THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N
VOL 49 / ISS 1 / SEPT 2016
THE NEW JOURNAL
THE EDGE OF S I S T E R H O O D Two Yale sororities reckon with a tradition of exclusivity
editors-in-chief elena saavedra buckley isabelle taft managing editor spencer bokat-lindell senior editors sophie haigney sarah holder yi-ling liu aaron mak david rossler associate editors ruby bilger victorio cabrera eliza fawcett amelia nierenberg aaron orbey natalie yang copy editors griffin brown philippe chlenski harry gray rohan naik
members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen
with support from
design editors ivy sanders schneider allison primak hilda huang photo editors elinor hills jennifer lu web designer mariah xu web developer philippe chlenski
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 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 49 issue 1 sept 2016
SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com
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feature THE EDGE OF SISTERHOOD Two Yale sororities reckon with a tradition of exclusivity Fiona Lowenstein
standards 4
points of departure NEW BEAR ON THE BLOCK — Ruby Bilger PLAY BILLS — Will Nixon A PRIZE OF ONE’S OWN — Frances Lindemann
10 essay TALK OF THE TOWNIE — Sophie Dillon A local takes a turn as a Yale tour guide 16 profile QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN RHYME — Claudia Mezey A young New Haven rapper strives to find recognition 19 poem WAIT WHAT’S THE QUESTION? — Pablo Uribe 28 poem LUBBERT DAS — Elias Bartholomew 30 snapshot MADE HERE — Matt Klineman A sticker helps small businesses show their pride in a post-industrial city 33 endnote SNACK TO THE FUTURE — Harry Gray Thirty days of liquid calories
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
NEW BEAR ON THE BLOCK Connecticut’s growing bear population takes on the big city Ruby Bilger
illustration ivy sanders schneider
The black bear’s mother kicked him out of her den in northwestern Connecticut when he was seventeen months old, the equivalent of a human preteen. It was May 2016, she was ready to mate again, and black bears don’t usually hang around while their mothers prepare for new cubs. He had no resources, no skills, nowhere to go—just a nose for food and a desire to find females. Bears are a solitary and territorial species, and no one was trying to help him, either. If the bear entered his mother’s territory, she would chase him away. Every suitable habitat he found in the nearby woodlands seemed to be taken already by one of his standoffish kind. Some of his peers had given up on their crowded quadrant and journeyed far, reaching upstate New York, Long Island, and New Jersey. But this one wandered beyond the woods. Wallace Street, New Haven: a quiet block in the Cedar Hill neighborhood near Wooster Square, overgrown with weeds that sprout from cracks in the sidewalk and crawl into the wooded grove that separates the street from I-91. It’s a street only two blocks long, where small auto-parts warehouses give way to modest clapboard houses between Grand Avenue and Jocelyn Square. Residents hose down their cars in the afternoon there, or lounge in beach chairs on their lawns 4
when the weather is nice. What they don’t do, generally, is hide behind dumpsters and call for friends to pick them up—which is exactly what Wallace Street resident Tonya Hall did on May 9, when she spotted the lone adolescent bear in the grove near the highway. “He was just walking along, and then he looked at me, and I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, a bear!’” Hall told the New Haven Register at the time of the incident. Fellow Wallace Street resident Oziel Melendez also saw him in his own backyard, and chased him out. The bear eventually ran up a tree, and a cluster of perturbed neighbors formed. The neighbors’ agitation upgraded the bear’s appearance from “sighting” to “contact,” and required the assistance of the Wildlife Division of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), whose staffers shot the bear with a tranquilizer dart and removed it from the immediate area. By the end of the day no one was hurt, and the bear, safely released into the nearest forested area, had been nicknamed Boo-Boo by the neighbors. Residents of Connecticut’s more forested towns would scoff at any commotion over a single bear in the neighborhood. In Avon, which sits on the edge of Talcott Mountain State Park in the north of the THE NEW JOUR NAL
state, there have been 580 black bear sightings since August 2015 alone. But in New Haven, a bear sighting is highly unusual. Luckily, Wallace Street seems unshaken: when I visited this July and asked residents on the block if they had heard of the recent bear sightings in the area, the replies were either “No” or “There’s a bear?!” But Boo-Boo’s brief New Haven tour represented a growing trend: people are spotting more bears in more areas of the state, including cities. There have already been 5,100 sightings in Connecticut this year, compared with 4,496 in all of 2015 and 3,003 in 2010. There have been eight in New Haven since 2010—one in 2011, one in 2015, and six this year. “This has been a big year for human-bear conflict,” says Jason Hawley, a black bear biologist with DEEP. A mere sighting isn’t a conflict, he adds; there has to be some sort of direct, negative interaction between the bear and the human. Paranoid city dwellers might immediately assume Hawley is talking about attacks, which do occur, albeit very rarely. Just this past June, a woman finishing a marathon survived a bear mauling in a nature preserve near Albuquerque, New Mexico. But Hawley is referring to less grisly conflicts, ones that consist of bears rifling through a family’s trash, say, or killing livestock, or charging at someone and then running up a tree. While these sorts of encounters certainly aren’t innocuous, they don’t often happen in Connecticut. DEEP tranquilized and relocated only fifteen bears this year out of nearly five thousand sightings, making Boo-Boo’s a special case. Hawley says that incidents like the one on Wallace Street in May will only become more frequent. Why? Much of Connecticut’s farmland has turned back to woodland in the past one hundred years due to the growth of industrial farming in other states and federal efforts to restore American forests. Black bears, suddenly sitting on a state full of suitable habitat, have expanded their statewide population to about seven hundred and ventured beyond their traditional northwestern quadrant. More unsettlingly, black bears are virtually indestructible. “Black bears have a survival rate of eighty percent,” says Hawley. “That’s unheard of for a wild animal. There are places where the human survival rate isn’t even that high.” Bears owe their success to their low birth rate and solitary nature: their population doesn’t grow so quickly that they strain their food supply, and they don’t interact with each other often enough to easily spread diseases that decimate other species. As the wooded areas in northwestern and eastern Connecticut become more saturated with bears, young naïfs like Boo-Boo will more frequently find themselves in urban and suburban areas. While Boo-Boo certainly SEPTEMBER 2016
can’t make a den on Wallace Street, he was shrewd to wander there. People in cities outside of the state’s standard bear range don’t expect to see bears in their yards, so they leave their trash and bird feeders in tantalizing rows that bears can raid like a lunch buffet. With circumstances so favorable, there’s no reason for ursine appearances in New Haven to wane any time soon. For the most part, the state doesn’t interfere with the bears’ rugged individualism. “Our job is to manage the bear population in Connecticut,” Hawley says. “But we don’t like to meddle too much. We don’t transport bears far away from where we found them. We think sightings are a good thing—they mean the bear population is healthy. Just let bears be bears. Let ’em do their thing.” But Boo-Boo’s own resilience might become one of the greater threats to his survival: to keep the population in check, Hawley says, Connecticut is considering allowing a bear-hunting season. And when he ventures into urban areas, Boo-Boo is most endangered by the kindly people who try to lend him a hand. It’s not uncommon for bears to break into people’s homes these days looking for food, or to return to the same bird feeder night after night, waiting for mealtime. “When you feed them, you habituate them to humans,” Hawley says. “And that makes them aggressive.” Hawley laments that DEEP has already had to euthanize six bears this year that had become accustomed to approaching people. Closer interactions between our two species could give the phrase “human-bear conflict” a more sinister ring for both parties. If we’d like to keep both humans and bears alive, just about the worst thing we can do is try to make friends.
— Ruby Bilger is a junior in Branford College. She is an associate editor for The New Journal.
