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MAGAZINE

MEET BAXTER HE PROMISES NOT TO STEAL YOUR JOB

MFC% OC@ @JJL< ( J<GK<D9<I )'(*

From the forge

04

personal essay by Vincent Tolentino

The view from here

small talk by Jennifer Gersten

06

A pile of shards

19 24

That was enough for the night feature by Sunik Kim

08

Vogel

small talk by Caroline Sydney

A tree grows in Iowa

small talk by Eleanor Marshall

10

Ice and sight

feature by Diana Saverin

Unschooled observer by Aaron Gertler

Baxter the friendly robot cover story by Brandon Jackson

12 15

A toxic legacy

feature by Jack Newsham

Belshazzar

fiction by Bassel Habbab

22

28 Photography Editor Sarah Eckinger

34

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Executive Editor Daniel Bethencourt Managing Editor Sarah Maslin Senior Editor Edmund Downie Associate Editors Eric Boodman Elaina Plott Joy Shan

Design Editors Ryan Healey Michelle Korte Rebecca Sylvers Design Staff Sammy Bensinger Jilly Horowitz Jennifer Lu Copy Editor Stephanie Heung Editor in Chief Tapley Stephenson Publisher Gabriel Botelho

3

N

othing prepares you to handle a pickaxe for the first time. You don’t anticipate the heft of it, the welt of solid iron, the brutishness of the shape. The name becomes scrutable: A pick, because that’s what it does. An axe, because it’s built like one and because you swing it. The function of a pickaxe was clear to me when I was handed one (it’s clear to everyone), but I can’t say I intuited the spirit of the thing. I found out, digging a precise hole in southern France, that the best way to pickaxe is to lift the heavy end straight into the air, and then to drive down with both arms, with all available back muscles, with knees bent and feet rooted at an athletic distance. It occurs to you, once you start using a pickaxe correctly, that you could easily use one to kill.

Pitchforks and torches come to mind.

Should I say this? — In brief flashes, I

4 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

thought of bloodying our hosts, kind as they were, and eating all their foie gras.

We forget that the pickaxe is a perfect object. A perfected object. A tool honed by centuries of workers and centuries of work itself. We’ve always felt a need to dig. Elongate the arm twofold and add to it a dense metal bludgeon, and you have a thing that superhumanizes the human. Add a spike — and all the momentum slings down toward a single minuscule point.

R

achel and I found Peter and Jennie Van Hanswijk Pennink through a website called Workaway. We traded four hours of daily maintenance work for meals and use of a vacation home they owned in the Dordogne River Valley. They were nice folks, of course — Dutch-English expats who had gone from “going

grey” to “gone grey.” Their house was a converted stone barn with guest rooms and underfloor heating. The stone was honey-colored. When we ate early dinners outside, we ate in the glow of the house, whose face seemed to take and hold the evening light.

The days, normally: Wake up close to 9:00. Frugal breakfast. Begin working.

Lunch served at 1:00. Afternoon free.

Dinner served at 8:00. Bed near midnight.

Rise, repeat.

I

dreamed about the work. Peter wanted me to level a 160-squarefoot portion of grassy slope, and then to build a parking garage atop it. He hoped it would be done in a week — “Then we can paint!” One

personal essay week was unrealistic (three weeks was unrealistic). Still, with Rachel’s help, by Saturday I had dug 2 feet into the high end of the slope, broken the soil from there downward, shoveled the dirt away, hacked and raked the plot flat, tamped it down with Peter’s Mercedes, set a perimeter of concrete stones, and laid gravel, checking and re-checking the level. Several days into pickaxing, shoveling, raking, I would sit up in bed with a faint grasping impulse in my fingers, and then in all my other muscles — as if my palms and limbs and shoulder blades and the arches of my feet had thoughts of their own, and were thinking of how hungry they were to be back in motion.

I had started reading Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium in the two or three weeks before France.

The book is a series of lectures, a short compendium of the writer’s thoughts on literature heading into the 21st century. Calvino’s ideal literary patron is the Olympian god Mercury — god of communication and mediation, inventor of writing. “Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture, between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects.”

I remember the first few days in France, when I would hack with the pickaxe for 10 minutes at a time, then stop for bouts of despair (“water breaks,” if Peter was looking). Standing over my sandbox-sized ruin I would think: Accomplishment has never meant less. Progress has never looked so stupid. A man to build the garage, finally. A wheezing, flailing kid.

But if Mercury is one ideal, Calvino admits that there’s Jupiter’s other son Vulcan — “a god who does not roam the heavens but lurks at the bottom of craters, shut up in his smithy, where he tirelessly forges objects that are the last word in refinement: jewels and

ornaments for the gods and goddesses, weapons, shields, nets, traps. To Mercury’s aerial flight, Vulcan replies with his limping gait and the rhythmic beat of his hammer.”

It got to be that my hands understood before I did the steps that would come next. My limbs came to revere the rhythms: pickaxe, shovel, rake, level, repeat. They knew the coming days would be spent knocking wood in place, nailing the roof together, weatherizing, painting. And they sat up ready. The sinews, knowing, led. I suppose this kind of manual instinct,

the product of hours, is craft.

It was an industriousness I’d forgotten — a feeling of youth, and puissance. Of muscular growth. I missed digging through something impossible for the sake of the feeling.

Having simple, but good, tools. And time. Somewhere in France, a wooden structure is standing on perfectly level ground. It’s a monument, if nothing else, to a series of precise motions I once made, rhythms of thought I once knew. Like a pickaxe I’ve laid to rest.

Or a book I’ve shelved in a foreign home.

ST JEROME EXITING THE WILDERNESS ON DONKEY, 1999 for Max He ate honeyed flies and drank Tang before it was popular and Cezanne discovered the Poplar tree He ran in the snow without shoes.

Everyone chatters about his views.

In the wilderness, he saw a decline in the use of the patronymic, not unrelated to the consumption of meat in Kurdish settlements where pastures of county become country.

Eventually he had to leave.

He wanders around East.

There he comes across rags, weeds, a dolphin-gang infested sea filled with dead dolphin.

This hurts him. The world hurts.

He went through a mystical phase, teaching English in a dry country that in many ways was the singular of lice.

There was nothing but brevity for Jerome to try on there. Duly undressed, always a little drowsy, He wore skins but not like a caveman.

At the Mirage, in Las Vegas, he very much enjoyed poker thinking it was a race to fold all cards and run quickly out through the spotless glass doors so as to never stop watching the volcano erupt, over and under itself–––so many suns born in one day!

He could have cried standing outside the lobby.

That volcano and it’s so fucking beautiful.

—Ava Kofman

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

the

VIEW

from here

A TRAVELER BEFORE CHRIST’S STATUE IN RIO DE JANEIRO

BY JENNIFER GERSTEN

A

t the top of Brazil’s Mount Corcovado, Christ the Redeemer overlooks the city of Rio de Janeiro. Emerging from the cable car, our tour group — some in hats, some in sunglasses, and some with arms pressed to their foreheads in a squinty sun salute — ascends the steps to stand beside Christ and take in the impressive view.

Today is Corpus Christi, and the mountaintop is crowded with pilgrims in shawls and rosary beads paying their respect to the Eucharist. When the 68 of us cannot advance to the lookout crag as a front, we scatter, corkscrewing around the other visitors to claim our view. I slip into a space at the center of the banister and lean forward.

In front of me is a city in miniature. I can pinch a skyscraper, trace a river with my pinky. I see our hotel beside the Copacabana coastline and squash it gently beneath my thumb. And right beside it, I see the favelas, Brazilian slums, strewn across the mountains like wayward marbles. I cup a favela in my hand and watch the ramshackle houses trickle from my fingers into the connecting city. Falling into one another, on top of one another, over and under.

6 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

small talk I have seen the favelas before, but only in glimpses from the dusty windows of our tour bus. Taller than the emperor palms that have captured my East Coast eyes and far more unwieldy, the favelas nevertheless had to compete with the palms for my recognition in our overcrowded bus windows.

Clothing hung on lines close to the highway; a beach towel featured Snow White, smiling benignly and oblivious to how she had been bent in half over a wire. Skinny children waded like mullet fish between seas of trash. Like Mordecai before Haman, some of the structures remained resiliently straight.

But the favelas’ existence seemed largely one of layered collapse, one shanty genuflecting over the roof of another, bending obsequiously in the wind. Our tour guide, neglecting the microphone as he chatted animatedly with the director, suddenly grabbed hold of it as we entered Rio. The city overtook our windows, and the favelas slipped from view.

Here atop Corcovado, I lean over the banister and look out at the view. I breathe in the mountains, apparently outlined in watercolor pencil, with color bleeding into the horizon, and the thick band of sun that stretches like a ring around the world to which it is engaged.

And then I look down. Finally I am positioned properly, at enough of a height that no part of the city can scurry out of sight, and into my wide eyes I ladle the view before me. Now the favelas and I meet again. I had known of them vaguely before, from a picture among others in a photo essay I had paged through in a magazine, in a movie we had watched before our departure. It is very hot, so I let myself wilt over the guardrail, blinking at the sheer number of favelas that a camera could never capture.

Around me, my friends are excitedly taking pictures, taking cues from the tourists before us who spread their arms out in the statue’s image — and then I recall that there is, in fact, a statue behind me, that there is more than one view on this mountain, and then I turn around.

The statue’s pose is precise and deliberate, and odd. I wonder, fancifully, what it might be doing: its palms are pushing outward, not upward as if to catch something. Are its arms extended so it might catch itself as it, seeming to tilt over the mountaintop, plummets; does it anticipate the failure of its sculptor to anchor it securely to Corcovado’s peak?

Or are its hands spread to welcome the world — to present us to Rio, or maybe to present Rio to us?

Except the statue’s Rio is not the Rio that I see. It looks not down at the city we have all come to ogle, but across, to the ocean. Those who pray to Christ, and take comfort in the cross-like statue’s presence at dark as it gleams like a nightlight over the city, are grateful, perhaps, to be reminded of the watchfulness of the constant guardian it represents. And yet, given the way it is posed, I am sure that the statue can see no more of the city than an earthworm sees of the sky. On the bus ride, I saw a man with boxes of Nestlé chocolate standing beside the favelas, arms spread like the statue’s, crisp red packages in both fists, crying out as the cars went past — does the statue hear him, does it even suspect that he exists?

But the statue is stone, and its blindness is not its fault, but that of its sculptor. Viewed from afar, its facial features become indistinguishable as it forms an unmistakable cross, exactly as the builders intended for the people of this traditionally Catholic country.

Our home is even farther from afar, though; we cannot understand what it is like to awaken to our gods upon great mountaintops, and to fall asleep, grateful that they gaze upon us still. As close as we are to Christ, the distance between us remains palpable, and I look upon it as I would look upon a stranger.

In the photo we have taken together, we are standing awkwardly in between two arms that let us loose into a city the statue cannot see, a nature it cannot know. I feel that his hands do not hold us, do not embrace us. Instead, they

push us, unknowingly, painlessly, into a country we do not understand.

We descend in the cable car, we walk to the bus, we get in and the door snaps shut and I grab a last picture of the statue before our sight of him is obscured, moving with uncomfortable speed as we have for the past week. A moment at a church, a moment at a mall, and another at an popular indoor market, where a vendor hardly has time to spear me a piece of pitaya to sample before my feet have moved onto the next stall, the next snatch of distracting color.

We are tourists who give our eyes no respect. We have replaced them with cameras that see what they photograph long before we do, if we ever see it at all.

And soon it will be time to leave. That is our trip, always going until we are coming home, always staying short of long enough. We will later rush through streets the statue neither sees nor dreams about, but that our view of them is better is no guarantee that we have seen them any more clearly. I have noticed the favelas, yet with the statue behind me I think I cannot even imagine what I have missed when I so easily could have seen.

At the top of Brazil’s Mount Corcovado, the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooks the city of Rio de Janeiro. But, if it saw what it should, then it would wonder if we were worthy of the redemption it so generously gives.

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

g o el

V

A new collection at the YUAG

By Caroline Sydney

T

he story could begin in 1961, when a postal service worker named Herbert Vogel and a librarian named Dorothy Hoffman together began a life of collecting, celebrating their engagement with a Pablo Picasso vase. Or it could begin in 2009, when a fraction of this collection arrived at Yale. But it really began in 1990, with New York City’s decision to replace windows in its city buildings. By this point, Herbert and Dorothy Vogel had already amassed a collection of over 2,500 artworks, delicate and important pieces that would be left vulnerable to the elements without windows in place.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA), with whom the Vogels had a relationship, arranged to move the works (filling five house-sized moving vans) from the Manhattan apartment to D.C. to be catalogued and archived.

In the decade that followed, the couple doubled this collection to over 4,500 works. Recognizing that it couldn’t house the collection in its entirety, the NGA selected 1,100 pieces to add to its own collection. As for the remainder, the NGA, together with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, conceived of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. Also known as the Vogel 50x50, this plan divided the remainder of the collection into 50 groupings of 50 works each, disseminating one portion to an institution in each state.

Yale received Connecticut’s portion and was charged with exhibiting it in its entirety within five years. Six Yale 8 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

Photography by Blair Seideman

students — two graduate students and four undergraduates — were chosen for the task through Yale’s student curation program. Guided by Molleen Theodore, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman fellow in the Education Department, they began to research the works, attempting to fit them inside the framework that would eventually become “Many Things Placed Here and There,” open now through Jan. 26, 2013.

“It’s thrilling, it’s really thrilling.

The bar is very high, the expectations are very high. These exhibitions are not segregated in separate exhibition gallery,” said Pamela Franks, deputy director for collections and education.

