YDN Magazine

yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxvii 路 Issue 3 路 December 2010 路 yaledailynews.com/mag

Prepare your Poker Face.

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Plus, Yale Entrepreneurs: Start Up, Drop Out? on page 23.

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Fareed Zakaria ’86.

Samantha Power ’92.

YOU? JOIN US: mag@yaledailynews.com

New from the Yale Daily News: facebook status, August 2 at 7:29pm

“i do not care about sharks. give me bonobo week.”

Comment: “what’s a bonobo?”

elm cityguide.com q

Every Place in One Place

(Overheard at Yale) To submit, e-mail ydnmag@yaledailynews.com

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

Dining, Shopping, Anything.

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Homeless to homeowner

Bob Woodward '65

by Joe Breen z 16 z

Kettle Corn x Quidditch for Muggles x Flea Market

8 small talk 10 crit

A Different Kind of Activism Molly Hensley-Clancy

START UP, DROP OUT?

by Edmund Downie bac 23 bac

14 profile

O Christmas Tree Jialu Chen

20 poetry

Memoriam x Posts x He Said

42 Personal Essay The Front Room Taryn Nakamura

45 ask mangy mark!

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poKER fACE

by Eliana Dockterman n 29 o

THE EMPTY CHAIR

by Yasha Magarik } 36 } Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Magazine Editors Zara Kessler u Naina Saligram Associate Editors Sijia Cai x Eliana Dockterman Jacque Feldman x Molly Hensley-Clancy x Ginger Jiang Nicole Levy x Lauren Oyler Cooper Wilhelm Designers Raisa Bruner u Eli Markham Christian Vazquez Photography Editors Christopher Peak Sarah Sullivan

Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Vivian Yee

Publisher Kyle Miller

shorts

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Editors’ Note

L

ast week, Stephen Berry taught his Introductory Microeconomics class a simple lesson about human behavior: most people are risk averse.

The vast majority of us would rather have a sure $800 than gamble for $1,000.

But some individuals defy this rule.

They take risks. In this issue, read about Newton Carroll, who drove to Alabama on a whim and spent almost $5,000 on kettle corn equipment. Or Leon Noel and Harley Trung, who bid their Yale educations adieu in order to jumpstart their company, SocialSci. Sometimes these daredevils flounder — losing time, money, and pride. But when they win, they win big. Case in point: Vanessa Selbst ’05 LAW ’12, who recently won over a million Euro in a poker tournament.

This issue has many other great reads.

Molly Hensley-Clancy discusses how to best fight homophobia, and Joe Breen’s inspiring photo essay documents the life of a New Haven resident who’s gone from prison to prosperity. These writers show how taking risks doesn’t just lead to monetary payoff — it can also reshape your identity.

As always we’d like to thank our fantastic writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, and editors, who all spent time during their Thanksgiving breaks and reading weeks to ensure that you have this magazine to read as you procrastinate studying for exams. We hope you enjoy this issue and remember to take some chances before 2010 ends.

a few things we learned in this issue: E The first Christmas tree farm in America was established in 1901 in New Jersey.

E In the last five years, three student entrepreneurs have formally withdrawn from Yale to pursue their start-ups.

E Bob Woodward was the chairman of the Yale Banner.

E At any point in time, 700 people are homeless in New Haven.

E Quidditch emerged on college campuses in 2003.

E The word “poker” comes from the German word pochen, “to beat or pulverize.”

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— Zara Kessler & Naina Saligram

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

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Professor Recs

What is your favorite holiday drink? harvey weiss

A glass of seven-year-old Havana Club rum. No ice. It’s Cuban.

Weiss is a Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology.

book review tweet cowboys full: the story of poker by james mcmanus ydnmag poker history & mcmanus book filled w/ cheating, strategy, intrigue. find out y poker = quintessentially american in fun, fascinating read.

VOCab•yale•ary

ora avni

Scotch on the rocks, French pastis, and if you want something more colorful, boucha, a Tunisian fig wine.

Avni is a Professor of French.

maria piÑango

Ah, mine’s boring…..peppermint tea…..

Piñango is an Associate Professor of Linguistics.

break \brayk\ n. A pause from immense amounts of work: when preceded by “winter” refers to a month-long hiatus from Yale; when preceded by “study” refers to five hours of procrastinating on Sporcle. v. What you want to do to your computer after writing a 15-page final paper.

mark your calendars:

john loge

Some hot Christmas mead — it’s an Eastern European honey wine. I’m a wine person, so no crazy drink preferences here.

Loge is the Dean of Timothy Dwight College.

thomas duffy

A Dark and Stormy — Bermudian rum with ginger beer. I also drink Becherovka, an herbal booze made in the Czech Republic. It’s one of those amazing drinks — it has the flavor of fennel and anise seed, it is 78 proof, it tastes exotic, allegedly aids with digestion, and when mixed with tonic water (a mixture called beton — Czech for concrete), it supposedly helps with arthritis.

Duffy is the Director of University Bands.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is coming to Yale on January 12. She spent 15 years researching and writing her latest book on domestic migration.

She’ll speak at five p.m. at the Whitney Humanities Center.

Don’t miss it!

Correction: In the November issue of the Magazine, we incorrectly stated that Kenta Koga ’14 was in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

Koga is in Sigma Phi Epsilon.

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Top 10

1 2 3

ways to procrasti during exams

Virtual Communication: Arrange Skype dates with all of your high school friends, middle school friends, elementary school friends, summer friends, friends of friends — even daycare friends! (You just need to find them on Facebook first….) If you get through this list, start Skyping with your friends at Yale! Or if Skype’s too much effort, just go on Gchat.

It’s what all the cool kids do.

Bake — ­ Crownies: The next best thing to eating is making food — many say it’s therapeutic, a perfect way to relax while generating nibbling material for later. Apparently ‘crownies’ are all the rage in Saybrook right now. If you couldn’t figure it out, that’s a cross between a cookie and a brownie.

Protest Something: See

someone always protesting something on Cross Campus? Why can’t that be you! Grab a few equally unproductive friends and brainstorm something you think is an abhorrent injustice in your life. Justin Bieber’s “autobiography”?

Bacon in the French toast muffins? The existence of exams themselves? The options are limitless.

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YALE Up Your Life: Feel like everyone has way more Yale paraphernalia than you do? Easy fix! Hundreds of Yale-branded items are sitting forlornly, awaiting a Yalie to claim them… at the bookstore, Campus Customs, even Walgreens!

This is the chance to make sure that everything you use, from highlighter to shot glass to shoulder bag, makes everyone aware that you go to YALE. Clean and Rearrange: Your common room is looking pretty grubby.

Assemble your suitemates, designate cleaning responsibilities, and spend the afternoon blasting a playlist (which obviously you create just for the occasion) and making your living quarters spic and span. After all, you can’t study if your study space is a mess, right?

Clean Out Your Inbox: You’ve been meaning to all term, and now that 99% of your inbox is totally irrelevant, you can go through and delete all of it — but make sure you still allot plenty of time to save anything sentimental.

Or, if you’re a packrat and can’t delete anything, create topic folders and organize everything accordingly.

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

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tinate

7

Start a Nonprofit or Launch a Business:

8

Start a Website: It’s

Haven’t you ever wanted to?

Now’s the time! Begin planning your ground-breaking business initiative (like “Sleep-in-a-Pill” or Speed Golf, to name a few ideas), or bring that nonprofit you’ve been mulling over into reality. For more, see p. 23. so easy, why not? Buy a URL — it’s only about $10 a year, depending on whether you choose to be .com, .net, or .biz — and create something cool, or better yet, controversial. Just check out domain.com and take it from there.

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Explore the Stacks: Slip out of the dreariness of Bass and into Sterling’s Stacks. Get lost and spend a few hours trying to find your way out. Maybe you’ll run into another disoriented, procrastinating, extremely attractive individual….

Make Lists — Lots and Lots of Them: Make lists of everything you need to do (but never will). Then, to make yourself feel better, make a list of all of the things you’ve already accomplished over the day (wake up, eat, make a list) so that you can check them off and get that great feeling of productivity.

Then make a holiday wish list to send your parents. Then make a Yale bucket list. Then make a list of ways to procrastinate.

— TaoTao Holmes

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Hide & Seek Yale is filled with great secret hideouts. We’ve already found them, but can you? Come re-energize your soul in this hidden place of tranquility...if you can find it.

chase niesner / contributing photograhper

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for Bob Woodward ’65 Bob Woodward is regarded as one of America’s preeminent investigative reporters and non-fiction authors. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter and is currently an associate editor of the Post. While a young reporter for the Post in 1972, Woodward was teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal that led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. Woodward has authored or coauthored 16 non-fiction books in the last 36 years, all of which have been national bestsellers.

On Thursday, November 18, Woodward visited the Yale Daily News and was kind enough to let the Magazine record his responses to student questions, some of which are excerpted here.

Can I ask why you didn’t do the Yale Daily News?

Because I had no idea I was interested in journalism. I did the Yale Banner and was chairman of the Yale Banner.... I wrote some things for them, but not much. It was mostly business, managerial.

Has your process in reporting investigative pieces changed at all because of technology or changed since you first started?

It really hasn’t — the process I have is total immersion: living with the people and getting to know them, multiple interviews.

The way I organize my data is two-fold: by people — a President Obama file, a Joe Biden file, a Secretary Gates file, and so forth.... Then the second way I organize it is by chronology.

I write the book almost always in pure chronological order, because it’s easier, because one common feature we all have — presidents, students, or reporters — is we all live our lives in

chronological order….

The Internet is a tool. I have a couple of assistants working for me full time who are geniuses — they can find anyone or anything. I have a Facebook account and they manage it...it’s not a radical change for me.... The good quality information about Watergate and, quite frankly, all of these things I tried to work on, is not on the Internet.

It’s secret, or it’s classified, or people aren’t going to talk about it. And you have to dig it out.

How do you conduct interviews and prepare?

Lots of preparation.... You really want to prepare, not just do a Google search on somebody. If they’ve written an article in Foreign Affairs 25 years ago, look it up and read it. And then, when you’re talking to them, say, “On page 36, you say the following. What did you mean?” And they’re astonished — they thought that only their mother read the article. And it’s not a ruse. What I’m trying to do [when I interview you] is understand where you’re coming from, what your values are, what your sense of your job is.... I am taking them as seriously as they take themselves. That is something you [as reporters] can leverage. You want to be neutral. And you go back again and again.

You, as a relatively young reporter, almost took down a president, but after, you didn’t bank on that, you kept going after the Supreme Court. And in the current age, you’ve talked to President Obama. What keeps you driving? And also, has there ever been anything as tough an assignment as Watergate?

They’re all tough. You have to peel the onion, you have keep going back, you have to have iron pants. When I was doing the Obama book [Obama’s Wars], to one of his top aides I will not name, early on, I said “I’m going to do a book on national security,” and he said, “ok, good luck, you’re not going to find many Deep Throats around here.” By the end of the process, reporting this summer, Vol. xxxviii, No. 3 December 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 9 he was getting his top secret notes out of this safe and reading them to me. I restrained myself and did not say, “Oh yeah? Is it hard to find Deep Throats around here?” But’s it’s always hard. There’s always an element of surprise.

Are you compelled to uncover secrets all around you or is it just about the government?

Hopefully, you’ve gained a level of trust and intimacy with those around you.... This isn’t true with the government, however, which has an extraordinary concentration of power. It’s always hidden; it’s not what you think. I get up in the morning, and I ask myself the question, “What are they hiding?”

Because they’re hiding. And so it’s very much a process of helping the government make itself transparent.

And you know it’s a great life. If somebody came from Mars and spent a year in the United States and they went back and they asked this visitor, “Well, who has the best job in America?” what do you think they’d say? Sportswriters?

Quarterbacks? Presidents? Who has the best job? Journalists. Why do we have the best job? Because we make momentary entries into peoples’ lives when they’re interesting, and we get out.

Can you talk about returning to your sources? When do you know when you’re done doing the story?

You never are. When I interviewed Obama for this last book, I walked into the Oval Office and he said, “OK, Woodward, you’re on the clock.” And I pushed the time. I had sent him a 20-page memo headlined “lynchpin moments,” key lynchpin moments in the decisions you had to make in these wars, and as time was running out and he was going like this in his chair [Woodward fiddles], I said, “Well, there are more questions.” And he said, “there are

always more questions.”

In terms of state secrets or national security interests, when will you allow someone to tell you what not to print?

They’re not in charge. They don’t get to decide. I get to decide. But I went to the Intel chiefs before this book [Obama’s Wars] was published, and it’s a scene out of a John le Carré novel: “Ok, there are ten things that I’ve got here and this is the form I’m going to publish them.” And we went through and [they said], “Oh, this gives us gas pains, that gives us gas pains, but oh, we can live with it.” And then there was one where they jumped. And I said, “On a scale of zero-10 where is it on the Richter scale?” And the answer, after looking out across the Virginia countryside from the top floor of the CIA: a nine. Because they made arguments [that] it would jeopardize lives and operations and things.

And that’s not something — it’s a hell of a good story — but I’m not going to do that. There is nothing illegal about it, it’s something for my memoirs some day.

