This WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013

All Work & No Pay JACKSON MCHENRY investigates what you need to do the perfect internship.

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TWERKING

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TRIPPIN’

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TITLE IX

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WEEKEND ‘WENT’ TO THE VMA’S.

LOLLAPALOOZA VS. HAYLEY

A RETURN TO CAMPUS

Will Adams barely understands Miley Cyrus in their interview. Her tongue was sticking out the whole time.

Can the masses at the hallowed music festival animate our wistful reporter?

Vanessa Yuan profiles Alexandra Brodsky ’12 LAW ’16, Yale’s homebred feminist.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND VIEWS

CAN’T BE TAMED: THE MILEY INTERVIEW SHE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ // BY WILL ADAMS I had the, um, privilege to talk with Miley Cyrus backstage after her provocative MTV Video Music Awards performance. She didn’t really answer any of my questions and left a big welt on my forehead (more on that later).

The VMA ended four hours ago. I left half an hour early to get in line for the VIP area where I would be interviewing Miley Cyrus, but no one was allowed in (the bouncer mumbled something about Lady Gaga giving a sermon).

It is now 3 a.m., and I am finally inside. There are a few scattered celebrities about, reclining in the red leather booths and complaining about the food (PopChips was the only sponsor, so there are half-eaten bags of the stuff strewn about the floor). I think I see Macklemore in the corner, but it turns out to be a burlap sack filled with potatoes. Eventually, I spot Miley Cyrus at the bar, still wearing the fleshcolored get-up from her performance. I work up the courage to sit next to her.

At this point, I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with her publicist regarding this interview. “Um, hi, Miley,” I say. “I’m Will.” She doesn’t move. “From the YDN.” She turns and scans me: “How did you get in here?” I brandish my press pass, and then her eyes light up. “Oh, you’re that snowboarding guy, right? With the red hair?” I pause for a moment, then nod gently. Security thought I was

Rupert Grint.

As I sit down, Cyrus loudly asks for vodka and Red Bull.

Instead of bothering to ask for her fake ID, the bartender just sighs and makes the drink for her. There is a straw in the glass but instead of using it she sticks her tongue out and laps it up. “So, um, I guess this a good time to ask …” She looks up occasionally to check if anyone is looking at her. No one is. I try again: “Um, I wanted to ask what was with you sticking your tongue out for half of your performance?” She considers the question for about two seconds. “It just, you know, symbolizes how I’m grown up now, you know? Like, I can stick my tongue out and do what I want, because I can’t stop and I won’t stop.”

I refrain from mentioning that sticking out your tongue is something that five-yearolds do, or that quoting your own lyrics is not an appropriate way to answer a question.

My mind is still swimming from witnessing her performance tonight, so I ask about her music video for “We Can’t Stop.” “Yeah, we just decided to go crazy, like ‘Ah, this is so crazy.’ And I think people really enjoy when I twerk, so I just did my thang.”

“Interesting,” I reply. Fearing that I’m being too obsequious, I take a different tack — unsuccessfully. I’m halfway through asking her if she is at all aware how much her performance appropriated black culture in a vulgar and cruel way when she throws

a travel-size bottle of Pepto Bismol at my face. “Sorry,” she says flatly. “I’m being sponsored by them, so I have to, you know … what was the question?”

After the bartender hands me an icepack, I try another approach. “What was it like performing with Robin Thicke?” I ask, not because I’m interested in hearing her answer, but because it’s my last question (since I crossed out the one before that about undeserved entitlement).

She finishes her drink and frowns. “Who’s that?”

I take a look at my notes, hoping to find something salvageable. It’s a total mess, a fury of scribbles on lined yellow paper. Then it hits me: She was trying to teach me a lesson. She’s just a confused human being without direction, and she showed me that I was just as confused, with no idea how to frame the interview and do my job as a reporter.

But then I snap out of it and tell myself that Miley Cyrus is a terrible interview subject and an even worse human being. Even before I excuse myself, she says, “Nice meeting you, Rupert. CAN I GET ANOTHER VODKA RED BULL, PLEASE?” I’m not in the mood to correct her about my name, so I get up from my seat. As I near the exit, I hear behind me: “Hey, is that Macklemore?”

Contact WILL ADAMS at william.adams@yale.edu . // THAO DO

Dreamsicle Summer

Permission of Instructor: The Secrets of Applying to Seminars

// BY JOY SHAN

The summer after I turned 20, I spent every day in mud-caked Keds sneakers, the same pair of blue jeans, and T-shirts stained brown and pink by darkroom chemicals and juice of an unidentifiable flavor. This was how I welcomed my first few months of adulthood: in a dense patch of pines in the North Country, where I worked as a photography instructor at an all-boys summer camp.

By midsummer, when the tops of my feet had browned to the color of plums and the mosquito bites on my legs had faded from red sores to blackberry bruises, the days had fallen into a glorious rhythm. On afternoons too sultry for anyone to move, a group of us would sit for hours on a screened porch, the floor fan rustling the pages of the novels open before us. We drifted on the lake in kayaks watching for the first stars to appear, while a trumpet song in the distance signaled bedtime for campers. At meals in the rec hall, we played games with the boys and put away plates of tater tots filmy with grease. We sat on red plastic chairs at the Dairy Queen eating Hawaiian Blizzards and Dilly Bars. We watched the locals and chatted of nothing.

The hours I wasn’t outdoors I passed inside the cool recesses of the camp darkroom. I had started out the summer wanting to encourage the boys to make photographs that contained some element of tension or conflict, rather than of merely pretty things. But I soon found myself genuinely praising their photographs of the same potted plants and waterfalls, or proudly gazing at the same dirt paths and sunsets. Our darkroom sessions often devolved into spontaneous dance parties (there were always the

F R I D AY AUGUST 30

same five pop songs on the local radio station), and my intentions were quickly forgotten.

Endless numbered days: the only way to describe it. True, there was fear, and doubt, and conflict of all sizes. But as a whole the pulse of the summer was slow and uniform and sweet.

MY LIFE THIS SUMMER, THEN, WAS EASY TO SWALLOW BUT DIFFICULT TO DIGEST. The cadence drew to a close, and now we’re back at school. In a way, it’s a relief to return to student groups that debate semantics, to poetry classes where we’d spend half an hour identifying the conflicting forces within a single stanza. It feels familiar to return to a world that, each minute, slams you with the notion that ideas are powerful and complex and have stakes worthy of our measured examination. So often we’re taught to pinpoint the drama and conflict in what we see, read and do. I, too, had hoped that by the time I returned as an upperclassman, I would’ve developed this sense of understanding.

There’s this “mature adult” image of myself I’ve been fleshing out in my mind since I was 9 years old, and I kept refining this image up until the end of my sophomore year of college. I would wistfully borrow attributes I admired from the intriguing upperclassmen I noticed in classrooms and

libraries — added to my future adult image a pair of quizzical and discerning eyes, a confident and authoritative voice unafraid to argue. This woman reflected all the good things that I thought would come of experience, of knowledge and of time.

But perhaps, this time around, my senses have dulled from too many lazy evenings spent reading out on the fishing dock. Or maybe, somewhere in the process of learning four square and attempting to master Magic the Gathering, a bit of the ease of childhood rubbed off me. It’s possible that when the heat lifts from New Haven and my memory of the pines begins to dim, the urgency that I used to feel will be restored — the urgency to ask too much of myself. I’d grown up believing that, for everything valuable and worth having, we had to struggle. I had learned so much in the past two years of school that I came to believe that this was the only kind of life worth living. I felt good, and noble, for deciding to never settle for stasis. My life this summer, then, was easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

The darkroom has been locked up for the winter, but I imagine I won’t be there next summer.

The semester has just begun, but already I’m beginning to hear that ever-growing voice telling me to see new frontiers and face new hardships. By next summer, the months that just passed may remain as only a strange utopia.

I’m lucky, though. On the walls of my room this year are new additions: a collage of black and white photographic prints, of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen.

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

// BY CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON

It doesn’t take Albert Einstein to see how competitive and stressful shopping period is at Yale. But it did take someone who aced “Albert Einstein in Film and Literature” (AMST 252) (me) to compile this compendium of advice on how to get into that coveted seminar. Follow my advice and you’ll have that cute professor who teaches “Global International Ethical Morals” (EP&E 445) begging you to enroll.

Before you even step foot in the classroom, shoot your professor an email to get ahead of those shopateurs (a portmanteau of shopping and amateurs that I made up) who are too focused on their “summers” to even think about the logistics of their fall term schedules. Be sure to address your prospective professors with the warranted degree of respect.

