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The Interview Issue

// FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014

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Chang-Rae Lee

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SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Q. You’ve previously written novels set in the past or in the present.

What made you want to tackle the future with your latest novel “On Such a Full Sea”?

A.Let me back up a bit. I had no intention of writing a book that was speculative fiction. I came across a premise about populating abandoned urban areas in the United States en masse with settlers from foreign countries, particularly from China. I liked the idea, but obviously the premise wouldn’t be very plausible set in the contemporary moment.

And so, in wanting to pursue the idea, I set it in the future. But of course, once you set a story in the future, then you have to describe the future.

As a Yale undergraduate, ChangRae Lee ’87 was admittedly a quiet one. He majored in English, but avoided creative writing courses, including “Daily Themes,” about which he said he “didn’t take it, thank goodness.”

But Lee, who was born in Seoul and moved to the United States at a young age, has become one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. His fiction experiments with setting and style, and his novels have collected accolades like the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, awarded to “Native Speaker.” “The Surrendered,” a novel centered on the Korean War, was shortlisted for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent novel “On Such a Full Sea” has been described in The New York Times as “a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee’s body of work but to the ranks of ‘serious’ writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy.” Currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton, Lee spoke to us about folk tales, finding stories through characters and how he runs his fiction seminar (which, he confesses, he would not have taken when he was in college).

// BY WESLEY YIIN

ican novels, and you as a great AsianAmerican writer, but you’ve also written before as a white narrator and from the point of view of A Chinese-American female in “On Such a Full Sea.” A.Actually, it’s narrated by a collective “we” voice of her community.

Q. But the protagonist would be the Chinese-American female?

A.Yeah, she’s the hero, but it’s not really from her point of view.

Q. So, then, how do you feel about being thought of as an Asian-American writer? Do you think it’s possible for someone of one racial or ethnic group to write in the voice of another?

A.Well, those are two separate questions. I think these days it’s funny because I’ve always said that being described as an Asian-American anything is probably just the vaguest way to describe anybody, whether they’re an Asian-American artist or Asian-American writer because “Asian-American” is composed of so many different kinds of peoples and languages and traditions. So really what we’re talking about is the racial category, right?

Because you can’t define AsianAmerican very finely at all. So in one sense I accept the category because I am Asian-American, and because I am a writer, but I think that ends up being one of the least interesting and descriptive ways of describing me or my work. It is a way to do it but it’s not terribly provocative. I just don’t think it’s an interesting term or even an idea. I would rather — as all writers would — be described in terms of my craft and the kinds of notions that my work brings out and to be spoken of — as all people would like to be spoken of, especially artists — as individuals rather than always being put in a group.

I’ve always felt that people can write about anything they like and

A. I think if you start disallowing people or censoring people in doing certain things that they’re “not supposed to do,” that’s a very dangerous game, [chuckles] both politically and artistically.

Q. When you were at Yale, what sorts of literary pursuits did you embark on, academically or extracurricularly? How did those experiences shape you as a writer, if at all?

A.Well I was just a generalist, but I enjoyed and concentrated in American literature. That’s probably an affinity I had entering Yale rather

I’VE ALWAYS FELT THAT PEOPLE CAN WRITE ABOUT ANYTHING THEY LIKE AND WHATEVER PERSPECTIVE THEY LIKE.

from whatever perspective they like.

That doesn’t mean they’re successful at it. It doesn’t mean that we should like it. But I think that if a writer approaches a project with an open mind, a lot of thinking, a lot of personal integrity and a lot of desire and purpose to get at a certain kind of truth, then I feel like they should be able to write about anything they like. So whether that’s me writing about an Italian-American guy in my third novel “Aloft,” or a white writer like Robert Olen Butler writing about Vietnamese people in “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” there’s a big responsibility on the writer to do as much as he or she can to bring as much open thinking and good hard thinking to the project.

Q. That’s a really positive way of thinking about it.

How else will your followers know you are #relaxed, #casual, #chill, etc.?

Instagramming your thighs

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That’s actually how the novel came about. Some science fiction writers of a certain type are deeply and obsessively interested in that world and all its details, and really, their joy is to describe everything about that world: the governmental structures, the architecture, the technology. I only do it insofar that it informs how we might think of the characters rather than for its own sake.

Q. You write a lot about culture and the idea of belonging and culture contributing to belonging. What do you try to convey in portrayals of these struggles in your novels?

A.To be honest, I don’t start with a theme or some broad kind of philosophical or psychological idea. I really start with an individual, and in exploring that person and looking into their history and present life and all the things they might think about, certain ideas come up — larger ideas about the society or the culture in which that person lives. I don’t start out with an agenda and then look for characters that fit that agenda.

It’s really the other way around. The characters suggest ways of thinking and ways of looking at a community or society or culture. In this book “On Such a Full Sea,” I suppose I was, in some ways, forced to look at the society first, just because of the world-building. Of course the only way to think about those societies is to interrogate — at least through a thought experiment — those inhabitants just to see what kinds of things they held as true and what beliefs they had, what kinds of expectations they had for their lives. Then a picture of a community or society starts to form. In those things, you have a sense of theme, but nothing really too definite.

Q. Speaking about character then, I have to bring up the idea of race or minority groups. Your novels have been described as great Asian-Amer-

because of your schedule or what have you. There’s lots to say about the practice of writing, whether writing can be taught through techniques or theories or exercises. I don’t really feel that that’s the case. I do think that people can be helped to become competent writers. I don’t think that competent writers can be made by virtue of a class into really fine writers. Other things need to have happened, and other things need to be there.

Q. What is your approach to teaching writing to your students at Princeton? Do you ever have them read your own work? How is the writing and literary environment there different from what you experienced at Yale?

A.I never have my students read my own work. I think it’s a strange thing to do. If we’re really going to discuss it or do a close reading of the text, I think they need to feel completely at liberty to do or say what they want. If it’s the professor’s work, I don’t think that’s possible. There are so many good stories and novels out there to be read. There’s no need to be focusing on mine. In the end, it’s about those discussions. My class is partly a workshop where there’s a critique of people’s weekly production. But really half the class is about close reading short stories that I assign.

Really, it’s just a contemporary literature class in my view, but it’s not just to expose them to literature but also to get them in the practice of reading as a writer, rather than a critical theorist or a feminist or what have you.

Our agenda is quite different from what you might get in the Lit Department.

When I was at Yale I was in the English Department. I’m not in the English Department here. We have our own little creative writing program. No one can major in what we do, and they’re selective courses.

Wes Anderson at his Wes Anderson-est.

In select theaters // Friday

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

than something I found out there. I surely preferred postwar American lit to, say, Victorian literature [laughs].

It just spoke to me. Who knows why?

Whether it’s just aesthetically or partly because of my being from an immigrant family and considering American-ness in all those ways and trying to figure out what Americanness meant. It’s all part of what made me interested or focused on those things. I think writers are influenced by all things that they’ve read, but I don’t know if it was formative more than any other reading I’d done in other times of my life. I didn’t really do a lot of creative writing at Yale.

When I was a student, there were just a couple of writing classes — fiction writing classes — and maybe one or two in colleges like college seminars. But I was shy about sharing my work even though I was writing on my own. I don’t think I was cut out for those kinds of classes, and I don’t think I was cut out for the kind of classes that I teach. [laughs] I always thought I was a pretty good writer, but I was hesitant to share that writing and have it talked about. I had one really fun and great class with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He was teaching a class in autobiography, and we were reading all these great classic autobiographies, but he would also have us write autobiographical pieces.

Of course, he allowed a lot of latitude in the way we might write them and what we would write about, so that was a lot of fun. It was probably my favorite writing experience at Yale. Aside from that, I was more of a reader in college.

Q. A good amount of writers think that writing can’t or shouldn’t be taught.

A.I think that one who wants to write should write and practice writing, and those classes are great for that because they prompt writing that you otherwise might not do

CHANG-RAE LEE’S FOLK TALES OF THE FUTURE

WEEKEND FICTION

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

Therein is a big difference. If I were in the English Department, things would be quite similar to what I experienced back then. But I really can’t compare the two things.

Q. So there’s no creative writing concentration at all? Do students just take these classes for fun?

A.Most of the time students take them completely as electives. There are some people who want to get what’s called a certificate, and they end up writing a thesis in creative writing after taking a certain number of courses, but those people have to apply for the certificate at the end of junior year, rather than having a concentration within the English major.

Our students are drawn from across all majors, which I like.

Q. “On Such a Full Sea” has been described as a dystopian novel, but from what I’ve gathered, the novel is a rather mild take on the future. What made you decide on this specific setting?

A.I never conceived of it as a dystopian novel. I thought I was writing a kind of folk tale set in the future. All these strange and bizarre things end up happening, and the society is a little warped and different, but that’s the case in a lot of folk tales. I considered it as an adventure tale about this girl who goes into a wild and odd landscape, but really also as a kind of fable about her adventures. I guess it’s been easiest to say it has a dystopian feel to it. While I can accept that notion, it’s really not how I preconceived of the book.

Q. What were your influences in creating this story and universe?

A.Probably more fables and fairytales, frankly, rather than the classical dystopian novels like “1984” and “Brave New World” and “The Road.” While I’d read those, I really didn’t have those in mind. I suppose I wanted to write a novel that was quite strange in a lot of ways.

// CHANG-RAE LEE

Contact WESLEY YIIN at wesley.yiin@yale.edu .

department. Think about the people who teach here. From poets like C.K. Williams and Tracy Smith to my fellow fiction writers Jeff Eugenides and Joyce Carol Oates and Edmund White, I mean, those are exactly the people that I deeply respect. There are lots of people like those everywhere.

We haven’t had much of that recently.

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where I’ll suddenly be “successful.”

I really don’t accept that. Each book has seemed so difficult and mysterious and almost impossible at times. I think it’ll always be that way. Success to me is where you can stop doing what you’re doing. I don’t really think that exists in art. Maybe that exists in a Wall Street career because you’ll get a certain number in your bank account [laughs].

Q. Who are some of these peers that you speak of? Who are some writers that you respect or enjoy reading?

A.Those two groups are not the same. Time prevents me from reading all the writers that I want to read and respect. But I don’t have to look very far. At Princeton, we have an i n c re d i b l e

Sleep

Q. That’s funny — I was just wondering because I read a review that compared “On Such a Full Sea” to “The Hunger Games,” but that doesn’t seem like what you were going for.

A.Well, if you read the novel, you’ll see that there’s really no [connection]. Whatever is so common is so basically common that it’s not even remarkable. And the way that my book is written, I hope, is distinctive and original.

Q. You’ve been shortlisted for the Pulitzer and won many other awards.

Your most recent novel has gotten glowing reviews, and I’m sure we’ll see your name on many award listings at the end of the year. I’m sure many Yalies and aspiring writers want to know how you define success, and when you think you reached it as a writer?

A.That’s a big question [chuckles].

I think it changes a little bit. When writers start out, they dream about a whole career, but they really just focus on publishing a book. A worthwhile, honest book. For a long time that was my definition of success.

Once you begin to see that maybe you can have a career as a literary writer, then I think the measure changes a little bit. For me, it’s not about the prizes or anything like that. I guess I measure it when peers that I respect tell me about their appreciation of my work. That’s the most gratifying feeling. Obviously I love it when readers will email me and say that they love the book, that’s really great stuff. But what truly makes me think that I’m on the right track or maybe I’ve done good work that could last is when fellow writers and really serious readers can appreciate some particular thing that I did either in my approach or my language. It’s usually something specific that makes me feel that I’ve done something really good.

