YDN Magazine by Yale Daily News

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INSIDE 12

FEATURE

The Hills Are Alive and Profitable BY THOMAS KAPLAN

Amid the prized forestland of West Rutland, Vermont, Yale may have developed an “alternative investment” — 45 windmills. Though the energy generated by the turbines would go to locals, the residents of the small New England town are up in arms at the destruction of their beloved landscape.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ben Brody

MANAGING EDITORS

Anthony Lydgate, Jesse Maiman

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Sijia Cai, Jacque Feldman, Zara Kessler, Nicole Levy, Naina Saligram, Eileen Shim

BY NAINA SALIGRAM

DESIGN & PHOTO EDITORS

WEB EDITOR

Cubist Portrait

A summer with her grandfather in India leads this art history major to confront her fear of Cubism.

Ginger Jiang, Loide Marwanga, La Wang, Weiwei Zhang Rachel Caplan

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

BUSINESS & DISTRIBUTION MANAGER

Tonia Sun

FEATURE

God at Yale BY MOLLY HENSLEY-CLANCY

In the wake of Jesse Morrell’s attack on the irreligious “dirty dancers,” “potheads” and “Obama-voters” of the Yale community, evangelical Christian students weigh in on finding and sharing their faith.

FICTION EDITOR

Angelica Baker

POETRY EDITOR

Rosanna Oh

STAFF WRITERS

Molly Hensley-Clancy, Eliana Dockterman, Isabel Farhi, Daniel Friedman, Laura Gottesdiener, Lauren Oyler, Jennifer Parker, Frances Sawyer

ILLUSTRATORS

Maria Haras, Sin Jin The YDN Magazine invites letters to the editor. Please send comments to the editor-in-chief at benjamin.brody@yale.edu. The views and opinions represented in the Magazine’s articles and advertisements do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false, or in poor taste. COVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS KAPLAN TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT ILLUSTRATION BY MARIA HARAS FICTION ILLUSTRATION BY SIN JIN FEATURE ILLUSTRATIONS BY LOIDE MARWANGA; TITLE BY LA WANG

FICTION

Best Years of Your Life BY AUSTIN BERNHARDT

Many miles and a seemingly interminable wait for a taxi separate two partiers. She wants sex; he wants more.

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

STUDIO SPACE

Ringin’ in the Rain BY LAUREN OYLER

MY YALE

Prop in a Box BY MAGGIE COOPER

AROUND ELM CITY THOMAS KAPLAN

The Thrill of the Fight BY LAURA GOTTESDIENER

UP THE HILL

Calorie Counts Count BY JACQUE FELDMAN

PROFILE

Tommy Boy BY MARY PAT WIXTED

POEM

Bitumen

BY MARISSA GRUNES

BACKPAGE

The Very Secret Diary of Ella Swan BY ISABEL FARHI

The residents of West Rutland, Vermont jealously guard their pristine surroundings. Many strongly oppose nearby wind turbines.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

t’s hard for me to believe that it’s been nearly three months since November and our previous issue. The lazy reading period that starts so soon after Thanksgiving always passes too quickly; the three weeks of winter vacation feel as if they last just a little longer than the purity of new snow on Elm Street. It was during this past November, incidentally, that I first read a draft of Thomas Kaplan’s article on Yale’s endowment, wind turbines in Vermont, and the ethics of backyards. At the time, I wrote him that the piece was “serious, surprising, absorbing.” I feel that even more today, as I put in the final edits on the piece. It is elegant and enjoyable, a worthwhile read in every way. This issue has a number of other treats. “God at Yale,” Molly Hensley-Clancy’s exploration of evangelical Christianity and finding faith in college, looks at the oft-ignored (yet utterly familiar) world of religion on a humanistic campus. Naina Saligram’s personal essay from Paris, “Cubist Portrait,” meditates on Modernist art and the meaning of family. “Ringin’ in the Rain,” Lauren Oyler’s account of her trip up Whitney Avenue to watch a carillonneur practice, reminds us of some of the subtle, idiosyncratic pleasures of this university. This issue has articles on pugilism and psychotherapy, the effectiveness of calorie counts, and the weirdness of prop warehouses. And did I mention the Twilight parody for our humor column, the Backpage? It’s an engaging issue, one that, for me, was worth the threemonth wait, even if that wait went quickly. It is also our final issue of original content for the year, a sad fact for me but a great prelude to April’s Wallace Prize Issue. Stay tuned and enjoy. — Ben Brody

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

STUDIO SPACE RINGIN’ IN THE RAIN by Lauren Oyler t’s a dark, rainy Monday in early February, and I’m sloshing up Whitney Avenue to see Harkness Tower’s replacement. Kate Kraft ’10, a member of the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs, has one of her first rings of the semester on the traveling carillon here. Since the bells of Harkness are out of commission — hidden beneath layers of scaffolding and blue debris netting — we trek up Science Hill, past the Peabody Museum to reach the temporary instrument. Though the concert featured in last Friday’s News marked the Guild’s first official ring since August, Yale’s student carillonneurs have been keeping their skills sharp every day, hiking out to the edge of campus. Kraft and I continue up Whitney. Gradually, the carillon emerges from the gray mist. I had imagined the bells as a kind of musical cupcake truck, crisscrossing campus and spreading joy wherever they went. But in reality, the traveling carillon is stationary; the only people who hear the Guild’s impromptu concerts are those leaving the Pierson-Sage Garage around 5 p.m. “It’s like a traveling music box,” says Kraft. A traveling music box parked next to a bulldozer. Designed by Chime Master Systems, cast by the Royal Eijsbouts Bell Foundry in The Netherlands, and put on wheels by a company called Mobile Millennium, the four-octave, 10,700-pound carillon is the larger of two traveling carillons in the United States. The carillon’s 48 bells are made of copper and range in size from the 2,000-pound low F to the 20-pound F four octaves above. Encased in Plexiglas, the bells and klavier (keyboard) have been entertaining Whitney Avenue drivers since November. They will resume their itinerant life on the road in May. Though it’s not hung high like the one in Harkness Tower, the Mobile Millennium is still several feet above ground level. To get to the instrument, Kraft and I have to climb a narrow metal staircase that leads up the back of the truck to the platform on which the room-sized box is perched. Inside, bells surround us; they are arranged

in rows from the smallest to the largest behind a thin pane of glass. Cranks, levers, and wires issue from the klavier in the center and line the ceiling, mechanically connecting keys to bells. A small white space heater sits unplugged in the corner. Kraft and I are seated so high off the box’s floor that my feet don’t touch it. A single work light illuminates the keys, and most of the bells are obscured in the shadowy compartments surrounding us. Kraft takes a seat and exchanges her heavy boots for a pair of blue Converses, which allow her easier access to the carillon’s narrow foot pedals. Then she begins to play. Kraft’s hands move gracefully and powerfully through the first song, an austere rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain.” Carillonneurs use their fists to hit the keys, but the instrument can provide a range of sounds. It all depends on the carillonneur’s touch. A technique called “preparing the keys” gives the player more control over the resonance of the bells; Kraft delicately Kate Kraft, a member of the Guild of taps a key halfway down before hitting it Carillonneurs, plays a 10,700-pound travagain with a flick of her wrist. The traveling eling carillon, one of only two in the U. S. carillon has six fewer bells than the one in Harkness Tower, but Kraft says the issue with the Mobile Millennium is really that starts playing faster. A Yale security guard in the bells just don’t sound as good. She finds a fluorescent green jacket passes by, ignorthe music for Europe’s “Final Countdown” ing the whirlwind of music coming from and plays the first few bars for me, then just a few feet above. A FedEx truck stops stops. “It sounds better from Harkness,” at a red light across the street. Kraft switches to a traditional sonatina she says. “Of all the places that have good acoustics, the Pierson-Sage parking lot is by Sjef van Balkom, then to the love theme from “The Godfather.” Although many not high on the list.” Members of the Carillon Guild received members of the carillon stick to traditional unexpected news in May 2009 when they pieces, Kraft is one of the few who likes learned that Harkness Tower would be to play things that people can recognize, under construction during the 2009-2010 providing a modern angle on an archaic academic year, but co-chair Andrew Lai ’10 instrument. She stops her ringing abruptly says that the Guild is not resentful about and asks me if I could please stand up. My being given such short notice. Still, I can shadow is obscuring the view of her feet, tell that Kraft would rather be in Harkness and the last several measures of the theme than shivering in a remote parking lot on a go by quickly. The box shakes with the force of the fast-paced finish. Kraft’s hands far corner of campus. As Kraft flicks, glides, and bounces her and feet fly across the carillon’s keys. Her way through a traditional piece, I gaze body bobs as she plays, but her eyes remain through the fogged glass to the scene out- fixed on the music. She seems unconcerned side. It’s completely dark now, and most of that I’m the only one around to hear her the cars in the parking lot have gone. Kraft ring.

LA WANG

In a remote corner of campus on the back of a truck hangs a strange contraption: a set of traveling carillon bells, used by the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs to practice and perform while Harkness Tower is under construction.

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

MY YALE PROP IN A BOX by Maggie Cooper The prop warehouse has everything you’re looking for, whether it’s a spare pot, an ancient calculator, or the body of a murdered king. If it ever appeared on stage, it now rests somewhere in these long, dusty aisles. mainstage production, Arcadia, leads me up onto the loading dock and through a door into the vast, dusty building. I have come to look for props with him and Rachel Sturm ’10, the set designer for the Dramat’s spring experimental production, a play by junior Matthew George entitled Commandments. Two men in Tile America jackets greet us as we pass through the store’s linoleum section. “I like the props warehouse,” says Stevens as we enter the School of Drama’s share of the building. He flicks on the lights. The warehouse is about the size of a regulation soccer field. “You need a dust mask, but I like it.” A kingly figure lies in state on a shelf near the front of the warehouse, a noose still dangling around his golden neck, the remnants of his last theatrical demise. “They have an electric chair in here,” Stevens tells me later. “Also a bunch of really cool steamer trunks. I really have a thing for boxes.” The standard theatrical definition of “prop” includes any item handled by an actor over the course of the play. Depending on the production, suitcases,

MAGGIE COOPER

am looking for a saucepan. The household items are located predominantly in this aisle, which is flanked by a variety of refrigerators. I pick up a pot from the shelf and bring it out into the light, running my fingers through a layer of steel-gray filth to reveal the silver surface underneath. I put the pot back and pick up another, going through several more before I settle on a medium-sized specimen. Then I turn to the mess of cups, saucers, and goblets on the shelves adjacent to me. The Yale School of Drama props warehouse, which houses the furniture and myriad other objects used in theatrical productions, is located at 105 Hamilton Street, about a ten-minute drive east of campus, near Long Wharf Drive. Most of the building is occupied by the Tile America showroom, a storefront filled with floor samples hanging on display boards. But around the back, in a far corner of the building, a forest of chair legs and sofas sprouts from the top of immense metal shelving units. Oren Stevens ’11, the producer of the Yale Dramatic Association’s spring

A king once hanged in a play now lies at Yale School of Drama’s prop warehouse. He is surrounded by miscellaneous other objects — coffee cups, rifles, and even an electric chair.

coffee cups, notebooks, stethoscopes, candelabras, rifles, and turkey sandwiches can all fall into this category, which means that the inventory the warehouse has accumulated seems nearly inexhaustible. It is a treasure trove spanning several centuries and more than a few imaginary worlds. Here, it’s surprisingly easy to find something that might become a theodolite, a sort of antiquated surveying tool, and even easier to track down a portfolio that looks as though it might have existed two hundred years ago. As I wander from the dim aisle that is home to swords and photo albums back towards a row of bicycles, I round the corner and am surprised by the sight of a stuffed human dummy lying on a stretcher. There are things the warehouse doesn’t have, of course. I ask Rachel Reynolds, the woman in charge, about a tortoise. She climbs to the top of a tall ladder to check, but the box labeled “Animals” is empty. “They pulled most of the animals for Servant of Two Masters at the Rep,” Reynolds tells me. “There is a place in New Jersey that might have a tortoise, though. They have a lot of animatronics.” I ask about pistols. “Those are in weapons lock-up.” Reynolds says. “I don’t do that stuff. We have the general and lockup areas here, and then weapons, and the vault, where we keep all the really valuable specialized things and the real antique furniture. There’s a lot going on.” When we are finished, Stevens and Sturm assemble by the exit as I trail behind, reluctant to leave this magical world of books that are really just spines attached to boards and ice cream that never melts. Outside the props warehouse, objects reassume their usual meanings, and a linoleum tile becomes a fact of life rather than a subject of theatrical significance. In the car on the way back to campus, I ask Stevens and Sturm about their favorite things in the warehouse. They agree almost instantly on the set of model human organs, each in a large glass jar. “They have a penis,” Stevens tells me, laughing. “A penis in a jar.”

