Volume 46, Issue 2

THE NEW JOURNAL The Magazine of Yale & New Haven

Volume 46 • Issue 2 • October 2013

staff publisher Tessa Berenson editors-in-chief Sophia Nguyen Cindy Ok executive editor Benjamin Mueller managing editors Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni design editors Lian Fumerton-Liu Emmett Kim David Shatan-Pardo photo editor Maya Binyam senior editors Tao Tao Holmes Isabel Ortiz Emma Schindler associate editors Maya Averbuch Lara Sokoloff A. Grace Steig Ike Swetlitz copy editors Nathalie Levine Justine Yan

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

staff writers Gideon Broshy Ashley Dalton

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 2013 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50 The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature.

We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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the new journal Volume 46, Issue 2 October 2013 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

features

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Brave New World Yale ventures into the digital humanities.

by Sonja Peterson

Re-Growing Oak Street Fifty years later, will New Haven finally get urban development right?

by A. Grace Steig

standards

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points of departure by various authors personal essay No Mirrors in my Nana’s House

by Navy Encinias verse Tobias Kirchwey Jake Orbison

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snapshot A Room with a View

by Olivia Schwab snapshot Friends Indeed

by Julia Schwartz endnote The Week in Review

by Eric Boodman

Cover Design by Emmett Kim & David Shatan-Pardo Photo Courtesy of Yale College september 2013

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Madeleine Witt

points of departure

Now in 3D “This is half a lung.” Mark Michalski held up a twisting piece of plastic, one inch thick, to his chest. To me, it looked like roots on the underside of a tree, with small white tendrils poking through brown mesh. This was one of Michalski’s first attempts to create customized plastic models of human organs.

Michalski is a fourth-year resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Over the past year, he has been making plastic replicas of body parts using the machines at Yale’s Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID), an engineering workshop space located on the bottom floor of Becton Center on Prospect Street. The CEID provides materials, tools, and advising for any Yale student who signs up to be a member.

One such tool is a 3D printer. It works like a regular inkjet printer, but rather than depositing one layer of ink on paper, it deposits many layers of material, usually plastic, to create a three-dimensional object.

Michalski converts patients’ medical data into instructions for the printers at CEID, which then produce plastic models unique to each patient.

What started as a pet project is morphing into a technology that could revolutionize surgery and, more importantly to

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Michalski, help doctors communicate with patients about their diseases. Aside from the lung, his recent projects include a fractured pelvis, a diseased kidney, and a cancerous prostate.

As a radiologist, Michalski spends his days looking at MRI and CT scans of the insides of people’s bodies, analyzing these scans to diagnose diseases and plan treatments. In his office, Michalski used his laptop to show me a 3D skeleton with a fractured pelvis. He rotated the skeleton with a computer mouse, highlighted various bones, and opened 2D slices of the 3D model. Staring at the screen, I felt nowhere near the real thing, an operating room where a surgeon would manipulate a patient’s pelvis.

“3D reconstructions give you some great data,” Michalski said. “But…for a lot of populations who are not radiologists”— he lowered his voice—“even within the radiologist community, frankly, there’s value that comes from being able to hold [the organ].” So he looked into 3D printing at the CEID. He created his first model on a lowend 3D printer, which is about the same size and twice the price of a new MacBook Pro. “It all started on that MakerBot right there,” Michalski told me, pointing to the printer. Within a wooden frame, a small black box moved back and forth along metal rods, squeezing out plastic like glue from a hot glue gun. This machine had printed the root-like lung Michalski had shown me earlier. While Michalski and I spoke, two other students watched the MakerBot spit out a custom iPhone case.

About a year ago, Michalski was printing a version of the lung when his project caught the attention of Joseph Zinter, associate director of the CEID. Zinter and Michalski started talking about the concept and they were soon partnering to advance the work of 3D printing. Zinter has since put hundreds of hours into the project and established a special fund for organ printing at the CEID. The two have discussed

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Devon Geyelin

potential applications for this technology, including educating medical students, informing patients about their conditions, and helping surgeons prepare for complicated procedures.

This last idea has already been put into practice. Joseph Turek, chief of pediatric surgery at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, has been using 3D-printed models of hearts for almost a year. They help him finalize his strategy and gain confidence for performing surgery when the stakes are much higher. “When I go into the operating room, it’s the exact same thing that I’m seeing,” Turek said.

This summer, Michalski printed a cancerous knee for an orthopedic surgeon at Yale. While preparing for surgery, the surgeon put the model on his desk, took out his surgical tools, and determined the best way to excise the tumor without damaging the surrounding area. The model allowed him to practice technique without consequence.

These 3D printing projects now take up most of Michalski’s time. But in addition to his residency, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in investigative medicine at Yale. “I have no idea if you can write a thesis on this sort of thing,” Michalski said. “But I think it’s interesting enough”—he corrected himself —“important enough, that I’ve got to do it.”

The models’ educational and surgical applications are significant. But Michalski is primarily drawn to this work because it could better inform patients about how a disease affects their own organs. Holding a model of your liver when you have been diagnosed with a tumor gives you a concrete sense of what that means.

“The story, for me, won’t end until I’ve used this technology to make patients understand better what’s going on inside their body,” Michalski said. “If we can print new bracelets and trinkets with these [printers], then we can print meaningful objects for people who are really undergoing the battle of their life.”

—Ike Swetlitz

This Little Light of Theirs On August 24, scandal struck St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Whitney Avenue: a lamp was stolen. In an interview with the New Haven Register, church rector Father Michael Ray announced a reward and a no-questions-asked return policy for the small, silver, Victorian lamp that had hung above the church’s altar for more than twenty years. The lamp’s absence was felt “like a hole,” he said.

The story of the lamp’s arrival at St. Thomas’s is steeped in community lore.

Every parishioner I spoke to repeated the basic story as though he had heard and told it hundreds of times. About twenty-five years ago, a pair of now-deceased sisters paid for the lamp to be sent from Italy (or some other distant country, depending on whom I asked) and placed over the altar in honor of their brother, who had recently passed away. Whether lit by candle or electricity, the lamp had shone in the sanctuary ever since.

The church’s property manager, Julie Kelly, was preparing to place a fresh eight-day candle into the lamp when she first noticed its absence. She made frantic phone calls, “hoping against hope” that someone had taken it down for cleaning.

Each call ended in disappointment, and she

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quickly realized that it had been stolen.

Kelly describes herself as more “securityminded” than St. Thomas’s leaders, who prefer to emphasize openness and trust in the church community. But she was proud to say that the violation of trust would not cause the church to shut itself off from the world.

“People who come here for worship really have an expectation of safety in so many ways,” Kelly told me. “We want to be careful without putting up these giant barriers to people. That’s just the constant conflict.”

When I arrived at the church at 8:45 on a Sunday morning in September, there seemed to be no sign that anything was missing—except people. The sparsely attended eight o’clock service had already ended, and worshippers had not yet begun to assemble for the next, and more crowded, ten o’clock service. But the church doors were wide open, and the sanctuary was lit with sunshine filtered through stained glass windows.

Outside, Sandy Anagnostakis, a small and elderly woman, was removing the spent flower buds from a rhododendron bush. The work wasn’t necessary, she told me, but it looks nicer this way. Reverence for the church’s physical space easily extends to the objects it houses—even those that strike outsiders like me as quotidian.

Anagnostakis has been a member of St. Thomas’s for eight years, and she was at church the Sunday after the lamp was stolen.

“It was quite a shock to all of us, because it was such a part of the background beauty of the church,” she said, still picking off flower buds. Beyond the shock, the circumstances of the crime struck congregants as particularly odd. The thief left behind two silver candleholders, which are likely more valuable than the lamp and were easily accessible on tables at either side of the altar.

I had gone to St. Thomas’s expecting to find lamp zealots angrily calling for police to organize a statewide search of pawn-

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shops. Instead, I found congregants seeming to apologize for their sadness at the loss of a material object. At the first service without the lamp in a quarter of a century, the church congregants prayed for the thief—that he or she had been able to use it to relieve a pressing need for food or money, and had found emotional solace.

When I finally met Father Ray, the rector in the Register’s article, I was slightly disappointed to find that, despite his collar, Ray looked much more like a harried businessman than I’d pictured. Glasses sat on his round head, which was topped with salt-and-pepper hair, and his voice still bore traces of a childhood spent in central Texas. He recalled there was more to the lamp’s journey to St. Thomas, aspects of its story which sounded even more miraculous than what I had heard from the congregants. Though paid for by the sisters, it had originally been discovered in a flea market

by Father Ray’s predecessor, who bought it when it was grimy and seemed of little value. When the rector paid to have the lamp cleaned, he found that it was made of sterling silver.

But the lamp’s monetary value is not what made it important. When Father Ray became rector, he had the electrical wiring taken out of the lamp and replaced with a candle, which was always lit, symbolizing eternal hope. Over the years, the lamp became part of the identity of the phyical church, and of its community.

“A lot of what we feel is tied up with spiritual and emotional senses that are difficult to describe,” Father Ray said. “I don’t know how else to describe it. We know it’s not an important thing in the whole realm of issues.”

As if to convince himself, he repeated, “It’s not important.”

—Isabelle Taft

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Madeleine Witt

Folk Wisdom Hidden behind high stone walls and a wrought-iron gate, Edgerton Park looks like a stately sentry, a signal to cars and passersby that they have reached the New Haven-Hamden town line. But on the first Saturday of every September, Edgerton becomes an inviting festival ground. The musicians, vendors, and exhibitors at the annual Connecticut Folk Festival & Green Expo set up camp atop the park’s grassy hillsides, filling it with the mingled sounds of folk music and children at play.