Address your professor as “Doctor,” “Master” or “Published Author.” If you’re applying to a Spanish seminar, use the formal, “Usted” form in your salutation. Don’t worry, it’ll pay off later when that first “tú” comes your way in class. Sometimes it will help to change it up based on what you’re applying to. For example, if you’re applying for “Movie Biology” (MCDB 344), start your message, “Hey Osmosis Jones!” Mention your name as much as possible in the body of the message. Here’s a sample sentence from one of my own emails.

“I, N. Ferguson, author of this email, N. Ferguson’s email, would be honored to have a place in your class, ideally, N. Ferguson’s place.” Finally, be sure to sign off with a memorable degree of confidence and verve. Finish your email “best,” “smartest” or “hardworkingly.”

When shopping period finally comes around, don’t lose the intensity you kept burning all summer. Remember, first impressions are everything, and you want to assert your intellectual dominance not only with your necessary and invaluable comments but also with your attitude of appearance. Dress for the seminar you want, not for the one you deserve. Stride into “Why is God So Mean?”

STILL LIFE: 1970S REALISM

—N. Ferguson Contact CODY KAHOE at f.kahoe@yale.edu . CONTACT CALEB MADISON at caleb.madison@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Yale University Art Gallery // All day Come see photorealistic recreations of the nude human body, especially if you can’t see the real thing.

(PHIL 375) with your hair treading the thin line between “homeless” and “genius.” Your beard should make your professor wonder, “Was he just released from prison?” If your professor makes a joke, be sure to have the loudest laugh in the room. It’s important that he knows YOU found it funny. Be sure to advertise your approval or rejection of each comment through simple voice cues, such as “Mhm,” “Yes!” or “I LOVE IT!” Volunteer for everything, from heading up the next week’s presentation to something your professor didn’t even ask you to do! Be creative! Professors love it when you go the extra mile to show your enthusiasm for the subject. If you’re applying for a theater studies class, interrupt class with an impromptu monologue from one of your favorite plays! Remember, during your monologue, don’t lose eye contact with your professor, and don’t let anyone leave the room. Make sure to cite at least one popular name in each of your comments and to refer to each one as “an influential thinker.” You’ll have everyone in the class wondering, “Who is this intellectual, and how can I be just like him?”

At last, for in-class applications, don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. Show how your set of interests intersects with the subject matter in unique and exciting ways. For “Intermediate Microeconomics,” write about how much money you have! If you’re applying to “The American Presidency,” talk about how your dad was President! Really think hard to find that little quirk that makes you special.

Finally, don’t be afraid to be the last one in the room, even after the professor has left!

I have spent many nights alone in WLH.

Emergen-C

We hear there’s a bug going around.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

// ALLIE KRAUSE

WORKING THE SUMMER AWAY // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

ne cool midsummer night before classes began, Clare Kane ’14 told me what it was like to be threatened by a man with a gun.

We were sitting in her freshman counselor room on Old Campus. Welch residents who had just moved in interrupted our conversation every couple of minutes. Each time, she would pause to give them advice about the mysteries of freshman year.

Her job on campus is very different from the work she did with convicts over what she called a “harrowing” summer. Kane, an English and Ethics, Politics and Economics major, was an investigative intern for the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. That organization is a product of unique circumstances: When citizens in the troubled District of Columbia are arrested, they are tried in the federal legal system. To give residents effective representation against attorneys at the United States Department of Justice, D.C. developed its own investigative division, hiring lawyers, clerks — and interns like Kane.

While Kane exposed herself to violent situations on a near-daily basis and transcribed interviews for cases late into the night, the Public Defender Service did not pay her or any of the 70-odd other interns it employed.

Instead, she subsisted on funding from Yale’s Class of 1960 John Heinz Government Service Fellowship, which provided for an apartment at George Washington University, and John E. Linck & Alanne Headland Linck Fellowship, which covered the rest of her living expenses.

“I couldn’t have afforded to do it myself,” said Kane, who is from a small

O

town in Washington state. Like 55 percent of Yalies, she is on financial aid.

She uses her freshman counselor job to cover costs during the school year.

Few other Public Defender Service interns received that kind of University support. In order to have the same experience as Kane, these interns, most of them college students, lived rentfree with family or friends in the D.C. area. Others worked menial jobs, like waiting tables, over weekends.

The other interns’ experience typified those of many college students across the country. To take advantage of unpaid opportunities, these students choose from a small set of routes.

They can find their own funding, rely on the support of their parents — or simply give up.

This summer, some former interns have publicly questioned the legality of unpaid internships. Back in June, two interns won a court case against the film studio Fox Searchlight. A New York federal court ruling in their favor set an important precedent: If interns do not receive an educational experience, the judge said, they must be paid at least minimum wage.

Fellowship funding insulates Yale students from the realities of a difficult and rapidly changing summer job market. But even on our campus, there aren’t fellowships for everyone. Some — like the freshman Clare Kane of 2011 — apply for fellowships, but don’t make the cut. As Kane said, you have to learn how to navigate the application process. Sources for funding are skewed toward encouraging work in public service or STEM. Yale’s reputation and deep alumni support may grant its students some institutional advantages, but many miss out on the summer they want.

As arguments about the ethics of

F R I D AY

RED GROOMS: LARGER THAN LIFE

AUGUST 30

Oversized paintings and cartoons debut in the YUAG.

Yale University Art Gallery // All day

unpaid or low-paid internships garner more national attention, Yale’s solution, using fellowships to support some but not all students, will face new questions and louder calls for reform. *** “Glatt and Footman were classified improperly as unpaid interns and are ‘employees,’” federal Judge William H. Pauley wrote in his summary judgment on the Fox Searchlight case. Pauley said that under New York labor law and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, Fox Searchlight had violated minimum wage laws in its treatment of the two former interns. The interns did the work of paid employees, he said. And they should have received compensation for their work.

“There’s not even a pretense that this is a training opportunity,” plaintiff Eric Glatt said, discussing the available intern positions at Fox Searchlight and other studios in a recent phone interview.

Camille Olson, a management-side employment attorney, said that while there is still “some dispute” on federal requirements for an unpaid internship, the consensus is that for these positions to be legal, “ultimately the benefit resides in the intern,” not the employer.

This “benefit” can mean pay, education or training, but some version of it is essential in any internship situation. No federal laws require interns to “benefit” the company they are working with.

Interns may not be aware of the specific federal regulations, but some who have worked at organizations like Harper’s Bazaar magazine, The Nation Institute and Gawker have taken action against conditions they call unfair.

Some activists demand to at least be

paid the minimum wage, and others use lawsuits to win back-pay.

Since he filed his lawsuit, Glatt has worked with Intern Labor Rights, an advocacy group that grew out of Occupy Wall Street and seeks to raise awareness about the damage internships do to what Glatt calls “cultureproducing” industries, like film, media and fashion, all popular fields among liberal arts students.

for interns do not apply in nonprofit and government offices. Kane and her colleagues at the Public Defender Service had no legal right to expect compensation, and neither do White House interns.

Olson has written about the trend of unpaid internships often, and has argued in The New York Times that unpaid internships can be valuable if they follow the letter and spirit of

IN BOTH PAID AND UNPAID INTERNSHIPS, COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE RARELY HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO VOICE THEIR CONCERNS. “People have grown accustomed to the idea that if you put ‘intern’ on a job title, you don’t have to pay for it,” he told me.

Glatt mentioned the group’s efforts to raise awareness about unpaid internships by handing out “pay your interns” buttons during New York Fashion Week and outside the United Nations. You can buy a tote bag with the same message for $10.00 on the Intern Labor Rights website.

Glatt is hopeful that unpaid internship positions will be all but eliminated in the near future, even for government work. Fair Pay Campaign, another intern advocacy group he mentioned, has spent months demanding that the White House pay its interns, who are asked to work 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. “at least” Monday to Friday and are not offered any help finding housing. But Olson pointed out that federal labor standards

the law. Students in well-run media internships, for instance, get exposure, bylines and published work.

She is skeptical about whether eliminating these programs is the best solution.

Following recent intern advocacy efforts, “many companies have discontinued internship programs or downsized them,” Olson said. She added that when some companies do start to compensate their interns, they may be less invested in actually educating them.

Where an unpaid internship program may have included seminars and training sessions, those features would not be legally necessary in a paid program.

“The question is, when companies do [pay], is it the same opportunity?”

In both paid and unpaid internships, college students have rarely had SEE INTERN PAGE B8

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Not using a window AC unit without a window It actually makes your room hotter.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

‘FOR ME IT’S ART HISTORY. WHAT WE DID THEN IS ART HISTORY’ // BY STEPHANIE TOMASSON

The Yale University Art Gallery’s new student-curated exhibit, “Many Things Placed Here and There: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection,” is not to be missed. The special exhibition invites its visitors to engage a selection from Dorothy and Herb Vogel’s 4,000-strong modern art collection. The well-curated exhibit takes its visitors on two simultaneous and interwoven journeys — one through the lives and intimate relationships of the Vogels and the artists whose work they collected, and another through the artistic and cultural revolution that redefined the art produced during the latter half of the 20th century, the period during which the Vogels were amassing their seemingly impossible collection. A teaching museum, the YUAG seems the perfect home for these stunning works as the collectors and the Gallery share the same goal of direct confabulation with works of art.

