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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · VOL. CXXXVIII, NO. 22 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

RAINY CLOUDY

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CROSS CAMPUS

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015

KEEPING SEATED INCUMBENCY IN CITY POLITICS

UPSIDE DOWN

$25.6 BILLS

Flipped classrooms improve female, minority classroom experience

SWENSEN TALKS YALE FINANCES AT JE MASTER’S TEA

PAGE B3 WEEKEND

PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY

PAGE 7 UNIVERSITY

Gang members indicted for murder

Ronnell Higgins sent a campuswide email last night informing the community of a theft that occurred in the Science Park area at around 8 p.m. Thursday. An undergraduate student was approached by four individuals who robbed him of his bicycle and backpack.

Cross Campus (the place).

Students on college campuses across the country — including Stanford, GWU and USC — will demonstrate for climate change awareness in an activism effort organized by national nonprofit Know Tomorrow. Yale’s event will take place on Cross Campus at 2 p.m.

ISO presents Flagg’d. The

International Students Organization will host its second annual Flag Party at Sigma Chi tonight. Show national pride by wearing your flag or your flag’s colors.

Old Thing Back. Ja Rule

— Chance the Rapper’s last-minute substitute for Spring Fling 2014 — recently announced that he will be going on tour again. The rap performer, who just finished a 28-month stint in jail for tax evasion, will be joined on the road by R&B performer Ashanti.

Coffee Crisis. Tragedy struck at Blue State on Wall yesterday when the cafe’s coffee machine stopped functioning. Patrons were only able to order espresso-based drinks for the majority of the day. Here at 202 York St., the News is happy that Blue State’s York location kept the caffeine flowing.

Panera Dread. Bad luck followed students who tried to order bowls of soup for dinner after being denied coffee at Blue State. Panera was out of its famous sourdough bread bowls yesterday.

Buck Daily News. Chi Psi’s

golden retriever Buck has the common cold. The News’ thoughts are with him. In the meantime, send tips to crosscampus@yaledailynews. com if you want to read about dogs other than Buck.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1968 American inventer R. Buckminster Fuller arrives on campus for a five-day visit. Called “the first poet of technology,” Fuller went on to serve as the second president of the international high IQ society Mensa.

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Eli men and women battle Harvard soccer on Saturday PAGE 10 SPORTS

Med school prof denies assault charges

Stay safe. Yale Police Chief

The Interview. Actor James Franco GRD ’16 fielded questions from students at Emerson over Skype after a Tuesday night screening of his film “I Am Michael.” According to the Boston Globe, the Skype video call was projected before a hall of students. Franco kept it casual — calling in from his bed in a Harley Davidson T-shirt. We wonder if he’ll call into Davies next.

THE OTHER GAME(S)

BY SARA SEYMOUR STAFF REPORTER

convicted of violent crimes in aid of racketeering murder, four of the defendants — Jeffrey Benton, Keith Young, Robert Short and Trevor Murphy — will face life imprisonment or possibly even the death penalty. The remaining two defendants, Robert Harris and Christopher Graham, could face prison terms of seven years to life for the brandishing of firearms in relation to crimes of violence.

Former Yale nephrologist Rex Mahnensmith MED ’77 is counter-suing the seven plaintiffs who filed a February federal lawsuit against him for sexual assault and sex discrimination.

Mahnensmith is also suing the clinic in which the alleged harassment took place. Six women and one man filed lawsuits against Mahnensmith, Yale University and DVA Renal Healthcare, Inc. — a subsidiary of DaVita HealthCare Partners, Inc. — alleging Title VII and Title XI violations. Mahnensmith, who was the medical director of the DaVita New Haven Dialysis Clinic and the Acute Hemodialysis Clinic in New Haven before retiring in April, filed 15 cross-claims against DaVita last month.

These claims included allegations of negligence in their investigation, breach of contract and unfair trade practices. Mahnensmith also filed counterclaims against the original plaintiffs for defamation and emotional distress.

“It is not Dr. Mahnensmith’s contention that the plaintiffs and DaVita consciously conspired with one another to destroy his reputation and career. The individual plaintiffs each [have] his or her own reason for falsely charging him with misconduct,” Mahnensmith’s lawyer Robert Mitchell wrote in the counterclaim.

According to the cross-claim, Mahnensmith believes DaVita disliked his prioritizing patient care over profit at the clinic. As a result, DaVita

SEE STREET GANGS PAGE 6

SEE MAHNENSMITH PAGE 4

DAVID SHIMER/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Six Red Side Guerilla Brims members have been indicted for interstate narcotics trafficking, armed robbery and murder.

BY DAVID SHIMER STAFF REPORTER Armed robbery, interstate narcotics trafficking and murder are just three of the charges on which six members of a New Haven street gang have been federally indicted after a 21-month-long police operation.

U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly, ATF Special Agent in Charge Daniel Kumor and New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman held a joint press

conference Thursday at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Haven to announce charges against six members and associates of the Red Side Guerilla Brims — a sect of the Bloods street gang based in New Haven.

“Our message should be clear to anyone involved in firearms trafficking or pulling triggers — you are next,” Kumor said.

The indictment includes six counts of murder spanning from March 2011 to March 2012, five of which occurred in the Elm City. If

AAU, Yale surveys emphasize barriers to reporting

BY VICTOR WANG AND QI XU STAFF REPORTERS While the Association of American Universities’ recent campus sexual climate survey was groundbreaking in the amount of data it collected — over 150,000 students participated at 27 universities nationwide, making the survey one of the largest of its kind — some of its results reinforced the findings of a much smaller, Yalespecific survey, conducted in

January by the Yale College Council and the Yale Women’s Center.

Both the AAU survey and the Yale-specific survey — which only received 75 responses — found that students who did utilize Yale’s sexual misconduct support services found them helpful and informative. But while the AAU survey results indicated that students at Yale have a better understanding of on-campus resources than other students across the coun-

Professor’s startup receives $300 million

BY BRENDAN HELLWEG AND JIAHUI HU STAFF REPORTERS Arvinas, a New Haven biotechnology firm founded by a Yale professor, announced on Thursday an agreement with the largest cancer-specializing pharmaceutical company in the world: Genentech.

Arvinas focuses on developing a new class of cancer drugs that have the potential for a wide variety of uses. Under the new agreement, Genentech will bring monetary support and research intel to its new partner. Arvinas will receive over $300 million in “milestone fees” from Genentech, according to a Thursday press release. Arvinas CEO Manuel Litchman MED ’86 said the two companies will collaborate on Arvinas’ research projects, which include a promising prostate cancer treatment that is set to move to clinical studies by next year. Litchman added that the agreement with Genentech will give Arvinas new access to a wide variety of research not previously available to them. The new access,

Litchman said, will help Arvinas understand the treatment potential of its own technology. “[The partnership] also affords us the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of cancer researchers that will hopefully help us with understanding our own technology better, and also expand the utility of our technology and the applications of our technology,” Litchman said.

Arvinas produces a class of drugs known as protein degenerators, which cause cancer cells to eliminate the proteins they use to replicate and reproduce, said molecular, cellular and developmental biology professor and company founder Craig Crews. By bonding to the “rogue proteins,” the drug causes the cell’s natural recycling mechanism to break down the targeted protein.

“Proteins are constantly being made and they are constantly being eliminated from cells,” Crews said. “What we want to do is recruit those rogue SEE ARVINAS PAGE 4

try, the Yale survey’s results suggested that confusion persists among students at the University. Still, the student authors of the Yale-specific survey said the AAU survey statistics generally supported their findings, as well as a subsequent set of recommendations that they submitted to the Yale Title IX Steering Committee in April.

“The larger AAU survey does provide a reassuring counterpoint,” Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd said.

“While the [YCC and Women’s Center survey] responses showed that some students still have questions about the details, the AAU survey gave students the opportunity to affirm that they do know where to go to get help or to make a report.”

The most obvious similarity between the two reports’ findings was that Yalies who reported sexual misconduct to the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Educa-

tion Center — a confidential group of mental health professionals at Yale Health — found the reporting experience highly satisfactory, said Elizabeth Villarreal ’16, one of the authors of the Yale-specific report. In the YCC and Women’s Center report, authors wrote that students were positive about the diversity of options available to them, whether they wanted to report an incident or simply SEE SURVEYS PAGE 4

New bill targets wage theft

JIAHUI HU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

ULA organizer John Lugo alleges that wage theft is ongoing in the Elm City

BY JIAHUI HU STAFF REPORTER Celebrating State Bill 914 and admonishing wage theft, roughly 20 members and supporters of Unidad Latina en Accion gathered outside La Carreta, a Mexican fastfood locale at 930 State St. Thursday evening.

In June, Gov. Dannel Malloy signed into law State Bill 914, guaranteeing employ-

ees suffering from wage theft a payout twice as much as the sum they lost in wages.

On Thursday, the bill came into effect, and ULA took to the streets in order to draw attention to wage theft in New Haven.

ULA organizer John Lugo alleged that the owners of La Carreta owe an exemployee $35,000 in unpaid wages but have only offered him $15,000 in compensa-

tion. Other Elm City locales, including student favorites Thai Taste and 116 Crown, have also paid their workers below minimum wage, ULA claimed in a Thursday press release.

“Today is the first day this new law is going to be taking effect ... We want to create a warning that several businesses are still stealing wages SEE WAGE THEFT PAGE 6

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT “Just bring a flask” yaledailynews.com/opinion

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T A L I N A YA M A N

Fighting for "gender other" E

leven days ago, the University released the results of the AAU sexual climate survey, confirming the worst for Yale’s queer community.

The jarring results that one in four women experiences unwanted sexual contact during her time at Yale has forced administrators and students alike to unequivocally accept the epidemic of sexual misconduct at Yale. Acknowledging this is a start, but it is far from sufficient.

The disproportionate effect on one group in particular — “other gendered” students — remains largely overlooked in the wake of the findings.

As someone who identifies outside of the traditional gender binary, I was not surprised to discover that students who don’t identify as cisgender faced almost every single form of sexual misconduct at a higher rate than any other demographic.

The survey showed that 84.2 percent of students who identified as “other gender” reported experiencing instances of sexual harassment — 10 percentage points higher than that of women and 27 percentage points higher than that of men. Further, over a quarter of gender nonconforming students have experienced sexual assault via force or incapacitation.

The results are disappointing, to say the least, but what concerned me most was the campus response to these numbers.

In his email to the Yale community following the report’s release, University President Peter Salovey made no mention of the disproportionate cases of sexual harassment and assault reported by Yale’s queer community, sparing only one line to mention the higher rate of misconduct experienced by women.

Nevertheless, the numbers tell a frightening story about what it means to be queer at Yale.

It is time we start actually talking about this as a systematic problem here on campus, something that extends far beyond our sexual climate. The administration is at a complete loss for how to fit genderqueer and transgender students in, so instead they leave us out. Whether it's the lack of mixed-gender housing for freshmen or it's not having preferred gender pronoun options in the Yale student system, everyday we face quiet reminders that we don’t belong.

But it is not just on the Yale administration to make these changes. We as a campus must make efforts to become more knowledgeable of the broad range of sexuality and gender spectrums that exist among the student body. We celebrate diversity in various forms — this is no different. At this point, however, being genderqueer or

'YDNREADER' ON 'HERBERT: LET THEM DRINK BEER!'

transgender here means a lot of things it shouldn't.

It’s the cringing every time a professor or classmate misgenders us, frantically searching for gender-neutral bathrooms in campus buildings and hiding our true selves from classmates and friends out of fear of rejection. It is the dread of appointments at Yale Health, where questions and advice related to sexual health are rigidly gendered and the burden falls upon me to explain where my identity fits in. It means having to fight for far too long in order to get the administration to even consider allowing transgender students to transition under the health plan. It should be noted that Yale has made incredible progress in recent years in its inclusion of transgender and genderqueer students, but these incremental steps are not enough.

So it leaves a sour taste in my mouth when the administration devotes colossal sums of money on large capital projects such as that of the Schwarzman Center yet tells marginalized groups that there just isn’t enough room in the budget for their needs. In short, it is clear where Yale’s priorities lie.

But this is not about economics, politics or religion — it is simply a lived reality of members of our community. For me, being genderqueer is only a choice in so far as I actively choose to live my truth. It is a choice to accept myself fully, a choice to find strength in that truth and to resist forces of disempowerment that challenge that truth.

What I am asking for here is that people sacrifice a little bit of their comfort in order to grant us our humanity. One tangible solution can be to include a formal discussion on gender nonconformity and the available resources for these students alongside the other mandatory educational programs in orientation. Faculty and administrators should similarly undergo training about how to best include students that may fall outside the traditional binary of gender and sexuality. These are small steps and won’t solve every challenge we face, but it is the least we can do to acknowledge and respect genderqueerness and transgenderism here at Yale.

So as we begin to digest the results of the AAU survey and consider how to best respond moving forward, let us not forget that campus-wide problems do not exist in isolation. Only once we firmly establish support for students of all identities can we begin to make this a safer campus for all.

Vital spark of American flame S

ome weeks before his death, Tyler Carlisle ’15 conversed all night with two friends in his apartment in the Taft. They ascended to the roof to watch the sunrise, each in silent prayer.

Tyler then asked that, if he were to die in war as an officer in the U.S. Army, his friends recognize the men he commanded in his eulogy.

Tyler never had those men.

But if he had, and if they had emulated the character of the man leading them, they would’ve merited the acknowledgement.

So Tyler’s friends from Yale, his vision of America, and his aspiration to a kind of classical political leadership will have to suffice. What follows is an encomium to a great American and a true friend, taken from his companions and his country many years too early.

Of prime importance to Tyler was hospitality, and he was a managing partner of each community he joined. His place in the Taft Apartments was available to anyone willing to accept his camaraderie and a drink.

Evenings out often concluded on his couch, but he also hosted what might seem like other people’s events. Last year, for instance, some folks decided they’d like to celebrate the first night of Chanukah. Tyler was a New England WASP, but did his

best to sing “dreidel d r e i d e l ,” nursing, with cheer and homemade remedies, those with excessive holCOLE iday spirits.

ARONSON I never saw Tyler uncomNecessary fortable in and proper a place, and he must have t h o u g h t belonging was a feeling he should work to extend to everyone.

This combination of paternity and fraternity was something Tyler learned in part from his time as an Eagle Scout, and it manifested perhaps most profoundly in his patriotism.

Tyler’s family has been here for a while, and his America was not simply a refuge for the persecuted, but an aspiration toward excellence. He longed for a United States in which leaders could engage in the best of faith, because they knew each other as the best of men. As a conservative, Tyler thought that creating such a country started with the family, the local church and the small town — all best embodied, of course, in his own Manchester, New Hampshire. But despite his high goals, he had none of

the demagoguery or appetite common in today’s politics. He viewed his intellectual opponents not as challenges or irrelevances, but first as partners. And while Tyler had opinions about political matters, he was mostly interested in a particular style of leadership. He hated the arrogance of elites who thought they could re-engineer society. His experiences in an intimate New England town, and the debate organization to which we both belonged, convinced him that in its highest form, politics is about making better men. Tyler understood that to lead someone, you first need to know him as a man. This ultimate interest in the familiar inspired him to talk frequently about the sort of father he wished to be.

Tyler’s commitment to America was more than intellectual — he wanted to defend his country in battle, and received an offer from the United States Army to attend Officer Candidate School after graduation. During his final semester, he drilled himself physically and mentally to prepare. He never concealed the connection between his commitment to soldiery and his desire to enter politics; fighting in wars and then debating in the Senate were, to Tyler, what the exemplary citizen did. And because he thought America was not just his country, but the best

country, there was no contradiction to him between the citizen and the gentleman.

Faith, among other things, prompted Tyler’s reverence for his friends and patriotic piety.

He came to Yale as a boisterous atheist, but returned to Christianity before he graduated.

Though many of his friends were philosophical Catholics, Tyler retained from his Protestant tradition a personal relationship with Jesus, and advised his Christian friends to do the same. Tyler was a mere Christian, of winsome and humble faith, never obsessed with what C. S. Lewis termed “cleverness shot forth on God’s behalf.”

Perhaps it was his personal relationship with Jesus that made Tyler’s outlook fundamentally optimistic. He believed man was fallen, but he loved people all the same — mostly he stressed that man’s possibilities equaled his effort, discipline and hope. He never indulged in radicalism. Tyler’s vision of his and his country’s future were too ambitious to permit such immaturity.

We’ll all feast together again soon, my friend — your place, as is traditional. Farewell.

COLE ARONSON is a sophomore in Calhoun College. His column usually runs on Mondays. Contact him at cole.aronson@yale.edu .

Seeing is believing I

t happens every year like clockwork.

Mid-September rolls around, and my Instagram feed becomes clogged with buckets of Honeycrisp apples and hay bales. Yale students flaunt their flannels and Bean boots in front of a bucolic backdrop of rolling green hills, lush fields and maybe a few cows.

Cider abounds.

The leaves start to change and the cable-knit sweaters unfold and all of a sudden an email from the Yale College Council events director comes careening into my inbox. “Sign up for Farm Tours!” she beckons, offering up around 90 spots to attend a “lavish outdoor breakfast” and to “visit some of Connecticut’s most beautiful farms.” The farm tours, a joint effort of the YCC and Yale Dining, facilitate exploring the Nutmeg State beyond Yale’s walls by picking berries and getting the best ’gram, no filter.

I call this sensuous conception of farming “farm fetishization.” Farm fetishization entices us to get our “hands in the soil,” if only for a minute, and reap the benefits of a beautiful farm without too much thought.

These Yale-wide farm tours are by no means the only instance of farm fetishization we all too

frequently encounter. Open the pages of any fashion magazine, and you’re bound to come across phoAUSTIN of someBRYNIARSKI tos one’s farm wedding.

Guns & butter Te l e v i s i o n commercials routinely romanticize idyllic farm scenes to convey an air of authenticity.

Snapchat recently aired a “Farm Life” story alongside its fascinating music festival coverage.

Even Williams-Sonoma, that suburban mall fixture of kitchen wares, has a section on their website dedicated to all things “agrarian.”

These sights and cues can delight anyone’s senses. Especially for urbanites who lack any obvious connection to farming such as me, the mythology surrounding the small farm serves as a source of comfort. One might walk away from a farm tour thinking that everything in the food system is hunky-dory.

The problem is that the food system is anything but.

Contrary to the small farm that exists in our minds, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tells us that the total number of farms is decreasing, while the average farm size is increasing.

Thus, our picturesque notions of small farms do not reflect reality.

And for all our fascination with “organic” and “sustainable” agriculture, only a fraction of a percent of all agricultural land area in the U.S. is organically certified.

What’s worse is that some major agribusinesses are taking advantage of this ignorance.

In many states, they’ve lobbied for “ag-gag” laws — laws that make it illegal to blow the whistle on agricultural operations, usually factory-style pig farming that are behaving badly. Six states have passed such legislation, which usually incriminate people who try to expose unsanitary conditions or cases of animal abuse.

This lack of transparency institutionalizes the myth we’ve created around “the farm.” It actively prevents us from investigating how some farms actually operate, limiting our exposure to a few cushy farm tours.

Sure, there are certainly benefits of farm tours that can’t be

overlooked. Spending time on farms can serve as a meaningful experience that informs and engages participants in a way that sheds light on system-wide issues and sparks in-depth conversations. If a trip to a farm is what gets a Yale student out of bed at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, then it can serve as a springboard to broader discussions about the way the food system works — or doesn’t. Farm trips are a fun indulgence, but are more meaningful when they encourage awareness about the agricultural sector as a whole.

Farm tours could be more informative without sacrificing their entertainment value. I understand that the larger purpose of a farm tour isn’t to also stage a teach-in about everything that’s wrong with our food system. But failure to understand the bigger picture can justify complacency.

Just because farm tours are good study breaks doesn’t mean they cannot be critically engaging. Enjoy your apple picking.

Don’t cherry pick.

AUSTIN BRYNIARSKI is a senior in Calhoun College. His column runs on Fridays. Contact him at austin.bryniarski@yale.edu .

ALINA YAMAN is a junior in Saybrook College. Contact them at alina.yaman@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

NEWS

“All I want is an education, and I am afraid of no one.” MALALA YOUSAFZAI PAKISTANI ACTIVIST

CORRECTIONS TUESDAY, SEPT. 29

Alders brainstorm homelessness solutions

The article “Summer program extends STEM offerings” incorrectly stated that 12,000 students will attend YYGS this summer. Rather, 1,200 students will take part in the program.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 30

In the story “Sterilization method may be unsafe,” Sanket Dhruva was incorrectly referred to as a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, although he is actually a research fellow at the School.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 30

The article “Yale partners with chefs on sustainability” incorrectly stated that Josh Evans ‘12 worked at Nordic Food Lab under Rene Redzepi. In fact, Evans worked in collaboration with Redzepi, who is a co-founder of Nordic Food Lab but has no legal ownership of the organization.

