Volume 54 - Issue 3 by The New Journal at Yale

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

VOL 54 / ISS 3 / JAN 2022

THE NEW JOURNAL

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

Copy Editors Meg Buzbee Jabez Choi Anna Fleming Lucy Gilchrist Ella Goldblum Ella Pearlman-Chang Kaylee Walsh Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Savannah Crichton Avery Mitchell Ally Soong Photography Editor Lukas Flippo Business Manager Sherry Chen

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Tessa Berenson, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Toby Galloway, Dana Goodyear, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Eli Kintisch, Bob Lamm, Kathrin Lassila, James Liberman, Sharon Lowe, Jim Lowe, Alka Mansukhani, Steven Mennerick, Beatrice Mitchell, Benjamin Mueller, Sarah Nutman, Sophia Nguyen, Amelia Nierenberg, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Laura Pappano, Dennis Pierce, Jennifer Pitts, Jeffrey Pollock, Julia Preston, Adriane Quinlan, R. Anthony Reese, Raymond Rund, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Marilynn Sager, Robert Scaramuccia, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Fred Strebeigh, Jeff Strong, Aliyya Swaby, Jacob Sweet, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Daniel Waterman, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., PO. Box 3311 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06515. All contents Copyright 2021 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to thenewjournal©gmail.com. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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54 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 3 JAN 2022 NEW JOURNAL T HE MAGAZINE AB OUT YA LE & NEW HAVEN

cover LOST AND UNFOUND Yale lost students’ stuff. They want it back.

Alexandra Galloway

Eli Mennerick

IDEAL GLASS Jayne Crowley, a stained-glass artist in Branford, restores the last church windows of her fifty-year career.

Nicole Dirks

A MONUMENTAL PROBLEM In June 2020, amid nationwide protests for racial justice, New Haven tore down the statue of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square. Now, an obscure group is suing to bring it back.

Yonatan Greenberg

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ALT-WEEKLIES GONE? The story of New Haven's forty-year resistance to corporate media.

STANDARDS Abbey Kim 4 Will Sutherland 8

points of departure CLASSICS IN THE CROSSHAIRS HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS?

Laura Glesby 7 Phoebe Liu 3

asides A THANK YOU NOTE A MORNING EGG IN THE TRUMBULL DINING HALL

poem Nimran Shergill 19 GOING BACK HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME

JANUARY 2022

CLASSICS IN THE CROSSHAIRS An anti-racist reading group challenges the conservative status quo in Classics. By Abbey Kim

The handful of students in the room were just as shocked to see me as I was to see them. Nevertheless, after the initial surprise, I was greeted warmly by two of the group's founders, Elizabeth Raab ’23 and Grace MacDonald ’23. I took a seat at the table in the center of the small room and watched as more people slowly trickled in. “I was so surprised when you came,” MacDonald later admitted. “Classics sometimes can be so insulated.” Despite its goal of inclusivity and anti-racism, the group is not immune to the isolation of the Classics department. Historically, that isolation has been strongly tied to the field’s conservatism, and often its racism. The discipline has relied on its rigidity, championing the same texts, philosophies, and scholars for centuries. The problem has carried over into the present day. As many in the group pointed out during their discussion, contemporary dialogue in the field still focuses conversation around “true Classicists”— who are overwhelmingly white and male—while

looking down on other scholars like gender theorists. And outside of academic discourse, Classics has been embraced by some extremists and white supremacists as a kind of symbol for the West. By the time everyone arrived, thirteen undergraduates, graduate students, and professors occupied the conference room, sitting in chairs against the wall, around the big oak table, or broadcasted on the Zoom call displayed on the TV. The group was small, but they filled the room and there were few open chairs left as the meeting began. Many of the older students sat against the wall by the door, while the discussion leader, two attending co-founders, and Professor Christina Kraus sat at the table. Though the group was racially diverse, the discussion leader and the club’s three founders were white. Was it possible for a group like this to succeed in its goal of countering racism in the field? The group quickly came together in conversation, and I instantly felt out of my depth. There were no other observers, perhaps in part because all of the group’s advertising is through internal departmental email lists—whether it's their undergraduate panlist or the departmental Pinax list—and it rarely sees any visitors outside of the Classics department. A typical meeting has anywhere from five to thirty people, all of whom are part of the department. Though MacDonald noted that they’d reached out to other department heads to scout interest in an interdisciplinary collaboration, she said they hadn’t received any responses.

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DESIGN BY AVERY MITCHELL

t’s rare to find something nowadays without any digital footprint, but the Yale Classics Anti-Racism Reading Group is about as close as it gets. A quick search for the group yielded three links: one to the Yale Classics Summer 2021 newsletter, and two to a departmental calendar listing the meeting I was about to attend. With this painfully limited knowledge under my belt, I walked into the room in Phelps Hall unsure of what I would find.

The discussion, led by Grace Blaxill ‘23, focused on Simon Goldhill’s Review of Patrick J. Finglass’ Introduction to Sophocles, in which Goldhill critiques Finglass for perpetuating a conservative framing of the Classics that omits gender, politics, and cultural commentary. Much of the discussion focused on the idea that these academic introductions are not neutral; scholars push their own views of the texts by excluding certain parts of texts in their analyses or piecing together fragments to suggest a different key takeaway. Late in the semester, by the time I visited them, the group had already exhausted the reading list of eight pieces selected by former Yale Professor Emily Greenwood, and the discussion I sat in on was not explicitly related to antiracism. These readings from earlier in the year included articles like “Lessons Learned: The Role of Classics in Black Colleges and Universities” and “Turning the Tables on Dominance and Diversity in Classics.” Greenwood, who was Yale Classics’ only Black professor, now teaches at Princeton, leaving the Yale Classics Department faculty of sixteen without any Black members. The reading group seemed to be at a critical moment of negotiating their identity, poised to explore a more intersectional analysis of Classics within gendered, political, and broader cultural lenses. After exhausting the anti-racist reading list, it was now up to the group’s leaders to decide where to direct the discussions. Blaxill’s conversation delved into sexism and elitism in Classics, while the December meeting discussed ableism in Classics. The group is now broadening its scope from anti-racism to wider discussions of discrimination in the field. Group members emphasized that though texts stay the same, field commentary should be dynamic. The push for more contemporary framing and analysis of texts reveals the battle to begin undoing the racist underpinnings of Classics, which traces back to the group’s inception in the spring of 2020. Jake Watson

’22 says the idea for the group came to him in his junior year, when he noticed that one of the required textbooks on The Odyssey for his and Raab’s class on Homer used the n-word without any scholarly justification. He explained that the carelessness of its use “really jarringly put it in our face how entwined Classics is with racist histories.” After a conversation with his professor and a class discussion of racism in the field, Watson began working with the professor, Raab, and another interested classmate to try to get the publisher to remove the word from the book. Eventually, after lengthy negotiations, the publishing company promised to add a note in the front of the text warning readers of the slur. As Watson and Raab were negotiating with the publisher, a second impetus for the group emerged. George Floyd’s murder, and the national conversation on racism that followed, pushed the students to take further action. Raab, Watson, and MacDonald formed the anti-racist reading group aiming to educate themselves, to seek out challenging conversations, and eventually to take action. One of its main goals now is reassessing Yale’s Classics class structure and content. Specific demands, or action items beyond that, are still unclear. Though group members said the Classics Department has been supportive of their mission since the club’s inception, Watson hinted at a slight tension between faculty and student priorities. He noted that when debating whether or not to keep The Odyssey commentary that used the n-word on the syllabus, some faculty argued it was the best book available due to a lower price and more comprehensive analysis than other textbooks. Faculty wondered whether it would be more exclusive for students to have to buy “a really expensive textbook that is not as good for pedagogy and doesn't cover as much of The Odyssey,” Watson said. “So I think there was some of that power dynamic there and generational difference. Inertia is a really strong force.”

“The reading group seemed to be at a critical moment of negotiating their identity, poised to explore a more intersectional analysis of Classics within gendered, political, and broader cultural lenses.” JANUARY 2022

Though the professor now teaching the Homer class has removed the textbook with the n-word from the syllabus, Watson notes that “that wasn't really a departmental choice…. that was just what the instructor decided.” The lack of departmental accord over this change in curriculum reveals a deeper slowness to change in the field. In the Phelps Hall meeting, Professor Kraus largely listened. She spoke a few times, framing her contributions with her extensive time in the field and speaking about the lack of proper credit given to female scholars. Group leaders said that more professors attended meetings during the pandemic, when they were not as busy, and now usually one or two come to each meeting. Despite the sometimes slow pace of progress, group members I talked to were quick to emphasize that their goals aren’t in conflict with those of the department, and that they haven’t faced resistance beyond differences in priorities. In fact, the two groups often work together. The Classics’ Departmental Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee formed at about the same time as the reading group, and the two are becoming more interconnected. Both Raab and reading group co-leader Ziming Liu serve as members on the Committee, which has two faculty, graduate, and undergraduate appointments apiece. This overlap is understandable considering the size of the department. Each year, faculty in the department outnumber the graduating seniors by a ratio of roughly two to one. Raab recalled attending a special graduation ceremony for Classics majors that featured seven seniors. That year was not an anomaly—the major’s average graduating senior class size is only nine students. It may be no surprise, then, that the students starting the push for change look like those who have historically been in the department. The group leaders were not oblivious to the optics of their operation. Watson explained that the founders’ whiteness, lack of knowledge about anti-racism in the field, and the surrounding whiteness of the Yale Classics department made starting the group a delicate process. “We just try the best we can,” Watson said. All of the group leaders emphasized that they do not claim to be experts on anti-racism. The communal learning of the group was something that made it special to them. This transparent framing of the group as an open place to learn helped counter some of the elitist and exclusionary history of Classics. Instead of

the group leaders assuming the role of all-knowing instructors, they learned alongside those in discussions. “Our goal is to put everyone on sort of an equal playing field—discussion—which often can be hard in an academic setting where there are professors, graduate students, there are all of these hierarchies,” Raab explained. “But in other ways it's hard, right? Because we want to be as responsible as possible in including the voices that should be included, whether that be in our readings, our participants, the people who we invite in to lead discussions.” Though leaders expressed their belief that those most interested in reforming Classics would be those in Classics themselves, they’re beginning to widen their lens. MacDonald and Raab explained, for example, that they’re working on a collaboration with the Yale Prison Education Initiative next semester in an attempt to counter the inaccessibility and elitist culture of Classics. Despite being small, the group fights complete insulation. Members have participated in numerous multi-college events, including Eos Reads for Black Lives, a workshop where participants read a selection of texts from the African diaspora and considered their current implications. Raab and MacDonald also mentioned their “Accountability Groups,” in which professors and students from colleges nationwide meet and discuss anti-racist literature. For now, the group is largely focused on curriculum-based work. Friday’s meeting ended with a list

“The push for more contemporary framing and analysis of texts reveals the battle to begin undoing the racist underpinnings of Classics, which traces back to the group’s inception in the spring of 2020.” THE NEW JOUR N AL

of action items about how to approach a flawed but helpful text like Finglass’s. Group members suggested adding an annotated bibliography that highlighted biases in the text, disclaiming sources, and disclosing texts as good for some things and not for others. One member referenced Professor Greenwood’s strategy of having students come to class with one thing they thought the text failed to accomplish or misstated. “We want to talk a lot about how the classes in the department are structured,” MacDonald explained. “To discuss how syllabi are created, what the goals of syllabi should be, are faculty doing that, and how can we make that better? We've talked a lot about how we can make Classics more accessible.” The group is already seeing movement on this front. Graduate student Christopher Londa designed his course “Identity, Power, and Practice in Classical Studies” with the help of a syllabus workshop by the reading group. According to its syllabus, the course aims to tackle the “systems of power and legacies of oppression” often brushed aside in the study of Classics. After the meeting ended, I took the elevator down to leave Phelps Hall. It was only as I left that I noticed the bright blue posters hanging in the elevator and entryway, their bold white font advertising the group. I was tempted to grab one to bring with me, as a kind of memento, but I decided to leave it be. I had faith that this would not be the last time I saw the group’s name. Abbey Kim is a first-year in Branford College.