Winding my way along the outskirts of this year’s festival, I take stock of the spectacle. To my right, a flock of unsupervised children gathers around a white tent where a grown-up fairy princess waves her arms in swooping circles. A young boy attempts to swivel his hips at the adjacent hula hoop station. The banner at the Wonderful Worms booth invites the brave and the dirt-loving to plunge their hands into pots of worm-filled soil and learn about its fertilizing properties. I have found my way to the kiddie section of the festival: the Green Kids’ Village.

Beyond face-painting and free childcare, the Green Kids’ Village exemplifies the festival’s commitment to education, founder and coordinator Coleen Campbell tells me. Of the more than eighty-five booths populating the vendor village this

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year, approximately twenty are in a workshop or performance format. The commercial aims of the festival are modest. Even vendors recognize that the most valuable aspect of a small-scale event such as CT Folk will be the customer interactions.

Vendors are not just peddling their organically grown apples, for instance; along with that apple, they hand over a lesson on the harmful effects of pesticides.

These lessons are passed on to attendees of all ages, says Campbell: “When you grab kids at a young age and educate them in fun ways about the environment, hopefully they will carry on and be the next coordinator of a green expo!”

Joe DeRisi, owner of Urbanminers, a deconstruction and salvaging business in South Hamden, calls this model of education “seed planting.” The metaphor is fitting: CT Folk is ultimately an exercise in community growth. The focus on youth education and community outreach helps create a space where likeminded community members can meet and forge connections, laying the groundwork for a more cohesive and environmentally sustainable community.

The sweet melodies of folk duo Hannah & Maggie float over a sea of white tents and draw me towards the festival’s central stage. Live music is a central part of the festival. Campbell explains that folk music and environmentalism are a natural combination, harkening back to the Great Depression days of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

In previous years, the folk festival had been a ticketed event, featuring headliners like Judy Collins and Emmylou Harris.

This was its second year with free admission, and a lineup of lesser-known local musicians. Barbara Shiller, president of the CT Folk Board of Directors, says, “My hope is that people will come to the event, perhaps not having heard of the musicians, but with an understanding that they will hear good music.”

In keeping with folk’s customarily fluid

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—Emily Quint-Hoover

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Devon Geyelin

definition, this year’s festival included musical acts ranging from country-inspired acoustic performers like Darrel Scott, to soulful harmonizers like Brother Sun, to quick-step bluegrass numbers performed

by Yale’s own Professors of Bluegrass, which includes Yale President Peter Salovey on the bass. On and off of the lowlying, white, wooden stage, the musicians appear at ease with the crowds. Many are CT Folk regulars, and they form part of an intimate local music scene. Some, like Hannah & Maggie, are out-of-towners who have grown attached to the festival’s musical community.

CT Folk is a labor of love for all involved— Campbell, Shiller, their colleagues on the board, and the host of yellow-clad volunteers who graciously accommodate the needs of vendors, musicians, and attendees alike. Shiller invited all of the volunteers and coordinators to her home as a celebratory thank-you, both prior to and after the festival. She recognizes that local events like CT Folk are community-building acts.

“Whether it’s environmental activism, or sharing in the love of music—when you’re working together to make something happen, you’re part of a community.”

This hard work has brought us CT Folk in all its summer-day glory. Vendors and customers chat like old friends. Festival volunteers call out to familiar faces in the audience. In line for Ashley’s ice cream, two strangers strike up a conversation about a side business in bike repair. Musicians, filtering off stage at the end of their act, find a spot among the scattering of picnic blankets and beach chairs, blending with audience members and playfully heckling their musical peers.

Stretching out into the late afternoon and evening, the festival stakes its claim on this last warm day in September, reminding us that there’s still time for another song.

Anna in the Park Vast gray clouds roll across the sky, shielding New Haven from the morning sun. In the center of Yale’s Cross Campus a tall metal chair waits, six folding chairs arrayed in front of it. A student emerges from Calhoun College, his hair spiked, a cigarette dangling from his lips. A ponytailed runner jogs by, and dozens of under-caffeinated students plod to class. The day will bring class discussions, email breakups, and drunken dances—imperceptible struggles and unrecognized victories.

Just past nine a.m., a young man holding a thick paperback approaches the chair and sits. The reader opens the book and regards his audience of one. He begins: “Anna Karenina. By Leo Tolstoy. Chapter One: All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way. All was confusion…”

The reader is a junior named Eric Sirakian, and he is the first participant in a marathon reading of Anna Karenina that will span the next thirty-six hours. The reading project is co-sponsored by the Humanities department and the Dramat’s production of Anna in the Tropics, a play in which Cuban immigrants in a cigar factory listen to the story of Anna Karenina in 1929. The work earned a Pulitzer for its author, former Yale School of Drama professor Nilo Cruz, in 2003. Sirakian directed the play at Yale in early October, but wanted the production to extend beyond the theater.

“The play and the novel are connected,” he said. “It’s a play that really celebrates storytelling and the power of stories to

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take us away from the manic world and to understand ourselves more closely.”

As he reads, Sirakian wears a plain gray shirt and black pants, a far cry from the fine riding gear of Anna’s lovers. But he reads the opening passages smoothly, with muted theatrics, stumbling only occasionally over the long Russian family names and patronymics.

In time, several other students take seats opposite the reader’s chair, and accidental spectators stand nearby, drawn by the strangeness of it all. They key in to the epic story of love, family, society, and betrayal in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. Kerry Philben, the next scheduled reader, arrives with her dog, a yellow lab, and waits for her turn to bring Tolstoy’s Tsarist Russia to life. Soon, she takes over for Sirakian, picking up where he left off with an impressive Russian accent. Another undergrad named Javier Cienfuegos, outfitted in a bow tie and blazer, taps his foot beneath his chair as he anticipates his turn. When he takes the stand, he starts describing Oblonsky’s goal to take all the pleasure he can out of life; meanwhile, some tourists and their microphone-clad leader come by and threaten to overwhelm Tolstoy with their oblivious chatter.

People mostly pass by in a rush, too busy to listen as Anna falls for the dashing Count Vronski, imperils her marriage to Count Karenin, and abandons her young son for the sake of a doomed love affair.

Was Yale shunning Anna as surely as St. Petersburg society had?

Yale’s campus is a poignant place for Anna to be brought to life; mere blocks from the reading, Tolstoy’s son Ilya lies buried in the Grove Street Cemetery under a black slate headstone that depicts the crucifix of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The younger Tolstoy moved to Connecticut just before the Russian revolution. He established an artists’ colony a few miles from campus and spent the rest of his life there. Although many of the world’s most eminent writers, including Nabokov and september 2013

Dostoyevsky, have called Anna Karenina the greatest novel ever written, Ilya maintained that his father hated the work and wished it had been burned.

For thirty-six hours, a devoted group of readers immerse themselves in its language and setting, and in the passion of its protagonists. Virgil Blanc, a junior who has never read the book, spends more hours than any of the other volunteer readers narrating Anna’s tribulations. Wrapped in a fleece blanket to ward off the cold, Blanc reads for five straight hours, from two to seven a.m. “I wanted to see the transformation of reading aloud after five hours of doing it,” said Blanc, who isn’t a stranger to testing his endurance, but usually does so with marathon runs and bike rides. “I couldn’t see what happened to the listeners, but I could see what happened to me.”

For much of the night, Blanc is alone.

He grows closer to the work. As the characters suffer, so does he. As they weep, his tears flow, too. Close to four a.m., a student returning from a night of revelry stumbles across the scene and listens for a few moments. “Right on, man,” he says, nodding his head.

The sun rises. Another night falls. The sky is dark and clear. With no classes beckoning, students amble across campus. It is Yale’s family weekend, and many have parents in tow. Anna’s life shatters as she moves from Russia to Italy and back, as she morphs from bored wife to reckless lover to social outcast.

What matters is not how many people listen. Tolstoy’s words, read aloud, bring Anna’s anguish, foolishness, and mistakes to the center of campus. Even as our heroine, falling from grace, hurls herself under the wheels of a train, she lives.

—Noah Remnick

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Madeleine Witt

Doctors Diminishing Death The title of the eighteenth-century British print, “The Doctor Diminishing Death,” seems too triumphant for the scene. Death, a skeleton, climbs through the open window of a sick man’s room, eyeing his next victim: a thin, nervous, pale man. The doctor, slightly disheveled in a red coat and breeches, points a golden medical instrument at the intruder in a desperate attempt to stave off his advance. The patient shields himself with the only available object—his porridge spoon.

Despite its grim subject matter, the print, which satirizes medicine’s sometimes futile fight against nature, is meant to be light-hearted. In this respect, it is typical of the prints in the Clements C. Fry Collection at the Yale School of Medicine.

The collection features prints on subjects ranging from mental hospitals to hypnosis.

It spans five centuries, with works by over six hundred artists. Satirical British and French prints from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often poking fun at the pain of illness or the incompetence of bad doctors, make up the majority of the collection.

Though the Fry Collection contains nearly eight thousand prints and drawings, its contents are squirreled away in the basement of the medical school’s historical library. It is open to public viewing, but

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only by request. Since the subject matter is unusual and highly specific, the collection doesn’t exactly draw crowds. Incredible care, however, is devoted to preserving the objects in the dusty basement recesses.