But I don’t think there’s an end point

PAGE B2

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Q. You’ve been on the job for a week.

How has that been?

A. It’s been a good week. A lot of acclimating myself to the job: getting myself into my office, getting a new aide. The session is well underway, so I come in a little bit late. I’m the chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, so we’ve been having the minimum wage debate this week.

We’re also dealing with hospital conversions and workers’ compensation stuff. What I’ve been doing is poring over research on those issues.

You haven’t seen the last of Gary Holder-Winfield. A popular fixture in New Haven politics — and not just because of his lively social media presence — Holder-Winfield was sworn in a week ago today as state senator representing Connecticut’s 10th district. He replaces Mayor Toni Harp, who held the post for nearly 21 years before assuming New Haven’s highest office this January. But Holder-Winfield is no stranger to Hartford. He was a state representative for five years, best known for his leadership on the groundbreaking 2012 repeal of Connecticut’s death penalty.

Now Holder-Winfield is helping to lead another charge: increasing the minimum wage, an issue sacred for Democrats nationwide. WEEKEND sat down with Holder-Winfield to talk about workers’ issues, his legislative experience and ambitions and his philosophy of lawmaking, which he says differs from Kevin Spacey’s on the hit Netflix series “House of Cards.”

Q. Because Mayor Harp served as the state senator for the 10th district for 21 years, people say you have big shoes to fill. Does that affect you — how do you plan on filling those shoes?

A. I replaced [former State Rep. William] Dyson as representative for the 94th district. He was there for 32 years.

A season a day keeps the ennui away.

Binging on Netflix

He was a legend. When I replaced him, people would say to me, ‘oh sorry that you replaced Bill Dyson; no one will know you for ten years.’ It didn’t turn out that way. I didn’t focus on replacing Bill Dyson — I focused on doing a good job. I’m not focused on how I can come in and do what [Harp] did. I’m focused on, ‘Can I do a good job and work harder than the people around me?’ All of that being said, she was a phenomenal state senator. Anybody who would tell you anything different didn’t know what Toni Harp did. She made sure that the things that are supposed to come back to her district did.

It’s something to strive toward.

Q. Harp initially endorsed you during the mayoral race last year. Then she entered the race, and you ended up dropping out and supporting her. Has that affected your relationship? What’s the dynamic like now?

A. I just feel it’s business. I don’t get into all of the drama of politics. It’s not good. It doesn’t serve you well. If you

do that, you’re not long for this arena.

I’m focused on making sure I’m around to do good things; I want to be around for a while. That means staying out of some of the silliness. In that election there were a lot of people who wanted me to come out and go after the mayor for going back on her promise to sup-

I JUST FEEL IT’S BUSINESS. I DON’T GET INTO ALL OF THE DRAMA OF POLITICS.

senator, you received the backing of numerous labor unions — and spoke about the obligation of politicians to raise awareness about workers’ issues.

What are those issues?

A. I have a lot of concern for working people. It’s certainly one of my main focuses as chair of the Labor Committee. I’m also a person who demonstrated on the death penalty debate that I don’t have an aversion to dealing with controversy. I also work for the professors’ union at Southern Connecticut State University, so I have a real understanding of labor issues. It’s what I’ve done for the last eight years.

So my point was that it’s important to have these conversations publicly.

We talk a lot about the middle class, but that obscures this group of people who are really more in the working class. The problem is when people start to see themselves as middle class, they stop thinking of themselves as the beneficiaries of policies that benefit primarily the working class.

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Q. The committee passed Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s minimum wage hike — $10.10 by 2017 — on Tuesday. What are your responsibilities with regard to the bill from here on out?

A. We voted the bill out of committee on Tuesday. As the chair, when it hits the senate floor, I will be the person who defends that bill. I didn’t get to see President Obama speak in New Britain on Wednesday because I was at the capital instead, doing research to make sure I know the arguments.

Q. Do you think it will pass?

A. I think it has a really good shot at passing. If you look at the approval ratings nationally and here in Connecticut, it has something like a 71 percent approval rating in the state. When something has a 71 percent approval rating and you have a Democratic majority, I would say it has a pretty good shot.

Q. You told me in January you didn’t think the legislature would move on an additional wage increase this session.

What changed?

A. It’s helpful that the President wanted to do it. It changed the conversation from ‘Connecticut is doing this on its own’ to ‘this is something that follows a national trend.’ It’s not just Democrats in Connecticut going off on their own and driving businesses somewhere else, which is what Republicans say. This is part of a movement and should the movement catch fire, we wouldn’t be all by ourselves.

Q. During your campaign for state

// BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

A good day not to don a toga.

The floor of the senate // midday

THE IDES OF MARCH

port me. I wasn’t going to do that.

That’s “Real Housewives”-type stuff.

Q. Speaking of the “drama of politics,” do you watch “House of Cards”?

A. I have only seen one episode. I haven’t had time. But the first episode was intriguing. I really would like to watch more.

Q. Do you think it’s an accurate portrayal of politics?

A. My politics don’t operate that way. My politics aren’t about how do I control everything or how do I game the system. I certainly don’t game the system in the way Kevin Spacey does.

There are people who see politics that way, and people who get into politics and see it as a game. Those people probably don’t do so well. Politics are about your relationships. If you’re always about undercutting people or manipulating people, you’re not going to build the relationships that are useful to you.

Q. You say you want to stick around.

Does that mean as a state senator or in another office? Do you plan to run for mayor again — or for federal office?

A. People bring that up from time to time. I will say this: I’m not looking to run for mayor anytime soon. As for federal office, I’m not thinking about that right now — I’m not thinking about the next race. From the mayor’s race to the state senate election, I’ve been involved in races for about the time it takes to run for president. I’m glad to have a little bit of downtime.

Q. People have compared you to Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson as a Contact ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER at isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu .

leading black Connecticut politician.

Do you think this is a useful comparison, and what is the importance of race or other identity categories in politics?

A. Scott and myself — yeah, whatever. I’m appreciative of the fact that people think I’m one of those people.

All I ever intend to do is figure out how I can learn enough to represent people well. If that makes me someone who’s prominent, great. As for the question of race, I think it’s important to have women, people of color, people with disabilities in elected office. It shows what’s possible. Young people need to see that a woman can be governor, or a black person or a Native American. It’s important for young people to open their doors and see people like that running for office and in positions of power.

Q. Was it important for you when you were young?

A. When I was younger, we didn’t have a lot of people like that in office.

I can’t think of anyone in particular. Maybe it was just my mom for me.

She worked every day to provide for me — working at the post office moving mail. She worked herself into bad health. I was inspired by the fact that she worked so hard. I didn’t have a black president. At the time we had to look backwards and see the people in the civil rights movement. But no one at present. That’s part of the reason I think what I’m doing is important.

GARY HOLDER-WINFIELD: Onward and Upward in Hartford

WEEKEND POLITICS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

No one needs to know you’re not actually in Paris

Skyping with a green screen

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//LILLIAN CHILDRESS

PAGE B3

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Jacob Reske Q. Tell me a little about a.squared.

JR. We are a group that started back last February. It’s a group that I started, Emily Bosisio was the first person to sign on and then we got a couple of singers on the way. Our initial roster was five singers including myself — I don’t really sing with the group very much, I do beat boxing. They’re all still with the group and they’re all still awesome. I got really really lucky when I got them. We have a shtick, we have a thing. Everything we do is made with the human voice, and everything is live, but we make electronic music with our voices. So we remix a cappella, live.

Q. Is there an improvisational element at all or do you know exactly what it’s going to sound like before you start?

JR. We actually go back and forth between those two things. We start

a.squared doesn’t just want to tell you what they’re doing; they’d rather show you. The little musical family includes six main performers and a whole host of production team members. Their YouTube channel allows viewers all around the world to watch as they use the computer program Ableton Live to remix a cappella, right as they sing it. When they’re not lovingly bickering over which roles they each occupy in the a.squared family (is DJ a father figure or more of an older brother?) or slyly avoiding reporters’ questions about their secretive postspring break plans, they’re all happy to tell you that a.squared is the best thing they’ve done at Yale. WEEKEND sat down in the studio with music director Jacob Reske ’14, vocalists (and newly tapped Whiffenpoofs) Jackson Thea ’15 and DJ Stanfill ’15 and producer Emily Bosisio ’16 to hear all about it.

// BY EMMA PLATOFF

DJ Stanfill & Jackson Thea Q. What are your roles within the group?

JT. Of the guy singers, I’m the tenor, or the highest singer. I’ve helped with some arrangements, but only inasmuch as running them through and kind of thinking about them during rehearsal.

DS. I sing the part right beneath Jackson, so of the guys, I’m the middle part.

I’m on both sides of the process so I do a little bit of the vocal stuff and I do a little bit of the electronic stuff. But most of the electronic stuff and the arranging is left to Jacob, and I’m like a mirror for him to bounce ideas off of.

Q. So there are six of you total?

JT. Yeah, so of the singers it’s Paul [Holmes ’13], who’s the bass, Nimal [Eames-Scott ’15] who I guess would be the baritone, second lowest; then

not designed for a cappella music — so I’m in Ableton and I’m adding an overdrive, or asking what would happen if you put a phaser on someone’s voice.

And I sent it to my choir director, and he’s like, “What are you doing?” and I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Q. How did you come up with the name?

JR. Hanoi [Hantrakul ’15, an a.squared collaborator] and I were in linear algebra, and we were just kind of sitting around being like, “A? a.squared?” I can’t remember anything other than wanting an A in the name, because I have synesthesia, and when I think of this project I think of yellow, and A is yellow to me. Weird thing, it got retconned — like when the facts get altered after the fact. In the first article published about us, they were like “a.squared is Ableton and a cappella,” and I was like, “That was pretty clever.”

It’s the only fool-proof hangover prevention tool.

Eating a lot of cheese before you start drinking

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out by improvising. That’s our main go to. But once it gets into the program, it’s very, very precise. So it’s this weird dichotomy between the improvisatory nature of the beginning and at the end, when you basically have to be at a certain bar at a certain time when you’re doing a performance.

Q. What is your role in a given performance?

JR. On the project, I do all of the production. So I write all of the arrangements of the songs — and co-write a lot of them with DJ. Then I program in everything that has to happen in the song — like, at this bar, this effect has to switch on and this loop has to switch on and this person has to, you know.

You just tell the program, line by line, exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.

And then in the performance, I do percussion, which is really fun for me, and I’m in the back with this guy [gestures at piece of equipment]. With this machine you can control everything about the program without actually looking at the computer monitor. A way easier way of saying that is I kind of DJ the show and do some of the percussion and the beats, and then the singers perform the material.

Q. When did you start working with this combination of electric and a cappella? How did that come about as an interest for you?

JR. The second that this idea came to my mind was the second that my old choir director in high school told me, “You can’t do that.” I was in an a cappella group in high school and we wanted to make an album. I produced the album and I had no idea what I was doing, at all, and I actually did all the mixing in Ableton Live. This is a program designed for electronic music, it’s

A.SQUARED REMIXES THIS BUSINESS

WEEKEND MUSICIANS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

DJ, who’s second highest; then it’s me who’s the highest guy, and then Keren Abreu ’15, the girl, so she can sing higher.

DS. And a lot of us switch around parts. There are times when I’m above Jackson and Jackson’s below me, for whatever reason.

