Yale Daily News Magazine | November Issue 2024-2025
Staff
Managing Editors
Fatou M’Baye
Brunella Tipismana
Everett Yum
Associate Editors
Keya Bajaj
Chloe Budakian
Owen Curtin
Lexi Eskovitz
Carter Flemming
Oliver Giddings
Angel Hu
Ethan Kan
Claire Nam
Sukriti Ojha
Moe Shimizu
Tara Singh
Will Sussbauer
Miranda Wollen
Copy Editors
Terence Harris
Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch
Cameron Jones
Anna Papakirk
Bella Washburn
Layout
Megha Kumar
Malina Reber
Michelle Vong
Ashley Wang
Illustration
Maria Andreu Bird
Anna Chamberlin
Sophie Chmelar
Davianna Inirio
Luke Louchheim
Neve O’Brien
Sophie Yi
Thisbe Wu
Photography
Addy Gorton
Dear reader,
It is easy to view our bodies as mere vehicles of the imagination. But what if, instead of removing us from the physical world, art hurled us back into it?
The stories collected in this issue are as grounded as they are inventive. New Haven neighbors volunteer to maintain parks neglected for years by the local government. A crushed lanternfly prompts a writer to consider her place in the natural collective. A tree grows backwards in time. Student researchers grapple with the life and death of creatures they care for in cold laboratories.
Our columnists, too, bridge the gaps between phantasmal and material worlds. Evan writes about his memories of food in San Francisco, Ingrid about the unfinished stories of her youth, Megan about her encounters with death as a researcher and a hospice worker. Each columnist approaches their own mystery with artistry, grace, and precision; we hope that you, like us, will eagerly await their next installments.
After reading the latest issue of our beloved magazine, make sure to set it down, stand up, and hug a tree.
Harper
and Kinnia Editors-in-Chief
Evan Sun
Illustration by Thisbe Wu
I was born with a short tongue, an attached lingual frenulum that keeps me grounded, hindering my ability to move my tongue as much as detached lingual frenulum folk. The doctor said I inherited it from my dad. One might think that a short tongue would hinder my appetite. Even with a short tongue, my appetite for the world is unrestrained. I yearn to taste as I wish. Love as I wish. Reminiscence as I wish.
Because who’s to say what I can or cannot do. So what? Maybe the doctor is right, and I’ll develop sleeping problems because of the frenulum. I’ll sleep restlessly with grace, as I toss and turn, dreaming about all the ways I feel genuine joy.
Digest is a culmination of all those joyous dreams. It just so happens that joy, to me, is synonymous with macaron towers, Peking duck, and peanuts.
Back to my frenulum. My short tongue was an alarming sign to me
Digest: Peanuts and their Auspiciousness
Digest is where I braid consumption with memory, stirring love and longing into every dish. Here I’ll serve my delicious escapades—my interactions with food, people, and places. What I’ve tasted, remembered, and still crave.
— I am my father’s son. Something about being inherently attached or related to another person gave me dysphoria. It’s like a feeling of perpetual teenage angst, of unruly pessimism that bites back.
When I was a baby, my dad fed me peanuts “bird-style.” Yes, it’s exactly what you’re thinking. He chewed up peanuts to a sludge and fed me the sludge, since baby Evan couldn’t crack open and chew his own peanuts. Every time he recounts feeding me bird-style, I tell him to stop talking — or I’d combust out of disgust. In retrospect, I get it. He fed me peanut sludge out of adoration — at least that’s what he thinks.
No, I’m lying — I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will.
Lately, I’ve been digesting a lot of peanuts. Not because I miss my dad’s peanut sludge, but in large part due to the two big saggy bags of dried garlic peanuts I brought with me to New Haven. I got them at Boss Su-
permarket, a quaint Chinese grocery store on San Francisco’s Noriega & 31st. On the day of my flight to go back east, my mom urged me to buy some for “college snacking.” I drove us there to pick them up. To be transparent, the peanuts were a pain to pack; my cowboy boots and Doc Martens already made my luggage ten pounds overweight. But the two bags of garlic-flavored peanuts were non-negotiable. They would sustain me, providing a candle-lit familiarity to my homesick belly.
This past summer, I perpetually snacked on Boss Supermarket garlic peanuts. Uncle Bobby gifted them to us whenever he’d visit Paupau (maternal grandma). Before I left for college, my mom gave me a spiel about her and Uncle Bobby’s shared affinity for peanuts, like how he updates her on all his new peanut finds. And how one time, they got a ninety-dollar parking ticket when they not-so-sneakily double-parked in front of a Chinese grocery store. The San Francisco meter maids are
brutal, and they don’t go easy on anyone—not even for peanuts. I don’t remember which brand or flavor they hunted for, but I know that it was worth the ticket.
Sometimes I question how my mom and Uncle Bobby came to love peanuts so much. Is that why I love peanuts? Is it epigenetics or the fault of a nutty irresistible aura? Maybe it’s something more simple like the satisfying crack of the shell, the fibrous texture that sometimes splinters my skin so well. Or the flaky exterior of the nut, shedding like gift wrap on Christmas morning.
ing. She insisted that the healing powers of fasheng (peanuts) would mend my broken skin. She would calm me down, drying my tears with her wrinkled finger pads covered in peanut shell dust. The dust would stick to my damp skin, but I would endure the discomfort for just a short while. When she turned away, I would immediately wipe away at the skin she had just grazed, erasing the dust, her touch.
I never wanted Paupau to see me wipe away her wet kisses or dusty fingers, but sometimes I just couldn’t help myself. To accept affection should be automatic, void of hesitation and
I have an inkling that it runs in the family.
When I was six or seven, I remember Paupau feeding me garlic-flavored peanuts after I fell jump rop-
flinching. I’d forgotten my manners. I wish I could savor the feel of peanut dust on my cheeks, to admire the powder, like real magic or Tinkerbell’s pixie dust. I wish that I could be dutiful and endure more discomfort, endure
more care. Her care is so sparse in New Haven. I only see Paupau a few times a year, and she sometimes forgets when I come and go. I want her to remember how respectful I am,to remember how much I love her. When I come back to my dorm after back-to-back classes, I crack open peanut shells. Again and again and again. I feel my cheeks dampening and my skin healing right in front of my eyes—magic. There’s an image of a jump rope in front of me, in the same position as I remembered. Purple rope and black handles. Light as a petal yet vicious and ready to ignite.
Today, I texted my mom, asking if she could ship garlic peanuts to the bookstore. I was missing them, and Hong Kong Market’s peanuts don’t have that same je ne sais quoi.
“how are you doing? classes going well?”
“I’m doing ok it’s a little stressful but I’m doing good overall”
“Also is it possible to ship garlic peanuts to me.The one from the market we went to”
“ok, will get the garlic peanuts and send them to you”
Now I wait. In the meantime, I’ll try to endure.
Art by Sophie Chmelar
Ingrid
Rodríguez Vila
Illustration by Thisbe Wu
Cemetery of Forgotten Books: Stormbringer
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. And I’ve been haunted for nearly as long as I’ve been writing. This is only half my own fault—sometimes, long before it’s meant to see the light of day, a story concept will take on a life of its own that isn’t completely snuffed out by early interment. Borrowing a concept from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind,” “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” will chronicle my visits to the vast cemetery where I’ve abandoned half-finished stories since I was a child. By exhuming some of their corpses and giving them another chance to state their cases, I hope to exorcize some of the spirits that still haunt me. And, hopefully, I’ll learn something about myself, my stories, and the philosophies that have shaped my life in the process.