You said not a lot of people actually read what’s in the book Obama’s Wars. And it seems like the wars right now are kind of a non-issue in comparison to a lot of things going on here. And to me that’s kind of strange considering especially college campuses’ past with protesting. Do you think that we should be more aware about that, and do you think the press has a responsibility to push that on the public?

I think that the press has an obligation and part of the reason I picked the war was because, look, read history as you do, it’s a history of wars in many ways.... We’re defined by our wars to people abroad. I think we’re defined to ourselves by our wars.... The dog

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

that hasn’t barked recently since 9/11 is a terrorist attack in this country. And when that happens, I talked to Obama recently and he said, and I quote him in the book saying, we can absorb another terrorist attack. Can we absorb another terrorist attack? It’s like the head of Goldman Sachs saying we can absorb another financial crisis.

It’s probably true but it’s probably not the best thing to say. I think he said it because he lives in a sea of warnings, and they’re going to come, and it’s going to happen.

And Woodward’s general advice for aspiring journalists: Go to the scene — no matter where it is, no matter what you’re doing....

Go to the scene; human sources; and documents, books, Internet, and so forth — there’s not a story you do or would do that shouldn’t have elements of all three.

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Small Talk KETTLE CORN W QUIDDITCH FOR MUGGLES W FLEA MARKET X­­­­­

Seven years ago,

Newton Carroll had never tasted kettle corn. “Never had kettle corn before, never seen it in my life,” he says. Now, people around New Haven crave bags of his famous snack — $5 for a large, $3 for a small — and stoop by the free sample dispenser in hordes for a taste of the stuff.

Newton founded his company, Elm City Kettle Corn, on a whim. After having retired from a twentyyear career at the Yale Health Center, in the spring of

JENNIFER gIANG / CONTRIBUTING photographer

2003, he stumbled upon an ad for kettle-corn-making equipment. He was so intrigued that he decided to get back to work and drove with his wife all the way to Alabama. There, he bought the equipment that would define the next seven years of his life: a new popper for $4,000 and a copper bin for $900. The only thing he lacked when he returned to New Haven was something to hold them. His wife solved that dilemma and built him a cart to house his gear. She’s now made him two, and a third is in the works.

The cart Yale students are most familiar with is the one on Elm Street. It’s a new location — two months and running — but the cart already seems like a familiar campus landmark, and regulars know and greet Newton by name. One of Newton’s favorite parts of the job is meeting people, from students to patients at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where his original cart is parked. “Sometimes I go inside [the hospital] and visit them,” he says. A pair of brown-rimmed glasses covers his eyes, which crinkle as he slowly speaks.

To maintain both carts, Newton switches shifts with his manager, Billy Williams, who joined the business three years ago. Together, they keep the Elm Street cart running from 12 to 10 p.m. and the hospital cart open from 12 to 5 p.m. (4 p.m. in the winter). Newton and Billy were classmates at West Haven High School, where Newton graduated in 1970. “He’s very valuable, very valuable,” Newton says of Billy while nodding his head. Billy is a bit taller than Newton and just as friendly. The two wear matching black beanies with “Elm City Kettle Corn” embroidered across the front.

One Wednesday afternoon in November, Billy is getting ready to make a new batch of kettle corn, while Newton looks on. Vegetable oil, popcorn kernels, sugar — all of these measured ingredients go into the big vat of a popper.

Nothing happens for the first minute. There are some small pops as random kernels explode within the mass of sugar Billy mixes with a wooden stirrer. Then, as he flips down the sunglasses that are sitting atop his head, the pot erupts. The pops come in quick succession, and stray kernels fly from the popper. A great plume

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JENNIFER gIANG / CONTRIBUTING photographer

of steam rushes out, carrying with it the aroma now associated with kettle corn: a sugary, buttery mix that people can smell even while walking through Old Campus. Not Newton — he’s grown so used the scent that he can no longer smell it. “Watch him as he dumps it,” Newton says, pointing to the empty copper bin that has caramel-colored rings running down its edges. The popping lulls, and Billy quickly turns the popper on its side so that a torrent of hot kernels tumbles out. Then, using the massive wooden spoon, he scrapes the rest of the sticky kernels into the bin and pours a shower of sea salt over the heap.

Done.

The process takes a mere five minutes, but in that time, students are already trickling over to get a taste of the freshly-popped snack. Newton begins scooping the goods into baggies, closing off each bag with a quick twirl of a twist tie.

As Newton works, he talks about his familiarity with New Haven. He’s known the city his whole life but his relationship to its citizens has grown with his company. Elm City Kettle Corn supplies kettle corn at many events: concerts in Hamden, tree lightings.

“I’d have to say my favorite event is the Apple Harvest Festival,” Newton says. He quickly changes his mind, though, and declares that he likes all of them.

His connection to Yale has grown, too. Newton supplies his illustrious snack at many campus events including tailgate parties. The kettle corn at the recent YCC-sponsored Harry Potter screenings? Right from Newton’s cart. Newton even supplies bags of kettle corn to Yale eateries like the Divinity School Refectory, Uncommons, and the Thain Family Café. Newton started selling packages of his product to other venues about three years ago. “I did an event on the Green,” he says, “and a lady from the library café approached and asked if we would supply popcorn for them.”

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Even people who say they don’t like kettle corn can never say no to his. He recalls one time at a tailgate when a guy approached him and told him he didn’t like kettle corn at all. For Newton, though, this was a problem easily fixed. “I told him to try some of mine,” he says. “And once he did, he just loved it.”

Sometimes, people refuse the kettle corn for other reasons. Often, it’s because they don’t think kettle corn qualifies as healthy — especially when it is so hard to stop popping into their mouths. “I just tell them all the calories are popped out,” Newton says as he fiddles with his apron and laughs. As for the kettle corn man himself? He eats a bag a day.

— Jennifer Giang

Ever since I read

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at the age of six, I’ve dreamed of zooming around on a broom in front of thousands of spectators.

But while the child dreamer in me could imagine playing Harry’s favorite sport, the realist knew that Quidditch was a game played only in J.K. Rowling’s magical world.

Muggles — those of us without magic skills — would never have a chance to join in a game.

Upon arriving at Yale, I learned otherwise.

Muggle Quidditch was founded in 2003 at Middlebury but did not come to Yale until 2009. Only a year later, the Yale team has just completed its first World Cup in New York City. Though they were ranked 22nd out of 46 teams, Yale’s Quidditch enthusiasts defied all expectations and made it to the top 16.

My first lesson comes just a few days after the World Cup, and I feel butterflies in my stomach as I contemplate learning how to play the sport and potentially embarrassing myself in front of a Quidditch expert. Jason Perlman ’11 is one of the founding members of Yale’s team, but luckily, he is a very patient and encouraging teacher. He points out that no one on the team had any prior experience with the

matthew claudel / CONTRIBUTING photographer

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matthew claudel / contributing photographer

sport before joining; indeed, no one goes to college on a Quidditch scholarship. So I have nothing to fear.

The rules Perlman describes are adapted from those in the Harry Potter series, changed to accommodate Muggles. Since most of us can’t fly, Muggle Quidditch keeps the broom component but gets rid of the levitation — players must run with brooms between their legs at all times during the game.

There are four positions: chaser, keeper, beater and seeker. Beaters lob bludgers (dodgeballs) at the other players, who have to drop whatever they are carrying if hit. Chasers run with the quaffle (a deflated volleyball) and attempt to score goals. A keeper carefully guards the goalposts. And last but not least, the seeker — played by Harry in the books — spends the entire game chasing after the golden snitch, which if caught, ends the game.

In Harry Potter’s version of Quidditch, seekers have to be very astute and observant as they chase after this golden ball with delicate wings. In Muggle Quidditch, however, seekers just need to be fast enough to keep up with a person dressed in gold with a tennis ball hanging in a sock from his or her back pocket.

To explain the hybrid sport in Muggle terms, “there’s a rugby-basketball part…there’s a dodgeball part…and then there’s a tag part,” Perlman says. We begin our lesson with the rugby-basketball part: chasing. I gaze down at the broom grasped firmly between my knees and hold the slightly deflated volleyball in one unsteady hand.

Sweeping my eyes to the left, I can see the three goalposts, a tall one in the center flanked by two smaller ones. I take a deep breath, walk to the other end of the field, and stand my ground. The game begins, and I rush toward the goalposts and try to catapult the quaffle through one of them, all the while attempting to thwart Perlman’s height advantage. My stomach feels as if it is twisting around inside of me as I miss the goal by a pitifully wide margin.

Disappointed but not deterred, I return to my position

across the field, ready to score the goal I have been preparing for since the first grade. I swiftly waddle toward the goalpost, fervently clutching my broom with my left hand and raising the quaffle over my head with my right.

This time, I chuck the quaffle and watch it sail smoothly through the goal on the right.

We then move on to the dodgeball part: beating.

Perlman hands me a red bludger, hoists his broom between his legs and tells me to guard the goalposts. I cock my arm back, poised to hurl the dodgeball at him if he gets too close. He comes running toward me, and I instinctively toss the bludger, missing my target. I chase after my red ball, and Perlman scores while my back is turned. We reset ourselves, and he runs at me a second time and a third time, never failing to evade my bludger and put the quaffle through the hoop.

By this point in my Quidditch tutorial, it is nearly dark outside. Perlman has already told me that we will not be covering the seeker’s chase in our lesson because unfortunately we don’t have a snitch with us this evening.

Like many Harry fans, I’ve always wanted to play the seeker. And so, as our lesson nears its final moments and I prepare to help Perlman carry the equipment back to the captain’s suite, I take one more step toward keeping my childhood dream alive. I ask: “How can I join the team?”

— Christina Hull

Every Saturday and Sunday

before dawn, white, red, and gray vans slouch into a parking lot off E. T. Grasso Boulevard. Cars skimming past can catch a glimpse of various opening ceremonies: the outstretching of tents, the flexing of table legs, the anxious reshuffling of jackets and rugs and nail polish bottles. From seven in the morning to four in the afternoon, vendors try to charm both serious shoppers and curious browsers at New Haven’s Boulevard Flea Market.

Ready to spend a relaxing Saturday browsing the booths, I jump out of my cab and float around the gate.

The regular sellers, those closest to the entrance, stand with puckered grins, their fists jammed in flannels.

They lay weekly claim over this coveted territory, and their status gives them the audacity to sell improbably seductive things, from spray-painted ukuleles to sequined fedoras. I count the booths on tiptoe until the crowd elbows me to the left fringe of the lot.

My strategy in navigating the market is to leave each stand after three seconds. Anything more cues a kind of crude, scripted courtship: the vendor hunkers forward casually; I jerk my chin in apology and duck back into the traffic of shoppers. I pass pile after pile of studded belts and Dora the Explorer underwear, but when I

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My inspection of ceramic necklaces ends prematurely when I realize that the vendor’s been trailing me hopefully from behind the table, waxing the pendants with skittish thumbs. I smile awkwardly, trying to put her at ease, when another customer arrives, drawing slow, meaningful sips from his Starbucks between interrogations. “Is this sterling silver?” Flustered nod. “You sure?” He nets a chain with two fingers, brandishes a silver-webbed peace sign inches from her face. “You sure?!”

I back off, past the smoking incense bundles and the plump white basketball shoes. Past a tableful of pixelbleary Reggaeton CDs. Past a rack of plum-colored geode hemispheres, those classics among novelty items. Past a woman lecturing a perplexed boot vendor about the range of colors between light brown and tan. At a tentless clearing, I listen to vendors swapping across the aisles summaries of their lives, sales, favorite television episodes, until my knee grinds into something: a cardboard box, one of dozens set on the rocks in a sprawling grid.

There’s something flamboyantly attractive about the Grandma’s-attic-like layout of this little field of treasures. To the left lie pudgy extension cords, “Skerpie” permanent markers, embroidered toilet seats,

Snuggies for Dogs; to the right, Spongebob thermoses and Pokémon cards. An ogler of Batman figurines rejoices: “Mommy! I could afford anything here!” The steepest price I can see is $7, leveled by a well-deserving box of red lacquered Buddha statues.

Next door, a vendor greets me in rapid Chinese. I recognize “Miss” and “look” from my intro class and, in a sort of studious ecstasy, batter him with prepackaged phrases: Do you give bargains?, What time is it?, Are you hungry?, and, ultimately, the graceful concession to the limits of my proficiency: Sorry, I must go now.

At my final stop, I spy a cream-colored knit cap, the kind-of-doofy type with braids lolling off the sides, and, at once, I understand that it will be mine — the only question, now, is how much I’ll pay for it. I guide the fabric over my ponytail and crack a joke about my big head; the vendor hears “the hat’s too big” and launches an earnest defense of his product. I decide not to correct him, instead setting down the cap and pawing through a pile of different designs. Finally I retrieve the first one and gaze at it punishingly, muttering something about one-size-should-fit-all before asking the vendor how much. He eyes me hopefully, fanning three fingers.

Frowning, I ask, “How do you feel about two?” He peeks at his wife; they nod vigorously.

After the purchase, we can both exhale. We’ve performed all the strutting steps in an elaborate game, and now we can shake hands, bid each other a great day and great business.

In the afterglow of my bargaining success, I head to the gate and peer over my shoulder at a market that still seems endless. I don’t mind — maybe after next Saturday, it’ll start looking smaller.

— Kate Huh

kate huh / CONTRIBUTING photographer

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Crit A different kind of activism D

I

by MOLLY HENSLEY-CLANCY

am lying.