Q. How would you describe your genre?

DS. Well, considering our repertoire can’t be more than 12 songs at this point, it’s hard to say. But I think I would say — this isn’t what we’re going to be doing, we’re going to be doing different stuff, almost as a point, this semester — we’ve lived in this ambient, electronica, down tempo, chill, R&B vibe. If that makes any sort of sense.

JT. With a touch of EDM. DS. Yeah, there’s a touch of EDM. There’s a splash of all electronic genres you can pretty much think of. I mean obviously not all of them cause there are thousands. But a lot of everything.

Q. Do you have any specific plans for the rest of the semester, song-wise?

JT. In terms of songs, we’re working on one right now, I don’t think we want to reveal it.

DS. Yeah, let’s not reveal it.

JT. [laughs] Sorry!

Q. What’s the most important thing for people to know about a.squared?

DS. The thing that I want everyone to know at least about a.squared is the fact that no matter what people think it is or what it’s construed as, it’s literally just five to six best friends making music that they like to make. And all of us just hang out. Rehearsal is literally just like — we’re brothers and sisters. We bicker, argue and spend half of rehearsal laughing — and the other half is spent making really incredible music, no matter Q. How do you think a.sqaured fits into the rest of Yale’s musical scene? Do you think it filled a gap, or just invented a new frontier?

EB. I think that Yale does provide space for innovation. I don’t think a.squared necessarily filled a gap, but it created a new category. As far as how it fits in with Yale, these singers are obviously ridiculously talented. Jake is absolutely brilliant, and our creative designer Asher Young ’17 is absolutely brilliant as well. What I think a.squared does very well is bring in people from all different aspects of Yale, not even just the music culture, but in general, including the talent within this industry. It brought us all together which is really cool, because we all work in different areas.

Q. Do you have specific hopes or plans for the future? Long term, short term?

EB. We definitely have short-term things that are coming up. We have new releases that are going to be coming out within the month. We also have plans for the semester while all of us are here.

As far as long term goes, we are really excited just to see where a.squared takes us. I feel like this project has a lot of potential, and we could be really surprised at what opportunities come our way.

Q. I know you guys have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Has social media been helpful in this process?

EB. Social media has been insane in this process. Initially we just wanted to just have our presence online. We were expecting to connect within the Yale community via social media, but what’s really amazing about the Internet is we just put this stuff out there and we’ve had people from all over the world con-

Like “Friday Night Lights,” but with hipsters and no Tim Riggins (sob).

Austin, Texas // March 7–16

SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST

Emily Bosisio Q. What is your title, and what is your role in the group?

EB. My official title is executive producer — I actually joined the team with them last March and was just behind the scenes. Last spring I was doing scheduling, stuff with CPA [Creative Performing Arts] funding, OBT [Off Broadway Theater] and doing marketing stuff, Facebook and Twitter. All of that behind the scenes. Now we’ve expanded our team to where we have more people on the production side.

the outcome. That’s the thing that not everyone might realize — it’s fully in the spirit of Yale. A full blown collaboration among best friends, doing what they want to do because they want to do it.

Q. Any specific favorite moments?

JT. For me, musical moments — there’s this one lyric in “Holocene.” It’s after the drop goes in. It’s at 3 minutes, 51 seconds. And we’re all just singing really loud.

DS. And Jackson sounds really good.

JT. It’s so fun!

DS. He’s belting an A-flat.

JT. It’s just one of those moments where everything melts away and you’re like, I am so happy. It’s cathartic.

DS. My favorite moments are every time Jacob comes in at the beginning of rehearsal and he’s like, “This changes everything!”

JT. Every rehearsal he’s like “[gasp] Guys I made this amazing new thing!”

DS. Since this shit has never been done before, it can be done in a multitude of ways. Jacob comes in and he’s like, I found these four new ways to have one person do an entire drum set with their mouth. You never know what to expect.

Contact EMMA PLATOFF at emma.platoff@yale.edu .

nect with us. We had a guy from the UK remix “Holocence” and post it online.

We’ve had people in Colorado ask us about going on tour in Colorado. It’s just incredible the scope of how far our stuff has gone, which is really cool. We’ve also connected with TouchAble, which is the app that we use in the “Retrograde” video. The company saw us on Twitter and saw our videos and reached out to us.

We have people from all over the country and all over the world following us on Twitter and waiting for our new stuff to get released.

It’s just really exciting that the Internet and social media have allowed us to start creating a fan base and bringing them together.

Q. Do you have any specific favorite moments, either social or musical?

EB. The moment after our concert at OBT was absolutely incredible. It was one of those things where even the day before, we were like, “I’m not sure if this is going to happen.” And months before, I couldn’t even imagine what it was going to be. It was just so much work, and we all put so much work and heart into this thing.

What was really cool about me not being a performer was that once that concert started, I just got to sit there and witness all of that hard work paying off, and it was just absolutely phenomenal. I cried at the end, because it was beautiful. That would have to be my favorite moment of all of us together so far. It changed the way I look at anything I do. // A.SQUARED

Their schedules are wide open, they’re nostalgic and they’re out of here in May.

Having a fling with a senior

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WEEKEND LEADS

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Her cover of “Let it Go” is fantastic.

Adele Dazeem

up by age division and difficulty level, so currently I would compete in age 16 plus — the old lady division — and I’m at the highest difficulty level, which is advanced.

Q. Do you still compete?

A. Yes! Primarily I was a competitive baton twirler, the whole performance thing is just an added bonus — it’s a lot of fun. I took a break last year just because freshman year of school I had to figure some stuff out. I was planning on still going to Nationals in the summer — it’s the third week of July every year, but I got offered this really awesome internship in D.C. with two congressmen so I did that instead. It was hard. I was really kind of having withdrawals and feeling lonely after quitting something cold turkey, but I have every intention of going back this summer and training.

Q. Have you been training all year or do you just train in summer?

A. You never really stop training.

It’s not one of those things you can take a break from, just because it’s so intricate. If you stop, even for a week, you immediately lose your timing on things, which is bad. It’s hard to get that back. So I practice every day if I can — it’s hard with a Yale schedule, but I try. I’ve been trying to find competitions in the area but apparently there are no baton competitions in Connecticut, and not having a car makes it very difficult to get around. I found one at the end of spring break in Penn-

// BY CORYNA OGUNSTEIN

Q. When did you start doing baton twirling?

A. When I was five years old.

So this is my 15th year doing it, or something like that. I kind of lost track after a while.

Q. What made you start when you were five?

A. I grew up my entire life in this teeny tiny suburban town ride outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, and there was a team there called the Saline Twirlettes. It was a private organization, run by my coach Susan Usher, who’d been a really well acclaimed competitive baton twirler, and every little girl sort of tried it for a little bit when they were four or five years old. For me, it stuck. I really loved it, and I decided to start competing with it and not just doing it recreationally when I was seven.

Q. What does a competition involve?

A. It’s complicated. It’s hard to explain to people who have not been living in that world as I have been. There are multiple events, both team and individual, some are choreographed to music, but most are not. They’ll just be playing John Phillip’s “Susan Marches” in the background for 12 hours straight, and it makes you want to cry after a while. Now whenever “Stars and Stripes Forever” comes on for anything I kind of cringe a little. So you compete in lots of different events throughout the whole day. It’s split

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Most Yalies have probably seen Christine Houle ’16 in action at a football or basketball game. Though everyone might not immediately recognize her on the street as the same girl twirling batons and tossing herself through the air with incredible grace and agility, Houle does maintain some degree of campus celebrity.

As Yale’s only serious baton twirler (ever!), it’s to be expected.

For Christine, baton twirling is more than the incredible-to-watch, slightly obscure sport many people perceive it to be. It’s an integral part of her life, and has been so since she was five. Christine is a Global Affairs and Modern Middle Eastern Studies major who, in addition to practicing twirling for hours every day in the gym, is involved in the Yale College Democrats, YIRA and YPMB. When Christine first came to Yale, baton twirling was not traditionally a part of athletic events. Growing up, Christine twirled for competition, not performance, which is what she does at football games. But she really wanted twirling to be part of her college experience, so she found a way to adapt to a different style of twirling. One of the perks of performance twirling is that the crowd is much more encouraging than, say, judges in a competition environment, she said, citing the sympathetic noises the audience makes if she happens to drop the baton. It’s the type of support that makes her “incredibly grateful” for the community Yale has offered her.

L R I G L R I W T S ’ E L A

THE WAY TO VICTORY

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

CHRISTIN E H O U L E : Y

WEEKEND just likes filling out brackets for the sake of it.

Across the U.S. // March 16–30

MARCH MADNESS

Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

sylvania that I’m going to because I can’t really just show up at the national qualifiers having not competed in two years. That’d be a really bad idea. But in the summer it’ll really kick into gear. My team is in the gym for 8 to 12 hours every day.

Q. Do we have a Yale team or do you have a personal team?

A. No. Yale’s a really old institution, but I’ve done research, and as far as I can tell they’ve never really had a baton twirler before, at least not at the capacity that I do it, like performing at football and basketball games. Twirling in college was always my childhood dream. Growing up right outside Ann Arbor, I wanted to be one of the U of M featured twirlers, which would have been amazing. They have a big house, and a 150,000 person crowd every football Saturday. That’s what my coach really wanted me to do.

But as I grew up my academic goals and aspirations kind of diverged from that and forced me to choose between the two: an Ivy League education or my childhood dream.

But Yale is really great; I contacted the band director before I even knew if I was accepted, and they were really positive about it [me twirling here]. The athletics department was also very enthusiastic about having me twirl at football and basketball games.

// KEN YANAGISAWA

Well, does it?

Reflecting on whether your life has meaning

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turned to dogs. Domesticated dogs grow up in environments just like humans do. They’re good at picking up on human cues and teaching, yet we know little about how this shapes their mind and how they think about the world.

Q. What are some of the important research studies being conducted at the Center?

A. We’re studying a bunch of questions. First, we’re interested in how dogs respond to human cues and whether they learn in the same ways as human children. My grad student

Angie Johnston GRD ’18 is studying this directly, exploring whether dogs share the same skill in picking up on human teaching cues as human children. We also have projects exploring dog moral cognition, the question of whether dogs have intuitions about what it means to be fair and cooperative. My postdoc Katie McAuliffe is studying these questions, exploring the conditions under which dogs will be motivated to help a person achieve her goals and whether dogs evaluate other agents on the basis of whether they help or hinder others. Finally, I’m very interested in the question of whether dogs can think about what’s going on inside someone’s head — do dogs recognize that others have things like beliefs and intentions and desires? So in collaboration with my student Lindsey Drayton GRD ’17 and my lab manager Linda Chang ’12, we’re all studying whether dogs can think about others’ beliefs in the same way as young human children can.

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Q. What’s your connection to Yale?

A. I’m one of those guys that has a picture of me as a one-year-old baby with a T-shirt that says “Yale, Class of ???” because my parents were graduate students at Yale — my dad in physics and my mother in chemistry. Apparently I was on Science Hill even in utero. My mother was very happy when she went into labor with me, because it meant she got out of a very, very difficult chemistry final exam. My parents left New Haven when they got degrees and I came back here as an undergraduate many years later and was in Ezra Stiles College and studied biology. While I was a student here I took a year off, which I think is a very good thing to do.

Q. Why do you say that?

A. At the time, I couldn’t decide whether to major in biology or French. And I was a good French speaker. So I wanted to go and work in a laboratory in France if I could. It was not easy to find such a position, but through sheer serendipity my mother ran into a neighbor of ours in Washington, D.C. who had a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health.

He was hosting a French scientist and suggested that I write to him.

