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table of contents
6
small talk
The Full-Time Student AUSTIN CAMPBELL
14
personal essay
The Shock of the Nu DYLAN KENNY
16
personal essay
Awake short feature
The Nesting Instinct BRANDON JACKSON
26
profile
Standing Athwart: The Legacy of Donald Kagan ELAINA PLOTT
30
LEARNING WITH YOUR HANDS Small Talk by Eric Boodman
VINCE TOLENTINO
18
4 8 THE COST OF A CURE Short Feature by Julia Rothchild
11 THE GIANT HOLE AT SACHEM STREET
observer
Sober Soldiers
Crit by Brendan Bashin-Sullivan
EVAN FRONDORF
DAILY NEWS
MAGAZINE Executive Editor Daniel Bethencourt Managing Editors Madeline Buxton Sarah Maslin Senior Editors Edmund Downie Amelia Urry Associate Editors Eric Boodman Elaina Plott Joy Shan Design Editors Ryan Healey Michelle Korte Rebecca Sylvers
Design Staff Jennifer Lu Allison Durkin Photography Editors Sarah Eckinger Jacob Geiger Copy Editor Stephanie Heung Editor in Chief Tapley Stephenson Publisher Gabriel Botelho
Cover photo by Jacob Geiger
21 THE SCIENCE PARK BUBBLE Feature by Ava Kofman
34 GET HAPPY
Cover Story by Joy Shan yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 3
Learning with your BY ERIC BOODMAN
HANDS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATHRYN CRANDALL
he pot came from Tel Akko, Israel. It had spent the last few thousand years buried under a fieldstone wall when Jane Skinner uncovered it in July. As a second-year archeology grad student at Yale, she was spending the summer excavating around this wall, using a trowel and a small pickaxe to break apart the clumps of sand. The pot was in shards when she found it, but once she had rebuilt it with Elmer’s glue and sand, she could see that this was a Cypriot jug made in the Iron Age. Yet she couldn’t tell exactly how it had been made. Nine months later, Skinner hands a photo of the reconstructed pot to Maishe Dickman. He looks at it, slaps a cone of clay onto his electric potter’s
wheel. With his foot, he sets the wheel turning and flattens the clay with a moistened palm. He eyes it for its center, and once he’s found it, puts his thumb there: the clay rises magically on all sides. “After each pull, I collar the clay, and it does something physiological — I don’t know what exactly, but it makes the clay less likely to twist as the wheel is spinning,” he says. For potters, pulling and collaring clay is routine, as unremarkable as riding a bike or holding a pen. But to the clutch of anthropologists and archeologists gathered in Dickman’s George Street studio, every finger mark he makes in the clay is worthy of scrutiny. These students — mostly grad students — are here as part of Anne Underhill’s
“Archeological Ceramics” class. They have brought photos of bowls and jugs and figurines from China, Mongolia, Central America and the Middle East, hoping to learn about the creation of these objects by watching Dickman’s hands. Dickman’s hands haven’t typed out any dissertations or graded any papers, but they have been quietly contributing to research and learning at Yale for decades. If you look him up on the Yale Directory, you will find him listed as a museum technician at the Peabody. Don’t let the drab title fool you: Maishe Dickman is an artifact-and-book-protector at work, a master-potter and kiln-builder in his studio, and an insect-collector at home and in the jungles of French Guiana.
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small talk And although Dickman insists that he is no intellectual — “I like to work with my hands,” he says — his skill in these fields have led him to a particular niche in the borderlands of academia: professors and curators come to him for his manual know-how. Part of that know-how was acquired during his time volunteering as a teen in the Peabody’s insect collection and during his training as an industrial designer at the University of Bridgeport. But the bulk, he says, comes from his 64 years of trial and error. In the mornings, he can be found making mounts for museum displays in the Peabody workshop. The air is full of sawdust motes, and it thrums with the sounds of construction: buzz saws, the clacking of wood, the hum of machines. “I still, thank God almighty, have all of my fingers,” he says. “Not all of us do.” His fingers are his best tools. Today, he is using them to heat sheets of Plexiglas over an electrical wire. Once heated, these hard rectangles can be bent into cradles for books and scrolls from ancient Egypt. Just as the feel of clay in his hands can tell Dickman when a pot is as thin as it will go, he can only know when the Plexiglas is hot enough by flexing it to test its consistency. “I tried timing this by looking at the clock, but every piece of plastic is different,” he says. “Can’t do a four-minute egg in three minutes, no matter how hard you boil the water.” His exactitude he learned from his parents, who, among other things, raised hundreds of parakeets in their house in the working-class New Haven
neighborhood known as The Hill. “Our entire basement was an aviary. We did it to make a little extra money, sold them to pet shops,” he says. “My jobs were cleaning cages, feeding, handling, keeping a daily diary of each pair — when they mated, when the eggs were laid, when they hatched, how they grew.” He remembers slipping a plastic band over the foot of each chick when it was still the size of a fingernail. Touring the Peabody galleries with Dickman, I can see that he has maintained that standard of precision. He points out a tiny wire that holds a diamond in place. It is hardly wider than a hair, and he has painted it silver so that visitors will think it is part of the jewel. “As a mounts-maker, my profession is a very humble one,” he says. “My best work you can’t see.” And yet as invisible as that work may be, it is what will allow someone to examine a jewel or try to decipher a hieroglyph when they walk into the museum. He knows that their focus is on the object, and his job is to create an environment that indulges that focus. He is interested in the material protecting the object, the angle of the light. After a morning at the Peabody, Dickman spends his afternoons mixing glaze and shaping clay in his studio. Once a year, though, he leaves behind this routine and flies to the jungles of French Guiana. He is there looking for insects. “I will sit with my back against a tree for three days, in unendurable heat and freezing cold, getting rained on and bitten — just to catch a beetle,” he says. He has also been known to sit
‘I tried timing this by looking at the clock, but every piece of plastic is different,’ he says. ‘Can’t do a fourminute egg in three minutes, no matter how hard you boil the water.’
by animal carcasses, piles of rotting fruit and bright lights in the hope of nabbing a butterfly or katydid. This work also traces back to his parakeet-feeding days. At a family picnic, his mother saw him trying to trap migrating monarchs in his hands, and she began to sew him a fine-mesh butterfly net. He clumsily pinned his treasures onto a piece of cardboard above his bed. Later, at 15 or 16, he began to volunteer at the Peabody under Charles Remington, founder of the museum’s insect collection. From Remington he learned how to spread a butterfly’s wings with wax paper, how to place the pins as inconspicuously as possible. Dickman still works on his specimens every night, placing them on a Styrofoam island in a Tupperware full of water. The next day, the humidity will have permeated their bodies, making them easier to spread and pin. In this field as well, his expertise has led professors to seek him out and ask him for help. He collects Noctuid moths for entomologist Larry Gall, disease-transmitting sand flies for public health researcher Leonard Munstermann. He is perfectly happy to contribute to their projects, but that is not the reason he keeps going back to South America. “I collect as an artist,” he says, “not as a scientist.” If you press him further about what drives him in all his jobs, he shrugs. And he is vague about his role in the academic projects he is part of. “I don’t even know what anthropologists do most of the time,” he says. But he knows the feel of clay spinning cool under his palm, remembers the particular jiggle of a 6.5-inch Titan beetle trying to escape from his grasp. And he knows that Anne Underhill’s students can learn a lot with their hands. “They might run their fingers over the side of a pot,” he says. “Feel the finger marks and touch the soul of the person who made it 3,000 years ago.”
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Small Talk
WASSERMAN TKTKTK
THE FULL-TIME STUDENT
BY AUSTIN CAMPBELL PHOTOS BY JOYCE XI
By Austin Campbell Photography by Allie Krause
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n Saturday night, while his friends unwind after a hard week, Isaac Wasserman ’14 bends over a stretcher in the back of a racing ambulance, trying desperately to stabilize his dying patient’s errant heartbeat. For Wasserman, weekend nights are anything but a time to relax. As a full-time paramedic in an ambulance, he provides emergency medical services to the residents of Bridgeport and Trumbull, Conn., on overnight shifts eight hours a night, four nights a week. Working with a partner, he alternates between driving the ambulance and caring for patients. The job is hard and often deadly serious. “The buck stops with me,” he 6 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
explains. “There’s no one else I can call prehospital who does what I do.” The possibility of death is a constant presence, and Wasserman has found himself the reluctant witness of a patient’s final moments. An energetic 20-year-old with wavy brown hair and an ever present smile, Wasserman’s youth makes him an unlikely choice for the part. He has excelled in his work, however, and has found in the responsibilities and challenges of paramedic life a new perspective on medicine. Wasserman first became interested in emergency work when he took an EMT course during his first semester at Yale, earning his initial certification.
Since he was planning to study pre-med, he saw the course as an opportunity to explore the practical, everyday realities of medicine. “I thought that if I worked as an EMT, I would be able to find out what medicine was like, what the hell I was getting myself into,” he explains. He liked what he found and followed the course by volunteering in an ambulance his second semester, a job he saw as an opportunity to simultaneously apply his new skills, practice medicine and help pay tuition. Eventually accumulating enough experience to work alone, he completed additional training to become a paramedic, the top job in emergency work and a
small talk position that requires him to give medication, set up IVs, and minimize the effects of serious trauma. As a paramedic, he deals with the most critical patients, including those with cardiac problems, gunshot wounds or other life-threatening conditions. For Wasserman, this work gives premed courses meaning and provides assurance that his chosen career is right for him. “My entire time in the ambulance further confirms why I want to be a doctor. I love everything about it,” he says. “I now know that medicine is probably the only thing I can do.” More than simply confirming his career choice, however, Wasserman’s work in emergency services provides a unique perspective on medicine, distinct from anything that he has learned in college or will learn in medical school. “For me, medicine is not the biological processes,” he explains. “It’s much more than that. It’s the intersection of biology and sociology. What factors go into determining someone’s behavior, their health decisions, and how they act?” As a paramedic, Wasserman sees his patients stripped of their pretenses. Medicine, and especially emergency work, brings relationships, decisions, and motivations out into the open. “How people act in an emergency is extremely telling,” he explains. This deep personal insight is what Wasserman sees as the most important and rewarding, but also the most difficult aspect of medicine. On one hand, the cruelty and anguish inherent in the human experience are painfully clear in the back of an ambulance. “It’s the social stuff that is wrenching,” he says. “It’s dealing with death, it’s dealing with just how horrible people are to each other, I mean, especially the assaults that you see … ” He trails off, searching for the right word but not quite finding it. “You see people at their worst,” he concludes at last. But Wasserman also gets a privileged look at the human capacity for courage and even joy. He smiles
‘The buck stops with me,’ Wasserman explains. ‘There’s no one else I can call pre-hospital who does what I do.’ when he remembers the conversations he had with some of his patients, the life stories he learned. “We have an Auschwitz survivor in Trumbull who I’ve picked up before,” he recalls, “and if you didn’t [talk] with her, if it was just medical, you wouldn’t know that.” His favorite calls are those where he delivers babies (he has done three so far) because he ends up witnessing the best day of his patient’s life. The full range of humanity found in an ambulance is the hardest part of Wasserman’s work, but also the most compelling. His experiences with people are what keep him working his demanding hours, weekend after weekend, year after year. As one of the few Yale undergraduates with a full-time job, Wasserman faces a tricky balancing act between college and work. His schedule this year keeps him off campus from Thursday night until Monday morning, preventing him from attending any of the weekend’s social events. In a way, however, such grueling hours serve to clarify which interactions are truly valuable. “I can’t go out and [drink] at a frat party,” he explains, “but to be honest, those things never appealed to me.” The time he spends with his friends during the week, on the other hand, becomes ever more important. “Without [them], I wouldn’t be able to work full time,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to deal with the stuff that I see, the situations that I’m put in, if I didn’t have these people to go back to. They’re able to help me talk it through.” Despite the scheduling tension between school life and work life, however, the two often complement each other. The practical realities and demands of emergency work teach skills that Wasserman has
found invaluable in his studies in the humanities (he has been accepted to the Icahn School of Medicine’s Humanities and Medicine program, which allows him take humanities in college while still attending medical school after graduation). Both pursuits require an alert and inquisitive mind. “It’s about asking the questions you didn’t know were there,” he explains. “In the field we call it ‘index of suspicion.’ At Yale, it’s called ‘intellectual curiosity.’ They’re exactly the same.” Conversely, Yale’s liberal arts education finds unexpected application in his line of work. “I feel like I’m in a better position to relate to my patients because I have this background in history, this background in literature,” he says. “I feel like I’m a better people’s person for it.” More generally, Wasserman finds that practical medicine and a liberal arts education ultimately work toward a similar goal. “It’s all about exploring life and humanity at some level,” he says, “and you see that on a very microscale in the back of an ambulance.” The value of an education for Wasserman is the ability to process and interpret his experiences at work, which can seem senseless and inexplicable. His classes help him connect moments in an ambulance to a larger understanding, perhaps an understanding he can try to bring to his patients. “There is some sort of synthesis,” he muses. Finding that synthesis, however, is still in Wasserman’s future. “You only realize it when you’re asleep,” he jokes, “and then you don’t remember it in the morning.”
