Volume 44, Issue 4—The Pressing Issue

The New Journal

THE PRESSING ISSUE Volume 44, No. 4

March 2012

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

March 2012

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Publisher Jimmy Murphy Editors-in-Chief Max Ehrenfreund, Jacque Feldman Managing Editors Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Senior Editors Jessica Cole, Helen Knight, Sara Mich Production Manager Andrew Calder Business Director Whitney Schumacher Research Director Nicholas Geiser Associate Editor Emily Rappaport Chief Copy Editor Heeseung Kim Copy Editors Ava Kofman, Justine Yan

The New Journal www.thenewjournalatyale.com To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph, e-mail: thenewjournal@gmail.com

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

Cover design: Susannah Shattuck 2

The New Journal

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

Vol. 44, No. 4 March 2012 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

and New Haven

FEATURES 20 Through the Spectrum

A change in the language doctors use to define autism could affect hundreds of thousands of children.

by Miriam Lauter

28 Fear of Needles

New Haven proved that syringe exchange programs prevent the spread of HIV. Why won’t the Obama Administration pay for them?

by Helen Knight

36 Smelling Blood

So you want to be a locavore? Grab your gun, bag a squirrel, and don’t be afraid to dirty your lily-white hands.

by Juliana Hanle

STANDARDS 4 Points of Departure 12 Profile Not Hungry

by Ben Mueller

16 Critical Angle Pillow Talk

by Nicholas Geiser

44 Snapshot A Fine Kettle of Fish

by Cathy Huang

46 Endnote

by Aaron Gertler

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven.

The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

March 2012

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen

Clare Randt

Queen Victoria of England ruled for sixty-three years, seven months and two days before her death in 1901.

In accordance with her meticulous instructions, the queen’s body was dressed in a white gown and her wedding veil, and beside her were placed the stipulated photographs, locks of hair, and a plaster cast of the hand of Prince Albert. On February 2, her coffin was borne through the streets of London on a gun carriage.

With perhaps less fanfare, after a reign of four years, another queen, in a kingdom on Whitney Avenue, was recently borne from her deathbed by a pair of forceps.

The queen of the Yale Peabody Museum’s leaf-cutter ant colony is no more. Her death in late October would have gone unnoticed, says the discoverer of the body and the Peabody’s education coordinator, Jim Sirch, but for the gradual decline of the colony’s population. He noticed the size of the population stagnate and then fall about a month before her death was confirmed in the fall.

It is hard, he explained, to quantify ants in the intricate, secretive, and microcosmic fungal garden they inhabit and cultivate. Staff, students, and visitors to the Discovery Room,

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where the ant colony is situated, noticed the fungus diminishing in size and expressed concern for the queen’s health.

Leaf-cutter ants form the largest, most complex societies on earth, next to our own. Rival kingdoms in the Peabody’s Discovery Room—which include poison dart frogs from South America and thumb-sized hissing cockroaches from Madagascar—do not compare. Leaf-cutters belong to some of the oldest agricultural societies on earth, cultivating fungal gardens in finely tuned reciprocity.

Fungal complexes have been discovered in the ants’ native tropics that are five hundred square feet in area and reach twenty-six feet below the ground, dimensions that, taking into account our much larger size, make the Great Wall of China look like a garden fence.

Leaf-cutters appear to have unanimously adopted monarchism as their preferred form of government.

Their entire social hierarchy is organized according to a simple principle. Size determines occupation, lifestyle, and every other quality an ant might wish to claim. The largest ants protect the nest from invaders.

Middling castes include the foragers and the soldiers who protect them as they cut scraps of leaves and haul them back to the garden in orderly columns. The smallest care for the brood of larvae or attend, like ladies-

in-waiting, upon the queen, who continually produces eggs throughout her life. The members of all of these castes are female, infertile, and dwarfed in size by the queen. As with Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, both six-foot-four, physical stature correlates with political power, and— for ant queens—size is something one is born into.

The old fungal garden in the Peabody, presided over by the now deceased and ever-unnamed queen, was, at its largest, about the size of a basketball. Built on top of hydrostone, a porous sculpting cement, the grayishgreen fungal garden—suggestive of moldy Swiss cheese—grew and shrank with the population of the ants and its own life cycle. The ants are always carrying away dying fungus and bringing new leaf material to fertilize the garden. It is hard to see what the ants are doing inside the garden, but a long tube runs across the room to the leaf pile, supplied by New Haven trees, rosebushes, and other foliage.

Visitors, especially children, enjoy watching the ants trundle back and forth with their jagged loads.

Without the queen, the whole colony must die. In captivity, a queen cannot lay reproductive eggs and ensure her succession. In the tropics, a queen begins her adult life with wings, flies up once, and mates in the air.

During the nuptial flight, fertile males from many colonies rise to meet her in an aerial orgy.

Once the queen is fertilized— with up to 300 million sperm—she leaves her lovers, who promptly die, and returns to the ground. There, she loses her wings and burrows deep beneath the rainforest soil. First though, she stores a bit of fungus in her mouth to provide the first few spores for her colony.

Though queens in the wild can live up to twenty years, conditions in captivity vary greatly, affecting the queens’ reproductive ability and The New Journal

Stopping the Presses 1981. The New Haven Register moved from a small office on Orange and Audobon to 40 Sargent Drive, a former shirt factory. Busloads of people came to tour the new stateof-the-art Goss Metroliner printing presses. New Haven was the industry showroom. Rockwell International, the company that manufactured Goss Metroliners, featured the Register’s pressmen on the cover of its 1982 March 2012

catalogue with the headline “Winning Team in New Haven.” In the picture, you can see the men’s reflections in the gleaming floors.

Today, the floors are black and slippery, covered in ink. According to the Register’s press manager, Frank Malicki, the custodians stopped cleaning the floors about three or four years ago, which is how he knew the Journal Register East Company (the Register’s corporate owner, known as the JRC) would close down the printing press. “How did I know?

The same thing happened on Orange Street.” Thirty-odd jobs at the press will be outsourced to the Hartford Courant’s plant over the course of four weeks. The press’s last run will be on March 4. Malicki started working for the Register as a sixteen-year-old delivery boy in 1970. When I asked him about the future, he said, “I don’t know. I need a job.”

This closure is one more sign of the transition from print to digital media, which has thrown the traditional news industry into chaos.

But the Register has been struggling for a long time. Since the Jackson brothers, Richard and Lionel, sold the newspaper in 1986, there have been three corporate takeovers, a bankruptcy filing, and dozens of layoffs. The 200,000-square-foot building at 40 Sargent Drive is now mostly empty. Last August, the trouble also affected editorial management.

Longtime editor Jack Kramer, a thirtyyear veteran, was replaced by Matt

DeRienzo.

Now, according to Paul Bass, the editor of the New Haven Independent, the Register “is at the forefront of trying to re-invent for-profit journalism.”

Digital journalism is the paper’s longterm strategy. In 2010, the newspaper gave every reporter a video camera. In addition, DeRienzo wants the paper to interact with an empowered online readership. He answers questions on online forums. As publisher of the Torrington Register Citizen, he invited the public to editorial meetings, which he streamed online through a live video feed. He also supervised the paper’s move to a downtown location that is both newsroom and coffee shop, a place where the public can interact with reporters as they work. DeRienzo hopes to make similar changes at the Register.

Closing the press will allow the Register to focus its resources on expanding its online presence. Bobby Suraci, the shift manager, estimates that lighting the press alone costs $20,000 a month. Add the costs of paper, ink, manpower, and plates, and printing becomes incredibly expensive, to the tune of $975,000 a year.

Although DeRienzo is the public face of the digital transition at the Register, he did not know what day the press would close, its location in the building, or whether any of the pressmen had jobs lined up. “A lot of people in the front have never even come back here,” Suraci said. “They’re a few doors away and they have no idea we’re back here.”

This separation between the newsroom and the pressroom is not unique to the Register, but it is difficult to ignore in light of the press’s imminent closure. The paper’s new editor is looking toward the future and is less concerned with the history of the business. At the time of writing, only one other person had visited the presses. When I asked DeRienzo 5

Clare Randt

life cycles. The life and death of this queen was, to some degree, shrouded in mystery. The museum staff does not know whether she took ill or whether she was poisoned but they are not extremely perturbed, despite the effort it takes to get a new queen and painstakingly coax forth a vibrant new colony. Sirch has obtained a young queen and her foundling colony from the Boston Museum of Science, which, in turn, acquired them from the rainforest of Costa Rica.

The new queen will rule over a growing population of ants and the burgeoning fungal garden in which her subjects harmoniously reside— now the size of several stacked kitchen sponges. This new kingdom has been placed in a plastic container near the dying one on display in the Discovery Room. The old queen will likely be forgotten by all but the entomology department, which houses her remains.

Sirch had watched the queen’s slowing activity for several weeks as he stole glimpses of her through an opening in the garden. Movement that for some time he took for the queen’s was in fact only the stirrings of her ladies-in-waiting. Eventually, Sirch used forceps to pull out the queen, the size of a small mouse. She was dead.

–Rachel Lipstein

Susannah Shattuck

about historical records, he jokingly answered, “Your article!”

The press is huge. It cuts through three floors and extends roughly the length of a football field. It is incredibly loud, forcing everyone to shout to be heard; it makes the floor vibrate and it is fast. When I visited, it was churning out forty thousand papers an hour, a visual whir. The future of this particular press, once the pride of the Register, is unknown.

“I hope I’m wrong,” Malicki said, “but they’ll probably scrap it for metal.”

In accordance with Connecticut law, the paper’s publisher notified the state of the imminent layoff of 105 employees. DeRienzo estimates that roughly seventy-five of them are part-time or short-term employees who work in the mailroom or in delivery. The others are the pressmen, the electricians, the platemakers, and the machinists. They stand to lose the most.

Malicki has stories. He remembers how Lionel Jackson would send him down the street to deliver ten thousand dollars in cash, and he remembers a catastrophic ink spill that left stains on the walls still visible today. Suraci started working one year after Malicki, in 1971. “I need health benefits,” Suraci said. “If it wasn’t for that, I’d take severance and unemployment and try to ride it out.” Many of the younger men have families to support and need to find work immediately.

State law is supposed to give communities a chance to deal with layoffs, but it has had no effect on the Register’s pressmen. A few will stay behind until May to decommission the press, which seems to mean scrubbing out all of the ink that has accumulated over the years. According to Suraci, two men have jobs lined up in Hartford. The rest are putting out résumés and going to interviews.

The likelihood of finding more printing work is grim. “Will I go into the printing business? Probably not, 6

’cause it’s a dying business,” Suraci said. “It’s the end of an era for us. It’s sad in a way, but you can see how the future is going.”

Like the reporters in the newsroom, these men have been watching that future apprehensively for years as technology and the industry have changed. When Malicki started, the presses were still using lead plates, and there were over seventy men working in the pressroom, one for every unit. The Register sold its second printing press in the late 1990’s, and Suraci explained that the papers are now barely half their former width—down from sixty-four inches to the current standard of thirty-four inches—to save money. The paper storage room has never had any extra space, until now. The Register is trying to use up its inventory.

On one of the walls in the pressroom, the men have tacked up lists of all the printing presses that have closed in the United States since 2005. (According to Frank, the number is 120 since 2009.) One pressman scrawled, “WHO CARES?” Another pressman said, “We’re all dinosaurs.” I asked him about his plans in four weeks. He laughed. “Go to Disney World!”

–Victoria Sanchez

X-Cubed For Kanani Lee, a geophysicist working at Yale, the key to reconstructing the earth’s history is high pressure. Her lab is known as the X-cubed lab, which stands for “Exploring Extremes Experimentally.” The lab studies a little-known layer near the planet’s core, about 1,800 miles beneath the surface and 257 times deeper than the deepest place on the ocean floor. At that depth, the temperature is about forty times hotter than a Finnish sauna. The pressure there is about twenty times that required to make coal into a diamond.

If you were to dig a tunnel to the center of the Earth, you’d first go through a layer of rocks and dirt five times as deep as Mount Everest is high. Eventually you’d hit the mantle, a wide layer of magma about as solid as warm wax, the molten rock rising and falling slowly as it gains and loses heat. Some radioactive elements would probably ooze by you. Then, before reaching the layer of liquid iron that surrounds the Earth’s solid core, you’d pass through something else.

“We think we know what’s down there, but it’s with your eyes closed and a blindfold on,” Lee said.

Geologists just can’t figure out what goes on between the rocky mantle and the nickel-and-iron core—whether that layer of Earth is liquid or solid, whether it’s cooling down or heating up, and what exactly it’s made of.

“There’s a big debate right now about how hot it is down there, with a discrepancy of about 2,000 degrees Kelvin. That’s a drastic uncertainty,” said Jung-Fu Lin, a mineral physicist at the University of Texas at Austin.

The layer between the mantle and core might be the source of heat that drives magma to the surface, causing volcanic eruptions. Ultimately, if researchers can understand this layer, The New Journal

then they might be able to reconstruct how deep and hot the ocean of molten rock that covered the earth’s surface during its infancy was once. “We want to know what the earth was like as a baby,” said Zhixue Du, a graduate student in Lee’s lab.

Lately, Lee and Du have been squeezing and heating various metals and compounds that geophysicists know exist at the core-mantle boundary. “The melting point is above 3,000 degrees Kelvin, so just getting these temperatures is hard,” said Lee. That’s more than hot enough to melt thermometers. As Du says, “You cook it.”

Right now, Du is researching magnesium oxide, one of the most abundant materials in the Earth’s mantle, and likely one of the compounds that was floating around in the scalding primordial mess billions of years ago. He wants to know just how hot and pressurized the material can get before it melts.

“You can simulate when the earth was molten and see how the atoms are moving. That’s what we’re hoping to get,” said Du. Du takes microscopic specks of the compound, which look like particles of yellow Jell-O! under the microscope, and wedges them between two diamonds set in steel cylinders. Then he tightens the bolts on the cylinders until the slab of oxide is under extremely high pressure— about 1.4 million times the ambient pressure in which we live and breathe.

He fires lasers at the oxide to heat it. The experiment only lasts about a tenth of a second.

The planet’s interior is currently the subject of heated scientific debate all over the world. One group has set up seismometers at the South Pole to measure earthquake vibrations that might reveal clues about the Earth’s inner structure. Many, like those in Lee’s group, are trying to find out how certain materials behave March 2012

at extraordinary temperatures and pressures. Some of the other methods used to create these conditions involve contraptions the size of a car and ten-meter long guns that create high-pressure shock waves with a tiny particle bullet.

“If you want to understand conditions billions of years ago, you can actually go to the lab and simulate them,” said Du. “We’re getting toward understanding the evolution of the world.”

–Rae Ellen Bichell

Getting Warmer For Robert Mendelsohn, a climate change economist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, efficiency is key. I asked him about the School of Forestry’s community tree-planting initiatives, and while he acknowledged the value of green space in a city, he couldn’t help pointing out the project’s potential negative outcomes.

He noted that leaves from the trees would fall on the streets, requiring more clean-up by the city and more taxpayer dollars.

Environmentalists consider Mendelsohn a menace. Mendelsohn considers himself a moderate who makes well-measured judgments.

“You need to look at all sides of the equation,” he said.

Mendelsohn is among the most respected researchers in his field, but his views on the economics of climate change are controversial. Though many climatologists predict that global temperature will increase by an average of two to four degrees Fahrenheit in the next several decades with serious consequences, Mendelsohn isn’t worried. He believes that people will be able to adapt their ways of life to warmer temperatures. The immediate economic drawbacks would outweigh the benefits of a large-scale effort

to reduce climate change, he argues.

Climate scientists have recently grown alarmist in their public statements, he said. “The actual science has not changed, but the rhetoric has gotten more shrill.”

