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table of contents

shorts

Around the Colleges Top 10 Q’s with Carl Zimmer 2 small talk

old campus, new history by Raisa Bruner

Pink Boats and Cotton Gins Home on the Green Spinning on a Stick 6 observer

Paolo’s Room Alex Klein

14 crit

startup culture goes viral by Daniel Bethencourt

The New Party Suites Tao Tao Holmes

24 Personal Essay

I Majored in Field Trips Frances Sawyer

27 photo essay

Curious geometry by Amelia Urry

hip bones by Caroline Durlacher

West Rock Autumn Jacob Geiger

30 poetry

The Kenwood Party 21 Hands 39 On s'entend bien 43

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shorts

Magazine Executive Editors Eliana Dockterman Molly Hensley-Clancy Nicole Levy

Deputy Editors Lauren Oyler Sophia Veltfort

Staff Writers Daniel Bethencourt Madeline Buxton Edmund Downie

AROUND THE

COLLEGES

In our newest section, the Magazine takes a look at the residential college plates that have now been lost to future generations of Yalies.

Berkeley

Design Editors Mona Cao Raahil Kajani Lindsay Paterson

Design Assistants Raisa Bruner Andrew Henderson Demetra Hufnagel Eli Markham Veronica Smith Christian Vazquez

Branford/ Saybrook

Calhoun

Davenport

Photography Editors Brianne Bowen Emilie Foyer Victor Kang Zeenat Mansoor

Yale Daily News Editor in Chief

Publisher

Max de La BruyĂ¨re

Preetha Nandi

Ezra Stiles/Morse Jonathan Edwards

Pierson

Cover Photo by Zeenat Mansoor Cover Design by Bahij Chancey and Quinn Zhang Subscriptions: To subscribe to the Yale Daily News Magazine, please contact us by email at mag@yaledailynews.com. Subscription for 1 year (7 issues): $40.00

2 |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

Silliman

Timothy Dwight

Trumbull

shorts

PROFESSOR RECS

What is your favorite tailgate tradition?

“We gather together prior to the game in a moment of silent prayer where we call on Hashem to help Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of us crush and destroy Classics and History Harvard.”

“Getting to the game on time.”

Steven Smith, Former Master of Branford College

VOCab•yale•ary App \ap\ n. 1) A student-run site that can order Wenzels with one button or text you about chicken tenders day; 2) When preceded by “common,” the most blatant self-promotion you will ever write until your first job application.

“I love getting a breakfast sandwich right off the griddle. Thanks for asking.”

“My favorite tailgate tradition is watching Yale’s finest beat the [obscenity withheld] out of hapless Harvard.” Robert Farris Thompson, Former Master of Timothy Dwight College

Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College

book review tweet ghost in the wires by kevin mitnick

ydnmag the author spent a year in solitary confinement for hacking. that’s pretty badass. “unleash him on our enemies” #colbertreport

Natural Fractals: Visualizing the story

The subject of our cover story, Michael Frame, teaches fractal geometry. Fractals are found everywhere in nature — in clouds, snowflakes, lightning, mountain ranges, trees, shells, shorelines, and peacocks. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

shorts

TOP

AWKWARD freshman moments

1. Getting caught with your hand in the entryway condom bag It’s not worth getting them for free.

2. Going to Toad’s for the first time Well, and every time after that.

3. Opening the gates the wrong way Somebody’s behind you, and you can’t tell whether to push or pull. Your expensive private-school education never prepared you for the trials of the real world!

4. That guy

Meeting the weird kid who friended everyone on Facebook over the summer. I wish I could say it’s nice to meet you, but it’s not.

5. “Are you a freshman?” You eagerly ask the cute girl hanging out on Old Campus only to have her respond, “No ... I’m a grad student.” So ... you don’t wanna be friends?

6. Froco encounter

You know, that moment when you run into him coming out of the shower. With his girlfriend. Yeah, they just had sex. Better or worse than walking in on Mom and Dad? 4 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

7. “Can I use my swipe?”

9. School success

8. Stalker encounter

10. Shared stalls

The very first time you go to G-Heav and try to give them your Yale ID. Oh, foolish freshman. You’ll soon learn that nothing there costs under $7 anyway. Bringing up something in a conversation that you’ve only learned through judicious Facebook stalking. “So how’s your sister? No, not the pregnant one, the one who got married to that Estonian guy while she was working on her Fulbright.”

— Will Hall and Lauren Oyler

Realizing that you don’t actually have to do the vast majority of your assigned reading. And that actually doing it has made upperclassmen think you’re a section asshole. Sharing a bathroom with a member of the opposite sex for the first time and learning that girls poop. Even the cute ones.

shorts

How do you like your coffee?

With milk, in large volume.

If you could ask President Obama one question, what would it be?

Will you do anything to put a brake on global warming?

What is your favorite word and why?

Heterochrony. It means “other time,” and it refers to how species sometimes evolve by a change in their developmental timing — adults arrested as children, children growing up quickly. It’s a beautiful mix of two scales of time: the time that measures our individual lives, and the time that measures evolution.

chu

lt e

for Carl Zimmer ’87 Carl Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale College and teaches Scientific and

Environmental Writing. In addition to having written ten books about science, Zimmer has written hundreds of articles on the frontiers of biology for National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, and Popular Science. Zimmer also writes an award-winning blog, the Loom, and is a frequent guest on the radio program This American Life. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Connecticut.

What’s the most difficult piece you’ve ever had to write?

The hardest recent one was a piece for the New York Times about a theory of consciousness based on information theory — the same mathematical framework used to build computers and telephone networks. You can’t use equations in journalism, and so you’re left with metaphors. And metaphors never quite capture the precision of mathematics.

If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be?

Martin Arrowsmith, from “Arrowsmith” by Sinclair Lewis. He’s the only really human scientist I’ve ever encountered in fiction.

Writing today needs more …

Can I change “more” to “less”? I’d say less cut-and-paste.

Do you have a Facebook account? Why or why not?

I do have one, and it’s mostly for my professional life. It’s absurd for writers to boycott Facebook. To be a writer, you need to be read. And Facebook is one of the places where people read, or find out about new articles they want to read. So you need to go where the readers are.

If you could go back to college now, what would you do differently?

I would take lots of science classes. When I was at Yale, all the science classes seemed to be at 8 a.m., and Science Hill seemed a thousand miles away from Saybrook College. That’s what happens when you have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex at age 20.

The most embarrassing moment of your career was ...

Every time I make an error in print, the embarrassment is fierce.

What is your favorite memory of Yale?

For some strange reason, it’s when Hurricane Gloria hit Yale. It was so memorable to see the campus turned upside down by the forces of nature. Irene was a profound disappointment as a sequel.

Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard?

More dinosaurs.

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Small Talk Pink boats and cotton gins D home on the green D spinning on a stick Two and a half miles northeast

of Yale campus, the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop lies on property that once belonged to the museum’s namesake, the inventor of the cotton gin. Walking into the New Haven-based museum on a warm Sunday in October, however, I find no immediate mention of Whitney. Instead, I’m met by the wares of the mid-20thcentury toymaker A.C. Gilbert Company. Across the room from me, a glass case displays Mysto Magic sets, kits full of props for kid magicians. Next to the kits stand display cases devoted to the company’s most famous product, the

Christina Tsai / CONTRIBUTING photographer

6 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

Erector Set, a metal toy construction set that gives budding engineers the tools for projects ranging from wagons and bridges to elevators and Ferris wheels. Boxes for both products announce with breathless postwar optimism the wonders in store for the lucky consumer: awe-inspiring illusions, masterpieces of construction. From the front room I pass through the building’s left third, where Whitney makes his first appearance. A huge model of his factory dominates the room, while opposite hangs a reproduction of a painting of Whitneyville, the town Whitney set up to house his workers. But his presence in the museum is short-lived. The workshop that makes up the back third of the museum contains not one reference to the museum’s namesake. Standing in the entrance, I see drill presses lined up on the wall next to me; metal stools crowd around long wooden tables in the center of the room. This room plays host to students who have come on school trips and summer programs, and during weekend walk-in hours to build a project of their own. Completed projects line the workshop’s walls around me: a model theater, an airplane, a treehouse, a hockey player, a pinball machine, a pirate ship. It may seem strange that the namesake of the Eli Whitney Museum appears in only one of its three rooms. But to look for Whitney in the physical objects of the museum is to miss his place, and Gilbert’s, at the heart of its philosophy. The cotton gin, as one of the inventions that spurred the Industrial Revolution, showed the power of innovation to transform society for the better. Gilbert’s Erector Sets, with their emphasis on hands-on exploration, fostered a similar set of values. So it’s no wonder that Bill Brown, the museum director, sees the pair as educational role models. “Whitney and his supervision of apprentices influenced how education took place in the 19th century,” Brown said. “And Gilbert provided expert building tips for children, which had an influence on learning in the 20th century. Both had a great respect for developing artisan skills.” In the workshop, I see the museum’s effort to bring those ideas to life. Two little girls and their parents sit before me at a table with one of the museum’s apprentices. The girls are working on models of boats, eagerly covering their newly assembled crafts with pink decorations and

small talk heavy sprinkles of glitter. These pink boats are far from cotton gins. Yet the workshop’s activities are heavily informed by Whitney and Gilbert’s methods. Like all the projects on the workshop’s walls, the boats begin with a set of basic parts designed and manufactured by the workshop’s apprentices, along with guidelines for the parts’ assembly. From there, the girls are free to develop their projects as they want, testing their ideas like the boys of the ’50s did with their Erector Sets. They may not spark an industrial revolution, but neither did Whitney when he was five. Even the greatest inventors have to start somewhere. – Natalie Collins

Sunday, Oct. 30, 6:30 p.m.

It’s already dark by the time my two friends and I get to the occupied part of the New Haven Green. We walk over to the food tent, where people are standing around in a circle, talking about movies. A woman in her mid20s asks me if I plan on occupying for the night. I nod. She gestures toward Elm Street. “You can go over there, or on the other side. Wherever.” She is interrupted by a man on the opposite side of the tent. “Here,” he calls out, in a raspy voice. “I’ll show you where to go. Come over by the security tent.” As we walk around the food tent to the other side of the settlement, he apologizes. “Don’t mind her,” he says. “She’s new and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know the street. If she knew what she was talking about, she wouldn’t be talking stupid like that.” He points to a small clearing. “Set up here, next to my tent. My name is Joe Comfort. I’m security here.” Joe comes to visit intermittently as we struggle to set up our tent in the dark. “Do you have a light?” he asks me. He reaches into his pocket, as if for a cigarette. “No, sorry man.” “Okay, then you’ll need this.” He pulls out a flashlight and hands it to me. “If you need a rake, it’s over there by that tree. Or ask somebody.” 7:15 p.m. While I’m standing with Joe by the kitchen, a man wanders over to our tent and starts to talk with my friends. “Now, that guy standing by your tent, don’t let him in,” says Joe Comfort, pointing to the man, who is wearing a tattered coat patched with duct tape. “He’s a crackhead and a thief, but he does some work around here, so we let him hang around.” Before I can stop them, my friends invite the man into our tent. “Hey you,” Joe calls out to the crackhead, “Get out of there now. These kids are new.”

