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Vol. ##, No. # Month 20##

Iceland

4 6

A sweet deal story by SKYLER INMAN

12 17

Utopia

feature by EVE HOUGHTON

Goodbye, salad days

feature by ANYA GRENIER

Yale Bowls process by ALEX SCHMELING

Waste management personal essay by HAYLEY BYRNES

26 28

feature by ABIGAIL BESSLER

Cold peace

20 27

photo essay by ANNELISA LEINBACH

In conversation Red light fiction by LUCY FLEMING

featuring RICHARD PRUM and CARL ZIMMER

Plastic, plastic everywhere story by IKE SWETLITZ

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

Illustrations

by KATHERINE WATSON and MADELEINE WITT

Editors Jennifer Gersten Oliver Preston Managing Editors Yuval Ben-David Lucy Fleming

Space invaders cover by JOYCE GUO

Photography Editors Wa Liu Alex Schmeling Magazine Design Editor Amra Saric Design Editors Olivia Hamel Carter Levin Illustrations Editor Thao Do

Associate Editors Abigail Bessler Jessica Blau Elizabeth Miles

Copy Editors Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Isabel Sperry Sarah Sutphin Design Assistants Isabel Benares Steven Pan Editor-in-chief Isaac Stanley-Becker Publisher Abdullah Hanif Cover photograph by Alexandra Schmeling

Iceland BY ANNELISA LEINBACH

Last March, I went to Iceland with a group of other Yale students to learn about its sustainable energy program. While we traveled around the country, I was captivated by the shapes and colors of Iceland's unique landscape, which was still blanketed in winter snow.

BY SKYLER INMAN

n Oct. 25, the PEZ Visitor Center in Orange, Connecticut, declared it an early Halloween. In honor of the upcoming holiday, the factory, which doubles as a historical landmark for PEZ enthusiasts, announced that all visitors under the age of 12 who arrived in costume would receive free admission. It was a modest treat, but for the kids in bumblebee suits and hybrid ballerina-fairy outfits — and, perhaps more importantly, for their baby-boomer parents — it was enough. Tucked away on a hillside road just off of I-95, the factory-cum-museum isn’t immediately distinguishable from the neighboring office buildings: red brick and beige stucco. A parking lot runs along its periphery, not unlike one you might see outside of a Target or a Hobby Lobby. Mousetraps sit prominently near the loading doors, facing outward toward the same parking lot that visitors use. Besides the traps, the only real hints at the building’s contents are three ninefoot replicas of PEZ candy rolls attached to the far side of the building. Inside, however, the bland exterior gives way to raucous candy-colored decoration. As a middle-aged gift shop employee named Paola tells me, this factory makes all of the individual PEZ pellets for North America. That means Canada, too, she reminds me as she hands me my yellow visitor’s lanyard. According to Paola, the factory creates about 12 million pellets a day. The only other PEZ candy-making factory is in Austria, homeland of the company’s founder, Eduard Haas. PEZ is famous today for its

6 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

collectible cartoon-headed candy dispensers, colorful toys that were once a staple of American childhood. But the company actually made its debut in Europe in the 1920s as an anti-smoking mint for adults. Hence the design of the sleek original dispenser, now called a “Regular.” To reach the mint, you flip the Regular’s top as you would flick open a cigarette lighter. Haas moved the headquarters of PEZ to America in 1952. Realizing how unsuccessful an anti-smoking mint would be in 1950s America, where the cigarettes had become as ubiquitous as Elvis’s records, Haas began marketing the candy to children. Now, Regulars could be topped with a cartoon head, and voilà: both toy and treat. For PEZ, it was a game changer, opening endless possibilities for PEZ dispensers. There were Disney characters, Olympics mascots, astronauts, faux handguns. On the lesser-visited second floor of the museum is another side to the company’s history — one with sex appeal. On the wall hangs a small photo collage: attractive young women dressed in vivid blue costumes stand before suited American men with boxes of PEZ mints. The “PEZ ladies,” as a sign calls them, were vital to the American debut of PEZ, and were a carry-over of Haas’s old sales tactics in Austria. With their hair coiffed and their lips rouged, the PEZ ladies lingered in clubs and malls: A mint for you, sir? It was Mad Men-style marketing in the flesh. And in print, too: not present on the walls are ads from an even raunchier streak in PEZ’s earliest American

marketing campaigns. In one I find in an online collection of vintage ads, a busty blonde reaches languidly, desperately, for PEZ mints held in an unidentified male hand. In another, a pinup girl in a PEZ uniform sits atop an oversized roll of PEZ mints, her thighs exposed. She coyly holds a PEZ mint to her mouth. She doesn’t only want PEZ — she wants you. But these ads, by the notorious ’50s lingerie-ad man Gerhard Brause, were the end of an era for PEZ rather than the beginning. Haas’s choice to redefine PEZ as a wholesome children’s candy was one that made the brand what it is. And while PEZ is no empire today — the brand survives mainly on its nostalgic value — it is a name that lasts, at least for the kids who were in its targeted audience back in mid-century America. That Saturday afternoon, more adults came to tour the facility than children. Parents with college-age kids arrived in groups of three or four, pointing out the PEZ dispensers they recognized, or the ads on the first floor that they remembered from the papers. The second floor’s exhibit on the company’s forgotten history, meanwhile, remained empty but for a few employees on their lunch break. The Visitor Center relies on the cheapest form of advertising there is: nostalgia. It doesn’t exist to entice new customers. Nor does it intend to attract kids, for that matter. One woman complained to her husband that the kids weren’t looking for the scavenger hunt items. Her husband’s advice: Well, let’s just look for ’em you and I, honey.

GOODBYE TO SALAD DAYS vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv

BY ABIGAIL BESSLER COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

n Aug. 5, 2014, Donna Fritz, a 53-year-old food service worker, walked down a long hallway, seated herself at a large oval table, stared down at a sheet of paper, and picked a new job. She was given 15 minutes, but she didn’t need the full time. People with meetings scheduled before hers had taken all but two of the original 16 choices on the job list. And the two items that hadn’t been crossed off already were identical: pantry worker at the Culinary Support Center, Tuesday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Donna had spent the last five years as Davenport College’s head pantry worker. As a CSC pantry worker, she would still make the same salary. But she felt the job was a step down in other ways. She would have to work weekends, and, more importantly, she would lose the leadership role she had earned after her 33 years as a Yale Dining employee. Looking up from the page and toward the far end of the table, Donna faced the intense stares of a dozen people: some from Yale Dining or Human Resources, others from the Local 35 blue-collar union. She reminded herself of the advice she had given a teary-eyed colleague in the waiting area minutes before: “Take a deep breath, give your answer, and leave.” As Donna signed the paperwork, a voice from across the table asked if she had any issues with the job change. She mentioned a few concerns — how would she and the other workers moving to the CSC, almost all women ages 41 to 72 years old, deal with handling the heavy equipment on their own? And did the University really think it was a good idea to put three men and 13 women, all of whom were used to being in charge of their own operations, into one kitchen? In response, she received a few sympathetic nods. Standing up, a copy of her new schedule in hand, Donna said thank you. Just before leaving, she turned, adding, “I wish all of us a lot of luck.” 8 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

ne week before the 15-minute meetings, Yale Dining employees had received a threepage “FAQ for Employees” from Yale’s Human Resources department in their paycheck envelopes. The letter said that Yale was opening a new off-campus food preparation facility, the Culinary Support Center, at 344 Winchester Ave. It went on to describe which members of Yale Dining were going to work there: catering, bakery, and head pantry workers. Linda Carbone, a caterer who has worked at Yale for 28 years, said the University pitched the Culinary Support Center over the last three years as a way of giving Yale Catering and Yale Bakeshop more space. Both teams were growing cramped in their workspace in the basement of Commons, and Linda remembers being excited about the prospect of an expanded, modern facility.

