

Nodelman corrected me, pulling out his own pen to demonstrate. I had to really point it. I placed the pen’s business end a few inches from my right eye and stared it down.

He asked me how I felt.

“Bad,” I said.

“That’s a poison arrow,” he said triumphantly. “That’s what’s coming off your pen. You know you’re not going to stab yourself in the eye. It’s energetic.” He gestured expansively at a building overhanging Chapel Street.

“You know that building’s not going to collapse,” he said, “but standing under all that concrete and glass, you’re going to feel a little bit offbalance.”

I pocketed my pen and looked slightly askance at Nodelman. He was standing with his back to a blinding The New Journal

mid-afternoon sun. I had trouble looking directly at him. “I take things really literally,” he said finally.

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nder the Shang dynasty, which ruled China from 1600 to 1050 BCE, diviners burned luminous, prophetic oracle bones; under the Sung dynasty, which reigned from 960 to 1126 AD, they practiced the first professional feng shui; over the intervening two thousand years, a series of sages yoked the common wisdom for choosing sanitary burial grounds to the aggregated beliefs of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, ancestor worship, and elemental and yin and yang energies—and came out with feng shui, which means “wind water.” Many Chinese homeowners and businessmen still seriously consult its rules.

When feng shui attained fad status in the West during the 1990s and 2000s, its focus shifted from exterior space to interior design and from placating ancestor spirits to solving personal problems.

Practitioners in the West have generally exaggerated the astrological component of feng shui because of their clients’ seemingly bottomless need to control what lies ahead. Western feng shui guidebooks promise that expertly arranged homes guarantee love, fulfillment, and financial success. Initiates write letters like this to the agony-aunt column on World of Feng Shui, a British online magazine founded in 1998:

children. He is a Rabbit and I am a Dragon.

He is planning to see the lady in July, Aunt Agga, please help, I need your advice on how I can bring his heart back. I have also placed a Rooster with Fan and Amethyst in the North of the living room. Please reply soonest possible, as my husband is planning to see the lady very soon. Please help, I am very sad and desperate for help and advice to mend the situation. Thank you.

Nodelman insists on using the lo pan, the traditional Chinese compass with dozens of numerals, characters, and I Ching symbols ringing its magnetic needle. He considers many Western feng shui consultants to be quacks.

He says that some carry suitcases filled with wind chimes, crystals, and mirrors to sell to gullible clients.

“There’s a certain practitioner where everyone, whether they need it or not, gets a bamboo flute over the doorway,” he said.

“We Westerners, we like a quick fix. We like that sort of magic pill. ‘I need a job; tell me where to hang the crystal,’ ” he said. “Some people say crystals and mirrors are the aspirin of feng shui… I mean, look, I’ll use crystals or mirrors as cures, but I just won’t use them every time, and I’ll be cautious about it.”

“Some people say crystals and mirrors are the aspirin of feng shui…

I mean, look, I’ll use crystals or mirrors as cures, but I just won’t use them every time, and I’ll be cautious about it.”

I have placed a raw amethyst crystal geode under the marital bed and I am sleeping on the right side of the bed and my husband should sleep on the left. I have also placed mandarin ducks and a couple of married toys on the table next to my bed too with red table lamp on each side. But my husband is still committing infidelity.

He asked for divorce and is ill-treating our Spring 2012

Aunt Agga replied with horror, sympathy, and the suggestion that the writer double-check that the crystal geode under the bed was clean and tied to the bed with red thread.

In some ways, Nodelman and Dancing Dragon Feng Shui are products of this craze. Nodelman studied feng shui at the Metropolitan Institute of Design in Syosset, New York, whose Universal Feng Shui Practitioner Certification Program was the first in the country to be accredited. However, Nodelman found the program too “watered-down” and “Westernized.” He notes that feng shui was not yet wildly popular when he founded Dancing Dragon in 1992.

While many Western practitioners orient a house using its front door,

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s a boy, Nodelman tried to hypnotize his friends on the playground at recess. He would spin in circles to make himself dizzy, developing an interest in “altered perceptions and how your environment affects that.”

He found kits for strobe lights at RadioShack and assembled them in complex patterns of light and sound.