Cynthia hua / CONTRIBUTING photographer

The man yells back, “But they invited me in.” “You better get out,” calls Joe. “What are you going to do, Joe? Call security?” Joe leans over to me. “I am security,” he says, as if to explain the joke. 8:30 p.m. Outside of what is called the comfort tent, I meet the medic for the night, Sam. He calls the hospital when anything goes wrong. “Last night this girl J-Lo — she’s a part of the movement — got drunk, asked a cop for weed, and shat herself. So I sent her to Yale-New Haven,” he says. A big man called Moose joins us next to the comfort tent. We discuss the general assembly that was held earlier, where Moose made his first proposal. “I asked for money to fill the kerosene lamps,” says Moose. Sam congratulates him: “It’s not easy to propose to GA. You did a great job.” “Thanks,” says Moose. “I think the kerosene will be covered by donations though. They passed around a hat. Maybe next week I’ll make a proposal to pass around the hat at every GA. What do you think?” “That will probably pass,” says Sam. 9:50 p.m. Inside the food tent, five occupiers are sitting around the heater and discussing drugs. A British man named Tommy Doomsday tells me about the reindeer that live in Russia and in Canada and eat psychedelic plants. There’s also discussion about the Occupy community. “We get along most of the time,” says Josh, a recently hired chef from West Haven. “There are some real douchebags, and there are cliques, like high school.” Josh explains that he has only lost his temper once, when people left cooking equipment out in the rain. “If you’re serving over 25 people per day, it’s commercial, and there are health code issues at stake. So, I bugged out. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

small talk Everybody was like, ‘Calm down.’” He goes on: “My point is, do we have to tell people to do things? I thought that wasn’t what this was about.” 11:30 p.m. It’s almost too cold to fall asleep. Outside our tent, people are carrying on into the night, telling stories about J-Lo and deciding whether she’ll be able to stay. Moose and Sam are talking about the legislation they’ll pass and how to maintain the community in the winter. They don’t talk about politics. What’s important for the occupiers is that, here on the Green, they make the rules. A man is yelling in the distance. I can only understand one out of every few words, but I can tell that he is talking about America. When I wake up in the morning, I find out that it was Joe Comfort. “Joe is an addict,” Josh explains to me, as we warm up by the fire. “He does some work around here, so we let him hang around.” – Will Hall

Lollipops have a long history

in New Haven — a history that no one seems to know much about. Ostensibly, the handy sweets were invented here in 1892 when local resident George Smith first began poking sticks into balls of boiled sugar. In 1908, he developed a confectionary machine that could churn out 40 of the suckers per minute. Then in 1931, he and his business partner, Andrew Bradley, trademarked the name lollipop, borrowed from a contemporary racehorse that was particularly fast. A building on Grand Avenue in Wooster Square once housed the world’s first lollipop factory, but it

With the slightest lingual pressure, the sensitive lollipop erupts. has long since been redeveloped. During the Depression, the Bradley Smith Company went bankrupt, ceased all operations, and lost its trademark. The titular lollipop has belonged to the public domain ever since. Historians at the New Haven Museum haven’t a clue where to start searching for Smith’s revolutionary machine, and the uncertainty only begins there. Consider the name: the word lollipop predates Smith and his trademark by more than 50 years; it’s featured in works by a group of 19th century novelists, including Charles Dickens. Their lollipops refer to a lozengelike candy that lacked the defining stick: the word lolly referred to the tongue in Dickensian lingo, so a lollipop 8 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

was logically an object — namely a candy — that one could quickly place, or pop, on his tongue (or something like that). What’s more, consider the straightforward anatomy of the lollipop. The concept of sugar on a stick is a simple one. As early as the Middle Ages, feudal lords licked spheres of boiled sugar on ornate sticks. Ancient Egyptians preserved fruits and nuts in stiffened honey, once again with the practical addition of a stick. The lollipop might be simple, but its story will always be one of uncertainty. Most kids who grew up in the United States after 1970 remember the same commercial — the oddly drawn, conspicuously nude boy, the anthropomorphic, academic-looking Mr. Owl, and the immortal question: “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” Today’s chefs have reimagined the lollipop of our youth. The Modernist lollipop was devised in Spain several years ago by Ferran Adrià, chef of the critically acclaimed (though currently defunct) restaurant elBulli, which is set to reopen in 2014 as a kind of gastronomic think tank. The process involves heating isomalt — one of a class of chemicals known ambiguously as sugar alcohols — to precisely 120 degrees Celsius, at which point the crystals melt into syrup that will form a thin film across a metal ring, like a bubble wand dipped into a bottle of soap. A bead of aromatic oil is dripped onto the stillwarm film of isomalt. As gravity pulls down the oil, the film bends like the image of space and time near a black hole, wrapping itself around the oil. When the isomalt completely surrounds the oil, it drips down in a narrow column and hardens as it cools. The result is a sphere of oil encased in a delicate shell of what tastes like sugar, fused to a thin stick composed of that same sugar-like substance. With the slightest lingual pressure, the sensitive lollipop erupts. It is extraordinary, unlike anything remembered from childhood. Over the years, artists and musicians have scrutinized the lollipop. (The unexamined food is not worth eating!) In 1960, Alexander Calder completed Gallows and Lolllipops, the sculpture that stands on Beinecke Plaza. In 1958, the Chordettes sang the infectious, innocent-enough “Lollipop,” and, in 2008, Lil Wayne topped the charts with his own “Lollipop,” about a shawty who wanna lick the lollipop and the (w)rapper. The song captures the lollipop in its essence: a thing of uncertainty, of transformation and disillusionment, and beneath it all, not a small amount of innuendo and sexual tension — namely, the college experience on a stick. – Alec Borsook DDD

old campus, new history D

by raisa bruner

There was once a little house here, in the middle of Old Campus.

It builds itself in my mind. Then a garden and a chimney and a pig in the yard. I blink and narrow my eyes: the sidewalks dissolve into dirt; the solid hulking towers of Bingham and Durfee and Vanderbilt crumble away. I am left with an image of New Haven at its genesis, before Yale had ever been conceived. A New Haven of vegetable gardens and woodsmoke and small clapboard houses. A New Haven of Puritans. A New Haven of my ancestors. photos by raisa bruner

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ver 350 years ago, Old Campus was my family’s homestead. It’s a discovery that surprises me still. On my way to my room in McClellan, I take a moment to savor the vision of the little house with its colonial garden, but the bells of Harkness begin to clang, and it dissolves. The preoccupations of today, the bells seem to say, should banish our reveries and claim our attention. But the past has a way of insinuating itself into the present when we least expect it.

n June 4, 1639, a young man named William Tuttle signed the church covenant document that established New Haven Colony. This fact is my favorite icebreaker at parties, and the following dialogue goes something like this: “So, where are you from?” “Well, California, but … my ninthgreat-grandfather was one of the original founders of New Haven. He owned Old Campus. So ...” “Whoa.” Then I launch into my story: in the winter of freshman year, after my Great Aunt Joyce had passed away, my dad traveled to North Carolina to settle her estate. From the dusty cabinets of her old plantation home he sifted out our family tree. Joyce had been researching our genealogy for 14 years. Printed on a typewriter, the stiff pages of information contained Sparknotes portraits in a set of statistics: birth date, death date, name, name of spouse, location of residence. “Nothing else is known about him,” many of the notes read with a sense of futility. The mere existence of those lives seem in doubt, hanging onto the present by such tenuous printed threads. The ordered names and numbers march back to the 1500s, to England, when the Toothylls (or was it Toothill, or Totyll, or Tuthill? — there is disagreement about the spelling) lived in a town called Ringstead, in Devonshire. They were better off than most; William Tuttle was a “husbandman,” which 10 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

meant that he owned land. However, as Joyce wrote in her account, “Stuart England was not a pleasant place to live if you were a Puritan, and the Tuttles were Puritans.” So one day in April of 1635, at the age of 26, William, his wife Elizabeth, and their three young children boarded a ship called the Planter and embarked from London on a 3,000-mile journey to America. “They were sturdy people with a dream in their hearts and they survived,” wrote Joyce, and I like the way she describes their resilience, as simple as hope, as simple as knowing that you must find a better home. And they did: in July, they stumbled off their ship and into Boston, which was neither a booming city nor a wilderness. (Harvard College was established the year they arrived.) William became a merchant and, according to the public record, was addressed as “Mr.” This was a mark of distinction, explained Joyce, especially for a young man not yet 30 years old. The story of William and Elizabeth Tuttle is a classic American one. They set sail, slipping away from their old homelands just like the rest of my ancestors — the ones from the Ukraine, from Poland, those tired, dirty, poor, huddled masses escaping religious persecution and poverty and barren land. Except that William and Elizabeth Tuttle were not huddled masses. They chose the Planter because it was a new adventure. They were devout Puritans, but they had faith in free will.

wo years after William Tuttle, John Davenport disembarked in Boston. The Englishman was no mere merchant, no mere “Mr.”: he was a Puritan minister with a dedicated following, and he had ambitious plans for his life in America. In 1638, Davenport, with Tuttle and his growing brood tagging along, left Boston and set up camp in a deserted bay whose land they purchased from the local Native Americans. They had no royal patent, and they did not form a chartered com-

pany before breaking off to set down new stakes. In other words, they were renegades and rebels. The organization of the community and a commitment to the teachings of Davenport were the central tenets of the new colony. Each person had a place. Nowhere was this more clear than in the seating arrangements at the meeting house: every man, woman, and child was designated a specific seat in the hard wooden pews to match his or her position in society. “William and Elizabeth were always seated in highranking places,” wrote Joyce, and it’s documented that William was placed at one point next to John Davenport, Jr. It’s also documented that my ninthgreat-grandfather was once fined for falling asleep on the watch; that he was an appointed “fence viewer,” a profes-

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sion that preceded a modern-day town surveyor; and that he often served as a juror, “selected from among the best of men.” When the original settlers first came to the untouched territory of New Haven, they instituted geometric order over the wilderness, blocking out nine squares. The central one, today’s Green, was for the market and the church. The other parcels were divvied up among the settlers. William was allotted the southeastern-most bit of land, which is on the corner of State and George Streets today. But William and Elizabeth did not stay in that corner for long. In 1656, he bought a more central piece of land: 200 feet on Chapel Street by 270 feet on College Street. Fifty years later, after William and Elizabeth had passed away and their

Today, we know it as Old Campus.

ife at Yale begins on Old Campus. Freshman move-in day is chaos. The parents. The nervous, tingling fear of “What will happen now that I’m here?” For some, the splendors of this place never quite set in. We always feel on edge — as if by a grand stroke of luck we have been plucked from our normal lives to attend this school, and the wonder, or discom-

We must be remembered because, if not, then how can we prove that we ever truly belonged? descendants had moved on, Center Church of New Haven sold this block of land to a group of men who had founded an educational institution called the Collegiate School. The block was the only property owned by that school, which soon adopted the name of Yale, for 30 years.

fort, never quite wears off. For others, coming here has always been a part of the plan. Any other twist of fate would have been a wrinkle in the fabric of expectation; we can stroll across campus feeling that we belong. Either way, we try to leave some sort of indelible mark on this place. We might carve our

initials on a wooden desk. Or prove ourselves worthy of leading big-name organizations. Or play for a team. We must be remembered, because if not, then how can we prove that we ever truly belonged? Like everyone else, I set out to make a name for myself. I signed up for dozens of clubs. I shook countless hands, wringing them out like a lifeline to this place. But I was unmoored: thousands of miles from home and independent for the first time, I was shockingly alone. In the fall I spent five days sick in the hospital. I might as well have disappeared. Faces I knew brought me movies to watch, then buzzed away with purpose. I just wanted to feel the sun on my face, but the doctors kept me inside, floating. For a long time after I returned to my dorm room, I felt disconnected, as though everyone weaved across campus in meaningful ways while I wandered. Soon after, I received that call from my dad about William Tuttle. Things flickered back into focus, and I re-

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feature turned to the all-consuming business of rooting myself at Yale. I hadn’t known it freshman move-in day, but Old Campus was, for me, fertile soil.

’m embarrassed to say that, despite my family history in New Haven, I haven’t explored the city very extensively. So it is with uncertainty that I walk under that ominous sign — “THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.” No matter, I remind myself fiercely. I march into Grove Street Cemetery. “Can I help you?” asks the caretaker, Bill, as he steps out of the brick building by the entrance. He is old, with grizzled gray hair and twinkling eyes. His mustache has a yellow stain. “Well … yes, actually. My name is Raisa.” We shake hands as he stands on a step above me. “Hey, you’re cute,” he says and reaches out to pinch my cheek. Surprised, I grin and continue: “Well, my ancestors are the Tuttles, and I know — I’ve read — that at least Elizabeth is buried here, maybe some others.” He lights up. “Oh, yes! We have lots of Tuttles!” I light up too. Is it this easy, I wonder, to come home? To find family? I almost like the fact that they’re all bones now.

At least, as an objective mass, they’re simple to analyze. No talking back, no guilt trips. Just my history, faded to dust, set in stone. “Hey, Jose, come meet my new girlfriend!” Bill calls out to the denim-clad man wielding the blaring leaf blower a dozen feet away. “What’s that?” yells Jose. “I’m his new girlfriend!” I call out. I say it cheerfully, because I can, because I’m excited to discover proof of my roots. But not today — unfortunately, I have class.

nthusiasm for family history runs in my blood. In 1883, George Frederick Tuttle wrote an extensive Tuttle genealogy, tracing our family back to Charlemagne and waxing poetic about our positive traits. In the preface, he contextualizes his obsession with heritage: “Not long ago it was usual to apologize in the preface for the publication of a genealogy,” he begins. “A pedigree was sarcastically likened to a potato plant, the best part of which is under ground.” He has a sense of humor, this Tuttle, and I find myself agreeing with him as he stakes his claim: “A great change has taken place … the man who cares nothing for his forefathers or kindred, like him

who has no music in his soul, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and is not to be trusted.” G.F. Tuttle’s point seems oddly reasonable to me in that it justifies my quest for heritage. “Of William Tuttle’s 12 children not one died young. The race is not only prolific, but is fitted to endure,” he writes. Twelve children — three of them axe murderers, some of them mentally disturbed, many of them cited for less-than-Puritan behavior — were all hardy survivors in a roughand-tumble age. They were a “race” of vigorous young Americans with large families. In 1883, one-third to one-half the population of the New Haven area had a blood connection to the Tuttle line. One in 20 Yale graduates was apparently a Tuttle of some sort. Jonathan Edwards was a Tuttle. Timothy Dwight was a Tuttle. John Trumbull, too. Each time I come across a familiar name, I experience a small thrill to think that the puzzle of Yale history all comes together in my family, to think that I’m ingrained in the foundation and the wonderful progression of it. It’s satisfying. It’s self-affirming. It’s stupid.