Typically, the duration of a curatorial project ranges from two to five years, but because this show relied on a group of students, they worked within a time frame of approximately one year, meeting on Monday nights as a seminar course would, but receiving no course credit. The pressure of frequent deadlines combined with heated discussions surrounding decisions would lead to tense moments. “We definitely took longer than a normal curatorial process to make decisions,” said Light. “I think the biggest barrier was, yes, that we were all new and inexperienced, but also that we were in a group.”

While the personal story behind the collection spoke to the student curators, they ultimately agreed to highlight a different narrative. “There’s been a lot of sentimentalizing of the Vogels, and ‘How cute is this little old couple?’ You know, ‘meager funds but wealth of art,’

there’s all these taglines— and it just doesn’t get down to the objects,” said Light. “Because ultimately, the objects are what we have, they’re what we’re looking at and they tell a story all their own.”

The curators were now tasked with identifying and sharing the voices of the works, taking an approach that focused on the collection over the collectors.

They also had a more practical role: to fold the gifted works into Yale’s existing collection, building up artist files on less researched additions and conducting an oral history project through artist interviews. In the end, the curators’ strategy merged these two goals.

“These works are embedded with the history and the memories of these collectors,” said Theodore. “They’re a fragment of this larger collection which now enters this collection of collections which is the Yale Art Gallery.” Even within Yale’s vast collection, the Vogel works stand out, due to their tendency towards intimate scale and references to the record of the creative act.

The show puts these aspects of the Vogel works into dialogue with Yale’s existing collection, a way of distinguishing the show from the 49 other 50x50 shows taking place across the country. The decision to include works from outside the core 50, from other collections and from Yale’s own, helps paint a fuller picture of the Vogels’ collecting practice. Searching for these points of intersection within Yale’s collection led to many interesting discoveries: for example, the curators selected a documentation drawing (a

small talk visual record kept for bookkeeping purposes) by the artist Robert Mangold for a work he sold to the Vogels. Though never intended for public display, the drawing is now on view in the show alongside other works by Mangold from Yale’s collection.

A focus on paper works led the Vogels to acquire pieces atypical of artists who were otherwise known for sculpture or painting. Nam June Paik, known for sculptural works featuring televisions, is represented in the Vogel collection by “Untitled, 1973,” a black field with a fine, wavering white line framing an inner rectangle evocative of a screen. In “Many Things,” the curators paired this work with a later one already in Yale’s collection— “Real Plant/Live Plant,” a closed-circuit video installation featuring a midcentury television casing and flasks holding flowers.

The juxtaposition allows the viewer to see a medium less identifiable with the artist and trace the ideas found in his early work to the later, more elaborate video art piece.

Among the 50x50 institutions, these connections are unique to Yale, explained Bailey. “At other places, [the Vogel gift] doesn’t so much fit it, but it is their modern collection. For us it fills in.” The gift introduced some new artists to the gallery’s holdings, but primarily bolstered existing collections of artists’ work.

As it happened, Yale’s collection is able to “fill in” for the Vogel collection.

Herbert Vogel had a close relationship with Sol LeWitt, the conceptual and minimal artist known for his wall drawings, speaking to him by phone nearly every Saturday. Yale owns the largest collection of LeWitt wall drawings in the world, but the Vogel collection that Yale received did not contain any works by the artist. Students borrowed works from the LeWitt collection and Yale’s collection — including one wall drawing — to represent the relationship between the collector and the artist.

Theodore described the opportunity as “a total gift — the gallery receives this gorgeous donation and the director says, ‘Do your students want to use it?’”

Each of these additions were meant not only to link the Vogel gift to Yale’s existing holdings, but also to help visitors, many of them peers of the curators, view the works as the Vogels did — closely and intuitively. When Dorothy Vogel visited the YUAG to meet with the students, her single complaint was that the works in the galleries were hung too high for her to get as close as she liked. This invitation for intense examination

characterizes the works and the mission of the show.

“The works they bought are intimate, both i n the sense that they reward close examination and that they reflect the Vogels’ intimate relationship with many of the artists they collected,” said Bailey. “After all, they loved these pieces and lived with them in their home. It doesn’t get much more intimate than that.”

During early planning stages, the group considered installing a replica of the couple’s apartment in the show. In the end, the Vogels’ 450-square-foot, one-bedroom home is perhaps best represented by the title of the show — “Many Things Placed Here and There.”

The name, taken from a Lawrence Weiner text piece installed by Dorothy in the Vogels’ bathroom, is placed to almost bracket the gallery. On the title wall by the entrance, the name of the show is flung “here and there” in bright yellow words across the panel. Then, the Weiner work itself closes the show, installed in large black vinyl letters on the back wall in full: “MANY THINGS PLACED HERE + THERE TO FORM A PLACE CAPABLE OF SHELTERING MANY OTHER THINGS PUT HERE + THERE.” “The quote is just inextricably linked to accumulating, and accumulating things you love,” said Bailey, “This ongoing obsession, where you accumulate things in order to make a place for things — it’s very Vogel.” The text tells the story of the works as they were placed in the Vogels’ home and of how they came to be “placed here and there,” around the country and here at Yale.

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

A TREE GROWS IN IOWA

BY ELEANOR MARSHALL

W

hen I was 16 years old and planting my first tomatoes, Jim Reynolds was already too old to pick or prune. But he watched me from beneath the catalpa tree, naming all the weeds as I pulled them and remembering that same blight from a few years back — knowledge you accumulate slowly from years spent in one place. Jim tended this garden for two decades of springs and summers, before he wore out and he handed it off to my mom and me.

Behind the vegetable plot and the 10 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

shade tree stretch thousands of pines, walnuts and cherries, which have been thickening quietly in rings for a quarter century. Every year, he adds one or 200 more saplings to the tree farm he has been growing just outside Oxford, Iowa, since 1987 — swamp white oak by the creek, Douglas firs in the far corner. Jim is always in his work boots and cowboy hat, and though his Levis are now loose around his shrunken frame and his face is weathered, he still gets out to the farm any time he can and rides the 40 acres on his four-wheeler.

Jim does not own the farm anymore — he passed it on to his three sons almost five years ago — but none of the wood has been harvested. He estimates that it will be another 10 or 15 years before the first timber is ready to be cut.

“You’ve got to do something for the coming generation, don’t you? That’s the idea behind it,” he told me in his plain way.

There are several reasons to start tree farms — because the earth is too hilly and eroded for conventional row crops, to provide an alternative source

small talk to the wood that comes from cutting down virgin forests, to capture carbon, or just to make a living by harvesting the lumber — but Jim says he did it mostly for his own amusement. He likes the trees, and likes being among them on the farm, measuring their expanding diameters every year.

Unlike pets or vegetables, trees are one of the few living things people care for that vastly outlive them.

Helicopter seeds become century-old maples. Jim’s new pines could see the next millennium. Even the plantation varieties of cherry and walnut wood that have been bred for speed take 50 years to mature into lumber for floorboards and side paneling. But Jim doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to harvest.

My mother has been driving out to the tree farm almost since it was started. She met Jim just after she was hired as a plant breeder in late 1990 at Holden Foundation Seeds, a small seed corn company in Williamsburg, Iowa.

They became fast friends and although neither of them still works for Holden, she regularly ate breakfast with him at the local HyVee until my parents moved away last spring. I had annual sleepovers and told secrets in the top branches.

When I go back home and feel already estranged, my sister and I ride our bikes up the gravel road and I am clear-eyed again.

Jim is one of those childhood fixtures that makes me feel like he has always been sitting up at the cabin — always having potlucks in the fall when the leaves turn and the apples are ready, always feeding half his sandwich to the farm dogs. But despite the eternity that seems to exist for me at the tree farm, this place has been a relatively recent rooting force in Jim’s life. Much of his early years were spent wandering, a habit he carried into adulthood.

Jim was born in 1928 in Snyder, Texas, the youngest of six. His mother died when he was 2 years old, and the children got passed around to aunts and uncles for years. “When you’re kicked around, nobody really wants you. They treat you as a duty,” he said. He attended

seven schools before his Aunt Eppie and Uncle Saul, a childless couple in Taos, adopted him in 1943.

“They really wanted me, I was their only child and I inherited what they had,” he said. “I tell everybody that’s when I was born. I was 15 years old.

In retrospect, I realized that it was the happiest moment of my life.”

When Taos lost its teachers to the war, Jim’s aunt and uncle sent him to boarding school in Kenyon City, Colo.

After graduating and starting at the University of Boulder, he, too, joined World War II — spending 18 months in Japan with the 25th Infantry Division.

He finished his degree with the help of the GI Bill and married Barbara, a family friend from Snyder. Painting still lifes and baking too-sweet walnut brownies, Barbara moved with Jim for years before settling into a permanent home. Another fixture of the farm, Barbara died last year.

“I was footloose and fancy-free.

I kept waiting for Barbara to divorce me but she didn’t,” he said. He hadn’t really lived any other way. “I had moved around since birth. It seemed normal to me to get tired of something and then quit.”

Jim has always been good at nurturing the beginnings of things — at making up new lives. He started his first tree farm just after college, when he and his wife were both working as teachers in Aberdeen, Wash. He planted 15 acres with Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, and even built a little cabin at the top of the hill. But they packed up and moved again a few years later. It was only after decades of further wandering that he found, almost halfway through his life, somewhere he could settle down.

After a stint at Iowa State University, he finally settled in Williamsburg, Iowa, in 1971 and began working for Holden Foundation Seeds as a plant pathologist.

He was a veteran researcher by the time my mother arrived a decade later. But on the tree farm, he was still caring for the first transplants. Amidst the supple new branches, his youngest son, Rod, got married on the tree farm about 20 years after the first roots.

Most forests just seem to exist — an ancient acorn fell and an oak grew — but this one was planted: Jim can remember each sapling’s beginning. In the spring of 1987, a crew of five men transplanted over a thousand trees in a week. These migrant foresters travel alone, pitching one-man tents with lone campfires among the fledgling stalks. With each annual planting, Jim has to prune his trees until they are 16 feet tall, so they’ll grow into valuable lumber, and he wraps the youngest saplings with aluminum to keep out the deer. When a tree is shorter than knee-high, it can be ruined by a mouse biting right through the bark.

After they are tucked into the ground, watered and protected by Jim’s gentle hands for the first few years, the transplants either make it or they don’t. Jim counts the survivors and gets excited the first time they produce nuts, collecting them in pails. After that, they seem to disappear into the forest. Forty acres seem to hold an infinity of slender trunks. But even more magical to me is the infinity it takes them to mature. My entire lifetime, from sitting on Jim’s knee to helping him out of his truck — all my angst-ridden phases and new haircuts — seem not to have registered in these woods. Despite over a thousand new additions and each season of steady growth, 10 or 20 years are hard to notice in a forest.

My memories of the tree farm begin just as his memory started to fade. I can remember Barbara reading me picture books under the picnic shelter, Jim speeding around on his four-wheeler.

Now Jim lives in a retirement home in Grinnell, Iowa, where his son John works as a nurse. Part of caring for Jim is driving him out to check on the young saplings and vegetables. He can’t walk long distances anymore, but he has left this farm to his sons — a little something for the next generation, a little something for the next kid picking green beans and learning about the tomatoes. For now, he watches from the catalpa tree, waiting for the first year the new apple trees bear fruit.

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

That was enough for the night Dominoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in Kiev is fantastic, and other observations while DJing across Europe

BY SUNIK KIM

12 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

feature

T

he TGI Friday’s in Ukraine was blasting “Hung Up” by Madonna. I ordered a taco. It was 10 minutes to our flight, and we’d only gone to bed a few hours earlier — with each bite of tortilla, the events of the past night twisted into a foggier and foggier haze, “straddling fantasy and reality,” one might say — a cheap magician’s catchphrase. Then the food was gone and it was time to board.

This past May I spent 15 days in Europe doing shows with four musician friends: Marcel (XXYYXX), Charlie (Giraffage), Slow Magic, and Mikey (Blackbird Blackbird). While we’d all talked over various Internet media pre-Europe, I’d only met Charlie and Slow Magic in person. We all had roots in similar places: making halfformed beats after school, bedroom insomnia. And while I can’t speak for my friends, I don’t think anyone who pirates music production software and learns how to use that software via YouTube tutorials ever expects to play a show anywhere. Let alone Europe, or Scandinavia.

Throughout the tour we played in a different city every night, a total of 14. We mostly got around with the tour van, complete with a bed, but also a few trains, planes, and Ryanair.

Paris, Berlin, Rome; Athens, Warsaw, Vilnius.

Reasons I fell in love with Vilnius: the lighting at around 6 p.m. threw an otherworldly blanket over the city; every body and street sign morphed into a silent silhouette. Also, the hotel had a rabbit in the lobby.

The fact that only a few hours after arriving I was performing a song I’d made in my bedroom when I was 17 brought on a crazy mixture of emotions. My junior year in high school, I’d just chop up a Beyoncé sample every night and put it up on SoundCloud for my friends to hear.

I wouldn’t say that I’d die happy after the 24 hours we spent there

because that’s lame and dying sucks.

But we came pretty close. Not to dying.

I should talk about the show. I couldn’t hear a single thing except the occasional hi-hat or rowdy audience member. The subwoofers hummed, pounded at my eardrums.

During Charlie’s set, the bass set off car alarms in the nearby lot. All of my equipment — laptop, drum machines, mixer — was bouncing like the hydraulic cars in the “Still D.R.E.” music video, every step of the way threatening to topple off the back and into the hands of who knows what.

And the crowd — my god. Around 800 people showed up to the Vilnius show. The second show I ever did, in a small club in Brooklyn, was for nine people. They were all my friends. The crowd in Vilnius was young, probably early 20s; they danced like crazy to the least danceable shit. Life is weird and awesome and rewards you just as much as it makes you want to lie down and sleep forever.

