YDN Magazine

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

The Boy Behind The Bus

By M. PeTer roThPleTz

VOL. XLIV ISSUE 1 SEPT. 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS Editors’ Note Dear Wunderkinds, When we became editors of the Yale Daily News Magazine last fall, we weren’t sure what to expect. We were given a panlist, a “How To Mag” Google Doc and some wildly incorrect advice on how to size page margins. At the time, some of the “HotButton Campus Issues” being discussed at Yale were the prospect of Toad’s closing and Peter Salovey’s mustache.

But soon after we assumed leadership of the Mag, long-brewing protests and demonstrations at Yale brought attention to some serious and painful issues on our campus — exclusion across many aspects of daily life here and real divides between the administration and students. To edit a publication without covering the ongoing change would have been unimaginable.

Every cover, from Alex Zhang’s feature on the history of faculty diversity — or lack thereof — at Yale, to Rohan Naik’s investigation of alumni influence on naming decisions, was both a challenge for us and a great responsibility. We hope that the Mag was a place of fairness and respect for our peers, especially in the face of so many misunderstandings and misconceptions.

We ran features on horror-film archives and women’s experiences in New Haven after prison. On fossil fuel divestment and a psychic named Miss Patty. And we found that, when asked to pick him out of a lineup, more Yalies identified Jim Walton of Walmart (#15, Forbes 2016 List of World Billionaires) as Stephen

Schwarzman than they did the real Stephen Schwarzman (#113, Forbes 2016 List of World Billionaires).

Okay, that one wasn’t quite a HotButton Campus Issue.

As for this (somewhat belated) backto-school issue... M. Peter Rothpletz took planes, trains and buses to explore campaign culture in the presidential election using only his youthful sense of optimism and Snapchat. (Also, he interviewed over a thousand people. Ask him about that.) Sara Tabin talked to Yale’s “Committee on Art in Public Spaces” on the picturesque and the political. Jacob Stern profiled Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Monica Wang reported from China, Claire Williamson from Japan’s coffee houses, Anna Rose Canzano from London’s streets, Irene Connelly from a pilgrimage route in Spain and Maya Sweedler from a pickle festival. This is, after all, the issue whose only unifying theme is, “Written Between May and August.”

It’s been a joy and an honor to edit the eclectic, funny and truly impactful stories you’ve sent our way, and it’s with a heavy heart that we bid adieu (to you and you and you) as editors of the Yale Daily News Magazine. We hope you meet our successors at their upcoming pitch meeting for the next issue. They like coffee, unscientific polls and horrific puns as much as we do.

We wish you all the best. Thanks for giving us a read.

Abigail & Liz

table of contents 4

photo essay

Home ALEXIS INGUAGGIATO

16

fiction

Bucks FRANI O’TOOLE

18

6

DROPPING YOUR GUARD

view

Profile by Jacob Stern

A Divided Bench SHANELLE ROMAN

20

9

short feature

Pane Politics SARA TABIN

22

short feature

The Busker ANNA ROSE CANZANO

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Feature by Monica Wang

short feature

Kissaten CLAIRE WILLIAMSON

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short feature

The Opioid Solution QI XU

38

poetry

In the Egyptian Wing at the Met RACHEL CALNEK-SUGIN

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36 FLOORS UP

15 PICKLESBURGH

Short feature by Maya Sweedler

bits and pieces

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Abigail Bessler Elizabeth Miles Managing Editor Lillie Lainoff Associate Editors Gabriella Borter Brady Currey Frani O’Toole Magazine Design Editors Emily Hsee Amanda Mei Design Editors Mert Dilek Eleanor Handler

Tresa Joseph Samuel Wang Photography Editors Elinor Hills Kaifeng Wu

24 TOURIST ON THE CAMINO Personal essay by Irene Connelly

Illustrations Editor Ashlyn Oakes Copy Editor Martin Lim Editor in Chief Stephanie Addenbrooke Publisher Joanna Jin

Cover photo by Elinor Hills

STAFF: Graham Ambrose, Charlotte Brannon, Teresa Chen, Edward Columbia, Elena Conde, Ahmed Elbenni, Abigail Halpern, Emily Hsee, Eve Houghton, Madeline Kaplan, Emma Keyes, William Nixon, Aaron Orbey, Tsedenya Simmie, Eve Sneider, Oriana Tang, Claudia Zamora DESIGN ASSISTANTS: Miranda Escobar, Amanda Hu, Avital Smotrich-Barr BUSINESS LIAISON: Diane Jiang

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THE BOY BEHIND THE BUS Cover by M. Peter Rothpletz

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

photo essay

T

he goal I had in mind was to capture a couple in their home and displace them through shadows, barriers—mirrors, walls, doors, windows—and visual geometries. I hoped this series would shine light on bodies and whatever it is that keeps those bodies from the physical spaces in which they feel most comfortable. My idea was that this might visually represent the tension and sense of entrapment such displacement creates.

H

by 4 | September 2016

photo essay

HOME

by Alexis Inguaggiato Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

profile

Dropping Your Guard

by Jacob Stern

Courtesy of Chris Murphy

S

en. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is the guy in the Sox cap with the sunglasses perched on the brim center fielder-style. The one in the neon-and-turquoise Adidas running shoes and the cargo shorts like the ones your dad wears. The one dressed more casually than anyone in the small crowd gathered inside a firehouse in Norwich, Connecticut to hear him speak.

This month, Murphy walked across Connecticut.

Beginning in Voluntown, near the Rhode Island border, and finishing in Greenwich, the 43-year-old covered more than 126 miles during the six-day tour. Murphy concluded the first leg of his journey in Norwich with a small town-hall meeting, or as he put it, “a little gettogether.” Roughly 40 people filled the small firehouse three-quarters of the way. Perched on a barstool at the front of the room, Murphy told them why he was there.

“My hope is that all of these out-of-the-box interactions that I’m trying to have with people throughout the state of Connecticut not only make me a better representative,” he said, “but ultimately may be recasting the impression of what a public official is, for people who are just used to seeing us in the newspaper or on TV or giving a speech. So I’m really not dressed like a senator today, but that’s OK. People want to know that we are real and authentic and deeply care about who they are and where they are.”

profile Here, he echoed a sentiment he expressed to me when we met in his Washington, D.C. Senate office. On Capitol Hill, he described voters’ thirst for sincerity in somewhat less diplomatic terms.

“I think people are clamoring for authenticity,” he said. “They want to know who you really are. They don’t want you to put on an act … You know, these days, I think the bar is pretty low when it comes to what people want in politicians, and they definitely want you to drop the façade and the talking points and be real.”

That much is evident in an election cycle featuring one presidential contender whose chief virtue in the eyes of many of his supporters is that “he says what he thinks,” and another whose greatest obstacle is her perceived untrustworthiness. Politicians strive to convey authenticity. The good ones don’t let you see the strain; the bad ones labor visibly. If though, like an increasing number of Americans, you believe none of them are genuine, why focus on any one in particular? Why focus on Chris Murphy?

O

n the heels of the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June, Murphy catapulted into the national spotlight when he led an impassioned 15-hour filibuster to force votes on four pieces of gun-related legislation. The measures, which included an amendment barring gun sales to anyone who had been on the terrorist watch list in the past five years, all failed decisively, with none coming within six votes of passage. Nonetheless, Murphy believes the filibuster helped “move the needle” on achieving common-sense gun control reforms.

It also helped raise his national profile.

Following the filibuster, Google search volume for “Chris Murphy” spiked to 25 times its previous levels. To Murphy’s critics, like Connecticut Republican Party Chairman J.R. Romano, the filibuster was no act of heroism, but an attempt to harness a cause célèbre for

political gain. A self-interested power play.

“It was all posturing,” Romano said.

“It was to raise money. It wasn’t about helping Americans … He’s attempting to raise his profile. You know, the bench within the national Democratic Party is extremely weak and he’s trying to become a national figure.”

To supporters, however, the act was not one of opportunistic calculation but of genuine, righteous indignation.

Laurie Rubiner, the chief of staff to Sen. Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73, the senior U.S. senator from Connecticut, called the moment a release of “pent-up frustration.” It was raw and it was real.

“It just felt like a really great moment for people to vent their frustration,” she said. “And I think it did get people’s attention.”

More so than most, Murphy grounds his pitch to voters in his authenticity.

Many candidates seeking elected office wax lyrical about their great-uncle the coal miner to avoid being labeled a member of the affluent and nefarious Washington elite that doesn’t understand the average American. But whereas their narratives of authenticity often seem like ad hoc appendages, Murphy tries to weave his anti-Washington message into everything he does.

Although not nearly to the same extent as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and with policy positions and ideological leanings diametrically opposed to the real estate tycoon’s, Murphy presents himself as an alternative to the political status quo.

“The age of incrementalism has to come to an end,” he said. “People fundamentally don’t think that the things we’re talking about here — like a small increase in the Pell Grant, or another tax credit for child care — are going to be meaningful to them. That was the attraction of Bernie Sanders and that’s in part the attraction of Trump.”

Murphy won his first public election in 1997 at the age of just 24, earning a seat on the Southington Planning and Zoning Commission. Since that first elec-

toral victory, he has rapidly ascended the political hierarchy, moving from the Connecticut House of Representatives, to the state Senate, to the U.S. House of Representatives and finally to the U.S. Senate. Part of the reason he is so grateful for his six-year Senate term is that he spent his 20s and 30s “running and running and running,” he told me.

Despite having now served a decade in Congress, Murphy still sees himself as an outsider in Washington.

“I’m probably not the traditional backslapping, hand-grabbing politician,” he said. “I don’t have natural gifts in crowds. I may not be a natural politician. I may be a little bit more of an introvert than some people here are, but I try to make up for it with hard work.”

At the time of his election in 2012, he was the youngest member of the U.S. Senate at age 39, and he remains nearly two decades younger than the average senator. Rubiner can recall times when Murphy has “come in looking like a college kid.”

In 2012, Murphy ranked third-tolast in wealth among U.S. senators, with a net worth of about $82,500 — more than $2.4 million below the chamber median. He has neither “a popular last name,” like his 2012 general election opponent and professional-wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, nor a family history in politics. His only electoral defeat — suffered in the 1992 race for the Freshman Council at Williams College — came at the hands of Walker Stapleton, the current state treasurer of Colorado and, as Murphy says, a second cousin of President George W. Bush ’68.

Since his first race for national public office, in which he upset 12-year incumbent Nancy Johnson to earn a seat in the U.S. House, Murphy has followed the same political “formula.”

“I don’t have the pedigree that some other people have running for office,” he said. “But I just work really hard and I care really deeply about the issues I work on, and my belief is Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

profile that, you know, if you do both of those things, voters will notice.”

And, for the most part, they have.

Murphy won his 2006 race against Johnson by a 12-point margin, then defended his seat in 2008 and 2010 with 60 and 54 percent of the vote, respectively. In 2012, he routed McMahon by 12 points to win the Senate seat he now holds.

His approval rating stands at 53 percent, ranking 37th among all senators.

M

urphy says the impetus for his filibuster — and for all his work to pass gun control legislation — traces back to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, which killed 26 people, including 20 six- and seven-year-old children.

The attack occurred in his former congressional district while he was still a senator-elect. Together with Blumenthal, Murphy met with victims’ families and attended funeral services in the aftermath of the tragedy. Blumenthal called the ordeal a “transformative experience.” In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, Murphy said he was “embarrassed that I hadn’t paid attention to this issue.”

When he took office just weeks after the shooting, he devoted himself to passing “common sense” gun control legislation. More than three years of congressional inaction later, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history drove Murphy, a self-proclaimed introvert, to seize the Senate floor.

Janis Sawicki, an audience member at the Norwich town hall meeting who hadn’t yet decided how she felt about Murphy, said the filibuster helped convince her that the senator genuinely cares about his constituents.

“He does seem to be interested in the people and the issues and the whole business with the filibuster and the gun control business really caught my attention,” she said. “I think that’s a real positive.”

To the senator’s longtime allies, the

8 | September 2016

filibuster showcased Murphy’s authenticity and caring, and, in that sense, provided a fitting introduction to the national stage.

Bob Berkmoes, a longtime friend of the senator’s and the chairman of the Southington Democratic Town Committee, can remember Murphy’s first campaign for the Connecticut Legislature.

“He walked, I think, to every house at least twice to introduce himself to the public,” Berkmoes recalled. “And the biggest thing that Chris did is he listened to everybody. You know, when he knocked on the door and he asked people if they had any problems or how things were going, if people had an issue or problem, Chris really looked into it and got back to the person.”

Berkmoes also reiterated a common refrain I’d heard from Murphy supporters: “What you see with Chris is what you get.” Scott Merchant, a firefighter in Norwich, echoed Berkmoes verbatim. And the senator himself assured me there would be few surprises if I spent more time with him outside the public eye.