I’ve been told that normally, I’m not very good at it — my right eye twitches, and the corners of my mouth turn up into a faint smile. Sometimes I stutter or lose track of my story. But at this particular kind of lying, I’m what you might call an expert. In fact, I’ve been practicing all summer.

So when Lauren asks me if I have a boyfriend in college, the lie slips easily out of my mouth.

“Yes.” Lauren, one of my coworkers at a summer camp in rural Minnesota, is not the first person to ask me if I have a boyfriend. Almost everybody at YMCA Camp Kici Yapi has heard about Mark, a sophomore from Los Angeles whom I’ve been dating for seven months now. I’ve told them about his summer in China and that he’s a cognitive science major. I’ve even boasted, once or twice, about his GPA. Perhaps the lie comes so effortlessly because it’s not entirely untrue: I have been dating somebody at Yale who fits Mark’s description in almost every way. Every way, that is, except for one minor detail. Mark is actually Miriam.

Lauren and I are sitting at the edge of Camp Kici Yapi’s little swimming pool, watching as screaming five-to-twelve-yearolds take running leaps into the glistening cerulean water. An eighth-grader paid to help me wrangle my group, Lauren has stringy hair dyed black and wears Vans decorated with skulls and crossbones. Unlike the other savagely hormonal junior counselors at camp, she’s unusually quiet and thoughtful. We know each other pretty well by now, so I can’t quite explain why I don’t just say, No, I have a girlfriend.

I’ve never been the kind of person who makes any special effort to come out of the closet. Most people at Yale don’t even find out I’m gay until I accidentally make a joke about it or my girlfriend comes into my room to say goodnight after rehearsal. Now, in rural Minnesota — where most people I encounter have never met somebody who’s gay — I’ve become the kind of person who makes a special effort to hide my sexuality. I’m just not sure how people would react.

The lifeguards blow their whistles, and it’s time for us to collect our sopping, crabby group of six-year-olds, reapply sunscreen and bug spray, and head back into the woods. As we wait for the kids to change, I make small talk with Lauren about her own friends and family. She asks forlornly, “Have I ever told you I have two moms?” My stomach twists. “It

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sucks. Everybody here’s so dumb about it. They make these jokes. They’ve, like, never met anybody who’s gay before, so they think they’re all…you know.”

Before I can respond, Kevin pokes his head out of the locker room. “Lauren, I can’t find my pants,” he says. She goes inside to help him look, and I’m left marooned on the pool deck.

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he thought that simply being honest about myself could have changed someone’s life consumes me.

Lauren wouldn’t have judged me if I’d told her the truth. In fact, I think, she probably would have appreciated hearing that I was gay, too. It might have made her feel less alone. There have been countless similar moments: times that summer when I could have told those same people who tease Lauren about my own wonderful girlfriend. There have been simpler moments, too, like the time in Central Park when Miriam and I decided not to hold hands because it was too uncomfortable in a public place, or the time at the train station before break when, feeling the other passengers watching us, I gave her a hug instead of a kiss.

We’ve reached a point in the gay rights movement where our last remaining battles, are, for the most part, battles against ignorance and isolation. Gay teenagers commit suicide because their classmates bully them, and they feel alone; more than half of all Americans cling to the belief that homosexuality is an immoral choice. Even the last vestiges of legal discrimination, such as the prohibition of gay marriage, are rooted in ignorance and fear; the Proposition 8 campaign ran on a strikingly successful platform that exploited peoples’ fears about their children being “turned gay.” Bloggers on the National Organization for Marriage website have written extensively on the supposed link between homosexuality, pedophilia, and prostitution as part of their anti-gay marriage campaign. Sometimes, we look to big, sweeping legal decisions or protests to counter these prejudices. We assume that people are activists only if they take part in such mass movements.

I don’t go to gay pride parades, or protests, or marches.

I’m self-conscious, intensely private. And I used to feel a bit guilty because of it. I’ve been troubled because, although I care passionately about equality, I’ve often felt I simply don’t have the personality to be an activist.

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

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KAT OSHMAN / STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

But those moments where I passed up the chance to tell people the truth about myself — the chance to help a teenage girl feel less isolated, to combat the ignorance of the people who taunted her, to give people in Central Park a glance at a happy, healthy gay relationship — have made me think of a different kind of activism.

This November, Pope Benedict XVI traveled to Spain to speak out against gay marriage laws. Within the church’s walls, the Pope called homosexuals “intrinsically disordered.”

Outside, 200 gays and lesbians made out with each other in a mass “kiss-in.” I wonder, sometimes, when I consider the stereotypes and lack of understanding that fuel the comments of the Pope and his supporters, what things like this accomplish. The answer, I think, is very little. The kissin did not change anybody’s mind; in fact, for those many people who believe that gays and lesbians are promiscuous, or hate religion, it probably only served to further solidify their assumptions. It did not demonstrate love, or compassion, but espoused — as many protests do — only contempt and confrontation. This is the “activism” that is so heavily promoted in the gay community, the kind I once felt guilty for not participating in.

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I’ve realized, through my missed chance with Lauren, that what truly creates change is much smaller in scale, and less glamorous. When a son, or niece, or best friend comes out, people may not change their minds about homosexuality being a choice. Instead, their compassion, and their love, transcend their prejudices. When they see gay people picnicking in the park, or dropping their children off at school, they may slowly begin to think of our love as being equally normal, as well as equally extraordinary. When they learn that a coworker or friend or classmate is gay, they may not feel like they are quite as alone or helpless.

As a community, we do ourselves a disservice when we assume the only way to fight for gay rights is by standing outside with a sign, or dancing on a float in the street — or kissing strangers in front of a church. We discount the importance of individuals. Sometimes, we pass up the chance to truly effect change.

That day at summer camp, I missed my chance to be an activist. I’m not going to make that mistake again. A few weeks later, I staged my own kind of kiss-in. Standing on a busy subway platform, I took my girlfriend’s hand, and I told her I love her. We kissed goodbye. I waved as the train pulled away.

16 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z Homeless to Homeowner.

Having been homeless for a few months after getting out of prison in 1998, Pete bought this house at 158 Pearl Ave. in 2005.

“I’m a guy who had four armed robberies, did two back-to-back prison bids, had a drinking problem, did a little drugs, and am living today as a homeowner, with a full pardon, working for the state of Connecticut, clean and sober for multiple years. I went from being homeless to a homeowner by never giving up. It’s unbelievable. I am the American dream.”

– Pete homeless to homeowner PHOTO ESSAY BY Joe BREEN Dolores Caul. Pete’s mother in her room at a senior home on 60 Warren Street where Pete tried to stay when he got out of prison. He was forced to leave and became homeless. Since this picture was taken on April 7th, 2010, an ill Dolores has been in and out of the hospital. “Pete is the youngest of my three sons and the first to own a home. I can go downtown, I can go anywhere, and people say, ‘You’re Pete Cox’s mom!’ I don’t know what changed him; I hope it was triggered by my prayers.” – Dolores

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 17 Respect Dolores. As a teenager Pete lived two separate lives, one on the street and the other at home.

His mother had no idea he was robbing banks. “We have a special unique bond that comes from respect. I never brung it home. I never did.” – Pete

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n New Haven, at any point in time, 700 people are homeless.

Peter Cox was once one of those 700, bearing a common story: teenage alcoholic with dreams of being a gangster, young black male behind bars, absent father, and homeless on the streets of New Haven. But today, Pete is an exception. He is a hardworking, clean, and sober. He is a family man and a homeowner. His tale is one of imperfection, and one of hope.

Pete was born in 1963 into a good family in New Haven. His parents worked steady jobs but divorced when he was young. Resentful of the way his father mistreated his mother, Pete rebelled. By the time he was in his teens, Pete had an alcohol problem. He used liquor as a way to escape from home and enter the fantasy of the streets, where he saw dealers driving big cars without working an honest day. He wanted to be like them, wanted to be the Scarface of his generation. In order to support his drinking and fulfill his gangster ambitions, Pete turned to robbing stores and banks.

In 1982, a 19-year-old Pete was arrested for robbery in New Haven and sentenced to five years in prison.

After serving his time, Pete moved to Georgia to live with his brother and stay out of the trouble New Haven brewed for him. But within a year of being released from behind bars, he was arrested again for larceny. He got into altercations in the Georgia prison that led to his sentence being extended to 10 years, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, where he was locked up for 23 hours per day. Pete says that around year five or six of his time in the Georgia prison, he realized he needed to make a change. “Prison saved me in more ways then one,” he says. “If I had not gotten incarcerated, I don’t think I’d be the person I am today. I don’t think I’d even be alive.

Prison redemption is for real.”

When Pete got out of prison in 1998, at age 35, he didn’t know how to work a microwave or a cell phone. He returned to New Haven and set about the struggle to pull his life together.

Like many recently released prisoners trying to reintegrate into society, Pete became homeless. But he stayed sober and leaned on his godfather, mother, and friends for support. He admits, “I’m here because of other people.”

Today, Pete lives a life that is “not

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

about dollars or cents.” He has money in the bank he used to rob. He works with the homeless as a case manager for the South Central Behavioral Health Network (SCBH) and mans the third watch night shift at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. He often works sixteen-hour days and for years went unpaid at SCBH — his work was simply his way of giving back.

For Pete, every day is a bonus: “I’m 46 years old, and I’m still here. Statistically I’m not supposed to be here. It’s a God-given gift. And if I fall short of being perfect, oh well. Because that’s God’s job — being perfect. I’m glad that I fall short. Lets me know that I’m human.”

Pete usually refuses to be interviewed. He does not want any fame for his story — that’s not him. Therefore, I am even more grateful he has allowed me to enter his life, meet his mother and wife, and spend time in his home. I believe he has let me in because he trusts me to understand his story and share it with others in a meaningful way. The best I can do is to show his life as it is. Flawed and inspirational.

18 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z 455 Howard Ave. Though Pete did not enjoy the time he spent sleeping in abandoned buildings like this one, he recognizes his homeless days as an important passage in his life story. “It helped me — helped me build character and humble myself.

I’ll never forget where I came from.”– Pete

Corey. Pete got this tattoo in honor of his son, Corey, when Corey was just a year old. Pete was in prison until his son turned 16. Now 28, Corey lives in New Haven and maintains a close relationship with Pete. “He meant the world to me, but I lost a lot of years with him.” – Pete

Walking Away. After a few months of staying in abandoned buildings, Pete found himself more stable shelter at a local sober house. “I knew there was something better. I had more to give. Who would want to live this life?” – Pete

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv 19 Roger. Pete hits the streets almost every day to offer homeless people help finding services and housing.

Pete came across Roger, age 57, on the New Haven Green.

Roger asked Pete to read to him from the Bible. Pete obliged with a few verses after asking Roger how he was doing and where he was eating and sleeping. “When I came home I took an ounce of hope and an ounce of faith and I bagged that up, man, and I’ve been selling the same package, man, for twelve years now.” – Pete

Gayle Cox. Pete has known his wife Gayle since 1998 when Gayle, working at a temporary employment agency, gave Pete his first job.

“One day she called and asked, ‘Hey, do you want to hang out?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I would love to take you out, but I can’t afford to take you to no restaurant.’ So I took her to Dairy Queen and bought her a slush and we’ve been kind of running ever since then. She’s been a great influence in my life. I don’t think I could’ve accomplished any of the things without her support, humbleness and more than all, her love.” – Pete

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Library Steps Advocacy. Pete and his boss, Ed Mattison, talk to homeless people on the steps of the New Haven Public Library on April 19th, 2010 about what the homeless are doing since the Cedar St. Overflow Shelter closed on April 12th, 18 days earlier than expected. “You guys are the voices now, there are no more politicians now. I once was homeless too, man, that’s why I’m out here, why I’m not going nowhere.” – Pete

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Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

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O Christmas Tree

by Jialu Chen

M

y freshman year of college, a friend of mine installed a real Christmas tree in his dorm. He and his roommates used it as the centerpiece of a Christmas-themed party complete with rainbow-colored Christmas lights duct taped to the walls and vodka-spiked eggnog in red plastic bowls. He hoped, I believe, that this elaborate stunt would attract women. It did, in fact, attract at least one woman: me.

This Christmas tree enthralled me. I came and studied in his room regularly just to inhale its woody scent and run my fingers along its soft, slippery needles.

When I was growing up, my Chinese immigrant family wholeheartedly embraced American holidays with a willingness to practice any and every supposedly American tradition. On Thanksgiving, our turkey was stuffed with rice and covered with bacon. (Americans love bacon, right?)

Fourth of July consisted of Korean-style barbeque ribs and backyard Chinatown fireworks. (Fire hazard be damned.)

But we always put up a plastic Christmas tree instead of a real one because even we didn’t believe that Americans put trees in their houses.

But they do. Americans purchased 31.3 million Christmas trees my freshman year, 2007, spending $1.3 billion. German immigrants brought the custom over in the early 19th century, and by 1930, nearly all American children had a tree at home. Americans were the first to supersize Christmas trees from small four-foot table-top centerpieces to great floor-to-ceiling trees of eight, ten — or more — feet.

photos by Alison Vivinetto 1947 at the age of 11 as a prize for winning a poultry contest sponsored by 4-H, a national student farmer’s association.