“I’d fairly regularly blow fuses in my parents’ house as a kid,” he said.

When he got a little older, Nodelman began to experiment seriously with meditation. Decades later, he still can’t help scrutinizing the world around him and imagining it differently composed. He never sees anything whole without also grasping how its parts could combine more elegantly.

Nodelman grew up in New Haven, like his father, Stewart, and grandfather, Otto, who founded the New Haven Chair Company in the 1950s. Nodelman worked there summers in high school. After Otto died in 1967, Stewart bought the business. Nodelman says he inherited 41

his father’s eye for design and aptitude for construction, though Stewart is skeptical of feng shui. Nodelman doesn’t blame him. “Some people are seekers, and they’re always looking for a new awareness,” he said. “Some people are just happy with the awareness they have.” Nodelman considers himself a seeker. After studying industrial design for a couple years at Syracuse University, he transferred to Southern Connecticut State University to be nearer the factory. He dropped out of college halfway through his junior year in order to work there full-time, secretly relishing the act of rebellion.

By then, the business had moved to a new factory.

Nodelman told me the original factory near Fair Haven was demolished by Richard Lee, an ambitious New Haven mayor who sought to renew the city by manipulating its spatial arrangements in the sixties.

As Nodelman remembers, his family was told that the land was needed for a new school, which was never built. Dick Lee’s infamous failed experiment in spatial planning was the Richard C. Lee Highway, also called the Oak Street Connector. The lowincome Oak Street neighborhood was razed to make way for this highway.

The displacement of an estimated two thousand five hundred eightyseven people and two hundred fifty businesses haunted their former community, which sank further into decay. The highway was never completed.

As his hometown absorbed these structural dissonances, Nodelman developed an interest in harmonious design. He eventually started his own business repairing furniture. His wife, Sandra, an engineer with an open mind, introduced Nodelman to various alternative practices—t’ai chi, acupuncture, herbology—and these

experiences led him to feng shui.

He felt an immediate affinity for the trends his wife had tested; he has used a naturopathic healer whom Sandra once visited as his general practitioner for more than twenty years. “I had this hot moment,” he explained, “when I realized that the chi that you’re working with in your body is the same as the chi that you’re working with in a space.” When the interior designers Nodelman knew through

New Haven the first planned city in the colonies. The ancient Chinese used feng shui to plan cities that would fit into the existing natural landscape, but nothing in nature takes the shape of a three-by-three grid. Chi tends naturally to spiral—as in seashells, or tornadoes.

Westerners usually expect feng shui consultants simply to shuffle sofas and mutter mysticisms, but in fact practitioners have always applied their art to larger canvasses than interior design. Beijing, Nanjing, Luoyang, and Xian, four major ancient Chinese cities, were chosen for their lucky locations and laid out carefully along axes that run north to south. Rules for auspiciously arranging cities were so well codified that a Chinese emperor ignored them at his own risk. Planned cities are often the places where the human desire to control the environment reaches its fullest potential for success and for failure.

The Air Rights Garage on York and North Frontage Streets is a gargantuan parking garage built to straddle the Oak Street Connector. Instead, the highway dead-ends right before it. A section of York Street lined by a bodega and a couple of fast-food places bisects the garage. It is always dark there because of the cement mountain overhead.

Nodelman and I recently walked to the Air Rights Garage and looked down into the cavernous pit underneath, where the highway was supposed to run. I wanted to know how Nodelman could account for his hometown’s predicament. “They weren’t thinking about people and nature when they were doing this,” he said. “They were thinking of engineering and construction and traffic flow.”

Dick Lee began to raze the Oak Street neighborhood in 1957, three years before Nodelman was born.

Illustrations by Susannah Shattuck

“The feng shui leaves people with their own to-do lists,” he added.

“Whatever changes I suggest would have to be done by you. I’m not going to move your desk.”

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his business learned about his interest in feng shui, they began to solicit his opinion. He decided to seek more training and charge for his services.

Nodelman is now certified to perform space clearing and clutter clearing ceremonies in which he uses candles, incense, and special rites to exorcise lingering, negative “predecessor chi.”

“The earth has energy,” he told me. “The earth has memories.”