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

MAGGIE COOPER

A king once hanged in a play now lies at Yale School of Drama’s prop warehouse. He is surrounded by miscellaneous other objects — coffee cups, rifles, and even an electric chair.

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

AROUND ELM CITY THE THRILL OF THE FIGHT by Laura Gottesdiener Everyone needs a place to let loose. And for Binnie Klein and many others in New Haven, that place is Fighting Fitness, where a massive fighter can face off with a tiny writer and a mild-mannered therapist can turn violent. ohn Spehar puts on a pair of large mitts and brandishes them in front of a petite boxer. “Jab, one-two!” he says. Binnie Klein’s cut-off Fight Club tank-top reveals a thick shoulder muscle that contracts as she rotates her hips, throws her arm out straight, and fires off two quick punches. The punches sound dry and rich as they make contact with the mitts, and the echo vibrates in the sweat-laden air of Fighting Fitness. “Good. Jab,” says Spehar. Smack, says her fist. “Double-jab cross.” Klein releases two quick punches and, shifting her weight to her back leg, hurls her right fist straight at Spehar’s face. As the punch flies, I wonder: Is a middle-aged Jewish woman from New Haven about to knock out the 1983 Connecticut middleweight boxing champion? Hardly. Klein is a psychotherapist, not a fighter. She is also the author of Blows to the Head, a memoir that explores the relationship between Judaism, femininity, and boxing. Smack! Spehar catches Klein’s fist only inches from his chin. “Good, baby,” Spehar says. He calls everyone “baby,” although he’s dubbed me “baby girl.” I’d usually object, but, given that it comes from a weathered 200-pound fighter who spends his days welcoming women into the testosterone-ridden world of boxing, the epithet feels empowering. “Don’t forget we’ve got two more divas of destruction,” Spehar says, nodding at me and Jenni Shettleworth, the co-owner of Fighting Fitness and one of only two female boxing coaches in the state. Shettleworth smiles at me. Shit. It’s my turn. From outside, Fighting Fitness in Orange, Connecticut, sounds more like a construction site than a boxing gym. Pow-pow-pow, pow-pow-pow! Is there a jackhammer drilling somewhere nearby? Stepping inside, I learn that the percussive sound comes from a mixed-martial-arts fighter who is glistening with sweat and pummeling a punching bag. I hesitate; somehow I don’t think a girl who barely tops 5’4’’

and has never thrown a punch in her life belongs here. A quick glance around, however, assures me that my instincts are wrong. Fighting Fitness is the America of gyms: here, every boxer is created equal. Tattooed cage fighters train alongside seventy-year-old women. Teenage girls blast Hanson over the loudspeakers. With such a diversity of athletes, Spehar and Shettleworth have one goal for their gym: to provide a safe place for violence and aggression. Spehar is aware of the paradox. His first gym, in the basement of a Hartford housing project, was run by a guy named Johnny Duke. Duke was a grizzled old man who wore turquoise rings on his fingers to give punches a little more, um, emphasis. When a skinny white kid named Spehar walked through the door, Duke partnered him up with Hector. “He’s got 51 fights and 51 knockouts,” Duke said of Hector. “His dad’s in prison for killing a white guy.” Spehar was terrified, and he got the crap beat out of him. But he kept coming back, and soon he was the white Hector. “This here’s John,” Duke would say to a black newbie. “He’s got 51 fights and 51 knockouts. His dad’s in the Ku Klux Klan.” That’s certainly not the ethos at Fighting Fitness, where a newcomer gets taught the mechanics of a right hook before getting taught the sting of it catching you in the liver. (Says Spehar, it feels like “getting stabbed from the inside out.”) Still, stepping into the ring for the first time is a nervewracking experience. Spehar shows me how to stand with my right leg forward, my left leg back, my elbows tucked, and my fists protecting my face. Meanwhile, Shettleworth rattles off instructions: tilt the pelvis, rock the shoulders, pivot from the hips. My head is swimming. My gloves reek of sweat. “So, jab,” Shettleworth says. I throw my arm into thin air. The smelly gloves feel awkward and heavy. “Breathe, Laura,” Spehar says. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I relax and suddenly feel calmer, more powerful. I jab

over and over until I understand what Klein meant when she wrote that boxing felt like “her eyeballs were sweating.” Eventually, I graduate from punching air to punching mitts. I throw a jab and — smud. The sound isn’t as rich as Klein’s, but I think it’s amazing. I lurch forward to jab again and lose my balance. My face turns red. “Go again,” Shettleworth says. I do. Smack! I’m giddy with excitement. Here is humanity’s dirty little secret: we like to hit each other. This rush is what keeps boxers in the ring with their eyes swollen shut, and what brings fighters as unlikely as Binnie Klein back to the gym week after week. As a psychotherapist, Klein is aware that humans are motivated by a mixture of drives. According to Freud, the two basic drives are sex and aggression. And though our society seems obsessed with sex, no one — especially not a middle-aged woman — is encouraged to express aggression. People are often dumbstruck by Klein’s decision to start boxing a few years ago, even those within the community. Once, while Klein was working an amateur tournament, one of the male boxers kept asking her why she boxed. Finally, he concluded: “I just don’t see it. Women are sacred.” Being sacred isn’t bad, but, as Klein shows, women are also physical, sweaty, confident, and constantly pushing the envelope. Next up for Klein is mixed martial arts. “I would like to feel how to get a man off me,” she says, pantomiming an imaginary fighter lying on top of her. I won’t jump into cage fighting anytime soon. But, as I’m leaving Fighting Fitness, Shettleworth invites me to attend one of the next day’s classes. I agree, though my neck feels sore and I wince as I push the door open for Klein. “Laura, get over here!” Spehar yells just as I am leaving. I tiptoe back inside, uneasy about his gruff tone. When I reach the office, Shettleworth throws a holiday gift bag at my face. Still wary of blows to the head, I immediately duck. Spehar and Shettleworth laugh. Then, growing more serious, Spehar nods. “Nice job today,” he says.

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT CUBIST PORTRAIT by Naina Saligram From a sweltering porch under India’s blazing sun to the cool rooms of a Parisian museum, it’s all the same world. But in order to see this world, you must break it into little pieces before putting it back together again. was always afraid of Cubism. It wasn’t an I-just-don’t-getit-and-that-scares-me kind of fear, but an I-just-don’t-getit-yet-I’m-sure-that-if-I-did-it-would-make-me-afraid kind. I was afraid of its ugliness, of its rawness. Afraid of its unsettling, destabilizing, mind-blowing potential. Afraid of knowing, afraid of not knowing. Perhaps, I was most afraid of changing the way I saw the world — from my simple, safe, fixed vantage point.

he summer before my senior year of high school, I spent a month in India with my grandparents. Technically, I was there to volunteer at an educational center in the village of Yelahanka — what should have been a life-changing experience — but what I remember most about that month are the long, luxurious afternoons I spent on the porch with my grandfather. India in the summer is hot: stifling, like a piston pushing all the heat in the air up against your skin. But my grandmother has this strange theory that if you drink hot tea in the heat, it makes you cooler. So, Grandpa and I would sit outside — he in his wicker rocking chair, I in my white plastic one — drinking hot tea in the heat. Grandpa and I had never really talked much about anything before that summer: at most, we had shared five-minute conversations on the phone every few months, when he would ask if I was studying hard, and I would ask about his and Grandma’s health. But this time I took the heat, and the silence that first came with it, as an open invitation. I told Grandpa about little things that occurred to me: about how the electricity was always going out in Yelahanka, which drove me crazy; about the enormous blizzard during the Valentines’ Day Rose Sale my house had organized at school that year. Eventually, we landed on the recurring topic of religion. It was natural, really, that it should come up. Three years earlier, I had completed a school project on Hinduism. My parents were very proud of the seeming depth of my curiosity and spirituality — I think they even sent Grandpa the project report. They must have forgotten that that same year, I wrote my first letter to God, pleading that he let me find the silver Tiffany bean earring that I had lost and loved so much. I never found that earring, and never believed in God the same way again.

dreadful years from 1909-1914 seemed so bleak and devoid of life! I wasn’t ready. As I continued to study art history in college, pouring myself into Renoir’s blissful idealism, I avoided scary Cubism at all costs. Perhaps by fate, I found myself last summer working as an intern for an exhibition of Picasso’s drawings, where I had no choice but to face my nemesis. Every day I read from Pepe Karmel’s Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, Anne Baldassari’s Cubist Picasso, Pierre Daix’s Picasso: The Cubist Years. Cubism — that “sum of deconstructions,” that “cornerstone of modernism,” that “horrific beast of an idea” — began to engulf me.

Grandpa has answers for everything on the porch. He says to imagine a cup of water. The cup is like our body, and the water is like our soul.

he month after my solo trip to India, I started taking an art history class at school. My world came alive with color and beauty, but as much as I loved art and was fascinated by modernism, I hated Picasso and Braque’s “little cubes.” Those

randpa has silvery white hair, parted and oiled. His soft, wrinkly brown skin envelops his bony limbs. When he is happy, he always says, “Good show, good show,” and he grips your arm and squeezes it with such intensity that you want to scream in pain and joy. Grandpa is wildly sarcastic, but also profoundly philosophical. He is full of truisms. He loves to tell the story of the boy (or is it when he was a boy?) who lied about being late to cricket practice by saying that his bicycle broke on the way there. Then, on his way home, the bicycle broke. Or that story of the tennis player, I can’t remember who, but the world’s greatest tennis player. When he lost Wimbledon one time, everyone was shocked and said, “Did you ask, ‘Why me?’” And he answered, “Every time I win, I don’t ask, ‘Why me?’”

read something last summer that finally made sense to me. It explained Cubism in the simplest of ways. Take a paper cup, for example, and think about how to represent it — not how it looks, but what it is. How can you represent the back, the front, the inside, the outside of the cup all at one time on a two dimensional surface? The only way is to tear it up into little pieces. That’s what Cubism does — it fractures a whole to represent its essence; it takes something apart to put it back together again. Unity and multiplicity — the whole cup and all its pieces — they are one and the same.

y atheist cousin Vivek went to visit my grandfather that year a few months before I did. Vivek, now enrolled in an M.D.-Ph.D. program, believes in Science, so my grandfather asked him about the eye. What makes the eye of a dead man and the eye of a living man different? If the organs are

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

UP THE HILL

CALORIE COUNTS COUNT by Jacque Feldman For students hoping to dodge the Freshman 15, calorie counts supplied by Yale Dining seem like a blessing. But could the placards above the steaming dishes be doing more to create eating disorders than conscientious diners? Indeed, Harvard withdrew the labels from its dining hall food in 2008, concerned that the posted nutrition facts worsened eating disorders among its students. At Yale, however, the question still lingers: Are the nutrition facts displayed over every pan of mushroom sincronizadas (358 calories each) really helping, or are they making us crazy? A new study, published this month by Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, may offer some answers. In the study, “Evaluating the Impact of Menu Labeling on Food Choices and Intake,” subjects were found to eat significantly fewer calories when menu items were labeled. Citing these results, graduate student Christina Roberto, one of the authors of the study, says she supports governmental mandates to label calories on restaurant menus. Food-labeling policies make sense, she says — even at a university that appears largely untouched by the national obesity epidemic they seek to address. Calorie labels are not only intended to reduce overeating, says Roberto. More fundamentally, they inform the consumer about the product — “and that alone is worth it.” This is especially important

ANTHONY LYDGATE

t’s peanut night in the Davenport dining hall. The air hangs heavy with the scent of delicacies like Peanut Parmesan Spiced Chicken Cutlet, and we savor their taste. A friend of mine returns to the table from the serving area with a slice of peanut pie, takes a bite, and exclaims, “This is so good!” “There’s like eleven hundred calories in that piece,” says the girl at his elbow. “Didn’t you see the card?” My friend’s expression changes. He prods the pie gingerly. “Anyone want to share?” Shamed, I decline. My friend puts down his fork and speaks words since immortalized by Kate Moss: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Moss’s statement was the subject of a recent News op-ed, which called her honesty refreshing. But another op-ed published just a week before focused on unhealthy eating, calling Yale Dining’s “Wellness Information and Nutrition” fliers dangerously “obsessive, restrictive, and negative.” “For a population of neurotic Yale students,” wrote Rebecca Stern, “this may be the first step down a slippery slope to some sort of disordered eating.”