Four skillful Yale undergraduate (Laura Indick ’13, Elena Light ’13, Emma Sokoloff ’13, Nicholle Lamartina ’15) and two Ph.D. History of Art students (Bradley Bailey GRD ’13, Audrey Sands GRD ’17) collaborated to fuse the donation Yale received from the Fifty Works for Fifty States program, which brings 50 works from the Vogel collection to one institution in each of the 50 states, with works from the YUAG’s permanent collection by artists that the Vogels collected. The minimalistic and spacious display of the 75 featured drawings,

paintings, photographs and sculptures seems a well-needed departure from the crowded one-bedroom home they formerly shared with 3,950 other roommates.

White walls and stands create an inviting maze that allows visitors to wind their way into closed-off sections, but also maintains a general cohesion to the works. Visitors are guided by the wall descriptions but not forced to explore the exhibit in any particular order physically, allowing them to experience the exhibit almost as if they were being entertained at a home — a home more spacious than the Vogels’ onebedroom New York apartment (he was a postal clerk and she a librarian). The exhibit even features a living room section that departs from the traditional linear wall-hanging style, featuring paintings mounted together in a visually appealing, but structureless form — an homage of sorts to the Vogels’ cluttered home. The centerpiece of this section is Will Barnet’s graphite, “Studies of Herb and Dorothy Vogel,” a personal detail indicating their deep connection to the post-1950s New York art scene.

Additionally, the curators chose to create smaller sections — almost makeshift rooms — by inserting strategic walls engaging the featured works in a further conversation and cohesion of color, subject matter and style. Within these classifications, the diversity of media is astounding. The exhibit fea-

Staring for Science // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN

tures everything from Richard Tuttle’s loose-leaf notebook drawings to Charles Clough’s layered pools of paint, from Loren Calaway’s sculptures that resemble furniture, to Peter Campus’ color

EXPERIENCE THE EXHIBIT AS IF [YOU] WERE BEING ENTERTAINED AT A HOME – ONE MORE SPACIOUS THAN THE VOGELS’ ONE-BEDROOM. instant prints.

“Many Things Placed Here and There” pays a special tribute to the Vogels’ collecting process; their style, character and complementary tastes are on full display. While the visual focus is certainly on the stunning works of art — this unique snapshot of a momentous and revolutionary period in art history — the exhibit devotes much of its written material to the personal relationships the Vogels shared with both the artists and their works. The curators give special attention to offering these relationships pride of place, for example juxtaposing works by father and daughter pair Edward and Edda Renouf, who naturally influenced each other’s art. The Renoufs played a large personal and artistic role

Doctors-in-training need to learn from art too.

AUGUST 30

G-HEAV BOYCOTT MARCH Gourmet Heaven // 5:30 p.m.

Bye forever bacon, egg and cheeses.

// BLAIR SEIDEMAN

Contact STEPHANIE TOMASSON at stephanie.tomasson@yale.edu .

Hanging in the short hallway entrance to the Cushing and Whitney Medical Library are three pairs of staring matches you might walk through as blithely as a local would a tourist’s family photo. Only a few steps into the tiny exhibition, titled “The Sexual Revolution and Movie Thrillers with Medical Themes,” and you have already interrupted the first pair: On a photographic poster to your right, a wry woman with arms around her pregnant stomach looks petulantly at the stolid doctor rendered in brushstroke on your left.

If one of these competitors blinks in the moment you block the other from view, the other, luckily, is none the wiser.

You could choose to extend these characters’ respite from the heat of competition and stay a while in between them. At the very least, the doctor’s disembodied hands, clawed and smoldering red like overdone lobsters, might snap up your wandering eyes. Designed for the movie Stopien Ryzyka [Degree of Risk] (1970), directed by Leningrad-based Ilya Averbakh and based on a novel by cardiologist Nikolai Amosor, the poster is a haunting depiction of a

// KATHRYN CRANDALL

F R I D AY

in the Vogels’ lives. Edward actually met the Vogels through his daughter.

Invigorated through color and gesture with the passion that characterized the period from 1962 to 1990, all of the works on display are brimming with energy. Even Edda Renouf’s paintings and drawings, all in muted tones of black, white and grey, explore a more dormant energy, a detail not readily apparent in the physical works, but bolstered by the accompanying wall writing. Lucio Pozzi’s “Young King” is more overtly energetic, featuring the oil-painted face of a young warrior, the paint textured with a palette knife, adding movement and depth.

This exhibit is exceptional, particularly for its attentive and skilled curatorial work in the form of extensive primary and secondary research and poignant dedication to detail. Most impressive is the fact that student curators were responsible for creating all aspects of the exhibition. Their final product — both exhibit and catalog — should be an inspiration to their peers.

“Many Things Placed Here and There: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection” is on display through Jan. 26, 2014, in the Fourth Floor Special Exhibitions Gallery of the Yale University Art Gallery.

The Vogels gathered a number of daring modern and post-modern works.

doctor no more empowered to control the fate of his patient than the crustacean he resembles.

Continuing on your right are the remaining three posters in the “Movie Thrillers” portion of the exhibit, each conveying a dark view of medical practitioners and problems. Especially striking are depictions of the mentally ill. A poster for Shock Treatment (1981), a follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, features a bald, spectacled man drawn slightly out of focus against a red backdrop. In the poster for Les Yeux sans Visage [Eyes without a Face] (1960), a woman painted like a pulp heroine in shades of red and black stares out mournfully, contemplating her fate as the recipient of a new face to replace her own disfigured one. These movies sought to humanize the medical subjects they portrayed. As their posters indicate, however, to make something more human is hardly to tame the chilling nature of its subject matter.

The more lighthearted left side of the exhibit displays three 1960s posters that advocated birth control and sexual empowerment by mocking classic American tropes.

Captioning a photo of Uncle Sam in bold print is “Have You Had Your Pill Today,” a radical missive from America’s most recognizable national personification. And across from the distressed damsel of Les Yeux sans Visage stares a cheeky

blonde with a scrunched nose and yellow-ribboned pigtails in a Girl Scout uniform, smiling perkily and cradling her very pregnant stomach. The caption reads “Be Prepared,” a tongue-in-cheek take on the Scouts’ motto. Unamused leadership personnel at the Girl Scouts of America filed a lawsuit against the designer, George Adams, fearing the public would believe their organization responsible for its distribution.

Fortunately for Adams, the judge believed in an increasingly accepting public’s ability to recognize artistic subversion.

There is nothing explicitly uniting the two walls save their shared theme of medicine, and the gazes, seemingly intentional, shared between posters on opposite sides.

Displayed here is only a sampling of the library’s vast historical collection, but there is only room in this hallway for a few examples of posters from the period, and thus only a surface study is to be expected. It is clearly less an exhibition than a passing interest for the library visitor, a mere taste of the troves that await her inside. But it intrigues interest nevertheless, one that colors the walk to the Cushing and Whitney rotunda, and grounds the doctors-to-be within studying in the storied history of their craft.

Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Personal training at Payne Whitney Gym

Don’t gain back all the weight you lost this summer.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND PLAYS

HIST 153

GO Set an additional alarm clock.

ER&M 220

History of Polka-Dots.

“A must-take for future Harvard Law students.”

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Collect a Durfee’s lunch swipe here.

, + * ) (

Hello, my name is...

Russian Experiences in Latino America.

“I, too, am a migrant. My family makes a trek to the Vineyard every summer.”

Your Advisee

3 steps forward if your academic advisor knows your name.

GLBL 139/AMER 550/RUSS 420/CPSC 131

Still looking for a 5th class?

GO TO JAIL #2.

Take 2 steps forward if you get to carry Louise Glück’s bag back to her limo.

LC 212

Jail #2 Intermediate Micro

AUGUST 31

Friday classes

Shopaholic

Still wanna be an EP&E major? You just lost this game!

S AT U R D AY

Jail #1

Take two steps back if you make a “Breaking Bad” reference for your orgo placement test.

Prime real estate for the writer in you!

ALLIANCE FOR DANCE AT YALE JAM

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Off Broadway Theater // 7–9 p.m.

Maybe Emily Coates ’06 GRD ’11 will be there.

Apple Care

You WILL break your MacBook at least once at Yale.

ECON 001

Didn’t get into any seminars?

Lose a turn.

!"#$%&' You have a crush on your new TA. GO TO JAIL #2.

S AT U R D AY AUGUST 31

Intro to Government Surveillance.

“No coding experience necessary.”

The Goldman Sachs Experience.