response, Michael Peel, the University’s vice president of human resources, explained the University’s position in an email. First, he wrote, the CSC could improve cold foods, usually ranked the lowest on Yale Dining surveys, by ensuring consistency across the residential colleges. Second, the move had precedent: food service operators across the country had shifted to centralized food preparation to improve quality and cut costs. The “FAQ for Employees” sheet asserted that the move was not a problem under the University’s contract with the union, which allows for “permanent transfers” in working location. And, as Peel concluded, “No Yale dining employee will lose their job, have their hours reduced, or have their pay reduced by this change.” But for the head pantry workers, and the 80-percent female workforce of pantry workers under them who would

“[Nicole] used to tell everyone she was the owner of the deli bar,” he said. “She made the hummus, the roasted carrot hummus… Now she’s just opening boxes.” But, she said, enthusiasm turned to exasperation when Yale announced in mid-June that it was moving the production of salads, dressings, and deli items from each of the residential colleges to the new center. That meant Yale Catering would actually have less space: they had six work tables in Commons, but now just have two in the CSC building. That also meant head pantry workers would need to leave their residential colleges to work in the new facility. Almost immediately, Local 35, a union that represents mainly dining hall and maintenance workers at Yale, publicly opposed the changes. In

stay in the dining halls, the move to the CSC meant a much greater loss.

ally Notarino, a 42-year-old head pantry worker who was transferred to the CSC, knew she wanted to work in the culinary industry from a young age. Her mother started as a University pantry worker in 1983. Sally still remembers staring with disbelief at the elaborate gingerbread houses and fruit displays her mom had helped create at the Commons holiday dinner. Sally was a culinary student at Eli Whitney Technical High School when, at 16, she started working at Yale on

// ABIGAIL BESSLER

weekends as a Trumbull College desk assistant. Over the next 17 years, Yale Dining became her career. Sally worked pantry jobs across the dining halls, from Yale Law School to Saybrook College. In 2006, she finally landed a job as a head pantry worker at Silliman College. She says the job, which included training new employees and coordinating up to a dozen pantry workers every day, wasn’t easy. But it offered extensive medical benefits — crucial after her husband was diagnosed with lymphoma — and the chance to be creative. Nicole Bertsos, a pantry worker from Greece who worked with Sally in Silliman, talked to me in the Silliman kitchen about how Sally used to plan elaborate displays of cookies on Valentine’s Day, caramel apples on Halloween, and even a “Pink Lunch” for a co-worker with breast cancer. “She was a leader,” Nicole said as she put a tub of grapes onto the counter where Sally used to work. “She was

not afraid to work, and she was able to create beautiful things.” With the CSC, Nicole said she felt Yale Dining had “cut our wings.” She said the Director of Yale Dining, Rafi Taherian, used to bring guests to lunch at Silliman because of the food’s high quality, bolstered by Sally’s handiwork. Since the CSC opened, Nicole said, Taherian has come less often. Taherian declined to comment for this article, as did several other Yale administrators despite repeated requests. One administrator, who asked that she not be identified, said Yale’s Public Affairs department issued an order telling Yale Dining not to comment. Three weeks before I talked to Nicole, Silliman Chef Stuart Comen, sporting his signature embroidered “Chef Stu” hat replete with Local 35 buttons, was showing me Silliman’s kitchen freezer. Before lifting up the CSC-labeled wrapped meats and ranch dressing bags for me to see, he told me Nicole had

called in sick that morning for the first time in recent memory. Sally’s departure has been tough for Nicole, he said — not only because they were friends, but because the CSC has changed Nicole’s job as well as Sally’s. “[Nicole] used to tell everyone she was the owner of the deli bar,” he said. “She made the hummus, the roasted carrot hummus … Now she’s just opening boxes.”

n an early morning in October, half a mile away from Silliman, Sally stands with Donna and a dozen others in a large, white-walled room filled with mint-condition machinery. They’re all wearing hairnets. It’s a brisk, bright day outside, but there are no windows in the cold food-prep area that would allow them to see it. There could be a hurricane outside, the workers joke, and they wouldn’t know it. They call it a factory. One woman drops cucumbers one by one into a specialized cutter. Another uses a

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

o I’ve heard Hillary Clinton has Yale in the bag. She’s a Yale Law school grad (’73), people practically sold their kidneys for tickets to her 2013 campus appearance, and, after all, Yalies are assumed to be universally bleed-blue liberal. But why did campus support group Yale Students for Hillary go dark over a year ago? Has student apathy begun to stall momentum rallied too early? In the age of Facebook and Buzzfeed and feminist blogs — when ideas have short life cycles, and heroes are transient — what does it take for young voters to form an attachment to a mainstream party candidate? “Everyone knows about Hillary Clinton,” says Charlotte Juergens ‘16, who has worked on gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, and has spoken at the UN on nuclear nonproliferation. She believes Clinton can already count on a formidable — almost unprecedented — base of support. “Thanks to Clinton’s political history, her legitimacy is indisputable. She feels presidential. She has settled into the collective consciousness as a national leader, something few men or women in this country can say.” During the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, formal student groups sprung up only after Obama declared his campaign. But Haley Adams ’16, a Global Affairs major from California, formed Yale Students for Hillary in 2013, three years before a presumed run. As of this writing, Clinton has not said anything definite about whether the rumors are true. Still, it seems Hillary’s iconicity already resonates strongly with college students. “The only reason I’d become a US citizen is to vote for Hillary,” Ally Daniels ’16, a Canadian citizen, told Adams. Yale Students for Hillary emerged last year amid preparations for Clinton’s campus visit in October 2013 to receive the Law School’s Award of Merit. At the time, Adams was one of the first college organizers in the country to contact Rachel Schneider, the youth coordinator at Ready for Hillary, with 10 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

the express purpose of bringing their “grassroots movement” to her school. Ready for Hillary is a Super PAC like any other: it raises large amounts of funds, independently of a candidate’s campaign. But Ready For Hillary also intends to convince its candidate to run in the first place. The home page stridently asks, “ARE YOU READY? Pledge to Support Hillary for President.” Behind the capital letters, a joyful Hillary Clinton is frozen midclap. Some might say you can see naked ambition in her eyes. Some might say it’s just a photograph. On October 5, 2013, the day of the event, nearly a hundred approached a table smothered with Ready for Hillary stickers, and the movement began. Adams formed a club, with an official constitution, around the group of volunteers who had helped her gather signatures. On Facebook, the page currently has 162 likes. One does not have to feign surprise at a Hillary fan club at Yale, an overwhelmingly Democratic liberal arts college in the Northeast, located in a ward of New Haven in which registered Republicans number under 200, out of 3715 total registered voters. “The List,” as Adams refers to it — containing the names, phone numbers and addresses of those who have authorized any potential Hillary Clinton campaign to contact them — was already longer in November 2013 than it had been at the end of Clinton’s 2008 campaign, with some 3 million members. If Hillary declares she will run, Ready For Hillary has pledged to shut down and transfer the list, through a complicated legal process, to her campaign. You can feel some revolution on the ground, taking place even without the organized political power of a declared run. Are young Americans Ready for Hillary, even if we’re not sure Hillary is Ready for Hillary?