Fish littered the dock the next morning, thin bones poking through matted silver scales, carcasses licked clean by the rolling tide. As Belén’s eyes sailed over the legion of fish cracked open like oranges, she imagined massive arms plucking sábalos, boquerones, and dorados out of the sea and flinging them, useless, onto the shore, where they could do nothing but rot and smell as the townspeople loaded empty nets back into their skiffs. Mami made a half-cross over her breast with lazy fingers. It was, apparently, too early in the morning to bother God with such things.
A few weeks ago, I asked a friend to name a literary trope she was tired of. Her first answer was magical realism—more specifically, a particular breed of magical realism, especially prone to overwrought prose and on-the-
nose metaphors. Despite the fact that this was, objectively, an extremely reasonable thing to say, I felt my brow furrow.
This apparently personal stake in the defense of magical realism didn’t come from nowhere: between the ages of 15 and 17, I was absolutely obsessed with the genre. I would read anyone whose work could even tenuously be filed under it: Cortázar, Esquivel, Borges, Kafka, Bulgakov, Murakami. The gritty atmosphere lent these stories a serious, respectable air, but it was laced with just enough magic to maintain a certain whimsy playfulness. A young man cannot stop vomiting rabbits. A wedding cake is poisoned by its baker’s bitter tears. A large cat teeters loudly along the streets of St. Petersburg, drunk on vodka. They made a case for the glorious indivisibility of realism and
fantasy. I was repeatedly dazzled by what they could make me believe.
At a particularly prolific moment in my writing career, I wanted nothing more than to emulate these stories. Four attempts at this ambitious task still float side by side in a folder buried deep in my documents tab titled Stormbringer
The real: The story always took place in the same fishing town: “a breathing, creaking mass of waterlogged wood and rusting zinc dangerously close to tumbling face-first into the bay’s deep green embrace.” This idealized bayfront was inspired by the cluster of huts and skiffs I saw in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, next to the dockside restaurant where I had the best dorado of my life.
The magical: With some varia-
from draft to draft, a young girl named Belén had to contend with a peculiar condition afflicting either herself or a family member — chronic stomachaches that correlated almost perfectly with the arrival of thunderstorms to pseudo-Cabo Rojo. It was unclear whether the relationship between the pain and the thunder was causal or merely predictive, which contributed to the apprehension with which the rest of the town regarded the seemingly-cursed family.
A certain atmospheric resemblance to another fishing village-set tale, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings — an iconic short story by magical realism giant Gabriel García Márquez — was far from incidental. After all, I had first been introduced to magical realism in my 10th grade Spanish class. I learned about the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, when authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Juan Rulfo’s phantasmic tales made them some of the region’s first representatives fully embraced within Western literary academic circles.
Even as my insatiable appetite for stories led me all the way to frigid street corners in St. Petersburg and lush forest cabins in Kochi, I remained convinced that the true value of magical realism was as a phenomenological study of Latin American existence. A group of disgruntled motorists could form a small city-state by the side of an infinite traffic jam only in the type of place where, for instance, a pigeon could explode into an electrical transformer and leave an entire small town powerless for two weeks. In the sticky heat of Puerto Rico, life often felt like an exercise in absurdity.
In the graceless body of a 14-year-old girl, this absurdity was only compounded — to the point that Stormbringer’s central metaphor felt like just a slight exaggeration. I was moody, dramatic, and extremely sensitive, prone to very old-fashioned fits: sometimes frantic hysteria, other times languid malaise. These came as involuntarily as stomachaches and proved as unintelligibly destructive as the tropical storms that followed Belén.
As my friend’s wariness could suggest, however, it might no longer be the time to crusade for magical realism. In a New York Times article, Mexican-Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia describes magical realism as a vague stereotype that has often “strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature.” Several recent articles echo this sentiment, and with good reason. For over 60 years, magical realism has hung like a hulky cloud over the continent. From the outside, it is impossible to see past it. The refusal to see Latin American authors as anything but “traditional” magical realists has both blocked the ascent of those who do not fit the mold and bulldozed over the nuances of those whose work can be reduced to the label.
Reading through lists of commonly miscategorized authors, I was horrified to realize I might be part of the problem, having committed terrible sins against the likes of Borges and Quiroga. Nevertheless, I remain certain that neither “surrealism” nor “naturalism” nor “modernism” can account for the viscerally magical realist way their stories move me. I realize now why my friend’s completely valid opinion offended me so, and why, as I
worked on version after version of Stormbringer from my childhood bedroom, the seemingly played-out genre still felt enlightening to me. My magical realism was never a shelf in a bookstore or a collection of recurring tropes — that massive cloudlike thing invariably seen but never apprehended from the outside. Instead, it describes a certain sensibility. A familiar frustration, a familiar beauty. And a reliable language through which to express my experience in the world without succumbing to insincerity or complete insanity.
I never intended for Belén to figure out what the nature of her condition was. I intended for the citizens of pseudo-Cabo Rojo to forever glare at her with the same half-swallowed resentment. A melancholy ending felt more mature. After all, using her as an unsubtle literary device for my own frustrations did not really help me understand anything better either. But it did help me feel less alone. In a funny twist of fate, I have since developed a hiatal hernia that causes me chronic stomach pain. Perhaps now I would write Belén a different ending. One where she is able to do more than barely cope with the destiny imposed on her and instead manages to take refuge and comfort in the absurdity of what she cannot fully wrap her mind around.
Megan Kernis
Illustration by Thisbe Wu
I killed him. The guilt wracking through me prevailed over my comparatively slight anxiety about spring semester midterms and summer research applications. I sat there while he died.
I called my mother and unloaded the news that her daughter had failed to save a life. She was an ICU nurse, more familiar with death than most, and in that moment, she reassured me that I was not the cause of death for my patient.
It was my second shift at Connecticut Hospice, and I was accompanied by another Yale student, a senior. On the commute, she explained that volunteering at hospice is a relatively lackluster gig. The only responsibility of patient care volunteers is to offer company and conversation to patients — conscious or sedated. Most of the time, patients are se-
Dear Life : The People I Would’ve Known
“Dear Life” is an ode to the nuance of emotion surrounding death and an exploration of the life we can live when it’s near its end. As I navigate chronic illness and end-of-life care as an aspiring physician, I’ve found that the beauty in healthcare isn’t just saving lives but making life happen.
dated to ease pain, so volunteers are expected to sit with them in hopes that their presence is felt. She told me it lacked the excitement and hands-on experience that other clinical opportunities provided.
My own experience has proven that the lack of excitement is exactly what makes it worthwhile. Through witnessing death as both peace and tragedy, I discovered that a “good death” exists, and it’s in moments of stillness that we find it.
The patients I sat with that day were both sedated. The room was large enough to hold four beds, but only two were filled. It smelled like antiseptic and microwavable lunches with the faint scent of get-well flowers wafting through the air. The room offered a wall-to-wall window overlooking the Long Island Sound,
which took the attention away from the dull paint and focsued it onto the still, blue water and wind-blown sailboats.
When I entered the room, one man was lying down facing the window and the other was positioned with his head raised toward the small television attached to his bed, but both patients were unconscious. Since each bed has its own chair, I chose to sit by the man with his TV on. He looked like he might wake up for a conversation, while the other man looked too peaceful to disturb.
Two hours into my shift, a nurse came in to check on the patients. Neither of them had stirred in the time that I was sitting with them, and I busied myself with schoolwork while the nurse performed her assessments. When she got to the patient who had been lying down, she lingered at
his body for a few too many seconds to be able to hide the truth.
“I think he’s gone,” she whispered.
Growing up, death demanded my fear and limited my freedom. My mother, occasionally overbearing, scolded me for reckless adventures through local forests and neighborhood streets and warned me against driving at night because we can’t control others’ decisions. Death took the people that we loved without our permission, so it was our responsibility to ensure it couldn’t take more than that. I was raised to believe death was tactless, greedy, and paralyzing — no more, no less.