Alongside the labyrinth of rooms housing old books and prints are technologically advanced printers, scanners, and machines for turning the pages of old books, to keep oily fingers from touching the prints. Those in the know will tell you that, despite the aura of obscurity, the Fry Collection is one of the most well-known medical print collections in the world.

Medical prints sound like a dusty area of study, but as William Hefland will tell you, the intersection of art and science is fascinating. One of the collection’s most prominent donors, Hefland has a background in pharmaceuticals but fell in love with medical art soon after beginning to explore it. Now a recognized figure in the medical print-collecting field, he spoke fondly of one German poster abstractly depicting a man as a chemical plant, a print he tracked down after losing it to a physician friend at an auction. In fact, he stressed that much of the prints’ worth comes from their aesthetic appeal—they give researchers less medical historical information than I had imagined.

“You’d like to have illustrations of certain moments in history,” Helfand told me.

“But you don’t.”

Much of the artwork depicts scenes the artists did not actually view; the satires twist historical facts to illustrate certain points. A common trope of British caricature mocks the rural apothecary’s absurd treatment of an unsuspecting peasant with bizarre animal-derived products.

To explain the niche these prints originally occupied, the collection’s curator, Susan Wheeler, likened them to satirical cartoons in the New Yorker today. Many of the works appeared in daily newspapers, and others were sold in print shops as decoration. A closer examination of the prints and drawings can reveal a time period’s con-

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temporary politics and popular thought about medicine. Along with its humorous pieces, the collection also contains a wide variety of serious works depicting medical hardships. The most haunting of these portray the trials of mental illness. A blackand-white, late-eighteenth-century print titled “Madness” shows a young woman, slightly disheveled and wrapped in a shawl, glancing toward the viewer with a searing expression of desperation and horror.

Each year, only a handful of researchers, if any, request access to the collection’s resources. They primarily use them to locate images for papers and books on relevant medical and historical topics. John Booss, a professor emeritus of neurology at Yale, contacted Wheeler when searching for images to illustrate his book, To Catch a Virus. He ended up using four posters from the Historical Medical Posters collection, noting the importance of the images’ aesthetic appeal. Booss wrote about the history of diagnostic virology for the general

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public as well as a technical audience, and he needed images that would appeal to all readers.

“Medicine has become so highly technical that doctors are at risk of becoming highly-skilled technicians, and a great deal of the humanity of medicine is lost,” Booss warns. He sees art as a powerful way for scientists to speak to the general public, if those scientists can realize it; although many of its individual prints satirize the grotesque, dehumanizing aspects of illness, the Fry Collection may bridge the gap between doctors and the general public.

Though there are few visitors, the meticulous preservation of the art allows researchers to present this side of medicine. Work like Booss’s helps bring hidden prints, if only a fraction of the thousands in the Fry collection, outside the dusty basement doors.

—Emily Efland

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poetry The Volcano

by Tobias Kirchwey

Every night, boats glide out from behind The island to keep an eye on the volcano And draw its luster out, through red eruptions, into the sailors’ eyes, and into the water which holds itself against the boat, against the island, and cools the stones intolerable to the skin.

Lapilli falling steadily from far away Slowly rake the night-slide of ash to water. The water keeps time, as Tuna are trawled in in a net between two boats.

Arm after arm, fishermen bring them to a calm place.

On the rocks that slip below and rise out again, Mother walks to meet the waves And the waves meet her with a splash and spill.

Is it enough to fill a black volcanic basin?

She descends wading deep.

The sand slopes so sharply that if she looks down, She sees depth with no floor, And the island begs in the distance, For tall grass, brush and broom made by the moon, Drawn by an inland wind into blue straw bales Before dispersing like hair.

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Warm Wool

by Jake Orbison

When I was a boy, my mother showed my sister how to milk the sheep. Once she’d fastened the ropes around the neck and feet, she stuck her cheek in the pelvic crook, digging her grayed black hair into the browned white wool.

The smell was stale, warm and sweet.

I ask you if nurturing is feminine, laughing you say yes. But you are very feminine.

My head didn’t fit; my wrist on your hip— shower water drizzled from your lips like laughter.

I dried lying on the bathmat between the sink and the wall, and after I heard you really laughing.

With the steam rushing out into the cold and open, you held your hair and wrapped a towel around your neck.

A drained, wrinkled grin dripped last drops right past me.

Go on then—baa your head off.

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No Mirrors in my Nana’s House

by Navy Encinias I’ve been thinking about mirrors. Mainly, I’ve been remembering that, for some months not too long ago, I took it upon myself to have a strange daily encounter with a mirror, every day except Sunday. Often I’d spend several hours in front of the mirror in the morning, and then again in the evening. I’d go home and eat alone in my bedroom, and I’d fall asleep soon after. I’d wake up and do it again. Because most days looked alike, I have trouble remembering them distinctly. So I was surprised when I realized a few days ago that I had kept this ritual alive for nine months—my entire sophomore year of college.

Mirrors provide us with an overwhelming amount of information about ourselves. That information—the clear and accurate image—is objective, or seems so. What I see in a mirror I take to be true and assertive, and because mirrors communicate with rare candor and immediacy, it’s easy to grow dependent on them. Mirrors show you where and who you are.

Think, for example, of the experience of sitting across from a friend late at night, when she’s willing to tell you something about you. Seeing myself through others this way has protected me on many occasions. I am uncertain of myself otherwise.

But as soon as I began asking mirrors for something specific that year, the need for information became dangerous. It became a quiet and desperate “I want, I want,” with an immediate response: the clear and accurate image.

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Illustrations by Devon Geyelin

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I grew up dancing, and I rely on this senaccurately as a mirror; ballet studios are timental-sounding phrase to explain that I full of them. began dancing well before I wanted to. For I attended ballet class that year with many years I danced as much as I played a newfound desperation. I know this beor worked at school, and when I came of cause if I try, I now remember those nine age, I confronted dance as an inextricable months as one continuous staring into the part of my sense of self. Dancing places me mirror, a time in which I kept noticing the squarely within my family and its dramas shortcomings of my own body, and returnand daily life, because my family is full of ing my gaze back to the image of my redancers. My choice to go to college was, in flected eyes. Because ballet is an exacting many ways, drastically alternative. I was art form, it quickly becomes psychologiraised with the assumption that, someday, cally disturbing, in its recursiveness and I would go on to dance full-time. When I in its daily demands. Your leg is never high return home, I find the assumption still or long enough; there is always someone alive. Sometimes I think of my time here better than you. I found solace in looking as a sanctioned, four-year vacation from myself in the eye threateningly, demandbeing who I am. Tomoring of myself that I work row I’ll wake up and reharder. By the end of the member that I’m actually year, I had overused my I grew up dancing, and I a dancer, and have been right hip flexor and derely on this sentimentalthis whole time. veloped a crippling anxiPart of the unique sounding phrase to explain ety problem. I had no idea claim that dance has on who I was. that I began dancing well a dancer’s identity is But there are some before I wanted to. that, in order to become things from that time a good dancer, you must that I remember clearly. be raised according to its A dancer’s talent, for exprecepts. Most good dancers are children, ample, is measured in two ways: how much their skill and talent not a consequence of physical potential he was born with and choice, but of strict deference to figures of has maintained, and how willing he is to authority. And so when parents raise their grit his teeth and use it well. This appears children, they guide them toward what to be a standard definition of talent, until is useful in their endeavors. When dancyou hear ballet teachers reconcile the two ers raise their children, they guide them metrics and reassign students into multitoward mirrors. Nothing is so useful, beplying categories. There are dancers “with cause dancers use mirrors to understand great facility,” but who are lazy. These their work. Terrifyingly, their work is their dancers often look as they should, but reown bodies. To grow up dancing, I felt, was main weak and careless. There are dancers to learn that being hard-working and selfwho are “inspiring” because they work hard critical was not a matter of introspection, and “to their full potential.” These dancers but one of constantly improving the way I don’t have the body to do well, but “love to appeared in a mirror. dance.” Then there are dancers who are When I arrived at college, I felt inadebeautiful. quate to my peers, homesick, and incapable So few dancers strike this balance and of finding my way here. I knew I had come achieve that distinction. Those who do ofto Yale to find a place in the world, so at the ten acquire an eerie, almost glassy look in beginning of my sophomore year, I Googled their eye. They rarely find their own eyes the closest ballet studio and started going in the mirror. Rarely do they look you in every day. Nothing tells you who you are so yours. I think, somewhere along the way, september 2013

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they’ve lost the sense that their bodies beimages and interpreting what I saw. I was long to them. Obedient now only to music more successful the more exacting I was, and the direction of their keepers, their the more I demanded out of what I looked every movement is the consequence of a at. Most of the time, I neglected that work balance serendipitously struck long ago, and performed it on myself instead. Such when they were deemed beautiful chilan intense and sustained look at yourdren. After growing up disciplined, they self isn’t healthy; it doesn’t improve you earn a career, one in which they are woand it isn’t what we’re at school to do. But ken up to rehearse, then again to perform. by nature, I’m a very willful dreamer, and Their artistic skill is called, by many, “inthe situation complicated when a ballet terpretive”—that is, at the whim of what teacher told me I had enough talent to quit they interpret. They work hard, but their college and dance full-time. Who knows if work has the look of ritual. Watching those it was true—but I looked harder at myself dancers is like watching objects suspended regardless, and willfully called that lookin midair, fragile because they’ll soon fall. ing a dream. A few weeks later, I couldn’t Regardless, it’s beautiful. I’m not quite sure move my right leg at night. Sometimes I’d what I envied, but I think it was everything. black out for seconds at a time; I think from Dancers are called nerves. I remember now narcissistic, because that when I’d return to Even after you fall and they’re obsessed with consciousness, I was usuretire, you carry the the beauty of their own ally looking at myself in image. But beautiful a mirror—in a bathroom look with you. dancers are no longer somewhere, or standing obsessed, per se; their in front of the full-length beauty and talent is the very water they in my sophomore suite. swim in—a banal and constant reality.

