This WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013

H ¡ T R O H R O `

O Id t¡ oRpSo b YANAN WANG unveils the story behind the resurgence of cultural Greek life on campus. PAGE 3

DEMOCRACY

B6–7

DOCTORS

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DOMINICAN

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NO LONGER UNCONTESTED

ON TRANSGENDER HEALTH

MORE IMPORTANT THAN YCC PREZ

We call bullshit on this year’s one-man YCC presidential race. Here are some additional candidates for you to consider.

Matthew Lloyd-Thomas looks into the healthcare benefits and challenges for members of Yale’s transgender community.

WEEKEND sits down with the former president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

ROTHBERG

WEEKEND VIEWS

ADAMS

// MOHAN YIN

Understanding Suzy Lee Weiss’ Anger

#SKYPHOS4LYFE // BY RACHEL ROTHBERG Society is just one of the strange things that we as Yalies can’t quite verbalize to outsiders. Our tongues tie when we try to explain naked parties — “you’re just … like … naked? Where do you look?”

— because there are no comparable explanations.

These are traditions undeniably Yale. But then there are the neglected traditions — the middle-child syndrome — not serious enough to command the other siblings, but not young enough to be nurtured.

Rather, the middle child is always relegated to the back of the dessert line, with no clear place in the family. This metaphorical middle child is the junior society.

Ladies and gentlemen of Yale College, it is time for this nonsense to end. I recently went through the senior society tap process and am wrapping up tap for my junior society’s new class (#SKYPHOS4LYFE). I am, therefore, at least somewhat qualified to discuss this grave matter at hand, and I demand honest talk about society — both junior and senior — the culture that so fascinates, frustrates, and arguably, traumatizes us for the months of March and April.

Junior societies have incredible potential. But for the past eight months, at most seven of 22 members show up on a given Thursday to share a pitcher at Viva’s. We rally for interviews, but only because those are infamously entertaining. And let’s face it — they’re for our amusement, not yours. Your facial expression is priceless when asked whether you’d prefer to change gender every time you sneeze or not be able to tell the difference between a muffin

and a baby (surprisingly difficult, especially if you’re either a muffin connoisseur or tipsy).

You’ll squirm, dress up as Honey Boo Boo, and bring us food and drink. Do we juniors enjoy anything more than some semblance of power?

As an added bonus, it’s a nice respite from being grilled in our own senior interviews.

But it’s little more than that. We can’t judge you by your joke choice or whether you know the square root of 69 (though for the record, it is neither 7 nor 9, but “8-something.” Your math teachers — and Rihanna and Drake — would be ashamed.) We’d rather not reject anyone, and on the flip side, Yalies are not programmed to accept such failure or rejection. But in this case, there is no trying again, no applying next year. It’s over.

And it’ll be over for me soon enough too. I adore the people in my society. It’s a pity I only just met (most of) them last week. A full year has passed since the haziness of Tap Night, and only now have they come out of the woodwork with their own flavor of interview questions, deadpanning, “Name me the three hottest Latin American authors,” or ironicizing, “Why does love always feel like a battlefield?”

I wish they weren’t as cool or as funny so I wouldn’t miss these strangers so much. But that’s just how it is with junior society, and how it will likely continue.

As a junior, it appears that most seniors here are willing to commit their Thursday and Sunday evenings to their society. No one is willing to devote a few hours on Thursday to a junior one, because it’s not bio-based, it’s “drinkingbased.” Don’t some of the best relationships, especially college friendships, form in these laid-back situations though?

Yes, we might have been a randomly constructed group, but so are senior societies. The ostensible goal is the same: Meet a new g ro u p o f amaz-

Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Suzy Lee Weiss, a high school senior who had received the short end of the college admissions stick. In her essay, Weiss argues that the common admissions rhetoric of “Be yourself!” is misleading, complaining that the advice is only helpful for tri-varsity athletes with nine extracurriculars and two moms.

Understandably, the editorial swept across the Internet. Gawker’s Caity Weaver published a 1,000-word exegesis in response, tearing down Weiss’ argument bit by bit.

But the backlash wasn’t unwarranted. What takes Weiss’ editorial from the familiar rants of spurned high schoolers to something genuinely discomforting is her flippant tone regarding … everything. She blames her rejection on mostly external factors (“My parents gave up on parenting me”), whines about diversity’s role in the admission process and mocks the notion of charity. Even more troubling: her claim that, had it helped her cause, she would have lied about her sexual orientation, created a fake charity or pretended to have Native American heritage (this, according to her, involves wearing a headdress to school). Weiss’ cynicism doesn’t make her any more sympathetic.

But Weaver also gets it wrong. She writes, in response to Weiss, that a good SAT score is a “very reasonable requirement for college admission,” as if cramming hundreds of stressed teens into a stuffy room for five hours — making them answer questions that some have argued are easier for certain demographics — gives anything other than a very narrow definition of “aptitude.” Weaver also assumes that Weiss interpreted the “Be yourself!” dictum as “Do nothing,” despite the fact that Weiss never mentions anything about her own resume.

Asserting that hard work is a requirement for admission is one thing; shaming someone for being lazy with very little evidence is another.

Discounting the grosser parts of Weiss’ essay, there is some truth to it. Though Weaver correctly points out that “Be yourself!” is not the only advice colleges give to applicants, the criteria for admission still seem vague. This is probably insolvable; each college, each appli-

F R I D AY APRIL 12

cant, is far too different to determine a universal standard for a student deserving of acceptance. Still, there is a general notion that hard work and passion — or at least the appearance of those virtues — have high value for college admissions officers. This leads to the problem of high school students resume-building to game the system, doing for the sake of doing.

Weiss’ sardonic attitude could be read as a reflection of this mentality.

The problem seemed especially intense at the boarding school I attended. In addition to the hypercompetitive spirit that drove so many perfunctory activities — the line, “Well, it’ll look good for college,” was tossed about regularly — the prestige of my high school undoubtedly made certain students feel entitled to admission at an elite school. This only resulted in more hurt feelings when things didn’t go as planned, when hard work didn’t pay off, when nothing in the world seemed fair.

Weiss’ grumbling leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but I understand her frustration. We are so intent on finding out why (“WHY?”) we were told no, why we aren’t good enough and whether there is anything we could have done about it. A similar desire pervades Yale, whether it’s stressing out about summer internships, society tap or grades. We want to feel validated. We want to feel appreciated.

Rejection causes us to look inward and dig up aspects about ourselves we might not want to find.

Two years ago, I discovered I was deferred from Yale’s early action pool. My reaction was similar to Suzy’s (minus the racism): I felt personally attacked, frustrated, unappreciated. As time wore on, as it will for Suzy, I became less beholden to a judgment made on a 500-word essay and three numbers. At Yale and beyond, we will experience rejection, whether it’s fair or not. Given that constant, I’d rather try to keep perspective on what I can change rather than agonize over that which I cannot. I hope Suzy will learn to as well.

Contact WILL ADAMS at william.adams@yale.edu .

HOLMES & HONG

// BY WILL ADAMS

From Anonymity to Acronym

reconnect more throughout the week, but those two days are non-negotiable.

All Yale activities and classes draw on one shared interest — be it backpacking or Kant — to connect us in doing and learning. Junior society is about chilling. So that’s why, when we ask whether you would rather have a falcon permanently on your head or a cat as an arm, we don’t want you to choke up in discomfort. We want to laugh with you at the utter ridiculousness of your first AIM screen name (really, why waterbubble9897?), not at you.

None of us are 100 percent comfortable in a social situation — especially when the interview room gets progressively steamier — but we need you to roll with the punches, to join us in the good fun, because that’s how we make the most of our connections here at Yale — or the vast majority do. Not over a deep discussion of Hegel — maybe that’s how St. A’s works — but over a deep pitcher of beer or a deep karaoke battle.

Full disclosure: I’m partial to Skyphos, and we’ve been told we’re milder in our interviews, but in general, no society wants to shame or intimidate or mock you. Like senior societies, we are competing for the same groups of people.

We need you to like us just as much as we like you. But that’s not to say the most incredible people don’t slip through the cracks — they do. For myriad reasons, inexplicable and stupid. And that’s what makes these processes sad and painful and chaotic.

Stripped down, societies are just an institutionalized way of forcing us complacent upperclassmen out of our shell, out of our rooted social circles. This construct of Skyphos Class of 2014 will soon be destroyed by X Senior Society Class of 2014, and I’m scared.

We’ll lose Thursday and Sunday nights, but there are five other days in the week to take advantage of. It will be up to us to muster the courage — the courage not only to keep our GroupMe alive, but also to follow through with those Viva’s nights, those Woad’s pregames, those lunch dates. We can do it.

Contact RACHEL ROTHBERG at rachel.rothberg@yale.edu .

// BY TAOTAO HOLMES AND EMILY HONG

The term “SWUG,” suffocatingly popular, has swept our campus, and now, the entire nation like a pandemic. Its exploding popularity has thrown the rest of us out of the spotlight and under the bus, and we feel a profound injustice. Here’s a list of key Yale terms that will hopefully help bring us, too, from anonymity to acronym.

SWOO: Senior Without Options. The senior slowly realizing her/she has no career or romantic options after graduation.

BOYS: Burnt Out Yale Student.

Took six credits one too many times (once) and needs a full year off to recover.

BaCK: Bass Cafe Kid. Do you even do any work, or do you just sit in the brown chairs and wait for friends to show up?

LiSH: Liberated Senior Honey.

Often confused with a SWUG, a LiSH is a fly girl or boy who has realized college is too short to do anything (or anyone) other than what he or she wants .

SWOS: Student Without Stan-

#FIRSTWORDPROBLEMS

dards. It’s hipster. Don’t worry about it.

FatBro: The frat guy who drank so much he’s no longer robustly athletic, he’s just fat.

DKE-Scusting: The ninth circle of male unattractiveness. Probably wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.

Life of PiPhi: The sorority girl who muploads her every waking moment.

SHAP: Should Have Attended Princeton. Where are all the husbands and eating clubs?

BoCAG: Banking or Consulting After Graduation. Interests include: designer suits, spreadsheets and gold stickers.

SWAH: Sophomore Who’s Always High. Hunh?

CATSIP: Considers Acceptable To Sing In Public? Oh, you have jam next week? Why pay $5 for milk when I got the cow for free all semester?

JOWJ: Junior, Only Wants a Job. Will evolve into a BoCAG. SAPS: Student Always Protesting Something. Cross Campus = second home, portable whiteboards = critical posses-

sion, believes = all other Yalies are heartless jerks.

SWONF: Senior With Oddly No Friends. What have you been doing for the past three years?

Realizes he has been befriending extracurriculars and not people.

SSLaR: Secretly Sexy Lab Rat. That super hot person you’ve only seen in Sterling Chem Lab. UGH: Unreachable Gay Hottie. Doesn’t play for your team, and thus the main source of your angst.

SIDH: Sneaks Into Dining Hall.

Time to get on the meal plan.

DOB: Drinks Only in Bass.

Nothing like a few shots to get pumped for a problem set.

DJAL: Dat Junior Ass-Licker.

We didn’t know there was a varisty social climbing team.

PW: Percy Weasleys. Takes IMs/College Council/tour guiding too seriously.

NoGAS: Nobody Gives a Shit.

Enough said.