Though his views are anathema to many environmentalists, Mendelsohn has always loved the outdoors. He often invites his doctoral students to barbecues, hikes on the trails in his neighborhood, and kayaking excursions around the Thimble Islands in the Long Island Sound. A New York City native, Mendelsohn has now traded life in the city for life in the Connecticut countryside. He enjoys running through the wetlands and forests along the old Farmington Canal.

“He clearly cares about the environment. My impression is that he just wants to make sure we’re being smart about how we’re managing it,” said David Keiser, a Forestry School doctoral student working with Mendelsohn.

Mendelsohn first began studying environmental economics as a doctoral candidate at Yale in the late 1970’s, just as climate change was first becoming a political issue. His current research focuses on the economics of climate change on a global scale. He and his colleagues have already created a model to predict the costs and the benefits of climate change in each country based on its geography. They are now working on more specific predictions for much smaller regions.

All climate change economists have to make decisions about how to weigh particular costs and benefits in their analyses. These weightings are called ‘discount rates’ in the world of climate change economics. One of the more difficult problems for climate change economists is determining to what extent our human desires and biases should affect their discount rates. For example, knowing that we tend to care more about our present 7

Clare Randt

welfare than we do about the future, Mendelsohn uses numbers that place less importance on the welfare of future generations.

But other climate change economists feel an ethical obligation to weigh all generations equally.

“What do we owe to future generations? Should we ignore them because we are here and they are not?” asked Frank Ackerman, the director of the Climate Economics Group for the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Ackerman is a prominent advocate for more aggressive policies to slow global warming. For him, the moral responsibility of policy makers and those who influence them is clear.

“I cannot stand the idea of being a part of the generation that only left a degraded planet for its future descendants,” he said.

even argued that climate change will benefit agriculture in countries at higher latitudes because the growing season will be longer, an argument Ackerman does not accept.

“A rise in temperature will would also affect countries such as the United States and Canada, who will experience a rise in the number of super-hot days that would override any potential agricultural benefit of a longer growing season. The details matter,” said Ackerman.

Mendelsohn disagrees and feels that many scientists pay too much attention to the potential downsides of climate change. “Exaggerating and accentuating the worst possible outcomes of climate change only delegitimizes the field as a whole,” he said.

It’s difficult to be entirely objective

Climate economists also argue over discount rates because those most responsible for climate change are not the ones who stand to lose the most from a warmer world. Agricultural economies will struggle more than industrial ones as global temperatures increase. Many largely agricultural countries are at lower latitudes where the climate is already warmer, and higher temperatures will interfere with rainfall and crop production.

These countries have not contributed nearly as much of the atmospheric pollution that causes climate change as the manufacturing economies of developed countries at higher latitudes, such as the United States and China. Mendelsohn has

in climate change economics, however, especially considering what is at stake.

Researchers like Mendelsohn, as well as policymakers and voters, have to think about every possible outcome, no matter how extreme. Their conclusions will ultimately depend on whose welfare they most value—that of future generations, that of people in developing countries, or their own.

–Yvette Borja

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Pressed Specimens While Horatio Fenn was studying at the Yale College Medical Institute in 1822, he created a book containing over seven hundred pressed plant

specimens he found in and around New Haven. Fenn’s book is now in the Yale Herbarium at 21 Sachem Street, where the university’s plant specimens are kept. The pages are yellowing, but the specimens themselves look surprisingly well preserved.

Patrick Sweeney, collections manager at the Yale Herbarium, is plucking pages from the spine of Fenn’s book and carefully turning them to prevent the pressed plants from cracking. He explains that the book contains only some of the 350,000 plant specimens in the herbarium. Sweeney replaces Fenn’s book in a covered box, which he then places in a metal cupboard on the side of the room. There are rows and rows of these metal cupboards— the Yale Herbarium looks more like a bank vault than a museum. There is a surgical feel to the room—its humidity and temperature levels are closely regulated and recorded.

In the years since Fenn assembled his book, botanists have improved the ways they prepare plant pressings.

They freeze specimens at -20 degrees Celsius for a week before storage to kill insects and use archival-quality papers and glues that won’t easily deteriorate or give off harmful gases.

The next advancement is digitization. Botanists are currently engaged in the colossal task of preserving fragile, sometimes centuries-old leaves like Fenn’s in online databases where scientists worldwide can access and analyze them. They take photographs of a specimen and store them with its taxonomic information and other data such as the time and location it was collected. Digitization saves time for plant scientists and helps them efficiently analyze differences over time in traits such as leaf size, the presence of glands on leaves, and flowering time.

“With a high resolution image of a specimen, I don’t have to go to the The New Journal

March 2012

Cheeseboy and the Golden Sandwiches The Connecticut Post Mall in Milford is not a remarkable place. It is not beautiful. It is grey and flat and illumined by cold fluorescent lights. I stepped off an escalator, crossed that sorriest of American public spaces— the food court—and approached the Cheeseboy counter. When a beaming young employee appeared and said, with real enthusiasm, “Have you ever been here before?” I suddenly felt everything was going to be all right.

He shepherded me through my order—American cheese on Italian bread with tomato and bacon—rolled the bread across some nifty cylinders covered in melted butter, piled on the ingredients, and stuffed the result in an industrial-strength panini press. A golden-brown sandwich emerged not two minutes later. It was, needless to say, delicious. Somehow, there in the Connecticut Post Mall, I had found a remarkable restaurant, a beautiful grilled cheese sandwich, and evidence of good old Yankee ingenuity.

Cheeseboy is a young and rapidly expanding company that operates “quick-service restaurants” specializing in grilled cheese. It is also the nickname of the company’s

cheese-crazy founder and president, Michael Inwald SOM ’10.

“The goal is to be the preeminent grilled cheese franchise concept in this country,” Inwald explained. He described himself as a serial entrepreneur. “I have entrepreneurship in my bones to the core,” he said. He has also been, as he puts it, “obsessed with cheese” his whole life, and claims to have lived on grilled cheese sandwiches through college and beyond, refining his preparation technique all the while.

Inwald’s Cheeseboy has channeled his passions for entrepreneurship and cheese toward a single cause, and it has placed him on the short list of Yale entrepreneurs who have launched successful startups while still enrolled as students.

Inwald first arrived at the Cheeseboy concept all the way back in 2004, when friends encouraged him to market his grilled cheese, but he shelved the idea in order to go to business school. And from his undergrad years at Cornell— “a liberal arts education creates a well-rounded base from which you can grow”—to the stressful experience of launching a small production company right out of college, to the years he spent in retail and advertising—he insists that every stage of his meandering journey has helped prepare him to launch and run a successful company.

Inwald sees his passion and the uniqueness of his concept at the core of Cheeseboy’s success. “I’m one of the few entrepreneurs who had a passion for something that hadn’t been truly explored,” he said. He’s just as quick, though, to point out the importance of the Yale resources he drew on. “I was very different from many MBA classmates, set on entrepreneurship from the day I started at SOM.” He said that focus allowed him to make better use than his classmates of what the School had to offer. “Take basic accounting,” he 9

Clare Randt

herbarium,” said Michael Donoghue, the herbarium’s curator.

Although herbariums have existed since the mid-sixteenth century, experts estimate that at least seventy thousand plant species have yet to be named. Digital herbariums will allow researchers to identify these new species more efficiently, study plant evolution, and strengthen relationships among botanists in different countries.

The Yale Herbarium recently finished digitizing the Peabody Museum’s collection of Connecticut plant specimens. From 2008 to 2011, nearly fifty thousand were catalogued.

Some of the specimens are more than two hundred years old.

Outside the herbarium is the Herb Scan, which resembles a washing machine with an inverted scanner on top of it. This machine takes highresolution pictures of pressed plant specimens with speed and uniformity.

A grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Global Plants Initiative, the world’s largest coordinated effort to digitize plant type specimens and scholarly resources from herbaria, paid for it.

Melissa Tulig, an associate director at the New York Botanical Garden, called the Global Plants Initiative a success because of the valuable funding it provided. “We needed that start-up,” she said.

A similar project, the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biological Collection, began in 2011 and aims to create digital records of the nearly one billion plant specimens in American museums within ten years. Together these projects preserve our world’s wealth of natural resources and create a global network of information for plant scientists.

–Mitchell Murdock

Susannah Shattuck

said. Most MBA candidates “are not going to use accounting in their realworld profession. I was able to say, ‘I’m going to need to know how to balance my books.’ ” In the summer of 2009, Inwald put twenty thousand dollars of his own money into testing his fast-food grilled cheese concept at county fairs.

The enthusiastic responses convinced investors, and his first restaurant, then called Grilled Cheese to Go, opened that November—the same one I visited in the Connecticut Post Mall.

He has since changed his company’s name to the catchier Cheeseboy, and has added six more locations across southern New England and New York.

The School of Management is not the only Yale institution that supported Inwald in his selfdirected business endeavors.

In 2009, while most of his first-year MBA classmates went looking for summer internships and jobs, he went looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. He didn’t think Yale had a strong or diverse entrepreneurial culture, but he did find the recently established Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, which took him on as a fellow, introduced him to investors, and helped him to plan the county fair tests.

Inwald said he is indebted to YEI. But according to James Boyle, the institute’s director, Inwald also brought about a “sea change” for the institute, which had previously focused on technological innovation.

“Cheeseboy,” Boyle said, “was the first venture that we ran across in an area that no one on the staff knew anything about.” Inwald’s bread and butter wasn’t hardware or software. It was bread and butter.

YEI was created in 2007 as a subordinate branch of the Yale Office of Cooperative Research in order 10

to do for students what OCR was already doing for faculty: “technology transfer” from academic research to patentable and marketable products and services. Inwald, Boyle said, “made us realize that we had to expand our thinking toward students who had innovative ideas for which there might be no intellectual property protection, based upon the strength of how they executed the idea.” Since Inwald’s involvement at YEI, the institute has offered opportunities to similarly offbeat would-be start-ups.

While Inwald is happy to know that he has opened doors to younger Yale entrepreneurs, he does not think entrepreneurship is right for everyone.

“I don’t think anyone should just get into entrepreneurship for the sake of getting into entrepreneurship,” Inwald said. “This is not an easy task.

Entrepreneurship is the antithesis of stability.” A true entrepreneur, in his view, would never complain about time commitment: such a person would find a way to learn the necessary skills, either through formal education or through professional experience.

Boyle said that Inwald was unusually ready to meet the challenges of entrepreneurship. “He had no background in fast food, real estate, franchising, but Michael understood at a very fine detail the costs of all his inputs and outputs,” Boyle

said. “When it came time to talk to professional investors and they asked questions about the business model, Michael could really blow them away.”

Boyle says Inwald is also exceptional in that he wants to remain the sole proprietor of Cheeseboy. “We think that’s way too much work for one student to take on.”

As Cheeseboy has grown, Inwald has worked hard to shape the institutional identity of the company according to his values. He visits all of the seven Cheeseboy locations at least once a month, he said, and the young man who served me in Milford confirmed that Inwald jumps in alongside his employees, making sandwiches or taking out the trash.

Cheeseboy is growing, and will soon enter the very different business of franchising new locations instead of operating them directly, but Inwald insists that it will “grow intelligently.”

It’s hard to imagine that this company that bears its founder’s nickname, even as its employee count crosses into the hundreds, will lose either his personal warmth or his business savvy.

In a few weeks, that original Milford Cheeseboy will close, to be replaced by a new one in a nearby service plaza on I-95. The young guy who made my sandwich told me he and his colleagues would move to the new location.

Maybe I’ll visit him, brave another tired American nowhere for the goo and crunch and warmth of a high-quality grilled cheese sandwich.

At the very least, as I drive down I-95, I’ll think of Inwald, and of the time, work, and sheer willpower entrepreneurship requires. Who knew? It takes a whole lot to make it in America, even if America is one big food court.

–Alec Joyner

The New Journal

On July 6, Campus Progress named The New Journal Best Overall Publication among the forty-nine college newspapers, online magazines, and other publications it supports through grant funding.

Campus Progress engages students in national campaigns on critical issues, from global warming to civil rights, student debt to academic freedom.

Visit CampusProgress.org/issues to learn more.

The New Journal thanks Campus Progress for its generous support.

March 2012

11

PROFILE

Brianne Bowen

Goldie Stands Over Bull with her Bible in her lap. Her annaul practice of an extended fast is a product of the religious tradition in which she was raised.

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The New Journal

NOT HUNGRY Goldie Stands Over Bull ’13 fasted for twenty days to get closer to God.

By Ben Mueller

G

oldie Stands Over Bull does not like doughnuts. There were no Dunkin’ Donuts on the Crow Reservation where she grew up near Billings, Montana, and her move to New Haven didn’t instill in her any new cravings. “They’re dry. I just don’t go for them,” she said.

And yet for one hour on January 13, she could not get them out of her head. “I don’t even eat doughnuts!” she said. “It was my central thought for like an hour.”

Goldie had been fasting. From January 8 to January 27, while her friends shopped new courses, trudged through the snow, and returned to old habits, Goldie, a junior Biology major, did not eat.

March 2012

“It’s a time when you slow down and stop and focus on your relationship with God,” Goldie explained. “It heightens your spiritual senses. You’re more sensitive to God’s voice and what he’s saying.”

Though Goldie had hoped to make it all the way through a biblically inspired twenty-one-day fast for the first time since she began fasting annually four years ago, she succumbed to her bodily needs on three occasions. Dehydrated and nauseous from a lapse in her usual fluid intake, she ate pretzels and Goldfish on January 16. Two days later she had a bowl of oatmeal, and on January 20 she ate a few bites of Indian food. She also stopped the

fast one day early, sharing her parents’ concern that she was losing weight.

Otherwise Goldie subsisted on water, Welch’s grape juice, and apple juice for twenty days.

“The hunger goes away after the second or third day,” she said eight days into her fast. She followed tips on IHOP’s website (that’d be the International House of Prayer, not International House of Pancakes) on how to stay healthy and comfortable during the fast, such as avoiding artificially sugary drinks. Goldie had the support of her family, who also completed the fast, and a few classmates who attend New Haven’s non-denominational Gateway Christian Fellowship with 13

Goldie and undertook partial fasts.

She also consulted daily video blog posts from Jentezen Franklin, a megachurch pastor who shuttles between congregations in Georgia and California. A section about fasting on his Web site, branded “Fast 2012: Reclaim Your Edge,” imitates Gillette razor advertisements and promises, “Fasting can recharge you!”

Goldie knows that many people “think this is sort of crazy.” I know people who fast for Yom Kippur, yet I wondered how Goldie could skip sixty consecutive meals. When she told people about her fast, they were often concerned about her health.

But Goldie said that she had trouble sleeping, and some nights she would be up until 5 a.m. because 14

“my mind didn’t shut off.” Yet she betrayed few signs of fatigue and appeared engaged and attentive weeks into her fast. She walked briskly into the Yale Bookstore to meet me one cool afternoon in heavy cowboy boots and a leather jacket, with red and white Beats by Dr. Dre headphones piping Christian music into her ears.

The challenge of a fast is as emotional and spiritual as it is physical, Goldie explained.

G

oldie didn’t always have the relationship with God she has now, but he has always been part of her life. She was born on a Friday and in church by Sunday, as she put it.

She struggled to describe the hardship that people face on her Crow

reservation. Only 30 percent of adults on the reservation have high school diplomas, and she returns home now to find many of her middle school friends pregnant with their second or third child. The unemployment rate was 46.5 percent in 2005, according to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and median household income is $27,044. Alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant.Goldie believes that no amount of federal aid can overcome the hopelessness that haunts the reservation. “People are defeated.

They’re in survival mode – every man for himself,” Goldie said. “It’s hard for people. Where is God if I can’t feed my family? But you have to trust Him fully.”