JANUARY 2022

ASIDE

A THANK YOU NOTE BY LAURA GLESBY

Keith was sitting on his Adeline Street porch when Annie and I approached him one sunny Saturday in October of 2017. His nephew, who seemed about five, introduced himself to us in one breath as Jacoby-Flash-Batman-Superman. The little boy zoomed around his front yard, pretending to be a medley of the heroes in his self-assigned name. Flimsy leaves crinkling beneath us, we asked Keith about a house at the end of the block: a sleek, angular duplex that seemed out of place in a neighborhood of older, vinyl-sided homes. Annie, the New Journal editor accompanying me on this reporting adventure, wore statement earrings and spoke fluent Spanish and rapped the first knock on each front door we approached. I was a soft-spoken first year, shy about asking strangers personal questions and fairly convinced that our escapade would lead to a fateful encounter with a serial killer. Our probable untimely deaths aside, I was certain that this would be both my first and last reported story. Journalism, after all, wasn’t for the gentle. Later that night, I wrote up a scene on my bottom-bunk dorm bed and realized all I had noticed that afternoon in my awkward quietness. I revisited the stream of suggestions that the New Journal editors had left on my draft and finally saw their unwritten message: You can learn how to do this. Poring through my notes, I found my last line: with time, Keith had posited, the new building sticking out from all the others could start to seem like a “regular old house.”

International students build a community during pandemic-era breaks.

By Will Sutherland

There’s no Metro-North to China, and your parents can’t pick you up and drive you back to Kenya while you sleep in the backseat.

It has always been hard for international students to go home during shorter vacations, like Fall Break or Thanksgiving Break—a few days don't cut it for a trip to Australia or Hong Kong or Ghana. There’s no Metro-North to China, and your parents can’t 8

pick you up and drive you back to Kenya while you sleep in the backseat. Still, longer breaks, over winter and summer, usually allow international students the time to visit home and see their families. But, since March 10, 2020, when President Salovey sent out his pandemic-induced email instructing all students to remain home or return home as soon as possible, international students have been navigating government quarantines, border closures, flight cancellations, and heightened travel risks. For many of us, this has meant being stuck in the U.S., usually in New Haven, for the longest we ever have been. Alara Degirmenci ’23, who is from Istanbul, stayed in New Haven for over eighteen months without seeing her family over the pandemic. Ha Uyen Nguyen ’23 still hasn’t been back to Vietnam since winter break during her first year, over three years ago. Teigist ‘Tiggy’ Taye ’22, my roommate, was stuck in New Haven for over a year and a half before she returned to Kenya this past summer. Mimi Kostoska ’21 spent a year in her Dwight Street apartment before she could fly home to Macedonia. I arrived back in New Haven to start my junior year in early August 2020, and I haven’t been home to Australia since. Almost every international student has a story like these. This isn’t a cry for pity, though. Many of us who were stuck here over the pandemic made a home; we found ways to create family, to support each other, and to stop ourselves from going insane as the time THE NEW JOUR N AL

DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

ost Yale students have probably never seen New Haven on Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve, or the first few days of January when everything is dead quiet on Elm Street and only a few footprints dot the snow on Cross Campus. A lot of international students have. There is a particular point at the beginning of most school breaks when I notice the exodus. The kids with suitcases wait on street corners, in front of their dorms, by shuttle stops, outside Phelps Gate. They have their phones in their hands, making sure their ride will be on time to scoop them up. But then, a few hours later, the kids with suitcases are gone, and I begin to take stock of the stragglers left wandering down Broadway at 4 p.m. “Oh, I recognise them from the international students’ orientation,” I think to myself.

stretched on and on. My roommate Tiggy has a kind of brain fog when remembering the winter break we spent together last year. “To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of it,” she texted me. “There were some extremes. I remember getting very drunk with my roommate [me] and taking out the trash in our underwear in the freezing snow because ‘Why the fuck not?’ I remember telling myself that it would be a great time to make a lot of paintings. I think I made about two little ones the whole holiday.” Despite every intention to stay mentally healthy and paint and do yoga and read even one book over the break, we lost our sense of time together. We stayed up till 4 a.m. painting the walls in our living room, we watched all of Bridgerton, and we drew giant faces in the snow outside our house in the middle of the night.

This was it for the time being, this was home. Tiggy and I lived in a six-bedroom house last year and our American roommates dropped like flies around the holidays, except for one, Jordan, who also stayed to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with us. We gave each other little presents we bought from deserted stores on Chapel Street, we decorated a Christmas tree in our living room, and we watched Love Actually. We made a big dinner and invited over Ha Uyen and her roommate Michelle, who couldn’t go home to California. We drank mulled wine and sat at a table like a proper family. We said what we were grateful for, we shared a highlight of the year, and we probably avoided the topic of home. This was it for the time being, this was home. Tiggy remembers our makeshift party of five people that we hosted to ring in the new year: “We had a very small New Year’s Eve celebration which included projecting the ball drop on our wall and wearing cowboy boots.” We didn’t have enough people to make three pairs who could kiss at midnight, but it didn’t matter; five people felt like a crowd that winter. Alara also remembers last year in New Haven as one filled with moments of pseudo-family and root-building in this city. When I messaged her about how she feels after being in this city for so long, she sent this reply: “I love how small New Haven is that I run into friends on the streets all the time with whom I can exchange smiles and Hi’s with that make me feel at home and gives a sense of belonging.” Having moved off campus last year, she also recalls the special moments of hosting and being hosted in homey JANUARY 2022

spaces in New Haven: “I think last year having a lot of small gatherings and dinners at people's apartments during the pandemic made it feel a lot more like home and family.” But no matter how many dinner parties and Friendsgivings and Friendsmases you attend, it’s still tough to be caught between two countries. Mimi remembers struggling being away from family over the holidays. “Last winter was pretty lonely and difficult especially since this was the longest time I was away from home and the first Christmas and New Years I spent not at home,” she texted me. Over winter break, Mimi and I hung out in her apartment on Dwight Street, just a block down from my house. We watched episodes of Friday Night Dinner and she gave me a three-hour lesson about Balkan history before I trudged home through several feet of untouched snow. Mimi and I hardly ever hung out during the school year, but over the break we did—when we needed it. Mimi loves to talk about Macedonia and I love to listen. When I texted her about how she felt about her relationship to home, she replied with this message: “I realized that when I don’t go home for longer than 6 months I start to lose that part of me, the Macedonian part…That’s why I decided that I will go this winter even if it’s for two weeks. Luckily I have the privilege to do so.” Mimi is counting down the days (twenty-four, as of our interview) until she flies back to Macedonia. As news of the Omicron variant started breaking in late November, we faced a familiar crisis. As I am writing this piece, we are still waiting for any conclusive news about how the new strain may impact winter travels. Ha Uyen is planning to return to Vietnam for the first time in three years. I have a flight booked to go home after my finals finish. Tiggy is going to spend Christmas with her family in Kenya. Alara can’t wait to be with her parents in Turkey. Will any of us get home? Will borders close again? Will stricter quarantines come back? Will we be able to get back to the US? Tiggy reminds me that we have roots here now; we have a little international family that could spend Christmas together again. We could decorate another tree and glaze a ham for three hours on the morning of the 25th. We would be grateful for it. We would have some semblance of normalcy. But, truthfully, after a year and a half in this city, I think we all just want to be the kids with the suitcases. Will Sutherland is a senior in Grace Hopper College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal. 9

By Eli Mennerick

IIDEAL DEAL GLASS GLASS

THE NEW JOUR N AL

Jayne Crowley, a stained-glass artist in Branford, restores the last church windows of her fifty-year career. JANUARY 2022

In February, Jayne Crowley will partially retire from her stained-glass business. ured out you could cut the solder with wire cutters. He walked from window to window, snipping them loose. Francis will take over Jayne’s studio when she leaves, and in the meantime, she’s teaching him the craft of restoration. Francis likes to call himself “grasshopper” and Jayne “master.” He’s in his late sixties and wears his gray hair in a short ponytail.

The windows needed a facelift, and Jayne was the plastic surgeon: a stained-glass artist and an expert in restoration. Jayne Crowley was here at Stony Creek Congregational Church to oversee the removal of the alpha window, the omega window, and four others. The windows were over a hundred years old, and their cames—strips of lead that join each piece of glass together—had warped and crumbled. A few pieces of glass had cracked. The windows needed a facelift, and Jayne was the plastic surgeon: a stained-glass 12

artist and an expert in restoration. Later this morning, the windows would be extracted from the walls; then Jayne would drive them to her studio in nearby Branford, take them completely apart, and, over the next two months, restore them. Jayne is 75 years old, about five feet tall, and not as strong as she used to be. She can’t lift large windows herself anymore. In February, she plans to go into partial retirement and give up major restoration jobs like this one for good. It’ll be nice. She’ll leave her Branford studio. She’ll work from home. She’ll focus on her own art, and she won’t have to deal with the physical strain of repairing heavy windows. These six in the Stony Creek nave will be the last of her career. But right now, there was a problem. Whoever had previously installed the windows had soldered them directly to the metal bars in the opening of the wall—according to Jayne, they should have twisted wires around those bars instead. “I don’t know what idiot ever did that,” she said. She tried to grind through the solder with a Dremel, to no avail. Then her apprentice, Francis, fig-

More scraping. More showering. The second worker pushed from inside. Finally, the window emerged. The man on the ladder hoisted it with both hands, found his balance, and began to climb slowly down. The ladder shuddered with each step. He reached the grass and handed the window to Francis, who received it reverently. It was too fragile to hold flat, so Francis carried it straight up in front of him, as if looking in a mirror. Beside the open trunk of her white Volvo, Jayne silently watched him approach. Francis rested the left edge of the window on the floor of the trunk and slowly lowered the right. We exhaled: the first of six was safe.

⬖ Glass shards in cardboard boxes, glass sheets leaning against tables, glass lampshades that look floridly expensive, one large glass dollhouse with a green gabled roof— THE NEW JOUR N AL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM TAI / DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

t was nine on a November morning, the sun low in the east, and eleven stained-glass windows in the west end of the nave glowed strangely from the indirect light. The glass was mostly opalescent sky blue, but it danced as I watched: ripples of orange, yellow, and green burst from nowhere, then faded away. In one window, four pieces of red glass formed the Greek letter alpha. In another shone a red omega.

Eventually, two guys wearing cargo pants and hoodies showed up. Outside, one of them climbed a ladder and began to scrape the putty around a window with his box cutter. Chunks of the stuff came showering down. Jayne, who had been inside labeling the windows with duct-tape Roman numerals, walked onto the lawn to watch.

all this and more litter the floor of Jayne’s studio. You have to watch where you step. One Thursday morning in October, Jayne herself nearly kicked a sheet of glass. “Always a million things lying on the floor that don't belong there,” she said theatrically, like it was someone else’s fault. Jayne wore black that day: black socks, black capris, a black T-shirt. But there were flashes of color— on her shirt, three cartoon fish: orange, red, blue. On her gray sneakers, threads of orange around the ankles and at the tips of the tongues. Her short hair is golden blond, dusted lightly with silver. Her eyes are blue, and the thick plastic frames of her bifocals are sunflower yellow. She was fixing a Handel lampshade. It was around a hundred years old and would likely sell at

JANUARY 2022

auction for a couple thousand dollars. A mosaic of cattails and water lilies circled the base; above them was a layer of blue pieces streaked with white, then a ring of orange. Each piece was lined with copper foil and soldered in place. A few of the pieces had cracked, so Jayne had glued them back together. Jayne doesn’t waste old glass. It often achieves rare colors that can’t be matched today, partly because glassmakers back then added ingredients like uranium and arsenic. (In the early nineteen-hundreds, some glass could be close to 25 percent uranium.) Holding a coil of bright silver solder against a soldering iron until it liquified, Jayne touched up a gap between two pieces of glass. The solder sank in and smoked. The air smelled bitter.

in both solder and came. I once asked Jayne if that was dangerous. “Oh, yeah. Yes. There’s lead poisoning,” she said, and laughed: a bouncing chuckle that died down gradually. The CDC says an elevated lead level is anything over five micrograms of lead per deciliter of your blood. Jayne has twenty-five. (Later, she pointed out that this likely wasn’t all from stained glass; some of it could have come from growing up around lead paint in the nineteen-forties and fifties.) She doesn’t feel any symptoms, but her work takes its toll in other ways. In November 2019, Jayne was climbing on a stool, trying to reach something on a shelf. Somehow, she shifted her weight wrong and the stool flipped over. She landed hard. It took a year and a half for her back to heal.