Those obsessed are those of us in desperate One day, I did the reading for seminar need to see ourselves in the mirror and find and found some help in it. It was an essay the reflection a certain way. Narcissism is on Édouard Manet’s “Un bar aux Folies hardly the word: there is no erotic interest Bergère,” by an art historian named T.J. or latent egotism, no pleasure in the act of Clark. Manet paints a barmaid attending reflection. It is, more simply, a consuming her bar. Everything in the painting takes aspiration, a sort of unhealthy relationon the quality of a reflective surface. On shi—a dependence on a mirror that will display and for sale are a bowl of a shining never give you what you ask of it. It took clementines and two roses in a vase, liquor me awhile to understand it, but eventually bottles with modern labels, and presumI think I did: it’s the dependency that develably, the barmaid herself. She shows a paops when you love something, and it simply tron the fleshy insides of her forearms, and won’t love you back. If you are lucky and there’s a bunch of flowers collected at her beautiful—if dancing somehow does love cleavage. She has an eerie, almost glassy you back—the mirror is no longer useful to look in her eye. We get an overwhelming you. You get that look in your eye; you earn amount of information, however, from the a career. Even after you fall and retire, you framed mirror behind her. In its reflection, carry the look with you. we see the sheer enormity of the FoliesAround that time I decided to become Bergère—the lurid, electric lights, the hunan art history major. The work was a fadreds of people, a trapeze artist swinging miliar, even convenient exercise, and I overhead. Amid the bustle, the mirror also wasn’t ready to challenge myself more captures a quiet exchange. The barmaid than I already was. It required looking at leans forward to her patron, in a delicate

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performance of femininity and supplication. The reflection shows one barmaid, servile and attentive—and yet her eyes suggest another, hardly servile and hardly attentive. It seems she’s forgotten where she is.

“A mirror is a surface on which a segment of the surrounding world appears, directly it seems, in two dimensions,” Clark writes. “As such it has often been taken as a good metaphor for painting.” The mirror may be a device that flattens, but it never fixes. Unlike painting, the segments of the world that a mirror captures are never rendered permanent. What’s flattened and framed by the mirror is always flickering and variable—subject to immediate and constant change. Clark continues, “there is literally nothing behind the barmaid but glass,” and he’s right. It’s just a piece of glass. He goes on to say that “there is a plain fact of vision somewhere” and, frankly, I wonder where it is. I wonder if, in all its plainness, the fact of vision is ever satisfying.

I kept asking the mirror for the plain and the factual, the immediately satisfying, and it never came. What’s most frustrating now is that, as many times as I looked at myself in the mirror that year, not one of those sustained stares still belongs to me.

They’re lost now, or I’ve misplaced them.

I have a large mirror in my bedroom this year, but I can’t find them there either, and maybe it’s best that they’re missing. Instead I have a few pairs of ballet slippers left and a drawer of practice clothes. They’re black and well-worn, and I cherish them now as surviving relics from a bad time.

My grandmother and I had a conversation about it all one afternoon, and I cried about it for the first time. She made a few promises: that even though I never trusted the mirror to show me so, that my body is strong and beautiful. She told me that this trouble was bound to come, but that it has passed. She promised that tomorrow I would wake up and remember that I am who I am becoming, and not who I am in september 2013

the mirror, and maybe not a dancer at all.

There was nothing immediately plain or factual about what she said, but for some reason, I’ve been better ever since.

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snapshot

A Room With a View A painter reflects on a beloved space.

By Olivia Schwob The card reader glows a prohibitive red.

It is barely September, and Yale’s campus is poised on the brink of the new semester. The clusters of graduate students who will soon clog the front steps of the building, smoking their menthols or scraping at Styrofoam pad thai containers with plastic forks, are nowhere to be seen. Green Hall is still waiting for its occupants. Coming in from the hard light of Chapel Street at noon, I pass through double glass doors into the cool dark of the atrium.

The painting studios are on the second floor, and I take the stairs with a rhythm now familiar to me. Usually, most of these rooms are locked, but today the heavy metal doors are flung wide open. The whole place feels atypically loose, and peaceful.

The soles of my shoes crack the quiet, sending an echo into the corridor as fluorescent lights flicker on to mark my way.

I note with satisfaction that Room 211, at least, is locked. I fish my key ring out of my bag and feel around for a thick brass talisman, with “AZHU” printed on its head.

I know the right key by its weight in my hand, and the door unlocks with a familiar schhckk. Room 211 is empty—it’s the early days, still. The last early days I’ll experience here. I’ve come back to be comforted; I want the space to fold me back in. I need a constant, something I can count on.

The room is dead quiet and barely recognizable. Light streams in from the windows spanning the facing wall, and sets a

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bleached glow over the room. It looks unbelievably clean—like the walls have renewed themselves over the summer, shedding a mottled skin for a newer, glistening one.

After the door slams shut behind me, 211 seems more familiar. Stepping closer to the walls, I see faint evidence of the room’s recent past: paint that the summer maintenance crew has failed to totally erase. Here, a dripped line of red; by the window, a constellation of blue acrylic spattering that I can trace to a friend’s practice in the autumn of our sophomore year. The floors are a complex map of past work. The oldest colors have been scrubbed down into the concrete, losing all but the very last of their character. Other stains look just-spilled. I try to parse the blots of color for their associations—a distinctive purple that another friend is known to favor; that blood red, that time I cut my foot on a broken oil bottle and the blood went everywhere (and how it looked like paint).

The first semester of my freshman year, I enrolled in my first painting class in 211. I took to the rhythm of the studio immediately—settling in for multi-hour marathons, balancing my dinner on the radiator. It was a lonely semester, with few of the other students intending to be art majors. They came to class, they left. They didn’t seem to feel the gravity of the room so strongly. The next year, however, I found my people. We felt like pioneers, building our shelter in Green 211.

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Zach was the owner of the blue acrylic constellations. I remember his glass palette, always spotless, his neat rows of small piles of paint, his paintings—small brown boxes against a blue grid, over and over again. His eyebrows, pinched together over wire-rimmed glasses, his skinny arms raised high, his fine fingers gripping the brush so hard that they turned white. I don’t remember him ever being happy with his paintings; I don’t remember any of us being happy with our paintings. That wasn’t the point. They’d hum on the walls, waiting for us, as we went about the other business of our weeks. The door swung open and shut, open and shut.

Now, as I stand in the middle of the room, any place my eyes rest is caked with memory. The dented gray radiators— spending the night here in winter, we huddled in front of the heaters on the cold floor, sleeping lightly, then rousing ourselves to finish the eight, twelve, twenty paintings due only hours later. That pink wing-back armchair (sagging more, now, than it used to) where we would sit when we had given up, however briefly.

To my left, the metal carts in which we stashed our lives’ trappings—artistic and otherwise. Teacups, warm sweaters, scented hand soap repurposed for brush cleaner. All the carts are imperfect in some way, whether it’s a missing wheel, a broken hinge, or a faulty latch. I know well the harsh screech of dragging the metal beasts across a concrete floor. Scraps of tape used to claim ownership, now effaced and cryptic: “racie,” suggests one, “CRAN,” shouts another. Thick gobs of paint can be picked off the surfaces like scabs.

Looking out over the fresh glowing white of the movable partition walls, the neatly stacked (if visibly rickety) stools, it’s hard to believe how quickly it can all build up and be taken down. Effort, frustration, investment, paint. Can it really be as important as it feels? Felling the trees, clearing the land, building the cabin—only to be swallowed in a forest fire at the end of each september 2013

semester.

That original wagon party finally reached the frontier and split to go their separate ways. Some people are making video work now; some are designers, some animators. Some have no idea what they’re doing after graduation this May, but they probably won’t be painting. As it pushes us out gently, the school gathers in a new batch of pioneers, preparing itself for their new architecture. We won’t be completely erased, though, and most likely, we will be back. We’ve kept our keys.

Illustration by Jin Ai Yap

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BRAV NE WORL Yale Ventures into the Digital Humanities

by Sonja Peterson

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he moment I walked into the stacks of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, I knew it was love at first smell. The scent of yellowing paper reminded me of the library in the small town where I grew up. I had nearly exhausted the collections of that library by the time I got to high school, whereas I haven’t even managed to set foot on each of Sterling’s sixteen floors.

What to do with all these centuries of words, endlessly piling up on library shelves? Most books in Sterling are a part of what’s called “the great unread”—the profusion of books and other cultural output that go ignored by humanities scholars.

From all the novels and histories, all the theory and criticism published in the last half century, we select a relative few, creating a comprehensible, manageable canon out of the overwhelming possibilities.

Until now, humanities scholars have been devoting their lives to narrowing down the resources in their field. But as libraries like Sterling begin translating their texts into digital forms, scholars have begun to wonder whether we might be able to use new technologies to make use of entire libraries of works, rather than a narrow few.

New computational techniques can then work to “read” these millions of forgotten texts, drawing out topics and trends. Using these tools, scholars in humanities and the sciences are partnering on projects that weren’t possible even ten years ago—things like text-mining, cultural mapping, and automated literary analysis. These new techniques are part of what’s called the digital humanities, a discipline that is just now beginning to take root at Yale. While the movement raises exciting possibilities, it is also asking scholars to confront how they define the humanities as a discipline.