THURSDAY, OCT. 1

In the story “New dairy store faces uphill battle,” New Haven Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson was misquoted as saying that experimental businesses in New Haven have a reputation for not lasting long. In fact, Nemerson believes New Haven’s demographics attract many experimental businesses to the city.

Additionally, the article incorrectly stated that Nemerson had not cooked the $20 pasta he bought at Extra Virgin Oil because the store had not instructed him how to cook the pasta. In fact, Nemerson has not cooked the pasta because he has not yet found an occasion to do so.

Motives for online learners examined

BY FINNEGAN SCHICK STAFF REPORTER As Yale increases its online presence through Massive Open Online Courses, a new study shows that more people are using these classes to advance their professional careers rather than to pursue academic goals — a finding that may be surprising at a University that prides itself on the liberal arts and spurns pre-professionalism.

A study of over 50,000 online learners conducted this month

by Coursera — an online company headed by former University President Richard Levin that offers online lectures from professors at over 100 universities — found that 52 percent of Coursera users surveyed said they took online courses to improve their professional careers, while only 28 percent of respondents turned to Coursera for academic benefits. Professors interviewed said they were not surprised by the study’s findings, but noted that certain academic fields attract more career-minded learners, while others, like the humanities, will likely keep drawing those interested in learning for its own sake.

And while faculty said the online courses extend Yale’s reach to an untapped international community of learners, some argued that an online course cannot replace a classroom experience.

“Those courses that tend to be more STEM-oriented tend to serve a younger demographic and a demographic that is degree- or vocation-driven,” said music professor Craig Wright, adding that Coursera humanities courses like the one he teaches on classical music appeal more to people who are taking the class for fun rather than for credit.

Art history professor Diana Kleiner expressed a similar sentiment, stating that while some of the students who enroll in her online Roman Architecture class are professional architects, others are Ph.D. candidates or even tourists planning trips to Italy.

In humanities courses like hers, Kleiner said, there are fewer people who take the course for professional reasons. Some students are so engaged with the topic that they have taken it three times, she added.

Professors said the online courses have allowed them to reach students in faraway places such as Syria and England.

But they also noted that some

52% of Coursera Users surveyed said they took online courses to advance their careers.

aspects of face-to-face learning cannot be replicated through the Internet.

“The personal experience [of a classroom] allows you to establish a one-on-one bond with the instructor and the learner, and that’s a powerful motivator,” Wright said.

Political science professor Ian Shapiro GRD ’83 LAW ’87 said that because MOOCs are filmed in a studio, he had to change his teaching style to fit the new medium. When he filmed his course “Moral Foundations of Politics” for Coursera, he used two actors as mock students to make the experience feel more natural and personal to the viewer. The experience taught him to reflect more on his own in-classroom teaching style, he said.

They’re teaching, I’m learning. I’m teaching and they’re learning.

DIANA KLEINER Art History Professor “If you give your lecture staring into a camera, you come across as someone who’s selling real estate at two in the morning,” Shapiro said. “[Filming this course] really shook me out of complacency about teaching. There are a lot of ways to improve your teaching if you really think about it.”

This spring, Coursera will add French professor Howard Bloch’s course on Cathedrals, School of Medicine professor Anees Chagpar’s GRD ’14 course on Breast Cancer Awareness and Divinity School professor Bruce Gordon’s course on the history of Western Christianity. Lucas Swineford, executive director of the Yale Office of Dissemination & Online Education, said Yale expects to add around five new courses to Coursera each year.

As the program continues to expand, Kleiner said, professors will be able to do more than bring their classroom experience to the online platform — they will be able to transfer lessons from the online platform back to the classroom as well.

“They’re teaching, I’m learning. I’m teaching and they’re learning,” Kleiner said.

Contact FINNEGAN SCHICK at christopher.schick@yale.edu .

28 % of Coursera Users surveyed said they took online courses to pursue academic goals.

TRESA JOSEPH/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

City administrators, alders, police officers and New Haven residents discussed homelessness and recidivism Thursday.

BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH STAFF REPORTER New Haven officials gathered Thursday to discuss solutions to two issues that have vexed the city in recent years: reducing homelessness and easing the transition from prison to civilian life.

The meeting was a workshop of the Board of Alders’ Human Services Committee that brought together alders, city administrators, police officers and residents in an effort to move toward solutions to two of the city’s most pressing issues. The alders heard from New Haven Community Services Administrator Martha Okafor and Sgt. Roy Davis, the district manager for Downtown and Wooster Square.

They outlined the strategies the city has pursued to reduce recidivism — relapse into criminal behavior after leaving prison — and homelessness.

Okafor spoke first, detailing the plans Mayor Toni Harp has proposed for cutting recidivism rates across the city. She described Harp’s plans for easing re-entry as an “innovative” new approach for the city, because they address the root cause of the problems.

“Our goal is in five years to cut down by 50 percent the recidivism rate of anyone who is coming out of prison with a New Haven address and is coming back into this city,” Okafor said.

Part of Harp’s plans involve

implementing the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which Seattle adopted four years ago. Okafor said the LEAD program is part of what she called a “harmreduction strategy” that aims to provide help to those who need it, rather than criminalizing them for their actions. This strategy will involve matching those with substance abuse problems with rehabilitation programs, Okafor said.

Okafor said that the city also plans to institute a program in prisons to teach inmates the skills they need to succeed after being released, in an effort to cut recidivism rates. She added that in-prison educational programs can help improve the employment prospects of recently released inmates, who often have poor literacy.

The group also focused on homelessness, an issue especially prominent in the area surrounding Yale’s campus.

But Davis said that although the New Haven Green has become the nexus of homeless activity in the city, New Haven may have more important problems to combat there.

“The homelessness, though it’s a problem, is not the biggest issue,” he said. “The biggest issue is — I don’t want to call it a black market, but that’s what it is. It’s like Times Square in the ’90s.”

Davis said people — many of whom are homeless — gather on the Green to trade goods like cigarettes, narcotics, watches

and bus passes in a burgeoning contraband market.

The police force’s strategy for combating that black market does not lie in criminalizing the purchase and sale of blackmarket goods, Davis said.

Instead, officers issue infractions for offenses like public drinking and urination, and cited citizens must either pay a fine or perform community service.

People typically will not pay the fine, Davis said, but are more willing to perform community service. He added that the city uses the community service for dual purposes — as the people charged with violations pay back their debt, the city will also offer them the opportunity to enter into counseling for substance abuse and other issues common among the city’s homeless.

But failing to complete the community service leads to harsher penalties, Davis said.

“The big picture is that, if you make a bad decision, you’re going to be held accountable,” he said. “But being held accountable doesn’t mean that you’re going to be criminalized.”

Ward 30 Alder Carlton Staggers, who works with the homeless and at-risk children through the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, said he agrees that the problems on the Green must be addressed. Noting the difficulties of establishing links with the homeless, he said

that nonprofits in New Haven should collaborate in order to reach out to the population.

Edward Madison, a former alder who served as chair of the Human Services Committee, said that homelessness and recidivism are nothing new to the Elm City. He said the agenda for the meeting was highly similar to the agendas that he saw during his time on the committee.

But those problems might grow worse this year, Madison said. He added that the city will face a crisis this winter when cold weather forces the population currently sleeping on the Green to relocate. The problem is compounded due to the recent loss of much emergency housing in Columbus House, a major New Haven homeless shelter.

“New Haven, like virtually every place in the country, deals with homelessness in the winter by just putting BandAids on it,” he said. “Unfortunately, this winter, it feels like the wheels are coming off our jerry-rigged solution.”

Okafor addressed Madison’s concern, noting that the city is currently working with Columbus House to find room to house additional emergency beds.

Roughly 25 percent of New Haven’s homeless population comes from outside the city.

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

Flipped classrooms benefit female students

BY VICTOR WANG AND JAY LEE STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Flipped classrooms, a pedagogical technique becoming increasingly popular in colleges across the nation, have been backed by a Yale-led study published last Tuesday.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, suggests that “flipped” classrooms — an educational model in which inclass lectures and homework assignments are reversed, with students completing problems during class and watching lectures outside of class — lead to significant improvements in students’ comprehension of the course material, especially among female students, underrepresented minority students and students with lower grade point averages. At Yale, the CTL has also found positive results from flipped classrooms. But students interviewed had mixed opinions about this alternative model.

“We found that because class meetings were active and engaging based upon the online lectures, students were preparing earlier and more often and

more accurately in the flipped classroom as compared to the more traditional lecture format,” said Mark Graham, evaluation director of the Yale Center for Scientific Teaching and one of the study’s authors.

According to the study, learning — as measured by exam averages — improved by about 12 percent for students in the flipped classes compared to those in standard classes.

Female students’ scores went from significantly lower than male students’ to statistically equal after the course flipped, according to David Gross, another one of the study’s authors and a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UMass Amherst.

The researchers collected data from one of Gross’ classes at UMass Amherst over five years. For the first three years, students learned in a traditional classroom setting with in-class lectures, and in the last two years, the course was flipped.

At Yale, the CTL has also worked with STEM professors to experiment with different forms of active learning methods, including flipped classrooms, according to CTL Executive Director Jennifer Frederick. With active learning techniques, students are

encouraged to participate more in class discussions as opposed to passively listening to professor-led lectures.

Frederick said Yale professors are invited to annual workshops about active learning, and that the number of classes that integrate such pedagogical methods is increasing every term.

“I can say that the data [about active learning] is very promising,” she said. “We have observed better learning outcomes based on test results.”

Frederick added that the CTL’s ongoing research shows that students who believe in active learning are more likely to benefit from it.

However, Yale students interviewed expressed mixed responses regarding their experiences with flipped math and science classrooms.

Wissem Gamra ’18, who took PHYS 180 last year in a flipped classroom, found the learning approach unhelpful for mastering new material.

“The problem was that those videos would explain the concepts, but if you do not understand, then the only option you had was to re-watch the video, saying the same thing again,” Gamra said. “So in other words, the flipped classroom experience for me was if as if

we were taking an online class, and then we go to class where we are given multiple-choice questions to practice with, some of which we could easily find online.”

Alison Fritz ’16, who also took PHYS 180 last year, said she could see how female students may benefit more from flipped classrooms than their male counterparts.

“In male-majority classes like physics, I think that men are often — but not always — more likely to stop the lecture and ask questions, or engage with questions the teacher asks,” Fritz said.

Professor of geology and geophysics Jeffrey Park, who teaches “Earth System Science” in a flipped classroom, said he appreciates that most of his students participate actively with an open mind during class. Park added that female students are typically not afraid to speak up and participate in class, sometimes participating more than their male counterparts.

The study was published in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education.

Contact VICTOR WANG at v.wang@yale.edu and JAY LEE at jay.lee@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“If only the human body could handle trauma as well as biotechnology stocks do.”

ALEX BERENSON AMERICAN AUTHOR AND REPORTER

Mahnensmith files countersuit against plaintiffs MAHNENSMITH FROM PAGE 1 administrators Elizabeth Chiapperino and Keith Parmalee helped the plaintiffs fabricate a sexual harassment case against Mahnensmith to remove him from the clinic, the cross-claim alleged.

Skip Thurman, a spokesperson for DaVita, told the News the company strongly disagrees with Mahnensmith’s allegations.

“When Dr. Mahnensmith’s conduct was brought to our leadership’s attention, we acted swiftly in conducting a thorough investigation,” Thurman wrote in an email to the News. “We deter-

mined it was important for us to remove Mahnensmith as medical director. The safety and health of our patients and teammates is a primary focus.”

In the original lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that on two occasions, Mahnensmith thrust his pelvis in a sexual manner against the chair a female plaintiff was sitting in.

The male plaintiff offered Mahnensmith a seat, but he did not sit down, the original lawsuit said.

“Dr. Mahnensmith replied with a smirk, ‘I’m not finished yet,’ and continued to sexually gratify himself until announc-

TIMELINE CASE HISTORY April 2014 Mahnensmith retires

June 26, 2014 Plaintiffs filed claims at the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities against DaVita and Yale

ing to the group that he was finished,” the complaint read.

But Mahnensmith denied these allegations in his counterclaim, stating that he was simply doing exercises to reduce the pain caused by his degenerative spine disease, right leg sciatica and osteoarthritis. Mahnensmith’s lawyer compared accusations lobbied against his client to events in “The Crucible,” a play about the Salem Witch Trials. “[Mahnensmith] says he didn’t do it, they say he did,” Mitchell said. “Why people get together and do this, I don’t know, but hopefully we’ll find

July 23, 2014

Plaintiffs filed claims with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against DaVita and Yale

that out in the course of developing the facts behind the case.”

Other allegations, including claims Mahnensmith touched a female plaintiff inappropriately on other occasions, made sexual comments and created a hostile work environment were dismissed by Mahnensmith as fabrications or easily explainable misunderstandings. He described these allegations as examples of the “collective torment” he was subjected to by the plaintiffs and part of a larger plan to remove him as the director of the clinic.

Jennifer Zito, who represents six of the seven plaintiffs, denied

all of Mahnensmith’s claims.

“Dr. Mahnensmith’s allegations against the individual plaintiffs I represent are baseless and incredulous,” Zito said in an email to the News. “The allegation that [seven] plaintiffs each individually, each for their own personal reasons, just fabricated accusations of sexual harassment defies common sense.”

The plaintiffs of the original lawsuit are also suing Yale for inadequately supervising Mahnensmith, alleging that the University’s failure to act appropriately in this case falls into a broader pattern of unresponsiveness in the face of sexual

Feb 12, 2015

First complaint filed by the plaintiff’s against Mahnensmith, DaVita and Yale

misconduct allegations against faculty members.

Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart declined to comment on the countersuit and whether Mahnensmith was under any supervision at the clinic. Peart said the University cannot discuss the lawsuit as it is currently in litigation and the details of Yale’s arrangement with DaVita are issues relevant to the suit.

Mahnensmith has been in full-time clinical practice and various teaching positions since 1984.

Contact SARA SEYMOUR at sara.seymour@yale.edu .

Sept 16, 2015

Sept 29, 2015

Mahnensmith files countersuit against seven plaintiffs and DaVita healthcare

Plaintiffs respond to Mahnensmith's countersuit denying his claims

MAYA SWEEDLER/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

Surveys yield insight on reporting barriers

DENIZ SAIP/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale Women’s Center and Yale College Council run a joint task force on sexual misconduct.

SURVEYS FROM PAGE 1 seek counseling and support.

The AAU report backed the YCC and Women’s Center report’s qualitative findings, many of which came through freeresponse questions, with statistics. Of Yale students who indicated in the AAU survey that they had reported an incident of sexual assault by force or incapacitation to the University, 30.3 percent said the University programs were “extremely useful,” and over 90 percent said they were at least somewhat helpful. Nearly half of the group who had reported such an incident also said University programs were “excellent” in helping them understand their options for proceeding.

The SHARE Center was the most frequently utilized University resource, with 68.9 percent of students who identified as victims of nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving force or incapacitation indicating that they had sought help there.

But the surveys diverged on the issue of whether students seek out these resources in the first place, and why some choose not to.

The AAU survey revealed that only 27.4 percent of women at Yale who experienced penetration by force reported their experiences to an authority. Isabel Cruz ’17, another author of the YCC and Women’s Center report, said the student-led survey did not focus on reporting rates.

It did, however, highlight barriers to reporting. The YCC and Women’s Center survey found that nearly half of the 75 respondents cited confusion or misinformation regarding University resources as a significant barrier to reporting, while the AAU survey found that the most frequently cited barrier to reporting was that victims did not think their incident was serious enough to report. Confusion or misinformation may not have been cited in the AAU survey sim-

ply because it was not one of the multiplechoice options given to students as a potential barrier to reporting. “Did not know where to go or who to tell” was provided as an option, but it was one of the least frequently selected ones.

In light of these findings, Cruz highlighted the authors’ recommendation to better advertise the Title IX Office’s informal complaint process, as well as the broader recommendation to eliminate social stigma around reporting sexual misconduct in the Yale community. An informal complaint process would likely mitigate many students’ fears that their experiences are unimportant, Cruz added.

“Many of our recommendations address the problem that reporting is such a socially embedded thing,” she said. “We need to develop a culture where people find a right way to deal with what happens to them.”

In the wake of both surveys’ results, administrators have already taken preliminary steps to address student confusion about Yale’s sexual misconduct policies and procedures. Boyd, along with several other administrators, ran a new segment during freshman and transfer student orientation this fall, during which they laid out key policies and resources available on campus.

In addition, Yale’s Title IX Office is in the process of revising information on its website, including adding explanatory infographics. The first of those is already available online. A new pool of trained advisors will be available to both complainants and respondents this fall as well.

“Ensuring that the campus understands the full range of options is ongoing work, but we’ve taken a few important steps already,” Boyd said.

Contact VICTOR WANG at v.wang@yale.edu and QI XU at qi.xu@yale.edu .

Arvinas and Genentech to team up ARVINAS FROM PAGE 1 proteins to that machinery and cause an early death for those proteins. We just want to get rid of them.”

The drug, called a PROTAC, currently targets the androgen receptor — a protein critical to the growth of prostate cancer cells.

The drug is a breakthrough, Crews said, because the protein degenerator class of drugs can be used for a huge range of diseases.

Since the PROTACs can be tooled to bind to proteins in any kind of cancer cell, the immediate next step is to develop drugs for other forms of cancer. But the opportunities do not stop there, Crews said.

“The nice thing about this approach is that it’s a platform technology, meaning that this idea of recruiting proteins you want to eliminate to the cell’s garbage can be applied to any number of proteins, like the ones that are driving prostate cancer, driving breast cancer, driving lung cancer,” he said.

“We’d love to go after neurodegenerative diseases.”

Crews added that the drug could potentially be used for diseases like diabetes, inflammation and even neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.

The announcement came as Alexion, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country,

relocates back to the Elm City from Cheshire, Connecticut. For many biotechnology companies, Yale is a primary draw to New Haven, said Sean Cassidy, Arvinas CFO. Cassidy added that the University provides talent as well as access to expensive, high-tech facilities such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machines.

Still, New Haven is still a long way from becoming as vibrant a biotechnology hub as Cambridge or San Francisco, Cassidy said. Cassidy added New Haven could work on becoming a stronger magnet for biotechnology firms by building an airport larger than Tweed New Haven Airport and creating more lab buildings for scientific research.

If the company’s drug is successful, one of the key breakthroughs will be a substantial drop in the amount of medication necessary for certain cancer patients.

That lower dose, said Crews, is the biggest change in the paradigm of cancer medication.

“We’re taking a rogue protein to a protein that is going to tag it for destruction, and so once we’ve brought it together, it’s tagged and it’s destroyed,” Crews said. “And then it’s sent off to do the same thing to another one, and another one, and another one. I view it as more of a seek-and-destroy drug that goes and just eliminates those proteins that are causing the problem.”

Each PROTAC molecule can be used to destroy many rogue proteins before the body naturally breaks it down. This recycling effect allows patients to receive a smaller and less invasive dose, he added, noting that tumors are not expected to build up resistance to PROTAC molecules over time the way they do to current medication options.

Ultimately, this new class of drugs will shift the paradigm of treatment from inhibition of the rogue proteins to degradation, directly destroying the proteins necessary for the cancer cells to replicate.

“The current therapy works for a while, but ultimately prostate tumor cells become resistant to the therapy,” he said. “One method they use to become resistant is that they make more of the androgen receptors. So eventually you just can’t take enough of the drug — it’s an arms race. We want to build a different paradigm. Not one that’s built on inhibition, but one that’s built on degradation.”

This year, the National Cancer Institute estimates that 27,540 men will die of prostate cancer in America, accounting for 4.7 percent of all cancer deaths.

Contact BRENDAN HELLWEG at brendan.hellweg@yale.edu and JIAHUI HU at jiahui.hu@yale.edu .