He has raised and sold Christmas trees every year since his first harvest, even when he had to leave the bulk of the work to his parents while completing an undergraduate degree at Wesleyan and a Ph.D. in Botany at Yale.

I meet Richard at his farm a few days after Thanksgiving, when Christmas trees usually go on sale, in the cozy dining room of his house, which is nestled right next to the farm.

He leans back nonchalantly against a wooden chair and sips a bottle of Sanders beer. Every once in a while he stops to smile encouragingly at me.

Richard attributes his good spirits to the nature of his customers. “Can you think of any other business where the customers are as upbeat or happy? If it’s snowing a bit, all the better,” he says. He knows many of the families who come year after year to pick out their Christmas trees — some for up to four generations. As for his personal preferences, “I’m now happy with a Charlie Brown Trees,” he says, referring to the misfit trees that nobody wants but still deserve to be loved.

Richard’s son Burton Jaynes GRD ’88 leads me on a walk through the farm. Burton also earned a Ph.D. from Yale (in Chemistry) and worked for 19 years at Pfizer; he had achieved a management position there before deciding to return to his roots at the farm four years ago.

Burton’s voice is gentle but deliberate, like the sound of footsteps upon damp, fallen leaves. His bright hazel eyes

We always put up a plastic Christmas tree instead of a real one because even we didn't believe that Americans put trees in their houses.

This affinity for Christmas trees quickly depleted the supply of wild trees available. To feed some of this frenzied demand, W.V. McGalliard, a farmer from Mercer County, N.J., established the first Christmas tree farm in 1901, planting 25,000 Norway Spruce saplings.

The story of Broken Arrow Nursery, a 24-acre Christmas tree farm perched on the rolling slopes of Mount Carmel in Hamden, CT, also began with Norway Spruce — specifically with the 250 saplings Richard Jaynes GRD ’61 received in Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

sparkle behind rim-less glasses as he patiently explains how to identify different species of trees. The Blue Spruce, which have a blue-green tint, are stiff and sharp; the stiffness makes them good for hanging ornaments. “When you touch a Blue Spruce you’ll know it,” he says.

I reach out and touch a nearby branch. The silvery bluegreen needles poke into my hand like the teeth of a hard, plastic hairbrush.

“Blue Spruce?” I guess.

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“Ah! Very good!” he responds joyously.

Then there are the White Pine, whose needles are long and soft like the bristle of brush-type drumsticks. Burt’s favorite species are the two most fragrant — the Fraser and the Balsam Fir. “They just smell like a Christmas tree,” he says. They’re also Broken Arrow’s biggest sellers.

Burton has vivid memories of tending to this land as a boy, when he would help his father clear it and plant trees.

Like his father, his favorite part of the business is this season, when families come out to pick their trees in time for Christmas. “People are generous in words and spirit,” he says.

He gets to know the preferences of his regular customers.

“There’s somebody who comes every year to get a really big White Pine,” he says. “Every year when I prune the White Pine, I think of him, this man in my mind.” He pauses, then remembers, “he was just in yesterday.”

Today, two of Broken Arrow’s other regular customers, Maria and Michael Madonick, have brought their two children, four-and-a-half-year-old Gina and two-and-ahalf-year-old Michael, to the farm. “They probably haven’t gotten coloring books yet,” Burton mutters to himself and, in an instant, reappears with two books titled “Welcome to our Christmas Tree Farm.” The Madonicks moved to North Haven in December five years ago. Though their

boxes were still unpacked, they came here for a tree and have been coming back ever since. Each year, their tree is particularly large — a 10-footer. They have more than one occasion to celebrate. “Did you tell her that your birthday is on Christmas?” Michael says to Maria, who blushes.

After the Madonicks leave, Burton and I continue on a path toward a ridge high on the Mount Carmel. When we reach the ridge, a gorgeous panorama of Connecticut autumn suddenly reveals itself to me. On the drive to Broken Arrow Nursery, dappled woods and clapboard houses hid the gradual ascent up Mount Carmel. But here with Burton, I can see the top of Sleeping Giant Ridge and West Rock in the distance and other hills behind them cloaked in withering yellow grass and bare sandy brown trees. The spry greenness of the Christmas trees around me poses a stark contrast to the dead and dying fall.

Suddenly, I badly want a Christmas tree of my own. I yearn to once again run my fingers along slippery needles and inhale the scent of pine. I picture looking up at the tree from my laptop after a particularly difficult stretch of studying and finding peace and joy from its presence. Yet this image seems hollow; the Christmas tree seems out of place. In my solitary dorm room, it’s missing the family to surround it, without which no Christmas tree would be real.

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yale entrepreneurs: start up, drop out? by edmund downie

i

t’s May 2009, and Leon Noel has an idea. As a Yale junior studying biological anthropology, he’s spent much time standing outside Commons in vain attempts to get people to spit in cups for his research studies. He’s gone as far as bribing people with money or Gatorade, but he still can’t draw enough participants. His struggles inspire him to consider whether the process of recruiting participants might be easier handled online. He’s thinking of some sort of website where researchers can post their studies and potential participants can select the ones that interest them.

news: a well-known Boston incubator called TechStars has accepted them for a three-month stay. Trung finally relents, and, two months before graduation, they take a leave of absence from Yale and move to Boston.

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eon Noel didn’t come to Yale expecting he’d leave before graduation. For much of his time in college, he was considering graduate school and a career in academia. “If you had asked me if I was going to drop out,” he says, “I would have laughed in your face.” Now, he doesn’t plan on

Over the summer, Noel teams up with classmate and rising senior Harley Trung to build SocialSci, a website intended to solve the problems Noel faced as a researcher. Before they’ve even mentioned the site to anyone, search engines are bringing them hits. They start to wonder whether SocialSci’s potential might be greater than they had imagined.

In September, they’ve returned to school but are devoting weekends to SocialSci, and Noel finds himself more and more drawn to the project. By December, he’s disengaged from school, ignoring homework and skipping class to work on the website. He wants to drop out, but Trung won’t do it. For the next few months, they commit even more time to the project, developing it into a platform for researchers administering academic surveys. They also submit applications to a handful of startup incubators, programs that provide office space, funding, advising, and networking connections for young entrepreneurs. March brings good Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

coming back for several years.

The decision to leave college early puts Noel in the company of some of the world’s most successful innovators.

Microsoft, Apple, Twitter — all were founded by college dropouts. Tumblr, acclaimed as the next big blogging platform, was founded by a high school dropout. And, of course, there’s Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s dropout story recast by Hollywood in The Social Network this fall. Since its premiere on October 1, the movie has drawn $89 million domestically at the box office, as well as serious Oscar talk.

It’s not just The Social Network that is upping this fall’s buzz around dropout entrepreneurs. In October, Silicon Valley financier and Facebook investor Peter Thiel announced the creation of the Thiel Fellowship, awarded to 20 budding entrepreneurs under the age of 20. Propose a plan for a business that he likes, and you’ll get $100,000 from Thiel to start your company, as well as advice and support

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from his team — as long as you drop out of school, that is. Thiel promotes his fellowship as a way to address deficiencies in the American education system, which, he claims, isn’t turning out the innovators we need to make this country great.

As lofty as Thiel’s goals are, however, most student entrepreneurs are dealing with a far more prosaic problem: time.

In the summer before his senior year, Brad Hargreaves ’08 joined three Yale classmates and one Columbia student to create GoCrossCampus (GXC), an online war game staged on college campuses. Its success prompted widespread interest from investors, turning Hargreaves’ senior year into something of a circus. “Essentially, I was not a student,” he says. “I’d go to one class and leave for New York, San Francisco, Boston for meetings and fundraising events. I’d schedule casual dinner with my friends a couple weeks in advance.”

It’s not just the frequent flyers who are feeling the time crunch.

Max Uhlenhuth ’12 has founded two companies in his three years at Yale and is also president of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, a networking organization for student and alumni entrepreneurs. Uhlenhuth minimizes

his academic workload to devote as much time as he can to his current venture, a forest-mapping project called Silvia Terra. Even with his limited coursework, he relies on the techniques of productivity guru David Allen to keep himself afloat. “My Bible is Getting Things Done,” he admits, referring to Allen’s best-known book on time management.

Faced with these compromises between school and business, some student entrepreneurs feel compelled to jettison the former and focus entirely on the latter. For students in this situation, Yale College offers a leave of absence of one or two terms; after the completion of the leave of absence, they do not need to reapply to return.

Bob Casey ’11 and Rich Littlehale ’10 took advantage of this policy to work on their electronics recycling company YouRenew. Now back at Yale, Casey has scaled back on his responsibilities with the company to focus on his senior year, though he still has days where he can’t make it to class.

Sometimes, however, two terms isn’t enough. At that point, the only option left is formal withdrawal — dropping out. Formal withdrawal does not bar one from returning; readmission requires two courses at a college or university with grades of A or B and approval from the Committee on Readmission, part of the Yale

College Dean’s Office. Still, it’s by far the riskiest option, if only because it exposes the possibility of not coming back. Labor Department studies suggest that dropouts have to contend with decreased salaries and lower job security, not to mention the social stigmas that equate dropping out with failure.

In the last five years, just three undergraduate Yalies have formally dropped out to pursue venture ideas.

Two of these students, who asked to remain anonymous because they worried appearing in the article would jeopardize their business, set up an advertising company. Both spent two years away from school, including one year of formal withdrawal; they returned this fall for their senior year.

Arun Gupta left Yale last winter, after the first semester of his junior year, to develop his company WakeMate, which produces an alarm clock for smartphones that wakes you up only during the optimum points of your sleep cycle. He has yet to return. Noel and Trung both also plan to drop out once their leaves of absence expire.

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evertheless, the dropouts are outliers. Much of Yale’s entrepreneurial community is skittish about the prospect of withdrawal. Casey of YouRenew admits that the idea of dropping out runs through his head every day. At the same, he says, “I can’t advocate completely dropping out for almost Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

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Those who argue against dropping out cite a number of reasons. A Yale education teaches critical thinking skills useful for any pursuit, but especially for entrepreneurial ventures.

Moreover, entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with complex fields like finance, accounting, and business law, all fields in which most undergraduates have no experience.

Meanwhile, having a degree can serve as a safety net if — or, more realistically, when — a venture fails. Graduating in

benefit by gaining the capital needed for investment, while the investors gain a stake in the companies, with the hope that the company’s success will bring them a good return.

In these situations, investors expect the students to stay out of school so that they are fully committed to the success of the venture. Indeed, Noel says withdrawal was an essential step for SocialSci in raising capital. “Who in their right mind gives $500,000 to a 21-year-old unless they really think they’re committed to the project and really think they have a good idea?” he says, laughing. “So how do I show I’m committed to the project? I drop out of the best university in the world.” Gupta also worried that if he didn’t commit fulltime, someone else would beat him to the product.

Gupta, Noel, and Trung produced businesses with potential, and their success forced them to face difficult

"who in their right mind gives $500,000 to a 21-year-old unless they think they’re committed to the project? so how do i show i’m committed to the project? i drop out of the best university in the world" 2008 allowed Hargreaves and two of his partners at GXC to devote themselves full-time to the company. Within a year, it had flamed out.

To be fair, all of the recent dropouts plan to get their degrees. The advertising company founders have already returned for senior year, and Gupta of WakeMate also expects to come back, albeit after a few years. Though Noel and Trung plan to formally withdraw to continue working on SocialSci, like Gupta, they anticipate finishing their degrees.

At the same time, leaving school marked the importance of these companies to their founders. Before SocialSci, Noel had already received what he calls “the entrepreneurial kick in the butt,” having started a nonprofit website called List Full of Hope, a Craigslist for charitable giving. SocialSci played on those interests. Gupta, for his part, says he felt “lost” and “directionless” at Yale before WakeMate. In addition, the balance between schoolwork and WakeMate became unmanageable. “I wasn’t doing anything properly,” he recalls.

Once Gupta, Noel, and Trung had left Yale temporarily, the evolution and growth of each company made formal withdrawal a necessity. SocialSci and WakeMate have both raised substantial amounts of capital from outside investors, usually referred to as venture capitalists. The companies Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

decisions about their priorities. What’s important here is not so much the nature of their final choice, then, as the fact that all three, as serious student entrepreneurs, had to make it. Any school with a strong entrepreneurial climate will produce students who face this decision, and it’s foolish to expect that all of them will opt against formal withdrawal.

The question becomes, then, what sort of entrepreneurial environment Yale wants for itself.

i

n 2007, Yale established the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), which marked a major transformation in the university’s relationship with its entrepreneurs. Sitting atop Ashley’s Ice Cream on York Street, YEI serves as the primary hub for entrepreneurs on campus, both graduate and undergraduate. Students with venture ideas can meet the YEI staff for advice and planning. Those whose projects come to fruition can rent office space and gain access to advisers, lawyers, and investors to help them build their company. In addition, YEI’s Summer Fellowship program accepts ten Yale student startups for an entrepreneurial boot camp. YEI even has its own incubator program, one of the first of its kind at an American university.