This was between my sophomore and junior years in college. So I wrote to the French scientist and he said, “We’d love to have you, because you could help us translate from French to English to publish in English journals.” That was about the only skill I had that could be useful at that stage in my life — I could speak English.

Sol Goldman Family professor of social and natural science Nicholas Christakis ’84 joined Yale’s teaching faculty just last year and now heads the ambitiously and eye-catchingly titled Human Nature Lab, where he and his students study phenomena at the intersection of the social and the natural sciences. Last fall he cotaught the wildly popular residential college seminar “Great Big Ideas” with Adam Glick, and now offers an iteration of a course he used to teach at Harvard, Sociology 126, “Health of the Public.”

Besides his high-powered teaching career, Christakis has a natural flair for storytelling and is an eminently accessible conversationalist.

He carved out some time to kick his feet up, drink a Diet Coke and tell stories about his adventures inside and outside of the ivory Tower.

// BY ANDREW KOENIG as a result of my clinical training, when I became aware of the low quality of care that we give to the dying in our society, I became interested in how to do a better job of caring for the dying. If you think about it, it’s very fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in our society, but it’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable population than those among us who are terminally ill, and we neglect them. And that’s how I became interested in networks, because part of my interest in care for the dying led to my interest in the “widowhood effect,” which is the fact that you’re more likely to die when your partner dies.

Q. Tell us about your work now.

A. I direct the Human Nature Lab, which is a group of people who are focused on an interrelated set of topics at the intersection of the natural and the social sciences. We’re

Contact GAYATRI SABHARWAL at gayatri.sabharwal@yale.edu .

Q. How do you hope the average person will benefit from the center’s research on dog thinking and cognition?

A. Pretty much everyone who has had a dog in their lives have wondered what that dog was thinking and feeling. Our studies will be able to give an empirical answer to this question.

We’ll learn more about how dogs really think about the world, which is a topic that I think most people find inherently interesting.

Q. What are the future directions for research at the Center?

A. Down the line, we do plan to do more studies on how dogs think about emotion and whether we can see dogs cooperating with other dogs in a rich way. We also joke about the possibility of extending our study to “catnition,” the study of how cats think about the world. But I think the catnition work is probably a long while off.

Q. What do you most enjoy about working with canines?

A. Honestly, it’s just fun. All the dogs we bring in are fun to work with, and they each teach us something new about the questions we’re studying. It’s also really fun to talk to the human companions of the dogs we bring in. Working with folks who love dogs is great because it provides a real “citizen science” angle to the work we do. We get to teach people about dog cognition but also about the scientific method.

Q. Is there anything else about the Center that you would like to tell us about?

A. We’re still looking for dogs interested in signing up for the studies! And we’re also looking for undergraduate students interested in getting more involved with comparative cognition studies. There’s lots more info on how to do that on our website, http://doglab.yale.edu/.

interested in how the social becomes biological and how the biological becomes social. I’m interested in the part of human nature that relates to our sociality — how we interact with others, why we interact with others.

What does it mean for our lives that we create networks and live in networks?

Q. How does that research play out?

A. We look at the evolutionary biology and the genetics and the sociology of social interaction, and we do experiments to see how we can intervene in the world to make it better. How can you form groups or target people with information to change people’s behavior? For example we’re doing a big project in Honduras, where we’re trying to identify who the influential people are in villages, and to get them to adopt clean water interventions or maternal health interventions. We’re trying to change the whole village’s mindset by taking advantage of our understanding of how people interact and how they influence each other.

Q. You sound like an optimist.

A. I’m an inveterate optimist. I just

Don’t feel guilty about pulling the Yale card!

Hooking up with your high-school crush

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The postdoc with whom I was working started laughing and he said, “This is going to be your job when you go to Paris — not to translate papers from French into English.” And he was right. (Laughs.) So when I got to Paris one of my jobs was to take a stainless steel Pooper Scooper and go out into the streets of Paris — and if you’ve ever been to Paris, in those days especially there was dog poop everywhere — collect specimens and bring them back to the laboratory, where we would extract the corona virus. That was my job during my year in Paris, collecting dog poop and translating things into English. It was a good time.

Q. You’re a professor of sociology, evolutionary biology, and medicine, and while at the University of Chicago you did work in hospice. What got you interested in that side of things?

A. When I was growing up, my mother was seriously ill and she died when I was 25, so all through college and medical school she was quite sick. I think partly as a result of that, I always wanted to be a doctor ever since I was a little boy; and also partly

SO WHEN I GOT TO PARIS ONE OF MY JOBS WAS TO TAKE A STAINLESS STEEL POOPER SCOOPER AND GO OUT INTO THE STREETS OF PARIS

So the summer after my sophomore year, when I was working in a biology lab at Woods Hole, Mass., and when I was still waiting to see if everything was going to work out, I get a letter confirming that I was going to work in a laboratory with a French virologist. I was ecstatic. The postdoc with whom I was working that summer said that we should go and look him up and see what kind of work he did. And of course I hadn’t cared until that point. So we went to the library and we pulled dusty thick volumes and pulled out hard copies of his papers and saw he was very interested in viruses that stay in pets and cause diarrhea. And it said in the “materials and methods sections” of the manuscripts that research assistants “were dispatched to the streets of Paris to retrieve dog feces” to bring back to the laboratory.

Dog Poop, Facebook and Optimism with Nicholas Christakis ’84

Q. What inspired you to start the Canine Cognition Center?

A. I’ve always been interested in the question of what makes humans special — why do we create universities, and talk, and do scientific research, and cooperate to build impressive institutions when no other species does that? For most of my time at Yale, I’ve addressed these questions by studying non-human primates — by studying our closest living relatives we can get a great glimpse into how human thinking evolved. But primates can’t tell us everything about why humans are special — another thing that makes us different from most species is that we grow up in really enriched environments, ones filled with artifacts and helpful teachers who try to help us learn about the world. My students and I realized that studying primates alone would cause us to miss the role that this human environment played in shaping cognition. And that’s why we

WE ALSO JOKE ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF EXTENDING OUR STUDY TO “CATNITION,” THE STUDY OF HOW CATS THINK ABOUT THE WORLD.

The dynamic Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Yale Psychology Department, Dr. Laurie Santos, started the Canine Cognition Center on campus this past December. The Center’s studies attempt to find out how the dog’s mind works. Interested in comparative psychology research, Dr. Santos believes a lot can be learned about human psychology by studying non-human primates. In the interview that follows, this “leading campus celebrity,” as christened by the Time magazine, helps us explore her puppy love.

WEEKEND SCIENTISTS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

Contact ANDREW KOENIG at andrew.koenig@yale.edu .

think that it’s possible to do things. I mean, who would want to be pessimistic and nihilistic? To me it’s not a very appealing way to go through one’s life.

Q. Do you still do field work?

A. My graduate students tease me that I don’t do field work anymore. In fact, they laugh at the thought. They say that I wouldn’t survive without hot showers. I don’t think that’s true but I let them mock me. [He pauses.]

I’m going to revise that statement.

I know that’s not true, but they can tease me anyway.

Q. What do you like about working with students?

A. I love the energy of young people. I like the enthusiasm and optimism of young people. I have hundreds of students who are Facebook friends of mine because I was a House Master at Harvard before I came here. I was in intimate contact with the slang, with the music, with events that were happening. I know weeks before my peers what’s going to be cool because I hear it first from 20-year-olds. Six weeks from now a friend of mine will say, “Did you see this?” and I’ll say, “Yes, I saw it six weeks ago,” because of my connection with students. (Pauses.) I have a rule though, which is I never friend anybody because it would be creepy if I did; but I accept all friendings.

Q. You were at Harvard when Facebook started. How was that?

A. Well, I wish I had bought stock.

(Laughs.) Jokes aside, at the time we were very interested in network structure. One day this student came to me, and she said, “You know there’s this new thing online called Facebook, where you can map the whole graph of the network of Harvard. You should look at it.” And to look at it I had to get an account.

So I got one and I looked at the graph of Harvard students. I thought it was incredible – I mean, scientifically incredible. I wish I had realized how commercially incredible it was too, but scientifically it was obvious.

Q. What is your goal as an educator?

A. I think the best thing I can do for my students is take them by the shoulders, move them to the scientific frontier and tell them, “Stand here and look out: that’s where the new stuff is.”

// BY GAYATRI SABHARWAL

everywhere // March 17

SAINT PATRICK’S DAY

Q. Are there aspects of life at Yale that provide new sources of stress compared to life here in the past?

A. That’s a good question. There’s also the question of, are the things we have and do today different? Not are they good or bad, but are they different? I think social media is different, very concretely. It means having access to a lot more information, information on multiple levels – intellectual information, social information. That’s definitely different, and that can be in some ways good, but there are also downsides to it. Maybe having too much information can be a lot to deal with. Having multiple demands adds load to the brain. It divides up attention. Some of the classic studies have been about, “How many things can we keep in our working memory?” or in our conscious memory. How many tasks can we perform? Whatever that capacity is, it’s limited — it’s not endless.

The more demands you put on this executive, I like to call it our “brain executive,” the more it’s going to get burdened, possibly at the risk of overload, and then the ramifications of overload are feeling weakened.

Not that you’re feeling physically or emotionally weakened, just that your ability to take it all in can be weakened in a physiological way.

Q. As a clinician and a researcher, can you tell us what is empirically effective to deal with stress?

A. There are some very simple things that help with that regulatory homeostasis: drink plenty of water, get sleep, eat three meals a day, have some social connections, take breaks. Those are basics, but if you think about college life, they’re not a given: Sleep? Food? Water? I’m talking about the body I don’t exclude the brain — the brain needs that very much too. So that’s number one.

What are additional things you can do? Here I would expand on positive activities and social relationships, because they take you out of worrying and choices and all of these other

The Yale Stress Center: just sounds like a description of Bass Library during finals, right? In fact, the Stress Center is a recently established research group looking at how everyday pressures affect our bodies and minds. Located on the second floor of an ominous-looking building near the Medical School, the Center combines clinical practice with empirical analysis in an integrated approach to treating and studying stress. WEEKEND sat down with Dr. Rajita Sinha, the Center’s founding director, to find out about the work she does and maybe pick up some tips for surviving Yale with our sanity relatively intact.

WKND once saw the NYC parade, innocently thinking the smell was caused by a surfeit of skunks.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE, WITH LAURIE SANTOS

things that can stack up.

The other thing that people in college aren’t careful with is alcohol, drugs and food: healthy and unhealthy behavioral choices. You have a drink and suddenly you’re more social, you might make some new friends, it’s also the thing that people do together when they party.

But in fact the stress system is a target for alcohol — it sort of chips away at your stress system.

Q. What is that “stress system”?

How does a mind-altering drug chip away at it?

A. We take most drugs to change our mood, and that’s the clue: If it’s to change your mood, it’s having other effects on your ability to manage your moods and emotions. The stress pathways in the brain have to do with all of these different levels of functioning: basic levels of survival, all the way up to thriving and enriching our lives. We have the “fight or flight” response, and then we stop thinking about stress, as if it stops there.

But that’s the basic level of survival: Hormones get released, chemicals get released, and that mobilizes your body so that you can be functioning in that moment of crisis to protect yourself. What also happens is that those hormones are going back into the brain and signaling the brain to get that next level of coping going: not just protecting yourself, but learning from it. For example cortisol goes back into the brain and helps shut down this acute arousal response, but it also has influences on memory and cognition, and so does adrenaline. Alcohol directly changes the signal that releases cortisol, it desensitizes this arousal response, because it’s a depressant: it starts to make you calmer in the acute state, but over time, and with lots of it, that becomes permanent. You lose the ability to not only be aware of stressors and respond to them, but also the secondary effects that come from it, like learning, like differentiating what’s important versus what’s not. The ability to have those pieces of information starts to get chipped away.