“You think you know, but you have no idea.”

PEOPLE’S ARTS COLLECTIVE DANCE PARTY 212 College St. // 7 p.m.

WKNDer Chantel Simpson ’14 is one of the DJs.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Hiding a spare key outside your room

Being locked out at 3 a.m. while drunk in a towel sucks.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND PLAYS

HIST 153

GO Set an additional alarm clock.

ER&M 220

History of Polka-Dots.

“A must-take for future Harvard Law students.”

ADF DFA SASDFS S dasfs DFASF ADFAS D A DFS sdsaas Sdfasd FSADF d A fa SFA DFASD fdsfsad sfasdfa SAFSD F Sdfa fs dsfs sdfa FSADF adfasd sdfs- SAFASS a s SAD dfsadfa fasdfas AFSDF fasdasd fA S d FSA s FSD dfasdas fasdfas AFASD DFSA S F a FSA d FAS fADFS ssdasfs ASDFA DFA A s SDF SDFSA dsaasd f ASF ASd DFASD F fasd fasfa

Collect a Durfee’s lunch swipe here.

, + * ) (

Hello, my name is...

Russian Experiences in Latino America.

“I, too, am a migrant. My family makes a trek to the Vineyard every summer.”

Your Advisee

3 steps forward if your academic advisor knows your name.

GLBL 139/AMER 550/RUSS 420/CPSC 131

Still looking for a 5th class?

GO TO JAIL #2.

Take 2 steps forward if you get to carry Louise Glück’s bag back to her limo.

LC 212

Jail #2 Intermediate Micro

AUGUST 31

Friday classes

Shopaholic

Still wanna be an EP&E major? You just lost this game!

S AT U R D AY

Jail #1

Take two steps back if you make a “Breaking Bad” reference for your orgo placement test.

Prime real estate for the writer in you!

ALLIANCE FOR DANCE AT YALE JAM

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Off Broadway Theater // 7–9 p.m.

Maybe Emily Coates ’06 GRD ’11 will be there.

Apple Care

You WILL break your MacBook at least once at Yale.

ECON 001

Didn’t get into any seminars?

Lose a turn.

!"#$%&' You have a crush on your new TA. GO TO JAIL #2.

S AT U R D AY AUGUST 31

Intro to Government Surveillance.

“No coding experience necessary.”

The Goldman Sachs Experience.

“You think you know, but you have no idea.”

PEOPLE’S ARTS COLLECTIVE DANCE PARTY 212 College St. // 7 p.m.

WKNDer Chantel Simpson ’14 is one of the DJs.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Hiding a spare key outside your room

Being locked out at 3 a.m. while drunk in a towel sucks.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND LOLLS

RUIN PORN RE-RECORDED // BY HAYLEY BYRNES

“Listen.” Think that at once it is a command, a plea and a hush. Wonder, too, at the strange absence of worthy synonyms. Hear?

Heed? Harken? No. Listen. To what, though?

To harmony.

While most radio stations inaugurated “Blurred Lines” as the default darling of the season, I couldn’t choose one anthem. To start the summer, I worked at an “international arts gathering” in my Midwest heartland. Brochure-speak aside, it was just a local music festival — a humdrum soundtrack to a humdrum home. As a strip mall’s musical equivalent, each night was innocuous enough, with the entirety nothing short of artless. By the end the summer, I trekked to Lollapalooza in Chicago. Three days, over one hundred bands, over one hundred thousand people. Somewhere in the middle of the summer, sitting on my bed, reading Zadie Smith and licking a spoon of hummus, my mother opened the door without a knock. Not unusual. Then, Hermes’ message fluttered to the bed sheet: an official, if passive aggressive letter, dictating our immediate move from Saline to West Bloomfield.

I scanned and found the bolded D-Day. August 2nd. In the narrative of my summer, the first day of Lollapalooza. Oscar Wilde once declared that life imitates art far more than the reverse. With that adage in mind, I romanticized the coincidence accordingly. Oh, Lolla! Leitmotif of my life! Joycean slap of a period on an unfinished sentence! Cookie-cutter climax to my trashy paperback existence! It was Stranger Than Fiction.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY With German Romantics as my guides, I wound myself into wayward Weltschmerz. Predictably, I retreated to the familiar “why me?” of adolescence.

The usual resentment I harbored for my small town became nostalgia. Yale, with its relative utopia, felt far away. But soon enough, my savior emerged. His name was Andrew Moore. A photographer based in New York, his work captured the decay and emptiness of my neighboring Detroit without apology. Empty schools, rusted railways, Dali’s clocks in physical form, warped and surreal. Beyond realism, it was romanticism.

Of imperfection. Of filth. Offended townies decried Moore’s work as sensational, “ruin porn.” I was a fan at first glance.

Why limit the concept to pictures? I soon synchronized my media for symmetry. Eminem, with his eight-mile grit, became my favorite poet. Kendrick Lamar, whom I deemed his California counterpart, followed. Bitch, don’t kill my vibe. Stray highlighting of salient words furthered the trend. From The Marriage Plot: “It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.” At the ominous end of a New York Times article: “There’s no such thing around here as ‘in case of emergency.’” I cared enough to save the sentences. Repulsion, in paradox, bred attraction.

My provincial music festival held a mariachi night (isn’t it a rule that every strip mall have a bad Mexican restaurant?) and I stared with wonder at a Latino man, about five-foot, as he danced with a pigtail-clad woman. She wore pink eye-shadow. He didn’t have a right eye. I cared enough to remember when he called me “sweetie.” The world became my porno, and, religiously, I watched.

End of tape. Glance up, instead, at the blinding clarity of Chicago. For five days, as I stayed with a friend from Yale in Lincoln Park, I played Nick Carroway. Reversing my ruin porn roots, I ogled instead at the complete absence thereof. At material saturation. Back in company, in conversation, I forgot all the dilapidated Dali clocks.

Soon enough, I stopped highlighting.

Climax comes from the Greek for “ladder,” and so, with stunning verisimilitude, Lolla sat atop a hill. I climbed my way up and, reaching the zenith, collapsed into the crowd. The seeming spontaneity of fellow festival-goers followed. Spandex, flower crowns, rainbow shorts. For two hours, it felt like I was set to maximum volume. After that, it felt only like the rest of the world had gone mute.

PLANNED PANDEMONIUM For all its spontaneity, Lolla recycles a calculated chaos. It’s the musical equivalent of a well-rehearsed freestyle, rapped with impressive creativity but never straying from the script. For three days, I watched a familiar scene. Flower crowns abounded, plumes of smoke swirled, cheeky shorts chafed skinny legs. Stumbling out of a concert, a muscular twenty-something followed me and a friend to the festival’s food court. We debated the burrito-versus-pizza dilemma, and our stalker squeaked, “Can I…have your…?” and then, exhausted, veered to the alcohol tent. Every scene, every moment, was saturated in kitsch and color. Bikini-clad (yes, bikini-clad) teens wrapped bony arms around their hips, Kodak-ready and waiting. They imagined (I imagine) the caption under the moment, #cantstopwontstop #flowerchild #lolla #chicago #whatever. Or maybe they even imagine being splashed across Teen Vogue’s blog: “Sasha Frederick, 15, from New York, rocks the season’s trends in a tasteful mix of florals and edgy combat boots. Nicely done Sasha!” Wes Anderson, ever the aesthetic perfectionist, would approve.

In the first three minutes of any Woody Allen movie, the audience knows that it’s Woody’s work. Just as most fans of the filmmaker cherish his signature, devoted Lollapalooz-ers treasure the festival’s trademark, its carefully constructed alter to the “alt” lifestyle.

And then, amidst the conformity, I found diversity. As I played Margaret Mead, tribes emerged from behind the trees. Each of the festival’s eight stages have a “sound,” and, with that, a “crowd.” Lolla is large, even relative to other music festivals, and maps only confuse inebriated attendants. Despite each stage’s distinct character, all avoid the cheesiness of genre-trapping. There’s no “folk” stage that sits atop a bed of flowers.

The noted exception, if only to prove the rule, is Perry’s stage, an eager ensemble of incessant electronic energy. Like any badly cooked meal, it proves to be both under and overwhelming. Here, too, the cartoonish conformity of Lolla emerges in Roy Lichtenstein hues. To each beat, we must arm-bob. To each drop, we must head-nod. To each streaking light, we must gawk. Together. Expected eccentricity breeds conventionality. Wave a glo-stick, and – open sesame – welcome to the club. Head to Pitchfork’s website, and you’ll find a frosty critic who decries Perry’s and its counterparts as an example of “the youth culture’s obsession with excess.” Or maybe as “a testament to our generation’s shortterm attention span.” But each commentary credits the tent with an undue cerebral relevance – we can opine the ominous death of Twinkies to the American culture, but that doesn’t mean that we should.