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The Cost of a Cure By Julia Rothchild
Photos by Henry Ehrenberg
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arriet, an 80-year-old woman in good health from Philadelphia, drove to the hospital in April 2010 for a routine procedure. She returned home from the hospital and soon began suffering spasms of pain and unpredictable bouts of diarrhea throughout the day and night. These symptoms continued — for over eight months — during which time she could not leave her apartment. The doctors discovered that she had been infected with a bacterium called Clostridium difficile. Because this bug clings to the surfaces of many materials, defying harsh disinfectant sprays, it thrives in hospitals and nursing homes, where it can capitalize on the vulnerability of patients’ weak immune systems. It is difficult to eradicate this bacterium once it is inside the body: each 8 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
time a doctor prescribed Harriet another cycle of vancomycin, the antibiotic often used to treat the bacterium, the C. diff in her gut simply hardened into tough spores, waited for the danger to pass and emerged again a week later. The doctors had no other medication to give her and nothing more to suggest. As a result of one short hospital visit for a routine procedure, Harriet almost died. C. diff, as it is sometimes called, is a patient bacterium. It curls into tight spores inside the stomach and can lie dormant for years, unperturbed by its highly acidic surroundings. When the stomach’s natural bacteria are wiped out by a broad treatment of antibiotics for minor or routine infections, like Harriet’s were, C. diff springs alive and begins releasing toxins. It causes severe diarrhea, stomach pain and other
intestinal diseases, and affects 300,000 American citizens each year. Thirty thousand of them die. Harriet’s experience is — alarmingly — becoming increasingly common, and as a result, researchers across the globe have begun in recent years to investigate the problem. In 2005, the United Kingdom’s Sanger Institute published a full sequence of the bacterium’s genome. At least one new drug designed to treat it was developed in the last few years, but its effectiveness is not as high as it needs to be — tens of thousands of people are still dying from infection.
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onald Breaker, a professor of molecular biology at Yale, has stumbled upon something that could radically change the landscape of C. diff research and treatment. Before
short feature coming to Yale, he received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Purdue University and worked at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where he isolated the first catalytic DNAs. Among his more recent major discoveries is the identification of riboswitches, previously unknown small sections of RNA molecules. While this finding is important to the entire field of biology, it particularly pertains to C. diff. Breaker’s desk on the fifth floor of the Kline Biology Tower at Yale is strewn with papers. Sitting in his office, he wears a crisp button-up shirt and wire-framed glasses, and leans back in his chair as he explains his research. He speaks softly but maintains a quiet intensity of tone. While the concepts he researches are complex, his carefully chosen words make his explanations, even to a pitifully scienceless person like me, astonishingly clear. He describes how riboswitches are complex sequences of nucleotides built into RNA molecules. In the past, scientists labeled them as “junk,” inconsequential to the functioning of the cell. To the contrary, Breaker has found, riboswitches have real regulatory power: they control gene expression. When the right small molecule comes floating along and slots itself into a riboswitch’s structure, the mechanism changes its shape. The change determines whether the gene controlled by the switch is turned on — so that it is expressed — or off. Breaker has identified many distinct classes of riboswitches, each with a specific small molecule that binds to it. In C. diff, riboswitches happen to regulate certain genes vital to the bacterium’s survival. Identifying and introducing a chemical to bind to the bacterium’s switches could trick the crucial genes into turning off, and putting that chemical into a capsule could cure people — or at least, that’s the theory. Breaker has done much to test this theory himself and to push the idea towards a medicinal reality. On the fifth floor of KBT, he and his lab intently
pursued the chemicals that could kill C. diff. First they established that the riboswitches were useful drug targets by creating a strain of C. diff that could survive even our most potent drugs. By analyzing the bacterium’s mutations, they showed that riboswitches were instrumental in the process of evolving resistance. With this knowledge, they began searching for the right chemical to trick the riboswitches into turning off. They ultimately created a compound that did what they wanted it to do: “We got very good at curing plastic test tubes of bacterial infections,” Breaker said with a smile. Energized by these early successes, Breaker took his data to investors in the early 2000s. He conveyed to them the importance of his project and the very real possibility of finding an effective treatment through continued research on riboswitches, and they started a company. BioRelix, as it was called, was created to push Breaker’s findings from the realm of academic research into the arena of drug research and development, and the company initiated a vigorous research program with Breaker as its scientific adviser.
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onverting an idea into a pill sold in a plastic bottle at CVS is no small task; the time, effort and money required are tremendous. Before a drug can be produced, it must progress through multiple stages of development. It starts as an idea in a lab like Breaker’s, where scientists are doing cutting-edge research. An exhaustive list of all the phases of development that follow is exhausting to read — a company like BioRelix must thoroughly research the chemical’s structure, bioavailability and toxicity; it must create a nontoxic formulation of the drug that can deliver the substance safely; and then it must
complete the preclinical trials, which are monitored by certain regulatory entities. These stages together take several years, and when they are finished, it’s time to start clinical trials. Drugs in the clinical phase are striving for approval by the FDA; only those that survive the maelstrom of rigorous studies and tests on hundreds of patients have the possibility of becoming legalized for production and sale. Apart from the huge sum of money required to drag a drug through the process from start to finish, the system of development also burdens pharmaceutical companies with a large amount of financial risk: according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, only about one in every 5,000 compounds that undergo preclinical trials is ultimately approved. Because pharmaceutical companies must devote so many resources to exploring drug ideas even though most of them will not make the final cut, they snatch up definite moneymaking drugs, and reject others based on financial constraints instead of medical need. And because companies must apply for patents during the preclinical phase of development, by the time a drug emerges from its 10year testing ordeal and begins its time on the market, its patent life has already dwindled to 20 years or fewer. Antibiotics in particular suffer another developmental difficulty: while good medications treating conditions such as high cholesterol generally work until humans actually mutate or evolve new cholesterol problems, antibiotics like Breaker’s drug are racing against the evolutionary time frame of bacteria. These tiny organisms multiply in minutes and whole colonies evolve in hours. An antibiotic effective today will be much less so in 20 years; this is why
‘I honestly believe we’re going to die like it’s the 1930s ... and then we’ll decide to do something about it.’ yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9
short feature
we have crisis of superbugs like C. diff that are resistant to our drugs in the first place. Breaker notes that because of these compounding dilemmas, even the largest companies like Pfizer have terminated their anti-infectives divisions. The rationale is frustratingly logical, he says: “People have gotten accustomed to receiving a course of drugs over a week that will save their lives, in fact extend them for decades, for the cost of a bottle of Tylenol.” And so more expensive medications are unprofitable, and the antibiotic pipeline is clogged. “I honestly believe we’re going to die like it’s the 1930s … and then we’ll decide to do something about it.”
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n its early years around 2005, BioRelix flourished. It established a strong program in antibiotic development with the help of several large investors. In April 2012, Connecticut Innovations, a group that supports high-tech growth in the state, gave the company over $250,000 as part of a plan to give $2.5 million total through its Eli Whitney
10 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
Fund. In 2010, BioRelix partnered with a subsidiary of Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. “In general things went very well with the partnership,” Breaker said, “but in the end the company, Merck, makes strategic decisions and decided that continued development of the technology wasn’t in their best interest.” BioRelix has since closed its entire research and development operations team, but sources are bound by confidentiality agreements about BioRelix’s business decisions and declined to elaborate further. With BioRelix closed, riboswitch drug research and development has hit a brick wall. The technology and ideas needed to create new antibiotics exist at Yale and elsewhere; certainly there is a pressing need for new drugs to combat C. diff and the host of other increasingly lethal bacteria. But 30,000 American deaths a year is just “not a big enough market for a major pharma company to commit to developing new drugs for,” Breaker says. “That’s where the unforgiving landscape of financial
realities comes into play.” What BioRelix and the antibiotic pipeline as a whole frustratingly lack are the financial incentives necessary to align drug creation with societal needs and goals. Ultimately, Breaker thinks, it will take an “act of Congress” to unstick the antibiotic pipeline. Recent pieces of legislation, notably the Gain Act, have made strides in the fight to reform the system. While this legislation is a good start, it isn’t enough, Breaker says. He thinks a $1 or 2 billion finder’s fee for any entity, public or private, that finds cures for certain extremely resistant microbes could possibly do the trick. But Breaker doesn’t expect Congress to act anytime soon. In the meantime, he continues his research on the fundamentals of life and advocates for the repair of our broken drug development system. “We’ve again fallen into this view that for certain infections there’s just nothing we can do — all we can do is have our friends and relatives die,” Breaker says. “And we’ve got to break those trends.”
The Giant Hole on Sachem Street
A critique of Yale Gothic
By Brendan Bashin-Sullivan Photo by Stephanie Tomasson
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here’s a massive hole at the corner of Prospect and Sachem streets that you’ve probably noticed. There’s also a slice of building, a mock-up, that looks suspiciously like a residential college about half a mile down the Farmington Canal Trail. It’s a nice-looking structure, with orangey-red brick and yellow sandstone to match; it looks like what would be born after the Hall of Graduate Studies mated with Branford College. Some deft Internet investigation confirms that this offspring will one day soon fill the giant hole on Sachem Street. I’m trying to come to grips with the decision to construct the new residential colleges in Gothic style. Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the School of Architecture and the architect behind the design of the new colleges, declined to be interviewed for this article. But when
I sat down with Alec Purves, a veteran professor in the School of Architecture, he offered a plausible explanation: a new Gothic building refers not to the cathedrals and monasteries of Europe, “true Gothic,” but to Yale itself. In fact, it’s not quite correct to describe our buildings as Gothic. They would more readily be called “collegiate Gothic,” or for my purposes, “Yale Gothic.” It’s evident to me that Yale Gothic architecture is part of the brand of the undergraduate areas of campus, the (nearly) unified aesthetic of the existing colleges is part of the package of a Yale undergraduate education, and it is a savvy and sensible move to offer more of a tried-and true product. I wonder, though, how integral the Yale Gothic style is to that same experience in a daily sense. Here’s why I think this matters: a university is a generative and
preservative power. It casts around itself a protective field, its auspice. This auspice arises from a complex combination of factors — personnel, money, regard, material, care, reputation and activity are all necessary for a building to stay standing and relevant. Behind this auspice, buildings are constructed and are for the most part both maintained in a physical sense and kept out of the real estate market. The university is one such power when it functions well, yet it also butts up against other such powers, negotiating and competing with them. Island and peninsular cities demonstrate this best: consider San Francisco or Manhattan, each spanning geographically small territory but hosting any number of moneyed and interested organizations, each casting auspices of their own. Charitable organizations, theaters, independent
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crit libraries, businesses large and small, schools, clubs, and governments all can generate the dynamis or human power, to keep a building or complex of buildings habitable. These organizations not only create and maintain their structures, they use them to make complex, nonverbal statements about authority, tradition, and importance. If you like, it’s comparable to the practice of extending the vote only to landowners: physical territory, and the control of physical territory, legitimizes and reifies an organization and its principles. Cutting the other way, a building occupied by a powerful organization draws a certain durability from that organization, and is elevated above mere real estate. It is in far less danger of being bought, leveled and replaced with a Jamba Juice.