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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
PLAY BILLS A theatrical social experiment asks participants to spend a pot of money Will Nixon
In an antechamber on the second floor of the Quinnipiack Club, a block from the New Haven Green, a group of mostly white adults mingles. One grey-haired, bespectacled gentleman chuckles in khakis and a sport coat. A middle-woman in capris and Asics sizes up the thirty-person crowd. Another woman, grinning and alone in an all-turquoise sweat suit, could easily be somebody’s grandmother. When Emily, an actor in a pinstripe skirt suit, enters through a pair of heavy wooden doors with a clipboard, Turquoise Grandma is the first to get in line. She passes through the antechamber into the oaken Club Library, where the shelved books look worn but staged, as if purchased en masse. In one corner, a digital clock reads “1:30:00” in apocalyptic red digits. An air conditioner hums in the center window. Both chill the otherwise stuffy atmosphere. Alice—another actor identical to Emily in manner and dress—waits just inside to welcome the crowd into the wood-paneled room. In dignified Queen’s English, Alice asks Turquoise Grandma: “Benefactor or Silent Witness?” “Benefactor,” she says. “Thank you for your contribution. You are now a Player,” Alice responds, seating her accordingly. Players are arranged in one of four rows of commanding, green leather chairs, two along each side of the long wooden table at the center of the musty library, while Silent Witnesses sit in the four rows of folding chairs perpendicular to the action. Once the Players and Witnesses have been segregated, Alice explains the rules and emergency exit procedures with the sterile friendliness of a flight attendant, down to the open-palm hand gestures and ascot. Emily waits by the beverage cart. (There will be free wine after.) The Benefactors have ninety minutes to unanimously decide—via signed contract—how to spend their $300 of that evening’s gross ticket revenue. (Benefactors pay $20 while Silent Witnesses pay $35, perhaps to encourage participants.) The Silent Witnesses silently witness, unless they ring a brass bell and cough up an additional $20 for a seat at the table and, thus, a voice. Benefactors can tap out, too, to the resonant chime of a small gong on a side table. Should the group of Benefactors fail to allocate their funds unanimously in the time 6
allotted by the clock counting down in the corner, the entire pile of cash turns over to the next day’s council. — This semi-parliamentary pomp and circumstance constitutes The Money, an interactive theatrical experience imported from British production company Kaleider and performed daily for a full week beginning on June 18 for New Haven’s annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The show, or game, or simulated oligarchy, is equal parts artful theater and social experiment, though the project’s conceiver and Kaleider’s Artistic Director, Seth Honnor, insists he feels no moral or ethical obligation as to how the money should be spent. Despite the fact that every group of Benefactors present in New Haven for The Money’s American premiere unanimously voted to support a charitable cause, Honnor appreciates those rare and brave suggestions that veer towards self-interest. But as electric red seconds tick away on the clock and the cash leers expectantly at the donors, “frivolity”—as one woman labeled self-serving expenditures like bar tabs and free pizza—finds no place at the table. One woman anted up on Friday’s show with an offer to match ten dollars a head if she could keep half the new total and invest in a Colorado marijuana farm. (The original total was $420.) Other players shouted her down before pausing to do the math. Honnor said the responsibility he forced on Benefactors kept him up at night. But nobody’s forcing anything on anyone, of course; it’s all a game that people have paid to attend. It’s an immersive work of theatrical art, one in which the actors’ desire to demonstrate their moral rectitude by advocating for the worthiest charitable cause feels similar to the performances of generosity staged by major philanthropists: Mark Zuckerberg, for example, announced his $100 million donation to Newark Public Schools on the Oprah Show. The trick of the production is that the participants don’t seem to realize that they’re acting. “Everything we do in that space is elastic, but there’s nothing that’s not considered,” Honnor notes, from the vaguely suggestive language of the tabletop Rule Book (the qualification that Players should be “visionary” was added mid-run in New Haven), to Alice’s seating THE NEW JOUR NAL
illustration ivy sanders schneider
process, to the deafening effect of the air conditioner. “They don’t even know when they’ve moved into the system.” — On Friday, the first few seconds crawl by silently. One of the Players, the middle aged woman in Asics, picks up the Rule Book before her and reads aloud. Then, the Players hold a brief vote, and each one’s primary suggestions are recorded. (Someone always takes notes in America, Honnor says). Forty-five minutes later, at the halfway point, Peter—the Player in the coat—buys his way into the center and pitches a brand new charitable initiative he’s named “Books and Bears.” Inspired by the sight of a child whose guardian was among the victims of the previous day’s wave of heroin overdoses—the cause of three deaths—Peter, a former Ward 8 Alderman, sought to establish an organization that would supply care packages to young children in the protective custody of law enforcement. Looking to inspire his less passionate fellow Benefactors, he argued against local homeless shelter Columbus House and the vague sentiment of “giving back to Arts & Ideas.” Well-spoken and emotional, Peter was accused of having an agenda. He fought back. “It’s seed money for a dream,” he insisted. Making his way towards the door later, carrying $440 in cash, Peter surprised everyone with a confession. His eloquent pitch was made on impulse. He found the early conversation to be “vaporous, liberal, do-goody shit,” and wanted to fight for a specific cause that had SEPTEMBER 2016
affected him deeply. The Money acts as a petri dish for performed selflessness to flourish, for a microcosm of society—or at least those who can afford the tickets—to push and pull in search of consensus. As Peter left with the cash and a new assignment, he griped, “My wife is going to kill me.” — Later that night, as Alice and Emily ushered the remaining guests out of the Library, two local elementary school students still disagreed. Theo and Ripley, the youngest ever players of The Money, reflected on the group’s ultimately unanimous decision to split the money between oral surgery charity Operation Smile and a devised wealth-sharing program the group called “Dollars at the DMV.” If given sole control, Ripley admitted she’d keep the money for herself. Theo insisted he’d give it away. Zoe, a professor at the School of Management who teaches negotiation, and Jen, Chief Inspiration Officer at an independent consulting firm, attempted to bridge the gap between their children. They offered a suggestion discussed in that night’s game, though it was ultimately vetoed: “Who wants to go hide some origami dollars on the Green?” A type of charity, perhaps, but an ornate one. — Will Nixon is a sophomore in Pierson College.
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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
A PRIZE OF ONE’S OWN Windham-Campbell Literary Prize winners reflect on unexpected fame Frances Lindemann
illustration ivy sanders schneider illustration ivy sanders schneider
As Aminatta Forna, a novelist raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain, sat down to work in her office one morning in 2014, she noticed an email from an unknown address bolded in her inbox. The message informed her she had just been awarded a major literary prize, and with it, an enormous amount of money. Instinctively, she thought it was a scam—maybe one of those “Nigerian-based hoaxes that try to persuade you they have a huge amount of cash they just need to put in your bank account for a few days.” It was no hoax: Forna had just received a 2014 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an award that included an unrestricted grant of $150,000 to support her writing career. (Forna isn’t the only one who nearly missed her award. As Time covered in March 2016, Australian Fiction writer Helen Garner similarly discovered she had won a Windham-Campbell Prize when she checked her email’s spam folder.) 8
The Windham-Campbell Prizes, or the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Prizes at Yale University, were first awarded to writers in March 2013, quickly entering the literary award arena as some of the most remunerative worldwide. It’s the latest in a long legacy; literary prizes have been around almost as long as literature itself. As the New York Times’ Daniel Mendelsohn notes in his November 2013 piece “Whom or What Are Literary Prizes For?,” tragedy as a genre was invented by the ancient Greeks for a prize-oriented drama festival. The Windham-Campbell Prize, funded by the estate of the late writer Donald Windham, offers a cash award second only to the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet unlike the Nobel (or its peers the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, or the Pulitzer), the Windham-Campbells are not book prizes, but instead recognize a writer’s entire body of work. In this sense, THE NEW JOUR NAL
they are more forward looking than others: they not only reward what a writer has already accomplished, but also anticipate the possibilities of what he or she might accomplish with more time, money, and public recognition. Later this month, the nine winners of the 2016 Windham-Campbell Prizes will arrive on campus to receive their checks at the three-day prize festival. For most Yale students, the meaning of the prize is simple: a chance to rub elbows with the anointed literary elite, attend talks by famous speakers (this year’s keynote address will be delivered by the musician and memoirist Patti Smith), and bask in the intellectual glow of writers discussing their work. For the winners, it is more complicated—a gift that comes with the implicit expectation of continued success in the future. Since the award is meant to come as a surprise, the selection committee does not contact nominated writers during the selection process. And although the prize money is intended to help liberate writers from financial concerns so they have more time to write, financial need cannot be taken directly into account. “We’ve given it to writers who needed it to pay for their health insurance and to writers who are wealthy,” said Michael Kelleher, the program director of WCP. “In terms of the impact on their career, that’s where the decision comes in.” That is, when choosing between two candidates of equal quality, the prize will more likely go to the lesser-known one. But not always. The prize goes to more established writers as well, such as the famous essayist Hilton Als, who won a 2016 Prize for Nonfiction and gave the keynote address last year. Als joked in a phone interview that the prize “gives you a little boost and it gives you some money. Financial support gives you a trainer and a therapist to keep you going.” The archetype of the starving artist is compelled by some internal force to create, but hindered by financial burdens and the isolation and concentration that their work demands. The Windham-Campbell seems designed to ease this figure’s way. Adina Hoffman, a 2013 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, describes her daily schedule as “either trying to write or writing or erasing or scratching things out and rewriting or correcting proofs or looking at some archival letter or taking notes or staring at a photograph or checking the dictionary or reading a book that’s connected to what I’m trying to write.” Though Hoffman welcomed the money, “the prize itself was worth a great deal in other terms as well: it was a vote of literary confidence of the kind that doesn’t register on a bank statement.” Of course, that’s the central paradox of the prize SEPTEMBER 2016
festival, which celebrates the interior work of writing while parading writers in front of cheering crowds who have somehow identified with that introspection. For Als, writing is not about winning recognition but rather about “a kind of longing to communicate something to myself.” If that’s writing, then, I asked him, what’s the point of literary prizes? “That’s for others to say,” he replied. “If they’re going to be nice enough to give you something, you should just take it and be gracious about it. I think art is self-determining, and whoever gets to weigh in is welcome to, but it shouldn’t shape who you are or your goals.” When Aminatta Forna received her $150,000 check, she bought gifts for people who had helped her during years of writing for little recognition and pay: crates of wine for a generous web designer, a nice dinner for a friend who had done Forna a favor. That the money didn’t fundamentally alter Forna’s lifestyle may be a sign of the prize’s success. After the happy surprise of receiving the award, after the glitz and glamour of the festival, the winners return home. Buoyed by the tangible benefit of cash, and the knowledge of other people’s high expectations, they continue to write. — Frances Lindemann is a sophomore in Davenport College.
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E S S AY
Talk of the Townie A local takes a turn as a Yale tour guide Sophie Dillon
“Give the facts, but share your personal experience,” says Joe Admissions, making friendly eye contact with the table of new recruits. When I applied to be a summer tour guide, I thought the job would be particularly easy for me, considering I grew up in New Haven and fancy myself as having some insider knowledge. Then, I read the “Yale Tour Facts” sheet and realized I didn’t know any of the bullet points. Some were interesting. A couple were wrong. Most were myths about statues. It was unclear how exactly I would give the facts and share my personal experience when some of the facts directly contradicted the history I’d amassed over my time on campus and in the city. In some ways my insider’s knowledge made me an outsider to the Yale presented in the Yale tour. When I arrived for my first day, thinking my shift would consist of working the desk, I was informed that I had misread the spreadsheet. It turned out I had been scheduled for my first tour instead. “Great!” I shrieked to the student who was actually assigned to work the desk. I hadn’t looked at the fact sheet since the trial tour a few months back, during which I may or may not have forgotten Nathan Hale’s dying words until my interviewers pointed out they were engraved in rather large print around the base of his statue. I walked to the front of the visitor’s room and turned off the television playing “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” the zealous, undergraduate-produced admissions video released in 2010 to Internet celebrity. “Welcome to Yale!” I said, clasping my hands professionally. “Will this half of the room come with me?”
illustrations by ivy sanders schneider, based on maps created by yale university
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I. SOME BACKGROUND ON NEW HAVEN Before we get started on Yale, let’s bust a few myths about New Haven. First, even though John Davenport founded the New Haven colony in 1638, the first people to inhabit this land were of the Quinnipiac tribe. Davenport purchased the land from the Quinnipiac, who then helped the New Haven settlers survive their first winters. If the Quinnipiac hadn’t already been living here for centuries, it’s unlikely that the European colony would have pulled through. Perhaps in part because of that, the white guilt in this town is pretty staggering, so if you attend a New Haven Public Schools school you’ll likely spend your first eight years learning about Native Americans. A fully Caucasian visiting poet named Dan might regularly come to your fourth grade classroom and ask you to write poems from the perspective of Native Americans whose land has been invaded by Columbus. Some representatives of unknown heritage from Mohegan Sun will come tell you old Quinnipiac stories. This will be confusing, since you’d always thought Mohegan Sun was a casino where people went to see Kelly Clarkson and drink fine liquors. You will learn about twenty different kinds of sixteenth-century Native American dwellings. Yet somehow your teachers will fail to mention the fact that Native people are still alive. Thanks, Dan. New Haven is also famous for food and firsts. We’re home to the first hamburger, the first Frisbee, the first factory to use interchangeable parts, and the first recorded use of the term “SWUG.” We’ve got a big Italian population, so our city is littered with amazing pizza and heated divisions among restaurant patrons, with the most famous being the Pepe’s/Sally’s divide. I’m a Pepe’s girl myself, though rumor has it Pope Benedict used to order Sally’s when he came to the Northeast, even if he was just crashing in New York for the night. What a diva.