Susan Bysiewicz ’83, Murphy’s Democratic primary opponent in his 2012 Senate race, offers a more conflicted perspective. On the one hand, she praised the work her former adversary has done in the Senate and emphasized that, with a few notable exceptions like financial regulation, on which she considers herself the Bernie Sanders to his Hillary Clinton, he and she hold similar policy positions. Bysiewicz commended him in particular for his efforts to pass gun control legislation.

“To me the bottom line is… that Chris and I are both ardent Democrats,” she said.

And for the most part, that was the bottom line of our interview. At times, though, Bysiewicz seemed hesitant to issue a ringing endorsement of Murphy, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the exchange that ensued when I asked whether she thought he aspires to the presidency.

“I am sure that he has very high aspirations, and, you know, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” she said. “Look, I am a person who believes that leadership is about helping other people achieve their goals and aspirations.”

“And do you think he embodies that?”

I asked.

“I think he has high aspirations,” she said, taking a long pause. “I think he has high aspirations and … he’s a person who has a lot he would like to accomplish in his life. Look, I’m a person who’s got a lot I’d like to accomplish in my life.

So I think that’s a good thing.”

Ten minutes after our interview, she called me back to “clarify” her comments — in effect, to assure me that she wholeheartedly supports Murphy.

Bysiewicz’s reluctance to criticize is rare. The U.S. Senate is “a world where people may simply take shots and they may often be unfair,” Blumenthal told me over the phone. It should be no surprise then that senators are loath to “drop the façade and the talking points,” to borrow Murphy’s phrase. For his part, Murphy acknowledges that he doesn’t always present the real Chris Murphy.

“I don’t know that I achieve that every day, because sometimes it’s hard to drop your guard in this job, but I try,” he said during our meeting.

In a follow-up interview two weeks later, I returned to that comment, asking why it’s so hard to drop your guard. He paused before replying.

“Well, I mean, this is a job in which people pay very close attention to what you say,” he said. “You know, if you make one misstatement, it can cause you a lot of heartache. So I think everyone in jobs like this is careful about what they say.”

I asked if he could recall a time when he regretted not dropping his guard more. “No I think I was making a general comment,” he said. “I don’t sort of think about it in terms of specific instances.”

I then inverted the question, asking if there were any time that he had dropped his guard and taken criticism as a result.

His answer was the same — nearly word-for-word.

feature

36 FLOORS UP

BY MONICA WANG COURTESY OF YALE CENTER BEIJING

In Beijing’s central business district, Yale’s first global center is furthering the University’s high-level ambitions. Is it doing so at the expense of attracting current students and faculty members?

I

t was an unusually clear day in Beijing as I stood on the 36th floor of the IFC Tower B, looking out at a city that sprawled until the edges of the horizon. Directly below, tens of thousands of passersby and cars crossed paths in one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods — the Chaoyang central business district, where multinational companies are headquartered and skyscrapers mark the landscape like trees in a forest. Vestiges of the old imperial Beijing — its city walls and Chinese-style drum tow-

ers — were outnumbered by the towering steel-and-concrete structures. Modernity flourished and the dreams of a more prosperous and powerful future were palpable in the air. In Beijing, especially in Chaoyang, people looked forward and upward.

The Yale Center Beijing, which occupies the entire floor, shared these aspirations. At the reception, big letters in Yale blue announced the University’s first such center in the world. Inside, the décor was simple but elegant: glass walls, light wood paneling and a few splashes of color; several offices, conference rooms and lecture spaces, all furnished with videoconferencing technology to connect Beijing with New Haven. It was as if the center’s architects took the Yale School of Management and condensed it into a one-floor design.

But the center offered more than just a pretty space in one of Beijing’s most fashionable districts. Only two years since its launch, the center has already hosted a diverse repertoire of events and programs to achieve an ambitious mission: forging a deeper bond between the University and China.

“The center is very much a conven-

ing space for showcasing Yale’s 100-plus research collaborations in China and an intellectual hub for gathering thought leaders from all fields to discuss the most important issues facing the world,” Carol Li Rafferty ’00, the center’s managing director, told me during my visit in August. The center serves both as a home base for visiting Yale students and professors as well as a platform for extending Yale’s name to the local Chinese community, she said.

But several Yale students and professors interviewed said they were unaware of the center’s existence or had not visited it during their time in Beijing, mostly because it is located far away from Haidian, the city’s academic district.

“The way I found out more about [the center] is by subscribing to its WeChat page,” said Diego Fernandez-Pages ’18, who was among the 40-plus Yale students studying abroad at the Harvard Beijing Academy this summer on the Richard U. Light Fellowship, which is funding almost 100 Yalies to study in China between summer 2016 and spring 2017. “It was completely by my own impulse. I wanted to find out more about [the center] so I looked it up,

Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

feature but Yale Center Beijing did not do any direct advertisements to Yale students in Beijing.”

Fernandez-Pages visited the center only once during his two-month stay in Beijing, to attend history and American Studies professor Mary Lui’s talk on a Chinatown murder mystery. He saw just two other Yale undergraduates at the event.

Rafferty and other center administrators said they would love to see more Yalies make use of the center and its resources, especially given its relative lack of awareness on campus and among Yalies in Beijing.

The center’s major donors and Yale alumni in Beijing, however, are not so worried. For them, the center is symbolic of a high-level, metaphysical relationship between Yale and Beijing, a brick-andmortar front connecting one of the leading universities in America with the political and business capital of one of the most powerful countries in Asia. The center is not so much a resting place for students and professors as it is a space for gathering “thought leaders” from different fields to engage in critical conversations. In their eyes, Yale Center Beijing represents something that is larger than the University itself.

I

n 1854, Yung Wing became the first Chinese student to graduate from Yale College and, for that matter, any American university. When he returned to China, he petitioned the Qing government to launch the Chinese Educational Mission, which brought more Chinese students to study abroad in the United States. Many of these students attended prestigious universities in the Northeast and went on to play important roles in China’s modernization.

But to Yung Wing’s dismay, in 1881, the Chinese government withdrew support for the mission and ordered him and his students back to China when anti-Chinese sentiments flared up in the United States (the Chinese Exclusion Act suspending Chinese immigration was passed just a year later). Still, Yung Wing left an important legacy in American education — especially at Yale. And more than a century later, his alma mater would take advantage of that relationship to launch and nurture its first University center overseas.

“Yale is the American university with the longest history of engagement with China, stretching back almost 150 years, in a time when it was much more difficult to connect

COURTESY OF YALE CENTER BEIJING

10 | September 2016

with China,” said David Bach, the School of Management’s senior associate dean for the executive MBA and global programs, who oversees the center’s operations from New Haven. “And China today is such a critical country in terms of its size, importance and history, and such an important country for Yale University, that when the question arose as to where it makes sense to have the first center of its kind in the world, it was obvious that [the center] would be in China.”

Yale Center Beijing came to life in October 2014, a bold endeavor championed by former University President Richard Levin during his term and assembled with the support of Yale alumni and friends. Chinese investment fund Sequoia Capital China’s founding and managing partner Neil Shen SOM ’92 led the donation efforts, along with Bob Xu of Zhen Fund and Brad Huang SOM ’90 of Lotus Capital Management.

Together, the three gave $16 million to inaugurate the center. The SOM currently handles Yale Center Beijing’s administrative tasks, but the center’s operations depend almost entirely on donations, which have not been difficult to raise because of the center’s popularity among alumni and local Chinese sponsors.

Huang remembered that Levin first approached him with the idea of establishing an independent Yale center in China when the two met for lunch in May 2010.

Levin had an international mindset and was deeply interested in China, Huang said. It was during Levin’s term that Yale started a program with China’s Central Party School — an institute of higher learning run by the Chinese Communist Party — which brought future Chinese government leaders to New Haven for an educational exchange.

From the Central Party School program, it seemed natural for Levin to try to expand Yale’s presence in mainland China, so he sought Huang’s help to make the center a reality. Huang then thought of Shen as the “perfect person to lead this project financially,” and Shen in turn brought along his friend Xu, who co-founded China’s largest private educational services company New Oriental and whose son studied at Yale College.

feature

COURTESY OF YALE CENTER BEIJING

“Yale is in a unique position to offer itself as a centerpiece in the communication and exchange [between the U.S. and China],” Shen told me. “Yale has a really long history in China and is well respected here.

It should play a role in bridging the gap between many different areas and subjects — business, culture, academics, social subjects and so on.”

And Yale Center Beijing’s staff took Shen’s words to heart. Through its videoconferencing technology, the center hosted a conversation between Robert Blocker, dean of the Yale School of Music, and Yu Long, a well-known Chinese conductor.

Yale Law School professor Daniel Esty held a talk there with Yale World Fellow Ma Jun on the Paris climate change agreements.

And Rafferty’s staff partnered with Philanthropy in Motion, an initiative started

by Yale alumni, to train millennial entrepreneurs on how to make impactful social changes. A wall by the front doors of Yale Center Beijing even showcases a timeline of Yale-China relations, beginning with Yung Wing and leading all the way to present-day events.

Huang said since China is the secondlargest economy in the world, it is the most important foreign country for any American entity to befriend. “The most critical relationship for Yale to develop is the one with China, so both sides need to under-

stand each other,” he explained. Even though Yale’s various schools already have programs set up with their counterparts in China, the center exists as a hub to facilitate these exchanges and to start conversations beyond the academic world, he said.

And Xu, who is not a Yale alumnus himself but who built his career on helping Chinese students study abroad, said he donated because he felt a “special emotional attachment to Yale.” In his view, Yale is the American university that gave the first Chinese college student in the United States — Yung Wing — his diploma, and subsequently trained generations of influential figures in China.

“I want to use [the center] to cultivate the next generation of young entrepreneurs and business leaders in China,” Xu said, referring fondly to the center as a startupembassy blend that is bringing the Yale spirit to his country.

Bach told me that Chinese nationals are the largest non-U.S. student population at the SOM. Not surprisingly, the SOM influence on the center is strong — it is administered by the SOM, supported by wellknown SOM alumni and designed with elements borrowed from the SOM’s physical appearance. But Bach and Rafferty stressed that the place aims to serve the entire University.

Shen, Huang and Xu, however, rarely

mentioned Yale professors and students during our conversations about the center, and Yale students interviewed seem to disagree with Bach and Rafferty’s characterization. Yale Center Beijing, several said, does not feel like a place for them.

I

n real estate, only three things matter: location, location, location.

With Line 1 of the Beijing subway running directly below the building and major highways crisscrossing in the surrounding area, Yale Center Beijing’s lofty nest in Chaoyang is no exception to the rule.

“Given our location [in the Chaoyang district], we have a pulse on everything that’s happening in Beijing,” Rafferty said.

She believes the center is able to assemble distinguished speakers, industry leaders and interested attendees more easily than if it were established in the Haidian district, where Chinese universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University as well as most other American university centers are located.

Daniel Murphy, Yale Center Beijing’s program director based in New Haven, explained that the Chaoyang district contains embassies, nonprofit organizations, international and domestic media, as well as Chinese and multinational companies, as opposed to the strictly academic institutions found in Haidian. Individual Yale pro-

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

feature fessors and departments may have partnerships with the universities in Haidian, but under one of Beijing’s most openminded municipal governments, Murphy said Yale Center Beijing has the independence in Chaoyang to assemble leaders from more diverse walks of life.

“We see this as reimagining education and redefining leadership,” Rafferty said.

“You don’t have to be at school to understand all this information. You can come to a talk here [at the center]. It goes into improving the world, and it’s not just about professors in ivory towers coming up with the solutions.”

Yale Center Beijing has hosted over 200 events and programs since its inauguration, and the center’s official WeChat account has close to 15,000 followers, many of whom have no Yale affiliation. In fact, half of all events at the center have been open for the general public to attend.

Shen’s fund Sequoia Capital China, for example, will use the center’s space to launch an executive program this October to train leaders of the fastest-growing startup companies in its portfolio. Shen said he chose to host the program at Yale Center Beijing in part because of its ideal location in the central business district.

No wonder Yale Center Beijing is the most active university center among its peers in China, Rafferty said proudly, with the highest number of events and attendees across the board.

Yet while Rafferty and Murphy spoke fondly of the center’s home in Chaoyang’s central business district, Yale students interviewed said the area’s business influence can easily overpower the center’s educational mission.

“People think about business when they see the center. It’s like another SOM in Beijing — it’s very corporate and it doesn’t have a college feel to it,” said Dale Zhong ’19, a native of Beijing who is also the public relations chair of the Chinese Undergraduate Students at Yale. “[Yale Center Beijing] is a place where you have official talks and people dress in formal attire.

Maybe the location is making it difficult for the center’s staff to build an educational platform.”