And there’s the usual wisecracking on the introductory tours about bricks being artificially aged in the mud of Long Island Sound, and the ridiculousness of going to that much trouble for oldlooking brick. And there’s the old joke where a modernist titan like Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe says he’d like best to live at the top of Harkness Tower, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. But I think these jabs are slightly misguided. Yes, it’s goofy and inauthentic to build a Disneyscale Chartres out of faux-aged bricks; there is a way in which this can’t help but be objectionable, in an eye-rolling kind of a way. Whatever it is in us that seeks realness in art and buildings causes us to recoil once we learn that the bricks are artificially aged and the decoration is too dense. I imagine it’s the same part of
To build another set of Yale Gothic colleges is to use our unlikely gifts to confirm that we have unlikely gifts.
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ale’s situation, though, is different. No organization in New Haven, possibly in all of Connecticut, possesses an auspice as large, wellfinanced or powerful as Yale. This not only means that the buildings on the Yale campus can fulfill different ends than the city as a whole, but also that the campus comes to set the architectural tone for the city itself. Unlike, say, Columbia, which must contend with the strength of comparable auspices in Manhattan, Yale is able to acquire land and construct buildings with relative ease. Yale has the rare luxury of not necessarily needing to tear down a building in order to build its replacement. I don’t mean to make the usual critique of Yale Gothic here. The critic Dwight Macdonald was already lampooning Yale’s Gothic buildings in 1957, calling them “more relentlessly Gothic than Chartres [the textbook Gothic cathedral], whose builders didn’t even know they were Gothic and so missed many chances for quaint effects.” 12 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
us that would recoil upon learning that a painting we admired was in fact a forgery. But the Yale Gothic campus complicates this sensation by being a forgery of intense, scrupulous sincerity, a forgery with nearly a century of history of its own. In some sense it is transforming, with the passage of time, from imitation to original. And so we treat the campus with a peculiar mix of derision, humor and affection: “Hey, it’s a fake, but it’s our fake and it’s not going anywhere.” For the most part we let it lie.
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or the most part I think Yale Gothic has a certain charm, and is usually brought off well. It delivers the experience promised, at least in the still moments when you can stand in a courtyard rather than hustle through it. The critique I’m advancing is more difficult to make because of that fact; namely, that undergraduate life, even Yale undergraduate life, doesn’t particularly warrant Gothic surroundings. They let us transfer students attend the Christmas
feast in Commons this year, the one where the holiday-attired dining hall staff emerge in a triumphal parade hoisting more glitzy meats than a thousand incoming freshmen could possibly hope to stomach. It struck a similar chord, the one that makes a person ask: “Isn’t this a little rich for me? For us? What could a person my age, even a thousand people my age, do that this food circus would seem called for?” This is more or less the sense I get when I walk through a Yale Gothic courtyard late at night and see a puddle of vomit on the flagstones. There’s a bizarre moment of dissonance. “What were they thinking, giving digs like this to college students?” I can feel the spirit behind Sterling Memorial Library and the Law School, whose Gothic touches seem appropriate to the ideals the buildings represent. Knowledge and The Law, with capital letters, can wear a Gothic style with a straight face. It makes sense, on some level, to enshrine these concepts; Gothic structures, with their ingrained connotation of spirituality, seem appropriate. Dressing undergraduate life in the same style, though, is a little bizarre. In my more cynical moments, I think the concept that the residential colleges enshrine is “I Got Into Yale.” Our first years in the academy, I think, should be ones of humble exploration and experimentation, yet the places we’re expected to dwell send a message of “You did it!” instead of “You need to figure out how you’re going to do it.”
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sat down with Elihu Rubin, who teaches courses in political science and architecture that deal with the American city, and tried to get a grip on how the University works as an architectural locus. He pointed out that Beinecke Library, the YUAG, Rudolph Hall, the British Art Center, Ingalls Rink, and Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges, to name a few, belong to a two-decade span of Yale’s history between 1953 and 1974, a period when modernist architecture was shorthand for progress. Yale used this opportunity to partially reinvent itself: Yale’s modernist period was in
crit
some sense a physical declaration of the changing values of the University. The skins of these buildings don’t match one another the way that Yale Gothic buildings do, but they belong to a distinct ideological and spiritual moment. Further, unlike the Yale Gothic spread of campus, the modernist period of building at Yale could persist in dialogue primarily with itself. In 1962, as builders finished work on Morse and Stiles, the modernist movement had not been given a capstone, declared “over,” schematized. Of course, that capstone has now been set. To build new colleges with a modernist rather than a Gothic palette would be to direct a potential future
back to a defined past. It would be branding of a different look, but it would still be branding. I want to know what a questioning style looks like, a building or set of buildings that can refer to its past without necessarily confirming it. I have had the sense before of belonging to a common project, one that includes great chasms of difference between members, between visions of what is good. The questioning style allows such differences to thrive; it is relentlessly opposed to stasis. It does not supply answers nor take sides. There is something of the workbench in it, something of the laboratory, of the stage, the battlefield, of the simple and
orderly home. It does not pat you on the head for merely being there. It orbits at its center an empty space, not empty because it lacks content, empty because its statement is, “Here is where you do the thing. Whatever it is, make it worth this space. Deserve this chance.” Empty because it’s getting the hell out of the way of you, and everyone you share it with, and the crackling of human power that abides between you. Empty as the vacuum that surrounds the filament of a light bulb. At Yale we have the privilege of an inordinately powerful, oddly unchallenged auspice, an improbable abundance of resources and time. If this questioning style is possible anywhere, it’s here. To build another set of Yale Gothic colleges is to use our unlikely gifts to confirm that we have unlikely gifts. I don’t mean to make this critique as an aesthetic resource. Or any kind of ethical authority. Or an authenticityhound. Nor do I mean to make it as an outsider. The Yale I’m critiquing includes me, despite the fact that I’m a lefty agrarian with longish hair, unemployable as a consultant, who doesn’t play sports and isn’t from the East Coast and can’t do math above a high school level and transferred here eight months ago from a utopianexperimental community college. I’m not trying to level accusations or indictments or offer a vision of what the content of undergraduate life ought to be. I’m trying instead to have us focus our attention a little more on how we clothe ourselves in buildings, how those buildings radiate beyond their physical forms, and how we subject ourselves to a strange dissonance when we let our architecture substitute for the confirmation we create through action. To Yale, we hope, it is given that we will make new things, preserve the sense that we must continually prove ourselves, and persist in making demands even as we acknowledge past successes. When Yale builds, it is to its own credit and benefit to promote this.
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13
The Shock of the Nu By Dylan Kenny Illustrations by Emilie Foyer
T
he Nugrape Twins recorded six tracks for Columbia Records between 1926 and 1927 — four gospel tunes (including “Pray Children if You Want to Go to Heaven” and “There’s a City Built of Mansions”) and two anthems for the soda Nugrape, hence the moniker on their 78s — “I got Your Ice-Cold Nugrape” and “Nugrape — A Flavor You Can’t Forget.” They recorded in Atlanta, accompanied by a company piano man. They are named in the Columbia accounts register as Matthew and Mark, biblically, appropriately. No last names. What we have is all we know. I’ve been listening to these six tracks for two years now, their haunting harmonies, their inscrutability, the tape phasing and the wax warping a rhythm of decay, jamming. These are songs on two themes: salvation and soda. Gospel tunes and singers being a dime a dozen, the Nugrape Twins took their name from what was unusual, the soda songs. But it’s unclear whether or not these jingles were commissioned by the Nugrape company, or are simply effusive, raucous praise (perhaps aiming at such a commission). “I Got Your Ice-Cold Nugrape” has been stuck in my head for a year now; whenever I pick up a guitar, my hands clench unthinkingly into the claws that will scratch out its choral turn. A philosophical friend tells me Kant was intensely annoyed, flabbergasted, by earworms. Perhaps he was abnormally beset and plagued by them — this does, of course, raise the question: what songs got stuck in Kant’s head? But I’m not a philosophy major. Anyway, Kant says that you can tell music is an inferior art to painting because it’s a joy to get a painting stuck in your head, but a burden to get a song stuck in your head. The worst, I could imagine, would be 14 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
jingles — songs designed like computer viruses or tapeworms, burrowed into the brain, muddy eddies in the stream of consciousness. But I’ve never drunk a Nugrape, and I don’t intend to. Not that the Nugrape Twins don’t make a compelling case for their elixir: it will assuage your blues, it will win you a wife, it will cheer your children, it will save your marriage. Nugrape is worldly pleasure, The City Built of Mansions its heavenly counterpart. Surely this soda is a golden calf, a false idol. Surely this is kitsch. Why, then, is this the song that’s stuck with me?
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he answer may be simple: it’s catchy, it’s weird, it’s an excellent pop song. Its harmonies are otherworldly. And it comes to us resembling holy speech, distant, disembodied. The Twins have long since disappeared; I think we’ll never know who they were. The recorded voice makes us think of ghosts. Someday, if you’re interested, you should listen to the oldest sound recordings we have of ghosts themselves. In 1930, a Yorkshire ghosthunter recorded ghosts rapping on wood. It’s terrifying. It sounds exactly like a person rapping on wood. You have to work to supply the spirit, draw it out.
personal essay
I’m reminded of Tithonus, the Trojan lover of the rosy-fingered dawn. Dawn won his immortality, but she forgot to ask for his eternal youth. Over hundreds of years his body withered until it started shrinking, flecking away, and then there was just his voice, babbling by the sea, singing as his lover stretched herself across the ocean, streamed across the strand.
A
seashell, as my father taught me when I was quite young, was the first record. You hold it up to your ear, even in landlocked central California, and you hear its song. It sings the ocean where you found it. I think of Tithonus, and seashells, when I hear the Nugrape Twins cutting through the crackle and phase of the wax. Beachcombing, too. One of the ways we talk about old shit like “I Got Your Ice-Cold Nugrape” is that it’s washed up on our shores. If you want to get really freaky, you can say it’s like a message in a bottle. A message in a Nugrape bottle. But I stand back from that. Let collecting be collecting, and beachcombing, beachcombing. Nothing is bigger than a whale on a beach. Two or three things about whales, from someone who’s neither a cetologist (nor a biologist of any stripe), and hasn’t read “Moby Dick”: they wash up onshore sometimes. They are central to God’s argument for his overarching justice and power. They started out like dogs or deer, 50 million years ago, and decided against evolution’s turn to land, and went
back to the sea. When they wash up on shore now, sometimes they explode. Gases from their insides decomposing build up inside them, until their body cavity bloats to the point of bursting in a violent explosion. In Taiwan in 2004, a whale carcass washed up onto a beach. Noxious fumes spread across the strand, which was as you can imagine a serious pleasure-drain for the community. They took a truck and tried to haul it away to a dump, but the gases had built up to a critical mass, and it exploded in a crowded street, a great fatty bomb in the marketplace. The same thing happened in a German coastal village in the 17th century; several died when the horses carting the carcass spooked in the explosion. Dozens more were mauled to death by wolves that had come down from the forests in search of the lingering whale bits. Imagine, the terror, a slow-ticking bomb, a great greasy meteor!
I
n the final analysis it’s unclear what you’re supposed to do when a whale comes to your shores. It’s a nuisance defined by its sheer mass. Where do you bury it? What do you do with it? You can’t just leave it there, stinking up your beach, rotting like some horrible play with an interminable fifth act, wondering if it’s going to explode and cover you and your family in oily seagoop. You’ve gotta do something with the body. (There’s a funny old book by a Polish poet who died young called “Killing Auntie,” in which the narrator bludgeons his kindly aunt to death in the apartment they share, but is at a loss as to how to dispose of her surprisingly heavy mortal coil. The book is the story
of the hiding of the crime. Brancusi, the sculptor, once said: “the work of art is a perfect crime.” Now you can visit his studio, reconstructed in its integrity, buried in Paris at the Centre Pompidou. Did he get away with it?) But the funeral is not the only quandary when it comes to whale carcasses. Sometimes they are quandaries themselves. Sometimes they wash up so disfigured, so fragmented, that they are completely unidentifiable. Since the 17th century, mysterious masses of tissue, hair and bone have washed up on unsuspecting shores. Oaxaca 1648, the Orkney Isles in Scotland 1808, St. Augustine Florida 1898. They take shapes like creatures hitherto unknown, or long thought dead. They could be leviathans yet hidden from view, testaments to the sheer expanse of the sea, and the powers still occulted in its depths. Remember your theodicy; remember God, to Job, in the founding big-fish tale: “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fish-hook?” Well, can you? Sometimes a basking shark rots and it looks like a plesiosaur; we know this now. Sometimes a whale’s head breaks apart on the seafloor and massive lumps of adipose tissue rise to the surface, making the landward turn, and their decomposition makes new bodies just close enough to creatures to pose the question of their origin. So, the thing is, when you find a globster (as it’s been termed), it’s unclear whether or not it speaks to a revelation, a glimpse at some depth of the world yet unplumbed, or if it’s just beach trash, puked up out of the snotgreen sea. You can’t tell whether or not it’s divine or base. The problem of the globster, like the problem of the Nugrape Twins, is about distinguishing the real thing from the fake. It’s about art versus kitsch. It’s about signs and wonders. It’s about carefully balancing low things in high places and seeing how they stand, or fall.