On Saturday, I clawed my way to a front-row spot for HAIM. The band, a sister indie rock trio from Los Angeles, had hype. Of the aforementioned Teen Vogue variety, equipped with tumblr-ready Polaroid album covers and flattering Fleetwood Mac comparisons. Only natural, then, for the performance to stumble and fall flat. Enter Este Haim, elder of the three and ruthless leader, creator of the “Este Haim Bass Face” phenomenon, in which the bassist contorts her face with acrobatic ability while rocking out. To the left: Danielle, brooding and leather-laced. And last: gyrating Alaina, the baby and the booty of the bunch. Together, they constituted the cronuts (New York’s latest croissant-doughnut hybrid) of Lollapalooza – idolized but derivative. HAIM convinced me, of our obsession, our adoration for imitation as an end, not merely a mean.

HALFWAY HOME When I waltzed out of Lolla, heaving and mud-slung with euphoria, the festival’s bubble burst. Within minutes of regaining proper cell reception, the call came. Mom, heaving with a different emotion, confirming it - the final click as she locked our front door for the final time. Sayonara, Saline.

Newly nomadic, technically homeless – remember, D-Day had arrived that day – I submitted to a creeping sense of nostalgia. Not for Saline, Michigan but for New Haven, Connecticut. Because somewhere, amidst the sticky Bud Lights and the titian-tinted mud and the ceaseless stream of sparkles at Lolla, I found Yale.

Not the dusty WLH part. Or the photogenic Sterling part. But the part that most matters to me. The part where listening breeds conversation. The part where there aren’t many perks to being a wallflower.

To resurrect my “ruin porn” reference, here’s my point: pornography may be good, but sex is better.

Contact HAYLEY BYRNES at hayley.byrnes@yale.edu .

F R I D AY AUGUST 30

YALE PRECISION MARCHING BAND FIRST REHEARSAL

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Hendrie Hall // 3:45–5:45 p.m.

They play Beyoncé.

Panera Bread

We promise you won’t miss ABP any longer.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

THE ETHICS OF FREE LABOR INTERN FROM PAGE B3 the opportunity to voice their concerns. Glatt pointed out that many see these internships as stepping stones to careers, whether or not the promise of a job materializes. And, while Olson said interns could go to human resources if they think their education is failing federal guidelines, it’s hard for a college student, especially an overambitious Yalie, to risk jeopardizing an opportunity.

“Once you commit, what else are you going to do for the summer?”

Olson said. *** Yalies looking for jobs over the summer face the same bleak options as college students nationwide.

Undergraduate Career Services spends a lot of time trying to convince companies to provide for Yalies on the job, according to UCS Director Jeanine Dames. And Yale refuses to provide students with course credit for unpaid (or paid) positions, something that many companies use as legal cover to meet federal requirements.

But sometimes, Dames admitted, UCS can only negotiate for payments as small as a stipend for lunch or transportation. In other cases, such as in fields where employers can count on student interest, UCS may give in and list the job as unpaid.

UCS prioritizes the quantity of jobs it can list before considering anything else.

“We want to make sure that students can find opportunities in all functional areas,” Dames said.

While this mentality does increase the breadth of the career services database, it means that students who cannot afford unpaid positions or negotiate the fellowship process to get funding are often left behind.

ONCE YOU COMMIT, WHAT ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO FOR THE SUMMER? Dames’ answer for students looking for experience but worried about paying for their summer costs: “Yale is also very fortunate in that there are fellowships available.”

Log on to the fellowship search page for the Center for International and Professional Experience and you’ll be confronted with a series of checkboxes.

You search for opportunities by keyword, checking off each box as you go. Find your major. State your area of interest. Are you an American citizen?

Hit the box and find your match.

When Katharine Konietzko ’14 applied for fellowship funding back in the spring, she went box by box. She knew it would be the summer after her

S AT U R D AY AUGUST 31

junior year. She knew she was interested in politics and government.

She soon located the John Heinz 1960 Fellowship (the same one that Kane received).

More checked boxes got her more results: with her field of interest and gender listed, Konietzko came across another opportunity, the “Establishing Pathways for Women in Politics” fellowship, which supplemented her funding from the Heinz fellowship.

Dimitri Halikias ’16 also found an opportunity specifically for Yalies like himself. A conservative freshman interested in political writing, Halikias identified one fellowship that fit his needs: a grant through the William F. Buckley Program, which he used to cover a summer at the National Review in New York City.

But Halikias only saw a couple of listings for freshmen back when he did his search.

“There isn’t really a great database outside of [those Yale offers],” he said.

“But it just doesn’t have that many things for freshmen who are looking to do humanities or political-related work.”

Not every Yalie fits into the categories the fellowship search has to offer.

Not everyone gets “sorted” and finds a match.

Turkish student Sera Tolgay ’14 managed to find one of the few fellowship opportunities for international students, but many of her friends, she said, weren’t as lucky — so they “got paid internships or went home, where they could actually cover the costs.”

Few science students have those kinds of worries, partly because as Dames said, UCS sees STEM as an area of major growth worth serious support.

Walter Hsiang ’15, who worked as a research intern for Novartis, a pharmaceutical company in California, broke into a grin as he told me about the amount of support he got from Yale. “[As a STEM student] Yale will support anything you want to do,” he said, adding that he’s “never had any trouble finding funding” over his two summers as a Yale student. The summer after his freshman year, Hsiang received $4,200 to do research with a professor on campus.

With the University focusing on STEM, students like Hsiang have vastly more opportunities for support than some of their peers. The CIPE database lists only a handful of fellowships for kids who select “entertainment” or “the arts” as their fields of interest.

Becca Edelman ’14, a film columnist for the News and the president of the Yale Film Society, is pursuing a path in the entertainment industry.

This summer, she found a paid internship with producer Scott Rudin, who was behind “Black Swan,” “The Social Network” and several other films.

But a year ago, Edelman worked an unpaid job at ICM Partners, a talent agency in Los Angeles. Living across

the country from her home in New York, Edelman knew that though having a car for the summer is almost an industry requirement, she wouldn’t be able to afford one. She was lucky enough to find a bus line that worked for her and ran on time, a rarity for Los Angeles residents.

Edelman said she loved her experience at the agency and found it “nurturing.” She is reconciled to the fact that most entry-level positions in film available to her will not offer pay.

“We work in an industry where some entry-level jobs are treated [as] and told that they are expendable,” Edelman said.

Yale has not entirely abandoned students in those industries. UCS recently hired a new associate director for the arts. And CIPE chief and Dean of International Experience Jane Edwards wrote in an email that her office will look to expand support where there is “unmet need.”

“We would like to find more sources of funding for students seeking to apprentice or intern in the arts,” Edwards wrote.

But she did not mention any specific efforts to do so.

UCS and CIPE have a worksheet up to help students who must pay for their own summers. It suggests considering ways to find cheaper housing, as well as looking for help from their communities, friends or family members. Like some of the interns who worked with Clare Kane, Yalies without pay or institutional support may get a part-time job, or as a last resort, take out additional loans. Those recommendations worry intern advocates like David Yamada, the director of the New Workplace Institute and a law professor at Suffolk University Law School.

Yamada said students, especially those from poorer backgrounds, stand to lose a great deal in the unpaid internship market. Alternative experiences are limited. And so they do what they can — or do not apply at all. *** When most Yale students return

to New Haven, they are armed with responses to questions about what they “did” with their summer and what goal they accomplished over the last four months.

Rachel Rothberg ’14 doesn’t have a tidy answer. She spent part of her summer studying how to teach English as a second language, another portion conducting research for history professor Jay Winter in Paris and the last section in New Haven, working as a research assistant for Yale’s International Security Studies program.

Unlike many of her friends, Rothberg didn’t complete an internship, and she didn’t secure a job for after graduation.

“I felt a little lost,” Rothberg said.

“It seems like everyone wants to have their life planned at 21.”

Rothberg didn’t expect to have this kind of summer during most of her junior year, a period she spent consumed by the highly competitive application process for a consulting internship. When they descend on New Haven in November and December, banking and consulting firms serve up “great food,” explain to students what exactly they do — and promote internship opportunities as springboards to jobs and future success. Students interested in such firms spend February and March caught up in interviews.

Though Rothberg made it to a final round interview at Oliver Wyman, she didn’t receive an internship offer, and decided not to pursue a job in business for the summer.

While she appreciated the time to explore different kinds of work, Rothberg said she regrets that she missed out on the chance to gain a job and know where she would spend her next few years.

Yalies use internships to find that kind of security both in consulting and finance and at other stages of their college careers. David Yin ’15, who worked at Forbes this summer, said he is already anticipating the relief that comes from securing another position.

“Knowing what you’re doing next summer makes your life during the school year 10 times easier,” Yin said.

RETURN OF THE 17-YEAR CICADAS

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

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Peabody Museum // All day

A timeline of Yale’s involvement in cicada emergences since 1843.

That’s part of what internships are good for. Then there’s the fact that many believe internships will tell them something about the world, or more pressingly, something about themselves.

Hsiang, the STEM student who spent his summer at Novartis, is a junior this year, but hasn’t yet found a niche he thinks he’ll fully commit to.

He admits that he has “career ADHD,” and has changed his focus several times over, partly because Yale funding gives students in his field the flexibility to try a number of very different summer jobs.

“A lot of us [in STEM] feel like we can only become doctors,” he said.

“When I came to Yale, that’s what I thought, too.”

Dames at UCS said what students seek to gain from internships is some sort of experience, or understanding, on the job. Yale pitches its students to companies by saying that we have “transferrable skills,” she explained.

She always tells students that it’s “good to try things.”

What “trying” means for their future is unclear. Dames said the idea that internships lead to job offers is largely a myth. Last year, 59 percent of graduating seniors with jobs post-Yale secured their positions in their spring semester. This means that, while some lucky students had plans made far in advance, the rest had to strike out on their own yet again.

Eliza Brooke ’13, a former editor for the News, was one of those graduating seniors.

Over the summer, she took a paid internship at TechCrunch that has now evolved into a more lucrative freelance gig.

During the summer after her junior year, Brooke received a fellowship from the News to cover part of her costs as she worked an unpaid internship at T Magazine. But she’s changed her tune now that she’s cut off from Yale’s resources.

“The idea of doing an unpaid internship after graduating is maybe the least appealing thing.”

Applying for summer internships Your resume is hungry.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND FEMINIST

AN ACTIVIST COMES HOME // BY VANESSA YUAN

“No means yes, yes means anal.”

By now, the words seem to be engraved in the collective memory of the Yale student body. In October 2010, Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges chanted this line, over and over again, on Old Campus. A swath of Yalies and administrators reacted in swift fashion — angry op-eds, schoolwide emails and public forums flooded the campus. The feminist campus publication Broad Recognition considered the DKE incident “the last straw” in a series of public sexual misconduct episodes.

For students such as Alexandra Brodsky ’12 LAW ’16, enough was enough.

“The administration just sort of said, ‘Let’s have a conversation!’” she said in a interview, regarding the dissatisfying administrative response to the DKE chants. In the spring of 2011, she, along with 15 students and alumni, filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

The complainants argued that Yale was fostering a hostile sexual environment; the administration’s ineffective response to similar previous incidents and muddled grievance procedures, they said, contributed to the situation. Events such as these had fueled Brodsky’s activism since joining Yale as a freshman — and the Title IX incident, she said, could be seen as a turning point.

“Too often the story about the Title IX complaint is that it was all about DKE,” Brodsky said. “That’s absolutely not true.”

And now, after a difficult relationship with her alma mater, she has returned this fall as a student at Yale Law School. After experiencing sexual harassment firsthand at Yale, she has increasingly felt the obligation to address feminist issues — on this campus and beyond. Despite her issues with the University, Brodsky’s brand of feminism has been inextricably shaped by her time at Yale. *** When asked about her background in social justice work, Brodsky chuckled.

“I wish I had a story to tell you,” she said.

“Something like ‘I grew up in an incredibly radical family.’”

Brodsky went on to list some of her early exposure to matters of social justice — “nothing super significant,” she recalled.

For a time she was involved in her synagogue, organizing around the Darfur genocide. On another occasion, her aunt took her to a pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C. Yet what Brodsky may dismiss as insignificant amounted to an early guiding outlook.

“The little bit of exposure — not a ton — that I got as a teenager struck me that there are things you could do to make the world better and therefore you should do them.

In my mind it made sense,” she said. “In high school I understood the work I wanted to do as ‘public service,’ which I think is related to but distinct from my current activism … It was a model of charity more than social justice, generosity rather than empowerment.”

She continued, “I had the privilege of understanding oppression as something that happened elsewhere and to other people, and concluded that if I could help them, I should.”

Her logical motivation for early charity work would become complicated as she became “a real person in the real world” — a Yale student. That is, instead of reading about social injustice, it became personal and salient. *** Before Title IX “became a personally urgent matter,” Brodsky was more frustrated with the constant instances of sexual discrimination she experienced from her peers. She has written in a previous op-ed for the News about being rejected from study groups because of her sex.

But during the Title IX saga, Brodsky never revealed she was a survivor. In her freshman year, one of her peers attempted to rape her. During her entire undergraduate career, that experience was not something she felt safe disclosing on a campus that she shared with her attacker.

In this respect, the Title IX complaint was much more personal to Brodsky than some might have expected.

“You don’t have to be a survivor to rec-

ognize that there is a problem,” she said.

“But there is a sense of urgency when you’ve had this experience.”

The DKE chants only fueled her anger further. As she put it, students have hoped for many years to work with the administration to improve how Yale addresses sexual misconduct. Seeing that internal change was not going to happen, Brodsky and the other complainants looked into legal options. “[We were] unified by the belief that the University’s administration was inadequately responding to instances of sexual violence and harassment on campus,” said Joseph Breen ’12, one of the 16 complainants.

Under the spotlight of a federal investigation, a series of administrative decisions took place soon after. Even before Breen and Brodsky graduated from Yale, the University centralized all grievance processes through the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct and created the Communication and Consent Educators program, among other services. It seemed that the longstanding battle against sexual misconduct was finally beginning to pick up steam.

“After the complaint, campus began to treat sexual violence more seriously,” Breen said. “The University realized it had to do a better job of making the campus safe, and so the administration began to make changes.” *** Since graduating from Yale, Brodsky has kept herself busy.

She co-directs Know Your IX, or KYIX, a nationwide campaign that seeks to educate students about their Title IX rights.

This summer, she worked at Planned Parenthood on a fellowship and at the Harvard Law School in their gender violence program. She is currently involved with Ed Act Now, a coalition of students and graduates working against sexual violence on colleges and universities. In July, the group rallied outside of the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. to gather signatures for their petition demanding that the federal government hold institutions legally accountable for their obligations under Title IX. Now Brodsky is back on campus, starting anew in the same place that compelled her feminist activism. (She is no stranger to the Yale Law School: she was fully introduced to the inner workings of Title IX in a law school class, “Sexual Rights,” in the fall of 2010.)

“I have no doubt wherever [Brodsky] finds herself, she’s going to be working from inside the institution that she wants to make more fair, more just,” said Crystal Feimster, assistant professor of American Studies & African American Studies and Brodsky’s mentor in her senior year.

At the law school, Brodsky plans to study prison alternatives and feminist legal theory. “I think that there’s a lot I can learn from the law school about how to challenge institutions like Yale,” she said.

Current activists acknowledge positive additions to campus in the wake of the Title IX complaint. Students Against Sexual Violence at Yale (SASVY) is a student group founded in response

to the Report of Complaints of Sexual Misconduct released this summer.

The group, which published an open letter to Yale with Brodsky’s help, offers educational mater i a l s to

help victims report sexual crimes. Since SASVY’s debut, administrators have issued a response to the open letter and agreed to meet with the student organizers to further discuss their concerns.

“We aren’t starting anything new,” said Emma Goldberg ’16, one of the founding members of SASVY. “There are so many students who really paved a path for activism.”

Brodsky said she is letting the “most affected constituency” lead the onthe-ground efforts to combat sexual misconduct on campus, and she is hoping to be a source of institutional memory for future activism.

In other words, she said, “I’m hoping to be helpful.”

Contact VANESSA YUAN at vanessa.yuan@yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

S AT U R D AY

ALL RECRUITMENT SHOWS

AUGUST 31

So you like a cappella and sketchy comedy? The real question is if they like you.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Everywhere // All evening

Taste of China

The classiest Chinese food to ever hit Yale’s campus.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

INEDIBLE DELIGHTS: A REVIEW OF ‘THE DINNER’ BY HERMAN KOCH // BY SCOTT STERN

“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This first line from Tolstoy’s immortal “Anna Karenina” is frequently on the mind and lips of the narrator of “The Dinner” by Herman Koch. “The Dinner,” published to international acclaim (and revulsion) in the Netherlands in 2009, has finally reached the States, and our calloused palates are now being challenged by its dry and acid taste. Not rich and delicious like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” (to which “The Dinner” is frequently compared), “The Dinner” is rather sour and unforgiving. Nevertheless, it is a delight and a necessity to read.

“The Dinner” is the story of two families, each unhappy in its own way. It is set in an offputtingly fancy Dutch restaurant, the kind of place in which it takes months to reserve a table. The diners are two couples: Paul and Claire Lohman, Serge and Babette Lohman. Paul is a retired high school teacher; Serge is a successful politician. The two are brothers. The two are enemies.

Paul and his wife Claire arrive first. The reader immediately finds sympathy with Paul’s longing to eat in the unassuming dive across the street. Paul is a lovable sort of misanthrope, critiquing everything from the food (“The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was the vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but you have voids and then you have voids”) to his brother. Serge is big, charismatic and gregarious — the sort of politician who would adopt an African child to further his political career (literally). His wife Babette,

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES who arrives with red and blotchy eyes, fresh from crying, is quiet and subdued. Ever the political wife, though, Babette puts on a happy face.

As the diners traverse a pretentious five-course meal, from aperitif to digestif, any façade of happiness begins to fade. The four are there to discuss a family problem. Each family has a son, and both sons were involved in a disturbing crime. What should be done? How will it affect the boys’ lives? How will it affect their parents? How has it already affected their parents?

And why would two boys from good and wealthy families commit such a gruesome crime? One of the delights of “The Dinner” is that it makes you ponder, along with race and class and Dutch culture, the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Are the boys the products of middle-class angst or sociopathy born of privilege? Perhaps it is their genetics. But if it’s their genetics, their parents are not all that they seem.

The characters that we know and trust in the beginning of the novel, we grow to suspect and then fear by the end. This reversal, engineered

by Paul, the least reliable of narrators, keeps the reader on the edge of his seat until the very end of the meal.

Everyone has a past, a dark side, and by the time the characters are ready to order (only the fanciest) coffee, the truth is out on the table. The tastes, textures and secret spices of the novel’s final fruits are simply to die for.

Sometimes dismissed by reviewers as intentionally sickening, “The Dinner” rather makes one rethink how one would act in the worst of circumstances. It may seem sickening only because evil is sickening. It subtly tells us who is to blame when children go bad, and it also provides us with a solution to the worst of shared nightmares (even if its characters choose not to do the right thing). Short and enticing, “The Dinner” is easily swallowed but not easily digested. It’s the sort of novel that teaches you more than nonfiction, the sort of parable that leaves you examining yourself.

“The Dinner” has many messages — about race, xenophobia, class pre-

Class Warfare

tentions, the falsity of politics and the root of evil. Its overarching message is that evil could be right around the corner — or right across the dinner table. Genuine mental illness, ambition-driven craziness and mysterious malevolence all play a role in the novel. When Koch has the chance to reveal whether one “bad” character has a mental illness or not, he ultimately demurs and leaves the reader guessing. In the end, we must come to our own conclusions whether nature poisons nurture or if nurture corrupts nature.

“The Dinner” is a story of unhappy families. Only if Tom Riddle and Lady Macbeth got married and gave

// TAO TAO HOLMES

This dinner is not for the weak of stomach.

birth to Leopold and Loeb, could the Lohman family get any more screwed up. If “Life of Pi” is a book to make you believe in God, “The Dinner” is a book that will make you question basic human goodness. You will never look at your fellow diners the same way again.

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

Buddy Cops Face ‘The Heat’

// BY ELEANOR MICHOTTE

// BY MICHAEL LOMAX Good lord, is there anything more depressing than applying to seminars? I was turned down from four today, and shopping period has literally just begun.

My ego is currently lying in little shards on the floor. The saddest part is that I hadn’t even applied to one of them in the first place, but the professor rejected me from it anyway, just in case I’d been considering it.

There are a lot of things at Yale I enjoy complaining about.

Durfee’s raising its prices from extortionate to straight-up hilarious is a big one at the moment. But seminar applications really do have to be one of the most aggravating things about this institution. Freshmen, in case you haven’t worked this out yet, here’s the deal with Yale classes. There are a lot of really, really amazing seminars here. There is also a solid smattering of moderately good ones.

But you can’t just take them.

Instead, you and 50 other students will first have to crouch on the floor in various agonizing positions and compete to write, in 15 minutes and on the back of an index card, the best explanation of why you want to take “The Comma in Western Media.” And then, regardless of what department it is, all the slots will just go to EP&E majors who preregistered in July.

I for one do not appreciate this. I’m an English major, so I really rely on class participation to charm my way out having a very shaky understanding of the world. It also means that for the rest of my life, I will be turning, cap in hand, to those same EP&E majors for my meager paychecks. Surely Yale could level the playing field a little and let me take an SC credit with actual professor contact? I feel this is not too much to ask.

I admit, I was initially con-

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 1

ELEANOR MICHOTTE CRIT FROM THE BRIT cerned that my views might be skewed by this recent swath of rejection. So, in the interests of journalistic integrity, I polled a representative sample of students (namely the two people in line at Bass Café with me) to see what they thought of all this.

Neither of them dared contradict me, and we swiftly started dissecting the vicious cycle that is seminar applications.

What this rigorous investigation revealed was that everyone — yes, overachieving freshmen, even you — will at some point apply to and get rejected from a class. First, we feel miffed and inadequate. Then we panic that — god forbid! — we won’t get into any seminars this semester. We frantically apply to nine more that we don’t really want to take. Unfortunately, so does everyone else, and suddenly even the most obscure classes are oversubscribed. Which is how, two days later, we end up somewhere in the upper reaches of WLH, desperately trying to convince a professor that we’ve always been interested in “The Modern Swiss Sewer System.”

What am I doing here, we start wondering; what am I even doing with my life? Suddenly we are wracked with the same sort of existential angst I felt after watching Miley Cyrus twerk at the VMAs. I find this whole trend particularly bleak because it reminds me how trigger-happy Yalies are with competition. We have this tendency, I’ve noticed, to create our own little boxing rings and push each other into them. Even the smallest club “needs” four leadership positions, and we scuffle over who gets them. We

act like it’s feeding time at the zoo when “50 Most” is released.

And we give seminars a cachet, hype some classes to celebrity status, so that even what we study becomes a prize hung on display.

I think we do it because it’s easy. Getting here means that competition is, by definition, something we’ve already excelled at. It’s a mode we understand. We know its rules and how to navigate it. And when, at Yale, we engage in it, we think that we don’t have a choice. But, at least in this case, we do. The competition around getting into classes is a prisoner’s dilemma on a campus-wide scale. And we can opt out at any time. Think about it: if everyone stuck to their guns and only pitched up at the classes they really wanted, then I wouldn’t have four emails in my inbox containing the words “very tough selection process.”

The thing is, we all know that that will never happen. It’s that old chestnut about wanting what you can’t have. Some courses are appealing precisely because they’re impossible to get into. So instead, here’s some advice as you sally forth into the next few days of trying not to write ‘passionate’ twice in the same sentence. Wear something bright if your strategy is to be sycophantic. Your professor will not remember your veiled pleas; they will, however, remember the violent green of your bowtie.

Alternatively, bring them a present. (Try books for professors on Hillhouse, wine for the folks in LC.) Finally, if you see any EP&E majors grinning smugly as you fill out your index card, give them a swift elbow to the groin.

And feel free to blame it on me.

Contact ELEANOR MICHOTTE at eleanor.michotte@yale.edu .

I can count on one hand the number of new releases I saw this summer: “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “This Is the End” and “The Heat.” All wonderful films, all very different.

“Star Trek” is an adventure and a half, and “The End” is astonishingly offensive and hilarious. “The Heat” is more different still. Oscar-winner Sandra Bullock teams with the always outrageous, never boring Melissa McCarthy to deliver a helluva comedic haymaker that never once loses momentum.

Miss Congeniality returns in good form as FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn — another stick-in-the-mud buzzkill who’s too good at her job, and is generally disliked because of it. Ashburn guns for a promotion and takes on a high-profile drug case in Boston to secure the new office.

There she quickly runs afoul of McCarthy’s brass tacks Shannon Mullins. First they’re at odds, then they open up to one another, then something goes wrong, then they kick ass.

But that’s not the only reason we love “The Heat.” It’s a buddy cop movie, plain and simple. Performance, not necessarily action, keeps us engaged. It’s about how our opposite-sides-of-the-track heroes take over the world.

Tragedy might strike and people might die, but our buddies banter their ways into our hearts, and we don’t tend to forget them.

Because what makes the Buddy Cop so memorable is that, fundamentally, it’s an incredibly entertaining equation. You have an X and you have a Y, and a combination of the two, however disjointed the pieces might seem at first, somehow makes a single,

MICHAEL LOMAX CINEMA TO THE MAX well-oiled film that’s barely rough at all. The best Buddy Cops are therefore the ones that are most visually mismatched while still coming together, and when you think of the famous examples of the genre, you get a nice little melting pot.

Black/white is the common one. It started with the more serious “In the Heat of the Night,” a Sidney Poitier detective film that tackled racism in the rural South, nabbing an Oscar for best picture and an acting distinction for Rod Steiger. It continued many years later with Eddie Murphy’s classic turn in “Beverley Hills Cop” and hit something of a peak when a burgeoning Mel Gibson teamed with Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon.” Out of necessity, Buddy Cops had to get a little more creative after that.