This idea deepened when Bryant Barbush, a classmate from high school, took his own life on July 24th, 2023. He was a year older than me and the teaching assistant during my junior year PE class. Naturally, the dynamic prompted my own little hallway crush on him, and so a few brief, flirty conversations kept us connected throughout the semester.
He asked me to his senior prom at the end of the year, but I already had plans. Nonetheless, he rocked an all-white tux and riled the after-party crowds with his backflips. Our friendship ended there, and I didn’t think much about it until he took his life last summer.
The narratives of life and death seemed dichotomous. Life was enjoyed, celebrated, and appreciated; death was grieved,
cursed, and terrifying. When life end - ed, death began, prompting the idea that if you’re struggling in life, you can start over in death.
Bryant’s death reaffirmed this sentiment. As young adults, we imagine death distantly — a far away event that can only be tragic because it’s not meant to be near us. The desire for death among teenagers segregates life and death, and death is used as an escape from life.
When I ended the call with my mom, I still felt uneasy about my patient’s passing. It took another month of volunteer work to realize that his view of death may have been different than mine. I found that the desire for death among the elderly inextricably links life and death, in hopes of carrying their life peacefully into death.
After that day, I realized many patients boast the same acceptance; they’re enduring the slow end to their life for the tranquility of death when it
chooses to take them.
It’s a weird experience to be surrounded by people who think so kindly of death. It never felt wrong to rejoice in the end of life with elderly patients; in fact, it felt beautiful. Despite my fear of death, I found beauty in its role as the conclusion to a life well lived — as if death could be a good thing. Still, it’s strange to watch someone experience the kindness of death, and I hope to never become desensitized to its impact despite the few values that it adds to life.
Death has always been the enemy, but given the op- portunity to live a full, sat isfying life, it seems to be the final knot to a beauti fully wrapped gift. It’s not an escape from yourself, but rather an augmentation of your whole being — mind, body, and soul.
Art by Anna Chamberlin
In Search of a Green Place
by Sophie Lamb
Heidi Herrick has a reverence for East Rock Park.
I meet her in the green, sunlit classroom space in East Rock’s Trowbridge Environmental Center. She’s stern, sarcastic, and in love with her city — which she’s lived in since 1998. Clad in blue-rimmed glasses, a suit jacket, jeans, and hiking boots, she’s there for the Saturday volunteer group arranged by the nonprofit Friends of East Rock Park (“FERP,” as she calls it), where volunteers shoulder routine park maintenance tasks — from picking up litter to repairing trails to pulling invasive plants.
For now, Herrick’s task is to man the classroom: refilling a steaming pot of coffee, cutting slices of sweet potato pie onto floppy paper plates, and swinging the door to the center open for passers-by. Outside, all is October and aflame, sugar maple trees dripping red, sun hot and orange, children chasing each other through piles of fallen leaves.
Last spring, when the daffodils came to College Woods, I first began spending every weekday afternoon on East Rock. Wrapped up in asphalt and highways, the 425-acre tangle of elms and oaks became a refuge for me. Green spaces like East Rock are all across New Haven; a study conducted by the Trust for Public Land finds 96% of New Haven residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, and 12% of the city’s
total area is parkland. For comparison, in the similarly sized Syracuse, only 76% of residents live 10 minutes away from a park, and only 4% of the city is parkland.
And yet, New Haven Parks has half the funding of Syracuse’s parks, a third of similarly sized Springfield, Massachusetts, and a quarter of Richmond, Virginia’s.
FOR THE NEEDS OF A CITY
“The fire department, you really can’t cut easily. Police, you can’t cut easily. So what do you have left to cut? Parks,” says Herrick. Since 1998, when she
Photos by Addy Gorton
first moved to the city, the park’s budget has fallen by $1,294,61 — equating to a near 50% drop.
“If you look at a map of New Haven, it’s got two huge high ways. You go downtown, it’s full of courthouses, and churches, and cultural institutions. And then there’s Yale,” explains Her rick. “None of that is taxable. So New Haven, as a city, is poor.”
Herrick whisks me on a tour of East Rock’s ranger offic es, down the hallway from the Trailbridge Environmental Cen ter’s classroom. She points out photos from 2022’s East Rock Park photography contest, de tailed hand-drawn posters of the park’s geology and trail sys tem, and “about a million bird books,” stacked in a free library.
The Friends of East Rock side of the Center, Herrick explains, was renovated just two years ago using a pocket of funds from the American Rescue Plan. The walls were painted green, the court yard was cleaned of weeds, picnic tables were put up, and a garden was planted near the entrance.
Herrick then leads me to a dim ly lit room, crammed with piles of fishing rods and snow shoes, a taxidermied screech owl, and a shelf of bones and snake skins.
“[This] is the rangers’ half, don’t ask about it,” she says, gestur ing to the shelved evidence of what was, two decades before, a blooming Parks Department.
“I never get tired of picking up people’s trash. I pick up the trash up and down my street almost every day,” he explains. “I like making things look nice, I like knowing other people will enjoy it, even if I don’t.”
A lifetime schoolteacher, Shimchick retired into his role as leader of Friends of East Rock Park.
As we walk, drivers shout out thanks, and runners pause to ask why we are there, at 10:00 a.m., pulling tires from the leafy mats that cover the park floor. In response, Shimchick always chants “FERP — Friends of East Rock!” He proudly points out several sparkling new benches framing College Woods, fresh mulch for the playground, a newly installed fence, and the tightly kept garden at the Center’s entrance.
That Saturday, volunteer Kimberly Gibson is fighting an equally endless battle against the surge of East Rock’s invasive plants. She’s the unofficial invasive plant wrangler for the park: armed with a blue Patagonia hiking pack and an 8-inch saw blade, the short-haired molecular scientist takes on the park’s most stubborn vines and shrubs.
I meet Gibson a little further up the road, as she’s sawing the lower-most branches off a red-crowned invasive euonymus shrub.
“Who needs a gym membership when you can just go into the woods and rip out invasive species?” she says.
According to Gibson, the green ery in some corners of East Rock is nearly 80% invasive — a rel ic of the park’s use in providing timber and fuel for the city’s first factories. Japanese barberry, garlic mustard, mugwort, and patches of invasive monocultures join the quilt of park greenery.
“When an ecosystem is de stroyed, generally the first things to re-populate it are invasives,” she says, pointing to the thou sands of glimmering red ber ries gathered at the tips of the euonymus shrub’s branches. In the shrub’s red shade, a young ash tree grows, its pointed leaves reaching up to the heavy October sun. With the shrub spreading its ceiling above it, the native tree wouldn’t last a year.
“I often feel like it’s just a losing battle,” she says, runninher fingers through the young ash’s translucent green leaves.
Last year, the Urban Resources Initiative surveyed community perceptions of New Haven parks. “Nature breaks in a city environment,” writes an anonymous New Haven resident, responding to the question, “What do you love about New Haven’s parks?”
It takes time and effort to maintain East Rock — resources that other parks in the city may not have.
Not every park gets the same amount of attention in New Haven. Parks in poorer neighborhoods are much smaller and less well-maintained, Herrick says. We sit down at a table in the Trowbridge classroom with Gibson, all of us sipping coffee from mugs with Donald Grant Mitchell’s face printed across. within the poorer neighborhoods of the city are much smaller, and less well maintained.”
Our conversation rapidly spins into one about housing; neither Gibson nor Herrick owns
a house in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood. According to her, most places near East Rock Park are priced at more than one million dollars.
Access to large, quality green spaces depends on class — which in turn provides one with the resources and voice required to maintain these spaces. As we picked up garbage, Shimchick alluded to demands made by East Rock residents during the pandemic to close East Rock’s Farnam Drive to car traffic. Shimchick, who has a general distaste for hiking, points out the closure means there’s less litter to clean — and fewer people who are now able to use the park.