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15
AWAKE February 2, 2013
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his begins in the graveyard, which, today, is actually a cheery place. It’s Saturday. It’s sunny. It’s warm for February. There are birds chattering in the trees that are everywhere. Two friends and I are here to read and lie on the grass, to shed the week’s noise. We walk along the rows of headstones and memorials. The “avenues” have names like Maple, Laurel, and Linden. I think of my eighty-two-year-old professor who lives on the real Linden Street six blocks from here, who, I guess, could live on Linden forever if he wants. How strange that the dead have residences. All the tombstones marked 1797 or earlier were lifted from the 16 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
By Vincent Tolentino Photography by Jennifer Cheung
New Haven Green, when that burial ground became too crowded. I wonder how much of what we’re walking on now is earth, and how much is bodies, and what these stones actually mean. On some of the grave markers, the letters have crumbled under centuries of wind and rain. These days they say very little. We sit beneath a maple tree. The other two open books, and I continue looking down the avenue. It takes sitting still to realize that the true presences in this graveyard are not the headstones, but the trees. The trees — which seem almost as numerous as the stones, and are larger by far. This isn’t a cemetery planted with trees; it’s rather a kind of forest intruded upon. Many of the trees are new, but a few have been here longer than the city has. I look
at the ground, where the roots of the maple clasp the earth, and I think about how everything else seems so fake. The “avenues,” the obelisks, the expensive cut headstones. Those things aren’t alive. I have the unmistakable sense that if the dead had souls once, they wouldn’t be anchored to the stones now. The wind picks up, so my friends and I zip up our jackets and head home. Inside, where it’s warm, we sit by the windows and listen to good music for the rest of the afternoon. We talk about how wonderful glass is — how glass windows let in the sunlight and keep out the cold. And then reading glasses and wine glasses and mirrors. Glass, we realize, is a kind of divine miracle by itself — it starts as thousands of bits of sand, heated so they start vibrating
personal essay together, until everything actually breaks apart and fuses, and finally the maker blows the glass, breathes into it, literally in-spires, like … I don’t know, Yahweh himself, breathing, “Let there be glass!” This goes on, the sun sets, we laugh, we change the music. Everyone is talking and drinking tea and breathing together, vibrating together, until dinner. We head to our favorite restaurant (we save up for meals like this every month) and continue our conversation. We order mostly the same thing and bite into our food at the same time. Everyone is silent as we nosh; the bliss is wordless and shared. We eventually get to talking about umami, the “savory” taste — how it doesn’t have to pertain just to meat, or to food at all. How umami can be hearing a beautiful piece of music and getting chills, or getting into a hot tub and saying ahh. It occurs to me that learning about umami is a rich kind of umami itself. We text a few friends as dinner winds down, and head back to the house with a legion. We blow the speakers wide open, and the windows, too, and let the talk, like the spirits, flow and flow, a glistening ribbon of amber. There’s dancing, there’s laughter — we talk about how in moments like this, when we put our heads together and breathe in the same space, it’s like flames joining flames and shooting up higher, each of us a little kinetic rift in the atmosphere, feeding on oxygen, burning to connect, burning to share light with everything around us. The music comes down and the poetry comes out. We talk till our throats dry, and wet them with wine. The sunrise is blue, and then bluer, then white — I look out the window and my voice starts crackling because it’s actually been emptied, but my mouth keeps moving, making words of my coughs. My friends just laugh and hand me water. In the afternoon, I become aware that I’m not quite moving, so much as I’m watching myself move. I’m watching myself hang a towel on a
rack, shuffle barefoot over a carpet, sit at a wooden desk ... every sensory stimulus feels like a memory. I look out at the sky, which has turned golden; another day, apparently, has gone by. The earth has rolled around again, and it is Sunday. Now that the house is quiet, now that I realize just how long I’ve been awake and moving, I laugh. I laugh at how this is becoming a habit. I laugh because I understand what it must feel like to be old and getting older. And I laugh because I’m relieved — the feeling is good. I don’t know why I’m compelled to mark the hours as they pass. Twenty-fourth hour awake, thirtieth now, how wild. Then, out of nowhere, thirty-fourth, thirty-sixth. It’s strange knowing that your day has run its course and still being up, moving through it. It really must feel the same as turning seventy-five, thinking that’s it, but then finding yourself, somehow, at eighty. And blinking — eighty-two. Still here, still going. And it seems clear to me that as surely as I’ll sleep today and wake up tomorrow, my body will die when its time is done and then whatever is me will continue moving onward. I’ve always supposed that this is the case, but I’ve never been so physically sure of it. Dying is just a leaving of the body — the body, which is a beautiful, capable thing, but in the end, just a thing. A rack of skin and bones, a trunk with roots and limbs. My energies, for now, are concentrated through the lens of this particular body. I think of the glass in a microscope or a window on an airplane. Whatever is me — call it a soul, call it anything — looks through the eyes in my head, tastes what my
brain is thinking, notes whatever I find beautiful, true. It walks through this narrative for eighty, ninety years, and then, it goes elsewhere. The body will be laid to rest, in a graveyard maybe, but whatever is me will be somewhere else by then. Other souls that have been in other bodies for the past thousands of years have maybe thought the same, and out of compassion, they’ve left good things for us to look at. They’ve steered us toward what’s important. They’ve made music and literature and art, things that say, We are like you, we’ve learned quite a lot, take this and flourish, make more good things. Because every hour of this day has been beautiful, and everything I’ve loved looking at or talking about has pointed me toward savoring life, being at peace with others. Back outside the window, it’s nighttime again. As I put my things away and climb into bed, I mark this, my thirty-sixth and final hour. I’m baffled, but I close my eyes exulting. I’m content. I’m alive. And death seems sweet as sleep.
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17
The
NESTING Instinct
BY BRANDON JACKSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGIA LILL
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ith over 130,000 specimens, Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History is home to one of world’s largest collections of birds, eggs and nests. The collection resides deep in the heart of a brick Gothic building. The corridors leading to it are lined with fossils, a stuffed llama and dozens of photos of birds. Ornithology professor Richard Prum leads me there. He briskly leads me out of his office, down the hall, through a bird taxidermy operating room and into a cavernous warehouse. The room hums as the ventilation system pumps in chilled, low-humidity air. Row after row of glossy white metal cabinets stretch from the floor to the 15-foot-high ceiling. The cabinet doors, with their continuous white façade stretching into the distance, keep their contents hidden. It is here that the nest collection is stored, filled with sticks, structures 18 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
and secrets. Despite their incredible variety, ingenuity and resilience, for some reason nests have been treated as novelties. Scientists have not studied them as rigorously as birds themselves; the nests of 20 percent of all bird species remain undescribed. Scientists know very little about how most nests are constructed, and even less about the physical principles responsible for their strength. “Biologists always point at these things and say, ‘Wow, look at how beautifully designed and structurally sound they are!’” Prum observes with a grin. “Yet those notions have never really been put to any scientific test. There has been no quantification, no anything.” Now Prum and a team of ornithologists, mathematicians, and physicists are looking past the beauty of the birds’ nests and starting to explore how such tiny creatures became some of nature’s greatest engineers.
When we enter the collection, Prum darts straight for the nearest cabinet. He slides open a drawer, revealing row after row of brilliant blue birds. Then he slides open another drawer. And another. Each tray is lined with a grid of seemingly identical specimens. Prum carefully picks up a little blue bird. Its feathers glimmer purple in the light. Tied around the bird’s leg is a tiny slip of aging paper. Prum peers through his thick circular glass and reads the beautiful cursive handwriting aloud: “Cotinga maynana. Alta Mira, Peru. 1962.” He puts the bird back and smiles. “I just can’t function unless I have 100,000 dead birds across the hallway,” he jokes as he closes the drawers and begins to open another cabinet. The door swings open, revealing a forest of nests, stored in clear cases. There were nests built with hair, and nests built with thorns. There were nests
short feature shaped like bowls, and nests shaped like tunnels. The nests were sorted by species just like the birds themselves, yet no two nests in the collection — not even those constructed by the same species — looked the same. It’s this variety that gets Prum going. Instead of simply adapting by changing their bodies, birds have also adapted by constructing ever improving homes. By studying the architectural history of nests, Prum believes we can gain insight into more than just the clever ways birds hid their eggs from predators: we can see the way that birds’ minds have evolved over time. These remarkable structures are the work of craftsmen who spent their days carrying out the vision in their minds. Once they are kicked out of the nest, birds are forced to make one of their own without any help from their folks. “They have no opportunity to learn. It has to be innate,” argues Prum. Birds seem to have built-in blueprints. Instead of mapping out every detail like an instruction manual, these plans seem to contain a few general engineering principles that help birds decide which materials to use and where to put them. Even though the exact layouts are never the same, ornithologists can still identify the species that built a nest just like humans can use architectural features to distinguish between Roman and Gothic buildings. The history of the ornithology collection showcases how science itself has evolved. Most of the nests in the collection date from the Victorian era, at the close of the 19th century. In those days, “egging” was all the rage. Everyone from schoolboys to scientists scavenged the countryside, searching high and low for nests. But nests were but containers for the real targets: eggs. The humans would snatch the eggs, drill a tiny hole in the bottom, drain their contents and place the shells in their collections. Egging was regarded as a respectable scientific pursuit. Legions of curious citizens catalogued the world around them and reported their
discoveries to the academy. They then showed off their collections of eggs to their friends. Nests, on the other hand, rarely appeared in Victorian collections. They simply weren’t as glamorous. Egging’s similarity to predation ultimately spelled its downfall, as more and more governments criminalized the disturbance of nests. As citizens lost interest in egging, natural history museums like the Peabody began acquiring their personal collections. The nature of science was changing, too. The gulf between amateur and
spent in the bushes with binoculars. Armed with a shotgun and taxidermy kit mailed to him by the Smithsonian Institute, Ripley used his sneaky skills to collect birds behind enemy lines. Now the collection has fallen into the hands of Prum. Prum got his start studying feather evolution, and won a MacArthur genius grant in part due to his discovery that dinosaurs had feathers. His interest in how feathers get their color brought him into close contact with engineers, who have inspired him to think of nests differently.