Goldie’s family was different from other families on her Crow reservation from the beginning. Her grandmother and grandfather are pastors of a church on the reservation. Her dad left the reservation to pursue a degree in geology in Denver, where Goldie lived until she was nine. He then took his wife, Goldie, and Goldie’s older brother with him as his job at an oil company moved, first to Houston and then to Scotland.

After this itinerant childhood, Goldie won a scholarship to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where she found herself surrounded by “those popped up Polo shirts.” She was the only Native American girl there and poorer than many of her classmates.

She was also the only Christian with the “charismatic, Pentecostal upbringing” that was typical on the reservation. She listened to pastor and televangelist Joel Osteen’s sermons online every Sunday to find a religious experience that was meaningful to her.

Her teenage anxieties were amplified. Goldie was struggling with “the typical things we teen girls go through,” “I was not the typical blond, perky, athletic all around lovely girl,” Goldie said. She had brown hair, The New Journal

brown eyes and was “cynical and introverted.”

Ashamed of who she was – quiet, Native American, and Christian— Goldie gossiped when her friends gossiped, badmouthed classmates when that was in fashion, and even found herself at Toad’s on a few occasions once she arrived at Yale.

Goldie cringed through all of it, but she wanted badly to be the person her friends wanted to see.

It didn’t work. “I felt depressed, I felt lost. Despite doing all this stuff I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere.” Though Goldie kept living out of the same suitcase that had followed her from Colorado to Montana to New Hampshire and then to Yale, she returned home. “I had to go out into the world to realize what I already had,” Goldie said.

What she already had was a God who knew her before she was in the womb, who loved her no matter what. Fasting helped Goldie regain her faith that God, who had brought her from Montana to St. Paul’s and from St. Paul’s to Yale, hadn’t made a mistake.

It was late in the afternoon. “I told her, ‘By this time of day I’m hungry and low on energy.’ And Goldie’s response was, “Oh, that’s awesome!”

He paused to let the paradox sink in.

“If you take that out of context, it sounds weird. When you’re fasting, physically it feels bad. But after you’re in it, you begin to develop that independence from food and independence from your flesh and suddenly you’re walking in the spirit.

You feel stronger, you feel more sensitive to God. It’s a weird kind of

The fast confines Goldie’s focus to spiritual questions. “I put pretty much everything on hold,” Goldie said. “I don’t go to the dining hall, basically all my time is spent in prayer and reading the Bible. You’re clearing everything away. All you’re thinking about is God.” Goldie’s focus during her fast this year is on teaching herself to pray for others. “I’m very shy,” Goldie said.

Before, she was too modest to include other people in her prayers, but now, she wants to bring the Christian spirit that has transformed her life to those around her in Montana and at Yale. Both places, she believes, need it. Her aim isn’t to condemn sin, but to soothe pain.

“Look around,” Goldie says. On this bustling January afternoon Yale’s campus is tense with anxiety over choosing classes. The Yale Bookstore Café serves as a thirty-second refueling station for a steady line of students strung tighter than the French braid that holds in place Goldie’s long black hair.

“You see emotional bondage here, mental disorders, the stress,” Goldie said. “There’s a greater qualify of life that’s out there that people are unaware of.”

On January 27, Goldie unceremoniously stepped back into the world of the caloric with a pizza bagel warmed in the microwave of her Swing Space dormitory. She was alone and she was hungry and she dug her teeth into a bite-sized grease and cheese-stained bagel that she knew wouldn’t satisfy her craving for an earthly, pastry paradise.

Fasting helped Goldie regain her faith that God, who had brought her from Montana to St. Paul’s and from St. Paul’s to Yale, hadn’t made a mistake.

F

asting demands that a person break her attachment to everyday physical needs, and that mental discipline does not come easily.

“It’s the cravings that get you,” Goldie explained. Cravings—for French fries, for cookies, for the gratification that comes as easily as the swipe of a meal card on most days—begin as hunger and quickly become hour-long bouts with apparitions of glazed doughnuts, as Goldie found. The magic of a fast lies in confronting those cravings and stepping away from bodily desires.

I’noli Hall, a junior at Yale and a Christian who abstained from dinner for twenty-one days to start the new year, recounted a conversation he had with Goldie about his hunger.

March 2012

good.”

Goldie describes this process of spiritual renewal in Christian terms, but it’s a principle that holds equal appeal to the Buddhist monk on a vow of silence or the backpacker who vanishes into the wilderness.

By learning to abandon her physical desires, Goldie becomes less constrained by her emotions. “You might be going through a personal or emotional issue or trauma. Around those times you let go of those things because you realize they don’t really have a hold of you,” she said. “You can move on and be free from them.”

TNJ

Ben Mueller is a junior in Berkeley College.

15

Katharine Konietzko

CRITICAL ANGLE

PILLOW TALK The recent debate over Sex Week stands in for the discussion no one’s having about educating—and sleeping with—the Facebook generation.

By Nicholas Geiser

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The New Journal

I

n the debate about sexual culture at Yale, everyone agrees that “intolerance,” “rape culture,” and “objectification” are bad, while “intimacy,” “respect,” and “love” are good. Both sides also agree that something is wrong with their school’s sexual culture here. So the indignant, supercilious tone of editorial on both sides isn’t a result of a difference in goals, but of a disagreement about what the problem is.

After news of the Department March 2012

of Education’s Title IX investigation broke last spring, President Levin hosted a series of student dinner discussions. Eduardo Andino ’13 attended one of them. As he described it to me, the discussion lacked a center because despite talk of “the problem” and various remedies—more training, more outreach, more publicity—“no one ever said what the problem was.”

Andino and a few other students would later form Undergraduates for a Better Yale College. According to Better Yale, the “problem” is that sexual norms of intimacy and commitment have given way to norms of hedonism and objectification. This fall, Better Yale petitioned the school

Selen Uman

Spoken word poetry about sex at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center.

to bar the organizers of Sex Week from using its classrooms.

Courtney Peters ’12 is an executive director of Sex Week 2012.

She sees the problem as a lack of creative imagination about sexuality.

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Katharine Konietzko

The starting point of Sex Week’s project is to construct new, positive models for sex. Making sure sex is safe and consensual is only half the task.

Sex should be glorious and, as Peters puts it, “prismatic”—a word that brings to mind sex accompanied by choirs of cherubs wrapped in colorful garments.

Thirty-five years ago, Ann Olivarius and four other plaintiffs brought the first Title IX suit against a major university in Alexander v. Yale.

She told the story during her Sex Week keynote speech, a story she’s told before in the pages of this magazine.

In 1977, Olivarius had presented a series of anonymous narratives documenting sexual harassment by professors and fellow students to the Yale Corporation. Her group recommended the formation of a central grievance board to adjudicate complaints of sexual harassment. In response, Yale accused Olivarius of libeling a professor of music and band director, Keith Brion, named in the complaint. Yale further stonewalled 18

If you really want to stop abusive sexual practices, you have to teach people how to demand good sex. when Brion began to stalk Olivarius.

She received threatening mail including death threats, a knife, and human excrement.

At the time, Olivarius told the Sex Week audience, it seemed like merely instituting a reporting mechanism would be enough. But a deeper problem lay with attitudes liable to result in sexual misconduct—attitudes

of neglect or willful ignorance of women’s sexual needs and desires.

An environment where partners can articulate and respect another’s wishes is the best way to prevent sexual misconduct. According to Olivarius, sexual education at Yale today is the natural conclusion of the argument that everyone should be protected from sexual abuse of all kinds.

One returning presenter from the last Sex Week in 2010 was Babeland, the New York-based sex boutique chain. Of all the material aired at Sex Week 2010, Babeland’s presentation on oral sex technique epitomized the thought that “education and excitement are not exclusive,” as Paul Holmes ’13 and Connie Cho ’13, two of Sex Week’s other executive directors, wrote in an editorial in the News.

This year, Babeland’s presenters began with a set of ground rules, a kind of Bill of Rights, for female sexuality.

“Love yourself first” and “Ask for what you want” came in high on the list. Here was Ann Olivarius’ thesis made concrete. If you really want to stop abusive sexual practices, you have to teach people how to demand good sex. Maxims like “Love yourself first” may sound like the grounds for shallow relationships. But in light of a history of denying or dismissing the particular needs of women, “Love yourself first” is a revolutionary idea.

It means the conquest of shame, or fear. It means that each of us, and no one else, is the ultimate arbiter of her sexuality.

At Sex Week’s core lies the thought that sex can be transformed into a liberating, empowering force for personal autonomy. Pleasure and desire can be reconciled with intimacy and commitment. Sex, in this narrative, is a fundamental feature of our character. Yale’s mission, moreover, to educate and lead students “in every sphere of human activity” creates a need for institutions like Sex Week.

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Better Yale doesn’t share this optimism. Sex may be a facet of human nature, they argue, but not all sides of us are equally worth exploring.

Desire and attraction are inescapably selfish concepts, they say. Rather than expand our personal freedom and choice, sexual appetite undermines our capacity to make choices and engage in meaningful relationships.

Sex is essentially about self-

Too many victims have suffered from unsupportive institutions and an indifferent campus culture for me to take seriously Better Yale’s obvious longing for “simpler” times.

indulgence and self-gratification, Better Yale seems to say, and it tends to overstep the boundaries that we ourselves place upon it. Sexual hedonism itself tends to objectify partners. We don’t master our own March 2012

sexuality. Sexuality masters us. The only remedies are conventions that restrain our sexuality—monogamy and marriage, to name two. Such institutions don’t constrain us, rather, they form a new version of human freedom—the freedom from our brutish desires. That’s why there are two rings at the bottom of posters for Better Yale’s “True Love Week.”

Better Yale puts forward an aspirational, almost transcendental vision of sexuality, in which sex is sublimated into a kind of platonic ideal. Better Yale’s organizers will freely admit it’s an unlikely and impracticable vision. Sex Week, on the other hand, starts from the view that sex is simply a fact of human nature. “Sex simply is,” as Peters phrases it. And another fact Sex Week emphasizes is that 1 in 4 women will become victims of sexual assualt in their collegiate career.

Too many victims have suffered from unsupportive institutions and an indifferent campus culture for me to take seriously Better Yale’s obvious longing for “simpler” times. Still, Better Yale’s members make one very important point.

For every student who undertakes the sincere and earnest reflection incumbent upon those who enjoy the openness of our current sexual climate, there will be someone else who does not. Alex Chituc made this point in the News in a column under the headline “Yalies for Minding Your Own Business.” In a campus of five thousand undergraduates, he argued, there are bound to be “a few assholes.” Some will viciously exploit a permissive sexual climate, just because they can.

In the last thirty years, the percentage of students who exhibit some narcissistic traits has doubled, according to a survey of sixteen thousand undergraduates by a San Diego State University psychology research team. The traits included vanity, a heightened desire for attention,

and a lack of empathy. A group of University of Michigan researchers found that empathy among college students had declined by 40 percent since 1980, as determined by how likely study participants were to agree with “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and similar statements.

At the heart of Better Yale’s worldview is the pessimistic thought that there’s something fundamentally narcissistic about sex. According to Bijan Aboutorabi ’13, one of Better Yale’s co-founders, “With the idea of hookup culture that we’re all just freefloating sexual agents, meeting briefly, then moving on, it’s almost inevitable that the desire for private satisfaction will overcome respect for the sexual autonomy of others.” Emphasizing desire and personal satisfaction will not bring autonomy and meaning to our lives, claims Better Yale. Rather, it will invite sexual violence.

I put this question to Holmes, who said that narcissism is “a symptom of our general inability to communicate.” It is “a bar to genuine reflection,” he added.

After all, there’s more to sexual health than self-love. Discussing and understanding your own desires can help you to communicate with your sexual partners, and it can give you the strength to demand respect. However, as students and administrators, we must also condemn forcefully those students who violate others. Knowing what you want is important. Knowing what we all want—knowing how to protect sexual safety on campus—is also important, and requires a firmer standard beyond our own desires.

And for that, we have to talk about sex.

TNJ

Nicholas Geiser is a junior in Branford College.

19

Through the Spectrum A change in the language doctors use to define autism could affect hundreds of thousands of children.

Katharine Konietzko

By Miriam Lauter

I

t is Valentine’s Day in Jack’s firstgrade class. A few at a time, his classmates get up to hand out their valentines, effortlessly matching names with the faces of their classmates until, empty-handed, they dart back to their seats. Jack glances down at the name on the top of his stack and wanders the maze of desks, staring intently, not at the children’s faces, but at the brown paper bags on each desk.

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The New Journal

“He’d look at the kid; then he’d look at the bag to see the name. He didn’t know, ‘Oh that kid who’s been sitting at that desk for six months—I know who that is,’ ” recalled Jack’s mother, Jean Winegardner, who was helping out in his Bethesda, Maryland public school that day.

Once home, Jean took each of the valentines Jack’s classmates had given him and asked him to describe the child who made it. He couldn’t.

Jack had been in class with the same children since kindergarten and was quick to correct his mother’s pronunciation of the names, but could not connect any name to a single detail about any of his classmates.

Jack has a lot of trouble with social interaction, clings to strict routines (for a long time he only ate foods that were brown, for example), and had trouble learning to speak when he was younger. Since the age of five he has had a diagnosis on the spectrum of autistic disorders. But in a little more than a year, his specific diagnosis, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), will not exist. Neither will the related and better-known diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome.

A group of psychiatrists are working on radical changes to the words that define the diagnoses that make up Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The changes at first might seem esoteric, affecting just a few pages in a dense volume known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. But for autism, words are key. The disorder cannot be diagnosed by a blood test or a brain scan. Change the DSM definition, which is the authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders, and you change who is considered to have the condition.

The impending changes may make the definition significantly more stringent. To those who believe doctors have created an “autism March 2012

epidemic” by handing out too many diagnoses to children with marginal impairments, the shift represents an opportunity to bring order to an outof-control situation. To advocates for autistic children and their families, the proposals threaten to deprive hundreds of thousands of children and adults of badly needed services and a label that has become central to their identities.

The debate, which until recently was largely confined to academic circles, has attracted increasing public attention with the release of new data by two Yale experts on autism. During a presentation at the conference of the Icelandic Medical Association in January, Fred Volkmar and James McPartland announced that their study showed that more than half of children with normal or high IQs who are currently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders no longer would qualify under the proposed new definitions. The study itself is currently under review by the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and is embargoed until publication in April.

“The sad thing is for many more able kids, because you see how smart they are, you don’t see how socially impaired they are,” said Volkmar, chief of child psychiatry at YaleNew Haven Children’s Hospital and chairman of the Yale Child Study Center.

“One might argue, if you have a system that’s working pretty well, why mess with it?” Volkmar asked.

Eighteen years ago, Volkmar headed the committee that last rewrote the definition of autism when the current version of the DSM, the DSM-IV, was written. The main goal then, he said, was to broaden the spectrum so that individuals with higher IQs could receive the benefits of having a diagnosis.

He continues to see the existing definitions as a significant success.

In a recent interview, he leaned back in his chair and spread his long arms to indicate the inclusiveness of the spectrum his committee designed eighteen years ago, then folded them over his rotund belly. “It would be nice to be able to get help to people who want it,” he said.

Michael John Carley, for one, believes cutting anyone off the autism spectrum entirely would be a tragedy.

Carley is the head of the Global and Regional Asperger’s Syndrome Partnership, or GRASP, which is the largest organization of adults with autistic disorders. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult just a week after his son was diagnosed with autism. His own experiences and those of the other members of his organization have made Carley keenly aware of the sense of identity a diagnosis brings, and the large, supportive communities it can form.

He said in November that he had been reassured about the proposed new standards. “Every expert has told me, don’t worry about it, it’s not going to happen,” he said then.