“It’s predictable,” Murphy-Dunning says, laying it out for me: Most of the maintenance of these parks tends to hinge on one or two people with enough time and care in their hands. While there will always be volunteers like these in wealthier neighborhoods, smaller, poorer parks become run down much faster if the few volunteers who maintain them move away or pick up a new job.
However, there is a small
FOR THE LOVE OF FIXING BROKEN THINGS
I meet Friends of Beaver Pond President Park Nan Bartow beneath a clump of young willows, at what used to be the city’s dumping ground. Ten years ago, Beaver Pond Park was a swamp of burnt-up cars and chunks of asphalt, home to the city’s trash and most nefarious invasives. Pressed up against the Dixwell neighborhood, where incomes dip to half that of East Rock’s, the park was left behind.
Understanding they did not have the staff or funding to maintain Beaver Pond Park, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department was in the midst of slowly converting the park to a football field for James Hillhouse High School when Bartow, Friends of Beaver Pond Park, and Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative stepped in.
Over the past 10 years, volunteers have transformed the “throwaway” urban swamp into what Bartow calls an “urban oasis.” Yellow warblers, robins, and song sparrows interrupt our conversation; bees flit between the densely grow n patch of native wildflowers, and young sugar maples glow in
the morning sun. Bartow shows me some of the park’s ongoing projects — a patch of dirt where a co-volunteer at Friends of Beaver Pond plans to design and build a playground and a line of native trees planted by past Urban Resource Initiative volunteers.
Having spent her childhood in the woods in Massachusetts, Bartow didn’t think New Haven would have enough “open spaces” for her to stay.
She’s now been in New Haven for nearly 60 years. I understand why.
“Having this area here and watching us return it to what it should be — it’s just been a wonderful experience knowing that we’re leaving it in much better shape than we found it, for the people who come here,” she says.
Bartow, however, is direct about the challenges that New Haven Parks faces. While she agrees with Murphy-Dunning’s belief in the magic of neighborhood-fu-
eled action, she also believes that a stronger central leadership in the Parks and Recreation department is necessary for equity and a truer unity between New Haven Parks and Recreation and city folk.
Some simpler conveniences come from a better Parks and Recreation Department. Bartow shows me piles of cut branches and weeds from a clean-up project two summers ago that still have not been picked up by the department. Shimchick, as we walk the green tunnel of East Rock, points out degraded trails, haphazard steps, and a fallen “No Parking” sign.
Last year’s URI survey on New Haven Parks showed that volunteers alone cannot shoulder everything the city’s green spaces require. Many respondents asked for improved “rule enforcement” in the parks — rangers to fine dumpers, crack down on drug use, and institute park hours. Others asked for adequate bathrooms, fixed roads, and new and improved play spaces. While Bartow continues
to care for her field of goldenrods, she cannot fulfill most of these requests; only the Parks Department can improve large-scale facilities.
Improvement, to Bartow, will come from untangling once again the recently-merged Public Works and Parks departments.
“When Mayor Elicker combined the departments, the guy who ran public works was suddenly
then in charge of parks,” Bartow says. “We didn’t have a leader that knew parks like we know parks.”
Bartow believes change is coming. Last spring, the Urban Resources Initiative, Friends of Beaver Pond, Friends of East Rock Park, and a smattering of other groups came together to work alongside the Mayor in rethinking park fund ing. The discussion succeeded in bringing about the un-merg ing of Parks and Public Works. The extent to which this decision benefits New Haven Parks will be unclear until the Mayor offi cially hires a new Parks director.
beneath a cyprus and cedar tree. The benches, she notes, were built from granite brought across the city by a park volunteer, and put together by Friends of Beaver Pond over the past year. Some lean haphazardly, one heavy slab of granite balanced on two rocks, wedged with woods and slivers of limestone. Others sit firm, seemingly grown from the ground itself.
water from the pond, check on their plants and how they’ve grown.”
This doesn’t mean that public volunteer groups like Friends of East Rock and Beaver Pond, or the Urban Resources Initiative, ought to disappear entirely. While having the secure backbone of city government is important, it remains essential to give groups like Friends of Beaver Pond the opportunity to decide what the land should look like and steward it, says Murphy-Dunning.
Before leaving Beaver Pond Park, Bartow insists on taking me to a small circle of stone benches, set
“This is where we have our group meetings,” Bartow tells me. Friends of Beaver Pond Park has ballooned to thirty strong since Bartow activated the group, and she is proud and resolute of this fact. Tucked beside the benches, a flower garden throws its scent into the hard wind.
“All of our volunteers have kids. And this, for years, has been their garden. They immediately gravitate here,” Bartow says. “As they grow, they keep coming back — they get
FLOWERS for SU6
Sarah Feng ’25 knew her rats intimately. She worked as an undergraduate researcher at the Arnsten Lab, a neuroscience lab at the Yale School of Medicine, from August 2023 to August 2024. She investigated how different chemical stressors, including cocaine, affected the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for abstract thought — by experimenting on rats. For six months, including this past summer, she trained, socialized, and cared for the rats in her lab. “You know their personalities,” she says, “because rats are very particular and intelligent.” She brings up that some come out of their cages less reluctantly than others, displaying levels of confidence, and that many can memorize layouts of mazes in their heads for several minutes at a time, displaying intelligence. After the rats became habituated to humans, she would pass them off to other researchers, who would treat them with the chemical stressors.
“Then you kill them, and that’s it.”
After my conversation with Feng, I had to wonder — what is it like to hold life and, in some cases, mete out death with your hands?
* Odessa Goldberg ’25 worked with mice, not rats. On Beinecke Plaza
on a busy Friday, she comfortably discusses how she used to slice mice brains as a part of research to discern how physiological conditions and changes to those conditions affect brain function.
Slicing brains was Goldberg’s main job at the laboratory, though she occasionally fed mice too. The intact brains were stored in -8 degrees Celsius freezers, packed in boxes like the ones “you get cheap jewelry in,” wrapped in tinfoil, and coated in a gel that preserved their integrity. Once Goldberg took the brains out of the freezer, she would have to slice them quickly, but carefully. The brains could not melt, but she also needed the samples to be viable — that is, cut well. With a gray, bladed machine called a cryostat, she cut brain samples while keeping them frozen at -20 degrees Celsius. Then she would place the freshly cut slice onto a slide for further detailed analysis.
Goldberg had “practice brains” that were, in fact, real mouse brains — they were just not meant for research data. A mouse brain contains “powerful information that you don’t want to be wasteful with,” she says, “and you want to treat it with the respect it deserves.” Throughout her time at the lab, she became focused on perfecting the practice of brain slicing. But, as she repeated the
process over and over again at her job, the slicing became rote; her body did the work automatically. She broke the routine on her twentieth birthday. As she was cleaning the cryostat, she forgot the machine was still on, and it cut off part of her pinky finger.
“And my first thought was, ‘Do I need to keep studying this?” she says, laughing a little bit in retrospect. However, the moment changed the way she thought about slicing mice brains. “It made it feel very much more real.” She became very cautious and aware of what she was doing after that experience.
Goldberg no longer works at that laboratory. She now conducts research that uses human models, which she prefers. She does not work with humans the way that she worked with mice, to say the least; she does not slice human brains. Animal testing “doesn’t feel like a great moral activity,” she says. But, she concedes, “then again, I’m not a vegetarian. I consume meat, and it’s not even for the higher purpose of science.”
By working at her former lab, she gained a new respect for mice. “I don’t really think of them as a pest or something,” she says. “Except, you know, I had many mice in Branford.”
*
What is it like to hold life and, in some cases, mete out death with your hands?