Contact TAOTAO HOLMES and EMILY HONG at taotao.holmes@yale.edu and emily. hong@yale.edu .

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ing people. All relationships depend on luck and timing, on getting in the same room with a person for a five-minute chat. In a sense, junior societies seem more natural than senior ones. Once you are in the same place (say, someone’s apartment), organic connections develop; they follow the normal path of gradual disclosure — first hometown, major, how your week has been (“midterms, ugh”). Then ex-boyfriend issues, insecurity about school and life crises. You should have another school year to solidify these bonds — except senior society appears to usurp the budding relationships and reappropriate our already overused mental energy. I wonder though: Will you get to know me better in a one-shot “this is my life in five hours” bio than in five one-hour segments of lunch, coffee and yogurt over the course of eight weeks? We’ve relegated junior society to silliness, knowing full well that if we choose to do senior society next year, we’ll really commit, we’ll hardly question our choices to do so.

But we should, because if all any of us really want is connection — and from Yale Crush, YaleFML, Rump Chat, etc. that truly is all we want — junior societies can help. But we’ve inherently structured our social fabric around senior societies. Juniors run organizations from YIRA to Theta, and very few participate in junior societies. They save it for senior year, when they will be free to dismiss their other activities and commit to society. Indeed, junior societies constitute a much smaller segment of Yale than even senior societies, which statistically speaking, involve only a small portion of the student body.

Regardless of numbers, maybe we have a problem in our fundamental attitude. For instance, most of our in-season, dry athletes will not show up to just hang out and bond with their junior society. That mentality is inverted senior year — Thursday and Sunday you will be there, unless you have a serious emergency.

After that, you have the personal choice to

Vine

Who would’ve thought an infinite video loop would be the next social media craze?

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BROTHERHOOD // BY YANAN WANG

n a chilly evening early this March, around 50 people gathered at the Afro-American Cultural Center, talking excitedly among themselves.

Some of them were Yale students, others from neighboring universities, and a group of them were older African-American men from across the Northeast who had arrived to celebrate the “coming out” of one of their own. It was the probate show of Leonard Thomas ’14, the first and, as of now, only Yale student to be inducted into the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity since the last active brothers graduated in 2010.

A probate — a term primarily used among African-American fraternities — is the ceremony in which a pledge comes out to his friends, family and brothers as a member of the group. Both a party and a ritual, the event generally attracts a large number of the fraternity’s alumni, who are eager to demonstrate their support for a new brother. Most attendees do not know the new member’s identity until the official “unveiling,” adding to the mystique and excitement of the affair.

At Thomas’ show he performed a step dance, recited information about the fraternity’s history and greeted other Greek organizations in the audience.

It was the final stage in a rigorous process that he had been undergoing since the fall.

“Some probates are better than others,” Thomas said, reluctant to reveal details. “But either way, it’s the moment when you present yourself.

It was the unveiling of me: my way of saying, ‘That’s who I am.’”

Alpha Phi Alpha is one of three cultural fraternities that have resurfaced on campus this semester, all considered to be outside Yale’s more mainstream Greek life. The two others are Kappa Alpha Psi (KAP) — also an African-American fraternity — and La Unidad Latina, a Latino fraternity also known as Lambda Upsilon Lambda (LUL). These three groups were all once active at Yale until recent years, but inconsistent participation, along with the graduation of key members, led to a halt in their activities.

While the organizations have experienced cycles of both high and low membership, one of their major points of appeal for the current brothers has been their long history on campus. The oldest, Alpha Phi Alpha, was originally established at Yale in 1909,

O

F R I D AY APRIL 12

just three years after its first chapter was founded at Cornell University.

Kappa Alpha Psi followed shortly, in 1911. La Unidad Latina, which celebrated its 21st chapter anniversary this Thursday, is the youngest of the trio.

As of their re-emergence this semester, Alpha and Kappa at Yale have one member each, while La Unidad Latina has three.

Many of the emerging groups are closely affiliated with existing cultural houses, such as the Af-Am House and La Casa Cultural, the Latino center. But within these organizations, students have expressed mixed feelings about the re-emergence of these fraternities and sororities. Those at the helm of the initiatives are excited about what a cultural Greek life can offer to minorities on campus — a

CASA’S GOT TALENT SSS // 7 p.m.

The Chinese American Students Association pits traditional Chinese acts against the modern.

stronger alumni network, additional lines of support, role models with similar backgrounds. But others are hesitant to place their support behind groups with the potential to cause divisions within cultural houses and existing social dynamics. For better or for worse, the sudden reappearance of these formerly dormant cultural fraternities signals a shift in the way minorities at Yale self-identify and interact with one another.

“It’s a wonderful coincidence that all of this is happening at the same time,” said Will Genova ’15, president of the Yale chapter of La Unidad Latina. “It makes you wonder, ‘Why now?’”

PARA SIEMPRE

This Sunday, the brothers of La Unidad Latina gathered in the Branford dining room for their weekly brunch. The meetings, which are open to the entire Yale community, are designed to introduce the brothers to the greater campus population, Genova said. That morning, two of the three LUL brothers at Yale, Genova and Alejandro Jimenez ’14, were in attendance, along with four Latina students. About 15 minutes past noon, a young man walked into the room and was immediately greeted by Genova and Jimenez, who rose to shake the man’s hand and pull up a seat for him.

“Have you had breakfast?” Jimenez asked. “We could swipe you in.”

“No, I’m good. I’m meeting somebody later.”

The man was Jamil Abreu ’08, a brother of La Unidad Latina at Yale from 2004 to 2008, the last year the fraternity had been active on campus.

Now a New Haven resident, Abreu is active in the process of reviving the group and continues to be a mentor to undergraduate brothers, Genova said, citing him as an example of the expansive cultural Greek network. Genova and Jimenez, who are both impressed by the support they are receiving from alumni, said the intimate size of the group makes the bond between brothers stronger than in mainstream Greek fraternities.

Jimenez traveled to Providence, R.I., over spring break for his friend’s probate. Following a brief conversation, one of the brothers immediately offered a ride for him and a few of his friends. This gesture of generosity bolstered Jimenez’s belief in La Unidad Latina’s far-reaching presence outside of Yale.

“Our motto is ‘Para Siempre’ [Spanish for ‘forever’] — not ‘Para Undergrad,’” Genova quipped. This summer, he will be interning at PBS in Washington, D.C., where he will receive guidance from a LUL brother who helped him prepare for the job interview. Both Genova and Jimenez

said it has been valuable for them to have mentors who have also undergone the experience of being a minority at an elite college.

For Wesley Dixon ’15, the Yale student responsible for bringing Kappa Alpha Psi back after its last member graduated in 2010, the fraternity has been an important part of his upbringing. The son of a former Kappa Alpha Psi member, Dixon grew up surrounded by many of his father’s friends, who were also involved in the fraternity as undergraduates. They were the men he looked up to the most, so becoming a part of their brotherhood felt natural to him.

On the day Dixon was initiated, March 14, his father and a group of the fraternity’s alumni came to participate in the celebration, as was the case with Thomas’ probate. Those who could not make it to the event called Dixon with their congratulations, and others sent him gifts such as letterman jackets and bow ties in crimson and cream, the fraternity’s colors.

OUR MOTTO IS ‘PARA SIEMPRE.’ – NOT ‘PARA UNDERGRAD.’ WILL GENOVA ’15

History plays a large role, both in choosing a fraternity and completing the membership process, according to brothers from all three of the revived cultural fraternities. They were all attracted to the groups’ enduring traditions, as opposed to an affiliation to a traditional fraternity or a cultural house that ends upon college graduation. “[One reason for membership] may be the lifelong association that is cherished so often by members of these groups,” said Rodney Cohen, the director of the Af-Am House. “This is not totally unique, but it is much more pronounced among black Greek fraternities.”

But for some who are outside of these circles, the fraternities’ histories can be alienating rather than appealing. Kadeem Yearwood ’15, a member of the Yale Black Men’s Union and Sigma Chi — a fraternity not affiliated with a specific cultural group — said he had not considered African-American fraternities as a freshman because as a “black Brit,” the tradition had not existed for him growing up.

“The rituals of the Divine Nine [the name for the national council of African-American Greek letter groups] are much more secretive than those of any other frat or sorority on this campus,”

// ALLIE KRAUSE

La Unidad Latina was revived at Yale this semester with three new hermanos.

Yearwood said. “I don’t feel as comfortable with it because I don’t have that tradition from my family.”

Denzil Bernard ’15, a brother of Sigma Phi Epsilon at Yale, said while the idea of an African-American fraternity was appealing, his cursory understanding of their history and their low profile on campus made them less salient to him when he was rushing groups this February. Yearwood acknowledged that it would have been too difficult for him to be the only Yale member of a revived group, which is the case for both Thomas and Dixon.

In Thomas’ opinion, the impact of cultural fraternity membership goes beyond mere family tradition and addresses racial grievances as a whole.

“No one can teach me how to be a black man except a black man,” he remarked. “I have mentors who are not black, and while I value my relationships with them, I can never ask them, ‘Where can I get a haircut from?’” On a deeper level, he added, this meant receiving advice on how to present himself during job interviews or at work from day to day, where people’s perceptions of him might be inextricably linked to his race.

FROM GENTLEMAN TO BROTHER

When a brother is officially inducted into a cultural fraternity, he is considered “crossed.” The moniker is not one that is taken lightly: In order to be initiated, prospective members have to undergo a process that several interviewed described as more intense than those for traditional Greek organizations. For many, the path towards brotherhood begins with gathering as much information about the organization as possible, from filling in an application to discussing the group’s ideologies with members past and present.

From there, pledges partake in activities designed to demonstrate their devotion to the fraternity or sorority. One Latino student, Harry, who asked that his name be changed given his work for La Casa, withdrew from the process early on because he thought the rush requirements reflected an exclusionary environment within La Unidad Latina.

For two to three months, Harry said, pledges were required to wear a uniform indicating their affiliation with La Unidad Latina. During this time, they also promised that they would SEE BROTHERHOOD PAGE B8

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

YALEDANCERS OWN THE STAGE // BY MAYA AVERBUCH

As organ music blared through the speakers, a troop of jean-jacket-clad dancers bowed their heads, and slowly, delicately, touched one another’s fingertips. They stood frozen in this intimate pose, making the audience hold their breath — until the beat of George Michael’s “Faith” kicked in. Scott Simpson ’13 was the first to move, his shoulder jerking up, down, up, down in sync with the music, until everyone burst into motion.

The opening act of the Yaledancers’ spring show, which will take place in the ECA Theater at 55 Audubon St. from April 11–13, is an upbeat extravaganza of jaunty moves and athletic turns that show exactly why the dance group sells out performances each semester. Choreographers are given complete freedom to add their own flair to each piece, but the fact that most members have backgrounds in ballet and modern dance is apparent.

In the opening numbers, the choreography fits the cutesy song — at one point the dancers lie on the floor, their chins leaned on their fists, waving their feet in the air — while showcasing the group’s technical skill. Dancers leapt across the stage, sometimes even rolling across the back of Simpson as he claimed centerstage. They maintained their dynamism throughout, until the

stage went dark.

Some of the subsequent pieces are less hard-edged, and instead embrace a more elegant style. Dressed in a flowing white top, Alex Lin ’13 gave a swanlike solo performance in the first act.