Last March, Peter Leonard became Yale’s first digital humanities librarian, a new position that signals Yale’s growing support for scholars exploring the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. In his office on the second floor

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Illustration by Jin-Ai Yap

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of Sterling, thick volumes of Old Norse, these areas will relate to one another and Swedish, and Icelandic literature sit next which ones Yale will focus on are questions to a few well-worn books on programthat Leonard and other Yale researchers ming. One shelf is dedicated to a few relics are working to answer. of technologies past: a motherboard from There’s also another, perhaps even more a 1980s NEXT computer sits alongside a pressing question to consider: how will the Nune, a tablet-style educational device digital humanities define its work in refrom the early nineties. lation to the disciplines from which it so Leonard’s path to the digital humanioften borrows tools, such as the social scities began with a relatively traditional ences? The technical challenges of repurhumanities education: an undergraduate posing the objective, mathematical tools of degree in art history and a graduate degree the social sciences or of representing the in literature. Like most literature students, full complexity of a manuscript in a digital he was trained to read a novel closely and form, mask a deeper tension in reconciling meticulously, and to the work of very different dissect paragraphs disciplines: one that focus“A book communicates around a seminar taes on data-driven, empirible. It was only during cal answers, and the other meaning to us, but it his postdoctoral work which is more comfortable doesn’t communicate at UCLA in Nordic litwith ambiguity and openmeaning to a machine.” erature that Leonard ended questions. Leonard became interested in asks, “how do we make use quantitative approachof techniques that might es to literary questions. Today, he focuses emerge from outside our disciplines, withon computer analyses of large collections out becoming unduly beholden to them?” of digital texts. As an example of this technique, he showed me an analysis he conOne of the earliest projects in the digiducted on 120 years worth of Vogue magatal humanities was finding ways to turn zines. The project tracked changes in the physical collections of “humanities data”— publication’s attention to particular topics which can range from scholarly works to from decade to decade. In the early twennovels, photographic images to historical tieth century, the editors were more interrecords—into a form that can be analyzed ested in social interactions; more recently, by a computer. That project of digitization the focus has shifted to beauty products remains at the center of the discipline. and fashion.

The work of women’s, gender, and sexAs digital librarian, Leonard will help uality studies professor Laura Wexler, a define a young and diffuse field. Since comphotographic historian, falls into this cating to Yale, he has begun holding open ofegory. She oversees a collaborative digital fice hours every Thursday with the Digital humanities project spearheaded by graduHumanities Working Group, fielding quesate students Lauren Tilton and Taylor Artions from students and faculty, and getnold, who come, respectively, from the ting a sense of what the digital humanities fields of American Studies and statistics. will look like at Yale. “The definition of digThe team is mapping and analyzing over ital humanities is probably a little different 160,000 photos taken by photographers on every campus,” Leonard explained. In hired by the federal Farm Security Adminaddition to computational research methistration’s Office of War and Information ods and digitization, the digital humanifrom 1935 to 1945, creating an online daties can include fields such as instructional tabase that is searchable and accessible to technology and new media studies. How a range of audiences from middle schoolers

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to schoolteachers to academics.

A version of Photogrammer, the tool they’ve created, is now available online in beta. You can easily follow a particular photographer’s walk around Chicago, search for photos from your home county, or use the caption search to find every image containing a lumberjack. A few decades ago, the only way to look at these photos would be to rifle though hundreds of file cabinets in a dank basement in Washington.

Wexler, Tilton, and Arnold are still determining what kinds of questions they might answer with their newly collected data. Beyond correlating various attributes of the photos and the geographical location where they were taken, they’re also interested in harnessing the potential of crowdsourcing. “It’s designed to be a public platform,” Wexler explained. Users could participate by tagging photos or uploading current images of the same locations to see what’s changed.

“We were able to take this big messy data set and put it into a form that’s nimble,” said Wexler. Humanities data tends to be disorganized, posing interesting technical challenges for programmers. The very idea of “data” in the humanities has been challenged by some scholars, such as Joanna Drucker, a professor of information studies at UCLA, who argues that rather than thinking of data as a direct representation of reality—in the sense of its Latin root, which means “what is given”—we should think of it as something that is collected and constructed. Digital data offers only a partial representation of an object; the object has to be broken down into a set of encoded attributes before it can appear on your screen. Deciding how to divide an object like a painting into a few lines of code is the biggest challenge in any digitization project.

“A book communicates meaning to us, but it doesn’t communicate meaning to a machine,” said Carol Chiodo, a Dante scholar and member of the Digital Humanities Working Group. “Anyone who’s tried to september 2013

extract text from a PDF knows that.” She pointed to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as a set of guidelines for how to format texts so that computers can understand them. These guidelines determine how to mark important features such as paragraph, section, and chapter breaks.

If you’ve ever been forced by a website to prove you’re a human by transcribing a nearly unreadable word, you may have contributed to cleaning up some messy humanities data yourself. These “CAPTCHA” (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) challenges are used by websites to ensure that someone filling data into a form isn’t actually an automated program attempting to hack the system. A decoding system called reCAPTCHA manipulates this tool for research by taking images from old manuscripts in the process of being digitized and using them as challenges. Algorithms identify which words in a manuscript are most likely to have been wrongly transcribed, and these are outsourced to an army of unwitting Internet users. reCAPTCHA’s first project was cleaning up digitizations of the New York Times, but it’s now moving on to work on the millions of books scanned by Google.

Technical challenges like these are part of what draws computer scientists to get involved with the digital humanities.

“Humanists aren’t inhibited by knowing what’s difficult to accomplish with computational techniques, so that can lead us to interesting new challenges,” said Holly Rushmeier, chair of Yale’s computer science department. Rushmeier’s work often involves visual data mining: transforming objects or images into digital data that can be manipulated and analyzed. Before coming to Yale, she worked on several cultural heritage projects at IBM. One involved creating a digital model of Michelangelo’s Pietà. The statue was partially destroyed

by Michelangelo himself, and another sculptor attempted to repair it. An art historian who was trying to understand what

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drove Michelangelo to damage his own work wanted to see how the statue looked with the repaired pieces removed. The techniques developed in the course of the project weren’t just of future use to scholars, but also to the development of commercial 3D imaging products. “With this type of work, you have both the immediate benefit for the scholar, and all these spinoff benefits,” said Rushmeier.

But what about the “great unread”? Peter Leonard is helping some Swedish scholars use a program that can identify topics in a huge collection of novels. He showed me a page of results. Each topic is displayed as a cluster of words, their relative sizes depending on their importance in the text, with related passages on the side.

The topics aren’t suggested by the researcher, but are drawn out of the text by the program itself. “The wonderful and terrible thing about it is that it only shows you what it thinks is there,” Leonard said.

There are limitations, of course—a computer can’t read 1984 and come out with a topic called “fascism” if it’s never directly mentioned—but topic modeling can expose unexpected connections.

Techniques like topic modeling can have larger implications for academic fields, and could potentially alter the canon itself. Leonard gave me the example of research done on nineteenth-century Swedish novels. When studying these novels, scholars had usually focused on the works of Ibsen and Strindberg, identifying the authors as primarily responsible in the drive to replace Romanticism with realism during that period, writing about the economic rights of women and life in bourgeois households.

In the seventies, though, painstaking archival research showed that there was also a large cohort of female writers who contributed to this movement, examining topics that had previously been ascribed solely to men. Those researchers were using traditional techniques—reading as

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many books in the archive as possible.

Forty years later, digital humanities scholars wanted to see if they could find similar results using topic modeling. They found that the same topics that turned up in Ibsen and Strindberg were also in the works of female writers.

“In that case, we had a cheat sheet to check our results against,” said Leonard.

But it was proof that the technique could identify previously overlooked pockets of important scholarly work.

While nearly every faculty member I spoke to was excited about the potential of the digital humanities to analyze large volumes of humanities data, they all acknowledged certain limitations. The first problem is assembling a truly comprehensive collection of humanities data in the first place, when not all of it is accessible.

“There’s a selection process at every stage,” Leonard explained. “First, not every writer gets their book published. Then, not every book gets purchased. Over the next hundred years, the library makes decisions about whether we should keep these books.

“Now the question is: which books do we want to send to Google?” Because information is lost at each step, scholars need to qualify their conclusions to acknowledge the way these missing pieces could bias their results.

Of course, there are humanities questions that this sort of approach simply can’t answer. For more contextualized and nuanced readings of particular texts, we need humans, not machines. “No one’s trying to say, Oh, it’s time to become a big data scientist and forget humanities training,” Leonard said. “But we can keep that incredible value as we use new techniques to engage with works that might have fallen outside the canon.”

Franco Moretti, a digital humanities pioneer and founder of the Stanford Literature Lab, snuck a jab at Yale into his well-known, now decade-old essay, “The

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Slaughterhouse of Literature,” calling close college students, was only invented in reading a “secularized theology…that has 2001. The digital humanities is evolving at radiated from the cheerful town of New a similarly rapid pace, in a way that might Haven over the whole field of literary studbe difficult for Yale to deal with under its ies.” current system. “What Yale needs to be Things have changed since Moretti working on is not necessarily making inwrote that essay, but Yale’s English and dividual changes, but figuring out ways to Literature departments are still known for adapt to change differently,” Kirkpatrick emphasis on close reading, and the Universaid. “We’re great on stability, not so much sity has been reluctant to embrace the “dison agility.” tant reading” aspects of digital humanities Kirkpatrick still hopes that digital huresearch. “We have a deep commitment to manities can be worked into the curricuclose reading, and that is something that lum. He imagines an English department computers have not been good at doing in which professors might list macroanalyet: that very human act of reading, underysis as one of many scholarly interests— standing, digesting, and making an arguright alongside, say, Anglo-Saxon poetry or ment,” said English professor Amy HungerMarxism—and a course on computational ford, whose work in American literature stylistics might be offered as an elective has grown to encompass studies of changfor undergrads. ing media forms.