Prum and a team of ornithologists, mathematicians and physicists are looking past the beauty of the birds’ nests and starting to explore how such tiny creatures became some of nature’s greatest engineers. professional scientists grew as biologists turned their attention away from the treetops and onto the hidden worlds of cells and genetics. Nest collections in museums worldwide gathered dust. Prum is the latest in a long line of eccentric individuals to build and incubate the nest collection. Much of it was assembled by Henry O. Havemeyer. Havemeyer was the heir to his family’s sugar business, which controlled 80 percent of the U.S. market. He dedicated his spare time to stocking a prolific bird nest museum in the comfort of his New Jersey mansion. Havemeyer’s collection was acquired for the Peabody by another character with private extracurricular activities named Sidney Dillon Ripley. Before he became the Peabody’s director for two decades, Ripley was sent to India to gather intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA). Normally, spies posed as ornithologists to distract attention from the time they
To begin my tour of the collection, Prum walked me through the architectural lineage of the weaver family. The birds start by finding a fork in a tree. Like a human with a needle and thread, the birds use their curved beaks to weave sinuous fibers in and out, forming a dense fabric. Once they bridge the gap between the branches, they build a pouch to hold their eggs. In moderate climates like those in Connecticut, these pouches are a few inches deep. Yet as the weather becomes tropical, the pouches stretch down as if melting from the heat. The result is a work of striking architectural beauty: a 3-foot-long pendulum. The collection is also home to mysterious nests. One monolithic nest dominates an entire cabinet: the towering home of the firewood-gatherer. The South American bird gets its name from the size of the branches it can be seen dragging along the forest floor. The nest’s architect stitched together a
yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19
short feature formidable tower. The keep’s circular outer wall is barbed with thorns. The only opening is a small entrance at the very top. No one knows what is inside. Most scientists who have attempted to cut apart firewood-gatherer nests have failed to dissect the constructions before they fall apart, taking their secrets with them. Yet the few who have succeeded report finding a spiral passageway that winds back and forth en route to the inner sanctum. “Perhaps someday we will get a robot to go inside of it,” muses ornithologist Kristof Zyskowski, who captured the nest during a 2002 expedition to Uruguay. Not all birds build fortresses to protect their eggs. Some, like the rosebreasted grosbeak, try to make their nests disappear. The bird uses tiny twigs that are thinner than spaghetti noodles to form a tangled web, and then lays its eggs atop it. The result: eggs that appear to float in the air. Although ornithologists were originally interested in the most intricately crafted nests, Prum’s attention is shifting to ones that seem to defy a conventional idea of structure. The next nest Prum grabs is similar to the grosbeak’s: it looks more or less like a handful of twigs dumped into a box. It was built by a brown bird with a short curved beak called a crissal thrasher. At first glance these nests lack clear signs of craftsmanship. Grosbeaks don’t stitch the twigs together into a fabric like weavers, nor do thrashers build castles like fire-gatherers. Instead, the twigs in these nests look like a cross between a wood pile and a tangled mess. Yet this apparent structural anarchy is what fascinates Prum: how did birds learn to make such strong homes so effortlessly? Or as an engineer would say, how did they become so efficient? The answer may be that there is something special about piles of sticks themselves. In 2010 a team of physicists led by Scott Franklin at the Rochester Institute of Technology started to explore why we can easily run fingers through a bucket of sand, 21 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
but not through a bucket filled with nails. They put a bunch of chopsticklike glass rods into a bucket and shook it. When they peered inside they saw something magical: all of the rods were stuck together in a spontaneous rigid structure that could be removed in one piece by a single string tied around a single rod. Prum describes it as a “chopstick hairball.” To uncover what mysterious principle held the hairballs together, Franklin tried the same experiment using sticks of different sizes. They found that structures made with shorter sticks fell apart, while those composed of longer sticks were strong. They soon realized that what mattered most was the ratio between the diameter and the length of the rod, called the aspect ratio. The resulting paper caught the eye of Yale engineering professor Corey O’Hern. Last year Prum invited O’Hern to visit the nest collection. The engineer was struck by the resemblance between chopstick hairballs and bird nests, and started to wonder: had birds discovered the wonders of the chopstick hairball millions of years before humans did? If birds have indeed evolved to understand aspect ratio’s engineering significance, Prum predicts that birds will instinctively use sticks with higher aspect ratios to build their nests. In order to explore this hypothesis, engineers would have to first measure the shape of every twig and then map all of the places where branches intersect. Here a problem arises. To measure the twigs, they would have to deconstruct the nest, making it impossible to then measure the interconnections. In order to get around this sticky problem, Prum and his team put the nests through a CT scanner. They carried a selection of structurally remarkable nests to the Yale-New Haven Hospital for testing. The lab technicians were thankful for the change of pace. “You would not believe how enthusiastic they were!” said Zyskowski. He tried to use the scanner to peer inside of
the firewood-gatherer’s citadel, but it was too big to fit in the scanner. Next up was the crissal thrasher’s nest. After adjusting the machine to scan wood instead of human tissue, the result was what the bird lovers had been hoping for: the world’s first precise 3-D image of a bird nest. Now the hunt for the secrets of bird nest blueprints is on. Mathematicians like Georgia Lill ’13 are working to transform that set of images into a virtual model. Prum hopes that soon we will be able to start quantifying the thrasher’s engineering knowledge in terms of the aspect ratios it prefers. Yet aspect ratios will never be able to explain the amazing variety of nests. Prum finds this exciting. He believes that biologists’ attempt to reduce life to a series of numbers and base pairs has been a distraction. “Without the phenotype, the genotype is just library science,” he argues. He believes that genetics is just a fad. “Soon it will all be done. Literally. We’ll have the genome of all the vertebrates. That’s going to happen in 10 years. And then what are all these people going to do for a job?” he asks. “In fact, they’re going to be studying the phenotype.” Prum sees nests as evidence that the world is still filled with mystery and complexity. “Science has reached the limits of its ability to reduce us … and I think this is an incredibly liberating message for the planet.”
The Science Park Bubble By Ava Kofman Photography by Jacob Geiger
feature
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ew Haven’s Science Park starts at the intersection of Munson and Winchester, about half a mile from Yale’s campus near its Health Services Building. Built from the remains of industrial decay, the mixed-use space of corporate offices, research labs, some retail, and soon, an apartment complex, presents an alternative for New Haven’s economic future. The city’s redevelopment of the Winchester Repeating Arms historic site mirrors transformations in America’s economic landscape. Following the mid-century collapse of the manufacturing industry, federal and state governments planned office park developments across the nation to help states transition towards an information economy. Science parks are often built near universities — the idea being that businesses and tech companies will benefit from being closer to their resources, students and research faculty, and vice versa. Ideally, this new highway of communication leads to increased innovation. In the bestcase scenario, one ends up with the Stanford Industrial Park, also known as Silicon Valley. In New Haven, the Science Park Development Corporation (SPDC), a nonprofit 501k, was founded in 1982 as a joint collaboration between the city, the factory’s previous owner (the Olin Corporation) and Yale. SPDC’s plans are aimed at encouraging New Haven’s economic strengths in education, research and medical care. But unlike other major manufacturing cities, New Haven’s possibilities for economic recovery were severely limited by its intense dependence on the manufacturing industry.
The Park currently houses the outsourcing of the administrative, IT and maintenance staff from Yale, which has filled Winchester’s shoes as the city’s largest employer. The reality of New Haven’s Science Park has yet to live up to the tech boom’s promise. Ivy Bistro, one of the Park’s only retail establishments, floats precariously as a trial balloon. Jeff, an older Asian man working the cashier, said it was “sometimes lonely” being the only business in the area, especially when business was slow. The restaurant is nestled, somewhat comically, in between 25,000 square feet of empty space for lease that has yet to see any offers. The “Now Open” sign that has been hanging outside since April might as well read “Open — For Now.” David Silverstone, president of the SPDC, said the process of finding additional tenants to lease these spaces — ideally “a mix of IT firms, biotech, retail and development, and state agencies” — has likewise been “slow.”
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he Park’s surrounding neighborhood of DixwellNewhallville no longer has the same proximal relationship to jobs that it used to, back when Winchester was the source of those jobs and the sense of its community. At its peak during the World Wars, the factory employed over 20,000 workers, 85 percent of whom lived nearby and walked to work. Ward 21 Alderman Brenda Foskey-Cyrus, who was raised two blocks up from Division and Winchester, estimated that up to 25 percent of the neighborhood was unemployed — three times the national average. But the direct link — between people who live in the neighborhood and work there — has been severed.
The ‘Now Open’ sign that has been hanging outside since April might as well read ‘Open — For Now.’ 22 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
The street that bisects Science Park and Winchester to its north is literally named Division Street. This fracture is also physical. The cosmetic difference between the developed Science Park section of Winchester Avenue and the rest of the street to the south of Munson and north of Division is startling: one half is paralyzed; the other, while not quite animate, is operative. On the four blocks leading up to where Science Park starts, Winchester’s sidewalks swell into concrete lumps that crack open with weeds and small shrubbery. Houses that aren’t burned out or boarded up are often next to houses that are. But reach the corner of Munson and Winchester and the sidewalks level out into linear walkways, and Blue Phones glow from every corner of the new parking garage. The design of Science Park heightens this sense of alienation from its surroundings. Biking and walking around the park in the rain, or after dark, or anytime, really, feels like bobbing around a ghost town. At night, its buildings stay lit. They are blank and glowing and completely anonymous. Peek inside the low-slung 344 Winchester for a deadpan world of polished white cubicles and thin white beams: unpeopled, weightless and humming, like the glowing ghost of capital to come. Last April, Higher One, a financial services and data analytics provider to universities nationwide, opened its headquarters in Science Park. The Park’s biggest employer after Yale, the company seeks out advanced financial and technical acuity; scientific research requires a series of advanced degrees. Yet many residents in DixwellNewhallville don’t have high school diplomas. Elihu Rubin, an assistant professor of architecture at Yale who specializes in urban redevelopment in New Haven, believes that workforce training programs, partly sponsored by private enterprises and partly supported by
feature government, can help bridge this “skills mismatch.” Initiatives, he says, should make sure that people who live in the area are positioned, whenever possible, to take new jobs in emerging markets: “It should be that if you grow up here you can have job at whatever it is: Higher One, a new biotechnology company, a new kind of service industry … It would be a missed opportunity, if the jobs created by the Park seemed a world away.”
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ewhallville Alderman Brenda Foskey-Cyrus sat in the renovated section of the Higher One courtyard. The space has been constructed, in part, from within the outer walls of the yet-to-be-renovated old Winchester factory where her father used to work. The Winchester rifle, renowned for its reliability and branded as the gun “that won the West,” was once shipped from here to every state in the Union. These days, Foskey-Cyrus says NewhallvilleDixwell’s biggest export is its number of shootings: the neighborhood that
once profited from manufacturing munitions for war now put their triggers to use for murder. Foskey-Cyrus said she became an alderman because of crime. Her brother was murdered just before Christmas in 2011. That year, Dixwell had a violent crime rate of more than twice the New Haven average. Though the area north of Newhallville comprises only one-fifth of New Haven’s total area, DataHaven, a Connecticut advanced data analysis organization, calculates that it accounted for over four-fifths of the city’s 2011 violent crime. When Foskey-Cyrus knocks on doors and asks the question, “What would it take to calm down the neighborhood?” she said that there was one urgent answer on everyone’s mind: jobs. As I did the same, asking residents on their porches and chatting with proprietors in their stores, I heard the same refrain — “jobs” — that seemed to have incantatory powers. I talked to residents living on Ivy, on Highland, on Lilac, on Star, on Newhall. Their problems with Science
Park were not so much with Forest City’s new housing development, but with what seemed to be the beginning of yet another saga in its long history of neglect. It seemed, to those living in Newhallville-Dixwell, that forces no one had told them about were shaping a development nearby that they would never work at, let alone ever see. So long as getting hit by a stray bullet was more likely than finding a job, some magic bullet seemed necessary to conjure real results. Could Science Park help with this? Could it have the same responsibility to the neighborhood into which it has plopped itself as Winchester once did?f Twenty percent of the current phase’s apartments have been set aside for low-income housing. “It should be half and half if anything,” Darrine Padgett, who lives on Lilac Street, said, of the 20 percent allotment for low-cost housing. Both of her friends nodded. But Padgett laughed and then said how unrealistic that would be, considering the apathy towards the community. Tiffany Barnes, 24, and her cousin
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feature Christina, 23, sitting outside on their porch on Winchester, explained that most people in the area didn’t know about the relief programs available to them because no one ever stopped to have a conversation with them. “They should post jobs here. The only posts I’ve seen is move your car or clean up litter,” Tiffany said. They see the city’s silence on neighborhood housing plans as a sign. They fear that locals will “slowly but surely” be pushed out by students and the middle class. “We feel like they’re trying to clear everybody out of neighborhood,” Christina said. “I’m just going to say it — don’t take it the wrong way — but I see white people coming over there trying to plan it,” Tiffany continued. “They definitely have plans.”