A similarly strong four-person ballet group dressed in blue skirts that flared out with each pirouette followed. With lighting to a minimum, the performers’ blurred reflections twirled with them in the glossy black paint of the theater’s floor. In the second act, a riveting piece choreographed by Molly Gibbons ’14 featured three dancers in simple black dresses who seemed to form human sculptures at various points, while the radiolike voice in Guy Clark’s “The Dark” filled the space around them.

Though the spotlight sometimes illuminated only one dancer at a time, the dancers often rose, fell and turned with impeccable coordination. The dance played with the song lyrics as the dancers slowly covered and uncovered their eyes at the opening and close of the piece.

As most of the undergraduate and graduate members of Yaledancers come to the group with preprofessional or professional training, the troupe is fit and technically advanced. Their skill was perhaps best seen in an incredible work choreographed by Jane Fisher

’14 and Gracie White ’16. The number opens with the silhouette of a girl held up by Simpson, the token male, while doing a midair split. The four dancers, who also included Natalia Khosla ’14 and the two choreographers, performed their gymnastic turns and lifts with ease. At one point, Simpson launched himself up and over one of the other dancers. The result, overall, was astounding.

The Yaledancers also left space for the ever-welcome whistle-inducing performances, including a duet set to “Bones,” from “The Game of Thrones.”

As the singer crooned about “empty churches” and “soulless curses,” the two dancers, Laura Bass ’15 and Rebecca Distler ’12 SPH ’13, flipped the hair out of their faces, took off their high black heels and embraced the girls-gone-wild essence of their choreography. Later on, dancers decked out in netted tops and short red skirts strutted to the tune of the classic “Lady Marmalade,” showcasing their ability to shake, shake, shake and kick their legs up high.

However, the most beautiful performances belonged to the co-presidents, Simpson and Elena Light ’13, who also led the way with mesmerizing, sometimes more experimental, choreography. Simpson’s interlude in the sec-

ond act was expertly done, to the point that he appeared to be his own puppet.

Light’s wonderful trio earlier in the show had no musical accompaniment; instead, the performers, who seemed like interconnected parts of a single machine, let out sighs, hisses and other emphatic noises, while incorporating the claps and stomps of step. The two leaders of the dance group seemed to carry on an unspoken dialogue during their duet in the second act; she hooked her foot behind his knee, and he caught her as they pitched forward. Later, he lifted the hand placed above her chest, and an invisible string seemed to make her rise with him. Light’s stand-alone performance at the end of the showcase also deserves applause, for as she said while dancing in and out of the spotlight, it was the first time she had ever spoken in a performance, though

// CARLY LOVEJOY

Yaledancers shows us how to move.

she has been in over 10 and even danced to the recording of a poem last semester. “Strange, isn’t it?” she said.

The Yaledancers should be applauded not only for their grace and skill, but also for their ingenuity. The spring show is a must-see for anyone with an interest in dance because, as the raw circus music in the closing dance suggests, the show offers a fascinating, well-coordinated medley of performances that will shock, awe and sometimes just make you grin.

Contact MAYA AVERBUCH at maya.averbuch@yale.edu .

“Edwardian Opulence”: a decadent feast for the mind, eye // BY CAROLYN LIPKA

// YCBA

F R I D AY APRIL 12

The Yale Center for British Art’s exhibit “Edwardian Opulence” is a veritable feast for all the senses.

The two-floored exhibition, which serves as an artistic and cultural representation of the opulence of the Edwardian era — 1900 to 1913 — provides audiences with a taste of the era that expands far beyond the typical portraits and still-lifes associated with many art exhibits at Yale.

Immediately upon entering the exhibition on the second floor, I was floored by the beautiful bodice, skirt and train, which belonged to socialite Mary Victoria Leiter. The intricately designed white dress set the tone for the rest of the exhibition as highly indulgent yet clearly representative of the cultural elite of the early 1900s. The dress itself was commissioned by famous Paris fashion house Worth for Leiter upon her marriage to the future viceroy of India, George Curzon. The dress served as a representation of the blending of her two cultures (despite the fact that she was Americanborn), combining traditional Indian techniques like zardozi, metallic threads, and patterns of vines, leaves and orchids with more European trends including the traditional silhouette and floral beading on the bodice. This sweeping gown was not only beautiful, but provided a rich

“BLOOD WILL HAVE BLOOD”

Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater // 8 p.m.

Six Yale College poets tear and analyze Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to a bloody pulp.

story, setting the tone as a historical artifact more so than just a piece of art.

The exhibition itself followed from this into sections broken down thematically rather than chronologically. Because this time period is relatively short, the amount of art represented here is remarkable.

Gorgeous jewels from Cartier to De Beers represented the bourgeoning use of colonial resources with the simultaneous growth of a market for luxury goods. Diamond tiaras and brooches sparkled alongside paintings and photographs. In the colonial sections, intricate and stunning fans were framed alongside hand-drawn designs for furniture and luxury hotel interiors. The “Mrs. James de Rothschild Ostrich Feather Fan” from 1912–’13 was particularly impressive, for similar reasons to the dress at the opening of the exhibition. The feathered fan itself was breathtaking in the intricacy of design on the gold handle and the over-the-top opulence of the ostrich feather, but its real impressiveness stemmed from the historical context. Ostrich feather fans became popular in the early 1900s because of the farming of ostriches in the Cape of Good Hope, and were yet another symbol of the golden age of British imperialism.

As the exhibition transitioned into a new section, the attention to detail in the installation shone through. Interactive elements of the exhibit were particularly impressive: the phonograph, which you can pick up and adjust to the iPods set up with early vocal recordings, makes the galleries engaging the whole way through.

The iPods were a delight as well, setting up a playlist of early sound recordings beginning with a Baroque-esque orchestral and vocal rendition of “God Save the Queen” which, while quiet, was still impressive. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for old documents and archives, because they bring history alive for me. This part of “Edwardian Opulence” did just that.

The next sections were dedicated to “Men of Mark,” “Town” and “Country” which all merit rave reviews of their own. “Men of Mark” was exclusively composed of photographic portraits of the cultural elite painted by William Orpren, perhaps the most prolific and represented artists in this exhibition. My favorite painting in the entire twofloor exhibition was in this section, a giant scene entitled “Homage to Manet” from 1909. This painting portrays the critic George Moor reading his own article on Manet, to

Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks, Hugh Lane, Walter Sickert and D.S. MacColl, who were all art critics, painters and artists in their own right. It is a celebration of artistic collaboration, discussion and admiration of Manet (one of my personal favorite artists).

The final section on the third floor began much differently with large, brightly colored paintings depicting glorified and successful imperial missions. This floor was much less exciting in the variety of art it offered, but was still a delight to visit. The final video, which displayed short silent films from the era, served as the perfect final note to the exhibit: beginning with the regal crowning of Edward VII and ending with the whimsical video of small children in a toy automobile entitled “Smallest Car in the Largest City in the World,” providing a range of emotional payoff representative of the Edwardian era.

The YCBA is always an excellent place for a study break, but this exhibit is worth a full hour of your attention. It is expertly put together, provides a pleasant educational experience and truly is a beautiful aesthetic feast.

Contact CAROLYN LIPKA at carolyn.lipka@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The B.A., not the B.S.

Fewer classes, higher GPA. Phi Beta Kappa, here we come.

PAGE B5

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND REFLECTS

IN PRAISE OF IMITATION // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

In two weeks, I’ll hit the obscure, awkward age of 19 — a little above adult, a step below maturity — and yet, I’ll have lived 19 times, at least, died 19 times, at least, to feel a bit above the whole birthday hoopla.

As my pocketbook Hinduism would have it, reincarnation is what happens when our soul moves through desire, cycling from fantasies of fame, fortune and power to love and goodness and eventually nothingness. And so, I guess you can say I’ve tumbled through the cosmic washing machine, as we all have, reincarnating in my miniature way from Oral Stage to Anal Stage to Phallic Stage or what have you. The photo albums bear witness: I’ve changed, though not so much from rock to tree to shrew to cow to me as me to me to me.

Or not. At 3, I was Shirley Temple, all long, bobbing curls and thick, red lips. At 6, we moved to America, my father, my mother and I, and in many ways we were all reborn but Shirley died; the crew-cut kids at my new kindergarten refused to accept the long-haired thing as a boy, so my “golden locks,” as I eulogize them, got the snip-snip. (Now that’s what I call an original sin.) Newly crowned with a Jewfro, I set out to recast myself as the Jewish immigrant of a century earlier — one of those huddled masses yearning to be free. Because, really, what could be more boring, more bureaucratic, than a 21st century migrant to Pittsburgh, fleeing inflation rather than pogroms? So I kept a journal, fashioning myself — as nice Jewish kids are maybe wont to do — as a survivor’s Anne Frank; inside the journal I scribbled nervously in what I imagined as the hushed, tenement-gray tones of an Ellis Island newcomer.

By around the age of 7 some testosterone must have kicked in, because that’s the age I started trotting around in circles as the self-appointed emperor of ancient Thailand, then China. For that, blame the “Eyewitness” book series, which were all the rage, and which taught me everything I’ll ever need to know about ancient civilizations. For my next career — as a photographer in the Brazilian Amazon — blame National Geographic, whose monthly covers graced the walls of a bedroom I tried to remodel as a natural history museum.

Whitman and I, we contained multitudes. For those were brief, blazing lives — Shirley’s, the emperor’s, the photographer’s — each invested with the full rage and earnestness of a bourgeois childhood. With each I must have seemed to my bemused parents a pioneer of childhood, a creative monster with schizophrenic tendencies. All children are. But these double lives, these imitative fantasies, occupy the purely personal realm; on the outside, my friends and I all shuttled around banally from tennis lessons to math tutoring, where we fumbled and stuttered and missed. Yet I secretly settled into my many personae the way I still settle into dreams these days: exquisitely, perfectly abiding my mother’s instructions to “think good thoughts.” I nitpick and obsess over the details, counting not sheep but the furniture of my dreamscape.

— bobbing, like the kid in the raised chair of a Hora dance. I was working so hard to keep up with my gawky, pubertal body, or waiting so anxiously for the height spurt that never came, that it was literally impossible to escape myself and literally impossible to not want to try. In one of my favorite books, “The Book of Intimate Grammar” by the Israeli novelist David Grossman, a 12-year old obsesses over both his body and Harry Houdini, whose body famously escaped spaces.

The boy imitates Houdini and escapes from refrigerators, boxes, cars — but these are just rehearsals for the big break: the escape from the body. So that was kind of how I felt, except I couldn’t imitate Houdini, or anyone for that matter. I was too old for that.

And that was the problem.

BECAUSE I’M RELATIVELY SANE, I HAD TO STOP IMITATING WHAT WASN’T THERE. The trouble with adolescence is that, once you’re bound within certain contours, you have to color inside the lines. Your identity spasms for a few years and, cruelly enough, it’s predictable. Everyone else might gripe and shriek about your teenage barbarities, but at the end of the day they trivialize your condition as angst. It hurts when adults laugh off adolescents as self-obsessed when, really, you’ve got no clue what your self looks like (or smells like, or sounds like). Not to mention that you invariably fumble at focusing your so-called “self” for long enough to be able to fixate on it.