At around 4 a.m., back at the hotel, we flipped the TV on, only to find a black-and-white feed of people … sleeping. We all waited for a moment, thinking it was maybe a reality show or a strange Lithuanian ad. After a few minutes, we realized — holy shit — this was a live security feed of some hotel room. In our drunk, delirious paranoia we stared at the two couples shifting around on their beds, as the silent camera stared down at them.

Soon enough, a heavily saturated music video replaced the haunting image — one of a man with a turntable lodged in his stomach. The curve of the record and needle bulged out of his body in a disturbing, “Alien”esque manner. He couldn’t escape the song pounding deep in his gut — an energetic dance track. The video cut between shots of bystanders dancing, grooving to this poor man’s disease as he tried to lead a normal life. At last, in the final throes of the piece, the

afflicted patient received a successful operation to extract the turntable.

That was enough for the night.

We continued forward, glimpsing pieces of monuments through faded van windows, leaving cities before we had time to pronounce their names or try their food, until leaving and arriving melted into one inescapable forward motion, a current sweeping each day away like a bowling ball to pins.

Athens sticks in my mind, mostly for these incredible chicken sandwiches. We finished them on the way to a bar, where we climbed up a rusty ladder to a balcony area barely large enough to fit five people. From there, we watched the humming crowd below: conversations sparked and fizzled out, friends became friends, and the world made sense — simple as the foam left in beer glasses, a pat on the back, a parting hug signaling the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

Speeding across a vast, unfamiliar territory makes you gain an appreciation for the strange as much as the beautiful.

In Helsinki, Marcel’s computer broke moments before his set, prompting an intense on-site surgery.

Marcel and the promoter were poised above the post-op MacBook like assassins, twirling massive butcher knives in lieu of screwdrivers, which were nowhere to be found, to lock the screws in place.

Our Luxembourg show was at a rained-out festival. It was like we’d stepped onto a movie set. Thunder, rain, mud everywhere, narrow footbridges, teetering Porta Potties.

We played our shows in ponchos, and spent the couple hours leading up to our set huddled in the tour van, trying to get Wi-Fi on our phones and watching “Workaholics.” At that point we didn’t even care that much about the show. We briefly considered staying there all night.

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feature I got completely lost in Musikbunker, Aachen, Germany — it stretched above ground and underground and all over the place for all I knew. I’d just stepped out of the main venue space to get a beer from the artist room backstage, and suddenly found myself in a stark white stairwell surrounded by THREE sets of double doors, all of which had knobs that spun uselessly in place like the useless fucking knobs that they are.

It was only half an hour later, after climbing up and down this insane labyrinth, that I got spat out the back entrance of the venue — which was guarded by thick metal doors — like a small, drunk turd.

I took 10 steps and I was in Manchester. The promoter had only sold 25 tickets for a 750-capacity space. After a discussion over dinner that nearly became heated — the food was enough to keep us grounded — we decided to take a day off instead of playing a subpar show. Since we’d only found out a few days prior, our flights and lodging remained the same. We flew into the U.K. and spent the entire day in the airport Travelodge. We slept, ate in the coffee shop, and slept some more. I counted my collection of European coins on the table, organizing them in stacks.

There was a rabbit right outside our window.

After 12 hours of sleep, the rabbit was gone and I’d kicked off my sheets.

Ready to move on, mind and body engulfed in fog, there’s no worse feeling than realizing you’ve forgotten your laptop at an obscure airport Travelodge when you’re past check-in and 10 minutes from boarding. I found my computer — it took frantic phone calls, two taxi trips, and tons of pacing back and forth — but consequently had to take a later flight by myself to make it to Aachen in time for the show.

I’m not going to say that I was glad I forgot my laptop. I wasn’t. It sucked.

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But being alone for the first time in a week felt really good. Just being able to sit with people I will never see again, throw on my headphones, and think about nothing for a few hours was the refresher I needed.

Across the aisle, an elderly lady sat next to the window. She held a small, white stuffed animal of some kind, and would talk to it, try to feed it, and turn its head towards the window and describe the view. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

The plane landed.

Aachen, Manchester, Athens, the jolt of wheels hitting tarmac and honey-roasted peanut packs. I looked out the window and saw a city through grey clouds.

Someone said Kiev, so it was Kiev.

The venue was called Malaya Opera, an abandoned, imposing opera house on the corner of a regimented city block. When we arrived, there were already people lining up, and they stared at the raggedy group of humans filing out of these vans like aliens.

Soundcheck was good. We ordered Domino’s. If you ever get the chance, try the Domino’s in Kiev. But for the most part, we hung out in the green room, checked out the urban sprawl from the third story where the stage was, and watched “Workaholics.”

It wasn’t until Slow Magic’s set that events fell into motion. The venue was eerie in a perfect way, the crowd was huge, and there were fog machines. However, right around midnight while munching on leftover crusts in the artist room backstage, we heard a growing ruckus. Just as we got in view of the stage, two burly police officers strode up the steps to Slow Magic (who, by the way, wears a kaleidoscopic, brightly colored animal mask for his shows). We were stunned — at first believing they were rowdy, dressed-up fans. After a few exchanged words, the officers picked up the onstage power strip and dramatically unplugged everything from it. The music cut out, fog machines turned off, the lights were

back in standby mode, and the crowd started chanting “Fuck the police” in a variety of languages as the officers stood onstage next to a man with an animal mask and a drum, out of their element, big brimmed hats and all.

In retrospect, we should’ve been more scared, perhaps a little more cautious, or cautious at all. But instead, Slow Magic started banging on his drum, sans microphone and computer, and the rest of us invited the crowd up to the stage. Dozens clambered up — there were no barriers of any kind.

At this point, the venue was beyond hysterical. The officers looked at what must have appeared to be a drugfueled ritual. They left.

The crowd, however, stayed. We never got the music back, but in place of that, we met and took pictures with and chatted with hundreds of fans onstage. Over and over, we heard about how rare it is for producers to come to Kiev, and how they only had famous pop stars tour there. Everyone was beaming, partially at excitement from the police run-in, partially at being able to put faces and bodies and handshakes to the music.

To have someone you’ve never seen before genuinely excited to meet you via a song they’d heard on the Internet — that is insane. And the fact that I would never see most of them afterwards lent the scene a sense of fleeting beauty that I’ll struggle to find again.

The clock ran down, the stragglers left the opera house, and we made it back to our lodging, which happened to be a massive mansion owned by a potbellied man who wore slippers.

We asked no questions, retreated to the balcony on the second floor, and soaked in the sounds of 4 a.m. Kiev: bottles breaking in the distance, vines creeping up brick walls, hushed conversations, and second-story rendezvouses.

I’d do anything to go back to that point in time when everything was fresh and new.

A TOXIC LEGACY

BY JACK NEWSHAM ILLUSTRATIONS BY KAREN TIAN

T

he sun had just come out when draped themselves in Italian flags graduation ceremonies began emblazoned with a demand for justice. on Old Campus on a wet May Absent that day, as he had been morning in 1996. While a huge labor at each of the dozens of court dates demonstration on the New Haven that preceded this one, was Stephan Green shook some students and their Schmidheiny. families, little of the clamor made it “In the name of the Italian people, the through Phelps Gate.

Turin court of appeal issues its sentence,” The Yale Concert Band played the tribunal’s presiding justice read Wagner and Berlioz as graduates from the verdict. “This court finds the proceeded through the gates of Old defendant, Stephan Schmidheiny, guilty.”

Campus. Before students returned to Schmidheiny probably wasn’t a their colleges and professional schools familiar face to most Yale students. to receive their degrees, University The Swiss businessman — 48 when he President Richard Levin presented eight walked across the stage at Yale, 65 today honorary diplomas to artists, doctors — was well-known in the budding field and innovators who had been selected of sustainable development from his from hundreds of candidates. forestry operations in Latin America and Among them was Stephan his advocacy for “eco-efficient” business Schmidheiny. practices, but archival searches indicate “You have helped to create an he had only visited Yale twice. attainable vision of a global economy “He’s not shy, but he’s always been based on sustainable, ecologically sound low-profile, definitely,” said Sean development,” read Levin, according to McKaughan, who chairs the board of the ceremonial citation. the Panama-based Avina Foundation, Seventeen years later, this June, in a group founded by Schmidheiny that a courtroom in Italy, the atmosphere funds sustainable development projects was tense as the judges filed into the in Latin America. Avina is one of his courtroom. Some wore notes of protest main philanthropic endeavors, and the clipped to their shirts, while others billion-dollar endowment he set up in

2003 to support it led Forbes to declare him “the Bill Gates of Switzerland.”

Schmidheiny’s low profile elevated in 1992. That year, in anticipation of the United Nations “Earth Summit” to be held in Rio de Jainero where he would be the voice of business and industry, Schmidheiny authored Changing Course, a book that outlined his belief that environmentally conscious business practices were not only feasible, but were an opportunity for growth and profit. In the book’s final pages, chairmen and CEOs of the world’s largest corporations co-signed a letter announcing their intention to “chang[e] course toward our common future.”

He was widely seen as someone who “had walked the talk,” according to William K. Reilly, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reilly later introduced Schmidheiny’s name into consideration for an honorary degree while serving on the Yale board of trustees.

“He’s a very progressive man, and personally, he’s a very sympathetic man,” said Reilly. His book Changing Course, Reilly added, “was a key document that was widely cited going into Rio in 1992.”

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feature

Unstated in Schmidheiny’s book, however, was how he had personally changed course.

Before he put aside a billion dollars to promote sustainable development, before he received his honorary degree from Yale, before he spoke to the U.N. or bought his first tract of forest, Schmidheiny led the Swiss Eternit Group, one of the world’s largest producers of asbestos cement.

As the Italian justice system tells it, changing course wasn’t enough.

As president of the Swiss Eternit Group, Schmidheiny was responsible for several asbestos cement factories in northern Italy and Switzerland from 1976 until the late 1980s. In 2001, an Italian public prosecutor began investigating Schmidheiny after learning of the deaths of Italian workers who worked for Eternit in Switzerland.

In 2009, Schmidheiny was ordered to stand trial. With the support of unions and activists, the investigation shifted to focus on four Eternit plants in Italy.

Citing internal company documents and medical reports, the prosecution alleged that Schmidheiny and other executives knew that breathing asbestos could lead to disease and death, but downplayed those risks to the public and failed to protect their employees.

It wasn’t just the employees who were harmed by asbestos, either.

Epidemiological studies of Casale Monferrato, where Eternit’s largest Italian plant was located, showed that residents didn’t have to work at the 16 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

Eternit plant to get sick. Even the wives of some asbestos workers contracted diseases like mesothelioma — a virtually untreatable cancer of the chest cavity — simply from washing their husbands’ clothes. Today, the vast majority of those dying of cancer in Casale never worked with asbestos.

The entire city had been contaminated.

In February 2012, Schmidheiny and a co-defendant were sentenced to 16 years in prison and nearly 90 million euros in environmental and medical damages.

Their crimes, the court found, included causing an “intentional disaster.”

A year later, in June, an appellate tribunal imposed millions of euros in additional penalties and added two years to Schmidheiny’s sentence. (His co-defendant died before the appeal was filed.)

Schmidheiny, for his part, has maintained his innocence and has promised that he will “never go to an Italian prison.” While he did not agree to speak for this article, press releases issued by his representatives have referred to the verdict as “totally incomprehensible” and “scandalous,” and his defense team has announced that they will appeal the verdict to Italy’s highest court.

only problem is that — with enough time and exposure — asbestos kills people.

As asbestos came into widespread use, though, few knew of its fatal consequences. Today, it’s widely known that prolonged breathing of asbestos can result in painful and sometimes fatal diseases like lung cancer and mesothelioma. Globally, about 100,000 people die from them every year.

In Schmidheiny’s telling, though, when he took the reins of the Swiss Eternit Group in 1976 at age 29, the company’s executives believed that asbestos could be used safely. In a 2008 article in the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche, Schmidheiny recalled that his father, who preceded him as president of the Swiss Eternit Group, had believed as much himself, and that he cursed Irving Selikoff — an American doctor whose studies on asbestos diseases received global attention — and wrote him off as a quack.

Though Schmidheiny was more concerned than his father, having himself worked in an Eternit plant in Brazil, he said he believed that scientific evidence suggested that controlled use of asbestos was possible.

“At that time, I had no intention of replacing asbestos in my sphere of CHANGING COURSE influence,” he said, according to Die he story of Schmidheiny’s trial, Weltwoche. however — and his philanthropy, By the end of his first year as his business career, and all the rest chief executive, however, he has said — isn’t just about what happened in a he became convinced that the use few factories in the 1970s and ’80s. Both of asbestos was unsustainable. He Schmidheiny’s defenders and critics say announced that Eternit would attempt that the trial is about an entire industry. to develop a replacement fiber for For nearly a century, asbestos could asbestos for use in its fiber cement. At be found in everything. The fibrous the same time, Schmidheiny said, the mineral was easy to mine and cheap Swiss Eternit Group would invest tens to process, and it lent its lightness and of millions of dollars into increasing durability to hundreds of everyday safety at its Italian factories. products — including Eternit’s cement.

“You’re a 29-year-old that suddenly “It’s a marvelous mineral,” said is telling the board that you’re going Geoffrey McGovern, a researcher at get out of the asbestos industry,” said RAND who has written about asbestos McKaughan. “To a lot of businesspeople, litigation and bankruptcy in the United the way that Stephan responded was States. “You can bend it, you can weave seen as a model of social responsibility.” it, you can wrap it around things.” The As the story goes, Schmidheiny

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feature succeeded in reforming Eternit’s production methods by the 1980s. While the company still used asbestos, it cut back on asbestos use where possible.