TIMELINE ARVINAS COMPANY HISTORY 2013 > > > > SEPTEMBER 26 Arvinas Secures $18.25 Million toward Programs Focused on Protein Degradation

2014 > > > > DECEMBER 17 Dr. Craig Crews Honored as CURE Entrepreneur of the Year

FEBRUARY 11 Arvinas Appoints Jim Winkler as Chief Scientific Officer

< < < < 2015 JUNE 4 Arvinas Publishes First Peer-Reviewed Paper on its Proprietary PROTAC Technology

APRIL 7 Arvinas Announces Strategic R&D Collaboration with Merck to Study Novel Protein Degradation Technology

MARCH 21 Nature Biotechnology names Arvinas a top spinout in 2013 JANUARY 12 Arvinas Appoints Manuel Litchman as President and Chief Executive Officer

rogue protein

2015 > > > > SEPTEMBER 23 Arvinas Appoints Robert Kleinfield as Chief Development Officer

SEPTEMBER 30 FierceBiotech names Arvinas as one of its “Fierce 15” Biotech Companies of 2015

OCTOBER 1 Arvinas Inks Strategic License Agreement with Genentech TRESA JOSEPH/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

YALE DAILY NEWS ¡ FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 ¡ yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whatever good things we build end up building us.â&#x20AC;? JIM ROHN AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR AND AUTHOR

Student-built house opens Monday

BY DANIELA BRIGHENTI STAFF REPORTER On a corner lot in New Havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s West River neighborhood sits a 1,000-square-foot house, recently completed by first-year students at the Yale School of Architecture.

The house, located on 193 Winthrop Ave., was constructed as part of the Jim Vlock Building Project â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a required annual program for first-year graduate students in which participants design and construct a home in New Haven.

First introduced in 1967, the project gives architecture students the chance to see a job through from conceptualization to realization.

From 1989 onwards, the focus of the project has shifted to serve economically challenged neighborhoods in the Elm City. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Vlock program has for decades distinguished [the School of Architecture] from its peers,â&#x20AC;?

Michael Morand, Deputy Chief Communications Officer for the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communication, said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Yalies in architecture are more than stu-

dents â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they become citizens and neighbors.â&#x20AC;?

This year, the students had to design the home on a corner lot â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a particularly challenging task since such buildings can only be accessed from one side.

According to project manager Alexander Kruhly GRD â&#x20AC;&#x2122;17, each student in the class designs a prototype for the house in the spring.

Halfway through the semester, the first-year class is split into teams to combine and refine their designs.

The faculty then chooses a winning scheme from the designs. Finally, the class works as a single group to fine-tune the winning design before beginning construction in June, Kruhly said. Fourteen students see the construction work to completion as interns at the school from July until August. â&#x20AC;&#x153;As students, we gain an entirely new understanding of architecture through active involvement in the construction process,â&#x20AC;? Kruhly said.

The school has partnered with NeighborWorks New Horizons of New Haven â&#x20AC;&#x201D; an organization committed to offering affordable

housing to city residents â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and private equity firm HTP Ventures LLC, which specializes in massproducing affordable housing.

This is the second year of both these partnerships. Last year, students built the house at 179 Scranton St., just 300 feet from the new building.

The building project will likely maintain its focus on low-income areas of New Haven, said project manager Tess McNamara GRD â&#x20AC;&#x2122;17. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The building project is one of the most notable and established projects of its kind,â&#x20AC;? Kruhly said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The project is an integral component of [the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s] curriculum and serves as an influential draw to the school for many prospective students.â&#x20AC;?

Kruhly said few other architecture schools allow students to work on a project as large as the Jim Vlock Building Project.

The houseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Monday grand opening is a free event, open to the public.

Contact DANIELA BRIGHENTI at daniela.brighenti@yale.edu .

DENIZ SAIP/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The 1,000-square-foot house was built on 193 Winthrop Ave.

Unequal leave for Yale mothers, fathers

BY FINNEGAN SCHICK STAFF REPORTER On paper, fathers working at Yale have the same parenting resources available to them as mothers. But not all University employees experience being a parent at Yale the same way.

For Yale faculty, staff and graduate students starting a family, there are a number of available support networks provided through employer benefits â&#x20AC;&#x201D; among them paid parental leave and free health insurance. In addition, groups like the WorkLife Committee â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a collection of Yale library employees â&#x20AC;&#x201D; aim to help staff members balance their responsibilities at work with their roles at home. Still, faculty and staff interviewed said Yale should extend paid leave for mothers and fathers in equal amounts, thereby allowing parents to raise a child together regardless of their respective employee statuses.

Under federal law, all Yale employees are entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave after the birth of a child. But when it comes to paid leave, Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s benefits differ according to the position of the employee. For staff, Yale offers any new parent a two-week leave after a childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birth, and that parent can also qualify for medical leave for up to eight weeks. Furthermore, a 2013 Working Women magazine article reported that the average length of paid maternity leave among Yale employees is 10 weeks, while the average length of paid paternity leave is eight weeks. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The paid parental leave that has been offered for two weeks is a tiny step forward for both parents,â&#x20AC;? Jordan Jefferson, co-chair of the WorkLife Committee, said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a good-faith effort in recognizing that [parenting] is a shared responsibility. Two weeks is nothing in the life of a newborn child.â&#x20AC;?

Jefferson, who recently returned to work after having a child, com-

P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D P&D PRODUCTION & DESIGN

design@yaledailynews.com

bined the two-week paid parental leave that Yale guarantees with eight weeks of medical leave, as well as many accrued sick days and vacation time. But, as Jefferson pointed out, a husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role in childbirth does not qualify him for medical leave. Jefferson said she wishes both she and her husband had more paid leave after she gave birth to take care of the child.

Jeffersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s husband, who is not a Yale employee, received less leave from his employer than Jefferson did from Yale. This left Jefferson to shoulder more childcare responsibilities after her husband returned to work. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not really until we recognize that there are many different types of families and child-rearing situations that weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll see a need for parity and equality,â&#x20AC;? Jefferson said, adding that at Yale and across America, â&#x20AC;&#x153;itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an institutionalized, systemic belief that child-rearing is womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work.â&#x20AC;?

The problem lies with Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s laws surrounding paid parental leave, said Michael Bell, associate university librarian for administrative services. Bell explained that Sweden has more extensive paid time off for both parents, and that two-parent families receive bonuses there. Bell said he wishes there were more extensive paid time off for child-rearing in the United States.

History professor Stuart Semmel said parenting can be easier when both parents are members of the Yale faculty, as both parents receive comparable parenting benefits. But Semmel added that all parents within the Yale faculty must plan their academic careers with their parenting roles in mind.

Semmelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife also works at Yale as a professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures.

While Semmel has had to apply for parental leave himself, he said he knows of female colleagues who feel strongly about the different

ways in which fathers and mothers are treated. In some cases, Semmel said, he has heard of women who say they have felt pressured to cover up the fact that they have childcare needs, or even the fact that they have children at all. At Yale, though, Semmel said he and his wife have never experienced such unequal treatment.

Lisa Brandes, assistant dean for student affairs and director of the McDougal Center, said equal parenting benefits exist for both male and female graduate students, adding that all Ph.D. candidates can take advantage of parental leave for up to a semester. Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley said Yale provides better benefits for graduate student parents than many of its peer institutions.

But parents interviewed said that when both parents work at Yale, scheduling problems often arise.

Anna Jurkevics GRD â&#x20AC;&#x2122;15, a graduate teaching fellow, whose husband also teaches at Yale, said she is often frustrated when colleagues schedule meetings between 4 and 5 p.m. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the time when her children need to be picked up from school.

Still, Semmel said faculty members who are also parents often feel more connected to one another.

This connection builds mutual understanding between parents and produces a workplace where both fathers and mothers can feel comfortable, he added. â&#x20AC;&#x153;A lot of the job of juggling work and life is in the hands of the jugglers,â&#x20AC;? Semmel said.

A 2014 study by the Yale and the Fatherhood Institute in London found that while fathers have a substantial impact on child development and family functioning, little research has been done on the role of fathers in a childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life compared to that of mothers.

Contact FINNEGAN SCHICK at christopher.schick@yale.edu .

Spending measure preserves SNAP

BY NOAH KIM AND SARA TABIN STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Congress secured three monthsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; worth of food stamps for 423,000 Connecticut recipients last Wednesday after approving a temporary spending plan.

The government narrowly avoided a shutdown by approving a temporary spending measure that will keep federal agencies in operation through Dec. 11. In response to the potential shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told food stamp agencies last week to stop processing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments. Due to the passage of the bill, retailers will continue to accept SNAP benefits without interruption for the next month. But if Congress fails to come up with a long-lasting budget plan, food stamps may not be circulated past December. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think people were fearful that they might lose their benefits,â&#x20AC;? Lucy Nolan, executive director of End Hunger Connecticut! â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a statewide anti-hunger and food security organization â&#x20AC;&#x201D; said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think we have to worry more about December now when [Congress does] the budget. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve just kicked the can down the road.â&#x20AC;?

Connecticut currently has nearly half a million food stamp recipients. Nolan said that 60 percent of people receiving food stamp benefits in Connecticut are families with children. According to End Hunger Connecticut!, 37,712 New Haven residents received SNAP benefits in 2014.

Last Thursday, the Department of Agriculture sent out an instructive letter to food stamp recipients and retailers warning them about the potential consequences of a government shutdown. The letter explained that if the shutdown occurred, beneficiaries would have been blocked from using leftover September benefits. It urged food stamp recipients planning to stock up on food before the Oct. 1 deadline to consider the option of long-term food storage.

Connecticut Food Association President Stan Sorkin said the shutdown would have been devastating for retailers and food stamp recipients.

He noted that over $60 million in retail value would have been lost if food stamps had not been distributed, adding that food banks would have had difficulty adjusting to an influx of people. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It would be very problematic for [the food

banks], because the more people that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have access to food, the heavier the demand would be for them to account for that,â&#x20AC;? Sorkin said.

The passage of the bill was slowed when congressional Republicans demanded that Planned Parenthood be defunded before they approved a budget, but the House ultimately voted 257 to 151 in favor of the temporary spending plan. While 186 Democrats and 91 Republicans cast their vote in favor of the plan, all 151 votes in opposition were cast by Republicans.

I think we have to worry more about December now when [Congress does] the budget.

LUCY NOLAN Executive Director, End Hunger Connecticut!

During the previous shutdown in 2013, the government could draw on funds from a federal stimulus plan to keep food stamps in distribution. However, there are insufficient funds to tide over SNAP without the passage of another federal budget plan, Nolan said, adding that thousands of families will go hungry in December if the government shuts down after the temporary budget expires. â&#x20AC;&#x153;People wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to eat because of this,â&#x20AC;?

Nolan said.

Yale students also voiced concern about hunger in Connecticut, noting that students can do more to increase the food supply for low-income individuals and families. Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project member Victoria Mevs â&#x20AC;&#x2122;17 said YHHAP has been making a concerted effort to recruit volunteers in the hopes of contributing as much as possible to the community.

According to End Hunger Connecticut!, 89.7 percent of 11th and 12th graders in New Haven are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.

Contact NOAH KIM at noah.kim@yale.edu and SARA TABIN at sara.tabin@yale.edu .

FRENCH THROUGH ACTING WORKSHOP led by Charles Mayer of French-in-Action fame

t 'SJEBZ 0DUPCFS o QN BOE o QN t 4BUVSEBZ 0DUPCFS BNo QN BOE o QN t 4VOEBZ 0DUPCFS BNo QN BOE o QN

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Participants must attend all sessions.

Application deadline: October 5, 2015 "QQMJDBUJPO BWBJMBCMF BU IUUQT DMBTTFTW ZBMF FEV Y 1C'I2 'PS JOGPSNBUJPO DPOUBDU 3VUI ,PJ[JN SVUI LPJ[JN!ZBMF FEV

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.” MICKEY MANTLE AMERICAN BASEBALL PLAYER

Six gang members face prosecution STREET GANGS FROM PAGE 1 “They’re in the federal system, so the consequences are very severe for violent crime,” said Mike Lawlor, undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning at Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office is very capable of locking these guys up for a very long time.”

Daly said police arrested Murphy, Young and Harris following news of the indictment, while Benton and Short were already in custody for unrelated reasons.

The offenses of murder, attempted murder, racketeering, firearms, narcotics and money laundering came to light through “Operation Red Side,” a police effort which began in January 2014. Daly said “Operation Red Side” connected these offenses through a series of controlled narcotics purchases and firearms seizures. The Connecticut state crime lab analyzed ballistics evidence recovered from the crime scene to link the shootings to the defendants, Kumor said.

“Operation Red Side” also indicated that Benton led other associates of the gang in transporting crack cocaine and heroin to Bangor, Maine. The gang members would either sell the drugs in the town and its surrounding communities or trade the narcotics for firearms, which they then brought back to New Haven.

“They used these guns to protect their criminal enterprise through intimidation and violence, including murder,” Kumor said.

Daly said investigations on other gangs remain active and ongoing, but she does not anticipate additional arrests in the near future. Esserman added that while his police station chooses

to keep the exact number of gangs in New Haven confidential, he wants all individuals who commit crimes such as murder to know “we’re coming after you.”

Daly said that Luis Padilla — a gang member involved in several of the defendants’ alleged crimes — is being charged separately after he pled guilty to a number of offenses related to the indictment earlier this week. She added that more defendants are expected to plead guilty in the coming days.

Professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Louis Schlesinger said in cases like these, the federal government typically looks to turn low-level defendants against their former gang in an effort to take down its leaders.

This isn’t your typical case, this isn’t your typical gang.

ANDREW PAPACHRISTOS Professor, Yale Law School “The government will look to flip those people to testify against the major ones in the group,” Schlesinger said. “They want to break this up, and the best way to do that is to go after the leadership.”

Yale Law School professor Andrew Papachristos said that prosecutorial success in federal courts is very high, citing the roughly 85-percent conviction rate of federal prosecutors in Chicago. Because federal investigations require a large amount of resources, he suspects the defendants are “serious criminals” and that prosecutors have enough evidence to form a strong argument.

“This isn’t your typical case,

this isn’t your typical gang and I think it’s consistent with what we know about violence in inner cities being concentrated in small groups,” he said.

In many cities, small networks are responsible for a large portion of violent crime, Papachristos said. As a result, the impact that the Red Side Guerilla Brims had on gun violence in New Haven was likely significant. Schlesinger said while the removal of six gang members might simply enable six other individuals to take their places in the gang, this case should bring a major blow to the Red Side Guerilla Brims.

Lowler said the defendants — assuming they are found guilty — will serve as an example to other gang members.

“People who are in these types of groups, we are ready, willing and able to help them exit from such a lifestyle — but if they choose not to, this is what will happen,” he said. “The message we want everyone to hear is they need to put the guns down and they need to stop shooting each other, this is a major example of the kind of consequences we’re talking about.”

Prosecuting these types of violent crimes is the first priority of state and federal criminal justice systems, Lawler said, adding that he expects the defendants to receive lengthy prison sentences.

Esserman said the indictment of these six men would allow locals to breathe a sigh of relief, given the impact he has seen the group has on New Haven.

“There are many, many New Haven families that have been waiting for this day who tonight will go to sleep with answers that for years have haunted them,” he said.

Contact DAVID SHIMER at david.shimer@yale.edu .

ULA condemns wage theft

JIAHUI HU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

ULA members protested wage theft outside of La Carreta on Thursday afternoon.

WAGE THEFT FROM PAGE 1 from workers,” Lugo said.

Lugo said the bill will hold employers more accountable when wage theft cases arise.

ULA’s press release also said the bill’s punitive consequences will help deter employers from exploiting workers.

Jim Crombie and Dan Fischer, two members of the Industrial Workers of the World — an international labor union — said they attended the movement to show solidarity with immigrant workers who deserve a fair wage.

“We’re showing some respect to the roots of the history of our organization by standing with ULA today,” Fischer said.

ULA’s protest drew attention from several spectators who

honked as they drove past La Carreta or watched from across the street. But not all observers were in full support of ULA’s endeavors.

Rosalba Portillo, who works at a liquor store near La Carreta and knows the owners and employees of the restaurant, said ULA’s decision to base their protest outside La Carreta was unfair to the owners.

Portillo said she does not believe the ex-employee accusing La Carreta of wage theft actually worked over 14 hours daily, seven days a week. Portillo said the ex-employee often visited the liquor store during his breaks from work, adding that her own daughters came to know him when they visited La Carreta.

Portillo added that she knows several past employees at La Carreta who have not complained of wage theft. On one occasion, she said, La Carreta’s owners continued paying an employee who could not work because of an injury. Portillo added that La Carreta even bought plane tickets to Mexico for an employee travelling to a parent’s funeral.

But Lugo stood firmly on his belief that La Carreta owes an employee $35,000, explaining that ULA calculated the sum by asking the worker to complete a form indicating when he entered and left work each day.

ULA was founded in 2002.

Contact JIAHUI HU at jiahui.hu@yale.edu .

MAP GANG ACTIVITY Bangor, ME

+

Money Guns Crack Cocaine

1 5

Hamden, CT

New Haven, CT

# of murders committed by the Red Side Guerilla Brims SAMUEL WANG/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 7

“Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.” OLIVER CROMWELL ENGLISH MILITARY AND POLITICAL LEADER

Swensen talks integrity in finance

BY DANIELA BRIGHENTI STAFF REPORTER Yale’s chief investment officer and resident finance guru David Swensen GRD ’80, along with Greenwich Associates founder Charles Ellis ’59, emphasized the importance of integrity in a field that can often be dominated by “individual greed and dishonesty” during a Thursday Master’s Tea at Jonathan Edwards College.

During a 90-minute discussion filled with jokes and mutual flattery, Swensen and Ellis discussed the success of Yale’s endowment, their personal career choices and advice on how financially-minded students can find jobs — but also fulfillment.

Jonathan Edwards Master Penelope Laurans, who moderated the conversation, began by bringing up a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal, which stated that “Yale Beats Harvard As Usual” in reference to the recent release of endowment returns for fiscal year 2015.

Swensen highlighted the importance of hiring and working with the right people to make Yale’s numbers as successful as they have been.

“The reason Yale can beat the market in every single equity [it] invests in is because we have 30 investment professionals, who are all incredibly well-educated and highly motivated, hardworking men and women of integrity,” Swensen said.

Ellis attributed much of Swensen’s success to the fact that Swensen only deals with companies and individuals he knows to be of unquestionable character.

Yale’s initial endowment success came from its diversified portfolios, Swensen said, and many universities, such as Harvard, Princeton and Stanford have since followed suit in using the method. What sets Yale apart now, he said, is recruiting top talent.

“I’m looking for people not trying to make as much money as possible for themselves, but instead trying to produce the best returns for the universities,” Swensen said. “And if they do that, they will do quite well for themselves. It’s a subtle difference, but incredibly important on whether Yale ends up succeeding wonderfully or not.”

In his own career, Swensen has demonstrated his commitment to just those priorities. When former economics profes-

sor James Tobin first contacted him about working at Yale, Swensen was working as a partner for the investment bank Lehman Brothers. Coming to Yale meant an 80 percent pay cut, but Swensen said by that point, he already knew Wall Street was not the place for him.

“It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was only about making money,” Swensen said. “I didn’t want that life where it was all about money and no balance between my professional and personal life.”

Both Ellis and Swensen encouraged students interested in finance to look beyond investment banking.

Swensen said that right now, too many smart young adults are going into finance — which would not be a problem if investment banks were making markets better or more efficient. Instead, Swensen said, banks are teaching young people the wrong priorities. “[Investment banking] has morphed into something that is doing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the basic provision of finance, but instead everything to do with individual greed and dishonesty,” Swensen said.

Ellis added that if he were starting his career now, he would not choose to go into finance or the investment world. Students should focus instead on developing their integrity and building a sense of self, he said, adding that students should never just take jobs, but instead take “components of a career” which can lead to long and successful employment.

Students in attendance largely agreed with the ideas Ellis and Swensen presented.

Stella Woo ’18 said it was heartwarming to hear the two men speak of finance in such a positive light, adding that bringing Swensen to Yale had been a “brilliant move.”

Other students thought Swensen’s analysis of investment banks was fair, acknowledging problems in the industry, but stating that they probably come not from immoral people but instead from larger issues in the way the banks are structured.

When Swensen first arrived at Yale in 1985, the University’s endowment was valued at $1.3 billion. Today, it is valued at an all-time high of $25.6 billion.

Contact DANIELA BRIGHENTI at daniela.brighenti@yale.edu .

ROBBIE SHORT/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale’s endowment has grown exponentially under the management of Chief Investment Officer David Swensen GRD ’80.

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“More people are watching college football on Snapchat than they are on television.”

EVAN SPIEGEL CO-FOUNDER OF SNAPCHAT

Elis begin four-game road stretch ELI OFFENSE THEN & NOW KEYS TO THE GAME

FOOTBALL FROM PAGE 10

Yale’s offensive balance in 2014 and 2015, through two games 642

666

1308 Total Yards

84

1 664 a 80 4 Tot l Yar

2015

2014 Passing yards Rushing yards ELLIE HANDLER/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

the FCS in passing yards per game with 332. Lehigh’s Nick Shafnisky is not far behind, ranking twelfth with 281.