12 | September 2016

Zhong was in charge of organizing a retreat for CUSY over the summer, and he chose not to plan the event at the center. The reason, he said, is because he was looking for a more informal and relaxed atmosphere — and he also managed to secure a different space free of charge.

Others who are visiting Beijing for a short period of time may be simply unaware or uninterested. Not including Fernandez-Pages, five other Light Fellows who spent the past summer abroad in Beijing said they did not visit the center. “[Yale Center Beijing] didn’t have any events specific to Yale students, for better or for worse,” Fernandez-Pages said.

He added that the hourlong commute between Chaoyang and Haidian is not the real problem, given that most of his peers at the Harvard Beijing Academy would take the same amount of time to travel to Sanlitun, another area in Chaoyang that offers popular dining and entertainment options.

A Yale Daily News analysis on Yale-NUS that was published last semester described the University’s experiment in Singapore as “an island on an island.” Yale faced many difficulties in starting a liberal arts institution under an authoritarian government, and the article noted that local Singaporeans are still largely unaware of the college’s existence.

Yale Center Beijing, on the other hand, has become a favorite among Beijingers and has hosted events that attract people from provinces as far south as Guangdong.

But it, too, is an experiment in Asia that is as exciting as it is challenging. And for Yale Center Beijing, that challenge is fulfilling the most fundamental purpose of providing a physical home to Yale professors and students in Beijing.

“Yale doesn’t have a systematic academic environment,” said Serene Li ’17, another native of Beijing who interned at Yale Center Beijing this past summer. “It’s not quite serving the faculty, staff and students on campus.” But, Li added, that may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Y

ale is hardly alone in its endeavor to create a physical presence in China.

Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania are among the American higher-education institutions that have opened university centers in Beijing over the past eight years. Harvard established its center in Shanghai in 2010, and New York University and Duke even formed ambitious joint ventures with local Chinese universities to launch degree-granting campuses in mainland China.

But according to Rafferty, Yale’s center is neither an extension of the business school with a primary focus on providing executive education like the Penn-Wharton Center, nor is it a full-fledged campus like NYU Shanghai or Duke Kunshan University.

“The center is a way of testing the waters of what the best way is for Yale to engage with China,” Rafferty said. “Every [American university] has different objectives. I would say that for Yale, this [center] has been envisioned as a space to showcase our work rather than to be a traditional education institute.”

The original sum of $16 million, along with subsequent alumni giving, is enough to keep the center afloat for five years. And according to Bach, the Yale administration is likely to call for a structured review of the center near the end of this period.

At that time, Rafferty explained the University will determine what the appropriate size of its footprint in China should be, as well as how the center should be updated to reflect that decision.

“China is a place of dynamic change,” Murphy emphasized. “And we’re a new organization in a fast-changing environment, so that means being flexible, nimble, innovative and continuously engaged in a process of self-introspection to think about what we do and how we can do it better.”

Huang is confident that the center will survive the test — fundraising is a continuous and successful effort, so money should not be a problem. The purpose of facilitating Yale-China relations is also unshakable, he said. Perhaps the only change he can think of is buying a permanent location for the center, as Yale Cen-

feature ter Beijing currently rents its space.

The other two donors echoed Huang’s thoughts and said they refuse to see the center perish. Xu even proposed starting a Yale executive program at the center that could generate extra income.

“What I would like to see happen is for the center to expand and evolve into something with a more educational function and a more structured program,” he said, adding that a full-fledged Yale campus in China is “unavoidable” in the next five to 10 years.

But Bach’s assessment of the center and its growth is more conservative — he said it should be more than a representative office for visiting Yale students and professors, but it will not become a joint venture with a local Chinese university any time soon.

“Yale is really nicely in the middle,” Bach said. “It’s broad in scope for the entire University, it’s bigger than just an office with a couple of staff looking out for the interests of the University and its stakeholders, but it’s not anywhere near a full-fledged campus, nor can it become that.”

A

s part of her internship this summer, Li was tasked with performing a competitive analysis of Yale Center Beijing with other American university centers in China. The results were strongly in favor of the center — it was doing well, especially among the Chinese public. Now, Li wants to take another step forward and improve on the center’s ability to reach more local Chinese by live-streaming events.

“If Yale’s current advantage gets amplified, I would prefer having this advantage over cultivating an academic focus to serve its own campus,” Li said.

Yale students, faculty, administrators and alumni all have different ideas about what shape the center should take and whom it should serve, but those familiar with the center believe that Yale’s effort to reach out to the local Chinese community should continue to be one of its top priorities.

Major donor Neil Shen said he gave money to found the center with the purpose of allowing Chinese people who can-

not visit Yale to interact with experts from the University and beyond. The center may have a Yale label, he said, but its presence can benefit those outside of the immediate Yale bubble as well.

“I think all these centers set up by American and European academic institutions in

China can give people more exposure to the cultural, economic, academic and various other aspects of the U.S. and Europe.” said Shen, who thinks having more university centers in China is ultimately a good thing.

“Collectively, I call them ambassadors serving tomorrow.”

July Fourth

by Emily Switzer In the event of an apocalypse please — exit through the rear doors to the parking lot.

Walk (do not run) along the shores of river rock, the granite that passes for beauty in this world without water — stone filling the wooden curb to the brim and welling onto the sidewalk.

There is something backwards about that.

Something unnatural in the movement of grey pebbles flowing to kiss an asphalt shore, already crumbling.

The sun bakes the wood to splinters and the concrete to dust: the day it crumbles will be the same as all other days.

Lotuses do not bloom here — rather, nightshades, marking time in mounting redness on a tiny island at the edge of the world.

Curious, then, that the small fruit whose flesh seeps crimson from the thinnest of skins does not taste like blood.

Curious, then, that its ripeness grows to sweetness over a litter of cigarette butts and fossilized gum — that its yellow blossoms, nearly invisible, fragrance indistinguishable from the warmth of the air have wooed bees across this tarry sea.

Curious, then, that this day — these tomatoes, bruising — should be the present.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

GH COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

giants (notably Google and Uber, the latter of which is rolling out its self-driving cars in the city), Pittsburgh is currently facing a massive demographic stress test. Agewise, the population disproportionately falls to the right of the bell curve: Today, less than 20 percent of residents are under 18, a figure that ranks among the lowest when compared to other major metropolitan areas. Of course, as Pittsburgh boasts the highest number of bars per capita, as well as a pleasingly low cost of living relative to quality of housing, the forecast is looking up.

But for now, Pittsburgh sits where the three rivers meet, shaken and yet proud of its past.

The two-lane bridge was just wide enough to fit the event. White cloth tents, their backs pressed up against the railings and suspension cables, arched over grills, brining instruments and tables of food.

The air, already saturated with the moisture that accompanies a typical Midwest summer, had a slightly salty flavor that annealed every time a stiff breeze came off the river. My co-worker and I wove through the crowd, arms slightly held up in an effort to catch that breeze, and pretended we weren’t as sweaty as we actually were.

And then there was the food. Sold by

the cup, jar or barrel, the Picklesburgh vendors hawked every type of pickled vegetable imaginable: cauliflower, carrot, pearl onions, garlic, radish, cabbage, zucchini, jalapeno. There were cucumbers pickled every which way, each with a suggested pairing. For the most part, the traditional dill pickles were forsaken in favor of chargrilled pickles (great with a Bloody Mary) or black-pepper-chip pickles (terrific alongside white cheeses, apparently).

Equipped with a half-dozen toothpicks, I tried every single flavor of pickle in Cleveland-based artisanal pickle company Randy’s Pickles, stopping only when my mouth went numb from the vinegar.

Vegetables, I quickly discovered, were not the only type of food that can be improved with a nice soak in some salt water. I saw pickled funnel cake, picked chips, pickled peaches, pickled bacon tacos, picked strawberries and brine ice cream.

As the latter was a sickly green color that I associate only with expired marine animals, I elected to skip the emetic treat, choosing instead to down a cup of soupy red liquid called a “shrub.” The shrub, a vinegar-based syrupy liquid infused with sugar and pureed fruit, technically has the same acidity level as lemonade — at least according to its vendor — but burned significantly more going down. Though it left

me gasping and with streaming eyes, I had to stop myself from going back for seconds.

The people manning the booths beckoned and called, cajoled and wheedled, passed out toothpicks and napkins and plates, blending in with one another as my co-worker and I reached the end of the bridge. With our lunch break ending and mouths burning, we decided to head back to the office rather than take one more pass through Picklesburgh.

Before we departed, I turned back toward the bridge. The black and white and yellow were less distinguishable under the blinding afternoon sun, but I knew they were still there.

“Pittsburgher” refers to a state of being, a permanent status, rather than simply a hometown. The city has a surfeit of pride, and after 10 weeks in Western Pennsylvania, I would never dare to say that pride is misplaced. At once vibrant and feeble, evolving and atavistic, Pittsburgh is the resolution of a million different contradictions. It’s not always pretty, but there’s beauty in the messes — in the jagged shards of glass, in the abandoned warehouses, in the crisscrossing lattice of bridges that should have been replaced decades ago — and that beauty is worth seeing.

And if you go — I’d suggest you try the pickles.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

fiction pulled swiftly toward the island — soon, however, his head began to tilt. His cheek fell to the side and his antler skinned the surface. Small ripples of breath radiated from the spot his lips met the water.

I’d spotted the buck before Corky, who had been busy watching the reed patch my sister and his brother had snuck off to earlier. When I reached into his backpack for binoculars, Corky turned.

“What’s that?” he asked, squinting at the buck. “Is it going toward the island?”

The shoreline of the island opposite us was wooded, though a shuttered house was visible behind tangled leaves and branches.

The house, blue and speckled, was owned by the mother of my sister’s friend. The woman, a florist, had moved there after her daughter married — eloped, actually, and without so much as a bouquet. Though our siblings often took us to the river when they were supposed to be “babysitting,” in all our time in that spot, Corky and I had yet to see the woman. The only sign of her came when the wind shifted from the east, and with it, a faint smell of roses.

Corky leaned close to me, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice the hair on my arm. He wanted me to pass the binoculars, which I did, though by now the current had dragged the animal directly into our line of vision.

Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to save him. I was never a swimmer. Last time I was in water, I’d capsized a canoe. It was at camp, and the captain of the capture-the-flag team had invited me on the water at night to see silver fish jump for no-see-’ems. When he tried to kiss me, I started rocking. Our canoe rolled over, and he pounded at the lake as I floated on my back, watching the moon.

“Is it escaping something?” Corky asked, sweeping the binoculars toward our side of the shore. The riverbank had always reminded me of a shadowed bed, hills formed by the raise of a knee. Corky’s gaze lingered a bit by the reeds, then continued, resting at my feet.

When I told her about the canoe incident, my sister couldn’t believe I didn’t want to kiss the captain. She was four years older than Corky and I and an expert in love.

She liked to lay in bed with one arm over her

head, flashing an armpit smooth as an avocado, and explain why dating should be seasonal — a rule she broke when she started seeing Corky’s brother. Corky’s brother was her excuse to climb out of windows. Just as storms were rolling in, she’d lower herself onto the oak limb. Branches whipped and her hair flapped like a shipwreck. Afterward I always took her place in the window, watching purple skies and waiting for Corky. Over the noise of sirens he’d arrive, soaked, hurriedly leaning his bike against the garage and hoisting himself onto the lowest arm of the tree.

On those nights, sometimes Corky and I would go out on our own. Last time, it was to the abandoned florist shop. In the rain, we pushed over trash cans and found the alley back entrance. Corky’s eyelashes collected drops while he concentrated on picking the lock. When we got inside, we found pots cracked on the floor, spilling dirt like ash. The air smelled like mold spores. The edges of everything looked burned. The scene made me feel like maybe the earth did better with humans after all.

“Maybe it’s trying to find a doe? Or its fawn?” I asked, watching the buck splash.

Corky put down the binoculars. I wondered if he’d glimpsed my sister with his brother. Corky didn’t like to talk about the fact that our siblings were dating. He’d always had a huge crush on my sister, and she’d fanned his love in the way she did with everyone’s. He stuttered whenever she was around, and she’d smile at him for it. He’d pick flowers and crush them absentmindedly between his fingers, and she’d use that as an excuse to put two hands around his as though in some kind of blessing.

“No. I doubt it has a family. He’d be swimming harder if he had something to lose.” Corky flicked at dirt caked in the sole of his shoes. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Did your sister ever mention anything about those flowers?”

In the abandoned florist shop, Corky had searched through the rubble and come up with an armful of the freshest red roses he could find. When we went back to his house, he wrapped the flowers in a brown paper

bag, like a butcher would a cut of steak. He showed up in my sister’s room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he left the bouquet in a ray of sunlight on her bedspread.

“No,” I said. In truth, Corky’s brother had taken credit for them. After she got off the phone with him, my sister asked me to leave. As I was closing the door, I saw her pick at the petals, scattering them over her sheets like small wounds. “Maybe she didn’t know they were from you.”