Everyone saw my so-called “identity crisis” from miles away. I couldn’t decide whether I was Israeli or American, or both, or neither. It wouldn’t have killed me to label myself an American. I could have done it long ago. English came quickly to me, and the warm multicultural embrace of my classmates would have made for a quick, painless conversion. But I’ve always insisted on being different, and remaining Israeli in America was one way to do that.

So, as a child, I parroted what I took to be my Israeli cousins’ Israeli sensibilities. I religiously followed the Argentinean telenovelas that swept the Israeli ratings.

By satellite, I tuned in to Israeli TV

*** By the time I got bar mitzvah’d at 13, it seemed like a golden age had passed. According to Jewish custom I now counted as a full-fledged, adult member of the co m m u n i ty, but I felt unmoored

shows to pick up the latest slang and the gesticulatory semiotics of that gesticulatory culture. During the long, dry summers I spent on a kibbutz — a Zionist twist on your classic socialist commune, where I still romp around barefoot in green hills — I conjured up some cult out of the place, and followed blindly. It’s embarrassing, now, to recall myself affecting the place’s imagined virtues: socialist stolidity, pastoral humility and swashbuckling charm — of which, of course, I’ve been disillusioned one by one.

Because I’m relatively sane, I had to stop imitating what wasn’t there. That was rough, and caused me no shortage of teenage angst. It felt lonely, too, to stop mimicking what was there — my cousins and their mannerisms — but I had my pride, and it struck me as humiliating to ape people without really understanding them. Understanding is one of those hefty philosophical concepts that lends itself to bullshit, but it’s intuitive, really. The moment my cousins started trickling into the army, which is mandatory in Israel, was the moment it hit me that there was an unbridgeable gap between us. I’ve never held a gun, or mobilized for any cause much larger than myself — my selves.

Some things you just can’t imitate. *** My brother came up to campus this past weekend. He lives in Israel, where, seven years after snipping off the dreadlocks, he’s practicing corporate law. But that’s a different story.

Anyways, Eyal, as he’s known, flew into New York to take the ethics component of the bar exam (which, as my dad likes to point out, sounds like an oxymoron). After spending the morning filling in bubbles in some dank auditorium at Pace University, Eyal met up with my dad and the two hopped on the Metro-North to see me in my natural habitat.

My dad left for JFK before Eyal, so my brother and I spent a few hours walking around campus, just him and me, for the first time in years. You see, Eyal’s technically my half-brother, and he’s 13 years older than me, and we’ve spent most of the past 19 years living on different continents, so our impressions of each other are episodic.

I know Eyal as a sequential stream of nouns — tennis champ, soldier, dreadlocked traveler, law student, married lawyer — and, being older, he probably remembers me more fluidly, but still as a pageantry of dress-up. Sunday, as we zigzagged our way up to the Divinity School, Eyal pointed out that I’d matured, because I seemed at ease with myself.

As he heaped p ra i s e on what he’d seen of Yale — the students s e e m e d so giddy, so poised — he observed that, maybe because of the atmosphere, I’d outgrown my erstwhile misanthropy. I seemed so comfortable in my own skin.

He was right in one way and wrong in others. It’s true that I’ve wrung

all the proper clichés out of my time at Yale: I’ve made the best friends I’ve ever had — people with whom I seem to share a private language and an unabashed humor. They don’t begrudge me my long stretches of solitude and I try to not begrudge them theirs. I feel like I’m flourishing in a way that would have made Aristotle proud, not to mention my favorite high school teachers. Perhaps this is what it’s supposed to feel like to be Yuval Ben-David.

But it’s funny, because my friends and I spend long hours communicating by imitation, by constant comparison of ourselves — and of our circle — to other lives and other circles. The childhood bug has come back. *** This spate of games is our current preoccupation: If we were characters in a TV show — “Weeds,” “Girls,” “The West Wing,” especially “West Wing” — which would we be and why? It sounds like a question from the back of some trashy magazine, but my friends and I take this seriously. I was actually a little hurt when the overwhelming consensus of friends (and eventually, of the strangers we started asking off the streets) pegged me as “The West Wing”’s Josh Lyman, the lovingly cocky deputy chief of staff. At first, I rationalized the pick — it’s because Josh and I both have curls, it’s because we’re both Jewish, I told myself — but eventually I embraced my double, and with him his negative baggage. It was easier being called “Josh Lyman” than being called out for cockiness. They’re the same thing, really, but one’s implicit and one’s explicit, and being called Josh instead of cocky suggests my friends see me past my flaws, as a total person. Nominating one another to “West Wing” look-alikes is cathartic; it’s a way of speaking about each other, sometimes furiously, in the most generous code.

Sometimes a game is just a game, and I don’t deny that ours has all the frivolousness of one of those freaky, buffet-style plastic surgeries, where people order up Angelina Jolie’s nose and Scarlett

Johansson’s eyelids and Megan Fox’s breasts. A great deal of narcissistic indulgence motivates our banter about who’s who and which character we want to be. I’d like to say that we deploy imitation for entirely different reasons than we did in childhood, but at the end of the day it’s still a means to self-reinvention.

But something’s different. Something’s new. I recently wrote a midterm paper on the postmodern condition, how it’s all about simulacrum, or the representation of things that don’t exist — copies with no original. Think video games, or life-size architectural models that replace the real thing. At Yale, we stress a lot about our futures.

Whether they’re there, waiting for us.

Whether they’re original, or we’re just hipsters. Our dreams are copies with no original in sight. In a funny, postmodern kind of way, maybe imitating Josh Lyman, or Hannah Horvath, or even Hannah Montana, for that matter, is one way of testing out our uncertain potentialities. Maybe it’s healthy. We’re not erasing ourselves, or replacing ourselves with other people. We’re just gingerly looking ahead.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to dream big about our futures when there’s no time to dream. Few of us take gap years to trek around and soul-search. The Kerouacs are long gone; they’re too busy rushing from one achievement to the next. Our lives are such stiffened facts; they are so consciously narrative arcs — “timelines,” as Facebook tells us — that we cut ourselves no slacks in the cords from one stage of life to the next. The common gripe about contemporary life is that we lose intimacy with each other — “hooking up” takes on too many meanings — but really we lose intimacy with ourselves.

Because our profiles are always in front of us, and in front of everyone else, we lose that self-pleasuring, sophomoric power to look in the mirror by ourselves: to dwell on who we are, and change it. To get comfortable enough in our skins and admit there’s room for improvement.

To do that, maybe we need to pretend someone else is in our skin.

Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

// MICHAEL MCHUGH

F R I D AY APRIL 12

“JAMTRACK”: REDHOT & BLUE’S ANNUAL JAMBOREE The Parish House, 311 Temple St. // 8 p.m.

There’s something about a train that’s music.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Daisy Dukes

Only if you can pull them off.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND CAMPAIGNS

WEEKEND WANTS DEMOCRACY // BY WEEKEND

D

on’t you dislike one-man elections? Don’t you think they decrease the legitimacy of the institution at stake? The saying goes, “Vote or DIE!” but here at WEEKEND, we just cannot take the Yale College Council elections seriously this year. We were hoping for the first female YCC president in recent memory, or a Brandon Levin ’14 surprise bid. Instead, we got three uncontested races. What. The. Fuck. So long, healthy competition. So long, government by the people. For the sake of democracy, though, here’s our list of potential candidates for the YCC presidential election. No, but actually — consider these honest contenders! Read their candidacy statements, “like” them on Facebook, tell your YCC representative to include these four names in the ballot.

WE WILL NOT STAND FOR TYRANNY!

Dear Leader: The eternally glorious hero Yale deserves

For a Clean Candidacy // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

// BY KARIN SHEDD

// YUVAL BEN-DAVID

When the phone rings at 3 AM, who do you want answering?

// KARIN SHEDD

The Dear Leader around the time of her brilliant anti-Harvard coup.

To the Comrades of what will henceforth be correctly referred to as the Democratic People’s University of Yale (DPUY):

their Dear Leader by making a pilgrimage to the Dear Leader’s birthplace (202 York St.).

This Thursday, in a landslide election enacted by you, the loving Comrades, WEEKEND will take its rightful place as the Dear Leader* of the YCC, henceforth known as the Supreme Undergraduate Assembly (SUA).

As the hero responsible for singlehandedly releasing Comrades from the oppressive yoke of the inferior Communists at Harvard, as well as establishing the DPUY in 1701, WEEKEND’s assumption of this title is not only deserved, but three centuries late.

THE “10K CHALLENGE WILL BE OFFICIALLY RENAMED THE “10K CELEBRATION OF OUR HEAVENLY LEADER”

As restitution for this late acknowledgment of WEEKEND’s birthright and to maintain the happiness and superiority of all Comrades, the following resolutions will be put into effect immediately: 1.

All media will be condensed under WEEKEND’s umbrella, with the exception of the communistic Rumpus, whose current staff will have the honor of serving as the practice run for resolution 5 (see below).

2. The “$10K Challenge” will be officially renamed the “$10K Celebration of Our Heavenly Leader,” to be used every year for the purpose of honoring the deserving WEEKEND. This year, those funds will be used to correct the statues on Old Campus from the defectors Nathan Hale, Theodore Dwight Woolsey and Abraham Pierson to appropriate likenesses of the Dear Leader.

3. Once a year, all Comrades will feel a powerful compulsion to pay homage to

S AT U R D AY APRIL 13

4. All musical and performing arts groups will be condensed into the Company for the Adoration of Our Dear Leader. They will spend the whole year rehearsing for the annual Mass Games — a replacement of the communistic glorification of outsiders known as “Spring Fling” — for the purpose of celebrating our Dear Leader’s role in the glorious establishment of the superior DPUY. 5.

Ezra Stiles, Morse, Silliman and Timothy Dwight colleges will be restructured into re-education and rehabilitation camps for Comrades who fall out of line with any of the aforementioned resolutions.

All glory to the Dear Leader’s eternal reign over the DPUY!

Hello. My name is Yuval BenDavid, and I am running for president.

Listen closely. Do you hear the stirrings of a 2032 White House campaign?

No, you don’t. Kids, I’m not just using this as a stepping-stone to greater things. There are no greater things out there. This is it, the endgame: Yale College Council.

I’m not one of those vest-wearing brats who’s just gonna write about this on his “Grand Strategy” app. Nuh-no. I’m clean. I’m moral.

I’m so dedicated to the YCC I read the salad dressing reports.

Speaking of which, that last one was a little short, don’t you think?

(See what I did there? I asked you a question. I invited you to a “public discussion” about pressing issues.

Democracy comes naturally to me!)

Anyways, Mr. Gonzalez, I’d have really appreciated news on whether the blue cheese dressing is compatible with my gluten-free, macrobiotic diet.

I’m not going to make cheap promises, but allow me to outline some ideas: 1.

Expand the alcohol “safety first” policy to marijuana.

Under my command, the YCC will

work aggressively to supply parties with pure, untainted medical marijuana. It’s ethical, too! No more of that blood-diamond Mexican stuff.

EXPAND THE ALCOHOL “SAFETY FIRST” POLICY TO MARIJUANA 2.

Work with Blue State to introduce a platinum membership for those of you who squat there, like me. (Perks will include preferred access to the comfy chairs.)

3.

Send the Mafia after the folks at U.S. News and World Report who ranked Yale third.

4.

Work with Presidentelect Salovey to find the most tactful way to avoid an athletic recruitment policy.

5.

Expand grade inflation.

You’re all above average. Ubermenschen, really. Way, way above average.

Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.

Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

*Alternative acceptable prefaces for the title “Leader” are any combination of the adjectives “Heavenly,” “Grand” and “Eternal.”

Contact KARIN SHEDD at karin.shedd@yale.edu .

“EL MONTE CAVO”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Bregamos Theater, 491 Blatchley Ave. // 8 p.m.

Fluent in Spanish? Yale’s Latin American Theater Series project presents two performances only in español.

Not Sperrys

Experiment – WEEKEND wants to see you do something fun.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

Caleb Madison’s Super Awesome Presidential Platform Just For YOU! // BY CALEB MADISON

Hey, you! Yes you, reading this right now.

I want to introduce you to a cool new candidate for YCC president. This person is awesome, cool, funny and smart. Sounds like the perfect candidate, right? I bet you can’t wait to meet this person. Good news: You don’t have to wait, because you can see this person right now. Take out your iPhone, open up your camera app and press the twisty camera icon on the top-right corner. That’s right. The candidate is you.

I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE A LEADERSHIP POSITION IN MY COLLEGE STUDENT GOVERNMENT BECAUSE I’M SELFLESS. The Constitution once said, “We the People!” The Gettysburg Address once said, “Of the people, by the people, for the people!”

These famous American words are why I am running for YCC president. I believe that normal, everyday Americans like you, me, or an

autistic man with a heart of gold and a passion for ping-pong can truly make a difference in people’s lives. Yale is a perfect place, and everyone here is so wise, amazing and talented. I wish everyone could be YCC president!!!! But they can’t. :( That’s why I’m running for YCC president: for you.

I’ve always wanted to have a leadership position in my college student government because I’m selfless. First and foremost, I want people and my friends to be happy. If I were YCC president, I would organize fun events around campus so that everyone was happy. Still not happy after all the events I’ve organized? Send me an email at my email address, and I will make you happy! After all, that’s why I’m running for YCC president in the first place: you. I’m coming to YOUR dorm and talking to YOU about why I’d be a great president. I’m inviting YOU to a million Facebook events about voting for me.

I’m taking pictures of YOU with a sign that has my name on it. So when you have the ballot in front of you next Thursday, whom are you going to vote for? Someone else who isn’t you? Or yourself? I think the answer is clear.

Contact CALEB MADISON at caleb.madison@yale.edu .

// CALEB MADISON

You do you: vote for me!

Yasmine Hafiz for YCC President: an advocate for riotous chilling // BY YASMINE HAFIZ

Does anyone really give a fuck about academic minors at Yale? I’m currently on the senior thesis strugglebus and have neither the time nor the inclination to have another random title on my diploma, a document which will probably vanish into the recesses of my grandmother’s basement along with the other things she likes to save and hoard for posterity — a collection of molded straw hats, photos in slide form and various other knickknacks.

In addition to the academic minor pointlessness, my opponent’s platform apparently includes restoring reading week, making the YCC “stronger and more relevant” on campus, and overhauling alcohol policy.

As a super-senior I have three things to say: Reading week/fall break is for drinking, YCC doesn’t matter, and when it comes to alcohol, always eat dinner first.

So here’s my suggestion for the betterment of Yale. It’s fucking nice outside, so everyone should be hanging out and chilling in the sunshine, preferably with some music and a beer or two. No matter how stressed you are, stop procrastinating with Netflix and messing around on your computer and GO OUTSIDE. In order to push this initiative forward, I have created the Picnic Panlist. Our mani-

festo and welcome message is below. If you can figure out the new Google Groups situation, then you are welcome to join us. Let the riotous chilling begin!

“Welcome to the Picnic Panlist. You are receiving this invitation because you have either attended/expressed interested in picnics. Messages will be sent out to alert members when picnics are occurring (usually on Cross Campus). Message the group if you are organizing a picnic of your own, but please DO NOT SPAM! ‘A picnic is a pleasure excursion at which a meal is eaten outdoors (al fresco or en plein air), ideally taking place in a beautiful landscape such as a park, beside a lake or with an interesting view and possibly at a public event such as before an open air theatre performance, and usually in summer.’ — From the Wikipedia entry on picnics.

See you soon for drinking and sunbathing!

If you would like to be removed from this panlist please email me. xx Yasmine” Contact YASMINE HAFIZ at yasmine.hafiz@yale.edu .

// YASMINE HAFIZ

Chill with Yasmine 2013

S AT U R D AY APRIL 13

“GOLD FEVER” AT THE ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

Come see how the pursuit of wealth transformed the Mexican economy.

Going to Myrtle. Or gun-control activism.

Your pick, really.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

GREEK LIFE, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM BROTHERHOOD FROM PAGE B3 not speak to anyone outside of LUL, in a sense placing themselves under a contract of voluntary social prohibition. While they were undergoing these tests, they were referred to by the brothers as “caballeros” — gentlemen. After they crossed, however, they were officially “hermanos”: brothers.

“All [the brothers] talk about now is La Unidad Latina,” Harry said.

“I’m afraid that there’s already a divide between the Greeks and nonGreeks.” He felt uncomfortable with the specific steps that had been prescribed by the national fraternity, because he thought they advocated uniformity, which seemed counterintuitive to the goal of celebrating diversity.

When the hermanos crossed over on March 2, they held a party at La Casa that was open to the entire Yale community. However, Harry said non-Greeks in attendance did not only feel excluded from the celebration, but also uneasy about its representations of Latino masculinity.

“We were told it would be a party for everyone,” he said. “But it was very clear that the event was actually for La Unidad Latina brothers and Yale girls, who were subject to some very aggressive behaviors.”

Harry described the brothers as “predatory,” noting that they spent the night dancing with the female students and were dismissive of the nonbrothers in attendance.

As Latina students explore their own options in regards to a Latina

sorority, some prospective pledges have expressed similar trepidations about the process. Sarah, who was involved with a push to bring Lambda Pi Phi back to campus, said concerns over rush traditions caused her to withdraw from that effort. (Her name has been changed for this article given her current work in forming a different Latina sorority with many of the same people who previously expressed interest in Lambda Pi Phi.) “People on this campus still have conversations about cultural houses and whether they should be around,” Sarah said. “People are still concerned about self-segregation and the allocation of special resources to some and not to others.

I felt like the exclusivity of Lambda Pi Phi’s pledge process perpetuated these stereotypes, and I didn’t want to be involved with something that would exacerbate the negativity toward La Casa.”

As with La Unidad Latina, Sarah said Lambda Pi Phi’s rush procedures would have required her to take certain actions that differentiated her from the rest of the student body, such as dressing in a uniform attire with other pledges. She had been uncomfortable with the idea of drawing attention to herself — had the requirements been more “low-key,” she said, she might have continued with the process.

Yearwood also attributed the low membership numbers within African-American fraternities at Yale to a challenging recruitment process, which might forge a tight bond between pledges but alienates those who are intimidated by its demands.

“Most people regard the level of hazing involved in black fraternities as much higher than that of any other frat on campus,” he said. “It may just be a stereotype, but I’ve heard that they hit their pledges with a paddle. A lot of the stereotype is that it’s much more severe.”

When asked whether Alpha Phi Alpha hazed its pledges, Thomas laughed. “There’s absolutely no hazing involved,” he said. “Hazing is illegal!” He described stigmas as a consequence of the perception that the fraternities are isolating or separatist in nature. While entry into these organizations is open to male students of all races, Thomas acknowledged that cultural Greek life may exude a tone of exclusivity.

“What bothers me is that this person probably knows what the group actually is: They know it’s a frat, and they know it’s people of color,” Guzman said at brunch this Sunday with the brothers. “It’s just racist.”

The brothers nodded in agreement. Their fraternity was no different, they said, from any of the other Greek organizations on campus: Sororities such as Kappa Alpha Theta and Pi Beta Phi, for instance, are also known for having signature hand signs.

“Honestly, it’s just bigotry,” Sarah said. “When I saw the post I thought, ‘It’s so interesting you chose “gangs” to describe a group of Latino boys — if it were a group of white, WASP-y boys, would you have said the same thing?’” It was clear to her that the comment had been made in contempt not of fraternity life in general, but of La Unidad Latina.

Beyond this particular controversy, there is the larger question of whether Yale’s campus is “ready” for full-fledged cultural Greek life, as fraternity brothers of all stripes have expressed uncertainty about whether the newly re-established fraternities will be able to sustain themselves past the college graduation of their founders.

The three members of La Unidad Latina have set themselves apart from the rest of La Casa, Harry said, noting that the brothers strongly believe that Greek life is essential to the strength of the Latino community and that it has begun to dominate their conversations. Both he and Sarah expressed a concern that cultural Greek life would threaten relationships previously founded on the Latino students’ mutual connection to La Casa. Harry’s fears are tinted with a mixture of nostalgia and pride — as someone who has invested a large portion of his college life in La Casa, he is protective of the progress they have made in the time since the Latino fraternity was dissolved in 2008.

R[ R

than with the “antics” that had come to dominate their membership process. It asked the question: “Are they fulfilling their legacy?”

The article stirred national discussion about the racial politics of black Greek letter groups. The writer of the piece was a former Alpha Phi Alpha brother, and just a year before, he had been hired as the director of Yale’s Af-Am House.

Today, Dean Rodney Cohen stands by his belief in African-American fraternities as a vehicle for social advocacy and leadership.

Cohen also pointed to the rich history of leadership in AfricanAmerican fraternities. He noted, for instance, that two of the three founders of the Af-Am House were members of Alpha at Yale. He ended his article with a powerful invocation: “In the religious world, Christians often ask WWJD, ‘What would Jesus do?’ It is now time for black fraternities to ask WWFD — ‘What would the founders do?’”

“Black Greek letter fraternities have had their challenges like most college-based fraternities, but these organizations have led the way in producing outstanding leaders and change agents in society,” Cohen said in an interview with the News, citing Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and Benjamin E. Mays as examples of notable alumni.

Cohen emphasized the importance of service efforts as a way of breaking down the organizations’ dubious public image, which he said in his article has descended in recent decades to that of “quasi-gangs.”

For the brothers of La Unidad Latina, the group’s new beginning presents an opportunity for them to rewrite the misconceptions of their own past, which are similar to some of the negative associations miring African-American fraternities.

The Rump Chat post was indicative to Jimenez of a larger problem surrounding La Unidad Latina’s reputation.

“It’s upsetting that that’s their first impression of the group,” he said. “But it’s up to us to show them that we’re more than that.” As with Cohen’s idea for African-American fraternities, the solution begins with service.

During the initial informational sessions Genova attended, he was inspired by the impact that the brothers of La Unidad Latina had made on the Latino community on campus.

The “hermanos” had founded many Latino student groups, such as the Dominican Students’ Association and Amigos, a mentorship program for at-risk New Haven public school students. He saw their legacy

as one that transcends not only racial barriers, but also the constraints of college life.

The future survival of these newly re-established groups rests not on the enthusiasm of current brothers, but rather on their ability to attract new and constant membership. Jimenez acknowledged that La Unidad Latina would not be able to call itself an active fraternity unless it continues to thrive long after they are gone.

“I don’t think we’ve been revived yet,” he explained. “If there’s no one else after [the current brothers] leave, then we didn’t do our job.”

I ^ \ I I Q CAMPUS CUSTOMS

In the days leading up to and following their crossover on March 2, the brothers of La Unidad Latina wore their fraternity letters with pride.