illary, for many, embodies the dream of “Madame President.” She’s the icon, the battletested Washington pro who got there

before this generation of college voters was born. Perhaps Hillary has already chipped the glass ceiling; now she stands the chance of breaking it. When evidence of gender discrimination comes to light, the necessity of action isn’t questioned. Instead, a definite and vociferous clamor arises unified — on change.org, on YouTube, in thousands of Facebook shares, and pressure from a nation of Internet activists. College students with politics on their mind have evolved into a typing-postingsharing-liking movement that demands a woman in the White House, too. As a political candidate, Hillary Clinton is much more than the movement’s placeholder. Eve Houghton, ’17, a member of the Yale College Democrats, feels that “greater representation of women in politics is always pretty much unequivocally a good thing. But Hillary has demonstrated a serious and deeply held commitment to improving the lives of women around the world, so I think her election would be more than a symbolic victory.” She showed me a video that summarizes her feeling about the Hillary campaign: an anthem titled “Female President,” by the Korean pop group Girl’s Day. I couldn’t understand the upbeat Korean lyrics, but the synchronized leatherbooted stomping and glittery shoulder pads undeniably conveyed some sort of girl power. Haley Adams believes Clinton’s (hypothetical) platform will appeal to students. “I would say she’s committed to saving the middle class. I think she is principally concerned with the growing income gap and what the institutional reasons for this trend are,” Adams says. “[Hillary’s] ‘Too Small to Fail’ campaign shows her commitment. Where she’ll differ from Obama is in the ideals she emphasizes. I would imagine her campaign would be less about ‘hope and change,’ and more about concrete issues and solutions. I think the public is a tad weary of promises for sweeping reform.” For students poised to enter a dispiriting job market, economic issues

will become as important as they are for their parents. On October 14, 2011, Occupy Wall Street organizer Matthew Siegel told NPR, “Young people are at the helm of this movement. With debt, with joblessness, with living at home with our parents well into our mid-20s, being told that we’re likely to be less better off than our parents, there is a great deal of frustration there.” I asked Adams what Ferguson will mean for Clinton. In the aftermath, Clinton remarked, “If a third of all white men — just look at this room and take one-third — went to prison during their lifetime… Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans.” On a campus where support erupted for Ferguson and protesters held a die-in the length of Wall Street, it’s a sure electoral bet that Yale is Ready for “Candidate Who Takes a Stand on Police Militarization” — fill in Candidate Name as Candidate Appears. But Hillary has been criticized for speaking rarely, too little and too late, and without conclusive policy recommendations, as if she were merely giving lip-service. Are candidates just passive vessels for the issues we demand they care about, attempting to please as much of their constituency as possible? Yale students are willing to make bold, unapologetic statements about Hillary herself. A dedicated early organizer at Yale Students for Hillary, where he is now treasurer, Adam Gerard ‘17 began interning for his assemblyman Ted Lieu, in El Segundo, CA, at age 13. He has been a political staffer ever since. “Personally, I believe there are no other individuals, in either major party, as qualified as Secretary Clinton for the job,” Gerard says. He cites her experience, eight years in Congress and twelve in the White House. “Clinton has had the opportunity to build relationships from both perspectives — which will be an invaluable skill in a political climate dominated by brinksmanship.” Though the Yale College Democrats will not endorse a candidate at this juncture, Tyler Blackmon ’16, President

of the Dems, says that “on a personal note” he believes “Hillary Clinton would be one of the most well-qualified candidates in American history to run for the Presidency, given her time in the White House, in the Senate, and as Secretary of State.” But Fish Stark ’17, who campaigned enthusiastically for mayoral candidate Justin Elicker in 2013, considers the fact that Hillary is “seen as an experienced, tactical, powerful figure in American politics a major advantage and major disadvantage.” Her decades as a DC veteran have solidified her love and hate camps. The August 2006 Time magazine cover even superimposed checkboxes labeled “love” and “hate” over her portrait, to let all of magazinereading America decide. Unlike Obama in 2008 — who was a senator for only three years, a relative newcomer to everyday voters and television audiences —Hillary is undeniably established.

or Clinton, established doesn’t imply out of touch. She takes selfies with another Yalie darling, Meryl Streep. When actor Jason Segel publicly expressed “interest in sharing the big screen” with Clinton, she wrote back a kind note: “I am a little occupied at the moment, but perhaps someday I can help you forget Sarah Marshall ... again. My only condition is that there be Muppets involved, and that is nonnegotiable.” As Time magazine put it, while Hillary was secretary of state, she was “a little occupied [negotiating] as a kind of referee between [the] dangerous frenemies” of Afghanistan and Pakistan. She can toss out winning pop culture references, destined for immediate immortalization by Buzzfeed. Like Time, she moves deftly between newspeak and youthspeak. In 2012, a Tumblr blog called Texts from Hillary popped up. The blog published a series of memes based on Diana Walker’s photograph for Time of Hillary texting from a C-17 jet, en route to Tripoli for negotiations during the Libyan civil war. In one image,

President Obama and Vice President Biden text her, “She’s going to love the new Justin Bieber video!” Looking as icily intimidating as a Matrix character, behind sunglasses and a snazzy brooch, Hillary responds, “Back to work, boys.” In the meme, Hillary is responding sarcastically, snappily, and she’s always in power. Meme-Hillary rejects Mark Zuckerberg’s friend request. She responds to “Who run the world?” with a deadpan “Girls,” as many Yoncéobsessed college students would. In April 2012, she really did respond, submitting her own post and meeting the founders of the blog. A year later, she solidified her social media celebrity when she joined Twitter. In her first tweet, she thanked the founders of Texts from Hillary, then said, “I’ll take it from here… #tweetsfromhillary.” Bill Clinton later updated his Twitter photo to a similar image to the meme’s photo, tweeting that he was following his leader, passing the torch for all of the Twitterverse to see. Hillary Clinton’s social media explosion resonates with a generation that hyperventilates when the WiFi is down. For many, she is, as Houghton put in all-caps in a message, “FLAWLESS.” She is no longer known to voters as the “frumpy” or “bossy” harpy the 90’s media made her out to be, when she asserted she wouldn’t stay home, doomed to a life of tea and cookies. It’s a far cry from the “cankles” she’s been teased for — a turn in her charisma that says just as much about her audience as it does about her appeal. Blackmon makes a point of referring to her as “Clinton” instead of “Hillary.” “We would never regularly refer to a male politician by his first name,” he says. But I don’t think the first-name status implies disrespect. Hillary as a moniker has come to embody an inimitable political pioneer, someone whose “rhino-thick skin,” as she once recommended to young women with political aspirations, has helped her outlast so many who doubted her. Like Beyoncé, one name is enough to call up superstar status.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

by Eve Houghton

Is Yale a good place or a no place? Photography by Wa Liu

n 1535, Sir Thomas More — lawyer, politician, and noted Renaissance humanist — was writing a book. He was planning to call it Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, which was fitting, because his own tribulations had landed him in the Tower of London. He scribbled annotations, notes, and half-formed ideas for the book in the margins of his psalter, 12 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

currently on display for the “Reading English” exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was to be his last work. On one page, he has written a prayer in English: Give me thy grace, good Lord, To set the world at nought; To set my mind fast upon thee, And not to hang upon the blast of

men’s mouths; To be content to be solitary; Not to long for worldly company; Little and little utterly to cast off the world, And rid my mind of all the business thereof. Perhaps he had never thought much of the world in the first place. As a young man he lived with the Carthusians at

volume on the ideal polity. The word utopia, it has been often noted, is a pun on the Greek eu topos, which means “good place,” and ou topos, which means “no place.” (It was the sort of thing he would have found funny.) In July of 1535, More was executed. He was reputed to have said he was “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” n Utopia, “the chief end of the constitution is to … allow all the people as much time as is necessary for the improvement of their minds, in which they think the happiness of life consists.” From across a gap of centuries, More’s ideal world bears striking resemblance to a university. But is Yale a good place or a no place? “Maybe it’s both,” suggests Alexi Sargeant ’15, a student in John Rogers’ “Utopia” seminar. “It’s an alternate society with its own distinct rules, and those rules make for a pleasurable existence. But after we graduate, people find that the rest of the world doesn’t really work like Yale.” In this sense, perhaps Yale is itself a sort of utopian fiction. In The University of Utopia (1953), former Yale Law School Dean Robert Maynard Hutchins stakes a claim for the indispensability of the liberal arts in a free society: “what every human being needs is a grasp of fundamental ideas and the ability to communicate with others.” The notion of the university as a humanist utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge is an immensely powerful narrative, even as this ideal society arrives with an expiration date. “I came to Yale because I wanted to learn / and I wanted to learn from the best. / I was tired of memorizing figures and facts / just to pass another test,” sings the pre-naturally cheerful protagonists of the viral “That’s Why I Chose Yale” admissions video. Such an assertion figures Yale as a place where the acquisition of knowledge can be distinguished from concrete objectives such as “pass[ing] another test.” But inescapably, the clock runs down on this intellectual paradise: eventually

students have to re-enter the real world. But it never existed in the first place.