A recent Rudd Center study points to the health benefits of calorie labelling like this.

at the chain restaurants that have been targeted by labeling policy, where healthy eating is rarely intuitive: a Caesar salad at the Cheesecake Factory might have more calories than a serving of meatloaf. At these restaurants, labeling also has what Roberto calls a positive “cultural-environmental effect.” Forced to disclose calorie contents, chain restaurants are offering healthier options to their customers. University dining halls are different, of course, from chain restaurants. But environmental differences, Roberto says, only “provide a different rationale” for labeling dining hall foods with calorie counts. She calls college a “transitional time” for students’ eating habits. Cut off from regular home-cooked dinners, unleashed on an all-you-can-eat buffet three times a day, scared by the looming specter of the “Freshman 15,” we could all use a little advice — and that, Roberto says, is where labels come in. Simply put, they teach us about our food. Fair enough. But do they promote eating disorders? Harvard policy-makers certainly thought so. Roberto, however, is more optimistic. She believes calorie labels could help prevent college weight gain and thereby “stave off” the disordered eating that can begin as an attempt to shed the Freshman 15. Moreover, she says, students truly afflicted with eating disorders tend to “isolate” and avoid the dining hall. Labels could reduce the anxiety associated with the unknown contents of dining hall food, encouraging these students to return to eating with their friends. In any event, Roberto says, eating disorders are conditions as serious as other mental illnesses, with biological and genetic causes, and they are unlikely to be triggered (or cured, for that matter) exclusively by a calorie-labeled dining hall. “I like to think that if we improve the food environment in general — if crappy food isn’t as accessible — then both eating disorders and obesity will start to go down,” Roberto says. Her recent study, she hopes, may be a first step, and calorie labeling is another. After all, maybe peanut pieis best enjoyed in moderation.

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

the same, what lets the living eye see? Vivek laughed and said that all the mysteries of the world, even the eye, could be explained by natural phenomena. Grandpa said that in Hinduism, God is nature. God isn’t a supreme being, God is being.

randpa, I don’t understand reincarnation. It seems really weird, doesn’t it? Do you really think that we were animals in previous lives? Grandpa, why are there so many gods in Hinduism if they are all supposed to be different sides of the same, one God? Grandpa, why do people pray? Why do you pray? Grandpa? Grandpa has answers for everything on the porch. He says to imagine a cup of water. The cup is like our body, and the water is like our soul. When we die, the water returns to one source, a river, and then when a new cup comes along, it too will be filled with water. But the water is the same no matter where in the river it comes from — it is all one, despite its fragmentation into bodies. People pray, he says, not to make wishes to a genie, but to achieve discipline and moderation, to distance themselves from their own bodies. Eventually, they aim to reach a state of enlightenment where they see themselves and all the little pieces of the world — all the water — as part of the same whole.

listened carefully, attentively to my grandfather’s words, without judgment but without endorsement. Maybe I didn’t really understand them then, or maybe I understood them but didn’t accept them. Maybe I wasn’t looking for answers about God at all. It’s funny that after all of the time I spent with Grandpa that summer, I still know so little about him. I know that he was in the army, and that he once got in this near-fatal accident. I know that he loves mangos and taking walks every day. But I don’t even know his whole name. Colonel B.V.S. Rao. I can’t tell you what the initials stand for. People

say that Cubism resembles shards of glass — how can I find them all to put the mirror back together?

few weeks ago, I was in the galleries of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, staring at Picasso’s Guitarist, an iconic Analytic Cubist piece from 1910. The monochrome canvas no longer appears coldly impersonal to me, but is alive with richly variegated tones of brown, inscribed with decisive black lines that become arcs, cones, triangles, and squares. The painting teeters on the verge of abstraction, and yet the fractured forms coalesce in space, giving way to a solid head, and then a body. Three short strokes at the center convey the strings of a guitar. The forms in their totality capture what it means to be a guitarist. But what strikes me most is that, despite the universality of the shapes, the painting remains a portrait. It reminds me of my grandfather.

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

PROFILE TOMMY BOY by Mary Pat Wixted Amid the organized chaos of crew practices, Tom Taft, the Yale Crew teams’ rigger, provides a constant, calming presence. He has seen Yale’s crew program through accidents, several coaches, scores of athletes, and Title IX. very afternoon in the fall and spring, three yellow school busses and more than a hundred Yale athletes like me descend upon the Gilder Boathouse in Derby, Connecticut. Coaches rev the engines of their launch boats; coxswains bark orders; rowers chatter, joke, and stretch. Crews gather to place their delicate racing shells in the water, shove away from the dock, and row up the meandering Housatonic. But the one person who rises above the frenzy is Tom Taft, the Yale crew boatman — or rigger, so called because he rigs our boats — who watches the commotion from the doorframe of the shop. “At regattas you see two types of overweight old guys,” Tom explains to me. “If they’re wearing blue blazers and carrying tote bags, they’re officials. If they look like homeless men out for a day at the beach, they’re riggers.” He laughs. To me, Tom has always looked more Ernest Hemingway than beach bum. Nevertheless, I laugh because he’s right: his tanned face, stocky frame, full white beard, and turtleneck sweaters under fishing overalls channel Hemingway, but the likeness is thwarted by Tevas with socks and oily rags peeking out of his pockets. Tom’s shop — a long, thin room adjacent to the boat bays — is crowded with sawhorses, workbenches, peculiarly shaped packages, crates of paper, cans of paint, orange Gatorade coolers, orange gasoline containers, rolls of plastic wrap, “No Wake” buoys, megaphones, oarlocks, oar handles, and oar blades. There are shelves full of nuts, bolts, washers, drills, and wrenches of every size, all carefully labeled. A long, thin space down the center of the room is the only place free of clutter; Tom is always ready for a novice coxswain to break the skeg off the bottom of a boat and bring the whole shell into his shop for repairs. Industrial fans overwhelm Tom’s voice, a surprising tenor for someone who looks so gruff. When I met to talk with Tom in the shop, he’d directed me to a white plastic Adirondack chair. I knew this chair; the Yale Women’s Crew Team head coach, Will Porter, had found it floating in the river. “Heyyyy! Tommy Boy!” Will called out

his customary greeting, upon sighting the chair. “Check it out!” Tom has improved the chair by attaching a substantial bottle-opener to the left front leg, at just the place where my left arm hung with an invisible beer. Tom keeps it hidden it in the shop, but if it’s regatta day and the weather is nice, he brings it out on the dock to watch the races. Tom grew up in New Hampshire and attended Philips Exeter Academy, where his father taught for 38 years. Tom didn’t row at Exeter, but instead participated in theatrical productions as a stagehand. “Looking back on that experience, I realize it’s a lot like what I do now. It’s the same feeling: watching a performance from backstage.” The oldest of five, Tom has two younger brothers and two younger sisters. None of the Taft boys ever displayed any athletic talent. It was Tom’s sisters, “in spite of their terrible physiology,” who were the athletes. One sister, standing at 4’10”, was recruited to play hockey at Harvard. “One holiday, after a couple glasses of wine, my mother said to us, ‘You boys were such a disappointment. I have three healthy sons … and it’s my midget daughter who can play sports!’” Tom’s mother attended Wellesley in the 1940s, where she learned to row — “although that was more of a posture exercise than a strenuous physical activity,” he says. The summer after Tom graduated from Williams in 1972, he returned home. “I was burned out, tired of classrooms.” Rejecting the idea of grad school, Tom sought work that would take him outdoors. When Exeter asked him to lend its aging rigger a hand, he started working at the boathouse part time. Soon, Tom quit his landscaping job and became more serious about his position as a rigger. He married one of Exeter’s coaches, a woman named Sue (now his ex-wife), and applied for boatman posts at colleges. Tom started at Yale in 1984; his daughters were born a few years later. Tom nods to the bottle-opener on my chair. “My predecessor was a heavy drinker,” he explains, adding that he found the bottleopener attached to the boat trailer when he first arrived. As a rower myself, I try to imag-

ine someone measuring pitch and adjusting heights in a drunken stupor. I can’t. Jerry Romano was Yale’s rigger for 43 years before Tom. He was born across the street from the boathouse, a Derby boy with an eighth-grade education. “Jerry was an old-fashioned guy,” Tom remembers. “I mean, the ’50s were the golden days of the Yale heavyweight program, and Jerry loved everyone, but he’d say, ‘varsity, lightweights, women.’ It was the heavyweights first, so as his assistant, I spent my time with the women.” Even in the early 80s, women’s rowing at Yale was treated as second-class. The team operated with less money than either of the men’s teams. On trips, sometimes an entire boat — nine athletes — shared a single hotel room. Women’s rowing at Yale had only begun in the 70s, and the athletes constantly had to assert themselves in the face of chauvinist male teammates and a prejudiced administration. In 1972, Title IX legislation mandated “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in... or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” But by 1976, female rowers at Yale still didn’t have showers or a locker room. After every practice, they would wait on a freezing bus in their sweaty practice clothes while the men’s teams showered and changed. Some athletes contracted pneumonia. That March, 19 women from the crew team walked into the office of Director of Athletics, Joni Barnett. They stripped naked, revealing “Title IX” written boldly on their bare chests and backs. When photographs reached the media, the backlash against Yale — and many other discriminatory institutions across the country — led to serious change. As Tom remembers, “One time Nat Case, the old head coach, got really mad at me. I’d said something like, ‘Let’s pick up this boat, girls.’ Nat took me aside and was very stern and very quiet. He said, ‘They are not girls. They are women. This is Yale Women’s Crew.’ Then I made it my business to advance this attitude, and I tried to

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

make every new crew understand it. Many years later I heard a rower call to her teammates, ‘Come on, girls!’ I remembered Nat’s words, so I took her aside, and I said, “You are not girls. You are women — Yale Women’s Crew.’ She looked me dead in the eye. ‘You don’t get to say what we call ourselves.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I guess that’s progress.’” Tom got to know the women’s team well in those years, but now he’s responsible for all three crew teams. He sighs. “I miss knowing the team, knowing what matters to them. I try to pay attention. I look at the boat pictures and match names with faces. I still know more women than heavyweights or lightweights. I meet all the heavyweights at Gales Ferry, but all the lightweights look the same. They’re all the same size, like a bunch of cats.” Tom weaves his arms in and out, imitating an overabundance of cats crawling over each other. When Tom started, the women’s team was built on walk-ons because there weren’t many high schools from which to recruit female rowers. “The coaches had to teach these new rowers how to be athletes. Some people never got it. There’s just something…” He trails off, unable to explain that “it,” that thing that makes or breaks an athlete. “Intellectually I understand it. I comprehend mentally how you do what you do — the training. Emotionally, I have a hard time understanding how you can face it.” He looks at me with what I feel is some kind of awe (or maybe concern for my sanity). “Sometimes I sit here and I think I don’t really know what I’m seeing.” Tom seeks to understand the athletes more than the sport itself, and, after thirty years of experience, he’s a good judge of character. “In their faces, you can see when they have confidence, or when they think they’re in over their heads. Or when they’re scared because they don’t know what more they can do.” Tom can read the team’s mentality, too. “Back in the 80s there was always a real edginess.” Tom recalls how, after he’d rough up the wooden oar handles to prevent slipping, the men would always sand them down to protect their hands, but the women would tough it out. After practice, there would be a film of bloody sawdust in the bottom of the women’s boats. “The team was itchy, scratchy, they were always on each other’s nerves, on the coach’s nerves. I used to think that was necessary.” About recent

teams, Tom thinks, “These guys aren’t angry enough.” I bridle slightly. But he continues, “I’ve learned that was a misunderstanding of where the drive comes from. There’s no comparison between the teams of the past and the successful teams of the last five years in terms of discipline, determination, and sheer athleticism.” Tom doesn’t consider himself handy. “I don’t believe in magic. There’s no magical knowledge.” He pushes his chair over to the desk and checks his computer’s e-mail inbox. “See, I’ve got messages from the riggers at Navy and Dartmouth.” The community of university riggers across the nation is closeknit. They trade ideas and argue about the best way to fix or build equipment. Some are known for their specialties — Tom is something of an expert on Department of Transportation regulations (Navy and Dartmouth wanted to know if special boat covers were needed for travel to Sacramento). While a little needling between schools occurs, the fiercest competition happens at the riggers’ annual Croquet Tournament at the women’s NCAA championships. “All riggers have to rescue each other at some time,” Tom explains. “I make sure the equipment doesn’t fail, but I don’t want the other guy to fail, either. Decide the race on the water.” Another beep from his computer announces an email from Harvard’s rigger. Coaches seem to have shifted away from an inclusive mentality focused on building the sport, Tom says; but the riggers’ community is still one of bonhomie.

hen Tom started, old boats were made of wood, and newer boats were fiberglass within a wooden frame. He remembers boats so heavy that they looked like caterpillars when the Exeter team carried them to the water, with dozens of pairs of legs supporting each boat. Now, racing shells are carbon fiber, which is stiffer and lighter. In Tom’s experience, though, one type of boat isn’t necessarily better than another. “If you look at the top three crews at NCAAs two year ago, they all were within two seconds of each other, and each in a different type of boat. Yale, obviously, first place in a Vespoli. Stanford was in an Empacher — I think that’s what their whole program uses. And Brown — well, John Murphy hasn’t even changed his underwear in twenty-five years, so, yeah, they were in Resolutes.” If everything goes smoothly, Tom has

little to do. But, he’s a very busy man. “My first accident was during my first spring,” he says gleefully, leaning forward. Tom had driven the trailer back from the Tampa training trip, his longest drive ever towing the expensive shells (each one costs about as much as a year of college). On the short drive home from the first dual race in Philadelphia, he stopped at a gas station. A delivery van broke the stern deck off the varsity’s brand new Empacher. “I thought, ‘I’m done,’” Tom said as he reenacted his horrified grimace. The novice coach, Carol Bower, was in the truck too. She called Nat Case’s wife with the news. “The first thing his wife asked was, ‘Anybody hurt?’ And then when Nat found out, he just said, ‘I didn’t like that boat anyway.’” Since that first race, there have been plenty of other catastrophes. “Once in San Diego, the driver somehow sideswiped the back ends of the lightweight boats on the trailer. One boat lost six inches in the stern. The other was cracked open all the way from the tip of the stern to the coxswain’s seat.” Tom measures the distances with his hands, and then picks up imaginary tools. “I got some putty and slapped it together. They raced in the heats with it, and every time they took it out of the water I’d sand it. They made the finals.” He smiled wryly. “It was a windy day. And when they lined up for the start of the race, the coxswain heard a loud crack!” Tom smacks his hands together like cymbals. “The cox told me later he was like, ‘I’m just not going to look behind me’ and he told the crew, ‘Hey guys, after we cross the finish line, do not stop rowing.’ Well they won, and after they crossed the line I just saw the boat turn 90 degrees” — Tom makes the turn with his hands — “and head straight for the dock. And when they took it out of the water, the entire top end of the boat fell off.” He laughs. “I probably shouldn’t have let them race in that,” he says more soberly, “but it would have been bad for my ego to say I couldn’t fix it. I’ve learned that having confidence in my skills means knowing how to fix it, and knowing when I can’t fix it.” So what does it take to be a good rigger? I wondered. Tom thinks about it a second and says, “A good rigger doesn’t get excited when all hell breaks loose. And when you travel to Tampa for spring break or Tennessee or whatever it is — you have to know where all the good bars are; the bars and the Home Depot.”

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE (AND PROFITABLE) BY THOMAS KAPLAN

Proposed wind turbines in a small Vermont town could supply energy to nearby communities and may benefit Yale’s endowment. But are they alienating locals? n easels in the theater of the town hall in West Rutland, Vermont, sat 13 photographs of mountains, and Justin Lindholm was eager to show them to me. As if browsing a museum with an expert guide, I proceeded slowly around the cavernous room one night in October as Lindholm, a native Vermonter, identified each ridge and told me what made it special. People in this state, he explained, take their mountains seriously. Lindholm, a 56-year-old retired owner of a sporting goods store, had gathered with a hundred other local residents to discuss what they saw as the gravest threat in recent memory to their beloved mountains: a proposal by a developer to install some 30 wind turbines on nearby forestland, rough terrain that locals here seem to cherish above pretty much everything else. “In Vermont, we consider our mountains sort of sacred,” Lindholm explained as we paused over a panorama of a nearby ridge that he had photographed a few days earlier. “In the Poconos or the Catskills, they may not care. But when you mess with our mountains, we take that personally. We get real intimate with them.” What brought me here, however, was not an interest in the forestland Lindholm treasures — though he would try his hardest to teach me to love it, too — but in the rumored owner of the bulk of the land for which the wind turbine project is planned: Yale University. The forestland that Yale is believed to own — some 4,000

acres in total — would represent a tiny sliver of the University’s endowment, the $16.3 billion treasure chest that will fund almost half of Yale’s total budget this year. It would be merely one of the many “alternative investments” that have proven remarkably lucrative for the University over the past few decades, helping to line Yale’s coffers with an amount of wealth virtually unparalleled in higher education — wealth that has allowed Yale to purchase a new science campus, refurbish its dormitories and increase financial aid, among other things. Yale would surely profit from the proposed wind project by leasing its land to the developer, which in turn would grow that endowment even larger, allowing the University, as Yale administrators like to say, to do even more good. But Lindholm and others here do not see any good coming of the proposed wind farm. Rather, they see the prospect of their mountains disturbed, their scenery marred, their community changed, irrevocably, for the worse. To them, Yale is a profiteer, preying on a rural community whose residents cannot fight back. But that’s not to say they won’t try.

he town of Ira, Vermont, is precisely 200 miles by car from 55 Whitney Ave. in New Haven, where Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and his staff preside over Yale’s endowment. The drive there seems longer than that. After a few hours on Interstate 91, you arrive in Rockingham,

PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS KAPLAN

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

Vermont, population 5,300 and home of the Vermont Country Store (offering aged cheddar cheese cut from a 38-pound wheel). You keep driving; in Chester, Vermont, population 3,000, you make a right turn at William Austin’s Antiques (“50 kinds of mounts,” a sign outside declares). Now you follow back roads, past roadside stands selling farm-fresh eggs and maple syrup, past signs warning of crossing moose, past so many wood-shingled, post-and-beam houses that you expect to see Bob Vila at any moment. Along the way, people are few, but shops are plentiful: offering taxidermy services and snowmobile storage, cheddar cheese or any product imaginable made of wrought iron. There are more antique stores than I imagine there could be antiques. In an hour’s worth of driving, there is only one stoplight, which you find down the road from the Okemo ski resort, across from a little breakfast nook called Trapper’s. Eventually, you arrive in Rutland City, which, with a population of 17,000, is Vermont’s second-largest city. Here you see many stoplights, and a kind of commercial thoroughfare that could be anywhere — except with the addition of mountains, their craggy peaks of all shapes and sizes silhouetted in the haze, in every direction you look. A few miles away from the city center, I parked in the leaf-covered driveway of Jeff Wennberg, who served as mayor of Rutland City for 12 years and most recently served as commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. These days, Wennberg spends the bulk of his time working for a Washington-based environmental think-tank, but I am here to speak with him about his after-hours job: serving as the point man for the developer who wants to turn nearby forestland into renewable energy. We sat on the sofa in his cozy living room, where copies of Smithsonian magazine sat on the coffee table and, behind a large wooden dining room table, the Taconic Mountains peeked through the window. Wennberg, 57, has lived in Rutland his whole life, serving as the city’s youngest school board member and then, at 34, its youngest mayor. He has spent his entire adult life in public service, at various times working for Jim Jeffords when he was in the House of Representatives, managing the town where Okemo is located, and running the local waste management district. Tired of traveling all the time for his think-tank job and interested in consulting on a local level, he got involved in the wind turbine proposal last spring after seeing an article about it in the local newspaper, calling up the developer, and inquiring about the project. He assured me that he did not sign on until he was sure it was a good project for the community. “I’ve been here all my life and have no desire to go anywhere, so I have to be very careful about whom I’m representing,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to

represent something I don’t believe in.” What Wennberg is representing is the project that was selected from five wind turbine plans submitted in response to a requestfor-proposal by Wagner Forest Management, Ltd., which oversees 2.7 million acres of timberland holdings in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada on behalf of different investors, Yale believed to be among them. The winning proposal — by a Danish-born Vermont developer and an Italian power conglomerate, Enel Inc., who together have formed a company called Vermont Community Wind — calls for about 30 wind turbines to be built on the 4,000 Wagner-managed acres and several other nearby properties. The project is exactly what is all the rage in the energy sector today: The United States invested $17 billion in wind farms in 2008, building thousands of turbines across the country and nearly doubling the nation’s windbased generating capacity in the process. Under the banner of promoting sustainable energy, wind farms are now up and running in 36 states, and the wind industry’s lobbying group, the America Wind Energy Association, estimates that the nation’s wind farms can power the equivalent of 7 million homes. Like scores of others under construction elsewhere, the proposed turbines in Vermont will only add to that figure. All told, when the wind blows, the turbines outside Rutland should produce 80 megawatts of power, enough to keep the lights (and everything else) aglow in some 30,000 Vermont households. Indeed, the allure of wind power as a renewable energy source is hard to argue. But as Wennberg has found in Vermont, and as other developers have found elsewhere, people don’t like to look at wind turbines in their backyards. Perhaps most famously, residents of Cape Cod — including the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his family — have fought for years to prevent the nation’s first off-shore wind farm from being built in the middle of Nantucket Sound. For all intents and purposes, it is Wennberg’s job to wage a public-relations battle in order to clear the way for the wind turbine project. He provided me with a printout of PowerPoint slides extolling the virtues of wind power, a news clipping documenting political support for wind farms, and a fact sheet about the developer that seems aimed at making sure people in Vermont don’t think that the Italian power conglomerate is somehow run by Mussolini. Just the name of the development company itself — Vermont Community Wind — is a publicrelations device. Its logo is even more shameless: A silhouette of a boy flying a kite underneath four wind turbines, with a flock of birds soaring majestically above. Marketing propaganda in hand, I followed Wennberg to his Honda sedan for the next phase in his attempt to sell me on the project: a whirlwind tour of Rutland County. In about 15 min-

“Going up here, you see the purpose. You feel more whole than when you came up here.” I asked him what he would do if the turbines were built. He shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to find another spot,” he said.

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

utes — there is not exactly much traffic in these parts to contend with — we crossed the border into Ira, the locus of the turbine proposal and also the source of the most opposition to it. The town of Ira is named for Revolutionary War hero Ira Allen, brother of Ethan Allen, an even more heroic Revolutionary War hero. Only 455 people live here, a tenth of them in poverty, in 21 square miles that lie between two ridges, a state highway running north to south between them. Wennberg and I drove along that road, and there was not much to see. Ira has no stores, save a roadside firewood stand and a large log cabin with the word “ANTIQUES” written in white paint above the door. What it does have are a small red-brick town office (about to be replaced by a small vinyl-clad town office, just completed next door), a small white-clapboard Baptist church, and a small cemetery. As we drove, Wennberg motioned toward the ridges on both sides of us — Susie’s Peak to the east, Herrick Mountain to the west — and toward where the turbines will be installed, where a power line will connect them to Vermont’s electrical grid, and where a temporary wind-testing tower has already been set up to make sure that the wind actually comes. “This is an extraordinary site,” Wennberg said. It is, he said, one of the best for a wind farm in all of New England, “and that’s something that needs to be understood.” For now, the view is also extraordinary. What is special about this town, residents say, is how untouched it is despite being mere minutes from what, by Vermont standards, is a veritable metropolis. Wennberg acknowledged that the 400-foot-tall wind

turbines will be distinctly visible on two sides when driving up or down the state highway in Ira; he told me that additional turbines planned for other ridges were scrapped in order to lessen the aesthetic impact on the town. Wennberg is quick to point out another type of impact the wind turbines will have on the town: an economic impact. Indeed, they will undoubtedly inject money into Ira and other local towns on a scale that few other developments could provide. The municipal budget in Ira this year totals about $170,000; with the proposed turbines in place, the town would collect between $380,000 and $630,000 annually in payments for the next 25 years, paying for the entire town budget with room left over for residents to receive an annual dividend check, of sorts. “You’ve got the highest unemployment rate in all of the state of Vermont here. Our economy is suffering more than any other economy in the state of Vermont. The money from this is going to get back into the community,” Wennberg said. “The benefits are huge.”

hy would a university own a forest 200 miles from its campus? The answer is simple: to make money. In fact, owning forests is one way that David Swensen and his staff have made almost unfathomable sums of money for Yale over the past two decades. For most of its modern history, Yale’s investment managers put the majority of the University’s riches in domestic stocks and bonds, which are safe but decidedly non-ambitious. But when he took over the endowment in 1985,

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

Swensen began to change that, diversifying the endowment by investing it in venture capital, hedge funds and what he calls “real assets,” including real estate, oil, gas, and timberland. These “real assets” made up nearly a third of Yale’s endowment last year, making it the largest single chunk of Yale’s 11-figure fund. Other universities have followed suit in pouring money into so-called alternative investments; schools with endowments exceeding $1 billion invested half their funds in them last year. Swensen has been on his heels lately — “real assets” performed poorly in the economic downturn, forcing him to defend his model — but people in the industry still generally credit him as having transformed the way large institutions invest their endowments. Timberland, in particular, “offers strong return potential, steady cash flow, inflation protection and portfolio diversification,” as Swensen wrote in last year’s updated edition of his 2000 book, Pioneering Portfolio Management. He notes that investment returns stem primarily from the value of timber harvested and changes in the value of residual timber and land; according to one index, timberland produced an 8.1 percent annual return, after inflation, from 1960 to 2005. But that’s not all: Swensen adds that leasing the forestland for “other activities” — including mining and “alternative energy uses” — can also be profitable. Still, the details of Yale’s experience leasing its forests for “other activities” are entirely unknown. The University’s annual report about its investments discusses the performance of the endowment’s alternative investments in broad terms, but rarely

does a specific holding come into public view. The University does not speak publicly about its specific investments — Swensen did not respond to requests for comment for this article — and out of competitive reasons, it even goes so far as to hide its land holdings under a variety of shell companies that are difficult to trace. And beyond that, it is not as if Swensen and his deputies micromanage Yale’s land holdings and other alternative investments on a day-to-day basis; in the most simplistic terms, they set how much of Yale’s endowment should be invested in what type of asset, and then hire outside managers to actually oversee how that money is invested. For that reason, it is impossible to state the exact nature of Yale’s relationship to the forestland in Ira. According to public records, the bulk of the land for which the wind turbine project is planned — most notably, Herrick Mountain — is owned by a company called Yankee Forest LLC and managed by Wagner Forest Management. About a decade ago, the University disclosed in a federal tax filing that it owned a 99 percent stake in Yankee Forest LLC. What remains unknown is whether Yale still holds such a stake, because the state of New Hampshire — where Yankee Forest is legally registered — does not require a limited liability company’s owners to reveal themselves publicly, and Wagner officials say they are contractually prohibited from identifying their clients. A Yale spokesman, Tom Conroy, would not confirm or deny that the University has a stake in the Ira forestland, offering only a one-sentence statement: “Yale does not disclose its invest-

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

ments.” Wennberg, for his part, would only say that Wagner has the full power of ownership to the property and that it is anyone’s guess as to the underlying owner of the land. “We don’t know, and I don’t want to get sucked into that whole debate, because it’s irrelevant to us,” he told me. “We have the lease, and we have the relationship with Wagner.” In any event, even if Yale is the underlying owner of the land, it seems unlikely that the idea for the wind-farm project originated within the University. Wennberg said that Wagner requested proposals for wind-turbine developments only after his boss, along with several other developers interested in wind projects, approached the company to say that Yankee Forest’s land would be perfect for a renewable energy project. A spokesman for Wagner, Michael Novello, would not discuss where the idea for the wind-turbine development came from, but he did offer an explanation of the logic behind it. “Especially in an economy like this, it’s important for diversification,” he told me. “If you have an additional revenue stream [beyond timber harvesting], that helps smooth out things during the bad times.” So the mystery continues. But this much is clear: Whatever is actually the case, the good people of Ira, Vermont, think that Yale owns a big chunk of their town. I am not sure if that is the case — but it does seem likely that Yale has something to do with the land in question, even if it did not come up with the idea for the wind project. After all: If the University hadn’t a thing to do with this, why would the developer spend two hours with me, a Yale student, trying his hardest to sell me on the merits of the project?

ustin Lindholm wanted to sell me on something different. He wanted to sell me on what it means to be from Vermont. Seeing the panoramic photographs on the easels in the West Rutland Town Hall, he told me, was not enough. Not even close. There is only one way to get a true sense of what was at stake, he said: “You’ve got to hike.” So hike I did. On an overcast afternoon, I met Lindholm in a supermarket parking lot by the town hall and piled my gear into his car, a mud-stained and very much mountain-friendly Jeep Wrangler. We drove to the base of another peak in Ira, Bird Mountain, which overlooks the land to which Yale is supposedly tied; another local resident who is fighting the project, Justin Turco, followed in his equally mud-stained GMC Sierra pickup truck. Lindholm, wearing a heavy flannel overcoat, comes across as a modern-day incarnation of one of the Green Mountain Boys, the ragged group of colonists led by Ethan and Ira Allen who fought their entire adult lives for independence: first from the nearby colony of New York, and then from the British Empire. Lindholm’s parents moved their family to West Virginia when he was nine, and Lindholm immediately missed his boyhood mountains. His time at the University of Michigan was no better. “I was going ape,” he told me as we started our hike. “I would take five-mile walks and still you couldn’t find woods. They had this thing they called the arboretum, where they planted everything. That was the best they could do.” So after two years in Ann Arbor, Lindholm dropped out and returned to Vermont, where he settled down and took over a sporting goods store that his

father had opened. Over the years, he bought forestland in different parts of the state, mostly so he would have a quiet place to go hiking and hunting and generally to enjoy the outdoors. One of those places was Ira, where Lindholm bought a large parcel of land on top of Bird Mountain, the destination of our hike. Turco’s story is different. An airline pilot, he flew A320 jetliners for United Airlines until losing his job in a round of layoffs in September. Like Lindholm, he wore a flannel overcoat, one that he bought at his hiking partner’s old store. Unlike Lindholm, he does not seem cut from the Green Mountain Boy mold; he offers a firm handshake and has an airline pilot’s requisite trustme-with-your-life gravitas. But Turco, 42, who lives with his wife and two daughters about a mile and a half from where the nearest turbine is slated to be built, is no less upset about the planned development. “We don’t have much in Ira, but what we do have is Herrick Mountain,” he said. “It’s who we are in this town. It makes up everything we stand for.” Lindholm, for one, has some experience with wind farms: he also owns land in Lempster, N.H., a town of 971 people where a dozen turbines began operating last year. Their developer asked Lindholm and his next-door neighbor if they would lease their land as part of the project. “And we both told them to screw themselves,” he told me proudly. Our hike up the mountain was a veritable nature walk. We talked about trees: maple trees, red oak trees, birch trees, and white oak trees, which I was informed are rare at this latitude and thus make it cause for excitement when we spot one. We talked about birds of prey; Lindholm taught me how to identify a peregrine falcon (“they look like a dive bomber,” with sweptback wings), but we did not see any. We talked about logging and hunting and the positives and negatives of ATV trails. We talked about the creatures of the Vermont forest: bobcats, porcupines, hawks, raptors, deer, caribou, crows, turkey vultures, and turkeys themselves. All of this talk seemed to move Turco, who eagerly peppered Lindholm with questions about the woods as if he were a young forestry student meeting Henry David Thoreau. “There is so much to lose here,” Turco reflected at one point, speaking to no one in particular. Finally, after more than a few slippery steps on the dewy leafcovered trails, we reached the peak of Bird Mountain, a grassy swatch no more than a few dozen yards square. We were standing 2,216 feet above sea level, and the view, objectively, was astounding: To the east were the Green Mountains, to the southwest the Catskills, to the west the Adirondacks and the faintest outline of Lake Champlain. The two men unfurled a map of the area, and Lindholm pointed across the horizon. “This is going to be all turbines,” Lindholm said. He spoke with a tone of resignation, like a man committed to a cause he knows he is not nearly powerful enough to defend. Our hike felt like part of the grieving process: bargaining (“We’ve got to keep the tourists coming — they don’t have to come here”) begot depression (“You ought to be here when the sun goes down”), and that in turn begot acceptance (“We should hang sap buckets on ’em in the spring just to get the spirit of Vermont back”). Above all else, Lindholm just seemed sad. To him, the peak of Bird Mountain has been a place to reflect—upon the death

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of a family member or friend, upon a stumbling block in life. Lindholm would go there and sit, sometimes for hours. Unless there is logging underway—as there was when I visited—the world is utterly silent, like peering at a snapshot of a dream. “There is a natural order of things. We’re all part of nature,” Lindholm told me as we looked over the edge. “Going up here, you see the purpose. You feel more whole than when you came up here.” I asked him what he would do if the turbines were built. He shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to find another spot,” he said. Last summer, Lindholm sold his land to the state of Vermont, striking a deal that allows him to tend to it for the rest of his life but guarantees that it will be preserved after his death. The turbine project was not a factor in the sale. “They never asked me if I wanted my own turbine,” he said with a chuckle. “I missed a golden opportunity — to tell them to go fly a kite.”

n trying to assess to what extent a wind farm would destroy the town of Ira (as residents told me) or secure America’s energy independence (as Wennberg promised), I figured a good starting point was to see a wind turbine in person. My conception of a windmill was the sort of wood-and-nails contraption you might find jury-rigged on a farm or ranch somewhere. It turns out I was rather ill-informed. The town of Searsburg, Vermont, makes Ira look like a burgeoning metropolis. Fourand-a-half miles square, the town, near the Massachusetts border, has a population of 96 people. It also has 10 wind turbines, which make up the first and only industrial wind farm operating in Vermont. And more are forthcoming: Seventeen new turbines are planned for a future expansion of the facility. While Wennberg pointed out one of the proposed sites for the turbines from his dining-room window 10 miles away from Ira, the turbines in Searsburg are not visible from the main state road that cuts through the town. To get to turbine-land, rather, you must turn down a side road that warns of rough pavement and crossing moose. The turbines remain out of sight until a bend in the road. First you notice a shanty on the side of the road, with a heaping pile of firewood, stumps, and trash and a rusted Chevy Blazer standing sentry beside it. In the distance, however, the turbines quickly come into sight, poking out beyond the treetops and spinning ever so gently in the morning breeze. Bright white pillars jutting out from the ridge, they look like something out of a science-fiction movie. It was an unseasonably cold morning when I arrived at the front entrance to the 12-year-old Searsburg Wind Power Facility, which is run by Green Mountain Power, one of Vermont’s largest power companies. The turbines here are 200-foot-tall dinosaurs,

capable of producing only one-half megawatt per turbine and only half the size of the smallest turbines planned for Ira. (“We won’t even take people down there because it would be misleading,” Wennberg told me.) But they are turbines nonetheless, and visiting a tiny turbine is better than visiting none at all, I thought. After a windy drive up a gravel road in a Green Mountain Power pickup truck, I stood atop the ridge among the turbines as Aaron Taylor, who has run the facility here for the last six years, unlocked the hatch into one of them. We climbed inside the base, a circular steel shaft that narrows in diameter from 12 feet to seven feet at the top of the turbine, and Taylor proceeded to show me how the turbines run. For the most part, they are controlled remotely on a computer; only when something bad happens does the 35-year-old Taylor have to physically work the control panel as he did for me. I was particularly interested to meet Taylor because of all the horror stories that people in Ira told me about living around wind turbines. For instance, the organizers of the town meeting in West Rutland recruited an anti-wind-turbine activist from Canada to come speak on “wind turbine syndrome,” a potentially fatal “disease” with which people who live near wind turbines are apparently stricken — and for which there is absolutely no legitimate scientific evidence, as far as I could tell. I asked Taylor about the criticism. “That’s really the sad part,” he replied. “It’s mostly myths, and it’s the bad myths that get exploited.” Modern turbines don’t dice up birds, he said; they don’t spin fast enough. They aren’t unbearably loud, unless something goes wrong, like when the rotor blades get coated with ice. Besides, he said, if it’s windy enough to make the turbines spin, the sound of the wind will drown out any sound from the turbines themselves — which certainly seemed to be the case when I was in Searsburg. And what about wind turbine syndrome and its supposed symptoms of nausea, depression, vertigo, panic attacks, and eventual death? Taylor rolled his eyes when I asked him. “I’m here every day and I’m fine,” he said. By all accounts, the turbines in Searsburg are not a source of many problems. Dorothy Schnure, who handles public relations for Green Mountain Power, told me there is little criticism to fend off in the Searsburg area. “We’ve had really good local support of the project,” she said. “Support before we built it was pretty strong, and after we built it was stronger.” Searsburg’s town clerk, a 60-year-old lifelong resident named Josie Kilbride, told me the same thing. A few people who own vacation homes in Searsburg complain about having to look at the turbines, but people who live in the town year-round do not seem to mind. “It’s like driving down the road and seeing the telephone polls,” she said. “You don’t notice them anymore.”

“It’s just not right. I feel that if Yale truly understands what is proposed here, they would take an interest. I’d hate to believe such a renowned university would just turn its head and take the dollar.”

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

his is not the first time that people have been mad at Yale for the way it invests money. Far from it. Over the years, controversies have spanned a wide range of topics, including investments in the tobacco industry and companies based in Sudan and apartheid-era South Africa, as well as matters involving defense contracting, political lobbying, environmental safety, sustainability and labor standards. In fact, the University is credited as being the first major institution to take on the issue of ethics in institutional investing. The 1972 book “The Ethical Investor: Universities and Corporate Responsibility” by Yale Law School professor John Simon and two graduate students set the standard for how institutions deal with social responsibility as a factor in making investment decisions. Concerns about Yale’s investments are heard by what is known as the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR), which is composed of two students, two alumni, two faculty members and two staff members. The ACIR is charged with carrying out the University’s policies on ethical investing, as approved by the committee of the University’s highest governing body, the Yale Corporation, that sets them. The University’s investment practices have been debated with particular intensity in the last year as a result of the emergence of a student organization aimed at reforming them, called the Responsible Endowment Project. The group seeks to restructure the ACIR, which it argues is not suited to function with a modern endowment composed in large part of alternative assets. Its members cite the wind-farm controversy as one example. “Whatever your stance on this particular issue, it highlights the need for a more transparent endowment,” Sarah Eidelson ’12, one of the leaders of the group, told me. After returning from Vermont, I called the ACIR’s chairman, Jonathan Macey, a corporate law professor at Yale Law School, to inquire about whether his committee had examined the wind project. Macey told me he had received several e-mails and phone messages from Vermont residents raising concerns about the project. One of them, a retired graphic designer named Peter Cosgrove, even traveled to New Haven in January to lobby Macey’s committee in person. It seems likely that public pressure on the University will build in the coming months, from the Responsible Endowment Project as well as people in Rutland County. In the fall, Cosgrove wrote every faculty member of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies to raise awareness about the wind turbine proposal; only one responded, he said. Several people told me they have written to Swensen or Yale’s president, Richard Levin. Other residents to whom I spoke said they had not reached out to the University, but that their opinion of Yale had changed for the worse as a result of the rumors of its tie to the wind project. One of them was Bruce Anderson, a 61-year-old who raises Belted Galloways, a rare breed of cattle that is native to Scotland, on a farm near Ira. Anderson has raised cattle in the Rutland area for 40 years, and he is not happy about the possibility of staring at wind turbines for the rest of his life. “It’s just not right,” he told me as we chatted before the town meeting. “I feel that if Yale truly understands what is proposed here, they would take an interest. I’d hate to believe such a renowned university would just turn its head and take the dollar.” Wennberg told me he thought local residents would try to

ramp up the pressure on Yale as the project advances and they begin to run out of ways to fight it. “The dedicated opponents are looking for any avenue,” he said. “Their interest is not whether Yale is transparent or not; they don’t care. Their interest is, if there’s someone with authority that is in this chain somewhere that they can bring pressure on to make this project go away, then that’s an avenue they’re going to want to take up.” For their part, Yale officials won’t speak publicly about the Vermonters’ complaints, but if they did, their response would probably be to explain that like other large institutional investors, the University entrusts experts (like the people at Wagner) to make the day-to-day decisions regarding the land it owns for investment purposes. It would make no sense, they would probably argue, for Swensen — amid managing the billions of dollars the University relies on to preserve its ability to carry out its mission and to protect its future — to be micro-managing which development proposal is picked for a 4,000-acre forest in Vermont. In fact, in the grand scheme of Yale’s investments, it is hard to imagine that the lease payments Yale would stand to receive from Vermont Community Wind would amount to anything more than a rounding error. At this point, there is little indication as to whether the ACIR might intervene regarding the wind project. Macey told me he was particularly curious to find out what public recourse the residents who had contacted him could take in Vermont. What regulatory hurdles does the wind farm need to clear? How are elected officials handling the situation? What are the zoning rules that apply? “It’s a complicated issue,” he said, and not one the committee is used to dealing with. Divestment from Sudan was familiar ground. Divestment from the Taconic Mountains, not so much. “This is clearly not an issue of apartheid or genocide in Darfur,” he said. “With renewable energy, there’s this other side: It’s a ‘you want omelets, you’ve got to break eggs’ kind of thing. It’s a tough issue.” It was also a tough issue the last time Yale’s forest holdings came into question. In 2001, the University came under fire after it was outed as the owner of land in Maine that state officials there hoped to include as part of a conservation area. Wagner, which also managed that land for the University, was accused of driving a hard bargain with conservation officials and prioritizing the timber-harvesting potential of the land over the environmental benefit of preserving it. It was that episode that shone the public glare onto Yale’s connection with Wagner and Yankee Forest, and it is the Google results from news articles about it that seem to be the basis for why most people in Vermont believe the University is behind the wind turbine project. Before we hung up, I asked Macey the burning question: Did he know if the University actually owns the property in question? “The only thing I know about this is from the people up in Vermont, and I’m not really even sure, frankly, what the nature of Yale’s interest in it is,” he said. Same here, I told him, adding that my trip to the Rutland area did not shed much further light on who exactly owned the land. Macey quickly interrupted me. “Oh my God, you went up there?” he asked. “What was it like?” I told him: Dirt roads. Farmers with tractors. Mountains, mountains and more mountains. He asked me about how far a drive it is, what the town of Ira is like, what residents seemed

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

to think of the proposal. He asked me whether I had ever seen a turbine, how loud they sound, whether they were anything like the squatty weathered windmill the Dutch used to build. “I don’t know why they can’t make them look like those,” he said. “Everybody likes those.”

ltimately, Macey put it best: This is a complicated issue. That was clear from the moment I arrived in Vermont. Annette Smith, the executive director of the nonprofit group Vermonters for a Clean Environment, summed up the quagmire: “Until seven months ago, I thought I was for wind power,” she told me. David Potter, who represents the area in the Vermont House of Representatives, is similarly conflicted. He told a Yale Daily News reporter this past fall that he supports renewable energy in principle — just not when it means wind turbines in his backyard. “And I’m proud of that fact,” he added, “because my backyard is important to me, although I suppose somewhere is everybody’s backyard.” In a way, the same applies to Yale’s land holdings: What is an item on a balance sheet at 55 Whitney Ave. is someone else’s backyard. And in this case, it is the backyard of a community that may be too small to protect it. That was the feeling I got in Ira — a feeling of resignation. There are many hurdles Vermont Community Wind must still jump before receiving the state permits to build the turbines, but many of them appear to be technicalities rather than substantive obstacles. Someone at the town hall meeting asked Smith for her assessment of the proposal’s future: “As far as we can tell, it’s on the fast track,” she replied. Regardless, in the months to come, the good people of Ira will keep writing letters to the editor of the Rutland Herald. They will keep showing up at community meetings. They will keep fighting. Turco, unemployed, said he is obsessing over the proposal, and I got the sense he was most definitely not alone. “I’ve just been glued to my computer researching this,” he said. “I keep thinking, ‘There’s got to be a silver bullet.’” Some people think Yale could be that silver bullet — if, of course, it turns out that the University does really own the 4,000 acres for which the turbines are planned, and that it could pull the plug (or, probably more accurately, force Wagner to pull the plug) on the development. But we don’t know if that’s the case, and we may never know. The night before I left Vermont, I drove through Ira at dusk, parking my car at the town office and walking alongside the state highway, the mountains at my side. At a dairy farm down the road, a cow peeked its head out from under one of the dairy’s large doors, raised two feet off the ground for ventilation. A small freckled girl, no older than 8 or 9, walked outside, pails of milk swinging in both of her hands. The sun soon receded beyond the mountains, and I eventually returned to my car, resting in the driver’s seat in the darkest of darkness. It was quiet, and it was beautiful. Whether it stays that way remains to be seen, just as whether Vermont needs more wind turbines, or whether the Yale endowment needs to be more proactive in ensuring socially responsible investment practices, are both debates that cannot be easily settled. But among those messy issues, one thing seemed clear: Looking into the distance from atop Bird Mountain, the Yale endowment feels very, very small.

Bitumen Having long given up on late-night radio, I wish only for rain, so that you’ll have To turn the windshield-wipers on. “We’ll be home soon,” I say into the silence. In the corner of my eye, your ring flares Each time we pass a hooded highway light. Be careful what you wish for, my mom’s fingers had said As she dipped them in vinegar to soften the skin. Just tell the truth, murmur your hands From the steering-wheel, we already know. It was the same party as last year. Same people, still single Or nursing a wound, “How happy you two look!” My lizard blood crawled at your touch. In shining scales I stood Snickering, driving you into the open. “What’s funny?” you asked, But I kept quiet. Winning is not always pleasant, say my hands As they burrow into my dress. After a few more miles I have fallen asleep. Giant sea monsters wink, diving And wheeling over the roof of our car. The nest they guard lies sparkling Fifty miles down the hillside: It is a long-dead civilization and we are playing At archeologists, unwrapping the stiff linen Piece by piece as gold beetles scuttle Away from the light and turquoise buds Shudder and fall from the thin black palms.in -Marissa Grunes

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

UP THE HILL

ANTHONY LYDGATE

A recent Rudd Center study points to the health benefits of calorie labelling like this.

GOD at YALE BY MOLLY HENSLEY-CLANCY

In a university that is often fiercely secular, a group of devout Yale students have come into their Christianity.

n an afternoon in early December, I stand on the curb of Wall Street and listen to a man in a bowtie predict my eternal damnation. Evangelist Jesse Morrell is surrounded by Yale students with arms folded across their chests and facial expressions that range from bewilderment to anger to amusement. Behind Morrell, a police car idles, waiting. His words are drowned out by the jeers of onlookers, but I get the message from the words on his sandwich board: I — among other things a feminist, Obama-voting Democrat — am doomed to Hell. This afternoon is the first time in my four months at Yale that I’ve encountered evangelical Christianity, or any sort of vocal Christianity. I have one or two friends who go to church on Sundays out of a vague combination of obligation and belief, but other than that, my experience here has been entirely secular. I’m not going to disagree with Morrell on

ILLUSTRATION BY LOIDE MARWANGA GRAPHIC TITLE BY LA WANG

The Yale Daily News Magazine Febraury 2010

this one — Yale is a place where sin, at least in the biblical sense, brews. But inside our depraved gothic walls, a small group of students has found a place where Christianity survives, and even blossoms. Though many of Yale’s deeply faithful Christians shy away from the word “evangelical,” they lead lives that are influenced every day by the desire to walk in what they see as God’s loving footsteps. Most have even, beyond all expectations, come into their true faith here among Jesse Morrell’s heathens.

thing a loss compared to knowing Christ. After his explanation Ing hesitantly asks me, “Are you a Christian?” Ing isn’t the first one to ask this; in fact, almost everybody I interview has a question about my religious background. They’re checking, I think, to see if I can really fathom their own faithfulness, or understand Christ’s love. Because I want them to speak to me honestly, I’ve so far been blurting out, “I was raised Catholic.” While this admission isn’t strictly true (I wasn’t even baptized), my grandma was a strong Catholic. The faith petered out in my family, and now I have trouble describing myself as anything more than a hopeful agnostic. I feel a kinship, however, with Ing and other Yale Christians because of my grandma, whose faith I deeply respected. Though I felt alienated from the Catholic Church for many reasons, I identified with and understood the part of my grandmother’s faith that emphasized love. For Liz Marshman, love is what Christianity is all about. When we first meet, Marshman tells me about another interview in which a reporter asked her what she thought God was. Marshman’s answer, “love,” seemed like a cop-out to the reporter. At first, I feel the same way. “The most radical thing about God is his love,” she explains to me, then pauses, struggling for words. “The Bible says, ‘so high, so deep, so wide, so long.’ After just soaking in it, I can’t help but want to give that out.” And she does. Marshman “loves on” everybody. She stops acquaintances on the street who look worried to talk to them and give them hugs, unafraid of seeming needy: “The only opinion [that] matters is God’s.” After spending an hour talking to Marshman, I honestly believe that her God is love. While she admits that she sometimes struggles with rules and ideas mentioned only a few times in the Bible, she puts love first. “Jesus says that the most important rule is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love each other. So I’m going to take that and run with it.” Love pervades the language of all the Christians with whom I speak. “The Christian community’s job is to show Christ’s love,” says Washer, “to provide that loving community. And that’s open to everyone, be it fundamentalist Christian or militant atheist. Come on in and we’re just going to love on you. You don’t have to do something or be something to be a part of it. Just come in and you’ll be accepted.” Dan Geoffrion ’10 speaks of Christ’s love with the same conviction. He, too, came into much of his Christianity at Yale; he says he grew up “spiritual rather than religious,” the son of lapsed ministers. He never felt part of a Christian community until he arrived at Yale, where he says for the first time in his life he has found people who wanted Christ’s love to be the guiding force in their lives. Recently, Geoffrion’s thin, gangly image appeared accompanied by his own story of faith on placards in college dining halls. After he was rejected from job after job, says the Yale Students for Christ promotion, Geoffrion found comfort in his Christianity. “God has enormous power to transform peoples’ lives. To me, it’s a source of hope, peace, and joy, knowing that my identity doesn’t

Yale is a place where sin, at least in the biblical sense, brews.

iz Marshman ’10 — sister of America’s Next Top Model contestant and fellow Yale student Victoria Marshman ‘09 — came to Yale as non-religious as I did. She grew up in Connecticut and attended a church that “was not as much about God and more about appearance.” Nobody she encountered “even believed in God, or thought [He] was plausible.” Her pre-Yale opinion of evangelical Christians: “They’re ignorant, they’re from Texas, they love George Bush.’” David Washer ’11, though neither ignorant nor, as far as I know, a lover of George Bush, is a Texas Bible Belt Christian. He sings in the Gospel choir, used to lead Bible study, attends church regularly, and doesn’t drink or smoke (which he says would be like “metaphorically spitting in Christ’s face”). Washer speaks with reverence of living his life in Jesus’s “likeness” and “lightness.” Though their upbringings were vastly different, Washer and Marshman are now both Christians. More significantly, both found their faith at Yale. Marshman quite literally discovered Jesus here after a friend took her to a talk sponsored by the Yale Christian Fellowship. Marshman says she discovered “people that were so clearly unafraid of what they believed, so clearly passionate and loving about God.” After a year of questioning, she experienced a nighttime epiphany. “I realized it was all true,” she tells me. “That God was present in my life. So I became a Christian.” For Washer, the journey to faith was less clear-cut. He was religious at home, but it was at liberal, secular Yale, Washer says, that his faith truly blossomed. In Texas, he explains, Christianity is expected of everybody; here, it is chosen. Yale students who take on Christianity as part of their identity are serious about their faith, and they do so out of true conviction rather than obligation. Like Washer, Kevin Ing ’10 grew up religious, but he too says his faith grew greatly once he got to college. Here, he developed a sense of his own faith through personal study of the Bible, and he’s now active in Yale Students for Christ and a member of the Christian a cappella group Living Water. Ing’s faith is deeply rooted in the Bible. He quotes large swaths of Scripture as fluidly as if he were reading them, weaving the ancient words in with his own proclamations of faith. “I want people to know what the Lord has done for me,” Ing says. To explain it, he turns to Phillipians: “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.” (I look it up later on the Internet; he has quoted Phillipians 3:8, the New International Version, word for word.) Ing explains that even the apostle Paul (who he says “had a pretty impressive resume”) considered every-

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

rest in how many things I can do.” Geoffrion, unlike any of the other students I interviewed, is comfortable identifying himself as evangelical. He is careful however, to add that by “evangelical” he means “ecumenical Protestant.” Evangelical, I learn, has at least two meanings, and likely more. In my world, and in the secular world at large, evangelicalism is synonymous with fundamentalism, and therefore with people like Jesse Morrell. Its meaning in the Christian community, though, is far more complex. Even Dave Derksen, the head of the Evangelical Fellowship at the Yale Divinity School, struggles to provide a catch-all definition evangelicalism. He explains that there are simply too many varieties: Derksen’s colleagues in the Evangelical Fellowship are Catholic, Episcopalian, and nondenominational; they are liberal and conservative. Rather than defining the community, Derksen gives me a set of the general characteristics. Evangelicals, he says, believe that Scripture is the Word of God, that humans are saved by faith and grace, and that Christians should establish a “living relationship with God” and share it with others. But identifying with evangelicalism’s main tenets doesn’t necessarily mean identifying as evangelical. Washer, for example, fits many of Derksen’s qualifications, but doesn’t consider himself evangelical. “To be honest, when I hear ‘evangelical Christian’ I think of the Ted Haggard crowd. I think of Jesse Morrell,” he admits. “I tend to shy away from the word because it has such negative connotations, ones that are perhaps justified.” Even Washer has had negative experiences with the evangelical community, such as his brush last year with evangelicals holding signs on the Yale campus. They claimed Washer didn’t know Jesus. Marshman, who does not consider herself “evangelical,” explains the problem with the word is that “if one is a Christian [and] believes the Bible is the word of God, there’s several times where it says to make disciples of all nations.” Essentially all Christians are called to evangelize, or spread the word of God. While Marshman doesn’t consider it her job to turn everybody into a Christian, she says she will never conceal her faith. “If someone comes to me, and asks, how did you become a Christian, then it is my job not to shirk the truth. I will never deny that I am a Christian.” Dan Geoffrion has a similar take on evangelism. “The way I view evangelism is, ‘I know about a great party,’” he says. “I have friends that may not know about that party, and I want to share that with them. I’m not going to drag them there. I just say, ‘There’s an awesome party, you’re invited, let me know if you need directions.’ A lot of evangelism in my life is just being friends with people, sharing with them. And then, if people want to talk about spiritual topics, I’m free. I’m not throwing Bibles at people.”

When Kevin Ing speaks of evangelism, his voice brims with excitement, just as it does when he quotes the Bible,. “I want people to know what the Lord has done, I guess,” he says. Usually, he doesn’t approach people, but “sometimes I’m like, this is so good, I just want to tell somebody about how life-changing it is. I just want to tell everyone!” Washer approaches evangelism more passively; “I’m always open to talking about my faith,” he says, “but I would probably be more inclined to wait for someone to come to me. I would like to think that, by striving to be like Christ, that is in a way evangelizing. I’m being a living testimony of my faith.” Washer states clearly that he doesn’t want to “proselytize.” That, he says, “is not good for either side. There’s no learning process in that.” As Washer speaks, I think back to Morrell, shouting on a street corner, throwing Bibles at people in a nearly literal sense. Why do students come into their Christianity here? Why do they find faith where so many don’t have it? The answer is, in part, in people like David Washer, who are overflowing with excitement in “the lightness of Christ” and also with something that Morrell does not seem to possess: an understanding of how we learn and come into new ideas. Geoffrion, Washer and others evangelize not by preaching, but by connecting, by meeting people halfway. They share their faith not to reap converts but to help others understand. Even the way they distance themselves from a word as controversial and abrasive as “evangelical” shows a desire to relate rather than dictate. With these vastly varying histories and shared strong beliefs, it’s not hard to understand why some are so drawn to Christianity at Yale. My time with Yale’s Christians has not converted me, but it has led me to comprehend the desire for — and the benefits of — faith. Just as I understand the nourishment my Grandma’s Catholicism provided, I can see the ways that various forms of Christianity have transformed the lives of my fellow students. There is undoubtedly an attraction in the security of God’s love. But there is something more complex at play here, something less likely to be found among college students than a simple desire for security. I think back to a Tuesday night I spent in the basement of Bingham, at a freshman Bible study hosted by the Yale Christian Fellowship. After bonding activities, discussions, and a careful reading of Ephesians 4, the students gave prayer requests. Someone asked for prayers for a healing leg; another, for a sister with a friend stricken by cancer. But one request in particular stuck with me. A girl asked for prayers for somebody she saw in the dining hall a few hours before, crying from stress about classes. She didn’t know the person’s name, but she had been thinking about her. She hoped that the girl was all right. Everybody nodded in assent. They bowed their heads and prayed for a stranger.