The creation of YEI filled a void in the Yale entrepreneurial community by providing a setup for serious entrepreneurs

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d wakemate to pursue their businesses. Before YEI, the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES) served as the primary campus organization for entrepreneurs. At its height, it offered connections to alumni and other students, published a magazine, and ran business plan competitions which gave out $50,000 each year to budding entrepreneurs

recycling for hundreds of companies nationwide. Other notable YEI ventures include Hargreaves’ GoCrossCampus, whose success earned coverage in The New York Times, and GSM Nation, an online retailer of unlocked cellphones that hopes to double its workforce by the end of the year. “If you’re a kid who’s 19 years old and has a good

espite its successes, there are some things that YEI can’t change about entrepreneurship at Yale.

Most prominent among these is New Haven. Of course, some Yale ventures do well in New Haven. The Blue State outposts on Wall Street and York Street are the third and fourth locations for the growing coffeehouse, which started in Providence back in 2006.

But most Yale undergraduate entrepreneurs are pursuing tech ventures, which aren’t so naturally suited to New Haven. For student entrepreneurs, these sorts of businesses are the easiest to start. For one, they rely on the sorts of technologies more familiar to young people who’ve grown up in a tech-heavy environment than to older professionals. In addition, many early-stage tech startups don’t need much in the way of office space and staff, the funding for which is

meanwhile, having a degree can serve as a safety net if — or, more realistically, when — a venture fails in the Yale community. While YES is student-run, YEI is a university institution, which gives it the resources to support a far wider array of programs.

Just four years after its founding, YEI already boasts a number of major student ventures that trace their origins to its offices. Casey and Gupta grew serious about their businesses as 2008 Summer Fellows and continued to work with YEI after the summer’s completion. Today, both are leading impressive companies.

Gupta’s WakeMate was accepted last year to the be-all and end-all of incubators, Y Combinator, and has been receiving press from major tech review websites like TechCrunch and Macworld.

Casey’s YouRenew handles electronics

idea,” says GSM Nation Founder Ahmed Khattak ’09, “then I bet that [YEI Director] Jim Boyle can help you more than Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, among recent Yale undergraduate ventures, only a handful has not ended up working with YEI. Andrew Ruben ’11 and his father founded Blue State Coffee while Ruben was a high school student.

Today, Ruben goes to YEI occasionally to chat with the staff, but his business had passed the startup stage by the time he came to Yale. Noel and Trung approached YEI this past February about SocialSci, but, by March, they had left campus.

rarely available to students without entrepreneurial track records. By and large, entrepreneurs agree that the best places for tech startups are Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York; New Haven hardly merits a mention.

SocialSci left New Haven for Boston

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and TechStars, while WakeMate headed to Silicon Valley after being accepted to Y Combinator.

Staying in New Haven also poses other problems. Gupta found it difficult to raise capital in New Haven for WakeMate. “East Coast venture capitalists are very risk-averse,” he says. “It was impossible to raise any money when we were there.” Finding personnel can also be a challenge for tech companies. Sean Mehra ’08 saw these problems firsthand as one of the five founders of GoCrossCampus.

“The pain point for most web startups in New Haven is, I can’t find engineers to build my product,” he says.

As a result, in nurturing entrepreneurs, Yale stands at a disadvantage compared to schools like Stanford, whose entrepreneurs benefit immensely from the school’s location in Silicon Valley. At Stanford, entrepreneurship is king. BASES, the undergraduate entrepreneurship club, is the largest organization on campus, and the university stages its own Entrepreneurship Week, with speakers like America Online co-founder Steve Case and even MC Hammer. Serial entrepreneur Tom Currier, Stanford ’13, founded his first business at the age of 9 and is now developing Black Swan Solar, a promising clean energy venture. “I’ve been dreaming about going to Stanford since I was a little kid,” he says. “Stanford is by far the most accommodating [school] to entrepreneurs.”

On the other hand, a good location doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good on-campus community.

Though

Harvard benefits from its location among a glut of universities in Boston, entrepreneurs on campus “are largely a fragmented community,” Stephen Maheshwary, Harvard ’12, wrote in an e-mail. He is the co-founder of an online language-learning company called NaviTOUR. While entrepreneurs at Yale praise YEI for building cohesion, Maheshwary reports a different picture at Harvard: “organizations don’t talk to each other, and there is no fluid movement of ideas between startups.”

A number of factors suggest

graduation. Most prominent among these is Sean Glass ’03, who, as an undergraduate, joined two classmates to found HigherOne, a financial aid disbursement company for colleges.

Today, HigherOne handles financial aid for more than 650 colleges nationwide.

Several YEI alums, including Casey and Khattak, also remain in New Haven.

While a few companies don’t make for an entrepreneurial hub, they do form a foundation for future growth.

At a certain point, however, debate about New Haven is pointless.

according to SOM professor Barry Nalebuff, "it is a terrible waste for [dropouts] to be spending time screwing on business ideas and missing the opportunities at Yale" promise for change in the New Haven entrepreneurial environment. Cheap real estate minimizes costs for office space, an important factor for student startups that need to expand. New Haven’s location between New York and Boston means that local ventures can, to a limited extent, take advantage of the thriving entrepreneurial communities of both cities. Proximity to Yale helps, too. Indeed, a handful of Yale entrepreneurs with tech businesses have stayed in New Haven after

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Regardless of whether the city improves, Yale isn’t moving. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other steps Yale could take toward making entrepreneurship an easier pursuit. On this question, it seems that everyone’s got a suggestion. Uhlenhuth of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society wishes he saw more undergraduates with computer science skills. “If Yale wants to be serious about startups,” he says, “[it] need[s] to start letting in more technical people.” Mehra of GCX points

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to the alumni network as an underused source of support for entrepreneurship. He’s currently a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he’s been impressed by how the Stanford entrepreneurial community taps into its alumni network. For Yale, he envisions an entrepreneurship endowment to which alumni could make donations

BASES has courted controversy with the Stanford faculty by inviting Peter Thiel to speak in late November. Max Marmer, Stanford ’14, is considering an application for the Thiel Fellowship. “I was considering dropping out before I even got in,” he explains. “I knew the University’s ‘product’ was increasingly irrelevant for the 21st century.” Most Yale

"if you're a kid who's 19 years old and has a good idea, then I bet that [YEI Director] Jim Boyle can help you more than Peter Thiel" specifically marked for the cause of entrepreneurship.

One of the most intriguing suggestions involves the leave of absence policy. YEI Director Jim Boyle has suggested to the Yale College administration that it allow a four-term leave of absence for YEI entrepreneurs. “Yale parents are less likely to feel comfortable with taking more than a year off because it’s not part of accepted Yale policy,” he explains.

Whether or not Yale takes up any of these suggestions, the school’s approach to entrepreneurship will undoubtedly play a large role in determining the sort of institution it evolves into over the next few years. Over at Stanford, Tom Currier has 10 companies under his belt. His latest venture promises to make solar cheaper than coal, and he’s already lured an industry veteran to serve as his CEO. Meanwhile,

entrepreneurs don’t know the Thiel Fellowship exists.

O

ver in Boston, Leon Noel is flying high. Since March, SocialSci has expanded to 26 universities on four continents, and the participant pool is growing daily.

He and Trung also raised $500,000 in funding from venture capitalists. Still, the degree lingers in the back of Noel’s mind. “I’m the first person in my family to go to college,” he explains. “Having that piece of paper means a lot to my family members.” In working outside of YEI, Noel never got a chance to engage closely with the students shaping Yale’s entrepreneurial community for today and beyond. When he returns, he’ll be able to see the work they’ve wrought. bac bac bac

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P O K E R F

C E

Poker is America’s new favorite pastime, and many Yalies have joined in on the game. Eliana Dockterman explores the world of chips and cheats from the inside to see if she has what it takes — whether it be skill or luck — to become Yale’s next great poker star.

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Chris Peak / photography editor

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I

t is November 6, about an hour into the Partouche Poker Tour Grand Final Tournament in Cannes, France. Of the 764 contestants who each paid 8,500 Euro to enter, eight surviving players sit around the rim of the green felt table.

At stake is a purse of 1.3 million Euro. The table is surrounded by stands to accommodate a mass of eager poker fans, but I can only hear the endless click-click of chips being shuffled by the players as I watch the game live streaming over the Internet. My eyes are on the only woman seated at the table: an American with the short brown hair, broad shoulders, and a piercing gaze.

All photos: emilie foyer / staff photographer

Vanessa Selbst ’05 LAW ’12 has taken the year off from Yale Law to pursue her poker career. A week before the tournament, sitting in New Haven, Selbst felt the pressure of the upcoming game. “I’ve never played at a final table so big before,” she said.

But now, she stares coolly at her opponent, a Frenchman who has just “gone all in.” The other six finalists have played it safe and folded for this hand. “She’s looking straight through him,” one of the commentator quips. “She has x-ray vision.”

Selbst calls.

The game is Texas Hold’em, so each player began with two “pocket cards” dealt facedown only to them. Now that the players have made their bets, the dealer flips over three cards, “the flop,” which act as communal cards for the entire table.

The two players splay their cards: two tens for Selbst, a king and a queen for the Frenchman. The pair of queens made from his pocket queen and the queen in the flop would beat Selbst’s pair of tens if the hand ended at five cards. But the dealer will throw out two more communal cards.

A ten. Selbst now holds three of a kind. Her countenance remains static as the dealer spins the final card across the felt.

The Frenchman drops his head as applause erupts from Americans in the stands. Selbst does not attempt to hide her smirk of triumph as she rakes in the pot. One down, six to go.

I

n the 1860s, Edmond Hoyle published a popular series of books on America’s favorite pastimes. Of poker, he wrote: “Success in playing…depends rather upon luck and energy than skill. It is emphatically a game of chance.” As I watch the dejected Frenchman leave the table, I cannot shake the thought that Selbst got lucky. After all, she had no control over the cards she was dealt. I’ve always thought of poker as a form of gambling, a product of luck. This impression comes mainly from movies where cowboys deal out hands in a smoke-filled room as they sip whisky. And so, although the idea of raking in a massive pile of chips has always held a certain allure, I have always avoided poker, fearing I might lose at the turn of a card.

When I later learn that Selbst has won the entire Partouche tournament, I cannot help but wonder how she has gotten so lucky. This 1.3 million Euro win has launched her into the highest echelon of poker players. I approach her win with naïve skepticism: this tournament seems to verify that Vanesssa is a skilled poker player, but what hand will she be dealt at her next tournament? Is poker a game of chance or skill? Seeking an answer, I decide to delve into the poker world, trying my hand at the game myself.

S

elbst first started playing poker as an undergraduate in Ezra Stiles. She participated in the infamous Trumbull Game, which took place in the basement of Trumbull College for several years and produced a slew

of professional and Internet poker players, including Selbst, Alex Jacob ’06, and Ariel Schneller ’06. Selbst, who joined the Trumbull game in her junior year, became so obsessed with poker that, by the second semester of her senior year, she began to neglect her three courses — one of which she was taking Credit/D/Fail. She played at Trumbull incessantly and even ventured out to Foxwoods Casino once or twice every week.

At the end of the semester, Selbst discovered she was earning a distressing “D” in her Credit/D/Fail class. In order to earn

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poker hands­: from best to worst Royal Flush: five cards in a row and of entirely one suit, with the ace as the highest card Straight Flush: five cards in a row of entirely one suit Four-of-a-Kind (Quads): four cards of the same rank Full House (Full Boat, Boat): three-of-a-kind and a pair Flush: five cards of the same suit Straight (Run): five cards in a row Three-of-a-Kind (Trips, Set, Triplets): three cards of the same rank Two Pair: two cards of the same rank and another two cards of the same rank One Pair: two cards of the same rank High Card: when you don’t have any of the above, your highest card determines your hand

terminology All in: having all your chips in the pot; the act of betting all of your remaining chips is “going all in” Blinds: mandatory bets made by the player to the left of the dealer (the small blind) and the player sitting

two to the left (the big blind, usually twice the size of the small blind) Board: cards dealt face up in the middle of the table for use by all players Button: disk that rotates clockwise and indicates which player is the dealer Check: passing when it is your bet and no one else has made a bet in that round Check-raise: to check when it’s your turn to bet, then increasing the bet after someone else bets Cowboy: a king Flat-call: to call when a raise is expected The Flop: the first three community cards, exposed simultaneously Marked Card: a card that is tampered with, or “marked,” on the back so a cheating player can identify it Mechanic: a card cheat who specializes in sleight-of-hand manipulation of the cards The Nuts: an unbeatable hand Pocket: the two cards dealt face down to each player, also known as “hole cards” The River: the fifth and final community card, also known as “fifth street” Satellite: a small preliminary tournament in which players can win entry to a major tournament Set: three of a kind Spike: when a card appears unexpectedly on the board, and gives one or many players a big hand Tell: a detectable change in a player’s behavior, verbal or non-verbal, that gives a clue to the player’s hand Texas Hold’em: poker game where each player receives two cards face down, followed first by three

community cards dealt simultaneously in the middle of the table, a fourth community

card, and then a fifth and final community card. Betting follows each round. Players

make the best five-card hand from the seven available cards.

The Turn: the fourth card dealt to the middle of the Board, also known as “fourth street”

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

32 pqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqp n the credit, she had to rewrite her final paper for the course at Myrtle Beach. “It was horrible,” she laughs. “But I attribute it all to poker.”