But between Italy’s weak construction sector and the inability of Eternit’s new asbestos-free products to compete with cheaper asbestos products, the company tanked. The Italian Eternit operation went bankrupt in 1986.

In the meantime, Schmidheiny got involved with other ventures. He had already purchased his first tract of forest in Chile four years earlier, and began to build a new company around forestry and wood products. In 1984, he established FUNDES, a philanthropy to support small businesses. He served on several corporate boards throughout the 1980s, and starting in 1988, began selling off the Swiss Eternit Group’s remaining factories. In 2006, he established a fund to make compensation payments to Eternit workers sickened by asbestos.

“One of his proudest life achievements was to rid his family of asbestos,” said Reilly, the Yale trustee.

And so Stephan Schmidheiny entered a new phase of his life. Embracing a lifelong concern for the environment, he advised the U.N., championed “ecoefficiency,” and founded the Avina Foundation. He spoke to industrialists and students alike, visiting Duke, Columbia, and Harvard — and, on a few occasions, Yale.

VICTORY FOR VICTIMS

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ut two courts in Turin declared that Schmidheiny was more aware of the danger of asbestos than he would ever admit. Alberto Ogge, the chief justice of the appellate court, even compared Schmidheiny’s culpability in the deaths of Eternit’s workers to Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

In Britain, the epidemiologist Richard Doll “exhibited a clear association [between asbestos and lung cancer] in 1955,” said Benedetto Terracini, an epidemiologist at the University of Turin who testified for the prosecution and

helped conduct several studies of Casale Monferrato in the 1980s and 1990s. “If we want to fix a date in which persons of the industries should have known, I would say early 1960s,” he said.

The prosecution claimed that internal records make the case even clearer. They cited company documents from a 1976 meeting of European asbestos company executives, including Schmidheiny, in which lung cancer and mesothelioma were acknowledged to result from working with asbestos.

“In most European countries, you have to adapt your safety standards to the level of technical knowledge,” said Laurent Vogel, a lawyer and a researcher for the European Trade Union Institute who has written about the trial. “The level of harm could have been reduced significantly.”

Barry Castleman, an American asbestos expert who testified for the prosecution, said he thought Schmidheiny’s actions were not just illegal under Italian law, but morally offensive.

“They didn’t go through the little bit of trouble to at least say, ‘Look, we’re going to provide you with work clothes, we’re going to launder them at the plant and provide you separate lockers,’” said Castleman. While European asbestos companies were not under the same legal obligation to warn their employees as American companies, Castleman said, they still bore a moral responsibility.

“They were mum because they were cheap and no one was making them spend the dollar,” he said.

The trial began in late 2009. For the next 26 months, dozens of researchers, politicians, and former asbestos workers would take the stand. The trial’s conclusion was broadcast around the world. As the verdict was read, Schmidheiny’s lawyers grimaced and kneaded their faces.

Laurie Kazan-Allen, the coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, was among those Italians and international activists who cheered the verdict. During the trial, her group

published a book of monographs on various aspects of Eternit’s history and environmental damage. It features a cartoon of a seven-headed hydra of Eternit executives perched atop a blooddrenched Earth.

“It’s inspiring, amazing, just extraordinary,” she said of the verdict.

“Next to the Renaissance, it’s one of the most important things that Italy has ever done.”

Kazan-Allen said that other prosecutors have been watching the trial in Turin closely. She imagines other asbestos producers were, too.

“They would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be worried,” she said.

A BIZARRE VERDICT

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ut on the other side of the courtroom, Schmidheiny’s defenders speak of a different and chilling effect. Columns and editorials in Swiss newspapers have declared Italy an investment risk and called the verdict “class warfare.”

For Schmidheiny’s defenders, the trial is about scapegoating one man for the sins of an entire industry, many of whose titans are dead. An open letter signed by more than 100 Latin American businessmen has referred to the proceedings in Italy as a “flawed political trial.”

“Most of the countries where asbestos processing is prohibited have found solutions to deal with the casualties,” wrote Peter Schurmann, a spokesman for

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feature Schmidheiny, in an email. “Those states have set up programs to compensate affected people and to safely dispose of asbestos. Italy is the only country which tries to solve the tragedy by a criminal lawsuit.”

Indeed, one of the biggest reasons the verdict has disturbed so many is the downright strangeness of the Italian legal system. For starters, Schmidheiny was tried in absentia, a rarity in most of Europe and illegal in most circumstances in the United States. Then there’s the fact that Schmidheiny was tried before a criminal court for something American justice solves these days with negotiated payouts, or less frequently, lawsuits.

“The European way of thinking about these things is fundamentally different from American law,” said McGovern, the RAND scholar.

Except for a single federal prosecution of asbestos executives that ended in a not-guilty verdict, said McGovern, “within the realm of asbestos, it’s purely a civil case for monetary damages.”

The American system for processing asbestos claims may be uniquely efficient, however. In Italy, “basically, there’s no legal shield, no way to get compensation” from one’s employer for asbestos-related disease, according to Giovanni Comandé, a professor of comparative law at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

In Italy, however, there’s precedent for prosecution of asbestos manufacturers,

YDN

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said Vogel, who added that Italian prosecutors have filed dozens of such cases against them — to mixed verdicts, none of which came close to that issued in Turin — since the 1980s. Still, he said, public and political pressure played a significant role.

“In most other European countries, it would have been possible to prosecute the managers and owners of Eternit,” said Vogel. “The point is that there was no willingness from the public prosecution officials.”

A QUESTION OF HONOR

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ow, an Italian advocacy group is asking Yale to revoke Schmidheiny’s honorary doctorate.

The Association for Asbestos Victims’ Families (AFeVA), an organization founded by residents of Casale Monferrato and unionized Eternit workers, has begun circulating a petition declaring that “there is no ‘honor’ in the conduct of Mr. Stephan Schmidheiny.”

Yale has never stripped any recipient of an honorary degree, and few universities have ever done so.

Since 2007, three universities revoked degrees they awarded in the 1980s to Robert Mugabe, the dictatorial leader of Zimbabwe. At the outbreak of World War I, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania revoked degrees they awarded to the Kaiser. They’ve been revoked for less, though; just last year, the trustees of Tufts University stripped Lance Armstrong of his honorary diploma after the seven-time Tour de France winner was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs.

Yale, so far, is standing by its decision.

“The decision to award this degree was made by a committee that considered Mr. Schmidheiny’s full record as a philanthropist who used his wealth to fund sustainable development in Latin America and elsewhere, and a path-breaking international advocate of change in the way businesses address environmental sustainability, as well as a businessman who

inherited and dismantled a decades-old family asbestos processing concern,” University spokesman Tom Conroy said in an email. Referring to the pending appeal, he added, “Yale does not believe that the ongoing legal proceedings in Italy provide cause to reconsider the judgment made by the committee in 1996.”

Though few faculty or honorary degree committee members remembered Schmidheiny, and deferred to the University for comment, Reilly said he believed the degree was still merited.

“He’s a very self-possessed, thoughtful, intelligent guy,” Reilly said. “A statesman, not a malefactor.” Having traveled to Italy several times and witnessed widespread open burnings of garbage — a crime in Italy — go unpunished, Reilly said that he “was not an admirer of Italian environmental performance” and was deeply skeptical of the charges brought against Schmidheiny.

“I’m an American lawyer. I’d want to see if it stands up to scrutiny under American jurisprudence,” said Reilly.

“To react prima facie to an Italian justice determination of criminal responsibility for something that happened 20 or 30 years ago would never be the basis for a revocation decision.”

Schmidheiny, for his part, has retired, and is said to by those who know him to be confident that the verdict will be overturned by Italy’s supreme court or by the European Court of Human Rights.

Even if both courts were to let the present verdict stand, though, lengthy case backlogs mean that wouldn’t be known for years.

“Mr. Schmidheiny is doing fine and enjoying life as a retired person,” his representative wrote in an email. “He once said that he enjoys not being on stage anymore but rather sitting in among the audience where he can watch the world theatre, applaud the performers or leave at the interlude.”

But to Stephan Schmidheiny’s accusers, the show isn’t over. And he still has a role to play.

A PILE OF SHARDS Four Yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes on China

BY EDMUND DOWNIE

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crit

T

he only time I pass for Chinese is when I speak on the phone. This June, I called the Fashionable Orchid Hotel in Ji’an, a city across the border from North Korea, and asked if they took foreigners. She was puzzled.

I told her I was a foreigner. She paused, confused. “Do you have a passport or a national identification card?” The latter is standard ID for Chinese citizens. “A passport,” I said.

I had never gotten that pointed a question about my citizenship status in China, because if I speak Chinese with a peculiarly accurate Beijing rasp, my appearance sits on the far, far end of that assumed continuum between China and the West — very tall, very blond, very white. I traveled once to a small town in the southern province of Jiangxi and spent the day wandering alone, and I wished my shoulders could hunch up to the crown of my forehead, so as to block from my vision at least some of the eyes looking my way. Of course they stared, and they deserved no ill will from me for it. I let my eyes go numb with acceptance and boiled fitfully inside.

One little boy followed me that day for 10 minutes, until I stopped in the downtown district and pointed a camera at him. He let out a shriek and ran away.

W

hen I visited China in spring 2010, I had the impression that I could somehow surmount the strictures of approaching the country with a foreigner’s consciousness.

Surmount to where, exactly, was less clear. The idea was negatively defined. I

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made it out of clippings from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and various other publications that offer themselves up as vessels for the memes of national political discourse. Their ambitions of generalist greatness require their analysis to be constructed upon a substratum of the familiar. China is big, China is repressive, China maltreats Tibet. These are the elemental components of these publications’ work. Those thoughts can be combined with fresher ideas to create compounds of genuine insight. But it is a rare article that will not be synthesized at least in part from them, and by extension, the orientation towards China they represent, a cat’s cradle of fear and ecstasy rooted in the concerns of the West’s transnational elite..

I came to China that spring, and I wanted a mode of thinking that could extract those elements from my own head with the precision of a pair of tweezers, until I could stand imperiously above the publications that had exposed me to China and point out why they were wrong. The foundation, I supposed, was language, and on that front, I was a ferociously directed student. But I needed also to read the right things about China, from sources directed at China-immersives, rather than China-dilettantes. I developed a stable of favorites that spring and kept up with them for most of the next two years in college. I cut the Times out of my Google Reader and pored over takedowns of Western media reports on Hidden Harmonies, the Englishlanguage project of several Chinese

expats, dedicated to savaging Western commentators and their misperceptions of China. Their postings felt like the work of unusually thorough YouTube commenters, and my own attempts to understand them were a high-wire act of self-dissolution, an attempt to liquidate my biases without submitting unreservedly to their ideas.

I remember the post I found most convincing. In the summer of 2011, the Georgetown University basketball team played a professional Chinese team as part of its tour of the country, and a brawl broke out. The Hidden Harmonies blogger “melektaus” said that Western media outlets blamed the melee’s uglier moments on the Chinese side and downplayed the Georgetown players’ roles as instigators. “Even in the US’s long history of yellow(peril) [sic] journalism against China,” s/he wrote, “coverage of this game is a salient example of lack of balance and outright prejudice against China and its people.”

Video of the brawl’s triggering moment seemed to show a Chinese player committing a hard foul on a Georgetown player, followed by the Georgetown player swinging wildly at the Chinese player’s face. I sat at dinner with my parents and told them how wrong Western observers had been.

I

t was this summer, on my fourth visit to China, when I finally realized that, despite three years of language study, an in-country research project, and a self-identity inextricable from long-term exposure to China, I could not warm

crit myself to Chinese food. I am normally an ecumenical eater, but I wandered in and out of restaurants this summer in jumpy frustration until I found a dish I liked or was too tired to find another.

Other habits of my past visits were fading, too. I was no longer blogging, nor was I taking the frenetic notes I used to collate my thoughts when I travel. These two activities had been the supposed vessels of my intellectual liberation, in which I would gather the products of my dedicated study and refine them into evidence that I was surmounting my foreigner’s consciousness. But China felt too familiar now to be analyzed through these media. I was no longer interested enough in my passing impressions to think them worth crystallizing in any printed form.

It was also dawning on me that the moment of severance from my foreigner’s mindset would not come in the manner I had imagined. I would experience no elevating drift of consciousness from the Western to the — Chinese? Non-Western? The two-poled line is not real. Old-guard Maoists are not state-sponsored hacks are not free-market champions are not American business elites are not liberal champions of democracy, and on and on, endlessly refracting in a series of negations. I am left with a pile of shards.

What can I create from them?

Experience is a fickle glue. I have walked through ancient Korean tombs in the borderlands of Northeast China.

I have seen Communist Party slogans emblazoned on bus seats. I have gone

to the house of a man who found his spiritual awakening as an Amway salesman. Chen Xiaoping grew up poor in the rural southwest, studied nuclear engineering, grew apart from it, found his classmates lifeless. There are larger messages about this country to be found in Xiaoping’s story, if you want to find them there. You can find messages everywhere you go, and they can say whatever your experiences convince you they say, and only your own dogged distrust can militate against this sort of conquest.

The price is a helpless fog. I can talk about the economic future of China in any number of ways, but not with a good sense of what I actually believe.

On these questions, at least, I don’t need an opinion. But I judge the food without willing to. Men mean to show affection when they grab my forearm while speaking to me, but I shiver at their touch.