The infamous Michael Bay broke ground when he paired black A-listers Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to produce the international blockbuster “Bad Boys.” Will Smith would strike gold again when he and Tommy Lee Jones lifted the genre to the world of extraterrestrial espionage in “Men in Black.” Tom Hanks even took a French mastiff as his partner in “Turner & Hooch.”

But of them all, “Rush Hour,” and its glorious sequel “Rush Hour 2,” are my favorites. Chris Tucker plays a loudmouth cop out of Compton who never misses a beat and always has a sharp quip ready to throw away at the drop of a hat. But when his

EXTRACURRICULAR BAZAAR

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at michael.lomax@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Payne Whitney Gymnasium // 12 p.m.

The only song we sing is Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You.”

brash style lands him in the doghouse, he circumvents the system with the help of Jackie Chan to rescue a Chinese ambassador’s daughter. To think you could team a riotously quick-witted black comedian with a Chinese martial artist-turned-actor who can barely speak English is something of a creative watershed to me, but more because it inexplicably took so long for someone to try it out.

This is how I feel about “The Heat.” It’s a Buddy Cop with two women, but that hardly matters with Bullock and McCarthy running the show. The chemistry between the two actresses holds up the weight of the film, and their steady stream of sight gags and potty jokes can at times even put Tucker and Chan to shame. So I can’t wait for “The Heat 2.” I’m looking forward to Mullins blasting a warehouse with an RPG-missile while Ashburn continues her climb from stick-in-themud to fiery and beloved FBI war general. But more than that, I’m excited for this new cache of Buddy Cop possibilities.

We’ll eventually get some ethnic variations of the allfemale Buddy Cop, and perhaps, in time, we could even see mixed-gender, and further along still, queer Buddy Cops.

If the trailer is funny enough, I don’t see why we shouldn’t watch them as they come.

And judging by the bankroll returns coming in from “The Heat,” I don’t think I’m alone here. So I await the changes with open arms. Just remember: If you’re not laughing, something’s probably wrong.

Drinking martinis

The price of one drink, but the buzz of three.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ADVISES

The 10 Commandments Your Frocos Won’t Tell You

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on’t ask me if I’m a freshman. Don’t do it. // Leah Motzkin ’16

D L B

on’t drink the water. // Andrew Kahn ’14

on’t pretend to be a junior. The juniors will know you’re lying. // Sophie Kaye ’15 ance floor make outs are for Toad’s, not pregames. // Glory Norman ’16

adies: check the next day’s weather before you choose to stay over somewhere. Your heels / your hook-up’s flip-flops are problematic if it snowed overnight. // Eleanor Michotte ’15

ate night swims in the New Haven harbor are really fun? // David Kemper ’13

ring a pair of socks when you go work in Sterling — it gets cold, and it’s impossible to think when your feet are cold. // TaoTao Holmes ’14

B

efriend the senior citizens who inexplicably show up in your classes. They are older (obviously) and wiser than you. // Isaac Stanley-Becker ’16

S D

tudy abroad: just do it (you won’t regret it). // Djenab Conde ’15

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 1

on’t trust my advice. // Jackson McHenry ’15

YALE SWING AND BLUES DANCE PRACTICUM Kline Biology Tower // 8–11 p.m.

Probably the only time you’ll ever go to KBT.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sending ideas for ‘WEEKEND RECOMMENDS’

Make our lives easier. Drop us a line at weekend@yaledailynews.com.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

JAMES PONSOLDT ’01

// CREATIVE COMMONS

BRINGING REALISM TO ROMANCE // BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS

W

hen James Ponsoldt ’01 set out to make “The Spectacular Now,” released earlier this month, he sought to recreate the teen movie. Based on Scott Neustadter’s novel of the same name, the film, set in Ponsoldt’s hometown of Athens, Ga., is at once realistic and nostalgic. It bucks the trend of high-budget blockbuster films portraying the “perfect” romance, instead embracing its characters’ imperfections in an effort to create characters resonant with the emotional realities of the film’s viewers. Steeped in the aesthetic of “Anytown, USA,” “The Spectacular Now” portrays a world simultaneously familiar in its failings and uplifting in its story. The film stars Miles Teller as Sutter Keely, a hard-partying high school senior with no future plans, and Shailene Woodley as Aimee Finecky, a studious girl who has never had a boyfriend. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Sutter finds himself on Aimee’s front lawn after a night of heavy drinking. The chance encounter leads to a romance between the two, with Sutter teaching Aimee how to live in the present and Aimee showing Sutter that life is more than partying. At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “The Spectacular Now” won the Special Jury Award for Acting. Director James Ponsoldt, best known for “(500) Days of Summer” and Teller spoke with the News and several other collegiate publications about the film.

James Ponsoldt. There is a difference between a sentimental mentality and nostalgia. [Sentimental films] don’t deal with the same pain and anxiety of feeling that you’re going to have your heart broken. A nostalgic film embraces the vast emotional spectrum.

YDN. How did you approach the way the film straddles different generations and the way that teenagers’ lives are different than they were 20 or 30 years ago?

James Ponsoldt. I don’t think that teenagers are all that different than they were 20 years ago or 40 years ago. I think it’s essentially the same.

Technology obviously changes some things. But the biggest thing for me in thinking about this film is acknowledging the technology that we have now, acknowledging where we are now with fashion or music, and then trying to remove all the elements that weren’t essential.

I wanted this movie to hold up and still be relevant.

University of Rochester. The definition of what romantic is has changed. Are people valuing honesty more?

James Ponsoldt. There’s a delineation between big cartoon movies and stories that are honest. In an age of YouTube, I think we have more of an appetite [for honesty]. We are seeing movies about real people being depicted honestly. I think we identify with characters mostly in their flaws. That’s how we identify

their humanity.

YDN. You talked about when kids started drinking in your hometown of Athens, Ga., which is where you filmed. How did that location change the film and how did your experiences influence the final product?

James Ponsoldt. In neither case was Oklahoma (the setting of the book) the defining character. The story wasn’t about young kids who want to be bull riders, where if you reset it it would completely undermine the story. What was important was that these weren’t kids who were growing up in, say, Manhattan. They weren’t growing up in LA or Chicago. And yet they weren’t growing up in the middle of nowhere.

They’re growing up in somewhere that was maybe a suburb, maybe a college town, a place where, as a teenager, you see kids that are maybe only two or three years older than you but they party like adults.

I felt that we were faithful to and honored the book by bringing it to Georgia.

University of Missouri, St. Louis. The way you handled teenage drinking was very realistic. Can you speak to that?

James Ponsoldt. The goal is to never judge the characters, because in real life nobody sees themselves as a bad guy or as someone who’s doing bad things. I think a lot of films, bad films, that deal with substance abuse demoralize and judge the characters and deal with slogans and offer easy lessons. But those are movies that don’t deal with real life. And if you’re personally dealing with things or if you have people that are close to you, who you love,

who are dealing with substance abuse or alcoholism, it’s not that comforting to see a movie where someone’s completely fixed and everything’s okay. I try to be a really great advocate [for the characters].

YDN. What’s it like to be 26 and play a high school senior? Do you see any of yourself in your character?

Miles Teller. For the record I was 25 when we filmed it. Obviously I wasn’t really looking to play a high schooler. And so I thought it was a step back, but it was one of the best scripts that I’ve ever read, so I was really excited to do it. And as far as seeing myself in Sutter, yeah I see a lot of myself in Sutter. Watching it now, I don’t see as much of myself in

“

him. But yeah, if Sutter had parents who were together and two older sisters that just showed a lot of love for him and had all the kind of stuff to succeed in life, I think we would have been very similar.

Boston University. The film felt very natural. Can you both discuss your directorial and acting styles in approaching this?

James Ponsoldt. The goal for me is to always create a film where the audience identifies with the characters.

[The actors] can try anything they want in front of a camera.

University of South Carolina. Why is it so difficult to make an honest

movie today with flawed characters in Hollywood?

James Ponsoldt. It’s hard to take a complicated character and complicated real people regardless of their age, whether they’re teenagers or whether they’re adults. A lot of studios have moved to a place where they’re more interested in movies that have the potential to be blockbusters and franchises. The films that all of the people in those studios love and respect, they’re not really in a place to make. Audiences are incredibly intelligent and they’re ready and waiting to see complicated characters on screen.

Contact MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS at matthew.lloyd-thomas@yale.edu .

THE GOAL FOR ME IS TO ALWAYS CREATE A FILM WHERE THE AUDIENCE IDENTIFIES WITH THE CHARACTERS. [THE ACTORS] CAN TRY ANYTHING THEY WANT IN FRONT OF A CAMERA.

“

UNCC. The theme of teenage love is extremely popular among films today.

What do you think it is about this theme that attracts people to these movies?