Q. How does stress get connected to destructive behaviors like drugs or drinking or binge eating?

A. That’s what I’ve been obsessed with, I guess, in my life. We know a few things about this connection.

One of them is that stress hormones, actually, are very involved in our learning pathways. So if you are overloaded with stress, these motivational and learning pathways that are linked to our stress hormones start to have an impact, and downstream effects.

If you start to have lower motivation under stress, you might want to have a pick-me-upper. And rather

ing attention to thinking about health from an integrated perspective, integrating brain issues and body issues.

In terms of medical treatment, we’ve divided the body into different pieces, and of course there’s importance for specialists, but wouldn’t it be good to have a place somebody could come and have a team approach to what’s going on with them? Could that perspective open up a different way of thinking about health, and well being, and addressing people’s problems? A lot of times in chronic disease, there are multiple causes, and those issues are related to stress, so it made sense to start with the concept of stress and all of its multiple effects in the brain and body, to construct what we call ‘clinical and preventive services’ that would link to the research, and there would be a really nice back-and-forth between research and clinical presentations.

So we established the stress center first as a research center, and three or four years later — that was only two years ago — we opened it for clinical

A. My work has been in stress and emotions for a long time, and how stress affects behavior and choices, the link between stress and addictive behaviors. NIH [the National Institute of Health] was interested in complex biomedical and behavioral problems that don’t get solved with more traditional ways of studying, and what they asked for was to set up consortia: bringing teams of people with different expertise to solve complex problems. We put together a consortium here at Yale, with two other universities as collaborators, with leading scientists to target the links between stress and these addictive behaviors of alcohol, nicotine and comfort food, because those are three of the main behavioral causes of chronic diseases, and we felt the brain mechanisms had been ignored.

It was all research from basic science, animal studies all the way to humanbased studies and population studies. But what we found was that people who were calling in to participate in our studies were saying, ‘What can you do about it? Can you help us with our stress? Can you teach us what to do?’ And in fact we were developing new interventions as well as looking at things that had worked in the past.

I’d found that people were not pay-

Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

ment?

A. I should say very clearly that stress is not the cause of cancer, as in, ‘A leads to B.’ It’s a really important contributing factor. The reason for clarifying is because stress, especially chronic stress, leads to changes. The stress pathways that I described to you earlier are there to learn and adapt to the challenges of the environment. So, it inherently is one that changes. So as it changes, those changes can be good or they can also be bad. If you have too much bad stress, you start having changes as a result of those adaptations, changes in secondary systems. For example, if you have too much adrenaline flowing around that doesn’t shut off, it will change your baseline state of things that are affected by adrenaline — that may be heart rate, it may be blood pressure. If you’re pumped up all the time, and can’t go back to your homeostatic state, the body’s system starts to shift. And now your basal level of blood pressure might be different than it was five years ago, and there are then secondary effects of higher blood pressure, in your blood vessels and other things. Those changes may be at the cellular level.

So things can translate pretty quickly.

Really, the complex diseases that I‘m talking about don’t have one cause.

We have to stop thinking in those simple ways, we’re not in the domain of simplicity. In fact I’m working on a paper on this. I think we might need a different scientific approach to think about complex systems.

Q. I’d love to hear about that paper.

A. I think we need a paradigm shift in our approach to science. All of us have been trained in the reductionist model, of breaking things down to see if A leads to B, and as you’re breaking things down you’re not going to get the answer for something that’s a complex, interconnected phenomenon. The paper is just taking shape, but it’s about the question of whether we need different scientific models and frameworks for addressing complex phenomenon, as is true in other disciplines like physics.

The one last thing I would say is that it can sound bad that we have so much stress in our lives, and sometimes people ask me, ‘Do you have hope?’ It’s crazy, everybody is getting stressed, and I have a lot of hope because I think we have a lot of capacity as humans to regulate ourselves.

We haven’t explored all of those options, we haven’t tested them, so there’s a lot of hope in terms of plenty of things that can be done.

It’s nothing personal, but there’s only two weeks and so much “House of Cards.”

Ignoring your high-school friends

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and preventive services. It really is an experiment, we don’t know if this is going to take off, but it’s at academic centers that we should be trying new things.

Q. Was it difficult to get recognition for stress as a medical issue?

A. Actually, it’s not like a diagnosis right now. It’s still experimental to think you want to treat it with medication, in fact we studied that in our consortium: identifying those who are highly stressed, who we know are highest-risk for developing stress-related diseases, whether cancer, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, neurological diseases. Can we begin to prevent these diseases? People have been studying stress and it’s been known to be a medical phenomenon that’s very critical, but it hasn’t reached the place where it’s become a treatable, preventable issue. In fact, one of the goals of the Stress Center is to approach stress as something that we address and treat in a routine way.

Our vision is that if we do that, we’ll change the relative risk ratio of stress contributing to these diseases.

Q. You mention some pretty startling physiological manifestations of stress: cancer, asthma, cardiovascular disease. How does a mental state like stress turn into a physical ail-

IT’S CRAZY, EVERYBODY IS GETTING STRESSED, AND I HAVE A LOT OF HOPE BECAUSE I THINK WE HAVE A LOT OF CAPACITY AS HUMANS TO REGULATE OURSELVES.

than taking good care of your brain, it’s sometimes easier to have a couple of drinks. There’s also some evidence that the amount of reinforcement you feel from a drug that feels pleasurable is different if you’re stressed versus not stressed. And then there are these direct effects of stress hormones on dopamine, which the mainstream media will often talk about as the “reward chemical.” Those are some of the links that we’ve studied: this dopamine pathway or “reward pathway” also goes all the way up to our frontal executive and helps us think and manage cognitive tasks. So these are very intricately linked, and what’ we’ve discovered is that there isn’t much of a difference, at least in the neurochemical pathways, between what’s involved in motivation and learning and what’s involved in stress and stress regulation.

Q. You helped found the Stress Center as a director. How did you end up putting something together like this, both clinical and researchbased?

// BY DAVID WHIPPLE

Relaxing with Dr. Rajita Sinha

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

PAGE B6,7

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

// MICHAEL KNOWLES

// BY AUDREY LUO

SPF 50 usually does the trick.

Wearing protection

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

THE MODERN RENAISSANCE MAN: MICHAEL KNOWLES ON ART, POLITICS AND JIMMY MCMILLAN

WEEKEND ENTERTAINS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

members as well. One response I heard when someone saw me in the video was “Michael, that is just so unbelievable. I just cannot express my disbelief when I saw that video. There is no way you would be in a football uniform.” I appreciated that response.

Q. Have you done similar gigs?

A. I did an MTV video about six months ago. When I got the part initially, I was the hero role, and I got to beat up the bad guy, and I got the girl.

I’m not a particularly large or formidable man. And when I showed up on set, they said “Okay Michael, here are the rewrites.” And it turned out that I was actually getting beat up and I was getting dragged out of the bar, but it was fun to do anyway. But originally after Yale, I came to New York to cut my teeth in theater and to train with Wynn Handman at his acting studio. The man is incredible. He still teaches four classes a week, really intensive. Because it’s a professional team, most actors are working in plays or films around New York. I’ve been performing in plays and films around New York and obviously going out to LA when that’s where the action is.

Q. How have you been involved in politics? And how does acting couple with your political activity?

A. The skills of an actor pretty naturally translate into politics. To borrow a phrase from George Bernard Shaw, “Acting is a revelation of mankind to itself.” So it’s not the priesthood or the military, but it still seems to be a noble vocation. In both acting and politics, you need to love people. I started to become politically active in 2010 with Congresswoman Nan Hayworth. I often use the skills that I’ve developed in the last 15 years of being an actor, whether that’s making political music videos for Nan Hayworth, doing TV commercials with Jimmy McMillan about the national debt or giving speeches with Jon Huntsman in New Hampshire.

My how-ever-many-great-grandfa-

Even those of you in “Structure of Networks” can embrace this day of math!

everywhere // March 14

PI DAY

Q. You recently starred in Great Caesar’s music video “Don’t Ask Me Why.” How did you get involved with that, and what was it like to be in it?

A. It’s always great to work with Yalies. What’s funny about that video is actually I had no idea it was for Great Caesar when I auditioned and got the part. Actors go on live auditions all the time, and that was one. It was a particularly interesting audition. There was a lot of improvisation. When I showed up to the set in Connecticut, John Michael Parker ’10 came up behind me and said, “Hey man! What are you doing on my set? How did we get you?” And I said, “That’s a hell of a coincidence!” He’s the lead singer of Great Caesar. I saw them during Spring Fling, and I knew him around campus, and the other band

A man of action, Michael Knowles ’12 flies between New York City and Los Angeles for his acting career, while pursuing his other passion — politics. He has worked with Jimmy McMillan, founder of the Rent is Too Damn High Party, Congresswoman Nan Hayworth and former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. In New York City, Knowles currently studies under Wynn Handman, the artistic director of The American Place Theatre, who has trained actors including Denzel Washington and Lauren Graham. Although Knowles does not often combine his passions in acting and politics, given his belief that we should leave politics out of art, he uses his acting skills to enhance his political ventures, such as hosting a lively web show with McMillan. And if dual pursuits of acting and political fame were not enough, Knowles is also the first translator of Machiavelli’s play, “The Girl from Andros,” which he translated for his senior thesis. WKND took a moment to pick Knowles’ brain on making it in acting post-Yale, making America a better place, parading on Columbus Day and indulging his love of cigars on the side.

politics or entertainment, I like action.

I don’t like just sitting around and having academic discussions about plays or strategies or politics. That’s important, too, but after the policy discussion, I like to get up and do it.

Q. How did you get involved with the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, and are you still hosting the webshow with Jimmy McMillan?

Q. Were you acting before you became involved in politics?

A. I’ve always been interested in both, but I’ve been acting since I was seven years old. Before Yale, I studied at the Stella Adler Studio in New York and now with Wynn. You know, they say that politics is showbiz for ugly people.

But I do find it’s sort of like that line in “The Godfather”: “Just when I’m out, they pull me back in.” When I came to New York, I got a call from Hayworth.

There had been a scandal with her former spokesperson, and she asked me if I would step in and be her new one. And I said I was flattered, but I really didn’t have the time, and I was pursuing other things in New York. She came down and said, “Let’s have dinner.” By the end of dinner and drinks, she had persuaded me that this campaign was important for the country and it was my duty to help. In senior year of college, because I had been involved with Hayworth and Jon Huntsman, I formed a company with a few political veterans in the Hudson Valley called Red Pillar Consulting, which has allowed me to advise and direct campaigns of some politicians I’d like to help. When it comes to

WKND advocates for safety!

(Spray) Tanning

Contact AUDREY LUO at audrey.luo@yale.edu .

Q. What kinds of acting gigs are you currently or planning on getting involved in? And are they at all related to politics?

A. I generally think that entertainers should keep their mouths shut and do their job and entertain, and not turn art into politics. Art that is political or ideological is not very good.

Q. Do you try to separate the two?

A. I do. My political activities I undertake because I have certain skills being an actor and a communicator and because I care about the condition of the country. Really, I just can’t resist. Art that is ideological — it just misses the point of the practice.