“You and the rat are the only thing in there,” says Feng. “And you just look at it, and it looks at you.” She did not kill the rats herself; her job was to habituate them for six months in a basement room at the Yale School of Medicine, which she describes as a “clinical,” windowless white box that played white noise.
Over the months, Feng grew closer to the rats. She learned to differentiate between them according to their particular quirks and behaviors. Some rats looked at her with more intimacy than others. Some appeared more confident or displayed more anxiety. They were named in a kind of code. “We’d be, like,
SU6 is really smart,” Feng says. Through playing and socializing, rats relied on her and the other researchers for comfort.
And then she watched them die. “You’re like, oh my god, I’m a terrible person,” she recalls thinking.
Feng maintains that animal models were necessary for her research, as well as for other neuroscience projects: brain systems are simply too complex for synthetic models to produce viable, scientifically significant results. She mentioned examples of treatments for diseases that could have only existed because of animal testing; one such is guanfacine, which was developed in the Arnsten Lab, and which now treats hundreds of thousands of cases of ADHD and schizophrenia. The development of guanfacine used macaque monkeys as research models.
I ask Feng if she might assume the rats to be more “human” than they actually are, that we might attribute familiar emotions, feelings, and thoughts to them because they display some social behavior. She doesn’t think that rats have the same level of consciousness as humans but acknowledges fundamental similarities between human and rodent brains.
“After you do research, you’re like, ‘oh, they have the same brain areas as us,’” she says, “and then at the end of the summer,
you’re like, “oh wait, they have the same brain areas as us.”
Via text, Feng told me that some researchers have quit shortly after working with animals, due to feeling uncomfortable with the process. Working with very human-like animals, such as macaque monkeys, can be especially hard and is more likely to push away researchers. However, there remain many researchers who accept the emotional difficulty and still work with animals. Dr. Stephen Latham, Director of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bio ethics, analogized the situation with his wife’s family’s neighbors in rural Scotland, who raise
Highland cows for beef. They raise the cows with great care, even though they’re going to slaughter them. If a mother cow dies, they bring the calves into their kitchen and feed them from a bottle.
Dr. Latham personally knows lab technicians who love the animals they test on. “They’re incredible,” he says. “They work so hard to keep the animals comfortable.”
*
When I was speaking with Goldberg, she recalled the disconnect between the animal-research training that she had to complete and the slicing of the brains. “I had gotten all this training not to kill them,” she
says, “and then I’m slicing dead mice.” If all goes well, Goldberg’s research will have helped make people’s lives better. But how does one think about the distant future when mice brains are right in front of you, sliced into pieces?
by Everett Yum
Art by Sophie Chmelar
The Bodies up on Science Hill: The Spotted Lanternfly and My Qualms on Killing
Rustle. Rustle. Flash of red.
I shuddered walking down Hillhouse Ave, recalling that battlefield, that slaughterhouse. My fingers balled up deep within my pockets. There was no undoing what I had just done. The splayed legs, the awkwardly craned neck parts. I could imagine the crimson path I left as I walked — bloodied stains on the soles of my sneakers stamping the pavement with each step I took.
It was just a lanternfly, I repeated like a mantra. I’m supposed to squish them. But the finality of murder weighed heavily upon me.
I’m a killer.
The spotted lanternfly is a beautiful creature. Introduced from the forests of East Asia, they are roughly the size of your thumb joint and marked with dots resembling bled-out ink at the tips. Viewed from the side, the lanternfly looks like a pink-tan teardrop. In resting position, their wings fold up side-by-side like a moth; unfurled, they are a flare of black, white, and red.
Striking as they are, lanternflies are invasive to the Northeast. They are incredibly fecund insects that deposit thousands of eggs in camouflaged masses. Given time and ample food, spotted lanternflies can quickly overrun an ecosystem.
Governmental agencies across the Northeast, like the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, began recommending people destroy egg masses and report sightings to curb their spread. Killing lanternflies became sensationalized: a quick TikTok search for “crushing lanternflies” reveals hundreds, if not more, short clips of environmental vigilantism. But not everyone caught on. In 2022, Bobbi Wilson was stopped by the police as she exterminated spotted lanternflies with a homemade concoction of water, dish soap, and apple cider vinegar. Wilson was only nine years old at the time — and Black. Wilson’s exterminating, and the subsequent media storm around her encounter with the police, granted her fame and prompted several interviews and an invitation for her to come visit the Yale School of Public Health. Wilson’s
spotted lanternfly specimens, carefully pinned and labeled, remain on display in the Peabody Museum’s collections today.
As an aspiring ecologist, I was inspired by Wilson’s act of young bravery. I followed climate and environmental news closely, despite living in Los An geles, thousands of miles away from the nearest lan ternfly infesta tion. Amidst an internet dive on the issue, I came across a video of children killing the mottled lanternflies by the dozens. The tree bark rippled with the fluttering and shuffling of dullgray wings. The chil dren were smiling as they pulverized the insects with their little shoes. They grinned ear to ear, proudly displaying the spoils of their playground menacing. I was horrified and fully enraptured.
Art by
Luke Louchheim
of dull-gray wings. The children were smiling as they pulverized the insects with their little shoes. They grinned ear to ear, proudly displaying the spoils of their playground menacing. I was horrified and fully enraptured.
Few bugs have met their end on my account. Frankly, I always hated the sound and the mere thought of the crushed insects’ texture. It felt immoral and disgusting, even, to subject any lifeform to torture and subsequent disintegration. With the exception of mosquitos. Those could die.
My aversion to extermination created a pastime that filled my windowsill and desk with bottles and jars.
For years, I built microbiomes for roly-polies, sometimes taking them out to hold and cradle their little bodies gently as they rocked back and forth in my palm. I had a mantis-raising stint for a couple of years in high school and wrote numerous college essays about how I don’t kill spiders. But fuzzy, googly-eyed arachnids are different from tree-sucking lan-
ternflies. Spiders are inquisitive creatures that eliminate undesirable pests. Spotted lanternflies, on the other hand, are prolific, malignant bodies. As I crushed the latter, visions of the future — gloriously green and lanternfly-free — filled my mind. I was doing good for the world.
But it turns out my vigilantism may have been for naught. I spoke with Peabody staffer Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, Associate Director of Student Programs, and Larry Gall, Senior Collection Manager in the Entomology Division, for further insight on the usefulness and morality of my actions.
According to the entomologists, by the time the public knew about the spotted lanternflies and their havoc, it was already too late. “Once the news spread, [spotted lanternflies] were already well established. And because they eat so many different kinds of trees, we weren’t able to just track them to single locations and eradicate them in a single location,” Palffy-Muhoray said. “Killing one out of 10,000 is not really going to make a difference.”
Palffy-Muhoray told me that she had not killed any lantern flies — she didn’t “see the purpose” in doing it. “And even if there was a purpose, does that justify it to me? That’s not clear.”
As we spoke, Gall and PalffyMuhoray showed me the collection’s insectile artwork — made not of bugs, but from them. Butterfly and moth wings trimmed and glued into the vibrant image
of two swooping cranes. Scarab beetles carved out and turned into gold jewelry. Even whole specimens themselves usually aren’t accumulated post-mortem. Collectors often go out with traps, nets, or an apparatus like a century-old Chinese rice wine bottle and return from the field with hauls of newly deceased critters. This freshness allows for a high-quality pinned specimen.
Something confused me about this approach; curators would not catch living mice or tear off songbird wings for display. This I easily chalked up to intelligence: birds and mammals are smart; insects are not. It feels more wrong to kill something that thinks or feels. While murder may be wrong regardless, killing a being of relatively higher cognition is, in a sense, a step closer to killing one of us. But PalffyMuhoray disagrees. “The idea that [insects] are not intelligent is based essentially on only looking at intelligence when it’s similar to human intelligence. While they don’t have the same brain structure, that doesn’t mean that there’s no other path to some kind of higher cognition,” said Palffy-Muhoray. The research on the full extent of how insects think, feel, or perceive the world is catching up, but it’s slow.