“Y

their monastery in London, spending his days in silent study and prayer. He never took vows, but some said that in later years he still wore a monk’s shirt of coarse animal hair beneath his black lawyer’s robes. He was ambivalent about public service and uncomfortable with the disingenuousness of the Tudor court. In official portraits, he stares off into the distance with a look of polite disinterest; his mind on higher things. In 1516 he published Utopia, a slim

ale has always tried to be a good place, but it’s not a noplace,” argues Craig Buckley, assistant professor of history of art. “It exists in a physical space; it’s rooted in a larger urban milieu.” This is perhaps the paradox of utopian architecture: if a utopia is by definition a place which cannot exist, how can it be reified in the physical world? Even before Yale moved permanently to New Haven in 1718, he points out, the city was modeled on a blueprint for an ideal space. Founded in 1638, New Haven was laid out on a nine-grid plan (one of the earliest of its kind in North America), uncannily echoing More’s urban planning for the cities of Utopia, which are “divided into four equal parts” centering around a marketplace. Yale’s architecture has not always adhered to an ideal plan, however. The campus bears traces of a variety of architectural movements and influences, some of which seem to actively contradict one another. Professor Buckley notes that the architecture of the residential colleges is derived from a monastic tradition based on the Oxford and Cambridge models, which “mark their autonomy by enclosure.” These “communities within communities” are differentiated by high walls, gates, and private courtyards and gardens, acting as mediating entities between the individual and the wider Yale and New Haven community. Still, professor Buckley suggests that we can locate utopian impulses in unexpected places on campus. Louis Kahn’s designs for the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art may not look like Connecticut Hall, but “utopia resides in the geometry he’s using, in the urge to create ideal forms.” Such a preoccupation with proportion and harmonious geometry reflects an attention to the moral as well as the physical construction of a society.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

// ELIZABETH MILES

ale professor Richard Prum, who received the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2009 for his work in evolutionary ornithology, and Carl Zimmer ’87, English professor and science journalist for The New York Times and other publications, first met when Prum came to Yale in 2004. The two friends got together one Tuesday afternoon for a quick chat by the taxidermic bird collections of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. On the evolutionary psychologist in the Jane Austen seminar

P The question I’m interested in is: how is the aesthetic change that happens in human acts like the aesthetic change that happens in nature? And really what it’s about is studying subjective experience, which most scientists are afraid of. That the fact that you like something — that’s a force in nature. What I’m trying to do is make that the subject of our study, and I think we can study it comparatively. So — two species had some ancestor that had the same 24 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

song. And those two species no longer prefer the same song that the ancestor did — they sing different songs. So we can’t know what it’s like to like a certain song, but we can examine how changes occur … Subjective experience won’t be reducible to standard analysis, but we can create new ways to approach it and understand aspects of it that people are afraid of. This whole work has led to a broader interest in aesthetics in human arts and in that case, I start with the body of work that is science and gradually move into a body of work that isn’t science, but somehow it is compatible with science. And that’s what I’m interested in now. How is it that the different bodies of knowledge are interconnected? But in a respectful way. I’m not a scientist walking into the humanities to say, “OK, let me explain. Once you understand this, you’ll understand your field.” That’s not what it is at all. What I’m trying to do is create a scientific perspective that supports work in the humanities and social sciences.

Z I’m an old English major here, so I always find it kind of funny that evolutionary psychologists are barging into English departments and explaining Jane Austen to them in terms of fitness, and so on. It’s not necessarily that it’s wrong, but it brushes away important issues about culture and history and even just the kind of thing that literature is great at — exploring language and [how] language works in our lives and how it can betray us, all its complexities. Sometimes scientists seem to want to bring it down to some basic principles.

IN CONVERS

Richard

P And that is an effort to explain away culture, not explain culture. And unfortunately a lot of people associate this with the mission of science. That reductionist relation is the value. And there are all sorts of examples in science where that failed and we gave up on it and moved on with better science.

this. But I guess you’re blocking their light.

Z Right. And scientists tend to have

P It’s like a button, a replay button,

a history of their field that is nice and clean. It can be difficult to draw people out and say, “You guys were battling it out and disagreed” — getting them to acknowledge that science is a process. On feathered dinosaurs, Hollywood, and thieving kids

P I did some work on the evolutionary origin of feathers that transformed the way we look at our favorite dinosaurs — Z Except in Jurassic Park. They’re not switching over.

P No, they’re not. Z You have to have a word with them.

P Yeah, I’ve emailed them! They think a T. rex with feathers would be a laughingstock. How would they sell tickets? Z To me, the research that you and others have done to show that all these dinos have crazy feathers with patterns on them is one of these surprises and is so fun to think about. I cannot imagine that Hollywood wouldn’t be all over

ERSATION:

Well, they’re investing a lot of money in the next Jurassic Park.

Z They would need to go back and

CGI [the old movies].

and it replays the feathered T. rex chasing the Jeep.

Z I think that movies can be a great

way to draw kids into science. When you start asking scientific questions, I’m all for that, when it works. Most of the time movies make you want to tear your hair out.

P But you’ve written for children. Z Some of my articles end up read

in high school classes. I actually really like going and talking. [High schoolers] are the toughest. If it’s not interesting, they fall asleep. They’re unconscious. So what are you going to do to keep them engaged? So usually what I do if I’m talking about parasites or viruses I use the most disgusting slides I have. And they love it. And at the end they start asking me these good evolutionary questions. How did the tapeworm get to be like that?

P Carl’s toxic book [Parasiterex] was the book most frequently stolen from high school libraries. Z There was one librarian in NYC

who told me to say she had to replace it six or seven times. But that’s how you know it’s working. I keep reminding people in teaching, I’m not teaching you about how to write things people

ard Prum and Carl Zimmer

have to read, but what they want to read. On useless, beautiful, tangled knots

P To me, the beauty of theories is

not an aesthetic issue. The reason is that theories are evaluated based on how well they explain the data. If they explain the data elegantly, that might be beneficial, but that doesn’t make the science any better. Physicists like to call things “feasible” as a compliment. And that’s actually a scientific force. Certain views of string theory are preferred as scientific leads or the future in science because they have mathematical properties that people find attractive or elegant.

Z I think biology is so inherently

messy that that doesn’t get as much traction … The structure of DNA is beautiful in an elegant, simple way, but that’s cherry-picking in a sense. If you ever look at a ribosome, oh, god — what a mess! I mean it’s amazing, but it’s just horrendous. Even DNA — if you back away from the double strand and see how it’s all tangled up, it’s just a useless knot. It’s not beautiful at all.