Q. Have you ever considered directing?

A. I have. I directed a bit at Yale.

While I was working on the political stuff in college, I was directing film, opera — I ended up directing a play for Ariel Shepherd-Oppenheim ’10. I particularly enjoy directing opera because I’m not a very good singer, so it’s always such a pleasure. I prefer acting to directing. Directing is very aggravating. You’re responsible for everything.

Actors are almost always irresponsible and difficult to wrangle. One thing I like about opera is that when all those frustrations reach their peak, I can sit back and listen to beautiful music and that would calm me down. I enjoyed translating as well. To speak of melding my political and artistic interests, that probably came to most fruition when I translated Machiavelli’s first play, “The Girl From Andros,” and produced it at Yale. What was very funny about that — just last September, I got a call from the Italian cultural institute in New York asking me if I would be interested in having a float in the Columbus Day Parade to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli. It was fantastic. A float, a microphone on Fifth Avenue, who could ask for more?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

A. With our schedules, we’ve had to do it less frequently. I met Jimmy in 2011 because I was leading a national student effort to draft Daniels to run for president. The central issue for that campaign was our ballooning national debt, our annual trillion dollar deficits. I had the idea to air the first TV ad of the 2012 cycle. I wrote up a little sketch about it and the crux of it was the debt and deficit are too damn high.

And we thought, how could we get this message across in a compelling minute or 30-second ad that we can air?

Jimmy had just run for governor of New York very famously for the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. I thought, “I gotta get this guy involved.” So I called him, and he picked up and did it for very little money, essentially just travel costs.

It starred Jimmy, CoCo [Courtney] Pannell ’11, and me. It got some views on Youtube and made the front page of Politico. CNN came up and did a story on it. Jimmy really helped with that campaign. Washington Post came to Yale to do a story on it. I think it’s safe to say that Jimmy had a greater impact on national political discourse than on rent controls in New York City.

I GENERALLY THINK THAT ENTERTAINERS SHOULD KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT AND DO THEIR JOB AND ENTERTAIN, AND NOT TURN ART INTO POLITICS.

thers sailed on the Mayflower and my how-ever-many-great-grandfathers fought and died at Bunker Hill. They served at Valley Forge with George Washington. And here I am performing in plays and films. And yet when I think about their sacrifices, and I see an opportunity that I can be of some use in any way, I just can’t help but become politically involved.

PAGE B8

REACTORS

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

// SARA MILLER

// BY YI-LING LIU

To the couch and back.

Reach Out Trip

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

JARED MILFRED ’16: A SMOOTH OPERATOR

WEEKEND NUCLEAR

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

The culture surrounding nuclear reactors is extremely male-dominated, conservative, and strongly tied to the military. Those aspects never really appealed to me, and I loved how Reed was the antithesis of that, how it combated all the traditional stereotypes associated with nuclear. It was full of people who self-identified as liberal and huge advocates of gender equality.

Having more women would be a huge boon for the industry. [Last Spring Break,] I went to a power reactor in Washington. In the control room, they have photos of all the operators on the wall, and I was looking around and every single one was male. By having the vast majority of the operators and the engineers be male, we are losing half of the brilliant people that could be having good ideas, fixing the problems, doing policy and helping to avoid things like Fukushima.

Q. How do you want to pursue your

Q. What makes an undergraduaterun reactor different from a typical nuclear reactor?

A. Firstly, the Reed Research reactor doesn’t generate electricity; it’s simply a research reactor.

Also, one of the biggest differences was that we have more female operators at Reed than the rest of the country combined. About half our staff is female. I was a huge proponent of that.

interests in nuclear technology at Yale and in the future?

A. I always knew that I didn’t want to go into the nuclear industry even after I worked at the reactor. As fascinating as everything related to nuclear technology is, I did not want it to be my life’s goal.

When I came to Yale, I was pretty sure that I wanted to major in Physics or Computer Science, but it kind of

THE CULTURE SURROUNDING NUCLEAR REACTORS IS EXTREMELY MALE-DOMINATED, CONSERVATIVE AND STRONGLY TIED TO THE MILITARY. THOSE ASPECTS NEVER REALLY APPEALED TO ME.

from. Neutron activation analysis was accurate to the point that if we were to take someone’s fingernails, we would be able to tell which one was their left ring finger, because we can detect the few atoms of gold absorbed in it.

Q. What kind of skills did you need to be an operator?

A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a very intensive exam you must go through in order to get a license. One thing that I really liked about it was that they emphasized theoretical knowledge just as much as they emphasized practical knowledge. It was not just a matter of knowing what to do when certain lights turn on and what buttons to push when; you also have to understand the underlying physics of everything that is going on among neutrons and in the atoms. Safety and regulation was another aspect of what we had to learn: we had to memorize pages and pages about the regulations.

Goodbye, goodbye, winter of our discontents.

North of the equator // March 20

SPRING EQUINOX

Q. What exactly did you do as a nuclear reactor operator?

A. We do everything from maintenance, repair, and education outreach, to actually operating the reactor itself.

It’s very Homer Simpson-esque, if you were to visualize it. There’s a big panel with buttons and switches, and we are there putting samples in the reactor, controlling how much fission goes on, raising and lowering control rods, etcetera.

The most useful thing that we did with the reactor is called neutron activation analysis. Put simply, you bombard a sample with neutrons, which makes the atoms unstable, causing them to decay and emit gamma rays.

Since each element gives off a distinct pattern of gamma rays, we can take a sample of unknown composition, and tell with astonishing specificity how many atoms of each element was in something. We would be able to identify specifically on the map where a sample of soil came from, based on quantities of trace elements. Art historians would come to us, and ask us where a particular type of clay came

Jared Milfred ’16 once operated nuclear reactors. A native of Portland, Oreg., Milfred spent his senior year in high school training to be an operator at Reed College’s research reactor, the only reactor in the world operated by undergraduates. A year later, he passed his licensing exam with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and officially became the youngest licensed nuclear reactor operator in the country. WEEKEND spoke to Milfred in the Pierson Common Room about neutron activation analysis, avoiding another Fukushima and big red buttons.

For us it’s a toss-up between “Mr. Bud’s Pot Smoking Games” and “The Hunger Games.”

Pleasure reading

Contact YI-LING LIU at yi-ling.liu@yale.edu .

neer around catastrophes like Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I am a fan of new technologies, such as modular reactors. A normal reactor, although centralized, concentrates risk.

Modular reactors, on the other hand, can fit on the back of a flat bed truck. If there’s ever a problem, you can literally just pick it up, take it away and install in a new one. It’s a lot safer, because you’re not hedging your bets on something huge. If something were to go wrong, you have to deal with something much smaller.

Q. Did you play any pranks at the reactor? Any nuclear inside jokes?

A. Well, we actually had this big red button that wasn’t hooked up to anything. On it, was the word ‘battleshort.’

On nuclear submarines, they do have a button that says ‘battleshort’, which overrides every safety mechanism and is only used in extreme emergencies like when the submarine is in the midst of battle, and if a safety mechanism shuts down the reactor, you are going to die.

The NRC was not OK with us having even a fake battleshort button.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

moved across the board a bit to EP&E. My interest in nuclear translated from tech interests to policy interests. So the vast amount of my work with nuclear right now is related to nuclear regulatory policy, which is helpfully informed by being an actual operator, knowing how the actual science works, and what it’s like to interact with the NRC. Just yesterday, I helped put on a talk at Yale Climate and Energy Institute, where we had an expert from Japan talk about what Fukushima meant for Japanese nuclear regulatory policy.

Q. Are you an advocate of nuclear reactors?

A. Most people assume that I am an avid proponent of nuclear reactors because I’ve worked in them. I’m certainly a proponent of more research reactors, and wished every college could have them. They are great for science and there’s no risk of Fukushima for something like a research reactor.

With nuclear reactors in general, I think that nuclear is an essential component for any future sustainable energy plan. I think carbon dioxide is by far the biggest enemy in making energy decisions. I definitely wish that we didn’t have to resort to technology like nuclear, and that we could use one that didn’t have any risk whatsoever.

But pragmatically speaking, it’s one of the very few technologies that not only we know works but has been proven to do so over the last 60 years.

But I am also a huge safety advocate.

The vast majority of my policy work is about making smarter choices with nuclear. The poor decisions people have made, here in the US and in Japan, have given nuclear a terrible reputation. But we don’t need to make those poor decisions; we have the technology to engi-

PAGE B9

THEATER

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

Q. Taking such a well-known classic and bringing it to a college campus is a daunting task. How did you decide to put on “Gypsy”?

EK. I spent a good part of my junior year deciding what show I was going to do as a part of my senior project.

There were a lot of musicals I played around with. I spent a lot of time listening to recordings; there were a lot of scripts I liked. At first, “Gypsy” wasn’t on that list because I thought it was too big to do at Yale. I thought it was a show that you couldn’t really do with college students. Then I revisited it because I liked the score and script so much and wanted to see if it could make it work. Once I opened my mind outside the confines of the Broadway production I had seen in 2009, I felt that it was a show we could do. So then I approached Chandler because I thought it was a show that really needed a partnership with Rose. Chandler and I talked about my concept for the show. We sang some songs together and started talking about the show in February of

“Gypsy: A Musical Fable” is coming to Yale. The story follows the relationships between the ultimate stage mother, Rose, and her daughters as she attempts to catapult them to stardom at the rise of burlesque. While the show is traditionally performed as an over-the-top spectacle, Yale’s take will portray an intimate family drama through a psychological lens, exploring how Rose lives vicariously through her children and ultimately hurts them. The show, the senior project in American Studies of director Ethan Karetsky ’14, will run April 3-5. Karetsky and his stars Chandler Rosenthal ’14, who plays Rose, and Lucie Ledbetter ’15, who plays Louise, spoke with WEEKEND about their unique concept and making a classic accessible to our community.

// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

ally starts out the play in her 40s and ends in her 50s. As Ethan and I decided to talk about her insecurities and the ways in which she feels trapped as a mother, we realized it aligns much more when you see her as a young mother, rather than as a middle-aged mother. That has been very interesting to play around with.

Q. Could you talk about how you came up with the vision of changing the lifespan of Rose?

EK. The thing we’ve come back to more and more in rehearsal is being trapped in motherhood. Mama Rose has become taken on in musical theater history … this obsession and cultish nature over Rose and her songs — it’s a favorite musical of a lot of people in musical theater history.

It’s a role that has taken on mythic proportions, so what I think is so great about casting Rose in this very natural, young mother way is that we are stripping all of this away. We’re making her more accessible to Yale but also more logical with the script.

For her to be a 25-year-old mom with these little kids makes so much sense: She feels trapped by her life and her motherhood because she had kids too soon, and she’s trapped in this life, and she can’t achieve the stardom she wanted to achieve for herself, so now she’s pushing her little kids into achieving it. In this version, she’s just too old. By the end of the script she’s 35. It’s not like she’s not an old hag who couldn’t be a star; she’s just barely too old to start now.

CR. It’s because of the circumstances of her life and less because of her actual age.

EK. That makes the play more tragic and more interesting. It’s a lot more about how she is dealing with what’s going on in each circumstance and relationship and how she builds and tears apart these relationships.

Q. To clarify, you did not rewrite

We’ll be shadowing the Portuguese cat lady next door.

Externships

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

last year. We agreed we would do this together last spring. It has been a year now of casting other talented folks, including Lucie, and now there are 55 of us collaborating on this show, which is crazy.