I do not regret my approach to studying China. I am glad that I can conduct research in Chinese, and if distancing myself from the Times and its peers was crude, it may have been the sort of extreme step I needed to reconsider the worth of these sources with fresher eyes. But my initial goal of transcending foreignerdom has given way to a sense that my task when I study China is not a linear movement from one perspective to another so much as the exploration of a vast and multidimensional mental space studded with all sorts of viewpoints. Familiar labels like “American elite” give that

space a sort of structure, linking ideas together in an accessible way. We should not be content with the ease of these parochialisms, but it also must be said that what we use to replace them are just as much our creations. There is no twopoled line, but, by the same token, there is no structure. Because who, really, is the American elite, and why are they so prominent in the mental space I created when I first started exploring China?

Why was I so concerned about being like them?

The answers to this question, and many others, have structured the way I think about China. As I change, I change in reference to them, and in reference to changing reference to them. I construct and navigate that vast and multidimensional mental space through just such a series of transformations, always traceable to my earlier orientation, and inextricable from it. Such are the strictures of the foreigner’s consciousness. Such are the strictures of everyone’s consciousness.

They stared at me in Jiangxi, and the attendant on the phone thought I was Chinese, and I’m located somewhere between those poles and so many others.

So many as to no longer be poles, but just an chaotic mess of points and points and points. I give it structure because I have to. It is dichotomies like ChineseWestern, democratic-authoritarian, capitalist-communist that give order to my thoughts, even as that order skews those thoughts in restricting ways. But the chaos bubbles beneath.

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BELSHAZZAR

by Bassel Habbab

S

tepping down into the bar Tagoreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, I found before him two small cups of port already poured. He wore red pants and a white tunic, bundled up inside a navy trench.

His thin black tendril fingers seemed equipped with suction grip, the way he wrapped them around the glass and tucked the edge between his teeth. He limped his left hand slowly through the air, to make a point. A daddy missing

22 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

three long legs. The glass before me tripped and spilled. The air around him often got this wrinkled, I recall.

Relieved of some queer weight that otherwise would keep it taut, the air withdrew into itself, a crumpled thankyou bag. Things nearby had difficulty standing up.

The whole week a verse had been running through my head and I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t place it, then finally I managed

to nip its corner. A fragile white receipt, barreling under rows of Suburbans in a Best Buy parking lot: lines from a French folk song my mother used to play on a Walkman plugged with two small speakers while I bathed my body before bed, a song about a lover who loses his beloved by failing to buy her a bouquet of roses, but which I suspect is about the death of a friend who is then reincarnated as a joyful nightingale.

fiction I grabbed a soggy napkin and started brushing my pants furiously. When my gaze re-rose, I found him staring, glazed. Tracing a French redhead, the first that came along.

Besides which, I remember just one more costume of his. The night we met, a baffling Napoleonic cloak enshrouded him in salty coral clouds. He moored his ghostly craft along a rusty drain, bounced ashore with devastatingly light steps as if the granite sands beneath were really undercooked meringue. I like your coat, I said. Ah yes, my coat, like he’d forgotten it was there, and sipped his rum. I was nineteen, I think Belshazzar was maybe thirty-five.

When he spoke, it never was to me, but to the walls and windows, kettles, the lemon tree or mattress, or else to nothing in particular; so I would speak to him, and he would to the world.

He had a strange habit of pausing, at the most unpredictable moments, his entire physical machinery during the course of our early evening walks.

Slowly, he would turn his head towards me, and his tender little eyes ... His eyes, I say. Helpless like twin waxy spiders slipping on two frozen milky pearls.

Sailing — one of us would always wait until the other brought it up. I often said I could come back in three years, a year more than he would yet live, and we could get a boat and sail around the world. We kept a journal where we listed carefully: ports, phone numbers, prices, pieces of equipment.

Ropes, chess pieces, bicycles, fishing lines, hooks, limes, suchlike. He’d cross things out, rewrite others, the more he crossed out and rewrote the less room there was left until he had to squint to read the lists. They scared me, his hard squints; I felt his squid-ink eyeballs might just tumble out his head. But would they bounce, or shatter?

Nearly two years after I quit Cape Town, death was lurking in his breast.

I, who did not know, was working out a story, a letter series between two prisoners writing little tales, one to

I grabbed a soggy napkin and started brushing my pants furiously. When my gaze re-rose, I found him staring, glazed. the other. A reckless correspondence, two fierce poets, lyrical brinkmanship.

It got stale, fast. By the time the third story rolled around, someone had to die. Belshazzar, Story Two protagonist, the safest choice: nothing personal, strictly literary. Two days later, he was dead for real.

Once, I met him. On a separate occasion, he died. One was first, and then the other.

I read a different eulogy for him at the funeral, which in fact I fail to attend, partly because it is in Durban and partly because I don’t find out about his death until he’s three weeks gone. I show up late, I suppose, or imagine it that way, somehow such a truly stupid hallucination comes more to life, in this miserable hour, if I am late. And his friends recognize me, all the ones I never met. There is a silent space between us which they patrol and they respect. Maybe we all go out for drinks, or maybe each goes home alone.

Years ago we met for early evening tea at Hello Sailor, and I told him I was working on a little story about him. Nothing happened in the story; nothing ever happened in my stories.

Mainly I would write down the last crazy thing he said whenever he got up to use the toilet, then later puzzle over vapid scrawls and try to rustle up a tale. His lips curled, his shoulders tensed. He put his teacup down. I so well remember the feeling of the light. Golden, thick, the whole street drowning in a flood of ancient honey.

I told him of the stories, and the sex, babbled news kept ever flowing forth like vomit. His teacup clinked against the plate, ceylon ripples broke against

ceramic. Then, he said: Belshazzar is an artist of whom nothing should be known. Now I break my silence, now I tell him: Eulogies are written for the living’s sake, and not the dead.

I help him on the squeaky bed, switch off the sterile lights. Out slips the nurse, and shuts the door. Close your eyes, and soon I start the track, scratch-scratch, scratch-scratch. Then — you must imagine this, I say, the soothing cycling beat expands to fill the room: it is late one night, a capital city which you could never have imagined visiting, and now you cannot ever think to leave. You climb the steps to enter, bloodroot candles burning in the trees, this music swirls around you. A neardark air in every inch bears memories, suspended … like never have you had before, I whisper in his ear. A weary smile spreads along his leathered lips, like spidery fractures desecrate a lake’s last ice. Lake Clarity. I swore I’d come back on a boat, and did I break my promise? I beg him: Let me take you there, and pull him up into my arms.

I trudge and sweat and by the time we reach the lake it is too much, one drop too dripped, the frozen surface starts to slip apart, reverses course, a violent shiver, crackles outwards algorithmically. I set him on his feet.

He squats, inspects a shining block of ice and says, surveying, smiling: now we’ll have cool drinks, at last.

The day before I left the city, he had me by for one last cup of tea. He talked about some job he might take on, I think. As I was walking out, he called: Just SMS me tomorrow or something, OK? I never did. In the end, I think, we were just lonely lighthouses who mistook each other for ships.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

BY AARON GERTLER

UNSCHOOLED C

ameron Chase, 13, has never been to school. He has never shown up for a state-mandated multiplechoice test, never bubbled in answers, never awaited results to find out where he stands in relation to others his age.

He has never sat in September homeroom. He has never felt first-day butterflies while scoping out fellow students, wondering whether any will become friends. He has never taken math or history from a certified teacher.

He has little interest in attending a traditional academic college, and his parents have no desire to change that.

Cameron is home-schooled. This is hardly remarkable. As of 2012, over 1.6 million school-age children don’t attend school in the United States, and in the last decade, the number of children whose parents take on the responsibility of formal schooling has risen by nearly 100,000 each year.

The home-schooling movement has come a long way since the 1970s, when the practice was rare and largely confined to rural areas. This began to change with 24 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

the rise of anti-school-system advocates like John Holt, founder of the magazine Growing Without Schooling, and John Taylor Gatto. Shortly after he was named New York state’s 1991 Teacher of the Year, Gatto announced his retirement with a letter to The Wall Street Journal announcing that he’d rather seek a job where he wouldn’t “have to hurt kids to make a living.”

By the 1990s, tens of thousands of parents — with political leanings ranging from hippie to libertarian — were coming to believe that traditional schools robbed children of agency and kept them from pursuing their passions.

Home-schooling newsletters began to circulate. Around the same time, a new technology called the Internet suddenly made it possible for people with unusual missions to find and learn from one another.

These days, the Web’s reach in the home-schooling world extends beyond just blogs and discussion boards (though I found plenty of both in my research on Connecticut home schooling, including

the mysterious Yahoo group “Pagan Homeschoolers of CT”).

The recent explosion of online educational resources — massive open online courses, Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, iTunes U — has sparked a rise in families preaching a onceuncommon philosophy on the homeschool “spectrum”: children are best off when when they teach themselves.

They should be mostly free from parental interference, trading their textbooks for TED talks, museum trips, and internships. In an elegant refutation of everything they hope to help their kids escape, parents call this practice “unschooling.”

Cameron’s mother, Ginnie Chase, leans heavily in this direction. Her son’s education doesn’t follow a tight schedule, and the routines he follows are largely of his own devising. The unschooling approach serves him well, as it has his older siblings. Abbie, 25, who studied theater at Smith after learning math just in time for the SATs, has helped resettle refugees at the International Institute of

observer Connecticut. Dennis, 23, plays guitar in a rock band, works with emotionally disturbed teenagers in Massachusetts, and holds a Hampshire College diploma.

Cameron is young, but already his goals are clear: he perks up whenever the Yale School of Music comes up in conversation.

“They have one of the best graduate programs in music,” he informs me.

Cameron is one of the best 13-year-old violinists in the state of Connecticut.

However, he’s not the very best and plans accordingly, with foresight unusual for his age. “I wouldn’t want to go to Julliard,” he says. “All the attention goes toward the top students. I don’t know if I’d really get taught.”

Cameron’s atypical education has left him with great sophistication in certain fields, though at other moments he’s clearly a young teenager. Our conversation bounces from his sister’s laughable attempts to race him on Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road to his love for Shostakovich; from the Haloinspired novel on his living-room table to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

I didn’t get to that book until my senior year in high school. Cameron tackled it last year. He had help — a volunteer instructor at New Haven’s newest haven for unschoolers, Beacon Learning, an out-of-the-box nonprofit that stands at the forefront of a movement working to redefine American education.

E

lisabeth Kennedy and the Catherines (last names Shannon and Fisher) were fed up. All three had tried home-schooling their children.

They’d also all experienced the standard education system. Fisher had worked in it as a teacher. They liked the students and the teachers (Kennedy’s husband teaches math at East Rock Magnet School), but had a strong distaste for the way schools were run. They saw students with diverse abilities and interests being lumped together by age group and forced to study the same subjects at the same times. They noticed

that the natural love of learning that all children share began to wilt once those children entered formal schooling.

“So 15 months ago,” Elizabeth says, “we found ourselves sitting around a table, not knowing what to do about it.”

Eventually, the trio began thinking about how they might structure their own ideal educational system, drawing on experiences in and out of what most of us think of as “school.” They spoke with the team at North Star, a program in Massachusetts that serves as a refuge for teens who have quit high school and need a place to learn on their own.

They read Grace Llewelyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook, a forceful manifesto that dares teens to take control of their own education. Finally, they rented a building on Whalley Avenue (right across from Stop and Shop) and founded Beacon. It would be a place for homeschoolers to loosen up, unschoolers to formalize their learning, and college journalists like me to look on with awe, wishing they’d had the opportunity to take classes in a place as cool as this one.

When I visit, a long day of summer session has just come to an end. Beacon is spacious, and its huge windows let in natural sunlight. One side room features a variety of anatomical models. Another is filled with Legos and art supplies. In a corner, two couches face one another, a place for Beacon “members” (they don’t call them “students”) who feel like interacting. Another corner has two couches facing walls — ideal for lone readers who prefer not to be bothered.

Nearby bookshelves contain enough material to last a student years: thrillers, encyclopedias, world history, most of the novels I treasured in high school, and half a dozen copies of The Teenage Liberation Handbook.

The layout, intended to provide space for group and solo projects alike, reminds me of preschool — the last time most kids leave school at 3:30 p.m. without homework weighing down their backpacks. Some Beacon classes have assignments, but none give grades, and of course, classes are optional in the

first place. Cameron has taken American history, biology, Shakespeare, and something called “Exploit the Library 101.”

“What was that last one about?” I ask him.

“Whatever I wanted,” he replies. “I took the class with Matt [Earls, who works at Middletown’s Russell Library and volunteers at Beacon], and he asked me what I didn’t know and wanted to know more about. I said the Middle East.

So we talked about the Middle East.”

Other topics followed.

For less than the price of a local Catholic school, Beacon members can access a private tutor with knowledge in any subject a library covers. This is the sort of thing rich families in Victorian England paid huge sums for, as it was an oft-preferred alternative to boarding school.

The more hours I spend getting to know Beacon, the more I wonder whether this new home-school hub and other centers with the same model might represent the future of nontraditional American schooling.

I

n the course of my research, I asked half a dozen mothers what comments they most often heard from nonhomeschool parents. One remark dominated the responses: “I could never do that!”

Sometimes, these words are spoken with respect, even awe, for the superparents who take on what is essentially a full-time job but receive no salary or benefits. Other times, working parents who don’t home-school their kids complain that home-schoolers — the so-called “lucky ones” who get to stay home all day — simply live in a different world inaccessible to kids in families that rely on two full-time incomes.

Elizabeth Cruz protests the assumption that all home-school kids come from families with a stay-at-home parent. She works full time. So does her husband. But her 13-year-old son, Jorge, left the difficult social environment of his middle school in October 2012 and

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observer has no plans to return.

For months, Cruz sent her son a daily homework email before she left for work: science, social studies, math, vocabulary, and an “I love you!” with four or five exclamation points. But the lack of structure was stressful for both of them, and Jorge soon began to feel overwhelmed. Around this time, they attended a Beacon Learning open house.