There must be a hundred cards here, a hundred graves: Ezekiel, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, Ephraim … I jot down a dozen or so, feeling a pang each time. 12 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

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t’s an unusually fine morning when I return to the cemetery, and Bill greets me with a smile. “I’ve pulled out all the Tuttle cards for you already!” Inside the caretaker’s building, I meet Joan, his wife of over 50 years. Two small old dogs are curled up in fluffy beds against the back wall. Every surface is cluttered: jars of birdseed, a plastic shopping bag concealing what looks like a human bone, stacks of papers, an old typewriter. Bill seats me at a chair with the sun full on my back. A vent in the floor turns on noisily, blasting up hot air that smells like a crypt, as I begin to look through the stack of yellowed notecards Bill has presented me, each printed with a name, dates of birth and death, age, and location in the cemetery. There must be a hundred cards here, a hundred graves: Ezekiel, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, Ephraim … I jot down a dozen or so, feeling a pang each time. There are over 14,000 bodies buried in the cemetery, according to Bill, but there are more gravestones than that. In 1797, when the old cemetery in the Green behind the church was becoming overcrowded, Senator James Hillhouse and the State of Connecticut established the Grove Street Cemetery. The old gravestones were moved to the North Wall, but the bodies remain entombed in the Green. No one has ever found the gravestone of William Tuttle — he must have been one of the first

to be buried there. I imagine a stone worn away, weathered until it looked like nothing but a boulder, nothing but a mistake. His wife Elizabeth outlived him by 11 years, and her gravestone is here in the new cemetery. I set out to find it, meandering down leaf-strewn paths, seeking out the Tuttle name amidst the obelisks and mausoleums, modern blocks and old-fashioned markers. In the distance, Bill and Joan are standing close together, silent and contemplative. They have worked here, day in and day out, for the past 36 years. Plots in the cemetery are already marked out for them, making their connection to this ground real. Is mine? The oldest gravestones are propped up against the back wall. The new Yale HEALTH Center, looming jaggedly from just across the street, casts a dark irony on these graves. Each gravestone is the same shape, like a raised palm with the names and words worn away. Centuries of weather erosion and natural decay have mottled the surfaces of family graves grouped together by last name. Finally, I find the Tuttles. Elizabeth’s is noticeably different: it’s a short, rounded rock, sunk into the ground, scratched with rudimentary engraving. The numbers are nearly illegible. The name even appears misspelled. Upon his visit to this very same gravestone over a century ago, G.F. Tuttle wrote, “A part of the inscription is still plain; a part is obscured by

the crumbling of the stone, and a part is entirely gone. Some ‘Old Morality’ has recently retouched the letters, brought out a few that were before uncertain. It is still but a fragment, like a faint and broken whisper from the far distant and still receding past.” I’m relieved to sit on the wet grass in front of the stone. The solid weight of history proclaims itself as proof that my past exists in more than just printed words. It rests, half-submerged in turf. It is a connection. A belonging. Leaving the cemetery, I wave to Bill. “You’re welcome back anytime!” he calls out to me. Welcome home, he means.

n his genealogy, G.F. Tuttle quotes Emerson: “How shall a man escape from his ancestors?” Today we flee as quickly as we can from the baggage that they carry — and it’s easy, and often better, to start clean. Remembering family, though, is an art that we have lost in the process of looking to the future. Sometimes we forget that heritage isn’t just history; it’s a continuing story, one that we are still shaping. It would be arrogant and foolish of me to say that, just because a drop of blood links me to New Haven’s history, I belong here more than anyone else does. But a part of me will belong to New Haven long after I graduate. DDD

ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

Observer

Paolo’s room D by Alex Klein D

ho the hell is Paolo? For now, he’s a room. A lot of what I can tell you about Paolo’s Room is recollection and rumor. It remains a mystery even to those fortunate few who have been there. In the room’s post-Paolo life, its marble walls have seen sex, stealing, sleep, sandwiches, booze, and Dada. It has been claimed, filled, reclaimed, emptied, and abandoned. Here is what I know: In 2009, during their freshman year, Michael and Austin climbed to third floor of the Yale office complex at 305 Crown St. They walked past empty Yale offices and bathrooms strewn with dead cockroaches: disappointing. But it was Michael’s birthday, March 18th, 3/18. So they pushed open the unlocked door to Room 318. The room was tiny, no more than five by eight feet. It had once been a bathroom, but shelving now covered the showerheads and a rug hid the tiled floor. Rickety bookcases groaned with Italian literature and criticism. Then they saw rows of filing cabinets and storage boxes. They flung them open and ran their fingers through the three-decade detritus of an odd and arresting life. There were Paolo’s old bank statements and phone bills, his passport, his social security card. There were dusty love letters from girlfriends and diaries written in German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. There were tire

was Paolo’s last name, they learned, and he had been a professor at Yale for a quarter-century. In 2005, he left New Haven and left a lot behind. D “Let me show you a man’s life,” Austin would say. And the gang grew: to Michael, Austin, Cyprien, Danika, Vanya, and guests. Some of them stole stuff. In the evenings, they brought food, drinks and dates, and talked late into the night. The room’s explorers pegged Paolo as “a traveler, someone sentimental, a bit of a packrat.” He had done everything and been everywhere — but outside of his room, Paolo was no one. The group christened themselves ‘The Paulisti.’ “We pasted the wall with shitty Dada poems and art,” recalled Cyprien. They spent hours writing the word “minchia” — which in Italian denotes the male reproductive organ — on a hundred sticky notes. After a few drinks, they scribbled a manifesto on the door: “We are the Paulisti,” it read. “We are here. We will Paulisti.” At the beginning of that summer, Vanya remained in New Haven with nowhere to stay. Paolo had the answer. Vanya and Danika dragged a mattress all the way from campus, up the three flights of stairs, and crammed it in. They slept there together for several days — and I’ll leave it at that. (They are now dating.) “Anyone could be a Paulisti,” said Austin. But not for long. Last spring, Michael cited one of Paolo’s books in an

They flung the boxes open and ran their fingers through the three-decade detritus of an odd and arresting life. receipts and $30 in cash. There was a note from Harold Bloom and a 1968 Playboy. There was a pack of Pan Am ticket stubs, a set of menus for East Texas restaurants, and a binder full of theatre programs from the 1970s. There was an old iMac, loaded with the files of a longdead poetry review. “It was a man’s life,” Austin told me. “It was a whole picture of a person.” Paolo was the room’s ancestral spirit: a first name and figurehead. “It took us over a year to start figuring him out,” Michael said. Valesio 14 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

essay. The Italian Department caught wind and locked the room. “I was so pissed when they closed it,” said Austin. “It was magical and a little voyeuristic … This man’s personality oozed through all of it.” Paolo didn’t know about any of this — until I told him. D Paolo’s accent is light, and his mood diffident. He’s one of those people who doesn’t speak in sentences, but

observer

madeline witt / staff illustrator

perfectly formed paragraphs. “The room was kind of an appendix, a space apart for my books,” he told me as he sat in the late-afternoon oranges of his new Columbia office. “They belonged to a past chapter of my life.” His real office at Yale had been housed in the Italian department on Wall Street. It’s easy to think that drunken Yalies had invented the myth of Paolo’s Room. But get him started, and Paolo begins to sound a lot like a Paulisti. “I myself am a writer, so I tend to invest places with particular meanings,” Paolo told me. “It was, in a way, picturesque: rather dusty, and kind of eerie. I liked the atmosphere; it was an odd, strange building.” Soon before Paolo left Yale, vandals broke in. “They found nothing to steal,” he told me. “But I was very worried. I ran into the office thinking they had taken my books.” And so, last summer, Paolo finally moved his belongings out of the room for good. Now they sit at home, surrounding him. “I kind of miss that place … It was mysterious, an image of old Yale, a walk out of my usual surroundings: less genteel but more interesting. In that sense, I miss it.” Paolo told me that he couldn’t remember keeping any personal bric-a-brac — passports, Playboys, or

love letters — in the office. It’s remarkable that he could forget leaving so much of himself behind. But in the canon of Paolo’s Room, forgotten fragments and unanswered questions are gospel. When Paolo visited campus last year for a futurism conference, Danika told me that “we saw him, but he didn’t see us.” There are only two known photos that show the room in use, taken by a tipsy guest and filed away in an album titled “Paolo.” Walk into Room 318 today and you won’t find anything mysterious. It has been emptied and scrubbed clean. Now, Paolo’s is a barren room in a great hallway of barren rooms, sucking up surplus air-conditioning and fluorescent light. In the abandoned office next door, there sits a bronze bookend statuette of a bearded man, prying open a treasure chest. Though I never saw its contents, I may now know more about Paolo’s Room than anybody else in the world. Ann DeLauro, the Italian Department’s administrative coordinator, had her own suspicions. “Someone was using it for his or her own purpose,” she told me. “I thought perhaps it was you.” D D D ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

startup culture

goes viral

s courses on web design and apps crop up at Harvard and Stanford, Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s students are running their own startup culture. Now, Yale wants to use their work.

by Daniel Bethencourt

16 |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

Illustrations by ilana strauss

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hen Charlie Croom ’12 entered the world of programming, he was six years old and had just learned to read. When he switched on his mom’s computer, he was met with a blank screen and a blinking cursor. The machine ran on floppy disks and a dial-up modem, and only understood commands typed out in code. Croom typed until he figured out the classic line that starts a programmer’s career: PRINT “Hello World” One day this spring, Charlie Croom was sitting in Yale’s computer science class called Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and he wasn’t listening. He had a laptop in front of him with a screen that glared white, and he was typing out thin black lines of code. Everyone around him stood up — the class was over — so he closed his laptop, stood up, sat down in his next class, and pushed the screen upright again. Fourteen hours a day proceeded like this: Croom face to face with ordered black trails of thought. Croom and his suitemate, Jared Shenson ’12, were coding Yale Bluebook, their student-run redesign of Yale’s online course selection service (OCS). Their goal was to get Bluebook ready for the first Yale College Council App Challenge, whose deadline was looming in two weeks. Shenson and Croom kept tweaking Bluebook long after it was one of four finalists in May — they were still coding in August when thousands of students logged on to their site for class searches instead of OCS. They kept polishing the menus and centering text while Yale’s technology services considered buying the site and while the YCC pitched the program to University President Richard Levin, who was enthusiastic. Shenson and Croom are not the only ones with recent success.