Lead is the main ingredient Jayne works in her studio in Branford, Connecticut.

Jayne has been making stained glass since either 1973 or 1974, she can’t remember which. Either way, it’s getting close to fifty years. She’s one of only a handful of independent stained-glass artists in Connecticut actively restoring old church windows—Jayne estimates there are three or four others along the coastline, maybe a few more upstate. All of them are getting on in years. Some are shutting down their studios, too old to carry on. When Jayne starts working from home next year, she’ll join their ranks.

Virgin and Child, dozens of Biblical scenes. The smallest rose window is thirty feet across. It must have been like looking straight into God’s iris.

Jayne believes that the coming years could be grim for the stained-glass scene. Without studios like hers, the only places that would restore church windows would be big out-of-state glass firms that charge huge fees. Small Connecticut churches wouldn’t be able to raise the necessary cash, and so their windows—old, beautiful windows—would deteriorate. Some glass, perhaps, would crack. The paint might chip and flake. The cames might stretch and corrode, or the window frame might warp, weakening the entire structure, until at last the glass falls to the ground and shatters.

Skip to the eighteen hundreds. The British Arts and Crafts movement, in search of a style untainted by capitalism, decided Gothic architecture (and stained glass with it) fit the bill. Across the Atlantic, American artists mimicked the crafts but dropped the socialist undertones, sparking a stainedglass renaissance. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Art Nouveau lamps and windows led the way—he’s still the one name you’d know if you knew any American stained-glass.

⬗ There’s a joke on Twitter about traveling back in time and giving a medieval peasant a Dorito. The punchline is they’d die. But if a nacho-flavored chip could have killed someone back then with overstimulation, I don’t know how anyone survived Chartres Cathedral. Inside are 176 windows, over twenty-seven thousand square feet of stained glass. Light pours from every wall, pooling in vivid scarlet and sapphire on the stone floor. Three massive “rose windows” blossom in concentric circles, depicting the Last Judgement, the 14

All 176 windows were installed between 1203 and 1240. Since then it’s all been downhill, many experts think. During the Renaissance, the big-shot artists picked up painting instead of stained glass. Then the Protestants arrived and began building their supremely boring churches. Stained glass’s decline was complete: walls of divine light had fallen decisively out of fashion.

During the nineteen-sixties, stained glass lost sight of God. Here’s how the website for the Stained Glass Association of America portentously describes the period: The statement “God is dead” was heard. It was time for stained glass to find a home in the secular world again. After the pessimistic “beatniks” came the optimistic “hippies” spreading eastward from San Francisco where they were rehabbing the old houses, painting them bright colors and, of course, repairing the stained glass.

Jayne was born a couple decades earlier, on the Fourth of July, 1946. As a kid in North Haven, she had no interest in art but lots in science. Her favorite toy was an A.C.

Gilbert chemistry set. She’d mix vials full of chemicals, heat them over candles, and watch them bubble over. Gilbert chemistry sets, long since banned, included plenty of harmless chemicals along with some plenty harmful ones, like potassium nitrate and sodium cyanide. The company even made a short-lived “Atomic Energy Lab,” which came with, yes, uranium. Jayne attended St. Mary’s High School in New Haven, a Catholic school. “That was probably the demise of my religion,” she told me. (About ten years ago, though, she returned to repair the convent’s windows. “I came back to haunt them,” she said.)

She fell irrationally, irrevocably in love. She studied chemistry for a couple years of college, then put her academics on pause. After a marriage and a kid and a move to New York and a divorce, Jayne ended up working at the West Haven branch of Miles Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company in the complex that’s since become Yale’s West Campus. She didn’t like it much, so after a couple years, she moved to Colorado. There, she met people who were part of a growing American crafts movement. (These were presumably the “hippies” who had killed God.) She played around with pottery, with macramé, with “all different kinds of crafts,” she said. Soon after, she moved back to Connecticut and tried stained glass for the first time. She fell irrationally, irrevocably in love. She speaks of the decision as if it had not been a decision at all, but an event beyond her control. She told me once that the glass itself had said to her, “This is what you’re going to do.” THE NEW JOUR N AL

Jayne restores one of the Stony Creek windows.

When Jayne first started, there were no stained-glass teachers in the area, she said. So she taught herself, a mystifying feat in a highly technical craft. Even she can’t explain how she learned everything—how to solder, how to cut glass, what kind of pliers to buy. Sometimes she visited a stained-glass store called Whittemore-Durgin, where she might have been told what supplies she needed. But the rest of it was luck and trial and error and youthful determination. She rummaged through dumpsters to find scraps of glass. Her first ever piece was a purple and blue glass jewelry box. At the time, the switch from chemistry to glass felt like a hard pivot. But the more deeply she fell in love with glass, the more she began to see the connection. “The chemical makeup of glass is so unusual,” she said. “It’s the only thing you can transform, shape, make it molten, make it solid, blow it into a ball, and then take that ball and flatten it out again.” In the nearly fifty years since she opened her first studio, Jayne has burned through ten studios (one of them did literally burn down), all in Branford. Now, she believes stained glass and other skilled trades—masons, cobblers, bookbinders, furniture-makers—are in JANUARY 2022

decline. “All these things are falling away,” she told me. “We live in a throwaway society.” She blames it mostly on IKEA: mass-automation makes it cheaper to buy new things, she says, than to fix old ones. But stained glass can’t yet be automated very efficiently, and the restoration of old windows is the opposite of throwaway culture. The real problem, Jayne believes, is that not enough young people want to devote themselves to the craft—the work is just too hard.

⬘

One morning at the end of October, I arrived at Jayne’s studio with a piece of paper stuffed in my pocket. The drawing on it looked like this:

Jayne chose a deep blue glass for the outer corners and something called “glue chip” glass for the central piece. Glue chip glass is made by sandblasting a sheet of clear glass, then coating it with animal-hide glue. As the glue dries, it “pings off,” Jayne said, taking little chips of glass with it and leaving a frosty, fern-like pattern. I told Jayne I’d be happy to pay her for the materials. She just laughed at me. “Oh, please,” she said. Jayne cut along the lines of my drawing and traced the corner pieces onto the blue glass with a Sharpie. Then she placed the glass cutter—a tiny wheel of carbide fastened to a plastic handle—against a straightedge and dragged it toward her along one of the Sharpie lines. It made a sound like quickly ripped cardstock and left a slender score. Jayne snapped the glass with her hands; it broke cleanly. Next she made a curved score, freehand. She squeezed a pair of running pliers— which have a mouth shaped like a frown—on the score, and the glass snapped along the curve. Piece number one was finished. I copied Jayne, dragging the glass cutter, squeezing the running pliers. It was like snapping a sheet of caramel. The edges of the glass left my fingers with an odd roughness, and I wondered if it was the feeling of tiny shards in my skin. “You’re all set,” Jayne said, and walked away.

Jayne was going to help me make it into stained glass. She wore a plain black sweatshirt over a red turtleneck. On her wrists and around her neck, the red peeked out from behind the black. Francis, the apprentice, was working at a nearby table and whistling.

I didn’t feel quite set. I tried my first curved score, but, pressing too hard and moving too fast, I slipped wide of my intended line. Jayne came back and excised a delicately thin slice to make my piece its proper size. She moved more slowly than I had and held the cutter more gently. 15

After considerable difficulty, I ended up with four ugly corner pieces. I still had to make my center piece out of the glue chip glass. On my first three attempts, the glass snapped in half immediately.

My second cut was clean again. Just two left. I squeezed my running pliers, and—disaster.

Last one. I scored the glass, squeezed the grozers, felt it crack all at once. I held up my star to show Jayne.

1.) Bad:

2.) Worse:

3.) Awful:

I’d wasted at least a square foot of Jayne’s glass by then, and I was starting to feel guilty. On attempt four, I tried angling the running pliers toward the curve of the score. Behold: it broke left and cracked clean.

“You’re starting to learn the properties of glass,” Jayne told me. I felt proud. “It’s nerve wracking,” I said. “It’s supposed to be fun!” she replied. 16

I felt genuinely distraught. Why is this so hard? I thought. What could I be doing wrong? I’m wasting Jayne’s glass for no reason at all. I wanted to apologize but didn’t want to show her what I’d done. So I just stood there for a while and pretended I was making great progress. Jayne was utterly unbothered. She cut me another sheet of glue chip glass, and I pulled myself together. Cut one was clean, but I hesitated on cut two. I’d have to squeeze the running pliers on the sharp point of the glass, rather than on a flat edge. It didn’t feel right. I asked Jayne. She came over slowly from across the room. “I’m done tormenting you,” she said. She made a score an inch outside the Sharpie mark and picked up the grozers—a pair of pliers with a bottom jaw that curves up like an underbite—instead of the running pliers. Working from the side, she snapped her approximate score with the grozers, then made a perfect break along the Sharpie line. I’d been using the wrong technique, and she’d been letting me struggle. On the third cut, I imitated Jayne: success.

“Hooray!” she said. Jayne seemed to take pity on me after that. I needed it—cutting the glass was more exacting than I’d expected. She had Francis help me line each glass piece in copper foil, paint the foil with flux, solder the pieces together, and frame it all in came. The next day, with Jayne’s guidance, I rubbed patina onto the solder, which darkened it from silver to dusky gray. Finally, I attached two metal rings to the frame, for hanging. It had taken me two days to make a suncatcher the size of a large slice of bread. The edges were jagged, the foiling was shoddy, and the solder lines bulged. I couldn’t imagine making a full-sized window. But on the whole, I thought my piece was pretty. Back in my apartment, I propped it up on the windowsill, and the glue chip glass scattered the afternoon sunlight across the walls.

⬙ The glass in a cathedral window flows toward the ground one nanometer every billion years. This is beyond slow. The universe, for instance, is a little under 14 billion years old. I remember being told in middle school that glass was a liquid, but that’s only sort of true. Really, glass is something much, much stranger. If it’s a liquid, it’s a liquid stuck in time, or locked out THE NEW JOUR N AL

of time: an eternal liquid. “Glass” is not a particular substance, it’s a category of substances. Anything can be glass if its molecules are arranged chaotically like a liquid but feel rigid like a solid. Ordinary window glass is made from melted silica sand, but theoretically, almost any liquid could

If you had billions and billions of years at your disposal, you might be able to catch the first glimpse of ideal glass. You might see a normal window, for instance, flow down into itself and gradually arrive at perfection. become a glass if you cool it fast enough. Plastics and hard candies are technically glass. You make glass by dropping a liquid’s temperature so fast that its molecules can’t crystallize into a solid—they keep flowing, only slower and slower and slower.

unlimited time to flow past one another, settle together, and reach the densest of all possible random arrangements. Its molecules would look jumbled but would in fact follow a mysterious, invisible pattern (a “long-range amorphous order,” scientists call it). All glass— from windows to eyeglasses to wineglasses to fiber optic cables— is slowly, slowly approaching this true glass. As far as anyone knows, ideal glass has never existed in the history of the universe. It just takes too long to form. If you had billions and billions of years at your disposal, you might be able to catch the first glimpse of ideal glass. You might see a normal window, for instance, flow down into itself and gradually arrive at perfection.