Shafnisky has the added benefit of playing alongside experienced weapons. Following a breakout year, wide receiver Troy Pelletier is wreaking havoc in his sophomore season.

Through four games, the All-Patriot Second Team selection has 28 receptions for 300 yards and four touchdowns.

“They’ve got the most skill we’ve seen at receiver so far this season,” Reno said. “They’ve got a big receiver, Pelletier, who’s improved a ton. He’s gotten bigger and stronger. They’re going to spread the ball to their perimeter and get them out as well as get downfield.”

The Mountain Hawks’ defense poses a threat, too. Like fellow Patriot League team Colgate, Lehigh plays an odd stack defense, a scheme that features three defensive linemen, three linebackers and five defensive backs.

This formation increases versatility and the additional defensive back

The Yale football team takes on its second Patriot League opponent in three weeks when it travels to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to meet Lehigh. If the Bulldogs can defend the full width of the field, kick-start their running game and play a clean game from start to finish, they can enter the fourth quarter with a lead rather than being tasked with yet another late-game comeback.

Candler Rich ’17 showed off his speed a few times in weeks one and two, but left during the third quarter of the Cornell game with an injury and head coach Tony Reno did not confirm or deny his status for Saturday. Rich’s replacement, Deshawn Salter ’18, performed well, but not at the level to which Yale football is accustomed.

Although Reno said the team will not be making adjustments in the backfield, the running game needs to find a source of inspiration if it is to make a difference.

SHORE UP THE PERIMETER

AVOID SETBACKS

BY MAYA SWEEDLER STAFF REPORTER

ds

with 571.5 yards per game.

While Yale’s young receiving corps has racked up 664 yards already — as compared to 666 yards through two games last season — the running game has dropped off dramatically.

After posting 642 yards on 101 carries through the first two games in 2014, the Elis’ ground game has produced 180 yards on 66 attempts.

Though the statistics tell a worrisome story about the rushing attack, the offense as a whole has struggled to get into rhythm at the beginning of each game. Miscommunications, penalties and mental mistakes have combined to hurt the Bulldogs in the first half of both games.

“From the start, we had a lot of selfinflicted wounds,” safety Hayden Carlson ’18 said. “It starts with penalties. As we transitioned in the second half, we were confident in our ability to get off the field and make plays, especially on third down … As the game progressed, we were smarter at every play.”

Carlson led the team in tackles against Cornell last week, one defensive standout among many. Following a consistently mediocre 2014 campaign, the more experienced defensive unit has stood up to the test in the early matchups.

Additionally, special teams have dominated, blocking a Division I-leading four kicks and keeping 10 points off the scoreboard in the process.

Kicker Bryan Holmes ’17 was named Ivy League Special Teams Player of the Week after his performance against Cornell, while the return game added 114 yards on three kickoff returns.

Meanwhile, Lehigh has been working its way through a significant chunk of the Ancient Eight, having played Penn and Princeton the past two weeks.

The Mountain Hawks dealt the Quakers a 42–21 smackdown before receiving a dose of their own punishment at the hands of the Tigers, 52–26.

“It’s bizarre,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to look into a team’s past games and figure out how they’ll do against you. It’s all about matchups [in the Ivy League] … The bottom and top don’t separate by much.”

Like Yale, Lehigh is known for having aerial production among the best in the country. Currently, Roberts is fourth in

provides more speed on the field. Furthermore, it allows Lehigh to employ creative attacks featuring surprising dropbacks and corner blitzes. Reno said the Mountain Hawks are talented up front and can apply pressure packages similar to Colgate, who had early success in disrupting the Bulldogs’ nohuddle offense.

“We’re going to work hard and prepare for a good Lehigh team,” Roberts said. “They’re solid defensively … We’re going to have to bring our ‘A’ game.”

One thing the Bulldogs cannot do is predict the weather. With a 60 percent chance of rain on Saturday, the matchup might take place under damp conditions. Reno said the team was going to prepare for inclement weather by running drills with wet footballs.

Rain or shine, kickoff from Bethlehem, Penn. is set for 12:30 p.m. The game will be available for streaming on the Patriot League Digital Network.

Contact MAYA SWEEDLER at maya.sweedler@yale.edu .

Against Cornell a week ago, Yale’s defense was strong in the middle of the field, but the secondary was burned on several big-yardage plays. Big Red quarterback Robert Somborn found players near the sideline for gains of 18 and 16 yards on the first drive alone.

While few opposing quarterbacks will be able to throw on the run as well as Somborn, the Bulldogs need to improve their zone coverage on the perimeter.

Additionally, the Elis struggled to bring down running backs who were able to kick their runs to the outside.

Cornell’s Luke Hagy was very successful, particularly in the first half, at gaining yards after contact once he found some open field. Much of Yale’s defensive headaches can be alleviated if Yale can wrap up and finish its tackles throughout the game.

TAKE IT TO THE HOUSE

Lehigh poses a unique challenge in that it runs the odd stack defense, a scheme that utilizes an additional defensive back while sacrificing either a linebacker or lineman. As a result, they are capable of throwing a variety of unorthodox looks at Yale’s offense.

Despite the talent of the offensive line and the high football IQ of quarterback Morgan Roberts ’16, throwing the ball another 47 times, as the Elis did against Cornell, is not a sustainable option.

The Bulldogs’ previous two contests have been marked by listless performances in the second and third quarters. Strong special teams and sturdy defense have kept the team in the game until the offense finds its stride in the fourth quarter. A Yale squad that executes well in all three phases could be a very difficult team to topple.

However, two setbacks have hindered Yale thus far — one controllable and one not. Throughout their first two games of play, the Elis have struggled with both too many yellow flags and too many injuries to key players. The Bulldogs have been penalized 20 times, giving them the unenviable honor of being the most penalized team in the Ancient Eight. Secondly, with skilled players already recuperating on the sideline, Yale cannot afford to lose more talent.

With the bulk of league play yet to come, the Elis must push past adversity and perform to their full potential. Many players have referred to the team’s ability to compartmentalize and put bad plays behind them as a strength, and the team must continue to do so as they head out for the first of four consecutive road games.

Contact MAYA SWEEDLER at maya.sweedler@yale.edu .

New York double dose for Bulldogs VOLLEYBALL FROM PAGE 10 Steinberg ’17 said.

In Friday’s match, history certainly favors the hosts: the Lions have not beaten Yale in 26 straight meetings. In fact, since the Columbia volleyball program began in 1988, Yale has lost to the Lions just three times, once in 1990 and twice in 2001.

The one common opponent the teams have faced this year, Rhode Island, defeated Columbia in three straight sets but fell to Yale in four.

Still, Columbia comes in riding the momentum of a comeback win over Cornell in which the Lions pulled out the final three sets after dropping the first. Columbia freshman middle blocker Luciana Del Valle received the Ivy League Rookie of the Week award for her efforts in Ithaca.

“Columbia has some offensive

threats from the pins and middle that pose a threat,” captain and outside hitter Karlee Fuller ’16 said. “They are fast and scrappy, but I’m confident that if we handle our side of the court, we will be fine.”

Yale, however, also has multiple offensive threats of its own who have proven themselves early in the conference season. Setter Kelly Johnson ’16 led all players with 18 kills against Brown, while middle blocker Maya Midzik ’16 and outside hitter Kelley Wirth ’19 each posted 11 in the win. All three players, along with libero Kate Swanson ’19, were named to the Ivy League Honor Roll this week for their efforts.

Cornell will arrive at Lee Amphitheater following a Friday night game at Brown. The Big Red, which has yet to play a match outside the state of New York, has also had one common opponent with the Bulldogs.

Both teams lost to the University of San Francisco, with Yale dropping its match in three sets and Cornell falling in four.

First-year Cornell head coach Trudy Vande Berg has inherited a team in a curious position.

Although the Big Red finished eighth in last year’s Ancient Eight standings, it lost only one starter from that squad and has just one senior this season. With that combination of youth and experience, Vande Berg is attempting to turn around the fortunes of a program that has not seen a winning season since 2006.

“Cornell is traditionally the opposite [of Columbia],” said Fuller. “They rely on their height and strength to score. Every year teams change, though, so we have to be prepared for anything.”

Playing two dissimilar opponents on back-to-back nights presents a test for the Bulldogs that they did not in their confer-

Men meet Crimson M. SOCCER FROM PAGE 10 offense has only mustered three goals in its six losses this season.

On the opposing side, Harvard’s offense has been even more anemic than Yale’s, having only scored five goals all season long — though the Crimson’s nonconference schedule has featured two draws against nationally ranked programs.

Leading the offensive attack will be a pair of senior forwards, Oliver White and Jake Freeman, who are responsible for four of the five goals scored this season.

While upperclassmen will head the Crimson, who finished third in the conference a year ago, Yale has integrated the freshman class since the start of the sea-

son. Of the 11 newcomers, nine have seen playing time and three have become regular starters for Stannard’s squad.

One newcomer, forward Kyle Kenagy ’19 enters Ivy play having scored two goals for the Bulldogs, but has missed the past three contests due to a sprained MCL suffered on Sept. 13. However, the Orland Park, Illinois native is expected to return to the pitch against the Crimson, still tied for third in the Ivy League for goals scored.

“Right now the team is really hungry going into the Harvard game,” Kenagy said.

“We can’t wait to start our Ivy season on the right foot.”

Kenagy and his fellow freshmen have provided a welcome layer of depth in

non-conference play, but will certainly face a new type of test this weekend when they receive their first taste of Ivy competition.

And since the HarvardYale rivalry is one of the most anticipated meetings of the season for any sport, tensions will be running high across both schools’ rosters.

“The most challenging thing when playing Harvard is controlling your emotion,” Iselin said. “It is obviously an important game, and generally the team that reacts the best to the pressure of the game will come out on top.”

The Bulldogs will play at 7 p.m. this Saturday at Reese Stadium.

Contact MADDIE WUELFING at madeleine.wuelfing@yale.edu .

ence opener. The win over Brown, though a definitive 3–1 victory, was the only match during the weekend for which Yale needed to prepare during the week.

Although Yale is no stranger to multiple-match weekends — the team opened the season with three tournaments — the players noted that conference matches present a different challenge altogether.

“With only one game, we only need to worry about scouting for one team,” middle back Jesse Ebner ’16 said. “So the challenge this weekend will be taking it one match at a time such that our focus is solely on Columbia on Friday night, and then we need to make that shift on Saturday morning to scouting and thinking about Cornell.”

Still, while the Bulldogs are preparing for two opponents, they hope to perform at what Steinberg called a “high and

focused level” throughout the entire weekend.

And Fuller emphasized that five straight league titles — let alone one conference victory — have not diminished the team’s hunger to continue its winning ways. “[We’re] extremely charged for our next set of games,” Fuller said. “It’s like a craving. Once you have a taste of victory you want another, and then another.”

Friday night’s match will be played in support of the Dig Pink Rally organized by the Side-Out Foundation, which helps breast cancer patients through research and support. The contest against Columbia will begin at 7 p.m., while Saturday’s matchup with Cornell is slated for 5 p.m.

Jonathan Marx contributed reporting.

Contact DAVID WELLER at david.weller@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS

Libero Tori Shepherd ’17 has registered 65 digs in the 14 sets that she has played in this season.

Rivalry at Reese WOMEN’S SOCCER FROM PAGE 10 going into it with confidence.”

Assistant coach Todd Plourde said that in addition to that confidence, strong team chemistry will aid the Bulldogs’ fight for a win.

Grossman also said that the team cohesion both on and off the field has been particularly powerful.

“As a senior class, the focus points we emphasize are working hard at every given moment and playing for each other,” said Grossman. “Our team definitely has the talent and heart [to win], but it will require leadership from everyone in the senior class and 100 percent effort until that final whistle blows.”

Yale’s matchup against Harvard will kick off at Reese Stadium at 4 p.m.

Contact NICOLE WELLS at nicole.wells@yale.edu .

KEN YANAGISAWA/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The Yale women’s soccer team has not defeated Harvard since 2007.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST

TOMORROW

Showers likely, mainly between 11am and noon, then rain likely after noon.

SUNDAY

High of 56, low of 48.

High of 63, low of 49.

THAT’S TRUMP BY NAVNEET DOGRA

ON CAMPUS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 12:30 PM A Conversation with Chloe Angyal. Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. Based in New York City, she is a senior front page editor at The Huffington Post. This conversation is part of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Hall of Graduate Studies (320 York St.), Rm. 211.

1:30 PM Consider the Lilies: Virtue and Virtuosity in Flower Paintings by Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Others. Paintings of vases with flowers spoke to the Dutch of the splendors of creation.

They also documented one of the great eras of horticulture, which saw the cultivation of imported species, fevered speculation in tulips and hyacinths, and systematic study in botanical gardens.

Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s compositions and unrivalled technique were influential for a century; John Walsh ’61, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and a specialist in Dutch paintings, examines them in detail. Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel St.).

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 7:00 PM Harakiri. Harakiri is a 1962 film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. An award winner at the Cannes Film Festival, it is one of the most celebrated samurai films for its presentation of a lone samurai taking individual revenge against a feudal system that made a mockery of the humanistic values that were also supposed to be part of the samurai code. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Aud.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4 3:30 PM Angles on Art Tour, Cultural Crossovers in Art. Explore the diversity of the collection through the eyes of our Gallery Guides, undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines. These lively conversations address a range of topics and will inspire visitors to see the collection in new ways. Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel St.).

y SUBMIT YOUR EVENTS ONLINE yaledailynews.com/events/submit To reach us: E-mail editor@yaledailynews.com Advertisements 2-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

2-2400 (after 5 p.m.)

Mailing address Yale Daily News P.O. Box 209007 New Haven, CT 06520

Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Editor in Chief Isaac Stanley-Becker at (203) 432-2418.

Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.

To visit us in person 202 York St. New Haven, Conn. (OppositeFOR JE) RELEASE OCTOBER 2, 2015

NAVNEET DOGRA is a researcher at Yale University. Contact him at navneet.dogra@yale.edu .

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

CLASSIFIEDS

CROSSWORD Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Lewis ACROSS 1 “I don’t like it!”

4 Waikiki allure 8 Like an old jalopy 14 Chemical suffix 15 Hesse-based automaker 16 Reporter’s coup 17 Man-mouse link 18 Angry young man’s fate?

20 Hill stint 22 Hershey bar 23 Bygone political entity that included Syr. 24 Hercules, e.g.?

28 South African golfer with four major championships 29 Be quite prevalent 30 Polite response to Aunt Polly 32 Seasonal affliction 33 Ingolstadt-based automaker 35 Crude carrier 39 Result of a Caribbean sanitation strike?

44 Poet Sexton 45 Popular melt meat 46 Einstein’s birth city 47 50-50, to Fifi 51 __ Council: “Survivor” feature 53 Rush 56 Proprietary paperwork?

59 “Well done!” analog 60 Pacific feast 61 Drudge 62 Ready-to-hang Cubist painting?

67 Indian state that was part of a former Portuguese colony 68 Tamsui River capital 69 Excited about, with “on” 70 “Monsters, __” 71 Magellan’s milieux 72 Breyers competitor 73 Require DOWN 1 Regional organisms

10/2/15

By Jeffrey Wechsler

2 Stimulant trademark 3 Jalapeño product, for some?

4 San José sun 5 News org.

6 Court charge caller 7 Soft tissue 8 In front of 9 Many sports commentators 10 Bee: Pref.

11 Chapeau seen in “Ratatouille” 12 Quotidian 13 Jury members 19 “__-doke!”

21 Apennines possessive 25 Ship loading site 26 Word on a bill 27 Old writings mentioning Odin 31 Open __ 32 Org. requiring milk pasteurization 34 The Bronx’s Jerome Ave. line is part of it 36 Mixture that dissolves gold 37 Rare twosome of July 2015 38 Pro __

Thursday’s Puzzle Solved

SUDOKU MIDTERM SEASON

3

2 1

6

7

5 7

5 ©2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

40 Pro’s support 41 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner 42 Regarding 43 Innocent 48 Big name in mustard 49 Wolf-headed god 50 One covering tracks, perhaps 52 Hit on the head 53 Book with steps

10/2/15

54 __ crest: pelvic border 55 Like H.P. Lovecraft stories 57 Tremble 58 Oreos, say 63 Org. monitoring endangered species 64 Letters of proof 65 Turn that’s hung 66 Chekov’s “Star Trek” rank: Abbr.

1 4

7

9 8 9

6 1

7 8

7 2

4 7

1 7 5 8

5

7 5

6

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y

IVY LEAGUE FOOTBALL FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS BEGINS The unprecedented series of Friday night Ivy League games will kick off tonight when Princeton hosts Columbia under the lights at 7 p.m. Yale, which plays at Lehigh tomorrow, will play its first Friday night game in 18 years on Oct. 23 at Penn.

YALE VOLLEYBALL VS. COLUMBIA ELIS SUPPORT DIG PINK Tonight’s matchup at Lee Amphitheater will be played in support of the Dig Pink campaign, organized by the SideOut Foundation. Fans are encouraged to wear pink to the game and donate to the foundation, which supports breast cancer patients and their families.

MLB Royals 6 White Sox 4

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE yaledailynews.com/sports

“It’s like a craving. Once you have a taste of victory you want another, and then another.”

KARLEE FULLER ’16 VOLLEYBALL CAPTAIN

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

Yale heads to Lehigh FOOTBALL

BY MAYA SWEEDLER STAFF REPORTER Riding two consecutive fourthquarter comebacks to open the 2015 campaign, the Yale football team looks to keep its record perfect against Lehigh, a Patriot League opponent who has played more Ivy League teams than the Bulldogs.

Despite their unblemished record, the Bulldogs (2–0, 1–0 Ivy) are not the same offensive juggernaut they were last year when they defeated Lehigh 54–43 in a season-opening shootout — although the 2014 Lehigh matchup played out in a similar fashion to the Bulldogs’ pair of wins this September.

Last season, the Elis fell behind 21–0 before rallying in the second half, holding the Mountain Hawks (2–2, 0–0 Patriot) to just eight points in the final 30 minutes.

This season, the Bulldogs have come back from 14- and 19-point deficits, holding Colgate and Cornell to a combined seven points in the second half. However, with four consecutive road games beginning with Lehigh, Yale cannot continue to rely on late-game heroics.

“We’re having an issue with consistency right now,” head coach Tony Reno said. “That’s something we need to continue to address. It comes down to me, it comes down to mental focus on the play, mental focus on your job, and maintaining that mental focus through the drive or through the play.”

While the Yale offense is still averaging a well-above-average 422 yards per game, it features a less balanced attack than it did a year ago, when the tandem team of running back Tyler Varga ’15 and quarterback Morgan Roberts ’16 lit up the Ivy League en route to leading the Football Championship Subdivision in total offense SEE FOOTBALL PAGE 8

Volleyball faces two conference foes

YALE DAILY NEWS

The Elis defeated Brown 3–1 in their only Ivy matchup thus far in 2015.

BY DAVID WELLER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER After a successful start to conference play, the Yale volleyball team is looking to build on last weekend’s league-opening win over Brown as it takes on a pair of opponents this weekend in New Haven.

GRANT BRONSDON/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Quarterback Morgan Roberts ’16 will look to replicate his performance against Lehigh from a year ago: 411 total yards and five total touchdowns.

Rivalry matchup awaits

BY NICOLE WELLS STAFF REPORTER Not a single player on the Yale women’s soccer team has played for the Elis during a win over rival Harvard. The Bulldogs’ winless streak against the Crimson has lasted since 2007, but on Saturday, the team’s seven seniors will get a final chance to take down their rival with a conference win.

WOMEN’S SOCCER With the home-field advantage on their side, the Bulldogs will have the overwhelming support of the crowd in the contest, which kicks off a HarvardYale doubleheader at Reese Stadium involving both the women’s and men’s soccer teams. The Elis (3–4–2, 0–1–0 Ivy) will enter the home game looking to rebound after a 3–0 loss to Princeton last Saturday, while the Crimson (3–6–1, 1–0–0) hopes to continue its undefeated conference season with a chance at its third-consecutive Ivy League title.

“Harvard tends to be one of the most intense and mentally challenging games of the Ivy League, especially since it is such a big rivalry,” defender and captain Ally Grossman ’16 said. “[The seniors] are hoping that we can pull out a win during our final season.”

Both teams started Ivy League conference play last weekend, with Harvard taking down Penn in a 2–0 triumph during the Bulldogs’ loss to the Tigers.