Gall also mentioned that entomologists are unconcerned with collecting because insects are highly capable of reproducing. Ecologically, collecting a few specimens here and there has little impact on the population
mologists are unconcerned with collecting because insects are highly capable of reproducing. Ecologically, collecting a few specimens here and there has little impact on the population as a whole. Plus, insects have a rapid life cycle and are capable of producing numerous young, whereas vertebrates typically put more care and investment into their young. In that sense, Gall said, “The impact of doing sampling for research on insect populations is radically smaller than the same kind of approach on a vertebrate population.”
So, does having more offspring reduce the worth of each individual? Palffy-Muhoray’s best answer to my ethical perplexity was, “It’s complicated.” She continued, “People might buy vegetables with pesticides sprayed on them, but then they might not be willing to kill a lanternfly, and there’s sort of an inherent contradiction there, right? Or maybe people don’t like spiders, and they’ll kill a spider in their house, but they think the lanternfly is pretty so they don’t want to kill that. So I think it’s an endless conversation.”
Feeling desolate and unsatisfied, I trudged back down Science Hill. I passed by seven lanternflies (yes, I counted). Two had already met their flattened fates, now mere remnants of wings and legbits. The other five were wholly intact. With my iNaturalist mobile app, a budding ecologist’s staple, I snapped several pictures, tagged their location for oth-
er casual naturalists to see, and forced my feet to keep walking.
That night, I did what any Yale student deep in the trenches of existential and ethical crises would do — email a professor of moral philosophy and normative ethics. Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, was congenial enough to speak with me on Zoom.
Kagan sees environmental ethics as a constant act of weighing various factors, akin to the costs and benefits of economics. In 2019, Kagan published his book, “How to Count Animals, More or Less,” which set forth a hierarchical view of life forms, one that places humans at the top and “lesser beings” such as insects at the bottom.
“When kids capture insects and then pull off the wings, we have this kind of knee-jerk reaction that [the act] is wrong,” Kagan said. I grimaced, remembering how it felt to step on that lanternfly. “Do [insects] count because they’re sentient, or are we projecting sentience on them in the absence of really good evidence?”
He then explained that, historically, the deliberation between what life forms “count” has broken down into three methods of thought: rationale, sentience, and agency. Rationality divides the objects of the universe into people and things, and things don’t count in their own right. “If you were to take a cat and douse it with gasoline and then light it
on fire for the fun of watching it die, Kant has a hard time explaining what’s wrong with that,” Kagan said. “Most of us think there’s something wrong with that. And that suggests that we think that things can have moral standing or moral claims, even if they’re not rational beings.”
Sentience acknowledges that “things” that feel pleasure or, in the cat’s case, pain have moral standing. Kagan used an unnerving but effective example to express this to me. “Pull an arm off a squirrel…that’s going to cause agony to the squirrel, and if the squirrel would have gone on to have a tolerably pleasant squirrel life, not only have you caused the pain, but you’ve robbed it of all the pleasure that would have come its way. [Sentience] says squirrels count because they feel pleasure and pain.”
The third perspective, agency, is sympathetic toward all things with intention or purpose. Agen cy, loosely defined by Kagan, is how you want “your life to be going, what you want to be do ing, what you want to be hap pening to you. [Like] having a will, as we might put it.” In this sense, the cat and the squirrel all have agency, as do snakes, flies, bacteria, and, yes, spotted lan ternflies. While these lanternflies use their agency to destroy eco systems, the basis of that destruc tion is survival. And people kill for survival all the time—they cut down trees for shelter, they kill elk for hide, they uproot vegetables for consumption.
their agency to destroy ecosystems, the basis of that destruction is survival. And people kill for survival all the time — they cut down trees for shelter, they kill elk for hide, they uproot vegetables for consumption. Things deemed nuisances or invasive are simply doing the same.
Far from an ecologist, Kagan considers his method of thought to be ethical individualism — concerning each individual animal or plant rather than desiring to protect the ecosystem as a whole. “If you go individualistic, which is the way I go, then you have to ask, ‘Do plants count morally, or is it merely animals?’ The victim that you most directly described for the lanternfly is that it’s killing off certain trees. Do trees have moral standing?”
Collectivistic ethics, which places the
“Do [insects] count because they’re sentient, or are we projecting sentience on them in the absence of really good evidence?”
Shelly Kagan Clark Professor of Philosophy
group before the individual, says that a forest should have legal protection. In 2021, the Ecuadorian government granted the Los Cedros Protected Forest the Rights of Nature, which includes the rights to a healthy environment, water, and environmental consultation. Like the Ecuadorian tropics, Northeastern forest systems provide a multitude of ecological and economic services. Lanternflies disrupt these existing processes — but whether that’s enough to lose their moral status is up to the individual.
However, I agree with Kagan: environmental ethics should be individualistic. I feel satisfied knowing that I am of the
same carbon as the fertile soil, or of the same nitrogenous compounds of the billowing kelp. On this colorful, multilayered planet, there are bits that hop, fly, croak, and lie still; there are bits that crash into each other and bits that rebuild the fragments. We are of this artwork, as are the roly-polies, the mice, the scarabs, the squirrels. We organisms are so interconnected, yet, will we ever know how the world looks from the eyes of the spotted lanternfly?
Until we know for sure, I will discontinue my pest-crunching, and transform my “save the trees” goodness into an “every being matters” goodness. The spotted lanternfly can carry on with its life, and I will with mine.
by Michelle So
Elise — A Letter to a Setting Sun
Cassia fistula. An inhabitant of paradise, rising only where rain falls. Licorice pulp case seeds in long pods. A sweet bitterness that licks teeth and sucks cheeks. Petals blossom in flaxen showers; the bathed body glows dark amber.
This tree begins where it all ends. The base sleeps in perpetual autumn: yellowed and browned and half sunken through the ground. The tree, barren, riddled with decay, carved out by termites, bends over to kiss the ground. Crumbs of bark set the bed for its grave, spreading out and disappearing under blankets of moss. Monkey cups and sassafras and chinquapins stand, expressionless, and listen to the wind’s lullaby.
Shattered branches rise, uncurling to claw at the waking sun. Sticks taper into a dense system of veins that compress into capillaries cut by abscission scars. Rot washes away as day becomes night then day again. From trickle to downpour, leaf and petal rain upward from beneath soil. They pool into a dense canopy. These leaves, once scattered and brittle, bounce back into life. Hanging golden spires fall from the foliage, showered in
sunlight, the only warm color in an ocean of emerald and wood. Colonies of termites fade as unwinding hours fill the holes carved beneath bark. The surrounding forest sheds its years. Buds tighten into blossoms and fold back into buds. Leaves curl and condense; branches follow suit. Sun bears collect their footprints as they retrace their steps. Hornbills deliver fruit to brush, bugs to soil, bugs that sink to replace the droplets collected by passing clouds. Nearby, trees appear paler than before the rain. Elsewhere, thousands of spiders converge and bundle into a silk sphere. A river flows up the valley, carrying songs from the sea. It braids cobbled stone into a scarf reflecting a patchwork sky. The current returns earth to the land, bridging the gap between eroded banks. Creatures enter wet and leave dry. They rest their lips on water to become parched. It won’t be long before the mountain dries, water stops flowing, and the earth thirsts.
The noises of a distant orangutan changes tune with age, from a flat echoed vibrato at death to a sharp squeaky pitch at birth.