Booksaver and Books@Yale both streamline coursebook purchasing, and Booksaver has expanded to over 400 schools and earned $100,000 from private investments. Roammeo won the App Challenge for streamlining campus event listings; SubletMeYale gives students an alternative to Craigslist; and the half-joking One Button Wenzel site led to so many orders for Wenzels that Alpha Delta Restaurant had to bring in an extra employee through the first weekend the site went live. Shenson, Croom, and the other

50 slots. “We are taking a very different approach than most computer science departments,” Gaybrick says, staring out at the faces behind the screens. “We’re focusing on the practical. Learn by doing and learn by immersion, not by listening to us.” The most popular programming languages once looked like streams of backward-leaning slashes and semicolons, but coding for the web has started to sound more and more like English. In the ’90s, languages

Meanwhile, if Yale buys Bluebook, it will have invested in software that was built during time spent ignoring the University’s own classes. finalists of the YCC App challenge are at the center of a startup culture that has expanded from a small number of isolated entrepreneurs to dozens of excited newcomers. The startup culture has the potential to re-imagine every online aspect of Yale student life. It has led some computer science majors to forgo their problem sets and rethink applying for traditional software firms, instead gambling on their own startup ventures. Meanwhile, if Yale buys Bluebook, it will have invested in software that was built during time spent ignoring the University’s own classes.

wo dozen white screens are glowing inside a modest lecture room on the highest floor of William L. Harkness Hall, where Bay Gross ’13 and Will Gaybrick LAW ’12 are teaching. The two have led the creation of HackYale, a organization that teaches the basics of designing web applications and received nearly 500 applications for

cost money to use and required slogging through dense books; today the succinct and friendly Ruby on Rails, for example, can be learned through an abundance of website walkthroughs. Gaybrick and Gross have put their lecture slides online for free, along with all of the course’s resources and homework. Both of them hope their course will inspire a community of coders that did not exist six months ago. “[Yale] could be an absolute hotbed for startup companies,” Gaybrick later said. “The scene just needs to be jump-started.” Across campus on Whitney Avenue, two dozen students meet to discuss their startup ideas at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, whose main space has soaring rows of shiny bright wood tables atop blue carpet and fluorescent lights. There are very few chairs. A whiteboard against one wall is littered with “Forbidden Corporate Buzzwords” like “synergy” and “leverage,” and a poster of Thomas Edison in the corydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

feature ner reads, “SPEED VICTORY / Let’s have your ideas.” The students who have gathered in the Institute’s meeting space sit mostly by themselves, working on their computer science problem sets or surfing websites that introduce programming. Two students confirm that they are working on startups, but they decline to talk about their ideas. A few physics graduate students sit toward the back, softly discussing something about a “Facebook replacement.”

efore the sudden rush of interest in programming websites, the traditional way to learn about computers was through the computer science major. Yale’s building for computer science is Arthur K. Watson Hall, but its main computer lab has been dubbed “the Zoo,” where the computers are named after animals. Computer science classes center around pulling up a box on your

in order to consume less memory. Gross spent 25 hours over one week on the problem set, and three computer science majors confirmed that some can spend 50 hours over two weeks. The classes can lead to a senior project that borders on abstract math. Cameron and Chris Musco ’12, identical twins who are both computer science majors, are pursuing projects that involve finding patterns across huge data sets. The process is something like finding a best-fit line across three dimensions. But outside of class, Cameron and Chris taught themselves something far more concrete: website design, which they used to code One Button Wenzel. “Most startups address everyday problems,” Cameron says. “Theoretical stuff might be less useful in the long run — your algorithm might never be used. But there’s a certain intellectual gratification from the math.”

“Ninety percent of programming is just Googling. You make Shakespeare by looking up every single word.” screen, inputting code to match the theory and getting numbers to spit back at you. Classes cover subjects like graph theory and data structures, and the more advanced problem sets are often elaborate programs that each student sends to a professor, who runs his own program that tries to find holes in what each student has created. Depending on how well you’ve coded, very few or no things will make your program fail — and your grade is determined as quickly as the holes are found. One of the major’s rights of passage is the LZW problem set in CS 323, which requires each student to compress large amounts of data 18 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

Chris adds, “In startups, your final product is appealing to the everyman. In academia, when it’s used, it will be hidden. It’s satisfying to prove something that someone else couldn’t prove, or make a connection that someone didn’t make.”

CS 323 is taught by Stanley Eisenstat, the department’s director of undergraduate studies. Eisenstat came to Yale to teach computer science in 1971, when computers had just started shrinking from the size of rooms. He has a gray beard, physicist’s glasses, and wears white New Balances. According to Eisenstat,

the Computer Science Department teaches languages for the theory behind them, not for their usefulness in modern programming. Choosing one language, he says, can be selfdefeating once it gets old in a few years, and serious websites run on a host of languages. So Yale’s Intro to Programming has been teaching the desktop language Java since the mid-90s, which Eisenstat says is best for new students because of its “sandbox” nature — it allows students to experiment without accidentally rendering their programs useless. But other universities have approached web languages differently. Harvard’s Computer Science 50 introduces website languages like PHP and JavaScript in addition to the traditional desktop language C. All of the course’s problem sets are online for free and the lectures are on YouTube and iTunes. Even though students reported about 11 hours spent on homework each week, the class has just over 600 students, making it Harvard’s second-largest undergraduate enrollment this fall. It lost only to an intro course on microeconomics. The course ends with a “CS50 Fair,” where students present their final projects to the college at large. Gaybrick and Gross said HackYale was inspired by the course’s opensource concept. “We want students to realize that they’ve not just learned C; they’ve learned how to program,” the Harvard course’s senior lecturer, David Malan, said in an email. And near Silicon Valley, Stanford has offered a course on designing iPhone applications since 2009, which has been taught by Apple employees and whose free lectures, according to Stanford’s website, have received over one million iTunes downloads. Malan plans to introduce a similar course at Harvard this spring. The coursebook-buying site

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Books@Yale’s founder, Sean Haufler ’13, is glad that Yale’s major teaches the more abstract concepts, and says they have enabled him to pick up the simpler web languages in a matter of days instead of weeks. But Haufler wishes the department would consider an intro class in basic web languages. “[CS50] is the perfect example of what should be done at Yale, and what hundreds of students would like at Yale,” he said. But Eisenstat says that interest in programming has had its high and low points. The number of computer science majors has risen sharply, from 15 graduating in 2010 to a projected 30 in 2013, but there were about 40 graduating in 2004, and before that, the 2000-era dot-com crash brought those numbers into the tens. “In the 40 years I’ve been

in the field, it’s ebbed and flowed,” he said. “I expect it to continue to ebb and flow.” Geoffrey Litt ’14, who helped design Bluebooker — a four-year course planning app that was an App Challenge finalist — wishes the department would consider the Internet’s role more strongly, adding that a student can complete the major without knowing the basic web language HTML. “The fundamental paradigm of how things work on the web is different,” he says. “Of course Ruby’s going to disappear … but the paradigm of how you program for the web has been established.” Web languages are becoming even easier, and at a faster rate. They are easier to learn than anything spoken by humans — once

a programmer has figured out the basics, languages ask for instructions in very similar ways, and writing new lines will often consist of tweaking ready-made snippets from a quick Google search. “Ninety percent of programming is just Googling,” Croom says. He shakes his head at his own analogy: “You make Shakespeare by looking up every single word.” As for whether Yale’s Intro to Programming will ever start teaching new languages, Eisenstat says the class may switch to Python, a web engineering language that reached its peak of popularity about six years ago and has since been largely supplanted by Ruby on Rails. “Computer Science departments have historically been about develydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

feature oping programmers for research applications … the next operating system, some high end medical device,” Jared says. “As web apps become increasingly popular and rel-

with two New York-based entrepreneurs he met at a Manhattan startup conference. The three of them devised a website called Kinecticle that would coordinate Facebook us-

“I ended up realizing if you want to build something, you have to build it yourself.” evant, that’s where people feel they can have the most tangible impact. Computer science departments have not accepted that fact yet.”

azear Brooks ’12, a computer science major, has a lucrative job offer from Microsoft. But last year he was chasing startup dreams on his own. He took last year off, got a job as an SAT tutor in New Haven, and spent the rest of his time working

20 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

ers’ workout schedules. A venture capitalist was interested in funding their work in the six-figure range, but Brooks realized he would need to teach himself Ruby on Rails if the project was going to grow. He first tried searching for New Haven-based programmers to help him walk through the idea. He showed up to a meeting for a group of professionals called Newhaven. rb, but the members were hard at work on their own projects. “I ended up realizing if you want

to build something, you have to build it yourself,” Brooks said. “It’s too technical to have someone walk through what I wanted.” So Brooks taught himself from online resources like railstutorial.org, but when he tried to integrate the site with Facebook, he found himself caught up in a trial-and-error game that wasn’t leading anywhere. (He added that Facebook has since made it easy to fix what he had been grappling with.) Months passed, and suddenly it was spring. The venture capitalist offered Brooks and the team a six-figure deal if they wanted to start talking about contract agreements, percent ownership, and hiring a bigger development team. But Brooks still hadn’t integrated the site with Facebook, and even once that was fixed, he would have to code for much longer than a year. At about the same time he got a 12-week paid summer internship at Microsoft, a popular career path among computer science majors at Yale. Brooks chose Microsoft and moved to its headquarters in Seattle, where he worked on the next version of Microsoft Office. The startup team declined the funding and suspended the idea indefinitely. Brooks now wishes he had started with around $10,000 of investments instead of aiming directly for the serious capital. He says he should have talked to more Yale students about how to manage his year off and tried to move the project to General Assembly, a Manhattan startup center run by Yale alums that has been called “the shiny new hub of New York’s startup scene” by the New York Observer. “Had I [started] a year or two younger I would have had more experience,” Brooks says. Even though Brooks helped start Yale Hackers, he says the surge of student interest in programming is likely short-term. He compares it to

feature brief crazes in the 2000s that died out almost as quickly as they arrived. “In the long term, computer science will always subsume web development,” he says. D Meanwhile, Sean Haufler ’13, founder of Books@Yale, is entering the startup world on his own. He came to Yale as a varsity swimmer and taught himself how to code with the free online lecture series from Stanford and Harvard. He first found a niche on the web when he noticed that an Italian company selling one of the best swimsuits in the world, Jaked, had no online shipping to US swimmers in time for the 2009 World Championships in Rome. Haufler emailed them for the rights to sell their suits through a website he had just created, and they agreed. He sold 100 suits in three months and noticed some of the credit card orders belonged to famous American swimmers — some of them his swimming heroes. Haufler was browsing Yale’s online course selection early this summer when he realized Yale had catalogued the ISBN data for all the course books into one place. But no one used the data because the site redirects to a page for each book at Barnes and Noble, when students would often rather use Amazon. He built the bare bones of Books@Yale in four weeks on his living room couch in San Francisco when he wasn’t working as an intern for a San Francisco startup. After a total of eight weeks, his site was live in time for Yale’s rush of book-buying. Haufler recruited a friend at Harvard to email final club panlists about his new Harvard version of the site. Through promoter deals, Haufler has since expanded the site to over 60 schools and is adding new schools at a rate of three each day.

room had been staring at code for the last three hours, trying to ignore hundreds of people as they filed into a basement auditorium in Manhattan. He was double- and triple-checking code for a startup demo at the New York Tech Meetup, which selects six startup teams each month to show their web apps to venture capitalists and the public. Croom is the lead coder for one of those teams. It was approaching 7 p.m. and he hadn’t eaten since he caught a train

from New Haven early that afternoon, but food was a low priority. He and the startup’s CEO, Seth Bannon, had just three minutes to prove what the site could do. If a single drop-down menu failed to expand smoothly, investors would pass them by. Croom and Bannon’s nonprofit campaigning application is Amicus, which builds phone banks based on Facebook friends. The idea is that campaigners should not have to pour through phonebooks alpha-

the kenwood party Make a right on the road with the prisons. Once you’ve reached the biker bar with the chickens in the parking lot, turn left. Pass my house, and then the Wamsley house that was burned last spring. He’s still there some nights, his orange tent between the dog sheds. Just across from the private airport, really only three two-wheeled planes left outside all winter, there’s a long stretch of gravel. If the gate isn’t open, get out. Unhook it quickly. Drive, but slowly, once Charlie got stuck. We all rocked his pick-up in our cocktail dresses until someone finally came with cat litter to unstick the wheels. We’ll be in the glassed-in back porch, if they haven’t learned to lock it yet. Walk past the white church house, the red lettered sign: For Those Who Come to Rest and Play, A Prayer for Ken, Please Say Each Day. We didn’t know Ken either. The swimming pool, the tennis courts, the woods — they’re ours anyway. . — Abigail Carney

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betically: an earlier version of the site carried the slogan “Killing the Cold Call.” The web app can also create door-to-door lists based on similar techniques. Amicus is almost entirely run by Yale students and graduates. It is coded by Gross and the Musco twins, designed by Shenson, and managed by a Yale alum. Gross and Croom spent the summer working on the site at General Assembly. The Amicus team has been testing the site with seven nonprofits and campaign groups, including the New Haven Ward 7 aldermanic candidate Doug Hausladen. Despite some short-term investments, the team is looking for funding to support themselves through December 2012. In the Manhattan auditorium, Croom and Bannon finally climbed up onstage, where New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg had opened the meeting. As Seth took the microphone, Croom loaded the Amicus homepage onto the enormous pro22 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

jection behind them. He couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny lines of text that weren’t quite centered. Both were anxious: Bannon started speaking extremely quickly, and Croom loaded the pages even faster than Bannon could talk. Suddenly three minutes had passed, and they were done. There was applause. No one noticed the tiny quirks in the design. The two were led to an open bar after-party on the second floor of The Foundry just outside Manhattan, where each of the six startups had their own dinner booth for fielding questions from a bustling crowd of investors and techies. The booth was far too big for the two of them. Despite the open bar, Croom did not see any food. They stood in front of the booth and fielded questions from excited nonprofit owners and coders who threw around tech terms like “deviance.” By the time Croom caught his train back to New Haven it was almost midnight, and he still had not eaten.

t a HackYale event two nights later in New Haven, there are no laptops in sight as Katie Rae speaks to about 40 students in a Timothy Dwight common space. Rae is the managing director for the Boston branch of TechStars, one of the country’s most successful startup incubators. “If you become a big banker, you will make more money than almost anyone will in tech,” Rae tells them. “[But] your life expectancy is much, much lower. When you join a startup, every day is really interesting. It may not be as much money in the beginning, but you’re creating something. Know that your expected joy will be much higher, even when you fail.” TechStars selects about ten startups at each location from a pool of over 1,000 applicants; the winners are granted $18,000 in funds, support from 100 professional mentors, and sometimes well over $100,000 once the project gets going. In return, the startups give six percent of their profits to TechStars. Nearly all of the companies accepted to TechStars are still active or have been bought. Katie Rae chooses which startups to fund. Rae later said of building a campus startup culture, “If you get a couple of successes, it starts to snowball really quickly. Yale can do that. But it’s a cultural shift. You have to have a student population that also cares.” She added, “I’m willing to bet that with enough strong students, you could do it without professors.” Facing the HackYale group, she says, “I need a volunteer who has an idea.” One student stands up warily in front of everyone. She aims both arms straight out at him: “You have thirty seconds. Pitch your idea.” Several try their unrehearsed pitches. “The core skill that anyone learns in a startup is listening,” she

feature says. “The best do it really, really well.” She checks her watch. “I have time for one more. Is anyone working on something right now?” There is a sudden moment of uncomfortable silence. Will Gaybrick, sitting in the front, glances back at Gross, nods, and starts to point an index finger. Gross is the youngest Yale student working on Amicus, providing more than 20 hours a week of coding. When Croom considers which Yale student would take over Bluebook next year, he says, “Probably Bay.”