⬙ On a table in the middle of Jayne’s studio, the alpha window and the omega window lay side by side. It was a little over a month after the windows had come down.

The alpha window was whole and apparently complete—all Jayne had to do was touch up the solder and rub putty into the seams to seal out the weather. Next to it was the deconstructed omega window. Scraps of came and slabs of milky glass were piled on the table, like puzzle pieces straight from the box. Jayne predicts she’ll finish restoring all six windows by the first half of January: all told, a two-month job. Stony Creek Congregational is paying her about fifteen thousand dollars. Exactly when they’ll be reinstalled, she’s not quite sure. Probably February. Her relationship with the glass in this church is a committed one. Around four years ago, she restored five other windows in the same nave. “It’s kind of like my baby,” she told me. “I just want to make sure they do everything right.” Today, Jayne was working on the omega window. In the past few weeks, she had made a rubbing of it, numbered each piece, cut the Sheets of glass in Jayne's studio.

No one can figure out why this happens. The Nobel-winning physicist Phillip W. Anderson once wrote that the nature of glass is “the deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory.” Some people think glass is matter stuck between solid and liquid. They call it an amorphous solid or a supercooled liquid. Others think it’s something weirder—an imperfect reflection of a yet unwitnessed state of matter they call “ideal glass.” Ideal glass is what glass would become if its molecules had JANUARY 2022

fine to be done. Of course, after working in studios for close to fifty years, it’s sad to leave the last one. “But it’s time,” she said. Then she was quiet for a while.

Jayne straightens a length of lead came. cames apart, disassembled the window, and soaked the glass in water to help remove the old putty. She had spread the rubbing out on a table, and now she was fitting all the glass pieces back together with fresh came, working from the bottom right to the top left corner. She had reached a row of blue, diamond-shaped pieces near the bottom. They looked like my troubled piece of glue chip glass, but a little smaller and a lot neater. She worked steadily, cyclically. Her cycle went like this: Set the next piece of glass into place against the came. Tap the glass gently into the existing structure with a rubber mallet. Drive a flatsided nail into the table, flush with the edge of the glass piece, just to keep it still. Cut a new length of came. Remove the nail and press the came onto the exposed edge of the glass. Tap the came snug with the mallet. Use another nail to keep the came in place until the next piece is ready. Remove the nail and repeat. The aim of restoration is not to improve the original window, but

to mirror it exactly. Where the original window used a thicker or thinner or flatter came, Jayne did too. The omega window displayed a technique called “cross weaving,” in which the vertical and horizontal cames alternated long and short. Jayne replicated it. Molding the soft came with fingertips dark from the lead, she wove a tapestry of metal and glass. Soon, the restored windows will be hauled up again the same way they came down. Jayne will load them in her trunk and drive them to Stony Creek Congregational Church. A man will carry one of them up a precarious ladder. The window will be slotted into the opening, where it will rest against metal bars. Thin wires that Jayne will have soldered to the came will be twisted around these bars to hold the window in place. The sun will catch the glass, and it’ll ripple orange, yellow, green. Then the other five will go back in, and it’ll be over, and Jayne will never again restore windows of this magnitude.

Recently, Jayne hired someone to convert a shed in her yard into a proper home studio. Now it has air conditioning, heating, painted walls, and plenty of windows. “It’s so light and airy,” she said. “They’ve done a wonderful job.” When she leaves the Branford studio and moves home, she’ll spend her days in that shed making original pieces, trying out new techniques, and reveling in retirement. Her neighbors, in Short Beach, are excited for her. Some of them have asked her to host an open studio so they can see the new place. People call out to her from the street, Jayne said. They yell: “That shed is so beautiful!” This isn’t the end for Jayne. She’s settling down gradually, like glass. It’s not yet time to call it quits— not when she can wake up in the morning, walk to her shed full of light, and work all day until the sun sinks in the west and flares in the windows one last time before it sets. Eli Mennerick is a senior in Ezra Stiles College and Managing Editor of The New Journal.

“It feels… fine,” she said. It feels

THE NEW JOUR N AL

POEM

GOING BACK HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME BY NIMRAN SHERGILL I. Main ghar aa gayi. I’ve come home. II. My hands fall into the usual routine. Muscle memory: I am washing the dishes and checking the washing machine and serving my siblings food and making sure water glasses were full. III. Flick, flick—why isn’t the light turning on? My finger doesn’t make contact With the toggle light switch. Oh, this is a rocker switch. IV. My brother’s soft hands, my sister’s warm arm. Singing in the car playing video games watching Pokémon pressing one M&M at a time into palms. Three of us together. That’s how time goes by, how time goes by, how it’s always been. V. Purple winter jacket, Engineering textbooks, and graph paper. My whiteboard with my schedule all orderly and arranged with most hours structured. Becton, Mason, Dunham... VI. “Were you here when—?” “Yeah.” “Were you here when—?” “Yeah, that was right before I left.” “So when did you leave?”

VII. You want almonds? Cabinet next to the fridge: third quadrant, second shelf, right in the front, steel container. Set it on the counter before you twist the top off. VIII. Vines of irritation creep into my thoughts. Wasting time on my phone, wasting time watching TV, not turning in assignments, not doing something that makes me feel like I’m making progress. I need to wor—you need to relax. Slow down. I remember walking up Science Hill and back, up and down stairs, thinking about my schedule constantly to email about my availability. You’ve done a lot, so slow down. I bite my finger, wanting to snap the vines. I don’t have a schedule! I shrug my shoulders. That’s the whole point. IX. I used to think I am in the New World, I will go back to the Old World, and things will be different. But I feel like the same person in two places. Unchanged and relieved. X. I am the toughest sister, the coolest, the calmest, so I think until the tears fall from baby eyes, his head down and shoulders shaking. Time for the big sister to play her part. “Don’t cry! I’ll be back! I’ll be back.” I say the only line I’ve rehearsed enough to say without my voice locking. I give a hug, and I smile with eyes wide open. I’m the softest sister, but I know that the promise of coming back is stronger than the reality of saying goodbye. I’ll be back.

ff. nts' stu e d u t s t . Yale los t it back n a w y e Th ANDRA X E L A BY AY GALLOW

DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA 20

THE NEW JOUR N AL

D. Wright ’24 shivered and curled into their sleeping bag. It was February 2021. It had snowed, and Davenport College’s heating wasn’t enough to ward off the chill in their dorm room. It was freezing inside and out—cold enough for your teeth to chatter and your joints to ache and for you to pull all your old blankets from the closet. But J.D. had no blankets to bundle under, or any bedding at all, save for that thin sleeping bag. Yale had lost it all. J.D. wasn’t the only one to lose their things. As of December 2021, students have filed 1104 claims to be reimbursed for lost items, some of which total in the tens of thousands of dollars. When the pandemic began in March 2020, students had already left for spring break, which made it almost impossible for out-ofstate and international students to return to New Haven and retrieve their things. So Yale stepped in, at first retrieving only essential items but later expanding their operations to packing up all student belongings. Once the items were packed, they offered to ship them home or store them for the student. If a student opted to store their items, they could later pick the items up themselves or ask Yale to move their stuff into their new dorm room upon their return to campus, in spring or fall 2021. After J.D. spent a year stranded in Illinois because of the pandemic, they expected that their bedding (and all their other possessions) would be awaiting them in their dorm room as Yale had promised. But, when J.D. arrived, they found that Yale hadn’t kept its word: Most of their things, including their bedding, were missing. JANUARY 2022

J.D. couldn’t afford to replace any of it—they’d come to Yale that semester with only $90 to their name, they recall. It wasn’t until six weeks later that Yale reimbursed them $800—the total value of all their lost items. But it was warmer by then, and they needed to start saving up to fly back home. So, they deposited the money instead of spending it on bedding, or warm clothes. Worse than the bedding, though, was the loss of their books. The books were “parts of the people they were from,” full of letters and well-wishes for the future, J.D. explains. They miss their Polaroids, too—“the physical representation of [their] memories,” of friends, of home. They wrote everything they lost down when filing for reimbursement from Yale, so they’re not worried about forgetting. But they miss the comfort of holding their memories in their hands. “Did they ever explain where my stuff went?” J.D. repeats my question. After a beat: “No.” Half-amused, J.D. tells me that Yale lost their stuff again this semester. They had stored their items with Yale over the summer as part of a summer storage program offered through Davenport College, but when they arrived on campus this fall, they once again found that all their items had vanished. Though Yale returned J.D.’s stuff to them after two weeks, the University still hasn’t explained this second disappearance, nor has the University explained how it misplaced the items of over a thousand students, who, when they finally returned to campus, opened the cardboard boxes littering their rooms and found nothing but disappointment.

“As of December 2021, students have filed 1104 claims to be reimbursed for lost items, some of which total in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

WHEN SHIT HIT TH E FA N “No one knew that there was going to be a pandemic,” says Kathryn Vieillard, Deputy Director of Yale Conferences and Events (Yale C&E), the campus office that was responsible for shipping and storing students’ belongings. She is excited to talk, like someone who has something to say but hasn’t had the chance to say it, and before I can even ask my first question, she’s taking me back to the beginning, when it all started in March 2020. In an email sent March 3, 2020—the Tuesday before spring break—Dean Marvin Chun urged students to “consider bringing any items [they] will want with [them] if [their] return to campus is delayed,” as COVID began to disrupt travel around the world. But the pandemic still felt like an impossibility, and, free from midterms and high on the promise of beach nirvanas, students didn’t listen. So, when the pandemic came and Yale moved classes online, many students didn’t have what they needed, and Yale was at a loss for how to return their things. They turned to Vieillard at Yale C&E to help them deliver essential items home to students. At the time, the task seemed simple, so Vieillard agreed. She volunteered herself and the 21

“Despite their best efforts, Yale C&E anticipated that things would, naturally, slip through the cracks.” Yale C&E team to help plan the retrieval of essential items, like laptops, textbooks, and passports. At first, it felt manageable—only 550 students had requested that Yale retrieve items for them. Vieillard’s team contacted two moving companies, Dorm Room Movers and Meyer; ordered gloves and hand sanitizer; and coordinated volunteers from the dining halls and their HR department to help get students what they needed most for this initial retrieval of items. But on the eve of executing this plan, Yale administrators asked Yale C&E for help on another front. They needed Yale C&E to clear the rooms on Old Campus of all student belongings so that Yale graduate students could live there and safely socially distance. Then the state of Connecticut said Yale C&E needed to clear 500 rooms for first responders. Then the team needed to organize COVID quarantine housing. And so on. Yale C&E, with a staff of only twenty-two, had to set up a 24/7 office. As Vieillard puts it, “No one knew the scope of what we would have to do.”

BOXED IN “Think about what a student’s room might look like when they are just leaving for spring break,” Vieillard bids me. My suite, I remember, had clothes strewn about the floor, papers scattered on the desks, unmade beds, and toiletries crowding the sink. Movers, both those from Meyer and those subcontracted to Dorm Room Movers, had to figure out 22

what belonged to which student— what went in the box and what went in the trash. (Sometimes, these decisions of what to send and what not to send bordered on the absurd. Maayan Schoen ’23 says she received a rotten potato and a half-used bottle of shampoo, but almost none of her clothing or valuables.) Often, according to Vieillard and Meyer’s Ryan DeVille (a Business Development Associate, who helped coordinate the Yale job), students wouldn’t respond to movers. Other times, movers would discover that students had switched rooms without telling Yale. “One suitemate moves to Italy for the semester, so [another girl] moves into [their] room, because it’s nicer,” Vieillard conjures as an example. After deciding what belonged to whom and what went in the box and what didn’t, Meyer and Dorm Room Movers had to either store the items in local Connecticut warehouses or ship them back to students, both domestically and internationally. The shipping process often involved lots of “red tape,” DeVille recalls. Meyer employees found themselves having to navigate the customs laws of countries around the world. When I ask about the most challenging delivery, DeVille pauses, before starting to read off a Korean mailing address. He gives up halfway through and starts to spell out the letters. He laughs, and says the hardest part was “communication.” Because of COVID regulations, no one could access dorms except the movers. Sometimes, Yale C&E employees could visit dorm rooms, but for the most part, they had to supervise the moving remotely. And once the boxes left the shipping company and headed

to Texas or Mississippi or London, Yale C&E couldn’t control what happened (they did, however, keep records, according to Vieillard). DeVille estimates that Meyer moved over twenty-five thousand items and coordinated between four-hundred and six-hundred deliveries. Given the scale of the operation, as Vieillard puts it, “it was inevitable some things would get lost and never be found, or damaged, or broken beyond repair.” Despite their best efforts, Yale C&E anticipated that things would, naturally, slip through the cracks.