Cruz met a few unschoolers from North Star, and was blown away by their confidence. Soon, her son became one of Beacon’s first members.

Jorge took to the center like a fish to water. In school, he’d been picked on by other children and often felt miserable in class. At Beacon, he made friends, took Elisabeth Kennedy’s creative writing class, developed his computer animation skills with Catherine Fisher, and went on “walking history lessons” with Catherine Shannon — exploring New Haven on foot with the help of a podcast recorded by a Yale history professor.

“He’s an old soul,” his mother tells me. “He seems to do better being surrounded by adults and older kids,” both of which Beacon provides. And the center’s philosophy has rubbed off on Elizabeth. She no longer presses Jorge to stay up late finishing work with her (“that’s silly — we can do pre-algebra on a Sunday morning if we want!”). She’s helping Jorge find a place to spend time volunteering this year as a break from academics, and they work together to create learning plans for him.

This year, Jorge will plan much of his own learning. “I’m going to back off and calm down,” says Cruz, relieved to catch a break and glad that her son has found a space for self-development. “I think learning begins when you take charge yourself.”

“S

elf-Direction 101” is included in Beacon’s course listing for fall 2013 with the following description: “This class will focus on how to be the best self-directed learner you can be, covering everything from 26 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

what it means to be self-directed in to start paying everyone,” Fisher said, your education, to staying motivated “starting with ourselves! Sadly, that’s and organized, to tapping into your still a ways off.” To stay in the black, the interests. Participants will learn how to center will have to recruit more students, keep a portfolio and turn the experience but recruiting can be tricky. into a transcript. Class will culminate Catherine Grobon, program director with developing your own idea into an at North Star, has dealt with similar independent study project.” problems. While parents and teachers Beacon seeks to strike a balance flock to volunteer, students (and the between unstructured learning and tuition they provide) are harder to come guidance for older students who need by. “If we could attract students like we to track and present a record of their attract staff,” Grobon said, “our financial education. The center pitches itself troubles would be over.” If these as the ideal alternative to the tight issues still persist at North Star after restrictions of traditional schooling and 17 years, can newer centers with the the fearsome prospect of learning from a same model have any realistic hope of world of endless, unfiltered information. growing themselves into sustainability?

For parents, the center’s adult volunteers Attracting students is especially hard provide enough collective experience because home-school learning centers, to make a common home-schooling by definition, market themselves to nightmare — children having to learn parents already skeptical of strangers’ something their parents forgot several ability to teach their children. decades ago — into a thing of the past.

Transportation is also a problem.

Sure, kids without a school lose Beacon is the only example of North access to official transcripts and Star’s unschooling model in the state of academic records, but the portfolios Connecticut. Parents who enroll their they keep at Beacon will take much of children have to drive them or carpool. the sting out of applying to college. Most If they have no car, they might be out of North Star teens make it to a four-year luck. Even if Beacon could afford a bus, college with no trouble, finding some of the logistics of bringing students in from the same freedom in liberal schools like six different towns are hellish to imagine.

Brown, Reed, and Hampshire. (It turns Logistical kinks aside, one bigger out that informal learning looks great question bugged me while I was writing on paper.) Offering nearly 50 classes and this article: what about kids who are a pair of “do not disturb” sofas, Beacon not very self-directed? Beacon’s classes promises to cater to young people of tend to be advanced, and though a every educational stripe, from those tiny member-to-volunteer ratio makes who function well in a semitraditional individual instruction a legitimate environment to those who can serve possibility, the center is geared towards as their own best teachers. At Beacon, those who already read on or above it seems impossible to slip through the grade level and arrive eager to learn. A cracks. six-year-old would be out of place. So might a dyslexic student. Or a kid who his isn’t to say the “unschooling has served time in the juvenile justice center” model is perfect. In fact, its system, and upon returning, has trouble flaws are serious enough that they readjusting to school. Public schools’ threaten to limit the practical reach of struggles are largely due to the fact that institutions like Beacon. they must be prepared to teach every Unsurprisingly, funding is the first. child who comes to them. It’s clear Beacon is need-blind, but partly as a that the North Star model will require result, it runs on a shoestring. Elisabeth serious updating before it becomes and the Catherines are volunteers, as capable of handling the full spectrum of are the rest of the teachers. “We’d love ages and abilities.

T

observer There are thousands of Camerons learn to read until he was nine, his out there. Most of them are in regular favorite book at 13 is “Ender’s Game” school. Some will learn to adjust to — it’s well above an eighth-grade the schedule, the social structure, reading level and was my own favorite and the relative lack of freedom. The book when I was 13. Cameron easily unlucky ones who can’t adjust will caught up to most of the kids who had have a tough time for 12 years between a three-year head start on him. More kindergarten and college. importantly, he learned on his own Most don’t have parents like Ginnie time and in his own way (according and Tucker Chase — parents with the to his mother, he essentially taught will and the means to spend much of himself ). their time at home trying to improve Then again, Cameron has never a system that many parents don’t taken a single class in a traditional think twice about. Perhaps they will school. Maybe he’d like it. Maybe be helped by unschooling centers like the school orchestra would take the Beacon, or by the home-school co-ops place of the Greater Bridgeport Youth that offer a less formal alternative, or Orchestra, and maybe the eighth-grade by other future developments in the math teacher would do an even better growing movement to ensure that kids job than Cameron’s sister, who now can learn in an environment suited to handles much of his math curriculum. their diversity and their self-reliance.

But it’s a moot point, at least for Kids like Cameron are the shining Cameron. He has everything he needs success stories of the unschooling at Beacon: a volunteer who plays movement. Though Cameron didn’t violin duets with him, attentive tutors

in other subjects he’s interested in, and most importantly, an environment that teaches him how to teach himself.

He may outgrow the place in time — many North Star teens return to high school for extracurriculars or leave the center early to attend college — but when he does decide to move on, he’ll have a host of mentors helping him proceed.

It may seem ironic that unschoolers feel at home in a building full of teachers with a class schedule written on a wall-mounted blackboard. But considering that history’s first “schools” consisted of a few youths clustered at the feet of a worldly tutor, debating at a natural pace in an untimed lesson, it’s easy to see Beacon as a return to form. The oldest educational tradition in the books is back, and it looks like it’s here to stay.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE BEACON SCHOOL

D i a n a

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S a v e r i n

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S i g h t

feature

I

n the middle of June, I woke up at two in the morning to a rising sun and a yellow moon. It was hardly dark, and without a feather of fog, I was convinced I could see all there was to see: a big sky, a valley full of snow, a horizon of crevasse-streaked peaks, piles of avalanche run-out spilling down the mountains like crumpled drapes.

At the time, I was camped on a snowcovered glacier, 17 days into a 30-day mountaineering course in south-central Alaska. Still in my sleeping bag, I boiled water for oatmeal and coffee on the gas stove in the vestibule of my tent. By 3, seven of us had roped up and were ready to walk toward an unnamed peak on Harvard Glacier we affectionately pointed to and called "that middle one" — our first ascent of the course.

We snaked our way around crevasses and over snowbridges, taking the east ridge to the top. Up there, we practiced headstands, jotted notes in our journals, ate a summit Snickers, discussed the possibility of doing the “Harlem Shake,” and took a self-timed group picture, all full of the rush that comes with the sensation of being on top of something high and pointy.

Scanning the ridges that weave back down to the valley where we were camped, we decided to take a different route, descending the west ridge this time. Again, I led. The terrain turned steeper than any I had seen; it was the kind of slope so slanted you couldn't see past a horizon directly in front of you.

To our right, the ridge plunged 1,000 feet down. A red-bearded, Canadian instructor named Max was walking behind me. He belayed himself toward me to look for a better route. He took a few steps around in his plastic boots, leaned over the windswept cornice to our left — what looked to me like another sheer cliff — and said, "This is going to be exciting."

One climber at the back of our ropeteam said, "I don't want exciting."

"Why don't we just go back down the way we came up?" another yelled.

Max didn't show signs of hearing

On the fourth stab, the ground below our feet gave way. The snow exploded. Our bodies dropped. them. He told me I was going to downclimb the windward side of the cornice to see if the other side of the ridge had a slope with a less steep grade. He sat in the snow, getting ready to belay me down, plunging his ice ax into the snow, one, two, three times so that he would have a steady grip, should he need to arrest my fall. On the fourth stab, the ground below our feet gave way. The snow exploded. Our bodies dropped.

Mid-fall, I looked over at Max in his bright orange parka, with his arms raised amid the spotted and white air.

Such experiences were reminders that we were walking on water out there. But unlike water, snow is opaque.

It is thick and white and if you aren't aware of just how hard it is to really see the ground you're standing on, it could cost you your life.

T

he first time I tried my hand at traveling on glacier two years before, I ended up traveling inside a cloud. A friend and I began that particular journey at dawn, about 3 in the morning in southeast Alaska, when the sky was all blues — pale on the horizon and deep overhead. By noon, though, having crossed the first of the three glaciers on our route, thick clouds swept over that sky and settled down close to earth. The world turned white. The horizon dissolved. It was the kind of fog I had heard stories about: a man who, in similar conditions, slept with his rifle pointing in the direction he meant to walk, as if the gun could shoot bearings as well as bullets; another man on a solo trip walked in circles, discovered his own footprints, then began shouting out for help, convinced that someone else was lost on the glacier, too. Much about the Far North can make you lose sight of where you are.

I

n Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez writes about the ways Western ideas depend upon certain experiences of light and vegetation in the temperate zone, where days are neatly divided into mornings, noons, afternoons, and nights, and seasons into four parts of the year, the meaning of each based on growth patterns of plants. I first noticed the light of the north flying into Anchorage in early June. Turbulence jostled me awake at 1 in the morning, and I pressed my forehead against the plane window and saw a splattering of color soaking into the ice-coated and carved Chugach Mountains. I was displaced enough at the time not to know whether the sun was setting or rising.

Our climbing team eventually headed into those mountains, and the days continued to blur together, with the sun lingering in the north, instead of rising in the east and setting in the west. There were few signs of life — a few spiders here and there, maybe a raven overhead — even during this "season of harvest."

This landscape challenged my and other climbers' most basic ideas about the movement of days and seasons. We tried to make sense of this land with comparisons. The most common was martian: utterly foreign. Sometimes, we saw in it a desert: vast, hostile, and at least at first glance, uniform in color.

In summer, glaciers are also hot, and the rays of light bouncing off the ice or snow can leave sunburns on the insides of your nostrils, on the roof of your mouth. In vaster stretches, the glacier was a “snocean,” with crevasses, seracs, and fins — curving choppy, bright blue dips and rises in the ice, often striped in color and swirled into marble bends by the winds — standing in for waves.

When we tried to make sense of this landscape, this was how we talked: the

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feature

glacier was like Mars, or like the desert, or like the ocean. These analogies helped us understand through what we were familiar with what's going on out there. They helped us see more than light, ice, and a lack of life. They helped us see, in a land that so challenged our notions of time and space, and power and possibility, a world we already knew.

W

hen we walked on the snowcovered glacier, we walked in a 17-person, single-file line, spaced 20 meters apart and linked by a fat, orange rope. Unlike on dry glacier, where a crack is a crack and firm ice is firm ice, with snow, it is difficult to know if you're on solid ground, or solid-enough ground, or ground that is no ground at all. We used 10-meter long poles to "probe" the snow, plunging the stick into the ground beneath our feet to feel where it hit ice, snow, or air.

30 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

Once, we were headed toward a peak named Denmark, and because it was early morning and the snow was hard and the valley was flat, we probed less frequently, often walking atop untested ground to save time. I was third in line, and punched through the snow up to my knees. When the fourth person on the rope team stepped over the same spot, he stopped our line. "There's air under here," he yelled out. When the next team walked over, three of them punched through, with snow up to their shoulders. Max hauled each out back onto solid ground. The three who fell said they could wiggle their legs in the crack below them. We turned around, skipped the peak, and crawled over the cracks on our way back to camp. It's what polar bears do on thin sea ice, too: get on their bellies, spread the weight over the cracking surface, and hope to stay on ground that won't give way.

We practiced to stay afloat. We

learned figure eight knots, alpine butterflies, prussocks, mules, overhands, slipknots, clove hitches. We learned fixed-rope ascension, team hauls, snow anchor construction, single-team crevasse rescue. We learned strategies for walking and traversing and going up and going down (in steep and exposed terrain, I often repeated to myself that my feet were my first belay). Most of all, we learned route-finding. We learned to read the depressions — where the snow dipped or was discolored, where the probe would hit air too soon, where the ground might give way to no ground at all.

We needed to discover all of this because we weren’t from there — not in the sense of someone not being from Amsterdam, but in the sense that we were profoundly maladapted. Most of us had grown up in houses or apartments.

As we transitioned to life on ice, we had to learn ultra-basic functions like

feature walking, cooking, and building shelter.

We had to haul hundreds of pounds of dry food, with huge sacks dropped off by bush plane every eight days. We had to go to the bathroom in plastic bags.

When we weren't traveling, we also had to stay inside probed-out perimeters.

Unless you were roped up, this meant that the campsite boundaries, often about 20 yards each, were fencing you in — a strange experience of confinement when vast open space extended toward each horizon.

In Arctic Dreams, Lopez describes "the native eye" as a way of seeing the landscape based on the accumulation of a tribe's experiences in it and observations of it over hundreds of years. Their dependence on other lifeforms for their own survival made such observations vital for the well-being of the tribe. It was this kind of eye we were pursuing, albeit as temporary visitors, rather than permanent residents. For us, the search came out of our "rugged play" — Richard White's term for play that resembles work. The embodiment and urgency of work links people closer to the land, and so the simulated experience of it through activities like mountaineering, backpacking, climbing, and skiing does the same for those playing, or play-working, on the land, as well. Rugged play seeks to foster the kind of intimacy that dependency demands. The familiarity we gained from it brought mountains out of onedimensional postcards depicting a land from another planet, a superlative place to flatten and fit into a photograph.