Several days after Volkmar and McPartland presented their study in Iceland, though, Carley indicated concern. “We’re a little surprised by this turn. I don’t think anybody told me an untruth necessarily, but clearly something inside that room has changed,” he said. “We couldn’t more strongly disagree,” he added.

“The intention of the committee was not to change the rate of autism spectrum disorders, but rather to make the criteria better match up to what clinicians actually do,” said Catherine Lord, a member of the American Psychiatric Association committee that is revising the criteria for the new version of the manual, which will be called the DSM-5. She feels that while “the DSM-IV criteria were a real improvement,” they left too much up to the arbitrary judgment of clinicians.

The new criteria are an attempt to 21

more thoroughly describe the patterns of symptoms and behavior that doctors are observing in children and adults with autism.

Lord also questions the ethics of Volkmar’s decision to release information from an embargoed article, calling the amount of publicity it has received “appalling.” When scientific articles are under embargo by a journal, the authors are expected not to discuss the study until it has been reviewed and printed.

According to McPartland, he did not find out that their article had been accepted by the journal until the day Volkmar gave his talk in Iceland, so the embargo may not have gone into effect until after Volkmar’s presentation.

In any case, the embargo rule most scientific journals follow allows authors to discuss abstracts of upcoming papers at scientific conferences, as Volkmar did. While authors are not supposed to court media attention, they are not penalized for ensuing news coverage; coverage which, in this case, has put the DSM5 committee in an awkward position. The members of the committee feel the need to defend the criteria they are developing. Because the DSM-5 committee cannot yet read the Yale researchers’ paper, however, they cannot assess the validity of the results. “It is impossible to talk about it until we’ve seen it, which we’ve not,” Lord said when asked about Volkmar’s and McPartland’s research.

disorder was first described in 1943 by a psychiatrist named Leo Kanner, the first two editions of the DSM did not classify it as a distinct illness.

Instead, autism was mistakenly said to be a rare subset of schizophrenia that came on in early childhood in reaction to a cold, disconnected “refrigerator” mother. In those days, a child’s diagnosis was a shameful secret to be

suffered from seizures, indicating that the disease was rooted in the biology of the brain, not in bad parenting.

Autism as defined by the DSMIII was severely debilitating. Most individuals who received the diagnosis had IQs below 70, in the intellectually disabled range. Few learned to talk or live independently. The individuals who qualified as autistic under this definition made little eye contact and often spent hours alone, rocking back and forth in corners, hands flapping rhythmically by their sides. By the early 1990s, it had become clear that psychologists diagnosing autism in children were leaving out a large group of kids like Jack who have normal and even high IQs, who are often talkative and talented, but who lag behind their peers socially.

These children seem to lack an understanding of social rules, fail to form friendships, and often cannot carry on conversations. When they do join conversations, they often talk incessantly about one apparently random topic, such as vacuum cleaners or aqueducts. While these people are better equipped to function in day-to-day life than their more severely affected peers, they often have great difficulty in school, face horrific bullying, and lack the social tact to hold down jobs.

Finding ways to help those people motivated Volkmar and his colleagues as they revised the DSMIII definition. In addition to covering children, the DSM-IV also changed the lives of many adults who had never been diagnosed as they’d grown up with the narrower criteria of the previous DSM. “Everything in life has been a struggle for me,” said John, who learned only four years ago, at 44, that

To advocates for autistic children and their families, the proposals threaten to deprive hundreds of thousands of children and adults of badly needed services and a label that has become central to their identities.

L

ined up on a shelf, the previous editions of the DSM, the “Shrink’s Bible,” form a rainbow— each paperback spine adds a new color, a new chapter in psychiatric history and a shift in the perception and diagnosis of autism. Although the 22

kept from family and friends. It was considered common knowledge that such children could not be taught, and they were shipped off to institutions, usually for life.

Then, in 1980, the APA released the lime-green DSM-III. Inside was a new section called “Infantile Autism.”

For the first time, autism had its own definition and a clear statement of its characteristic symptoms. Researchers began to notice that autism ran in families, across generations, suggesting that genes might play a role in determining who developed it.

They also realized that a larger-thannormal percentage of autistic children

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such as Jack and John has led to a large increase in the number of diagnoses.

Since the publication of the DSM-IV in 1994, autism and related disorders have gone from being relatively rare, around one in five thousand children at the time of DSM-IV’s release, to alarmingly common. The most recent studies put the prevalence at around 1 in 110 children.

Volkmar believes that the increase in the rate of autism diagnosis means doctors are getting better at identifying the kids who need help.

But other psychiatrists disagree. Some believe that the DSM-IV’s expanded definition went too far.

Allen Frances, the former chairman of the DSM-IV Task Force, the umbrella group responsible for the DSM revision process, has repeatedly denounced the DSM-IV for setting

off a “false epidemic.” He argues the rate of diagnosis needs to be curtailed.

At stake in the debate is money.

Before the DSM-IV, less than 1 percent of students receiving special education services were autistic. Now more than 4 percent are, and the amount districts spend on special education services has skyrocketed. The annual cost of caring for individuals with autism in the United States is now $35 billion.

In 2007, the APA set about revising the criteria again. The association appointed Dr. Susan Swedo, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, as the chair of the committee that would deal with the autism criteria. A year later, Volkmar and thirteen other prominent psychiatrists and experts were asked to join the committee under Swedo’s leadership. Soon after,

Katharine Konietzko

he has an Autism Spectrum Disorder.

John has a steady job as a lineman for Connecticut Light and Power, a wife, and a home, but getting there has been tough. He was held back in the first and tenth grades and eventually dropped out of high school. He finally earned his high school diploma at the age of 23. John’s peers teased him and called him names at school and his alcoholic father did the same at home. Age has done little to reduce the number of taunts thrown at him.

“One guy said to another guy in a conversation in a room, he said ‘Uh, I think John is functionally retarded,’ ” said John, recalling a recent incident with his co-workers. “The other guy said, ‘Well, what do you mean, you think he’s an idiot savant?’ And the other guy says, ‘No, he can’t be an idiot savant, he’s not good at anything, he’s just an idiot.’ ” Under the DSM-III, John, who asked that his last name not be used for fear of repercussions at work, was too smart, too verbal, and too functional to be considered autistic.

As a consequence, John never received help in school. No one ever took the time to try to teach him the social skills he lacked. The DSM-III left him, and many others, out in the cold.

“If you’re not sure what you have, how do you know to handle life?” John asked.

The DSM-IV, with its broadened definition of autism, gave John and others like him a name for their problems. That broader definition came too late to help John in school but has changed his life since then, he said.

“If I run into a situation either at work or at home and it’s a rough course I’m going through,” said John, “I can analyze it and think to myself, ‘Well, wait a minute, that’s the Asperger’s.’ ”

B

ut the breadth that allowed the DSM-IV diagnoses to help people

March 2012

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Susannah Shattuck

Jack Winegardner, one of the children who would be affected by changes to the definition of autism.

the committee held a small conference for its members at the University of California, Davis.

During the conference, three groups each made recommendations for changing the DSM. One suggested only mild reforms, examining the role of IQ in diagnosis, for example, but made no mention of changing the overall DSM-IV structure. The other two groups, however, came back with much more drastic recommendations.

Both advocated eliminating Asperger’s Syndrome altogether and suggested starting throwing away the existing framework entirely. By the spring of 2009, just a year after the conference, Volkmar and another member of the committee had resigned.

Volkmar refuses to discuss his resignation, saying only that he had become “disenchanted with the process.” When asked about the committee, he said, “I’m not saying anything bad about anyone. They’re wonderful people, God love ’em. Just, 24

what a mess.”

Since that conference and Volkmar’s resignation, the DSM5 committee has followed the recommendations of the groups advocating radical change. In several statements issued to the public, the committee has stated that the distinctions in the DSM-IV among Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, and autism are arbitrary and confusing, like “trying to cleave meatloaf at the joints.” They intend to replace the DSM-IV’s Pervasive Developmental Disorders category with a single disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Currently, a patient can receive a diagnosis on the autism spectrum if he or she demonstrates only some characteristic autism behaviors. The system is complicated, and there are a total of 2688 combinations of symptoms that would qualify for a diagnosis. The new rules are simpler— there are only six combinations of symptoms that qualify.

While simpler, the new rules may make the standards for determining who receives a diagnosis on the autism spectrum more stringent. A patient will only receive a diagnosis if he demonstrates each and every one of a series of social and communicative impairments. He will also have to have at least two types of restricted or repetitive behaviors—rocking back and forth and obsessively lining toys up in a line, for example.

The committee that has drafted the new definitions maintains that no one who currently has a diagnosis will be cut off. The spectrum of disorders will be just as broad under the new rules as under the current ones, they say. “Really, things looked pretty good,” Lord said, based on the data she has seen. She admits that the field trials examining how the new criteria will affect autism diagnosis rates have been small, and that other, larger studies of the new criteria have not addressed the question of whether The New Journal

POD-NOS

the DSM-IV criteria and examine how the children who participated in the study would have been scored had they been using the proposed DSM-5 criteria. As they disclosed at the conference in Iceland, 56 percent of patients with normal or high IQs (above 70) who received a DSM-IV diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s, or PDD-NOS would not have qualified for a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder according to the new standards.

Similarly, this June, a group of researchers from Finland announced that only 46 percent of a group of children who were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder under the DSM-IV met the new criteria for autism. In another study, researchers in London examined diagnostic records of children with PDD-NOS. Almost none of the children displayed enough rigid, stereotyped behaviors to meet the proposed criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The infographic below illustrates the changes being made to the definition of autism; the top bar shows the current spectrum of disorders associated with autism, while the bottom bar shows the new singular definition of autism.

ASPERGER’S

AUSTISM

Photo courtesy of Jean Winegardner

the criteria would cut people off the spectrum.

Volkmar calls the committee’s assurances “misleading.”

The committee’s public statements have implied “we’re gonna have one big happy family of Autism Spectrum Disorder,” he said. What the committee is not advertising, he said, is that the newly defined Autism Spectrum Disorder will narrow the spectrum back down to a disorder more akin to autism under the DSMIII. “It’s actually going to be classical autism,” Volkmar says, smacking his palm with the back of his other hand.

He is frustrated that the new criteria may narrow the autism spectrum back to intellectually disabled individuals, excluding those with higher IQs but significant social impairments.

Shortly after Volkmar left the DSM-5 committee, he and McPartland decided to go back over diagnostic assessments carried out while testing

AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

March 2012

25

Lord argues that these studies all have a “major inherent flaw.”

Some of the symptoms the DSM-5 asks clinicians to check for, she says, were not included in the DSM-IV at all. If clinicians never asked about these symptoms when the diagnoses were first made, there is no way to know whether a child evaluated under the DSM-IV had them or not. For this reason, she says it is impossible to determine from previously collected data how the new criteria will affect autism rates. Still, she said, “We really want to know who didn’t meet and why.” She said the committee is open to making changes if its members can be convinced that many patients will be cut off the spectrum. But, “For that, we need information,” she said. “We don’t need polemics.”

Lord said that the DSM-5 is strictly a scientific description of symptoms and behavior and that her colleagues can’t be expected to decide social policy for the country.

DSM does not directly determine who gets access to services. “If you need treatment, you should get it, with or without a label,” she said.

But Jennifer Laviano, a special education lawyer in Sherman, Connecticut, noted that bureaucracies such as school districts that regularly care for autistic people depend on authoritative diagnoses. “While there should be no difference in the services a child receives based on the label the child is given, the reality is that there are many important reasons that label matters.” An autism diagnosis can give parents more bargaining power in their meetings with school board officials and can help educators understand the obstacles a child faces.

School districts spend three to six times more on educating a child with autism than they would on educating a child who receives no special services. “School districts generally

will use almost any excuse they can not to identify a child, especially if it’s going to be a costly program,” Laviano said. She also said that it is especially difficult to convince school districts to provide services for children who have high IQs but who are socially impaired. “School districts

skills training, goes hand-in-hand with the battle for a diagnosis. The biggest weapon parents have is a federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees a “free and appropriate public education” to all children with disabilities. In order to be eligible for the school services mandated by the law, however, a child must fall into one of thirteen categories.

Autism is one of them.

Decisions about special education services are made by a tribunal of school administrators, teachers, special education providers, the child’s parents, and often lawyers. The group is called a Planning and Placement Team, and it determines what kinds of services are included in each child’s Individualized Education Program. Often, the members of the group disagree on what services a child should receive.

Parents want their children to get as much help as possible, and schools need to conserve resources.

Parents come to the meetings armed with every shred of information that could help prove that their child has significant challenges. Having an official diagnosis makes a difference.

“The reason that we have diagnoses is to help people who need help to get help,” said McPartland, the Yale researcher who presented alongside Volkmar in Iceland.

Lord argued that the committee’s responsibility is to science, not to society, but McPartland wishes that she and the other committee members would think more carefully about the effects their work will have. “We’re at the intersection of clinical decision making and public policy, and I don’t know how it’s going to be decided,” he said.

Since 1994, the prevalence of autism and related disorders has gone from around 1 in 5,000 children, to around 1 in 110 children.

26

will say, ‘Oh, well, academically, he’s on grade level,’ or ‘If you look at his Connecticut Mastery Test scores, he’s always meeting goal,’ ” she said.

Although the laws governing special education cover functional and adaptive skills—such as classroom behavior, cooperation, and learning to take care of oneself—as well as academics, schools do not usually prioritize helping socially impaired children.

Andreana Bellach, a lawyer in Stamford, Connecticut who represents Connecticut school districts, argues that, often, more intelligent children don’t need special education services, even if they are awkward and uncomfortable in social situations. Such children benefit from “high cognitive functioning as well as their ability to be resilient and apply what they’ve learned,” Bellach said.

Often, parents find that the fight for support in school, for classroom aides, therapies, and special social-

T

he qualities that Bellach described are visible in Winegardner’s son Jack, who, despite his social difficulties, The New Journal

has a high IQ and performs above grade-level on his standardized tests.

“We struggled a long time and fought for a long time to get an autism diagnosis,” Winegardner said. Jack, who at six had so much trouble passing out valentines to his classmates, is now eight years old. He was diagnosed with PDD-NOS when he was five, but even under the current DSM-IV criteria, getting the label and more importantly, school services, was a struggle.

“We were told by a lot of people, ‘Oh he doesn’t present as a kid with autism,’” said Winegardner. Still, by the time Jack was two and in a preschool class, she knew something was wrong. “I started to notice that he wasn’t interacting with his peers and he wasn’t talking to the teacher,” she says. In fact, Jack wasn’t talking at all.

Jack’s teacher voiced concerns and encouraged Winegardner to seek help.

But when Jean took her son to be evaluated by the Maryland Infants and Toddlers Program, the state’s agency for very young children with special needs, he did not qualify.

“They were like, ‘Oh he’s a boy, he’s a second child, he probably doesn’t have to talk as much,’ ” Winegardner recalled. Her older son had been a late talker as well, and the evaluators suggested she was probably overreacting. When Jack turned three and was still struggling in the classroom, Winegardner again sought to qualify her son for special services, this time at Montgomery County’s special education department, Childfind. Again, she was disappointed.

“He works really well one-on-one with adults, and that was what the test was, so he performed really well,” said Jean. “It wasn’t really indicative of how he was functioning in the larger world.” When a psychologist finally visited the school, she agreed with Jean that something was wrong. Jack did not interact with his classmates March 2012

but spent most of his time playing by himself. He was obsessed with trains. He could speak, but did so rarely. Following the psychologist’s recommendation, the school system moved Jack to a special-education preschool.

Without an autism diagnosis, however, Jack would only be eligible for services until the end of kindergarten.

With a diagnosis, he could receive help until his 21st birthday or high school graduation.