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III. II.
II. SILLIMAN COURTYARD Welcome to the Silliman Courtyard. Maybe you recognize it from the news. Isn’t it horrifying how it looks like this tree has an eye? Great, let’s move on.
III. WOOLSEY HALL Ahh, Woolsey Hall, the alternate rain location of every high school graduation in New Haven. This is where the famous people come to speak—unless they’re really famous, in which case they speak at some undisclosed location and you find out a month later that they ever came (I’m looking at you, Meryl). Once I saw Morgan Freeman speak about the unique benefits of reading on a child’s developing mind. So there you have it: even Morgan Freeman thinks the kids are watching too much TV these days. Woolsey Hall is also home to the biggest nighttime racket in all of Yale: the YSO Yale Symphony Orchestra’s Halloween Show, for which Yalies “supposedly” play a live score over an “original” film they have “supposedly” “made.” If anyone ever scores tickets, please let me know so that I can verify the aforementioned rumors. On the other side of Woolsey Hall you’ll see Commons—sorry, I mean the Schwarzman Center, donated graciously by the honorable Mr. Schwarzman Center. Currently students and faculty are brainstorming Ydeas for the Center’s future, such as my Ydea, which is to make the doors lighter. SEPTEMBER 2016
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IV. CROSS CAMPUS Here we are at Cross Campus, which is apparently called Cross Campus because it’s shaped like a cross. Who knew? Underneath us is the behemoth known as Bass Library, where many a Yalie goes to be seen studying and, on occasion, running naked through the stacks. All of the old-looking buildings around you were built by this architect named James who had a major hard-on for Oxford and Cambridge. I didn’t realize this until I visited Oxford a few years ago and experienced a tsunami of déjà vu. Yale’s campus is essentially a theme park version of Oxford—the buildings look authentic until you look down at your feet and see the gummed-over sidewalks and some kid’s vomit. Also underground is a series of tunnels that connects parts of campus. You can climb into them through some key sewer grates on College and Wall streets—though these are heavily trafficked by cars, so it’s best to choose a friend you don’t like that much to sit in the middle of the street while you unscrew the grate. Decades of townies have traversed these tunnels, spray paint in hand, marking them with some of New Haven’s most infamous tags (such as the elusive “Milf Shake”). There’s even a room down there with a couch and a light with “BUCK FUSH” marked angrily on the wall. I mean, not that I would know from personal experience because going into the tunnels is illegal and I am a law-abiding citizen. Quick: I see a cop. Let’s move.
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V. PHELPS GATE Welcome to Phelps Gate. I found out during our training that Phelps Gate is the official entrance to Yale College. This is misleading, because Yale is everywhere. Except for right behind you. This is the New Haven Green. The Green was the center square of the original nine-square plan. That’s right, New Haven was the first planned city in America. This is ironic, because if New Haven was so great at planning, then how is it possible I grew up on a street that was one-way in both directions? Riddle me that, tourists! A couple fun facts about the Green: first, it was originally a cemetery, since John Davenport built the Green around Center Church, and the Puritans believed that burying their dead around a church would help God find their souls. There are actually thousands of bodies buried under the Green. The city preserved some of the more prominent families’ gravestones in the a crypt beneath Center Church. The rest of the stones were stolen or relocated to the Grove Street Cemetery. When a bolt of lightning felled an oak tree on the Green during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, a human skeleton was found tangled in the roots, its mouth open. Second, the New Haven Green is not actually owned by the City of New Haven. It’s owned by the Committee of the Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven, a private group with an unwieldy name, composed of the descendants of the New Haven colony’s original seven landholders. This wasn’t much of an issue until 2011, when New Haven’s branch of Occupy Wall Street set up shop on the Green. When the New Haven Police tried to remove the occupation, protestors took the City to court, arguing the City didn’t have the right to remove them from the Committee’s land. While Occupy ultimately lost the case and had to relocate camp, this little loophole helped Occupy New Haven become the longest lasting occupation in the Northeast. With our perfect storm of college students, free-spirited liberals, and a booming homeless population, Occupy New Haven was the spot to be for a solid eight months. Plus protesting the 1 percent was always more fun than attending high school. Again, not that I would know from firsthand experience because I cherish rules.
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VI. OLD CAMPUS This real-life brochure in front of you is called Old Campus. Those two sturdy boys playing catch over there are not, in fact, being paid to do so by Yale Admissions. Apparently some people just like to play catch for fun! You really do meet all kinds of people in college. That statue over there is Nathan Hale, who is famous for being a crap spy. The man volunteered to collect intelligence on the Brits by posing as a Dutch schoolteacher during the Revolutionary War, and was caught after only a few weeks. He was hanged with a Bible and a Yale diploma in hand, prompting his famous last words: “Cs get degrees, but degrees don’t get you much when you’re getting hanged for treason.” Also this isn’t really a statue of Nathan Hale, since no one could find a picture of him when Yale decided to make the honorary statue in 1914. Instead, the Administration lined up the Yale class Class of 1914 and chose the most patriotic-looking man for the mold. The bigger statue by that tree is Theodore Dwight Woolsey, the only president of a northern university to not send southern students home during the Civil War. There’s a story about how his toe is lucky, so people rub it for good luck, but don’t be fooled—that toe is more golden with student urine than with luck. This isn’t just a Yale tradition. Harvard similarly has a big statue of John Harvard with a toe that tourists rub for luck and students relieve themselves on for laughs. Oh, the Ivy League! Of course, that one’s not really a statue of John Harvard either, and John Harvard didn’t even found Harvard. That’s sort of how this whole thing works, if you haven’t figured it out already. Someone builds something on somebody else’s land, and later it gets named after a benefactor with nebulous ties to the building. And that’s how tradition is made, folks.
VII.
VI.
VII. THE YALE BOOKSTORE And now our tour must come to an end, conveniently located by a store where you can buy all sorts of Y-emblazoned stuff for three times what it’s worth. Or you can find a nice book, read it in the store, and then put it back on the shelf with a few friendly dog-ears for the next time you want to visit. If anybody wants lunch, you can buy a fourteen-dollar salad at Claire’s Cornercopia Corner Copia, or you can steal an iced tea from Gourmet Heaven, climb a fire escape, and see how many phalluses you can find in the Gothic architecture. First one to thirty wins! — Sophie Dillon is a senior in Davenport College. 14
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PROFILE
QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN RHYME
illustration allie primack, ivy sanders schneider. photo jennifer lu.