Their Facebook profiles were covered with photos of them posing in white T-shirts with Lambda Upsilon Lambda emblazoned in brown and gold. Jimenez’s cover photo is an image of the three Yale brothers posing with two other members, arms around each other’s shoulders and palms up with thumbs, middle and index fingers raised.

About a month later, an anonymous posting appeared on Rump Chat, the campus tabloid blog. The submission read: “That new frat on campus is basically three guys wearing the same hoodie and taking photos with hand signs. It’s basically the college equivalent of a gang.”

Shortly after the message was posted and before it was removed by Rump Chat moderators that same day, it circulated widely among members of the Yale Latino community. Online Yalies, in particular, were quick to respond to the thinly veiled slur. Tumblr users, including Heidi Guzman ’14, pointed out the discriminatory undertones of aligning Latino men with gang life.

S AT U R D AY

“BAD WATER” AND “REDEMPTION”

APRIL 13

Think New Haven’s dirty? The Environmental Film Festival shows two documentaries that’ll change your mind.

IT IS NOW TIME FOR BLACK FRATERNITIES TO ASK WWFD – ‘WHAT WOULD THE FOUNDERS DO?’ DEAN RODNEY COHEN

“Of course we respect and care about them, but it gets complicated when there’s a potential for conflict,” he said. “I fear it will take a long time to adjust to the addition of this fraternity, and that in the meantime it will be harmful to the existing framework.”

He paused and then added, “We’ve come so far without them here.”

“WWFD?”

Two years ago, the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi celebrated the centennial of their fraternity’s founding. Members came out in the thousands to Indiana University Bloomington, where the first chapter of the organization was formed. It was both a pilgrimage and a reunion.

Around that time, an article published in Uptown magazine, a publication for affluent African-Americans, questioned the development of black fraternities over the decades, pointing to the hazing and abuse controversies that have cast a shadow on the groups’ storied histories.

The piece called on the fraternities to return to the guiding principles outlined by their founders, to commune with their culture rather

Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 3 p.m.

Being a SWUG

Jezebel might not like it, but we still love Chloe Drimal ’13, Raisa Bruner ’13 and our home girls.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND CHANGES

FOR TRANS STUDENTS, NO SIMPLE REMEDY // BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS

employees, Murchison says, Yale Health has already stated that they are medically necessary for transgender individuals. It is unclear, then, why they remain excluded from the student plan.

In February, Brown University joined 36 other universities in covering gender confirmation surgery for students on its medical plan. Yale was not among the 36.

Seizing upon an article in The Brown Daily Herald, hosts on “Fox and Friends” told their viewers, “Don’t date anyone from Brown without reviewing medical records.”

Although the comment echoes nowdisparaged rhetoric on gay and lesbian issues from three decades ago, no apology was ever offered.

The episode, however, revealed something more than the leanings of Fox News. It showed that to most Americans, transgender issues are defined by gender confirmation surgery, which many wrongly believe to be a single procedure, and in what many transgender individuals would consider offensive, referred to it as a “sex change.”

The language of transgender issues is fraught. Is it sex reassignment surgery or gender confirmation surgery? Is it FTM (female-to-male) man or transgender man? Transgender issues, like gay and lesbian issues, lie at the intersection of sexuality, politics and religion. But unlike gay and lesbian issues, transgender issues have stayed in the shadows of national and campus discussion, perhaps because of the size of the transgender population and perhaps because they continue to appear too fraught to broach.

At Yale, policies on gender confirmation surgery remain contradictory. While covered under the faculty medical insurance plan, the procedure remains explicitly excluded from procedures covered by the student plan.

Although the surgeries, of which there are many, can cost anywhere from $7,000 to $50,000, utilization rates, says transgender student Gabe Murchison ’14, would be so low as to make the cost to the University “a drop in the bucket.” Activists, including members of Resource Alliance for Gender Equity, of which Murchison is a part, are pushing the University to cover the procedures, although major change in the near future appears unlikely. In covering the procedures for faculty and most

*** As prospective Yalies pore over admissions materials throughout April, few are likely to make their way onto the Yale Health website to download the Student Handbook, which describes, point by point, what is and what is not covered by Yale’s student health plan. But for the University’s transgender students, a small minority that receives even smaller consideration, the policies contained in the handbook make all the difference in how they live their lives and how they are regarded by the University as an institution.

Public narratives emphasis gender confirmation surgery over any other medical treatment sought by transgender individuals. But hormone therapy, in part because of its low cost and in part because of the ease of treatment, plays a role in transitions from one gender to another more than any surgery. The University recently altered the student plan to cover hormone therapy — in which individuals born as one gender take hormones associated with the other — which Murchison says is a major step forward in providing necessary medical care.

The change in the University’s policy on hormone therapy is the sum of many small pushes, by transgender and gender-conforming students alike, the kinds of small pushes that are the only way for transgender students to receive necessary care in the labyrinthine Yale Health bureaucracy.

Students’ experiences reflect a frustratingly complex system that poses significant obstacles to transgender students seeking health care specific to their transition from one gender to another. When Jake Hodge ’15 tried to access gender-specific care at Yale Health, including endocrinology, which would prescribe appropriate hormones, he found the experience “hellish,” a not-uncommon sentiment.

BY THE IVIES TRANS HEALTHCARE COVERAGE

“I was given contradictory information from multiple departments, my psychiatric and endocrine referral papers were lost in the system, and my care was delayed by almost a month so that an ‘interdisciplinary board’ within the hospital could approve it, which I was outright informed by my physician as a completely unnecessary protocol,” Hodge said of his attempt to see an endocrinologist.

Once Hodge made it through the bureaucracy, though, he found the staff at Yale Health helpful and sensitive.

“After jumping through an absurd number of arbitrary hoops, the Endocrinology Department itself has been nothing but supportive and competent,” Hodge said.

In cultivating a good relationship with an endocrinologist, Hodge cultivated the same thing that defines all good relationships between patients and doctors: trust. The ability to trust health care providers, several transgender students say, is rooted in cultural competency: In this case, the ability to knowingly and sensitively address, or at times not address, a student’s gender status.

But such competency can be elusive at Yale Health.

“Some providers know enough to do a good job, while … others clearly do not. I have heard of more bad experiences than explicitly good ones,” Murchison says.

Transgender students describe experiences of doctors dragging their gender status into otherwise unrelated medical conditions, doctors appearing visibly uncomfortable or stumbling over how to appropriately refer to a student.

Angel Collie DIV ’14, who identifies as a man, recollected a visit to Yale Health in which doctors continued to use female pronouns, even though he identified as a man. It took speaking to a younger nurse, whom Collie felt to be more likely to accept his gender identity, to slowly disseminate the word that male pronouns were correct, after which Collie said doctors exercised appropriate sensitivity in discussing his gender.

“On file, it must be female, so that’s what they assume,” Collie said.

At a personal level, expanding cultural competency, at times through as little as a conversation, appears within reach. Yet there remain institutional barriers that make widespread change difficult.

Paperwork poses a significant problem. On the intake form, three

options are offered: male, female and transgender, which, Murchison says, betrays an underlying misunderstanding of what being transgender is.

“The term transgender describes the fact that they have moved from one gender to another, not their gender itself. Thus, making male, female and transgender mutually exclusive options makes little sense,” Murchison says, suggesting that a better

nondiscrimination clause, after a transsexual dining hall worker sued the University for harassment. And three years later, non-transgender and transgender alike proposed that the University permit mixed-gender housing. Like all institutions, Yale moves at its own pace: In 2011, the University allowed seniors to live in mixed-gender suites, and then, in 2012, the policy was expanded to cover juniors.

STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES REFLECT A FRUSTRATINGLY COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT POSES SIGNIFICANT OBSTACLES TO TRANSGENDER STUDENTS SEEKING HEALTH CARE SPECIFIC TO THEIR TRANSITION FROM ONE GENDER TO ANOTHER. option would be to ask if a student is transgender in a separate question. *** There is no silver bullet for a lack of cultural competency, but a combination of education and generational turnover might do the trick. Collie and others interviewed believe the best way to improve cultural competency is through continuing education for staff at Yale Health, adding that the University needs to create incentives for its employees to actively pursue more knowledge on the topic.

“Anyone who’s going to be coming in contact with trans folks should be educated about what that means,” Collie said.

Any organized push for that kind of continuing education on transgender issues among medical practitioners will be part of a long-term battle. Yet any current or future efforts will find themselves closer to the beginning of a movement’s history than the end. At Yale, Murchison says, there is little to no student organizational history around transgender issues, beyond Trans Week, which has brought artists and speakers to campus to discuss the issue for the past 10 years.

The first attempts to actually change University policy to reflect greater sensitivity have an even shorter history.

In 2006, the Yale College Council pushed the administration to include “gender expression” in its

Today, some activists on campus are asking Yale to liberalize even further, and extend the same option to sophomores.

But the trajectory of transgender activism at Yale runs alongside — and at times separately from — the history of transgender activism in the nation at large, which has sought to address issues faced by few, if any Yale students. America’s transgender population is marked by disproportionately high rates of homelessness, violence and suicide. According to a 2010 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 41 percent of transgender individuals have attempted suicide. In addition, a 2010 study by the Center for American Progress put the percent of homeless and at-risk youth who identify as gay, lesbian or transgender at 40 percent.

Reconciling what could easily be described as two different worlds, the one inside the University and the one beyond it, is no easy task for transgender activists, Murchison says. In one sense, the knowledge that transgender individuals, some as nearby as downtown New Haven, are frequent victims of homelessness and targets of violence, makes fighting for insurance coverage appear relatively trivial.

But at the same time, perhaps those changes that within the scope of a University are small, and within the scope of a nation even smaller, will together constitute small pushes on a grand scale. And perhaps those pushes will yield larger results — precisely the way Hodge’s push to receive the medical care he needed at Yale Health did.

Contact MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS at matthew.lloyd-thomas@yale.edu .

Brown Cornell Harvard UPenn Dartmouth Princeton Columbia Yale Gender Confirmation Therapy

Hormone Therapy

Offered Not Offered

S AT U R D AY APRIL 13

TURKISH CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERT Luce Hall // 7 p.m.

Rumor has it there might be baklava.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Not wearing so much black eyeliner

Taylor Swift went au naturel, and so can you.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

Spring Broken

FASHION FORWARD

// BY MICHAEL LOMAX

// BY JACOB EVELYN

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Consider the zipper. British author Arthur C. Clarke is famous for noting, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and the zipper certainly qualifies. Over 100 years old, the zipper revolutionized clothing by providing a magical way for materials to be fastened with ease. Even when a zipper jams, it seems more like bad luck than a mechanical malfunction.

Nowadays, zippers are pretty uninteresting (except to NASA and Speedo USA, who combined forces to create more aerodynamic zipper seams for the LZR swimsuit that helped swimmers shatter records at the Beijing Olympics). But clothing technology continues to evolve: From Gore-Tex and Under Armour to no-wrinkle shirts, it’s not hard to find textiles that play a huge role in marketing, fashion and athletics today.

But recently a new trend has been sending shocks through the industry: electricity. (Terrible pun acknowledged.) The use of electricity in fabrics has led to advances into the realm of the previously impossible. Recently, for example, companies like Hexoskin and VivoMetrics have sensors built into shirts, allowing users to track biometrics like heart and respiratory rates.