Just after Jack turned five, he got a diagnosis. Jean enrolled him in a study at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and during the screening process for the study, doctors gave Jack the PDD-NOS label. Armed with the diagnosis, Jean was able to get her son an Individualized Education Plan, which provided a classroom aide and accommodation on assignments.

Perhaps most importantly, the diagnosis helped Jack’s peers and teachers understand him.

“An autism diagnosis and identifying my son as PDD-NOS has given us a starting place and a map and a path,” said Winegardner. Although coming to terms with Jack’s disability has been difficult, the diagnosis has given her a way to get Jack help. But Winegardner worries a lot about what will happen when the DSM-5 comes out and what will happen if the criteria become narrower.

“No one would look at Jack now and say he’s not autistic,” Winegardner said. “But then again,” she hesitated, “there will always be somebody who falls just outside.” She just hopes it won’t be her son.

TNJ

Miriam Lauter is a junior in Branford College.

Join the distinguished ranks of TNJ alumni: Daniel Yergin Pulitzer Prize winner James Bennet Editor-in-Chief The Atlantic Jay Carney White House Press Secretary Andy Court Producer 60 Minutes Richard Bradley Editor-in-Chief Worth Magazine Dana Goodyear Staff Writer The New Yorker Emily Bazelon Senior Editor Slate Magazine Daniel Kurtz-Phelan Senior Editor Foreign Affairs Steven Weisman Chief International Economics Correspondent The New York Times www.thenewjournalatyale.com 27

FEAR OF NEEDLES

New Haven proved that syringe exchange programs prevent the spread of HIV. Why won’t the Obama administration pay for them?

Katharine Konietzko

By Helen Knight

28

The New Journal

F

rom two to three o’clock on Tuesday afternoons, the New Haven syringe exchange van parks on the corner of Grand Avenue and Ferry Street in Fair Haven. It’s here that George Bucheli, HIV counselor and educator, takes dirty syringes from intravenous drug users and provides them with sterile ones in return.

“This stop’s been hopping lately,” Bucheli told me. “We’ve been getting a lot of young male clients. Young.

I mean like 19, 20 years old, Latino, white. From other places, too—East Haven, Waterbury, Branford.”

Across the street from the van is a Rite Aid Pharmacy. In Connecticut, the sale and possession of syringes without a prescription has been legal since 1993. This Rite Aid won’t sell them without a prescription, Bucheli told me. It’s easy to understand why.

Who but a drug user wants to buy syringes without a prescription? And why condone—indeed facilitate— drug use?

From a public health perspective, the answer to these questions is simple. When drug users have access to clean syringes, they don’t need to share. When they don’t share, they don’t transmit blood-borne diseases.

In 2009, the Center for Disease Control estimated that injection drug use caused over four thousand new HIV cases. It’s the number one cause of hepatitis C transmission. All eight federally funded reports on syringe exchanges that have been published conclude that the programs do not increase drug use. In fact, if the programs are structured properly, they serve as an important point of contact between drug users and treatment.

And the programs are cheap. Syringes costs about a dollar apiece. On average, the lifetime cost in medical care for a person with HIV/AIDS is between $405,000 and $648,000.

From a political perspective, things are more complicated. Ever March 2012

since the concept of syringe exchanges was introduced in the late eighties, it has been a tough sell to politicians who believe the program “sends the wrong message” about drug use. In 2009, there appeared to be progress in the air when Congress lifted a twentyone year ban on federal funding for syringe exchange programs. But this sense of progress was short-lived. In December 2011, Congress reinstated the ban.

All eight federally funded reports on syringe exchanges that have been published conclude that the programs do not increase drug use.

The ban inspired a few stories in the media, but not many. It was passed just over a week before Christmas, as one of many measures in an omnibus spending bill, needed to keep the federal government funded for the rest of the fiscal year 2012. Most people were happy that the federal government would keep operating through June 2012. The new barrier to preventing HIV transmission turned few heads.

I

met Bucheli on what was a quiet day for him. All his colleagues were out: one was recovering from back surgery,

one’s father had died recently and one had called in sick. Because of the rain, few clients were coming to the van.

The van is not really a van at all— it’s a 1996 motor home. It contains a couch and dining booth upholstered in neutral tones. Bucheli’s clipboard is stowed in what was once the kitchen sink. Syringes and other supplies— alcohol swabs; hand sanitizer pads; cotton; cookers, or bottle-cap sized containers used to dissolve and mix drugs; and ties, for enlarging veins— occupy the kitchen drawers where some family once kept their dining utensils on a camping trip. A red sharps container sits on one side of the dining booth.

“All of the syringes that we collect get melted and get out of circulation,” said Bucheli, slapping the sharps container. “When that doesn’t happen, they end up in the garbage and they end up in the park. People are shooting up at Long Wharf, even tricking, hustling.” He clarified.

“There’s a lot of dudes I know, who in order to shoot up, they have sex with men at these parks.” Bucheli used to go running in the area and would pick up the used syringes and throw them away. The New Haven Health Department reprimanded him for fear he might sue the city if he was accidently pricked.

Bucheli’s interest in the cause is the product of personal experience: he is an ex-user. His history gives him a lens through which to understand his clients’ experiences. The job involves a lot more than handing out syringes.

He and his colleagues provide HIV counseling as well as testing. When clients want to quit using drugs, Bucheli can help them get into local treatment programs, for which there is often more demand than availability.

Having worked on the van since 1993, Bucheli knows all of the drug treatment programs in the area. He listed them according to their merits.

South Central Rehabilitation Clinic on 29

Cedar Street is good, but they require a photo ID, birth certificate, and social security card. Few of his clients have these documents. He often brings people to Central Dupage Hospital in Middletown; they take anyone he refers. Milestone Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center is ninety miles away in Putnam, Connecticut, but it’s one of the few places that take women who are pregnant or have children with them.

Long-term treatment programs like the Carnes Weeks Center in Torrington accept clients for rehabilitation programs. “What’s cool about Carnes Weeks is that if I have someone who is just doing crack or just doing cocaine, they’ll take them,” said Bucheli. (There are no pharmaceutical treatments for cocaine addiction.) “They’ll just give them a thirty-day break, and sometimes that helps. When you haven’t done coke for a while it just clears your head, makes you less paranoid. You eat more, start thinking clearer.”

Twelve years ago, Bucheli had a relapse with crack. “By that time, I had gotten hundreds of people into treatment, and I couldn’t do anything for myself,” he recalled. A close friend realized that something was amiss, and called the New Haven Employee Assistance Program.

Bucheli brought up his substance use history without prompting. I think he wanted to teach me something.

Unlike many of the clients he works with, he had a safety net: a friend who would help, easy access to a program, a job that wouldn’t fire him. Since Bucheli was talking freely about his personal life, I thought it was as good a chance as any to ask him a personal question.

“Are you HIV positive?”

“No,” he responded, but then changed his answer. “Actually, you know what, even though it’s none of your business, I am HIV positive.

It’s one of the things that motivated 30

me, because if there was an exchange program when I was getting high, I wouldn’t be positive.”

Bucheli and I discussed whether I would include his HIV status in this article. Initially, he was not comfortable with the idea. My question, intrusive and unexpected, embarrassed both of us. I tried changing the topic.

“What do you like best about this job?”

“All of the syringes that we collect get melted and get out of circulation.

When that doesn’t happen, they end up in the garbage and they end up in the park.”

“The other day, one of the sex workers, an IV drug user, came to see us at the last stop,” said Bucheli.

The woman had completed drug treatment. “She looked great, she had her hair done, she hugged us, she kissed us, she just looked so beautiful.

There’s no words for it, just felt really good to see her like that, and she was so grateful. Sometimes it happens like that.”

I

n New Haven, the battle for a syringe exchange program began in 1987. That year, the city began funding street outreach workers to

seek out intravenous drug users in the community. They distributed condoms, information on HIV/AIDS, and bleach for cleaning syringes.

At the time, New Haven was the epicenter of the HIV crisis in Connecticut. More HIV positive individuals lived here than anywhere else in the state. Today, it’s hard to imagine what that meant. HIV/AIDS is now a chronic health condition.

With the antiretroviral drugs that are available, HIV-positive individuals can achieve clinically undetectable viral loads. People don’t look sick and they can live long, productive lives.

In the 1980’s, an HIV diagnosis was considered a death sentence.

“There were just so many people that were impacted and dying at a very young age,” recalled Elaine O’Keefe, executive director of Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. At the time, O’Keefe worked at the New Haven Health Department.

“It was traumatic. It was actually traumatic. I know at the time we used to use a lot of military language and I disparaged that. I think back, and I can understand why. There were a lot of casualties from this epidemic and it didn’t have to happen.”

By 1987, drug use was the primary cause of HIV transmission in New Haven. Syringe possession without a prescription was illegal, and syringes were hard to come by and expensive.

Addicts would go to shooting galleries, where they could rent syringes to get high. After shooting up, they would clean the syringes in a pail of water.

The Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS, established in 1986, guided the city’s response to the epidemic. The committee was largely the brainchild of Al Novick, a Yale biologist who in the mid-1980’s shifted from his work on bat sonar navigation to research the HIV/AIDS crisis. The street outreach program was the product of lobbying by the Mayor’s Task Force.

“The notion of actually going out The New Journal

and working with people who were actively engaged in illicit drug use and not trying necessarily to change that behavior was quite radical,” said O’Keefe. “The bleach was so fraught with emotion. People thought: this is condoning drug use.”

To those who knew the situation on the ground, providing syringes made sense. Syringe exchanges had started in Amsterdam, in 1984. By 1987, an illegal syringe distribution program was running in New Haven, the first of its kind in the United States. Jon Stuen-Parker, a former addict and a student at Yale School of Medicine, had started an HIV/ AIDS outreach group called the AIDS Brigade. With his headquarters in a storefront on York Street, StuenParker distributed syringes in shooting galleries in Boston and New Haven.

He bought the syringes in Vermont.

While providing needles illegally provided immediate relief, it was not an option for the Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS. Nor would it improve perceptions of syringe exchanges, in an age more hostile toward drug use than today. Myths were common: addicts were on suicide missions; they shared syringes ritualistically.

To provide evidence for the utility of a syringe exchange, the Mayor’s Task Force had city outreach workers survey drug users about why they shared syringes. The results were unsurprising. Addicts were sharing needles because they feared arrest and because needles were difficult to buy on the streets. In the research, addicts also complained about drug treatment programs. The waitlists were long. There were not supportive services like childcare available during treatment. There was not enough rehabilitative training to remain drugfree after treatment.

With evidence in hand, the Mayor’s Task Force began a campaign to reform the approach to substance use and HIV at the state level.

March 2012

They called for AIDS education and outreach, decriminalization of possession and sale of syringes, expanded drug treatment services, and the establishment of legal needle exchange programs. They met with the police force, members of the criminal justice system, those involved in drug treatment, and other communitybased organizations to educate these groups on the potential value of needle exchanges and to garner their support. Talking with the drug users was also important. “We wanted to make sure that we were not making assumptions without touching base with the people that were going to use the interventions,” said O’Keefe.

In early 1989, the Mayor’s Task Force presented a proposal for decriminalization of the sale and possession of syringes to the Connecticut State Public Health Committee. The hearing was a failure, according to O’Keefe. “Members of the legislature said, ‘We can’t do this; don’t even come back.’”

W

hile I was on the van, a new client approached. Bucheli sat down with him at the dining room table to complete an initial intake form.

As in a clinic, all client information on the Community Health Care Van is confidential.

Bucheli gave me a copy of the intake form: What is your drug of choice? How many times a day are you shooting? Where did you usually get your syringes? Have you ever been to a drug treatment program, and would you like a referral? What is your HIV status? This question is multiple choice: Positive, Negative, Don’t Know, Don’t want to disclose.

After the forms were completed, Bucheli turned to the kitchen drawers. He filled a brown lunch bag with supplies. “If you ever want to get tested, if you ever want to go to treatment, whatever you want, whenever you’re ready, let me know,”

he said to the client. He gave him a pamphlet on safe injection procedures.

With brown bag in hand, the man was on his way.

Bucheli turned back to me.

“Basically,” he said, “that’s it.”

I

n March 1990, the Mayor’s Task Force on AIDS returned to the Public Health Committee for a hearing on the decriminalization of possession and sale of needles without a prescription. A year of dedicated lobbying had followed their initial rejection. Elections for the mayor of New Haven were held in 1989, and the Mayor’s Task Force campaigned to make sure that all candidates would support their policies if elected. They gained the official endorsement of public health organizations. They found state legislators who would co-sponsor a bill, William Dyson of New Haven and Joseph Grabarz of Bridgeport.

At the hearing, the results of a year of advocacy were mixed. The committee was more receptive, but significant compromise was required for the bill to move forward. In the end, the state legislature approved one demonstration syringe exchange program for one year. The program would be exempt from legal restrictions on injection drug use, but the laws would be maintained in the rest of Connecticut. The state legislature chose New Haven as the demonstration site. The bill passed successfully through the state House and Senate and was signed into law in June 1990.

“It was less than what we wanted,” said O’Keefe, “but I can tell you we were thrilled to have done that because there were very few places in the country that had even made it that far.” The successful passage of the Connecticut bill was especially remarkable because of the simultaneous closure of a syringe 31

exchange program in New York City, largely as a result of newly elected mayor David Dinkins’ opposition to the program.

T

oday, victories for the syringe exchange van are still hard-won.

The program is still funded by the state, and finances are strained.

The current van is a 1996 model.

But to Bucheli, it’s the “new van,” having been purchased by the program last July. The previous vehicle was in bad shape, and had been for some time. A fiscal year 2010 report on Connecticut syringe exchanges notes that the New Haven program was “in dire need” of a new van. “We fought for this,” said Bucheli.

Within thirty days of purchase, the new van’s generator broke. Now, it’s too dark to continue working after 4:30 p.m. As a result, Bucheli and his colleagues have shifted the van’s schedule to complete the stops that were in the evening during the day.

They’re missing out on an important time for connecting with clients. No one stops shooting up at four o’clock.

“We have to fight, sometimes the money doesn’t come from the state that fast, either. We’re still waiting on some of the money we got awarded.

When that comes, we can get that [the generator] fixed,” said Bucheli.

Nevertheless, the new van is an improvement. For one thing, it’s larger. The old van was too small to draw blood for STD testing, though all of the van’s staff is trained to do so. Bucheli hopes they can start STD testing in the near future.

A lot of the new van’s superiority has to do with what is painted on its side. The old van said “Harm Reduction.” While harm reduction is not inherently linked to HIV/AIDS, Bucheli believes it helped the van gain its name on the street, the AIDS van.

Because of the label, a lot of drug users were reluctant to use its services.

On this van, the words 32

“Outreach Unit” have replaced “Harm Reduction.” Bucheli attributes the new name to a lot of new clients, almost one hundred in the last quarter alone.

The paint on the van’s side has changed, but some drug users still don’t want to be associated with the AIDS van. Some still access the van’s services through friends who pick up needles for them, a process that is termed “secondary distribution.”

Bucheli filled a brown lunch bag with supplies.

“If you ever want to get tested, if you ever want to go to treatment, whatever you want, whenever you’re ready, let me know,” he said to the client.

“A lot of the time, clients think secondary distribution is a bad thing,” said Bucheli. “I have to reassure them that what you’re doing is a good thing.

It’s a great thing.”

W

hen the demonstration program was approved in 1990, it was given a year and $25,000 to make its point.

Approval for the program stipulated that within a year, data be produced on its effects. Given that the $25,000 was barely enough for program costs, the New Haven Health Department was fortunate that Yale was willing to fund the evaluation pro

bono. To do the research, Al Novick, chair of the Mayor’s Task Force, recruited Ed Kaplan, a mathematical modeler at the Yale School of Management.