A young New Haven rapper strives to find recognition Claudia Mezey
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There’s a charged silence as 22-year-old Matthew Barrington Bethea IV, sitting in the Starbucks across from the New Haven Green, searches for the title of one of those songs he “put more of himself into.” He cannot remember its name, but he recalls the lyrics with ease: Don’t wait up ’cause time ain’t waiting on you; You let all the problems pilin’ up, now the weight is on you. You been strugglin’ in the street, claim you’re hungry, tryna eat, But what happens when you look in the mirror and the weight is on you. His voice lifts the stale air of the New Haven café where we sit. Bethea, or “IV” (pronounced as two letters) as he’s known by his one thousand−plus fans on the online music platform ReverbNation, leans delicately over the table. He seems at ease, yet he never removes his heavy coat. The song he offers, “HOW MUCH REALER,” is one of his “struggle-slash-motivation” tracks. For his audience, it’s a call to action. For him, it’s a reflection on the weight he carries as a young rapper with a small following, trying to make it big. He wonders how to balance the uncertain future with his need to pay the bills; how to yank himself out of neutral to produce work that satisfies his standards and fans; how to speak to himself and to his audience simultaneously. “I mean, I do it with the intentions and hopes that the one person who’s going through this is hearing this,” he says. But how to reach that one person is an open question for IV, other rappers in New Haven’s small but active hip-hop scene, and artists worldwide. IV says his goal is to “catch the listener” with lyrics that matter. He has recorded tracks with Phil Blount, owner of the recording studio No Gimmick in southwest New Haven. Since the nineteen-eighties rapper Steve Williams, known as “Stezo,” got two singles onto the Billboard 100 R&B/Hip-Hop Chart, no recent rapper from the city has been able to build a comparable national audience and put the city on the hip-hop map. IV, like many others, wants to change that. Connecticut’s first well-known rapper of the early nineteen-eighties, Tony Pearson (“Mr. Magic”), told the New Haven Register in 2011 that New Haven’s hip-hop scene is a gold mine for new talent, especially with the advent of home-recording software that allows IV and his peers to mix tracks in their bedrooms. But there’s no established pipeline for that talent to go to the big leagues. In the wake of New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr.’s decision to raze the New Haven ColiSEPTEMBER 2016
seum in 2007 because of the steep cost of operation, few venues remain. “We only have one place,” IV explains, referring to Toad’s Place. “We need more.” Blount recognizes IV’s potential to not only join the ranks of those rappers he places in New Haven’s rap elite—IB Trizzy, Tye Henney, and Wiley Don, who’ve all taken the stage on myriad occasions at Toad’s Place—but also to break through the limitations of New Haven’s music scene. Although IV has yet to reel in the number of local fans that IB Trizzy and Wiley Don have, Blount thinks IV could transcend their level: “IV raps way beyond his age in terms of his content.” According to Blount, IV “fits [New Haven] like a glove.” IV has dabbled in the 203’s vibrant rap battle scene, recorded a few tracks with Blount, and collaborated with other local rappers. His ReverbNation profile says he “sounds like” Drake and J. Cole. But those artists are far away, and there’s no road map from New Haven to where they are. — IV’s interest in rap began when he was around six years old, riding shotgun in his uncle’s car with the radio blaring. “[My uncle] started rapping, and I asked him, ‘How do you do that?’ and he taught me how to do it, and then I started writing it,” IV recalls. “And he laughed at the first one I wrote, because it was garbage.” He worked from there. Throughout middle school, IV took the stage at poetry open-mic nights every second Thursday for cash prizes. In the family room with his mom, IV was immersed in the Motown sensuality of Stevie Wonder and Guess Who’s Back? by 50 Cent. “This is where I came from,” he says. Born in Manhattan, he lost his father when he was 7 and moved to New Haven when he was 16; his mother recently passed away. In the song “28° Fahrenheit,” he offers an intimate, pensive rendering of his relationship with his parents. He raps about the marked contrast between the advice of “Moms and Pops,” and the fragmentation he faced after they died: My tie between my Moms and Pops completely disassemble They took the road to Heaven, then I can’t afford the rental Vivid dreams play in my mind as I’m tellin’ them what I’ve been through Pops told me don’t be gentle; Mom said live it through the pencil. IV’s foray into serious music composition began in a concrete-walled classroom at New Haven’s Wilbur 17
Cross High School. In January of 2013, Donald Sawyer, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University, founded a hip-hop advisory program at Wilbur Cross. The inaugural class was made up of twenty-five young men, including IV. Many members had been affected by gun violence, economic deprivation, racial discrimination, and the daily reality of metal detectors and uniformed officers in their school hallways. Sawyer transformed his drab classroom into an artistic incubator, teaching poetry through the lens of music while encouraging each student’s unique voice. Sawyer recognized IV’s potential from the beginning. “On the day we met,” Sawyer says, “it was clear that he was a talent. He had a mastery of the English language.” One of the most talented musicians of his class, IV stood out because of the way his lyrics confronted adversity head-on. IV feels indebted to Sawyer, whom he calls “Don,” and the role he played in his artistic development. Aside from showing IV the value of weaving literary devices, irony, and rhyme into his work, Sawyer gave IV the tools to be a keen observer. “He taught me it’s all about taking in what’s going on around you,” IV says. After his formative period in the “judgment-free zone” of Sawyer’s classroom, IV began performing in New Haven’s Arts and Ideas Festival in 2014, ‘openbox’ rap-sparring events on the New Haven Green, and cyphers (continuous freestyle sessions) in New York and Connecticut. He won a talent show at Quinnipiac University this past February. Despite his growing visibility as an artist, IV’s music doesn’t pay his living; he works at Bruegger’s Bagels on Whalley Avenue. But there’s a reason why IV’s lyrics stood out to figures like Sawyer and Blount. His work takes from the wisdom of Jay-Z’s Decoded: “Bang out a rhythmic idea.” Even though IV was born decades after the lyricism of Gil Scott-Heron in the early nineteen-seventies and the dynamism of Run-DMC’s self-titled 1984 album, his music recalls those earlier styles. IV’s songs have what Sawyer calls “old soul […] touched by the golden era of hip-hop.” When Sawyer drove IV to a rap battle in Lower Manhattan one late weeknight in high school, the roars of the crowd carried IV—“the kid from Connecticut?”—to a silver medal. “He showed that he was able to hang,” said Sawyer. — Even with the praise IV receives from Sawyer and Blount, there’s still room for him to penetrate the local New Haven music market by booking shows and marketing himself to the community. When he’s not working his day job, IV directs his efforts toward refining his first mixtape for release 18
this fall. “I’m still trying to learn to balance life and music at the same time,” he admits. He scribbles down verses in his collection of “old-school” notebooks, and he invites his sixty-eight Facebook followers to recommend beats. He participates in cyphers every few months, like Grind Mode Cyphers in New York this July. He posts weekly rap videos from his desk or couch. In them, slivers of a pillow, blinds, or a blank wall are barely visible behind him as he raps, his shaky camera work intensifying the urgency of his delivery. He strategically curates this new online material with hashtags and links to the social media sites of other artists. Yet these current efforts leave IV’s career stagnant or, at least, slow-growing; his ReverbNation followers fluctuate by just one or two each week. He is counting on his pending mixtape to establish him. Unlike local pioneer Pearson, who has always clung to his New Haven roots, IV avidly seeks to avoid the local musician trap. He explains, “I’m trying to spread, I’m not just trying to be in New Haven, I’m not just trying to be in Connecticut, because…I don’t want to be ‘local.’ ‘Just local.’” For IV and amateur artists like him, the present moment is pivotal. As he tries to construct a distinct identity for himself, he must do so with sensitivity to the dichotomies that frame any early music career. At Bruegger’s, he’s Matt; on Facebook, he’s IV. As a lyricist, he studies poetics; as a musician, he wants to produce music that can be readily remixed in the club setting. He desires to bust through the boundaries of the “just local” 203; but, as Blount explains, he must wholly become IV, “change his government name,” define his audience, maintain virtual and physical proximity to that audience, and forge a brand that meets its needs. For now, it’s easy for IV to envision a future in which he is Drake-famous, reaching fans worldwide. It is harder for him to figure out the route to that future. Every few weeks, as he publishes a new Facebook recording, amassing close to one thousand views, he addresses the anonymous fan and theoretical viewer he isn’t quite sure how to reach. Watching him, I found it nearly impossible to hold his glassy gaze. He seems to treat the camera like a mirror, rapping for himself. — Claudia Mezey is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.
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poem
WAIT WHAT’S THE QUESTION ? Pablo Uribe
I got us a mystery and I need you! I’ll say when Can you make magic with how about this? The mountain is not preserving I don’t care about the dirt in my mouth I need to grab on to this rope of yours Is the water broken? Is that a tree or a grave? Yes without a wing it’s not a ship but I found all the animals on that day Who here can keep promises? Nobody Throw your clock out the window if you want it to be night time Here’s the thing I’m a negotiator Here’s the thing things have names I think they were gold purple yellow orange and red! Let’s do that every single day We have everything we need in the wheelberry and I’m always watching I’m not a door I want a rematch — The twenty-two phrases printed above were spoken by twenty-two different kids, ages 5-12, at Common Ground, a high school, urban farm, and environmental education center in West Rock. The writer worked there as a counselor this summer.