JACOB EVELYN THE FUTURE Combined with wireless communications systems like Bluetooth, these “smart shirts” have potential uses in everything from athletics to the military to remote monitoring of the elderly. Now your grandpa’s shirt can tell you if he has fallen and can’t get up.

Electricity can be a medium for self-expression in clothing, too. French electronica duo Daft Punk is famous for wearing helmets featuring complex LED effects when they perform — but now, companies are starting to put LEDs into ordinary shirts, allowing a custom logo or message to light up in the dark. Light-up shoes for grown-ups, anyone? London-based CuteCircuit takes this a step further, connecting LEDs (as well as a camera, microphone, accelerometer and speaker) inside a shirt to your phone and the Internet to light up your shirt with changeable, programmable images. That’s right: Your shirt can now display live tweets. Human technological innovation is complete!

CuteCircuit even argues that

this is the next logical step in creating self-identity. It claims in a promo video that the T-shirt is “the original canvas of personal expression. … The status update before the status update existed. The original ‘like’ button.” But although CuteCircuit wants you to be seen and to advertise both your own creativity and their product, sometimes that’s actually the opposite of what you’re looking for.

So - ca l l e d “ i nv i s i b i l i ty cloaks” — fabrics that, connected to a computer, capture images of the environment on one side and project it onto the other side — render the wearer transparent from a particular angle. (Research is under way on invisibility cloaks that use “metamaterials” to bend light around objects Harry Potterstyle. So far, though, everyone who wears them has remained awkwardly visible.)

We’ve seen heart monitors, we’ve seen fashion statements, we’ve seen invisibility — and now a new dress by designer Daan Roosegaarde brazenly combines all three.

The “Intimacy 2.0” dress turns sheer when your heart rate spikes, resulting in either an erotic experience with a romantic partner or a less-erotic late entrance to that lecture you just

ran across campus to get to. Who said technology didn’t have its risks?

And, of course, no discussion of fashion tech would be complete without a mention of Google Glass. The nonprescription eyeglasses connect to the Internet and let you perform many tasks you used to have to pull your smartphone out for — photo taking and sharing, messaging, even navigating around a strange city. No longer will you have to use your iPhone to accidentally walk into lampposts as you text. Perhaps the sneakiest part of Google Glass is its marketing: So far, users have had to apply just for the opportunity to drop $1,500 on a pair. Google is breaking into the luxury and status market. But, let’s be honest: Google already knew if you were into that sort of thing or not. In a way, Google’s user profiling has eliminated some opportunity for self-expression.

Are these new outfits enough to make up for it? Will expensive eye-phones and chameleon clothes become the zippers of the future, or just another pair of light-up shoes? That, like all trends, is up for the cool kids to decide.

Contact JACOB EVELYN at jacob.evelyn@yale.edu .

Why Two Men You’ve Never Heard Of Are More Important Than You’ll Ever Be // BY SCOTT STERN

Have you ever wondered about the process by which scientists pressurize natural gas to turn hydrogen into liquid nitrogen, thereby helping manufacture artificial fertilizer? Don’t worry; no one has. And that’s what “The Alchemy of Air” by Thomas Hager is all about — nitrogen fixation (aka the HaberBosch process). But here’s the thing: it’s fascinating. Even more than that: it’s really important.

A little more than 100 years ago, experts believed that the world couldn’t possibly support more than 4 billion people. Even the most efficient farming in the world couldn’t feed more people than that, the thinking went. But now we have a world of 7 billion people. Something must have happened in the meantime. It did, and it was called the HaberBosch process. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, two remarkable and flawed men, created a way of extracting nitrogen from the air, and using it to make a stunningly good fertilizer. Or, to quote Hager, “They discovered a way to make bread out of air.”

As Hager provocatively states, he believes that this is the most important scientific discovery ever made. Bar none. It’s an exciting statement, and one I’m still not sure I agree with, though it has won me over to some

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES extent. Without the HaberBosch process, literally billions of people would have starved to death beginning decades ago.

At the same time, without Haber and Bosch, World Wars I and II may have ended years earlier. Fewer Jews may have died in the gas chambers. Fewer soldiers may have died in the trenches.

Fewer explosives would have been made, and fewer gallons of synthetic gasoline would have been produced. Is the world really better for Haber and Bosch?

Haber and Bosch, whose combined legacies imply a close partnership, were hardly friends.

They were temperamental opposites — Bosch adored his wife; Haber alienated his to the point that she killed herself. They barely knew each other when Haber sold his process to Bosch’s company, and Bosch began trying to apply it on a macro-scale.

Fritz Haber was a German Jew, and despite his conversion to Christianity and decades of uber-patriotic devotion to the motherland, he never lost the

stigma of his lineage. Haber was the brash young chemist who figured out how to fix nitrogen from the air. Haber sacrificed his marriage and many of his personal relationships to perfect his technology, and in the end, he triumphed. Yet later in life, Haber served his country by creating the poisonous chlorine gas used in World War I. This discovery also led directly to the development of the gas used in Nazi concentration camps — which ironically almost housed Haber. When Hitler came to power, Haber was forced to flee to Switzerland. He died a year later, a broken man.

Bosch was the more outgoing of the two, and as a young industrialist he figured out how to make Haber’s system practical. Because of Bosch, Haber’s process was used to make enough artificial fertilizer to make the modern world sustainable. But Bosch’s massive factories churned out enough nitrogen to be used as explosives that World War I lasted a year or two longer than it would have otherwise. And Bosch’s other great discovery, how to synthesize gasoline from coal, likely prolonged World War II an additional couple years. Bosch too died in ignominy; after refusing to go along with Hitler’s anti-

Semitic regime, he was forced to resign his post.

Haber and Bosch are studies in contrasts. Brilliant men with ruined personal lives. Outgoing leaders wracked with sadness and guilt. They created processes that modernized war, but also made it far more costly.

They found a way to feed billions, but their process has polluted our rivers and poisoned our oceans. They rose to the peak of scientific greatness, but died alone and unloved.

They are not, however, forgotten. Hager has captured Haber and Bosch with all the detail of a biographer and all the complex feelings of someone supporting Anthony Weiner for mayor. Hager is an excellent writer whose narrative sometimes borders on the sensationalist, though you can hardly blame him. “The Alchemy of Air” is one of the rare books that has thrilling narrative (complete with great battle scenes and heart-wrenching deaths) and a thought-provoking story.

How different would the world have been but for these two men — whom you’d probably never heard of.

With March now solidly behind us, students everywhere grudgingly turn their attention back to work — while keeping one eye set on the summers before them. Here is that weirdest month of the year for us young adults. The weather drifts day by day between gorgeous (and unexpected) heat and aggravating cold. That’s how it goes in April. So who could possibly remember March? Director Harmony Korine, for one, definitely does, making it a battleground of youthful depravity in his latest and most enigmatic feature: “Spring Breakers.”

Disney tween goddesses Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens tag team with Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine to make a debauched college foursome hell-bent on having the spring break of their lives. But when scraping together enough money for the trip proves too difficult, the girls go crazy: They rob a local chicken restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun, cleaning up in the process and punching their tickets to Florida. And the chaos hardly dies down from there. By winding turns, the girls meet Alien (James Franco), a local Floridian dealer and budding rap artist, who takes them under his wing to serve them a gritty slice of the extremes of the modern day underworld.

I CAN GET BEHIND WHAT OUR FEMME FATALES BELIEVE: NAMELY, THAT LIFE CAN BE EXCRUTIATINGLY MONOTONOUS. Judging by the trailer and this synopsis, you’ve got the makings of a standard, potentially delectable crime thriller — delectable if only because watching Gomez and Hudgens turn heel in a definitely un-Disney-like work is enough to peak the interest of any guy between the ages of 16 and 44. But then you notice who exactly your director is.

Harmony Korine is a certifiably artsy auteur whose directing credits for “Gummo” and “Julien Donkey-Boy” have been heard of by few, and watched by even fewer. So you know there just has to be some offbeat hitch to “Spring Breakers” that will surely turn us away from the movie altogether. The prettiness of the cast (minus Franco) can only keep us engaged for so long, after all. And true to form, Korine’s film is an aesthetic assault that’s nothing like what you expect it to be.

“Spring Breakers” adopts a meandering narrative built on

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX bodiless voiceovers. It avoids straightforward plot construction and takes our general understanding of the story for granted.

For many people, especially those swayed by the film’s marketing, this is an absolute turn-off — and as well it should be. You’re looking for pretty girls shooting dirty guns, not deep philosophical examinations of the idea of spring break itself.

That being said, I want to say Korine pulled off what he was trying to do. He’s attempting, in not so many words, to paint a picture of mismatched and misguided ideologies. The girls escape to Florida to get away from the doldrums of campus living: boring classes and shitty roommates. After a while, they go stir crazy, but there is no such thing as paradise. The same beaches the girls hit during the day double as a stomping ground for the city’s most violent drug dealers, and once they’ve stepped off the main strip, they’re confronted with a brutal culture completely at odds with the willy-nilly drunken free-for-all that dominates the standard student’s conception of spring break.

But does that mean running away from it all is any better than dealing with the problem itself? I can get behind what our femme fatales believe: Namely, that life can be excruciatingly monotonous. So why not take a chance on escape? The problem is that the girls don’t realize that what they’re escaping to is just as real, if not more so, than the admittedly simple lives they lead to begin with. And even if they think they’ve happened on the time of their lives, that place they’ve uncovered has a whole host of issues just waiting to creep up on them.

So keeping this in mind, what do we latch onto in Harmony Korine’s latest feature? I think it’s more a mood than anything else. We must walk away from “Spring Breakers” with an assurance that while our lives might seem imperfect or unimportant, it could always be much worse.

Therefore, treat breaks for what they are: breaks. Never get too wrapped up in the allure of the exotic, or else you might find yourself lost in something much darker than you ever expected.

That doesn’t mean you should ever get complacent with home.

Just be careful not to take it too far. Gomez, Hudgens and the rest do exactly that, and they have but a string of bullet holes and dead bodies to show for it.

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at michael.lomax@yale.edu .

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu . // DIVISION FILMS

S U N D AY APRIL 14

FAMILY PROGRAM: STORIES AND ART Yale University Art Gallery // 1 p.m.

Folktales, myth and fairy tales — with no age limit.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Facebook status updates

Now we can update our status to “WEEKEND — is feeling rough.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

PUTTING THE SEX IN SHAKESPEARE; RICHARD III SEDUCES AUDIENCES // BY KARIN SHEDD

In one of many tense moments in this rendition of “Richard III,” Queen Margaret (Nora Stewart ‘13) curses the titular Richard (Cambrian Thomas-Adams ‘13) with many plagues of heaven “beyond what (she) can drum up” as a prophetess.

She accuses him of being a “destroyer of the world’s peace,” a title he certainly deserves after he executes a series of bloody murders in an attempt to gain the throne he sees as rightfully his. However, despite his prolific use of staves, daggers, hired hands and asphyxiation as violent tools to gain the upper hand, Richard’s real strength lies in his seductive rhetoric in this gritty version of Shakespeare’s classic.