For a lingering moment, it feels like Gross is going to pitch Amicus, the kind of idea that Katie Rae would consider funding. Gross sits down and faces a room full of interested eyes: “This isn’t what I’m actually building, but I’d like to build it. I don’t know if any of you have heard of Klout, with a k, like a measure of how cool you are on the Internet? I want to make Klout, but for bros. Instead of how popular you are on Facebook and what your re-tweet potential is, we see how often you

say things like ‘keg stand!’ and ‘Natty Light!’ and ‘Brah!’—and then you get a bro score, and you can push it on your Facebook wall.” “Stop!” Katie Rae yells jokingly. “It’s gonna be huge!” Gross says. Gross could have pitched Amicus, but he didn’t. He and all of Yale’s coders, in a culture independent of the university in whose rooms they work, have figured out how to do things on their own. DDD

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Crit

the new party suites D by tao tao holmes D

tAO TAO HOLMES / STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

dim, luminous red pulses at the end of the long dormitory hallway. As I draw nearer, the walls begin to throb against me, and the floor sends deep tremors of Taio Cruz through the soles of my slim flats, up through my gut, and into my woozy head. The walls emanate a pinkish glow; the ground shines with the sticky residue of spilled Keystone Light. The air is dense with the combination of evaporating sweat and the pungent smell of stale beer on party guests’ breath. I plant my feet, bend my knees slightly, and execute a strategically placed hip check in order to cross the party’s threshold; a few stealthy but deadly elbows soon help me propel myself to the center of the swaying throng. My eyes settle on a wall etched with several sets of initials. They’re the initials of the past members of the God Quad, Branford College’s party suite — sets of initials that, over the past 15 years, have only belonged to women three times. As a Branford freshman last spring, I heard that a group of girls had won an uncontested election to man the next year’s God Quad. Ripples of skepticism passed 24 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

through my peers in Vanderbilt; questions circulated about whether the designated party suite of Branford was going to devolve into nail-painting sessions and late night tea parties. I easily bought into this line of thinking, dubious that girls would be able to create the bass-thumping ragers that, by then, the familiar set of senior guys seemed so predisposed to fostering. Another night in October, I decided to drop by the God Quad. There were no pulsating floorboards guiding me down the hallway, and I was able to enter without pulling out any middle-school hockey skills. Replacing the usual empty bottles of Dubra were boxes of powdered donuts, chocolate chip cookies, jugs of milk, and innocent-looking paper cups. A small group of Branfordians mingled quietly, discussing classes and IM standings. I could lift my arms out, spin an entire 360 degrees, and not touch a single sweaty chin. The only thing missing was the nail polish. Except that this was a Tuesday. The Goddess Quad has doubled the function of the suite, a central hub of Branford College social life, by

crit hosting both parties on weekends and smaller, quieter gatherings during the week. It took only five minutes in that familiar cavern on a Saturday night this fall before I realized the obvious: you need just a few basic things to throw a party. “They always happen naturally; it’s a struggle for us not to have parties on the weekend. It’s a large space and people feel entitled to come,” says Natalie Akers ’14, a current member of Saybrook’s own

a slipping social scene and had taken freshmen under their wings. Their success was rooted in pure charisma and gregariousness; as visible members of the college and campus, they played brother figures to lost frosh. Max Engelstein, one of these God Quad legends, has pointed out that whatever gender stereotypes may apply to “most females” or “most males,” they are probably negated by the fact that the God Quad is a self-

“It is a well-accepted fact that nobody wants to go to a sausage fest.” all-female party suite, the “12 Pack.” The God Quad isn’t the only historically male party suite to attract female leadership. Saybrook’s “12 Pack,” Calhoun’s “Book World, ” Davenport’s “Cottage,” and Timothy Dwight’s “Bar-H” have all seen hostesses over the past two years. Maybe these girls are simply exercising their “genuine appreciation for initiative” that admissions has told the News it looks for when selecting future Yalies. A recent article in the News examining the role of women’s leadership on campus rattles off a large list of campus organizations — such as the Yale College Democrats, YHHAP, the Yale Historical Review, and the Yale Scientific — whose leaders lack a Y chromosome. The feature concentrates on a Princeton study whose researchers found that men and women do not perceive leadership the same way; while women are less likely to seek out well-known leadership positions, they do aspire to managerial roles in which they feel they can facilitate activities. The study recommends a push for women to run for highprofile positions, rather than only managerial ones. At Yale, there’s little doubt that women are capable of running a publication or leading any kind of organization. But nearly all the women interviewed who have lived in party suites acknowledged prior (and later disproved) skepticism about whether they’d be able to throw the kind of raucous parties their male predecessors had. “Prejudice. It’s just pure prejudice, just like any other kind,” says David Crosson, a sophomore in Branford. I wander in and out of suites in Branford asking whether the Goddess Quad was any different from the God Quads that came before it. Though several students voiced a preference for the bros of 2011, their attitudes have more to do with an affinity for the prior members than with the way the suite functioned. Plopped on their common room couches, several juniors and seniors revel momentarily in nostalgia for God Quad 2010, a supposedly legendary group that had revived

selecting group. A group of girls who would rather stay in for “Sex and the City” reruns isn’t about to campaign to be the next popular campus pregame spot. Taking all of that into account, though, there’s still a residue of unfounded sexism. All else held equal (speaker size, iPod playlist, quality of punch), there are still some differences between a party suite led by girls rather than guys. They’re prettier and cleaner. “They have more of an aesthetic touch. It’s more imaginative,” says former Branford master Steven Smith. The Goddess Quad and this year’s 12 Pack are dedicated to mopping, scrubbing, and recycling after every rowdy night. Eric Levine ’13, a previous member of Timothy Dwight’s octet, another similarly designated suite, holds this against the ladies. “They’re usually less willing to constantly be throwing parties because they value cleanliness,” he says. Girls might also have more trouble with the logistics of defusing drunken fights or lifting furniture. Under the command of men, God Quad largely funded its parties with money made through a move-in service at the beginning of each school year, a lucrative strategy which, some say, girls are less able to capitalize on. “Though I guess a suite of diminutive men would face the same obstacles in this regard,” Engelstein notes. There’s the issue of technology, too: “We’re way worse at tech stuff … speakers have been a struggle bus,” Akers says jokingly. The differences cited by critics are clearly ridiculous. So why do some students doubt these girls’ ability to measure out the simple ingredients required to cook up a rager? Are people uncomfortable depending on women for their important Saturday night plans? Is there some psychological factor at play that might prevent men, or women, from considering legitimate a party suite of women rather than one of men? Mike Miles ’14 and Victor Bloch ’14 aspire to take on the God Quad their senior year. Their suite is already host to gatherings every weekend, and their walls are lined with dim neon strings of lights while a smoke ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

crit that the model of a college party is naturally that of a frat party, and it can be difficult for girls to fill a sort of “frat bro” role, or to be taken seriously doing it. That said, they hope to include a girl in the ranks of their God Quad and become a coed suite — which would be the first in God Quad’s history. Female party hosts are trailed by certain social implications that play into gender dynamics and that can influence the type of crowds who filter in and out on weekends. “It seems as though girls who throw parties are resented more by other girls than guys who throw parties are resented by other guys,” Engelstein says. “Even if that’s not true, it is more important to get females to a party than males. It is a well-accepted fact that nobody wants to go to a sausage fest.” His general observations lead him to conjecture that male party suites have an easier time attracting younger female party-goers. And evolution has proven that where women go, men will follow. Nevertheless, the gentle touch of a woman also has

positive implications. Engelstein mentioned how girls are less likely to be branded “creepy” or “skeezy,” which might be to their advantage. “It’s hard if you have a lot of guys,” says Akers of the 12 Pack, which has welcomed its second group of girls since the suite’s renovation ten years ago. “It can be intimidating to show up if it’s not a big statement party. It’s not intimidating to party with girls.” She pauses, then adds, “We’re also extremely bro-y girls.” However, these considerations are secondary to a party suite’s true road to success. As former master Smith says, “It cannot be viewed as a sprint, but as a marathon.” It’s a matter of persistence, motivation and character. “Each God Quad had a different personality,” he adds. And none of that depends on gender. The women of the God Quad have embodied the “high profile” status that the Princeton study emphasizes. On a recent night in the God Quad I happened to hear a freshman guy ask one of the suite’s members, “You live here? Wow, you’re like a queen … you’re like royalty.” Being seen as a queen? The possibility made me wonder whether I’d ever like to be one of these Goddesses. As party-throwers, these women are widely visible while still taking on a “managerial” role, the kind that women feel allows for greater contribution. This year’s God Quad didn’t want to be viewed exclusively as a “party suite”; in addition to parties like “AMURRICA (one nation under God Quad),” the girls are highly involved in the Branford community through intramurals, the college council, the Buttery, and hosting events like their Parents’ Weekend Wine and Cheese gathering and the milk and cookies study break. Perhaps with more Goddess Quads in command of the social realm — a realm that attracts a wider range of students than any individual extracurricular does — we can truly revise traditional notions of female capacity. Maybe women just need to show the world that they can throw down a decent party. D The other Saturday I found myself again in a crowded God Quad. The same beats, the same pulsing mass of sweaty bodies. I turned to a boy dancing frantically beside me. “So, what do you think about God Quad being girls?” I asked him. “It sucksss!” he slurred back at me before lolling his head away from my ruptured eardrum and resuming his general flailing. Funny, really, because it seemed to me like he was having a pretty solid time. D D D

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Personal Essay

I majored in Field trips (and so can you!) D by frances Sawyer D

FRANCeS SAWYER / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

n the Namibian desert —the Fish River Canyon, to be exact — I pick up a small rock. I don’t know what it is. “Adam, what about this one?” I yell over the sound of the river charging below us. I toss the rock, and Adam catches it in one hand, leaning into the hill to keep from slipping down the slope. A graduate student in paleontology, he knows more about minerals than Jenn or I do. Neither of us has taken mineralogy, and we’re trying to learn how to identify rocks on the fly. “Feldspar,” he says, walking down toward us. “You can tell from the way it breaks.” We look at the white rock, a little yellowed, with jagged edges. Feldspar? Adam chucks the rock at a boulder, and it explodes back at us in several pieces. Jenn and I laugh, surprised, as Adam finds one of the larger remnants and hands us a perfect prism. It’s

smooth on four sides and raw on two. The flat sides are those where the cleavage is planar, the rough ones those where it is not. “I’ve always wanted to do that in the intro lab — to just throw it against the classroom wall — but we never have enough feldspar to justify breaking a sample,” Adam says. “I guess that’s a benefit to learning this stuff in the field.”