The design of the evaluation was inherently challenging. If it were too intrusive, drug users would not come to the van. For this reason, testing clients for HIV was not an option.

Extensive collection of qualitative data—asking the clients about their drug use behaviors—was both intrusive and limiting in terms of the conclusions that could be drawn from it.

Kaplan came up with a solution.

Rather than basing his modeling on client data, he would base it on syringes data. If he could test the returned needles for HIV, client involvement in the evaluation could be minimized.

Robert Heimer at the Yale School of Medicine was enlisted for the actual needle analysis. To test the needles, Heimer used the polymerase chain reaction, a technique that is now an essential part of biomedical research, but at the time was still emerging.

Each syringe would be given an identification number, and each client would choose a pseudonym to identify him or herself. The program’s workers would record who was given which syringe and when. They would take the same data for returned syringes.

In the lab, Heimer would determine which returned needles were HIV positive. Kaplan, in his analysis, would compare the percentage of the program’s needles that were infected to the percentage of needles collected on the street and in shooting galleries that were infected.

Meanwhile, the program design was assembled. Many of the original street outreach workers served as the van’s staff. Yale donated a van that was once used for dining hall deliveries. It was the same color as blue police vans, so it was re-painted a cheerful peachy orange, and adorned with murals by The New Journal

March 2012

The same week that Kaplan and Heimer released their results, the National Commission on AIDS issued a report. Entitled “The Twin Epidemics of Substance Use and HIV,” the report criticized the federal government for its insufficient response to the drug user-driven HIV epidemic. Among its recommendations, the report called for expanding drug treatment services, legalizing the possession of syringes, and developing programs for preventing HIV transmission related to drug use. Three years before, the Mayor’s Task Force had begun campaigning for these same changes.

It had taken a few years of advocacy, but in New Haven in July 1990, progress appeared possible.

B

efore Bucheli began working on the van, he was an advocate. In the late eighties and early nineties, Bucheli was a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. At the time, ACT UP participants were nationally famous for their public demonstrations to change AIDS-related policy.

In 1993, Bucheli and fellow ACT UP members in New Haven were

disrupting a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force. They were protesting the fact that drug users were only able to receive ten syringes at a time from the program. As they were dragged out and arrested, one of ACT UP’s police liaisons noticed the health department was looking for an outreach worker for the program. “He said, ‘This would be a great job for you,’ ” Bucheli recalled.

Three months later, Bucheli was hired.

When Clinton was elected, the New Haven chapter of ACT UP disbanded. They thought the fight had been won. For syringe exchanges, the early 1990’s did produce some successes. In Connecticut, the state legislature established five additional syringe exchange programs and legalized the sale and possession of syringes without a prescription. The early success of the New Haven syringe exchange program influenced the development of programs nationally, including in Massachusetts and California. In New York, the New Haven results were instrumental in Mayor Dinkins’ decision to revive a syringe exchange program two years after shutting it down.

Clinton, however, disappointed advocates of syringe exchange 33

Katharine Konietzko

local high school students.

On November 13, 1990, the syringe exchange van set out on its maiden voyage. That day, the program enrolled twenty clients, collecting over fifty needles. Three clients requested drug treatment. Within the program’s first year, over nine hundred clients enrolled and over one hundred were referred to drug treatment programs.

Kaplan and Heimer released preliminary results of their research in July 1991. Fifty percent of the needles returned to the program were HIV positive. In comparison, 68 percent of street needles were positive, as were 92 percent of needles from shooting galleries. According to Kaplan’s modeling, the program decreased the HIV infection rate among clients by 33 percent.

Kaplan and Heimer’s results made national headlines. At the time, data on syringe exchanges was limited. The researchers’ approach was compelling for its objectivity and unobtrusiveness. “People still recognize how extraordinary it is, looking at the needles rather than the people,” said O’Keefe. “It was all that I had hoped for; it was enough to keep the program going.”

programs. While he recognized that the programs helped slow the spread of HIV, he refused to lift the ban on federal funding for syringe exchanges that had been in place since 1988. In 2002, Clinton said that he had made a mistake in not supporting syringe exchanges during his presidency.

The Bush Administration did not express support for syringe exchange programs.

The New Haven program also did not live up to initial expectations.

Funding was perpetually an issue.

Staff numbers declined. Hours were cut. The vehicle suffered from mechanical problems.

Frederick Altice, professor at Yale School of Medicine who has been involved in research on HIV/AIDS and substance use in New Haven for over two decades, noticed a gradual decline in the city’s syringe exchange program beginning in 1993. “Then, from about 1998 to 2000, I think you saw a major decline. I think from 2003, they’ve really struggled continuously.”

Bucheli hopes that the program can find new sources of money other than state funding. The program has recently received a new supervisor, Brooke Logan, and she’s supposed to be good at grant writing. “The thing that’s bad with that is that they’re putting that federal ban back in place,” said Bucheli. “Now it’s over. Unbelievable.

Stupid. We’re all going to die.”

It’s clear that Bucheli is upset when barriers stop him from distributing syringes. The program operates as a one-for-one exchange.

Clients can only receive as many syringes as they bring back. Clients might come without syringes, or without as many as they need, because they are distributing clean syringes to friends who don’t return them. And they don’t want to be in possession of

syringes after using them, for fear of police harassment.

The idea behind a one-for-one exchange is that it prevents people from accidentally getting pricked by needles discarded on the streets or in parks. Kaveh Khoshnood SPH ’89 GRD ’95, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the Yale School of Medicine, explained to me that this concern is only so legitimate. The risk of someone getting infected by an accidental needle stick is not zero, but it’s incredibly low.

knew that the drug users it served needed more than clean needles.

Altice began the Community Health Care Van to meet those needs, initially providing HIV testing and counseling, social services, and basic primary care. He waited three years after the syringe exchange was established to enact the plan. “Needle exchange was so polarized as an issue for the communities. At the outset, there was a concern of not doing anything more than syringe exchange just to prove it worked,” said Altice. “We did not want to destabilize the process by adding on too many different things.”

By mid-1992, the effectiveness of the syringe exchange program was well established. Without any outside funding, Altice assembled the Community Health Care Van. The vehicle was donated to him. Altice was the doctor on board. Yale-New Haven Hospital sent a social worker, and the New Haven Health Department sent an HIV counselor. In the first year, the van went out once a week, following the syringe exchange van to each stop. Clients could go get their syringes and then walk over to the Community Health Care Van for assistance with medical issues.

While the Community Health Care Van worked directly with the syringe exchange van, Altice never intended to be the same kind of statefunded initiative. “At the time, the health department was just not in a position to do anything more than it was doing,” Altice explained. His use of private funding was “the only way it would have happened.”

The van’s history has been one of growth. By collecting data on the van’s services, Altice was able to gain grants to expand its programs.

The van was on the streets five days a week by 1996. Today, it offers an

“Why has 20 years of evidence, continued advocacy, and support not done the job? At some point, it’s just politics.”

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In Windham, Connecticut, a syringe exchange program was shut down in 1997 because a child was accidentally stuck while playing in her backyard. “Politicians who don’t like syringe exchanges made a huge deal out of the fact that discarded syringes were here and there,” Khoshnood said. “And somehow they pushed this story. They didn’t understand syringe exchange or didn’t want to.”

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n 1993, Altice started a mobile healthcare program—the Community Health Care Van. Its history is closely linked to that of the syringe exchange van.

When the syringe exchange program was started, its initiators

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expanded range of services, including drug and HIV treatment, tuberculosis testing, vaccinations, and mental health services. The program owns a beautiful, forty-foot mobile clinic, complete with examination and intake rooms.

When the syringe exchange van has struggled, the Community Health Care Van has stepped in to fill the void. Until the early 2000’s, the two vans still went to all of the same stops, but variability in the syringe exchange van’s schedule due to funding issues made this challenging. The Community Health Care Van started to work independently.

“Their hours were cut, their van was broken down, they just weren’t out on the streets,” Altice said of the syringe exchange program at that time. “We would have a lot of drug users who would come in for health services, who were essentially saying, ‘We don’t know what to do. We would like clean syringes.’ ” In Connecticut, only licensed providers could legally perform syringe exchange. The Community Health Care Van did not qualify as a licensed provider, but Altice figured out another way to make sure users were getting clean needles. He discovered clinicians could legally prescribe needles for HIV prevention, and so the van started doing this in 2002.

I asked Altice what might be done so that Obama repeals the ban in his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2013.

“You mean why has 20 years of evidence, continued advocacy, and support not done its job?” he replied.

“At some point, it’s just politics.”

I

n the United States today, there are 221 syringe exchange programs in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. It is not known how many have received federal funding since the original ban was repealed in 2009.

March 2012

“When Obama allowed federal funds to be used for syringe exchange, he didn’t actually allocate any new funds,” explained Khoshnood. “In a sense, I don’t think much happened between when he announced it and when the Republican Congress just reinstated the ban.”

As a student at Yale School of Public Health in the late eighties, Khoshnood was involved in the underground syringe exchange in New Haven. He participated in the initial evaluation of the demonstration program, and has researched HIV/ AIDS ever since.

“In some ways, it’s kind of back to square one. It’s unbelievable that in 2012 we have to go right back to what we were doing in the late eighties and early nineties—remind government officials that this saves lives, does not increase drug use, saves money—and it’s a little surreal,” said Khoshnood.

Scientific research is one way to appreciate the value of syringe exchange programs; a second is the people they affect.

To Bucheli, every syringe makes a difference. His ideal syringe exchange would be one that is open twentyfour hours a day. He wishes there was a hotline program, where drug users could call for syringes and a program staff member would go meet them with the requested supplies.

“Sometimes I think I enable,” he said. “But then I figure I’m giving them a clean needle, so it’s a thin line.

It’s hard to stop getting high once you start. It was very hard for me to stop, took years.”

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he Community Health Care Van and the syringe exchange van still do share a stop, on the corner of Chatham and Ferry in Fair Haven. It’s a high drug use and prostitution area, so it’s a good location.

I went there with Bucheli from Grand and Ferry. The Community Health Care Van was parked on the

other corner, looking dry, warm, and inviting in the cold weather. If a client comes on with health problems at this location, Bucheli walks them over to the other van. We walk over too, to say hello.

Bucheli left Chatham and Ferry to pick up some donations. He also was dropping me off back at Yale—I wasn’t going to find a cab willing to pick me up at Chatham and Ferry, he said.

“I appreciate you coming and asking questions,” Bucheli said. He brought up his HIV status. “You can put it in there if you want. I think if other people know, it’s not such a bad thing, ’cause it kind of felt good telling you. Maybe that should be in the article. Makes sense.”

Ten minutes later, he dropped me off on York and Chapel, an intersection very different from the one from which we had arrived. I watched the van pull away, loaded with its cargo of clean syringes to distribute.

TNJ

Helen Knight is a junior in Davenport College and a Senior Editor of The New Journal.

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Photos courtesy of Juliana Hanle

The author and her hunting mentor, Joe LaGatutta, in upstate New York.

Smelling Blood Get your gun, bag a squirrel, and don’t be afraid to dirty your lily-white hands.

By Juliana Hanle 36

The New Journal

J

ust two weeks before Thanksgiving, the scent of braising meat, like bread and old leaves, filled the kitchen.

My squirrel was breaking down, slipping off its bones. One of my housemates walked in, where I leaned over the stovetop watching our dinner simmer.

“Smells great,” Travis said. I nodded and sniffed again. Squirrel, I thought, smells like both rabbit and quail, but also nutty and a little gamey.

March 2012

Rodent might not be prime protein, but a hunter obeys her principles. If you kill it, you eat it.

The inversion of that principle brought me to hunting. If you eat it, you kill it—or at least comprehend what it means to kill for food. The combination of that conviction with a commitment to local, organic food forms the foundation of an ethos of eating that is increasing in popularity.

The locavore, or local eater, reduces

carbon footprint, removes her support from landscape-destroying factory farms, and instead contributes to her regional economy (generally within one hundred miles). More and more local eaters—mostly young, white, and educated—are making the lunge from the neighborhood farmer’s market to the forest kill. This fall, I joined them.

I have been trying to eat local as much as possible for almost five years. I’ve also worked, both for pay 37

and not, for brief stints on organic farms. Eating local, organic food ties the diner to the land, celebrating the methods of agriculture just as much as the products. Locavorism is beautiful.

Like most urban locavores, what I’ve done to support local, organic agriculture has mostly been limited to conscientious consumption. However, for those who eat meat, the inevitable conclusion of the locavore philosophy is killing, not purchasing, your dinner.

Eating wild game uses fewer natural resources and causes less ecological damage than eating domesticated animals. Six years ago, Michael Pollan suggested in his seminal book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that if most of the food Americans consume travels across half a continent to the dinner plate, then hunting in your backyard is the omnivore’s solution.

Some urban foragers have quietly taken to parks to seek rabbits and pigeons for their stockpots.

Others swipe fresh roadkill. They’re beginning to gain public recognition.

Last summer Hank Shaw published his cookbook Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, gave the book a strong, positive review. A month earlier, Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared his abstinence from any meat that he has not shot himself. Jackson Landers, who offers a home-butchery and deer biology course called “Hunting for Locavores” in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, published a book called The Beginner’s Guide to Deer Hunting for Food in September.

What the book doesn’t mention is that hunting brings the locavore into contact with more than an animal.

Hunting placed me at a meeting-point between hunters living their family tradition and young urbanites who’ve never tasted wild game.

I decided to try hunting myself, first for small game and then for deer. I hoped to end the season with 38

a freezer chest of butchered venison.

If you, reader, are like me, then you will want to know how the uninitiated can become blaze-orange-wearing huntsmen.

First, you’ve got to get legal.

Killing this creature only felt tragic because I had witnessed its death. I don’t see the meat that lives as poorly as it dies.

LICENSED TO KILL

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he Ulster Heights Rod and Gun Club sits at the feet of the Catskills, some ninety miles upriver from Manhattan, twenty miles west of the Hudson River. Cell phones don’t work there and, on a Saturday morning in October, fog lay over the few fields visible from the road like a second crop. I am nearly one hundred miles west of New Haven, but only a few dozen from my mother’s family home.

It was terribly cold inside the cement brick building, but it was crowded. Most of the forty odd hunter’s safety education certification candidates were white males, ranging in age from the twelve-year-old three rows back to the whiskered grey-hairs who know their guns. Nearly all of us wore variations on old jeans and work flannel. It was a worn-looking crowd.

Most of these men were preparing to enter a hunting community

sustained by tradition. Families pass on that tradition, fathers, like the man who embraced his son, a soft-cheeked teenager, when the boy walked out with his safety certificate. These families have been eating sustainably for generations. The wood-colored fellow next to me, who called me “honey” when I passed him a rifle, told me he liked bear meat best of all game.

New York, like most states, requires attending a hunter safety course like the one hosted by the Rod and Gun Club. The International Hunter Education Association provides the curriculum, which covers different types of firearms, ammunition, the mechanical sequence of a bullet leaving a gun, and basic safety rules and tips. Our two instructors speak most adamantly, and eloquently, about the ethics and tradition of hunting.

“You do not drive through town with a buck on the hood of your car.

Those days are over,” Carl, a former police officer, told us. He doesn’t want hunters vilified. The combination of a cute, dead animal and triumphant gunman paints a tired picture of redneck bloodlust. It is the clichéd image of a community whose sport has become increasingly regulated and politicized over the last three decades—a sport on the defense.

Carl told us that hunters have a duty to conservation, to protecting land and resources for sustained use.

A hunter kills only as many creatures as a healthy ecosystem can afford.

“Conservation is not environmentalism,” he announced, his enunciation forceful from years in law enforcement. Carl was assuring my fellow students that he did not want to force a partisan agenda on them. I imagine that, to Carl, “environmentalism” means something too extreme, irrelevant, and yuppie—a little like me, staring at him from the aisle two rows back.