Corky didn’t look up. There was a dandelion pressed into the pattern of his sole.

My sister liked to do all sorts of things with dandelions when Corky or his brother were around. Tie a stem into a knot with her tongue. Pout her lips and breathe the cottony head into a bomb.

“They’ll break up when she goes to college,” he said. “She’s too good for him.”

“I doubt that’s going to happen.”

Corky looked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she’s not going.”

“To school?”

“She decided it wasn’t the right place for her.”

“She’s staying here? Why?” Corky asked, his eyes flickering over my shoulder. I turned around, only to see my sister and his brother approaching from the reeds.

My sister was wearing a short skirt that cut off before her knees, both of which were bruised with grass stains.

“Well,” I said. “She’s going to have a baby.”

This is a fact I’d known before I found her hugging her knees on the windowsill. This is something I’d known since the night she called her friend who had eloped and, while I sat outside the door, I realized they were talking like grown-ups.

When they reached us, my sister slung her arm around me and tousled Corky’s hair. “Hey, you guys,” she said.

Corky, hair ruffled, stared at his brother.

I turned away. On the island, a woman was kneeling in at the shore, bent over the motionless deer. She took off her gardening gloves and put both hands around its antler, stroking it. When I turned back, it was to see Corky’s whole body shivering, as though he’d just come out of the river.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

by Shanelle Roman photo by Amanda M

A DIVIDED BENCH T

he beginning of freshman year was all about who I could be. It was about exploring parts of myself that I had been afraid wouldn’t belong in the picketfence suburb of Edina, Minnesota. I was the girl who had never attended a party in high school but, first semester, went out every weekend. I had never been involved in Latino activities previously, but upon coming to Yale attended La Casa Cultural events almost every week. And while Old Shanelle may have kept silent, New Shanelle was Out and Proud.

I went to Sappho parties (named after the Greek poet Sappho, the namesake of Sapphic love) and told every boy who flirted with me that I was bi for the sake of “full disclosure.” I didn’t want to hide who I was anymore. All throughout high school, I had wondered. I had laughed along when my friends gushed about “girl-crushes,” the term they used to describe that one girl whom they all wanted to be. I had been pushing away that nagging little voice in my head since 18 | September 2016

the middle of seventh grade, when I had first heard the term “bi.” I liked boys. I had dated boys. I was boycrazy, but terrified at the thought that I might be girl-crazy too. How could I tell any of my friends when I wasn’t even sure? Maybe what I was feeling was just a “girl-crush?” I had never even kissed a girl, so maybe I was just overanalyzing everything in my head. If I even revealed that I was questioning, I knew that it would change everything. At my high school, nobody I knew was openly bi. There was the queer captain of the women’s rugby team and the girls who were involved with the GSA, but at the time, I had never met another girl from Edina who liked both boys and girls. Yale was a fresh slate, a chance to be true to who I was.

I wasn’t the first person to feel this way. Sarah Chinn ’89, a queer female student during the ’80s, noted that “it was a very queer-friendly place … Some people arrived and it was like ‘Thank God!’” It was a haven, isolated from the harsh realities of family life and the outside world.

G

iamatti’s Bench on Old Campus, dedicated to the president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, bridges the 30-something years between Chinn’s time at Yale and my own. Hidden in the corner by Lanman-Wright Hall, its black marble is always cool to touch, isolated from the drama of parties, hookups and breakups that take place in the nearby dorm. Sliced down the middle, it gently curves to form a dissected semicircle. Surrounding it to complete the circle, white pebbles mark the divide between the world of Frisbee and Spikeball on Old Campus and the world of high academia. When I first came to Yale’s campus this fall, the bench was just a place to sit — somewhere I could withdraw from the world and listen to music.

However, this bench is where I decided to bring my mom for our first heart-to-heart since my transformation into New Shanelle. I was so thrilled with my new life and I wanted her to share in my happiness.

I can still remember how we were seated side-by-side on that bench, during Parents’ Weekend in Sep-

view

Amanda Mei

H

BY SHANELLE ROMAN PHOTO BY AMANDA MEI tember 2015. When I said, my heart pounding, “You know how I like boys? Well, I like girls too,” her back immediately stiffened. As she looked across Old Campus, observing the kids playing Ultimate Frisbee, I wondered if she was hoping that she had just heard me wrong, that we could just rewind a few minutes and everything could be normal again — that I could be normal again.

That next hour felt like it would never end. An hour of terrible questions. She asked how I was “going to be fit to raise kids,” how I could possibly “give them a moral compass, given what you are.” What you are — as if I were no longer fully human, as if I were no longer her daughter — the one who had made her proud with straight As all throughout high school, the one who watched Disney movies with her every night sharing a beanbag in the basement, the one who loved her more than anybody else in this world. She asked me not to tell my little sister. “I don’t want you to influence her. She’s in a very delicate place right now,” she said, as if bisexuality were some sort of virus

that could be transmitted through an honest conversation. In the span of an hour, I fell from the status of the golden daughter to the skeleton in my mother’s closet.

B

artlett Giamatti ’60, the namesake of that quiet bench, once wrote, “A liberal education rests on the supposition that our humanity is enriched by the pursuit of learning for its own sake … that growth in thought, in the power to think, increases the pleasure, breadth and value of life.” I brought my mother to that bench because I was trying to teach her. I wanted to show her how much better my life was now that I had acknowledged the truth about myself.

I think there are some truths that are too painful to hear, that are too dangerous to say aloud because they have the capacity to transform your place in the world if said to the wrong people. Looking back, I’m still not sure if telling my mother was the right decision. On one hand, I’ve now technically “come out.” That should be a weight lifted off my shoulders. But

on the other hand, did I really want to know where the line beyond which she was no longer willing to support me was drawn? It’s months later, and my mother still doesn’t acknowledge what happened. It’s a silent truth in our house, only felt when a queer couple kisses on the television, or when my sister talks about the gay guy at her high school. My father laughs about it as an awful weekend for my mother, while my mother shakes her head and snorts as she remembers.

They think it’s just a phase for me — a reaction to the complete and total freedom college offers. They don’t understand how horrible that weekend was for me, how within the span of three days I had to face truths I didn’t know existed. But now I know that there are some truths that do not need to be told.

Giamatti’s Bench is supposedly split to show the complementary roles between the teacher and the student, but whenever I sit on the bench and look across Old Campus, I see it differently. To me, the split is because education is only ever possible if the other person is willing to listen.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

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PHOTO BY KEN YANAGISAWA

PANE

BY SARA TABIN

PHOTOS BY AMANDA MEI

I

n the Calhoun College dining hall, high above tables where students sit engrossed in their food and conversation, five windowpanes are missing. In their places sit sheets of yellow glass. Walking out into the college’s common room, students might note that six more panels of glass have been replaced there too.

One of the dining hall windows was shattered in July by dining hall worker Corey Menafee, an incident first reported in the New Haven Independent. The others, along with two windowpanes from Branford College, were moved in July and August on the recommendation of the University’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces. They now await their future in framed boxes, deep in the archives of Yale’s libraries.

I

n the wake of student protests over the residential college naming decisions, Menafee’s window-shattering drew attention to campus artwork as another means of engaging with Yale’s controversial past. Yale President Peter Salovey sent a campuswide email on July 14 in response to the window-shattering incident, stating that he had commissioned the Committee on Art in Public Spaces to “undertake an inventory of public rep20 | September 2016

POLITICS

resentations — such as stained-glass windows — throughout campus to determine if they are better viewed in the context of a historical exhibit.”

To current Yalies, the committee might seem like the administration’s attempt to address campus protests. In fact, it has existed since the early 2000s. It was revived last spring, with new members selected from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the History Department and the Yale administration.

The Committee first showed signs of renewed activity when Martha Highsmith, senior advisor to the president and co-chair of the committee, reached out to the student body in an email on May 6 asking for student responses to a survey on campus art. The committee received over 100 responses to the survey, but did not publicize any decision to remove or keep particular works of art on display until mid-September.

Martin Kersels, the committee’s other co-chair, a contemporary artist and a professor at the School of Art, hesitated to talk about the possible removal of existing campus art and declined to disclose information about what works of art have already been inspected or discussed. He said that the ultimate goal of the commit-

tee is to expand and diversify the University’s collection, not to take pieces away.

“We are not an art police by any means.

We are here to carefully address what is here and not to whitewash the past, but to add to and raise questions about the past,” he said.

There has been debate within the Committee over whether to place a new piece of art in Calhoun memorializing its controversial history. Committee member Carol Snow, who is deputy chief conservator and senior conservator of objects at the YUAG, does not think that such an approach to the new windows would fully address the college’s problems.

The Committee’s most recent update to the Yale community indicated that there will soon be new windows installed in Calhoun College. Chairs Kersels and Highsmith wrote in a campuswide email on Sept. 16 that a new committee, composed of “faculty, staff, students from and the head of Calhoun College and alumni,” will “gather proposals and recommend an artist or artists to create work for Calhoun College.”

The Committee on Art in Public Spaces also formed a subcommittee to discuss whether the windows that were left intact after the Menafee incident should remain.

short feature Ultimately, the subcommittee advised the University to remove and relocate the most objectionable images, including one of a slave cabin and another two in Branford College that were racially offensive depictions of African Americans.

According to Snow, any art that the committee votes to remove will be available for the public to study. Of particular interest is the window Menafee smashed, the shards of which have been gathered and saved.

“As far as I know there is no intent to repair the glass and I believe it should stay broken as part of its history,” Snow said.

The Committee’s campuswide email on Sept. 16 also expressed the intention of installing contemporary Native American art on campus, which committee member Ned Blackhawk, a Western Shoshone history and American Studies professor, has been advising for months. The purpose of the art would be, in part, to honor the people who previously lived on the land Yale University was built upon.

This installation would come after the recent removal of a Native American mannequin from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, an act independent of the committee. The mannequin depicted a Native Connecticut figure working with stone tools, and had been on display at the Peabody since the 1980s. According to Peabody Museum Director David Skelly, the exhibit was confusing to visitors as it was oriented closer to the dioramas of animals and natural habitats than it was to the rest of the stone point exhibit. The mannequin, which is from the 1900s, is still available in storage as a means to study how Native people were represented.

“We are continually updating the Peabody’s displays,” he said. “Other renovation projects are in the planning stage.”

Also operating independently of the committee, Calhoun’s Head of College Julia Adams had three portraits of John C. Calhoun removed from the college

COURTESY OF BRANFORD COLLEGE

in March, after the college’s yearlong discussion of the name came to an end.

The portraits, two of which were in poor condition, are still being cleaned. Adams said the feedback she has received from students has been overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing relief at the portraits’ removal.

T

he co-chairs of the Committee for Art in Public Spaces both emphasized the committee’s desire for student input, which prompted them to form a new committee that will include students to decide the design of the new Calhoun dining hall windows. Until now, students have not served directly on the committee and have only been able to submit their opinions through an online form.

A few undergraduate students who spoke to the Mag said they did not have strong feelings on public art.

Prior to the September email, Phillip Hicks ’20 said he was neither aware of the committee’s existence nor of public art on campus, but he supports diversifying the University’s collection. He added he did not like the idea of removing existing art pieces.

Amrutha Dorai ’18 expressed tentative optimism at the prospect of the committee. She said she remem-

bered that the email notifying students that Calhoun College would retain its name had mentioned that the University would add art to the college to commemorate the college’s legacy. She explained she did not think simply adding art was enough and worried the wrong art could serve to reinforce the college’s negative history. “If the right people are serving on the committee and putting thought into art on campus, it might create positive change,” Dorai explained.

After the Sept. 16 email, some students expressed excitement about the possibility of new art. Cameron Martel ’20 told the Mag he liked the idea of showing the diversity of the country through the acquisition of new campus art pieces. And Wei Tai Ting ’19 said he was excited to see more variety in the genre of art on campus.

“We have a lot of surrealists on campus, so diversifying the public art holdings that we have makes Yale a culturally richer space,” he said.

As campus discourse continues, so will discussions within the Committee on Art in Public Spaces. And for students who have complaints about existing art — or a vision of what they want to replace it — now may be the time to speak up.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

short feature

The Busker

by AnnA Rose CAnzAno illustRAtion by soniA Ruiz

T

he flame-tooting tuba player has two top hats. He wears one, and the other sits in front of him and collects coins. I circle the block with my accordion on my back; I am searching for a place to play, but how can I compete?

“It’s all bouquets and brickbats, as they say,” says Steve Marshall, a saxophone player from Cornwall who plays under Blackfriars bridge in London. He likes there to be some natural resonance so the sound doesn’t get lost. When I ask how much he makes on a good day, he shrugs and says, “I don’t worry about it.” People stroll along the river. Most do not stop to listen. A couple sits on a ledge nearby. Perhaps they will throw a coin in the saxophone case, but most likely they will continue on their way.