Q. You talked about how Rose is important in the show. Why was casting Rose the first step in your process?

EK. This is a show in which a lot of the momentum comes from Rose.

She is onstage for so much of the show, and it’s such a unique role that I wasn’t confident just picking a show and going through the casting process 10 months later and hoping a Rose would show up. I generally avoid precasting as much as possible. I have never done it at Yale, and I don’t like it as a concept. But for certain roles and moments it can be really important.

I wanted to make sure that I found someone that I liked as a person and had a good working relationship with but also someone who could carry that role. It’s not something every undergraduate with the vocal range could do. It’s a unique role.

Q. Chandler, I’d love to hear from you about your concept of Rose and how it maybe differs from traditional portrayals of the iconic role.

CR. Funnily enough, I played this role in ninth grade so I’m reprising it seven years later. I already went through one whole process with that character, but I was 14, so that changes things. It’s been really helpful because from the get go, I felt like I had some insight left over from walking in her shoes so long ago. This has made the character a little less daunting because I already understood her in some ways. Ethan and I have been talking about the timeline of her life.

Ethan’s concept takes place over 50 years, but traditionally, there’s a 10-year jump in time. The Rose part is traditionally played older. She usu-

any dialogue to make this age change?

EK. No, we did not. Factually, you aren’t allowed to rewrite any of the script. That’s what’s so amazing about this play. In many ways, you can treat this play like Shakespeare.

We think of Shakespeare as this thing that is so easy to manipulate — that you can put any interpretation on it and come up with any concept in a different production, and people tend to not treat musicals as flexibly. We think that if you respect the text and keep returning to the text for any choice and justifications, there is a lot you can do with a show. They don’t have to be untouchable. There is no reason it has to be the same as the Broadway production.

Q. Can you address your concept more generally?

EK. We knew that at Yale we could not have a show with a million set changes and a cast of 60, so we had to strip it down. I immediately thought of Rose as the best way to do this. She is looking at her life and the story. I wanted to see what it would be like to take her out of the story. This led to me starting the play with her in a nursing home. She is in her 70s and 80s. She is watching TV in the overture, and as the overture captures the music of all of the play, Rose is watching her entire life on TV. We watch Rose relive and think through her memories. Traditionally the first few moments of the show have the audience watching her kids onstage when she marches in and takes the stage, she normally gets thunderous applause — here comes Mama Rose.

What we’re doing instead is having Rose watch the performance on TV, the audience watch her watch it.

Then, she walks off her stage and onto the mainstage for the interruption, entering her memories. From then on, we are living in Rose’s world from 25 to 35. But it is in a stripped-down for most of the play. It isn’t until the end of the play that Louise becomes Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper. There’s a seven minute chunk of the show where you see a large passage of time in which Louise matures rapidly from her younger, more shy self to a persona she creates.

Q. How do you approach that rapid shift?

LL. For Louise, her little sister has

Not as cheerful as it sounds :(

Liberia // March 8

DECORATION DAY

world. A lot of the set is projected.

Furniture is repurposed from scene to scene. The costume world, though, is quite rich. Rose is someone who cares so much about appearances. Only at the end do you come back to the nursing home and allow her to have a final moment in the final scene in her. The final scene of the play is that in which mother and daughter confront the demons in their relationship. It’s so smartly written because the lines are so open. I’ve seen it performed with the exact same lines and then they hug and leave together, or where they leave in separate ways. It’s been an argument or reconciliation or something in between. We’re playing it in a unique way in taking her outside of the stories.

Q. How do you tackle the makeup and costuming of Rose, who walks from her 70s to her 20s and back again while on stage?

C. There isn’t going to be that much of a costume change, it’s going to be based on physicality.

EK. It’s really lighting and Chandler’s body that will tell that story.

She won’t have age makeup that she has to wipe off.

Q. I’d love to hear more about the character of Louise. How do you, Lucie, conceptualize your character?

LL. What’s actually really fun and crazy about the show is that Louise starts at seven in the first scene.

Obviously, it’s a little bit of a stretch to make me play a seven-year-old.

So we have two kids who play Louise and her baby sister June. Ten-year old Rosa is playing baby Louise for the first 10 minutes. They have a musical number and at the end of their scene, Sarah Chapin ’17, who is playing June, and I walk in and take their place. At that point, I’m 15. At the end of the show, I’m 21. You see Louise mature and gain confidence, slowly. She lives in the shadow of her younger sister always been in the spotlight. Louise doesn’t consider herself extremely talented. When she does come to this transformation, it’s more of an alter ego she takes on and sees it as not herself performing, but somebody else.

Q. How are you making “Gypsy” relevant to Yale?

CR. The age change certainly helps.

It allows us to feel more connected to

Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah. motzkin@yale.edu .

which is exciting for a younger audience. We didn’t just dust off a 1959 musical. We have an aesthetic that will grab people and underlying themes — success, what and who drives you to success, and parentchild relationships — that are as relevant as ever.

// BRIANNA LOO

PAGE B10

I think you mean “sneak peek”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

LL. The story of a girl who is trying to fit in my different roles and separate their ambitions from their parents’ relates to my life in particular.

Everyone at Yale is trying to figure out where they want to go and whom they want to be.

EK. The only thing I would add is the modernity of our design aesthetic. The film and projections we are using are cutting edge at Yale,

@StealthMountain

the characters that are closer to our age, and I’m sure it is more accessible for the audience as well. The show is about the drive for success and stardom. These words and ideas are definitely talked about a lot on campus, especially in terms of what to do after graduation. This play doesn’t answer questions, but it expresses a lot of these themes Yalies have anxiety about now.

// BRIANNA LOO

REMAKING A CLASSIC: Ethan Karetsky, Chandler Rosenthal and Lucie Ledbetter Talk “Gypsy”

WEEKEND MUSICAL

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

VIRAL

// SARA MILLER

SPRING BREAK

YO U R

// BY VIVIAN WANG

Everything all right.

Drinking watermelon

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Q. Were you involved in music at Yale? Did Yale a cappella shape your decision to get involved with a cappella at all?

A. I didn’t do any a cappella here, to be honest. I was in YSO and a chamber music group, and I started a jazz trio my senior year. And you know what, I think I’m actually glad I didn’t do a cappella in college, because if I had done that, I wonder if it would’ve given me a preconceived notion of how a cappella should be.

With my band, none of us really had that much a cappella experience, so we came into it with very fresh ears. We thought, we don’t know what a cappella is like, but let’s try anything and everything. Not having any boxes set up really gave us the opportunity to push boundaries, cause we didn’t know we were pushing them. We were just doing whatever felt natural. So I didn’t do it here, but I think it turned out to be something that might have benefited me in the end.

Q. At your TEDxYale talk, you discussed making classical music more relevant by adding elements of pop. Does that mean classical music has to change to be relevant today?

A. Wow, that’s a tough question. I think that if we use the same formula that we’ve always been using, I’m not sure if people will see it as relevant. One really cool thing I’ve seen is these YouTube videos of orchestras out in squares in Europe playing for people, and the people are like, “This so cool.” I think there has to be way where we bring classical music to them. People are distracted by so many different things nowadays, there’s gotta be ways to grab their attention. One way is taking orchestra pieces and adding something to them that people can understand or relate to, like beats.

Kevin Olusola ’11 and his a cappella group, Pentatonix, are in the middle of a sold-out American tour, and when that wraps up, they are headed to Europe. His group’s videos can garner over 6 million views in less than a week, and their channel is the 16th-most subscribed music channel on YouTube. His “celloboxing” videos, in which he combines classical cello playing with popular music and beatboxing, consistently go viral. But before any of this happened, Olusola was one of us — a Yalie. After coming back to campus to give a TEDxYale talk before a packed Sudler Hall on Tuesday, Olusola sat down with WEEKEND to discuss his journey from pre-med student to star musician, his mission to make classical music relevant again, and what it’s like to be on Sesame Street.

E.T. phones home, asks for a ransom.

United States of America // March 20

NATIONAL ALIEN ABDUCTIONS DAY

KEVIN OLUSOLA ’11: BEATS OUTSIDE OF THE BOX

0:30/4:15

WEEKEND GOES

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

465,000

Q. What do you think makes Pentatonix different from other musical groups on YouTube?

Why are you guys so successful?

A. I think what we’ve done is realize that people want a more organic sound. In today’s industry, pop music is so electronic, so drum and base heavy, so auto-tuned. I think there is a good amount of people that want a more raw, organic sound. I think that’s what we provide, but we also do it in a way that people can understand and relate to. Also, there are a lot of vocal acrobatics. We try to create moments where people say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe they did that with their voices.”

Q. Tell me about the decision to get involved with music right out of Yale. You were premed when you came in — those are very different tracks. Can you talk about that decisionmaking process?

A. I actually finished all my pre-med requirements at Yale. But during my junior year, two big things happened to me. First, I did a competition online that Yo-Yo Ma hosted, called the “Celebrate & Collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma” contest. I got second place, and Yo-Yo Ma said my music was “inventive and unexpected,” and that was very surprising to me, because I think that’s the essence of who he is as cellist. The second thing was that I got to open for KRS-One, this old-school rapper, after he visited Southern Connecticut State. He came backstage after we were done, and he said to me, “You could continue

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this. You could really change the way people view hip hop.” That was when I realized that two people on completely opposite sides of the music spectrum were telling me something very similar, which was that the music I was doing was very different and very cool.

That gave me a lot of validation and strength to pursue music.

Q. Was it scary deciding to do music instead of going to medical school?

Contact VIVIAN WANG at vivian.y.wang@yale.edu .

Q. Do you have any advice for Yalies who want to go into music, or any other more unconventional track?

A. If you’re trying to do music, I would say start looking within yourself, and find who you are and what kind of stuff you like doing. Hone in on those unique gifts you have in music.

And start putting your stuff on YouTube — it’s a free, amazing way to get your music across and start building your own fan base. If you want to be an artist or producer, you can show so many people who you are. That’s what I did, and that’s how I got to meet such cool people like [renowned record producer] Quincy Jones and the people in Pentatonix.

For people pursuing other unconventional paths, I would say really learn and figure out how people do things in that industry. That’s one of the things that has really helped our band: not just being passionate, but having a tailored passion. We understand that we want to get this music across, but we want to do it in a way that everybody can enjoy it. That’s why we choose pop covers, because we know that’ll get a wide audience. But we’re also passionate about doing music in our own way; that’s why we do a cappella, which is very unconventional.

Q. You guys have done a commercial which aired during the Grammys, you have a soldout tour, you’ve been on Sesame Street — what has been the coolest thing you’ve gotten to do?

A. Definitely Sesame Street. Oh my god, literally, I almost cried. Because the thing is, those Muppets, they don’t break character.

The whole time, while they were talking regularly, they were talking in the same voice. I was screaming. I was so happy. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Touring Europe was also a huge moment, because it’s cool to know that just because of YouTube, we had a fan base that could sell out venues in Europe. This time we’re going back and doing venues upwards of 2,000 people, and selling them out, only because of YouTube. That’s crazy to me. I just love this band. I literally love every single person in it. They mean so much to me.

Q. What is your musical guilty pleasure?

A. Justin Bieber has this new album called “Complete My Journals.” This thing was actually dope. After hearing it, I was like, “OK, you better grow up,” because it was great. You’ve messed up, but that was great.

We’re not fucking with you when we say this will change your life.