There are already some scholars inFor Hungerford, the corporating digital techdevelopment of digital niques and social science For Hungerford, the humanities at Yale, partools into their work, development of digital ticularly in her departKirkpatrick pointed out; ment, is a “chicken-andthey simply don’t publish humanities at Yale, egg problem.” In order to in online journals devotparticularly in her attract digital humanied to digital humanities department, is a “chickenties scholars, Yale needs or consider it central to and-egg problem.” to have the community, their research. There is resources, and senior faca pitfall: having scholars ulty that support them. use digital techniques But in order to invest in those resources, without maintaining digital humanities’ someone needs to lobby the administration separate identity makes it difficult to easand raise awareness about the need for ily identify progress. “If digital text analyYale to make those investments. sis falls alone in a forest, does anybody hear Trip Kirkpatrick, a member of the Digiit?” Kirkpatrick asked. He believes that tal Humanities Working Group and a senior digital humanities will only be thought instructional technologist for Yale, agreed of as a self-standing field if scholars who that the growth of the digital humanities clearly identify their work as digital huat Yale hasn’t been as rapid as it has been manities become successful. at some peer institutions. “Yale is in many I asked Leonard what separates the soways a structurally conservative institucial sciences from the humanities if both tion,” said Kirkpatrick. “It’s been around for begin to use the same tools. For him, what over three hundred years and expects to be differentiates the disciplines isn’t so much around permanently, so it looks at things methodology as the sort of questions they in terms of big time frames.” want to ask, but he acknowledged that the Meanwhile, the digital world moves relationship can be “uneasy.” fast. Kirkpatrick pointed out that Wikipe“People will keep doing close readings dia, a now indispensible resource for most forever,” Leonard said. “It’s just that some september 2013

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people are interested in supporting close readings with quantitative and algorithmic analysis of humanities data.”

Regardless of how the work is labeled, the new generation of scholars is clearly making a turn toward a more technological approach. Erin Maher, a senior at Yale, is a perfect example: she began her undergraduate years in the humanities before switching computer science, and finally majoring in women’s, gender and sexuality Studies. “I thought, well, now I have to drop my interest in technology,” Maher said. But classes like Wexler’s that incorporate new media studies have allowed her to find an intersection between her two interests.

Maher’s senior project, under Wexler’s guidance, will study communities developed on the microblogging website Tumblr.

In the past, Maher told me, anthropologists studying communities like Tumblr have tended to be “disconnected.” “They publish their work in places that the people they’re writing about will never have access to,” she explained.

Maher also works as a programmer for Yale’s Information Technology Services, helping develop educational tools such as Pnut, which will allow students to give lecturers feedback in real time. She’s hoping that in the future she will use her programming skills to help build more accessible scholarly publishing platforms online, building ladders in and out of the ivory tower.

It’s this ethos that particularly drives Chiodo in her work on the history of Dante scholarship. “We’ve got seven hundred-plus years of commentaries and scholarship, of blood, sweat, tears and tons of words expended on this author. I’m finding that digital tools are allowing me to say new things, to see the work in a new way, and that’s true of my colleagues as well,” Chiodo said. “That in and of itself offers huge possibility.”

Riding the elevator up through the stacks, I’m now hyper-aware of the “great unread” around me. Tracking down a par-

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ticular volume of Chaucer, I feel myself taking part in a long tradition of skimming across the top of a vast reservoir of cultural output. While exploring the digital humanities, I’ve realized that in my past three years as an English major I’ve never been forced to truly examine the tools I’m using.

While I may go on close reading Chaucer’s stanzas, I’ll do so with a better sense of other technologies of knowledge, other ways of seeing, that—for the moment—exist outside of my reach.

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snapshot

Friends Indeed A Quaker preschool tries to make a home for more of the community.

by Julia Schwarz No one cries over spilt milk at the Friends Center for Children. The Tupperware has tops there. Everyone always remains calm.

A small boy reaches for the Puffins cereal and frozen blueberries sitting in the center of a low table. He pours them into a neon yellow bowl, and turns to three other boys at the table. They watch their peers stack blocks, curl up with books, and fiddle with puzzle pieces. Then one boy reaches for the Lazy Susan and gives it a whirl. Containers of milk and raisins are upended.

Fluorescent cutlery goes flying.

What looks to be a playtime mess is part of an attempt to clean up early childhood education in New Haven. The Friends Center for Children, a progressive Quaker pre-school in Fair Haven, began with four children in a basement and today educates more than seventy toddlers and infants in a new state-of-the-art facility. The 9,245-square-foot building was completed just this year, but is already well on its way to serving the community.

When the center first opened in 2007, local families with young children were severely underserved. New Haven Mayor John DeStefano had formed a group of early childhood educators, administrators, and community leaders to develop an education plan for the city’s youngest children. With over a third of children under the age of five living below the poverty

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line, low-income families were the focus of their discussion. When the Friends Center announced its decision to expand to a K-8 school, representatives from the city urged a different direction. According to board member Greg Moschetti, many approached the board with the same plea: “Please, please take care of our babies.”

In 2009, they embarked on a campaign to build a new home for the center. The school needed a space that could allow for growth but still maintain the sense of community and intimacy that had led families to line up on their waiting list. The Quaker congregation donated a plot of land behind its building to form what would become the independently-run Friends Center for Children. After a three-year wait, Connecticut approved a $1,750,000 bond to fund the center’s construction in June of last year. Work progressed quickly over the spring and summer; the children watched backhoes and frontloaders move in and out of their backyard.

On the September morning that I arrive at the center, all is quiet, the cacophony of construction now absent. An unassuming wood and glass façade peeks out from behind the dark brown, two-story Quaker meeting house. The obtuse angles and metal paneling of its roof distinguish it from the quaint twentieth-century mill houses on the street. The building, I learn later,

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Parents, teachers, and students take part in the ribbon cutting for the Friends Center. was built to gold-level LEED certification, with walls made from local cedar wood, a geothermal heating system, and a rooftop garden.

Today is the new building’s grand opening. In the parking lot between the school and East Grand Street, rows of chairs face a big red and yellow ribbon strung across the front of the center. It is still early, and Greg Moschetti arrives before the crowd.

Though Moschetti is a member of the founding board, he doesn’t think of himself that way. “I would rather think of the original small band of Quakers in the lower level of the meeting house as conveners,” he says. “We convened a conversation that will continue for years and years to come, as the Friends Center leads the way in early-childhood education.”

That conversation is mainly concerned with keeping high-quality childcare affordable. Around two-thirds of the center’s students live in households earning less

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than the state’s median income of $54,000; its average annual tuition is $7706 a year.

Early childhood education is expensive: the hours are long in order to accommodate the schedules of working parents, and the state mandates high caregiverto-child ratios. While Head Start and New Haven’s magnet school pre-K programs offer a free alternative for students from low-income families, spots are limited. At the Friends Center, parent volunteers and a great deal of administrative legwork allows the school to calculate tuition on a sliding scale. The center covers the difference between tuition money and the operating costs using what Schiavone says is a “jigsaw puzzle of public funds, foundation grants, and private donors.”

As a crowd gathers in the parking lot, I meet Michael Anderson, an employee at the Peabody Museum and another founder of the Friends Center. He tells me that back when the childcare program was in the plan-

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Photos by Ian Christmann

A crowd gathers to celebrate the new 9,245 square foot building. The pre-school originally opened in the basement of the Quaker Meeting House. ning stage, he suggested a co-op program, which the other founders embraced. Every parent volunteers for an hour and a half each week, with some adjustments based on the number of children parents enrolled.

Some help out in the classroom, while others do laundry on weekends. Arie Mobley, a postdoctoral candidate at a neurosurgery lab, spends her volunteer hours serving on the board. Her husband, a carpenter, uses his skills to build furniture for the center.

In some small way, each of these parents is addressing a national call to narrowing the achievement gap between kids from low- and high-income families.

Across the country, studies by universities, private foundations, and NGOs point to early childhood as a crucial period in a child’s development. The Center’s efforts are part of a national conversation. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said, “In states that made it a priority to educate our youngest children...students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already

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behind.”

Moschetti envisions Quaker schools playing an important part in this process.

As one of the four Quaker members on the school’s fourteen-person board, Moschetti was instrumental in shaping the school’s mission in its early days. He emphasizes that Quaker values will continue to shape the school, excitedly pointing out that there are already measures in place to remind students and teachers at the Friends Center of their roots. Each of the classroom doors is labeled with a different Quaker value: Peace, Community, Equality, Truth, and Simplicity.

Many share his optimism. At the ribbon cutting, graduates of the original basement preschool stream in, as do parents, mayoral candidates, and neighbors. Passing by a white press tent, they settle into seats set up in front of the Friends Center door.

A large easel with lined white paper displays the agenda in large, curly handwriting. Brightly-colored buckets filled with scissors sit at the end of each row of chairs.

Then a line of preschoolers, holding hands, emerges from the playground gate. The crowd quiets as they watch the children find their seats—right in front.