For the month we were out there, at least, such sight rendered them full, particular, real.

A

fter the ground below Max and my feet gave way, the moments stretched out. What was seconds before a seemingly steady cornice became midair matter, there was the flutter of thought that this might be what death feels like, then the sight of Max falling, too, the brief awareness of his vincibility. Then, we landed — 15

feet below, onto boulder-like mounds of snow. The shock of landing reverberated down my spine. My sunglasses were crooked, my eyes wide. I saw a glowing blue hole next to us, snow all around, then Max's body crawling toward me. I asked if we were going to keep falling.

The next moments quickened; Max and I relayed that we were both OK and that nothing like that had ever happened to either of us and that neither of us were expecting that to happen that very moment before and wow, did you feel that? I exclaimed that it is funny when the very things you're scared of happening actually happen, and they aren't as bad as you think. Within minutes of the "is this how I am going to die?" thought, I had the "I'm so grateful that just happened" thought. I was grateful because in those moments of falling and landing and getting out from the rubble and communicating with the rope team and navigating down the left side of the ridge, I could see where I was.

When the stakes mounted, such awareness came easily. When you fall down, you look up. The body feels — pain, exertion, danger — and the mind takes a hint. The "native eye" draws in some ways upon the accumulation of such moments of full presence and embodiment over centuries. For tribes living off the land, what you see might very soon mean the fate that you get.

No one is more aware of what's around him, Lopez observes, than a hungry hunter.

But as my adrenaline faded that morning, such vision did, too. It was hard to master that sense among the mundane. The first week of the trip, I was leading the group through a traverse of a scree-coated side of the glacier. When I reached a flat spot of moraine, I suggested a break, not noticing that above us, an overhanging and eroding ledge threatened a rockfall at any moment. Living on ice requires full attention and full sight. Anything less, and the mountains start giving you feedback on what you're not seeing.

Feedback, in this case, might mean a rock to the head, or a fall through what you think is ground.

Even after seeing more, I was still missing a lot. Toward the end of the trip, I learned about the life in the ice and snow: the algae and bacteria, the tartegrates and rotifers. There's a lot going on there. I saw my first fly toward the end of the trip, zero-ed (stopped) my line, and sunk my knees in the snow, leaning closer to see her metallic green eyes twitch. I could squint at the snow all I wanted, but I still wouldn't get the full picture; mysteries were caked inside all that white matter, microscopic bacteria squirmed inside the layers of ice and snow. And who knows what else? Fossils of prehistoric creatures have emerged from melting ice they were encased in, fur attached and all.

T

hese days, I live in a cabin, not a tent, a few hundred miles north of the Matanuska on an 80-acre homestead near Denali National Park, cooking in a kitchen and sleeping in a bed. I sometimes feel far from the ground two floors down from the loft where I rest my head and read my books. I was playing during the month I spent on ice, and a return to something resembling routine means I don't need to really see or understand where I am to survive. I don't depend upon my ability to identify monkey flowers, miner's lettuce, or potato seeds to eat; if I'm hungry, I can always scan the aisles of the grocery store six miles down the highway, or the numerous restaurants, cafes, bars, and gas stations a few more miles to the south. And since my work doesn't force me outside all of the time, if the mosquitoes are bad, which they were through the end of July — everywhere in the woods, thick swarms of them, each with the kind of buzz that stuck to the air and wiggled inside your ear — I spent many days my first weeks here staying inside, fly-swatter at the ready. Some of the closest I have felt to knowing this place was when I started enjoying its treats: when the mosquitoes

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feature

The woman next to me woke up, looked out the window, and gasped. Her eyes widened, and she whispered, over and over, in disbelief, “That’s our earth! That’s our earth!” died down, I would lie in the bushes for hours, picking blueberries until my fingertips turned purple, and several Ziplocs overflowed with sticky juice.

More recently, I have set out on a few missions to learn about this place where I claim to live. I wander the

32 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

grounds with a map, compass, and three different field guides, crawling through the tundra, navigating through the forests, getting lost in the hills as I identify pumpkin berries and amanita, grey jays and reindeer lichen. My mind empties and my senses fill up when

these wanders bring me into contact with some rustling in the brush nearby — a cow moose and calf grazing by the pile of boulders I call the "shipyard," a young black bear bounding back into the trees at the edge of the property, the rack of caribou antlers jutting up from the ridge I am approaching.

Sometimes, I run barefoot through the moss off any kind of trail because such runs make me focus on the ground beneath my feet. My injuries have been minimal — a sliced heel, a bruised toe — and the rewards, numerous. The spongy feel of sphagnum and the crunch of downy land coral press against my arches and stick between my toes. The black spruce and birch branches blur

feature into undulating sinews. When I am tired, I collapse onto pools of moss and look up, following each gust passing through the shaking aspen leaves, as if each tree were an instrument and I know exactly where the conductor will point for the next windswept solo.

Such runs offer me the trifecta of forced attention: embodiment, dependence, and presence.

As much as these moments make feel intensely present and grateful and alive, I still wonder: do they mean I know where I am? Do I really see the place I exist in? I fear that I too often mistake appreciation for awareness.

This climbing business has given me many moments of appreciation —

landscapes so wild and beautiful they seem unreal in the moment, and when later recalled, appear more as dreams than memories. But it has also shown me how much work real awareness anywhere entails. It's easy to ignore how much we miss when missed sights lack direct and immediate consequences.

But even when we don't consciously suffer for all that we have missed, we are missing out on something. I don't settle for superficial relationships with people, feeling satisfied with a circle of acquaintances, instead of friends.

Why is it so much easier to settle into a superficial relationship with place, seeing fuzzy images of light and ice and a lack of life, remaining complacent and blind to what is right around us? When I talk to people, as well, I do not let my mind to wander among others I am not talking to; I try to look at people in the eye, rather than over their shoulders.

How can I look at my surroundings in the eye? How can I carry mountainsight over to city-sight, or town-sight, or even rural-cabin-sight, where the stakes of seeing what's around me lower?

I

recently devoted an afternoon to discovering the front yard of this cabin I'm calling home. I turned off my phone, took off my watch, hid my books, took a jacket, pulled rubber boots over my jeans, and shut the door.

I stared down an aspen, examined a woodchip, leafed through patches of lichen. I wandered only a few steps at a time, and happened upon a small patch of fireweed, a purple flower that grows like crazy throughout interior Alaska.

I lay on my stomach and propped my chin on my fists and looked until the rest of my surroundings became fuzzy.

I watched a bumblebee pollinating for some silent elapse of time — following her thick, velvety legs as they climbed over and engulfed each petal, my eyes glued to her yellow and black fuzz. Her mouth seemed to have antennas that devoured each petal she encountered.

Up close, she became massive, the only being in the world I was aware of.

Then, she fell. She dropped some 20 inches onto the hard ground. I jumped back several feet. I felt nearly as full of fear as I had when I fell through that windswept cornice, and it took me a second to realize that the fall must have been the same to her. She rolled on the ground, took a few steps, then buzzed off. I was still clutching my stomach and catching my breath.

As high as the stakes seemed that afternoon, they were in reality quite low. I was within a few steps of my cabin on distinctly terra firma. But through the fear evoked from a vicarious fall, I felt embodied and present; I was paying attention to the exact place where I was.

As much as I am a sucker for beauty, I realize that I don't need obviously magnificent places to shake me into that sense of presence, of attuned seeing.

That sight — of foreign, unfamiliar, and strange places, where you have to relearn all of the tasks and functions you take for granted in familiar territory — comes more easily. The travel required in such lands cues us to immerse ourselves, to pay attention, to look a little closer. On familiar grounds, we have to decide to see. And it is through seeing that we can render any place magnificent. Everything we need — eyeballs, ground below our feet — we already have.

I flew into Anchorage again later in the summer, and sat next to an older couple from France. We drifted over that same chunk of continent, full of rugged mountains and cracked-up glaciers. The woman next to me woke up, looked out the window, and gasped. Her eyes widened, and she whispered, over and over, in disbelief, "That's our earth!

That's our earth!" It's a realization we can have with ecstasy and delight among ice-cloaked mountains, amid fields of blueberry bushes, in the company of a singular bumblebee. This is our earth.

This is the place where we live. If we pay close attention and keep looking up, whether or not we are falling down, we might catch a glimpse of it.

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Baxter the Friendly Robot

by Brandon Jackson

N

ine faces gather around a con- into plastic bags. As the parts roll down veyor belt watching miniature the assembly line, Baxter’s head turns plastic cups roll by. One of to look at the objects. His two big eyes these faces belongs to Baxter. Baxter is squint, to let everyone know that he a robot. He — we’ll call him “he” for is focusing. He slowly moves his hand now — has a swimmer’s body: two big into position, gingerly lowering his arms, a powerful chest, and tiny legs. claw over one of the stacks. We’re all The other eight faces include a factory rooting for him: It’s his first day on the owner, several automation engineers, job, and with the lightning-fast Wittand a reporter (that’s me). Together we man robot in the background, Baxter’s wait to see if the rumors are true: could meditated pace makes him quite the this awkward new robot with cartoon underdog. eyes save American manufacturing?

But Baxter keeps dropping the cups.

And at what cost to the humans who Justin, a thin 18-year-old hacker-turnedcame before him? automator moves in to help him out.

The floor of the plastics factory is Justin leans on Baxter’s shoulder as covered with cardboard boxes embla- he navigates the robot’s smartphonezoned with “Made in the USA.” High- like interface. Like a loving father pitched crackles, like the sound of teaching his son how to properly hold pouring a hundred boxes of cereal into a golf club, Justin grabs Baxter’s hands a giant bowl, shoot from the ceiling as and shows him how to do the task. bits of plastic are sucked out of giant This is one of Baxter’s most revolutionsilos, pushed through thick tubes, and ary features: teaching him how to do poured into the belly of a plastic mold- something doesn’t require any coding. ing machine.

As we watch, the engineers and The bits are melted and the hot liq- salesmen trade anecdotes about recent uid is squirted into a mold. The ma- automation jobs and the uncertain chine hisses as hydraulics squeeze the state of the industry. “Times are lean,” mold tight and then pull back to reveal says one engineer. “I get phone calls all the product: eight small cups. These the time from small business owners cups, slightly more durable versions saying, ‘Help me … if I don’t do someof the ones you’d find atop a Pepto- thing soon I’m going to lose my busiBismol bottle, will be used to deliver ness to China.’” Another rambles about doses of medicine to patients around the deficit and “Obamacare.” the world. When they arrive at hosAmerican manufacturers have taken pitals, they will be fed into automated a beating for the last two decades as medicine dispensers. But first, the cups more and more production has been need to be stacked. offshored. The newest industry strateAn instant after the plastic hardens, gy to bring factory jobs back home cona robotic hand shoots into the maw of sists of automating as many jobs as posthe press. The hand belongs to a Wit- sible. Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based tman robot — a traditional industrial startup led by some of the world’s most machine. It looks like a cross between brilliant roboticists, hopes to use this a World War I tank and a Rube Gold- strategy to ride to the rescue of Ameriberg device. The Wittman robot moves can manufacturing. Their knight-inwith such speed and disregard for hu- shining-plastic-armor is a brand-new man life that it is kept inside a Plexiglas species of robot named “Baxter.” cage. Its hand grabs the cups and lifts Baxter provides factories of all sizes them straight up like lightning. Then with a new form of low-cost labor. But its arm rolls 10 feet to the right and his true strength is that he does more plummets to the conveyor belt below, than just produce: Baxter is designed to stacking the cups. seem friendly and be a fast learner. BaThe final challenge falls to Baxter: sically, he’s a “drag-and-drop” replacethe towers of cups must be dropped ment for a human being. According to

Rethink, robots like Baxter empower factory workers by giving them userfriendly machines they can manage themselves. But in the past, employers have cared far more about productivity than robots’ facial expressions. Meanwhile, the workers are only concerned about keeping their jobs. Is Baxter “helping” either? Or is “saving American manufacturing” just a euphemism for taking jobs away with a smile?

Baxter’s stomping grounds in Boston are a sort of visual metaphor for the resurgence of American manufacturing. Rethink Robotics Inc. is housed in a giant brick building with a towering smokestack, which, no longer releasing manufacturing fumes, hosts a smattering of satellite dishes and antennae.

I went to Rethink to spend some quality time with Baxter and his folks.

I was curious to find out if the robot lived up to all the hype it has been getting in the tech world and the media.

I also wanted to understand Rethink’s vision of how technology can save manufacturing. Is the future of robotfilled industrial America as utopian as they make it out?

Baxter was dreamed up by one of the world’s most prolific geeks: Rodney Brooks, the Australian inventor of the Roomba robot and the former head of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks left MIT in 2008 to found Rethink Robotics, on a mission to rescue American manufacturing through technological innovation.

Baxter, Brooks’ most recent brainchild, solves two major problems. The first is that automation is expensive.

Lots of small factories across America can’t afford to hire engineers to build customized robots. Baxter — with a sticker price of $22,000 — provides these factories with an easily trainable robot that can quickly pay for itself.

The second problem is that traditional industrial robots are scary: they are so complex that ordinary workers can’t interact with them — much less program them — and they often pose safety hazards that require them to op-

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erate within clunky cages. Baxter, on the other hand, works at a human’s pace and has the common sense to stop moving when something (or someone) is in his way.