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ast fall, the Board of Aldermen unanimously approved the plans by the developer Forest City to convert the rest of the old building surrounding Higher One courtyard — the rest of Winchester Repeating Arms historic site — into 158 loft-style apartments. When I asked SPDC President David Silverstone whether he would classify this type of development as gentrification, he explained that he understood the issue but didn’t see it as relevant in this case. “We’re taking abandoned factories — what Europe used to look like after World War II — and we’re turning them into productive uses. To me, that’s not gentrification,” he said. “To me, gentrification is taking out buildings, adding colored paint and upping the counters so that existing neighbors can’t pay the rent. We’re not doing that; we’re making existing area more attractive. We’re making the existing area better and more attractive to existing residents. We’re not displacing anybody. We’re not taking over buildings that benefit blue-collar workers and making them better for white-collar workers.” Drew Morrison, a Yale junior whose
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organization New Haven Action has worked with City Hall on solutions for housing and crime, supports the Winchester renovation but sees the “pressure to follow this model” of development in other areas so that everything becomes “high-tech parks and apartment buildings” as dangerous. “As much as I support Winchester, it shouldn’t be the model, though it makes sense for this particular situation. Something in Newhallville has to benefit Newhallville.” Silverstone has spoken of plans to open a daycare center for employees in Science Park, with 15 percent of its slots reserved for Newhallville. A nonprofit center, established by the SPDC at 4 Science Park, houses a jobs center, Literacy Volunteers and New Haven Reads. The Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCat), which is not part of the center but is located next door, prepares adults for jobs through a holistic training program that, as Rubin hoped, caters directly to the current demand of the market. This type of workforce training opens dialogues between new employers, educational institutions and people in the area to tailor opportunities to resources already available. Though ConnCat serves the needs of the larger New Haven community in addition to Newhallville, Clemons says that he chose the location of Science Park intentionally so as to be in the “midst of cutting-edge technology while also being in one of the most depressed neighborhoods in New Haven.” He says that he hopes to debunk the myth of Science Park as an “unfriendly, tread-with-caution place” that people never even drive through by “bringing people into the idea that is Science Park.” The proximity provided by Science Park’s shared space has led to mutually beneficent results: ConnCat has worked with Literacy Volunteers to target the specific needs of applicants who didn’t pass ConnCat’s intake assessment, so that they can try again.
ConnCat is now looking to expand its ability to serve more people given the “incredible need” and demand from the community. In ConnCat’s future, Clemons sees the possibility of building a culinary school to serve the criminal re-entry population, who cannot legally work medical jobs but are allowed to cook. Residents have also spoken hopefully about programs like Solar Youth, Achievement First, CitySeed and the Winchester Arts Initiative that had all recently moved to the area.
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n a Monday morning in October, Abe Naparstek, the project’s manager and Forest City’s vice president, gave me a tour of the old Winchester factory so that he could better illustrate these plans for its future restoration. As he unlocked the gate to the section of the building that had been left to rot since the 1980s, he explained that the way these traditional industrial spaces were designed in the early 1900s — connecting section onto section as needed — had proved inefficient over time. After restoration, however, these sections made for bright loft spaces: the structure’s narrow frames, big windows and high ceilings allowed for lots of sunlight. Inside, it was cool and quiet. As we carefully stepped across the floorboards jutting out in every direction like fallen Jenga pieces, Naparstek said that the new apartments at Science Park would be “top of the market,” geared towards people who “appreciate historical details and the urban fabric of living there.” He expects its tenants to primarily be “young professionals interested in the flexibility of renting,” graduate students, people working in the area, or couples looking to downsize from a home. From where we were standing, it was as hard to imagine a young 20-something someday cooking quinoa as it was to conceive of the thousands of men who once delicately
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For the 15 residents I talked to, development, Yale and gentrification were all different words for the same thing: rising prices and, eventually, displacement of renters. pieced together the parts of a revolver. Rows of thin beams and soft pink columns, their pastel paint peeling and tearing, ran down the long length of the narrow rooms. Some rooms were filled with shells and casings. Others were emptied of everything but dust and an old sign: “DO NOT THROW CIG BUTTS ON FLOOR.” One bathroom’s toilet had exploded, scattering shards of porcelain across its bright teal tiling. Outside, the old buildings enclosed an unrenovated courtyard the size of two baseball diamonds. Unlike Higher One, strings of long weeds and snarling purple flowers all spun and fell over the trees like tufts of hair thrown down to earth from a barbershop up in the sky. “Every time we do development, we have to spend a lot of money on cleanup,” Naparstek said. “During the last 100 years, these factories didn’t have the sensitivities to lead, soil, all of these chemicals that are left around.”
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rik Johnson’s job is to serve as an intermediary between the forces of development and the interests of the neighborhood, and if all goes well, to resolve these differences in a mutually beneficial way. Johnson works for the Liveable City Initiative (LCI), whose principal concern is to make sure there are “opportunities available to residents and existing homeowners.” Johnson’s family grew up in Newhallville when it had its highest concentration of home ownership. LCI has partnered with Neighborhood Housing Services,
which tries to aggressively acquire and rehababilitate formerly vacant properties. NHS, using LCI funds, has helped create a new home-ownership community through a concentrated approach to development. Johnson believes that Forest City’s $50 million investment in new apartments and NHS’s commitment to development in Newhallville are “working to the same end from different spectrums.” While NHS is working on preservation, Forest City is working on “opening the eyes of the market to a neighborhood that’s been neglected for 25 years.” The return of a larger middle class to Newhallville can help to stabilize crime, increase retail and promote improved housing stock and green space. He foresees the neighborhood regaining some of its diversity — both “racial and incomewise” — as Science Park emerges as a “business and entrepreneurial destination point in the city.” I wondered aloud to Johnson about the two sides of this coin. On the one hand, if the area becomes more attractive and more desirable, property values starts to rise. On the other, this may affect tenants negatively as what was once affordable housing will now be out of reach. At the moment, only 26 percent of New Haven residents own their own homes; the national average for cities is 50 percent. For the 15 residents I talked to, development, Yale and gentrification, were all different words for the same thing: rising prices and, eventually, displacement of renters. These developments seemed particularly inevitable to residents
because of the Park’s ties to Yale — its proximity, its new colleges and its stake in these investments. But it was precisely this convergence of activities, Johnson said, that LCI is trying to prevent by putting measures in place to help sustain the neighborhood long before the pull of the market hits full stride. LCI’s strategy, he said, is to be “proactive” rather than “reactive” in order to help people take advantage of the “trail of investments” that follow from Forest City’s. When these conflicts of interest do collide in three to four years, Johnson is optimistic that the question will become, “How are we going to manage the change that’s taken place in neighborhood?” rather than “How are we going to manage the decline of this neighborhood?” Though Johnson conceded that pairing investment positively with cost and affordability was a constant struggle, he added: “I’d rather have that first conversation.” Anything was an improvement over the status quo. It was possible, Johnson said, for Newhallville to again become the “mixed neighborhood of choice” it once was. The best parallel for Newhallville to follow may be itself: it was once a dynamic mixed-income community. “New Haven as a whole,” he said, “is too hard on itself.” New urbanism, walkable streets, porches — “it’s already here, we already have that. The question is, can we accept the fact that we have it?” As Science Park appears today — straddling old and new, decay and progress, ruined industry and bright new glass — it is a screen onto which everyone projects home videos of the past and visions for the future. But the rate of change and development negotiated between the Park and Newhallville will tell which of these projections will someday become real — and to whom.
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STANDING ATHWART THE LEGACY OF DONALD KAGAN BY ELAINA PLOTT PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARA MILLER
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n an overcast day in January, George Will left his hotel room at The Study with a purposeful stride. He had just arrived at Yale on invitation from the Buckley program, and his first request was for directions to the Elizabethan Club. Inside, Donald Kagan was waiting for his old friend, eager to reunite. The scene was a far cry from when Kagan and Will first crossed paths 13 years ago. Though the then-dean of Yale College and Pulitzer Prizewinning columnist, respectively, were two of the nation’s leading conservative voices, often championing the same principles in the classroom and in the
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pages of The Washington Post, they found themselves at an intellectual impasse. Despite their political harmony, the two would forever be at odds on one fundamental topic: baseball. Will had just published “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball,” an effort to break down the game to an exact science through managing, pitching, hitting and fielding. It rapidly achieved widespread acclaim, but Kagan, a fellow baseball enthusiast, was not impressed. He quickly took to The Public Interest, a quarterly public policy journal, to pen a 20-page rebuttal, emphasizing Will’s “failure
to appreciate the lost grandeur of baseball” and daring to define the work as “democratically modern.” “I have been called many things, but rarely, if ever, ‘democratic’ or ‘modern.’ This mudslinging must cease,” Will wrote in response. Kagan’s impassioned rebuttal was far from unusual. There’s a vigor that defines his every cause, from America’s pastime to America’s place in the globalized era. His colleagues herald him a fighter, one who never shies from an opportunity to defend his principles, chief of which is his call for intellectual diversity in higher education. And when the Sterling
profile Professor of classics and history bids Yale adieu this May, after 44 years, it is this banner he will leave behind, a lingering conservative voice in a faculty overwhelmingly colored blue.
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n a spring day in 1970, John Hale ’73 struggled to push through the barricade of students outside Phelps Gate. Anti-war demonstrations were in full force on Old Campus, and several professors had caved to the pressure, canceling classes for indefinite periods of time. But Hale and his classmates would not lend their voices to the protests. They were expected promptly in a small seminar room inside Phelps Hall, and professor Kagan was waiting. “Everything was in disarray,” Hale recalls. “But Kagan was a rock throughout it all. The chanting — it was so loud through the window of our classroom. But he just kept teaching.” For Kagan, the sounds of Old Campus were all too familiar, a vivid reminder of the reason he fled Cornell less than one year before. When gunwielding students seized Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall in 1969, Kagan was confounded as the administration surrendered to the occupiers’ demands, including amnesty for all students involved. In the takeover’s aftermath, as Cornell exploded in tension and polarization, Kagan left his post for Yale, one of the few Ivy League schools then untouched by student violence and protest. Yale, of course, would not carry this distinction for long. “I felt like Typhoid Mary, coming here,” he jokes in reflection. “There was a lot of fear that year and a lot of political pressure to call off classes. But I couldn’t think of anything worse — it was unfair to let those things rule out the educational process.” Before the Cornell incident and burgeoning unrest at Yale, Kagan was a self-described “FDR-style, New Deal Democrat.” As anti-war aggression
If the administration viewed Kagan as a problem, it was one deemed indispensable to the University’s functioning and success. spread like wildfire, however, his views would shift sharply right, culminating in the neoconservatism that defines him today. Even then, it was an unpopular torch to carry at Yale, but, as Kagan puts it, a “necessary” one. “A proper American institution needs a strong balance of ideas,” he says with a smile. “And to get there, you have to cause a stir now and then.”
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n the past 44 years, Kagan and controversy have often gone hand in hand. Kingman Brewster, Yale president from 1963 to 1977, first caught wind of the professor’s principled defiance as early as 1972, just three years into Kagan’s time at Yale. Brewster had recently appointed him chairman of the Classics Department, but almost as soon as Kagan took on the position he was threatening to leave it. Affirmative action policies had just gained a foothold at Yale, and Brewster was quick to inform Kagan of the department’s new hiring guidelines. The requirements would now entail keeping records of and “sorting” job applicants based on race and gender, all in an effort to ensure a steady influx of minority faculty. Kagan refused. He expressed his opposition in a letter to Brewster. “I told him, although he was a lawyer, and I wasn’t, I was convinced that this order was illegal, indecent and unconstitutional,” Kagan recalls. “I wouldn’t do it.” Brewster called him and invited him to discuss the matter in person. In the meeting, Kagan remained adamant. “I said: I’m afraid we don’t agree on this one, Mr. President,” he recalls, “so you better find yourself a new chairman of
the Classics Department. There’s no way I’m going to do this.” For Brewster, it was not an attractive option. “‘Yale President Fires Department Chair over Affirmative Action Policy’ — can you imagine? He certainly didn’t want that,” Kagan says. The point of the conversation, he says, was for Brewster to determine if Kagan meant to elevate the issue onto a public stage. “But I had no desire to do that,” he continues. “I just thought it was wrong.” Brewster, relieved that Kagan’s grievance would not take on a larger audience, put forth a proposition: Kagan would continue his hiring practices as he had pre-policy, and the Dean’s Office would “take care of the rest.” “In other words,” he says, “they would do their ‘numbering’ and ‘sorting’ by themselves, and I wouldn’t have to play a part.” He agreed to Brewster’s proposal, holding the title for three more years before stepping down to become master of Timothy Dwight in 1976. But as he recounts the episode, Kagan’s voice is touched with solemnity, and it’s clear that regret still lingers in the story’s outcome. “Sometimes I think I did the wrong thing,” he admits. “I said earlier that you have to be willing to make a stink about what you believe to be right. Maybe that was a time when I should have.” According to Kagan, it was clear that Brewster thereafter began to view him as a “problem.” Subsequent Yale presidents might have felt likewise, as it would not be the last time that Kagan questioned administrative decisions.