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Feature

Re-Growing Oak Street Fifty years later, will New Haven finally get urban development right?

by A. Grace Steig

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J

ust six blocks south of the New Haven Green, the strongest signs of life are the distant roar of traffic on the Route 34 Connector and the less-regular stream of cars here on Church Street South. A schoolbus drops off a girl carrying a backpack with a cartoon design whose mother waits to walk her home. I watch two boys behind them bike back and forth on the sidewalk.

They are the only pedestrians on this boulevard. Though I’ve been told that the long beige buildings to my left hold three hundred residences, the nearly-empty streets of the neighborhood make that hard to believe.

“CHURCH STREET REDEFINED: A VITAL MAIN STREET FOR NEW HAVEN’S HILL-TO-DOWNTOWN DISTRICT.” The black letters crown the city development plans that were unveiled at a public meeting at Hill Central School on September 24.

The plans are part of an effort by city officials to dramatically re-envision the future of this area between Union Station, Yale School of Medicine, and downtown. Within a decade, the street I am walking along could be thronged with residents of different ages, incomes, and backgrounds living in new four-to-six-story homes. They could take long walks through a neighborhood bordered by an array of shops and restaurants.

If they succeed at redefining Church Street, the project will be the second major identity shift for the area in the past sixty years. What officials now sterilely label as the “Hill-to-Downtown District” once formed part of the vibrant Oak Street neighborhood. In 1959, a diverse but poor community of immigrants lived in the area. It was culturally rich, but physically poor, and officials fixated on the limited infrastructure. Instead of improving living conditions, the government decided to demolish the neighborhood altogether. Three thousand people were displaced. Subsidized highways and mass production were making the automobile a ubiquitous presence in American culture, and the project september 2013

aimed to clear the way for a freeway—the Route 34 Connector—to send traffic from Interstate 95 smoothly into downtown New Haven. City planners envisioned a city in which commerce would flow, unimpeded by the Oak Street neighborhood. Mayor Richard C. Lee was certain that New Haven would become “a slumless city—the first in the nation.”

But rather than supporting an urban core, the highway accelerated a mass exodus to the suburbs. It served commuters, not the dwindling surrounding population.

By the time political momentum for Lee’s mid-century urban renewal project ran out, plans for a longer highway were scrapped— the connector now splits at the hulking Air Rights Garage into the two forks of Legion Avenue—and the promises of a renewed city were unfulfilled. With the Oak Street neighborhood permanently razed, the connector became infamous for dividing the city in two—separating the Hill neighborhood to the south from downtown New Haven. Today, the several-block trek from the Hill to the Green, or from Yale School of Medicine to the heart of campus, is a knot of over- and underpasses. Blocks are long, and loud with the roar of speeding cars.

New initiatives are aimed at reenergizing the urban wasteland created by the connector. In 2007, the city was awarded a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant to convert the eastern section of Route 34, which runs from Park Street to Union Avenue, into two “urban boulevards”—with traffic lights, narrower lanes, and a lower speed limit—alongside new developments.

The ambitious project, called Downtown Crossing, will eventually lower the College Street overpass to street level. Phase I of construction will replace a segment of highway at 100 College Street with a new pharmaceutical skyscraper. Ground was first broken in June.

The Downtown Crossing project will pave the way for a larger—and, ideally, a more coherent—urban plan. To achieve

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this, as the Downtown Crossing project Silverman remembers urban renewal with advances, the city is simultaneously redebitterness; it displaced Jewish organizasigning the area lying south of the Connections he had belonged to, and erased many tor, between Union Station and the mediother features of a previously flourishing cal school. Called “Hill-to-Downtown,” the community. expansive new project includes two large Today, few homes remain in the area residential-and-retail developments, the where Oak Street disappeared, and resifirst across the street from Union Station dents nearby miss these hallmarks of a and the second on a more upscale site in lively neighborhood. “There’s a lot of nosthe former Coliseum property just north talgia for what used to be,” says Chris Soto, of Route 34. The first development sits who works for the mayor’s office’s Livable on Church Street, which in the new plan City Initiative. forms the centerpiece of the district, with There is good reason to look back with more stores, housing, longing. Since the removand greenspace. The disal of the so-called slum, Within a decade, the trict will host new office the Hill-to-Downtown and lab buildings, most area has felt lifeless and street I am walking along of them serving the biobleak. On Church Street, could be thronged with medical industry that vast swaths of surfaceresidents of different currently dominates the level parking surround ages, incomes, and area around the medical squat office and medischool on the district’s cal buildings. Iron fences backgrounds. western side. Residents and security cameras reand officials hope that mind passersby that they the changes brought by this pair of major are not welcome. projects will reap social and economic benefits for the neighborhood, transforming Crossing the street on a sunny Tuesday, an area still feeling the effects of the sixI start to reconsider. Despite the city’s misties-era urban renewal into a community. takes, some features of a community have clearly taken root. The beige buildings of “You could classify Oak Street back the government-subsidized Church Street then as a slum,” acknowledged Robert SilSouth housing complex seem lived-in. Resverman in a 2004 interview, “but it was a idents stroll around and lounge beneath thriving slum. People were living in the the trees of a small designated greenspace. houses, business was in the stores, and Groups of people gather on the balconies or business was being done. sidewalks, chatting in Spanish and English.

Silverman lived in the Oak Street A young man stands at the corner with a neighborhood until it was razed. Along skateboard and a spaniel. This atmosphere with several other former residents, he gives me hope that I had misinterpretlent his voice to a historical project uned the foreboding atmosphere. Perhaps dertaken through the Manuscripts and Church Street South has retained the comArchives department of Yale’s Sterling Memunal atmosphere that I thought had been morial Library in the early 2000s. The New lost decades ago. A family jokes and laughs Haven Oral History Project compiled voice together in front of their apartment door. interviews of these New Havenites into an I approach the group and ask them what it exhibit called “Life in the Model City,” a refis like to live there. Two of them introduce erence to the Johnson administration’s nathemselves as Shanequa and Tangie, and, tional Model Cities project, which had been asking not to be identified by their last inspired by Lee’s program for New Haven. names, tell me:

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What was once the Oak Street neighborhood is now a dense tangle of overpasses, surface-level parking, and office buildings.

“Shitty,” Shanequa says, then adds, pausing between each word, “Trashy.

Messed-up. Terrible.”

At each word, the others nod. “Everything’s falling apart,” Shanequa says. Problems abound, and the street feels unsafe for the families who live there. “The area point-blank is bad, with drug dealers, and our kids having to see it all.”

To make Church Street South a better home, developers would “have to do a lot of rearrangement of the people. They’d need to rebuild it, step up security, make it safer for kids,” she adds.

Developers have made an attempt to respond to residents’ concerns. Representatives from the mayor’s office, as well as from Goody Clancy, the architecture firm hired by the city to lead the project, held a series of public meetings at Hill Central School. After listening to feedback from New Havenites, particularly residents

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of Hill neighborhood and Church Street South, the firm spent three months narrowing the ideas into a single drafted plan, unveiled on September 24.

At the meeting, I listened as David Spillane, Goody Clancy’s director of planning and urban design, explained the plan behind that promising title: CHURCH STREET REDEFINED. He envisions a thriving district centered around Church Street as its main commercial and residential street.

At previous meetings, Church Street South residents had advocated for grocery stores, pharmacies, and other shops that would serve their daily needs. Planners for Goody Clancy and the city have acknowledged these requests, but because the properties are privately owned, they are vague about which businesses will eventually move in there. “They potentially serve residents, they potentially serve commut-

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City officials hope that the combined Hill-to-Downtown and Downtown Crossings plans will revitalize the area. ers,” Spillane says. “Over time the goal would be to get a real mix here.” The city is in discussions with the private owners of Church Street South.

Renowned urban designer Julie Campoli emphasizes that urban vibrancy begins with density—in order to make a city street lively, a large number of people must live in a relatively small area. But a large population alone will not create community.

In New Haven, the Church Street South planners have their own ideas about what will make this happen: they hope to build mixed-income, mixed-age housing where residents feel safe. Current residences there would be torn down to make way for these developments.

Campoli wants to upend the idea that affordable housing has to be unpleasant.

At an October 1 talk at the New Haven Hall of Records, she challenged participants’

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preconceptions. She showed the audience vibrant housing developments at various communities throughout the country and gave them handheld clickers to vote on whether the houses were market-rate or affordable. The homes blended in attractively with their cityscapes, and many had small gardens for residents to tend. The audience members frequently guessed incorrectly.

Talking to me outside the residential complex on Church Street, Tangie said that she thought the current buildings look “like jail”; instead, she would like to live somewhere that people admire, where “when you walk you go, ‘Damn.’” Shanequa adds, “I don’t feel that just because we can’t afford it, we should have to live like that.”

The new plan makes room for between six hundred and 750 units, but just twenty percent are affordable. This would halve

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the current number of federally-subsidized units to 150. Though they are anxious for change, this and any additional plans to replace these units elsewhere leave some residents wondering where they will fit into the project. “They need to hurry up and do it!” says Shanequa. “Hurry up and kick you out,” quips one of her friends.

Development (TOD), which prioritizes placing a mix of housing and retail within easy walking distance of transit.

The new urban boulevard is designed to correct the problems caused by building a highway in the middle of a city. Kelly Murphy, New Haven’s director of economic development, remarks, “A highway doesn’t really generate jobs or income or create vitality, but we think that what we’re doing to remove the highway will.” An urban street, rather than serving as a thruway for suburban commuters, should serve as a place to walk, congregate, browse, shop—in short, a place that can be lived in.