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But from where I sit, conservation is environmentalism. In an America where food is produced on fear-inducing scales and where we throw away our meals as easily as we consume them, the idea of being conservative in what you kill and eat is countercultural.

I wondered what else I might agree on with these men. I saw in the instructors and my fellow students signs of an unspoken, deep respect for the natural landscape. A new hunter needs the knowledge that these men possess. After a license, you need a guide.

AMONG THE TREES

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t took me half an hour to bag my first squirrel. She went down with a shoulder shot, which shattered her right leg and struck through her left ribs, exactly what Joe had told me you want with small game. It was the first weekend in November and the first time I had ever looked through the scope of a rifle to see an eye gazing back.

Joe LaGatutta, my new mentor, had driven over for my gun shakedown that afternoon. We were shooting on my mother’s late aunt’s property on the Hudson River. Eight years ago, when Joe had started helping my mother tear asbestos insulation out of one of the buildings, he had already been working for many of the families in the small village of West Park (seven miles north of Poughkeepsie on the western bank of the Hudson) as a contractor. Joe had agreed to take on my mother on the condition that she let him track game across the property. With his extensive client list, Joe has accumulated a massive system of private hunting grounds this way.

He shares the tree stands he has set up all throughout the creased woods of the Catskill foothills with a group of hunting buddies, and he teaches many of the neighborhood kids how March 2012

to hunt, including me.

Joe grew up in the Bronx, spending his summers in the village five miles south of West Park. As a young teenager he would walk into the woods at the town’s end and, when he re-emerged, it was with pockets heavy with squirrel, he told me. He wanted me to start the same way.

With little preface, Joe had slapped a cardboard box with target stickers in front of a brush pile and watched me load his Remington .22 caliber with four bullets. I had settled myself around the gun, nuzzling its stock into my shoulder and curving down so that my cheek bulged on top of its butt, pulling the gun hard against my collarbone, pressing my hand into the side of a tree for stability. This settling isn’t a quick motion, not for a beginner, because the coordination of muscles is unique to shooting.

More important, however, is breathing. All gunmen know and preach the same breathing sequence: you breathe naturally until you’ve got your sights aligned, take a breath, release it halfway, and gently squeeze the trigger. I first learned this technique at summer camp, where I loved the rifle range and shot nearly every day, though, when I had considered it then, I was repelled by the thought of killing animals. Joe had me practice standing shots and then sitting ones, my back against the tree, arms braced against my knees, taking advantage of the natural environment.

I shot well and he was pleased. Of the few that weren’t bulls’ eyes, Joe said, “That’s still a dead squirrel.” I was ready enough. Any beginner with steady hands and a week at a practice range could be as good.

Joe taught me only a little less carefully than he had helped sight his elderly brother-in-law who, due to damage from cataract surgery, has had to learn to shoot lefty. Another day I watched, disconcerted, as the older man’s bullets went wide of the

deer-sized target’s entire body. But Joe watched him keenly, offering pointers to bring his shot into the killing circle.

Joe left me the rifle and a box of bullets. I walked down the wooded river bluff with an intent to kill.

I settled myself in the tree stand that Joe had installed above a deer bedding area in a low spot that runs parallel to the river. From fifteen feet up I could see the Hudson, the neighboring monastery, and an entire swath of forest that I had never seen before. From this vantage I could read the terrain. I saw the worn tracks of animals in parted grasses and deadfall.

I sat there twitching. Hunting really shouldn’t be an active verb, I thought. From all that I had heard from Joe and the guys at the Rod and Gun club, the activity largely consists of hours spent waiting and watching.

Hunters will come away from the deer season often with only one to four kills, but many cold days of stillness.

I didn’t shoot the first squirrel I could. You don’t shoot the first one, Joe had explained to me, because more will follow, and you don’t want to scare them off. When you do shoot one, you do not retrieve it immediately.

“Fifteen minutes later they’ll come back to play,” he told me.

The second squirrel came skittering into the western edge of the deer’s clearing, spiraling around a log as it chased a third. My sensations heightened by adrenaline, I nearly laughed at their play. The squirrel stopped on the log, though her friend continued on into a thicket. She sat up on her hind legs in perfect profile and looked at me, coquettish and bold, and as accommodating as Joe had said she would be. I lined up my muzzle, my shoulders, my cheek, and breathed in, half out, and gently pulled the trigger.

She flew off the log, bounced three, maybe four, squirrel jumps and then dribbled under another downed tree about six feet from the first, where she immediately ceased moving.

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tragic because I had witnessed its death. I don’t see the meat that lives as poorly as it dies. This squirrel lived wild and now it would be eaten—and that was good.

The following hour was quiet, as the sun passed over the hill and the woods seemed to age, turning grey and amber. My shadow lay across the groundcover, enflamed by the falling sun. I listened for more squirrels.

There are hours when the squirrels are loud and hours when they are quiet.

When they feel bold, the animals can make as much noise as a child crashing through deadfall. Other times only the uncanny twitch of a leaf reveals their progress across a branch. Over the next hour, a quiet one, I pinned three more squirrels in my crosshairs, hesitated, and lost them. A deer leapt down the western banks, moving south with the wind. It was growing far colder and my hands on the rifle

were white, blue, and green. It was time to dress my kill.

A squirrel is adorable in death.

Its fur is soft, features delicate, and eyes cracked as if it were just sinking into a doze. Only a bubble of blood at the nostrils and the red exit and entry wounds show its trauma. Outside my great aunt’s house, I set up my squirrel on a board and swigged from a bottle of Hudson River Valley whiskey. I started by clipping off the feet. When you press in the tendons by a squirrel’s feet, the toes curl in, just as they do in limp human wrists, and I dropped

The author, atop a hunting perch in upstate New York.

Photos courtesy of Juliana Hanle

My whole body quivered, thrilled with horror. I nearly cried. I wondered at how senselessly I had ended her game. I stared through the canopy, the trees all breathing and swaying.

The birds had gone silent with the gunshot. Would this be the moment, I asked myself, that I would remember in the future as my conversion to vegetarianism? I could see the furry hind of the dead squirrel but the thought of touching it made me feel ill. The Hudson River glittered calmly behind the trees.

I couldn’t tell if my shaking was from endorphins, shock, or the cold.

I was stuck in the metal stand, waiting because Joe had told me to, but also because I wanted to make sure that the squirrel wouldn’t still be alive when I descended, and I had nothing to do but sit in the sky and think over what I had done.

Killing this creature only felt

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the thing with a cry when its claws unexpectedly scraped my latex-gloved hand. With scissors I then snipped through the skin across the abdomen and up its belly, gripped the fur and started to peel back. Joe had told me that it would feel like I was undressing the squirrel, but it didn’t. It took strong pulling, and I had to push my fingers between her warm abdomen and her hide, though I did slide her leg stumps out from her furred sleeves as if they were the ends of a winter parka. This was almost a bloodless process, since the body is encased in muscle. She was nearly meat.

The body peeled, I chopped off the squirrel’s tail and head and discarded them with the feet. I sliced a line below and then up between her ribs, cutting away the diaphragm and then the tissue connecting the heart and lungs to the chest cavity. I set those organs aside. I then pulled out her gastro-intestinal tract, whole, because puncturing the guts would release bacteria. Cutting through the joints, I divided the carcass into six cuts: four legs and an upper and lower torso. These I put inside, into the freezer, where any germs would die in a few hours.

The next morning, before dawn, I returned to my post. As the sun rose, above grasses and leaves lined with frost, I listened for the wakening forest. A turkey clucked. Hawk-sized Pileated Woodpeckers watched the forest floor from the highest limbs of a dead oak with far keener eyes than mine. The sun rose over the Hudson, shining in one amber track across its waters, slipping gold trails between the maples. The squirrels began to chatter.

I took one out in the first twenty minutes with a perfect shot. I waited for my third squirrel.

I watched with my ears, because the story of the woods is in every sound. The chickadees tentatively warming their throats, the tiny tablespoon songbirds sparrowing March 2012

through the thorny brush, the hisses of squirrels speaking to one another.

These noises, ebbing and flowing with the wind, ceased when a hawk flew overhead and after a six-point buck strode boldly through the valley.

I missed the third squirrel’s shoulder, hitting the middle of his torso. He ran behind a tree and bled

With his bare hands, Jackson Landers has butchered armadillo, an animal that carries leprosy. there for half an hour. I climbed down out of the stand and flushed him further into the woods where he ran onto a log at the crest of a small hillock and lay there watching me.

I walked up, carefully took a sitting position fifteen feet away, speaking gently aloud to the squirrel, and then shot. Without the elevated view of the tree stand, I couldn’t see where he landed, and, despite a systematic search, couldn’t recover his body.

I couldn’t use the second squirrel either. I had waited too long, several hours, to field-dress, and after too much time cooling, the meat was no good. I felt terrible, irresponsible and reckless. Still, I would eat what I had butchered the night before EATING MEAT

A

stew is only as good as its foundations. I seared my squirrel, deglazed the pan, and then braised the

meat in chicken stock. After nearly three hours I put in caramelized carrots and squash, and potatoes, celery and barley. I pulled out the bones and removed the lid to cook down the base, adding pinches of rosemary and thyme. The kitchen smelled of grease, woody herbs, and fermented fruit. I served my housemates and each of us went back for more.

When we put away our dishes, there remained the lava-pink heart and lungs, still tied to each other. I prepared a frying pan and slapped the tight bundle on top of sizzling butter, coating each side with brown sugar as it cooked. A cut through the muscle and lung split the organs into two equal parts. Travis took one half on the end of a fork, and I took the other.

It tasted like a cross between French toast and kidneys.

The next time I prepared meat for dinner, a few weeks later, it was venison that Joe had shot that season.

Uncooked deer, unlike squirrel (or any other meat I’ve ever seen), carries a dark purple color and has the taste of root vegetables. I marinated the venison cutlets in whiskey and mustard and grilled them outside in the cold December night. No steak or chop has ever tasted so good and hearty to me as that deer, flavorful, tender, and lean.

As I smeared the venison with marinade, I thought of Jackson Landers, the Virginian author of The Beginner’s Guide to Deer Hunting for Food, who, before he started hunting, would not touch raw meat. Landers, 33, was raised a vegetarian but began eating meat as an adult. He would manipulate his raw meat from a distance with utensils. “I decided,” Landers explained, “that if I couldn’t handle the reality of this meat, I should confront where the meat was coming from.” So he decided to hunt, kill, butcher, and eat a deer.

Landers spent years educating himself from college studies and 41

textbooks about the natural history of deer and firearms. He spent hours watching the animals and shot hundreds of rounds a week in practice. He now hunts all his meat.

With his bare hands, Landers has butchered armadillo, an animal that carries leprosy.

As soon as he asked, in July 2009 on his blog “The Locavore Hunter,” if readers were interested in attending a workshop class on locavore hunting, Landers became the Northeast’s defacto spokesperson for environmental and food-focused hunting. Since then Landers has taught New Yorkers how to cook Canada geese culled from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and has written a second book, Eating Aliens, which advocates fighting invasive species by consuming them.

When I spoke with him over the phone late one night, he had just ended a long day stalking boar in Texas hill country. Landers told me that, other than a school in Texas (that he was currently visiting) whose curriculum was modeled after his own, he knew of no other hunter’s science and butchery courses besides his own. The Virginian estimated that he has taught 150 to 300 people the basics of locavore hunting over the last three years—and his book is now reaching thousands more.

Landers wrote Deer Hunting for Food for the same kind of people who enrolled in his courses, educated people largely between the ages of 25 and 45, most coming from the metropolitan areas around New York City and Washington, DC. Landers taught several former vegetarians and even a practicing vegan who makes exceptions for wild game, he told me.

Nelson Lafon, Deer Project Coordinator with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, welcomes the new hunters.

Virginia and the Northeast need them, he told me, because the region has become severely overpopulated with 42

whitetail deer. The deer population, which has been increasing for seventy years, surpassed a healthy size in the 1990s, just as numbers of hunters began decreasing nationwide, Lafon explained. This season the state issued twenty percent fewer hunting licenses than it had fifteen years ago. The deer are starving, competing for food in populated areas and, no longer carshy, causing fatal accidents.

Lafon would like to see hunters

permitted per license each season. In the last two decades both Virginians and New Yorkers have been taking between 200,000 and 250,000 deer per state per season—and, if Lafon is right, they could be taking perhaps thousands more. Two good-sized deer could yield more than 150 pounds of venison combined, enough to last a single locavore hunter a year.

When I took to the woods again, this time for deer, I felt good knowing that it served an ecological purpose— and that I might come away with enough meat for months.

The deer population, which has been increasing for seventy years, surpassed a healthy size in the 1990s. The deer are starving, competing for food in populated areas and, no longer carshy, causing fatal accidents.

THE HUNT

take to the wooded pockets of semiurban communities. Archery presents less danger in close quarters, and Lafon thinks urbanites could use bows in their own backyards. I asked him what the least amount of land is on which a person can hunt deer.

“I hate to say there is a minimum, especially if the hunter works with neighbors,” he told me. Lafon also told me that he does not fear overhunting because the state ultimately controls both the number of licenses distributed and the number of deer

T

he second Sunday in December was the coldest in weeks, staying resolutely below freezing for most of the day.

From my perch thirty feet up in a hardwood I could see nearly two hundred yards through bare tree trunks. The land is crumpled there, run through with ridges that parallel the Hudson. A long swamp lies about a mile and a half west of the river. Joe calls the land that cups it “the bowl,” and he has peppered its rim with tree stands. He maintains the grounds for the Catholic convent that owns the swath of land, which is two miles south of my family’s place. In the dark forest of 6 a.m., when moonlight touched branches and frosted grasses, I climbed a tall oak, settling onto a wooden platform nailed across an elbow in the tree. A hoot owl cooed the same meter over and over, and after about an hour the sun rose out over the mountain, sending fingerprints of warmth through the full body camouflage suit Joe had leant me. I cradled one of his rifles— the smallest caliber that you can use to hunt deer—and tried not to fall asleep and off my perch. I watched for deer to cross from the swamp to the high ground covered in pines and leafless oaks that lay behind me.

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Bagging a whitetail takes thorough knowledge of the animal.

Joe places his tree stands by bedding areas or above well-used tracks. He learns the routines and habits of specific animals. On this Sunday in November, the deer, he told me, should have spent the night hunkered down seeking warmth in the valleys and by the inland bodies of water, moving upland with dawn for browse.

We had to be in position before the deer entered the woods about us.

Joe, one of his nephews, and I ripped through the forest on ATVs, over logs and steep hillsides, and then tramped through the unevenly frozen swamp to our posts. By sunrise the three of us were high in the branches, each about two hundred yards away from the other two.

I ran through Joe’s words of advice in my head. Even the best book, I realized, can’t replace the field presence of a man standing by your side who knows his gun, the beast, and the terrain. New hunters need to find experienced guides.

Lafon, who learned to hunt from his father, had told me that he has seen the demand for mentors from aspiring hunters. “It’s almost like you need a match system, and we’ve actually thought about that,” he said. Lafon would like to attach urbanized locavores to traditional hunters, education flowing both ways, locavorism exchanged for hunting skills. He has begun talking with Landers about launching a state-sponsored version of Landers’ locavore hunting course, which was offered for the last time this fall.

Lafon thinks Landers would make a good ambassador for both locavores and hunters. It is in Landers’s favor, Lafon said, that Landers is a Virginian.

The co-education Lafon hopes for is tied, just as locavorism is, to place identity. After all, I think as I wait in the predawn, Joe wouldn’t have taken me under his wing if I hadn’t been a March 2012

part of West Park.