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Mikayla Harris never thought of herself as a typical sorority girl. Like many women who become involved with sororities at Yale, she was attracted to the University in part because Greek organizations don’t dominate the social life. But sometime around the end of her first semester, after attending first classes, going to first keggers, and making first friends, she began to wonder if something was missing. Like hundreds of other women at Yale seeking community, female friendship, and extracurricular and professional opportunities, Harris decided to rush. Unlike most women in sororities, Harris is Black. In the winter of 2014, Harris, now a senior, was initiated into Pi Beta Phi (Pi Phi). In her pledge class, she was one of eight women of color, part of a group that comprised about sixteen percent of the class—an unusually high figure for the sorority, Harris said. (In the Yale undergraduate population, about thirty percent identify as students of color.) If Harris’s class deviated from the Pi Phi norm, she says it was thanks to one woman: Olivia, an older Pi Phi member at the time and member of Yale’s Afro-American Cultural House. “She really wanted to make Pi Phi as diverse as possible,” Harris said of Olivia. “I was like, if people who look like me are in this, then Ill join it.” SEPTEMBER 2016
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Olivia described her work to make Pi Phi more inclusive, with a tinge of irony, as being like “the ambassador for Pi Phi” to the Af-Am House. (Olivia asked to be identified by a pseudonym to avoid the backlash she said accompanies “the airing of uncomfortable truths within Yale’s Greek community.”) Harris also said she sometimes felt there was a “frustrating” burden on her to single-handedly diversify the group. “It’s a lot of pressure on the women of color to get other women of color to join,” she explained. Harris resigned—the official term for cutting ties— from Pi Phi in the winter of 2016 in part because of time constraints, but also because she found it harder, as she puts it, to “push it out of my mind that I was one of the only Black people in a room” after the campus-wide demonstrations regarding race last fall. Shortly after she made her decision, the ritual of rush unfolded much as it does every year, but Yale’s campus had changed. Throughout the fall, students witnessed charged conversations and protests about racial justice, and students of color described experiences that contradicted the admissions brochure narrative of a community that is not only diverse but also fully inclusive. Student organizations at Yale put out Facebook statements of their failures, desires to change, and support 21
for women of color. Sororities, often seen as bastions of race and class privilege, were no exception. All four of the sororities—Pi Beta Phi, Kappa Alpha Theta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and newcomer Alpha Phi—held chapter-wide conversations, and Yale’s Panhellenic Council, comprised of representatives from all the sororities, held an open forum just before recruitment that sought to establish new diversification initiatives regarding race and income. Attendees broke into small groups where they discussed big questions: How could they make sororities more accessible? What role should they play as a group of women in discussions about racial justice? How should they be better allies to women of color? Lauren Weston, a member of Pi Phi who graduated in 2016 and who is also Black, echoed Harris’s sentiment that she hadn’t initially anticipated the sorority to be especially racially inclusive. “I never came to Yale expecting my sorority to be this all-encompassing entity that would support me as a marginalized person,” she told me. “I didn’t expect it to go out of its way to include people of color, because most places don’t do that.” Increasingly, however, students at Yale and across the country are asking for exactly that. In the Yale College Council Greek Life Task Force Report, released this past May, students of color in focus groups “explained that due to the homogeneity of much of Greek life, they are often not only at a disadvantage during recruitment, but are also vulnerable to feelings of discomfort and exclusion.” The report called on Greek organizations to have honest conversations about the degree to which their membership reflects campus at large. At Yale, exclusivity, reputation, and hierarchy pervade aspects of student life from seminars to senior societies, and sororities are no exception. Pi Phi and Theta members sometimes speak frankly about the general campus perception that they particularly attract privileged women; Theta member and junior Sophie Freeman described Theta’s campus reputation as “rich bitches.” Pi Phi and Theta offer their members entrée to a particular sliver of the Yale social scene, one that blooms around High Street frats and at glitzy formals that yield a slew of similar Facebook profile photos. I spoke to past and present members of Pi Phi and Theta about their ability to provide communities, safe spaces, and platforms for Yale women. At a university where students continue to engage in heated and often painful debates about institutional inclusivity, the question is: Which women? — Every winter, Yale freshman and sophomore women gather to primp in residential college bathrooms, shar 22
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ing straightening irons and eyelash curlers, rummaging through roommates’ closets for the perfect top, and finally pouring out of dorms into the barely-plowed streets. Many walk in high-heeled boots, huddling close together for warmth in the second-semester cold. They hope to join a tradition that stretches back more than a century. As Jessica Bennett noted in last spring’s piece in The New York Times, “When a Feminist Pledges a Sorority,” sororities began in the nineteenth century with the mission of helping young women navigate hostile co-ed institutions. Some early sorority members were active in the suffragette movement, and the groups served as organizing spaces for women seeking social, academic, and professional support. Kappa Alpha Theta came to Yale in 1986, less than twenty years after Yale College accepted women in 1969. Kappa and Pi Phi followed in 1987 and 1989, respectively. When Theta was founded, it was the only sorority on Yale’s campus, in some ways following in the footsteps of the early twentieth century groups by serving as an alternative to allmale fraternities and secret societies. But while sororities are meant to offer refuge to female students, they don’t always become more inclusive as student bodies become more diverse. As Bennett points out, many sororities responded to an influx of first Jewish students, and then students of color, by tightening their recruitment process, safeguarding their privilege and, often, their whiteness. Their histories share something with the American feminist movement: wealthy, educated white women struggled for equality with white men, holding onto what power they had while excluding large numbers of low-income women and women of color. Skyler Inman, director of the Yale College Council’s Greek Life Task Force and president of Alpha Phi, said that sororities and fraternities have been at the “vanguard of tradition in a very negative way in a lot of places.” Today, Yale’s sororities are reckoning with that history. Some sorority sisters, like their early founders, want their organizations to be homes for political activism and platforms from which they can effect change. Unlike the first sorority members, many hope their organizations can one day provide a supportive community for all women. The recruitment process, where each member’s relationship with her sorority begins, is an example of how unquestioned traditions can create barriers to access. But relatively small changes in these traditions could have a big impact on the composition of the group. In most sororities, the executive board turns over right before the rush process, so deliberating over a new class SEPTEMBER 2016
is any new president’s first opportunity to make major decisions. It’s the entry point for diversification. As several women made clear to me, it’s where you would start if you wanted to change things. The culture of recruitment is such that some people may feel they must arrive ready to talk about their prep schools or summer homes, according to Nat Wyatt, a Theta, and Diana, a member of the Theta executive board. (Diana requested to be identified by a pseudonym after corresponding with the group’s international organization about this piece.) Some of this atmosphere comes from old reputation, but some comes from modern practice. Before the actual rush process starts, Pi Phis and Thetas have traditionally had the opportunity to alert their sisters to friends and family who may be rushing. Facebook profiles were projected on a screen in the Pi Phi or Theta house, during a sort of unofficial pre-recruitment presentation. It is a tradition that allows women to give people they already know—often people similar to them—a small advantage. Weston described the practice as “fifteen minutes of Greenwich, Connecticut girls.” At the Panhellenic meeting in November, practices like the pre-recruitment slideshow faced criticism. Many of the most concrete suggestions for change concerned rush. One proposal was that sororities be more transparent about finances during the recruitment process. In the past, the Panhellenic Council has mandated that sororities not specify their exact dues during recruitment. Instead, the Council gives a pre-recruitment presentation to women rushing, which depicts a range of dues. A Panhellenic Council member said the dues typically range from $300 to $500 per semester; she declined to provide information about each sorority’s specific dues. “They don’t want us going up to girls and saying, ‘Well, Kappa is…cheaper than Theta.’ They don’t want us influencing girls in that way,” Carly Huard, a member of Kappa, told me. She recounted an instance last winter in which a woman rushing found out another sorority’s more expensive dues and decided to withdraw from recruitment. Huard told me the woman had assumed all the sororities had equally expensive dues and that she couldn’t afford to be in any of them. “Maybe the concern is that people will start segregating themselves by income,” Huard told me, “but what happens is people who think they can’t afford it just drop out anyway.” The Panhellenic Council disagreed. They decided they’d continue to run that first meeting themselves, but stressed that “each sorority had an obligation to explain their financial situation at some point during 23
recruitment,” Diana explained. For some, it presented an opportunity for a turning point—the chance to speak candidly to potential members about the financial burdens of sorority life. For others, the lack of a clear directive from the Council opened the door to continued obfuscation about dues. “To what extent it was explained was sort of up to the group,” Diana said. The Council’s decision put the burden of change in the hands of individual sororities rather than addressing it at a systemic level. — When Jéssica Leão rushed Theta, it was for one main reason: “I had heard Theta was number one, and that’s why I joined it basically,” Leão, who became president of Theta in 2015, told me nonchalantly, flipping a lock of her dark brown hair over her shoulder. She was walking with difficulty, on crutches after a recent accident, but wore a tight crop-top and shorts to our interview. Leão, who graduated in May, may have joined Theta because of its elite reputation, but she quickly realized there was much she didn’t share with many of the other members. “I’m from Brazil, I’m from Latin America, my parents don’t speak English, I’m a QuestBridge Scholar here,” Leão told me, explaining that she had personal reasons for wanting Theta to be a more inclusive organization. In 2014, she ran for president to effect those changes herself. “I was, I guess, particularly good at assimilating into white spaces and rich spaces,” she said. As president of the sorority in 2015, she tackled recruitment as the first challenge. “I feel like when I went through recruitment, people were like, ‘Oh my god, I love your shirt, I love your earrings,’ and we were like, ‘Don’t make this about materialism,’” she said. She wanted the group to instead focus on the interests of those pledging. “What we were looking for was people who were really engaged and passionate about something and leaders in their own right, and not pretty girls, basically.” She says the class she recruited as president was “incredibly diverse.” According to Theta’s executive board, thirty-five percent of the new members initiated in January 2016 are women of color, compared to roughly twenty percent of the class initiated in 2014. Theta members I spoke to insist that Leão’s efforts have redefined their sorority. Diana points to Leão’s presence as a Latina sorority president as a huge shift in and of itself. What started with Leão’s discussions last year has grown into a revamping of some of Theta’s traditions. The sorority now has a speaker series that includes lectures on the prison-industrial complex. Last year, they held a fundraising drive for the Flint Water Fund that 24
