WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014

Bridging the gap between students and the YCC

By David Whipple //Page 3

CURATION

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COMMONS

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CULTURE

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YUAG AND YCBA

THE UNTOLD STORY

FROM SWIFT TO LINKLATER

Our reporters break down two exhibits on faraway lands.

Hannah Schwarz reveals food fights, dress codes, slum and more.

We turn a critical eye toward the summer’s best pop fare.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND

WEEKEND VIEWS

IN THE MARGINS

// ANNE

gins world. On the weekend, you have time. Dig into larger issues — what is the deal with the YCC? Wander off with some humor. Meditate on a couple of Views. Take the time in this brief partition to do something different before the week begins.

In the other, we tell you the weekend never ends.

For us, your editors, WEEKEND will end. We have one month left in our positions. After then, who knows what lies ahead — Elaina will probably recruit a band of sailor scouts to save the universe, Yanan’s hoping to befriend a neighborhood cat, Jackson will refocus on his novelty honey jar collection.

But WEEKEND never ends.

New editors will take our place.

Like each new iteration of Olympic athletes, they’ll be smarter, bet-

ter, faster and stronger. And they join a line that stretches back to our founding as an extension of the arts section in the 1970s, through names as diverse as “After Hours,” “Theater Hours,” and “scene.” (Let’s not forget the short-lived, but muchlauded “scened.”)

In 2010, the Arts & Living Section was retitled WEEKEND. We prefer the all-caps stylization. We love the renewed focus on in-depth reporting. We’re proud of our own innovations in formatting and structure. In the last year, we’ve covered more than art, from mental health and University Properties, to local elections and the complexities of LGBTQ life at an Ivy that emphasizes only one of those letters.

There are other numbers in our lives. We three have four issues of WEEKEND left to edit.

Labor and Loss at Sea // BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

Fishermen here carry knives in their jackets so if they’re swept from their boats, pulled underwater by a tangle of ropes a mile from shore, they can cut themselves loose. This precaution is for naught if they’re knocked unconscious in a collision with something — a buoy, a lobster trap, their boat.

That’s what they say might have happened to Jeremy, who died on a Wednesday in midAugust, found lifeless by another lobsterman out among the multicolored buoys that indicate troves of crustaceans deep under water.

It was my neighbor who found the body, but I don’t hear that from him.

A different topic drives our conversations: the Maine Lobsterman’s Union, a fledgling local organized by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Before the news of Jeremy’s death, it’s the political and social dimensions of the organizing drive that interest me. I wonder about new, oceanic frontiers of the labor movement.

What can a union do for a fisherman at sea, with no employer in sight, only the punishing winds?

My neighbor’s musings are about his checkbook. Are the dues worth it? Can a coalition protect his trade?

He’s ventured a yes in response to those questions. He tells me this August he’s joined the local — one of several hundred members. The union will swell in membership if it proves itself by lobbying in Augusta, he says.

Lobstermen want the state to scrap a requirement that fishermen use whale-safe rope in their hauling operations. This rope frays and snaps. It also rips up their hands, my neighbor tells me.

A dozen days later, suddenly no one’s talking about frayed rope or endangered whales.

In hushed voices, they’re talking about Jeremy’s four children. Or is it three? I hear conflicting reports. I learn that one of his children is having her first birthday next week. At dinner a woman serving me soup says she’s going to Jeremy’s house the following day to run the dishwasher, sweep the floors and blow up birthday balloons.

“There’s a pall over the whole island,” a friend of my parents says. A cloth spread over a coffin, hearse, or tomb. *** The island of Vinalhaven lies in the Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine, a tiny point in the Atlantic separated from the mainland by a 15-mile stretch of ocean. A hulking white ferry boat takes people and their cars across in an hour and 15 minutes. The Camden hills scarcely recede in the ferry’s wake before the pine trees lining Vinalhaven emerge at the bow.

Closer to the harbor, the smell of gas is thick, emanating from the dock, where lobster boats idle, their 800-horsepower engines

FRESHMAN YEAR (NEVER AGAIN)

humming.

Stunning physical beauty is the backdrop for a rough-hewn fishing culture that evolved as lobstering replaced quarrying as the centerpiece of the island’s economy. Fifteenhundred people live through summer and winter on the island. In warmer months, the population doubles.

Some families have lived so long on Vinalhaven that the ocean inlets and winding lanes bear their names. Volunteerism isn’t a cliché.

The weekly newsletter, “The Wind,” reminds people to put aside money for the sick and spare time to clear paths in the nature preserve. Every week people cook for the bean supper and sort recyclables for Elder Care.

Residents are co-workers in the civic labor of the island. *** The day I leave the island, one of Jeremy’s high-school classmates is also aboard the ferry, traveling to the mainland to see his friend’s body. His father is with him, too, because the path to a friend’s coffin is best not trod alone.

This image reminds me of a poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” by Walt Whitman. In the summer of 1865, amid national grief over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Whitman wrote of death, and its disparate effect on the dead and the living.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought, They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not, The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d, And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

In life that’s communal, it’s the survivor who suffers. Grief besets the wife and children, the high-school classmates and those he knew at sea.

I learn only later that Jeremy, like my neighbor, was a member of Local 207, the island’s lobster union. He wanted to tie his fortunes to those of his neighbors. He thought he was stronger with others, and joined in the struggle against the whale-safe rope.

The union is accepting donations to assist the family. Please make checks payable to the family fund.

Contact ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER at isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu .

FALLONE

STANLEY-BECKER

In the WEEKEND lounge, we have many favorite phrases — “bless,” “dear reporter, send us your story now,” “fastest fingers first,” “we made deadline,” — but none are more close to our hearts than our two seemingly contradictory mottos, “You live five days for two” and “Every day is WEEKEND.” In one motto, we acknowledge that the weekend is a finite measure of time, two days that lie on either side of the calendar week like the empty margins of a coloring book, where you can draw what ever you imagine. It’s freedom defined by the absence of constraint. This Friday, the one you’re reading this paper, leads you out of shopping period and into a brief, beautiful, blank space.

What you find in these pages is meant to exist in the off-the-mar-

INBACH LISA LE

And then there are the four years of college.

Like a weekend, college exists in a time frame that you can extend or compress, but both inevitably end.

What are you to make of your freedom in the time in between? Despite our helpful tips in this issue’s Ticker, we don’t publish the answer — that’s not our job. We just publish the questions we want answered and the stories we want to hear.

Of course, when you tell any story, you have to choose a beginning and an ending. This past year we’ve counted words and column inches, set deadlines and called the Yale minibus at 4 a.m. Here, at the start of the school year, we approach the end of our editorship.

But the stories — the tales of tour groups, Toad’s, tripping — are still to come.

Lives: Lost and Found in the Stacks // BY EMMA FALLONE This summer, I spent most of my time reading documents that were meant to be private. As an intern at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, helping to curate an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, my job was to comb through the Archives’ vast collection of artists’ diaries and seek out interesting passages to put on display.

I made many small, exciting discoveries: a postcard sent by John Lennon to Andy Warhol, a worn notebook kept by a newspaper correspondent during the Civil War, a delicate handful of wildflowers pressed between the pages of a young girl’s diary. But sometimes the most intriguing finds are not the physical objects themselves, rather the information their owners recorded within their pages, never expecting that their writings would become public.

I found one such passage in the diary of the little-known American Impressionist, Alson Skinner Clark. His notebooks during his twenties were fairly unremarkable — until Oct. 1, 1898, when halfway down the page, Clark’s handwriting condensed into a small, almost furtive scrawl. Even after the meaning of the words became clear, their significance remained a much larger mystery.

“In the afternoon I dressed in girls clothes [sic], corsets under clothes etc. Put in earrings and Mela did my hair. She made me a nice waist with lace sleeves. Wanted to wear Mrs. O’s earrings but didn’t. Roved over to the Jacksons with George. It was wonderful … I was in entirely girls clothes [sic] for four hours and felt very much like a girl.”

I spent the rest of the week reading through Clark’s diaries, enthralled. His writings in the years to follow continued in the same, farmore-traditional vein as before. Clark kept painting, married Atta Medora McMullin in 1902, and served in World War I as a naval aviation photographer. Inexplicably, it was during this period that I came across another unusual entry.

On March 24, 1918, Clark was stationed in Paris. Located near the bottom of a page was another beguiling passage, again written in a smaller, cramped script.

“Stayed in all day and went up to see Mme a la Petite in womens clothes [sic]. Looked very pretty, earrings, bracelets, etc … I enjoyed being some one else all day [sic], getting my lunch and later changing my dress and calling on a la Petite with Ford. She was quite surprised to see me … This has been a day I will long remember.”

Alson Skinner Clark’s diaries end soon after — the last year in which he kept a consistent record was 1919. As I carefully closed the pages of his final notebook, my mind was

HOLIDAY DINNER

Contact EMMA FALLONE at emma.fallone@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ADVISES:

December // When hunger strikes See your classmates acting like ba-barbarian, ba-ba, barbarians.

already buzzing with curiosity.

Assuming that Clark did indeed write these entries himself, the question arises: what would it signify if Clark chose to dress in female clothing during those two occasions?

There may well be no easy answer. In any issue regarding the sexual orientation or gender identity of an individual, particularly one who is no longer living and therefore unable to speak for himself, we must be very careful about assigning absolute labels. Human sexuality is incredibly complex and is often impossible to completely define. Nonetheless these sorts of discoveries still have great value, as further study and careful consideration may lead scholars to gain a better understanding of Clark’s life, and possibly even offer insight into his art.

As the summer drew to a close, I found myself packing up Alson Skinner Clark’s journals and carefully returning them to their shelf, without having made any definite conclusions about his life. Yet somehow, I still felt a sense of peace.

In the end, we may never know the full story behind Alson Skinner Clark’s mysterious diary entries — and, as I have come to realize, that’s just fine. While archives can be an excellent resource for the study of American art and history, they do not hold all the answers to the questions that we may ask today. Sometimes, a postscript in a letter or a sentence in a diary can provide exactly the piece of evidence that a scholar was searching for — but at other times a browse through the collections can leave a researcher with more questions than answers. While it may seem counterintuitive, this mysterious nature is actually the true value of an archive.

Individuals’ lives are vast and multifaceted, and even the most detailed records can only capture a small slice of any person’s complex character and personality. In some ways, the understanding of this fact is the archives’ greatest gift. The history of our country is filled with thousands of gifted people and artists, whose work both reflected and forever changed the course of human experience, but whose lives — just like all of ours — could never be fully contained and documented within a series of archival boxes. Yet in preserving the fragments of their existence that remain, we are fortunate to gain an intimate view into their worlds, with all the complexity and idiosyncrasy that made them extraordinary.

Letting your little light shine

One dim glow in a sea of valedictorians can go a long way toward a finance job.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

THE POLITICS OF YALE // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

ichael Herbert likes to imagine the Yale College Council (YCC) as a magnifying glass, or perhaps a laser.

“Think about light,” he says on a Monday morning over coffee. “You go outside, the sun shines on your face, but it’s very diffuse. Take out a magnifying glass, you focus the light a little bit more, and all of the sudden you can set the grass on fire. You magnify that light more, and you make a laser that can shoot down a plane.”

“When you use that metaphor, what it shows,” he continues, “is that when we focus, when we concentrate our efforts, we’re capable of doing a lot more.”

In April, Herbert was elected president of the YCC on the strength of what he calls a “unique” campaign: his promotional materials featured him posing with Batman, or staring into the distance alongside running mate Chris Moates ’16 while American flags fluttered in the background.

Herbert was elected president without any prior YCC affiliation. His candidacy was distinct as well in that Herbert is a conservative on a campus where 80 percent of students planned to vote for Barack Obama in 2012, according to a News survey from that year. He’s also a member of ROTC at a university where it was only recently reinstated.

Yet in one way, Herbert’s campaign was similar to those that preceded it: He promised to change a system that many saw as flawed, distant and ineffective. His campaign used a mix of humor, populism and opportunity to convince voters that he represented a new brand of YCC President, one who would engage the student body in a way he felt that previous leaders had not.

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But some, including Ben Ackerman ’16, former YCC Student Organizations director and candidate for president, are wary of whether an energetic and eye-catching campaign will translate to effective leadership.

“I think the election of an outsider may not necessarily be the best way to resolve the underlying discontent [with the YCC] that students have,” Ackerman says.

“Unless the outsider has some outstanding capabilities, I don’t know if he or she is going to be able to achieve more than an institutional candidate could.” *** As Yale’s student government, the YCC is the official avenue for students to influence University policy. Representatives are elected by residential college, and serve under the guidance of an executive board chosen in a campus-wide election every spring.

Avraham ’15, the Council’s new members began reforming internal operations as soon as their terms began.

Those changes were eventually put into writing by Joseph English ’17, then the Davenport representative. The new constitution was ratified by the Council and approved by the administration over the final weekend of January. Avraham sent a campus-wide email that hailed the document as a long-overdue fix to some of the YCC’s most fundamental problems —“a reputation of inaction, inefficiency and overall ineffectiveness.”

Through the new constitution, elections were reformed so that, rather than having representatives elected in the fall and officers in the spring, each member took office at the same time. The Council adopted an online platform, Trello, to log all YCC decisions and activity. And individuals, rather than commit-

“THE ELECTION OF AN OUTSIDER MAY NOT NECESSARILY BE THE BEST WAY TO RESOLVE THE UNDERLYING DISCONTENT [WITH THE YCC] THAT STUDENTS HAVE.” BEN ACKERMAN ’16 Despite the importance of its mission, the YCC has suffered from widespread student apathy, which Herbert would eventually latch onto in his campaign. This, according to several past and present YCC members interviewed, has at times trapped the YCC in a vicious cycle: students are apathetic because they don’t see results, but without student investment, results are hard to come by.

The YCC rewrote its constitution last year with the aim of avoiding such a trap. Led by then-President D a n n y

tees, would be held responsible for completing projects.

According to Andrew Grass ‘16, who has served as Communications Director and FCC chair, “the goal of it was to make YCC actually do its job and not spend so much time reinventing the wheel every year.”

But more than a restructuring, the new constitution was also a rebranding. Because the Council had come under fire for a lack of communication with the student body, Avraham’s board established the Student Referendum as a means of gauging student opinion on a

variety of issues. Furthermore, an official YCC production and design team began publicizing the YCC’s work with easy infographics, flashy layouts and a new logo.

“The rebranding was a way to say, ‘Hey, guys, something new is starting,’” Avraham explains.

Initially, it seemed to work. After an active fall semester that witnessed the referendum on divestment, progress on long-term initiatives like gender-neutral housing, and short-term accomplishments like the campus events calendar, the once-forlorn council seemed to be working its way back into the campus consciousness. And by spring, the YCC had become a staple of student conversation, but not in the way it had hoped. *** When Dean Mary Miller announced last year that she would be retiring, the search for a replacement began, and the administration weighed several options for involving students in the search.

When administrators eventually settled on including a student representative on the search committee for a new dean, they tasked the YCC with selecting that student. At a February 22 meeting, open to the student body, the YCC turned to the question of how: an application process, a campus-wide election or an internal vote?

In what YDN columnist Scott Stern ’15, who was in attendance, calls a “contentious” debate, the desire to involve students competed with the logistical problems of holding a fair election on one day’s notice, as the search committee was scheduled to meet on February 24. In the end, the latter won out, and the Council voted 12-9 to choose the student representative via an internal vote.

The next decision was easier. In a vote of 17-1 with 3 abstentions, the YCC voted for President Danny Avraham to be the student repre-

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WEEKEND ADVISES:

Commons // Night to morning The closest thing most of us will ever get to an orgy.

SEE YCC PAGE 8

Vote for

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sentative on the search committee.

But for the seven non-YCC members who attended the open meeting, the decision represented a blatant overreach of the Council’s powers.

“When we elected the YCC, we elected them to do a number of things,” says Stern, one of the nonmembers arguing against the decision. He was joined by Sterling Johnson ’16 and News columnists Diana Rosen ‘16 and Tyler Blackmon ‘16. “None of those things was to appoint a student representative to a committee to help choose the next dean.”

Even though Stern and Johnson felt the process was fair, they were nonetheless disappointed with the result, which they felt gave students no voice. And, according to Stern, others agreed.

“Judging from the response we got from students, on social media and elsewhere,” he says, “I think there were a lot of people who were like, ‘This is different, this is unusual. We care.’” *** Part of this frustration with the decision stems from the 2013 YCC elections.

That year, Avraham was the only candidate for President after his opponent dropped out shortly before the election. Kyle Tramonte ’15 was the only candidate for VicePresident, and Eli Rivkin ’15 the only candidate for events director. Only 953 ballots were cast in the presidential election—a contrast to the 2,618 and 2,704, respectively, in the two years prior.

While some saw the elections as evidence of widespread apathy, those affiliated with the YCC offer a different account. They say that when Avraham and Tramonte stepped up to fill voids left when board members took leaves of absence in the middle of the year,

Boycotting Durfee’s

Ain’t nobody got time for that $5 Chobani.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014· yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND GLOSSES

// BRIANNA LOO

“THE LYF SO SHORT, THE CRAFT SO LONGE TO LERNE” // BY JANE BALKOSKI Caveat: I am not an English major.

I am not an English major for many reasons, including a fear of large departments, a freaky obsession with Russia, and “The Victorian Novel,” a course I took last semester.

English 265: “The Victorian Novel” was lovely and informative. But I spent every lecture in hiding, at the back of the room, by an elderly gentleman auditing the class. I sat in the lecture hall’s shadowy recesses, and I was incapable of sitting anywhere else.

This was the problem — class felt like an alternate reality. The professor made perfect points; we took perfect notes. And even when she said, “this passage is tricky and complex,” I only ever drew a bullet point and wrote “tricky and complex.”

My recollection is flawed of course, a memory warped by confirmation bias and personal mythology, but still — I don’t remember grappling with the texts. I never unpacked the words “tricky” or “complex.”

As Margaret Shultz ’16 says,“In English classes, there are just these standardized reactions to texts. And I think there should be an antagonistic approach.”

I wanted one of us to nod or gasp or faint or even blink when our professor said something controversial.

And we never did.

That was my caveat. *** The English department casts a long shadow, looming large over the humanities at Yale. The faculty is star-studded and prize-winning. “Daily Themes” is a class every alumnus tells you to take. And the undergraduate major is undeniably popular — about 75 students graduate with a bachelor’s in English each year.

In other words, everyone has an opinion about the department, from the English majors themselves (some of whom call their peers a “flock of sheep”) to my parents (who like to ask “Why can’t you just major in English, Jane? It’s just a lot *realer* than Literature.”)

My parents might be right. The

SOPHOMORE YEAR (UGH)

English Department has strict, nononsense requirements — majors complete three courses in literature written before the nineteenth century, one in literature written before the twentieth century, and one in American literature.

And, of course, students must take the notorious English 125 and 126.

Titled “Major English Poets,” the two prerequisites cover eight authors, from Chaucer to Eliot, and should be completed by the end of sophomore year.

Ruthie Prillaman ’16, an English major, has found that these courses weed out less committed students.

Many take 125 and conclude they’re not cut out to keep going.

And Shultz, also an English major, said “125 and 126 do a terrible job of recognizing alternative narratives, especially regarding the total absence of women and people of color.” In other words, all eight of the major English poets are dead white men.

This, of course, can trouble or alienate students interested in more contemporary literature, literature that doesn’t quite fit into the American or British cannon.

While Professor Jessica Brantley, the major’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, acknowledged that these requirements have only “changed slightly in the direction of more student choice,” she also defended them. “The point of coming to Yale is to open your mind to new things, precisely those things that you would never have been reading unless someone asked you to.”

Most professors stand by this assertion — they’re quick to shield the requirements from attack.

According to English Professor Ruth Yeazell, “students think their interests are more present-oriented than they are.” They’re surprised to find courses in Middle English, for instance, “actually cool.”

For both Prillaman and fellow English major Ariel Katz ’15, Yeazell’s assertion certainly holds true.

The English requirements have been immensely rewarding, some of them

blessings in disguise. “Major English Poets,” for instance, traces a particular intellectual and historical narrative that can be eye-opening to students unaccustomed to such survey classes. Katz remembered English 126 as “a class that kind of convinced me [these authors] were worth studying.”

But still, many English majors find the department “stuffy” and a little arcane. Indeed, of the 32 full-time professors, over half are white. Many have been teaching the same classes for decades.

In talking about the department’s rigidity, Shultz was unflinching. “There’s a huge problem with old, stodgy lecturers,” she said.

She’d prefer “more seminars, with younger, more enthusiastic professors.”

interacting with any professors or any other English majors,” she said with a shrug. “It’s an impersonal major.”

To a certain extent, this perceived intellectual conformism accounts for the emergence of newer majors, ones like American Studies, Humanities and Literature. These majors are often smaller than English, facilitating relationships between professors and students, and enabling a more personalized course of study.

Jingnan Peng ’15, for instance, picked Literature for its flexibility.

“You can build something for yourself,” he said of his department.

And in Rampell’s experience, many students stray from the English Department while looking for a more open-ended academic experience. He has noticed that students

IT’S AN IMPERSONAL MAJOR. Yeazell, for one, acknowledged that variations in age are unfortunately slight. “Too many of us are older,” she admitted. “A lot of us are in the same generational cohort.”

This lack of diversity may be a consequence of the University’s tenure policy. At Yale (unlike some other research universities), faculty members must publish two books before they receive tenure. According to Palmer Rampell GRD ’17, a fourthyear graduate student in the English Department, “it’s harder for [the department] to retain talented young scholars of color” because of these regulations. Such scholars are in high demand at most universities, many of which can offer them tenure sooner than Yale can.

But Yeazell maintained that the homogeneity is temporary — many professors will be retiring in the next decade. She hopes this will encourage a new diversity of thought and opinion in the department.

To Prillaman too, the major allows for a certain academic laxity. “You could just float by without ever

sometimes prefer American Studies to English because it has fewer requirements.

But these majors cover completely different material, Brantley noted, and therefore should not be seen as competitors. *** In my flawed recollections, memories warped by confirmation bias and personal mythology, the students in “The Victorian Novel” were clean, stylish and happy. Most had shiny hair and clear skin. The boys wore boat shoes. The girls wore makeup to look as though they weren’t wearing makeup. They seemed a homogeneous bunch, all either well-adjusted or damn good at looking well-adjusted. They took perfect notes, on Macs or in Moleskines, and I watched in awe as many transcribed the lecture verbatim, even pesky repetitions and quotations. I have no idea how these students felt or how they conceptualized literature. They might have harbored hidden doubts about readings and interpretations. But they

NOTHING SPECIAL

Contact JANE BALKOSKI at jane.balkoski@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ADVISES:

Most days // Most times Two is the loneliest number.

operated so smoothly in that lecture hall, they looked so serene and attentive, that I couldn’t sit near them.

Still, some professors are unfazed by complaints of rigidity or homogeneity (even those less petty than my initial ones). They’re not bothered by a possible overrepresentation of white males in the reading. According to Professor Brantley, the department’s requirements are already “designed to guide majors towards as full and diverse an experience of Anglophone literature as is possible.”

While some professors of English 126 do eschew Eliot in favor of non-white or non-male poets, substantive curriculum reforms are not forthcoming. The department does not appear perched to add requirements or tweak the status quo.

Rampell, however, favors reform and cites a handful of professors also championing academic amendments within the department. He knows the matter is contentious. No one is quite sure how to define or delimit the English Major, he says. While this ambiguity might confuse and frustrate students, it’s ultimately essential to the major.

“It’s important to expose students to different ideas of what an English degree is supposed to do,” he said.

I suddenly felt guilty, hearing that. I thought back to “The Victorian Novel,” the boat shoes and shiny bags, the Moleskines and Macbooks. Didn’t I know that only a self-selected bunch would take a class on “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”? Why had I extrapolated so wildly?

I thought — I’m an idiot. Of course a few students aren’t metonyms for a department. Those kids and I just have different ideas. We have different ideas of what an English class should do.

After all, when I interviewed Ruth Yeazell, she said “one doesn’t go to literature to look in the mirror.” One doesn’t go to class for that either.

Getting a haircut

An asymmetric bob being a tried and true way of avoiding the slump.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

THROUGH ART, SOUTH AFRICA SPEAKS // BY THERESA STEINMEYER “I just want to give you what really happens,” says the projected video of Griffiths Sokuyeka, an older black South African man with a skinny face and a lone front tooth. He’s giving a personal tour of the 1820 Settlers’ National Monument, which honors the contributions of English settlers to South Africa. Sokuyeka shares his struggle to find education and work in the midst of South Africa’s political tensions — on one side of the room, that is.

On an opposite screen, he’s giving a separate tour, this time to a public audience — he reviews key dates, points out commissioned murals and speaks of the “common motherland.”

A second man gives his personal and public tours of the Grahamstown Observatory Museum on a separate set of two screens.

I check the description of the piece, a little lost in the conflicting and overlapping voices.

“Four-channel color projection with sound on 4 HD video projectors and 4 Perspex screens, 18 min., 30 secs.” I let the videos play through again and give the four voices of the two guides another chance to reverberate around me, some of the stories collected, some impassioned — a tortured soundscape that speaks too much, but also perhaps not enough.

Mikhael Subotzky’s “Moses and Griffiths” is one of several

experimental pieces featured at the Yale University Art Gallery’s “Contemporary Art/South Africa” exhibit, open until Sept.

14. Organized by past and current Yale undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates, the display coincides with the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s election. Combining some of Yale’s existing collection with borrowed pieces, it doesn’t pretend to give an overview of contemporary South African artwork. Instead, it offers a crisp and thoughtful representation of three conflicted relationships in South Africa’s recent history: art and politics, personal life and social issues, place and identity.

THESE YELLOWED DOCUMENTS CONFRONT THE VIEWER WITH THE TURMOIL OF APARTHEID. These themes are briefly but sufficiently introduced at the beginning of the exhibit, and then the visitor is left to wander through the two-story display.

Since multiple issues are often explored in individual pieces,

this organization succeeds. But beyond the tensions identified in the exhibit, this collection is really a story of communication: Through contemporary artwork, South Africa can begin to share the stifled trauma of its past and push forward into an optimistic future.

Barely-muted frustration frequently manifests itself in the exhibit, as in Robin Rhode’s short video “Piano Chair.” The animation presents a man who hammers, burns and hangs a piano.

Along another wall, Sue Williamson’s “For Thirty Years next to His Heart” is an arrangement of 49 frames containing photos of passbook pages meant to give proof of employment — some stamped, some bare — which black South Africans were required to carry at all times. These yellowed documents, stretching from floor to ceiling, confront the viewer with the turmoil of apartheid.

But buried within this tension is an unexpected hopefulness, as in Gary Schneider’s “HandPrint Portraits,” one of the exhibit’s most innovative works. Schneider captured the sweat and heat from South African artists’ hands on film over 10-minute exposure periods. At a glance, the images look like X-rays, and you expect to be able to see straight through to the bone. Instead, in the chilly, metallic image, you find conveyed the warmth of the artist’s touch,

// SANTIAGO SANCHEZ

Contemplating the multiple layers of South Africa.

a desperate drive to create something beautiful. It is this sort of paradoxical emotional complexity that makes “Contemporary Art/South Africa” a difficult but successfully compelling display.

As he finishes his personal tour of the Settlers’ Monument, Griffiths recounts that following a fire at his foundation’s building, his employer unjustifiably brought him to the police station.

Now, he says, the building has sprinklers installed. Gesturing at his audience with clasped hands, he says that this kind of treatment has made him “aggressive.”

Still, Griffiths is hopeful for the future. “I love this place,” he says, adding that the employer still owes him an apology.

There’s not enough here to glean a sweeping sense of this artistic tradition — but in setting out to say just a little, this exhibit says plenty through its complicated, thoughtfully displayed emotional tensions. Just a few pieces are enough to leave visitors thinking about what has been in South Africa, and what could be.

Contact THERESA STEINMEYER at theresa.steinmeyer@yale.edu .

The British Isles in Black and White // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

// JENNIFER LU

SOPHOMORE YEAR (MAKE IT STOP)

In my mind, the images of the British Isles in the ’60s are musical.

I envision rock and roll bands with color-coordinated suits, meticulously messy hair and electric guitars descending on London and transforming Western culture. I imagine the Rolling Stones playing at Hyde Park to the youthful masses, and The Who stuttering their way through generational anthems. I do not imagine the barren landscapes of northwestern Ireland or thousands of middle-aged, middle-class families vacationing on the English Channel.

The Yale Center for British Art’s new exhibition “Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland,” then, came as something of a revelation.

The exhibition combines the black-and-white photographs, produced by hand in darkrooms, of the two American photographers, both of whom worked throughout the British Isles in the 1960s. Caponigro’s landscapes, taken with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship, focus on the megalithic monuments and cairns that dot the hills of Ulster and Connaught; Davidson, sponsored by The Queen magazine, instead turned his camera on the un-glamorous aspects of middle-class and working-class life. Moving from Caponigro’s works to Davidson’s is to move from the unknowable mysticism of the ancients and the early Christians to stark portraits of mass culture in the waning days of traditionalism, before the great Sixties cultural revolution.

Caponigro’s photographs, essentially, are of stones. Only in a few do humans appear. These stones come as cairns, as churches, as megaliths and tombs. The two photographs of Kilclooney Dolmen in County Donegal on the far northwestern fringes of Ireland are his most effective. Some

of its compelling nature derives from the oddity of the subject — one massive moss-covered stone balances horizontally on top of four others. The near- s i l houette against the ubiquitous grey sky makes the points of contact seem unfathomably small. Nothing but desolate hillside and windswept grass surround the dolmen. One cannot help but marvel at the ingenuity of the ancient tribes. That is the effect of most of Caponigro’s photographs — sheer astonishment that peoples so primitive in building techniques constructed monuments that have lasted for five millennia.

Davidson’s works are especially brutal in their undisguised realism.

This is Britain — unromantic, bleak and often depressing. From that realism derives the effectiveness of the Davidson half. I find Caponigro’s photographs more beautiful, but I spent far longer with Davidson’s dozen photographs of South Wales coal mining communities. In one, a soot-faced miner stands in the Spartan doorway of his house holding his infant child. In another, a group of five men, their filthy clothes ripped and torn, walk along a dirt path, their mine visible far behind them.

In a third — this the most memorable photograph — a miner stands on a treeless hillside, his arms crossed defiantly over his white shirt. Two others, their forms dark and indistinct against the grey sky, stand by a cart in the background. With them are two horses. These are the most poignant photographs in the exhibit; hanging over each of them is the heavy, inescapable burden of history. Partly, this derives from my own knowledge — that Brighton and Blackpool are no longer quite so popular, that the South Wales coal mines

BREAK UP WITH YOUR COLLEGE

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ADVISES:

On a swing or beside the lipstick sculpture, depending // After dark Dry your tears with the handkerchief they gave you during Freshman Dinner.

a l l s h u t te re d under Thatcher. It’s like staring straight into the eyes of something about to end after a thousand years and seeing it stare right back. The effect is profoundly haunting and the photographs return far more easily to my mind than does the remainder of Davidson’s half of the exhibit, much of which I found forgettable.

In the end “Two American Photographers” forces us to consider uncomfortable, penetrating questions. Caponigro’s collection presents the monuments of a far-bygone age: These monuments, pagan and Christian alike, essentially consist of no more than stacked stones, yet have lasted for millennia in harsh, unforgiving terrains. Still we have little idea of what exactly all those stones mean, and Caponigro’s portrayal makes them seem even more unknowable. Davidson, meanwhile, presents modern life, but a sense of twilight permeates throughout his work. We are left with a lingering question, conveyed through the sullen eyes of the coal miners and their children: What will remain?

Caponigro has shown us what the ancient Irish left behind, but what will remain from our era? It is an uncomfortable question, and Davidson offers little help in answering it — after all, his photographs show the sort of pre-1960s mass culture that has largely failed to survive even the last 50 years. Permanence and ephemerality coexist in this moving exhibit, and the thought that nearly all of what we have built will one day vanish is indeed a frightening one.

Pickled Things

Sour and a little damp, much like sophomore year.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND AWKWARDNESS

There are many things for which we must brace ourselves when returning to Yale in the fall. There’s the anxiety that comes with seeingliterallyeveryoneyouknow at once in your first trek across Old Campus. There’s the horrifying realization that eating salt-and-vinegar chips while crashing the Netflix server is no longer socially acceptable. And of course, the mythic, the immortal, the perennial question: “How was your summer?”

Flarf Poem in Response to “How was your summer?”

“How was Your Summer?”: A critical discourse

// BY MARGARET SHULTZ

// BY DAVID WHIPPLE “How was your summer?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“Well, that’s just such an ambiguous statement.”

“Not really, dude…”

“No, think about it. Like, what does “summer” even mean? Are you just referring to the months of May through August? Because that’s winter in the southern hemisphere.

So if that is what you mean — and I’m not saying that it is — then I think you’re really taking a global-north perspective when you ask that question. What if I had spent those months in Australia,

The whole thing is a travesty, really. WEEKEND doesn’t really care about your summer (no offense). And you don’t care about ours. So why do we ask? Are Yalies all secretly masochists at heart? (Actually pls don’t answer that.) Whatever the reason, we continue to sail blindly across the murky waters of this conversational tradition. For this week’s Doubletruck, we’ve come to tell you what “How was your summer?” — and our answers to it — truly mean.

where it was winter, and then you asked me about my summer? Wouldn’t you really be asking me about your summer?”

“Um… I dunno, I hadn’t really thought about it that much…”

“Well that’s pretty clear.

I think if you had, you would have realized how problematic some parts of that question can be. How can you even say it was my summer? That’s like saying that just because we go to Yale, we’re entitled to have entire seasons to ourselves. Like, “Oh, my daddy is in the House, so we get March all to ourselves. But if he gets appointed to Ways and Means

then we might be able to get October.” How elitist is that?

So I think what you meant to say is, ‘How were our months of May through August?’

That’s a very different and, I think, more democratic question.”

“OK, fine. How were —” “Not that that’s a perfect phrasing, of course. One could argue that it puts a lot of disparate phenomena into a typology that might not very carefully constructed. Like, the months of May through August were different for everyone who experienced them. First of all, they started at different times depending on where you live in rela-

tion to the international date line. Like, if you live in China, May begins a full twenty-four hours before it does in Sitka, Alaska. The same is true when August ends. Like I said before, you have to be careful not to act like the Western perspective is the only one. But if you’re willing to do that, then I think we’re ready to have this discussion. Ask me again.”

“Jesus Christ, dude. OK. How were our months of May through August?”

“Pretty chill, I had an internship with Goldman.”

ing. My summer was stimulating. My summer engaged myself.

summer was in New Haven.

My summer existed only in my mind.

My summer was OK or boring and also too hot, you know?

My summer took itself for long walks on the beach, oh my summer swam by my side at sunset.

If only I could go back to Paris.

If only I could go back to my summer.

My summer was cool. My summer was on fire. My summer was spent putting out forest fires in Brazil.

My summer experienced things it had never experienced before, you know? My summer knows.

My summer was kind of bor-

My summer was at home. My

My summer was oh my god so good so so good.

My summer was great. My summer was fine.

If only my summer could lie in the dirt on Cross Campus and cover its head with its arms and cry and cry and cry.

Contact MARGARET SHULTZ at margaret.shultz@yale.edu .

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

BACK TO SCHOOL ACQUAINTANCESHIP: A TRANSLATION // BY CAROLINE HART

Student A: How was your summer?

Student B: I thought it was really impressive, actually — totally worth putting on my résumé.

But I’m going to briefly summarize it now in a casual, low-key way!

Student A: No way! I actually didn’t do anything, but have been feeling a lot of pressure to make it sound like I left the couch at my parents’ house! So, in good fun, I prepared a one-totwo sentence spiel that I recite whenever someone asks me this exact question!

Student B: Haha, well here we go with mine! For the first month and a half, I was in Naypyidaw interning for the Burmese water conservation committee.

Student A: No way! Totally love that place based on how it looked in your Facebook pictures.

Student B: Yeah, it was the chillest place of all time! What were you up to?

Student A: Well, I worked at a local web start-up. Actually, it was more of a blog that I ran from home. Actually, I kept a really active Pinterest board.

Student B: Wow, I had no idea that you were into web design! I, too, enjoy technology, and in the second half of the summer, my friend and I created an app just for kicks! It’s called Churrobutton, and with just a few clicks, a fresh pastry is delivered to your exact location within minutes!

Student A: Now that’s my kind of fun! That’s what summer is all about — just hanging out and stuff!

Student B: Yeah, for sure. So same page. We have so much in common, and definitely, definitely need to get a meal sometime.

Contact CAROLINE HART at caroline.hart@yale.edu .

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

JUNIOR YEAR (WORK B*TCH)

TURNING 21

WEEKEND ADVISES:

Somewhere near BOX // hopefully you remember when Welcome to the part of your life where you hope you *are* carded.

Sleeping, occasionally

It’s literally the only way to survive junior year.

JUNIOR YEAR ( I N T E RV I EW SEASON)

CONSULTING INTERVIEWS

WEEKEND ADVISES:

The Study // seemingly 24/7

It’s secretly not a big deal and just 4 loud kids in suits with free food.

Meeting your personal librarian They miss you.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

COMBATTING APATHY C C Y

Vote R for O F E T O V YCC

VO TE

F OR

C C Y YC YCC FROM PAGE 3

SENIOR YEAR ( V I C T O RY LAP)

of the vote.

The election became a referendum on the YCC’s relationship to Yale students, with rhetoric sometimes veering into personal attacks on Danny Avraham, the face of the YCC and—fairly or unfairly—the search committee decision.

But many affiliated with the YCC do not believe the search committee controversy had a significant impact on the elections or on candidates’ decisions to run. Avraham, Gonzalez and Grass all suggest that the urgency of issues like mental health reform and financial aid contributed to the open field and the resurgence of student interest. If anything, Avraham says, the controversy discouraged people from running.

“There were some people who were very interested in that issue,” Grass says, “but I think overall the real focus on the campaigns stemmed a lot from the fact that there were a lot of people running who had some different platforms and some different ideas.”

Herbert and Stern disagree. Stern believes that the search committee controversy played a “huge” role in shaping the themes of the election, and he points to the similarities between candidate statements as evidence — similarities that other theories about the election don’t explain.

“All four [candidates] ran on the same platform,” he says, “essentially an anti-Washington platform.

And Michael Herbert won — he was the least affiliated with the YCC. He was literally not a part of the YCC.”

E T O F V

Herbert was uniquely positioned to deliver such a message. He says his outsider status helped him reach out to communities like Greek life and athletics, who have traditionally had little to do with student government.

As to the search committee controversy, Herbert says, “I don’t think it hurt me.”

Johnson, for one, was impressed.

“I thought it was kind of cool,” he says “that in spite of all the people with a large amount of YCC experience, Michael Herbert just shows up saying ‘I’m here to be your friend as president’ and he wins.”

The tongue-in-cheek moments of Herbert’s campaign, like a campaign video composed of snippets of Disney movies, represented a calculated effort to appear uncalculating.

A perfect opposite to the image of the earnest, bureaucratic and insulated “student government enthusiast.” *** The campaign’s populist theme helped some more than others.

Ackerman thinks some saw him as exactly the kind of “institutional” candidate that Herbert stigmatized, and he concedes this may have hurt his campaign. But he thinks Herbert’s focus on engaging students might have come at the expense of substance.

“I thought Michael Herbert’s campaign was more limited in its appeal to the issues,” he says, pointing out that despite it being a key

O

they became natural candidates for the next round of elections.

“It was not anything to do with apathy,” says then-President John Gonzalez ’14. Avraham agrees, simply saying that “When someone decides to run, by virtue of the politics that are involved, a lot depends on who they’re running against.”

Stern believes that the nature of the 2013 elections further alienated the YCC from the student body.

Indeed, as students like Ben Healy ‘15 put it, “No one cares about the YCC. Only a few people are interested in it, and they aren’t representative of the school.” Carly Hafner ‘15 echoes that “YCC seems like a certain friend group, and composed of people who want to be seen as the big people on campus.”

Stern makes clear that he doesn’t blame the winners of those elections for running uncontested.

But had there been more contested races and more student interest, he says he would have been more comfortable with the YCC acting unilaterally on students’ behalf.

When the decision was made public, its reception wasn’t improved by the misinformation that spread throughout campus after the fact, says Zach Murn ’17, who was involved with the presidential campaign of Leah Motzkin ‘16.

The prevailing notion, says Maia Eliscovich ’16, the current Vice President of YCC, was that “Danny chose himself.” “It was an awkward turn of events,” she concludes.

This was nothing new; according to Gonzalez and others affiliated with the YCC, students’ lack of knowledge often allows uninformed and unfair images of the YCC to go unchallenged. No student interviewed was able to describe the Council’s decision-making process.

In reality, the President has no voting power, which is reserved for the representatives and the VicePresident in the case of a tie. Ultimately, Avraham didn’t have a vote in the YCC’s decision.

And according to Eliscovich, Avraham recused himself for most of the debate, but few people knew that at the time.

With students unaware of how the YCC actually worked, they were more ready to see the decision as a dictatorial one. In the end, the decision bolstered the perception of YCC as an empowered clique rather than a representative body. Many students interviewed said they view the YCC as distant and opaque, and some YCC members agreed that their friends felt removed from the Council’s actions.

“As long as I’ve been here,” says Johnson, “YCC has seemed to be less like a student government and more like a club that works with the Yale administration.” *** For Michael Herbert, this gap between students and the YCC was the perfect opening. And the wider, the better.

While Grass, Gonzalez and Avraham still hesitate to acknowledge student apathy as an important element in the 2013 elections, Herbert, in his campaign, underscored it as the most pervasive problem of all. (Today, however, Herbert allows that 2013 was in fact an unusual year for many reasons.)

In his April 11 YDN op-ed, Herbert wrote of the 2013 elections that, “student apathy was so profound that seven out of twelve colleges did not even have contested elections for the Council of Representatives.”

But Herbert wasn’t the only candidate running on a quasi-populist platform, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the candidates’ statements in the YDN. Herbert’s piece was titled “A new YCC for everyone.” Sara Miller’s ‘16 column, “It starts with us,” called for “transparent, democratic student government.” Motzkin, the runner-up to Herbert, titled her statement “Bringing YCC to you,” and lamented the fact that many students didn’t know who their YCC representatives were.

The only candidate with a significantly different platform—and the only candidate with Executive Board experience—was Ackerman, who wrote about the YCC’s need for executive power over University policy. Despite being the candidate with the most YCC experience, Ackerman finished fourth with 17%

C

“MICHAEL HERBERT JUST SHOWS UP SAYING ‘I’M HERE TO BE YOUR FRIEND AS PRESIDENT’ AND HE WINS.” STERLING JOHNSON ’15

That would never have happened, Stern thinks, had students not felt alienated from their supposed representatives.

Both Stern and Avraham credit Herbert with understanding students’ perceptions of the YCC. YCC members weren’t student leaders, Herbert said—they were “student government enthusiasts.” And

issue in his campaign, Herbert never offered a clear policy proposal regarding sexual assault.

But Ackerman says that this won’t undermine Herbert’s term.

Rather, he thinks that the biggest question facing the new president will be whether he maintains the enthusiasm he generated during the campaign, especially among groups

WRITING A THESIS

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

WEEKEND ADVISES:

The stacks // forever

There’s also talking about your thesis, which is not cool.

unfamiliar with the YCC. Ackerman says it’s been tried before.

Like so many YCC Presidents before him, however, Herbert believes that this time will be different. Among the innovations backing his claim is the Pulse addition to the Yale Mobile app, which Herbert says is ready for deployment “as soon as they need it.” Pulse will allow the YCC to poll students in real time.

Herbert is quick to point out that the app could have alleviated much of the controversy over the search committee.

He and Eliscovich also plan on having weekly dinners with leaders from various campus communities: the editors-in-chief of student publications, sports captains, college council presidents and other.

Herbert plans to hold office hours in a different residential college each week, something he says past YCC presidents haven’t done.

If he maintains the broad enthusiasm he generated during the campaign, Herbert could have formidable student backing when taking proposals on mental health reform, sexual assault and gender-neutral housing to the administration. He says that while mental health is up first, as a YCC report on the topic has already been completed, sexual assault was a key issue in his campaign and a personally important one.

Yet probably the biggest difference is the new constitution that Herbert will work under—a constitution drafted by the predecessors whose public image he exploited to win the presidency. Herbert does take pains to acknowledge his debts to the 2013-’14 YCC for drafting the new document, but he might owe them his office as well.

Ultimately, with a new president, a new constitution and maybe a new reputation, the YCC is poised to take on a more pronounced—and hopefully more positive—role in the day-to-day lives of Yale students.

Even Stern is cautiously optimistic.

“It’s going to be different,” he says, “which I think can only be good.”

Catching up with old friends

Your freshman screw date is in your senior seminar. Deal.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND COLUMNS

FOR GOD, FOR COUNTRY, AND FOR FAKE YALES “I think of all Harvard men as sissies,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise nearly 100 years ago, “and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

A lot has changed since then — Yale began admitting women, Commons stopped serving hot breakfast — but the popular conception of Yale has remained the same (think pretentious jocks who wear navy and say, “Bulldogs, bulldogs! Rah rah rah!”). Yalerelated television subplots are filled with the airs of silver spoon-having stars. Nowadays, real-world applicants to Yale have about a 6% chance of getting in. But the acceptance rate for the one nerd in every high school drama seems to hover around 100% (See: “Boy Meets World,” “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” “Beverley Hills 90210,” etc.). But not all fictional Yales are created equal. Below, a comprehensive investigation of some of television’s most memorable Bright College Years, from most to least realistic: “Gilmore Girls” Next time you’re in Commons for lunch, take a moment to look around the room. At least 40% of the people you see decided to come to Yale

MADELINE KAPLAN MAD TV because of Rory Gilmore. Rory, with her gift of the gab and high SAT scores, has all the attributes of the model Yalie. She’s brunette. She’s from Connecticut. She wears cute sweaters in autumn. Though the show was shot in California, the sets are near-perfect replicas of New Haven.

There’s something eerie about sitting in a Durfee Hall suite and watching Rory move into a room with the exact same layout and blue curtains. Sure, she takes an uber-dramatic leave of absence in season 5, but when she makes her triumphant return to New Haven and becomes co-editor of the YDN, it’s clear that Rory is embracing the Lux et Veritas way. Hundreds of undergrads agree: This is Rory’s Yale.

We’re all just living in it.

Related quote: “You’re in Yale, not Amsterdam. How you conduct yourself socially is as important as how you conduct yourself academically.”

Realism rating: 8 “The Simpsons” Depictions of Yale on “The Simpsons” are frequent and typically unflattering (what else would you expect from a show written by Harvard grads?). Most often, the show’s anti-Bulldog sentiment comes from its portrayal of Mr. Burns, Homer’s affected, slithery boss, as the consummate Yale man. He’s old (decrepit, really), and obsessed with wealth and status. He donates an international airport to the school to get the admissions office to overlook the fact that his applicant son “spelled Yale with a 6.” In a time-traveling episode, Future Lisa is about to attend Yale thanks to a scholarship from Mr. Burns. Bart steals the scholarship in order to impress a girl, resulting in anger from Lisa and plenty of jokes at Yale’s expense. Good central conflict, perhaps, though in real life it would have resulted in more long phone calls to Student Financial Services.

Related quote: “Even though McDonald’s owns Yale now, it’s still a great school.”

Realism rating: 5 “Gossip Girl” For Blair Waldorf, the backstab-

Summer Reading Roundup For so many Yalies — myself included — the summer is a time to catch up on that elusive dream of semesters past: reading for pleasure. This summer in book world was marred by the increasingly bitter and intractable feud between Amazon and the French publisher Hachette (over something to do with e-books), spurious charges of plagiarism levied against a respected historian (see below) and charges of manipulating a 100-year-old woman levied against a spurious journalist (also see below). Nonetheless, the summer saw some very good reads!

So, obviously, I figured there was no better time to discuss this summer’s best reads than after the summer, just as a new, time-devouring semester is about to begin. Most of these I have read; some I have yet to read. They are listed in alphabetical order. Enjoy!

1. “All the Light We Cannot See,”

by Anthony Doerr: “All the Light” tells the dual tale of Marie-Laure, a blind, brilliant Parisian girl, and Werner, a German orphan with hair so blonde the Nazis call it “snow.”

Across pages and pages of beautiful, lyrical prose, we see Marie-Laure and Werner attempt to live through World War II — she from the exploding French countryside, and he from the unforgiving barracks of an elite Nazi military camp. For years, the two protagonists’ paths seem as if they will never cross, but, of course, they do — in an ending as cathartic as it is tragic.

2. “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan,” by Rick Perlstein: This long-awaited third volume in Perlstein’s epic story of the rise of American conservatism does not disappoint. Though it is an unwieldy 880 pages and almost mind-blowingly comprehensive, critics have described it as “engrossing” and “ultimately irresistible” — perhaps much like Reagan himself. “The Invisible Bridge” doubles as a political biograph, that of a nation in malaise, and an actual biography, that of the strange B-list movie actor who rose unstoppably to national prominence. Though its release was marred by charges of plagiarism, it appears that these do not hold muster. Indeed, I hope it is not a stretch to assert that they illustrate that this history, only a few decades old, remains as hot and controversial as ever.

3. “The Last Magazine: A Novel,”

by Michael Hastings: This is the last work by the late, great Michael Hastings, a journalist so dynamic that you’ve probably seen his work, even if you’ve never read his stuff.

(Hastings, who passed away last year in moderately suspicious circumstances, wrote the profile that took down Stanley McChrystal and penned several important pieces on the war in Iraq.) “The Last Magazine” is the semi-autobiographical story of a young journalist named Michael M. Hastings, an

SENIOR YEAR (NOSTALGITTACK)

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES intern at The Magazine, who is ultimately alienated from nearly everyone he knows — his bosses included — because of his drive to cover the war in Iraq. (Sound familiar?) “The Last Magazine” is a story of the rise of a journalist and of the fall, some might say, of journalism itself.

4. “The Magician’s Land,” by Lev Grossman: The brilliant finale to Grossman’s “Magicians” trilogy, “The Magician’s Land” is magically delicious. Grossman, a former Yale doctoral candidate and a book critic for TIME Magazine, set out to write a sort of Harry PotterNarnia crossbreed for adults. It has become so much more. The “Magicians” trilogy tells the unforgettable tale of Quentin Coldwater, a boy who dreamed of going to Princeton but found his way to Brakebills (think Hogwarts) instead. This third installment has Quentin returning to Brakebills to teach — but, of course, he can’t stay there for long.

Adventures beckon, and it is up to Quentin to save one of magic’s greatest secrets. It sounds dumb, but I promise it’s not.

comes this surprisingly literary collection of short stories. As with most short story collections, “One More Thing” is difficult to describe except in the broadest terms possible: It is funny, warm, endearing and nearly un-put-downable.

7. “The Silkworm,” by Robert Galbraith: Let’s start with the awesome: Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. Yeah. Moving on to the book itself, we can remain within the realm of the awesome. “The Silkworm,” Galbraith’s second mystery starring the crotchety, tough, lovable Cormoran Strike, is as much a critique of the publishing industry Rowling knows so well as it is a breathless tale of murder and revenge.

8. “Stokely: A Life,” by Peniel Joseph: This long-awaited biography by an eminent civil rights historian finally does Stokely Carmichael justice. Carmichael, a Zelig-like figure of the Civil Rights movement, went to school in the Harlem of the 1940s and the Howard of the 1950s, took part in sit-ins and marches with Martin Luther King Jr., founded the original Black Panther Party and became the iconic forefather of the Black Power movement — all before he was 27. Then, at 27, he left for Africa and adopted the name Kwame Ture, preaching an anti-imperial, largely anti-capitalist pan-African gospel until his

THE BRILLIANT FINALE TO GROSSMAN’S “MAGICIANS” TRILOGY, “THE MAGICIAN’S LAND” IS MAGICALLY DELICIOUS.

5. “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee,” by Marja Mills: Ooh, this book is controversial. It is a sort of biography of Harper Lee, the author of the beloved “To Kill a Mockingbird” and a notorious recluse. Mills, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, traveled to Lee’s rural hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in an attempt to profile the author. Mills ended up moving in next door to Lee and Lee’s much older sister, Alice, whom she befriended. It was this friendship — as well as a release signed by the then-100-year-old Alice, that allowed Mills to write this entertaining, if relatively unsubstantial, biography. After its publication, Lee penned a bitter denunciation, claiming she had never, ever cooperated with Mills and that Mills had exploited her sister. Nevertheless, “The Mockingbird Next Door” received mildly positive reviews and sold well — all the better, probably, because of the controversy. Is it a touching, clever profile or a heartless hack job? You decide!

6. “One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories,” by B.J. Novak: From one of the writers of “The Office”

GRADUATION

No. Stop. // 2015 isn’t a year.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Nope. Nope.

death in 1998. “Stokely” is a vibrant story, not just of this extraordinary figure, but also of the movement he helped to create.

9. “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,”

by Gabrielle Zevin: This book is at once heartbreakingly sad and airily light, literary and ephemeral. It is undeniably sentimental, but it also kills off important characters with a sort of blasé shrug. “The Storied Life” tells the tale of a prematurely curmudgeonly bookseller whose life changes irreversibly when someone abandons a baby in his store.

10. “War of the Whales,” by Joshua Horwitz: This last book is a triumph of narrative journalism, the ultimate David versus Goliath story, in which several likeable Davids fight a massive Goliath on behalf of other, massive Goliaths. After a U.S. Navy submarine detection system blasts the ocean with sound waves, whales start beaching left and right. A distraught lawyer and disgusted marine biologist must team up to take on the might of the U.S. government in this epic legal and scientific thriller.

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

bing, headband-wearing queen of the Upper East Side, Yale is the ultimate status symbol. In one memorable episode, the whole gang of high school seniors journeys to New Haven, and stereotypical Ivy League shenanigans ensue. The resulting hour of drama is stuffed with the show’s same-old absurdity, this time done up in Yale Blue. While making an official campus visit, Blair has an inexplicably critical meeting with the dean of admissions, a Yale gentleman (in the Fitzgerald sense) named Dean Baraby. In the same episode, a prospective student is kidnapped by members of Skull and Bones. No one on the tour asks whether Yale will accept their 5 on AP Physics. Viewers don’t even have the satisfaction of recognizing the sight of the sun glinting off Harkness Tower or sweaty freshmen returning from Toad’s — the whole thing was filmed at Columbia. To be fair, nothing on “Gossip Girl” was ever all that realistic. But an admissions visit without the overbearing parents? Please.

Related quote: “Yale is mine!”

Realism rating: 1 Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

Things Organized Neatly Dear Rebecca, New year, new dorm room, and I’m facing a crisis. I have too much stuff, and not enough places to put it all. How can I organize my room in a way that gives my clothes (and me) some space to breathe?

Sincerely, Hoarder Harry Dear Hoarder, This is a classic question, and a situation that I face every year. How can you make the small square footage allocated to you work? Especially once it’s filled with the many suitcases of clothes and boxes of books that you convince yourself you absolutely need?

Living in a dorm is all about discreetly maximizing the space you have.

And it absolutely has to be done discreetly. Otherwise, you end up as a senior, in a tiny single where it seems that every square inch of space is filled with every possession you have gathered since your first Camp Yale. So, organize discreetly. Color-coordinating your closet is a great way to make it look neat. Don’t be lazy — put papers in file folders and organize small odds and ends in shoe boxes. Line up the things you use often at right angles and come up with ways to tuck away things you don’t need every day. When all else fails, buy plastic bins. Your Instagram following will thank you.

As you probably know from my column last year, I have moved off campus.

But even the spacious rooms of Harrison Court have not solved my problems. Off campus life requires a whole new category of things, and, like dorm rooms, most apartments do not come equipped with enough places to hide all these things.

Sure, my clothes are happy. I have two closets (one with amazing builtin shelves) … but my kitchen? That’s another story.

My roommate, Caroline, and I are the kind of girls who require three kinds of flour and four kinds of sugar in the pantry. We like rolled oats and steel cut oats, and of course, we need service for eight (including soup bowls and salad plates) for when we host Shabbat dinner. So, what did we do? Organize it all discreetly, of course.

One of the highlights of our organization is that Caroline stocked up on genius plastic bins over the summer.

You know, the kind you see filled with nuts and snacks on lifestyle blogs. They are the perfect places to keep all of our grains and baking supplies, and they stack away neatly under the island we bought from Ikea. (Shoutout to Caroline’s dad for building that island!)

Tricks like these secretly double the space in my apartment. Behind the foot rack in my closet and hidden by my hanging clothes are my suitcases. And under my bed? You don’t want to know.

But when you walk into our apartment (especially if I’ve remembered to put away the dishes from dinner the night before) all you see are cleared-

REBECCA LEVINSKY ASK REBECCA off surfaces and plenty of space for two romper-wearing girls to dance around.

Everything is in its place. You have to look a lot harder to see where all our stuff is hidden, and that’s the best part.

Bet you can’t find where I put it, Rebecca P.S. For more tips like this, follow @ theromperroom on Instagram.

Dear Rebecca, I spent all summer on a farm, waking up with the roosters and going to bed when the lambs came in for the night.

Now we’re back on campus and no one is around to hang out with me when I wake up with the first rays of sunshine, and I fall asleep so early. How can I adjust to the campus-life clock, when all I want to be doing is picking hay out of my hair?

Sincerely, Sleepy Senior Dear Sleepy Senior, I wish I could tell you that I have no idea what this problem is, but sadly, I also spent my summer on the weirdest internal clock. I think my clock was partially set by morning sunlight shining through the broken blinds in the apartment I was subletting. (Did you know that the sun rises at 5:30 a.m. in NYC?) My internal clock was also confused because my room had very thin walls and my bed was directly next to the TV, where my roommates watched “The Bachelorette” until the early hours of the morning.

Regardless of the reason your internal clock has set itself the way it has (be it NYC street noise or the cuckoo’s calling), getting back to Yale is hard.

It doesn’t help that shopping period requires you to pay attention in lectures and catch up with everyone you don’t care about and have met one time.

Really, the only advice I have is to man up and get back on your Yale Clock.

If you’re still waking up early, that’s great — go for a run, or whatever, before class … Just plan time for a nap in the mid-afternoon. Because if you think getting up with hours to spare before your 9:25 a.m. seminar means it is OK to be too tired for Toad’s, you’re wrong.

I expect to see you dancing to Journey when 1 a.m. on Wednesday rolls around.

Yours when the sun rises and the sun sets, Rebecca Have Contact more questions?

REBECCA LEVINSKY at rebecca.levinsky@yale.edu.

Email WKNDadvice@gmail.com or submit them anonymously on the Yale Daily News website.

WEEKEND ADVISES: Learning the words to “Bright College Years”

Something something time death college was great go Yale woo!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND REMINISCES

THE TRAGI-COMIC HISTORY OF COMMONS // BY HANNAH SCHWARZ

They say Hogwarts’s Great Hall, home to treacle tarts and pumpkin juice, was modeled after it. That’s not true — the honor belongs to the dining hall in the College of Christ Church at Oxford University — but it may as well be. High, cavernous ceilings; lights strung around the interior as if it is never not Christmas; long, dark auburn tables; and portraits of mythical (mostly) men who have had some affiliation with the school. Commons is the wizarding world come alive for a few hours a day; it’s the Harry Potter series of dining spaces — some patrons are diehards, others poo-poo the popularity, but everyone recognizes the cultural importance.

Now, it’s no longer serving you pancakes.

On July 9, Yale Dining announced in a statement to the News that starting this academic year, Commons will end its breakfast service. The change comes as the University tries to make whatever cuts it can to chip into and eventually eliminate its $39 million deficit. Ezra Stiles, Morse, Branford, Saybrook and Silliman will now each provide hot breakfasts — eggs, pancakes, etc. — filling Commons’s former early-morning role.

The change brings Commons down to serving one meal of its former three. When residential college renovations ended in 2011, Commons closed for dinner. In response to that announcement, students started a Save Commons Facebook group and a petition urging the administration to reconsider.

“It’s kind of fundamental to Commons to be this neutral gathering ground,” Sophia Sanchez ’13 told the News. “Not every meal you eat has to be encapsulated within a college.

We’re not just students of Davenport or Calhoun; we’re students of Yale College.”

But the dining hall remained closed for dinner.

Commons isn’t new to controversy. A dive into the Yale Daily News archives pulls up grievances small and large — food fights, management-student animosities, and gripes about cleanliness and the quality of food — each dispute fueled by a sense of collective ownership.

Commons was the first building to unite an otherwise then fragmented community, and since its founding in 1901, everyone has felt like a stakeholder.

But while students have formed their own social structures within, and attachments to, the shared space, for most of Commons’s history, the administration has had the final say. From 1901 to 1969, students were required to wear a jacket and tie for meals. Recent, sometimes temporary, closures — in 1991, 2011 and 2014 — have come down without student consultation and to various forms of dissent.

FROM BREAD TO BOURGES

“You may complain about braised beef and assorted cold meat, but the present fare in Freshman Commons is a far cry from the starvation rations

ALL FOUR YEARS (THE SHORTEST AND GLADDEST)

served there in times past. Early in the eighteenth century the staff of life lived up to its name in Commons, where bread and apples formed an almost unvarying menu.”

So reads a November 1938 Yale Daily News article headlined “Worms, Dirty Dishes, Graft, ‘Slum’ Have Caused ‘Food Wars’ in Commons” looking back on the history of the building, and the various shared eating spaces (dubbed “the commons”) that preceded it.

In the early 1700s, the piece reported, “slum” — “an incongruous mixture of leftover food from the day before, ‘fried to a consistency which baffled digestion’” — and a quarter pound of bread constituted breakfast. For lunch, students had to drink cider straight from shared pewter pitchers because their peers insisted on stealing cups en masse — on average, 600 per semester — from the dining hall (some things never change).

ver, Exeter and Choate, said Professor Jay Gitlin ’71, who teaches “Yale and America.” It was also that the Yale undergraduate population divided into two groups: the Academics (“ACs”), the equivalent of students graduating with a B.A. today, and the “Sheffs,” the equivalent of students aiming for a B.S. While the ACs spent their days on the south side of campus, the Sheffs largely remained in the SSS and Silliman region, home of the Sheffield Scientific School.

Gitlin said Commons was supposed to link these different spheres, “It served as a bridge where everybody could meet.”

But the new dining hall, built in at the same time as Woolsley Hall to form the Hewitt, or Bicentennial, Quadrangle, got off to a rocky start.

There was a spiffy new building, but students weren’t up to its standards.

On May 2, 1902, the News published an editorial referring to “the

“THERE IS TRUTH TO THE IDEA THAT CROSS-RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE FRIENDSHIPS CAN AND ARE FORMED AND DEVELOPED AT COMMONS.” PAAVAN GAMI ’15 A hundred years later, the situation wasn’t much better. All freshmen were required to eat in Commons, while upperclassmen dueled with the administration over whether they too had to eat there.

In 1819, the students staged a mass walk out, refusing to eat meals because, they said, “the steward had been drunk, the ham stank, the dishes were not washed clean, loose and mixed company was entertained in the kitchen, and the steward was involved in ‘graft,’ selling pies to outsiders.”

Though the faculty responded by “conducting an inquisition” and giving a “sharp shake-down” to the culinary staff, 10 years later, the problems had gotten worse. In 1828, students staged another walk out, also refusing to take the classes that were held in the shared space. This time, the faculty didn’t budge. A large number of students simply up and left school (the majority later returned under parental pressure). *** When the building we now think of as Commons, with a capital C, was built for the University’s bicentennial in 1901, students found options a lot more appealing than slum, but expectations that ran higher as well.

At the time, students lived in boarding houses scattered throughout New Haven. They slept there, ate there, and socialized there. Opting into group meals at the dining hall was one of the few ways to unite an otherwise fragmented social scene.

It wasn’t only that students lived in different houses, grouping with those they already knew from Ando-

disturbance at the University Dining Hall.” The piece never explicitly mentions what the disturbance is, but calls it a “continuance of a practice indulged in at the Old Commons … decidedly out of place in such a building as the new dining hall.”

Though the editorial never named the details of the event, the piece was followed by several explicit reports of food fights in the paper, and was probably the first of a years-long trend.

Then, in October of 1903, a “Mr. Tyler” sat down Commons’s regular boarders for a spiel about the dining hall’s student-management relationship, which, never great, had soured. Tyler was less interested in laying down the law than having a constructive discussion. At the root of less-than-stellar service was a tipping issue, he said. Some students were tipping, some were not; the latter were, unsurprisingly, less satisfied with the service than the ones who were quick to hand over cash.

Instead of individual tipping, students ought to pool their money for all the waiters at the end of every term, Tyler said.

Tyler’s democratic management model also extended to the food fights. Students would elect representative from each table, who would negotiate between dining hall management, school administrators and their peers. It seemed to work. A few days after, the News published an article announcing that, for the first time, a food fight perpetrator had been punished.

With the enforcement of order, came higher expectations of eti-

quette. There were waiters, assigned seats, pre-determined and uniform meals, and strictly enforced dining hours (you didn’t walk in and out whenever you pleased; failure to show up on time meant demerits).

This lasted for over half a century.

“Until my junior year [in 1969], there was a coat and tie rule,” professor Gitlin said. By that time, students were serving themselves buffet style, but they weren’t yet bussing their own dishes.

Still, the signs of post-war counter culture were starting to show.

Commons hosted a junior prom every year, and the big name bands during Gitlin’s time—the Byrds, Wilson Pickkett—played in the main hall, “much like Spring Fling.”

Meanwhile high society continued upstairs. A band played in the President’s suite on the second floor of Woolsley Hall, where “everyone would go and dance the Foxtrot or some old romantic dance.”

The affair lasted from Friday until Sunday night, when Commons switched back to a traditional dining hall that at least had the potential to unite everyone from across campus — though not in the way the administration might hope.

“Honestly, Commons was a place we all avoided,” Gitlin said. “Nobody liked it much. You couldn’t hear anyone. The acoustics are God-awful.”

AND BACK AGAIN

If there’s a Commons of old and a Commons of new, Gitlin’s years at Yale, from 1967–1971, were bifurcated by the two. The Commons of old served up staid dinners, punctuated by outbursts of immaturity, while the Commons of new became the home of those left out by that very society.

In 1969 Yale simultaneously admitted women and relaxed the formal dress code in the hall, paving a trajectory of increased inclusivity.

Meals were no longer a boys club, and they didn’t have to follow club rules.

So in 1991, when Yale Dining announced for the first time that Commons would no longer be serving dinner, the loss of a common space was acutely felt by certain groups.

“Minority and gay students often congregate in Commons,” the New York Times noted in its surprisingly detailed coverage of the event.

“Nikki Montgomery, ’92, explained why she enjoyed dinner at Commons, ‘It is one of the few times on a daily basis that you get a lot of black people sitting down together to really talk because there aren’t that many black students in any given residential college.’”

Commons only remained closed for seven years. In 1998, the administration, beginning its renovations of residential colleges, chose to restart dinner service to accommodate those students who were unable to eat in their own dining halls. But as before, Commons became a home to Yalies of every college.

In 2011, Commons ended dinner again. This time, the announce-

BUCKET LISTS

ment was over email, and the student reactions over social media. According to a News article published in May 2011, more than 800 students joined a “Save Commons Dinner” Facebook group, and more than 300 signed a petition by the next day asking Yale to reconsider.

As before, strong reactions came from those with affiliations that crossed college lines. A member of the fencing team noted that Commons was the only place that could fit his 15 teammates at once. And thenfreshman Paavan Gami ’15 appealed to a sense of larger community.

“There is truth to the idea that cross-residential college friendships can and are formed and developed at Commons,” Gami wrote the news.

“Dinner is the perfect time for freshmen to be integrated into the Yale community.”

But as much as collective dining influences student life, the administration makes decisions based on many more factors. In 1991, thendining hall director Alan R Kenney cited the need to cut the dining budget by more than $1 million in a letter to students. More recent news has a financial bent as well — University President Peter Salovey and Provost Benjamin Polak have asked departments across the University to cut what they can from their budgets to make up a $39 million deficit.

In a statement to the news in June, Director of Residential Dining Cathy Van Dyke cited “limited options for mitigating operation cost increases,” but in a recent email, she wrote that “the decision to close Commons for breakfast was not financially focused; rather the key driver was the opportunity to facilitate planning for its future renovation” and to make the “operational footprint” of the food service in the hall small enough for renovation to be feasible without impacting students’ food service.

But while Van Dyke also acknowledged that Commons is a “precious and important resource” for the Yale community, these changes have been made without student input.

Yale College Council President-elect Michael Herbert ’16 said he was not told about the decision to stop serving breakfast until the administration issued a press release.

Commons will remain open for lunch, now from 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m., and several residential colleges will offer hot breakfast in its place.

The shift is nowhere near as large as when the dress code was imposed, or when women got a seat at the table, but for those who liked the experience of pancakes in Hogwarts’s Great Hall, a little morning magic is gone.

For others, it simply won’t matter.

As Jay Gitlin said, perhaps capturing the experience of a large segment of Yale’s undergraduate population, “I never made it to breakfast.”

Contact HANNAH SCHWARZ at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu .

WEEKEND ADVISES:

Stacks? Roof of WLH? // ongoing Sketch out a list of places you’ve always wanted to have things. Like conversations and picnics, you know?

// MANUSCRPTS AND ARCHIVES, YALE LIBRARY

Writing it all down

A sentence a day keeps the nostalgia at bay.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND POP

PAGE B11

CULTURE

SHAKING OFF‘SHAKE IT OFF’ // BY WESLEY YIIN When Taylor Swift premiered her new song “Shake It Off” and its accompanying video last Monday, I was in Pierson secure storage, helping two former suitemates move boxes up to their rooms. Fifteen minutes later, when I discovered that I had missed the entire Yahoo! Live Stream during which Tay had also announced her new album, I told my suitemates that only their true friendship could have torn me from my goddess, my kindred spirit. (In reality, I had just knocked my head against one of those sharp protrusions on secure storage’s already-low ceilings and was worried about internal bleeding. Blunt-force trauma

and hypochondria were the true culprits.)

I didn’t miss very much. I listened to the track and watched the video multiple times that night, and though the catchy chorus burrowed itself into my brain and burst out of my chest during my lengthy, steamy, noisy, hater-free shower the next day, I was, comparatively, disappointed. “Shake It Off” is, in my opinion, the weakest of Swift’s five lead singles. It lacks the sweet naiveté of “Tim McGraw,” the crossover appeal of “Love Story,” the surprising growth of “Mine” and the cheekiness of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It uniquely is devoid of

uniqueness.

But the world works in mysterious ways. In 2009, I had missed the live telecast of the other low point in Tay’s career — when Kanye snatched the mic from her at the VMA’s and ruined literally everything. Mere moments after, texts and tweets came pouring into my phone, and I leapt from my desk of SAT study books and AP-whatever homework, turned on the television, and fast-forwarded the TiVo. I’d like to think that some benevolent deity — or perhaps just the mystical force that unites all of us Taylor Swift megafans — was my protector during these two parallel nights almost exactly

five years apart. He (or She — girl power, amirite Tay?!) must have recognized that watching the tragedies unfold live would have made me doubt my love for her.

Instead, on both occasions, I was shaken, but I never lost my faith.

Speaking of “Faith,” on maybe my third time through the song, I noticed something fairly George Michael-esque about its opening.

After one more listen, “Shake It Off” reminded me of “Footloose.”

Now, I’m no ’80s music expert, but considering that the album was inspired by the ’80s, according to Swift herself, I think I could be on to something here!

“1989” marks Taylor’s “first documented, official pop album,”

but it lands disconcertingly far from her comfortable niche of country-pop. Sure she wants to experiment — and play dress up, as always. This is a big leap away from something she was very good, if not the best, at.

The youngest-ever recipient of the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year honor seems to have given up the genre and subculture that she fought to win over.

But here’s what I will say: Taylor has never failed to deliver when she promises a good record.

Of course, she’s had missteps with individual songs, but the better tracks always outweigh the disappointments. “Shake It Off” may just be the only mediocre song on “1989,” unluckily chosen to lead publicity because of its radio-friendliness.

And so, back to faith.

Taylor Swift has been with me through the good times and the bad. I cried with her in high

// BIG MACHINE RECORDS, LLC

to say to him. Your life isn’t supplemented by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. Your life isn’t perfectly soundtracked with mid-2000s Coldplay, Sheryl Crow and Soulja Boy. That dismissal of “Boyhood,” however, is somewhat valid.

When we go to the movies, we don’t often seek what we already know. We go to be consumed by Michael Bay explosions, we go to experience the folds of a foreign

love story, we go to sit in a velvet chair and lead ourselves away from normality. We’ve been taught, time and time again, to expect from fiction what we can’t from our lives: fast-paced plots, solutions, themes that lead us towards little bits of understanding.

But because “Boyhood” doesn’t satisfy our craving for excitement, it forces us to see beauty in what often seems mundane. It’s easy to focus on experiences that come preloaded with action or moral messages, but most aren’t so coherent or clearly meaningful.

And yet, “Boyhood” finds something valuable that thousands want to watch. It’s the recognition of our own childhoods — for those of us who grew up in the United States in the 90s and early 2000s, the tangible details aren’t wholly unique. He has friends who ride Ripsticks.

Lady Gaga’s music videos show up twice. There was none of the otherworldliness of a sci-fi or the convincing hope of a romcom, but Gabe and I still left feeling the dreamy afterglow that tends to follow more escapist films. But this time, the high came from the validation of our own stories as something worth being told.

Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.

school while bedridden by a broken heart, and I’ve fogged up countless mirrors belting literally all of her songs in the shower. I’ve written two essays about her previously: one for my Brown University application (waitlisted) and another for an ENGL 120 assignment (B+, I’m over it). I’ve sat and stood and sung through two concerts of hers. “Shake It Off” is the farthest thing from her best song — or even one of her “good” ones — but as of now, I see no reason to believe that her album will be anything but a success.

Obviously, I eagerly await its release.

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

Seeing Ourselves in “Boyhood” // BY ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY

I went with my friend Gabe to a movie theater in New York City, and instantly I knew: I was part of an event. This was no fleeting Netflix stream — we were there to see, and to experience, “Boyhood,” the film about an American boy’s childhood and adolescence. While the plot of the film might have convinced some to buy tickets, its concept made the line go around the block. Richard Linklater, the director, writer and producer, shot the film over the course of 12 years, allowing the actors’ aging to show on film.

“Boyhood” follows Mason and his family through marriages, divorces, hairstyles and relationships, tracing the small details of their experiences — camping trips, sketchy latenight hangouts, walks home from school.

Ellar Coltrane, captured from ages seven to 19, plays Mason. We meet him as a first grader in Texas, adorable with his bowl-cut and childish curiosity. He collects arrowheads and contemplates the origins of wasps. He throws pillows at his sister Sam, played by Linklater’s daughter Lorelei, when she wakes him up with her (pretty great) Britney Spears impression. Mason’s dazed moments of childhood, though, occur as adults spar around him. His mother (Patricia Arquette)

does her best to remain resilient as she enters relationships that fall into downward spirals, and often bottles of liquor.

Meanwhile, his estranged father (Ethan Hawke) seems to be in his own eternal boyhood, living in Alaska and writing songs on his keyboard before returning to Texas and the periphery of Mason’s life. But both struggle to improve, as does everyone surrounding Mason. Even minor

characters — his friends in high school, his mother’s second and third husbands, his roommate in college — seem caught in attempts to change, no matter how long they’re on screen.

The day after seeing “Boyhood,” Gabe and I discussed the movie, rehashing every detail that mirrored our childhoods — and there were many. He then told me, though, that after summarizing the film for one of his

colleagues at work, he was met with an underwhelmed shrug.

“Why would I see a boring movie about a kid’s life?” The man had said. “I’d rather live my own.”

Like a jersey-wearing sports fan, I instantly disregarded the negative opinion of the movie I so loyally loved. How could you disregard Linklater’s elegant way of telling such a simple story? Your life isn’t viewed with dreamy camera angles, I wanted

Contact ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY at elena.saavedrabuckley@yale.edu .

//IFC FILMS

12 YEARS IN THREE PHOTOS.

ALL FOUR YEARS V I C T O RY L A P S N O T INCLUDED

BEING GRATEFUL

WEEKEND ADVISES:

Everywhere // Always WE KNOW COMMONS DOESN’T SERVE BREAKFAST ANYMORE BUT YALE IS STILL PRETTY COOL.

Being #brave

Say what you wanna say, and let the words fall out. Like the Yale YouTube video.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

// BRIANNA LOO

DR. J: REBOUNDING WITH YALE’S NEW DEAN // BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN

Q: How was the transition from master to dean?

A: My predecessor, Mary Miller, said it was like drinking from a hose and also drinking from a fireplace. As the master of a college, you have a very specific focus and you’re trying to tend to the needs of that particular community. But as the dean of the College, that community is a lot bigger. You’re dealing with administrative systems and academic systems, so what has thrown me through the loop is how the questions of a Dean come from many different places. That’s been an interesting challenge that’s mostly pretty fascinating. Sometimes, like any job, it has its tougher parts.

Q: What are some of the tougher parts?

A: Broadly speaking, I’m sitting at the end of a line of processes. I might be the person who decides on appeals, for instance. Frankly, that’s not fun, no matter what. No matter what situation it is, I know that I’m the last step. And I wear the burden a little differently in that way.

Q: Is there anything you miss about being master?

A: It’s too early to know, really. But my favorite day of the year has always been freshman move-in. I really loved being surrounded by the students in my college, being totally obnoxious in a prideful way, and astonishing the newest freshmen by knowing their names.

So when President Salovey and I walked around Old Campus and TD and Silliman, we got a taste of it, but they weren’t my students anymore.

I didn’t know who was getting out of the cars. I suspect that one thing it’s going to take a lot of time to get used to is that on a daily basis I’m used to being surrounded by students, and I loved it. Now, on a daily basis, I’m surrounded by staff. In fact, I’m trying to find ways of getting out into the college community.

Q: Did you come up with anything particularly exciting or promising?

A: (Whispering) The email’s coming out in a few minutes. (Laughing) Well, actually I’ll tell you. It’s called lunch with Dr. J, which is an old jokey nickname. It’s starting in a couple weeks. As the email delineates, I’m going to have nine lunches this semester. It’s going to be a yearlong series, hopefully a years-long series. It’ll be in the dining halls. I’ll sit down with students from different cohorts. For example, not just D-port, more like music students, and the next week it will be people in debate. It just depends. We’ll just sit and talk and spend time together.

Q: How did you get the nickname Dr. J? A: I like to play basketball. You’re too young to know, but there was a famous basketball player named Dr. J. When I was teaching at UCSD, my students saw me playing and gave me the nickname. So when I became master of Calhoun, I decided I

wanted students to call me Dr. J, only to find out years later that students have no idea who he is anymore. If this makes it in the Backstage, could you put a Wikipedia entry or a picture of the actual Dr. J? [Ed note: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Julius_Erving] Q: What are some of your main goals in your deanship?

A: Well, it’s not a goal, it just a task, but the main thing is that we’re building two new colleges within the next five years. Over my fiveyear term, those colleges are going to be built, opened and populated.

My task is to make sure that the college experience feels the same in 2018 as it does in 2014. Or better. I don’t want the addition of new students to diminish what’s already happening with Yale’s 12 colleges.

More broadly speaking, I want to be available to students. I want to be visible to students. It’s my job to be their best advocate and to help encourage thoughtful conversations about how to form a really functional, ethical and critically engaged community. I remember that when I was master of Calhoun, students would complain to me that there were two cultures on campus when it came to the weekend: partiers and shut-ins. Students that didn’t want to party that hard or be shut in were finding themselves in situations where they weren’t succeeding. I’d like to think there are more than two cultures and to find a way to give other options.

Q: How do you as Dean plan to change that?

A: I don’t have an answer to that yet; it’s a difficult problem to solve. But I don’t want to throw my hands up and say I don’t want to deal with it. However, I think by encouraging conversation about this I can effect change. As master of a college, I can model behavior. I remember in Calhoun there was a year that was really difficult when it came to alcohol and drug abuse. I was willing to fund any activity where alcohol wasn’t the focus. I like to think it created opportunities for large-scale community events, like a dining hallwide game night.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about working at Yale?

A: The undergraduates. I love teach-

ing them, they are endlessly interesting, and I’ve learned so much from them. I think most Yale faculty would tell you that what separates teaching here from teaching other places is that the energy at the undergraduate level is so much more exciting. Also, having lived with the undergraduates for years and learning that they weren’t just book smart was totally exciting.

My wife and I feel blessed that we raised our children in the college surrounded by really conscientious, impressive, twenty-year-olds. I like you guys. I really do.

Q: Least favorite thing?

A: March is tough. The month of March never ends.

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

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MORE BROADLY SPEAKING, I WANT TO BE AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS. I WANT TO BE VISIBLE TO STUDENTS. I WANT TO BE THEIR BEST ADVOCATE.

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W

EEKEND sat down with Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway, who arrived directly from a meeting on how to increase his interaction with undergraduates. An interview with WEEKEND, of course, was a good start. Now settled in since becoming Dean in May, Holloway discusses his aspirations in his new post, his nickname of Dr. J and his favorite things about undergraduates.