all me a second-grader, but I love a good field trip. Now, you may be thinking of sweaty elementary-school bus rides to local landfills, but I’m thinking of the highlights of my Yale education. When people ask me what I’m majoring in, I tell them field trips. I’m only slightly joking. The hidden truth I’ve discovered is that Yale offers a vast array of courses with field components. There ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

personal essay is no set formula for these excursions: trips can last for an afternoon or a month, they can be in the sciences or humanities, and they can be advertised in the Blue Book or not. Mama Yale completely funds most of these classes, and some of the best professors teach them because only the most dedicated teachers will take extra time to spend the day — or the entirety of spring break — with their students. Field trip courses are, in other words, completely worth taking if you’re interested in their subjects. Natural history, my primary academic interest, begins in nature. And, as Henry David Thoreau and Geology and Geophysics Professor David Evans say, you’re not going to truly find nature by just reading a book. So over the last four years, I like to think I’ve become a self-styled expert on Yale field education opportunities. There are several significant omissions to my tally — namely archeology, journalism, and economics courses — but I’ll claim that I’ve stumbled onto more trips and more diversity of trips than anyone else on campus. If you think you can top my list, call me. So far, seven courses have taken me to three

FRANCeS SAWYER / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

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continents, five countries, and eight U.S. states. They have been in the Geology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, English, and Humanities departments, but all, in some way, relate to natural history. Together, they have come to define my idea of what an education should include: hands-on and place-based activities that reinforce what you’ve learned in the classroom and library.

nly as a senior can I retroactively claim that all my studies have had some form of telos, some destined end and unifying thread. But field courses are not why I chose Yale. In fact, I didn’t even know they existed when I showed up for my very first, an ornithology lab in the spring of my freshman year. Needing a science credit, I shopped the lab and was shocked to find 50 people crowding the room. Only four kids had taken the class the previous year. What had changed? Amid excited whispers, I heard that the lab was going to Ecuador on Mama Yale’s tab. Ecuador! I went back to my room and worked into the wee hours of the night on my application essay. Miraculously, I got in. That March, I found myself on a plane headed south. Two weeks later, I was sleep-deprived and suffering from a blister where my binocular strap had cut across my neck, but I had 14 new friends, and I had learned more about birds than a traditional class on the subject could have taught me. That first trip catapulted me into the fleeting field trip lifestyle. Fields trips are intense academic sprints that test your sense of adventure and stamina. They’re not vacation time, and they’re not research. Like any day in a class, each day on a trip has a purpose. In Ecuador, that purpose was to witness biodiversity by spotting as much avian life as possible. As if we were playing Pokemon, we had to “catch ’em all!” We set our alarm clocks for 4:15 a.m. so we could hit the trails before the songbirds’ dawn chorus. And we stayed up until midnight in search of owls. Even at meals, we would either eat in the field without dropping our binoculars or use the time to compare our 27-page checklists that recorded the daily species count. Everything was hands-on and open-eyed. My classmates and I climbed rickety ladders down two 30foot waterfalls into a cave to see oil birds, big brown and white mottled creatures that shriek like devils from Dante’s “Inferno.” By slipping on their thick lubricious dung, we learned firsthand the effects of an avocado-family-only diet. That’s something that could

personal essay

FRANCeS SAWYER / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

never happen in Bass Library. Bass Library with a dozen articles and a geological map By the end of that first trip, I was exhausted. Don’t scattered about me. I was working on a typical literature ask me how second semester ended — I can’t remember. review paper about the Aeolian Islands. However, unlike

I could feel the Mediterranean breeze on my face, taste the sulfur in the air, and remember the feel of the volcanic scree under my feet. It wasn’t just a case study in the literature: I had been there. But I do have a record of all 455 species of bird we spotted other students working on papers that week, when I got in our 11-day sprint, more species than most American discouraged in the early morning hours with three more birders see in their entire lives. pages to write by dawn, I could open iPhoto and see myself standing on the rim of Vulcano. I could feel the fter that first taste of Yale-sponsored travel, I Mediterranean breeze on my face, taste the sulfur in the wanted more. I started looking into academics air, and remember the feel of the volcanic scree under with a new question in mind: Where to next? my feet. It wasn’t just a case study in the literature: I had I went to the Adirondacks, Walden Pond, and been there. Edwin Way Teale’s homestead in an English course. I And in that final paper — a summation of a term’s went to Sicily with the geologists and Florida with the worth of thinking, reading, learning, and experiencing entomologists. tectonics — everything in my traveling academic In each of these adventures, on-site exploration was life collided, as only a Yale field trip could guarantee. paired with a traditional Yale course. That meant a lot of work. Spring reading week of 2010 found me sitting in D D D

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photo essay

west rock autumn Photo Essay by Jacob Geiger

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photo essay

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curious geometries By Amelia Urry

photos by zeenat mansoor / photography editor

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cover

n the first day of Math 190, Michael Frame shows the 80 students gathered in Dunham 220 a picture of a mountain. Thin and slightly stooped, Frame looks out at his class from behind large glasses and a scruffy white beard. Though he at first seems tired, his voice bounces as he begins to teach. He shows us three pictures — a child’s face, a brick wall, a snowflake — to represent three familiar types of symmetry. These are the sorts of shapes we might have cut out of folded construction paper in elementary school. The fourth kind of symmetry, and the business of this class, is fractal. On the screen, the craggy red spires of the mountain loom high in late-afternoon light. We watch as Frame clicks to zoom in on a certain section of the mountain. The zoomed-in image echoes the form of the first, its spires made up of smaller spires. Each part of the mountain resembles the shape and texture of the whole, from the original peaks down to the eroded rivulets worn by rainwater in the side of the rock itself. These patterns are everywhere in nature: the winding together of creeks into rivers, the complicated curving of a coastline, the branching of the veins in a leaf. Frame spends the rest of class whisking through a series of in-plain-sight fractals that range from bubbles in crepes to the distribution of certain words in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Mathematical examples — a curve of infinite length, an infinitely subdivided line — have slipped in here and there, but the emphasis is on the relationship between math and art, math and science, math and the world around us. “Now there is one thing you should know,” Frame announces in the last minute of class. “I have an inoperable tumor.” The word he uses — “inoperable” — is precise and

ambiguous. He explains that he will likely be confused and tired at times. He intends to finish the semester; the implication is that he might not.

ichael Frame’s first memory is of looking at the sky and wondering about the clouds. His later research into the mathematical properties of chaos would reach back up into the clouds to describe their turbulence. The clouds, the stars, the scattering of galaxies beyond that, all find their place in his life’s work. Born on Bastille Day, 1951, in Spring Hill, West Virginia, Frame had a curiosity that stretched far beyond his own horizons. He made baking soda grenades out of old pill bottles, and he dismantled radios to see how they worked, endlessly exploring the scientific processes that run the world. “Sports were never a real possibility,” he jokes with a gesture of hopeless gawkiness. “I was just focused differently.” And so he read. He read everything, from science books for children to works of literature — in high school, he would develop a taste for Plato and Dostoyevsky — to the sets of encyclopedias that his parents bought from the grocery store. One day, Frame came across an encyclopedia entry on Portugal: history, language, cultural, and geographical statistics, including the length of its border with Spain. When he arrived at the entry on Spain — history, language, culture, geography, and the length of its border with Portugal — he was startled to realize that the two lengths did not match. “This was an epistemological crisis,” Frame remembers. “When you’re 12 years old, you think truth lives in the encyclopedia.” In fact, both numbers were estimates based on different units of measurement. When measuring the precise turns of an erratically wiggly

line, such as the natural boundary along a meandering river, only a very small unit of measurement can capture each tiny divergence from a straight line. If one surveying team measured every wandering meter of the Spain-Portugal border, while the other only measured using straight shots of a kilometer, the two answers might differ by hundreds of kilometers. Frame at 11, asking questions the encyclopedia couldn’t answer, realized this of the irregular world: the smaller the measuring stick, the longer the measure would be. The truth lives with whoever asks the right question. Years later, Frame would come across this border problem again in an article called “How Long is the Coast of Britain?” by a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot.

ater molecules, when viewed under a microscope, move in chaotic patterns as the agitation of their atoms jostles them against one another. The path of each molecule follows a clean, predictable trajectory until another water molecule slams it in a new direction. In nature, the movement of individual water molecules can ultimately determine the shape of hurricanes. This is why weather forecasts are so unreliable — even the slightest variation at the beginning of a process can be amplified over time to create unforeseeable events. These same chaotic forces form snowflakes, whose famously individual symmetries arise like perfect six-sided puzzle pieces amidst the turbulence of clouds and atoms. “The rules for building a fractal are the story of how it grows,” Michael Frame tells his class. Each snowflake would tell the story of its journey

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cover through the storm, if only we knew how to read it.

n March of 1980, French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot first saw the picture of the mathematical object that catalyzes a new way of seeing the world. As with most great discoveries, its elegance was in its simplicity. Produced by a one-line singlevariable equation, the shape at low resolution looked like an arrangement of recognizable geometric shapes: the heart-shaped cardioid, the progression of quickly shrinking discs, the short spike of a line segment. But Mandelbrot noticed strange specks scattered symmetrically along the periphery of the cardioid. Random flaws in the image quality, he knew, could not produce such regularly-spaced blips. At higher magnifications, these blips turned out to contain smaller copies of the whole shape, nestled among the swirls of the complex border. These were in turn made up of smaller copies of the whole set, and so on. The more he zoomed in, the further he saw. This keystone discovery sparked the imagination of scientists and laypeople alike. The tie-dye spirals

of the Mandelbrot set’s complicated coastline flooded the popular consciousness. These images appeared on the covers of science and graphics magazines, on posters and t-shirts, and on screen savers of early personal computers. Classical mathematics had always been full of strange examples that seemed to break the known laws of infinity. Until Mandelbrot put the pieces together, these were merely monsters, blips on the screen of the knowable universe. Mandelbrot made them visible. In 1982, a detail from the Mandelbrot set appeared on the cover of Mandelbrot’s book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” Two years later, a student at Union College brought the book to Frame, who decided to develop an introductory-level course on the material, which later led to an invitation to give the opening lecture on fractals at SUNY Albany’s commencement ceremonies, where Benoit Mandelbrot told him that one day they would work together.

n Tom Stoppard’s play “Arcadia,” one of Frame’s favorites, mathematics graduate student Valentine waxes poetic about natural chaos: “People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole

“By some miracle our internal clocks had stopped at the same time. In the image I keep returning to, [Mandelbrot] and I are two little kids, running around in a field under a big blue sky, showing each other new things. It was just pure pleasure of discovery.” 34 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about — clouds, daffodils, waterfalls, and what happens to a cup of coffee when the cream goes in — these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.” The importance of fractals lies in the fact that nature, unlike cleanedged Euclidian geometry, is based on complexity. One can find the limit of a parabolic curve to determine its length, but the rough curve of a coastline weathered by storm and sea resists simplification. “Clouds are not spheres,” Mandelbrot wrote. “Mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” The forms of the natural world are not ruled by quadratic equations, but they are, nevertheless, ordered. The way a tree branches from its trunk to the tips of its twigs is regular; any segment of limb or branch resembles the structure of the whole. The genes that encode the instructions for building a tree contain no blueprints, only a small set of rules that will teach the tree how to build itself.

few years after their initial meeting, Frame was surprised to receive a call from Mandelbrot. True to his word, Mandelbrot invited Frame to spend the next year working with him at Yale. Frame was more than happy to collaborate with the founder of his field, though he did not understand why Mandelbrot had chosen him. “I’m not really very bright,” he thought, though he admits that he has a talent for explanation. At Yale, Frame taught a version of his fractals class and worked with

cover Mandelbrot on investigating fractal characteristics. Their first project involved measuring the distribution of the empty spaces inside complicated fractal structures. After outlining the general problem and the probable way through it, Mandelbrot gave Frame his prediction. Frame’s job was to prove it. He labored at the calculations for two weeks. Intimidated by the accounts he had heard of Mandelbrot’s terrible ego, Frame checked and double-checked his work carefully. By the end, there could be no mistake that Mandelbrot’s predictions had been wrong.