To get the upper hand against the twotime defending conference champions,

Yale (6–4, 1–0 Ivy) will host Columbia (3–7, 1–0) on Friday

SEE VOLLEYBALL PAGE 8

Elis and Crimson set to clash

BY MADDIE WUELFING CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Yale has been working with added intensity this week in practice, assistant coach Marty Walker said. Walker also said the rivalry contest will test not only Yale’s physicality and skill, but the mental game of each Eli athlete.

“We talk about the three ‘A’s,” Walker said in an email to the News. “There is no point in having ability unless you have the attitude and application to back it up. With all three, success comes more often.”

Thus far in 2015, Yale’s offense has outshined Harvard’s, with the Elis scoring an average of 1.56 goals per game while the Crimson averaged just 0.70. The top goal scorers for the Bulldogs this season have been forward Michelle Alozie ’19 and midfielder Sofia Griff ’19, with five and four goals, respectively. Most of Harvard’s goals have come from midfielder Brooke Dickens, forward Joan Fleischman and forward Margaret Purce, but each only has two goals to their names.

Defensively, however, Harvard has maintained a clear advantage over Yale.

The Crimson are fourth in the conference with a 1.20 goals against average, whereas the Bulldogs have dropped to the bottom of the Ancient Eight rankings with 2.11 goals allowed per game. Yale’s young defense — with just one upperclassman out of four starting defenders — has struggled despite Eli goalkeeper Rachel Ames ’16 tallying 53 saves, the most in the Ivy League, in nine games.

“We know how important this game is for the rest of our season,” defender Colleen McCormack ’17 said. “So we are SEE WOMEN’S SOCCER PAGE 8

STAT OF THE DAY 4

VOLLEYBALL

and Cornell (4–7, 0–1) on Saturday as the Elis continue their quest for a sixth-consecutive Ivy League crown. The matches follow Yale’s conference opener at home last Friday, which saw the Bulldogs defeat their rivals from Providence in four sets.

“It’s always great to start out the [conference] season with a 1–0 record. As the season progresses, we are trying to set the bar higher and higher,” outside hitter Brittani

With Ivy League play beginning tomorrow against Harvard, the Yale men’s soccer team is looking to redeem itself after a disappointing start to the 2015 season. In their seven non-conference games, the Bulldogs have only won a single decision: the highly anticipated showdown against cross-city foe Quinnipiac.

MEN’S SOCCER Saturday’s home contest against rival Harvard (1–4–2, 0–0–0 Ivy) grants Yale (1–6–0, 0–0–0) the opportunity to jump out to a quick start in Ancient Eight play.

“The Ivy League has always been our main focus, and all the training we’ve done since the end of last season has been geared toward getting us ready to play these games,” forward Avery Schwartz ’16 said. “Ivy League soccer is known for being physical and fast-paced, and we’re excited to compete.”

The hiring of new head coach Kylie Stannard brought a new level of intensity to New Haven, along with hopes that his experience would help the Elis rebound from their one-win campaign last year. Joining Yale from the successful Michigan State soccer program, Stannard brought a new focus: transforming the Bulldogs into the hardest working team in the Ivy League.

“He’s pushed all of us beyond our comfort levels to make us better both individually and as a team, and this is going to serve us extremely well going into Ivy play,” Schwartz said.

ROBBIE SHORT/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Bulldogs will look to turn around their offensive woes against Harvard. In seven games, Yale has scored six goals.

Despite the lackluster results thus far, players remain optimistic, fully aware that all seven Ivy contests still await them. According to defender Ollie Iselin ’18, the team recognizes where improvements can be made heading into conference play, specifi-

cally referencing the Bulldogs’ inability to frequently put themselves into scoring positions.

Excluding the three goals scored in Yale’s win over Quinnipiac, the SEE MEN’S SOCCER PAGE 8

THE NUMBER OF CONSECUTIVE AWAY GAMES THAT THE YALE FOOTBALL TEAM IS SCHEDULED TO PLAY, BEGINNING TOMORROW. The Bulldogs play at Lehigh, Dartmouth, Maine and Penn before returning to the Yale Bowl for a home contest against Columbia on Oct. 31.

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015

INCUMBENCY: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD? //Noah Daponte-Smith ALL THAT JAZZ

SOURCING B6, B7

MELLOW DRAMA

BUT NOT THAT MUCH JAZZ

GETTING AT THE TRUTH

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGED READING

Yale lags behind its peer institutions in jazz offerings. Rohan Naik investigates.

WKND finds out what’s really on students’ minds.

What’s in a play when the actors sit in a row?

Caitlyn Wherry finds out.

B4

B10

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WKND

WEEKEND VIEWS

HOW WKND LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE PRECIPICE: AN EPIC //ASHLYN OAKES

// BY WEEKEND

CHILDRESS

Emily Xiao ’18 gazed at the eclipse outside the window and wondered aloud if the blood moon was some sort of metaphor for the year to come.

“Should we be worried?” she asked morosely.

“I don’t know, but let’s antagonize management with this couplet*,” Caroline Wray ’17 said, rushing in late but still careful to flash the good side of her face. “By the way, did you know that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis today?”

“Make that a triplet,” Irene Connelly ’17 shouted. Still unaccustomed to the geography of 202 York, she found her way to the lounge by its palpable aura of IPA and SWUGs. Just as these three strong female characters embarked on their quest to bring you, the unwashed masses, the Arts and Living supplement you desperately need to give meaning

to your lives, calamity struck. Right after sending an online epistle to its devoted legion of henchmen/women asking them to cover crucial campus events like the Hamlet First Quarto Staged Reading (page 10, it’s profound), WKND realized that exactly half its panlist — names N through Z — had disappeared into the ether.

Irene crawled under the table to contemplate her future in a world where all knowledge is obsolete except that which she lacks (how to use the Internet).

Caroline, like her Biblical ancestors, gnashed her teeth, ripped out her hair and called the ITS 911 number (they have yet to respond, but WKND isn’t angry — just disappointed).

While sailing away from burning Troy, Aeneas told his crew: “Perhaps one day you’ll even delight in remembering this.” WKND tried to find sol-

ace in these lines, but Aeneas had only to deal with sea monsters. No one was taking away his panlist.

It was Emily who came to the logical conclusion that if you can’t get your nudes and middle school profile pictures off the web, then a panlist can’t hide forever either. And it was she who emailed our goddess of wisdom, Steph “Athena” Addenbrooke, who solved the problem, restoring to us the second half of our alphabet and to you, dear reader, the content without which life would be as bleak as all of Jane Eyre.

As we march on into the heart of thicket, we resist the siren calls of functional friendships, our mothers’ phone calls and Woad’s. Here, 874 hours past deadline, these are the things that tether us: a Jack Bauer action figure, a broken typewriter, the photo of a DKE pledge’s bare ass emblazoned on an old cover, Edith the giant panda,

a padlocked trapdoor, the phosphenes behind our eyelids and Spotify Premium.

But most of all, we’re tethered by the small, the astonishing, the varied stories our writers will tell. This week alone, we learned about the Board of Alders’ attendance record (poor), Junglepussy’s thoughts on knitting and jazz hands.

We, your three new WKND editors, humble ourselves before you. We apologize to all those whose first names begin with the letters N through Z. We vow to never (however unintentionally) discriminate alphabetically again. We vow to make deadline over 50 percent of the time. And, following the path trodden for us by Jane, Andy and David, now frolicking in SWUG-dom, we vow to foster what makes WKND wonderful: the weird.

We’re going to spend the year seek-

ing and publishing the weirdest shit going down at Yale. Maybe we’ll learn something about ourselves in the process, or maybe we’ll just learn how to sleep through the afternoon on Fridays.

(Well, except Emily, because she has chem lab on Fridays.)

Either way, we can’t do it alone. We need you.

“Let us go then, you and I, while the [year] is spread out against the sky, like a [panlist] etherized upon a table,” wrote T.S. Eliot about WKND, in 1915. As with all profound verse, his words hold remarkably true today. Let us go then. *Couplet: Two direct quotations in a row. A no-no in the YDN style guide.

(RE-)JOIN the WKND PANLIST or send in your memoirs by emailing us at caroline.wray@yale.edu, irene.connelly@yale.edu & emily.xiao@yale.edu .

Shouting and Clapping Through Years of Dance // BY LILLIAN CHILDRESS There is a class at Yale where we begin by taking off our shoes and walking back and forth with our eyes closed. Soft music wafts in and out, and our teacher, Lacina Coulibaly, snaps his fingers to keep our steps on track. Three steps forward, three steps back. Forward, back. Each contact our bare feet make with the wooden floor is slow and intentional. I walk all day but somehow this is the only walking that matters, when my eyes are closed and

thoughts drift away and all I am left with is each sticky foot pressing down in time with Lacina’s snaps. Slowly our meandering becomes rhythmic steps, which flow into stomps and leaps from side to side, and we begin the myriad of hand flicks and hip shakes and arm twists that is West African dance.

I tried this for the first time on a muggy spring morning in Woodstock, New York, a town which never quite moved past its hippy stardom of the ’60s. It was my mother who convinced me to drive out

to Woodstock to the class with her.

After years of hearing about it from our neighbor, she was finally giving West African dance a try. Through some stroke of luck, or perhaps bribery, I rose out of the depths of my early teenagerdom and agreed to join. A pale wrinkled woman in a velvet leotard and baggy cheetah-print pants opened the door to greet us.

“Hi, I’m Carol. If you’re here for West African dance you’re in the right place,” she explained.

My mom asked where everyone was.

It was 10:57 and the class started at 11.

“Oh, don’t worry. No one comes on time,” Carol replied with a grin.

Fifteen minutes later, everyone had shuffled

in, three men were pounding on drums with their palms and we were twisting our way across the floor, shaking our hips and chests in a way I had never seen or done before. In Carol’s class, and many others like it, the best dancers are in the front of the room, the worst behind, and we dance across the floor as a pack, forward and back. I flailed wildly in the back, tripping over my feet and narrowly avoiding hitting others with my stray arms, trying my best to keep up in a room of middle aged white women who were all somehow really good at this.

Somewhere between the sticky sweat, the tired limbs and the exuberant grin with which I always ended the class, I found the resolve to keep coming back, again and again. By the time I graduated high school I still hadn’t graduated from my place in the back of the room, awkwardly flailing my arms.

But the drums beating polyrhythms, the multicolored patterned skirts, the encouraging claps and shouts all made it okay that I still sucked.

When my friend told me that there was not only a West African dance class at Yale, but that it also counted as a humanities credit, I jumped onto my sofa for joy and immediately signed up. The professor, Lacina Coulibaly, is a professional dancer from Burkina Faso. He dispenses a mix of traditional and modern West African dance steps,

perspective on the cultural climate that the dances grew out of and life lessons that always tie back to dance. But we never begin without walking barefoot with our eyes closed, back and forth across the floor.

There is a quote we study in Zen Buddhism that is attributed to Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist teacher: “To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to realize the ten thousand things.” As I study dance the urge to excel and be good at things, or even just not to suck at things, drops away and what I’m left with is the sweet feeling of sticky feet touching down on the ground, nothing more, nothing less.

In African dance classes back at home in upstate New York, I still dance in the back. Carol, who is well past retirement, twists and throws her frail body across the floor in moves I can only imagine I’d ever be able to execute.

On the last class I went to before coming back to school, as we were dancing a particularly involved section of a dance called yankadi, for the first time in my life I had the thought that I was so happy even my full smile couldn’t express my joy. So I kept dancing.

Contact LILLIAN CHILDRESS at lillian.childress@yale.edu .

//CAROLINE TISDALE

FRI D AY OCTOBER

2

A CONVERSATION WITH CHLOE ANGYAL

WKND RECOMMENDS:

HGS 211 // 12:30 p.m.

Schmooze with a senior front page editor at HuffPo. Did we mention she’s Australian?

The first time.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

WEEKEND GTVO

INCUMBENCY: A DOUBLEEDGED SWORD?

Incumbents won 6 of 8 races in September

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// BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

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Incumbent victory Challenger victory

// EMILY HSEE

n a ritual of latesummer politics, residents of eight New Haven wards went to the polls in mid-September to vote for the Democratic candidates for alder. Eight incumbents ran; six incumbents won.

The results of the election mean that in its new term, set to begin in January, the Board of Alders will likely look much the same as it has for the past two years. This is hardly abnormal. Looking back through the records of past alders who have sat on the board, one sees many of the same names persisting throughout its history.

Those long-serving alders are often the beneficiaries of the incumbency effect, the political phenomenon wherein incumbents possess certain advantages over challengers. In New Haven, though, the traditional models don’t always hold. New Haven politics operates under a unique blend of labor unions and a Democratic machine, a model that few other American cities still espouse. As a result, local incumbents find themselves specially vulnerable nearly as often as they find themselves specially advantaged.

I

EXPERIENCE, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE Just after 8 p.m. on Sept. 16, Fish Stark’s ’17 campaign team sat assembled in a private room in Wall Street Pizza. The polls in the Democratic primary for Ward 1 alder had closed minutes earlier, and soon the moderator would read the tallies from the voting machine. Some 10 minutes later, the results arrived

FRI D AY OCTOBER

2

ARTIST LECTURE: SHEILA PEPE

School of Art, Room C220 // 12:30 p.m.

A cross-disciplinary artist who does “improvisational crochet” installations.

Sounds like she’ll spin some good yarns.

via text message: Sarah Eidelson ’12 had won with 310 votes to Stark’s 175, a margin of nearly two to one. The incumbent had prevailed yet again.

That incumbency confers a significant advantage upon a candidate running for re-election is a general maxim of political science. Studies of congressional and presidential elections consistently demonstrate an advantage for incumbents, said David Cameron, a professor of political science.

Among the benefits of incumbency are name recognition, previous victories in the district, better funding, and an already-established familiarity with running a campaign, Cameron said.

Incumbency also plays two crucial roles in procuring endorsements, a hugely important factor in New Haven elections. For one, Mayor Toni Harp maintained a blanket policy of endorsing all Democratic incumbents in contested races this year. And having already served in the elected position means the incumbent has established relationships with members of the city — relationships that can be leveraged once it comes to receiving endorsements.

Both factors played a role in the Ward 1 Democratic primary.

As the incumbent, Eidelson received the endorsements of a host of local dignitaries: Harp, state Sen. Martin Looney and a majority of the Board of Alders, among others. Stark, meanwhile, boasted a much smaller slate: only six alders, nearly all affiliated with the now-defunct anti-union “People’s Caucus.”

Despite some prominent figures coming out in his favor — including state Sen. Gary

Winfield and former mayoral candidate Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10 — Stark proved unable to match Eidelson’s backing.

And Eidelson’s campaign ensured that voters heard about her endorsements. As Eidelson stood outside the polls at the New Haven Free Public Library talking to voters on election day, she was joined by many of the alders who had backed her.

Alders Jeanette Morrison, Frank Douglass and Dolores Colón ’91, as well as board president Tyisha Walker, joined Eidelson throughout the day.

These endorsements proved influential for voters. After voting, Frederick Van Duyne ’19 told the News that Eidelson’s public support from 19 of the 30 alders pushed him to cast his ballot for her.

“As an incumbent, she has a rapport with Yale and with New Haven, and with the dialogue between the two communities,” Van Duyne said. He added that Eidelson’s continued presence in the city over three years after graduating demonstrates her commitment to New Haven.

Sweyn Venderbush ’18 echoed that sentiment. He said he voted for Eidelson based on her “proven track record in the city.”

Van Duyne’s remark reflects a political reality in Ward 1 that rarely applies in the rest of the city. Outside Ward 1, a candidate’s commitment to staying in the city is rarely, if ever, challenged, while Ward 1 candidates largely belong to a demographic — Yale students and alumni — that does not often remain in New Haven after graduation. A candidate’s professed commitment to the city is a common subject of discussion, with students speculating on whether

the candidate is running out of genuine interest in New Haven or for personal gain. Long-term incumbency in the ward after graduating seems to indicate a candidate’s genuine desire to serve Ward 1 and New Haven.

For Stark, the incumbency effect was a real and important factor in the primary. He noted that there is an innate challenge in opposing Eidelson, who can point to her record in the city as evidence of her abilities.

And Eidelson’s record is not inconsiderable. As chair of the Youth Services Committee, she coordinated the creation of the New Haven Youth Map, an online resource that catalogues youth programs across the city.

Eidelson also played a leading role in establishing the first student elections to the Board of Education in June. Earlier this year, she was elected the third officer of the Board of Alders, making her the first Ward 1 alder in at least a decade to attain a board leadership position.

“I think [the incumbency effect] is the ability to point to things that you may or may not have done in office, to point to titles that you may have,” Stark said. “People who voted for her on the basis of experience were certainly voting for her for the right reasons.”

In some ways, the September primary was atypical. Normally, incumbents enjoy higher name recognition and stronger funding networks than do challengers, according to political science lecturer Cynthia Horan, who teaches a seminar on urban politics. But over the course of the campaign, Stark raised 10 times the amount of money that Eidelson did. And two surveys SEE ELECTIONS PAGE 8

WKND RECOMMENDS: Getting to Woad’s first.

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FEATURE //COURTESY OF BENJY STEINBERG

CAN YALE JAZZ UP CAMPUS? // BY ROHAN NAIK

“Why don’t you have a jazz program like Princeton’s?” a parent of a prospective student emailed Michael Hoot ’17.

In his response, Hoot — the president of the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective — outlined the few jazz opportunities available at Yale, while acknowledging that the parent’s inquiry was not entirely unwarranted. After all, each of the top 20 universities in the nation — as ranked by U.S. News & World Report — will have at least one jazz band this year.

But not Yale.

Last year, the University suspended the Yale Jazz Ensemble, citing a lack of qualified undergraduates and suitable practice space. Yale also lacks adequate courses in jazz performance, any semblance of an undergraduate jazz studies program and a jazz faculty.

University Bands Director and music professor Thomas Duffy, who led the ensemble for 24 years, said that it had so few qualified undergraduates that he was forced to hire professionals for half of the band. He added that it was the “perfect time” to consolidate resources and leave the jazz ensemble off the schedule altogether.

The dissolution of the ensemble, as well as the general state of jazz at Yale, have evoked frustration from students and sparked national debate on the place of jazz within both Yale’s undergraduate curriculum and the graduate School of Music. In a particularly incendiary article in The New York Times, School of Music Dean Robert Blocker was quoted saying, “Our mission is real clear. We train people in the Western canon and in new music.”

The statement was deeply troubling for many, as it seemed to indicate that the School of Music considers jazz less worthy of study than classical music.

Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, criticized the attitude as backwards and reminiscent of 1930s’ America — an era when public authorities campaigned against the so-called vulgarity of jitterbug dancing.

The situation at Yale is “real bad,” Ross wrote.

For his part, Blocker maintains that his quotation was taken out of context. He remarked that the allegations were particularly hurtful given that he has been an advocate for jazz his whole life.

But has Yale at large proved itself to be an advocate for jazz?

STUDENTS GETTIN’ DOWN Students have responded to the situation with rapid action and passionate rhetoric. However, the recent suspension of the ensemble is only the latest development in a long-running trend of student discontent with jazz on campus. Back in 2012, Sam Frampton ’15 and Ethan Kyzivat ’15 founded the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective, partly due to frustration with Yale’s lackluster jazz scene — specifically, the absence of a space for jazz musicians to coalesce.

Now in its fourth year, the collective hosts a regular concert series, “Jazz in the Underbrook,” which takes place in the Saybrook Underbrook every other

FRI D AY OCTOBER

2

week. Among other endeavors, it provides open jam sessions and organizes an annual jazz festival on campus, a weekend in the spring filled with concerts and master classes. In an effort to bridge the gap between Yale and New Haven, the collective also hosts local profession-

Yale doesn’t offer jazz coursework,” Dubovoy said. “The problem is more that Yale hasn’t felt compelled to expand or arrange its jazz work [such] that it amounts to a cohesive program.”

Students i n te r v i e we d remarked on Yale’s seeming

offerings is less a judgment on jazz itself as a genre than a reflection of the school’s limited capabilities and resources.

However, amongst faculty, staff and students interviewed, there was overwhelming consensus that a path to a substantial jazz program must begin

“THE MORE MUSIC — JAZZ INCLUDED — WE CAN [BRING] TO CAMPUS, THE RICHER THE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT WILL BE FOR ALL STUDENTS.”

als who perform and coach students in jazz performance.

Former YUJC president Alexander Dubovoy ’16 said the organization tries to engage as much as possible with the administration in organizing jazz programming. Still, Frampton noted that because the collective is entirely student-run, it has greater freedom of choice than it would under University control.