caused Yale’s NAACP representative Brea Baker, who graduated in 2015, to say she was surprised Theta had participated in such an initiative. Most significant, however, seems to be Theta’s new financial aid plan. Like most sororities, Theta’s national chapter offered competitive scholarships for academic costs, such as books and tuition, but no assistance for paying dues. This year’s executive board wanted to change that. Diana told me she thought about asking alums, current members, and members’ parents for funds to support scholarships, though doing so without permission from the international organization would be against its policies. According to Liz Rinck of Theta’s international staff, restrictions from the Internal Revenue Service prohibit raising money for individual members. Despite the restrictions, Diana said, the chapter began fundraising in November. “I wasn’t hiding it from [internationals],” she told me, “I just didn’t consult them.” Freeman has a different take: “I don’t think our financial aid program is legal technically,” she told me. “We didn’t want to ask [internationals] because we were pretty sure they’d say no. So they’re not super supportive of that, which seems racist to me, and classist.” Diana eventually broke the news to the international Theta organization, who explained that if they deposited the money for safe-keeping with an alumni organization instead of retaining the rights to dispense it themselves, they wouldn’t be breaking the anti-fundraising rules. Diana continued fundraising over winter break, eventually raising five thousand dollars from alumni and parents. Their financial aid program is currently supporting twenty percent of the 2016 pledge class. Celeste Dushime, a current Theta and member of last year’s pledge class, is one of the new members using Theta’s financial aid plan. Dushime is from Rwanda and identifies as queer. In “old” Theta, she would be an anomaly. “New” Theta insists she exemplifies a growing wave of change. When I asked Dushime if she thought the sororities had been transparent about dues during recruitment, she told me Theta was the most straightforward, which led to her choice to join. She reiterated that dues and financial aid were “the first thing that they talked about” at the first recruitment event. Wyatt is in Dushime’s Theta pledge class, and as far as they know they are the only non-binary person in all of Yale Greek life. They mentioned Theta’s financial aid program as a reason why they joined. “I thought this could be fun, this could be interesting, but I was like, man…I don’t know if I can put my name with THE NEW JOUR NAL
an institution that essentially is fundamentally elitist and does not give people the opportunity who are from lower socio-economic backgrounds to actually be a part of this group,” Wyatt said. The scholarship program has made a difference for Theta, at least in the eyes of a few new members. But it required the chapter to sidestep traditional rules in a way that is perhaps difficult for others to replicate. — In Pi Phi, the “Greenwich girl” slideshow is now gone—a change intended to make the recruitment process a more level playing field. In Theta, it continues, though one member emphasized that in recent years members have been asked to introduce only close friends, and that the sorority hasn’t decided whether it will continue the slideshow tradition this year. But while Theta and Pi Phi both contend with highly restrictive national organizations, the rule regarding fundraising that Theta seems to have circumvented appears especially strict for Pi Phi, which has not established a scholarship program. Some members argue that, even as campus at large has paid more attention to concerns of inclusivity and racial diversity, Pi Phi has remained predominantly white. Due to international organization rules about speaking with the press, the current executive board of Pi Phi and members contacted individually either declined to comment for this piece or did not respond to requests. A spokeswoman for the international organization also declined to comment. Weston told me she was frustrated by how few women of color were in the sorority during her time at Yale. SEPTEMBER 2016
Out of forty-four members in her pledge class, Weston counted four black women, one of whom withdrew before graduating. Chapter President Miranda McKay declined to provide statistics about the number of their members who are women of color, but Weston, among several other women interviewed, perceived a decline in Pi Phi’s diversity during her time at Yale. “It’s been noticeable to the point that I’ve talked to other people about it,” Weston said. Harris and Weston told me that the underrepresentation of women of color in Pi Phi isn’t the only problem. They say the culture of Greek life, and of fraternities in particular, is hostile to women of color. Weston stopped attending mixers with fraternities. “I did feel marginalized. Just in terms of feeling beautiful,” she told me. “What people are looking for, what is seen as hot in SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon] and Sig Ep. And obviously it sucks to wonder what the guys are going to want, but you want to be talked to, and when your friend next to you is chatting and you’re just standing there, you notice these things. It’s one of those unspoken truths with women of color.” Olivia, the self-described “ambassador for Pi Phi” to the Af-Am House, deactivated from the sorority after a brother from SAE—which disassociated from its national organization in May and is now called Leo— addressed her using a racial slur at Spring Fling. She told me she didn’t feel comfortable turning to her Pi Phi sisters for support. “I knew nothing would come of it and there wouldn’t be a response from my sisters,” Olivia explained. “They would have found a way to excuse it.” (Leo President Grant Mueller said he was unaware of the incident Olivia described and “would definitely not condone that in any sort of fashion.”) Olivia said it wasn’t until she heard about the protests this fall that she realized her problem with Pi Phi had been with the frats they associated with. Like Weston, she said that “racialized dating preferences” often caused her to be left out of conversations at mixers. Sometimes the brothers made her feel invisible. “I always felt kind of flabbergasted at the fact that every time they would meet me, it was like ‘oh who are you again?’ You know very well who I am.” Last fall, at a Pi Phi–specific discussion about race, members of color voiced that they felt the sorority should not mix with SAE again. It was a serious proposal—Pi Phi had long been unofficially “paired” with SAE for many campus mixers and events. Jenny Allen, an Asian-American former member who resigned from Pi Phi in 2015, recounted a similar discussion in the spring of 2015. After SAE was accused of violating Yale’s code of sexual misconduct, Allen went to the 25
Pi Phi executive board to propose that they cancel an upcoming mixer, an incident Harris and Olivia also remember. The Executive Board agreed to cancel, but it didn’t cut ties between the two groups. Harris told me she wasn’t sure what conclusion the Pi Phi board had eventually come to in the fall. She said she was dissatisfied with what she perceived as an initial lack of action. Leo President Mueller says that Pi Phi ultimately decided to stop mixing with SAE last fall, and they gave SAE tips on how they could improve. Mueller says the organization is trying to listen. “They wanted to see more overt efforts to make our house as safe as possible,” he said. He explained that Leo is “really taking it over the top now” with female bartenders and increased sober monitors, but he did not mention any changes outside of party environments. — At the end of each of my interviews, I asked my subject to recommend other sorority members I should speak with. Thetas, in particular, were excited to recommend friends. At the beginning of the interview process I was surprised by the names they easily rattled off: women of color, women from low-income backgrounds, women who are passionate about social justice. At first, it seemed like there was an almost overwhelming number of sorority women from what I considered “non-traditional” backgrounds. However, as I continued my interviews, the names began to repeat: Celeste Dushime, Sophie Freeman, Jessica Leão, Nat Wyatt, Diana. It soon became clear that this group of Theta changemakers might be smaller and more insular than I had initially thought. On several occasions, I mentioned in conversation with subjects that I had spoken to a queer woman of color in Theta. Almost everyone I spoke to guessed it was Dushime. I asked Dushime if she ever worries that Theta is tokenizing her. She laughed. “I always wonder if my achievements that I’ve accomplished here are because I deserve to be admitted, or if I got admitted because I’m a Rwandan female student applying,” she said. Wyatt had similar qualms about the recruitment process. “Yeah, I look very different from everyone else in Theta, I really do,” they said. “But, that being said, I went to Exeter, I’m from New York City, I’m affluent, I’m white. I’m gender non-conforming, but to them I look like a combination of Ruby Rose and Justin Bieber.” Theta isn’t yet at a point where Wyatt feels comfortable encouraging trans or non-binary friends of color to join. Increasingly, women seeking single-gender spaces at Yale have options beyond sororities. The Yale Black Women’s Coalition, founded in 2006, seeks to pro 26
vide a network for Black women at Yale. Dara Huggins, YBWC President until this spring, described the group’s mission as “to cultivate a space where Black women on campus could discuss various topics related to that community, have social events, and act as a network for professional and academic reasons.” Huggins says that membership in the YBWC has increased in the past year, specifically during the events of the fall. The YBWC doesn’t require their members to pay dues, or choose between their group and sorority life. They have several members who are also a part of sororities. Huggins was quick to explain that the YBWC is not a sorority in any way, and “isn’t akin to the Divine Nine,” the national historically Black sororities and fraternities. “However, I don’t think it’s coincidental that we don’t have that and we happen to only have this,” Huggins said of the absence of Black Greek life. Yale’s multicultural sorority, Omega Phi Beta, has grown slowly since its Yale chapter was founded in March 2014 after five Yale students petitioned for its establishment. Olivia mentioned the income diversity in multicultural and historically Black and Latino sororities, adding, “I think that’s something that more predominantly white sororities can learn from.” Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much communication between the Panhellenic sororities and Omega Phi Beta, or even the YBWC. “There is a very minimal relationship, and that relationship is mostly fueled by the fact that some of our members are part of the Panhellenic groups,” Huggins explained. “But there hasn’t been any kind of active reach-out that I can recall from sororities.” Some members told me Theta and Pi Phi don’t communicate much with each other, either. Many people I spoke with were quick to explain that the diversity problems sororities are facing are not unique to those groups at Yale. Dushime said Yale “equips you early” to feel marginalized by class or income. Wyatt expressed that they think we “live in a society that has these issues,” and that “Greek life is a microcosm.” Weston’s early claim that she didn’t expect her sorority to go out of the way to support her as a marginalized person reflects a general sentiment that the problems of Theta and Pi Phi are the problems of Yale, and perhaps society more broadly. Olivia was originally pessimistic about the institutional potential of Yale sororities—until the end of our call, when she asked me what I’d learned throughout my research process. I mentioned Theta’s new initiatives, and she laughed in surprise. “Theta?” she nearly yelled, incredulously. She began describing the “old Theta” she’d witnessed at Yale: the huge group of mostly white wealthy women who were exclusive in THE NEW JOUR NAL
their friendships. Almost every Theta member I talked to wanted to show me a picture of the new rush class. Like new parents, they proudly scrolled through their Facebook accounts and iPhone camera rolls. The diversity shows, they say. It was not my first time seeing numerous photos of sorority women. Like most Yalies with a Facebook, I’d been privy to the several-hundred-photo filled albums Yale sororities upload after mixers. “We’re notorious for our love of photos,” Olivia had said to me. She had also said that she felt the photos from sorority mixers often used lighting effects to make the women look more tan, thus washing out the sisters of color. According to Olivia, amid the glamorous flashing lights, she and the “handful” of Black members had been erased. After our call, I revisited old photos of Theta and Pi Phi mixers from Facebook. I could see what she was talking about. In the photos I was shown on Theta iPhones, this was not the case. The glossy veneer was gone, replaced by an occasional awkward Instagram filter. While the women weren’t all white, the racial diversity did not strike me as exceptional. Then again, I wasn’t shown a before and after picture. It struck me that all the photos still depicted a select group. Even with slight improvements from Theta, Pi Phi, or other sororities at Yale and elsewhere, organizations such as Greek groups still operate on a foundation of exclusivity. While that tradition was born as a response to a more stark set of boundaries—one that blocked women from mostly male, already elite institutions—it now runs into problems of opening itself up to groups even more historically excluded. There’s no question that sororities are changing. The question is how much spaces like these can push against boundaries they had a hand in creating. As I looked at more photos, a before and after did begin to form in my head. Before were the near-professional photos from events like the ones Olivia attended, and after were the more casual iPhone snaps which were shown to me as tokens of success. The Theta members who brandished them seemed to be almost urging me to notice the women of color. From background to foreground, I wondered how much had changed. — Fiona Lowenstein graduated in 2016.
SEPTEMBER 2016
27
poem
LUBBERT DAS Elias Bartholomew
The doctor is bent at the waist, working furiously, his instruments plotted around him like counting-houses in the town square. The patients wait while a flower unfolds from his open head. Soon, the doctor will break for a light lunch. Outside, the freeway is under close scrutiny, the birds floating so peacefully they might be drones. They pass through arches inscribed with the compact names of the sane. Even the serifs look muscular. I feel like I have a kitchen funnel on my head! and its end opens up to heaven.
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THE NEW JOUR NAL
yale institute of sacred music presents
Carolyn Forché
poet and human rights advocate In the Lateness of the World
thursday, september 22 · 5:30 pm Marquand Chapel (409 Prospect St.)