Nodelman has always lived around New Haven. He says he has hometown pride for this city, which has always been peculiar in its physical space. While other colonial cities like Boston grew organically around geographic features—streets twisting crazily to follow the course of rivers— its original nine square blocks made

The New Journal

Nodelman recalled that this area— past the parking garage, beyond the unfinished highway’s premature end—remained an unused no-man’s land for decades, wracked by sha chi, or negative energy. Now, the area between North Frontage and Legion Streets is a parking lot that seems to stretch from Dwight Street to the horizon. I had the sense that the massive lot is never completely filled.

Residents of the former Oak Street neighborhood reunited years after its dismemberment at Anthony’s Oceanview Restaurant on Lighthouse Road. City lore considers the area a battlefield where a residential culture was mowed down by a mayor’s unthinking hubris. As Nodelman and I stood at the brink of the great paved-over expanse, I asked him whether the parking lot between Dwight and Orchard Streets could use a space clearing ceremony. “I would say it does,” he said, “but that’s called earth clearing, and I don’t do that. I have a friend in Seattle who does earth clearing, and I usually refer people to him. He can do it on-site or remotely.”

I

knew before he rang my doorbell that I was not Nodelman’s ideal client. He likes to help people who are desperate for his help. “I actually appreciate that they’re as open as they are,” he said of these clients. “I tell people, the more you tell me, the more I can help you. If you tell me your most innermost desires, then that’s what we can work on.” Nodelman recently graduated from a program in marriage and family therapy at Southern Connecticut State University and is licensed as a drug and alcohol counselor by the state of Connecticut.

He works as a counselor a few hours a week at West Haven and Milford Youth and Family Services.

Unlike some of Nodelman’s clients, I dislike talking to strangers about my problems. He told me not to clean before his visit, but I Spring 2012

couldn’t resist kicking a heap of dirty laundry into my closet. Still, it’s hard to get my apartment entirely neat. My roommate is similarly cavalier about our living space. At the time, she and I were flummoxed by our kitchen sink’s failure to drain. A mud-colored liquid speckled by coffee grounds had welled up there for a few days. (Later, I rolled up my sleeves and plunged in an arm to loose debris from the drain. My roommate came home and shrieked with joy. “What did you do?” she asked.)

I sat Nodelman at my kitchen table, so he could not see the liquid in the sink. He found my kitchen to have good chi, although he recommended that I move the toaster next to the microwave in order to bundle together the Fire energy. Its current position next to the fridge created an undesirable juxtaposition of Water and Fire elements.

Along with my completed Four Pillars chart, Nodelman brought along the tools of his trade. He keeps the colorful lo pan tucked under his arm, in a soft brown leather case. He also has a small black box that detects electromagnetic fields in volts per meter. He uses two metal dowsing rods, L-shaped and about a foot long, to trace geopathic stress lines. He holds them loosely in front of his hips and watches them bend apart or inch closer together. After he’s finished, he tucks the rods into a pouch of crushed red velvet. Nodelman said he can often intuit the needs of a space without any instruments. He was born with a cleft palate and retains a cut in his mouth that never completely healed. He said this slit is sensitive to air quality and smoke. “It’s like my built-in meter,” he said.

Nodelman can spend three or four hours on a consultation. Because we were short on time, he focused on my bedroom. He checked for electromagnetic fields around my pillow and recommended that I 43

unplug a nearby lamp. “You can’t put a price on a good night’s sleep,” he said.

He turned next to my overstuffed bookshelves and recommended that I thin the books until someone with two glasses of water could set them down. “This can be a cure for allowing new possibilities to come in,” he said.

“The bookshelves are bowing from the weight of the books, so you could feel like there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders.” Taking in the stacked tomes that loomed like thunderclouds over my bed, I felt as though I’d caught myself complaining about a particularly arduous homework assignment.

Before he left, Nodelman told me that he once consulted a massage therapist who couldn’t work because her hands were red with eczema.

He discovered moss growing up an exterior wall and recommended she power-wash the house. “It cleared right up,” he recalled.

Nodelman’s faith in small changes was catching. Not long after he visited my kitchen, I decided to move the toaster next to the microwave. I needed to shuffle around a few things, squishing the olive oil, vinegar, and knives closer together. I wedged in the toaster. Its sides were sticky. It occurred to me that the sides of our toaster—like the strip of floor under our couch—are a part of our apartment that my roommate and I have neither touched nor cleaned in the year and a half we’ve lived here.