HOW DO YOU LOSE A COUCH ? Katherine Sylvester ’23 doesn’t understand how her couch slipped through the cracks. It wasn’t a special couch, L-shaped and beige, but she thought it would be hard to lose. She understood how items could get lost in the chaos of the pandemic. Katherine had experienced it firsthand when she opened the boxes Yale sent home to her in spring 2020 and found that her framed Dead and Company poster — a gift from her dad — was missing. But like J.D., when they lost their items for a second time, she had stored the couch with Yale through her residential college’s summer storage program (run in conjunction with Meyer). The program, which was cheaper and more convenient than getting a storage unit, permitted students (among other things) to “leave one couch per suite” to store over the summer of 2021. By then, she thought, Yale would have had enough time to ensure no item went missing. The couch was big, and she had labeled it with her full name and suite number, as Davenport College had specified in their THE NEW JOUR N AL

summer storage directions. She was disappointed when it went missing, she recalls, but more than anything, “determined to find out” where it and her other belongings (a lamp and a chair) had gone. So, she contacted the Davenport College office, who then directed her to Yale C&E, who re-directed her to the facilities manager for Davenport, who re-directed her back to Yale C&E, who then encouraged her to send a mass email to her residential college and to email Meyer, who said to ask Yale. No one knew anything.

“It felt like they were ducking responsibility,” Katherine says. “I was constantly being directed to ‘this person’ or ‘this form.’” When Katherine had exhausted all avenues for finding her couch, after weeks of emailing back and forth, Yale C&E sent her a reimbursement form, which Yale C&E forwards to students seeking repayment after they determine an item has been lost. But she never got reimbursed. A few days after submitting the form, she received an email from Yale C&E invoking the fine print of the initial summer storage email Katherine had received. “Yale takes no responsibility for any items that are left on campus in Spring 2021,” they quoted.

KNOWN UNKNOWNS When I ask DeVille what Meyer does when they can’t determine who owns an item, he answers matter-of-factly. They rely on Yale C&E to help them make that identification, he explains, but if they can’t find the owner, they put it with the “Unknowns.” According to DeVille, Meyer compiles these “Unknowns” JANUARY 2022

together in one of their storage units—from what he describes on the phone, it’s a jumble of couches and fridges and boxes, full of whoknows-what. From what I piece together from Vieillard and DeVille and my conversations with students, there could be Burberry scarves, Gucci belts, spare notebooks, game consoles. There could be surrealist senior art projects and Polaroid photos. Journals and game consoles. Childhood stuffed animals. Soon, Yale and Meyer will unbox the items and dispel the mystery. They are planning to donate all the ‘Unknowns’ to the Salvation Army. It’s both an act of charity and of simple business. Vieillard explains to me that Yale has still been paying to store these ‘unknowns.’ (Though she couldn’t give me the exact cost, I got the impression that it was expensive.) Neither Vieillard nor DeVille mentioned any plan to let Yale students look at the ‘Unknowns’ before they are donated. For Christmas, a lucky child may get a Burberry scarf, or Stuart Weitzman boots. They could even get a couch, or—who knows?— maybe even an organ, according to Elko Gerville-Reache ’24, a student in Trumbull College. “I had an organ—emphasis on had,” Elko says. Elko had spent years looking for a vintage Ace Tone Electronic Organ Model Top-2, like the one Ray Manzarek of The Doors played. In his common room, he set up a music studio, replete with amps, pedals, guitars, basses, and microphones. According to Elko, he knew Yale would somehow lose his stuff, so he emailed his residential college, Yale C&E, and Dorm Room Movers at the onset of the pandemic: “Do not touch my stuff.”

“For Christmas, a lucky child may get a Burberry scarf, or Stuart Weitzman boots. They could even get a couch, or— who knows?—maybe even an organ.” They touched his stuff. They moved it into storage, which Elko says he was “initially okay with.” After all, Yale C&E had to move everything eventually to open up rooms for the 2020-2021 school year. But he was nervous about them moving his things again, so, as Elko recalls, he emailed them again: “Do not touch my stuff. Whatever you do, leave it there.” They did not leave it in storage. “[The organ] took three to four years to find, and now I was told they just threw it out,” he says. His words crescendo, but then he stalls, as if imagining the red paint chipping in a landfill. His voice is heavy: “I hope someone took it and not—not just threw it out, you know?”

" SATISFIED " When I ask Dorm Room Movers if there were any challenges to moving such a large volume of items, Director of Customer Experience Tonya Kinney tells me that Dorm Room Movers “doesn’t see challenges, just opportunities to create a new service.” When I ask her what happens when an item goes missing, she assures me that customers have the “ability to purchase a protection plan” but that they will “use everything and every resource [available] to find that item.” If they can’t, she promises me they try to reimburse the client and do “everything in their power to ensure the customer is satisfied with the outcome.” 23

PAY BACK TIME The first time the (203) ******* number called Katherine— who is still, to this day, missing her couch—she thought it was a scammer. The second time, she picked up. She was shocked to find it was the Yale Police Department (YPD), calling her about the reimbursement claim she filed for the missing couch (and other items). At the time, she had yet to discover she was ineligible for reimbursement. So when she filled out the reimbursement form with photos and prices for each missing item, she had thought she was done with the process. But it had just begun. It can take weeks to receive any reimbursement, which can hurt students who “don't come to campus with a lot of resources to fall back on,” according to J.D. Lieutenant Sabrina Wood of YPD tells me that it is standard procedure for officers to call students who file reimbursement claims. They go over students’ personal information, information about the items, and confirm they have taken steps to find their items before seeking reimbursement. Then, according to Wood, they let the student know that, under Connecticut Code 53A-157B, it’s a “Class A misdemeanor” to file a false police report. Wood estimates that the YPD has handled 75-100 of these cases. Vieillard tells me that, though the University has paid out 831 total claims to students, Yale C&E only forwards reimbursement

claims above $500 to the YPD. “There have been claims of tens of thousands of dollars,” Vieillard says. When I ask if Yale is concerned about false claims, Vieillard tells me no. Wood, when I ask her the same question, tells me that “[YPD has] no way to investigate [false claims].” Yale C&E’s policy, according to Vieillard, is to take all claims at face value no matter how incredible. “[You get students with] five Gucci coats, three of those goose down jackets […],” she explains. “It was kind of amazing what some students had in their rooms.” “The University put finances second,” Jennifer Franssen, Deputy Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Yale, tells me. Neither Franssen nor Vieillard can tell me how much any of this has cost—the storage, shipping, and reimbursement. When I ask Franssen, she says, “I don’t know.” (Yale has a “chart of accounts” system which lets employees label any budget item and then total them accordingly. I ask Franssen if I can use this system to add up the numbers myself. I am told, quite gently, “No.”) But Vieillard assures me Yale isn't worried about the money. “The directive was not to be a penny pincher with these students,” Vieillard says. “The directive was to make them whole.” The reason they involve the YPD at all, Vieillard says, is because Yale’s Office of Risk Management wants to ensure that there were no “patterns of foul play” by movers, not students. But why, then, would the YPD call students and not movers? It frightens students, and it doesn’t make much sense. After all, if Yale C&E were keeping records, as Viellard suggests, they would be able to notice and notify the YPD of those patterns themselves without talking to stu-

dents. But still, Vieillard tells me she has “no knowledge” of any such patterns of foul play. When I contacted Risk Management and asked them to explain, they did not respond to my requests for comment.

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS *Asterisk marks a pseudonym Peter’s* mother waited for four hours on Easter to buy him Guitar Hero 3, when it came out in 2007. His eyes crinkle, as he smiles at the memory, before his face sinks, as he remembers how the game (and all his other games) vanished. He and his suitemates wanted to make sure all their items had been packed up and stored, so they asked Yale C&E for a list of their things. Yale C&E then contacted Dorm Room Movers on their behalf. But instead of a list, Dorm Room Movers sent Peter pictures of his items. Peter and his suitemates could see that some of their things weren’t there, but they were pleasantly surprised that most things seemed to be. But when they moved into their dorm rooms this August, it was clear there were even fewer boxes than what Dorm Room Movers had promised in the photos. Plus, all their games and their game consoles (a Wii and an Xbox) were missing. To Peter, the logic should be simple. You open a box, you load the box, then someone else opens the box. An error, he suggests, must have occurred somewhere along the way. “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist,” he tells me. But when searching for replacements for his rare games, which are no longer made, he was surprised that a number of them on eBay were being sold THE NEW JOUR N AL

from Connecticut.

AWARD - WINNING SERVICE “Considering how crazy it was,” Davenport College’s Head of Operations Shaffrona Phillip-Christie tells me, “[it’s] shocking we didn’t lose more items.” She wishes the residential college offices had been more involved in the process, but she tells me that in the big picture— while some items were lost—many more were delivered, and Yale C&E did eventually find some of the items that went missing. With a staff of only twenty-two coordinating thousands of student items, it does seem miraculous that more wasn’t lost, all the while helping first responders and those sick with COVID. “I am so proud of my staff,” Yale C&E’s Vieillard says. “They became like detectives.” According to Vieillard, when COVID restrictions were relaxed and allowed her staff to go into closed buildings, they would go look for student items themselves, often becoming personally invested in the case. “We're…on the phone, talking to kids,” she recalls, “trying to figure out what happened, why somebody had the wrong box, or why they didn't have any boxes, or why they were missing certain things.” They wanted to make it right. Out of 1104 claims for missing items, Vieillard’s staff was able to resolve 273. (They reimbursed the other 831.) For their service to the University, the team won a Linda Lorimer award, which according to its website “recognize[s] individuals and teams among the Yale staff who have distinguished JANUARY 2022

themselves through a commitment to excellence and innovative thinking.” Still, this apparent success is hard to reconcile with the feelings of students. “Maybe I’m being naive,” J.D. says. “But it can’t be that hard to store something.” Elko, when I ask how he feels, calls the team “incompetent.”

OUR DEEPEST SYMPATHIES “Sometimes, [a student] is missing something, not to coin the credit card company ad, that is ‘priceless,’” Vieillard explains. “Something your grandmother gave you, or a note from someone you can’t find now, or whatever it was. There were plenty of heart-breaking stories about heirlooms, which people may or may not be reconnected with.” Vieillard says her team has a system in which they track a student’s quest to find an item—whether a locket, or a diary, or Polaroids— from beginning to end. They mark each development, from the moment they are contacted until they find the item, or until Yale C&E determines that it’s unfindable.