As is often done with productions of “Richard III,” Shakespeare’s secondlongest play behind “Hamlet,” students and staff of professor Joseph Roach’s (who also directed the show) English and

theater studies seminar edited the original script to highlight the show’s portrayal of the influence of sexuality in the struggle for political power. The plot centers on Richard’s bloody usurpation of the British throne during the 15th century Wars of the Roses, but Roach and company’s version moved beyond history to focus on universal rhetorical and sexual power dynamics, stripping down “Richard III” to its barest self.

And strip down they did: In lieu of “women in farthingales and men in pumpkin pants,” as mentioned in the director’s note in the program, the actors instead stalked around the minimalist stage scantily clad in almost entirely black clothing. In a blatant underscoring of the show’s sexual themes, the actors frequently appeared in various levels of nudity, dominatrix-style outfits and accessorized with BDSM-esque gags

or collars. Thomas-Adams and Stewart themselves (whose performances doubled as senior projects) strutted around the stage wearing a long black leather coat and boots and a skin-tight black leather bodysuit, respectively.

All this imagery combined would, in any other setting, offend one’s sense of propriety and common social decency, especially when only cast in the harsh light of a couple overheads. But it doesn’t, because, in this show, the production design serves as a brazen accent on the sexual-political power plays its characters utilize — and it does so brilliantly.

But the bold costuming and masterful staging would be nothing without the support of the actors themselves.

In tackling a script that merely bores in many a high school English class, each and every member of the cast manages

to mesmerize an entire audience and keep them captivated for the all of the show’s two and a half hours. As director Roach put it: “Shakespeare was never meant to be read.” The characters seem to effortlessly rattle off one complex cadence after another, all while switching between passionately shouting and whispering shakily with repressed emotion.

Though choosing one actor to applaud above the others is about as impossible as picking the cutest puppy of the litter, Thomas-Adams deserves particular credit for his portrayal of the title character. To see evidence of his complete and utter surrender to his performance as Richard, one need not look any further than his eyes: They are the perfect embodiment of “crazy eyes.” They shift and glare and overwhelm other characters without conveying any sign of

// BRIANNA LOO

Heating up the winter of our discontent.

remorse in his actions or the belief that drives them. They are downright seductive — hypnotizing, threatening and betraying when Richard’s quest to gain the throne requires it — and they, along with the rest of the cast and production, will seduce any audience member into rapt attention from the opening music to the shocking twist ending.

“Richard III” opened April 5 and has two more performances April 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center.

Contact KARIN SHEDD at karin.shedd@yale.edu .

At Cabaret, surrealism and surgery // BY HELEN ROUNER Inside the Yale Cabaret’s little black box theater, boundaries are slippery. The space is simultaneously a trendy restaurant, a substitute Bingo hall and a stage. Hip grad students split chocolate cake with their beaux at back tables, two to a bottle of Chilean wine, chatting about which Brooklyn neighborhood is best for subletting. Elderly women, one sporting a sweatshirt covered in the logos of hit Broadway shows, inhabit the one row of chairs up front, their knees pressed against the shallow black stage.

Neither date night nor retirement home activity night seems conducive to watching a mother having sex with her son with a strap-on. Perhaps the Cabaret just has an unusual sense of propriety.

“The Ugly One,” the 18th and final show of the company’s 45th season, runs in the theatre this Thursday through Saturday. It tells the story of Lette, a man who is so horrifically ugly that his wife refuses to look directly at him and his boss Scheffler forbids him from pitching the industrial products he has designed.

At the beginning of the production, Scheffler breaks the news to Lette about his repulsive appearance, urging him to undergo extreme facial reconstruction surgery under Scheffler’s knife.

He emerges from the procedure as an irresistibly handsome man.

His new face propels him to success in both his career and his sex life, prompting others to have

S U N D AY APRIL 14

their own faces redone in just the same way.

The script features adultery, incest, verbal abuse and attempted suicide. The Cabaret’s production, directed by Cole Lewis DRA ’14, takes every opportunity to magnify the abrasive ambiguity on which the script centers. Each supporting actor plays multiple characters, switching between them in an instant. Arguments between husband and wife morph without warning into trysts between adulterous lovers, creating a surrealist, out-of-time world whose success hinges on the audience’s willingness to accept whatever the characters say is true. We have to believe that one actor can be at once unbearably ugly or devastatingly attractive, and that two different actors have the same face. In a space as casual and intimate as the Cabaret’s, these necessary illusions prove difficult to maintain.

Lewis dresses the show’s four actors in definitively unattractive white and fuchsia costumes vaguely suggestive of the 80s, all the while slathered in a quantity of starch and gel indicative of the 50s. They perform on a stage divided into three sets: two rooms in an office and Lette’s house, marked by a desk, a table and a stool. The locations morph and merge into one another as characters in the house respond to conversations in the office, and at another moment the office suddenly becomes an operat-

ing or a dressing room. A screen comes down to indicate an elevator or a boardroom, or to display a silhouetted rendition of a gruesome operation. The fluidity of the physical set creates an environment as confused and disconcerting as the plotline itself, making for a performance that is altogether aesthetically and conceptually disquieting.

Lewis’s staging of the show makes a point of rendering even quotidian activities foreign.

Characters unpeel oranges or eat bananas in the middle of others’ scenes; Lette’s wife eats an energy bar as she perches on her stool perusing a gay porn magazine, powdering her nose to excess; the male characters take turns doing arm exercises at their desks in the office.

The Cabaret pitches the show as a social satire about identity. If the story is meant as a critique of vanity, this message is obscured by a grotesque sensationalism manifested in everything from sex scenes to simulated operations. The play’s moral drowns in its own gratuitous staging.

Contact HELEN ROUNER at helen.rouner@yale.edu .

// EMILIE FOYER

No face nor set left unchanged in “The Ugly One.”

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PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

LEONEL FERNÁNDEZ

// JENNIFER CHEUNG

FORMER PRESIDENT, PRAGMATIST, BOOK ENTHUSIAST // BY JORDI GASSO

T

his semester, the Yale Chubb Fellowship — the University’s most prestigious visiting speaker series — invited the former president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Antonio Fernández Reyna, to visit campus to meet and speak with members of the Latino diaspora and the overall Yale community.

Timothy Dwight Master Jeffrey Brenzel ’75, in his introduction before Fernández’s conference on Wednesday afternoon, referred to this Chubb fellow as a “pragmatist” — a man who believes in learning through practice. Indeed, during his visit Fernández continually stressed his belief in forging connections between individuals of all stripes, and applying one’s academic knowledge outside of the Yale ivory walls. WEEKEND editor and native Dominican Jordi Gassó sat down for an exclusive one-on-one with Fernández, to discuss and reflect on Fernández’s 12 years in office, his views on the future of Latin America and his expansive reading list.

A. I’ve always had a personal inclination toward books, one that has increased over the years, especially due to the creation of the Juan Bosch Library within the Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo [President Fernández’s nonprofit].

The library was first made up of my own personal collection of books, but it has since expanded from additional purchases. In total, we have around 400,000 individual works in the library, including books, journals, magazines and newspapers, specialized in the social sciences.

So I’ve made a habit of buying books wherever I go, particularly ones about economics, political science, international relations, literature; these all end up in our library, free of access, which has become a one-of-a-kind place of reference in the Dominican Republic.

So when I got to New Haven, I wanted to see if I could find specific books from Yale authors — professors, alumni. Of course, within political science, there are the works of Robert Dahl and his theory of polyarchy. Master [Jeffrey] Brenzel said I ended up buying around 60 books! The point is to bring all this knowledge from around the world back to the Dominican Republic.

Q. Master Brenzel heard you say that the world’s best job is that of an ex-president. What are the

benefits and drawbacks of this role? What do you think are the responsibilities of an ex-president?

A. It’s almost a figure of speech, to say that being an expresident is the world’s best job.

Here we can visualize what the former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González once said: Ex-presidents are like Chinese vases — everybody appreciates them but they don’t know where to put them! [Laughter.] I think that if you have presided over a democratic political system, at the end of your tenure you have the opportunity to continue to do work based on your own values, and reconnect with your country in a different capacity. For instance, coming to Yale and meeting so many Dominican students studying in different areas, I start to think about how we can establish a more permanent relationship with Dominican youth, through seminars, workshops, service trips and other group-based initiatives.

These experiences enrich the lives of everyone involved, by providing fresh perspectives and ways of knowledge. With this kind of foundation, one opens up a myriad of opportunities that one didn’t know existed.

Q. Turning now to some current affairs back home: The second line of the Santo Domingo subway system opened this month. What is your ultimate vision for this project you started? How do you think it has aided in your mission of transforming Santo Domingo into a “little New York City”?

A. In effect, with this second line, the project is now a reality, valued and appreciated by many Dominicans. With the new line, the subway will be able to manage around 300,000 daily users, translating to 5 million nonunique users per month. The greater Santo Domingo area is now a city with over 4 million citizens, akin to many European capital cities, and it has sprawled in a horizontal manner. As such, getting to places will require fast, safe and comfortable means of transportation — a modern system. I think a country’s transportation system says a lot about its development, of how a nation progresses and moves forward. As the population grows, the subway becomes a continuing, ever-evolving project. It never concludes, because new needs will keep arising.

Q. Tell us a little bit about Latin America’s economic development, and what your conference will touch upon.

A. This last decade has been one of great growth for Latin America and the Caribbean; it has been so spectacular that one must now pose the question: Will this growth continue? It will, but not without challenges.

The main obstacle is figuring out how to optimize our own natural resources. Right now, we have been mainly an export-based economy, exporting raw materials. If we do not learn how to transform these resources into more elaborate products, we will not be able to make the most

out of our circumstances. This is closely linked with training our production capacity, our human capital, to remain competitive in the global market. The region is aware of this challenge; the hard part is knowing how to best implement these changes.

Q. What is the economic sector in the Dominican Republic that holds the most promise for increasing our national income?

A. I think tourism is still a key factor in our economy. Right now, our model for tourism is based on massive, all-inclusive appeal. This is now transitioning into more high-end, niche tourism, with more specific kinds of opportunities and destinations. This brings about a specialization of our tourist offerings, maintaining the Dominican Republic’s allure. It attracts tourists that can spend more, even if it means a lower number of overall tourists. This readjustment will keep tourism relevant as a major player in our economic future. The great importance of free economic zones in our service economy also holds great potential.

Q. Any favorite books? What are you currently reading?

A. I read several things at the same time. But right now, I’m reading a book, keeping in mind the 50th anniversary of Juan Bosch’s government in the Dominican Republic. “Overtaken by Events: The Dominican Crisis from the Fall of Tru-

jillo to the Civil War,” by John Bartlow Martin, the former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic. I plan to write an essay related to the book’s argument.

I’m also reading Al Gore’s latest work, “The Future” — quite interesting, he refers to six key elements that will help us reach the “future” he has in mind.

Q. What have you liked the most about your visit to New Haven and Yale’s campus?

The tranquility, the order, the city’s cleanliness, the civic attitude — we have all been very impressed. The physical structure of the University. The friendliness of its community.

The only thing everyone in my team, myself included, seem to lament is the fact that we cannot stay for longer.

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at jordi.gasso@yale.edu .

A. Mostly, the peace you all seem to breathe in this place.

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THIS LAST DECADE HAS BEEN ONE OF GREAT GROWTH FOR LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN.

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Q. The first thing you did when you arrived in New Haven was go to the Yale Bookstore. Why was that your first stop? Were you looking for any book in particular?