Yale Literature & Spirituality Series Book-signing follows · Presented with Yale Divinity Student Book Supply
Yale Schola Cantorum Masaaki Suzuki, conductor Mourning in Dresden Music of Bach and more
saturday, october 8 · 4 pm Battell Chapel (400 College St.)
Both events are free; no tickets required. ism.yale.edu
SEPTEMBER 2016
29
SNAPSHOT
MADE HERE A sticker helps small businesses show their pride in a post-industrial city Matt Klineman
Matthew Freiner of Devil’s Gear Bike Shop. Photo by Jennifer Lu.
Matthew Freiner sits in his makeshift office on the second floor of the Devil’s Gear Bike Shop on Orange Street, leaning back in his folding chair. His desk is piled with random notes, and an array of cycling suits is tacked to the wall. Since 2001, he has designed and printed his own t-shirts and stickers, in addition to fixing bikes and selling gear. Matt Freiner loves making things, but making them in New Haven, he says, is especially rewarding. “Ugh, God. It’s colossal,” he says said. “I mean, New Haven’s the home of the bicycle.” The Elm City claims to be the birthplace of a lot of things: the Frisbee, the hamburger, and planned cities, to name a few. (Technically, the bicycle’s city of origin is disputed: A German aristocrat invented the first human-powered, bike-like machine in 1813, but pedals weren’t added until a French immigrant to New Haven patented the design for use in “improvements of velocipedes” in 1866. Freiner never mentioned the German model.) Outside, pasted next to the large orange Devil’s Bike logo and some sale notices is a sign printed in black and gold, featuring a large box with the words “Made in New Haven” and “Est. 1638” printed in simple lettering. Devil’s Gear received its sign last month, joining the ranks of New Haven stores that have been granted the designation as a part of the city-wide “Made in New Haven” campaign. The New Haven Office of Eco 30
nomic Development and Project Storefronts, a city program that encourages entrepreneurship, started the initiative this summer and awarded the distinctive logo to New Haven stores that sell products manufactured in the city. The project aims to create a directory of small businesses that New Haven residents and visitors can use to shop locally, uniting the small bike-fixers, jewelry designers, and cheese mongers, and highlighting stores that aren’t just selling things in New Haven, but making them here too. New Haven has been making things for a while. The city witnessed nearly two hundred years of industrial prosperity, starting in 1798 when Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin and promoter of interchangeable parts, opened up the rifle factory where Samuel Colt would eventually later invent the automatic revolver. By the time the smoke cleared from the American Civil War, New Haven was humming with activity. Through Throughout the late Nineteenth nineteenth century, thousands of Southern European immigrants were arriving arrived each year (see: New Haven’s famous pizza tradition) to produce not only rifles, but also brass hardware for Sargent, cigars for Osterweis & Sons, and the nation’s first lollipops for the Bradley Smith Company. During World War Two, the city supported the nation’s “Arsenal of Democracy” by housing factories founded by the legendary arms manufacturers O.F. Mossberg and Oliver Winchester. THE NEW JOUR NAL
Though New Haven experienced growth during the war, by the nineteen-fifties, urban decline set in as residents flocked to the suburbs and factory after factory shut its doors. In 2006, the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory was one of the last of the factories to shut down its giant assembly lines. The plant had once employed upwards of fifteen thousand people; its closing marked the end of an industrial era. The “Made in New Haven” campaign aims to highlight the small businesses that have emerged in the wake of the city’s industrial collapse. But the participants consist of include t-shirt printers, independent video game designers, and restaurateurs—small shops standing that stand in stark contrast to the huge employers that sustained New Haven’s economy for much of the twentieth century. Those factories provided jobs, supported families, and fostered a community identity for the city. Should we be expecting tangible economic results from a campaign centered around boutique businesses? Does New Haven need a government-sanctioned sticker to reaffirm its local identity? — Mark Sincavage, one of the family members who co-owns Skappo Restaurant and Skappo Merkato, is selling a line of sandwich spreads in Big Y supermarkets with the “Made in New Haven” logo attached. He stands behind the spread counter proudly wearing the family polo shirt, waving often at friends and community members out the window. His father is from New Haven originally, and his grandfather had a small grocery store on Dwight Street in the early seventies. “You know, it’s not just Brooklyn that’s the only neighborhood that’s creating interesting products,” he says. “[In New Haven], you meet the people that are working on it, that are getting their hands dirty, that are creating, that are networking. I think it could work inside out: Like let’s establish ourselves first, let’s create a bond and community of people.” For Sincavage, “Made in America” is simply too big. Big corporations can claim they are “Made in America,” appealing to shoppers’ patriotic sensibilities while concealing the fact that the label could mean “made two thousand miles away.” Being made in New Haven means being made by “small people, by small businesses.” Of course, a small business like Skappo doesn’t have the capacity to employ thousands of people or sustain a whole city’s economy as the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory once did. Skappo has just three employees, and the “Made in New Haven” list features very few such industrial production centers. Fiber optics manufacturer Radiall and aerospace contractor SpaceCraft were included in the launch only as advisors, not SEPTEMBER 2016
participants, and the pharmaceutical company Alexion, which moved to New Haven last year and brought with it twelve hundred new jobs, was not listed. “Made in New Haven,” though, is neither equipped nor intended to fill this economic hole; instead, it’s using the language of production to rekindle a sense of former glory. For Sincavage, it seems to be the small-business owner’s anthem: the launching of community, perhaps even an attempt to escape New Haven’s past problems through enterprise and sweat. — When the city announced the “Made in New Haven” campaign this May, the program was only thinly defined. It featured online promotions for businesses, community networking, and a newly designed logo for product packaging, but it was unclear if the city had any concrete goals beyond boosting spirit. Fashion designer, business owner, and “Made in New Haven” participant Neville Wisdom displays the logo in his shop window, but he says that besides the sticker, the campaign organizers haven’t yet “talked [with him] about anything specific in terms of a collaboration.” The campaign’s graphic designer Kelly Bigelow Becerra told the New Haven Independent that she drew inspiration for the logo from New Haven’s own design history, choosing a border that once lined the 1845 Postmaster’s Provisional stamps. The botanical look— two Elm trees standing on opposite, shrubby shores, with running water in between—is meant to market New Haven as a “place where innovators come to be mindful.” But this tranquil scene does not carry the feeling of other origin labels, like the iconic “Made in the U.S.A.” mark, which seems to radiate pride through its patriotic stripes. The “Made in New Haven” sticker lacks any real indication of New Haven’s economic history or potential. The city just looks calm. Matthew Nemerson, the city’s Economic Development Administrator and a key player in economic strategies like the “Made in New Haven” campaign, doesn’t envision the project changing New Haven’s economy drastically, but rather increasing city morale. At the very least, he told me, it couldn’t hurt. “People forget history and don’t have a good sense of the past,” he says. “It would surprise people today, but at the World Columbian Expo in Chicago [in 1893], we had one of the largest displays. What other city would have won the prize for best hardware, best horse drawn carriage, best rifle innovation?” Those prizes, though, aren’t attached to New Haven’s name New Haven like automobiles are to Detroit. Elinor Slomba, a New Haven entrepreneur, sees “Made in New Haven” less as a way to bolster big com 31
Matthew Nemerson, New Haven’s Economic Development Administator. Photo Jennifer Lu.