P There are a lot of styles of mind

out there. People are attracted to all kinds of different things. Intellectual motivations … But I think science often does misrepresent itself to people by pointing to beautiful results. The genome is an infinitely packed, bizarre tangle. It’s a mess. We would be disserving science if we only recruited people who [found] some beauty in it.

Z I suppose when I’m writing about

science I’m drawn not necessarily to things that are beautiful but things that are surprising. I had no idea that kiwi eggs were so big. He regards the taxidermic kiwi bird. Almost making the reader blink. That’s the kind of reaction I go for.

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Red light BY LUCY FLEMING

hey say that red light is more calming for safari animals. The exit signs are red. The conductor came by to take my ticket. He said Where you goin’? and I said Boston and he said Bahston and I said Yes and he said I’m from Boston I’m just teasin’ ya and he kept going but not unkindly. I always used to wonder what it meant when books said Not Unkindly because something is kind or not kind, one of the two. Whenever I say this to Christine, Christine says It’s A Spectrum and laughs in that way she has, where her throat bulges. Christine has been texting me Steph where r u but I have not responded. I am sitting on the train. 26 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

I turn the pages of my book to make it look like I am reading. I shake a little. A Home Depot blares by in an orange blur of aisles and ladders. I am going to see my father. He will know what to do. When I was three or four, my father shaved his beard. When he came home, I cried. Or at least I’m told I cried. My father tells me I cried. He found it amusing. He says I “burst into tears.” As if water sprang out of me, a clear bubble popping and suddenly the little threeyear-old red-haired girl is gone and there’s just a spray of spherical droplets where she was standing in her striped jumper. I imagine the puddle left on the floor. I imagine myself as water soaking through fine-grained wooden floorboards and

spilling down slanted broken concrete and sinking into the earth.

att’s bed had those blue-andgray striped flannel sheets that boys’ moms buy them for college. There was more blood than I was expecting. It stained the sheets in dark pools, thick and wet.

must have fallen asleep because I wake up as the conductor passes by again. “New London will be next — New London, Connecticut will be next.” The train is almost empty. No one takes the 12:46 Amtrak. Maybe that’s why the tickets were so cheap, why they were available at 11:38 p.m. on a Friday

ILLUSTRATION BY ZISHI LI

as I ran panting towards the street. The woman behind me snores a little. When I fall asleep again, halfway through the book I am not really reading, I dream of his face. Not the eyes. Christine always talks about boys’ eyes, her preference for long lashes, but I dream of the curve between his jawbone and his neck. In my dream he is tilting his head to the side, again and again, reaching his arms towards me with a smile.

went on a night safari once, with my father, on a trip. We sat in the grumbling truck as it bounced along dirt roads. My father was quiet. Night hunting is more difficult, he told me. His breath puffed in the cold air. He held his gun in gloved hands. Look, Stephanie, he said. Don’t look at the bush, look through the bush. Nothing, and nothing, nothing but

dark bushes and stars for miles, until we puttered to a stop near the inky outline of acacia trees, and the driver turned on the night lights. The eyes were white gleams at first, and then there were bodies slung low to the ground, taut muscles and bulging loins. Hyena, the guide said in a low voice. Their snouts were dark, wet. The sound of fabric being ripped, sheared with wet scissors. Funny they would rip fabric with their teeth, I remember thinking. On their snouts the blood looked black in the red light.

wake sweating. The woman behind me is awake, too. I am filled with the fear that she saw my dream through the back of my skull, saw Matt reaching for me again and again, and saw the red on his covers, and disapproved. But this is stupid, because she is reading a James Patterson novel and seems engrossed.

The font on the cover is big, bold, raised. Audacious, Professor K would say, and point to the chunky serifs that he likes so much. I picture Professor K’s face: the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the mottled skin of his neck and the way it trembles slightly as he speaks to the lecture hall, clutching his Bic pen in one hand. Graphic design is a science and an art, he says to us, and I face forward, forward, refusing to look at Matt and his sheen of auburn stubble, sitting in the red-upholstered lecture hall seat beside me, because if I look at him, I will blush. My father. My father will know what to do.

e said we would work on our project but really did we? Matt’s room had a bare floor. I liked it. Classy, I said as we came in and he turned on the lights. I breathed in. We

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

had never been alone. Yeah, was all he said. He arranged the paper squares on the floor. We knelt and moved them around, talking about how weird it was that graphic design involved so much Canson paper and cutting with X-acto knives instead of playing with Adobe Photoshop. Do you want some Maker’s Mark, he said. Um sure. Yeah. The burble of liquid in glasses. Then we drank from the bottle. We talked about how dumb group projects usually were. This X-acto knife is mad sharp, he said. I can do the cutting if you want. It’s mad sharp. His room smelled like cedar. It’s too bad the library study rooms weren’t open, I said. Is it? he said. Not really, I said. Later, when we were on his bed, I noticed again that his room smelled like cedar, and Axe, and hot breath.

hristine told me there would be blood. She whispered it to me that morning freshman year when she came home from Sig Nu wearing a plaid shirt that wasn’t hers. Just a little, she said. She giggled. Steph, she said. Steph. She didn’t say more, just squeezed my hand. I knew.

e pass through Stonington, and Westerly, and Kingston. The conductor struts up and down the aisle. He gives me patronizing looks. My father shaved his beard when I was three or four. My father shaved his beard. I cried. I had never seen him without his beard. Even now I cannot imagine him without it, cannot imagine what made my three-year-old self begin to wail. My father is his beard. Sometimes it seems that he doesn’t have a face at all, just the pillowy thick hair parted by his teeth smiling, the balls of his cheeks riding on top, eyes pinched at the edges. It’s bad form for a man to dirty his beard, he would tell me. Even at the cutting table, he wore a flowered scarf around the bottom of his face to 28 | Vol. XLII, No. 1 | October 2014

prevent the blood drops from flying up onto his chin. As a little girl I would steal the scarf, wrap it around my face, stand at the cutting table when he had gone to get rooibos tea from the lodge. He always cleaned his knives before he left. Don’t want rust on your knives, Stephanie, he said to me. The guides chuckled at me then, this tiny white girl holding the big skinning knife. Do you know how to use that knife, gehl? they would tease me in their low Tswana voices. Not unkindly. Father showed me, I said in my high voice. Yesterday’s kudu lay heavy on the cutting table, its sides taut and still. I took the knife in both hands and plunged it into the flap between the kudu’s skin and the glistening bulk of its meat. The soft clish of tearing fat as it ripped away from muscle. The guides hooted. And then my father was there, his big gloves turning the knife in my hands, along the curve of the kudu’s loin. Next time you’ll make the first cut, he said. He was proud of me. I clench my fists against the seat of this train, see my eyes in the dark window in the night, my eyes in their porcelain shells against the red beams of traffic hurtling by. Matt whispered in my ear, tilting his head to the side. Stephanie, oh my god. He smelled like cedar and Axe and bourbon and his hands were around my wrists and I melted into water when he kissed me. He kissed me and kissed me and kissed me and I laughed and he kissed me and his arms were around my waist. His tongue. The lights were off. Stephanie, he said. A warm pressure at his pelvis, pushing me. All those days in lecture when I had wondered what his lips would taste like, whether they would be wet or dry, soft — but their taste didn’t matter at all, it was their weight, their weight — Next stop, Providence, Rhode Island. Providence, Rhode Island, next stop, the conductor says in his singsong voice. Providence, Rhode Island, next stop, Providence, Rhode Island, next stop.