Selbst has parlayed her college poker success into enough money to pay Yale tuition several times over. Selbst funded her way into the Cannes event by winning the $5,000 Main Event of the Mohegan Sun leg of the PokerStars North American Tour, bringing in $750,000 and earning a sponsorship from PokerStars in April. Her total live tournament winnings now exceed three million dollars.

But Selbst and her classmates are not the first group of Yalies to seriously pursue poker. Matt Matros ’99 has been a major player in the poker world since he graduated from Yale. Recently, Matros won the 2010 World Series of Poker Event 12, earning him $189,870. As of 2010, Matros’ total live tournament winnings exceed $1,400,000. He has made his living not only from playing poker professionally, but also teaching poker, and writing — non-fiction poker works such as The Making of a Poker Player: How an Ivy League Math Geek Learned to Play Championship Poker, as well as fictional stories. After watching Selbst play in France, my own brief foray into playing poker begins in Brooklyn, where Matros volunteers to sit down and teach me the basic rules.

Matros brings out a poker set equipped with heavy casinostyle chips for my lesson, and we quickly move to the game I watched Selbst play in Cannes: Texas Hold’em. Each individual player’s hand is made up of five cards — two pocket cards and three of the five communal cards on the table. These cards can arrange into pairs, triplets, straights, flushes, and full houses.

Betting occurs first after the pocket cards are dealt, then again after the river (or first three communal cards) are dealt, and then again with each proceeding communal card.

After playing a few hands, I push Matros to try to understand how one can make a career out of playing poker. As Matros shuffles the cards, he explains that while the specific cards I am dealt are a matter of chance, it is purely a matter of skill as to how I play my cards. Still, every poker player has stretches of time where he loses — it’s part of the game. “The difference,” Matros explains, “is when you play professionally, hopefully the losses are kind of blips in the radar of the long term.” Once you have established a certain skill set, you will suffer losses, but you will eventually emerge on top.

Matros admits that he did not play a single hand of poker in his first three years at Yale. When he was a kid, first learning how to play, he lost a couple of times and vowed never to play poker again: “I hated losing so much. It wasn’t until I realized that you didn’t have to lose, and I learned how not to lose, that the game became more fun for me.” This revelation occurred senior year when the movie Rounders reminded Matros how much he enjoyed and missed playing poker. Matros was not alone. The arrival of Rounders coincided with the poker boom in the 1990s. Poker players, young and old, cite the movie as the best poker film in existence, with The Cincinnati Kid as a close second.

I think I may be able to trace Matros’ renewed commitment to poker to an oft-quoted line from the movie: “Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?” Matt Damon’s character, Mike McDermott, uses this argument to try to convince his girlfriend that poker cannot be a game of pure luck. Though this line may inspire poker players around the world, the girlfriend remains skeptical, and she and McDermott agree to part ways. She has, after all, already seen him lose his life savings.

E

dward Norton’s character in the movie — a friend of McDermott nicknamed “Worm” who has recently been released from prison and is looking to pay off gambling debts — bypasses the question of risk by cheating at poker. Such a strategy suggests the primacy of luck in the game. The best way to win is to take control of your fortune, rather than submitting to the dealer’s random distribution.

And the history of poker is indeed riddled with cons. For decades, poker was known as “the cheating game,” a phrase coined by Jonathan Harrington Green, a man who made his Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

o pqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqp 33 living as a hustler before “reforming” in order to make his living by lecturing on the evils of gambling. In his presentations, Green would “prove” that all cards in decks were “marked” by guessing the number and suit of any card he drew from a newly-opened deck. But, in fact, his lectures were hoaxes themselves, as he was using a hidden mirror to identify the cards’ faces.

Green, despite being a fraud, was correct. Cheating was prevalent in the early days of poker. But unlike what Green suggests, cheating in poker tends to depend not upon marked cards, but upon the dealer: the man who controls what is dealt can have, if he chooses, a decisive edge over his tablemates.

Often, swindles in poker involve a team of cheaters who depend on the “mechanic,” a card sharp who nimbly and stealthily sequences the deck in his favor while shuffling and cutting the cards.

These hoaxes recall life on the Mississippi River boats of the mid-19th century. Even today, in the age of casinos filled with security cameras, some players still attempt to cheat. Ali Tekintamgac, one of the final nine players at Selbst’s table in the Partouche Poker Tournament, was disqualified for having used fake reporters to signal to him the other players’ hands.

But Tekintamgac seems to be an exception: now that casinos, which have a vested interest in keeping the game fair, rotate their dealers every 30 minutes, and now that tournament games are televised, cheating has become more difficult. These days, as James McManus, author of Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, tells me, “Pure poker skill in combination with luck is what determines who gets the money at the end of the day, as opposed to the best cheater.”

M

cManus is a journalist-turned-professionalpoker-player who only began to play the game seriously when he was given an assignment by Harper’s Magazine to cover the 2000 World Series of Poker. In order to better understand the game, he used his $4,000 advance from Harper’s to play his way into the tournament, writing as he competed. Although Matros insists that luck had little to do with long-term success, McManus notes that the luck factor in poker does matter, and it is “both beautiful and terrible.” Further, he believes that this luck factor contributes partially to the current popularity of poker.

Poker has indeed become a national phenomenon: the World Series of Poker Main Event, which costs $10,000 to enter, has increased from a field of six in 1971 to 839 in 2003 to 7,319 in 2010. Internet poker played a significant role in the boom; the option to play online is especially popular among young adults who cannot legally gamble in casinos. Today, college students can play online poker 24 hours a day from their dorm rooms and thus are exposed to more hands at an earlier age than any generation preceding them. Televised poker has also contributed to the game’s growing popularity: these days, ESPN covers every major tournament. McManus posits that it Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

is the luck factor in the game that makes it so perfect for television. “The fact that the best players can be beaten by amateurs adds an element of giant killing,” he says. But he agrees with Matros that even though poker can be anyone’s game in the first few hands, “in the long run, the best players will win.”

P

oker games have been prevalent at Yale for some time. When Matros played on campus, he gathered a group of friends interested in participating in tournaments and traveled out to Foxwoods himself half-a-dozen times in his senior year. Today, according to Zak Kaplan ’13, a Branford sophomore, a big game rotates around campus, and the group of about 20 people play up to four times a week. (Anyone interested in joining their game should check out their Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_166237656742805.)

The trouble with poker on campuses, Kaplan tells me, is that its legality is questionable. Here the question of luck or skill comes into play. The controversy has been debated in courtrooms since the days of that old Mississippi riverboat hand, Mark Twain, who in his short story “Science vs. Luck” describes a trial in which seven boys are prosecuted for playing poker for money, violating the laws against “games of chance”

34 pqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqp n in Kentucky. Their attorney argues that ‘old sledge’ — the type of cards they were playing — was not a game of chance at all but rather one of skill and, thus, exonerates them.

The argument still resonates today. Ken Adams ’67, a lawyer and professional poker player living in Washington, D.C., explains that though each state regulates its own gambling laws, the definition of gambling in most states incorporates a predominance test: whether skill predominates over chance or chance predominates over skill. Games depending entirely upon chance are outlawed, while those that partially depend upon skill are not. Roulette, for example, qualifies as gambling; there is no skill involved, and the outcome is entirely dependent on the random drop of the marble. Lawyers, led by the Poker Players’ Alliance, have been successful in demonstrating that poker differs from roulette in that it necessarily depends upon an element of skill. These cases have been backed by expert testimony and a plethora of statistical literature. One 2008 study published in Chance Magazine, a publication of the American Statistical Association, used data from high-stakes poker and golf tournaments (golf generally being considered a game of skill) to identify the rates at which highly skilled

“I hated losing so much. It wasn’t until I realized that you didn’t have to lose, and I learned how not to lose, that the game became fun for me.”

players are likely to place highly in the tournament. They determined that there was a significant skill component in playing poker: previous finishes in tournaments predicted current finishes.

The gambling laws in Connecticut, however, differ from those in most states. According to Adams, gambling, defined in Connecticut as “risking any money or thing of value for gain contingent in whole or in part on chance,” is prohibited in the state. The key words are “in part.” Adams adds, “I don’t think

anyone would argue that poker is not at least partially based on chance.” This law has no age associated with it — even those over 21 cannot gamble — but it does not apply to licensed card rooms like Foxwoods. Connecticut statutes go on to outlaw gambling equipment and devices, a factor that brought down Morse and Stiles’ notoriously fun Casino Night, even though no real money was ever at risk in the event.

However, the poker games on campus are safe under the law: there is an exception in the statute that the prohibition on gambling does not apply to individuals whose activity is “incidental to a bona fide social relationship.” Poker games around Yale are not run by any organization for profit and thus fall within this exception. In fact, Adams says, a return of Casino Night sans craps tables, but including poker, would be legal under state law. ssuming that the statisticians, the lawyers, and the poker players are correct — that poker is more a game of skill than a game of luck — I wonder, can I make it as a poker player? The rules, as Matros explains them, seem straightforward. But what are the skills I would have to acquire to become one of the elite who can depend on poker as a source of income, to know that in the long-run, I would eventually come out on top?

My first hurdle is the math. I tell Matros that I am what you would call a “humanities person.” Math is not my strong suit. Matros suspects that “a completely math-illiterate person would have a tough time with poker because it is important to understand risk versus reward.” Math is especially essential to online poker, which is almost exclusively focused on people’s betting patterns (due to the absence of actual people whose reactions can be analyzed). To determine these patterns, one must know the basic odds and stats behind each hand dealt.

But in addition to the math, the skills of logic and strategic thinking are essential. All the poker-playing Yalies with whom I spoke also love playing other games that stress strategy and logic. If I manage to master the math, I may have a chance of fitting into the poker world: I, too, enjoy strategy games.

The aspect of poker that I find most intriguing is psychology; it holds a lot of appeal because there is something fascinating about sitting down with someone else at a table and trying to figure out what they are thinking. Selbst tells me that in comparison to online poker, “live poker is much more about gathering all the information that is available to you.” Selbst and other great poker players bluff, deceive, look for tells, interpret other players’ stories, attitudes, and tics. Selbst thrives in this type of game, telling me that her preferred game is No Limit Hold’em: “In No Limit Hold’em there’s a lot more bluffing and psychology because it’s a lot more about putting your opponent under pressure.” It seems that this aspect of poker is similar to reporting: in both realms, reading people is essential and, for me, enjoyable. I must also admit that I get a thrill out Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

o pqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqpqp 35 of “bluffing” and think this aspect of the game would come naturally.

A great poker player must also understand her own strengths and weaknesses as well as recognize those of her opponent; the real challenge, then, is to apply this information to the game — deceiving others while simultaneously forcing them to reveal their true character. I use Selbst as my model.

One of her jobs in the Partouche Tournament was to maintain a “poker face” while deciphering the poker faces of others.

Selbst applied pressure to one of her opponents by demanding, “Why did you do that?” while he raised. He did his best to ignore her but I noticed he began shuffling his chips a little faster. Selbst firmly believes that to be a successful poker player, one has to be excellent at reading other people. When asked if she is a good evaluator of character, she fires back her answer without hesitation: “Definitely.”

Aggression seems to be another key factor in poker. The word “poker” itself is derived from the German word pochen, which means “to beat or pulverize.” From its very origins, aggression has been at the heart of the game. Selbst tells me that she is known for being “crazy and aggressive” in the poker world. “People don’t like to play with me because I’m so aggressive, and it puts a lot of pressure on them,” she concedes, with a hint of pride. Selbst’s self-analysis is confirmed as I watch her play. Within a few hands, one of the commentators has already made the crack, “We don’t have the balls of Vanessa Selbst,” alluding to the fact that she is the only woman seated at the table. She stares down her opponents, goads them into discussing their cards, and raises the stakes, creating an ominous presence at the table.

But aggression comes in all shapes and sizes. Kaplan uses Yale’s name to strike fear in the hearts of his opponents. “Whenever I go to the casino [in Minnesota, where the gambling age is 18], I always wear a Yale sweatshirt because I don’t like to slip under the radar,” he says. “I want a strong image at the table.”

As Kaplan describes his strategy to me, I can envision myself at Mohegan Sun, touting my favorite Yale hoodie, hoping the symbol will force my opponents to take me seriously.

Finally, poker takes discipline and patience. Matros finds this to be the most important skill of all. First, the game necessitates the discipline to sit at the table for hours at a time,

persevering through both wins and losses. Second, the hands themselves demand self-control. “You have to be disciplined enough to not just know what the right play is but to actually do it,” Matros says. Many players understand the concepts, but when they are sitting at the table, they react emotionally and play the wrong hand; they are naturally too timid or naturally too cocky. He concludes that any good poker player must “have the stomach to get through the bad runs.” Because poker is a game where players will inevitably go through periods where they don’t do well, Matros says, “you have to have the discipline to be able to get through and come out of it as a better poker player.” This is where my poker career may fall flat: patience is not one of my virtues, but perhaps, with Matros’ guidance, I can learn.

I

win my first hand of poker. Matros made a disclaimer at the beginning of the game that even though he is a professional and has been playing for years, I could beat him. And I do. After a succession of decent hands, I take the entire pot. Elated, I leave Matros’ house feeling particularly lucky. On the train ride back to New Haven I replay the game in my mind, trying to determine when the cards fell in my favor. I realize that I cannot pinpoint the moment — I do not know enough about poker to actually figure out when I had a good hand, let alone the probability that I held better cards than Matros did. He let me win. It would have taken extraordinary luck to compensate for my complete lack of skill. I am smart enough not to return to Matros’ table. After a few more games, he would have me bleeding chips. non ono

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Fiction

The Empty Chair

by Yasha Magarik illustrations by Mona Cao

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hat’s the point? wonders Jack, laying

out knives with their blades facing the plates, the little desert forks across the tops, the folded napkins down the other side. His hands moves swiftly over the tablecloth, adjusting and readjusting in staccato bursts, as he finds clusters of errors — six settings sans spoons, three with wine glasses on the wrong side of the plate — all Marie’s fault. Frau Altbäumer said there would be thirteen people, but half of them are antisocial and the others will ignore each other in their rush to speak.

Will any of them really have a good time? Will any of them return home happy? Will any of them speak English?

Jack knows there is only one answer to these questions, but he isn’t the one calling the shots.

Frau Altbäumer, a tall, fiery, thin-lipped lady with a glassy orb of blond hair, is. She and her corpulent, silent husband are hosting Jack as a favor to Jack’s father, Herr Altbäumer’s business partner, who believes that a winter in a conservative Bavarian household might cure his son’s recently revealed “condition.” Jack, it must be noted — without euphemism or tiresome allusion — likes men.

Frau Altbäumer told him, when she picked him up from the airport, that he should expect neither to speak English nor touch her dear eleven-year-old Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

t }t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t} t} 37 Johann. Jack replied that he was a homosexual, not a pedophile. Frau Altbäumer told him, with the last English he heard from her, to speak German or be quiet; Jack, knowing none, held his tongue.

Since that delightful car ride, Jack has picked up a few words — mostly the vocabulary of a waiter. He has also learned how to get around Munich, the nearby city, with the help of Marie, the Altbäumers’ daughter, who is older than Jack and speaks English fluently. She is home for the holidays from her school up north, and having been exposed to the philosophy of Berlin, laughs off both her parents’ homophobia and her hostbrother’s homosexuality as equally chimeric. She is getting ready for the party now, straightening her hair and listening to the stray cats howling like babies at the slabs of meat that the Altbäumers hang, from rotting twine, on their veranda during the winter. She is thinking of Jack.

Frau Altbäumer enters the dining room, ejects a stream of German, ponders the place settings and lights the Advent candles, looking out on the marshland — the marshland stretching for thirty dreary miles before them. Johann trails behind her with a box of ornaments for the Christmas tree and starts to say something but soon shuts up; his mother pays no attention. It was Johann who found the MADE IN INDONESIA sticker on the set of ornaments that Jack brought for them, and it was Johann who let Jack know that the house had been a Gestapo headquarters. The Altbäumers need never fear that Jack and Johann will get too close.

Frau Altbäumer greets the guests as they arrive: the Langweiligers (what bores), Frau Reiche and the Russian professor visiting her (a scandal were Reiche not so decrepit), the Schatzsuchers (such talkers). She shuts the door and has Jack take their coats. Onkel Lamm will be late, as always; they should start without him. The Langweiligers, a mellow couple, own a nearby brewery; Frau Reiche is a literary translator with a blind, deaf poodle she refuses to leave home. Herr Schatzsucher, another business partner of Herr Altbäumer’s, is a broadshouldered man with a pockmarked face and full suit and vest, his wife an accountant with a passion for calendrical oddities, their pimply-faced adolescent son Jakob just another German name for Jack to remember. Barely two years Johann’s senior, Jakob shifts from foot to foot until he gets his first glass of wine, which he promptly spills, eliciting a cascade of giggles from Marie.

The party moves from the front hall to the parlor, where Herr Schatzsucher admires the Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

wine bottles’ age, their necks pressed against the insides of his chubby elbows (always thinking about the price) and the Langweiligers yawn behind loose fists. Frau Altbäumer fears, as she frets with the tablecloth and humors her husband’s tedious ministration of the red wine (he pours it into a decanter and swirls it until the lines sear themselves into the glass), that Jack will not serve the appetizers without prompting. She prompts him; he heads to the kitchen to get the bruschetta.

Johann is making spätzel there, pouring dough through a strainer into boiling water and then spooning the finished strands into a nearby bowl. Every time a little hot water touches his skin, he whines softly to his mother, who is busy entertaining her guests in the next room. Jack gives the boy a curt nod, grabs the plate he needs, and exits.

The dining room, through which he passes on his way back, is dressed in baroque maroons and darkly stained wood. A Persian painting depicts a softly sleeping couple in a four-poster king-size bed, and a supple hand emerging from underneath the bed. (Safely stowed adulteress or suspicious wife?)

Candle flames bob to the sporadic rhythm of the conversation from the parlor.

A door opens and Marie, her hair sufficiently straight and her lithe, almost boyish body clad in a black dress, narrows her eyes at him, but lets him hold the door to the parlor for her. She is mad because I told her three weeks of Madonna was enough for me and went off to sled with Johann the other day. And Johann had left him for his real friends anyway — leaving Jack, with his pathetic reflexes, to crash on his own and wait at the bottom of the slope, fearing the results of a second attempt.

All about him the snow had fallen heavily. Many children in multicolored jackets had successfully descended on their thin wooden slats and Jack had tried to appreciate the way the scene looked like something out of a Dutch Renaissance painting, but panic had paralyzed his pleasure.

Now, watching Marie go through the door, he sighs; she has been hurt.

The guests sit waiting in the harrowing light, listening to Frau Reiche discuss in what ways French translations of German philosophy fail.

Jack catches snippets and translates them for himself: “There are…half of a change [or did she say diamond ring?]…from any language as beautiful as German.” Jakob squirms and dodges off to a bathroom. When he returns, having popped a prominent pimple on his forehead, Marie smiles.

Jack thinks the violated blackhead looks like

38 }t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t} t} t nothing so much as a Nazi banner: black, red, and white. The conversation gradually shifts to the auto industry; will it survive? “What’s the point?” asks the Russian professor, provocatively, but he’s no communist, just a foreigner to German economics. Jack, taking a hint from Frau Altbäumer, clears an appetizer while the party sits down to dinner.

Johann is examining the duck, while Marie tells him about an illegal party she attended in Berlin last year on New Year’s Eve. As Jack enters, Johann exits in relief. Marie switches to English: “It was in the basement of this gigantic parking garage under construction in the middle of a park.”

Jack chops celery and glances at the newspaper.

The past, he decides, is a cross we bear, the future our crucifixion. “There was no heat, no electricity, no running water. There were all these young people standing around with their coats on, drinking out of dirty cups from a sketchy bar, smoking. I was shivering and could not go to the bathroom. There was no bathroom. So I decided to leave, except I was kind of drunk and on my own, so I got lost in the tunnels of this construction site, and they were all dark, and I only had a cell phone with me for light, and that started running out of batteries, until I stumbled into a guy who also seemed lost, and—” No more stories about sexual awakening, prays Jack. Over the past few weeks, neither of them having other friends around, they have covered every conceivable topic, but she always returns to sex — specifically, how Jack is so sure that he is not bisexual. Jack starts to stir the duck.

“—he turned out to be a lapsed Jesuit. He helped me find the way out and to the train station. And as we walked, he told me why he had quit the faith.”

Jack stops and looks up. “Why did he?”

“He said he couldn’t keep waiting for salvation all of his life. He got to the point where he needed to either die, so he could go to heaven, or stop believing in Christ. But that alone didn’t do it.

Because you can’t just decide to stop believing in God.” She pauses and bites her lower lip, takes her hands out of her hair and rubs them against each other in the air, as if she is washing her knuckles in a sink. “Then he was on the street one day, and he saw a guy he had known growing up — a guy whose father had given tons to charity — and this guy was, well, homeless. Begging for bread.

He couldn’t understand how the children of the… what’s the word?...righteous, could go hungry.”

“Wow,” says Jack. She has been gazing at the

duck, and only now do they make eye contact.

After a moment they look away; he notices a mole on the top of her left breast. Her cleavage, normally pale, is rosy. He looks back up to find her watching his eyes. “Do you believe in God?” he asks, feeling childish.

“I don’t know,” she says. “If there is one, He would be saving us, wouldn’t he? But if there isn’t one…could life really be that meaningless?”

Another pause. The knuckles stop moving. “What about you?”

“No, but if I did, I guess it wouldn’t be the same one anyway.”

“You mean because your mom’s Jewish?”

Jack nods, his eyes shifting over to the plate of pistachios he has brought back. After a pause Marie remarks, “I guess both religions think you’re a sinner.”

“Condemned to shell pistachios for eternity,” he jokes, and she laughs the way Frau Altbäumer never does at one of his quips. Then she looks serious again. Seemed hurt when I said I’d go sledding instead. Should apologize. But how many Madonnas can you stand — even if you’re a medievalist like her?

Jack opens his mouth.

“If only you were into girls…no hell then,” she says, picking up a plate of stewed prunes and exiting as Frau Altbäumer enters and tells Jack to finish clearing the hors d’oeuvres. Moving through the house, Jack considers death. If we fear death, our lives will be unhappy, and insofar as death is an end to life, death will end our suffering—so we should welcome death. But if we do not fear death, our lives will be happy, and death will end our happiness — so we should fear death. Can the same thing be both feared and welcomed? He clears the hors d’oeuvres.

Frau Altbäumer rules the dinner itself with a steel grasp. Every self-applauding comment she makes involves her beloved Heidegger. Jack, who has never heard of the man, asks Marie if he is a family friend; she laughs and (because her mother has forbidden English at their dinner table), replies, “Nein, er ist tot.” She adds, “Ein Philosoph.” Getting the gist, he nods.

Frau Reiche, gripping her jittery dog between her feet, drinks too much seltzer and becomes drunk first out of everyone because of the carbonation. Frau Schatzsucher explains intercalations to the Russian professor, who drinks periodically.

“Sehr wichtig für den Menschen der Antike,” says Frau Schatzsucher.

“Die Ente, bitte,” says the Russian professor.

Jack passes him the duck.

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Marie, after making sure her mother is otherwise occupied, promises, “I won’t make you speak German,” reassuringly squeezes his shoulder, and begins to tell him about a themed New Year’s Eve party she is excited about; she promises to bring him along. Jack wishes they would talk about theology. When she wonders about God, she runs the back of her hand over her jaw as if stroking a beard; then she fascinates.

But even talking to him is a favor, so he endures.

Useless without her. Should apologize.

Indeed, just this afternoon Jack had rejected her company and the Christian art in favor of the only modernist museum in Munich. He couldn’t understand Mary; was she incestuous or were there two different godheads? He was sure there was a reasonable theological explanation, but it eluded him. Judaism requires none of these theological maneuvers — just an answer to the question, where’s Elijah?

The museum used a handful of surrealist paintings as a springboard for its true interest: eclectic art by current painters. Looking at a picture of a naked woman with alarm clocks instead of breasts, Jack became aware of another visitor: a tall man in a long black overcoat, who looked at the same pictures as Jack, just moments afterward. From painting to painting the two of them hopped, the other man always a painting or

two behind. He was clean-shaven, with flowing black hair and blue eyes, but it was the grace of his stride that most impressed Jack. He walked as if crowned with laurel.

At the end of the exhibit was a dark room with a short experimental film. The two men sat on the only bench there, watching as nebulae coalesced into stars, which amassed matter due to gravity, and then, suddenly, lit up as nuclear fusion commenced. They watched as Red Flowering Gum bloomed, pushing up out of the sand, shedding grains carelessly like underclothes, sucking in the Australian sun. They watched as the electrons in an atom of uranium buzzed around, as the substance decayed, releasing alpha particles in swift jets. Jack watched as the other man got a massive hard-on, looking nervously at Jack between segments, and finally got up and left. Jack sighed with relief. He had almost lapsed.

Then he checked his watch; he was late for the dinner preparations. So he straightened his own pants and took a few deep breaths, suppressing his shame. As he rushed back by bus, he wondered whether mere desire constituted a sin. But had it been mere desire? Had they not watched each other, waiting for the other to advance, each wanting to be fed the apple by the other? Their lust had been physically realized, even if they’d never touched each other. Jack shuddered and walked into the Altbäumers’ still thinking of blooming nebulae.

Marie’s voice penetrates his memory: “You should hear Onkel Lamm. He used to think he was gay, but one night a woman dressed up as a man and he didn’t know the difference. Blew his mind.” Jack looks toward the empty chair at the table’s foot, where Lamm will sit if he ever arrives; a glass of red wine awaits him. The hostess motions for Jack to clear the table and bring the equipment for Frau Reiche’s favorite drink: a complicated concoction of rum and wine. As he does so, he notices that a fake plant on a table in the kitchen appears to have shed a leaf. Carrying back desert, Jack has the peculiar sensation that he is looking at the room from far away, perhaps a mountaintop. Everyone is so small, so distant, like lecturers in a shadowed valley. He cannot shake the feeling and is happy when Frau Reiche takes over.

In a pot is a large quantity of heated red wine with spices and fruit slices; she rests this over two candles. She lays a metal bar across the diameter of the pot and a sugar cone on the bar. Then she takes a bottle of rum of over 100 proof and saturates the cone with it. She lights the cone on fire and the party watches as the cone sizzles and Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 December 2010

t }t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t}t} t} t} 41 melts into the wine, carrying the rum with it. The entire pot burns with a naughty blue flame, a fire that refines. When the sugar melts entirely, Frau Reiche drunkenly doles out the wine, which they drink with mango slices.