After the Yale Jazz Ensemble was suspended, Benjy Steinberg ’17 established the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Orchestra under the umbrella of the YUJC. Essentially, the new orchestra functions as an undergraduate big band in place of the ensemble. While the ensemble was, for many years, unable to fill all 17 of its spots, the orchestra — which has the same number of spots — had no problem doing so this year. In fact, more undergraduates auditioned than could be accommodated.

Steinberg, the orchestra’s codirector and conductor, believes such enthusiasm resulted from extensive personal outreach that began over the summer. He noted that while the Universityled jazz ensemble had publicized its auditions by reaching out to students at Yale Band meetings and emailing music panlists, Steinberg — being a student himself — was able to reach out to individual players in person.

“There was student interest, but no one was reaching out in the right way,” he said.

The orchestra has two concerts scheduled for the fall semester; it also hopes to engage in community outreach in New Haven and build connections with alumni. Additionally, the group will host an open rehearsal concert in November — an opportunity to show University administrators that student interest in big band jazz is alive and well.

YALE TOO “CORPORATE” FOR JAZZ? Despite the orchestra’s promising nature, undergraduate students remain dissatisfied with what they see as a dearth of institutional jazz-related opportunities at Yale.

For instance, Max Vinetz ’18 described available courses in jazz as virtually nonexistent, noting that he couldn’t find a single class in which one could study the variations or intricacies of jazz.

To some, the issue goes deeper. “The problem isn’t that

commitment to expansion, but questioned where its priorities lie. They believe that while the school has done much to promote the construction of the Schwarzman Center and the new residential colleges, it appears reluctant to meet the needs of the existing student population. Specifically, students questioned the lack of a structured jazz program despite the presence of these elaborate construction projects.

“Financially, Yale always operates in its self-interest.

We know there’s this massive endowment and see money going to … things that are perhaps supporting pomp and circumstance at Yale, rather than protecting the integrity of student life,” said former YUJC Vice President Eli Brown ’17.

Hans Bilger ’18 said that he views the University as corporatized, with the result that curricular options are defined by streams of funding. He finds it especially disappointing that “a place with so many resources could also have a such poverty of resources” with regard to jazz performance.

Brian Kane, an associate professor in the undergraduate Department of Music, said that Yale could easily have a more robust jazz program were the administration or outside donors willing to fund it. He emphasized that, because Yale lags behind peer institutions in jazz offerings, the Department of Music would greatly support efforts to raise the profile of jazz on campus.

“While the music department has the will, we don’t have the means,” he explained. $100 MILLION ISN’T ENOUGH? For many students, the lack of resources seems incongruous with a 2006 donation from Stephen Adams ’59 and his wife, Denise Adams, pledging $100 million to the School of Music.

However, because the donation was made to the professional school, it is not beholden to undergraduates.

School of Music Deputy Dean Melvin Chen cited historical and traditional reasons for the graduate school’s failure to offer performance degrees in jazz. For over 100 years, he said, it has primarily dedicated itself to classical music education.

He added that the $100 million donation allowed the school to catch up to the level of its peers, and that its current lack of jazz

LECTURE: CONSIDER THE LILES YUAG // 1:30 p.m.

Examine Dutch Golden Age flower paintings. Feel the splendor of the meadow.

within Yale College, rather than in the graduate School of Music.

Both Kane and Steinberg said they do not envision the School of Music establishing a jazz program in the near future –– but that they hope either the College or University can.

Blocker himself could not offer a reason for why so much ire was directed at him as dean of the graduate school; he also views the creation of such a program as the responsibility of the undergraduate Department of Music faculty and the Yale College Dean’s Office. It’s not an impossible task — Blocker pointed to the establishment of a musical theater program in 2006 as a promising precedent, attributing the program’s success to the enterprising nature and determination of its creators.

“For new programs, everyone will say it’s a resource question,” he said. “There are never enough resources, but you have to go out and find [them].”

TEXTURES OF JAZZ While Yale searches for these resources, it also seeks to diversify the echelons of the music department — an aim that students view as highly germane to the establishment of a fullfledged jazz program.

According to Frampton, though jazz is a diverse and ever-evolving art form, its roots lie in African-American communities. Its trajectory, he said, has almost always been intimately tied to black history and culture. Given current conversations on campus regarding the racial implications of “Calhoun College” and the title “master,” Frampton sees jazz education as an opportunity for Yale “to put its money where its mouth is for once, and celebrate the contributions of people of color to American culture.”

Similarly, other students find the school’s reliance on classical Western music to be unrepresentative of today’s society.

Out of the 69 faculty members at the School of Music, only one is African American.

Brown noted a direct correlation between the lack of black faculty members and the lack of a jazz program, saying the establishment of African-American voices in music academia would allow for a more prominent jazz culture and education.

As administrators at the School of Music, both Blocker and Chen noted that diversity is a “serious problem” they are

struggling to solve. According to Chen, only a small percentage of classical music performers are African-American or Latino. In an effort to counteract this trend, the School of Music has established a “Music in Schools Initiative,” aimed at providing musical opportunities and mentorship to kids in New Haven who would not ordinarily have such access.

While students and administrators are working to address the lack of diversity and opportunities for jazz, Yale is already losing prospective students.

Each of the Ivies and Stanford University have continuously maintained at least one jazz band for several decades. Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell each have two or more jazz bands. Princeton offers a certificate — similar to a minor — for jazz studies, and many of Yale’s peer institutions offer jazz studies as an area of specialization within their larger music major.

Vinetz said that high school jazz players would be unable to continue their studies given the current situation at Yale. He recalled that he, like other jazz musicians on campus, had been hesitant to matriculate.

“Yale’s great, but if it can’t support jazz, why would jazz musicians go here?” he asked.

IMPROVISING CAMPUS OPPORTUNITIES While Yale flounders to create a structured jazz program, undergraduates have taken their own initiative in creating jazz opportunities.

The aforementioned Yale Undergraduate Jazz Orchestra is not looking just to fill the role of the suspended jazz ensemble, but also to venture beyond the gates of Yale. It hopes to raise enough money to perform in New York City, as well as to hire a professional conductor.

Additionally, small jazz bands have also popped up on campus.

Vinetz formed a new experimental jazz quartet this year, in which he hopes to incorporate elements of hip-hop as well as influences from Kendrick Lamar to Christian Scott. Brown added that his separate band is looking to record an album in the spring.

Ana Barrett ’18 said she hopes to create a self-directed group that will provide members an outlet for personal creativity.

She said that she sees her group as bringing together a variety of arts disciplines, from jazz to visual arts, and that it will allow the opportunity to pursue creative action in a communal way.

Likewise, faculty and administration looked positively toward the future. Duffy said he is excited to see the undergraduate orchestra perform, and that he has offered his music library as a resource. He added that his constant presence overseeing the Yale Jazz Ensemble had allowed the University to remain complacent in failing to address jazz offerings — a luxury it no longer has.

“The more music — jazz included — we can [bring] to campus, the richer the cultural environment will be for all students,” Blocker said.

Contact ROHAN NAIK at rohan.naik@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: First-person prose.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

LOVE IN THE TIME OF WINDHAM-CAMPBELL // BY FRANI O’TOOLE

It’s best not to bring reading materials to speed dating. Unless, of course, it’s Literary Speed Dating — in that case, bring all the books you can.

Literary Speed Dating, hosted Tuesday evening by the Windham-Campbell Literary Festival, was billed as a night of good conversation with this year’s prizewinners. Standard rules of speed dating applied: ten minutes at each table, groups move clockwise at the sound of the chime. There were eight stations, one for each writer. These included authors from Teju Cole to John Jeremiah Sullivan to Ivan Vladislavi. Of the nine recipients, playwright Debbie Tucker Green was the only one not in attendance.

The event took place in the President’s Room at Woolsey Hall, a space with an ornate ceiling and oil portraits lining the walls — the setting was appropriately literary.

Cheese, crackers, olives and dried fruit adorned a platter in the center of the room. White linen covered every table.

Writers and guests arrived in semi-formal attire, mingling briefly before taking seats at their respective stations.

//ROBBIE SHORT

This is the second year of Literary Speed Dating; last year, the program took place in the Beinecke Library, which is currently under renovation. Windham-Campbell Festival director Michael Kelleher said he’s enjoyed working with a committee of eight handpicked undergrads, most of whom were recruited through professor Richard Deming. The committee had preliminary meetings at the end of last spring, and met weekly this year to discuss planning and publicity.

A representative from the student committee was stationed at each table.

Assigned a writer to study over the summer, these students came prepared with questions in case there was a lull in conversation. Student moderator Erica Wachs ’18, who studies drama, spent the evening at playwright Helen Edmundson’s table.

Wachs, who attended Literary Speed Dating last year and became involved with the festival after taking Professor Deming’s English 123 class, said she likes the event because of the “amount of contact that it allows the writers to get with the undergrads.”

With roughly 40 attendees, the setting felt particularly intimate. Guests came from various backgrounds: My group of four included me and Sam Laing ’19, as well as two Connecticut residents. Laing commented that there were much fewer undergraduates than he expected.

Of course, this meant the conversations at each table were personal, and the chime — an actual chime, tapped lightly by

a mallet — always came too soon. Edmund de Waal would be describing his habit of scribbling ideas on the walls of his pottery studio (a converted gum factory) and how at the end of each writing project, he whitewashes the walls and begins anew — *chime* John Jeremiah Sullivan thinks about writing as discovering “little pockets of [his] own ignorance” and reflects on how important a sense of legitimacy was to his early development as a writer — *chime* Teju Cole says photographers have an “infinity” of choices in the framing and selection of their sequences. *chime* Helen Edmundson discusses silences and pauses in her work. *chime* Ivan Vladislavi speaks about writing in response to works of visual art. *chime* Geoff Dyer gives insight into the film “Stalker.” *chime* Jackie Sibblies Drury ’03 remembers her experience as a Yale undergraduate. *chime* Helon Habila talks about being “seduced by language” — *chime* Literary Speed Dating finished around 9 p.m., following a few concluding remarks

by Mr. Kennelly. While the event didn’t seem to produce any budding romances, there was a lot of inspiration to be gleaned from the stories and anecdotes the writers shared. So, in that sense, maybe sparks did fly.

Contact FRANI O’TOOLE at frani.otoole@yale.edu .

SEE TO MOVE AND MOVE TO SEE // BY GRACE CASTILLO I walk past “Video Mixer Group Exhibition” every time I go to my painting class at the School of Art, but as a perpetually late person I’ve never had the time to investigate closer. This week, though, I ducked into the gallery expecting to find just a few artsy videos with a couple of sculptures thrown in. But I soon realized I had drastically underestimated the video-making abilities of the Art School’s graduate students.

Just walking into the gallery is an experience. The lights are dimmed and the quiet audio of each screen creates a low murmuring throughout the space. The pieces span four rooms stretched out among three floors, with videos that cover topics as familiar as the role of social media in everyday life to niche explorations of human sexuality.

I was particularly drawn to the works that focused on isolating certain aspects inherent to the medium of film. For instance, one video had several long shots that seemed at first glance as if the frame had been frozen. In reality, the people on the screen were purposefully remaining extremely still, such that the only indicators of time were the movement of tree leaves in the background and the slight motion from the actors’ breathing.

Another piece involved shining light onto a glass cube dangling from the ceiling, creating abstract light that traveled slowly around the room.

A second projector with a camera attached to it projected a real-time, miniature version of all this onto the

wall. This interaction of light with the events of real life passing through video was beautiful and thought provoking.

Other highlights included a room lined with dark screens, one or two of which might have been playing a very dim video. Sound echoed around the space. The natural reflections I created simply by walking around provided an interesting perspective on movement and screens, in that I found it difficult to distinguish between prerecorded moving images and my own wandering shape. In another work, two projectors, mounted on dangling fans that rotated sporadically, shone a video of someone dancing.

The video I was most drawn to was displayed in the lower level of the exhibition. A young woman looks into the camera for minute and is then physically flipped by two mostly unseen men. The camera moves with her as the men rotate her, so her face is always shown upright — the movement of her hair helps indicate how she is oriented in space. She never breaks eye contact with the camera, resulting in the eerie sense of her watching you watching her. I actually watched the video three times in a row, trying to figure out what I thought about it and what it could potentially be trying to say. Though I haven’t come to any concrete conclusions, I do know that I found it visually stunning and emotionally moving.

Although I enjoyed the

aforementioned videos, there were parts of the exhibition that didn’t make much sense, to be honest. I would have appreciated signs with brief artist statements or explanations so that I could have better understood the pieces. I’m sure the creative choices were intentional and would have been interesting to know more about.

But as the exhibition stood, several videos remained mysterious to me.

Overall, I would recommend visiting “Video Mixer Group Exhibition.” It can be seen in portions or as a whole, depending on how much time viewers wish to spend in the gallery.

Expect some bafflement and confusion — but there’s more than enough aesthetically pleasing and thought provoking material to make it worth your while.

Contact GRACE CASTILLO at grace.castillo@yale.edu .

//ALEX SCHMELING

FRI D AY OCTOBER

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CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE TRIO (JAZZ) Sprague Memorial Hall // 7:30 p.m.

Shout “hoo!” and “yeah!” at random times to make your fellow audience members think they’re missing something.

WKND RECOMMENDS: Queen Elizabeth the First.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND DUBTRUCK

ON THE RECORD, OFF THE RECORD

A

h, journalism. Some say it’s “dying,” “on the way out,” “irrelevant,” “dead,” etc. But we disagree. If not for incisive reporting, how else would the masses learn about

Important Happenings: reasons to hate Donald Trump, Kanye West’s fashion line, David Cameron’s porky relationship with

swine, dogs that find their way home after years on the streets?

Only after conducting a few interviews did WKND learn that the very best quotes will never grace the page. The truest truths and the hardest (so therefore most interesting) feelings are all shared off the record. Disheartened? Not for long. “Throw open the shades!” we cried, casting outdated adages like “jour-

Top-Notch Academics // BY ELIOT LEVMORE ON THE RECORD Yale offers more than 2,000 undergraduate courses in over 65 departments and programs. Yale’s curriculum is extensive and diverse — there are offerings in disciplines ranging from agrarian studies to diagnostic radiology to theater. Classes are small and personal — 75 percent of undergraduate courses have fewer than 20 students, and nearly a third have fewer than 10. Yale professors are deeply invested in teaching undergraduates; many of Yale’s most distinguished professors, including Nobel prizewinners and Fields medalists, teach introductorylevel courses.

nalistic integrity” to the wind. WKND presents, How We Feel: ostensibly, and truly — the WikiLeaks of our campus. If you need us, you can find WKND camping out with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

OFF THE RECORD Seventy-five percent of the classes have fewer than 20 people, but you definitely don’t want to be in most of those because the professor will notice when you show up 50 min-

utes late to your two-hour seminar in a postWoads hangover haze. Yale should be more honest about the metrics that matter, like “how many classes meet after 11:30 a.m. and not on Fridays?” Sometimes it feels like the administration is just jerking us around because it’s funny — I mean, only a sadist would put the coolest Econ seminar, “Cooperative Game Theory,” at 9:25 on Friday mornings. Let’s be honest: Most Yale professors don’t care about teaching undergrads.

No professor has ever been hired or fired on grounds of her teaching ability. But that’s OK! Besides, here’s the thing about courses with fewer than 10 students in them: “That Kid” — you know what I mean — loves them.

Maybe lectures aren’t so bad. Unsurprisingly, one of Yale’s most popular courses is CS50 … the one that doesn’t force us to listen to section assholes “discover” the trolley problem.

The Residential College Experience // BY MADELINE KAPLAN

How Busy I Am // BY EVE SNEIDER ON THE RECORD I am so busy. You would not believe how much is happening in my life right now. My GCal looks like a patchwork quilt and I swear I have never had so little free time in my life. I can’t remember the last time I took a Buzzfeed quiz or painted my nails or, god forbid, read for pleasure. My life has devolved into an endless cycle of sleep, eat, go to class, read, write, attend 15 different meetings, repeat. I used to have sleep problems but now I’m out cold before I’ve even kicked my shoes off, let alone turned off the light. Did I mention how busy I am? How much I have to do? How few hours there are in a day? No? Well, let me tell you …

Contact ELIOT LEVMORE at eliot.levmore@yale.edu .

ON THE RECORD The residential college experience is what makes Yale feel like home! I don’t know who I was before I had a residential college affiliation with which to identify.

My favorite part of academic life at Yale is the moment at the start of the semester when we get to go around the room and say which college we’re in. My grandparents can’t seem to understand the residential college system, but that’s okay because I never tire of explaining it. My room is kind of small, but the basement has a bookbinding facility, so I’m very happy here.

And did you know that my resi-

Reading Week // BY IAN GARCIA-KENNEDY

dential college has a fiber arts studio? For weaving! I’ve never seen it but I hear it has, like, nine looms.

Without my residential college, I would have eight fewer T-shirts and 63 fewer friends. Even though we were randomly assigned, I know these are the people I was meant to befriend. I can’t believe we get to go apple picking together. Apple picking! What a life I lead.

OFF THE RECORD Guess how many hours of sleep I got last night? Eight!

And the night before that? Eight and a half. Actually, I can’t remember the last time I’ve gotten this much sleep for so many nights in a row. It’s a revelation. And I take long showers! And I’ve been doing my laundry regularly! The other day I went to a talk by an author I had never heard of on a topic I was previously unfamiliar with. A few weeks ago I crashed a tango dance class. The possibilities are endless every (Thursday) Friday and Saturday night. Sure, I’m busy, whatever. I have a paper due in two days that I’ve barely started. But I’m also not. The weather is lovely and I have had the opportunity to revel in it, to sit in the sunshine and schmooze and feign productivity, and that is phenomenal.

OFF THE RECORD Apple picking is only a little bit fun.

Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

Contact EVE SNEIDER at eve.sneider@yale.edu .

The Oldest College Daily // BY GRAHAM AMBROSE //AYDIN AKYOL

ON THE RECORD Reading Week can be a tough time for everyone.

You’re living in fear of that one class where, no matter how much you study, you’re going to encounter some question that comes out of nowhere and which will earn you zero points (not even half-credit). You wake up every morning and immediately head to the library, where all your friends are. Except you’re not having fun and hanging out; you are all working, heads buried in $1200 textbooks, trying desperately to wrap your minds around a concept that you were supposed to understand in September. People can be testy and annoyed. You find yourself snapping at people you like for basically no reason. Even an empty library cubicle can quickly turn into a Hunger Games-style battleground if cooler heads don’t prevail. And your sleep cycle is totally shot. As much as your kindergarten self dreamt about the day you would stay up until 4 a.m. and then wake up at noon, the reality is a lot less glamorous. Still, there are definite upsides. It can be oddly gratifying to spend three hours studying some derivation only to have everything click into place in an instant. There also is something communally satisfying about suffering through it together. Your friends understand that it can be a stressful time, and they’ll forgive you for some of your outbursts. In the end, you come out of Reading Week better off than when you went in.

OFF THE RECORD I FUCKING LOVE READING WEEK! Everyone’s stressing, everyone’s freaked out, and me? I can be my real self. Oh, I’m sorry I said, “I’d rather stuff my head in a garbage disposal than go to your mindfulness group meeting” to you — I’m just really stressed

FRI D AY OCTOBER

2

about reading week. I’m sorry I spent the majority of your seven-minute acoustic rendition of Hotel California pretending to stab myself in the throat with a pencil — this Econ final is just really freaking me out.

I love it. I just look at my list of Facebook Event invites and cackle as I press decline on every single one. They’ll write it off as you being stressed and busy, and you’ll get off scot-free. Plus, this is the time to really let yourself off the hook. In this stressful period that could decide the future of your entire life, what could be more important than mental health?

You need to get comfortable, and if that means that you want to eat an entire red solo cup filled with cookie dough from the buttery, then by all means proceed. It’s Reading Week; calories don’t count!

Also, in all the crazy hustle and bustle of Yale life, how often do we truly get a space to call our own? Yes, I am of course referring to the library cubicle, which will be your fortress of solitude for the next week.

“But Ian,” you say, “libraries are so crowded. How can I possibly guarantee that one cubicle will always be available to me?” Answer: trash it. Make your presence known even while you’re on one of your threehour study breaks. I’m talking empty Starbucks containers, pencils, old flashcards, dirty syringes, used condoms and severed deer heads all spread out over the entire desk. Ain’t nobody taking that cubicle except you (although do remember where all of this is. I’m pretty sure there’s a cubicle somewhere in Bass that I’ve had “reserved” in this manner since last April). The point is, Reading Week has the possibility of being the best week of your semester. Just don’t have too much fun, or Finals Period could be the worst week of your life.