panies or famed products and more as a way to export “a perception of New Haven as a place where creative people can be supported and can realize their ideas.” Slomba is the founder and CEO of Art Interstices, a company that creates opportunities to unite creative arts and entrepreneurs, and is the current head of Project Storefronts. The campaign is partially piggybacking off of the success of Project Storefronts’ 2009 program to fill vacant commercial space, or even special sections of occupied space, with pop-up concepts that are usually artistically inspired. To that end, the “Made” “Made in New Haven” campaign also includes producers of digital design and media goods as well as physical products. Nemerson doesn’t care what it the goal is as long as it boosts prosperity within the city. In the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth century, “New Haven had agents in Europe—Italy, Germany—literally signing people up, bringing people, whole families, to a manufacturing center of the world,” he says. “We can’t recreate that, but we can recreate the ideal. It shouldn’t be surprising that people would move their business here, that we would make something.” — A company that exemplifies Nemerson’s ideal—a company that makes something on a relatively large scale with world renown—is Vespoli, a producer of crew racing shells. With roughly forty employees, the company produces between three hundred and three hundred sixty 360 boats per year, selling them all over the country and internationally, as far away as Japan, for anywhere from eight thousand to forty thousand dollars per boat. Dave Trond, Vice President of Sales for Vespoli, described that the sense of community that New Haven businesses provide (“if we need a new roof, a Connecticut company does it for us”), but also the sense of pride 32
in holding out as a “last stronghold” of the heavier manufacturing of the city’s past. Vespoli has long been a subscriber to the “Made in America” movement, and their boats will now feature a “Made in New Haven” sticker prominently alongside the older seal. Founded in Hamden in 1980 before moving to New Haven in 1987, Vespoli has seen a lot of changes in the Elm City. Trond himself arrived about twenty-five years ago, after growing up in Pennsylvania and coaching crew at the University of Massachusetts, though he “never thought [he’d] move to New Haven in a million years.” Today, he is even more impressed with the city’s cosmopolitan spirit and its reputation as the new “restaurant destination of New England.” This is good because, as Trond pointed out, Vespoli probably couldn’t leave even if it wanted to. When we spoke in June, the company was only about a week removed from its first anniversary of transitioning into an employee-owned company. And with all of its new shareholders—employees and their families living in and around New Haven— Vespoli has intertwined itself within the fabric of the city, fully tied to its economy. According to Sincavage, the co-owner of Skappo, there is a poem by Saint Francis that reads something along the lines of “No man can escape the inevitability of death.” Maybe the same applies here. “Made in New Haven” isn’t an antithesis to “Made in the USA” but rather an expression of the post-industrial city, reborn: We are still here, and, like our grandfathers before us, we are still building things. Not necessarily things of steel, but of community, of originality, and always with our hands. — Matt Klineman is a sophomore in Berkeley College. THE NEW JOUR NAL
ENDNOTE
SNACK TO THE FUTURE Thirty days of liquid calories Harry Gray
illustration ivy sanders schneider
I began consuming Soylent 2.0 this April, three months after I learned about it online. Soylent 2.0 is a meal replacement beverage created by Rob Rhinehart, who marketed his product in 2013 by eating nothing but Soylent for 30 days and blogging about the experience. The idea of a liquid diet fascinated me. It was almost unbelievable that Soylent had all the nutrients my body needed. I’d be able to throw a few bottles in my backpack and forget about the dining halls. I would have more time to sleep and do homework. If I liked Soylent, I thought, living off campus next year would be a breeze, since I wouldn’t have to worry about cooking or shopping for food. Even so, the name Soylent didn’t sit quite right with me. Hearing it, all I could think of was the famous line in the 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green: “Soylent Green is people!” Detective Thorne, the film’s hero, screams the words as he discovers a secret that the Soylent Corporation doesn’t want the world to know: Soylent Green, the food substitute that most of New York City’s residents rely on for their survival, is made out of human beings. Why would Rhinehart name his meal replacement Soylent? Rhinehart’s Soylent isn’t made from people—ingredients include filtered water, maltodextrin, soy protein isolate, high oleic algal oil, isomaltulose, canola oil, rice starch, oat fiber, isomaltooligosaccharide, and soy lecithin. The macronutrient ratio is 33:47:20, which means 33 percent of calories come from carbohydrates, SEPTEMBER 2016
47 percent from lipids, and 20 percent from proteins. There are four Soylent products on the market: Soylent 1.6, a powder; Soylent 2.0, a bottled drink; Coffeeist, a caffeinated Soylent 2.0; and Soylent Bar, a snack bar with a salted caramel flavor. The sleek white bottle of Soylent 2.0 has a black cap and displays two pieces of information in black, sans-serif font: soylent. 400 kcal. Assuming you’re a normal American, you need 2,000 daily kcal, which means all you need to do to keep typing lines of code 24/7/365 is drink five bottles of Soylent 2.0 each day. I decided to ignore my concerns and judge the drink itself. At the time I was taking a class on sustainable food and agriculture, and for my final project, the Yale Sustainable Food Program granted me $400 to purchase all the bottles I needed to survive for thirty days. To test Rhinehart’s claim that Soylent is nutritionally complete, my diet was 100 percent liquid Soylent, 0 percent chewable. There were concessions I wasn’t willing to make for the duration, like giving up coffee and staying completely away from the dining hall. Once a day or so I sipped burnt black coffee as my friends sated their appetites with chicken tenders and hard-boiled eggs. But for the most part, I took meals alone, in my dorm room and during breaks between classes. As I grew accustomed to the tan, thick, and bland liquid, which conceals its true textural nature—sandpaper—until it reaches the esophagus, I was increasingly 33
disinterested in consuming it. I lost thirteen pounds. I didn’t ever feel very hungry or very tired. Instead I had a consistent hum of energy from half past nine to just after midnight. I had ample time for classwork. I recorded my “average mood” each day, which was usually slightly negative or neutral. When I decided to free-associate with the word Soylent on day six, I wrote down control, serialization, and crazy. On day thirteen I wrote down diarrhea. In my Excel spreadsheet I created a column for writing down other notes, and the most common word in that column was alone. The second most common word was frustration. Four bottles a day—10:30 am, 1:30 pm, 4:30 pm, and 7:30 pm—was my rhythm. It was four-on-the-floor energy, no more and no less than what I needed. I like to make electronic music, and without explicit intention everything I made while on Soylent was around one hundred beats per minute with a kick drum on quarter notes, the sort of commercial groove that leaves you longing for something with soul. At 1:30 pm, truly on the dot—I remember checking the time on my iPhone—while walking back from a logic class, I slipped on early spring ice outside the C.E.I.D. Perfectly on schedule, I had an open, chilled bottle of my chalky Soylent in hand, which I was sipping slowly. I must have spilled 40 calories or so, and I remember thinking I had made an irrevocable mistake. My mind shot straight to the boxes of Soylent in my dorm room, to the fear of being hungry right around 11:30 pm that night, to the questions of whether, now 40 kcal short of my thirty-day caloric need calculation—two thousand per day times thirty—I would be slightly undernourished, and whether I was doing myself psychological harm by experimenting with this crazy liquid food. To my horror, I made eye contact with a student walking the other way on my right. She glanced in disgust at the slimy gray puddle I had created. This happened on day seven, April 4. In my journal I often wrote that relationships with my friends were beginning to frustrate me. During that month, I thought it was because I had time away from the dining halls to lie on my navy blue duvet, look through my ceiling’s dusty skylight-on-a-slant, and think clearly about Big Questions. I spent hours and hours in that position, ignoring text messages, feeling anonymous, turning food cravings into nagging self-doubt. Pre-April I was spending that time in dining halls, laughing over chicken nuggets and Brussels sprouts with the very friends I would soon complain about in April’s journal entries. But there is a better explanation. Soylent came up in conversation time and time again: what it tasted like, whether it was a life hack, how my digestion was. Those 34
conversations, the brief kind you have with more casual friends, got old for me and my closer friends. “Let me guess—you’re talking about Soylent again,” was the biting remark that reminded me not to talk about my experience, my foray into the so-called future of food, too dull to dwell on. Someone in particular said that to me a few times, granted, but routinely I said it to myself. Soylent 2.0, the latest and greatest, is ideology. Subsume the urge to eat and the joy of sharing a meal under obstacles to productivity. Stamp out the tiresome clatter of cooking from your busy and important life. Free yourself to do the things that actually matter faster and better than ever before. But do always remember: your productivity is an end in and of itself. You will get very hungry indeed if you notice that you’re all alone and you forget why you’re in such a rush. The blackand-white, less-is-more of Soylent offers no answer to that question. It won’t engage you in dialogue, the way the friends you used to eat with did. Sure, Soylent 2.0 is no Soylent Green. It isn’t made out of human beings. But it has a different secret. It will control you. It will empty you. And it will isolate you, too. I lived on it for a month of my life, sipping, digesting, and ridding myself of the very life forces that food should sustain. — Harry Gray is junior in Branford College. He is a copy editor for The New Journal.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
YALE UNIVERSITY
JUDAIC STUDIES Fall 2016 Course Offerings FRESHMAN SEMINAR RLST 012 Divine Law in Historical Perspective, Hayes, Christine 9-10:15am MW BIBLICAL JDST 110 The Bible, Hayes, Christine 11:25:12:50pm MW ANCIENT JDST 230 Law & Narrative, Gender & Sex, Bickart, Noah 3:30-5:20 Th JDST 391 The Midrash Seminar: The Revelation at Sinai, Fraade, Steven 9:25-11:15am R JDST 392 Mishnah Seminar: Tractate RoshHaShanah, Fraade, Steven 9:25-11:15am W MEDIEVAL & EARLY MODERN JDST 200 History of Jews to Early Modern Times, Marcus, Ivan 11:25-12:50pm TR JDST 260 Jewish Biblical Commentaries, Breuer, Edward 1:30-3:20pm W JDST 261 Jews at the Origins of Islam, Yadgar, Liran 9:25-11:15am T JDST 270 Medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Conversation, Marcus, Ivan 9:25-11:15 R JDST335 Jewish Philosophy, Franks, Paul 9.25-11.15 Th MODERN JDST 216 Intersubjectivity and Dialogue, Angermann, Asaf 1:30-3:20pm R JDST 332 Zionism, Stern, Elli 10:30-11:20am MW JDST 336 The Culture of Acculturation, Sorkin, David 1:30-3:20pm T JDST 340 Political History European Jewry 1589-1897 Sorkin, David 2.30-3.20 MW JDST 349 Ethnicity, Religion and Nationality, Hever, Hannan & Stern, Elli 3:30-5:20pm W LANGUAGE & LITERATURE HEBR 110 Elementary Modern Hebrew, Dina Roginsky 9:25–10:20 or 10:30–11:20 MTWTHF HEBR 130 Intermediate Modern Hebrew, Shiri Goren and Orit Yeret MW 1-2:15, Orit Yeret, TTH 2:30–3:45, Shiri Goren HEBR 150/JDST 213 Advanced Modern Hebrew: Daily Life in Israel, Orit Yeret 9:00-10:15 WF HEBR 158/JDST305 Contemporary Israeli Society in Film, Shiri Goren 11:35-12:50 T Th HEBR 160/JDST 360 Hebrew in a Changing World, Dina Roginsky 1:00-2:15 T Th JDST 339 Politics in Modern Hebrew Literature, Hever, Hannan 3:30-5:20pm T JDST 416 Reading Yiddish, Price, Joshua 1:30-3:20pm Th _____________________________________________________________
Program in Judaic Studies Yale University 451 College St., Rm. 301 New Haven, CT 06511 Tel – (203)432-0843, Fax – (203)432-4889 www.judaicstudies.yale.edu
Please note that information on courses, including meeting days and times, is subject to revision. Students should check the printed YCPS and especially the on-line course information for the fullest and most accurate information
WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES
Festival 2016
YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y S E P T E M B E R 1 9 – 2 1
Hilton Als
Tessa Hadley
Helen Garner
On Becoming a Writer, and Other Tales of Self-Invention Prize director Michael Kelleher talks with Hilton Als, Tessa Hadley, and Helen Garner about how and when and why they started writing, and the greatest challenges they faced in forging their identities as writers. T U E S D AY, S E P T E M B E R 2 0 , 6 : 0 0 P M T H E G R A D U AT E A N D P R O F E S S I O N A L S C H O O L C L U B AT YA L E ( G P S C Y ) , 2 0 4 Y O R K S T R E E T Co-sponsor: South Asian Studies Council, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Film Study Center, and the Whitney Humanities Center.
F U L L C A L E N D A R O F E V E N T S A V A I L A B L E AT 36
WINDHAMCAMPBELL .ORG
THE NEW JOUR NAL
ALL EVENTS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
PHOTO OF HILTON ALS BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE