This WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013

Worth it?

ANYA GRENIER analyzes the substances, stimulants and study aids you’ll be putting in your body for the next two weeks.

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TAKEOFF

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TURF

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TOAD’S

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OUR ANCESTORS BID US FAREWELL

THE GRASS WE WALK ON

DJ ACTION IN ACTION

Emeritus WEEKEND editors Chase, Erin, Brenna and Nikita drop their last pearls of wisdom onto our pages.

Andrew Bezek reflects on Yale’s lawn — how it changes, who maintains it and what it taught him.

For his last arts & living expedition, Jordan Schneider gets an inside look at DJ Action’s booth and beats.

// ALLIE KRAUSE

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

// BY CHASE NIESNER

LALWANI

AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 22 Apr U dont need this any way cum chill with me on the beachh What often distracts me these days as I sit in the library staring at my computer screen isn’t the river of headlines or the steady stream of noise collecting on the next tab, but rather some unseen soundboard of springtime emanating from without. There is the shadowy “night bird” that I’ve yet to identify, whose circuitous whirl defiantly inverts my expectations of darkness (I thank him for this). There are the ROTC recruits locked in step on the Cross(ed) Campus, whose imperial grunting defies any shred of wisdom (and adds a touch of irony) to whatever I might glean from the parsed pages around me. And then — what is for me the most piquing aural distraction of them all — there’s the high-strung din of six-stroke engines ripping down Elm Street, whose ruckus, like the “night bird,” similarly upsets mine and everyone else’s sense of order (to be sure, I thank them for this, too). And yet, in New Haven, it’s the “Harlem Shake” that’s universally despised.

On the New Haven Indy, one Fair Haven mother complains of the roar, saying her 11-month-old daughter’s first word was “brrrrrrrrr … ” AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 22 Apr Heard u One “Wildwest” posts: “why don’t you kids raise some money and buy some land?”

AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 23 Apr Payy Upp One “Long Time NH Resident” encourages “ALL THE BIKERS TO RIDE ON THE MAYOR’S STREET” because “IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM JOIN THEM.” AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 24 Apr Prayin 4 attention shameless

New Haven BIKE LIFE is the 203 chapter of the nationwide collective of urban motocross riders that’s coalesced at the behest of A$AP TyY, the self-proclaimed first “street motocross rider to be sponsored by a major brand” and one lesser-known member of the incendiary hip-hop group the A$AP Mob. On a recent stop at Toad’s Place, members of the Mob joined forces with the riders of the 203 203 and cut together a short film of concert footage, wheelies and tailspins (you can find this on therealbikelife.com). The “12 o’clock,” when the nose of the bike points to the sky, is the Tony Hawk “1080” of the BIKE LIFE: once a mark of a true genius, now but a kowtow to an innovator’s past.

AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 23 Apr Stunting 2 the Maxxx In New Haven, the riders’ brash flouting of traffic laws has drawn the ire of Elm City residents and left a police force with their hands tied. Under the New Haven Police Department’s “no chase” policy, an officer can only pursue an unarmed suspect for two minutes before they’re told to fall back due to safety concerns. Beyond this allotted pursuit, when the structures of authority dissolve into back alleys, the bikers find themselves buzzing in an unrestricted funhouse. What sort of fuel is this? What to do, where to?

AsapTyY (@AsAp__TyY) — 21 Apr X games next promise u that Sitting in the library in the springtime, I find this oddly inspiring. A Thom Gunn poem entitled “On the Move ‘Man, You Gotta Go’” comes to mind: “Men manufacture both machine and soul / And use what they imperfectly control / to dare a future from the taken routes.”

VANDERHOOF

No frontin’, just stuntin’

Carried away // BY ERIN VANDERHOOF

In my days of post-senior essay reverie, I’ve become the sort of TVconsuming monster I only dreamed of being back when I had real responsibility. I’d worked my way through countless current sitcoms when one day, I walked in on a housemate watching “Sex and the City” on his laptop, and walked out six hours later with the entire first season under my belt. I watched the earliest stages of courtship between Carrie and Mr. Big, saw the frank sex scenes and the chronicles of weekly brunch. I felt like I was home again.

Though I’ve probably seen every episode at least thrice already (and that’s not counting the edited reruns on TBS), watching the show again as a grown lady has been an entirely different experience. It seems so much more relevant this time around, as if the vignettes were speaking to something true in my life. For example, I spent one whole day wondering if I was a slut, before returning home just in time to catch my crew watching the episode “Are We Sluts?” (The answer, in case anyone was wondering, was: No, sluts don’t exist, and we are awesome.) I’ve had some sexual experiences (and some social experiences) that mirror what I see on the screen now; what was once general laughter has been supplemented by the cathartic twinge of identification.

I t ’s like

I’m watching SATC with new eyes, and those eyes have brought with them an important realization: I’m fairly invested in the lives of all four women, but it’s Carrie’s plotlines that leave me screaming at the computer screen. I am a Carrie.

Carrie narrates the show, and though she is undoubtedly the protagonist, she is also the most erratic, absurd and whimsical character.

Most people really hate her or think she’s a childish excuse for a grown woman. But I just love her. We have plenty of things in common: She writes about her personal life for a wide audience; she’s messy and a poor financial planner; she wears her emotions on her sleeves. She believes in love deeply, but she’s also a lustful serial dater. It obviously takes a lot of hubris to identify primarily with the main character, but Carrie is a freaking narcissist, and so am I. Obviously, SATC character identifications are a meme so asinine they were mocked in the first episode of another HBO zeitgeist-hound, “Girls,” but even that scene established the debt that TV shows about women — and the 21st century popular female con-

sciousness in general — owe to the show. The sexual rules that I follow, even if they frustrate me (in order of importance: have sex, fall in love occasionally), were brought to the mainstream largely thanks to Carrie and the gals.

Because of that, the final scene of SATC will always stick with me. After a giddy brunch with all of her friends, Carrie is walking down the street in a ridiculous fur coat, when she gets a phone call from Big. It’s simple, but she just seems so happy. And I think those are the stakes of identifying with Carrie (or Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte for that matter); we know she gets a happy ending. I guess I really want one of those, and watching Carrie’s road to it, pratfalls and all, makes us feel assured that we’ll get them too.

Rewatching SATC as graduation draws near has reminded me that some happy endings are possible. I’ve gone through four yearlong “seasons” of my own in college, and I think the pratfalls were worth it, more or less.

I’ve been frustrated and lost myself a few times, and had enough intellectual, emotional and physical dalliances. Now I’m ready to make like Carrie and move on, take some risks, live out some cliches, and find my fur coat and Mr. Big (whatever form those will take). In true Carrie fashion, I will probably overshare my feelings about it on the Internet.

Contact ERIN VANDERHOOF at erin.vanderhoof@yale. edu .

Contact CHASE NIESNER at chase.niesner@yale.edu .

A willful amnesia // BY NIKITA LALWANI

A funny thing happens the last few weeks of spring semester. One morning, magically, the grass on Old Campus turns green again and soft. The sun emerges exuberantly and all at once, anxious, perhaps, to forget a half-year of forced hibernation and relentless catand-mouse. The light teal of the clock face on Harkness Tower begins, finally, to approximate the color of the sky.

It’s a strange sort of trick Yale plays on us. Brief, intense moments of sun and warmth bookend the school year, from Camp Yale to mid-October and then again near Spring Fling. In fleeting pockets of blue sky and welcome humidity, we experience college the way it’s advertised online and in the brochures. We toss Frisbees on Cross Campus and then feast on Ashley’s before sunbathing on a friend’s roof at the top of Morse Tower. We wear sunglasses and sundresses.

Time seems almost within our control; it slows for us, heightening the sensations of each moment and deluding us into thinking that these, the days we’re happy and carefree and wild, might last forever.

Of course in a way they do. That’s the thing about memory: We remember beginnings and endings but not so much what happens in between. It’s almost as though Yale intentionally places its best days at the start and finish so that, upon graduation, we remember Spring Fling and Myrtle Beach and Senior Week instead of final

exams, midterm papers and the harsh, biting cold.

Today, finishing my last class of the year, I sat on Old Campus as light refracted off the High Street Gate and a pair of students played the fiddle. I was thinking that I don’t mind this willful amnesia, that what I want to remember about Yale after all are days like today, days of brilliant sunlight and cool breeze, of walking the longer route to class and lounging, after, in a choice spot of shade.

It’s the Yale of the song: bright, happy, golden and — soon — bygone. Can that be all there is? I can’t help thinking we live so little of our time in beginnings and endings, that we live, by definition, mostly in the middle — and wouldn’t I be missing that?

In the end I want to remember more than the beginning, more than the happy and sunny and warm. I want to remember that time I opened my apartment door to find New Haven bathed in a sea of white. I want to remember the frigid nights my roommate and I ordered Alpha Delta and danced to keep ourselves from falling asleep. I want to remember the papers and the deadlines. I want to remember those crisp, fall days I sat on my Swing Space window ledge, watching the leaves redden and fall and talking to friends about things meaningful and inane.

It’s not possible, but I’ll say it anyway: I want to remember everything.

Contact NIKITA LALWANI at nikita.lalwani@yale.edu .

F R I D AY APRIL 26

NEGHAIWI

NIESNER

WEEKEND VIEWS

On limits and self-respect

// MICHAEL MCHUGH

// BY BRENNA HUGHES NEGHAIWI At a particularly low moment at the end of fall semester junior year, I sat on my housemate’s bed as she read aloud from Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect.”

“Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself,” she began.

I cradled a mug of tea as she recited the instance of Didion’s first failure and its more brutal admission: the recognition that things would not always go according to plan.

It was the evening before my last final, one for which I no longer had the energy to study, a reality for which I no longer had the stamina to care, and my housemate had orchestrated this reading to help justify why this was not only okay, but right.

“The dismal fact is that selfrespect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is some-

JACK HITT SIXTH ANNUAL PIG ROAST Yale Farm // 2 p.m.

Come for the pig, stay for deh frendz.

thing people with courage can do without,” she continued. “To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.”

I decided not to study that night, content with the fact that, in doing so, I was making a decision to respect myself. I went to bed early and did a light review over coffee and cereal the next morning before heading to my exam. It went just fine. Perhaps it would have gone (just a little bit) better if I’d done just a little more studying, uncertain as that outcome seems. But I wouldn’t have been better. As small of a concession as that might seem, it is the pattern of such small concessions that can lead to the feeling of powerlessness.

Over the course of the next semester and the year following it, I didn’t always respect my limits. Pushing them drove me more times than once beyond comfort and exhaustion, into a

place of physical and emotional defeat. What’s more, it brought me to resent myself and to resent the external circumstances that I felt were propelling me into this state.

Perhaps I should have been more stringent with the limits that I set. But — what’s more important — in choosing to defy them, I needed to be making an active choice, instead of passively submitting to perceived pressures.

I don’t know anymore about conquering everything. I’ve felt too conquered in the past four years — by stress, by too-long workdays, by feelings of inadequacy and failed academic/ social/extracurricular attempts, by unsatisfactory campus regulations and the persistence of unkindness and abuse — to maintain notions of total possibility, which now seem arrogant.

I believe this is just the sort of loss of innocence that Didion wrote about. What I hope for now, though, is something brighter and more challenging in its own quiet way: I hope to exhibit confi-

dence in my efforts, commitment in my endeavors and self-awareness in my resignations.

I think that this is especially important in a time of transition, because adjusting to new circumstances and reflecting on the old means re-evaluating your limits.

Right now I am facing a big transition in my life, but I’ve faced big transitions in one form or another around this same time in each of the past three years, something that I think is true of everyone in their college years.

Self-respect is less grandiose than triumph or unending praise; it requires more of you and guarantees less from your environment. It matters deeply and truly only to you, and only you can assess whether you have it or not.

But in the end, respecting yourself means facing your No. 1 person on equal terms. And that is something bigger than any external measure can bring.

Contact BRENNA HUGHES NEGHAIWI at brenna.neghaiwi@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Pumping up the energy

Reading week is a sprint, people.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

WHAT WE USE TO FUNCTION // BY ANYA GRENIER

athy Huang ’15 usually sleeps from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. She makes sure to schedule her other commitments around her eight hours.

She realizes that’s “not normal.”

When Huang first came to Yale, she found herself staying up late much more often than she had in high school and gradually consuming more caffeine. Part of it was the nocturnal lifestyle college seemed to demand. Part of it was the culture of meeting people for coffee, working in coffee shops.

Huang can list off the effects drinking caffeine has on her: “My palms sweat, my heart starts racing, my mental to-do list just starts forming without my consent in my head.

I have a really hard time enjoying things just to enjoy them. I feel really intense.”

After a “bad” beginning to her sophomore year, Huang began seeing a counselor at Yale Mental Health and realized there was a correlation between her negative moods and not sleeping enough — and with having to use coffee to keep awake.

Now she’s back to her high school schedule. She has tried bringing friends around to her way of thinking, but hasn’t had much success so far.

After all, there’s a prevailing sense on campus that, in the words of a recent Red Bull campaign, “Nobody ever wishes they’d slept more in college.”

And we don’t have to. We don’t have to drink Red Bull either: We’ve got options. Reading “week” starts tomorrow, and from what I can tell through conversation osmosis, everybody is basically fucked. A News survey conducted earlier this week shows that more than 70 percent of students feel “somewhat” or “very” stressed about the upcoming finals period.

Over the next 10 days, Yale’s student body will deal with the end of year crunch by consuming stimulants including coffee, tea, energy drinks, 5-hour energy shots and prescription stimulant drugs intended for the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

“I’m not classically against drugs,” said Hedy Kober, an assistant professor of psychiatry and psychol-

C

ogy at the Yale School of Medicine.

“But everybody who takes drugs has a responsibility to know exactly what they’re taking and what they’re doing [to their brains and bodies].” *** According to a 2005 New Scientist article reassuringly titled “Coffee: The demon drink?”, 90 percent of adults in North America consume caffeine daily in some form, and the Internet of 2013 seems to pretty much agree with that number.

I’m not sure if that’s us already, or just future us. But we’re getting there.

The longer we stay awake, the more our brains produce a chemical called adenosine, which makes us want to go to sleep. While sleeping, we make less and less adenosine, so that in the morning we wake up feeling less tired than when we went to bed. Caffeine is primarily an “adenosine antagonist,” Kober explained: Technically it is a “sleepiness-reducing” agent rather than an “energy-producing” agent, though feeling less sleepy may leave us more energetic.

Caffeine also increases the action of dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters associated with, among other things, energy and euphoria. But this is a secondary action. What caffeine mostly does is stop the brain from following through with its natural sleep-promoting processeses.

All of which makes me pretty nervous. I’ve been dealing with the opposite problem on and off for most of the last eight years. During peak angst times (grades six through 12), I’m pretty sure 3/4 of the emotions I experienced were produced by insomnia. It’s hard not to feel Kierkegaardian levels of Despair when you’re consistently the only one awake in your house during the witching hours.

Drinking caffeine has, until recently, been unthinkable. Once, in sixth grade, I tried a cappuccino. I didn’t sleep for a full day and a half.

At home, my parents still get mad at me for eating so much as a piece of dark chocolate after 7 p.m.

John Sununu ’15 has always had coffee in his house and in his life.

Starting around age 12, he began to sample some himself. It made him feel grown up.

His freshman year of high school, Sununu first started drinking coffee in the evenings to help him make it through late nights of studying.

By junior year, Sununu realized he was drinking between seven and eight caffeinated beverages a day. He decided it was time to stop.

“I was alone and irritable and interning, and detoxing cold turkey,” Sununu recalled. “I was really fidgety and always falling asleep in the middle of important things, which is not good when you’re interpreting.”

Sununu went back to drinking coffee after the summer, but feels he has a healthier relationship with it now that he knows he could quit if he really needed to. Still, he added: “It’s just easier to have a little extra energy — or a lot of extra energy.”

For most of this year, even if I’d slept nine hours out of the past 48, it didn’t occur to me try anything stronger than weak green tea. But I’ve started to think about experimenting. First, though, I decided to seek out a few of the uncaffeinated 10 percent, and see what they had to say.

IT SCARES ME ... I WOULD REALLY ENJOY DRINKING 5-HOUR ENERGY TO STAY AWAKE. KERRI LU ’14

For Kerri Lu ’14, coffee just doesn’t work. She gets about 20-30 minutes of nervous energy before she crashes and falls asleep. The same thing happened when she tried 5-hour Energy, but she admitted she wasn’t brave enough to pound the whole thing at once. Lu more or less summed up the concerns seven other students interviewed cited about the product when she said she was worried it would make her heart “explode.”

“It scares me, because I think I would really enjoy drinking [5-hour Energy] to stay awake,” Lu said. “I would probably resort to those things if they helped me physically.”

But for at least a small portion of Yale’s student body, whether or not coffee would help doesn’t matter. What does is maintaining a sense of spiritual responsibility over what does — and doesn’t — go into

the body. The Church of Latter Day Saints’ health code requires Mormons to abstain from consuming “harmful and addictive substances,” said Russell Ault ’14. The church explicitly forbids alcohol, tea, coffee and tobacco.

“Mormonism has a strong emphasis on agency,” Glorianna TillemannDick ’14 said. “Developing an addiction reduces agency because we feel the need to partake in the same specific substances.”

Glorianna and her sister, Mercina Tilleman-Dick ’14, have different approaches to living through the prohibition. Mercina allows herself the very rare Diet Coke, but generally plans her schoolwork so as to avoid needing to stay up too late.

Glorianna pulls all-nighters fairly regularly but keeps herself up with lots of water and small naps. When done naturally, it’s hard to feel that it’s “no big deal” to stay up all night, Glorianna added. By allowing herself to feel the physical consequences of her decision without the aid of stimulants, she keeps the emphasis on her own agency — and what she describes as her failure to plan her time better.

Huang would prefer to email a teaching fellow and tell them she’ll be turning a problem set in late rather than compromise her health in the long run.

But when it comes to sleep, she said, “I think we’re the few and the proud here.” *** When Rachel* found herself left with a single night to cram for a final her freshman year at Yale, a friend asked her if she wanted some Adderall. She needed to stay up all night, and coffee had always made her feel jittery. The Adderall kept her awake, and she felt like she was getting a lot done.

According to a 2009 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, full-time college students 18-22 are twice as likely to use unprescribed Adderall as their non-full-time student counterparts. The report underscores Adderall’s role as a ‘study drug’ on campuses across the nation.

Sadie*, another sophomore girl, has used un-prescribed Adderall as a study aid on several occasions.

She drinks coffee at other times to

keep herself awake, but said that it doesn’t give her anything close to the increase infocus and motivation she feels when on Adderall.

Otherwise, Sadie said, taking it doesn’t make her feel much different. She has never experienced any negative side effects and doesn’t know anybody who has. She said she knows a broad spectrum of users on campus.

And with reading and finals period ahead, she is asking around for more Adderall.

“But it’s not 100 percent necessary,” Sadie maintained. “I can organize my [work] so I don’t need it. It’s not like I plan to use it … If I can find some, I’ll use it, but I’m not going to seek it out unless the people I usually go to have it.”

She can get it from friends who have it prescribed to them or others who have obtained it from someone else with a prescription. Prices vary with the dose of the pill she’s buying.

Sununu also knows students at Yale who use the drug regularly.

“On the whole, [stimulants like Adderall are] relatively easy to access, and college kids have grown used to the idea that if they need to access them they can,” he said.

But he is not prepared to condemn his classmates’ Adderall use outright: “I don’t want to judge anyone for their personal decisions. As long as people stay healthy and safe, I think it’s their prerogative to do what they need to do.”

Sadie said that the only people at Yale she would peg as not using Adderall would be those who already devote so much time to school work that they would not need the extra boost.

Adderall and many other ADD/ ADHD medications are part of a category of stimulants called amphetamines, which keep you awake by entirely different means than caffeine does. They do not bind onto adenosine. Instead, like other stimulant drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines work primarily on dopamine and norepinephrine, which also have roles in promoting wakefulness.

Amphetamines are extremely close relatives of the methamphetamines (see: Breaking Bad).

Students don’t think of them that way. Sadie doesn’t see developing an addiction to Adderall as a conSEE STIMULANTS PAGE B8

// ALLIE KRAUSE

F R I D AY APRIL 26

“FIVE SCENES BY EUGENE O’NEILL”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Davenport-Pierson Theater // 7 p.m.

James Dieffenbach’s senior project reimagines the works of Eugene O’Neill.

Coffee

Blue State? Starbucks? Dunkies? Pick your poison.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND THEATER

JUST MISSING ‘NORMAL’ // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

It’s obvious, even from the first couple of scenes, that “Next To Normal” is designed to be impressive. The musical, as the play’s program helpfully points out, won a Pulitzer in its original Broadway run. It features impressive songwriting, trios and quartets that erupt out of petty arguments; a whirring plot that builds family drama and mental illness all the way into drug abuse and shock therapy; and ballads designed to tear your heart out. In this performance, however, the actors reach for the same drama, the same pathos and the same notes — finding them just beyond their belting range. You can imagine the target, but the feeling doesn’t quite land.

“Next to Normal”’s plot, fittingly, focuses on the idea of living in the shadow of something else. Diana Goodman (Rachel Goldstein ’16) is haunted, literally, by the early death of her son, Gabe (Jordan Schroeder ’16). Gabe died as a child, but Diana imagines that he has grown up, and pays more attention to him than to her daughter, Natalie (Tory Burnside Clapp ’15). This arrangement means that Gabe follows Diana around for most of the musical, glowering. Schroeder carries this off with a series of color-coded shirts (once shirtless), and a broad maniacal grin, though his voice, struggling in the higher register, didn’t have the strength to make his presence as nerve-wracking as it could

// HENRY EHRENBERG

Crazy for the characters’ craziness.

have been. Meanwhile, Natalie practices piano etudes and falls for a stoner boyfriend (James Lee ’16), who puts in a valiant effort to be edgy, despite never unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

As the musical progresses, Diana’s illness gets increasingly out of hand. Her husband (Carter Michael ’15) pushes her through a series of psychotropic therapies with the help of Dr. Fine at first, and then Dr. Madden (both Skyler Ross ’16) — yes, the names are meant to be meaningful. As a shrink, Ross exudes just the right, unsettling level of whitecoat-powered exuberance, as he lists drug names like flavors of candy. But the doctor’s performance overwhelms Goldstein’s Diana, who uses her wavering soprano voice well during moments of moving fragility, but remains too restrained when she is supposed to become unhinged. When she tries to struggle out of a shock therapy room, for instance, Goldstein seemed more a rag doll than a woman on the edge.

Part of the performance’s softness was due to constrictions of performing in the Saybrook Underbrook. “Next to Normal” includes a generous portion of rock influences in its soundtrack (presumably for a modern flair), but the electric guitar-infused orchestra tended to overwhelm the efforts of the non-mic’ed performers. The musical’s set-piece songs were made for a booming Broadway stage, and here they feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic. At one point, one of Goldstein’s quiet solos was nearly run over by the wandering melody of a particularly out-of-tune,

amplified violin.

Still, there were moments when performers successfully took matters into their own hands. Clapp, who co-directed with Ben Symons ’15, stole most of her scenes with a totally believable, hands-in-her-pockets portrayal of an angst-ridden teenage girl. In Natalie’s big song, “Superboy and the Invisible Girl,” the daughter complains about how her parents spend more time on her dead brother than her. But, watching Clapp perform, whether she’s dishing out a nearly fourth-wall-breaking quip, or choking back tears with wavering lips, you can’t believe that she’d ever lose your focus, much less disappear.

But even when “Next to Normal” rises to the occasion, you can still feel a better performance lying behind it. Clapp and Symons’ staging includes a set of mirrors at the back of the stage. By the end of the performance, the performers reverse all four to reveal each one’s shattered backside. This device seems to track the relative sanity of the main characters, like a sports game’s noise-ometer. Through them, you are reminded that the Goodman family is in a pretty bad state. And sure, the plot tells you that. Over two hours, the actors work through motions of sanity and insanity. But, without the extra push, without true, ferocious highs and lows, it’s not quite enough. This is almost normal; madness lives elsewhere.

Contact JACKSON MCHENRY at jackson.mchenry@yale.edu .

‘Spinning into Butter’: A Conversation Starter // BY CAROLYN LIPKA

Did you know that Ron Paul went to Colgate University this week and admitted to an Eritrean student that he was racist? That was one of the many things that crossed my mind when I watched director Kesewaa Boateng’s ’15 interpretation of Rebecca Gilman’s 1999 “Spinning Into Butter.” The performance is effectively thought-provoking as it is meant to be, proof being the several relevant issues that crossed my mind as I watched the play: the egregious (from my perspective) column in the News last year calling into question the ER&M major, the millions of Tumblrs screaming “check your privilege” into the abyss of the internet, the Boston bombings and the reaction to the bombings.

But “Spinning Into Butter” revolves around a specific racial issue tackled by the Dean of Student Affairs, Sarah Daniels, portrayed by Mitra Yazdi ’15, at a small predominantly white liberal arts college called Belmont College — think a less diverse Dartmouth, but in Vermont. It follows her dealing with the fallout from a hate crime committed against an African-American student on campus, as well as her fel-

F R I D AY APRIL 26

low administrators and teachers, all of whom range from woefully ignorant to unbearably pretentious. There’s race, there’s angst, there’s ignorance — by nature of the play, it’s a very juicy plot.

Despite the room the script gives the actors to bring these critical issues to life, the performance itself is a little stiff. Yale plays are often criticized for their over-theatricality, but “Spinning into Butter” was nonetheless overacted for my taste. The movements seemed almost too calculated, particularly in the second act, and the lighting was so dramatic to the point where it almost felt like they were shoving the symbolism and weight of the topic down your throat — a militant, less effective approach than a delicate touch for a sensitive topic. Although warranted, every line was screamed for the latter part of the second act, but I felt like they were screaming at me — and not each other.

These minor issues, however, were but few pitfalls in what is an incredibly strong story about a topic Yale needs to start an honest and open dialogue on. This story was, ultimately, aided by strong performances from two partic-

ular actors. Yazdi gave a notable performance, especially because she’s tasked with carrying virtually the entire play on her back.

She delivered her lines with a reasoned tone that sounded less and less like she was reading a script (admittedly, it took her a while to settle into that rhythm). Her makeup and costuming added to the new wave “colorblindness” that her character embodies. I was particularly impressed with Yazdi’s delivery of the racist monologue which reveals all her character’s intentions (I won’t ruin it for you). She delivered it with just the right amount of poignancy and pain that I was waiting for someone, somewhere — maybe even me — to shout out “first world problems!” In fact, her performance was second only to the hilarious Leyla Levi ’16 who portrayed administrator Dean Catherine Kenney. With Levi, everything was perfectly timed, delivered with the right amount of socially awkward, self-centered frustration that we so associate with caricatures of administrators — I cannot praise her enough.

With regard to other actors’ performances, I followed a

strange train of feelings — annoyed, confused, impressed, then confused — about Alex Saeedy’s ’15 portrayal of Ross Collins, the pretentious professor who sort-of-dated Yazdi’s character, then broke up with her, then remained friends with her (and maybe kind of dated her again?). At first, his speech patterns seemed unnatural and were off-putting, but later I realized that it was possibly to make his character more even more pompous. When his character seemed to come through in the clutch on behalf of human decency, I was impressed with his delivery of the lines and the genuine chemistry he displayed with Yazdi’s character in the second act; the line between romantic chemistry or just gay-best-friend chemistry is also playfully blurry. Unfortunately, this version of Ross Collins was completely inconsistent with the portrayal of him in the first act, which left me con-

relate to one another, and this show is definitely a way to get it started — it comes highly recommended from this reviewer.

“Spinning Into Butter” is showing in JE Theater from April 26 - 27.

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

// CARLY LOVE JOY

Actors tackle controversial subjects.

“THE SPECTACULAR NOW”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

Get a sneak preview of this Sundance winner!

fused again, wondering if maybe the depth of Collins’ mysterious character had yet to be fleshed out.

Despite minor bumps in the acting, “Spinning into Butter” was incredibly thought provoking. This play is dramatic and intense — a combination sure to get students into discussion.

Yale’s campus needs a change to the way we talk about race and

Push-ups

Exercise is a (not so) fun way to set the brawn and the brains in motion.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND GLOBETROTTERS

THE SNYDER EFFECT // BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA

When Edward Snyder assumed the Yale School of Management’s deanship two years ago, some members of the SOM community feared he might not fit into the school’s culture.

Snyder moved to New Haven after having served nine years as dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an institution widely recognized as one much different from SOM. The Booth School currently enrolls a total of roughly 3,300 students. SOM’s class of 2013 has fewer than 300 students, and the school holds a historic reputation of educating students for the private as well the nonprofit and public sectors — a reputation many in the business school community believe has harmed outsiders’ perception of the school.

“I think that when you get a new dean, especially from another university that has a somewhat different DNA than yours, there will always be a certain amount of weariness,” said SOM Deputy Dean and Professor Andrew Metrick ‘89 GRD ‘89.

Despite their hesitations, SOM community members were fully aware of Snyder’s long trail of successes as a business school dean. At the beginning of his term as dean at the Booth School, the school placed tenth on BusinessWeek’s ranking of best MBA programs in the United States. When he left, the school was ranked number one, and had received a $300 million donation from alumnus David Booth — the largest in the history of business schools. Under Snyder’s leadership, the Booth School almost doubled its number of endowed professorships and tripled its financial assistance to students. In the press release announcing his appointment, University President Richard Levin said Snyder is regarded as the most successful business school dean in the nation.

Over 30 members of the SOM community interviewed agree Snyder quickly showed them they have nothing to worry about.

“I could really tell from the beginning that he just made a lot of observations and was in listening mode, instead of arriving with a specific agenda,” said SOM student government president Caitlin Sullivan SOM ’13. Metrick said SOM faculty members realized that Snyder “did not come to impose,” as he took the time to really glean the school’s needs before formulating policy.

After getting acclimated at Hillhouse Avenue, Snyder articulated three visions for SOM — to make it the business school most integrated with its home institution, to make it the most global business school and to make it the best source of versatile business leaders who can solve problems across business sectors.

This July will mark two years since Snyder officially joined SOM, and the SOM community agrees that the dean has managed to tangibly improve the school while preserving its core mission — “educating leaders for business and society.”

SOM students and faculty take the school’s mission seriously.

There is a sense of purpose regarding the role the school can play in educating leaders who can “take a deep dive but also understand the big picture and really take into account all the nuances of the surrounding world when making business decisions,” SOM Senior Associate Dean for Executive and Global Programs David Bach ’98 explained.

Though the school has evolved the way it implements its core objective, Bach said, the mission still holds, and Snyder has made it the thrust behind all of his decisions about the school. But given the school’s “rather abstract ”mission, Bach stressed the importance of translating it into specific goals clear to the SOM community and outsiders alike — which the SOM students, faculty and staff believe Snyder has done particularly well.

“The school’s mission here is actually felt and lived much more by students and faculty than at other schools, and Dean Snyder has taken note of that,” said SOM Associate Dean for the full-time MBA program Anjani Jain. “Sometimes at big business schools, mission statements live on websites. But here the mission is contemplated and lived.

That would have never happened at

Wharton [School of Business].”

ENSURING INTERNAL EFFICIENCY

Last year, Jain headed the MBA program at the Wharton School of Business, which holds the third position on this year’s Financial Times annual ranking of MBA programs worldwide. Across the Atlantic, Bach was dean of programs and professor of strategy and economic environment at the IE Business School in Madrid, eleventh on the Financial Times’ list.

This academic year, both Jain and Bach began their work at SOM, ranked 14th in the world by the Financial Times and 21st in the U.S.

by Bloomberg Businessweek. In June 2012, Snyder announced that Jain and Bach would leave their institutions to fill two SOM senior associate deanships that did not exist before Snyder’s arrival at the school.

Snyder’s announcement surprised both business school experts and members of the SOM community.

“Rarely if ever does a business school recruit and hire leadership talent of this caliber, particularly at the sub-dean level,” wrote the business school news website “Poets and Quants” after Snyder’s announcement. “Both Jain and Bach have played high-profile roles at their schools for years and either of them could just as easily have landed a full deanship at another business school.

Snyder’s decision to create these new positions is part of his broader effort to make the school administration operate more efficiently, an attempt professors and students said has produced “tangible” benefits, such as increased contact between administrators and the rest of the school community. In addition to delegating some responsibilities to the new deans, Snyder also brought in Julia Zupko — former director of operations at the Booth School — as the new director of SOM’s Career Development Office with the goal of increasing collaboration between the office and the student body.

Snyder also recruited retired U.S. Army brigadier general Tom Kolditz from the West Point Military Academy to create and direct a new leadership program for SOM students.

While Snyder’s predecessor, former SOM Dean Sharon Oster, was the one who identified a gap in leadership training at the school, Snyder recruited Kolditz to establish the Leadership Development Program — a program integrated with the school’s curriculum that imparts leadership skills through a combination of academic coursework and practical experience.

Metrick praised Snyder’s ability to “locate and recruit the right people,” a quality he said Snyder demonstrated by hiring individuals who have since their arrival spearheaded or supported a variety of successful initiatives.

“You have to have the charisma and vision to inspire really successful people from really good schools to come work for you, and Ted has both,” Metrick said. “He saw the need to hire new people, had the savvy to convince them to come, and gave them the resources they need to do their jobs well.”

GOING GLOBAL

But Snyder’s vision for the school extends beyond internal changes.

In order to connect with foreign institutions, U.S. business schools have traditionally either created networks involving one or two other schools or built campuses in foreign countries. But Snyder has realized this is not an efficient way for a business school to enhance its global influence, Metrick said. By conceiving the Global Network, a coalition of 23 international business schools that Snyder created last year, Metrick said the dean has set a model for how business schools should interact in the 21st century. Della Bradshaw, the business education editor of the Financial Times, said Snyder has “visibly” increased SOM’s international presence through the network.

One of the network’s first initiatives was Immersion Week — a weeklong program conceived by Bach that allows second-year MBA students at SOM and other schools in the network to take intensive

courses on each other’s campuses.

Immersion Week took place for the first time this March with five schools. After over 90 percent of participating students said in a survey they would like the program to take place every semester, the school partnered with six network members last week to organize an additional Immersion Week this fall.

“Immersion Week is very much about innovation; thanks to the network, Immersion Week enables curricular innovation across continents and gives students the chance to learn how to do business across sectors, time zones and cultures,” Bach said. “It fosters in them a global mindset and prepares them for the kind of work they will have to do if they join multinational corporations.”

THE SCHOOL’S MISSION HERE IS ACTUALLY FELT AND LIVED MUCH MORE

BY STUDENTS AND FACULTY THAN AT OTHER SCHOOLS SOM ASSOCIATE DEAN ANJANI JAIN

Vivian Li SOM ’13 visited IE Business School in Madrid during Immersion Week — because most of her classes at SOM focus on the U.S. market, she found it “refreshing” to learn about business problems that affect other parts of the world. Li is a student in SOM’s Master of Advanced Management Program, a degree SOM introduced last year to enable students from network schools to study in New Haven for a year.

During Immersion Week, each school hosted a course that addressed the entrepreneurial and economic issues of its respective region. Over 30 participants who visited either Spain, China, Turkey or Brazil this March said the program helped them engage with local issues and bring new knowledge back to SOM — knowledge they will integrate in case studies and other curricular components.

SOM Director of Admissions Bruce DelMonico said he has noticed increased interest in the MBA program from students in countries with network schools during this year’s application cycles. Though the admissions office has yet to analyze this data, he added that SOM has received applications from countries where the school has not attracted a lot of attention in the past.

While the Global Network is yielding specific initiatives, such as Immersion Week and the MAM degree, some see its purpose as a push to shift the underlying mindset of the SOM community — the network is “almost a way of thinking,” Metrick said.

“When the Global Network started, [Snyder] might have known where it was going, but most of us were not sure where it would go,” SOM professor Ravi Dhar said.

“Now, we are seeing many benefits, though I think we are using just 20 percent of the network’s full potential. Who knows how many more we will see in the future?”

SOM AND A “MORE UNIFIED” YALE

Snyder’s goals for SOM seem aligned with President-elect Salovey’s goals for the University, in particular with Salovey’s vision of a “more unified” Yale. Integrating SOM more fully with the rest of the University is one of Snyder’s central goals for the school.

SOM already offers 10 joint degrees with seven professional schools and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — Bach said 12 percent of SOM students are currently enrolled in a dual degree program and 74 percent are taking at least one course outside SOM, numbers “one simply doesn’t see at a place like Wharton.”

“There is a tremendous alignment between the strategy of SOM and the pillars of what Salovey has sketched so far,” Bach explained. “The dual degree offerings which we hope to expand just change the conversa-

tions happening in our classrooms because students studying business with medicine, law or divinity have such unique insights.”

SOM’s integrated core curriculum, first implemented during the 2006-’07 academic year, enables professors to teach different disciplines in a single course. While the school’s interdisciplinary approach to learning renders its academic program unique among leading business schools, Bach said the curriculum also makes it difficult for non-SOM students to enroll in an SOM class that focuses on a single business topic they might like to explore.

But this will change in the fall, when SOM tests out two “foundational courses” that will be offered to the rest of Yale — one on accounting and one on finance. These courses will aim to make the knowledge generated and disseminated at SOM accessible to the rest of Yale’s schools, and both Jain and Bach expect this kind of course offerings to grow in the future.

A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?

With Snyder entering his third academic year as SOM dean in the fall, many in the business school community wonder if his new initiatives will prove financially sustainable.

SOM Senior Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations Joel Getz believes the school will continue on its upward trajectory because Snyder’s proven fundraising abilities can prop up his ambitious goals.

“Ted has really focused like a laser beam on the budget — on the scope and scale problems that a business school faces,” Getz said. “He is using his wide knowledge of the business school landscape to think about what the school really needs in terms of programs, but also funding to build a strong financial framework.”

Though the school boasts a $500-million endowment, Snyder is currently raising money the school can spend right away. Snyder has diversified SOM’s sources of revenue in part by expanding the school’s portfolio of degrees, in addition to actively soliciting donations from SOM alumni.

Snyder has made it clear that strengthening the school’s relationship with its alumni is crucial to his fundraising efforts, and Getz said Snyder has increased the school’s alumni giving rate through in-person meetings with alumni around the world. Since Snyder arrived at SOM, he has raised roughly $5 million toward the construction of Evans Hall — the school’s new campus slated to open in January 2014 — along with several sizeable donations of over $1 million for the school’s new leadership initiatives.

SOM, which currently allocates roughly $3 million of its budget for financial aid, has also announced that it will increase its combined scholarship and loan-forgiveness budget to $6.4 million by 2015. This increase is “natural,” Jain said, given the school’s plans to increase its class size to 600 students by 2017.

As SOM continues to reach its intended targets, Jain said, he expects the school’s priorities to shift accordingly. The school is still in a transitional phase as it fights its way toward a new reputation in the business school sphere.

“For years, [SOM] has unsuccessfully battled the misperception that it is merely a school of nonprofit management, a haven for do-gooders outside the MBA mainstream,” wrote “Poets and Quants.” “And despite basking in the halo of one of the world’s most valuable educational brands, the school has never been able to develop the stature of any of its Ivy League rivals.”

Most SOM community members are aware that Snyder’s initiatives will take time to reach their full potential. In the meantime, the school can reap the immediate benefits of Snyder’s leadership, though it remains to be seen whether he can work his magic on SOM the same way he did on the Booth School.

Contact ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA at aleksandra.gjorgievska@yale.edu .

// MINH NGUYEN

F R I D AY APRIL 26

YALE SCHOLA CANTORUM: BACH MASS IN B MINOR

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 8 p.m.

Calm your mind with some classical music.

BLT Grinder

F push-ups. WKND wants/reallyjustneeds greasy calories to survive this reading week.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND EATS

ZAFRA // BY DANIEL STERN AND SKYLAR SHIBAYAMA

With mismatched cups, colorful lighting, loud music and a generally busy atmosphere, Zafra’s vibe suggests “snacks and drinks with buddies” more than “New Haven Restaurant Week.” For this cramped Cuban bar on Orange Street with only about 10 tables, a $32 price tag just seems a bit much. And, sure enough, the bill associated with a Restaurant Week dinner may well surpass what you’d spend on a typical meal at Zafra.

When we arrived at Zafra on time for our reservation, a wait of “just two more minutes” ended up escalating closer to 20. The host was apologetic, though, and, to the restaurant’s credit, after being seated at a small two-stool table towards the back of the space, each round of orders came quickly out of the kitchen.

Of the three appetizer options, we chose the ceviche and papa rellena (in Spanish, “filled potato”).

The ceviche — served

RESTAURANT WEEK

H

ungry? Broke? Desperate? Don’t worry – Restaurant Week is here. WEEKEND explored 4 classy, popular and up-and-coming restaurants in New Haven and dished out what good deals and meals are out there. Masticating yet?

(Look it up, you philistine.)

ZINC // BY ELIZA BROOKE AND EMILY FOXHALL

SCENE: Two highly under-qualified restaurant critics, EF and EB, enter Zinc. They are seated at a table. It is not the best table. In fact, it is an awkward table smushed to the side of the restaurant’s long thoroughfare. “If only they knew who we are,” EB and EF thought at once.

The waitress asks if they would like a drink. They decline, but open the menus.

EF: I am hungry.

EB: I pregamed with some peanut butter from the dining hall. Sorry. But this way I won’t be biased by hunger. Also, will Zinc be better than dining hall peanut butter? I’m really into that peanut butter.

EF: Ooh, the Salmon.

EB: Definitely the salmon. Although the Vegetable Bolognese looks really good EF: And the Organic Greens with Pistachio Vinaigrette and Piquillo Pepper Relish — or the soup? I feel lame ordering greens during restaurant week.

EB: Yes, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup is more interesting.

They do not consider the Shrimp Bruschetta, because capers are gross.

EB: Flan or Berry Crumble?

EF: Flan because it’s the first one on the list.

I like that we picked the first one listed in each category so far.

EB: Also, I feel like flan is more … [Words fail her, but she definitely feels that flan is the right choice.]

EF: Can berries crumble?

The waitress returns. They proceed to order.

EF orders because they only have enough money in their budget for one prix-fixe menu. EB has assured EF that she only wants a salad — she did pregame in the dining hall, after all — but that she will have bites of EF’s food.

EB: I’m on a diet.

EF: Is that going to be enough?

EB: I was seriously considering just getting a glass of wine.

The dour waitress brings a small plate of toasted things and gingery dip.

EF: Yay, a bonus! What did she say these were?

EB: No idea. Corn something? I love free things.

They each try not to be the one to kill the toasty nibbles.

Reflecting on their order, the girls use the menu’s abundant choices as a metaphor for life.

As in, they have a lot of choices right now. They are graduating in May. Intro Psych-grade psychoanalysis ensues.

APRIL 27

Contact DANIEL STERN AND SKYLAR SHIBAYAMA at daniel.stern@yale.edu and skylar. shibyama@yale.edu .

// BY KAROLINA KSIAZEK Ever since the ROÌA Restaurant and Café opened on College Street last March, most of the buzz has been about its architecture. The ’20s-themed restaurant exists in what was the dining hall of the Taft Hotel over a century ago, and months of renovation were put into the space. But now that the pomp of the reopening of the space had settled, I wanted a chance to taste the dining experience for the food itself.

The first thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant for dinner was how spacious the main dining area was. I had to concede — the renovation truly was impressive, with beautiful woodwork and a decorative plaster ceiling. I felt the history of the building, especially with jazz music filling the wide two-story space. But something about that spaciousness felt a little off to me: More than half the tables were still empty at 7:15 p.m., and it was strangely very bright. It felt very much like a café; I would have liked the lighting to be dimmer for dinner.

The service staff was very friendly and attentive. We didn’t have to wait very long for any of our requests. Sometimes the attention we were given was overwhelming, and made it hard to have a conversation. It was an atmosphere that was appropriate for an opening week, but a month in, it was a little distracting.

To start, we ordered local diver scallops with a celery root puree, port wine reduction and watercress salad. Unfortunately, the serving size was very small — just three scallops — but they were cooked and seasoned perfectly, and the celery root puree was an interesting addition that I liked a lot. We were also served delicious sourdough bread, which was carried over in a very cute wicker basket.

For the entrée, I ordered the arctic char with whipped potatoes, lacinato kale and thyme cipollini onions. I am usually not big on fish, but the char was delicious. The presentation was eloquent and simple. My date ordered the Tagliatelle Bolognese — egg yolk pasta with natural beef and veal ragu. He com-

The bowl leaves. The next course arrives.

116 CROWN

EF: Ooh, the Pan Seared Salmon with Sweet Cabbage + Caraway Slaw and Rye Berry Risotto!

EB: What even is a rye berry?

// BY WILL ADAMS

EF offers a forkful of risotto, ponders.

EB: Whoa, this tastes like the holidays at your parents’ friends’ house when you’re six. As in, it’s kind of spicy in a cinnamon-y way, but it also has a kind of foreign taste. Like feeling lost, and your parents are off in another room, and you have to play with kids you don’t know and who might try to trick you into locking yourself into a side room.

EF: Huh. [Masticating.] The salmon is perfectly seared. It’s so perfectly pan-seared. This is exactly what I want from a restaurant: I want them to do something that I couldn’t do. Sometimes I imagine myself cooking food that in reality I could never make, but, as it happens, someone can.

The world is a dangerous place.

You can’t trust just anyone; they may try to deceive you, rip you off and make your life suck. So you must imagine that I was pretty skeptical when I found out I would be writing about 116 Crown for WEEKEND. “116 Crown?” Sounds more like a street address than a restaurant name, if you ask me. How could I be sure that this was even an establishment that serves food? I couldn’t be sure by looking at their website that they wouldn’t kill me if I went alone, so I had my good friend Alex accompany and protect me. We arrived promptly at 5:30 p.m. and were thankful to find that, in fact, 116 Crown was a real restaurant that existed and that also served delicious food.

The waiter seated us in a small booth and asked us what we wanted to drink. We said, “Water,” and he gave us four options: Cucumberinfused water, distilled tap water, distilled bottled water and distilled sparkling water. That sure is a lot of types of water — highly suspicious.

We opted for distilled tap water, but later in the evening the waiter surreptitiously switched it out with the (admittedly tastier) cucumberinfused one. Some might call that nice. I call it underhanded and dishonest.

It’s really creepy when people order the same thing at a restaurant, so I ordered from the prix fixe menu while Alex got a burger. After we

EB embarks on diatribe against “New American” cuisine. This diatribe has been redacted for the sake of just about everybody.

EB: … but the salmon is really good.

EB is approximately 4/10 of the way through her salad.

EB pauses to Instagram the food. Follow her at @thebrookestagram.

The plate departs. Dessert arrives.

EF: What is this? [Pokes at what appears to be two small granola clumps sitting next to the little flan.]

EB: I think those are the Candied Almonds.

EF: With the Cinnamon Flan, I feel as if I’m eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch!

EB: Yum. The texture of the flan is perfect, though.

EF: Yum. EB: Yum.

ordered, the waiter smiled and left my menu with me (but not Alex) in case I “changed [my] mind.” Changed my mind? What would cause me to change my mind? That’s pretty suspicious. I mean, I was happy with what I ordered and didn’t end up changing my mind, but it was as if the waiter was trying to warn me of something.

That something must have been “food of mysteriously high quality.” My first course was a large spinach salad with Gorgonzola, walnuts and strawberries. Though slightly overdressed, the salad was curiously delicious, the strawberries curiously fresh and the bits of nuts and cheese curiously flavorful. Even more disturbing was the hanger steak I received for my main course, which was cooked way too perfectly and served over a dollop of potato purée and red cabbage. I grew increasingly anxious that something was slipped into my cucumber water that made me hallucinate that I was eating an extremely tender cut of beef and that I would soon be hypnotized into working for 116 Crown forever, serving martinis to the after-work crowd at the restaurant’s light-up bar. Thank God that didn’t happen!

Also, thank God the dessert I ordered — a rich chocolate trifle — was sweet enough to distract me from the nagging thought that the booth’s cushion was going to swallow me whole.

I was most paranoid when we

received our check, especially since it took a while to get the attention of our waiter. What took so long? Was he whipping up a contingency plan since the drugged cucumber water scheme didn’t pan out? Probably, because when we received the check, it was tucked into a small, black Moleskine. I opened the notebook, thinking that it was our waiter’s diary that would have a desperate “Save yourselves, fast!” message or perhaps an antidote for the spiked cucumber water. No, it was actually a guestbook with two messages: “Gird your loins — Restaurant Week approaches!” and “Bring back the Rolito.” This was horrifying. What happened to these people? Why didn’t they sign their names? Did they write these statements under duress? I signed the check quickly, and Alex and I left before the glass of olives at the bar could sneak up on us.

It’s important to question things, people. You can’t just blindly accept great food when it’s handed to you.

The world doesn’t work like that.

The next time you’re at a restaurant, especially one as nice as 116 Crown, ask yourself if you’re enjoying a lovely dinner or just a part of some construct. For me, as much as 116 Crown’s food had a suspiciously delicious nature, the experience was the former — a lovely dinner.

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

The two fall into silence.

Curtain.

Contact ELIZA BROOKE AND EMILY FOXHALL at eliza.brooke@yale.edu and emily.foxhall@yale.edu .

The food arrives.

S AT U R D AY

main courses and desserts beat Yale Dining at its best—but, for a $32 Restaurant Week menu, you might be better off going somewhere where that price is a deal, rather than an uptick. As for this Cuban bar, the most appealing option might still be ordering bar food: on our next visit, count us in for the nachos and mojitos being enjoyed at the table next to ours.

ROÌA

EF: All of the food is too hot, but after 20 seconds it’s perfect.

The waitress leaves.

14 inches of it, eyeball still in socket—over a bed of Cuban red beans and rice, peppers, and shaved carrot. The fish was flaky, so it was easy to debone. It was easy to eat, too: the meat was delicate, perfectly cooked, and delicious—flavorful, but not too fishy.

The skin, blackened and spiced, was a treat in itself. The sides, on the other hand, were lackluster: For all their color, the red beans and rice were overcooked and bland; the tostones (fried and salted green plantains) came out more chewy than crispy. Even so, the snapper made the entrée a winner.

When the host returned to collect the food, he asked us if we’d eaten the snapper’s eyeball. “The eyeball is meant to give you good fortune,” he said. “And I’ll tell ya — I ate one recently, and I’ve had great fortune!” For some reason, good fortune was sounding less appetizing than dessert, so we chose to go straight to the latter.

Both desserts, though small in portion, were large in flavor. Hazelnut Rum Bread Pudding was served hot and smooth over caramel sauce. The sauce tasted a touch burnt, but in a good way— like the torched top layer of a crème brûlée. Bread puddings can often be soggy; this one wasn’t. It was easy to cut, chewy, and rich. The mocha caramel flan was equally good: its sweetness wasn’t overpowering, and berries layered on top helped make the dessert feel refreshing.

In the end, our dinner at Zafra wasn’t bad—the

EF: Ooh, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup!

EB: That smells great. It smells like borscht, but orange-y.

EF: Ow! Too hot!

EB: It’s soup.

EF: It tastes like chunky earth. You know what I’m trying to say? Not like dirt.

EB: …

EF: Like eating the organic aisle. Er, your grandmother’s garden.

EB: I actually dig this. And I don’t usually like “takes” on things. I want a traditional tomato soup, just done really, really well. But this is good. I’d get this again.

EB: Can I also get the Organic Green salad?

The waitress gives her a look.

stone cold inside a halved and hollowed coconut shell—featured shrimp, mango, red onion, tomato, and lime juice. It was light, refreshing, and clean. Still, it lacked the aji or chili of more traditional renditions, and, as a result, didn’t really ever have the kick that you’d expect from ceviche. Instead, the mango was left alone to dominate the flavor of the dish.

The papa rellena was less successful: a dry and overdone potato did no favors to the chili-like picadillo that filled it. Spicy cherry peppers and jack cheese added zest, but these notes didn’t make up for the otherwise underwhelming course.

But the platillos principales came out quickly enough — and were good enough — that we could forgive the rocky start.

Heralded by the menu as “Our Specialty!,” the hearty lechon asado would easily satisfy any college student’s appetite. (Some made its way back to the suite in a takeout box.) The slow roasted pork, rich and fatty, was tasty, and the yucca and sautéed onions served alongside it were mild, allowing the house-made tangy mojo sauce to take the fore. The highlight of the sides was a cup of black beans, with a smoky chipotle preparation that managed to stand out.

We also ordered the Carribbean snapper, which came recommended by the host.

Being presented with the snapper dish felt like receiving a sacrificial offering: the fish was served whole—all

OPEN STUDIOS

Green Hall // All-Day Annual event at the Yale School of Art represents the school’s four areas of focus.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Dark chocolate-covered espresso beans For the sweet-tooth sweetie.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 27

“JACK AND THE BEANSTALK: THE YCT SENIOR SHOW”

mented that the Bolognese was a bit too sour, but in all, he loved the dish so much he gave me dagger eyes whenever I stole some from his plate. Again, the use of simple but delicious ingredients was a huge success for the dishes. The entrees were modest in style but so flavorful that they offered a unique aura to the dish.

THE USE OF SIMPLE BUT DELICIOUS INGREDIENTS WAS A HUGE SUCCESS FOR THE DISHES. For dessert, we ordered panna cotta infused with mint and served with orange confit, as well as rice pudding with vanilla bean, salted caramel and roasted pistachio.

Both were delicious — again, ROÌA was striving for a delicate flavor instead of large portion sizes or sweet frostings. The panna cotta was presented in a small jar, which added to the stylish décor that the restaurant offers.

Still, with a venue so big, ROÌA has huge shoes to fill. All the empty seats did make the experience feel a little odd: for the price, the emptiness and the lighting made the environment a bit too casual. A month out from its opening, the restaurant would benefit by seeking to fill more of its seats perhaps through more vigorous marketing, if only to improve the ambience.

Nonetheless, the potential is definitely there.

I have no doubt that ROÌA — with food so delicious and a staff whose excitement is very obvious — will fill those seats. It will take some time to develop the reputation of some of New Haven’s other restaurants, but I believe that ROÌA soon find itself as a New Haven classic for years to come.

Contact KAROLINA KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Dwight Hall // Saturday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Monster/Red Bull

Mix with a little Dubra, and you’ve got an energy drank.

Feel like a kid again!

Monster/Red Bull Mix with a little Dubra, and you’ve got an energy drank.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND EATS

ZAFRA // BY DANIEL STERN AND SKYLAR SHIBAYAMA

With mismatched cups, colorful lighting, loud music and a generally busy atmosphere, Zafra’s vibe suggests “snacks and drinks with buddies” more than “New Haven Restaurant Week.” For this cramped Cuban bar on Orange Street with only about 10 tables, a $32 price tag just seems a bit much. And, sure enough, the bill associated with a Restaurant Week dinner may well surpass what you’d spend on a typical meal at Zafra.

When we arrived at Zafra on time for our reservation, a wait of “just two more minutes” ended up escalating closer to 20. The host was apologetic, though, and, to the restaurant’s credit, after being seated at a small two-stool table towards the back of the space, each round of orders came quickly out of the kitchen.

Of the three appetizer options, we chose the ceviche and papa rellena (in Spanish, “filled potato”).

The ceviche — served

RESTAURANT WEEK

H

ungry? Broke? Desperate? Don’t worry – Restaurant Week is here. WEEKEND explored 4 classy, popular and up-and-coming restaurants in New Haven and dished out what good deals and meals are out there. Masticating yet?

(Look it up, you philistine.)

ZINC // BY ELIZA BROOKE AND EMILY FOXHALL

SCENE: Two highly under-qualified restaurant critics, EF and EB, enter Zinc. They are seated at a table. It is not the best table. In fact, it is an awkward table smushed to the side of the restaurant’s long thoroughfare. “If only they knew who we are,” EB and EF thought at once.

The waitress asks if they would like a drink. They decline, but open the menus.

EF: I am hungry.

EB: I pregamed with some peanut butter from the dining hall. Sorry. But this way I won’t be biased by hunger. Also, will Zinc be better than dining hall peanut butter? I’m really into that peanut butter.

EF: Ooh, the Salmon.

EB: Definitely the salmon. Although the Vegetable Bolognese looks really good EF: And the Organic Greens with Pistachio Vinaigrette and Piquillo Pepper Relish — or the soup? I feel lame ordering greens during restaurant week.

EB: Yes, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup is more interesting.

They do not consider the Shrimp Bruschetta, because capers are gross.

EB: Flan or Berry Crumble?

EF: Flan because it’s the first one on the list.

I like that we picked the first one listed in each category so far.

EB: Also, I feel like flan is more … [Words fail her, but she definitely feels that flan is the right choice.]

EF: Can berries crumble?

The waitress returns. They proceed to order.

EF orders because they only have enough money in their budget for one prix-fixe menu. EB has assured EF that she only wants a salad — she did pregame in the dining hall, after all — but that she will have bites of EF’s food.

EB: I’m on a diet.

EF: Is that going to be enough?

EB: I was seriously considering just getting a glass of wine.

The dour waitress brings a small plate of toasted things and gingery dip.

EF: Yay, a bonus! What did she say these were?

EB: No idea. Corn something? I love free things.

They each try not to be the one to kill the toasty nibbles.

Reflecting on their order, the girls use the menu’s abundant choices as a metaphor for life.

As in, they have a lot of choices right now. They are graduating in May. Intro Psych-grade psychoanalysis ensues.

APRIL 27

Contact DANIEL STERN AND SKYLAR SHIBAYAMA at daniel.stern@yale.edu and skylar. shibyama@yale.edu .

// BY KAROLINA KSIAZEK Ever since the ROÌA Restaurant and Café opened on College Street last March, most of the buzz has been about its architecture. The ’20s-themed restaurant exists in what was the dining hall of the Taft Hotel over a century ago, and months of renovation were put into the space. But now that the pomp of the reopening of the space had settled, I wanted a chance to taste the dining experience for the food itself.

The first thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant for dinner was how spacious the main dining area was. I had to concede — the renovation truly was impressive, with beautiful woodwork and a decorative plaster ceiling. I felt the history of the building, especially with jazz music filling the wide two-story space. But something about that spaciousness felt a little off to me: More than half the tables were still empty at 7:15 p.m., and it was strangely very bright. It felt very much like a café; I would have liked the lighting to be dimmer for dinner.

The service staff was very friendly and attentive. We didn’t have to wait very long for any of our requests. Sometimes the attention we were given was overwhelming, and made it hard to have a conversation. It was an atmosphere that was appropriate for an opening week, but a month in, it was a little distracting.

To start, we ordered local diver scallops with a celery root puree, port wine reduction and watercress salad. Unfortunately, the serving size was very small — just three scallops — but they were cooked and seasoned perfectly, and the celery root puree was an interesting addition that I liked a lot. We were also served delicious sourdough bread, which was carried over in a very cute wicker basket.

For the entrée, I ordered the arctic char with whipped potatoes, lacinato kale and thyme cipollini onions. I am usually not big on fish, but the char was delicious. The presentation was eloquent and simple. My date ordered the Tagliatelle Bolognese — egg yolk pasta with natural beef and veal ragu. He com-

The bowl leaves. The next course arrives.

116 CROWN

EF: Ooh, the Pan Seared Salmon with Sweet Cabbage + Caraway Slaw and Rye Berry Risotto!

EB: What even is a rye berry?

// BY WILL ADAMS

EF offers a forkful of risotto, ponders.

EB: Whoa, this tastes like the holidays at your parents’ friends’ house when you’re six. As in, it’s kind of spicy in a cinnamon-y way, but it also has a kind of foreign taste. Like feeling lost, and your parents are off in another room, and you have to play with kids you don’t know and who might try to trick you into locking yourself into a side room.

EF: Huh. [Masticating.] The salmon is perfectly seared. It’s so perfectly pan-seared. This is exactly what I want from a restaurant: I want them to do something that I couldn’t do. Sometimes I imagine myself cooking food that in reality I could never make, but, as it happens, someone can.

The world is a dangerous place.

You can’t trust just anyone; they may try to deceive you, rip you off and make your life suck. So you must imagine that I was pretty skeptical when I found out I would be writing about 116 Crown for WEEKEND. “116 Crown?” Sounds more like a street address than a restaurant name, if you ask me. How could I be sure that this was even an establishment that serves food? I couldn’t be sure by looking at their website that they wouldn’t kill me if I went alone, so I had my good friend Alex accompany and protect me. We arrived promptly at 5:30 p.m. and were thankful to find that, in fact, 116 Crown was a real restaurant that existed and that also served delicious food.

The waiter seated us in a small booth and asked us what we wanted to drink. We said, “Water,” and he gave us four options: Cucumberinfused water, distilled tap water, distilled bottled water and distilled sparkling water. That sure is a lot of types of water — highly suspicious.

We opted for distilled tap water, but later in the evening the waiter surreptitiously switched it out with the (admittedly tastier) cucumberinfused one. Some might call that nice. I call it underhanded and dishonest.

It’s really creepy when people order the same thing at a restaurant, so I ordered from the prix fixe menu while Alex got a burger. After we

EB embarks on diatribe against “New American” cuisine. This diatribe has been redacted for the sake of just about everybody.

EB: … but the salmon is really good.

EB is approximately 4/10 of the way through her salad.

EB pauses to Instagram the food. Follow her at @thebrookestagram.

The plate departs. Dessert arrives.

EF: What is this? [Pokes at what appears to be two small granola clumps sitting next to the little flan.]

EB: I think those are the Candied Almonds.

EF: With the Cinnamon Flan, I feel as if I’m eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch!

EB: Yum. The texture of the flan is perfect, though.

EF: Yum. EB: Yum.

ordered, the waiter smiled and left my menu with me (but not Alex) in case I “changed [my] mind.” Changed my mind? What would cause me to change my mind? That’s pretty suspicious. I mean, I was happy with what I ordered and didn’t end up changing my mind, but it was as if the waiter was trying to warn me of something.

That something must have been “food of mysteriously high quality.” My first course was a large spinach salad with Gorgonzola, walnuts and strawberries. Though slightly overdressed, the salad was curiously delicious, the strawberries curiously fresh and the bits of nuts and cheese curiously flavorful. Even more disturbing was the hanger steak I received for my main course, which was cooked way too perfectly and served over a dollop of potato purée and red cabbage. I grew increasingly anxious that something was slipped into my cucumber water that made me hallucinate that I was eating an extremely tender cut of beef and that I would soon be hypnotized into working for 116 Crown forever, serving martinis to the after-work crowd at the restaurant’s light-up bar. Thank God that didn’t happen!

Also, thank God the dessert I ordered — a rich chocolate trifle — was sweet enough to distract me from the nagging thought that the booth’s cushion was going to swallow me whole.

I was most paranoid when we

received our check, especially since it took a while to get the attention of our waiter. What took so long? Was he whipping up a contingency plan since the drugged cucumber water scheme didn’t pan out? Probably, because when we received the check, it was tucked into a small, black Moleskine. I opened the notebook, thinking that it was our waiter’s diary that would have a desperate “Save yourselves, fast!” message or perhaps an antidote for the spiked cucumber water. No, it was actually a guestbook with two messages: “Gird your loins — Restaurant Week approaches!” and “Bring back the Rolito.” This was horrifying. What happened to these people? Why didn’t they sign their names? Did they write these statements under duress? I signed the check quickly, and Alex and I left before the glass of olives at the bar could sneak up on us.

It’s important to question things, people. You can’t just blindly accept great food when it’s handed to you.

The world doesn’t work like that.

The next time you’re at a restaurant, especially one as nice as 116 Crown, ask yourself if you’re enjoying a lovely dinner or just a part of some construct. For me, as much as 116 Crown’s food had a suspiciously delicious nature, the experience was the former — a lovely dinner.

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

The two fall into silence.

Curtain.

Contact ELIZA BROOKE AND EMILY FOXHALL at eliza.brooke@yale.edu and emily.foxhall@yale.edu .

The food arrives.

S AT U R D AY

main courses and desserts beat Yale Dining at its best—but, for a $32 Restaurant Week menu, you might be better off going somewhere where that price is a deal, rather than an uptick. As for this Cuban bar, the most appealing option might still be ordering bar food: on our next visit, count us in for the nachos and mojitos being enjoyed at the table next to ours.

ROÌA

EF: All of the food is too hot, but after 20 seconds it’s perfect.

The waitress leaves.

14 inches of it, eyeball still in socket—over a bed of Cuban red beans and rice, peppers, and shaved carrot. The fish was flaky, so it was easy to debone. It was easy to eat, too: the meat was delicate, perfectly cooked, and delicious—flavorful, but not too fishy.

The skin, blackened and spiced, was a treat in itself. The sides, on the other hand, were lackluster: For all their color, the red beans and rice were overcooked and bland; the tostones (fried and salted green plantains) came out more chewy than crispy. Even so, the snapper made the entrée a winner.

When the host returned to collect the food, he asked us if we’d eaten the snapper’s eyeball. “The eyeball is meant to give you good fortune,” he said. “And I’ll tell ya — I ate one recently, and I’ve had great fortune!” For some reason, good fortune was sounding less appetizing than dessert, so we chose to go straight to the latter.

Both desserts, though small in portion, were large in flavor. Hazelnut Rum Bread Pudding was served hot and smooth over caramel sauce. The sauce tasted a touch burnt, but in a good way— like the torched top layer of a crème brûlée. Bread puddings can often be soggy; this one wasn’t. It was easy to cut, chewy, and rich. The mocha caramel flan was equally good: its sweetness wasn’t overpowering, and berries layered on top helped make the dessert feel refreshing.

In the end, our dinner at Zafra wasn’t bad—the

EF: Ooh, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup!

EB: That smells great. It smells like borscht, but orange-y.

EF: Ow! Too hot!

EB: It’s soup.

EF: It tastes like chunky earth. You know what I’m trying to say? Not like dirt.

EB: …

EF: Like eating the organic aisle. Er, your grandmother’s garden.

EB: I actually dig this. And I don’t usually like “takes” on things. I want a traditional tomato soup, just done really, really well. But this is good. I’d get this again.

EB: Can I also get the Organic Green salad?

The waitress gives her a look.

stone cold inside a halved and hollowed coconut shell—featured shrimp, mango, red onion, tomato, and lime juice. It was light, refreshing, and clean. Still, it lacked the aji or chili of more traditional renditions, and, as a result, didn’t really ever have the kick that you’d expect from ceviche. Instead, the mango was left alone to dominate the flavor of the dish.

The papa rellena was less successful: a dry and overdone potato did no favors to the chili-like picadillo that filled it. Spicy cherry peppers and jack cheese added zest, but these notes didn’t make up for the otherwise underwhelming course.

But the platillos principales came out quickly enough — and were good enough — that we could forgive the rocky start.

Heralded by the menu as “Our Specialty!,” the hearty lechon asado would easily satisfy any college student’s appetite. (Some made its way back to the suite in a takeout box.) The slow roasted pork, rich and fatty, was tasty, and the yucca and sautéed onions served alongside it were mild, allowing the house-made tangy mojo sauce to take the fore. The highlight of the sides was a cup of black beans, with a smoky chipotle preparation that managed to stand out.

We also ordered the Carribbean snapper, which came recommended by the host.

Being presented with the snapper dish felt like receiving a sacrificial offering: the fish was served whole—all

OPEN STUDIOS

Green Hall // All-Day Annual event at the Yale School of Art represents the school’s four areas of focus.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Dark chocolate-covered espresso beans For the sweet-tooth sweetie.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 27

“JACK AND THE BEANSTALK: THE YCT SENIOR SHOW”

mented that the Bolognese was a bit too sour, but in all, he loved the dish so much he gave me dagger eyes whenever I stole some from his plate. Again, the use of simple but delicious ingredients was a huge success for the dishes. The entrees were modest in style but so flavorful that they offered a unique aura to the dish.

THE USE OF SIMPLE BUT DELICIOUS INGREDIENTS WAS A HUGE SUCCESS FOR THE DISHES. For dessert, we ordered panna cotta infused with mint and served with orange confit, as well as rice pudding with vanilla bean, salted caramel and roasted pistachio.

Both were delicious — again, ROÌA was striving for a delicate flavor instead of large portion sizes or sweet frostings. The panna cotta was presented in a small jar, which added to the stylish décor that the restaurant offers.

Still, with a venue so big, ROÌA has huge shoes to fill. All the empty seats did make the experience feel a little odd: for the price, the emptiness and the lighting made the environment a bit too casual. A month out from its opening, the restaurant would benefit by seeking to fill more of its seats perhaps through more vigorous marketing, if only to improve the ambience.

Nonetheless, the potential is definitely there.

I have no doubt that ROÌA — with food so delicious and a staff whose excitement is very obvious — will fill those seats. It will take some time to develop the reputation of some of New Haven’s other restaurants, but I believe that ROÌA soon find itself as a New Haven classic for years to come.

Contact KAROLINA KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Dwight Hall // Saturday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Monster/Red Bull

Mix with a little Dubra, and you’ve got an energy drank.

Feel like a kid again!

Monster/Red Bull Mix with a little Dubra, and you’ve got an energy drank.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

SUBSTANCE. STIMULANT. STUDY AID. STIMULANTS FROM PAGE B3 cern, given the infrequency and low doses of her consumption.

And she added that she finds students see Adderall as ‘less illegal’ than other drugs, since “no doctor is ever going to prescribe you cocaine.”

“Adderall is not generally viewed as a party drug — it’s viewed as a drug for college students that have to get their shit done,” Sadie said.

Part of the reason Adderall may seem less intense than other drugs has to do with the method of taking it rather than its chemical composition. When taken in pill form, part of the pill is degraded in the stomach, and the effects are felt more gradually. If snorted, some of the drug would get lost in the nose, but what was ingested would go to the brain much more quickly, Kober said. She added that the effects of snorting Adderall would be more akin to snorting something like crystal meth.

And the faster the drug enters the brain, the greater the chance of one’s forming an addiction.

Kober said because the drug is relatively new, the medical world lacks research on whether taking these stimulants in college will harm you in the long run. But researchers also don’t know that it doesn’t.

Robert Malison MED ’87, a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine who studies stimulant use and addiction, said the best current research demonstrates that one in 10 people who try Adderall or similar amphetamines will develop an addiction.

That might sound like good news: it means that 90 percent probably won’t. But it’s a gamble students should at least know they are taking, Malison feels.

He is worried about students’ growing use of such stimulants. To illustrate its risks, he brought up the example of the methamphetamine craze that has swept over Thailand in the past decade. It began with over-the-counter capsules, which he said were used primarily by university students and truck drivers to stay up through the night.

The pills have now crossed over into all parts of Thai society. Malison recounted how on a research visit to Thailand, he saw eight and nine-year-olds in hospitals for addiction. And while they used to be called “diligence pills” they are now commonly called “crazy pills”: once users become addicted, the pills can make them psychotic.

Malison sees the rise of Adderall in the States as having “all the hallmarks of our country’s next stimulant epidemic.”

He is interested in further studying how the kind of sleep loss Yale students report can make individuals more vulnerable to addiction and said correlative

(though not causal) studies have shown a link between the two.

“If you’re going without sleep for weeks, you’re most likely to feel those benefits and euphoric effects. We know young people are sleep deprived,” Malison added.

“It’s fertile soil for the use of stimulants to plant themselves in.

Mood changes evaporate on stimulants.”

When we lose sleep, our cognitive performance declines, said Dr. Vahid Mohsenin, director of the Yale Center for Sleep Medicine.

Malison said some of the positive effects these stimulants have on cognitive function would likely be far more modest if users were sleeping enough in the first place.

The one time Rachel took Adderall, she experienced some of the euphoric effects Malison described.

“I was just intensely content and happy; I felt like everything was going to work out,” she said. “[When sober] I realized it was a fake, temporary feeling.”

But Rachel found herself crashing by the time of her final and had to drink two cups of coffee in the morning to stay awake. The exam didn’t go well, and she felt unable to eat or function normally for the rest of the day before passing out at 6 p.m. Looking back on the experience, she’s not at all sure that taking the drug had helped her study more than she would have on her own.

“At the time I was like, ‘Wow, I definitely need to take this all the time!’” she said. “After, I was like, ‘No way. I don’t want to do that to my body ever again.’” *** So, to recap: the less you sleep, the more likely you are to resort to stimulants, such as amphetamines, and the more likely you will be to experience positive effects from taking them that can then lead to addiction — and which you might not experience if you had just slept more in the first place.

So why aren’t we just sleeping more?

Different animals sleep very different amounts, Mohsenin said.

Horses and donkeys only need to sleep for about 3 hours a day. Large cats do about 16.

“Humans have been programmed for 7 to 8 hours,” Mohsenin said. “It’s all hard-wired.”

That is about one third of all of the hours we have each day.

That means we’re supposed to be spending a third of our lives asleep, which sounds a little excessive.

And four students interviewed agreed that at least part of what’s keeping us awake isn’t papers or problem sets: it’s FOMO, or fear of missing out.

Kevin Ho ’12 SPH ’13 said everyone at Yale loves sleep. But when it comes down to it, they just value other things more. According to

the News survey, 60 percent of students sleep an average of 6 hours or less per night.

“The opportunity cost of sleeping at Yale is higher than at other places.” Ho said — there’s just so much else to do with your time.

“We have the rest of our lives to sleep.”

And anyway, we are young!

We’ll bounce back! And we all like to have a good battle story or two at the very end of the year. Last semester, I took five exams and turned in a term paper in the span of four days. On day five, I took a two-hour final about fish after sleeping two and a half hours. I later described the experience as both “harrowing” and “epic.”

Mohsenin said that a normal sleep pattern would mean that our internal sleep-producing forces are aligned with the external cycles of light and darkness. When these fall out of alignment, a range of things can happen, including increased insulin resistance— which is what leads to diabetes— and increased risk for stroke.

But sleep remains one of the few things we are collectively not that afraid of missing out on.

Science is telling us we’re wrong, but Science also tells us a lot of things. Whether wine/chocolate/tobacco/organ meat are recommended to us as healthy or carcinogenic can vary wildly from one decade to the next, and we don’t always listen. We’ve all heard the new studies saying the brain doesn’t finish developing till well into our 20s, that we shouldn’t be binge drinking so young. Many of

us just don’t seem to care. *** I remember hearing a particular verse read during Wednesday Lenten services at my Russian Orthodox church back home. It turned out to be Psalm 127:2, and of all the verses intoned by candlelight, it’s the only one I can recount almost from memory: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep,” Of course, if you look through the Bible hard enough, it seems you can find instructions telling you to do pretty much everything (lots of stoning to death).

In offices at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life, I asked for interpretations from two people who have spent considerably more time studying the text than I have: Rabbis Noah Cheses and James Ponet ’68. Cheses is young and soft-spoken. Ponet has gray hair but a lively and intense manner of speaking. He said he would offer me tea if he had more time.

Ponet explained that part of the idea of the “ever-watchful God” is that it gives us, people, permission to go to sleep. But especially in ego-driven environments like Yale, it’s hard to let go of the idea of constantly exerting control over bodies and minds.

“We feel a certain shame at limitations; we seek to show we aren’t bound by them,” Ponet said.

“Sleep seems to be a thief that steals time.”

What side effects have you felt after consuming energy drinks?

You can select more than one.

?

59%

25%

jolt and crash headaches feelings of increased alertness and energy followed by a sudden drop in energy

S AT U R D AY APRIL 27

49% heart palpitations feelings or sensations that your heart is pounding or racing

7% other

When the promise of control provided by caffeine didn’t work out for Lu, she had to come to terms with the fact she couldn’t push herself infinitely. She said that learning her own limits has been a college-long struggle for her, one that’s ongoing. “[By using stimulants] people think they can control nature and not subject themselves to the limitations of physiology, of their humanness,” Cheses said. “It’s the illusion of control.”

Ponet thinks there is room for us to think of sleep as more than just a physical weakness to be overcome.

He linked the origin of the expression “I’m going to sleep on it,” to the sayings, “I’m going to pray on it,” or “I’m going to give it to God,” explaining that they all point to the fact that there are some things we can only understand with the unconscious mind. He also cited the many instances of revelatory dreams to be found in the Bible.

“There’s a connection between effort and attainment of truth in life,” Ponet said. “But that’s not always the case. There are gifts, miraculous insights. There are times exhaustive efforts prevent us from seeing what’s there already.”

On some special days in the Jewish calendar, one is asked to stay up all night long learning and studying the Torah. Cheses said these practices originate from around the time when coffee began to spread out of Northern Africa during the 15th century.

But such celebrations are viewed as “exceptional evenings, when you’re intentionally going above and beyond nature,” he said. From a pastoral perspective, he counsels students to sleep.

“When they don’t sleep, they don’t have full access to their emotions, and they make dumb decisions because they are not fully aware of themselves,” Cheses said.

Ponet admitted, though, that he does find something special in the experience of being up and lucid at 11, 12, 1, 2.

I know what he means. Even in my insomnia years, I sometimes felt the exhilaration of being awake and reading long after midnight. It meant hearing things no one else around was hearing, being the only one to see and notice all the different kinds of darkness. Right up until this year, I wouldn’t take back any of the all-nighters I’ve pulled, however reluctantly.

But sleep has never been the enemy for me. Until, suddenly, it was. This semester, I planned my schedule knowing there was no way I could get more than 6 hours a night for most of the week, and would often have to make do with less. What worries me is that that this didn’t concern me. Since I came to Yale, I have gone from thinking of sleep as something with obvious, intrinsic value to seeing it as an inconvenience at best.

Common phrases like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” make us think of

HANDEL’S “GIULIO CESARE”

*** I wrote almost this entire article after midnight on a single night.

When my friend went to G-Heav at around 2 a.m., I made a decision, and asked him to bring me a cup of coffee.

I could instantly taste the difference. It was sharper, more metallic than the decaf I’d been having for my entire life.

Within 20 minutes, I no longer felt like I was going to fall asleep, and I didn’t crash for a good few hours after drinking less than half the cup. So unlike Lu, I know it works for me now. I also felt surprisingly cheerful, more optimistic. I stayed focused for three more hours, but found myself more hung up on small details of word choice and grammar, however hard I tried to force myself to look at the big picture.

I also started to feel other things.

I became weirdly, intensely aware of my heartbeat, which seemed to be getting faster and faster. My hands were shaking. After a while, everything was shaking. Still, I couldn’t believe how awake I was.

I began to question why I hadn’t been doing this all along. I also thought about how, if I did choose to start drinking caffeine, I would probably never feel it quite like this again.

I thought of something Kober had told me. The other things it’s possible to experience when you take stimulants, such as increased jitters and anxiety, aren’t really side effects. They are just other effects. Stimulating our central nervous systems might mean less sleepiness, but it also means more of everything else, whether we want it or not. As Huang put it, I felt “really intense.”

Around 5:30 a.m., the effects began to wear off. I was surprised to find out it was light outside.

I walked back to my room.

By 6:30 a.m., I was asleep. *Name changed for anonymity.

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Sprague Memorial Hall // 12 p.m.

Broadcast in HD live from the Met. WKND loves Opera.

sleep as opposed to life. Sleep is not-doing. When we sleep, we give up acting on ourselves and on the world around us. We wake up with nothing tangible to show for it, except, hopefully, a reduction in the amount of adenosine floating around in our brains.

We won’t always live by semesters, with papers and p-sets to make us stay up. Yet 90 percent of us will go on drinking caffeine daily. And I think part of it has to do with the way we view sleep, and our bodies: as tools to control instead of to take care of, by drinking a cup of something or by taking a pill.

Red Bull says no one ever wishes they had slept more in college. It’s up to us to decide whether we’re going to believe them.

5-Hour Energy

When you are getting a little desp.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND APPRECIATES

GRASS // BY ANDREW BEZEK Sometimes I think the square patch of grass between the two halves of Berkeley is mostly an in-between place where people exchange a few words here and there about their dogs. I was sitting there the other day, when one woman stopped another midlawn to reach down and scratch a disheveled, gray head.

“Is that a Yorkie?” she said to the dog.

“Yes.” “I have a Yorkie too, but it’s a teacup.

It’s smaller.”

“Oh.” There was a look of genuine interest in this small matter.

I stared at the creature she was petting. I thought to myself, I can’t imagine anything smaller. Their conversation lingered for another sentence or two before it floated into the air and was consumed by the cirrocumulus clouds overhead. The scene was hardly sublime. The grass was sparse, chunked out and smeared inconsistently with yellow streaks, leaving shadowy gashes of the dirt underneath. A girl in a white T-shirt rode her bicycle across it, bumping over the uneven turf, her wheels digging down to the roots.

Cross Campus is, more often than not, in a state of disrepair.

In the springtime, most of Yale is abloom. This lawn is not. It isn’t allowed to be. People cross it in droves every day, bringing soccer balls and blankets and cleats and tables and signs to push down into the quick of the dirt. They do yoga in the mornings, and they carry their boxed chicken Caesar salads from Uncommon there at lunch, sprawling out with laptops, taking off their shoes, staring at the people billowing past in packs. The effect is magnetic. One person strolling across the lawn beckons dozens of others to abandon the pathway and forge full speed ahead, trampling the turf to mud. Then they move on: off and away. *** Eric Uscinski, Yale’s director of facilities services, does not move on.

He sits in his office on Whitney Avenue, dressed neatly in a shirt and tie, with a large map of Yale’s campuses tacked to the wall behind him, a reminder of his domain. He has arranged several stacks of papers on his desk. If his job deals in the mechanics of the flowerbed, then his desk is proof of his skill; he is a manicurist by instinct.

Eric’s daughter is a student at the School of Nursing, so he is invested in Yale in more ways than one. He has a warm voice, not too low, and in it, it’s

S AT U R D AY APRIL 27

easy to detect compassion and care, as if there are nights he falls asleep, dreaming of rolling fields of fescue, tilled and trimmed. Eric employs 65 year-round staff and four supervisors in order to maintain these rolling fields all over campus, from the central campus to the Yale golf course in Westville.

When I asked Eric to talk about his job, he described it as an “ever-evolving process.” Perhaps this is the most obvious way to think about grass — evolving, changing, growing.

But even if lawn care, by essence, seems like a seasonal job, working on Yale lawns is what Eric calls a “12month operation.” “This place never shuts down,” he said. In the summer, they’re always cutting and watering.

In the spring and fall, they have projects: seeding, pruning and planting.

And in the winter, they’re dealing with three and a half feet of snow. The process never ends; it only cycles.

There are roughly 26 weeks of mowing in the Northeast. These 26 weeks started two weeks ago, so until the end of September, Eric and his team will mow Yale lawns as often as twice a week. Yale seeds its lawns about four times each year with a Kentucky bluegrass blend. When I asked Eric about bluegrass, he stared blankly. As a Georgia boy, I was unfamiliar with bluegrass — at home, everyone uses Bermuda, except my parents who, for some reason, believe only in fescue. Apparently, even grass is a Mason-Dixon conflict.

Bluegrass, known also as Poa pratensis, is common in Northeastern climates, as it tends to be hardier at moderate temperatures. The name comes from the characteristic blue flowers, which appear only when the grass grows to its natural height of 2 to 3 feet. But most of the bluegrass on Cross Campus isn’t growing at all. What little does gets smashed by passers-by, or if not, trimmed by the landscaping staff.

The Yale landscaping crew stores their army of mowers at a facility on Goffe Street, where they also manage campus recycling and an equipment repair shop. One of the supervisors there, Joe Signore, spoke with me briefly about fertilizing. To my surprise, Joe told me they actually fertilize very little, maybe once a year or so. It’s a hot topic, fertilizing, and like every-

one else, the landscaping crew also worry about pesticides and herbicides and are very cautious about what they put down. Joe acknowledged, “our turf doesn’t look pristine,” and in place of overfertilizing, they try to seed it several times a year. He said, a little exasperatedly, “We’re constantly seeding.

It’s continuous and people forget about that.”

As I look across the lawn, he’s right.

I’m not noticing an excess of seeding.

If anything, I’m noticing a deficiency.

Sometimes, there’s more dirt than grass. But this deficiency isn’t on Joe; it isn’t on Eric. If anything, they’re more concerned than the rest of us about the appearance of the lawn. “There’s an expectation that lawn area should look like a show place,” Eric said. It doesn’t. He knows. I asked Joe if he ever gets frustrated with students who overuse the grass. “Naturally you do,” he told me, “however, we all just look at it as job security. If we didn’t have to keep cleaning up the grass, then we wouldn’t have jobs.” *** Last Wednesday, I sat on Cross Campus for six hours reading through my 70-page senior essay. It took six hours because, as a senior, I finally know people, and a few stopped and sat for a while. It was a welcome distraction from proofing. We spread out.

I had a towel and a large bag of kettle corn — everyone was eating — and we spilled small kernels across the dirt (if only they had been grass seeds instead of corn.) Other people were around us, napping in the sun, talking about the pending end of the year, handing out flyers for the Yale Quidditch team.

In the few short weeks between midterms and finals, when the weather finally warms up, Yale takes some time to renew its sense of community. That’s why we were there, remembering what it means to be 20-something and in

college. Sitting down in the quad, if only for a few hours, before returning to the next paper. Part of something slightly more freeing than the inside of Sterling. I even noticed one guy had brought his entire bedroom out there: a desk, a lamp and a dorm bed, all set up in the middle of the lawn.

But when I notice all those people out there on the lawn, splayed out on the grass or running across it, I wonder if Eric, Joe and the lawn maintenance team are not a little discouraged. Six hours into my essay, when I pulled up my blanket to leave and shook off the kernel crumbs, the grass looked tired, as if it had just suffered an afternoon of abuse. It had. I was one of the many people who had willingly disregarded the sidewalks and forged ahead.

Cross Campus is unique. It’s a meeting place, a nexus, where people from all parts of campus come together mostly in passing, on their way from one place to the next. We’re lucky to be able to set foot on the grass. No one tells us it’s forbidden; it’s our lawn.

And even if it’s never quite beautiful, it’s ours. And while most people brush past it, some stop and stare. Some sit with a blanket for several hours and take it in.

After spending some time there myself, I have come to understand this less-than-perfect grass invites two kinds of souls: those who are going places and those who are watching people going places. The world flies by, and while some people sit on blankets and watch as others head off in dozens of different directions, like pool balls shot out from their opening triangle, others head for the corner pocket: speedy, determined, goal-bound.

Take, for example, one man in a blackand-white striped shirt with a widebrimmed hat and a linen blazer slung over his arm who is strolling quickly down the path, his canvas bag swinging in time with his step. He doesn’t

pause. He’s really going somewhere; he’s gone. Sometimes, the events of this patch of grass fall into the forgotten past almost before they even occur.

Then, there I am, sitting for hours, watching dozens of people brush past.

Some of them don’t even look up. Most people are not so careful. They stop to say hello, but never really to talk, never really to linger. This patch of lawn is well-acquainted with breathless, fivesecond conversations, as everyone dashes from one place to another.

Eric and the lawn team have the incredible task of making something beautiful that really isn’t meant to be beautiful at all. It’s meant to be trampled. Ruined. In my final days at Yale, sitting on this imperfect lawn has become something of a ritual. It’s a way of clinging, if only superficially, to the heart of Yale. The truth is if Cross Campus really were beautiful, Yale wouldn’t be on the go. It wouldn’t be running from one building to the next, from one rehearsal to another, from Beinecke Plaza to Old Campus, from everything to everything else.

Spending time on that lawn, I’ve learned about Yale, the way people walk, the things they say in passing.

But most importantly, I’ve found that if you stop on Cross Campus. And sit.

And wait. Even in that unbeautiful grass, beautiful things are possible. I remember one time this fall there was a full moon. I was walking home from a concert, and I collapsed there and stared at the sky. The brightness of the moon rounded out the rough edges of the blackness, giving it the particularly cavernous look infinity might have if it could be contained. I could make out only two stars. That was enough. There was no wind, as I laid there for an indeterminate amount of time.

Contact ANDREW BEZEK at andrew.bezek@yale.edu .

// BENJI GOLDSMITH

The grass we enjoy at Yale is a round the year process of care and cultivation.

DANCEWORKS PRESENTS: “FIRE & ICE”

Off Broadway Theater // Saturday at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.

According to the Yale Arts Calendar, “YOU’LL HAVE THE BEST TIME EVER!!!”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Adderall

IT WILL MAKE YOU CRAZY!!!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

REAL-TALK: GOOD-BYE. // BY MILA HURSEY I’m a super senior, so you should, like, listen to my sage words of wisdom about how to make the most of Yale. This is my last hurrah, so I’d like to take this opportunity to bestow advice on you young, spry, not-jaded folks.

These are the things I have found to be true. It’s not like I made the most of Yale. In fact, I have very, very mixed emotions about leaving Yale. I’m somewhere in between wanting to GTFO and wanting to redo some things.

Somewhere between glad that I watched all of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” here, but also regretting that I wasted that much of my Yale experience on Netflix. I don’t know! Well, here’s what I’ve got, for better or for worse: -Check your privilege. Take an ethnic studies class.

-Take science classes. Take math classes. Take computerprogramming classes. Take

MILA HURSEY EMANCIPATION OF MIMI classes vaguely involving the kind of thing you want to get a job in after college. I did not realize this until my senior year, but the Internet has essentially made the humanities and social sciences accessible to anyone. You don’t have to go to Yale to be exposed to Derrida and engage with people about him. I’m not saying these classes aren’t wonderful, and that you shouldn’t major in whatever you happen to find interesting (holla Anthro majors!!), but nobody is going to pay you cash money for your thoughts about post-colonialism unless you get a Ph.D. in it (and sometimes not even then). The most powerful and wealthiest folks in the world are programmers and engineers. I know you love critical analysis, I do too, but

it is only useful here, and Yale is not forever. Sorry. I, for instance, learned how to write script coverage. Horrayyyyy. Someone will maybe pay me minimum wage for that.

-But don’t let school get in the way of your Yale experience.

Hmmmmmmm should I do a great job on this paper two people will read or meet an academy award nominated screenwriter?

Or go to a talk with freaking Aung San Suu Kyi? Seriously, is that even a question? You can write papers at any university. Besides the fact that we get brick oven pizza in our dining halls and have lots of money for petting zoos, the only difference between Yale and basically anywhere else is easy access to super duper awesome folks. Also, more often than not there’s catered food involved.

And alcohol, depending on the department. Who am I kidding?

In every department.

-When you are done hanging out with your profs, hang out with international students.

They throw the best parties. Best music, best dancing, best looking crowd.

-Study abroad. I guarantee you that your friends will still be here.

They will, and you will be cooler.

Or you could feel ownership of that country and be like, “Yeah, well I lived there for several weeks,” whenever someone mentions it. I swear, every time anyone mentions the Czech Republic I turn into a name-dropping monster. Anyway, the point is you should go, and of course, get Yale to pay for it.

-You know what? Squeeze as much travel money as you can out of this University. If I could do it all again, I would plan my academic career by which classes sent students to awesome places.

Seriously, why didn’t I take Rainforest Exploration? Stupid.

-If you don’t want to take Orgo in exchange for a vacation to the jungle, visit East Rock. It’s an easy escape from the bubble. Go there, commune with nature.

There are deer in New Haven! Did you know that? No, you didn’t because they live in East Rock. It’s a mile away, people, and it’s literally a Garden of Eden and joy and puppies and babies.

-But most importantly, it’s okay to be lost. It is okay not to have a passion. It is okay to not know what the hell you want to do with your life. There are people here who have known what they want for their entire life.

Sometimes it’s easy like “I would like to be rich,” or “I would like be the best _______ in the whole entire world.” Some folks have no idea what they want to do at 20 years old. That sounds pretty

healthy to me. We got in for displaying passions, drive and a good return on an investment.

This does not mean you are not allowed to change your mind. It also does not mean that other people are better than you for having direction. That just means they are faking it better than you.

NOTE: You should fake a passion in order to get money from Yale to do cool things. Go visit penguins or some shit.

So after 4+ years here, that’s all that I have to offer. This is all that’s left. I have nothing more. I am washed up, drinking wine from the bottle, over language and seriously over my agebracket. Good luck motherfuckers, may the odds be ever in your favor.

Contact MILA HURSEY at mila.hursey@yale.edu .

This year’s ten must-reads // BY SCOTT STERN

// CREATIVE COMMONS

In the last year, I have written 15 book reviews for WEEKEND. When I tell people that I write book reviews, they always ask me two opposing questions: 1) How do you possibly have time to read for pleasure? 2) What do you recommend?

In answer to the first question, I have three words for you: books on tape. Listen to books while you work out, walk to class or wait in line at Durfee’s. I also make a concerted (and intermittently successful) effort to set aside half an hour a day for pleasure reading (or “The Daily Show,” if I’m less committed).

I usually puzzle a little more over the second question. Often, I refer the eager questioner to my latest book review. Yet, in today’s half-hour, I decided to pick the 10 books you really should read from the last year. Bear in mind, this is super subjective. But anyway, here they are (in no particular order): 1. “My Beloved World” by Sonia Sotomayor: This sparkling autobiographical best-seller is a rare achievement — a statement from a public figure that is both remarkably honest and beautifully written. In a break from

S U N D AY APRIL 28

SCOTT STERN A STERN PERSPECTIVE tradition, a sitting Supreme Court justice — and not just any Supreme Court justice — has written a memoir that details a childhood in the projects, a life with diabetes, and the culture shock of transitioning to the Ivy League and then the legal big leagues.

2. “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn: More than any other on this list, this novel was un-put-downable. “Gone Girl” made the jump from pulp fiction into mainstream acclaim with uncommon pizzazz. It tells the story of a wife who simply disappears, perhaps violently, leaving everyone to blame her husband. Secrets are revealed, all is not what it seems and then there’s this crazy twist.

Like truly insane, though my lips are sealed.

3. “The Other Wes Moore” by Wes Moore: An unusual memoir that intertwines two kids, both named Wes Moore, both of whom grew up on the same street in the same bad neighborhood. The author went on to be

a Rhodes scholar and acclaimed leader; the “other” Wes Moore is serving a life sentence for murder. In an engaging (though occasionally self-congratulatory) book, Moore explores why two kids who seemingly had so much in common led such different lives.

4. “Barack Obama: The Story”

by David Maraniss: This monumental biography is so much more than a biography. It tells the story of Obama’s family, beginning a century ago in Kansas and Kenya, giving details that even Obama did not know existed. Its gripping narrative is only matched by the superb accomplishment of its journalism — hundreds of interviews make this book the authoritative account of young Barack’s life and the forces and places that shaped America’s first black president.

5. “The Orphan Master’s Son”

by Adam Johnson: This recently crowned winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is as enthralling and mysterious as the country it seeks to expose. The protagonist, Jun Do, is the son of a man who runs a work camp for orphans in Pyongyang, North Korea, and

young Jun Do gets to pick which of the orphans eat first and which do the hardest labor. As he grows older and rises through the ranks of bureaucracy, Jun Do becomes a violent criminal indentured to the North Korean elites. He eventually risks his life and so, so much more to challenge Kim Jong Il for the affections of the woman he loves.

6. “My Brother’s Book” by Maurice Sendak: A mere 31 pages, this children’s book is surprisingly not for the faint of heart. Written by the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are” and published posthumously, “My Brother’s Book” is Sendak’s final work, dedicated to his late brother, Jack. In the book, a star cleaves the Earth in two, separating two brothers, Jack and Guy. It is a touching story of danger and loss, from a man known for his unusual approach.

“I’m not Hans Christian Andersen,” Sendak grumbled shortly before his death. He’s not your average children’s book writer, and this is the last time we’ll experience the curious glow of his prose and pictures.

7. “White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf” by Aaron

Bobrow-Strain: This endlessly entertaining book tells the story of America through our most ubiquitous foodstuff. BobrowStrain reveals that the history of white bread is intricately entangled with the politics of race, class, gender and ethnicity. From a beloved “superfood” to the fare of “white trash,” white bread’s history tells a tale of high ideals that often stratify our society.

8. “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling: I reviewed this book earlier this year, and I called it an “important” book from “perhaps the world’s most important living author.” I stand by that. A tricky tale of death and deception from the small English village of Pagford, “The Casual Vacancy” appears to be just a story of a local election, no magic in sight. But this dark fable has more than just a hint of myth. It is a cutting indictment of the class divide that defines the modern world.

9. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” by Jeremy Scahill: This stunning book, hot off the press, tells the story of America’s covert wars. Scahill, a reporter for The Nation, explores the lives of the soldiers,

“JAMMING FOR JANE”

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Morse Crescent Theater // 4 p.m.

A performance by the Yale Irish Dancers to benefit the Richard Family Fund.

Martin Richard, Jane’s brother, died in the Boston Marathon bombings, and Jane lost a leg in the tragedy.

spies and private security contractors who are funded through “black budgets” to incite revolt, target leaders and destabilize regions. Detailing breathtaking and heartbreaking events in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and numerous other places, Scahill reveals the scary backbone of modern American foreign policy.

10. “We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March” by Cynthia Levinson: Based on four extensive and remarkable survivor interviews, this book tells a story often omitted from the annals of American history.

When desegregation efforts in Birmingham stalled in mid1963, thousands of black schoolchildren marched for their rights — against the initial wishes of Martin Luther King Jr. Many were imprisoned, some suffered physical harm, but astoundingly, they changed the course of the civil rights movement.

Well, there you have it. Perhaps this reading week, you can start reading for pleasure. I know (I wish) I will.

Introspection

There are bigger things in this world than your exams.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND MUSIC

DJ ACTION SPILLS HIS SOUL // BY JORDAN SCHNEIDER

On Wednesday night, senior reporter Jordan Schneider sat down in Yorkside over buffalo chicken tenders to discuss the illustrious career of Toad’s Thomas ‘DJ Action’ Jackson. He spoke on his early days as a high school exchange student skiing in Austria and what happened after he broke his dad’s record player.

The former Quinnipiac physical therapy student, who started at Toad’s in 2004, answered pressing questions about sex on the dance floor and just who the hell is the guy with the giant beard.

Q. When did you first get into music?

A. When I was 3 years old I thought my dad’s belt-driven turntables were the coolest thing … I remember my dad worked nights as a social worker so he worked for Department of Children and Family Services. I would wait on him to go to work on Saturday and as soon as he left there I was down in the basement playing with the turntables.

One day he came back, he said, “Have you been messing with my turntables? My levels are off!” One day I broke the needle and stylus … that was the worst ass-whooping I can remember. I took that but hours later, guess who’s waiting for him to

go to work and messing with the turntables.

My dad was never a DJ, but he had a huge love for music.

You don’t expect a black man in inner city Chicago to listen to groups like Led Zeppelin, the Alex Harvey band, the Cars …

I’m sitting here like, wow, this man is about the music.

Q. When did you DJ your first party?

A. In 7th grade I had a boombox.

We’d have parties in our classroom, I’d bring a boom box and CDs that I brought from my dad. No mixing, no scratching. I would mix from CD to the radio while I mixed until the next CD. Q. What was your first set of decks?

A. I went to Colby College before I went to Quinnipiac [for grad school in physical therapy]. The school just had a set of three CD players that had a tray and mixer. I would just DJ off of that. Most people end up with campus jobs that pay minimum wage, but my roommate who was a DJ said, “Come DJ with me!” He showed me how to hook up the equipment and before I knew it I was getting requested for all the parties.

Q. What’s your DJing philosophy?

A. It never really mattered what I wanted to hear, it was what the crowd wanted to hear. You put yourself last, otherwise you’re just a bedroom DJ and you play for yourself.

Q. How did you get involved with Toad’s?

A. The Toad’s DJ who was graduating at the end of the year was a buddy of mine who was familiar with one of the promoters at Toad’s and heard me DJ. He said, “Oh man we gotta get you into Toad’s.” But I’d never even heard of the club.

I was a graduate student … I was out of the loop! I thought it was the dumbest name in the world for a nightclub. I did the set, and the DJs who were there were really impressed. The guy ended up graduating and I’ve been doing it ever since 2004.

Q. So what’s changed since then?

A. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The party has been the same, the energy’s been the same, the music’s been the same: house, hip hop, R&B, some classics.

“Livin’ on a Prayer” is a staple, and if we don’t play it, Brian

[the owner] will yell at us.

trouble with Yale kids.

Q. What are the most outrageous things you’ve seen at Toad’s?

Q. What do you think are some differences between Yale and Quinnipiac students?

A. Extreme drunkenness. What I mean by that is not just people who have passed out. People do things and appear to have forgotten where they are.

For example, people having sex on the dance floor, doing it like they’re at home and no one’s watching them. People having sex in the DJ booth like I’m not there doing my job. And I’m not talking about just heterosexually. When I’m trying to DJ it makes things difficult.

As much as I can appreciate a fine female figure, you can see that the girl is not quite with it.

I feel for people’s safety, and I don’t want to see anything bad happen to anybody. The way people dance these days they could be doing it so sometimes you don’t know. But the last thing you want to hear is someone getting sexually assaulted in the nightclub, that you saw it and you did nothing about it.

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. So that’s why I call over security.

I’ve also seen some pretty nasty fights. Back in 20052006, back when a lot of the Quinnipiac kids appeared to be juicing, they always had

A. When Quinnipiac kids come in, it’s like they come to impress. They dress to impress, they order their drinks to impress. The average Yale student, they come in in whatever the hell they feel like wearing.

You guys kind of don’t care.

There’s something really cool about it. For Quinnipiac kids it’s like they’re going to the finest establishment in the city.

There’s something cool about that too.

Quinnipiac kids will go nuts to certain records, and Yale will too to the same and some different records as well. You can play older music to a Yale crowd and they’ll still love it — Yale never gets tired of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” One time, I didn’t play it and 20 people came up to me and were like, “What the fuck?” Quinnipiac kids, if they stay that long, are like, “oh, here it comes again.”

Quinnipiac, no disrespect,

but truly Toad’s is [Yale’s] club.

It’s in your neighborhood.

I’m not gonna say [the owner] caters to you more but you guys have always been and will always be the foundation.

Q. So I hear you were a ski racer?

A. I wanted to go to the Olympics so I spent a year in Austria freshman year of high school training with their junior team, and then I went to Salt Lake City and trained with a ski academy for three years.

Q. So who is the guy with the beard?

A. Jim Day. He is the light technician who is often times confused as me. He’s just that guy.

He’s just a regular old dude.

Nice guy though. I don’t know how long Jim Day’s been there, or what’s up with the beard.

Contact JORDAN SCHNEIDER at jordan.schneider@yale.edu .

// HENRY EHRENBERG

DJ Action spinning the tunes.

A Mild Case of EDM // BY AARON GERTLER

David Rudnick ’09, former host of some of Yale’s best parties, once told me he’d almost managed to get Justice for a concert in the Davenport dining hall, back when they were DJ-famous but not yet hipster-famous. He thought as many as 400 people might have come.

That was in another era, before Sonny Moore was Skrillex, before Steve Angello started Swedish House Mafia, before Calvin Harris could sell out stadiums. This year, Yale has almost as many Soundcloud DJs as we do rock bands, and I’ve heard more electro than rap in the TD gym.

A brand-name DJ’s appearance would be a Spring-Fling-level spectacular, but in my time, that hasn’t happened.

Instead, YCC puts money into T-Pain and Macklemore, leaving EDM fans with the likes of 3LAU and RL Grime. Still, this is almost certainly the right decision.

S U N D AY APRIL 28

When we pay T-Pain, we pay for backup dancers and champagne showers and t-shirts thrown into the audience — and most of all, the famous name. But we can’t afford Calvin Harris, or anyone else Yale has heard of. Swapping Mr. Grime for someone pricier but still barely known (Steve Aoki, perhaps, or Wolfgang Gartner) would add thousands of dollars to Spring Fling’s price tag for a DJ most of us would still see as “random guy pushing buttons”.

Besides, do Yalies really care about electronic music? We might listen to it, but another thing about DJs is that they can all play the tracks we love; you’ll see 3LAU throwing down Avicii (and Carly Rae Jepsen), while Macklemore is unlikely to drop “Niggaz in Paris.” Few of us know enough to derive pleasure from a specific mixing style, or a clever reference to some British hit from the ’90s. Is a live DJ any more than an

excuse for us to dance outside to the same songs we hear in Toad’s?

Judging by our showing at Electro last Saturday night, it’s hard to tell. Most of the six DJs in Commons played awesome sets, but without ever straying from the pattern of Top-40 pop layered over Top-40 dance. The crowd size never topped 400, and stayed under 100 for the first hour. Almost everyone missed Thomas Rokholt, whose funky, skeletal house was a fun exception to this night of rave.

Fortunately, those who came had the floor to themselves, and a few took full advantage of the space. The beginning of a concert is always high-variance, as the cool WYBC kids stand around with their arms crossed and the DJ’s friends spin around in circles and reenact “Stomp the Yard” on their personal patches of dance floor, as though they’d pregamed with Red Bull and Skittles. As a

reporter, my dancing was limited by my note-taking, but I got the chance to appreciate YCC’s ridiculously crisp sound system, helped along by a pretty sweet Commons echo. Also, there were lasers, which we trot out several times each year, but which never cease to look awesome (note to fellow laser-lovers: If you just stand there and stare up at the beam with your mouth hanging open, someone will eventually knock you over).

Actually, except for the fog machine, which seemed to emit smoke early on, leaving the left side of the room to choke on fumes for half an hour, this was a near-perfect night. I couldn’t make out even a minor mixing mistake, and after an hour of stillness, the floor picked up speed around 11:30. The DJs were fans of each other (lots of hugs between sets), had fans among the student body (several peo-

ple took turns holding a “We Love You Nick!” sign for the second man up), and even turned out not to be a boys’ club when a woman came on and spun for a while. There was also diversity among the dancers: While Yale parties follow the Pareto principle (20% of the moves are adopted by 80% of the people), students closer to the outskirts tried everything from T. Rex arms to finger-waggling (think “invisible rave piano”). My favorite group was an all-male kick line, whose members resembled a tipsy Riverdance audience getting their Irish on in the parking lot after the show.

And though I remained rhythmically limited by my role as a hired stalker (some people call them “reporters”), listening was often pleasure enough. Best moments of the night: extra percussion thrown over Alesso’s remix of “Pressure”; the word

THE YALE RUSSIAN CHORUS SPRING CONCERT

Contact AARON GERTLER at aaron.gertler@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Dwight Hall // 7:30 p.m.

Come enjoy the ensemble’s annual spring concert.

“slizzard” in “Like a G6”; and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” decades older than anything else on the floor, swirling up like a joyful ghost.

(Worst moments of the night: “Sexy and I Know It” getting cut before the chorus; the “My Humps” vocal dominating the mix for nearly two minutes; and every other word in “Like a G6”.)

But even in the night’s least tasteful moments, Yalies danced.

Whoever RL Grime is, we’ll do the same for him. Get enough of us together, and we’d rock out to the Cha-Cha Slide. (If I’m ever called upon to DJ a Yale dance, this will be my secret weapon.)

And though we may not know the difference between a sampler and a sample platter, we know how to have a good time, and that’s what electro is all about.

Sleep

You deserve it!

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

ELLIS LUDWIG-LEONE ’11

// SARAH ECKINGER

SONGWRITER, BANDLEADER, FAN OF HEMINGWAY // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

Q. First of all, I’d love to know the history of San Fermin. How did you guys get together, and where did the idea come from to release an LP? A. Right after I graduated from Yale in 2011, I spent two months in the Rocky Mountains in this studio there, called the Banff Centre. I had this idea to write this record. I didn’t know who would be singing on it or performing on it or anything. I just knew that I wanted to write this thing. There are a lot of classical musicians up at the Banff Centre, and the songs all became very interconnected, motivically and harmonically. There was an operatic scope to the thing as I was writing it.

When I came back, I started talking to people about it – there was my friend Allen Tate, who sings on the record, I found some female singers in Brooklyn, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, and then I built the album around that.

It was actually funny, we had a finished album before we’d played a show, which was totally crazy. So then we needed to perform, so we played a show at Pianos in downtown New York. After that, we got an offer from Downtown Records. Then, things picked up. Now we’re planning a summer tour and a fall tour, and releasing the record in September.

Q. Was your performance at BAR part of that touring plan?

A. The BAR performance was sort of a warm-up, we’ve been changing around the personnel of the band. Last night was the first time that Rae Cassidy performed with us. She’s singing lead vocals now. She’s really great. And so we performed onstage to get us used to what will probably be a very long and sometimes brutal slog, this tour.

And it was fun to get back to Yale, too.

Q. Do you feel many of the songs changing as you perform them and adapt them?

A. They change a little bit. It was interesting. I studied musical composition at Yale. I was writing classical music at school, and I ran the classical music group SIC InC when I was there. Because of that, I had this idea that you could figure out and write out, in notation, everything that you wanted and that then the performers would just do that. But the reality of it is, especially with indie-rock and pop singers, is that you have to work around, and work with, the voices that you have. So, as we’ve started to perform these things live, we definitely adjust to the singers. We change the key. We change the background harmony. We even change the forms of the songs in order to streamline it for a live performance.

Q. You mentioned that the album has an operatic theme. How does that play out?

Do you think of the album as a unit?

A. Yes, so, when I was in Banff, I wrote a song a day for the first two weeks. No matter how complete the idea was each day, I’d move onto the next one the next day. The idea was that I thought that a lot of very concentrated creativity in one small period of time leads to a lot of subconscious connections. That was one of the ideas behind the record. I really wanted a lot of themes that connected throughout. There are melodic and harmonic themes that are consistent with certain ideas that come back throughout the record. The way I wrote the lyrics — I don’t sing — but

I wrote for certain characters, mostly from books. “The Sun Also Rises” was a big help. It’s helpful for me, when I’m writing for someone else to sing something, to write from the mind of another character. At least for me, you get a little “singer-songwritery” if you write for yourself. If you write for characters, you end up writing about yourself, but through the lens of this fictionalized person.

Q. And the record’s theme?

A. The male singer has these grandiose thoughts. He’s sort of a blunted Romeo character. He knows he’s looking for something, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. The female character ends up being much more jaded.

She cuts him down anytime he gets too big. Then there are these interludes through the record that help tie it all together. You hear the girl whispering and hear her inner life, and this is supposed to create a world where the two characters have a dialogue. There are these musical thematic connections that go through the interludes that then play out in the songs as well, which is consistent to the operatic idea that certain characters have certain themes, and that those themes change over the course of a narrative.

Q. When you were at Yale, did you mostly write classical music, or did you know that you wanted to go in an indie direction?

A. I had a series of bands when I was at Yale — to varying degrees of success — but I was mostly focusing on a classical approach. I came from a world in high school of playing for bands and stuff, but when I came to Yale I really wanted to immerse myself in the traditional classical side. I focused on composition, especially in my last two years. But there are all sorts of devices you can take from that world, even if you’re writing a pop song.

Q. And, according to your website, you are also collaborating on a ballet.

A. Yeah, there’s this choreographer, Troy Schumacher, who is part of the New York City Ballet, and he and I came up with the idea to work on this ballet that we’re going to perform at the Joyce Theater in August. And actually, he had the idea to work with Cynthia Zarin, who’s a professor at Yale.

I was in her freshman year English class, and she’s now a very good friend of mine, and it wasn’t even my idea, at first, to get her involved. Anyway, the three of us got together and she wrote a narrative poem, from which we built this ballet. I’ve been working on that in the moments that I haven’t been traveling around playing rock music.

Q. How was it being back at Yale, performing at BAR? A. It was weird, man! I’ve been out for almost two years now, but that’s long enough that all of the people have changed already. When you’re one year out, there are still people that you know, and now I’m kind of a stranger.

My sister goes there now, so it’s her school at this point. But it’s great to be back. What was exciting about last night was the chance to bring back some Yale bands. There’s a lot of great stuff happening with recently graduated Yale bands. We play a lot with Great Caesar. Elijah from Plume Giant plays a lot with us. Magic Man is also doing great stuff. There’s a great community of Yalies in New York City.

There are a lot of grads from the Yale School of Music there, too, so both of those two worlds are in the city.

Q. Do you see yourself leaning either way in the future — classical or rock?

A. The idea behind San Fermin was that it is a project that combines all the ways I naturally think about music, whether that’s from school or the radio. In that sense, I think, the answer is to mix it all up together. It’s a pretty exciting time to be just out of school and to be in New York, because there are so many opportunities open. I’m doing this ballet. I love writing chamber music. Whatever comes up naturally, I’m excited to do it. It’s a “say yes, and do it” sort of situation. In the future, it’d be nice to keep both those things going together. It looks like we’ll have a lot of shows and activities related to San Fermin, but there’s also a lot to be done in the other worlds of music. Whatever comes up, I’ll do it!

Contact JACKSON MCHENRY at jackson.mchenry@yale.edu .

“

IT’S HELPFUL FOR ME, WHEN I’M WRITING FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO SING SOMETHING, TO WRITE FROM THE MIND OF ANOTHER CHARACTER.

“

O

n Wednesday night at BAR restaurant, the band San Fermin (named after the Spanish town featured in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”) performed selections from their upcoming self-titled debut LP, a self-described “pastiche of post-rock, chamber pop and contemporary classical composition.”

For San Fermin’s bandleader and album’s songwriter, Ellis LudwigLeone ’11, this was the first chance to perform his new work in front of his alma mater. On Thursday, after the show, WEEKEND caught up with Ludwig-Leone on the phone to discuss the ins and outs of putting together a debut album, blending genres and collaborating with your English 120 professor.