Along Brick Lane, Deanna carries a can of beer in the early afternoon, yelling out expletives and asking for money. She sings to me and tells me, “Honey you’re so talented don’t you ever stop playing.” I try to tell her to stop throwing coins in my case, but she prances away, slurring, “I love you.

Don’t worry about a thing.” Later, a woman with a fresh scar along her cheek asks me for a coin from my case, and promises to pay it back. I cannot refuse.

When I play, I am careful not to reveal who I am, why I am in London, or what I do during the week. It seems out of character to say that I attend an elite university, that I go to work every day at a big museum in South Kensington, or that I pay my rent with grant money. At work I never mention

22 | March 2016

that I play an instrument. When I busk, I am part of the world of the street.

I have my own false promises as a street musician: the long list of the songs I’ve promised to learn for next week when people make requests. It includes Norwegian folk songs, the theme from The Third Man (supposedly it sounds better on the zither) and Bella ciao.

I play a rotation of six or seven songs, including The Godfather Waltz, Starman, that song that goes what is love baby don’t hurt me no more, some vaguely French ones that are actually Beirut covers and a song that a crocodile plays in a Russian cartoon. Most of them I taught myself when I was 15 and tired of the endless polkas my teacher assigned.

The summer I turned 16, I started busking at Eastern Market in Detroit, three minutes from my home. I played a few simple tunes with my younger sister on violin. In the fall, I went off to play with some friends from the market. We practiced in the back alley of a print shop and our singer took frequent breaks to roll cigarettes. He stopped showing up, and I started playing on my own. I have no amp.

I do not sing. I like to sling my accordion on my back and go.

When I set out into the world of busking in London, I find I am most comfortable among the stalls of its street markets.

My least favorite is Portobello Road, full of too-hurried tourists. On Sundays I alternate between Columbia Road Flower Market and Brick Lane. Broadway is filled with expensive vintage and artisan elderberry

sorbet, but the marketgoers have tight pockets. I make more money at Hoxton, where toiletries and clothes are cheap and the children dance to my music.

Two hours at the market in Detroit would earn me $75. In London, I might make half that. Garance Louis, a French musician who lives in East London, says, “It’s gambling. You don’t know. You can make three pounds. I think the best is 200 pounds. You never know.” Garance also plays a red accordion, and in her I see a dream version of myself if only I knew more French chanson. In the winter, she travels. “It’s too depressing here.

So I just go,” she says. She has played forró in Brazil, spent a month in New Orleans and has travelled throughout Europe.

She says, “I feel I will carry on doing it until I’m 70. I feel I will never stop.”

She asks me if I’ve ever wanted to quit.

I think of the relief I feel when I wake up to rain on a busking day. I’ve had to fend off creepy men who stood too close. I’ve had to walk on feet aching from playing all day to save £2.40 on tube rides. And then there is the self-doubt: That I am no good, that I am just an amateur.

I recently spent a week back at home in Detroit. That Saturday, I returned to the market. The little girl who played violin with her father by her side now calls herself The Urban Violinist. Pearl — the shoe repairman’s puppy — is no longer small. The paint-bucket drummers must have played later in the afternoon. But as I opened the bellows once again, I thought to myself: No, I will never stop.

short feature

K I S SAT E N by

by Claire Claire Williamson Williamson

K

atsura Coffee in Kanazawa, Japan, has no menu. Instead Toshio Sakaguchi, 77, greets you with a piercing look and a blunt, “What do you want to drink?” And since it’s not apparent what types of coffee beans are available, either, you have to ask by flavor profile. Whatever you get then will be up to him.

“Can I make it stronger?” Mr. Sakaguchi asked, after I requested a medium roast, and though my nod was hesitant he seemed pleased. I guess I passed his taste-test — an average cup of hand-drip coffee in Japan has anywhere between 12 and 25 grams of beans per cup, making it stronger than most coffee you find in America.

As Mr. Sakaguchi poured beans from a slightly dented tin onto a scale, I idly looked around. The counter was full of vintage grinders and small cat figurines: gifts from regulars. Mellow jazz music was playing from hidden speakers. Once Mr. Sakaguchi handed me my coffee, served in a blue porcelain teacup decorated with gold monkeys, I asked him about all his different machines.

“You have to have a different machine for the type of coffee you want,” he said.

“Depending on the type of coffee, the fineness of the grind changes. And I do all the maintenance myself.” He proffered the manual for a German Probat roaster, predictably written in German — although the

margins had handwritten notes in Japanese.

“That’s what defines a pro — that, and being able to taste every single bean used in a coffee blend in one sip.”

Mr. Sakaguchi had apparently made me a cup of coffee that used four different beans, but there was no way I could tell you what sort of beans they were. Nor, I assume, would the average Japanese consumer.

K

atsura Coffee — small, cluttered, clean but worn, and completely coffee-focused — is what’s known as a kissaten. Kissaten translates to “coffee house” or “coffee shop,” but there is a much more historic and atmospheric connotation than your average neighborhood Starbucks.

Kissaten are practically a Japanese cultural institution, and they’ve been around longer than one might think: The first coffee house in Japan was opened in 1888 by a man named Tei Ei-kei, a Yale alum.

Anthropologist Merry White describes Ei-kei’s life and vision for this coffee house in her book, Coffee Life in Japan. A gifted linguist, Tei Ei-kei attended Yale from 1875, at the age of 16, until 1879, when he had to abruptly stop his studies. He found his taste for coffee while in America, and upon returning to Japan he opened the Kahiichakan, a “space to share knowledge, a social salon where ordinary people, students

courtesy of Claire Williamson and youths could gather,” according to Tei Ei-kei’s friend, Terashita Tatsuo. The Kahiichakan was a space of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) — which in the late Meiji Era from 1868–1912 meant “Western” — that Tei Ei-kei based off time he had spent earlier in London.

The Kahiichakan was less coffee shop and more elite male social club, its amenities going far beyond what was typically offered in coffee shops: social games, leather chairs, smoking, newspapers and more, for the price of a cup of coffee. And there was no time limit on how long you could stay.

In the end, Tei Ei-kei had a revolutionary idea but poor business sense. The Kahiichakan went out of business in 1893, just five years after opening. But Ei-kei’s legacy remained — kissaten and coffee would become a staple in the Japanese social sphere and a strong influence on global coffee practices.

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t’s difficult to explain what distinguishes a kissaten from another type of coffee shop — and while modern kissaten have some of the flavor of Tei Ei-kei’s Kahiichakan, they’re quite different.

Though some kissaten do specialize in providing a specific atmosphere or experience (Meikyoku Kissa Lion in Tokyo is what’s known as a “classical music kiss-

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short feature aten”), atmosphere is largely secondary to the coffee, as opposed to the Kahiichakan, where popular Western sensibilities and fashions were functionally on display. The “Masters” and “Mamas,” as kissaten proprietors are called by their regulars, are the original “coffee nerds” of Japan, and their quirks and experiments drove coffee from a basic beverage to a drink with strong emphasis on craftsmanship.

More importantly, each kissaten’s Master or Mama has their own flavor profile.

The same roast will taste completely different depending on the shop, because each one’s brewing method will differ. Even though kissaten owners are searching for coffee perfection, there isn’t a single definition of delicious, or even one “best” method of brewing — and Masters and Mamas typically have no qualms about bashing methods they feel are inferior to their own.

“Tachikoohii?” Mr. Sakaguchi scoffed when I mentioned an elaborate apparatus I’d seen at another shop that makes cold drip “standing coffee” over a period of eight hours. “Too much air gets into the coffee as it drips down the glass.” He was adamant that his “open pot” method was the best.

“Paper filters are no good,” he added later.

“They make the coffee taste bad.”

That’s not to say that kissaten design isn’t also important. Small and frequently dominated by a large counter, the layout does much to encourage socialization. Customers sitting at the counter can socialize with the Master — if he’s of a chatty temperament — or others sitting around them, companionably smoking, drinking and relaxing. One kissaten I visited had a row of regulars taking up the entire counter, and even though they came in at different times during the morning, there was an easiness and a friendliness about their interactions that spoke to many years of frequenting the same place.

That can make it intimidating for newcomers, who may feel like they’re intruding on this space of previously established relationships.

“I want to create a ‘new culture’ where it’s easy for people to talk with each other,” said Mr. Akagawa, a champion latte artist at The Theater Coffee in Tokyo. He used his hands to illustrate a triangle of commu-

nication between customer A, customer B and the shop’s Master. He described how he wanted to create a community where people with different goals — socializing, studying, relaxing — could mix together harmoniously. “My favorite part is communicating with customers.”

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ronically, what made kissaten unique and popular in the past — their intimate settings, the possibility to develop close relationships with owners and other customers, and their fastidious attention to the coffee — is making them less popular in Japan today. “They’re just not cool anymore, not casual,” said Eric Tessier, founder of and blogger at tokyocoffee.org. “When you sit at the counter of a kissaten you can’t hide away.”

The younger generations are drifting away from kissaten and toward coffee shops and cafes that have a different atmosphere — bright, photogenic and tech-friendly.

Places where take-out is an option are also increasing: corner coffee stands don’t have seating, but offer quality coffee to-go for someone who simply doesn’t have time to sit down. Many Masters lament that 100yen (about $1) convenience-store coffee and chain brands are eating into profits.

Kissaten certainly remain influential: Many contemporary coffee shops take concepts and brewing techniques from kissaten and apply it to their own work. But it’s hard to feel confident ordering coffee when a single shop has over 10 types of beans to choose from; many customers I spoke to about their

habits mentioned that they often deferred to a Master’s recommendation because they didn’t know what bean would be delicious or not.

Ultimately, the belief that people should have fun with and enjoy their coffee remains the same. “Koohii wo tanoshimu” or, “to enjoy coffee” is a phrase that’s at the heart of coffee culture in Japan. Not only do the customers enjoy the coffee they purchase, but those making the coffee also enjoy experimenting with and improving their brew methods. By merging tradition and change, even new spaces can be considered a de facto “modern kissaten.”

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r. Sakaguchi, however, remains committed to tradition and, above all, his definition of quality — even if it means less business. As he and I were drinking and chatting, a man popped his head in the door and asked if smoking was allowed. Pointing to a “no smoking” sign, Mr. Sakaguchi shook his head and the potential customer left.

“Smoking isn’t good for drinking coffee,” he said. “It’s bad for tasting and smelling.”

I hadn’t heard that before, but perhaps his mentality could help bring kissaten closer to the present-day coffee shop standard. Or maybe not.

All I know is that if I ever return to Kanazawa, Mr. Sakaguchi would still be running Katsura Coffee — open seven days a week, from 1 to 6 p.m., no exceptions — and a hot, strong cup of coffee would be waiting for me.

24 | September 2016

courtesy of Claire Williamson

personal essay

BY IRENE CONNELLY PHOTOS BY DAVID CONNELLY

TOURIST ON THE CAMINO

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n our second day of hiking we walked through the predawn hush to the Romanesque bridge for which the village was famous. My guidebook urged me to take note of its craftsmanship but I did not; I was worried that I had already lost my sunglasses, that we would be too tired to finish that day’s section of the trail, that my Spanish would prove insufficient and that I would fail my brother, whom I had convinced to join me on this trip. Comparatively, though, these were minor issues. The Codex Calixtinus, a 12th-century version of my guidebook, warned travelers of thieves who stood by the river

“sharpening their knives, waiting to skin the horses of pilgrims.”

Now a quaint feature of the landscape, when the bridge’s classical arch first took shape in the 13th century it must have seemed like a marvel of technology. It was a safe passage across the water and a refuge from bandits on the riverbank.

It was an invigorating sight at the beginning of a journey that was far more dangerous and far less fathomable than it is today: the pilgrimage to Santiago.

Two days earlier, I’d been sitting in the fluorescent atrium of the Philadelphia airport, wearing the single outfit I’d allotted myself for the next

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

personal essay

six weeks. I carried a 15-pound borrowed hiking pack whose carefully selected contents included a volume of Shakespeare, which I would not open once. Dangling from one of the straps was a yellow rape whistle, euphemistically labeled a “rescue howler,” which my mother insisted be within reach at all times.

My brother, David, carried a matching one.

We were setting out to hike Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage trail that stretches from the French border in the Pyrenees to the Cathedral of Santiago in the western Spanish province of Galicia. I was going to walk 15 miles a day and think Meaningful Thoughts.

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hey’re known today as Catholic pilgrimage routes, but the roads that make up the Camino de Santiago long precede Christian influence in the region. During the Roman occupation of Spain in 206 B.C., they served as trade routes, providing access to lucrative mining regions and a coastal point the Romans called finis terrae — “the end of the world.”