Intergalactic Pizza Cats

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A. It was very scary. I don’t know if that’s something that you’re taught at Yale — how do you pursue something like music? It’s such an open-ended question. The only thing I knew was that I had a very unique vision of how I wanted to do that – I could do this cello and beatboxing thing, and I knew that was kind of special. What I’ve learned is you need a team to be successful in this industry. You can’t do it alone. You always need someone to watch your back. That’s why we have a manager and all these people that help us make this work.

They give us so much advice from other people’s experiences about how to pursue this.

Q. Do you think Yale’s environment, where so many people go into consulting or more traditional paths, was conducive to your decision to pursue music?

A. You know what, I do think so. There are definitely a lot of people who go into consulting, law, medicine or more traditional paths.

But I know for myself, even though I was on a traditional path in medicine, I definitely explored. That’s why I love this place. Yale has the resources to make things happen, and if they don’t have it here, then you have to be willing to push for it — but that’s just a trait in life that you need. In the long run, pushing for it, and making those things happen, will help you out in whatever career you’re in. Whatever you want to do here, you can make it happen.

It just might take some exploration at the end of the day.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED IS YOU NEED A TEAM TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS INDUSTRY. YOU CAN’T DO IT ALONE.

That’s what I tried to do with “Julio,” [the piece I played for my first viral video]. I tried to take this piece that was more of a modern day classical piece, but add beats, to give it a swagger that I thought people could relate to. I don’t know if it’s things that have to change about classical music itself, but we have to shove it in people’s faces so they can see it, and say, “Wow, I didn’t know this was cool, that it was something that could be relevant to my life.”

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Q. You’ve spoken a lot in interviews about immersive reporting, so extensive checking, confirmation through meeting notes or through in-person interviews, having unnamed sources that you can corroborate.

Could you tell us about how you convey that in a syllabus? How do you unpack so many years of doing this kind of reporting in a few weeks in a classroom?

A. Well, I have the luxury of time to work on a book or a long project for the Washington Post, so you can get information and then try to get documentation, try to get contemporaneous meeting notes, and talk to all the people who might be involved or are present at a discussion or meeting. By surrounding a topic that way, I think you can get what we call the best obtainable version of the truth. But it takes time, and in the class I’m teaching, I have described it as a way of explaining how you get information through all kinds of ways, obviously — how you verify it and then how you write it up so others can read it and hopefully understand it.

Q. Professor [Steven] Brill has been teaching the course for some years now. How have you built on how he’s been teaching it? Did you design a completely new syllabus?

A. I looked at his syllabus and what others have done, like Jill Abramson, who’s now the [executive] editor of the New York Times, what some people have done at Columbia Journalism School and other schools and I devised my own syllabus.

Q. How has the experience been so far?

Are you learning as you go along with it?

A. I’m hopefully learning a lot. They’re fabulous students — I like it much more than I ever expected because of their engagement.

I’ve selected things to read and discuss which have to do with the methods of reporting, and I’ve found that to talk abstractly about

References to Bob Woodward can make chills run down a young journalist’s spine, and not just because he’s in sub-zero New Haven hell. Bob Woodward ’65 is the man who uncovered Watergate and, indirectly, led to President Nixon’s resignation; he’s been in the game since the early 1970s, writing books and, for his reporting, staying loyal to one paper, the place that published his most famous work: the Washington Post.

Woodward is, this semester, connecting with another part of his past — Yale. He’s teaching the “Journalism” seminar, a high-level writing course that focuses on the methods of strong reporting. WEEKEND tried to keep its feelings in order and caught up with Woodward about his thoughts on journalism at Yale (we told him he didn’t have to play nice), how he chooses what to write about and why should we be paying more attention to the hidden universes around us.

// BY AKBAR AHMED

some of these things and even practice them, then to kind of try to develop a succinct way of stating how you go about it has helped me in my own reporting. For example, the simple rule of trying to talk to everyone, be aggressive … in talking about it, I’ve found that it puts me in a mode of, “OK, now practice what you’re talking about!” After doing this for four decades, you can get … to put it in English, you can get lazy. I’ve found it very energizing to talk about these things and see what the students’ ideas are.

Q. What do you make of journalism at Yale right now? What do you think kids are doing right, and what do you think people could be doing better? Obviously, your class is not necessarily a representative sample, but what are you finding?

A. There were, I guess, 81 people applied to the class. I took the journalists, the people who have been editors at the Yale Daily News and The Politic, but also a couple of scientists, a couple of people who are very religious, and so it’s a very diverse group, it’s not just journalists. I am interacting with the people who are engaged in journalism there — they’re tired, they’ve worked very hard.

The number of hours they put in each day is extraordinary… the publications there are excellent and I think the people practicing it are walking around all of these issues, “How are you sure what’s a story? How do you get responses?”— all of the fundamentals of journalism.

Q. With that, something that I think is interesting for people who do writing at Yale is the question of how much do we learn about journalism, and how much do we learn through our extracurriculars, things like the News or The Politic — do you have any guidance on that, in terms of how much people can learn about journalism in an academic way?

A. I think by reading examples. For instance, a couple of weeks ago we did Seymour Hersh’s My Lai stories from Vietnam — are you familiar with that? [WKND: Yes!] And a book called “With the Old Breed,” which is a World War II book by somebody on the ground in the island-hopping in the Pacific. I intentionally selected that because hopefully these students aren’t going to go to war — you never know — and it’s something seemingly removed from their lives, and I wanted them to see it and wrestle with the questions of what war does to people … so it’s journalism but it’s also on a subject that they barely have a lot of familiarity with.

Q. That’s actually something I wanted to speak with you about in terms of your own career: approaching new subjects. I’m Pakistani, and I noticed that you wrote a story on drones in late October — you broke the news that the Pakistani government had

been aware of the drone strikes, that the CIA had been sharing documents with them. I’m really interested in how you pick what you want to cover now. You did the drone story, and you said in an interview that you wish you had gotten the Snowden scoop. How do you pick, as a veteran journalist, what you cover today?

A. That’s an important question and something that you want to think about. I did four books on President Bush and his wars; I’ve done two on Obama, “Obama’s Wars” about his decisions in the Afghan war, relating to Pakistan intensely as you know, and then a second one on the budget wars with the Republicans. To be honest, I’m not sure where the center of gravity is now in American politics and the White House, whether it’s in foreign affairs or the budget/ domestic issues, obviously they’re going on in both, but I’m kind of doing reporting in both areas and even some others. I haven’t decided on the next book yet.

Q. So with something like the drones scoop or Snowden, is that something that strikes you as interesting because the White House is paying attention to it, or is that potentially a new area of interest for you?

A. We were talking in class on Monday about the stories that Dana Priest and Anne Hull did on Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] … they’d spent months [there] without telling any officials running the hospital or seeking their permission. So they kind of embedded themselves. And in their articles, they wrote that this is a hidden universe. I think one of the standards is to try to find what’s hidden, and there’s always a great deal, and try to explain it. That’s what they did so well in those articles.

Q. That’s really interesting, especially because of the comments you did make about Edward Snowden and how you would have approached the story. You said that he shouldn’t necessarily have been named — you would have approached him as a protected source. In finding hidden universes and exposing these areas in your journalism, how do you approach questions like the protected source, particularly in today’s media environment?

A. I think it’s essential to protect sources, and obviously if people can be on the record, that’s much better, but involving many of these sensitive cases, they can’t. In the case of Snowden, he’s chosen to be on the record.

There are lots of people who have made the point that he, in being on the record and having these documents and kind of playing publications against each other, has been in control, and I think it’s better if the reporter can be in control.

Q. How do you think that reporters and publications can maintain control today,

given that sources obviously have so many more outlets of their own to shape the narrative?

A. That’s the world we live in. Ideally, you want to be able to weigh it against other information, put it in context, explain it — I think a lot of these stories occur that people are baffled by. People are baffled by what’s going on in Ukraine now. There’s pieces of information, people say things, there’s an analysis of “who is Putin?” A giant question, so people are working that out, running a story of great influence. I think lots of people are confused. The new owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, when he came to visit and talk to the staff, said one of the things he really liked in the Post has been the story “10 Reasons Why Syria Matters.”

He said that really helped him and he felt it helped readers. I think that’s true — I think it’s very difficult to sort out the meaning and the background on lots of things.

Q. What is your take on pieces like that?

We’re seeing these, “10 Reasons why Syria Matters” or the “Four Things You Should Know About Ukraine Today” becoming this popular format because people like to click on those things — it’s instant information.

As someone who’s done very immersive, source-dependent journalism, are you open to that?

A. Sure! I think it helps. In the long books and projects I do, hopefully I explain the context and what it means and why it matters, but in the daily newspaper, I think it’s incredibly useful, and you’re right, people click on it, people like it. One of my approaches is I think people take very seriously what they read and what they know … I think that the eventual survival of newspapers hinges on that, or of the news media whether it’s newspapers, online or print — that the implicit argument always is, “We’re going to tell you what you might want to know,” and I think people want to know what’s going on. The more of that can be done, the better, particularly when it has to do with hidden universes, going back to Nixon and the CIA and the Supreme Court and what goes on in the White House. Those are all hidden universes.

Q. So the task of the reporter is to bring that out.

A. The obligation is to bring that out … to do it in a fair-minded way but a very aggressive way.

Q. One thing that has concerned me and I think a lot of younger journalists is … I wonder if today you feel that people are as aggressive or as willing to be aggressive in their reporting, to go after sources who have more power and more of an ability to get their voice out there. Do you think that courage is still there among young journalContact AKBAR AHMED at akbar.ahmed@yale.edu .

ists?

A. Sure, but I think there’s not enough of it. I’ve, in my last book, “The Price of Politics,” criticized Republicans and Democrats but particularly President Obama, and there’s no more powerful figure around. I know from people I’ve talked to he doesn’t like it, he’s not happy with it, and I understand that but particularly when you look at the facts, there’s a leadership burden that he bears as President and CEO of the country.

At the same time, he’s dealing with a very difficult hand and the Republicans are difficult, to say the least … I think there is a lot of in-depth, aggressive reporting, but I’d like to see about twice or three times as much.

Q. You’ve alluded throughout our conversation to coverage of Ukraine. I was interested in how some media critics spoke about American reporting on Sochi—things like #SochiProblems. People were uploading these pictures of half-completed bathrooms and hotels that they thought were shabby.

How do narratives of journalists affect foreign affairs, and how much are the effects considered? Some Russia experts have turned around and said, you’re not helping, you’re only boosting the Russian people’s idea that others are xenophobic. I was wondering what you thought of that kind of reporting.

A. If the reporting was good and accurate … I look at it and I didn’t think it was at the center of what the Olympic games were about. Again, I think you have to go to 30,000 feet or 100,000 feet and we’ve got a new media … if there was a thimbleful of information forty years ago, now it fills the universe to a certain extent. And as a kind of committed believer in the First Amendment, people should say what they want and report on what they want and I don’t object to that at all. The former editor of the Post, Ben Bradlee, used to have this saying: “the truth emerges.” I think that’s exactly right.

People put things out there, they write stories about bad hotel rooms and toilets that don’t work and so forth … that may be true, but to expand on what Bradlee said, the context and meaning emerges also over time.

Q. How does the Yale of today compare to the one you remember as a student?

A. Listen, it is really a pleasure to come back there. My 50th reunion is next year. The change is phenomenal and, quite frankly, I think it’s a much better place than it was 50 years ago, with the admission of women, much more diversity, much more …Yale now represents the whole world. Fifty years ago, it was a very small segment of the world.

BOB WOODWARD ’65: UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN UNIVERSES

WEEKEND INVESTIGATES

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

// BOB WOODWARD

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