SOME THINGS YOU CAN ' T REPLACE My grandfather sent my grandmother cross-country love letters when they were college students in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. She mailed them to me in the fall of my first year. I remember keeping them in the bottom drawer of my desk, with school supplies and cards my mom sent me. When I was homesick, I would take them out and read them. I liked to feel the weight of their love in my hands. My grandfather died when I was four, so I never knew him,

but I got to know him better through those letters, when he was eighteen and felt out of place at Yale, just like me, hundreds of miles from Fort Worth, Texas. When I went home for spring break in March 2020, I didn’t think about the letters. Now, I can’t remember if I made sure to put them back in the drawer, or if I left them on the coffee table in our common room when I left. Sometimes, I wonder if they fell under my bed as I was packing for spring break, or if I threw them into my luggage and forgot about them. I’d just turned nineteen and was too distracted by the Jimmy Fallon tickets in my back pocket to worry when Dean Chun warned us to take what we needed. But I do remember that I felt thankful when my stuff was shipped back home to Texas. I knew that it must have been a nightmare for Yale to coordinate. Almost all my things were there, though all the papers were mixed up and my mug had been chipped. My notebooks were there. So was my bedding, and my ballet shoes, and the photo my mom and I took in front of Princeton. The letters weren’t. Alexandra Galloway is a junior in Davenport College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

f I was ever uncertain of whether other white grandmas dressed like mine, the breakfast meeting of the Italian American Women of Greater New Haven (IAWGNH) made the answer obvious. Her uniform was everywhere, without an infraction in sight: tan leather velcro-strap shoes or white sneakers, white shirts underneath buttoned cardigans or fleecy vests, the occasional whiff of Chanel noº5 in between overwhelming waves of Chanel noº5, pearls and bulbous necklaces, little swooshing curls in hair just a few inches long, and so many scarves. Was this what my grandma’s mysterious bridge club looked like, all those years of my childhood?

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM TAI / DESIGN BY AVERY MITCHELL

“This is my pleasant leisure time activity,” said Frances Calzetta, the President of the IAWGNH. With a little smile, she gestured past a jumble of Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations, to the group’s members seated around square tables in a corner of the Twin Pines diner in East Haven. Despite the festive ambience, Calzetta asserted that this was a “business meeting.” Or, she corrected herself, it usually doubled as a breakfast and a business meeting. Usually, they’d discuss business first (fundraisers, candidates for their scholarship, other miscellaneous items) and then chow down. But this time, it was a mess: the restaurant had booked two funerals—most likely either Greeks or Italians, she said—in the back room of the diner where Calzetta and her colleagues had planned to conduct their business. With agenda items thwarted, their breakfast was reduced to, well, just breakfast. It turns out the IAWGNH is nothing like a bridge club. Their “pleasant leisure time activity” is not cards—it’s a lawsuit against JANUARY 2022

the city of New Haven. The group filed their suit in October, in response to the removal of the Columbus statue from Wooster Square Park in July of 2020. The removal resulted from protests against the statue during the movement for racial justice in June 2020 ignited by the death of George Floyd; over the course of the year, nearly a hundred other statues were removed across the country. If Calzetta and her colleagues are fighting on the side of white backlash in the war over American history, their battle may seem obscure: a small group of mostly elderly Italian American Women of Greater New Haven, with funds raised from a fashion show (partially collected in what appeared to be a Barnes and Noble paper bag), via discussions at eggs-and-bacon breakfasts at a local diner, have taken it upon themselves to compel the city to put back a statue in a tiny park in New Haven. Columbus, of course, is not obscure; he has been aggrandized to the point of ubiquity. And the group’s actions aren’t surprising: they fit a national pattern of Italian Americans going to impassioned lengths to preserve Columbus’s monumental presence in America. Most statues taken down across the country in the last few years have stayed down, but local campaigns to restore them, in some cases, have been successful, or at least noisy. In Pittsburgh, an Italian American group has been in the process of suing the city since October of 2020, in response to their Columbus statue’s removal. In South Philly, a judge—who appeared on a podcast with QAnon organizers earlier this year, and was listed as speaker at a QAnon event she says she didn’t attend—reversed a decision made by city officials

to remove their Columbus statue. City officials in Bridgeport voted to return their Columbus Statue months after voting to remove it, though the decision was reversed again a few hours before the statue was to be returned. Monuments are limited artifacts—and, ironically, Calzetta and IAWGNH’s lawsuit gestures towards this fact. Statues depicting historical figures feed the reductionist mode of historical thinking that has driven unwavering support for ‘heroes’ who are often anything but. In many cases, monuments arise from—and perpetuate, even—the same kind of American myth-making that views the acknowledgement of structural oppresion’s role in this country’s history as an existential threat; it’s the very approach of those who deem critical race theory to be an erasure of “Western history” and who agitate over the 1619 Project’s reframing of history in terms of slavery and racial oppression. America’s and New Haven’s recent confrontation over monuments is more than a matter of political tip-toeing to appease proponents of old monuments and devise new monuments to fill space once held for racist symbols; it is also a fundamental reflection of the finite capacity of monuments to serve as meaningful vessels for public memory at all. Representation matters in the public imagination—and new monuments that prioritize marginalized voices can offer a valuable solution, especially in a country where monuments remain ever-present in public spaces. But the failures of the Elm City’s approach to replacing their Columbus statue also show that reframing history, improving representation, and creating dialogue between two partisan camps might be best achieved through other 27

means. Perhaps we need to rethink monuments themselves.

⭑⭑⭑ On June 24, 2020, a large crane appeared in Wooster Square Park. Mayor Justin Elicker, citing “many leaders in the Italian Community” who helped the city arrive at the decision, had unexpectedly ordered the statue’s removal just two days earlier, after the city Parks Commission voted to remove it. In the company of supporters and protesters, Columbus was transplanted to an orange platform on a truck, tethered with thick straps, and driven off. The statue’s base remained, protected by an iron black fence and a moat of tulips. On the day of the statue’s removal, the Italian American Heritage Group—a local organization made up of about 10,000 Italian Americans from New Haven and the surrounding area—filed a lawsuit against the city over Columbus’s removal. A year later, on the one-year anniversary of the statue’s removal, a handful of the group’s members and other Italian Americans gathered at the statue’s vacant base and hung up a sign that read, “ALL LIVES MATTER,” signed off: “From your Italian American Friends.” By then, the Italian American Heritage group’s request to nullify the vote to remove the statue had been dismissed. The IAWGNH decided to take up the fight; they filed their own lawsuit in October 2021. According to Calzetta, it rests on three claims: first, that “the mayor chose one ethnic group over another”; second, “a denial of due process” in the decision-making to remove the statue, which, they claimed, had violated Civil Rights protections, as well as First and Fourteenth Amendment rights; and third, “an 28

Monuments are limited artifacts– and, ironically, Calzetta and IAWGNH’s lawsuit gestures towards this fact. inability to enjoy the park” where the statue once stood. Their lawyer, Patricia Cofrancesco, who represented the Italian American Heritage Group before them, is presenting their case pro-bono. The rest of the legal expenses are being funded by local IAWGNH fundraising events, including an annual fashion show. Calzetta and her colleagues are optimistic they will win, because they feel they have support from community members. Elicker has been publicly dismissive of the campaign. “This suit is without cause or merit,” he wrote in an October statement, “We will vigorously defend this case. The plaintiff, in bringing it, is draining city resources away from more pressing issues before the city.”

⭑⭑⭑ Calzetta considers herself a politician. She flaunts her campaigning for the preservation of the memory of Columbus at the New Haven Historical Society, where she is a member, and her “antipornography work,” which includes fighting for the closure of a strip club she feared would increase crime rates according to the New Haven Register, which described her as an “outraged neighbor.” She was also named to the Wooster Square Monument Committee, tasked with selecting an idea for a replace-

ment statue that represents Italian Americans; in August, the committee selected a replacement, and it has yet to be officially approved before the eighteen months of fabrication and installation of the new statue can begin. During our interview, Calzetta freely reprimanded New Haven politicians for their roles in removing the statue. She called Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Wooster Square-born Italian-American who strongly opposed the statue, “an unfortunate congresswoman who turned her back on everything she believed in for political reasons,” and chided Mayor Justin Elicker as a “very weak man,” “terrible terrible,” and, at the end of a string of more pejoratives, “a mayor who did not care about Columbus.” Calzetta cares about Columbus. She cares about Columbus to the point that New Haven-born and raised Italian American Historian Anthony Riccio calls her the “voice” of all Italians who oppose the removal of the Columbus statue. Columbus “was a tough governor,” Calzetta euphemizes, “but he did magnificent kinds of things: improve the lives of the Indians, the country became open for trading around the world, improving the lives of even the people who came to settle here.” When asked about how she weighs this supposed magnificence with Columbus’ responsibility for the genocide of Indigenous peoples, Calzetta says, “don’t give me all this about how great and wonderful they [Indigenous peoples] are,” and adds that “they are hell bent on trying to destroy Columbus. And by destroying all this, they are discriminating against the Italian American people.”

⭑⭑⭑ THE NEW JOUR N AL

The base of the Columbus statue stands empty in Wooster Square Park. In June 2020, after protests, the New Haven Parks Commission voted to remove the statue.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, as scores of Italian immigrants settled in the Northeast of the United States, Columbus’s legacy was settling, too. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed Columbus Day as a onetime national celebration. But Italian Americans took the holiday and ran with it, organizing celebrations across the country in the following years with the help of sponsorship and state lobbying from the Knights of Columbus; soon enough, Columbus Day was a federal holiday. Simultaneously, Columbus monuments cropped up nationally: often funded by private donations from Italians, these monuments were a point of pride, ceremony, and a new, hybrid Italian American nationalism.

JANUARY 2022

New Haven’s statue was unveiled in Wooster Square on October 12, 1892—the day after the first national celebration of Columbus Day. According to the New Haven Register’s archives, at the statue’s unveiling ceremony, an Italian-American speaker declared: “May this statue serve to eliminate whatever distinction there may be between Italians and Americans, and may it keep peace and prosperity for all future time.” In New Haven and nationally, these Columbus-centered fixtures helped reinforce convenient myths: that Columbus was Italian (he wasn’t; he was born in the independent republic of Genoa four centuries before Italy was unified), that he “discovered” America (he never set foot in North Amer-

ica), that he was the “first immigrant” to the United States (the United States, of course, hadn’t yet been formed, and Columbus’s expedition was commercial, military, and resulted in the genocide of millions of Indigenous people). But these myths had motive far greater than pride: Columbus was “central to the process through which [Italian-Americans] were fully ratified as white during the 20th century,” as author and editorial writer Brent Staples writes in his October 12, 2019 New York Times op-ed entitled “How Italians Became White.” In Italy, Southern Italians had faced discrimination from whiter Northern Italians, and immigration offered no escape. Abuse in America often took the form of slurs, exclusion 29

from schools and labor unions, and consignment to segregated church pews. In the South, Italians were also subject to some of the mob violence routinely terrorizing Black Americans: in 1891, eleven Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans—President Harrison’s 1892 Columbus Day proclamation was a direct response. Facing racialized violence, Italians had a choice between aligning with whiteness or with people of color, a choice they and other European immigrants were privy to because their new American identities were still undefined. They chose whiteness, and with it the racist violence of white supremacy essential to proving themselves as white. As the legal scholar and author of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty Brando Simeo Starkey writes: “[European immigrants] watched whites abuse blacks, mimicked whatever they saw and whiteness—the carrot they had long reached for—slowly came closer to their grasp.” Columbus’s role was thus twofold: he was an instrument for grabbing the carrot and a symbol for maintaining a grip on it. Professor Thomas Allen Harris, a Senior Lecturer in African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale, spoke to me about the artifice embedded in the Columbus hero narrative. “Who decided that Columbus was [a hero] and how did that happen? That was a creation of manufacture,” said Harris. The Columbus hero narrative, Harris told me, was a way for Italian-Americans to ennoble themselves—which all communities seek to do in one way or another. But the myth of Columbus didn’t just ennoble Italian Americans or make them more acceptable to the white majority. It made them white. 30

⭑⭑⭑ Calzetta was born and raised in Wooster Square, but now she lives in Branford. Riccio, who has interviewed hundreds of former residents of Wooster Square, describes the area in his book The Italian American Experience in New Haven as a space where tradition lives on, where “one can still catch glimpses of the old neighborhood and imagine it in its heyday.” When I interviewed Calzetta at the Twin Pines Diner, I expected her to wax sentimental about Columbus’s role in Wooster Square’s Italian American tradition. But little sentimentality was detectable. She didn’t express passion for the neighborhood as an Italian American hub. Despite “enjoyment of the park” being the basis for the third claim of her lawsuit, Calzetta seems indifferent about the neighborhood. “It means nothing to me. As far as I'm concerned, Wooster Square contemporary, they cleaned up a major slum,” said Calzetta, referencing an urban renewal project that rehabilitated the industrial area and uprooted Italian-Americans from Wooster Square. Addressing the square in the second person, she said, “No, you’re

In New Haven and nationally, these Columbuscentered fixtures helped reinforce convenient myths. But these myths had motive far greater than pride.

not the center. You’re not better than anybody else.” According to Calzetta, Wooster Square is important mainly because it displays Italian-American culture to others. “[The statue’s] been there one hundred twenty years, and Chapel Street’s a main street. So you drive by, the statue’s there,” she said. Calzetta is not personally invested in Wooster Square nor its park—and perhaps her investment in Columbus isn’t personal, either. Thanks in part to the Columbus myth, Italian Americans have been securely ratified as white for over half a century. Claims that Italian Americans face racism and discrimination in the twenty-first century, then, seem hopelessly out of date. But if their whiteness is no longer in danger, why do so many Italian Americans feel threatened by the reevaluation of Columbus’s legacy and the removal of his monuments? Perhaps Calzetta’s impersonal, unsentimental investment in Columbus provides a clue. “You drive by, the statue’s there.” Calzetta is more interested in imposing the symbolism of Columbus on others than in preserving Columbus as a symbol of Italian American heritage. Columbus no longer needs to symbolize inclusion; Italian Americans have firmly achieved it. Instead, he now seems to embody only the ugliness of his historical legacy—the preservation of a white supremacist status quo and a tradition of racialized violence.