His fingers clenched around my wrists. Stephanie, he said. My back pressed against the wooden frame of the bed. His tongue was everywhere, the weight and push and his hands reaching down towards my thighs, his breath and there it was on Matt’s desk mad sharp and I grabbed it and held it to make him stop but he didn’t stop. His breath in my ear and my eyes slid.

y father told me there would be blood. The guides were murmuring about this white hunter, the low-bellied bearded man who was so friendly and carried the checkered flask. Good for business, they said. We had run the kudu hard, that night. It lay panting, the kudu, its mouth fringed with foam. Careful, Stephanie, my father said. Gently, he said. The knife is an instrument, and you are playing it. My eyes slid and it burst in a crimson spray from the groove between the neck and the jaw, the blood; red flesh sliced in a neat line along the blade of my knife; our knife; warm pulsing as he crumpled to the bed with a muffled cry of surprise; red splashed over the white paper squares abandoned on the floor.

pulled my skirt down. I cleaned the knife. Don’t want rust on your knives, Stephanie. I wiped it on the damp towel draped over the desk chair. I put on my coat and my gloves and grabbed my backpack and heaved the door open and ran. Away. The dorm was empty. I hailed a cab. I shook as the blood dried sticky under my coat. I told the driver I needed to see my father. I wanted to fall to the floor. My father is in Boston. I told the driver to take me to the train station.

oston, Massachusetts, next stop. The exit signs are red. Antelopes freeze when cornered, my father told me that time in Africa. They believe if they do not move, they are invisible. He chuckled then, and I remember not knowing why.

PLASTIC, PLASTIC EVERYWHERE BY IKE SWETLITZ

In Ghana, the women carry everything on their heads. Canisters of propane, bowls of groundnuts, platters of water sachets. The clear bags gleam in the equatorial sunlight. In the rural towns, where there is no plumbing, this is how water is transported. Half a liter of liquid is sealed in a few inches of plastic. Young girls skip school to sell sachets. The girls, in geometric print dresses, crowd the highway. They run up to stopped cars and buses, water in hand. I am sitting on the bus from Kumasi to Koforidua. When we come to a stop, the women along the road swarm the bus, selling toothpaste, canned fish, and, of course, water sachets. A woman rushes ahead, clutching a sachet in each hand. “Water!” she shouts. “Cold water!” A dozen passengers get out of their seats and reach across my row toward the window. The woman hands over her water in exchange for a few coins. As the bus begins to move again, she runs to keep up. Five hundred milliliters of water is enough to brush my teeth, wash my mouth guard, and even have a few sips. To open the water sachets, you grab a corner with your teeth and pull. Some people toss the entire sachet on the ground after drinking only half. I could go through a handful of the sachets in a day. We bought them in bulk from the 25-square foot supermarket at the intersection of two dirt roads in Somanya. In the compound where I lived, we put our used sachets in a burlap sack. My landlord told me that one of the women made things out of the plastic, but he didn’t say what. A single paved road runs through Somanya. There are no sidewalks, and cars honk their horns when they approach anyone or anything. The roads are flanked by open-air sewers instead of curbs. Wooden planks stretch over the sewers, connecting the road to the shops. The

sewers are full of plastic. I usually bought breakfast — rice with beans, noodles, and a hard-boiled egg — from the same woman on the way to work. She scooped the freshly-cooked waakye into my Tupperware and then covered the plastic box with a big black plastic bag. A friend told me that the opaque plastic protected the food from evil spirits. I never saw any evil spirits, but I did see the black bags, clogging the sewers. The garbage was causing cholera outbreaks, according to articles in the local paper. I kept my distance. The pollution makes sense. Waste reclamation requires infrastructure, and I can’t imagine getting a garbage truck down a street barely wide enough for two taxis. Across Ghana there is an informal infrastructure of plastic. Plastic bags enable food and water to travel hundreds of miles. But what quenches the thirst of humans threatens to choke nature. My roommate, Kolu, and I hiked to Umbrella Rock, a huge flat stone resting on top of a few boulders. The trail was covered with used water sachets. Kolu and I followed the plastic across a stream and through the tall grasses. When we arrived at the rock, it was covered in writing. The rock was decorated with the names of other hikers, probably the ones who had paved the path of plastic. Some of the plastic ends up on the

// IKE SWETLITZ

ground and in the sewers, and some of it ends up in stomachs. While I was riding a bus, I saw a woman across the aisle pull out a thin plastic bag of chicken and rice. She turned the bag upside down and bit off a corner. The plastic disappeared into her mouth. She kept eating, as if the bag were a tortilla and not synthetic, refined oil. I was glad that I was eating out of a hard plastic box instead. Back in the US, I marveled at the fact that water flowed so freely from the faucet. And I marveled at how much water I used, now that it no longer came in five hundred milliliter increments. I have thought about filling up Ziploc bags with water to make makeshift sachets. Maybe all that plastic is worth it.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

// KATHERINE WATSON

// MADELEINE WITT

COVER STORY BY JOYCE GUO

With more people playing video games than ever before, issues in gaming culture, including misogyny, have opened themselves up to broader scrutiny. How is the gaming community at Yale, and at large, responding to issues of its own expansion?

SWIMMING LESSONS DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX SCHMELING GRAPHICS BY AMRA SARIC

hat is a gamer?

On a Wednesday night, the 10 regulars of Smash@Yale have lugged eight 20-pound cathode ray televisions from their dorms to the basement of WLH to play Super Smash Brothers Melee. They use these bulky, outdated TVs, the group explains, because modern LCDs produce a delay in gameplay of about 100 milliseconds — which, in a fast-paced multiplayer fighting game like Smash, can make the difference between living and losing. I am watching a room of people play Smash for the first time, and it’s like watching a silent symphony orchestra: a room of coordinated finger patterns executed with precision and speed. No one is going to risk small talk when it might mean dying in the next round. The concentration is broken only by the occasional pained “ah” or exuberant “yes!” Tonight, Smash@Yale has invited Anthony Detres, a professional Melee player from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to mentor some novice players. “This kid hasn’t slept in 40 hours,

and he’s down here playing Smash,” 160-member Smash@Yale Facebook Detres says, gesturing to Smash@ group inviting members to watch a Yale’s President Eryk Banatt ’17, who how-to, read an article, play a game. is furiously pushing the buttons on his Like many of his friends, Banatt controller. wouldn’t necessarily call himself a Banatt rebuts.“That’s not fair, I had gamer: “It’s a hobby, just like any two midterms.” other hobby,” he tells me — no more “Right — but, instead of catching distinctive than reading or watching up on sleep, you are down here playing TV. “I don’t attach a weird label to my video games,” Detres counters. identity because of it.” The room laughs. Banatt tells me he has been playing video games for as long as he can remember — he claims it’s even through video - 2014 Entertainment Software Association Report games that he learned to read. There was no formal gaming group at Yale when he enrolled, so he But a gamer, according to the co-founded Smash@Yale with four of dictionary, is just someone who plays his friends this year to centralize the video games. Under that definition, gaming that had been taking place more and more people, whether in common rooms all over campus. serious vide game players like Banatt Almost every day, there’s a post on the or not, could call themselves gamers. According to the 2014 Entertainment Software Association Annual Report, the chances of the person sitting next to you having played a video game, whether a mobile game or a massive multiplayer online role playing game like League of Legends, is 58 percent. Media researchers attribute this statistic, in part, to there being more platforms, like tablets and smartphones, on which to play. There’s the gamer who plays Candy Crush on the way to work — and then there’s the sort of gamer who, in 2013, the U.S. State Department officially recognized as a professional athlete. Last month, in a South Korean stadium built for soccer, those athletes competed for $1 million in the League of Legends World Championship before an international audience of 40,000. The internet has helped to transform gaming into a spectator

percent of Americans play video games.