The Camino’s Christian epoch began in the first century A.D. when Santiago (also known as Saint James), one of the twelve apostles, sailed to Spain to convert the pagan populations in Galicia. Upon his return to Jeru-

26 | September 2016

salem, Santiago was beheaded, but his followers allegedly brought his remains back to Spain. The bones and their story then faded into obscurity until the 800s, when they were rediscovered through a series of coincidences attributed to divine intervention. The official legend pivots around a shepherd drawn to Santiago’s remains by a bright star (thus the final city on the route is named “Santiago de Compostela” or “Saint James of the field of stars”). But historians note that the remains appeared “in perfect timing to spearhead the Reconquista of Spain.” Santiago was cited in battles against Muslim forces in the south, and monarchs used the route as a way to shore up religious sentiment in the precariously Christian north. And the clergy took care to establish the saint as an official component of the Catholic apparatus, quashing attempts by other sects or cities to appropriate the legend.

“May rivals across the mountains blush,” the Codex blusters, “who say they have anything of him or his relics.”

The Camino hit its heyday between the 12th and 14th centuries. At the time, there were fairly clear-cut reasons to go. A pilgrim who completed the journey received a clerical indulgence which pardoned all his sins and promised entry into Heaven (at least, until he

personal essay committed more transgressions). And during the Middle Ages the Camino provided a kind of novelty we can barely comprehend today. Most travel was only available for the rich, with the average person never venturing more than a mile from his birthplace in his lifetime, except on a trip like this, subsidized by the Church.

The symbol of the trail is the seashell, frequently seen on waymarks and attached to pilgrims’ backpacks. What hikers may not realize is that this practice originated in the Middle Ages, when pilgrims would bring home shells from Finisterrae, the last town on the coast, to show family at home who had never seen a shell and could barely conceive of the ocean.

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bout 150,000 people walk the Camino every year. In festival years, when the feast of Santiago falls on a Sunday, the number swells to over 250,000. But it never approaches the level of traffic it would have during the high Middle Ages. Then, pilgrims clogged the path, the richest carried in sedan chairs and followed by retinues and the poorest subsisting on berries and trout. The Codex warns that the path is filled with “malicious, hostile-looking types … perverse, treacherous, obsessed with sex and booze … hot-tempered and litigious.” With the exception of one old man who wanted to talk to my brother about whether he preferred “blonde or dark” women, these have been replaced by scrupulously polite hikers, on the trail to find themselves and brimming with goodwill. Even if we matched 13th-century numbers, I thought, we could never, with our ergonomic shoes and quick-dry shorts, our travel shampoo and

Neosporin, approach the smell, the grit, the visceral spectacle of the earlier pilgrimages.

On the modern Camino most pilgrims make an approximately 33-day journey from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, just over the Pyrenees in France, to Santiago, nestled in the westernmost province of Galicia. The route, which winds its way through pasture, flatlands, woods, highways and local backyards, is highly supported by the Church and by towns that make a lucrative industry from feeding, sheltering and providing beer to thousands of hikers every year. Most towns contain a hostel that for a few euros provides pilgrims with a bunk, a kitchen and the 30 least-satisfying showers of your life.

The daily routine is both stark and rich in its simplicity. You wake up in the dark, shuffle through breakfast alongside other somnolent hikers, and are out the door before the sun rises. When leaving a small town, you might see stars over the fields and pilgrims in the distance, bobbing and indistinct. Passing through a city you share the streets with laughing partygoers finally turning in for the night. The route is flecked with Lilliputian towns whose metal shutter-clamped windows give an unfriendly impression, but are really just a defense against the pressing afternoon heat. Pilgrims stop to catch up with friends of three or 23 days, and to have a fortifying cafe con leche around the plastic Estrella Galicia card tables in the cafes. The same hikers resurface at each coffee break, and I amused myself by assigning them names before I’d formally met them: a capable German doctor was Dietrich, and a dazed Frenchman in purple running shorts was Jean-Paul-Claude-

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personal essay Henri-Baptiste. By early afternoon the heat of the day begins and pilgrims reach their endpoint, where they claim a bunk at the next hostel, devour lunches and nap or explore until dinner and bedtime.

While the daily routine has not changed materially since the Middle Ages, contemporary reasons to walk the Camino are now more varied. In this age, when religion has a much weaker hold on our collective consciousness, it’s not often the primary reason to walk. “Es un asunto de fe,” some people told me — “it’s a matter of faith” — without elaborating or qualifying. But they were the minority. Many people listed faith as part of a long list of motivations. I spoke to a German man named Michael who was working as a hospitalero, a volunteer who runs the parish hostels that provide inexpensive accommodation to pilgrims.

He said religion was one of his reasons for going, but that it was “not so important … [I wanted to] know the countries I crossed, and to know the people, to speak all the languages I ever tried to learn.”

Antonio, a younger hiker, made a distinction between traveling for religion and spirituality, saying that he wasn’t “into dogmas or codes” but that he started the Camino hoping “it would be an experience of spiritual relevance.”

Marianna, who had just graduated high school when she began the Camino, told me, “The reason I went is I thought, ‘Oh I’m going to find myself, I’m going to have some revelation about who I am.’”

One hospitalera I encountered, Marie, said that after she suffered neck damage in a car accident, she made a promise, not to God but to herself, that if she got better she would walk the Camino. The next year, recovered but with her husband carrying her pack, she did. Afterward, they both began to volunteer as hospitaleros.

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hat most people agree on is that they are not tourists, and usually view the concept of tourism negatively and diametrically opposed to a spiritual journey. Mari-

28 | September 2016

anna said she “didn’t think of [herself ] as a tourist” because she felt so “natural” on the Camino. Marie, who has worked as a hospitalera in a town outside Finisterre for the last 20 years, described a gradual negative shift in Camino culture away from spirituality and toward tourism. She said that while “there used to be much more spirituality” on the trail, now people are more focused on how many kilometers they can hike a day than “reasons of the heart.”

Nowhere does this antipathy toward tourism emerge more ferociously than in the last 100 kilometers of the pilgrimage, from Sarria to Santiago. Pilgrims can begin walking at any point on the route, but in order to receive the compostela, an official certificate of completion from the cathedral, hikers have to walk at least 100 kilometers — so timepressed hikers, tour groups and people on vacation often begin in Sarria. The sudden influx of hikers at Sarria not only ramps up competition for hostel beds, but also impedes the tranquility of the walk and is often jarring to pilgrims who have been seeing the same limited cast of characters for almost a month. On the way out of Sarria, fellow hikers indignantly pointed at people getting out of tour buses; one of my friends was so frustrated that she stopped greeting people with the standard buen camino. I tried to adhere to my guidebook’s warning to resist “aloofness based on a false sense of superiority,” but nevertheless I found myself scrutinizing hikers for boots that were too fresh or clothes that were too clean. While these distinctions are forgiven in the euphoria of arriving in Santiago, almost everyone can remember which other pilgrims have walked more or less.

“To arrive at Santiago is the beautiful thing,” Marie told me of her own experience, and I agree in a way, because the sense of getting there is much more aweinspiring than the actual sights. Unlike at Burgos and Leon — where brilliant confections of buttresses and stained glass appear in the distance an hour before you reach them — the Cathe-

dral de Santiago is a stolid structure, surrounded by a block of parochial administrative buildings. Its small, opaque windows, mismatched on either side, reminded me of the abandoned factories by my hometown’s train station. The front gate is forbidding and institutional.

When I arrived, most of the facade was covered by scaffolding. But the feeling of finally getting there, after over a month of walking, made up for any lack of aesthetics. Galician bagpipe music echoed over the immense plaza on which justarrived pilgrims lay spent on the ground, posed for pictures and shared cigarettes.

Hikers hugged strangers and reunited with friends lost weeks ago on the trail.

At this point it became more acceptable to “be a tourist.” After a month hiking through towns that often featured one sole dusty market, we were in a city whose every street was lined with souvenir shops, whose menus came in multiple languages. I accompanied a friend to get a commemorative tattoo and ran into several others doing the same. It was a departure, if a pardonable one, from the purer spiritual ethos we imagined our predecessors possessed. Though, in the Museo de Peregrinacion, I saw shards of blue and white pottery that looked remarkably like those for sale outside, on a plaza which the Codex describes as filled with vendors hawking “wineskins, purses, herbs and spices” to pilgrims who want something to bring back to their mothers.

Lining up for the pilgrim Mass at the cathedral or the famous statue of Santiago, people complained of being caught in the crowd of tourists. In fact, we are just doing as centuries of pilgrims did before us, who were also strangers to the area, also stumbling in their Spanish. So, anxiety about the dichotomy between tourism and spirituality on the trail is somewhat misplaced. As the presence of a medieval guidebook suggests, the Camino has been a tourist haunt for hundreds of years. To be a tourist now, following centuries upon centuries of past tourists, is to participate in the most essential aspect of its history.

feature

THE OPIOID SOLUTION

by Qi Xu photo by Sally Weiner

S

ally Weiner ’18 opens her pocketsized medical kit with care. Inside the pouch are a pair of blue medical gloves, a set of graphic instructions and two doses of naloxone.

“It’s very easy to use. You put it up on someone’s nose and you press it,” Weiner says, holding up the spray. “You can use it on a child. You can use it on a pregnant woman.”

The Yale junior and student in public health first heard of naloxone after reading about police officers in her hometown of Mansfield, New Jersey carrying it on patrol. Naloxone — commonly known by its brandname Narcan — is a medicine that, when injected or inhaled, blocks the effects of opioids and counteracts respiratory depression caused by an overdose. A Narcan kit costs around $50 at pharmacies, but Weiner and many other New Haven residents get the life-saving tool for free.

Four weeks ago, on her first day of school, Weiner walked to the New Haven Free Public Library on Elm Street. It was International Overdose Awareness Day, and the city’s health department was hosting a session to distribute free kits and train the public on how to use Narcan. Weiner provided her name and zip code, and got a kit in return. None of her family or friends struggle with addiction, Weiner says, but she’s kept the medication — in case it may save a stranger’s life.

“There were grandmothers getting Narcan for their family,” she remembers. “It is a midway intervention: You don’t want to break the connection with your family by forcing them to quit, but you also don’t want them to die from an overdose.” Having learned how the medicine worked wonders in her hometown, Weiner is a strong supporter of increasing access to Narcan in the Elm City.

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feature

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roblems of drug overdose have gripped the nation for several decades, but New Haven recently came into the spotlight when, on June 23, a bad batch of street drugs led to nearly 20 overdoses and claimed three lives in a single day.

Kathryn Hawk, an instructor in the Emergency Medicine Department and a researcher on drug abuse, addiction and HIV at the School of Medicine, says although her department sees overdose patients every day, the June incident was very unusual.

In a typical overdose case, first responders — passers-by, police officers, firefighters — call for an ambulance, which can then provide Narcan on-the-scene and transport patients to a hospital for further life support and long-term treatment. In 2014, a state law gave civil and criminal liability protection to anyone who administers Narcan in “good faith” to an overdose sufferer. The law led to extensive police training, and in the past two years, Connecticut police have saved 100 people with naloxone.

The sudden spike in overdoses in late June put a strain on the city’s Narcan supply, according to Hawk. The day after the overdoses occurred, the Connecticut Department of Public Health had to send an additional 700 doses to the city to replenish its stock.

But Hawk says current Narcan supply in the Emergency Department is in good shape. Since late June, her department has started identifying high-risk individuals — patients who have used emergency care for overdose-related issues before and those with a history of drug and alcohol dependence — to give them free take-home Narcan kits.

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hat is perhaps more alarming than the numbers in the June incident was the drug involved.

As reports of overdoses started to wind down on the 23rd and residents — many still unaware of the incidents at that time — got ready for bed, a citywide message broke the peace. The city declared a “pub30 | September 2016

lic health emergency,” warning of “tainted life-threatening heroin” on the streets. No one was sure where the impure drug came from or what led to the catastrophe, and a press conference was scheduled for the next morning.

It was almost 10:30 p.m. when Esteban Hernandez came across a tweet about the overdoses. The City Hall reporter for the New Haven Register was in Pennsylvania for a long weekend, but he immediately got back to work.

“That was shocking. I’ve never heard of that many overdoses in a single day,” Hernandez shakes his head. In the fall of 2013, when he first started covering opioid overdoses in Torrington, Connecticut, three overdoses over a span of four days made big news.

Over the years Hernandez and his colleague have seen an increasing number of overdose cases involving drugs coated in other toxic chemicals. The worst case he’s written about, he says, was one involving heroin laced with a drug used to kill worms in sheep. Then in August, Carfentanil — often used as an elephant tranquilizer — hit Ohio streets and caused dozens of deaths. Although the synthetic opiate has not spread to New Haven, the thought of it sends shivers down Hernandez’s spine.

“It is pretty alarming. There has been an enormous amount of disgusting materials.”