⭑⭑⭑ The day the Columbus statue was removed from Wooster Square Park, Norm Clement visited the park. A Confederate Quinnipiac Native and a member of the Penobscot tribe, Clement also serves as a community organizer, THE NEW JOUR N AL

activist, and elder on the land now referred to as New Haven—though New Haven, including Wooster Square, is the unceded territory of the Quinnipiac people. Clement had been protesting for the removal of the statue for a decade, so he showed up when he heard the statue was to be removed that day. There, in the middle of the first wave of COVID-19, he said an Italian-American counter-protester spat in Clement’s face. Clement describes his fight against the Columbus statue as a no-brainer: “The Columbus statue is representative of the beginning of colonialism—why wouldn’t we fight against that?...If you want to honor Italian Americans, then choose somebody else, somebody who represents you. Not a mass murderer and rapist.” And New Haven’s statue carries added symbolism because the Knights of Columbus’s homebase is in New Haven—“that’s the organization that fought for and put up these statues across the country,” said

Clement, and it’s also where the statue will soon reside. Even though Clement and other advocates have fought against celebrations of Columbus for years, Elicker acknowledged only the recent initiative of “many leaders in the Italian Community” when the statue was removed. But this is unsurprising: at a recent Board of Alders meeting, Clement told me, only Italian-Americans were invited to express their perspective on Columbus’ legacy in New Haven. “The way the city has looked at it, the Italian Americans are a big voting bloc,” said Clement. “There's only a few of us Indigenous people here. And why is that? Because of Columbus.” On the subject of the IAWGNH and the city officials in Bridgeport who voted to put back their statue, Clement said, “White supremacists are going kicking and screaming into the night. They don't want to give up any power. They're

A close-up of the statue's base, battered by time and the statue's removal.

not going to give up any power without a fight, and then they'll manipulate and do whatever they can to regain that power.” Columbus’s statue has generated more than a fight: it’s become a distraction. For James Rawlings, the former President of the NAACP branch of New Haven, Chairman of the Connecticut Native American Intertribal Council, and tribal elder of the Wampanoag tribe, the persistence of debate over these monuments detracts from more present, consequential social, economic, and health inequities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He points to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in the Cabinet, whom he says is creating long-overdue change, especially in returning stolen land to Indigenous peoples. When the statue was removed from Wooster Square, Clement gathered Indigenous people from the area and reblessed the ground where the Columbus statue had stood. He doesn’t want to have to do it again, nor does he want to have to fight for the statue’s removal once more. But, he said, he would. “It is tiring,” said Clement, followed by a long pause. “This government has been trying to erase us for 500 years. They haven't done it yet, and they're never gonna do it. Our communities are under attack all the time...We still have to go through that every day. It's sad. When is it going to end?”

⭑⭑⭑ “Indicando la via al futuro,” or “Pointing the Way to the Future,” is the title of the monument that was chosen among artist submissions for a statue to replace Columbus. Created by Marc-AnJANUARY 2022

thony Massaro, it depicts an Italian family, with a man at its helm and his son pointing to the horizon—while two women of the family watch. It was chosen by the Wooster Square Monument Committee, which included Calzetta. Elicker assembled the group following the removal of Columbus to seek out a statue that would better represent the Italian American experience. Calzetta hates it. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “That is not the Italian American immigrant. ... It shows their lack of knowledge of the Italian culture, of the Italian immigrant experience, no knowledge of art.” Calzetta says the statue depicts the two women as “very weak,” which she finds not only demeaning but also historically inaccurate. The Columbus statue was not explicitly about women, according to Calzetta, so she found it more representative (though, unsurprisingly, Columbus was not kind to women—for one, he regularly “gifted” Taíno women to his crewmen to be beaten and raped). Other Italian Americans are dissatisfied with the statue. Vincent Mauro Jr. is the chairman of the Democratic Party in New Haven, a former alder of Ward 8, which includes Wooster Square, and a 48-year-old second-generation Italian American. If he had it his way, Mauro wouldn’t pick Columbus to represent Italian-Americans—instead, he’d pick the kitchen table as a symbol for family and exchanging ideas and culture. Clement wishes he had been included in the discussions.“I would have liked if Indigenous people were invited to the table to decide what was going to go there,” he said. “[Mayor Elicker] 32

decided that he was going to leave it up to the Italian American community.” Rawlings proposes a more prominent location for a monument that honors Indigenous histories—perhaps near City Hall. To put it bluntly, New Haven’s solution disappoints many people: the new monument’s symbolism is too much, not enough, and completely wrong, all at once. Perhaps the form of the monument itself is underestimated, or overlooked, as a limiting factor in this debate over public memory. Perhaps if we can think beyond the monument, we can reach a real solution. In addition to teaching, Professor Thomas Allen Harris makes films. His work explores the historical narratives within families in relation to larger cultural shifts. One of his projects—first founded through the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC, and then turned into the PBS series Family Pictures

To put it bluntly, New Haven’s solution disappoints many people: the new monument’s symbolism is too much, not enough, and completely wrong, all at once. USA—focuses on inherited and collated family photo albums, and the relationship between personal family narratives and collective ones. Harris tours the country, summoning families from diverse backgrounds to slip on gloves and dive into photo archives of their

ancestry. After interviewing about one hundred families, Harris combined the narratives into an exhibit he calls a “shared family album.” His work proposes a new mode of documentation, historical thinking, and public memory. “The family album is in some ways a kind of monument,” said Harris. “It's not really a monument, but it has in it this solution to understanding the complexity, the fullness and the diversity of who we are and who we've been. For me, it's really about moving the family album into the public space in a way that approximates or tries to engage in the space that monuments would typically occupy.” Harris’s interviews, especially those with families who have connections to the Confederacy, often confront topics similar to those broached when discussing colonial monuments. “I have people who come to me with pictures of Confederate family members and history in their albums,” said Harris. “I create a space where they can come and share those [...] They don't have to have shame around that. That's part of the history. They could look at it squarely, and we can have honest conversations around the ambivalence people might have.” Monuments are predisposed to promoting a genre of historical thinking that parallels IAWGNH’s approach to Columbus: a singular, mythologized narrative that obscures history. To change this pattern, federal guidance might be necessary—instead of leaving it all up to city government to make (or reverse) monument decisions, which tend to prioritize wealthy and white groups’ concerns. But the monument problem will not be solved by just changing the figures and ideas that monuments repreTHE NEW JOUR N AL

sent, nor by adding plaques that gestures at historical, political, and social context. It’s about moving on from monuments altogether, toward other vessels that engage in other ways with their public, the present, and the truth. On June 24, 2020, once the Columbus statue was lifted from its granite base in Wooster Square, it was moved to the road and onto the open platform of a truck. It was an unfamiliar sight: Columbus, embarrassingly, was smothered by ropes. Then the truck started to move, and all of the sudden, the monument was replaced by momentum; the symbolism transformed, at least momentarily, into performance art. Here was nuanced symbolism, embedded in its form an obvious context about both the statue’s present and past, and the product of a public re-engaging with history. If a public representation of Columbus were to ever seem appropriate, then perhaps this was it—for it was de-centered, defamed, and, most of all, fleeting. People cheered along the sides of the road when the statue came to them, and when it rolled away, they looked away. Nicole Dirks is a sophomore in Branford College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

JANUARY 2022

WEEKLIES GONE? The story of New Haven’s forty-year resistance to corporate media. by Yonatan Gre

enberg

Alden’s buyout of the Tribune was just one crisis in the long conflict between capital and journalism. New Haven provides an illuminating case study. Included in Alden’s deal for the Tribune was a much smaller paper, New Haven’s very own Advocate—or at least a mutilated remnant of it. Founded in 1975 in an attempt to break out of the confines of the corporate newsroom, the New Haven Advocate went through a long series of buyouts until it was dissolved into CTNow, a weekly aggregator of arts and culture events in the state. When Alden purchased the Tribune Company, the relatively obscure CTNow was part of the deal. THE NEW JOUR N AL

DESIGN BY SAVANNAH CRICHTON

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ALT-

n October 2021, the Atlantic ran a piece about Alden Global Capital’s ransacking of the American press. A pioneer in what has been called vulture capitalism, the Manhattan-based hedge fund had purchased the owning company of the Chicago Tribune in May of 2021. At the time of sale, Alden already owned roughly two hundred newspapers, many of them small-town publications that the fund proceeded to ruthlessly gut. With its recent purchase, Alden added to its spoils the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, and six other publications. Two days after the sale, the staff of the Tribune, a quarter of whom wereas immediately laid off, was put to work in an obscure corner of the city. “Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle,” reporter McKay Coppins wrote.

How did the Advocate, a paper inspired by the anti-capitalist leaflets that nineteen-sixties stoners stapled together, end up absorbed by the conglomerate-behemoth Alden? The basic timeline is simple enough. In 1999, Advocate founder Geoffrey Robinson sold the paper to the Hartford Courant. The following year, the Courant’s parent company, Times-Mirror, was purchased by the Tribune Company for eight billion dollars. In May of 2021, Alden bought the Tribune company. Somewhere in the debris lay the disfigured corpse of the Advocate. Born in protest of to the atrocities of American capitalism and the lies spun by the mainstream media, the rebellious spirit of the Advocate would have to find a new home. On an unseasonably warm day in late November, I walked east past the northern edge of the New Haven Green to learn more about the history of the Advocate. Afternoon threatened to turn into evening, and the setting sun caught the season’s last orange, yellow, and red leaves. Initially, I struggled to find the building I was looking for—51 Chapel Street, the current home of the New Haven Independent, a locally-rooted non-profit newspaper that publishes exclusively online. Finally, I spotted 51 in bronze lettering. The entryway sat between a high-end hat shop and Ferucci’s, an independent dress clothing es store. The block looked like it was frozen in the nineteen-fifties; as I crossed the street, I wondered if I might run into a twenty-year old Leonard Cohen. Up three flights of stairs, I found someone who came close enough: the Independent’s editor and founder, Paul Bass. Wearing a yellow t-shirt, a colorful yar-

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mulke, and blue jeans that might generously be called fatherly, Bass carries himself with a humility that obscures his importance in New Haven’s journalistic landscape. As I sat in his office and snacked on cannolis, Bass treated me to an hour-long history of New Haven journalism. He walked me through how a beloved, city paper, anti-establishment to its core, inspired by anti-capitalist leaflets of the nineteen-sixties was ultimately purchased by the vampires at Alden.