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profile But in spite of the controversy that seemed to accompany the professor’s every move, he continued to field requests for filling nearly every top position at Yale, including an offer to become provost in 1987. (He turned it
THE ART HANDLER’S DAUGHTER He dropped, stiff in front of a new acquisition of contemporary decoupage. The piece was mediocre. She was wearing a shoelace tight around her neck, he used to say What, is that holding your head in place? And he said it and said it and he said it. Her arms grew into a frame. His collarbones, a frame. The hole in the dirt. She wore his plastic work gloves to shake hands with the strangers. Sweet girl. Mostly what they said is Sweet girl. — Sarah Matthes
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down. “Being an administrator is no fun,” he explains.) If the administration viewed Kagan as a problem, it was one deemed indispensable to the University’s functioning and success. Today, however, this contradictory treatment continues to puzzle him: “Even with all the trouble I caused, they just kept asking me to do things,” he laughs. “I’m still trying to figure out why!”
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n answering this question, one might look to an educational cornerstone of Yale: Directed Studies (D.S.). Though viewed today as one of Yale’s most successful recruiting tools, D.S. suffered a rocky beginning. According to Norma Thompson, director of undergraduate studies for the Humanities Department, the program’s first three decades were rife with instability, and “Misdirected Studies” became the title of choice throughout campus. It was failing to attract Yale’s brightest, and as the chaos of the war years escalated, there was a palpable fear that D.S. would soon collapse. Kagan, however, would revitalize the program, crafting the very structure that makes D.S. the prominent fixture it remains today. “I don’t know where Directed Studies would be today if it weren’t for Professor Kagan,” Jane Levin says admiringly. Levin, director of undergraduate studies for the program and wife of President Richard Levin, credits Kagan with launching the Class of 1937 Guest Lecture Series, which invites distinguished faculty to speak on topics ranging from Greek art to Western views of China. For Levin, these opportunities comprise a large part of what makes D.S. so exceptional. In addition to introducing the series, Kagan changed the program’s basic structure, scaling it back from two years to one and establishing a required set of courses for enrolled students. “It’s remarkable to think that, before Kagan, a program called ‘Directed Studies’ had no mandatory
courses for its students,” Thompson quips.
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hould a “History of Directed Studies” be taught by Donald Kagan, he would probably forget to mention his own hand in its success. When discussing the program, he spends most of his time singing the praises of Jane Levin and Norma Thompson, who, for him, are the reasons D.S. continues to thrive. “They are the best Yale has,” Kagan raves. “They’ve done wonders for that program, and it’s in superb condition thanks to them.” In the end, any attempt to change the subject, or steer the conversation back to Kagan is met with a wave of his hand. “Before that, wait, I just can’t emphasize enough. Those two are just wonderful, and there’s this one more story I have … ” At the end of the day, Kagan’s memories of Yale are shaped not by his own accomplishments or words of praise from others. Instead, they are the product of those who surround him — namely, his students. “That’s the magic of his teaching,” Hale says. “For most of my professors, we were clearly just an audience. But Kagan made us feel like we mattered. … It was just in his nature to take an interest in everyone.”
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n a small office in the Hall of Graduate Studies, Donald Kagan sits amid a scattering of cardboard boxes. Wooden shelves once heaped with books are now empty, most of their contents stacked neatly in preparation for a new setting. “It is a little strange, seeing everything packed up,” he says. For Kagan, the decision to retire after 44 years at Yale and 57 total years of teaching comes with a certain acumen. “There’s no potent reason,” he says. “It’s just time. I think I’ve done it about enough, and even I’m tired of hearing myself lecture.” His departure promises time for the experiences he treasures most, including driving across Connecticut
profile with his wife, Myrna, ever in search of a new favorite lunch spot. (Luc’s in Ridgefield was their most recent try.) But while he looks forward to more days like these, Kagan’s retirement strikes a somber note for those closest to him at Yale. For the University’s small contingent of conservative students and faculty, Kagan has carried a banner that all too often goes unspoken for. Ultimately, it’s difficult to determine where the fight for a balance of intellectual ideas will go when its primary champion leaves the ring. “When conservative students look for a spokesman, they look for Kagan,” Thompson asserts. In a faculty who, as the Yale Daily News reported on Nov. 26, 2012, gave 97 percent of its campaign donations to Barack Obama, Thompson feels that Kagan’s leadership has been vital. “He’s shouldered this responsibility in an amazing way. Yale needs more of that.” However, Alec Torres ’13, a veteran of two of Kagan’s most popular seminars, “Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War” and “Spartan Hegemony,” remains hopeful that Kagan’s legacy will pave the way for a new, young voice that will reaffirm the principles he’s entrusted the Yale community to carry on. “He always liked to tell the story of what an education should look like,” Torres remembers. “He would say, if a student can go to two professors in one day, and hear completely different sides on the same issue, then you’ve achieved a true education. That’s what we should we striving for.”
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t the end of the fall semester in 2001, Jane Levin sat among more than 200 students in Sudler Hall. Many were without a seat, instead crowding shoulderto-shoulder along the aisles. Some were forced to stand by the doors.
Finally, in walked Kagan, and the bustling lecture hall fell silent. After he reached the podium, he turned and faced his audience, preparing to deliver the semester’s last lecture in his “Introduction to Ancient Greek History” course. Levin, who was auditing the class, remembers the experience as “truly breathtaking.” For the past semester, she had listened to Kagan speak fluently on the entirety of Ancient Greece, the subject on which his life’s work centers. On this day, he would conclude the course with a discussion on Demosthenes, drawing a parallel among the Greek orator, Winston Churchill and, although left unspoken, himself. Like Demosthenes, Churchill breathed defiance when there was no physical justification for his position. Kagan read from his speech warning of Germany’s potential invasion, which proclaimed that Britain and her empire would continue to fight at whatever cost. “If necessary, for years,” Kagan quoted. “If necessary, alone.” He then set down his notes and looked out at the crowd. “Churchill’s bulldog determination would seem, in retrospect, a wrongheaded defiance,” he began. “But men like Churchill and Demosthenes know that those who love liberty must fight for it, even against odds, even when there is little support, even when victory seems impossible.” Despite the passage of nearly 13 years, Levin remembers Kagan’s concluding words well. “In spite of the outcome,” he stated, “it seems to me that the stand of Athens and their Greek allies at Chaeronea may have been, in the words of Churchill, their finest hour. Thank you.” Kagan then picked up his briefcase and walked out, the storm of applause echoing behind him.
Crows In the early evening, the light touching only the tops of the buildings, I lie in the shadows and watch three crows flickering on and off as they cross the sunlit sky. Each is a single point oscillating along the whole length of the sky. They are high up. They open and close their wings high up. Three crows is three black stitches, stitching and unstitching. Three crows is a number I can make into meaning. Then they have crossed, and are gone. Three new points appear from the other side, and cross, as if a reiteration of one idea. Then one alone, then three, then seven swells to a numberless flock of points. Some of the birds fly lower, appear as fully two wings, a head, the stiff fan of tailfeathers spread against the quivering air. They pass from left to right, folding and unfolding their bird shapes as if they were the shadows of the birds flying above them. They come and come until I no longer expect anything else or see the birds that one by one appear and disappear, one edge giving as the other obliterates and does not change the shape of the whole. Until it ends, or pauses, and the sky becomes, in a moment, deep and unmarkable.
— Amelia Urry
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SOBER SOLDIERS BY EVAN FRONDORF PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLIE KRAUSE
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n Friday, Feb. 15, a few a signature flattop. He’s also one of the hundred students filed into the most emotional players on the court. John J. Lee Amphitheater in Early in the first half, a quick grin after Payne Whitney Gymnasium. For most a teammate’s heads-up play turned of them, the night ahead would be a into visible frustration a few seconds busy one — pregames, parties, late- later when the Bulldogs committed a night Wenzels. But the first stop was turnover. His play style, too, shows watching the men’s basketball team the scrappiness and selflessness of take on Cornell, where the evening’s someone determined to assert his entertainment was provided in large place on the court. Head coach James part by sophomores Javier Duren and Jones said, “Javier … plays with a Brandon Sherrod. chip on his shoulder. When someone Duren, a guard from St. Louis, is messes with that chip, he turns into known for his slick no-look passes and ‘Beast Mode,’ if you want to call it that.”
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Meanwhile, Sherrod, who grew up just a few miles away in Bridgeport, is considerably more stoic when it’s game time, but his intensity crops up in different ways. Yale’s strength coaches ranked him as the most powerful male athlete on either football or basketball this preseason, and it showed with just 1:05 left in the second half, when he threw down a one-handed slam to bring Cornell’s lead down to four. Despite falling to Cornell 68–61 that Friday, Duren and Sherrod played to
observer their strengths. Duren had seven points — and a career-high seven assists. During Sherrod’s limited playing time after returning from injury, he had two mega-blocks, stuffing the Cornell offense with his 6-foot-6-inch, 240-pound frame. “The story [against Cornell] was that we didn’t come out aggressive enough,” Duren told the News. “Once we finally got going, we were battling the whole game.”
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uren and Sherrod are Division I athletes, with profiles on ESPN and MaxPreps and highlight reels on YouTube. After the Cornell game, you might expect them to spend their Friday night like their fans — you know, the wild fraternity parties and nights at Toad’s that have led to recent stories damaging the reputation of Yale studentathletes. Yet both Duren and Sherrod completely abstain from alcohol. Driven by their strong Christian faith and health concerns, the two have dismissed the stereotypical lifestyle of the Division I athlete. Don’t get it wrong — they still want to be out there on Friday night, hanging out with the team and exploring Yale’s nightlife. “We’re always outgoing guys. We want to be at the latest scenes and parties. But we [don’t] drink at all,” Duren said. “Brandon and I [are] comfortable with who we are. We can walk into any scene, any party, and be perfectly fine with not drinking.” Duren and Sherrod decided to go public with their perspective during their freshman year when they created “#TeamSober.” The rules of the group are simple. “All you have to do is sign a pledge,” Sherrod said. If you’re under 21, joining #TeamSober is a pledge to abstain from the consumption of alcohol and other illegal substances. Once a member turns 21, #TeamSober members pledge to not “overindulge” in alcohol. The goal is to provide
“a place for people who may feel Sober.” uncomfortable in other situations, “The guy walks off, and I give it a just to have people who feel the couple seconds,” Duren continued. same way they do,” as Sherrod put it. “Then I look over at Brandon, and I’m “We’re not going to try and impose like, ‘Team Sober? That’s kinda hot! Prohibition or something like that.” We could do something with that!’” Of course, #TeamSober was met up with Duren and Sherrod founded on more than just a witty on the Thursday after the Cornell rejoinder. The project crystallized game on the second floor of the the pair’s personal experiences Gourmet Heaven on Broadway. and aspirations. Sherrod initially Duren arrived first just after 11 p.m., struggled with Yale’s drinking culture headphones in place and basketball as a freshman. “My teammates were jacket full-zip. Sherrod strolled up doing it, so I thought I was fitting in shortly after, the on-court intensity by drinking with them. It just wasn’t replaced by a big grin. (“Brandon is really me,” he said. “If I had a group a big, strong, feisty kid,” Jones said. like #TeamSober that would provide “But off the court, he’s a teddy bear.”) me with people who had the same “We didn’t really know each other walk I had … I would have definitely when we were on our official visits,” joined.” Sherrod also pointed to the Duren explained over the din of the health advantages of the #TeamSober late-night GHeav crowd. “When we pledge. “For me personally, as an got on campus — my family is really athlete, you don’t want to have such faith-based — I found out that his substances in your body because you family is really faith-based. That was want to live the healthiest lifestyle the link. ‘Hey, you’re a Christian? I’m possible,” he said. a Christian too!’ And it just sort of Both see their status as Division I meshed from there.” athletes not as a license to party, but But faith wasn’t the only link that rather as an opportunity to spread led to #TeamSober. The missing a message. Social media is integral piece of the puzzle was, of all things, to the #TeamSober mission: the one night at a frat party. #TeamSober name includes a hashtag “We were just standing there, to encourage members to share watching things, just being the cool their pledge, and the group’s hub is dudes at the party,” Duren started off. a Twitter account with the handle “A guy comes up to me and he’s like, “@SoberSoldiers.” “As Division I ‘You want a drink?’” Duren declined, athletes at Yale University, we are but this friendly — if persistent — blessed every day,” Duren said. “God Yalie moved on to Brandon to ask the has given us a certain platform that same question. Brandon’s response? we would like to use to express our “Nah man, I’m good. I’m with Team views and show our faith.”