The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out...” Quinn said. “Of course I know that this is just a small minority of the angry and disenfranchised, but I felt like it was the entire world. 34 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

sport. Sixty million fans per month tune in to watch competitive gamers play on the website Twitch.tv, the brainchild of Yale graduates Emmett Shear ’05 and Justin Kan ’05, who sold Twitch to Amazon this October for an unprecedented $970 million. Whatever the game, to play is to participate, even momentarily, in an industry that technology company Gartner anticipates will generate about $111 billion dollars in 2015. It’s easier than ever to be a part of the gaming community. But not everyone feels welcome.

n August, Zoe Quinn, a female indie game developer, released a narrative-driven, textheavy game called Depression Quest that placed players in the shoes of a young adult suffering f r o m depression. Later that m o n t h , Quinn’s exboyfriend, Eron Gjoni, posted a long diatribe on his blog accusing Quinn of sleeping with Nathan Grayson, a journalist for the video game blog Kotaku, for a favorable review of her game. The accusation that Quinn traded sex for a review is unfounded. Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo pointed out that the single article Grayson published mentioning Depression Quest was not a review of the game at all, but rather a discussion of Quinn’s participation in a reality show. The article was published in late March — before the two began a romantic relationship in early April. #Gamergate, a term meant to evoke Watergate, was coined on Twitter under the pretense of reassessing ethics in video game journalism, which users of the hashtag believed Quinn had violated. Looking at what happened, though, it seems people were less interested in journalistic ethics than they were in harassing Quinn. She received 14 times more outraged tweets with #Gamergate than did Grayson. After being sent a

barrage of death threats, Quinn felt unsafe enough to leave her home; the BBC reported on October 29 that she was still living elsewhere. She was “doxed,” her personal details obtained and posted online. Her home address, sexual history, and nude photos spread all over social media sites like 4chan. #Gamergate became the rallying cry of a movement that soon spiraled into an incomprehensible mess. Anyone seeking change in the gaming community was targeted, with an overwhelming majority of harassment directed toward female gamers, female game developers, and feminists in the gaming community. When game developer Brianna Wu tweeted out a meme that made fun of the #Gamergate movement and expressed solidarity with the harassed women, she received so many death threats in response that she and her husband were forced to go into hiding, just like Quinn. In October, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist pop culture critic, planned to give a talk at Utah State University based on her work in her YouTube series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” which criticizes games’ perpetuation of misogynistic tropes. After the school received an email from an anonymous source threatening a shooting rampage if she went through with the talk, Sarkeesian was forced to cancel. As the gaming community continues to grow, it’s inviting more scrutiny. Misogyny and harassment are not uncommon in online gaming forums, but #Gamergate has thrust gaming culture’s dark underbelly into the headlines. Gamers who are hurling harassment are worried that their medium is becoming corrupted by “social justice warriors,” who see games as the next platform on which to advocate their liberal agendas. But Sarkeesian and her supporters argue that their intention is not to dismantle the gaming community. Rather, they are pointing out the misogyny they find, both in gaming content and culture, that might be alienating to women. Sarkeesian believes that tropes

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

like the “damsel in distress” — a weak, often minimally-clothed female who must be saved by the gamer’s male protagonist — are off-putting to girls who are trying to join the community. Gaming has reached a watershed moment. What will #Gamergate mean to the inheritors and the innovators of the changing gaming community?

hile the male gamers I spoke to at Yale said they disagreed with what had happened to Quinn and Sarkeesian, none of them felt they had an obligation to respond to the vitriolic gamer culture from which Yale seems to be exempt. Kar Jin Ong ’17, who is on the board of Gamers@Yale, the umbrella gaming organization that encompasses Smash@Yale and other gaming groups, has been closely following #Gamergate. He believes the harassment is an issue, but not one that necessarily impacts the Yale gaming community. “I think that it’s a very small minority of gamers that are into this sort of thing, and you can find that sort of minority everywhere,” he said. “I think they are given much more credit than they deserve.” Ong believes #Gamergate is under media

scrutiny only because gaming is still so new. A lot of gamers end up feeling unfairly targeted when they are told their community is more unwelcoming to women than others, he said. Diwakaran Ilangovan ’17, copresident of Gamers@Yale, feels similarly. “I would say that misogyny and other aspects of male culture that pervade video games are not in any way excusable, but video games have a tendency to be used as a scapegoat, because they are new and not as well established,” Ilangovan said. “I get somewhat frustrated when other people start blaming video games for perpetuating stereotypes when they’re not just present in video game culture — they’re pervasive everywhere else, too.” “If anyone ever told me that she felt discriminated against, I would definitely do something about it,” he added. “But no one ever has.”

Five hours after I spoke with her, at 1 in the morning, [Yang] sent me a text. ...She had been unable to get the incident off her mind.

“P

eople

[assume] that if you’re a girl, you’re not playing seriously.” By her own estimate, Meredith Derecho ’17 is one of two serious female Smash players on campus. Derecho started playing Smash with her 36 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

little brother before she came to college, and found that she was good at it. She entered local competitions, and even appeared in an episode of the popular Smash Brothers Documentary Series, posted last year on YouTube. The video has received 400,000 views. The five Smash players I talked to consider Derecho one of the best players on campus. But despite her

skill, Derecho feels that it is hard to be taken seriously as a girl in the broader Smash community. “I think I’ve definitely had the feeling sometimes that ‘Oh, Smash is this guys’ game,’ and I am intruding on it,” she said. “It’s a fear, a feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be here, because this is the guys’ thing.” Although she doesn’t experience that fear at Yale, she does feel it when she goes to local tournaments. Derecho even said that people have accused her of playing Smash just to get guys. At the end of last year, Lining Wang ’17 co-founded Gamers@Yale with Ilangovan, with whom she now shares the presidency. Among other duties, Wang helps organize weekly dinners and events like viewing parties for major game tournaments. The group has 148 members — 16 of the members are girls. Wang, alone of the people I’ve spoken to, openly declared how she felt about her peers and Quinn’s harassment at the hands of the

#Gamergate movement: “I’m definitely anti-Gamergate.” Wang has taken a firm stance, but she thinks that getting the gaming community to organize in its entirety will be difficult. “To reform the culture thoroughly as a whole, you don’t just need to denounce the blatant misogynists,” Wang said. “You need to reach the bystanders too — people who are fairly certain that they will never harass anyone, and so when they see it happening, they say, ‘Wow, that’s not my problem.’” Together, the gaming community needs to openly declare its opposition to #Gamergate, she thinks, not merely marginalize the offenders. But, when asked whether she had ever tried to bring #Gamergate up with her male gamer friends, Wang admitted it was harder than it sounded. “I guess it usually doesn’t quite come up when I hang out with them, and it’s really difficult to present it in a non-polarizing way,” she said. “I’m a non-confrontational person. But people really do need to hear about it.”

ick Yee, a video games researcher and author of The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us — And How They Don’t, has found #Gamergate draining. “We’re all just physically exhausted by the storm,” he said. For Yee, #Gamergate is a leaderless movement with too many different interests at stake, all of them churning within the chaos of the Internet. “There’s no one who’s come forward to say, ‘This is the mission, these are the goals, these are the demands, this is what we’re against,’” he explained. “It’s got several different strains of very different claims. It all depends on who you talk to.” For Yee, the people slinging death threats and other forms of harassment under #Gamergate are thought of as just the rabble. “[The death threats] sound massively bonkers to people

who are not in the gaming community — but the problem is that, within the gaming community, everyone has normalized this behavior so much that when the Anita Sarkeesian episode came about …it was kind of like the big reaction within the community was, well of course she got emailed death threats, everyone gets emailed death threats.” However commonplace, the “rabble” is powerful. “Academics and industry leaders have said, ‘I’d like to speak up, but I’m just afraid of getting death threats and harassed,’” Yee said. “It’s been really, really scary. Until the story broke in the mainstream, in The New York Times, there was this pervasive fear of, ‘My God, I don’t want to speak out because who knows what’s going to happen.’” Yale professor Laura Wexler, who teaches the Yale course “Gender & Sexuality in Media and Popular Culture: Dialogues in Feminism and Technology,” believes that part of the issue is that the anonymous nature of the Internet has created a space where people can delve scot-free into their basest fantasies and speak without impunity. The issue for Wexler is when that virtual behavior starts to bleed into reality. “[People] can say and do whatever they want in fantasy and in cyberspace,” Wexler said. “But that freedom has crossed over to have real consequences, and that’s what the public doesn’t quite understand.” “The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life,” Quinn wrote in an article published on Cracked. com in September, shortly after the harassment began. “Of course I know that this is just a small minority of the angry and disenfranchised, but I felt like it was the entire world.”