Following the June incident, an investigation by the New Haven Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed that victims who intended to buy cocaine unknowingly consumed fentanyl, a drug that also appears as white powder but is 100 times more potent than normal morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.

The State Office of the Chief Medical Examiner projected 888 accidental overdose deaths in Connecticut in 2016, up from 495 cases three years ago. Of the projected fatal overdoses in 2016, 446 will involve fentanyl, a huge jump from 37 cases in 2013.

The reason why fentanyl has only become popular in recent years is unclear, according to Yale School of Medicine

assistant professor Daniel Tobin. But, he says, the pattern of substances involved in overdoses has always changed over time.

For example, cocaine overdoses were much more common in the past, but drug trafficking from China and Mexico has given rise to a greater supply of heroin and fentanyl in the United States, resulting in more overdoses on those drugs.

But increasing supply has not been the only factor. After Hernandez’s initial story on Torrington was published in 2013, a man who had struggled with addiction reached out to him for a follow-up.

Their 40-minute conversation, which ran the gamut from personal stories to public stigma, left Hernandez in utter surprise.

“The man told me, ‘When [drug users] hear of something so powerful, they try and look for [the drug].’”

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or his coverage, Hernandez and his colleague scanned through a list of people who died of an overdose, and noticed that the majority of victims tended to be white males aged between 25 and 40.

On a local level, New Haven drug activity is concentrated in The Hill and Fair Haven, as well as on the New Haven Green downtown, according to George Bucheli, who works for the city health department’s syringe-exchange program.

Every weekday Bucheli and his three co-workers take turns driving to those neighborhoods in their outreach van, trading clean needles for ones brought by drug users, who Bucheli refers to as “clients.”

Bucheli stresses that the team keeps the exchange confidential and judgment-free.

The city started the needle-exchange program 26 years ago in response to the lack of access to sterile needles among drug users, with HIV prevention in mind.

Neighbors can also get food, clothes and on-site Narcan training when they come to the van, Bucheli explains. Having devoted many years to the program, he says he’s built close relationships with his clients, and knows by heart which streets in the city see more drug activity — though he says he’s happiest when his clients do not need him anymore.

feature

“That was shocking. I’ve never heard of that many overdoses in a single day.”

“I’ve seen people who gave up drugs come back to the van. They look beautiful — that’s good enough for me. They come to say thank you; some of them just want to hug you. That’s it.”

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ucheli and his needle-exchange program are a part of New Haven’s multifaceted approach to drug abuse, tackling a small piece of the complex puzzle of addiction.

About a decade ago, patients in the state could obtain multiple potentially addictive prescriptions by switching from one physician to another, a practice known as “doctor shopping.” It is has become harder in recent years though, Tobin says, because doctors now compile data and track druguse history online. However, he adds, this change might have led more people to turn to street drugs.

Hernandez says that based on his experience interacting with people in recovery from addiction, a majority of them recount starting with prescribed painkillers. It’s only when they run out of prescriptions that they start buying drugs from street dealers, which are much cheaper but lack regulation.

To make things worse, more and more dealers are mixing up or substituting pure heroin with other more potent drugs, in order to boost interest in their drugs and make more money, medical school professor David Fiellin says. Under the charge of Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, Fiellin spearheads the Connecticut Opioid Response (CORE) Initiative to come up with a 10-year strategic plan combating overdose in the state.

Fiellin’s team worked over the summer to draft a solution based on data from state agencies. The draft highlighted a number of areas for improvement, including increasing access to addiction treat-

ment, focusing on higher-risk individuals and making naloxone more available.

It also emphasized the need to work with the public to raise awareness of opioid-use disorder and the benefits of seeking treatment.

The CORE team published the report on Aug. 24 and accepted public feedback through Sept. 14. Over the past week, it convened to respond and pen a finalized version.

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arlier this year in April, standing in front of a cheering, 10,000-strong crowd on the New Haven Green, Sen. Bernie Sanders declared to his Elm City supporters that addiction and substance abuse must be seen as a health issue instead of a criminal one.

A drug user cannot help but seek the high, Fiellin explains, because with each additional dose, their bodies develop more tolerance to the drug. They need a greater amount to feel the same level of experience each time, or else they suffer from withdrawal symptoms that usually include anxiety, seizures and depression.

“You don’t get the drug to feel good. You get it to not to feel bad,” Hernandez says.

As a reporter, he has sometimes felt lonely and helpless trying to convey the message that addiction is not a personal choice.

“When they are addicted to it, it’s beyond their control. They are doing it so they won’t feel sick. I wish there could be more public understanding of what addiction is.”

Many of the responsibilities eventually fall on the shoulders of medical professionals, Tobin says. In the old days, the only medication treating opioid-withdrawal symptoms was methadone, which could only be used at centers with a special certification. Patients seeking treatment would have to wait in line at a methadone clinic.

There was incredible stigma attached to

drug treatment, Tobin explains.

Nowadays patients have another medication option: suboxone, which also treats narcotic addiction but may be prescribed by primary care physicians.

“You go to a doctor’s office, and you sit next to those who have a cold or high blood pressure. It really helps people overcome the stigma,” Tobin says.

To be able to prescribe suboxone, doctors need to undergo a special training and obtain a certification from the DEA. Tobin argues that the practice is currently underused. “It’s not hard to do, but for whatever reason, doctors are not taking advantage of it.”

Throughout his career, Tobin has taught and spoken widely about how to mitigate the risks of opiate prescriptions. He has met with residents, many of whom are family members of drug users, and still remembers their sense of helplessness and the questions they asked.

“How do I get access to treatment?”

“Where can I get Narcan?”

“What will happen if I call the police in case of an overdose? Will I get fined?”

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he day after the flood of overdoses shocked the city, one of the drug users who mistakenly took fentanyl sat down with a radio program, WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven,” and confessed that he had resumed his daily routine. And a couple days after the June 23 incident, officials said the city returned to its “normal level” of overdose response calls.

Hernandez and his colleagues will continue to cover the topic; Hawk and her emergency department will continue to save lives from overdose on a daily basis; Bucheli and his team will continue to go out in their van and trade clean needles.

Much seems to have changed; much is left to be done.

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cover

The Boy Behind the Bus

by M. Peter Rothpletz photos by M. Peter Rothpletz

32 | September 2016

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n Albuquerque, New Mexico, my summer begins with a riot. I’m standing in the middle of the street, downtown, a few blocks from the convention center. It’s dark and hot and it’s too smoky to see much of anything. A few feet to my right stand half a dozen men wearing Guy Fawkes masks — the kind made famous by V for Vendetta. One of them picks up a discarded “Make America Great Again” T-shirt from the ground. He examines it, pulling at the fabric for a few seconds. Then he lights it on fire and lobs it into a crowd of police, screaming, “Fuck Donald Trump.”

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cover Over the course of three months, I found myself at the center of one riot, half a dozen large protests, two nominating conventions, one cloud of tear gas, nine states, an ungodly number of high school gymnasiums and the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting committed on U.S. soil.

I didn’t pack much: a small suitcase I could trust to fit in any overhead bin, a camera bag, my Canon G7 X, extra memory cards, my laptop, my cellphone, a Yale Baseball cap, my wallet, a monstrous 814page novel by Hanya Yanagihara, and a toothbrush.

Historians don’t agree on the specific election that gave rise to the campaign embed, a masochistic subspecies of political journalist that turns their back on every comfort known to mankind every four years to travel across the country in the back of a glorified school bus. Many, however, like CNN alum Peter Hamby, point to a 1988 Time Magazine piece by Laurence Zuckerman that heralded a group of 20-somethings following presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson as the way of the future. They weren’t bothered by 4 a.m. wakeup calls. They didn’t mind subsisting on airline peanuts and protein bars. And they were young — free from the duties of serious relationships and family life. While network correspondents were tethered to hefty camera gear and nightly newscasts, embeds could pick up and move at a moment’s notice, traveling across the state or across the country.

In the last 20-plus years, the job has cemented itself within the American mythos. Stories “from the trail” of embeds boozing, seducing and marrying future White House bigwigs inspired Timothy Crouse’s famed The Boys on the Bus and half of all the television plot lines Aaron Sorkin has pumped out in the last two decades.

It’s a romantic job. A tough, romantic job — one that tests just how much your body can take while forcing you to grapple with every conception you’ve ever had of this country, its politics and its people.

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hree days before arriving in Albuquerque, I was in Boston, waiting in line for a small black cof-

34 | September 2016

fee inside Logan International Airport.

It was already late in the afternoon but I needed to be awake for the entire flight.

I had footage to comb through, Airbnb hosts to contact, and an itinerary that seemed to evolve by the hour. Across the terminal, a panel of network news pundits was discussing the 2016 presidential campaign on television. They touched on Hillary Clinton’s persistent email woes, debated recent tightening in nationwide polling and then turned to the California primary. All three remaining campaigns would be descending upon the Golden State for the next few weeks, hoping for a groundswell of voter turnout to carry them into the nominating conventions come mid-July.

I was headed west too, just on a packed United Airlines Airbus A320 instead of a private plane. The plan was to fly to LAX, drive a few hundred miles to meet up with the Donald Trump campaign in New Mexico, and then follow his traveling press corps to San Diego and up the coast of California. It wasn’t much of a plan — more of a quarter-life crisis that Jack Kerouac could write a short, angsty book about. But that didn’t bother me, at least not at the time.

If you grew up in the United States, you’re probably familiar with the phrase “the most important election of our lifetimes.” Talking heads and campaign surrogates resurrect it once every four years, dredging up a maddening degree of party polarization, just so the media has something to cover and voters actually show up to vote. But even though it’s a tired, horribly overused phrase, you’d be hardpressed to find anyone at Yale who doesn’t think it genuinely applies this time around.

Regardless of who wins in November, Clinton and Trump will go down as two of the most significant characters in American history. One is the first female major-party presidential nominee in the country’s 238 years of existence. The other secured more primary votes than any GOP candidate ever. With lightyears between their policy platforms, rhetorical styles and time in government, the

pair comprises one of the strangest political odd-couples this country has ever seen. And, chances are, you absolutely, wholeheartedly, 100 percent despise one or both of them.

Yalies aren’t shy about their political beliefs; it’s often one of the reasons students are drawn here in the first place. I was the weird seven-year-old who opted for Meet the Press and The McLaughlin Group over Nickelodeon on Sunday mornings growing up; I’d plop myself on the living room couch in pajamas and eat breakfast watching Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift call each other sociopaths.

Trump and Clinton have transcended their roles as political standard-bearers, though, becoming de facto symbols of America’s evolving culture war. And, as such, they’ve become the two most disliked and distrusted candidates to ever get so close to the White House, demonized to such a degree that 27 percent of American voters in a Public Policy Polling survey said they would rather see a “giant meteor of death” hit Earth than vote to elect either major-party candidate.

Looking back to the beginning of the summer, no one had any idea who would win come November — and recent CNN/ ORC polling suggests that the pair is still on relatively even ground. At print time of this article, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and a number of other swing states were all too close to call.

There’s a sense among the traveling press that they’re watching history, that nothing like this race has ever happened before (in retrospect, no, Barry Goldwater was not a billionaire real estate tycoon turned reality show host turned major-party candidate). And, perhaps more interestingly, that it will likely never happen again. Data from the Pew Research Center shows Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before, and the country will see even greater demographic shifts in the coming decades. The “Trump train” — a voting bloc of primarily white, male, middleclass, high school-educated voters — may never again hold as much power as it has

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in this election cycle.

In short, 2016 isn’t just a referendum on the Affordable Care Act, or the settlement of Syrian refugees or even the last eight years of Obama’s presidency; it will serve as perhaps the last competitive battle between a populist wing of the old Republican base — reinvigorated by Trump’s signature Trumpiness — and a growing Democratic coalition of women, millennials and people of color.

I met a young Black Lives Matter activist outside Cleveland’s Public Square before the second night of the GOP convention. Her braids were dyed bronze to complement a sleek pair of sunglasses, and she wore a shirt that read Brown As Fuck. She told me she identified as a Democrat, but didn’t love Clinton. I followed up by asking if she thought the race would still be competitive come November. “I think it’s going to be close,” she said, “but if we win this one, we’ll never lose again.”

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raditional presidential campaigns tend to announce rallies, fundraisers and sometimes even diner meet-and-greets days ahead of time; it allows journalists to adjust their schedules to easily follow candidates. Press coverage and media exposure equal a rise in poll numbers when most of the electorate is still undecided. That’s why many

argue Trump’s estimated $2 billion worth of “free advertising” first vaulted him to the top of the GOP primary pecking order more than a year ago. Coverage is so valuable that campaigns charter buses and planes so major outlets can hire a cover-every-event traveling reporter. But the patriarch of America’s House Lannister decided to ignore this practice.