Rethink is aware that though Baxter appears physically unthreatening, his unprecedented affordability and intelligence may nonetheless pose a different kind of threat to factory workers.

Brooks firmly rejects the idea that Baxter will replace humans on the factory floor. At the core of Rethink is a vision of a brighter industrial future in which mindless repetitive tasks have been automated and humans are free to do more interesting and satisfying work.

“Our vision is that Mildred-the-lineworker becomes Mildred-the-robottrainer,” Brooks explained to a crowded auditorium during a recent TED talk. As he spoke, a projection screen showed blown-up images of smiling factory workers with their arms around Baxter.

Yet inside Rethink’s office, it is clear that making humans comfortable around a humanoid robot like Baxter is no easy task. In the space’s center is an eerie area roughly the size of a tennis court that is referred to as the “robot dance floor.” It’s filled with Baxters. A team of mostly middle-aged computer science Ph.D.s. monitors the 6-foot-tall humanoids as the robots pick up boxes from conveyor belts. Crossing the dance floor felt like walking in a room 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

filled with people who had all frozen still simultaneously, but whose eyes still watched my every move.

Another area called “Matt’s Playroom” serves as a Blade Runner-esque robot workshop. Here, Baxters have been cut up into pieces in order to test the endurance of their parts: arms swing back and forth, screens nod left and right, claws open and close.

Designers like Matthew Klee are working hard to give Baxter a loveable personality. Klee, a slim, soft-spoken man in his 30s, is an expert in making machines that are easy to use (he also worked on Skype and the Xbox 360 Kinect).

“You don’t want it to be communicating any kind of arrogance, like it’s better than you, or anything like that,” Klee says on the day that I visit Rethink.

The design team had to walk a fine line. “What is the difference between an intelligent robot and a dishwasher?”

Klee asks. “Both are machines, but there is something special about the robot that makes people treat it very differently and assign it human qualities.”

The designers wanted Baxter somewhere in the middle. If Baxter was not human enough, people would not feel comfortable interacting with him. On the other hand, if he was too confident, people would be threatened and feel like he was replacing them.

The designers eventually realized it

was all in the eyes. The team tried over 80 different styles. Some were incredibly realistic; others, downright cold.

“As soon as they started to look a little human, people started to freak out,” Klee tells me. In the end they settled on a pair of eyes that were cartoonish yet realistic enough to convey five emotions: neutral, surprised, focused, confused, and sleepy. I ask if Baxter can blink. “No,” Klee laughs, “that would be creepy.”

Rethink employees refer to Baxter as an “it,” not a “he.” When Product Manager Alex Goodwin accidentally uses “he,” he stops himself midsentence and restarts using the neutral pronoun. Apparently there has been a long-running internal debate over which pronoun to use when referring to Baxter. Brooks has long held that, officially, Baxter is an “it.” Customers, on the other hand, consistently refer to Baxter as “he.”

Some factories have treated their Baxters like a giant family, assigning each robot its own first name and using “Baxter” as its last.

But despite the nicknames, Klee is worried that many manufacturers don’t seem to understand the importance of emotionally integrating robots into the workforce. One of the most common questions from factory owners is if Baxter can move faster.

He can, Klee says. But for some reason, thinking about speeding Baxter up makes the designer pause and look a little shaken.

“He’s made me nervous a couple of times in the past few weeks,” he admits after a second. “It’s sort of like if a dog you really get to know bites you one day. You’re like, Baxter ... why’d you do that?”

I imagine Baxter executing humanlike motions at three or four times human speed, and realize just how terrifying such a sight would be to factory workers worried about losing their jobs.

Klee senses my discomfort and tries to crack a joke. “Now we’re trying to figure out if we can keep Baxter from biting people,” he says, laughing.

cover Rethink launched a major media blitz in September 2012 to introduce Baxter to the world. The robot appeared on the cover of Time and on numerous “Game-Changing Technological Breakthroughs of the Year”-type lists. Baxter was famous long before any robots hit the factory floor.

The key to Rethink’s publicity campaign was convincing the public that Baxter was not out to steal their jobs.

To help with this, the company directed reporters to talk to Chris Budnick, the owner of Vanguard Plastics. Budnick quickly became one of the most recognizable robot-allies in the manufacturing world. Nearly every article about Baxter includes a quote from Budnick: “Our folks loved it and they felt very comfortable with it,” he told The New York Times. “Even the older folks didn’t perceive it as a threat.” In an interview with CNBC, Budnick went so far as to promise that “Baxter won’t replace any of our people.”

How could a factory owner in today’s struggling manufacturing world make such a claim without losing mass amounts of revenue? Was Budnick lying when he said he wouldn’t fire people, or had he figured out some genius way to automate without sacrificing human jobs? I decided to ask Chris Budnick himself.

W

hen the Industrial Revolution made its way to the countryside of New England, it traveled by barge up the Farmington Canal.

Not long after the canal’s completion, the 60-mile-long channel of water was filled in and replaced by train tracks.

Once-quiet villages alongside the canal line were transformed into industrial hubs. Large brick factories flanked the tracks, and the Farmington River ran brown with pollution.

Now the Farmington Canal railway has been converted into a bike trail. Cycling the 30-mile stretch from New Haven to Vanguard Plastics, I pass ghostly brick complexes that once employed thousands of people. The air is clear,

and the foothills of the Appalachians photos of his children. loom regal on the horizon over empty Budnick went to military college, industrial parks. It’s hard to imagine served four years as an officer, and the puffing smokestacks and churning after surviving Ranger School, was ofengines that once earned Southington, fered a spot in one of the Army’s most Conn., its motto, “The City of Prog- elite units. He turned it down to return ress.” home and help his father run the famYet nestled between a forest and a ily plastics business. highway on the north end of town, in As we walk out of his office, Budnick a small building that is made of alumi- hands me a pair of safety glasses and num siding and flanked by two huge leads me onto the factory floor. Vanwater silos, industrial Connecticut lives guard produces a wide array of plastic on. This is Vanguard Plastics. parts: grips for all-plastic Colt handI dismount in a parking lot at the guns, fittings for Dodge Ram steering end of a long driveway, completely ex- columns, caps for water filters, and the hausted from the ride. I expect to find a small medicine dosage cups. The facbleak industrial wasteland but the first tory is on track to crank out 40 million thing I notice is a vegetable garden. It cups in 2013. wraps around the building and is filled Budnick is the first to admit that with basil, grapes, heirloom tomatoes, manufacturing plastic parts can be and a 20-foot-tall sunflower. dull. “I like to think of my job as a The garden is my first clue that way of helping people,” he says. When Chris Budnick, the president of Van- Budnick describes the conditions in guard Plastics, is not your typical facto- factories overseas, he does so with a ry owner. As I pause to catch my breath tone of moral outrage. He can’t be(and ogle the produce), Budnick emerg- lieve that people are subjected to such es from the factory. He’s incredibly fit, cruel working conditions and paid so 49 years old, and wearing a tucked-in little. Hence the garden, and the break denim shirt. He welcomes me into his room table covered with fresh produce, air-conditioned office. The walls are which he says he offers to his employcovered with paintings of trout and ees to make sure they have access to

FIRST WORDS The first words of this poem are the and first, and then—words, and that is all there is.

A palm reflecting sunlight toward the cheek.

The ability to laugh at weakness.

To dry a rose in a desk-top vase day by day by day.

A clock glimpsed in a dream or an infant that stirs suddenly in its sleep.

There are no words for sunrise or moonlight or death.

For these, we have just sunrise, moonlight, death.

— Vincent Tolentino

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cover good food.

It’s a nice gesture — Budnick’s desire to support his workers is undeniably sincere. But the trend in manufacturing is hard to ignore: robots like Baxter are increasingly replacing workers as American factory owners “race to the bottom” to compete with Chinese manufacturers’ absurdly low prices.

Budnick admits that these days, it’s hard to justify employing a human due to high taxes, health care costs, and the specter of Obamacare. “The state of Connecticut is making it as difficult as possible for me to hire someone,” he says. Judging by their actions, his colleagues agree. Between 1969 and 2011, the number of Connecticut manufacturing jobs has plummeted from 477,000 to 174,000. During the same period, manufacturing’s output has soared.

Budnick stands by his promise not to fire the workers whose jobs will be replaced by Baxter. Yet at the same time, he plans to expand production without hiring new workers. Vanguard has already invested heavily in new machinery, robots, and computers. The number of injection molding machines (23) nearly outstrips the number of employees (30). In the 1970s, Vanguard employed around 60 people. Now the company makes far more stuff and employs half as many people.

Budnick views Baxter as a potentially exciting new player in the game of globalized manufacturing. “We like to buy new toys,” Budnick says, “as long as the new toys pay for themselves.”

Baxter is so affordable that he could pay for himself in about one year. Budnick has already purchased one “Baxter,” and if all goes well, he’ll purchase two more soon.

Automation is more than just a way for Budnick to boost revenue. The factory needs it to survive. Without robots, Budnick says, he would be unable to offer customers low prices and pay his workers a reasonable wage (an entry-level machine operator is paid $30,000 per year, but costs the compa38 | Vol. XLI, No. 1 | September 2013

ny around $40,000 after taxes and ben- ability. The fewer humans required to efits). Budnick says that an equivalent watch over Baxter, the better. facility in China — lacking AmericanStill, Budnick is excited about Baxter. style automation — would employ 100 He is thankful that he is in a position to people but pay them only a fraction of experiment with what he calls “a new what he pays his workers. species of robot.” For now, Baxter isn’t So how will Baxter’s eyes help save very profitable, but Budnick’s betting Vanguard? Budnick isn’t so sure the that the robot’s descendants will be eyes matter much. “Well, Baxter has revolutionary. “It’s a Wright Flyer,” he to sell,” he jokes. Jay Marple, the auto- said. “It doesn’t go very far, but it gets mation engineer tasked with training off the ground.”

Baxter, mishears Budnick. “What? He’s got a soul?” he asks. We all turn to look he troupe of automators at Vanat Baxter and laugh. Marple admits he guard continues coaching Baxter wishes he could replace Baxter’s face for several hours. He keeps getwith a programming console. To man- ting better and better at stacking the ufacturers like Budnick, the Rethink medicine cups. There are hiccups every vision of collaboration is secondary: once in a while — the cups will slip out what matters most is speed and reli- of Baxter’s grip a moment too soon, or

T

cover he will knock over neighboring towers with an enthusiastic swing of his claw.

But the overall trend is clear: this task will soon be fully automated.

From time to time a 30-year-old Hispanic woman wearing safety glasses and a yellow blouse passes by and disappears behind a giant machine. I sneak away from the crowd and hide behind the machine to watch her work.

Her movements are fluid and refined.

She bags the towers at least five times faster than Baxter. I go back and ask Budnick who she is. “That’s Lesbia.

She is a really nice lady. She has been with us for a long time. Her husband, Jaime, is over there.” He points across the factory.

“Is it OK if I replace Lesbia for a little while?” I ask. When Lesbia rotates to another machine across the factory, I start stacking. The cups are not nearly as stackable as I had anticipated. Just before I slip one giant tower into a bag, it breaks apart in six different places.

The cups scatter all over the assembly line. I hear laughter and realize that Lesbia is watching. She comes over and silently starts stacking the cups with precision and aplomb.

I try again. And again. Over time I gradually become competent. I try to start a conversation about automation.

“So, how long have you been doing this job?”

“Seven years,” she replies.

I ask if she is worried about the robot. She points at Baxter and starts laughing. She clearly doesn’t feel too threatened. To her, Baxter is just another machine.

After I’ve bagged about 6,000 cups, Budnick walks over and silently watches me. “It’s a dull job,” he says. “I couldn’t do it. I would beat my head against the wall.”

When I rejoin the spectators surrounding Baxter, the conversation about automation is still running.

Reina Ellis, a representative of Rethink, shares the simple heuristic she uses to justify taking jobs away from humans and giving them to robots: “If it is

something you don’t want your child to have to do when they grow up, then that is something that should be automated.”

But would that justification console Lesbia if she were replaced by Baxter?

F

or centuries, engineers have been working hard to eliminate toil from our lives. They’ve been wildly successful at making factories run more efficiently. But for the most part they’ve operated without a clear vision of how their inventions will change the work landscape. But that’s where Rethink is different. The reason that they have been able to garner so much attention is that they have attempted to fully articulate a vision of an automated future: one where man and machine work side by side, and where humans are able to pursue more satisfying and meaningful jobs.

The reality of the situation is darker.

Once Baxter is deployed, what happens in the factories is increasingly out of the robot designers’ hands.

Manufacturers who take control of the situation don’t have the luxury to make decisions based on utopian visions. They must lower prices, or perish. Most likely, many laborers will lose their jobs, and eventually, factories will be filled with fleets of Baxters moving at high speeds with only a few human supervisors.

Yet whether or not Baxter’s eyes betray his maker’s vision, why were we so captivated by that vision in the first place? Baxter makes us think about our answers to an important question: What do we want the automated world to look like? Do we want Lesbia to be a robot supervisor? Or perhaps doing work she finds even more satisfying?

The shape of the automated world is destined to lie beyond the control of engineers and manufacturers. Perhaps the burden is on the rest of us to figure out what we really want from machines, before workers like Lesbia end up in the unemployment line.

hatchback It’s a new day and I’m not leggy and unwilling.

I’ve posted up next to some vertical surface.

My face mysterious if cheerless.

My butt frowns away from you or maybe makes a face about the heat.

My stomach tenses with imaginary laughter: I induce a firmness you can relate to so you walk to me— someone told me about how men are supposed to “touch you with their eyes” if they want you.

That they make up a room where they’re alone with you with their eyes.

—Cassandra da Costa

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