Frame brought the results to Mandelbrot with not a little trepidation. To his surprise, the infamously arrogant mathematician accepted the proof with no sign of a bruised ego. “Marvelous!” Mandelbrot said. “The answer is much more interesting than I had thought.” Frame tells the story in Mandelbrot’s thick French accent, then switches back to his own voice. “He was a scientist.” An answer that perplexed was as good as or better than an answer he could predict, because it led to the next set of mysteries. For Frame, this event showed that they could work

together. And as Mandelbrot would eventually acknowledge, he had also decided then that the two of them would make a good team: Frame was not too afraid to tell him when he had done something wrong. “Of course,” Frame admits twenty years later, “I really was terrified.” Over time, Frame realized that the apparent arrogance for which Mandelbrot became known was a side effect of the attention he had received for the discovery of the Mandelbrot set. “For 20 years, he was the hermit crying alone in the wilderness,” Frame says. “After being ignored for so long, he was surprised to be taken up so quickly and so completely.” The sudden academic interest in fractals often overlooked the work Mandelbrot had already done ten or fifteen years earlier — and Mandelbrot was not averse to saying so. Instead, Frame remembers Mandelbrot for his intense loyalty. If you worked closely with him, Frame remembers, “You were his folks. He would do anything he could to help you.” After his sabbatical at Yale ended, Frame alternated between teaching at Yale in the fall and Union in the spring. This worked for a few years until Union objected. Mandelbrot, hearing this, said, “We’ll see about that.” Not much later, Frame was offered a full-time position as adjunct professor at Yale. He took the job, even though it meant leaving the certainty of his tenured position. “If it hadn’t been for Benoit’s being here,” Frame told me, he would have stayed at Union. “Then again, if it hadn’t been for Benoit, I would never have come to Yale in the first place.”

hat first year at Yale, Frame taught his introductory course on fractals. It was the first non-calculus course the math

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cover

Fractals explored Michael Frame describes fractal geometry in a simple way. He says, “Look at a tree in the wintertime.” A branch on the tree will look like a smaller version of the whole tree; a twig on that branch will look like an even smaller version; and so on. And, in the simplest terms, that’s really all fractal geometry is. It is the study of shapes and patterns that are made up of smaller versions of the whole. Fractal geometry is used to describe shapes that are not simply one-, two-, or threedimensional; rather than squares or spheres, fractal geometry can mathematically explain the crevices of a mountain or the composition of the lungs. Central to fractal geometry are the concepts of self-similarity — that larger images are made up of smaller copies of themselves — and non-integer dimension — that a shape is not merely a line or a plane, for instance, but something in between. Fractal geometry is also important to chaos theory — that out of apparent chaos, patterns can be discerned. Fractal geometry has countless applications. Every time you use a cell phone or download something from the Internet, you can thank fractal geometry. Fractal geometry is used in designing more efficient capacitors, generating camouflage patterns for the military, and understanding DNA. – Scott Stern

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department had ever offered. Several well-meaning faculty members reassured Frame that he should be happy if even 20 students enrolled. On the first day, there were 180. Since then, Frame has reinvented Yale’s calculus curriculum, designed special calculus courses that focus on applications in biology and medicine, and taught classes for non-math majors. The rules of logarithms and integrals are ultimately less important to Frame than being able to watch that “spark” going on in the eyes of his students. “That is truly wonderful,” Frame says. “There is no way to fake it, and there is no way to hide it when it is happening.” “I guess under the circumstances, I should be gloomier than I am,” Frame tells me one day, sitting in his office with his hands folded across his lap. He fell down the day before on his way home from work; the therapy to treat his tumor sometimes makes him dizzy. Though he seemed shaken earlier, he now looks calm. “Curiosity is a wonderful thing. If anything will save us as a species, it’s curiosity.”

he second project that Frame and Mandelbrot worked on together dealt with a certain shape called a self-contacting fractal tree. In this structure, a line segment divides at certain intervals into two shorter segments until the “branches” began to curl back again and, in the exact middle, touch. As they began, Mandelbrot again gave Frame the trigonometric formula that he expected to be the result of their work. This time, Frame’s proof came to the same answer. “This was complicated stuff,” Frame says of the equation, a matter of sines and tangents raised to unusual powers. And yet the precise geometric relationship between each variable had been immediately apparent to Mandelbrot. “I asked him how he did it and he said, ‘I can just see these things.’” “In cases of genius, it is helpful to be able to see what ability sets one

apart,” Frame says. “For Mandelbrot, it was his remarkable ability to visualize mathematical problems as geometrical shapes in his head.” His tic of rapidly forming associations between disparate objects was not always easy for other people to follow in conversation. “Benoit had certain odd linguistic traits,” Frame says. “Because he was so good at seeing connections, he could never stop seeing connections.” This talent was ideal for synthesizing fractal geometry from fields as disparate as aeronautical engineering and art, geology, and astrophysics. “He read everything imaginable,” Frame says, remembering phone conversations that wandered through six or seven tangents of tangents. To keep track, Frame held up a finger for each new digression. Frame’s understanding of Mandelbrot’s personal vocabulary was better than average, perhaps because the two of them shared the same fondness for digression. What in Frame is merely a tendency to wander was almost another language for Mandelbrot. Frame remembers one instance of this confusion took place at Clark’s Dairy, where the two of them often had lunch together. Mandelbrot always ordered the same thing: a bowl of pea soup with rye bread. (Frame had a cheese sandwich.) When the waitress came to take their dessert orders, Mandelbrot asked for a bowl of butter pecan ice cream “with a funny hat.” Frame was as confused as the waitress, until he realized that an upside-down ice cream cone would resemble a strange sort of dunce’s hat. To Mandelbrot, the connection was obvious. “He was not always straightforward,” Frame explains with a wry grin. Mandelbrot frequently referred to himself simply as “a storyteller.” Frame’s job, then, was to make Mandelbrot’s ideas accessible to others: “To translate them from Benoit into human!”

andelbrot collaborated with people in many different fields, but these were all what Frame

cover categorizes as “adult relationships.” With Frame, Mandelbrot was free to wander. “By some miracle our internal clocks had stopped at the same time,” he explains. “In the image I keep returning to, he and I are two little kids, running around in a field under a big blue sky, showing each other new things.” He cannot explain the image — it has no counterpart — but he returns to it again and again. “It was just pure pleasure of discovery. There was no posturing.” There they were, for twenty years, pointing and sharing and wondering under a limitless expanse of sky.

piece of writing I’ve ever read. The temptation to read them to you is almost overwhelming.” Staying himself, he puts the book back on the shelf. Upstairs, Frame’s office holds volumes on chaos and fractals and bifurcation theory, among others. Books lie piled up on tables and on the floor, having already packed solid every inch of shelving. Among this impressive collection are various paintings and prints, some fractal, some not, many painted by his students or given to him by friends. Another he shows me is the first piece of artwork he ever purchased:

“If you wait long enough, every state that is accessible will occur.”

ichael Frame’s library has been carefully subdivided with extra shelving into cramped aisles lined on both sides with hundreds of books. Among them are whole shelves devoted to Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Paul Auster, Scott Bradfield, Richard Powers, T. C. Boyle, Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago, Marcel Proust, the criticism of Roger Ebert, a 25 volume set of Mark Twain, the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, and 60 volumes of an ambitious series called “Great Books” — a title that covers everything from Homer to “20th Century Imaginative Literature.” “I think fiction tells us deep things about the world,” Frame tells me, coming in from the kitchen where he has been making crepes. “José Saramago had a huge influence on me.” His favorite book of Saramago’s is “Death with Interruptions,” which he now takes down from the shelf. “The last page and the first page taken together are the most perfect

a small, square canvas of an abstract starburst pattern, bought for five dollars at a craft fair in West Virginia. The paint is layered on thickly in deep teals and blues that stand out in ridges from the canvas, though it has developed a network of large cracks over the years. Its effect on him was immediate, he says: “You could just get lost in it.”

n August last year, Mandelbrot called Frame. “I knew immediately something was wrong,” Frame remembers. “He was sobbing. ‘I won’t be here long.’” Mandelbrot had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a notoriously aggressive disease with a very low survival rate. The doctors predicted that he had four to six weeks to live. Mandelbrot only wanted to focus on the work left to be done. The two of them had been collaborating on two new books on fractals, as well as a paper on a particularly tricky problem that Frame would not be able to solve on his own. Mandelbrot had also been working to finish his memoirs. At the time

of his diagnosis, multiple drafts existed in complicated states. The task of clarifying and cutting it down required months, not weeks. “Benoit was heartbroken and furious that he wasn’t going to be able to finish the memoirs himself,” Frame remembers. They were meant to be “his victory lap,” his chance to tell the whole extraordinary story himself: from his childhood in Poland to hiding in the French countryside during the German occupation of France in WWII, to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set. Frame finally convinced Mandelbrot to tell some colleagues and friends about his illness. Old acquaintances, colleagues in the department, people with whom he had collaborated, all sent letters and emails with words of gratitude and support. Many told him that fractals had revolutionized the way they navigated their fields; it was often more surprising not to find fractals. Mandelbrot thanked Frame for having enabled this kind of gratitude. “I attempted to say something about how influential he had been,” Frame says, “but he already knew this anyway.” When Mandelbrot died in October, two months after his diagnosis, he left behind the work that no one else knew how to finish. Mandelbrot’s widow and his assistant took on the task of editing the memoirs. Frame helped with the technical translation and wrote the afterword, the first draft of which he wrote out longhand. “That was really a hard thing to do,” Frame admits. “I filled up ten pages before I looked up.” The book, called “The Fractalist,” ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

cover will be out by the end of the year. “I’m embarrassed to say that there is a short section about me,” Frame adds with characteristic reticence. In fact, their partnership defined much of the last decades of Mandelbrot’s career. At the memorial service, a colleague remembered that the great mathematician had once said that his greatest success at Yale was bringing in Michael Frame. A year later, Frame insists on a simpler view. “We really were little kids together. I truly miss that.”

‘I

’m getting awfully tired of being old and sick,” Frame admits sometimes. Though his reaction to the experimental treatments has been better than expected, his health continues to decline. “In weaker moments, I get frustrated that I won’t see how things turn out. In that sense, I have nothing but envy for you young guys … You’ve got decades and decades.” Frame’s grandmother saw the first flight at Kitty Hawk, and she saw the

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first man on the moon. In Frame’s lifetime, he has seen the invention of the Internet and the proliferation of the laptop. “That was mammals opposed to dinosaurs,” he says. “Nobody saw it coming.” He only wonders what can come next. “It hit me a year ago that I don’t really care what happens anymore, at least to me. There are things I am interested in seeing,” Frame admits, but he is most aware of the great happiness he has found in his family and his work. “Ever since I began learning geometry, I’ve known that understanding how something works, how the pieces fit together and why, is a pleasure subtle beyond all common measure. I have gotten to spend the bulk of my life helping several thousand students have a few moments of this pleasure. For me, there is nothing better.”

egmark’s multiverse theory hypothesizes that a truly infinite universe would go on and on for so long that it would have

to contain all possible arrangements of matter. Frame describes this to me one afternoon, gesturing toward the cinderblock walls of the office as though the infinite lay just beyond. “My own view is perpendicular to this: what if there were infinite time?” In the cosmological short term, the galaxies of the visible universe are drifting farther and farther apart. Stars are burning off into white dwarves, or collapsing into supernovas that scatter heat and energy across the sky. Our sun will die some spectacular swollen death and the planets ringing its bonfire will eventually turn to ice. One by one the stars will go out, or maybe all at once — disappearing over the horizon faster than their light can get to us. After that, everything will be swallowed into black holes. Then, the ultimate darkness of a universe gone still. And after that? “If you wait long enough,” Frame says, a spark in his eye, “every state

cover that is accessible will occur.” The black holes will evaporate particle by particle. The energy which had dissipated across the whole universe will at some moment reconvene by random chance. The whole universe will stutter back into life — it would have to, given infinite time to do so. “We will be back in this room again and again and again with every variation … Not just us, but the objects around us will return again and again in every configuration. The whole universe will just reassemble randomly.”

n the afterword to Mandelbrot’s memoirs, Frame writes a version of this story: “My first memory is of looking at the sky and wondering about the clouds. I’ve been fascinated by ‘up’ ever since … A half-century ago, visiting my grandparents on a summer evening, my grandfather and I were lying on his driveway, warm from the day’s sun, watching the stars come out as the sky darkened. Darkened isn’t right, although that’s what happened ... It isn’t that the evening sky is higher; it’s deeper. Watching blue to azure to violet to black, I had a moment of dizziness, when instead of looking up, I was looking down into impossible depths. The lonely space between the stars swallowed me, Gramp’s voice drifted away. Was the tightness in my chest fear? No, it was curiosity, sharpened by the hint of an amazing surprise just slightly out of reach. What was this sense of falling trying to show me? I could almost understand it. Then my grandfather’s hand on my shoulder and his question, ‘Did you fall asleep, buddy?’ I wanted to say, ‘No, Gramp, for the first time in my life I was just about to wake up.’ But I knew I couldn’t explain what I meant, because I didn’t know what I’d meant. More directly than you might think, the years I’ve spent studying

math and physics, all the papers and books and software and webpages I’ve published, the thousands of students who’ve listened to me try to explain math, have been, in broad strokes, about trying to figure out what I’d have meant by ‘just about to wake up.’ This is the context of my interior life. If there is one, the answer to what I’d have meant will lie in the details.” DDD

hands She liked to scan her hands in the old machine and print out three copies of her left hand, three copies of her right. Usually she made mistakes and had to print out more. With each wasted piece of paper, she said a little prayer. As the strip of light ran from left to right and right to left, she averted her eyes, watching the light move at all places but the source. The machine made zurr, zurr noises she tried to imitate, but she sounded like a buzzing cat, and she hated cats. She had once tried to scan a cat. She never tried again. She took photographs of her scans and smoked chemicals as she watched them appear in the darkness of red light. There was her right hand, holding an image of her left hand. She hung them up in no specific order and rearranged them every two weeks. Once she forgot to, and she sat in the dark until she figured out why. Sometimes she tossed out a few photographs when she had no room left on her clotheslines, but mostly she looked at them. Then at her hands. When the red light was off, she could not see them, and this made her sad, panicky, and slightly hungry. She once tried to glue her palms together with Elmer’s glue. She waited patiently until the whiteness hardened clear, and then she tried to pull her palms apart. Too easy. She peeled off the residue, bit by bit, like foil off of a gum wrapper