ON THE RECORD The Yale Daily News is America’s premier undergraduate newspaper. The quality of the journalism, professionalism of its staff and respectability of its ethic and character enliven campus and all those fortunate to work under its auspices. Without the Daily News, Yale would lack a critical platform to examine the key issues of our day. I am grateful for every opportunity to associate myself with the Yale Daily News and hope its stay on campus outlives the many people who love and care for its longevity.

OFF THE RECORD

Contact IAN GARCIA-KENNEDY at ian.garcia-kennedy@yale.edu .

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Marquand Chapel // 7:30 p.m.

A public conversation at the Divinity School with DeRay McKesson, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This discussion matters.

What is journalism. I was told to source five peo-

WKND RECOMMENDS:

FRI D AY OCTOBER

“If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

2

INDECENT

University Theater // 8 p.m.

A play about a play that holds a contested position in Jewish cultural history. WKND is 33% Jewish and 100% intrigued.

ple, so I stole the Xbox from the common room until my five suitemates texted me their opinions. Honestly, I just miss my friends. They spend their lives at the YDN. It’s the 13th residential college, and if I have to feign interest for the faculty senate or write 600 words on a new olive oil shop to gain entrance, so damn be it. If you find yourself anywhere near the Daily News orbit, the gravity sucks you in until you’re trapped and can’t escape. I haven’t seen my chemistry partner since Tuesday. In fact I think he’s dropping most of his classes. He just emailed me.

He’s dropping chemistry. So I’m dropping chemistry. How about that for a headline?

Contact GRAHAM AMBROSE at graham.ambrose@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: First holiday in Nantucket.

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND STICKING

WITH THE UNION

UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS A CROWN // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

ELECTIONS FROM PAGE 3 in the News over the past year have indicated poor name recognition for Eidelson — an April survey found that only four of 37 students could name her as their alder.

At the same time, though, Horan said scholarship indicates that incumbents often benefit from low turnout: a notable advantage in September’s primary, in which only about 10 percent of Ward 1 residents voted. If this model holds, poor turnout may have been one of the keys to Eidelson’s success.

And as Eidelson heads into the general election against Republican Ugonna Eze ’16, her incumbency will likely influence voters once again. She said her record has proved an important benefit to her campaign. Having a history of success in the city, she said, gives her a strong base to stand on during her conversations with students.

“I definitely think it’s helpful, when I’m talking with students, that I’m able to talk about what I have actually done since they elected me,” Eidelson said.

“There’s less speculation that voters need to do about whether or not I’ll be effective, about whether or not I’ll follow through on my commitments.”

Eidelson added that having a strong record can eliminate much of the uncertainty present in elections, where candidates often make promises without any way to guarantee they will reach fruition. Her four years in office, she said, prove that she has the ability to deliver her goals if elected to a third term.

Eze acknowledged that he will have to grapple with Eidelson’s record during his campaign, which he said makes standing against her all the more difficult. Still, he expressed confidence about his chances. He called incumbency a “doubleedged sword,” explaining that while incumbents can take credit for the progress made during their term, they must also bear responsibility for their failures.

He suggested that Eidelson’s perceived disengagement with campus, for example, will hurt her in November.

Eze dismissed the idea that Eidelson’s plethora of endorsements will swing the scale in her favor. Though as a Republican he anticipates receiving few, if any, endorsements from city officials, he said his campaign is all about challenging the status quo.

“I think voters at the end of the day are picking between two candidates, not the people who may or may not come out and endorse them,” he said. “What matters is your ability to mobilize and inspire people to vote for

you in Ward 1.”

GETTING OUT THE VOTE Outside the boundaries of Yale’s campus, too, the issue of incumbency casts a long shadow.

In the 2013 aldermanic elections, for instance, all seven incumbent alders who faced challengers prevailed; in the citywide primaries in September, six of eight incumbents emerged victorious.

One of the victorious incumbents in 2013 was Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison, whose constituency encompasses much of the Dixwell neighborhood as well as four Yale residential colleges.

Morrison, who herself won her seat two years earlier by defeating the incumbent Greg Morehead, said incumbency can prove invaluable for candidates.

Morrison explained that alders are often judged by their records — alders with good records, then, can be difficult to beat. In her first term, she said, she gave her constituents reason to trust her as a community leader by making sure to respond to calls and emails. Morrison also pushed for popular neighborhood initiatives during her first term, including the long-delayed reopening of the Q House, a shuttered neighborhood community center. Though the Q House has yet to reopen, the issue has helped Morrison — along with other alders, including Eidelson — rally a base of support in the city.

But incumbency isn’t always advantageous, Morrison added; a poor record can come back to haunt you.

“If you’re an incumbent who’s been doing your job, it’s going to make it hard for the challenger,” Morrison said. A record of incompetence, on the other hand, will cause greater hardship for incumbents than would a blank slate. In those cases, she argued, “it’s going to take some courageous conversations to talk with constituents about your role.”

Darnell Goldson, a former Ward 30 alder and current candidate for one of two newly created elected seats on the Board of Education, echoed Morrison’s ideas, adding that a candidate’s legislative record in office is less important than his record as a community figure. Politics is all about personal relationships, he said: an alder must be constantly present in the ward for incumbency to augment his or her chances of re-election.

But Goldson said the most important factor in an election is a candidate’s ability to get out the vote. He attributed his 2011 defeat, in which he lost as an incumbent to challenger and current alder Carlton Staggers, to his opponent’s superior efforts to

//ROCKY BOSTICK

mobilize voters.

Indeed, Goldson suggested that incumbents may actually have a harder time getting out their vote than do challengers — pushing back against Horan’s evaluation of the scholarship surrounding incumbency. A false sense of security, or a belief that the incumbent already has the election in the bag, can cause voters who would normally cast their ballots for the incumbent to skip the polling place altogether, he said. Voters who support a challenger, meanwhile, have a greater competitive impetus to go to the polls. Part of the difficulty he faced in rallying voters in 2011 should be ascribed to this phenomenon, Goldson said.

Ward 12 Alder Richard Spears, who lost his primary in September but has vowed to run as an independent in the general election, expressed similar views. As alder, Spears has had one of the lowest meeting attendance rates on the board, a record which critics have latched onto during his re-election campaign.

Spears rejected the idea that an incumbent’s legislative record is — or should be — the determining factor during an election. He said that an alder’s job extends beyond City Hall, and voters should consider all parts of the alder’s performance, especially his or her presence as a community figure in the ward.

“You can always count attendance, but you can’t count [the] phone calls and deaths and shootings that I’ve had to address,” he said.

UNIONS: AN ELECTORAL JUGGERNAUT At the center of New Haven politics lies an institution fairly distinctive to the city: the UNITE HERE union coalition. The unions hold enormous sway over the city’s political process in a system that, for some, seems a vestige of a past age.

“The Democratic Town Committee has 1960 policies for the 21st century,” Spears said.

In 1960, Chicago Mayor Rich-

ard Daley’s Democratic machine orchestrated a monumental votepulling operation that played a major role in John Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon. Spears suggested with this parallel that the unions’ role in New Haven might not be so far off from that model of machine politics.

Though historical records suggest that incumbents do enjoy a certain advantage in re-election campaigns, New Haven’s 2011 elections departed from the norm. Of the 12 alders who faced challengers in their bids for reelection that year, eight lost.

Seven of those eight opposed union-backed challengers, and the four victorious incumbents were union-backed. Ward 23 Alder Yusuf Shah planned to run as an independent after the Democratic Party endorsed his challenger. He later decided to drop out as a result of the amount of union money spent on his opponent’s — Tyisha Walker, the current president of the Board of Alders — campaign.

The union successes in the 2011 election are made all the more remarkable in light of the fact that City Hall had backed many of the defeated incumbents. The re-election of thenMayor John DeStefano Jr. showed that City Hall certainly retained some sway over city politics, but other election results proved that union power had made City Hall’s influence subordinate. With the 2011 landslide, UNITE HERE came to control a large majority of the Board of Alders.

To some participants in New Haven politics, the union coalition possesses strength enough to counteract the incumbency effect. “[UNITE HERE] is a powerful organizing force, and I think they’ve proven that they’re able to mobilize and win elections in a way that I think is stronger than incumbency,” Stark said.

He added that the only unsuccessful union-backed campaign he could recall was Ella Wood’s ’15 in Ward 7, where she suffered a heavy defeat to then-sitting alder Doug Hausladen ’04 amid

THEY HAD 100 PEOPLE WALKING MY WARD TRYING TO DETHRONE ME.

SATURDAY OCTOBER

3

HARAKIRI (JAPAN, 1962) WHC Auditorium // 7 p.m.

A samurai tragedy that’ll get you right in the abdomen.

controversy surrounding Wood’s residency in the ward.

Stark said the 2011 sweep and the victories of union-backed candidates Jill Marks and Gerald Antunes over incumbents in September demonstrate the power of the union coalition. According to Stark, union power exceeds the influence of incumbency.

Union influence flows from several sources. UNITE HERE has proven extraordinarily adept in recent years at mobilizing a network of volunteers to bring residents out to the polls. Unions also wield considerable fundraising power. Further, union-backed candidates can typically enjoy the endorsements of the unionbacked alders already sitting on the board.

Spears, who fell to Antunes by an 82–18 margin in September, echoed Stark’s sentiments.

Spears said the Local 34 union, a member of the UNITE HERE coalition, pervades the political process. Democratic ward committee chairs, he said, are “dominated” by Local 34; he added that the union will not hesitate to endorse a challenger if they believe the incumbent is not aligned with their own interests.

“If [incumbents] aren’t practicing the policy that’s backed by the unions, they don’t get a bankroll,” Spears said. “I had a committee of three people on the campaign. They had 20.”

Ward 28 Alder Claudette Robinson-Thorpe’s campaign, Stark said, illustrates union influence in the electoral process. RobinsonThorpe came to power in Ward 28 in 2009, and retained her seat as a union-backed candidate in 2011 and 2013. But in January 2014, she joined with six other alders to form the People’s Caucus, aiming to counter union influence on the Board of Alders. Days later, a union-backed challenger, Ward 6 Alder Dolores Colón ’91, unseated Robinson-Thorpe as chair of the alders’ Black and Hispanic Caucus by a vote of 10–4.

In the 2015 primary campaign, 18 months after RobinsonThorpe split with the union, the coalition supported challenger Jill Marks, the wife of Rev. Scott Marks, co-founder of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, a powerful union-affiliated group. Despite receiving endorsements from Mayor Harp, state Rep. Robyn Porter and the AFSCME union, RobinsonThorpe fell to Marks by a 55–45 margin.

In an interview with the News, Robinson-Thorpe emphasized the political importance of an onthe-ground organizational effort.

She said she had no access to the kind of vast resources that Marks could easily tap.

“They had 100 people walking my ward trying to dethrone me,” she said. “You’ve got to have

troops on the doors. They had the whole union behind them, and I didn’t have that many people. If you [have] 300 to one, of course you’re going to win.”

Many of Marks’ campaign volunteers, Robinson-Thorpe said, didn’t live in the ward, or in New Haven at all, instead hailing from outlying towns and suburbs like Guilford, Branford and East Haven. With those volunteers, Marks was able to blanket the ward in a way that RobinsonThorpe couldn’t. Personal factors played a role, too: shortly before the primary, Robinson-Thorpe broke her leg and ankle, rendering her unable to complete a careful canvassing of the ward. Had she been fully mobile, RobinsonThorpe said, she would have prevailed.

Robinson-Thorpe said Marks’ superior ground strength, a product of her union backing, delivered her victory in the primary. Robinson-Thorpe has yet to decide whether she will run as a petitioning candidate in the November general election. If she does, she will face a formidable challenge. *** Now that the Ward 1 primary is over, the prospect of a three-way race — which would have been a real possibility had Stark bested Eidelson in the primary — has dissipated. Eze has now set his sights on the general election. He said that he will focus on exploiting Eidelson’s weaknesses, particularly what he called her disengagement on campus. Eze aims to maintain an active presence on campus, and to that end plans to attend Yale football games and has hosted events to discuss policy proposals and his vision for the Ward 1 alder’s role in the city.

But Eze faces an uphill battle.

Incumbency and union backing have proven their strength in recent years, and they are all the more powerful when they coincide, as they do for Eidelson. Eze may well prevail — his connections on campus and anti-status quo message could win over enough voters to overwhelm Eidelson. A victory for Eze, though, seems unlikely in a city where incumbency and union backing each play their crucial role in determining the power structures that dominate city government.

Still, Eze’s very campaign predicates itself on its outsider status. As unlikely as a Republican, non-union-backed, nonincumbent’s victory in New Haven might seem, Eze — armed with dozens of enthusiastic volunteers and a reformist zeal — says he is ready for the challenge.

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: The 1%.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

WEEKEND NOTES

TWO WORLDS, ONE SOUND // BY CLAIRE WILLIAMSON

These past weeks saw many Yale students celebrating the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as well as the harvest festival of Sukkot. As someone distinctly not Jewish, what information I have about these holidays comes from my friends’ celebrations and complaints. As I listen to friends remark on their growling bellies during Yom Kippur, or watch them walk back from services carrying pillows under their arms, I feel like I’m looking through a window at a world defined by traditions and history that I will always respect but never quite understand.

On the heels of the Jewish holidays was one of Yale’s own: Family Weekend. Performance groups of all kinds prepared for weeks to entertain their families, and the Glee Club — of which I am a member — is no exception. The Glee Club historically shares its annual Family Weekend concert with the Concert Band and the Yale Symphony Orchestra. This year there was an additional guest: the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, an Israeli-Palestinian youth chorus under the direction of Yale alumnus Micah Hendler ‘12.

Hendler’s participation as a teenager in youth programs that focused on facilitating international communication among teens in the Middle East influenced his desire to start the choir when he left Yale. After graduating in 2012, Micah took his knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew, as well as his double majors in International Relations — now Global Affairs — and music, to Jerusalem with the goal of founding a youth choir. After serious recruiting efforts during his first year, 80 teenagers auditioned for the Cho-

rus, and it’s been a thriving group of roughly 35 ever since. The group garnered international fame in part because half its members are Israeli and half are Palestinian. In 2014 they toured in Japan, this summer they participated in Yale’s International Choral Festival and on September 24th, they appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The group’s diverse composition has implications beyond the various languages in which they sing. Hendler founded the chorus in hopes that it would facilitate dialogue between the opposing groups. The teenagers rehearse together, sing together, tour together and share stories with each other, despite and in defiance of the violence and conflict often exploding around them.

They rehearse in Jerusalem’s International YMCA building because, according to the New York Times, it is one of few places considered neutral. As Hendler said to the Huffington Post in 2014, despite the use of force on both sides, the Youth Chorus has continued to meet, sing and talk in order to “[get] into some of the issues surrounding nationality, [and] citizenship.” For the singers, the “other side” becomes not a number or a news clip but rather a colleague and a friend.

Jerusalem has existed for me mainly as a peripheral location, one that occasionally comes to the forefront of my newsfeed whenever a new social or political issue commands an international view. I am, of course, aware of the turmoil surrounding its governance and the tension between Israel and Palestine, as well as the fact that Jerusalem, as an extremely diverse city, is a microcosm for the wider conflict. When headlines distort real-

ity, it’s all too easy to see the conflict in terms of numbers, not lives. But when Hendler and part of the Youth Chorus came to sing at Yale, it led me to see the Israel-Palestine issue in a new light.

On Saturday, the Glee Club and the Youth Chorus collaborated on a song called “Adinu,” based on an old Sufi chant. The lyrics read, “Adinu bidinil hubbi, anna tawajjahat raka’ibuhufal hubbu, dini waimani” which in Hendler’s translation mean, “I believe in the religion of love wherever it is found, for love is my religion and faith.” The arrangement of “Adinu” by Shireen AbuKhader and André de Quadros that the Youth Chorus performs goes beyond a simple melody. In fact, it’s highly improvisational and sometimes atonal; it stands in contrast to Western musical conventions of traditional harmony. The original melody is fused with different styles, especially the Arabic improvisational tradition of mawwal to transform it into a unique, unexpected sound. So, even though the group has performed it over a hundred times, it’s always new and different — it doesn’t get old for them.

Hendler described it as a “collective improvisation that always takes [the audience] into a space that is transformative and transcendent.” For one part of the song, Hendler asked every Glee Club member to think about what the phrase “religion of love” meant to them personally and to choose a song or a melody that best reflected the ideal.

I spent quite a bit of time considering what song epitomized a “religion of love” for me. There were a few contenders, each with their own backstories. First, there was “White Coral Bells,” a lullaby about flow-

ers and fairies that my mother used to sing to me. Billy Joel’s “And So it Goes” reminded me of my melodramatic high school crushes, when my heart was always recovering from various slights and break-ups. The Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” was the favorite song of a dear family friend who was a grandfather to me. A “religion of love” was, for me, a difficult emotion to pin down: it had to be intimate but inclusive, narrow enough to appreciate details, but broad enough to encompass a bigger picture of life.

Ultimately I decided on “The Parting Glass,” an Irish folk song about leaving loved ones behind, but telling them not to worry. The song goes, “though since it fell unto my lot / that I should rise and you should not / I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call / goodnight and joy be to you all.” This is to me the defining line of this song, a reminder that peace can exist despite loss.

The songs selected by the Youth Chorus and the other members of the Glee Club were incredibly diverse, in both language and genre: everything from show tunes like “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables to traditional folksongs and even a rap about love written in Arabic.

Esther Portyansky ‘16 chose the Hebrew song “Ashira l’Adonai” from the film The Prince of Egypt because it epitomizes to her God’s transcendent love and the strength it takes to have faith amid the suffering of the world.

Greg Suralik ‘17 picked “Amazing Grace” because it was less overtly religious, and much more welcoming to people of all religions.

One person sang the Chinese words for “Love us, love them,

love you” over and over again in an improvised melody to express how love transcends boundaries and languages. There were songs about raising one’s voice, songs sung for years by parents, songs that reminded people of the love they felt for their family or for the simple objects of everyday life.

I asked Hendler what song he would pick, given the opportunity, and he answered that his expression of love was the song created by the totality of the voices in front of him. “I hold the energy of the song and facilitate the [emotional] space instead,” he said. Sung simultaneously, the ninety-six songs made a wall of sound that was “powerful, breathing, and alive.” He views this role as more profound than any song he could sing on his own.

One of Hendler’s goals is to help the teenagers become leaders and future peacemakers. That aspect of the Chorus, which will work to create the “beautiful Jerusalem” that Hendler imagines, succeeds in part because even though there is strife, the chorus, with its members from East and West Jerusalem, is what draws them in.

“The whole thing is a journey anyways,” Hendler said. As I finished typing up my notes I could only agree with him. Music is a journey, dialogue is a journey, and love is a journey. Most importantly, they are journeys that can’t happen in isolation. Music, dialogue and love are essentially collaborative, and they help us overcome conflicts like the one that currently wracks Jerusalem.

Contact CLAIRE WILLIAMSON at claire.williamson@yale.edu .

// YANNA LEE

SATURDAY OCTOBER

3

YSO 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON OPENER

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Feel 50 years younger listening to the jubilance of Tchaikovsky.

First Citizens Bank.

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND THEATER

JUNGLEPUSSY AND A VISION FOR BODACIOUS SELF-LOVE // IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR

It’s a soggy Tuesday afternoon, and St. Anthony Hall has never looked so sexy. Ombré fades, skewered septa and birkenstocks abound.

Indistinguishable rap music diffuses for a cool six seconds before a woman emerges from the room’s navel, in a lime green blazer bisected by a hunter green belt. The woman sitting in front of us with one leg crossed over the other, smiling and smizing, reminds me of Oswald, Coco Chanel and Erykah Badu, but she’s entirely her own woman: Junglepussy.

The female rapper (and I use the word “female” because this is central to her vision; she describes her first album, Satisfaction Guaranteed, as “unabashed womanhood”) arrived at Yale shrouded in mystery. The only thing I or anyone knew about this chat-cum-monologue was its title: ‘Self Love. Bodacious Rap.’ But it was very quickly clear that Junglepussy would answer whatever questions we cared to ask.

The first concerns her upbringing, to which she replies: “Do you wanna talk about growing up when I was reborn?” Despite her young

//TEVIN MICKENS

age — she’s only 23 — she juggles the topics easily and seamlessly. Junglepussy’s rebirth, she told us, and her movement toward a new musical method, began when her song “Stitches” received critical acclaim.

The song was violent (“I done told these bitches/If you fucking with my man, I’ma leave yo ass in stitches”), but no more violent than the average Schoolboy Q single. The song brought her publicity, recognition, acclaim — all the things young musicians dream of.