I wiped my hands and looked at the toaster and the microwave for several minutes. The larger, sleeker microwave

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reclined powerfully, leonine in its corner. The toaster stared back at me, small, white, and spunky. Eventually, my roommate came home.

“Do you notice anything different about the kitchen?” I asked finally.

“The toaster is in a different place,” she said.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“I like it,” she said.

I asked her if she felt anything more.

“I like it a lot,” she said. “Is there something else different that I missed?

It looks very nice. Is there something else?”

I

recently returned without Nodelman to the Air Rights Garage and made my way to its roof, nine stories up. It was warmer there than at street level. I took off my jacket.

There was nothing between me and the sun.

The rooftop parking lot is concrete, and the few pebbles lying around are concrete, and a pockmarked concrete wall about four feet high rims the whole space.

I stepped over crusty old snow to the edge. I looked downtown, over the cardboard-colored AT&T building, over the Walgreens where once I overheard a man say in Spanish that he got his black eye in a fight. I could read the time on the clock atop Harkness Tower, the Gothic icon of Yale University, but the tower was very far away. My apartment was blocked by one of the twin highrises on Crown Street. It seemed far away, too. Ambulances wailed on their way to the nearby hospital. A breeze was chasing away the smell of car exhaust. Dust-colored birds alighted on the perimeter wall, chirping shrilly.

I looked down on the spot where the Oak Street Connector pools into a roundabout planted with unflowering shrubs. This complicated mess of roads is always clogged with traffic. I thought some more about a people’s

continuous efforts to control the land I was looking at. I imagined the primordial New Haven, a low, silky swamp. I wondered whether the city was doomed to failure, or whether its leaders simply needed to be more thoughtful and meticulous in planning their space.

Through the tall buildings of the Yale School of Medicine, past a few smokestacks that billowed chemical steam, I could make out a sliver of blue. I once asked Nodelman about the damage this city incurred by cutting itself off from the sea. “Water is a really strong life force,” he said.

“If you cut off the water energy for people, it’s going to create a problem for them.” I asked him how he would fix New Haven. “For something this major, you could hang all the mirrors and talismans in the world and it wouldn’t do a thing,” he said.

I braced myself against the low wall, letting the unfinished cement scratch my palms, and looked straight down. I knew I wasn’t going to fall, but I still felt queasy from the height.

TNJ

Jacqueline Feldman is a senior in Davenport College and a former Editor-inChief for The New Journal.

The New Journal

ENDNOTE

Reading Sarah Stillman’s resume is scary.

Six years after she graduated from Yale with a Marshall Scholarship, as well as both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Anthropology, Stillman has written for The Nation, The Washington Post, The Atlantic.com, and The New Yorker.

“The Invisible Army,” which The New Yorker published last June, is a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She sat down with The New Journal to talk about finding her journalistic voice.

The New Journal: How was your road from Yale to writing for magazines like The New Yorker ?

Sarah Stillman: Highly circuitous.

I went to Oxford, where I realized that I could get cheap tickets to go travel during breaks. I started flying off to places where I wanted to pursue stories—Berlin, West Africa, Australia. I started doing side stories on the Iraq war and other issues that I cared about, but I quickly realized that super-opinionated punditry wasn’t my strong suit. I’m more comfortable with in-depth narrative and slow, methodical reporting—the sort of stuff you don’t have to turn around in a day for the blogosphere.

Spring 2012

TNJ: What is your philosophy when you go out to get a story?

SS: Often, I start by looking for socially relevant stories that are at the margins of more widely-reported events or phenomena—stories, for instance, that emerge from the questions that remain unanswered by mainstream headlines. Then, I try to start scratching beneath the surface through reporting, making phone calls, showing up in the relevant places.

I try to be open to the facts on the ground and the places they lead me.

It’s amazing how often my initial, tidy idea of a story gets complicated or even totally unraveled once I actually show up and start poking around.

Often, I’ll find that something far more nuanced and interesting is taking place than what I’d imagined.