Outside of time’s constraints, they all sound the same: silent. Time erases the perennial lines etched in pith. The tree forgets the stories written on its growth rings, stories of thick floods and thin droughts, and dark scars from fires that taint years of memory. Cambium absorbs xylem and phloem. Roots retract roots as water returns deep beneath the surface. Buds tighten into blossoms and fold back into buds. An endless cycle that persists until the first germination, existing regardless of any presence to bear witness. This tree loses its spent time unnoticed, where frogs breathe through skin and leopard cubs learn to hunt. Cassia fistula, golden shower, purging cassia, Indian laburnum. Blooming blonde hues, fruiting contradicting flavors, growing and dying but never dying. They live until they cease— Years and years and the surrounding cloud forest sinks into the moss, dissolving into fresh soil. Soot, rubble rises to displace it. Leaf and petal wilt. Each sear yellow with rigid brown outlines. Weeds lie charred, discarded on the floor. Graves are marked by charcoal stumps.
I never knew if you were laughing or crying until I could see you. The same music but a different intention. And all you ever wanted me to do was listen.
A setting western sun is met by the mourning song of a lone bird. A distinct aria rings out as the horizon snuffs out all light. The world falls into nothingness as embers begin to smolder.
Water soars as the freshly dead forest blares with bright new life. A serenade of crackling roars in the rhythmic pounding of water. Flames whip the air. Grassy kindling sizzles green. Through an orchestra of fire, the forest burns with floral colors and smoke. Snaps and growls fill the warm black sky. Beneath this, a light drumming, a pattering pitter that develops as the inferno moves eastward, as raindrops flash up and down— thrumming and tapping— as they dive through air and the water cures the leafage back to a refined jade. A cymbal crashes, and the world flashes olive with lightning.
No applause follows the crescendos. A chorus of whining chicks picks up after the fading drums, mouths to the sky, a plea for their mother to return home.
The chicks go silent as the ground dries. The symphony ends.
Many days, many nights, many deaths, many lives. The tree fades into its youth. More rains rise, falling upward until the tree finally ages into a sapling. It tucks itself under mossy covers, tears away from mycelium, and sinks into its shell as other lives float in. The seed lies in the earth. The trickling river and mosquitoes produce an impenetrable white noise. The sea is calm and the sky is autumn. Emerald and wood, stagnant. The world goes silent. With that, the song can finally begin.
by Kamalu Ogata
Art by Davianna Inirio
BY MIA KOHN
GA ZE LO NG
To the Guards of the Yale University Art Gallery, works of art become colleagues, intimate friends, and objects of comfort. What does a painting carry when it coexists with everyday life?
For 30 years, Frank D’Angelo worked with pizzas, frying sausages in garlic and fennel at Grand Apizza in Clinton, CT. Since April of 2023, he has worked with Picassos.
“The big Picassos worth money, he didn’t give them to Spain,” Frank says on the third floor of the Yale University Art Gallery, amidst five of Picasso’s pricey progenies. Frank stands taller than the picture frames, donning a warm grin for all of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design to see. Picasso’s choice was political, Frank explains. “He had a problem with the government, so now we’ve got them.”
Frank likes the Picassos, but his favorite piece is George Grosz’s 1926 Drinnen und Draussen (Inside and Outside); it has a story as well as a political motivation. Split down the middle by a thin row of bricks, the cartoonish painting places
FRANK
in front of Drinnen und Draussen
two men back to back. “This guy made money in the war, he’s happy, he’s eating,” Frank says, pointing to the man on the left with ripe, red cheeks. “The other guy lost his leg in the war. He’s angry.”
Frank’s major task is to minimize anger. “When people come in, you gotta go, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ You gotta get them on your side. You don’t want to look at them like that.” Frank feigns a stern glower from behind his glasses. “Then they’re your enemy –– automatically they’ll get mad at you.”
At 73 years old, Frank began his guarding career after retiring from pizza. He heard about the gig from a guy at his gym. Despite the late start, he’s a natural. “I don’t want to brag, but I’m getting promoted.” Frank leans back, hands up and out to the side. “October 9th ––
they’re pulling me out of here. I’ll be with the cameras.” That is an honor among the guards. He could go sooner, but he is staying on for a few weeks to cover for the other guards while they find someone new.
At all times, 29 guards must be stationed at 29 “posts” throughout the YUAG. Although the guards do not call the gallery the YUAG, Frank explains. “OhYAG, Oh-YAG, that’s what we say.” Why? “It’s the slang. At the end of the night, I say, ‘Oh-YAG post 9 is checked and secured.’”
Not every guard takes such a social approach to the job, Frank admits.“But I’ll talk to you, I will. But I have to get back now, young lady,” he says. Some welldressed women are pointing their pinkies too close to a Picasso.
Jeremy Hudman welcomes me to post 19, the contemporary section of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design. He is short with a wide smile and stripe of black hair atop his upturned head. I ask how he is doing.
“More great than frosted flakes,” Jeremy says.
Before becoming a guard in 2023, Jeremy was the manager of a medical factory –– the first job he took after moving to Connecticut to escape “the heat, the racism” of Texas. Jeremy is Irish-Mexican. He is also a philosopher. He taps his earpiece to pause an audiobook: Machiavelli’s The Prince. Jeremy enjoys Voltaire’s Candide, but despises Rousseau. “Candide reads like an episode of Family Guy,” he insists.
Jeremy has a verdict, a theory for everything –– including his favorite works in the gallery. He whisks me to his spot. “It’s a corner, three paintings, done by different artists at different times, but they talk to each other.”
We form a square with the pieces. A collage in front of us and a photograph to our left fill the tall corner walls of the white room. In the huge painting hanging on a freestanding wall to our right, a woman in a green hoodie slumps on her couch, phone in hand, earbuds to brain, temple rest-
JEREMY
ing heavily on tired fingertips. Outside the window behind her, there’s just blue. An eerie, too-bright sky.
“So she’s in therapy.” Rebecca Ness titled her 2021 self-portrait Teletherapy. Jeremy pivots to our left, across from Rebecca, towards the reflective black photograph. “And she’s staring into the abyss, as Nietzche said.” When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. (I didn’t know what Nietzsche said. I had to ask Jeremy.)
The abyss is a deep ink spill of a photograph behind a thick plate of glass. In the right third of the photograph, thin masts of sailboats and a dock emerge. I can see clearly — as in a mirror, myself and Jeremy and, behind us, Rebecca. “When this one was placed, I want to say a year-and-a-half-ago,” Jeremy says, “I kept noticing, while she was in therapy she was looking at herself.”
We turn again, towards Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage –– a kaleidoscope of tropical palm trees. Four shattered mirrors part the canvas like snake eyes. “Because of all the negative self-talk, the negative stereotypes, she shatters. That’s the whole therapeutic process, believe me,” Jeremy says. He has been working with
with his three paintings
a therapist recently, “doing some heavy stuff.” Rebecca looks remarkably like my former therapist (also a messy-bun, monochromesweat-suit-type millennial).
He bounces back to Rebecca. “Notice she’s wearing open-toed sandals. Think about what feet represent in movies.” I’m not sure. “Usually, feet represent a character’s soul. She’s opening up her soul and trying to find herself within the void.”
To the right of Rebecca’s distressed feet, an overturned canvas is stashed behind her couch. “Her canvas is unusable right now,” he says, “You know what it’s like –– when you start, you’re all blocked up.”
Coincidentally, my ankles are throbbing –– dance injuries. Jeremy encourages me to go upstairs before I leave. There is a new exhibit about art after the Civil War. Jeremy has a theory to share, of course. “You’re walking through the adult mind of Amy March,” he says. He’s been reading Little Women with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. I ask if he will be around to discuss the exhibit later. He won’t. He has therapy.