‘We couldn’t help but make money’ Before Bass became the editor of the Independent, he wrote for and edited the Advocate. The paper was born as an alternative to the straight-laced newsroom of the Hartford Courant. However, the Advocate had its roots in what is now called the underground press of the nineteen-sixties.

Exposure to the brutalities of Southern racism, the escalating war in Vietnam, and, most of all, the mandatory draft, fueled for youth of that generation a rage at establishment institutions—schools, government, newspapers—that no mainstream publication could temper. The underground press was given its name for its promotion of drug use and legalization, but it was equally marked by a rebellion against the lies of American capitalism and their dissemination in major U.S. newspapers. To better understand the counter-cultural presses of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, I spoke with Jim Sleeper, a retired professor of political science at Yale (and a former writer at the New Journal) who worked as a journalist in the nineteen-seventies. His baritone voice carried smoothly over the phone. He had a confidence and meter to his speech that reminded me of my grandfather, but instead of telling me stories about the lessons he learned in business school or his memory of

Paul Bass, founding editor of the New Haven Independent, sits in his Chapel Street office. Photo by Lukas Flippo.

the founding of the state of Israel, Sleeper’s stories centered around his time in the nineteen-seventies counterculture. Sleeper recalled his time as a graduate student at Harvard in the mid nineteen-seventies, when he would line up on Wednesday nights to pick up each week’s issue of the Village Voice, a paper born out of the same frustration with the mainstream press that helped birth the Advocate. By the nineteen-seventies, the rebellious spirit of the previous decade had partially dissipated, but an appetite for news sources that rejected the inanities of the corporate press remained. The papers born from this nineteen-seventies transition period—the most famous of which was the Village Voice—are now referred to as “the alternative press.” These alternative weeklies retained much of the rebellious spirit of the previous decade but were run like small businesses.

To Bass, the Advocate’s great popularity stemmed from the paper’s willingness to challenge the established norms of the day—drug culture was promoted, slumlords were exposed, private property was questioned. That, and they knew where the best restaurants were.

The Boston Phoenix, which Sleeper wrote for, was one of these alternative weeklies. The Advocate, for its part, was founded in 1975 by two copy-editors at the Hartford Courant who, in Bass’ telling, were bored by the articles their paper was publishing.

blem—the alternative papers were beloved, and the mainstream press was loathed. “Even if the people running these papers were stoned out of their mind, forgetting to pay the electricity bill, they couldn’t help but make money,” Bass said.

“The hippies and druggies were coming above ground in their lives,” Bass told me. “They’re buying homes, making a little more money. And I think the new alternative press reflected that. They were still anti-military, they were still critical of the establishment, especially the media, and they were very pro-drugs, but they were more above ground and they made their money from restaurant ads and sex ads. Especially sex ads.”. (In a eulogy for the Advocate Bass wrote in 2013, he quotes a friend asking him, “Don’t you feel like you’re wrapping the Talmud around a copy of Hustler?”)

One of the hallmark features of the independent press of those years was the writing style known now as “New Journalism.” In the underground and alternative press, commitment to objectivity—a staple of the mainstream press—was seen as nothing but the mainstream media’s veneer for the corporate agenda that their papers pushed. “Capitalism is good, corporate profits are good for the economy,” Bass told me, mimicking the one belief that mainstream journalism was not supposed to question.

A past cover of the Advocate, excerpted from Paul Bass’s “obit” in the Independent for the dead magazine. Photo courtesy of Paul Bass 36

I asked Bass how publications like the Advocate managed to retain their spirit of rebellion and independence while meeting deadlines and generating enough income to stay afloat. Bass assured me there was never a pro-

New Journalism embraced a different philosophy. “You brought tools of fiction to how you write,” Bass said. “You develop character, you always make a point, and you don’t pretend to be objective.” To Bass, the Advocate’s great popularity stemmed from the paper’s willingness to challenge the established norms of the day—drug culture was promoted, slumlords were exposed, private property was questioned. That,

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and they knew where the best restaurants were. “Even though the front of the book was the news and the investigative pieces, people of all backgrounds counted on it to know where to go out and have fun, wrestle with ideas about culture. It was fun, it was controversial, it was wild.” But the paper’s days of youthful rebellion did not last. By the late nineteen-nineties, alternative weeklies “were making so much money, and their owners were getting older, that all over the country, big companies, mainstream corporate newsrooms, were buying these weeklies because they thought they were cash cows,” Bass said. In 1999, satisfied with the success of the paper he created, Advocate founder Geoff Robinson sold the paper to Times-Mirror, a major media conglomerate and the parent company of the Hartford Courant—the paper Robinson and his colleague Edward Matys had abandoned in order to found the Advocate. Business-savvy as they may have seemed, the new owners “didn’t have the DNA of those founders, they didn’t exist to challenge established norms,” Bass said. These new owners were interested in cash and cash alone. To Bass, it was no surprise that the paper eventually tanked. Mark Oppenheimer, now a lecturer in Yale’s English department and coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative, served as an editor of the Advocate from 2004 through 2006. “By the time I got there, you could no longer show up to work,” he pauses, “on substances. I think there was probably too much fear of lawsuits.” Oppenheimer still found the Advocate a welcome change of pace from the Courant. Compa-

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red with the three- hundred- person newsroom at the Courant, the Advocate had a staff of roughly ten. “It was more like being part of an elite strike force, instead of having a boss, a deputy boss, and all that bureaucracy,” Oppenheimer said. The death of local newspapers, and the struggles of contemporary journalism, are frequently blamed on the internet. Prior to the internet, a venue like Toad’s would have relied on advertising in papers such as the Advocate to reach their desired audience. With the rise of the internet, however, local businesses no longer needed the Advocate to reach their audience. The loss of ad revenue created a problem for the papers. Nevertheless, Bass insists that the issue that actually felled the Advocate and similar papers was much simpler: they weren’t interesting anymore.

The loss of ad revenue created a problem for the papers. Nevertheless, Bass insists that the issue that actually felled the Advocate and similar papers was much simpler: they weren’t interesting anymore.

By the late nineties—once the Advocate had been bought by Times-Mirror—alternative weeklies were owned by “boring, corporate types—their main concern was not getting sued,” Bass

said. “So, if you wrote a lede and it totally sucked, your editor would say, ‘What a great lede—how can we make it better?’ even though you misspelled everything and it was total crap.” Unlike these papers, the New Haven Independent, founded in 2005 and published exclusively online, has remained free of corporate influence and, according to its editor, Bass, is committed to staying that way. Despite the inroads the corporate media has made into independent media in the past four decades, Bass remains confident that the Independent of today lives up to the best values of independent journalism. “I find that with the Independent—I’m closer with my readership, I have the most diverse readership I’ve ever had, and it costs the least,” Bass said. “The ability to challenge corporate control and do independent media is by far greater than it’s ever been. The alt-weeklies were nothing compared to what’s around now.” From perusing the Independent’s website or spending an afternoon in their office, no one would guess the paper’s roots in the alternative press. Today, Bass’s hair is short, and his office has an atmosphere of middle-class professionalism. A twenty-year old looking to rebel would do better to trip acid and burn an American flag than intern at the Independent. But, if today’s Independent might disappoint adrenaline-seeking college leftists, that’s not particularly surprising. It’s been forty years since Bass was twenty.

Connectic*nt When I walked into their apartment, Zoe Jensen and Mariana Plaez were sitting by their kitchen

table. Overflowing with magazine cutouts—text, images—the table was barely able to contain the scraps. I felt that if I sneezed too hard I might send the whole arrangement flying. There were only five days until their deadline, and they had lots of cutting, folding, gluing, and re-gluing ahead of them. Zoe Jensen and Mariana Palaez are two of the three editors of the recently-born Connectic*nt Magazine. Spell- check can forget the red underline. Meant as “a love letter to the state of Connecticut,” the zine was born as a reaction against the dismissive attitude towards the state that Jensen and Palaez found obnoxiously common. “I know so many people that are just like Connecticut’s so lame, there’s no one cool in Connecticut, and a lot of these kids will move to New York or something like that because they have the means to do that,” Palaez said. Palaez herself was eager to escape the state when she graduated from high school. But she couldn’t afford Boston University, so she went to the University of Connecticut instead. “And then I found cool people there!” Palaez said. “I’m like damn, there’s cool people everywhere! But Connecticut just doesn’t get the love.” Jensen herself left Connecticut after high school to attend film school in Los Angeles, but came back a year and a half later. “I just missed this place too much,” she said. In the zine, many of the submissions are collages. It summons an elementary school era of simple joy, a time before pinging notifications and round- the- clock stress, when it was perfectly natural to spend an afternoon cutting shapes out of magazines, gluing

them together, and repeating. But the child-like play that goes into the zine doesn’t keep it from addressing issues worthy of attention. The magazine’s October issue featured a full-page graphic lampooning the University of Connecticut’s proclaimed commitment to human rights. “Human rights is an interesting way to spell Imperialism,” muses the graphic. The page mentions the University’s partnerships with military contractors Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky and the school’s partnership with “the world’s biggest terrorist org (US military).” Delivered without the self-seriousness of other publications, the charge hits hard. I asked if there had been any particular intention behind the vulgarity in the magazine’s name. “I chose it because I thought it was funny,” Jensen said, laughing. “I really just thought it would be a silly little thing for a few friends.” Now, with roughly 1,500 copies sold and consistent interest from local advertisers, Jensen and Palaez must come to terms with just how popular their zine has become.

few conventions of newspaper creation they adhere to. “Fuck a style guide,” Palaez said, laughing. As editors, their main job is simply to select which submissions to include in a given issue. They’re not interested in fact-checking, or telling a contributor how to better word a sentence. Really, they just want to create a low-stress medium for people to express whatever it is they do, or don’t, feel like saying. But, like the papers of the nineteen- sixties that preceded it, Connectic*nt has been very popular. I wondered if the zine’s promise of profitability might pique the interests of any aspiring business-owners. Jensen herself mentioned that she would love to work on Connectic*nt full-

Talking with Jensen and Palaez, I considered the similarity between their zine and the underground press of the sixties. The editors bragged about how

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time, if possible. In my conversation with Paul Bass, the editor was insistent that no tension exists between a magazine’s profitability and its ability to generate thought-provoking content. Readers seek content that is stimulating and fresh, and advertisers shell out the most for publications that readers love. Typically, decay at a newspaper results not from profitability itself but from the paper-pushers, HR consultants, and money-grubbers that get hired later.

In the rise and fall of publications, there is something of a life-cycle. Stories about the predatory behavior of a company like Alden are undeniably troubling. Journalists at publications like the Tribune and the Advocate had lifelong careers overturned by a handful of nihilistic venture capitalists. At the same time, the tedium of corporate media is precisely what has pushed writers and readers to seek out new platforms and styles of communication, both in the nineteen-seventies as well as today. While Alden chews on the charred remains of the publica-

tions it buys, the boring papers it will publish will give even greater incentive for writers to break new boundariess and attract readers in yet more powerful ways. Yonatan Greenberg is a junior in Saybrook College.

ASIDE

A MORNING EGG IN THE TRUMBULL DINING HALL BY PHOEBE LIU

A blood orange wearing a golden crown fills the cover of Connectic*nt's debut issue at left, published last July. Above, a recent collage from the magazine criticizes the financial influence of military contractors at the University of Connecticut. Photos courtesy of Connectic*nt. JANUARY 2022

Knock, knock. A crack. Tap. More cracks. Peel—an attempt, at least. I press the egg onto the table. The translucent white bounces back, just enough to let me know it’s there. I pick up a knife and cut into the egg, watching the deep yellow seep out. It’s inevitable. Kind of like my day. I’m wearing my hoodie with the hood all the way up so that it covers most of my face, and I’m letting my polka-dot pajama pants sag just enough to be embarrassing. As if no one can see me cutting open an egg in the dining hall every morning during the 9 a.m. lecture I never attend. I don’t want to think about it. So I salt, pepper, and swallow. When I leave, there are always five or so small shards of shell stuck to the table, to a napkin, or to the bottom of my shoe. I leave, walking on eggshells.