TNJ: You uncovered the story of an “invisible army” of foreign workers at U.S. army bases, which was published in The New Yorker in June 2011. How did you know that that was the place that you should go and the story that you should cover?

SS: When I was at Oxford, I was in this

Andrew Nelson

A Conversation with Sarah Stillman Indian restaurant and my waiter heard my American accent and came to me and said, “Oh my gosh, I worked on a US military base and I have pictures of me and Jessica Simpson.” He busted open his phone and had all these pictures. He had had a really great experience in Iraq. He shared with me how many of his friends from his hometown also ended up there—but he also had colleagues who’d faced serious abuses and injuries. When I was able to go to Iraq for the first time in 2008, that was one of the things on my radar — who is this international workforce?

As soon as I arrived, I noticed that these workers were ubiquitous.

Everywhere I went, they were cooking all of the food, they were cleaning the latrines, they were trucking all of the goods from here to there. You couldn’t be in Iraq and not see them.

But I noticed that I had read very little about where these people come from. They were Indians, Bengalis, Fijians, and from Sierra Leone. It was stunning to me that we had tens of thousands of these people, but rarely read about the conditions that 45

brought them there or what it was like for them.

TNJ: What do you think about the idea that there are two different schools of writers and journalists now — the kind that likes technology and the kind that doesn’t like putting a personality online?

SS: As a journalist today, you’re expected to put yourself in the public sphere and feel comfortable participating in instantaneous debates and conversation, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. That’s really exciting and energizing in a lot of ways, to be able to be in touch with one’s readership and get immediate feedback and engage.

But I think it also runs counter to a lot of what draws me to journalism.

I’ve never felt particularly articulate

off the cuff, and I really appreciate the time to choose my words carefully.

The translation process between what is going on in my head and what is coming out of my mouth is never happening at 100 percent or even 70 percent efficiency. So being able to spend time calibrating my words is useful.

TNJ: Does it feel like there is a stronger population of tech-savyy journalists now?

SS: I think so, because a lot of publications really want you to be a part of it. Even writers that are resistant, like the Jonathan Franzens of the world, have reluctantly resigned themselves to the fact that every now and then they may find themselves participating in a videocast or a live author chat.

TNJ: Do you think the place for

long-form journalism is changing?

SS: I’m so excited about some of the new platforms that are providing journalists with the opportunity to try out hypertextual modes of storytelling. Places like The Atavist where people are experimenting with integrating audio and visuals into the arc of a longform story. There are some unbelievable new opportunities for thinking about how we tell stories creatively.

TNJ: Do you see yourself integrating multimedia into your pieces in the future?

SS: Multimedia offers some new tools, I think, for getting out of your own way as a narrator. You’ll always have the complication of being the person who’s editing things down and choosing what parts of someone’s own self-presentation make it out there.

But multimedia allows for a degree of immediacy that wasn’t available to storytellers before. It’s like creating a direct line between sources and reader.

I’m such a Luddite in a lot of ways but I’m trying to embrace these new vehicles, partly because I think they’re interesting and meaningful.

TNJ: What has been most embarrassing in your career?

SS: I’ve written a lot of things that make me cringe. It’s so complicated that for young writers on college campuses now, no one has the opportunity to learn in private, because of the Internet. Part of learning to be a journalist these days is learning to accept the fact that your opinions will change over the course of your lifetime and you have to feel comfortable recognizing that your thoughts are evolving. Yet another reason why it’s good to have a great editor.

TNJ. 46

The New Journal

Spring 2012

47

YALE UNIVERSITY

Judaic Studies Program Colloquium 2 Lectures “Scriptural Authority and the Life of the Text ” Presented by

Hindy Najman, Associate Professor Religious Studies & Judaic Studies Yale University

& “Where You Take Words: Sites of Translation in Contemporary Israeli Poetry ” Presented by

Adriana X. Jacobs, ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow Comparative Literature &Judaic Studies Yale University

April 17, 2011

4:00pm —7:00pm Judaica Collection Reading Room Sterling Memorial Library (SML 335) A light kosher dinner will be served

For more information, please contact Nanette Stahl at (203)432-7207 or nanette.stahl@yale.edu 48

The New Journal This Colloquium is sponsored by the William & Miriam Horowitz Fund