Americans spend more on video games than on tickets to the movies. Grand Theft Auto V was the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time, with sales of $1 billion in just three days. – NPR

ax Jesse Goldberg ’17 feels online gaming forums have always been toxic. “It was guys saying things that’s beyond what anyone would hear outside of the virtual world,” he said. Goldberg used to play video games pretty seriously in high school. When he came to college, he stopped. He has not considered himself a part of the gaming community at Yale — or, for that matter, part of the broader gaming community — since he came out as gay during his freshman year of college.

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Goldberg said many of the games he played in high school, like Team Fortress 2, were multiplayer, in which you can speak to other players via microphones or group messaging. Gamer comment culture, Goldberg said, is extreme: he’d often hear “Faggot, come over here,” or “we just got raped,” in the midst of gameplay. Goldberg tried to push back. At one point, he changed his profile picture to a rainbow flag in order to make the other players more aware of how their language could be harmful to others. The idea backfired: he himself was attacked with slurs and hateful language. “I think it’s a reflection of what this community has become,” he said. “[It’s] one of the last places where you can say those things and not be shouted out of the room, or have even a concern raised.”

essica Yang ’16 told me she hadn’t had many discussions about #Gamergate or the gaming industry with her friends in Gamers@ Yale. “Gamers usually only talk about the gaming experience as a very mechanical experience,” she said. “It’s this big issue about the gaming community at large, [and] if I’m talking about games with someone, I’m going to be talking about how to exploit a bug to get additional cash from this quest, not about the industry in general.” Five hours after I spoke with her, at one in the morning, Yang sent me a text. She told me that she was playing a driving simulation game, Euro Truck Simulator 2, and she wanted to show a male gamer friend one of her plays. She started a live-stream of her game. At some point, while having trouble reverse-parking her truck, another gamer whom she had never met logged onto her channel, watched her struggle, and commented to her friend, “Women and reversing don’t mix.” Her friend said nothing in response. The comment bothered Yang for 38 | Vol. XLII, No. 2 | November 2014

long afterwards. She said that when it told me the issue was on his mind. first happened, she just felt annoyed. Sultan, a senior and board member But she kept going back to it. Every of the E-Sports Association, told me time she tried to parse the incident in that the problem of gender disparity in her head, her feelings about it grew gaming exists across the broad gaming stronger. She knew that misogyny in community, not necessarily in any gaming culture existed, but before this individual gaming organization. she thought of it as something remote, When asked about #Gamergate, something exaggerated by the media. It was never something she considered relevant to her or to the gamers that she knew. “I definitely started to see - 2014 Entertainment Software Association Report how one could start to feel alienated by the gaming community,” she said. Sultan said that because gaming was Yang didn’t know how to respond. becoming so ubiquitous, there was a “I’m not sure why I didn’t complain to social responsibility to make sure the my friend about it,” she said. “It’s like I gaming community was welcoming to thought it wasn’t really relevant to our all groups. discussion and that it wouldn’t interest “If you want to be taken seriously, him, that maybe he’d think I was you have to be willing to look at the making a mountain out of a molehill.” flaws,” he said. “The argument that She admitted to me that she had it’s a small remote minority is just been unable to get the incident off ludicrous, because if that’s the face of her mind for the last five hours, and gaming at all, then it’s something that had no one else to turn to voice her the people who don’t agree with have frustration. She tried messaging a to take active measures to combat.” male gamer friend at Yale about what Sultan told me that his board is had happened, but the reply she got discussing active measures that can be was bored and ineffectual. The only taken to ensure a welcoming gaming advice he gave her was to mute the group to all. It is partnering with player so that he couldn’t bother her women’s organizations on campus to anymore. But no one she talked to give women more opportunities to seemed willing to engage in a dialogue play video games, and makes clear that with her about her experience. the E-Sports Association does not support misogyny of any kind. f the four out of nine Since the last time he played in high Gamers@Yale board members school, Goldberg said, he has observed I spoke to, none seemed the broader gaming community to hold increasing representation starting to change. of women in gaming at Yale to be a One reason for the change, he priority. But Niv Sultan, a member of explained, is that gaming is becoming the Harvard E-Sports Association, a more visible and shared by more campus gaming group started around people. Popular gaming sites like the same time as Gamers@Yale Twitch.tv, where players can live-

percent of U.S. households own a dedicated video games console.

stream themselves and watch others play games, are helping to create a more positive gaming culture by broadening access to the gaming world. As gaming expands, Goldberg said, it would become more accountable to its members. Yee also believes that Twitch has helped to counter assertions that women aren’t gamers by allowing people to watch women streaming themselves gaming. Twitch, he explained, is providing a counternarrative to the stereotype that women aren’t serious gamers. He added that gamers can also enact change on an individual level. “I think it’s really easy for people to discount these experiences of people that they don’t know that they read online,” Yee said. “I think one thing male gamers can do is talk to female gamers they know and really ask them about their experience.”

y first experience with gaming was at parties my parents used to drag me to when I was little. The adults stood in the dining room, sipping drinks and eating food, and the children were thrown in the basement with a gaming console, a box of pizza, and some emergency protocol. Gaming for us was more than just about the video games, more than just the mechanics behind winning or about beating an opponent — it was what we did to be together. But now games are more than just that small community in the basement. The gaming community has become too large to be contained in a single room. Writing this article was hard. For two months of my life, I went from never thinking about video games to only ever thinking about video games. I skipped classes to see game developers give speeches and to call gamers who were willing to speak to me. I stayed up late at night watching YouTube videos of Pikachu and Fox battling it out on a digital screen. A week ago, a friend questioned whether

a topic like video games was really important enough to stress over, and I nearly took his head off. Two game developers I talked to refused to be included in the piece after the word #Gamergate was mentioned. I was told I was not a part of the gaming community, and therefore had no right to write this article. I was told that if I have ever played a single video game, even played a round of solitaire on a bored afternoon, then I could not deny I was a gamer. People told me #Gamergate was dead. Yee believes that until the issues at stake are addressed, #Gamergate will never die: even if the hashtag fades out, the #Gamergate specter would continue to haunt the video game community until something changed. As a person, writing this has been tiring. As a woman, writing this has been disturbing. I read so many 140-character death and rape threats directed at Quinn, Wu, Sarkeesian, and other women in the gaming community

that I started to become paranoid myself. When I tried to share that fear with other gamers, I was instructed, again and again, to simply ignore them. “It’s the rabble of the internet” was the mantra I was given each time I tried to tell them that as a woman, I felt like there were crosshairs on my back. One gamer was even convinced that Sarkeesian had made up most of the death threats for attention. I began to fear myself that I was making mountains out of molehills, that my fears were unfounded, that they would think I was just doing it for attention. I began to fray. I asked how this industry would ever change. Gamers told me it had to come from game developers. Game developers told me it had to come from gamers. Male gamers told me it had to come from the female gamers, female gamers told me it had to come from the male gamers. So who is going to pick up the controller and do it?

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