However, she remarks now of “Stitches” that its discussion of violence and adultery was influenced by a bad relationship that had recently ended. “[The song] wasn’t very ‘Girl Power’ to me. It’s always confused me that girls come up to me after the show, and say ‘Why didn’t you perform Stitches?’ I’m like, it’s so violent!”

For rappers, loving oneself is not too strange a topic to include in your music, and that comes through clearly in Junglepussy’s discussion

and its title. But what about loving one’s womanhood, and asserting it in the music world? The audience wants to how she handles the challenges of a rap industry rife with misogynistic dialogue and in which female MCs often have to hypersexualize themselves to be “marketable.”

When someone finally mentions the word “feminism,” Junglepussy nods slowly, like a sage mother preparing to indulge us with an old vignette. By this point, her bodacity has won us over completely and we defer to her wisdom without question.

“I didn’t make a conscious effort to promote myself as a feminist, but people started saying ‘oh, she’s a feminist, she’s making feminist music.’ I thought if I had the focus on me being a better human, that would come across into feminism as well.”

She pauses, and stares wistfully at the grayness outside. “Would that be feminism — just rooting for Junglepussy? That’s sometimes too much for me because [the name] ‘Junglepussy’ is already such a label.”

Charged enough as her stage name is, Junglepussy doesn’t want her music to be equated with a particular ethos or politics.

The tranquility of the moment is interrupted when someone asks her about the music video for her song “Nah,” in which she sits on a white woman a la Allen Jones.

“Garage Magazine put out a piece with a greased up black woman molded into a chair. They had a white woman dressed up in a chair, with jeans and a button down, ready to start her day. The girl who sent me that was white.” Junglepussy asked the friend if she could sit on her for the “Nah” video and the woman acquiesced. Her candor on subjects like this is such that I feel like I could ask her about anything.

As she proceeds to dish out bon mots on the Internet, her return to Brooklyn and quest for Canadian citizenship, I again recall that she’s only one year out of college. In the same vein, Earl Sweatshirt is 21.

Wiki, the primary MC of Brooklyn-

based rap group Ratking, is 21. We have before us an exhilarating generation of prodigious talent in the rap community, who are done with the formula, whose music is coming out for free.

My ears prick up when I hear her speak about her age: “I’m so young, I’m only 23, and I always wanna keep myself open. It’s a full-time loving yourself, you know that. It’s a full time job respecting yourself. There’s still a lotta stuff I gotta learn, but I just wanna be the best human I can be. Even though I do really want to learn how to knit.”

As I amble out onto the corner of College and Wall, I linger a while in awe of Junglepussy’s holistic calm. I don’t know what I want more — to stroll across Old Campus in a few months listening to the new Junglepussy album, or to explain to a curious inquirer how I came by an authentic Junglepussy knitted sweatshirt, with her insuperable mantra emblazoned across the chest: pussy muscle hustle.

Contact IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR at ivan.kirwan-taylor@yale.edu .

Knowing What It Is, But Not What It May Be: A Staged Reading of the First Quarto of Hamlet // BY CAITLYN WHERRY Tension in the theater is palpable. The audience’s anticipation grows along with the crises in the tormented world of Danish royalty and the pitch of Hamlet’s swelling rage until they’re jolted suddenly by the stage manager’s summary of action that does not take place onstage: “He stabs through the man.” Shakespeare is a world they think they know, but this performance makes them question that knowledge.

The Yale Drama Coalition’s production of the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is far from typical. The opening performance took place last night at the Calhoun College Cabaret to an audience of scholars and students alike.

The First Quarto is a far cry from the modern Hamlet. Discovered in 1823 by Sir Henry Bunbury, this text is a first draft that was hidden away for over two centuries.

The language of this rough draft reads less eloquently than the later one and many of the most identifiable quotes of the play are noticeably altered. Unpolished, it often lacks the rhyme scheme that permeates many of Shakespeare’s later plays. In fact, the text has caused controversy for its lack of resemblance to the rest of Shakespeare’s body of work.

One of the most easily identified of these differences comes in Hamlet’s soliloquy that begins, in the well-known version, “To be or

SATURDAY OCTOBER

3

not to be, that is the question.” In the First Quarto, it instead reads as “To be, or not to be. Aye, here’s the point.” The rest of the speech lacks much of the complex analysis of what is to be gained or lost by living or dying that makes the soliloquy such a standard in English classes.

Alyssa Miller ’16, who is the play’s executive producer and who is writing her senior thesis in conjunction with the production, says that the differences don’t necessarily mark the First Quarto as an inferior draft, but rather display the extent to which Shakespeare is “as lively and malleable … as time itself.”

fered from a traditional production in many ways, most notably that the typical props and stage setting were replaced with a minimalist approach that emphasized the actors and the language.

Shakespeare aficionados, and those of us who enjoy watching Romeo and Juliet on Netflix, anticipate long and drawnout death scenes. With its lack of staging, the First Quarto couldn’t accommodate those expectations.

The carnage at the end of the play had to take place without props or accoutrement or even movement.

While Gertred (spelling unique to the First Quarto) actually pantomimes drinking the poison that

YESTERDAY’S HAMLET IS DIFFERENT FROM TODAY’S AND CERTAINLY WILL NOT BE THE SAME AS TOMORROW’S. “Yesterday’s Hamlet is different from today’s and certainly will not be the same as tomorrow’s,” Miller said.

Upon walking into the Cabaret, the audience met a brick wall framing a backlit stage. Minutes later, a handful of black-clad cast members filed into a row of chairs and began the performance. The staged reading dif-

SAYBROOK SCREW

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We all know it’s just a precursor to the inevitable strip.

kills her, the stage manager narrates the sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes while they stand still onstage. Instead of collapsing on the ground to signify their deaths, the actors merely sit back in their seats as the show goes on. But while their bodies remain on the stage, they succeed in removing their presence, and the moment is as striking and as evoc-

ative as a staged production.

With little to work with beyond themselves, the actors were met with the challenge of bringing a new world to life through only their facial expressions and intonation. However, the cast was equal to the challenge. Iason Togias ’16 provided a dynamic Hamlet that was at once hilariously sarcastic, broodingly selfinvolved, and witty. Ari Zimmet ’17 gave a consistently enthralling performance of King Claudius.

The comedic timing of Skyler Ross ’16 and Dan Rubins ’16 as Rossencraft and Gilderstone kept the audience laughing even during intense scenes. Tasked with the portrayal of ubiquitous, oversized characters, the cast humanized their emotions and relationships, making them remarkably relatable for the audience. Overall, the cast pulled together a dynamic and compelling show filled with realistic interaction and all the angst of a young man trying to sort out what exactly it means to be human.

Perhaps “to go or not to go” is the true question here. To which the answer is a definite “go”: This performance is as delightful in its originality and pathos as it is enlightening about the history and development of the Shakespeare canon.

Contact CAITLYN WHERRY at caitlyn.wherry@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Delaware, the first state of this great nation.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015· yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND COLUMNS

Josh LaRocco

Songs of summers past

Ree Ree Li

// BY WAYNE ZHANG As the temperature dips below 70 and bursts of orange and yellow begin to dot Hillhouse, let’s reflect on some of the best songs from summer 2015. Although fall has arrived, these tracks will still sound just as good playing in our suites, booming through courtyards, or blasting at Toad’s.

Laura Anderson

“Can’t Feel My Face” — The Weeknd More than Abel Tesfaye’s (aka The Weeknd’s) embodiment of Michael Jackson reincarnate, more than Max Martin’s hitmaking magic, more than the title’s punch line, it’s the mastery of momentum that makes “Can’t Feel My Face” an instant classic. From the introduction’s ominous, synthetic aura, to the moment Tesfaye eeks “OOH!” the track sucks you into a world of passion that is as self-indulgent as it is self-destructive.

Tesfaye’s snapshot of hook-up and drug culture is fatalistic — the first words out of his mouth are “And I know she’ll be the death of me,” followed by the not-so-subtle “At least we’ll both be numb.” But as the track progresses, the mood lightens. You hear over and over again — from a choir, several back-up tracks, and Tesfaye himself — distortions of “But I love it! But I love it!” And then everything climaxes at the bridge when Tesfaye concludes, “She told me you’ll never be alone!”

Whether those voices keeping him company are real or imagined is yet to be determined.

Jamie Cahill

CALL IT A GOINGOUT ANTHEM FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO STAY IN.

POMPOS

“All My Love” — Major Lazer, Ariana Grande and Machel Montano Ariana Grande’s image problem is remedied only by her voice. No other pop starlet can publicly declare that she hates America, survive Donutgate, date Big Sean — and get him to hate her — and still maintain a cult following. Chalk it up to stunning pipes: knife-through-warm-butter, 5000 thread count, super-lux tonality, never oversinging, but never sounding restrained. On “All My Love,” Major Lazer produces dance hall music reminiscent of an angry hornet’s nest, and Machel Montano’s crazy Caribbean soca borders on grating. But Ariana sings stupidly well, the benevolent matriarch of a rabid dance floor transforming chaos into cosmic love.

PICKS Jamie Cahill ’16 Melbourne, Australia Just a quick disclaimer: Jamie Cahill is indeed a student here. I did not hire a model. With such a striking disposition, this handsome Aussie looks dashing whether he’s working out in Payne Whitney in one of the five identical maroon tops he circulates, or brilliantly DJ-ing in his prized distressed white tank — a purchase from 2008 that initially had no holes. “I like it because it’s the scantiest thing I can wear on a hot day,” He remarked with affection. Connecticut’s transition to fall weather has many on campus devastated. He describes his personal style as being inspired by a collection of subcultures, including “avant-garde Japanese stuff, football casuals, Scandinavian minimalism, ghetto gothic” and beyond. He enthusiastically claimed, “I’m a total poser!” Regardless of his style inspiration on any given day, his looks are so exceptional they could hypnotize anyone into believing Vegemite is actually delicious. Maybe he actually should consider a career posing professionally, or endorsing Vegemite … Durfee’s would sell out.

“Loud Places” — Jamie xx and Romy A typical college student is supposed to like certain things. It’s “fun” to go out five nights a week.

To drink until you pass out or throw up. To hook up with random people at Woad’s. These activities are frequently fun, to be sure — but perhaps just as frequently, we force ourselves to enjoy things we’d really rather not do.

From its opening lines, “Loud Places” appeals to tucked-away parts of ourselves that implicitly understand this collegiate cognitive dissonance: “I go to loud places / To find someone / To be quiet with.” A sample of indistinct chatter and a pensive piano accent precede this poem, both of which establish Jamie xx’s bubble of reality — a place where time stands still on a dance floor and you look inward while everyone else projects outward. The couplet “I go to those places that we used to go / They seem so quiet now, I’m all alone” evokes the essence of Robyn’s classic “Dancing On My Own.” And the sample of Idris Muhammad’s “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This” adds both a dance groove and a melancholy aftertaste: “I have never reached such heights.”

Call it a going-out anthem for people who want to stay in.

Contact NATALIE POMPOS at natalie.pompos@yale.edu .

Contact WAYNE ZHANG at wayne.zhang@yale.edu .

// NATALIE POMPOS

Josh LaRocco ’18 San Diego, California One glimpse at Josh LaRocco and you wonder why Katy Perry did not debut a single crediting California boys. San Diego’s finest graces campus with a style so rad, it’s no surprise people turn up to the hit “I’m in love with LaRocco.”

When this surfer is not promoting global warming with his practically boiling presence in the ocean, you can catch him accessorizing with a backwards cap, blacked-out shades and a skateboard underfoot. When asked for style advice, he remarked, “The shoes make the man. All black never hurt anyone.” Fond of simple tees and board shorts, LaRocco recalled a time when his beloved mother purchased him a shirt that was “a little too hipster.” “It didn’t last long. I just took it off and rocked the shirtless look.” Maybe he should start off every day wearing shirts a little too hipster? Unfortunately, this accomplished wave rider has had his share of encounters with sharks. One in particular was rather distressing, but honestly, can you blame the shark for wanting a taste?

Ree Ree Li ’16 Waxhaw, North Carolina When she is not signing autographs for her tennis superstardom, Ree Ree Li might as well do so for her effortlessly chic fashion sense. As the women’s varsity tennis captain, she serves campus with a personal style described as “comfortable and casual” — a combination she aces. With a flash of her stunning smile — undeniably her best accessory — Li remarked, “My mood definitely influences what I wear.”

Throughout the years, Li’s desire to unite comfortable and casual remained consistent, albeit with a changing aesthetic. “I’ve always enjoyed comfortable clothing, but I definitely did not have a good sense of style back in the day. I either wore large t-shirts that covered my shorts or my older brother’s massive sweatshirts that went to my knees and large sweatpants.” Li admits she can occasionally be seen embracing this former aesthetic during tennis season, when she dons her monochromatic “blue marshmallow outfit” consisting of a navy oversized sweatshirt, sweatpants, and running shoes. Only because it’s Ree Ree Li here — that’s a marshmallow Yale never minds seeing s’more of.

Laura Anderson ’17 Atlanta, Georgia With her figure, Laura Anderson’s impeccable sense of fashion is not even necessary. Yet she continuously showcases her pretty girl swag with silhouette-flattering outfits. Even with her favorite combination of high-waisted jeans, booties and a loose blouse, she finds herself most inspired by how she feels when she wakes up. “I’ve never been one to plan out my outfits for the week or even the next day; when my alarm goes off, I feel completely different [from] when I fell asleep, and I have no way [of anticipating] what that will mean for my outfits.” Regarding her early years, she confessed to hopping out of bed and turning her swag on with some skirts over jeans and a Limited Too wardrobe worthy of the store itself. How unfortunate that that phase lasted the same duration as Soulja Boy’s stardom. This Southern belle mentioned she routinely wears tights or silk underwear under her jeans in winter: “I cannot handle the cold, and I have no shame.” It’s astonishing that New Haven even experiences winter with her on campus. When questioned for advice, Anderson offered, “Authenticity is sexy. Wear what makes you feel confident and you will always look your best.” Crank dat.

SUNDAY OCTOBER

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JACKIE BROWN (USA, 1997)

WHC Auditorium // 3 p.m.

Tarantino flick starrin blaxploitation film icon Pam Grier and — you guessed it —Samuel L. Jackson.

WKND RECOMMENDS: The First Amendment. #freespeechforwknd

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

K

imberly Peirce wrote and directed the Oscar-winning feature film “Boys Don’t

Cry,” the true story of transgender teen Brandon Teena, who was raped and murdered in 1993, and the Iraq war drama “Stop-Loss.” On her visit to Yale this week for the Six Groundbreaking Lesbian Filmmakers series, she sat down on Monday to discuss her craft, television and Hilary Swank’s smile.

// IRENE JIANG

ON MOVIES & MAGNETISM: KIMBERLY PEIRCE // BY JACK BARRY

Q: Why did you decide to make “Boys Don’t Cry” as your first feature?

A: I didn’t have any kind of calculated decision about this movie. I was in graduate school searching for a project. James Schamus, one of my professors, said, “If you’re ever going to make a movie” — and this was new to us — “you just have to satisfy your audience. If your audience loves it, you have a chance of crossing over.” I fell in love with [Brandon Teena]. He was a character no one had seen before. You didn’t have trans characters, [except] maybe in comedies. You hadn’t had a character who lived in real life and was a reflection of a realistic character in a non-comedic role. It hadn’t been done.

Q: What were the challenges in bringing this type of movie and this

A: The first reaction I got from my teachers — and my teachers were brilliant — [was] “you can’t have a character who both wants to sleep with women and wants to be a boy. You can’t have a character with two needs.” It’s really interesting to be told something doesn’t work, because I find that problems are the seeds of solutions.

Q: How did you solve this problem?

How did you reconcile Brandon’s dual needs?

A: It wasn’t until I got to the Sundance Institute and met an amazing artist named Frank Pierson, who was my advisor, and said to him, “Look, I’m torn.

Brandon’s need is to live as a boy.

B r a n d o n ’s need is

“HIS NEED: IT’S TO GET LOVE.” HE DID THESE THINGS IN HIS LIFE IN ORDER TO DO T H AT.

also to be with girls.” He said, “Neither of those are the needs.

That’s what he’s doing. His need: it’s to get love.” He did these things in his life in order to do that.

Q: What problems did you run into after you solved any narrative issues?

A: I had to satisfy my audience, and transsexual and transgender were just starting to be pulled into the [LGTBQ] movement. All the letters kept getting added.

I was making this movie before “T” had been added. As a young queer person, I felt I had to do justice to Brandon, who was raped and killed and silenced.

Who was misunderstood. I don’t have a right to make this movie unless it honors this person and feels reflective within my own community. That was the huge challenge. My community was not unified. Satisfying the community meant a deep investigation into what you were trying to represent and knowing that you were going to piss people off.

“

“

character to life?

Q: Did you have any idea how successful, how impactful, the movie would become?

A: I had no idea that we would shoot the movie.

It took five years to make.

I looked three years for Brandon Teena.

Q: What happened during those three years of searching?

A: Many now very well-

known, very established, wonderful queer artists came to audition for me. We didn’t get straight actresses because people didn’t want to play gay roles.

Then Ellen [Degeneres] came out and I got tons of straight girls.

My instinct back then was a gay person could play it better. We were already in production, and we didn’t have Brandon. There was [an] elephant in the room.

If this person doesn’t pass [as a man], the other characters seem ridiculous. If the audience doesn’t believe it, and if it looks ridiculous, then the audience has no faith in any of those characters.

Q: How did Hilary Swank eventually win the role?

A: Our casting director brought back all these tapes. None of it was working. I put a tape in, I was exhausted, and this person floated across the screen. She, he, was in the middle of the gender. There was a kind of androgyny that was really intoxicating and you just kept watching.

On top of it this person, playing masculine, smiled. The big thing I realized about Brandon: yes, he passed on a certain level. I think it was very fluid and always leaking out. I think there was a little bit of buying in. The thing that Hilary Swank brought that was miraculous, which is what a great actor brings, was she smiled and she put you at ease.

You wanted to embrace this person. You wanted to bring them into your life. You wanted to get closer to them. Charm and charisma. Then I said, “Oh my God. That was the thing that Brandon must have brought to people.”

It wasn’t just that Brandon was masculine. Brandon charmed people; he opened up their hearts. Automatically, what I saw was the power of a movie star. An old-fashioned movie star, someone who affects your heart and

wins you over. Hilary had that.

Q: What draws you to a project when you are looking for your next feature?

A: I am deeply interested in sexuality. I’m very interested in gender. I’m very interested in violence. There is physical and emotional violence in all of my work. My second movie, “StopLoss,” was about my brother fighting in Iraq. That was hugely disorienting to me. I often make movies about people that I don’t like or understand. So with “Boys Don’t Cry,” I did not like John Lotter and Tom Nissen. I hated that they raped and killed Brandon, but I spent all those years understanding them, to understand: How does a boy turn into the man who does that? Same thing with “Stop-Loss.” I’m deeply interested in how my little brother, who was 18 years old when 9/11 happened — when I was going to anti-war marches — ended up signing up and ended up killing people.

Q: So what is your next project?

A: My parents had me at 15. They were the best looking kids in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My dad, he thought he was the king of the world, but he really was a con artist. He and I went down to Florida when I was five and he kind of revolutionized the shopping mall industry. He was building shopping malls and he fell prey to his own good looks, charm, and charisma … hence my love of movie stars. He got involved with the Mafia and ended up running drugs. It’s my family’s story. I have an interesting prodigal son — or daughter — story of reconciling after he basically exploded through this journey. I think we all live in such a unique way and we all love films that are personal because they take us on journeys we would

not necessarily go on. That’s my next movie. Then there’s also a butch-femme romantic-sexcomedy, which I’m very excited about.

Q: What do you see for your future in the film industry?

A: We’re living in a time when, as a director, you can go onto a set and work with fantastic actors, feature-level crew and you get access to equipment you wouldn’t normally get access to, and [then] you get to go in and make these short films. That’s essentially what a cable episode is.

Q: Do you expect to work more in television?

A: Absolutely. We all have to admit, [in the entertainment industry] women work [in production] six percent of the time.

We’re an endangered species.

If I look at the Finches and the Scorseses, if I look at my heroes, the men who clearly have more access than any woman does, they’re all doing television in addition to features. I don’t even call it television anymore. We should just think of it as content.

Q: How do you think television will influence feature films?

A: I think that content takes cues from content. What you’re getting is access to all kinds of voices you didn’t have before.

You used to have a real reflection of the people in power. You were echoing not the culture, but the power structure of the culture.

Now, with so many opportunities, when I take a Netflix meeting or an Amazon meeting, what they say to me was what James Schamus said to me 15 years ago.

Satisfy your audience.

Contact JACK BARRY at john.c.barry@yale.edu .