FERNANDO
next to the human figure sketches in Dance of Life
Amy March’s adult mind, or, as it is formally known, The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917 took over the fourth floor in September, when Fernando Ortiz began guarding. The exhibit showcases a generation of artists working after the Civil War who, as the gallery wall reads, “embraced life as their subject.” These artists turned to the human form to embody their new motif.
Fernando’s springy voice greets me in the winding hall, adorned with kinetic sketches of bodies in motion. On the white and navy walls, pairs of hands clasp one another, torsos twist, and gowns billow from half-drawn forms. “The body itself is a wonderful thing,” Fernando says. “It also is a gateway to imagination.”
Bodies prompted Fernando’s fascination with art. “I’ve always had the sort of creative, perhaps imaginative mind. I loved stories,” they say. It was sequential visual art –– comics, manga, animation –– that first interested them. These styles rely on caricatures of the human form. “You look at video games and anime, they know the body in and out,” Fernando says. “So they know how to bend and break or change it to suit what they want. I realized in order to do anything like that, I had to learn about the human body itself.”
Fernando felt pressure in high school to pursue a career in STEM. They enrolled as a biology major at Southern
Connecticut State University, despite the challenges their ADHD presented to coursework. “I did have a fascination with biology,” especially in the science of gender, they say. “But the whole ADHD thing reared its ugly head.” Fernando realized they could not split their focus between art and biology. “I said, ‘screw it.’ If I’m going to go to college for something, it might as well be something I want to do.” They began a program in graphic design at Gateway Community College, where they study part-time.
Guarding the gallery seemed like a good gig to pair with the degree. Despite the large amount of standing involved, quite a bit is enjoyable. “I can look at what others before me did,” Fernando says, palms folded and feet planted wide beneath John Singer Sargent’s study of clasped hands.
The Dance of Life charts progress ––of a nation toward rebirth, of artists towards their monuments to this rebirth. It is rare for sketches to be displayed alongside masterpieces. For artists, however, this mode of study is standard. Fernando takes inspiration from digital artists, “people you could just follow on Twitter or Tumblr,” they say. In videos and chat rooms, these artists share their processes with global communities.
The Dance of Life serves the same purpose. The internet eliminates the barrier of space in sharing artistic practices; The Dance of Life eliminates the barrier of time. It groups studies by different artists to highlight parallels between the art-
ists’ methods. And viewers are invited to participate. In early October, curators added sketching stations throughout the exhibit, loaded with paper, pencils (Blackwings, which Fernando and I agree are the best), and corkboard drawing surfaces. Next to one of these stations is Fernando’s favorite piece in the exhibit, James Carroll Beckwith’s 1892 sketch The Telephone and the Ticker.
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized just how fascinating a still image can be. How that frame can tell a story just by how something moves.” Suspended ticker tape encircles the androgynous figure stepping down from its pedestal. “The body has been posed in a way that accentuates the moving parts of it, you know?” The figure’s elbow juts out, one hand up by the ear, the other down by the hip, pinching a strand of suspended ticker tape. It is hard to tell if the figure is clothed –– sleeves hang from the biceps, but I can also make out a belly button and soft abs.
Fernando likes this ambiguity. “It’s a little bit weird. If you look near the neck area, it looks like they began drawing a shirt, but then it forms into how the naked flesh would be, right?” Right.“It feels like something I do, like, I’m drawing something and I’m like okay, I just have to finish this. Like they didn’t know where they were going with it, so they said, ‘screw it.’” This departure from strict realism also allows the figure to maintain an unspecified gender, Fernando-
and I agree. “The movement and sensualism of the body, regardless of the figure, is still there. I guess it’s a bit of a mistake, but it also makes it human,” Fernando says.
Beckwith drew the piece to personify the telegraph as an ode to instantaneous modern communication.
Fernando and I gaze at the androgynous figure, separated from its creator by more than a century. The
sketch hangs here as a monument to the body –– the first and eternal mode of human communication.
JEREMY in front of the finale piece
The finale of The Dance of Life, titled The Hours, is itself an iteration, a half-scale study in which Edwin Austin Abbey, as the wall label reads, “recorded his final thoughts, uncertainties, and many changes.” He painted the finished mural onto the ceiling of the Pennsylvania State Capitol between 1904 and 1911.
On my second visit to The Dance of Life, I turned into the final room to see Jeremy, dwarfed beneath the massive circular canvas. Six feet above him, hunched masculine figures cloaked in black march along the top of the frame towards twirling women, draped in loose pastel tulle. Behind the women, long golden rays of a sun stretch outward. Behind the men’s cloaks, a smaller silver moon glows. Against the dark blue sky, a thick spread of golden stars lights the whole scene.
“You keep on going around,” Jeremy says. Soldiers in the Civil War, he continues, witnessed weapons of death like none seen before. “People never heard of guns that shot more than once, let alone 20 times. You look at war journals, people describe how they were horrified watching people get gunned down, enemies or not.” The human body had been a site of violence. Abbey’s work upheld it as one of life.
He imbues the female body with particular radiance. “It was the moms, sisters, daughters that were running society,” Jeremy says, like the March sisters, who greeted their father with joy upon his return from the Union Army. Jeremy raises his palms toward the mural, a monument to love, “that great, big, soft love that we all feel from this.”
He and his step daughter, however, haven’t reached Mr. March’s return. “Right now, we’re still at the beginning. But I have ambitions.”
As with all of the art in the OHYAG, Jeremy walked around The Hours over and over, “trying to piece together every symbol. What does it mean to me? What does it mean to the general population? Historically? What does it mean in art and poetry?”
Jeremy has settled on the theme of recovery. The Hours places bodies in pain across from those rejoicing, but provides for them, too, a path to reach one another. Abbey composed a rhythm of recovery: a perpetual chase of death for life, darkness for light, bodies dancing through time –– together in it all.
Punitive Psychiatry
You stayed the swelling flesh around the ignored gaping wound were gifted the bitterest of blames for your own suffering and never pardoned for the sin of wanting to not feel As if with your neat acquiescence you would forget how he had hit but you had known the shape of fear felt it mold to your liver and coat your tongue had tasted it sweet like stomach acid it ate your unremarkable girlhood whole
To cope they licensed your autonomy for a chance at your complacency your bondage their own comfort your safety too abrasive to their frayed mirage you stayed miserable in a docile body were driven to those peeling yellow walls to knowing the curve of your name as pointed diagnoses of you never trying hard enough at embodying commitment to belief and formal deference to science ever an impenetrable motivator that desires ultimate submission and is ever eager to frame you its project to smother you with apathy and castrate your small quivering body under the guise of burning up your burial shroud
To make you malleable insure you profitable prisoner they reached within you with self improvement sermons peer reviewed and crushed your care in their latex fists they spanked you with the knowledge that your body was provocative were prideful at seducing you into believing that harm’s the consequence of self They all discussed you like a specimen disgusting animalistic disobedient yet vaguely beloved trainable your bloated body held the captives yearning to go anywhere but there
They squeezed dissent from your form and left only damaged husk convinced you that the dying skin was goodness that your body craved and handed you the blame inside a plastic cup and lifted up your tongue to make sure that you’d swallowed it
by Caroline Hube r
Art by Neve O’Brien
After Kezia Stiles
At age eleven, Ezra calculated the age of the world by summing the years before and since the Flood. Its high-water mark fell above what he knew by sight: blue night blotted out, the crest of East Rock whelmed, that deer waterborne. He worked it all out on paper.
His mother had passed away in his afterbirth. This news was given him slowly, with none of the earlier scriptural surety. It shone through him, like December light through dun-white, chest-high grass.
His mother’s eyes were black, like his stepmother’s, but inexhaustible. He knew this by asking his neighbors and recording what they said. In that doe’s eyes he must have seen his mother’s, in the leaf she nibbled the dove’s sign of land.