My tree grew at the edge of the hardwoods. Beyond this margin, which runs from east to west for a several miles, softwood saplings spring up from thick frozen grasses where loggers had sliced off the forest a few years earlier. Deer like these margin areas. I was perfectly placed.

As the morning progressed, I heard a few songbirds and squirrels, and some sporadic gunshots from across the bowl, but none of the soft, crisp rustles that characterize a deer’s delicate browsing pace. After six hours spent watching the sun follow the moon across the sky, I had not seen a single deer and had not spent a single bullet (other than the one I dropped from the tree stand in the dark, along with my hat). None of us had.

Two days later, I was sitting

by Union Square in Manhattan with John Durant, one of Lander’s former students, a 28-year-old former management consultant who is writing a manual for living like a modern hunter-gatherer. Durant had shot his first deer three weeks earlier.

It was a yearling, yielding about thirtyfive pounds of venison. It had been a clean shot and the beast was dead within ten seconds. Durant had been delicate at first in slicing it open—but soon realized his hands needed to get dirty to get the job done. The beast was warm and the air cold, Durant said. It had been the same with my squirrel. Warm organs do not feel like meat. Durant said that he expected the venison would last him a few months into the new year.

Over coffee, Durant and I traded stories. We laughed at how the experienced hunters had teased him for being so green, and for his small deer. He leaned forward to talk about holistic solutions to the physical and ethical problems of modern life. I told him all that I had learned through my own education and research. Hunting is a tradition and knowledge should be

shared.

Young people who looked like New York University students sat at the tables around us. I don’t know how we sounded to them, or if they were planning to try venison themselves anytime soon. Suddenly, it felt important for me to know how serious I was about what I had done— and would do.

I had committed myself to hunting in the moment when I worked through my first squirrel’s death. I had seen, riding behind Joe on his ATV as he yelled about loggers clearing the forest, that his care for the land was as genuine as any naturalist’s. Between two people who care so much, there is an opportunity for a conversation that crosses political and cultural boundaries.

Whatever Durant, I, and others like us become will likely remain a small subculture. Durant will reach into the freezer chest in his Manhattan apartment, I’ll return to West Park for more squirrels this spring, and friends will eat our meals. Locavore hunters could have, as Landers said, an impact far larger than our numbers might suggest.

Joe had told me that I could think of hunting as going out to the garden to pull carrots. But the two are not the same. In hunting, you put yourself behind another’s eyes—and it seems to me that we could use this more complete, and more complicated, perspective.

If you take to hunting, give me a call. We’ll invite everyone we know to dinner.

TNJ

Juliana Hanle is a junior in Davenport College and a Managing Editor of The New Journal.

43

SNAPSHOT

A FINE KETTLE OF FISH

The Maritime Aquarium in South Norwalk turned the tide for a depressed neighborhood.

By Cathy Huang

A

t the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut, a work crew is preparing a large, empty room for new shark tanks and sea urchin habitats with state-of-the-art filtration systems.

They’ve been told to be unobtrusive, so the workers speak softly and crane operators silently ease thousandpound slabs of concrete into position.

Several hundred people still visit the aquarium each day, and the sounds of heavy machinery in the background wouldn’t be ideal for a leisurely family outing.

“We spent the last decade expanding our educational programming and varieties of species.

It’s time our facilities get a face-lift, too,” said Dave Sigworth, a spokesman for the Maritime Aquarium. During his fourteen years working there, he has witnessed the aquarium become a popular destination for families touring New England. There are about 85,000 people in Norwalk, but the aquarium now welcomes almost half a million visitors a year.

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At a September celebration of the launch of the $4 million renovation project, a shoal of notable people— Norwalk Mayor Richard Mocci, aquarium president Jennifer Herring, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Robert Forrester, president of Newman’s Own Foundation—floated toy sharks in the old tanks.

“The event symbolized how much we can give to visitors locally and to Connecticut,” Sigworth said.

The aquarium’s history is a remarkable success story. Local governments and nonprofit organizations invested in a community and created a major center of economic activity, all while teaching New England’s children about the ecology of the Long Island Sound.

The blocks around the aquarium, once run down and largely derelict, are now the most valuable commercial real estate in the city. But the aquarium has sailed only recently from rougher waters.

I

’d always heard that [the Aquarium] wasn’t pulling in much money back

in the early nineties, but they have to be making lots of money now,” says Donna Rey, a third-generation Norwalk resident. “I mean, I bring my two kids here every weekend. They’re nuts about the ray eels.” Moray eels, or ray eels for short, are spineless, with dinosaur faces attached to flattened, finless bodies.

Her two toddlers tug at the fabric of her pants, their eyes flitting ceaselessly toward the puffer fish floating in a central glass column. One launches his body into an imitation of an orca whale, and his brother waves his arms to mimic ocean tides.

Rey and her husband were both raised in Norwalk, and she remembers the aquarium’s opening in July 1988, back when it was called simply “The Maritime Center.”

A mere three months after it opened, the center was mired in “a fiscal and financial crisis,” according to the city’s finance director then. The problem was that not enough people were coming to the aquarium.

When city officials approved The New Journal

proposals to build the seventy thousand square-foot museum and aquarium in old factory buildings, they hoped visitors would return to a once thriving and eclectic part of town, an area known as the Washington Strip.

Population drift had left the area deserted and the economy crippled.

The proposed Maritime Center appeared to fuse educational and environmental objectives with the potential to make money. Biologists liked the idea of teaching people about flora and fauna in the Long Island Sound, while economists and city planners nodded at the proposed center’s family appeal.

Families didn’t come, though, and as sponsors began to lose hope that the center would become financially self-sustaining, the city government stepped in and offered the Maritime Center a $30 million advance to cover maintenance costs and, most importantly, start advertising. It was a big gamble.

Pete Marnane, who became president a few years later, proposed a name change. He believed the aquarium should be able to attract 25 million visitors in five decades, but he thought that the “The Maritime Center” was too humdrum, not a name that would prompt families to pull off the Connecticut Turnpike, the only major highway nearby. Marnane wanted his facility to be a destination that parents would plan afternoons around. He wanted his aquarium to be called an aquarium.

“I wanted to make sure we were planning ahead,” he said. His staff spent months surveying visitors, until they convinced aquarium board members that changing one word would bring in 10 percent more visitors. The name changed in April 1996. In the following year visitors to the new “Maritime Aquarium” more than doubled.

Marnane spent the remainder of his tenure addressing every funding March 2012

request, every remodeling initiative, every addition to the aquarium, and every new crustacean tank with his characteristic diligence. “Pete turned things around for us. Everyone knew that, and none of us wanted him to leave the aquarium,” Sigworth said.

Eventually, Marnane stepped down. He purchased a small Tudor house and quietly raised his family, making occasional appearances at the annual Norwalk Memorial and Independence Day Parades and business ribbon-cuttings. He purchased a tank and filter for his home, but never got around to buying any fish to fill it.

T

he Sound is a lot like Vegas,” Sigworth said. “What happens there, and comes by way of the rivers, stays there. And we become responsible for taking care of it.”

The Long Island Sound loses several of its unique species every year to overfishing and water pollution. The Maritime Aquarium finds no shortage of conservation topics to inspire its in-house and offsite programming, serving 150,000 students in Connecticut each year. In 2002, it unveiled two lab classrooms on the third floor. Colorful diagrams of crustacean life cycles span three walls, and a long stretch of sinks, tubs, and tanks lines the fourth. As students rinse their hands after playing with turtles or poking at sea cucumbers, they can look out the south-facing window at the Norwalk River, perhaps at the very place where biologists gathered the specimens for that day’s workshop.

The aquarium’s economic impact eventually caught up to its educational outreach. Today, the area around the aquarium boasts a swanky Italian ristorante and several smaller shops offering stationery and fashions by local and national designers.

Ike Litovsky waits tables at O’Neill’s, a pub a few blocks away

from the aquarium. Between his lunch and dinner shifts, Litovsky visits the aquarium and takes in an occasional IMAX matinee.

Many of the guests at O’Neill’s have just visited the aquarium, Litovsky said. “I tell them we offer fresh cod that’s been dropped off to us that morning by harbor fishermen, but some people give me this funny look like, ‘I just saw those happily swimming around with their marine friends; no way—get me a steak.’

Others go crazy and get seafood platters.”

Litovsky wouldn’t mind moving a few blocks for work. “I’d love to work for them,” he said. “This town, this restaurant, needs that aquarium.”

The aquarium is looking for “people who get what works here,” he added.

“I think they just really want people who care enough to stick around. Sign me up.”

Thirty-six percent of the aquarium’s approximately 475,000 visitors each year come from out of the state. As it continues to expand, the aquarium is set to meet Manarne’s target of 25 million visitors in five decades. Over the last two decades, various donors have sunk nearly $335 million into the aquarium, which generates an estimated $42 million of economic activity in the city every year.

The current executive board includes state councilmen and public servants of surrounding municipalities.

The Maritime Aquarium brought new life to the surrounding district.

Now, as the quieter winter season drags on, the city will return the favor with new underwater homes for the aquarium’s toothiest denizens.

TNJ

Cathy Huang is a sophomore in Morse College.

45

ENDNOTE

THIS COULD GET HEAVY

By Aaron Gertler

First, a chronology of my athletic career: 1997: At the age of five, I set out to become a professional wrestler and superhero. Though I dominate the 37-pound circuit for a while, I develop no powers. Also, I discover professional wrestlers fake it.

1998: Tee-ball is much harder than it looks.

1999-2006: I sit inside my house and read, avoiding sunlight if possible.

2007-2009: For three years, I try to make the varsity soccer team and be a coordinated person girls will like.

Alas, no.

2010: My new goal, as a senior in high school, is to run five kilometers at a reasonable pace without Death casting her cold shadow over my pale, skinny, ill-clad body. But Delaware has a lot of hills. A LOT OF HILLS. I end the cross-country season five46

foot-eleven and 125 pounds with ten black toenails.

That autumn, I affixed a chin-up bar to my door, hoping to attach a few scraps of muscle to my skeleton.

With push-ups and crunches and curls and crunches and more crunches, I packed on more tone than the average Kenyan marathoner, but I still wasn’t in underwear model territory.

Desperate, I decided to Bing “how to build muscle” and started to read.

“Food! I forgot about eating food!”

The sites that came up were full of helpful advice. By February, I’d settled into a rhythm: eat, work out (biceps, triceps, biceps, triceps, biceps, biceps), eat, read Bodybuilding. com, sleep, repeat. I was better at the reading part than the others. My epiphanies multiplied. I realized I had muscles in my legs, too. I learned that

I was using my spine to lift.

Before long, I was a genuine expert on weightlifting. I was doing thoughtful, smooth, full-body workouts every few days and eating through half the family grocery budget (we have three kids and a spoiled cat). Then came the move to Yale. A gym in the basement! More food than I could eat! And, of course, the Yale Powerlifters.

By mid-September I was hanging out with people who could squat a barbell weighing as much as me on either end. I learned more in a month of practice than I had in a year of watching people lift things on YouTube (unexpectedly engrossing, if you’ve never tried it). I knew enough now to be concerned for the other lifters at Payne-Whitney. Picking up heavy things is a lot like taming lions or walking tightropes—you won’t The New Journal

strong as possible. Buffness is only a secondary concern. As their captain told the News, “Why am I going to care about looking strong, if I’m not going to be strong?” I take a different view.

Like 90 percent of Yale gymgoers, I exercise mainly for the sake of the opposite sex (or, given lack of success on that front, mirrors). I wanted to go from beanpole to bruiser—stick to brick—geek to freak. Benchpressing three hundred pounds held no inherent appeal for me.

Since then, I’ve taken up the most efficient possible weighttraining system: a few carefully chosen exercises, ninety seconds apiece, with a weight heavy enough to drive my muscles past pain into total shutdown.

Bodybuilding pioneer Arthur Jones summed up this system’s philosophy: “If you’ve never vomited from doing a set of bicep curls, then you’ve never experienced outright hard work.”

The first few workouts were the closest I’ve gotten to an out-of-body experience, but my once-infantile pain tolerance is creeping upward. You could say I’ve traded my irony for

iron, but that still sounds ironic, so I’ll stop before I drop a joke on my foot or something. From now on, I’ll just keep to my new plan and lift.

So if you’re ever passing through the basement of Timothy Dwight and hear what sounds like a werewolf transforming, it’s just me on the leg press, getting ready for my next têteà-tête with my favorite mirror. And of course, working toward my latest goal: 2012: Just be a decent person without letting life get me down. Also, become an underwear model.

TNJ

Aaron Gertler is a freshman in Timothy Dwight College who’s actually very serious about this stuff. If you have any questions about exercise or sports nutrition, he’s available at aaron.gertler@ yale.edu.

Katharine Konietzko

look cool until you do it properly, and doing it any other way will probably get you hurt.

The average male training plan seems to devote two days each to arms and chest and three to abs—the only muscle group that really doesn’t get any larger on an average human.

Or, as Olympic weightlifting champ Alison James ’12 said, “So many guys apparently think it’s attractive to have an unnaturally inflated chest and arms that sits on top of a pair of chicken legs.”

The average female training plan involves jogging, and maybe some breaks for combination squatcurl-lateral raises with ten-pound dumbbells, preferably while standing on an exercise ball, giving the wall mirrors a death stare, and trying not to breathe, lest she grunts. The most common male movement, conversely, is the “bicep jerk”—like a curl, but of the entire body, and with twice the weight he knows he can handle.

I soon left the team over a difference in weightlifting philosophy.

The Powerlifters’ goal is to be as

March 2012

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SUBMITTED BY JOSH PLAUT’S FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

JOSH PLAUT 1969 - 2011

J

oshua Andrew Plaut – or Josh Plaut, as he was known to his friends and in his byline – came to Yale as a freshman in Timothy Dwight College in 1987.

Back then, The New Journal was a well-established alternative to the News or the relatively new Yale Herald. Although we composed our articles on our clunky, first generation Apple Macs, we didn’t have desktop publishing and would send our small floppy disks to a printer, getting back rolls of shiny printed columns that we would painstakingly paste onto graph paper. Over one sleepless weekend, the whole staff would gather at a local architectural office, proof reading every article and cutting typos out of the pages with razor blades. It seemed like Steely Dan was always playing on a boom box, and there was a seemingly bottomless box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and too much Diet Coke lying around on the tables. Nobody had cell phones, so it was hard for our roommates or friends to reach us.

Josh, a lacrosse player from Summit, N.J. with a feisty mind and a sharp wit, had all the elements of a good writer: curiosity about worlds he was not a part of, discipline and determination, and many lovely turns of phrase.

One of his first major features for The New Journal was “Tattoo Uncovered” in April 1989, a portrait of several New Haven tattoo artists and their clients. In the first paragraph, he described a tattoo artist named Spider Webb inscribing a tiger head on a woman’s shoulder. “Staccato bursts from the gun drown out the strains of Poison’s ‘Fallen Angel’ pouring out of a color television set,” Josh wrote.

His senior year, Josh became a managing editor of The New Journal. He always kept us laughing during ridiculous all-night editing sessions where we labored for hours over one paragraph that we had to get just right. He went on snack runs to WaWa’s at 2 a.m. He wrote many of the best headlines.

And he rescued a few stories in desperate need of an injection of his humor. He also skewered pretention and gave blunt, though never painful, criticism.

After college, Josh did a brief stint at a Scholastic magazine before going on to make news as a spokesman for the Department of Education. In his 30s, he went to law school at Fordham and Columbia, and in law firm jobs he was known as a talented writer. He was very proud when a sentence from one of his briefs was quoted in a judge’s decision. And in emails to friends, he occasionally corrected what he regarded as imprecision or exaggeration.

Josh was a wonderful writer and a dear friend. He loved The New Journal. He was proud of its continuing excellence and a loyal donor. We will miss him. The New Journal 48