Walking through the Hill-to-Downtown district is challenging. From Church Street South, I turn onto Lafayette Street and quickly find myself thwarted. This street was a prominent place for business and housing in the old Oak Street neighborhood. Now the road, which abuts St. Basil the Great Greek Orthodox Church and the Unlike the suburban population that Tower Hill/Tower East aswas to be served by Consisted living facilities, ends nector in the fifties and in a fenced parking lot and sixties, a growing num“Everything’s falling apart. ber of people today eia walking path between The area point-blank is the buildings of Church ther prefer not to drive Street South. Two men on or cannot afford cars. bad, with drug dealers, their balcony stare. The and our kids having to see According to the 2008 paths do not feel like pubAmerican Community it all.” lic space, and I backtrack.

Survey census, close For the casual walker, to half of commuters there is no clear or intuiin New Haven reached tive route to Union Station. I start again work without solitary driving—fourteen down Church Street South, continuing percent used public transit, thirteen peralong its length until I am able to turn at a cent walked, eleven percent carpooled, and sharp angle. From here, it is a nerve-wracktwo percent biked. Fewer young people in ing jay-walk across a large intersection bethe U.S. own cars, and they are increasingly fore I am headed north on Union Street toliving in cities. 2011 marked the first time ward the station. in a century that cities grew at a faster rate A few days later, I am poring over the than their surrounding suburbs. With inrecently unveiled Hill-to-Downtown plan creased migration to city centers rather alongside Anstress Farwell, president of than suburbs, the same forces that renthe New Haven Urban Design League. I nodered Route 34 obsolete should prompt the tice that, as part of the development, Lafaydesign of cities less reliant on cars. ette Street will be rerouted and extended.

These shifts emphasize the importance But will it be walkable? of making New Haven a place where people “There are some good things about the can explore the city by foot—and the ways plan,” Farwell says, mainly “the basic obin which the current proposal falls short. jectives to make very direct and intuitive Back in the Urban Design League office, I connections to downtown.” Direct routes find myself nodding as Anstress Farwell tend to improve “walkability,” a buzzword describes some necessary improvements. among urban designers; it is often used in “For instance,” she says, pointing to a tandem with the phrase Transit Oriented proposed park near Church Street South, september 2013

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drawn in a line with Union Station, “you wouldn’t know to go around the park to downtown.” When pedestrians are frustrated, they often choose not to walk at all. This problem extends to the rest of the plans for the neighborhood. “There still isn’t an intuitive way to know that you can go downtown or to the med school.”

The city is set up in such a way that people are expected to drive to the station, but residents are questioning this layout. In the community meeting, a young man raises his hand: “Is there any talk about changing mass transit included in this plan?”

Erik Johnson dodges the question: “That’s a separate conversation.”

Urban designers and residents disagree. People taking the train would not need to park near Union Station if buses ran from their homes to the station. At the moment, Goody Clancy has drawn up an additional garage to supplement the massive one already abutting Union Station. Bus routes will not be added, however, if parking additions are a central component of the plan. By trying to solve the problem of how cars fit into place, they ignore the way that people would like to travel from one place to another.

I repeat the question of transit to Kelly Murphy, administrator of the mayor’s office’s economic development department.

She evades: “Generally, the service comes after the need.”

Residents already feel that need. Some urban planning advocates who have long been at work designing a transit- and person-centric New Haven object to the indefinitely long delay in taking action. “There’s really a strong community of people that understand this and have been very active for years talking about this,” Farwell argues. “The city has adopted the language but not the principles.”

As I walk west and turn up College Street, I watch as bicyclists weave around construction at a nearby bridge over Route 34 and lean on the curbs while waiting

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for the slow Frontage Road traffic light to change. Depending on decisions made in the planning process, the bicyclists’ route after development could become much more pleasant—or remain tedious. In place of a highway, the two new “urban boulevards” are meant to create easier routes for New Haven’s already-thriving bicycling community. After Route 34 is dissolved and the section of College Street rebuilt, bike lanes will be added.

Elm City Cycling, a bicycling advocacy group, was an early and vocal supporter of the Downtown Crossing project even as others raised concerns. But it publicly withdrew its support in August 2012. The city had dismissed some proposals for twolane or four-lane city streets in favor of eight lanes of traffic. The group’s public statement explains that they grew disenchanted with the project. What had begun as a “bold vision” had become a “road-widening project that repeats the mistakes of the past.”

“There was really a failure to bring it up to today’s desired standards,” Elm City Cycling’s spokesperson, Mark Abraham, tells me. “I think the standards have to do with equitable access to all ages, all abilities, and making it more walkable, more bikable. You’re not going to see children riding on these roads alone.”

Looking back from the roadwork toward the Hill-to-Downtown area, where construction has yet to begin, I still have questions. Despite the many meetings and published material, the plans for the district remain more tenuous than their bold headings suggest. When Mayor John DeStefano, Jr., leaves office at the end of the year, many appointed city officials may also be on their way out. The execution of any plan will inevitably rely on the choices of the new administration, and the vision set out for Hill-to-Downtown could change drastically.

City planners are hurrying to set the current plan in stone before the mayor’s

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term ends. At the September 24 meeting, Erik Johnson invited interested residents to be part of a steering committee that will champion the presented Church Street plan. “When Kelly [Murphy] and I aren’t here and other people aren’t around, we want to make sure that there is a community voice.” The plan will go before the city planning commission on November 20. “We want you to come with us to talk about our plan,” Johnson says to the assembled community members. “After we go to the planning commission, we are going to take this to the Board of Aldermen in December…

We would like you to be there.”

Many aspects of the Hill to Downtown plan could change over the fifteen to twenty years it will take for the Downtown Crossing project to be completed. But just by agreeing to remove Route 34, the city has shown that it believes that New Haven can be a better and more livable city. I recall Shanequa’s words: “They need to hurry up and do it.”

ment at Church Street South, where residents are hoping for grocery stores. But it evokes a style of city life that the designers think Hill-to-Downtown district could aspire to: a place where people can live, work, and play. A revitalized Church Street, if executed well, could be just as lively as the architectural designs. People could be excited to gather and to walk down in the new Main Street. Instead of living among the ghosts of a once-vibrant neighborhood, residents could find a place to call home.

Photos by A. Grace Steig Map provided by the city of New Haven

Past the treacherous highway overpass, I thread east through the park behind the Knights of Columbus tower, to the site where the New Haven Coliseum sports arena stood from 1972 until the city imploded it in 2007. The Knights of Columbus tower casts a shadow over the sweeping parking lot. In the future, this lot could be entirely transformed as part of the Hill-to-Downtown projects: a developer hired by the city submitted a design featuring a town square with apartments, restaurants, and top-ofthe-line wine shops; later plans include a luxury hotel and a corporate office tower.

The estimated cost of the project is $250$350 million.

After the meeting, Chris Soto says of the plan, “In their scheme, you see a hotel. You’re also seeing a lot more activated streetscape. The folks on the street aren’t just walking by businesses, it’s more stopping and looking and whatnot.”

Many details of the Coliseum development would be out of place in a developseptember 2013

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endnote

The Week in Review

by Eric Boodman The Fiscal Crisis Affects the Presidential Breakfast President Barack Obama hasn’t tasted coffee in two weeks. Nor has he put butter on his toast, or poured fresh milk on his cereal. Instead, he has been drinking a coffee substitute made from boiled chicory root, spreading margarine on his stale bread crusts, and pouring reconstituted milk onto his cornflakes. Given the government shutdown, the Department of Presidential Breakfasts has had to drastically scale back its menus. Read more American Refugees Head to Canada Americans are flocking to the Canadian border to escape what they see as a looming civil war caused by the government shutdown. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has granted Americans temporary refugee status, as well as provisional access to the Canadian socialized medical system. “We are happy to be able to provide relief to our southern neighbors,” Harper said at a press conference. He pleaded with those Americans currently camped out at the border to be patient while their applications are processed. Read more Michelle Obama Announces Foraging Campaign On Wednesday, Michelle Obama announced a program designed to teach the children of furloughed government employees how to forage for edible plants. At a White House press conference, she displayed baskets of

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acorns, a handful of purslane, and bushels of chickweed, as well as the camouflage rain boots that allow her to venture into muddier spots. “Whether you are looking on the grounds of the White House, in your local park, or in your own backyard, you can bring home a free, nutritious meal for you and your family,” she said. The program will begin as soon as the government is back in session. Read more Congressional Republican Accused of Mooning Protesters Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) has been accused of indecent exposure after allegedly mooning protesters in front of the Capitol. Albert Jessny, a student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, says he was holding up a sign that said “Stop Arguing,” when Scalise came out, dropped his pants, and shouted, “Argue with this!”

Read more Castro Volunteers as Interim President In a five-hour speech delivered in front of Havana’s statue of José Martí, revolutionary leader and former Cuban president Fidel Castro offered to come out of retirement to serve as interim president of the United States. “This is more than just a fiscal crisis—it is a crisis in leadership,” he shouted. “This is an opportunity to show the world what a real government looks like.” His grandson, Alexis Castro Soto del Valle, stood beside him, waving an AK-47.

Read more

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Everyday Writing in the Medieval Near East: Documentary History and the Cairo Geniza Public symposium Sunday, November 3 Luce Hall MacMillan Center 34 Hillhouse Avenue New Haven, Connecticut www.everydaywritingyale.com

made possible by the david a. oestreich fund sponsored by the program in judaic studies