In the secular world at large, evangelicalism is synonymous with people like Jesse Morrell. Its meaning in the Christian community, though, is far more complex.

February 2010

The Yale Daily News Magazine

FICTION BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE by Austin Bernhardt He’s at a party, lonely and drunk. She’s miles away, teasing him with sex — stringing him along as usual. The night dies fast while he sends longing text messages, watches people leave the party, and waits and waits for a cab to come.

It was the night after the Homecoming Game, and I was drunk. It had stormed earlier in the day and the ground was soft and muddy under my feet. I had a beer in one hand and my phone in the other. As I walked through the crowd, I heard someone scream from the balcony, then someone ripped open a cardboard box and beer cans fell on everyone. Pushing my way through, I had just begun to think I had had one too many when my phone rang. “Helloooo?” I said.

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

“Hey stud,” she said. She had been making this a habit. We had hooked up a few times, but we weren’t an item or anything. I straightened my posture and tried to sound lucid. “Hey. Whas— “I stopped myself, swallowed, tried again, enunciating. “What’s up?” I managed. “Nothing… just hanging out in Great Neck with some friends. Where are you?” “Homecomingparty,” I mumbled. “Oh yeah? You want to come over here instead?” Her voice exuded sex; in my condition, it wasn’t even fair. “Yeah,” I said. She gave me the address and hung up. I checked my wallet and found six dollars for cab fare. I wondered how far Great Neck was from here. I found Blake and John smoking a joint by the side of the house. “You guys, I’ve got to go.” “What? Why?” John asked, coughing as he exhaled. “You feeling alright?” “Yeahyeahyeah… I’m fine, fine. I just—it’s—you-know-who’s in Great Neck.” Blake and John looked at each other and wished me luck as I stumbled out into the street. I walked until I came to an intersection and stopped in front of a big brick house with a faux Roman fountain on the front lawn. I leaned against the fountain and dialed the number of the cab company. An automated voice told me to wait for the next available representative. “Hello, King Cabs. How can I help you?” “I need a cab from Roslyn to Great Neck,” I slurred. “What’s the address?” “I’m not at a… mm hold on.” I stepped back a few feet and stared at the street signs until the words came into focus. “Intersection of Spruce and Elm,” I said finally. “Alright. We’ll have a cab there in half an hour or less.” “Thank you,” I said, but the man on the other end had already hung up. I leaned back against the fountain and waited. She sent me a text message saying she wanted me and asking where I was. A few cars drove by, the first wave of people leaving the party. A few offered me a ride. I mumbled that I had called a cab and stuffed my hands in my pockets. I sat down Indian-style on the street corner and waited. I sent her a text message to tell her I had called a cab and that I wanted her too. I wanted to be next to her, to feel her breathing, but I was too exhausted for what she wanted tonight, tired of empty sex in basements and bathrooms. I could see lights being turned off all along the street. I twiddled my thumbs. In the house behind me, a woman watched me from her bedroom window. I put my hood over my head and stared at my lap. I knew she didn’t want a boyfriend, and I had lied and told her I didn’t want a girlfriend. She had gone out with a senior last year when she was a sophomore. I had seen them in the hallways sometimes, kissing each other on the cheek or holding hands. The senior fucked some girl when he was on vacation in Florida, and the girl posted pictures on Facebook or something. Everything got screwed up after that; she broke up with him and started drinking a lot and everyone started calling her a slut. I saw her a few times on the weekends; I remember she drank so much once that an ambulance had to take her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped.

I closed my eyes. I could hear the party from here; it was only a block away, but it felt like I was underwater. I imagined what Blake and John were doing. Blake would get sick because he always got sick. John would wait until a freshman got drunk and then convince her to take her shirt off because he liked stuff like that.

thought of the last time I had been with her. We had snuck down to the basement of someone’s house and were on the couch. We could hear the footsteps and the bass from the music above us. Her shirt was off, and I pulled her tight against me. After I finished, she put her shirt back on and hooked her bra together. I zipped my pants back up and fixed my hair. “You look really nice tonight,” I said. She hesitated for a minute and looked at a point on my cheek. “You look nice too,” she said, putting her hand on my chest. She left her hand there for a second, then got up and went upstairs. I followed her up and tried to find her, but I couldn’t, and then I drank until I couldn’t see straight.

called the cab company again to ask where the cab was. They told me it should be there any minute. I waited. I called her and told her I’d be there in a few minutes. I heard sirens, and a few minutes later everyone left the party in a big crowd. A few of them offered me rides, but I just mumbled, “Cab,” over and over. After a few minutes, everyone was gone, and the whole street seemed a lot quieter. All of the lights in the houses had turned off except for the porch light from the house behind me. It felt like a spotlight. I turned around to look through the window, but the woman from before had left. Then the porch light turned off, and it got really dark. I started to feel sick, like the whole world was tilting forward, so I planted my feet shoulder length apart and waited. I remembered the first time we made out. It was weird because we were both sober. I told my friends we hooked up because she had big boobs. I just said, “What’s up?” and she grabbed my shoulder and said, “You want to go somewhere?” We found a room and turned off the lights and started kissing. I unhooked her bra. She rubbed my inner thigh with the palm of her hand; I didn’t say anything.

got another text message; it was her telling me she was wearing sexy underwear. I called the cab company again. They apologized and told me they would make me a first priority; they had no idea why I hadn’t been picked up yet. I waited. I texted her back to tell her I wanted her naked. I tried to stand very still so the world would stop moving like that, but it kept tilting. A few minutes later she texted me again, saying she was tired of waiting and that she had hooked up with someone else. I didn’t want to hook up with her anymore, but I knew I would later on. I threw the phone on the ground and looked at it for a minute. I picked it up and waited for something to change. I stomped on the blacktop a few times and listened to the echo. I sat down and wished that I had someplace to go other than home. I had lost track of the time; I had stopped calling the cab company, but it was probably past one by now. I felt it coming now, and I knew I couldn’t stop the world from spinning like that. I puked and spit a few times and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. A few minutes later the cab came and I got in. “Howdy, pal. Looks like you’ve had a rough night,” the cabbie said. I felt like shit, so I didn’t really say anything. The cabbie had

February 2010 The Yale Daily News Magazine

picked up an old guy before me. He was wearing a trench coat and a red beanie, with long wispy gray hair sticking out from under the hat. He had thick glasses and a goatee, and a bottle in a brown paper bag between his legs. He turned and smiled at me. “Where you headed?” the cabbie asked. The cabbie was fat and scruffy and had big purple bags under his eyes. His teeth were yellow. For a second, I thought of making up an address, but I ended up just giving him mine. “Don’t know where that is, chief. Could you look it up on the map for me?” The cabbie took out a laminated book of maps from the glove compartment and handed it to me. I stared at the map, but it was too dark and I was too dizzy to make out any street names. “Do you know where the 7-Eleven is?” I asked, giving him the

map back. “Sure thing, cap’n,” the cabbie said, saluting. The cab was the only car on the street that late at night. I was going to get in trouble for coming home past curfew. I opened the window and spat out onto the street. After a minute, the cabbie turned on the radio to a classic rock station. The other man in the cab tilted his head back and said something like, “Ah, brother, those were the days.” The cabbie nodded. “Don’t I know it. Back then, it was a new thing every day.” “Fuckin’ Morrison, fuckin’ Hendrix, man!” the old guy said. He shook his head and took a swig from the bottle. “Not like the shit they put out nowadays.” “Yeah, now it’s all that rap bullshit. To hell with that!” the cabbie said. The two of them stopped talking for a minute, then the old guy turned to me. “How about you, brother? You living it up tonight?” he said, nudging me in the shoulder. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Come on, man. You get some action tonight? You get with a lady tonight?” He nudged me again. “Nah,” I said. “What’s that?” the man said, leaning closer to him so I could smell the booze on his breath. “No action tonight, my man?” “Not tonight,” I said. The old guy laughed. “Man, screw that. Don’t sweat it. Don’t even sweat it. You’re young, you got plenty of time to get with ladies. Believe you me, brother. These are the best years of your life.” I was beginning to feel nauseous again. The old man coughed, sat up, and fell asleep. A few minutes later the cab stopped in front of the 7-Eleven; the neon sign shone in through the dash. I paid the cabbie and got out of the car. I went inside to buy a Slurpee and realized that I spent all of my money on the cab fare. The guy at the counter had red eyes like he was at the end of his shift, and he watched me as I walked around the store. I left and walked over the railroad tracks. I stopped in the middle for a second and looked in both directions like a train was going to come. I tried to see further down, but the tracks turned around a bend and I couldn’t see past that. I put my hands in my pockets. I could still taste the vomit in his mouth. We’re not an item anyway, I thought, and I spat and walked home.

The Yale Daily News Magazine February 2010

BACKPAGE THE VERY SECRET DIARY OF ELLA SWAN by Izzy Farhi Dear Diary, I’m absolutely positive about three things: first, Nedward is hot and I love him, second, he’s really hot and I love him, and third, he ‘s really really hot and I really love him.

Dear Diary, This town’s boring and cold. It’s not like back home in Phoenix, where it was always sunny and beautiful. Here, no one will like me, because I’m so plain and shy. I don’t want friends here either Dad’s life is so boring. But I couldn’t stay home with Mom and her new husband, either — they wouldn’t pay enough attention to me. Dear Diary, So today there was this boy at school that was so amazingly hot that I immediately started wondering about him. All the other boys here are so annoying, anyway — they’re all trying to hit on me. But this boy… he just drew me to him even though he acted like he totally hated me. That must mean I should pay more attention to him. Obviously. Did I mention how beautiful he is? Dear Diary, Nedward, that gorgeous boy from the other day, changed classes so he could avoid me. He must hate me. But that only makes me want to know more about him. Mike keeps getting in the way, though; his flirting is so obvious. But I don’t like him at all. Who wants someone who actually likes you? Dear Diary, I think something might be weird about Nedward. He totally saved me today by stopping a truck with his bare hands. I was, like, totally freaking out because I was, you know, about to die, but then BANG he was there and I was like, oh my God, Nedward, you saved me, and he was like, eww, I’m still not going to talk to you, and I was like, damn it what is wrong with him? Dear Diary, I figured out what’s up with Nedward! I got Jacob to tell me, because I like totally needed to know, and who cares if I led him on? He’ll get over it. He told me: Nedward’s a vampire! Like, a real, suck-your-blood vampire. But, I mean, who cares if Nedward could kill me? He’s really hot! Dear Diary, Nedward told me today that he doesn’t actually eat people. That’s such a total relief; but I would have been just as much in love with him if he had sucked my blood. But now I know that he’s a good vampire, a vegetarian one. How cute is that? And he’s already saved me, like, a dozen times, so I know I’m fated to be with him forever. I’ve already known him for more than a month. It must be love. Dear Diary, I love Nedward. I love him I love him I love him I love him I love him. He watches me when I sleep, and says he’s addicted to my scent. Which he actually can’t smell for long because it makes him all vampire-y. How romantic is that? Dear Diary, Oh my god, I’m going to die. Well no, I’m not, because I know Nedward’s going to save me again, because that’s what he does. This new vampire saw me, and he got obsessed with me too, except not obsessed in a good way like Nedward is, obsessed in an I want-to-drink-your-blood way. So now I have to run away back to Phoenix. But how will I survive? I’ll have to be away from Nedward! I don’t know if I can do it, Diary, I really don’t. Dear Diary, I’m alive! And, more importantly, I’m back with Nedward! He saved me! It was like so totally romantic. The evil vampire bit me, but Nedward, like, sucked his poison out of me. It was really hot. And now there’s nothing to keep us apart. We’ll be together for, like, ever, because I know I couldn’t exist without him. I don’t know how I did before I met him. I love him so, so, so, so, so, so much.