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Fiction

Hip Bones

By Caroline Durlacher Illustrations by Mona Cao

40 |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

fiction

Daddy enters the echoing stone house with sharp thick too loud noises. Eve still sits on the floor in the growing dark of the living room, talking to her friend Elsie, her friend made that afternoon out of an old can of kidney beans and some paper from the typewriter in Daddy’s office. As she shifts, the foot she’s been sitting on seizes awake from its deep sleep. She lowers her talk to a whisper. Daddy’s home, Elsie. Shhhh. She hears his nearing footsteps. He enters the living room. She feels the room to be deepest in the center where he stands, as if settling into the earth. She worries she might begin to slide down toward him. He stoops to switch on a lamp. Eve is seen. Because she is Elsie’s only protector, Eve stares fathoms back up at Daddy’s shadowed face. His big body settles onto the couch. Come sit on my lap, Eve. She takes Elsie into her arms. Come up here now, Eve. She puts Elsie down, stands, wobbly, one foot still pins-and-needles, approaches his knee, tries to climb up. She makes a numb and trembling smile, her face feeling not her own. His hand grips the top of her thigh, another pinching hand under her armpit. He stares large and close into her face and she lets him maneuver her body onto his lap. Do you know what I do at work, Eve? She shakes her head, studying the imprint the wooden floor has made on her knee. I’m a lawyer. She hears liar and scrunches her brow. I make sure people get what they deserve. She feels ashamed, wonders what she has done wrong. Then Mom comes in with the glinting amber-filled glasses. Eve trips trying to get off Daddy.

Her belly, the beginnings of her thighs are in a shallowing slumber. And one hot summer night for sheer wrongness she takes some Anais Nin and reads, and when she feels that

dense dizziness in the bottom of her belly, where her body spreads across the frame of her hip bones, she braces her lids closed against the light and reaches down herself and tries to put her fingers where it sweetly hurts.

Dad lies dead in the bed. His white-blue eyes, asymmetrical, one half-closed now, one fully open. Margot and Mom and Eve herself stand on the threshold. She thinks the light in this room must be recycled through a TV set. She thinks how when she was little and it was dark and Mom was out she used to imagine he’d been in an accident, that he was dead. She wanted to feel it in the black septic depths of her chest so she imagined never seeing him again. What Mom would do. Not the funeral, but she did imagine not having to go to school. The sweet sour pity for her when she finally went back. Eve thinks she is sick herself, something wrong, but no one notices right now because of the dead body.

It is summer and she is on the train, her skin dewy with sweat, hair a little matted though she showered only an hour before. She isn’t wearing a bra. She feels like she’s asking for it. Who but a slender soft wild-haired young man approaches her? She’s a little

scared by his glance, hunches over and covers her chest with her arms. Crosses her legs. What stop? he asks. She tells him 72nd street. He nods. There’s a theater right around there, do you know it? The Cherry Street? There must be something wrong with this blue-eyed guy, or he wouldn’t be talking to her, would he? She sees him shoving her down in an alley and her hands and hips and eyes-closed. Which is what her mind gives her when it is asked for “rape.” But there is the scruff on his jaw, the wrinkles in his shirt, the thick newspaper tucked under his arm, his soft eyes. How can she help but hope for succor?

17½

Eve is in love with the chapped lips and worn nearsighted eyes and soft nowhere body of a young man. When he touches the warm tender undersides of her arms and when she buttons the frayed cuffs of his thin shirts, when she forgets to look away from his eyes after too long, she feels as if the earth is in her chest and that it may break violently out. She has wide open eyes and he is 25. One Christmas morning they give each other gifts: a bracelet bought at some trinket shop in a cobblestoned pocket of the city, a jar to catch fireflies, a failure of a hand-knit cap. He offers her a sleek black leather journal in which to write slanting heartsick frantic memories. He promises to read them.

She shakes her head, studying the imprint the wooden floor has made on her knee. I’m a lawyer. She hears liar and scrunches her brow. I make sure people get what they deserve. She feels ashamed, wonders what she has done wrong. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 41

fiction

She doesn’t know what he is saying but she wants to pull him on top of her, in his linen pants, plain loose shirt. His cherub curled hair. Wants to pull him on top of her on this couch. Couch like in old hoary Rome, where goddesses recline. One after another, and the pretty brunch her mother made is cold on the kitchen counter by the time they’re done. Sometimes they smoke to folk music in his apartment and she sits cross -legged on the veal-colored couch, his arm along the back rest and their two hands kissing at the fingertips. And they, otherwise still, give their sight to each

other, collect the seeing between them. Maybe he will slowly raise the hand from the back of the couch and bring it to his face, lift the slender glasses from before his eyes and place them on the floor beside his shoes. They swim together in the melancholy of sound and smoke. What if he has been her father? Fingers murmuring, whispering together. They tried to get back to that place

again one night high and listening to Baez this time, and only ended up fucking on the couch.

In Italy, on a couch, a low low couch. Kohl smeared around her eyes, throat a little sore even when she says the smooth buon giorno. Eve is watching one particular man. His smile and his frown. Notices the weird high set of his shoulders and yet the length of his legs. She watches his wrists and the blinking of his eyes. She doesn’t know what he is saying but she wants to pull him on top of her, in his linen pants, plain loose shirt. His cherub curled hair. Wants to pull him on top of her on this couch. Couch like in old hoary Rome, where goddesses recline. Her cheek below his shoulder, torso on torso, his hip bones, the stretch weight move of his thighs. Wants to wonder where next his breath will hit her, on the nape of her neck or the blank between her collar and her breast. How can she pull him down on top of her, feed him her luxurious desperation?

Eve and Tracy at just the right moment remember their overwhelming desire to muck around in their brains with some potent hallucinogen. Eve gets a hold of the stuff, laughing goofily at their girlish recklessness, their whimsy. Who are they to be so whimsical? To be beat poets under Reagan? It’s like a moment from the movies. She wants to scream like the young girls did for JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo, scream that way in front of this funny young unibrowed academic supplementing his unlivable salary with drug money. To scream. She laughs instead, as if from being overwhelmed, about to faint away. She sits on her made bed. Whitewashed walls and wooden floors. She handles the Baggie carefully on the quilt. Tracy sits beside her. Four hands hovering a little, moving around this stuff to

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fiction frolick in the firings of their brains. Two swallows. Eve has some idea that she is an oracle. The seeds of bones are coming out through the cracks in the wall before her. But if she goes into those cracks, travels around inside the veins meandering through the wall she can find her future. Why is it hiding there? She is full of hip bones and tries to take off her pants to look at some, slides the clicking zipper. The jut and flesh white and green and purple. These hip bones are full of flowers. But she knows that her husband will tear these flowers with his broken teeth. Her husband will be full of shoulders, childish and angry and punished and head stuffed full of the flowers from her hip bones.

On s’entend bien Dust from the Tuileries walks clings to my suede boots, but the small violet mark on my right breast has started to fade. I've watched it disappear beneath towels and sweaters these days that you've been gone.

I've been biting my nails, always when I read. I have little attention for A Farewell to Arms, bought together in a Burbank bookstore. It sat on your shelf at ease for years, before I reclaimed it It is hot, so hot she spends to be read, as it should.

her wine money on a window air conditioner. She sleeps well that night because she can breathe for once, which means a lot considering that the warm wine once helped her fall asleep. She wears thin shirts with thin little straps and stares at her collar bone and shoulders in mirrors she passes. She doesn’t have time to shower more than once, in the morning, but she wishes she could. By midday the slender layers of her dark blonde hair have condensed, darkened at the roots with sweat. She won’t shower a second time today before the party. It wouldn’t be in character anyway, for a wild west party theme. How often did they shower in the old West? She stands in front of her frameless mirror in a thinning flowered blouse, a jean skirt, and her thrift store cowboy boots. They even have spurs. Who wore these ancient leather things in Albuquerque or the plains of Kansas a hundred years ago? They must have been a man’s. She does have big feet, Mom says. She braids a few tendrils of her hair in front of the mirror. It is dark and the air is hoarse with smoke of all kinds and she is damp in all the crooks of her limbs. It is not the straightforward hot and arid of tumble-

How long Hemingway sat parmi les autres never to gain your admiration! Perhaps once I've read it, long after my violet mark fades, you may borrow it again. I rest meanwhile by the quais of St. Michel, and when you see me next, you will, je crains, be disappointed. It's not that I want to live sans doute au-delà de toi but the air here does me good. The sun, when it shines, is sweeter than our gold California days.

Toujours, l'intention but never the completion. I am not quite halfway through, Expect to finish someday, Though I can’t say when. Fitzgerald, too, wrote things for me to read. He recounts days at Princeton, and I miss my Yale lointaine — ainsi on s'entend bien. I find, without much looking, myself in these texts which have not been touched by your hands and eyes.

I love you more since I can keep you without forgetting myself. The sight of my words on a page is too tempting to pass up. Don’t lament the absence of your name or, in its place, another's. Your presence lives in its best dress even as I breathe in, look down, dust off my shoes. – Isabella Lores-Chavez

weed America but some complex jungleheat. She sees some man, shoulders for children to sit on, shoulders to eclipse a woman. And a wide forehead. Soft eyelids. A wide wide grin. He is wearing a red bandanna tied around his neck, a concession to the party theme. She’ll drink this beer, drink a bunch of this beer because there’s no money for wine. She’s been feeling for a while the pressure beneath her hips, dreaming of her mother and of grandchildren. Seeing

men for features and fathers. My name is Johannes, he says. Johannes? she says. Yes. I am not from here, you maybe can tell. She laughs. And you are? he asks her. American, she tells him. Oh, Eve. I’m Eve. She swallows. So where exactly are you from? In Ecuador it’s cheap. I want to retire there, live like a king, only wear a Speedo for the rest of my life, he says. The rest of your life, she repeats. She thinks of the shiny used cars her father put out for

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fiction sale in their driveway, the plum-colored chicken her mother once prepared from a Julia Child recipe. Johannes places a warm coarse hand on the bare beginnings of her shoulder blade. Her lungs stutter and begin again, heart unwieldy and off-beat in her chest. Languorous heat thickens below her jaw where doctors feel for swollen lymph nodes or a heartbeat. Sometime later, after more beer, he tells her a dirty joke. They laugh big and loud together like thieves.

Hiding under the coffee table in the den, on her belly, shag carpet tickling her nose. She is hiding from Uncle Frank, strange, missing teeth, who always smells musky and smokey and whose laugh has deep cracks in it, ravines. Mommy said yes, he’s coming to dinner, when Eve asked her earlier. She’ll hear his husky laugh from the foyer any minute. Hey, happy Thanksgiving. There it is. Eve burrows into the rug, closes her eyes. Opens them. Climbs out from under the table. Tiptoes to the doorway, stands at the frame, so she can just see Mommy and Uncle Frank in the other room. He sees her, and smiles big. Breathes out a crackling laugh. Hey you. She smiles big back, can’t help it. She bounces a little skipping up to them. She pokes his leg. He reaches down to tickle her and she is laughing great shrieking laughs before he even touches her.

28½

It is a civil ceremony, Eve in blue and pink, Johannes in a beige suit. That night they get drunk. Not on Champagne but on beer. In the kitchen of their new home, cluttered and warm already, the slender out-door tabby cat they took in a few days ago slinking against their legs. Johannes dreams out loud to her in 44 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 | November 2011

his off English. I want to own my own business, you know? That’s why I left the old country. The nepotism there — I can’t even tell you. I want here to start something. All it seems that you need is a good idea, and bam — you’re rich. Imagine retiring to Ecuador. Or the south of France. Nothing to do but tan and fuck, you know? As he speaks she is thinking that she married him for his shoulders and his

grin and because he needs a green card and because she is ready. She is afraid, wants to hide under furniture. She thinks of that time with Tracy, when she was an oracle. Now she can see her future as if it is past. Eve? Johannes calls her back, impatient. She turns to kiss him. D D D