Trump spent the summer hopscotching between cities on his Boeing 757 instead, announcing his plans often less than 24 hours ahead of time and leaving his press corps to fight over last-minute American Airlines tickets. As a result, veteran political operatives and one Yale freshman were constantly glued to their phones.

Every moment of not refreshing the “Make America Great Again” homepage was one I could find myself stranded and left behind by the campaign.

Despite the constant chaos, routine on the trail still develops rather naturally. Mornings generally start the same way. You wake up at some ungodly hour before the sun rises, shower if you have time, and skim through the dozens of emails and AP updates you’ve received overnight. Breakfasts are fast and simple: coffee and cheap protein bars. Then the day is spent in a constant state of motion.

You’re sprinting to catch the Democratic National Committee press bus to South Philly or hunched over in the back seat

of a graveyard-shift Uber pretending to sleep. You’re headed down the tarmac on a flight headed for Orlando or editing stories on a SoCal Amtrak train, glancing out the window every few minutes at the Pacific Ocean. And in the rare moments of calm (during days both Trump and Clinton are out of reach or nights you make it to a motel at a reasonable hour) … well, you spend those moving, too: carpools to rooftop bars on Cleveland’s famed East 4th Street, midnight food pilgrimages to 7-Eleven, track workouts at public parks in West Hollywood. Tiny shifts in your schedule are the only things that keep days from blurring together.

As time goes on, most weeks end with the feeling you’ve both conquered the world and achieved absolutely nothing.

You may have traveled halfway across a state — or even halfway across the country — but you’ve also been forced to listen to the same poll-tested, focus-grouped applause lines for the umpteenth time.

Speeches rarely change. Gaudy spectacle gets tired. Celebrity testimonials are annoying. The same playlists drone out of high school gymnasium speakers on repeat (Clinton likes Katy Perry and Rachel Platten, Trump prefers Elton John and The Rolling Stones). And campaign slogans and party chants (Build the Wall, Dump Trump, I’m With Her, Lock Her Up) bludgeon themselves into one crazed, self-righteous cacophony.

The people make it interesting, though.

Not Trump or Clinton — they’re special in their own way — but their supporters: The waitresses and obstetricians and truck drivers and retired teachers that form a line before dawn for the chance to post a single, blurry Snapchat story of their hero. I conducted more than a thousand individual interviews over the course of the summer, and every person manages to surprise you.

At my second Trump event in San Diego, I was still learning the ropes of the traveling press corps. I hadn’t woken up early enough to get screened into the media pen, so I was forced to enter with the 7,000 supporters that had poured into Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

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the city overnight. It was easy enough to make it to the front; people see a lanyard press pass with a camera and they literally run in the opposite direction. No one likes the press. Perhaps that’s the best lesson I learned this summer. The notion of a “neutral” observer doesn’t exist any more; journalists aren’t allies, or particularly “objective” witnesses. Anything they see may ultimately be tampered with, spun and polluted into some Frankenstein’s monster of a hit piece. You’re not necessarily the enemy, but you’re not welcome either. People look at and treat you like a hyena — a mangy scavenger that circles from a distance, waiting to snatch away just enough to write a story.

By the time I made it to the front of the convention center, Sarah Palin was onstage delivering an impassioned call to arms like only she can. She stuck to her usual talking points: Obama’s “apology tour,” the oppressive tax system, moose.

The speech wandered a bit, but the crowd loved her. One young woman in particular, a short, fair-skinned brunette wearing a Spiderman sweatshirt, hung on every word. She erupted with glee any time Trump was mentioned by name, jumping up and down and screaming “Build the wall! Build the wall!” And she was so infatuated with Milo Yiannopoulos (the controversial Breitbart Tech editor) that 36 | September 2016

when he walked onto the dais she almost started crying.

I asked her, casually, what she thought of his comments on feminism. She responded flatly, citing earlier remarks by Yiannopoulos, “I believe in equal rights, it’s just that feminism is worse than cancer.”

I dropped the topic and moved on to Trump. She thought his lack of time spent in Washington was a clear-cut asset, and when I followed up by asking if it might hamper his policy work, she countered, “It doesn’t matter. He’s a genius, all you have to do is look at his businesses.”

We talked a bit more about the real estate tycoon. She loved his children, especially Ivanka, and couldn’t wait to vote in November. It didn’t bother her that I was a reporter — or that I didn’t express agreement (or disagreement for that matter) with anything she said. “I don’t mind people who are neutral. It’s just that no one is really neutral. There’s a reason people call it the ‘liberal media.’”

Donald Trump took to the stage then — the crowd exploded, of course — and I didn’t manage to ask her another question until after the rally ended.

We were walking out. She had removed the red, white and blue bows from her hair and was tossing them into the air on beat with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” I

asked her what she planned to do should Trump lose. She didn’t answer right away.

The question didn’t puzzle her, she just couldn’t find the words she wanted. Then she looked at me and smiled, “That’s the thing, though. He’s not going to lose.”

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he traveling press corps combines “the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March,” or at least it did for Crouse and the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential race between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. As Katy Tur explains in an essay chronicling her year as an NBC campaign embed, life on the road has evolved to some extent.

For starters, the culture has become distinctly more professional. Journalists spend less time drinking and more time debating objectivity — what it means to strive for balanced coverage in the age of Trump. Not everything has changed, though. Flying, driving and running after the future president is still a family affair.

Over the course of the summer you recognize more and more of the usual suspects: Nancy Cordes from CBS, Brianna Keilar from CNN, Jennifer Griffin from Fox News. Awkward conversations get started. They turn into normal conversations, which in turn produce introduc-

cover tions and more awkward conversations.

I met Alex Stone, a national correspondent for ABC News, in the middle of a Trump protest in downtown San Diego. The rally had just ended — it was the one where he questioned U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s impartiality because of his Mexican heritage — and Trump supporters began flooding into the street. Waiting for them was what Reuters later estimated to be nearly 1,000 demonstrators.

In the heat of a protest — or even a riot — a press pass and camera garner you some protection. You’re generally safe from the line of fire. Bottles and rocks are lobbed at police and rally-goers. Sucker punches, tear gas and smoke grenades are thrown back. People claim different sections of the street, barricade themselves around one another and test just how much the other side will take. Arguments over who is more un-American escalate into screaming matches which erupt into fist fights. Then officers clad in riot gear sweep in as a unit, herding people into smaller, more controllable pockets. Only the press move freely.

Stone and I found ourselves inter-

viewing a SDPD officer. A police helicopter had just announced overhead that the protest had been deemed an “unlawful assembly.” We both wanted to know if officers planned to use tear gas on the hundreds that refused to leave. He declined to comment.

Reporters and cameramen began taking precautionary measures, passing out impromptu gas masks jerry-rigged from the facial screens surgeons use in hospitals. The crowd was getting more volatile: A Trump doll had been hanged in effigy from a lamppost. A group of men wearing military camo responded by hoisting a Confederate flag into the air.

I recorded, by happenstance, a neighborly couple in their late 40s walk up to a young woman with olive skin. The man — who was dressed so much like a “typical dad” it scared me — thrust his middle finger into the girl’s face, screaming “Go back to your country! Fuck you and fuck Mexico!”

I looked to Stone, who was also there, also recording. I can remember saying I couldn’t believe this was happening in our country. Political unrest of this scale was something you saw on the news, but

never in person, never in a commercial district of San Diego.

All around us massive, faceless men cloaked in Kevlar were throwing people to the ground, wrapping their hands with plastic cuffs. It wasn’t working, though.

For every arrest made, three more protesters would brandish masks and rocks and bottles. Everyone was filled with anger, and they didn’t need much provocation to act on it. Nearly as soon as the rally ended, one boy, no older than 16, was screaming for help. His face was covered with blood. He kept shouting, “I don’t even support Trump! Why did they hit me!?”

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an Diego and Albuquerque were the two worst protests I witnessed on the road, but they weren’t the only ones. Demonstrations followed both Trump and Clinton all the way to their respective nominating conventions, fluctuating in intensity and violence. I’d greet them nearly every time I walked out of a campaign event, and every time I would be received differently. Some days I would be allowed to take pictures.

Other days — especially if I was wearing too much red or blue — they’d curse at me, cover their faces with signs, scream that I was a racist or a socialist or a communist or a bigot.

I’d curate the stories I sent back to my parents. Calls home were light and happy: I’d rave about West Coast weather and discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones; mentions of tear gas exposure, sucker punches, flying bricks, and the like were edited out. They were only a small part of the summer anyway. What mattered more was simply being on the campaign trail, seeing firsthand what everyone else glimpses on television. It’s tiring. And frustrating. But you keep going because you love it. There’s something incredible about meeting people who are so passionate about the state of their country. You may disagree with their politics, you may disagree with their methods, but that doesn’t matter. You’re there for the adventure, to watch and to report on history.

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poetry

IN THE EGYP TIAN WING AT THE MET

by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

38 | September 2016

My roommate calls me over to look at leather flip-flops and woven chairs and beaded necklaces. She gestures indignantly with her shoulders, like an ironic tour guide, and says, There’s nothing new under the sun.

What have we been doing since 3000 B.C. if our shoes still look the same? Secretly, my favorite thing about museums is their comfortable confirmation of humanity, of a “human spirit,” a craving, desiring, sexual, caring, hungry, lonely, fearful humanity; traversing the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum means traversing thousands of miles and thousands of years and everybody everywhere is always obsessed with the same things which makes me feel a little better about the amount of time I spend thinking about bodies and water and this boy I’ve never even slept with and a certain girl in springtime, her skin and her smile especially.

My professor says all great writers write about the same things their whole lives. She says, there’s love and there’s death, that’s it. She says, you make a phone call, you eat a pizza, then you’re forty. She says the first time she saw her husband, leaning against a building, smoking, she knew he was inevitable.

The gloriously painted mummies make me think of my own mortality, though my roommate says she never thinks about her own death. She is most attracted to the shattered faces, and lingers at glossy fragments of noses and eyebrows, the outline of her forehead reflected inside them. Maybe art just means whatever is resonant with the human spirit, I think about saying, but she is already in Oceania, reading the wall text on a massive wooden drum that would shatter everything in the entire gallery if somebody struck it.

bits and pieces

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by Graham Ambrose

(1 shot) for every complaint about Directed Studies (1) each time a freshman asks how to find the Saybrook dining hall (1) per tourist who bumps into you on Old Campus (1) per complaint about a 10-minute walk being “so far” (1) per Overheard at Yale post with more than 1,000 likes (2) per Overheard at Yale post with under 30 likes (1) per Overheard at Yale post that definitely wasn’t overheard (3) for every new committee created by Salovey (1.5) for every Applied Physics major you meet (2) if you ask them how they apply physics (1) each time Ward 1 Alder Sarah Eidelson ’12 personally knocks on your door (2) for every Trump supporter you meet

(1) every time you hear the exact sentence “What’re you doing next summer?”

(2) for every GHeav run after midnight [1 before, 1 after] (1) each year you are short of being 21 in the state of Connecticut (1) for every unread book you purchased for class (1) for every use of the word “interesting” in section (1) for every reading you didn’t do for section (2) for every meal you plan but never execute (1) for every missed call from a parent (2) for every missed call from a grandparent (3) for every campus publication you read coverto-cover (1) more for reading YDN Mag

FRESHMAN POWER RANKING

Official 2016–17 YDN Mag Drinking Game

by Madeline Kaplan

elcome to Yale, class of 2020! Read on for the first installment of the Freshman Power Ranking.

Chester P. Farnam, JE ’20 1.

When Chester P. Farnam was born in a Monaco summer home in 1998, he was already a winner.

When he dies at the age of 133 after his third heart transplant in the warm embrace of his muchyounger wife, Chester P. Farnam will still be #1.

2.

Irina Stepkovsky, TD ’20 Irina is taking seven credits this semester, including MATH 230, PHYS 260 and the senior essay seminars for EP&E and Modern Greek.

She was shortlisted for several major fiction prizes while still in high school, but you already knew that, because she told you.

3.

Vivian Kim, MC ’20 Because she’s from New York, Vivian already knows everyone in the freshman class. Still, she claims it’s “actually kind of hard” because she “just wanted to make new friends in college,” even though you and I both know this is a fake concern invented by popular people who wish to appear more relatable.

4.

Olivia Dunn, TC ’20 Olivia forgot to buy a rug on move-in day, and now there is nothing to tie her room together.

5.

Amar James, SY ’20 Amar came to college as a pre-med, but decided to abandon his lifelong dream of becoming a doctor within the first 15 minutes of BIOL 101. The next four years will be a roller coaster of intellectual and emotional adventures, until he is forced by default to become an American Studies major.

6.

Nadine Radner, SM ’20 On the first night of college Nadine’s suitemates went to a party without her, and now she will never make any friends.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 39

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Marie Colvin ’78.

Samantha Power ’92.

You?

VOL

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