Johann ends the lull with a whisper to his mother. She directs the four children into the southern wing of the house, to play a board game. Marie cops a bottle of rum. She and Jack take swigs from it as Johann sets up the board and Jakob creeps off to the bathroom. Jack, going to pee, finds Jakob not picking zits but vomiting into the toilet with relish. Jakob, mortified, shuts the door, so Jack returns to the game and asks Marie if there is another bathroom he can use. Getting up, she seems amused. Maybe she isn’t angry after all.

Marie leads the way through dark corridors and turns on the light only when they reach their destination. When Jack finishes, he finds her waiting in the dim hallway. His reflexes are inadequate as she approaches, slides a hand up his shirt, and with his back against the wall, presses her mouth to his.

He detaches his lips and tries to dodge away, but her thin body is somehow everywhere. Should apologize, but not this way. “Marie, Marie —” but she silences him.

“Relax,” she says. “Just pretend I’m a man.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’m not your Onkel Lamm.”

“Would it help if I gave you some better motivation?” Jack edges his hips away from hers at the thought. Maybe if I promise to go back to the museums with her? Couldn’t alienate her… useless otherwise. “I guess so,” she says, her voice suddenly steelier.

“I can call the others,” says Jack before she continues.

“But will they come when you call?” asks Marie. Then, pressing her body more firmly into his, she raises an eyebrow. “You know how my parents would kill you if they thought you’d touched Johann?” Shit.

“Marie, that’s blackmail.”

“Think of it as coercive enlightenment. I’m not above it.” Looking into her eyes, mere glimmers a few inches from his face, he knows she isn’t. Jack knows what happened to Joseph in Potiphar’s house; he can’t afford the same fate.

“How do you expect me to perform for you? I can’t even get it up with a girl.”

“Relax,” she repeats, victory in sight. “Pretend I’m a man.”

He sighs, and they commence. Making out Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

and undressing cause no extraordinary problems.

He arouses her, trying not to cringe at her sour odor. They move into the bathroom, go down on each other — he closing his eyes and grasping for a man, she up on the sink. He keeps his eyes closed and thinks back to the man in the Museum of Surrealism, to the blooming particles, to the phallic plants. Intercourse begins; Jack remembers the overcoat, the walk of laurels. When she begins to moan, he pretends she is a lithe castrato.

She becomes louder. She’s not howling for me.

Like prayer, her ecstasy is mere apostrophe. But unable to ignore her femininity, Jack tries to imagine that he is about to impregnate her, that via the seed of a Jewish homosexual her ancestors’ fantasy of the Aryan Race will become irrevocably sullied. He conjures the swastika, the Fuhrer’s mustache, the Sig Runes of the SS, all submerged in mud. He sees his father, Herr Schatzsucher, and Frau Altbäumer, unholy trinity, washed away by a howling torrent. On, on, on, they rush, and behind them rushes the river of oblivion.

Jack is returned to reality by the voice of Frau Altbäumer calling from the living room. He is slumped against Marie, who pants, with sated lust, into the sink. “What is she saying?” asks Jack, disengaging himself for the first and last time from a girl.

Marie contentedly closes her eyes. “Onkel Lamm has come.”

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Poetry memoriam ™ posts © he said r

memoriam on the morning post-hallows, past-all-souls, death hangs on the campus with streamers of orange and black–sticky treacle in corners and crannies, in eyelids, and stares from eyelids, into holes and one another. he nets the darkness, to nestle in our pockets and clasp it to our coughs and stares. but god has dripped sweet sugar gloss across the firmament and winked it into blue. god has exhaled coolly across a dandelion its lithe white stream has encircled the catastrophe, netted the ghosts: not demons, nor ghoulies— plastic, paper-mache— not rotting orange smilers.

rebecca zhu / contributing illustrator

the nighttimed howl: caroused and forgotten. the rest is golden thread. the souls are caught in “I-am”s web, drawn towards a breathless blue and now, to lightness, once again.

— Alex Klein

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posts [I. Washington departures] When traveling, we must always run on coffee and another time sped up fast, faster. The clock is cruel when we forget stockings, a glove or shampoo.

The scale is crueler yet when your bag’s morbid with weight and I pray not another ounce, dear God! When we finally sit in the monorail, eyes and hands all jumbled in papers and pockets: where? when? now?

Then you touch me in the brief second as the steel-cold door creaks open for another departure, and I think of the old diplomat and his wife we’d left behind, still slow crawling through corridors for the thousandth time.

[II. First post: 1957] It took an extraordinary will to breath the February air of Leningrad and say I love you despite this barren apartment and my face turning into a radish and your eyes greying as we speak.

To say let’s smash this old radio with two knobs and put on Ellington like it was Sunday afternoon once in Virginia, when cherry flowers filled up the back seat— there is only one reason for a drive in the country, you’d say as I ungloved one hand, as domes and obelisk faded behind us.

And it took much lip-biting to unravel tissue paper to find the latest faux-Leica from the shop whose name I could never pronounce, to hold the two rolls of film at the bottom of its leather case when I have no gifts for you except soup with chunks of potatoes and pleas: please God let us go to where spring comes with Easter peals.

She said Bobby darling, maybe next year, then turned on Voice of America.

Enough waltzing between words and wits. Now dance with me.

[III. The Tidal Basin] Marvel at modernity, this age when boats could hold two: to pedal, to pedal when Aeneas could only weep.

Then give us time and a pond, a lake, or the whole of the Mediterranean.

— BaoBao Zhang

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he said MY NAME IS JUJU PEACE DRUMS PIANO LOVE TARABAKU PLAYER .

HE SAID: IF I COULD SHUT YOUR MIND OFF YOU WOULD NOT SPEAK TEARS WOULD BURST FROM YOUR EYES YOU WOULD DROP TO YOUR KNEES AND KISS THE EARTH YOU WOULD STREAK THROUGH THE STREETS SHOUTING “MY GOD, MY GOD” .

rebecca zhu / contributing illustrator

HE SAID: YOU CLIMB A TREE the sun’s setting on the Seine and AND HOWL AT THE MOON our faces are flushed from the Sapporo and AT THE WATER’S EDGE my eyes roll back in my head YOU DON’T LOOK BACK and my lips curl up in the drunkest smile YOU LAY DOWN and I’m sliding down the embankment AND CLOSE YOUR EYES headfirst with my eyes tight shut and THE WAVES CARRY YOU AWAY I hit the water LIKE DRIFTWOOD belly laughing.

— Zachary Mulvihill

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Personal Essay the front room D

Taryn Nakamura

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hen my house cracks, the front room will be the first to fall off.

Its western walls meet at an acute angle, and the room juts unsupported into bottlebrush trees like the beak of a bird that has forgotten — mid-air — how to fly. Spider veins creep through the base of the walls where the front room hangs from the body of the house. We discover more of these thin cracks every winter — and only then, because the room lies dormant the rest of the year.

We refer to it as the front room, although it could be “the parlor” or “the sitting room.”

But no one in Hawaii has parlors, just as no one wears shoes indoors. For the first few years after our house was completed

D

good luck, or scare away the bad spirits that might wander through the windows?

In the barren front room, every step was amplified through the creaking floorboards, bounced off high, angular ceilings, and trembled through the walls. The racket scared us at first, then delighted us, and then we tired of it, learning to walk quietly with our weight suspended from imaginary puppet strings. With the help of my older sister, Lauren, I tried to tame the front room’s unfriendly, unlivable space. We tied rags to our feet and dragged each other in circles over the slippery wood paneling. And at night, we lay down and rolled around, trying to get the coolness of the floor to wrap all around our legs and arms.

Spider veins creep through the base of the walls where the front room hangs from the house. in 1995, the room was empty. My mom complained about its trapezoidal windows, which couldn’t be fitted for shades from The Home Depot. Before we installed custommade shutters, the front room let in sunlight and scrutiny without discrimination. Eyes could tour the entire house — mismatched placemats on the dining table, Food Network on the 42-inch TV, child-size fingerprints on the lower reaches of the slanted ceiling — and then see their own curious faces in the woodframed mirror at the end of the hall. The mirror was a point of debate. Would it deflect

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When we began to feel the emptiness of the front room, we looked for objects to fill it. The Persian rug came first. Then a koa wood shelf, smelling gently of orange oil, for books that we don’t read: pages of blue-green parrotfish with yellow lipstick, dentistry manuals, Okinawan recipe books, and curiously (since we are neither Chinese nor philosophical), the Tao Te Ching. The front room grew out of its awkward childhood and acquired stuff. But even with the couches and the coffee table, we didn’t know what to do there.

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We are not a musical family, but the front room is where we now store our instruments — two violins stifled by red velvet coverings and a viola buckling under a collapsing bridge.

They are all Lauren and I have to show for 12 years of lessons. Even the calluses have faded, and when relatives ask us whether we still play, we shake our heads and uncurl our smooth fingers as evidence.

When I was in middle school, the front room also exhibited my dad’s handmade ukulele, cut from the same wood as that of his best friend, Steven Luke. My dad and Uncle Steven had signed up for a “uke” workshop together and learned, over a year, how to soak and bend wooden strips into curved molds, sand away splinters, match one grey pencil mark with its pair — how to lacquer, glue, and wait. On Friday nights, our families gathered on the Lukes’ patio among algae-speckled fish tanks and cockatiel cages while my dad and Uncle Steven drank beer, consulted diagrams, and talked more than they worked.

But after Uncle Steven died unexpectedly, the ukulele disappeared, and we later learned that my dad had disassembled it. He said he had no use for an instrument he couldn’t play, but he had saved the wood. I think he was dealing with sadness in the same way he might handle a sputtering weed wacker — by taking it apart to find the broken motor. But this repair couldn’t ever be finished.

When my dad was planning our house, he spent hours with the architect, discussing the foundation of the structure, the height of the roof, the flow of the rooms. I was in kindergarten when the house was under construction. Every weekend my family drove to the site and parked behind the portable toilets. While we ate cheese pizza in the trunk of the station wagon, I would squint my eyes and peer through the gap between my thumb and forefinger, measuring the house’s growing girth in pinches. After dinner, Lauren and I would explore the steel skeleton, sticking our heads through the spaces where walls and windows would later

stand.

By building on a hill, my dad tried to keep us safe. If a tsunami washed away Waikiki, we would stay dry on high ground, 800 feet above sea level. If a strange car passed through the community’s guard gate, we would have the license plate on camera from up above. To guard against intrusion by sea and strangers, we have retreated skywards. But living on a mountain ridge, we have become conscious of the edges of our world. Though far from perils of the world below, we all suffer from a chronic fear of falling. At age 21, I have never learned to ride a bike, inhibited by an irrational terror of plummeting off a cliff. In order to stay perched on this peak, we cling to an inhospitable mountain — but it has gravity on its side. The rain washes soil from one yard to the next, rolling houses downwards, drawn towards the ocean.

When my house cracks, we will fall.

Last December, as we cleaned the house in preparation for the new year, my mom opened the front room’s shutters to let the space exhale the smell of old wood and sneeze out the sticky dust of violin rosin.

We swept up white-tipped gecko droppings and examined the annual damage. The front room had sunk as the dining room steps receded, creating a gap for the pale-bellied lizards to wriggle into the intestines of our house. The front door was stuck shut, shaken out of alignment by the shifting earth. My dad snapped when my mom pointed out the cracks. He was frustrated that this was something he couldn’t fix, that there was some danger he couldn’t shield us from.

“Everybody’s house is falling,” he said. “I can build you a new house, but I can’t make it stop.”

Perhaps in our minds, the front room has already fallen. Here, we store possessions too beautiful to use, but not too precious to lose. I hope that the heart of the home lies somewhere else, that when the front room breaks from the body, it won’t hurt.

Vol. xxxviii, No. 3 December 2010

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Ask Mangy Mark!

This week, Mangy Mark is out sick. However, Mrs. Nuñez’s 3rd grade class at Ridgeway Elementary

School has generously offered to paint a mural to answer each of our reader’s questions. Thanks kids!

Dear Mangy Mark, recently graduated and six weeks ago, I moved from a small town in Wisconsin to Los Angeles, California. I’d love to fly back home to enjoy Christmas with my family, but it’s just too expensive. I haven’t made many friends here in LA and, after Thanksgiving, I’ve learned it’s much healthier for me not to spend major holidays alone. Are there any community or cultural organizations I can contact that might be able to connect me with other people looking for some company? ­— Lonely in LA

I

Dear Lonely,

Dear Mangy Mark, ecently, my girlfriend and I have stopped doing a lot of the fun, spontaneous things that really defined our relationship early on. We used to go skinny dipping, carve our initials into trees, go to amusement parks, etc. But now, neither of us wants to do anything like that.

Do you think we’re falling out of love, or does the natural arc of romance mean that passion and excitement always fade after a time, and we should get used to the fact that we’ll mean less and less to each other as the years go by? ­— Concerned in Connecticut

R

Dear Concerned,

rrrrrrrrr

Mangy Mark has all the answers. Got a problem? E-mail mag@yaledailynews. com.

By Jacob Paul, Mark Sonnenblick, and Brendan Ternus Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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