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TeamSober was born from faith and a frat party, and it still enjoys close ties with Yale’s Christian community. Duren and Sherrod met with Christian groups on campus several times for advice and funding as they worked to launch the group. The two themselves are involved in a number of faith-based organizations on campus, including the new Yale chapter of Beta Upsilon Chi, which drew controversy earlier this year when it was reported that the fraternity effectively requires its members to be Christian. Because of the fraternity’s alcohol policy, all BYX brothers are #TeamSober members. BYX brother Will Davenport ’15 says he was drawn to #TeamSober as a concept because for him, “the principle behind [#TeamSober] is based on Scripture … not filling yourself with wine, but filling yourself with the Holy Spirit.” But Duren and Sherrod stress that #TeamSober is not faith-exclusive. “It’s definitely just a campuswide organization. It’s not faith-based at all,” said Sherrod. “We don’t want to pigeonhole the group in that way.” Duren agreed: “We wouldn’t want people to be like, ‘I don’t drink, but I’m not Christian, so I can’t join.’” The two also want to make it clear that the organization isn’t intended to be forceful or militant with its message of sobriety. “We think that by providing an outlet, we could eventually change campus culture, but we’re not here to infringe on anyone’s right to drink,” Sherrod explained. “I think that’s cool. [#TeamSober] sends a message, and it’s a very light one. …
Sunday, After a Service Organ grumble, coffee breath, altar flecked pale blue and gold (it is morning) and once the sermon’s over: This is my body, broken… Metaphors, metaphors. Afternoon—I am happy!—the sun disallows them, the sidewalk all sunlight and surfaces, my mind all putty and lint, the city slides off it, nothing sticks. You walk with my hands in your hands, on your lips, eyes trained on the glaring pavement (I pay it no mind). Today it’s one long mirror, so much shattered glass. Bad luck for whom, and for how long? Listen, I am happy! Ask how we got there. I follow my fingers (I am inside your throat) I unpack a suitcase, exhale theatrically. Looking to play pranks, scuff things up a bit. So little room, and not a soul to share it with. To be happy— Look down till your eyes hurt, look up for relief. That gauzy ball of sun rolls anywhere; give it away—
— Sam Huber It’s not one that really tries to malign Klein admitted the playful jokes, but or judge others for what they do.” said the team “is very supportive of Teammate Will Childs-Klein ’15 everybody’s pursuits off the court, affirmed the respect Duren and and [#TeamSober] is no exception.” Sherrod have for the choices made Coach Jones also speaks highly of by their teammates and classmates. the group and its stand against “doing “They don’t talk about #TeamSober things in excess.” On a more personal very much in the locker room. note, the 13-year coach thinks the They’re always willing to answer any strong bond that Duren and Sherrod questions people have, but they don’t have formed along the way is essential. force their beliefs on others.” “Javier having Brandon, Brandon While no other teammates having Javier. That’s important.” have joined the cause, everyone interviewed agreed that #TeamSober TeamSober has big plans and is respected in the Yale athletics big ideas, but has their message community. Not that they don’t get truly spread to the campus? light ribbing from teammates. “We Right now, the group counts over 40 definitely get some little jabs [from pledge-signers over their first few teammates] like, ‘Hey, #TeamSober is semesters in action, many of whom in the building,’” Sherrod exclaimed, signed up during #TeamSober’s recent laughing. “They’ll hit us up and say, publicity push during the basketball ‘#TeamSober, bring mixers.’” Childs- season. #TeamSober has even spread “Ivy League-wide,” said Duren with feigned smugness. The group counts members at Dartmouth, Princeton and Harvard, including many students who signed up during the 2011 edition of The Game at the Yale Bowl. Sherrod and Duren laid out a handful of ideas for expanding #TeamSober’s reach, particularly at Yale. First up is getting official recognition as a student group and using Bulldog Days to get
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observer in touch with incoming freshmen. In the long term, they’d even like to work with the Yale College Dean’s Office on future alcohol-related initiatives. Said Sherrod, “I think [Yale College Dean] Mary Miller would love #TeamSober, considering all the emails we get from Dean [of Freshman and Student Affairs] Gentry about alcohol.” Duren chimed in, “They need to recognize that we have things like BYX and #TeamSober on campus that implement what they’re trying to persuade.” “Mary, if you see this, I’ll be seeing you soon,” Sherrod said jokingly. Student Affairs Fellow Hannah Peck DIV ’11 said the Dean’s Office is
definitely aware of #TeamSober. “In fact, we provided some funding for them to hire security at a party a few weeks ago. I’m impressed with the work they are doing and the maturity with which they approach their social life in college,” she explained.
also among those in attendance, and they watched the Elis come close to taking down the Ivy League’s top team. With 13:21 left in the second, Duren brought the ball past the time line and into Yale’s half-court. Filled with confidence, and yes, swagger, Duren kept possession, drove inside the wo days after our meeting at 3-point line, pulled up and drained a GHeav, the Bulldogs took on 15-foot jumper, putting the Bulldogs Harvard in a nationally televised up 44–43. The Crimson called timeout matchup with huge Ivy League and the amphitheater exploded. implications. Many students in the Dean Gentry definitely saw that. stands wore their orange #TeamSober And if he hasn’t already, he’ll be shirt as a part of an “Orange-Out” hearing from #TeamSober soon. event publicized by their two leaders on the court. Yale President-elect Peter Salovey and Dean Gentry were
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Has happiness become just another checkbox? A critical look at college happiness movements
Get Happy By Joy Shan Photography by Allie Krause
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n West 113th Street, on a hill in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, the former convent of the Community of the Holy Spirit is undergoing construction. Men in soiled boots and orange hats move in and out of the jungle gym of scaffolding that encloses the brownstone. Behind the black construction fabric, I make out the white façade and red doors that match those from a photo I saw on the Columbia Student Wellness Project’s (SWP) website. The image accompanied an announcement, which urged, “Live well. Apply to live in the Wellness House.” The nuns have moved to a different neighborhood, and the brownstone now belongs to Columbia University. For this college in the city, 2012 was a year of emotional tumult, with the October suicide of junior Tina Bu rousing her fellow students to talk more openly about stress, alienation and mental health. Underground forums gathered and organizations like SWP formed to address student wellness on campus. This autumn, the third floor of the former convent on West 113th Street will house a small group of students who were chosen out of 82 applicants to live in the brownstone. The students will have wood floors in their bedrooms, will enjoy fireplaces and bow windows, and have access to a kitchen in the basement. More importantly, the announcement emphasizes that the home’s residents will have the space to form a “warm, supportive, and welcoming community.” The Wellness House, the white brownstone with red doors and a stillempty interior, is perhaps the largest and most tactile product of a trend that’s also been quietly on the upswing here at Yale: our very own happiness movement. The evidence on our campus is not of stone or cement but can be found instead in the stacks of publications outside dining halls, on the cluttered bulletin boards on
Cross Campus and, of course, on our Facebook news feeds. These are the places you’ll see a budding contingent of student groups with something in common: they want you to think more about being happy. But on a windy spring morning, it’s my presiding skepticism that brings me down the Metro-North rail to the sidewalk in front of SWP’s latest project. I’d always thought that one only stumbled upon happiness by aiming for something else — that by making happiness the goal, we’d automatically prevent ourselves from ever reaching it. Could the deliberate, the regimented and the academic approaches to happiness on our campus actually help us come closer to achieving this most elusive state? Or is the quest for happiness turning into one more checkbox on an already long list?
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he conversation about happiness on college campuses often takes on the form of lists or the language of statistics. In 2011, Newsweek ranked Yale first in a listing of the happiest college campuses. A 2009 American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment reported that almost 30 percent of students experienced depression so painful that it was “difficult to function.” Such facts do little to capture the group of thinking,
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cover breathing and feeling people they’re meant to describe. The data that ring true and familiar, rather, tend to be those that resist metric calibration. In May of 2012, Yale lost Zachary Brunt ’15 to suicide. Six months ago, a student anonymously posted on YaleFML, “One month into freshman year and Yale is already making me feel so, so inferior.” At least intuitively, it’s always seemed to me that the body of rules and rituals adopted purely for the purpose of making us happy is, from the outset, doomed to failure. I’ve struggled with anxiety for a few years now, but doing exercises to reassure myself that “things will be okay” has always struck me as contrived. Once, on a day when I’d woken up beneath that dim cloud of worry, a friend pulled out her notebook and began to draw what looked like a flow chart. At the top, she wrote four broad things she wanted out of life. From these four desires she drew branching lines and wrote more specific desires within each of the four broad ones. By the time her pen reached the bottom of the page, she had derived several concrete steps to take towards her goals. I thanked her, but I couldn’t help but think that her chart somehow grandly missed the point. My fears about the future seemed too large and amorphous to reduce to a short list. The method seemed like it would provide just a temporary form of relief that would quickly be eclipsed by reality. One of today’s best-known advocates of a regimented approach to happiness is, in fact, a Yalie. Not long after I arrange to speak with Gretchen Rubin ’88 LAW ’94 about her best-selling book “The Happiness Project,” in which she spends a year test-driving modern and ancient wisdom about how to attain happiness, I receive an email with the subject line “Happiness Project monthly newsletter.” Skimming the email I catch the words “What you 36 | Vol. XL, No. 5 | April 2013
can do to be happier right now,” “7 tips for bringing the pleasure of art into everyday life” and “Yippee-yiyyay.” The newsletter also says that Oprah.com, that eternal well of selfhelp wisdom, called Rubin’s newest book, “Happiness at Home,” “a mustread.” My skepticism only deepens. Surprisingly, Rubin’s voice on the phone is serious and composed, not the bubbly effervescence reflected in the chipper words of her blog. While in college, Rubin rarely considered the question of whether or not she was happy or if she could do anything to make herself happier, behavior she now deems “the dog that didn’t bark.” The question of personal fulfillment and satisfaction, she recalls, didn’t occupy much of the campus conversation. Rubin’s book, published in 2009, has spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and its popularity is consistent with the country’s burgeoning interest in positive psychology, the deliberate study of how to be happy. A great portion of the letters Rubin receives are from college students, and some professors even assign “The Happiness Project” to their classes. Theories explaining its appeal to our age group note increased awareness of personal satisfaction in the workplace and the psychological effect of our time’s economic uncertainty also gets an obligatory airing. The question “What do I want out of life?”, a question Rubin rarely asked herself in college, is asked so frequently today that it’s almost become cliché, perhaps symptomatic of our generation’s more individualistic bent. It makes sense that this movement, increasingly popular on college campuses, should spread to Ivy League schools, which are known for their cultures of stress and competition. On a frigid Tuesday night in February, a group of 10 students meets for dinner in a room in Slifka. The night’s conversation, moderated
by Daniel First ’14, asks, “What is the role of philosophy in happiness?” A religious studies major and an economics major sit across from me, a cognitive science major is on my left and a physics major sits near the end of the table. This gathering is hosted by Flourish, a new journal publication that sets out to understand how different fields and disciplines approach “the good life.” Twentyfive students contributed papers to Flourish’s first issue — that is to say, even when students are immersed in academic work during the day, the idea of doing additional research isn’t unappealing when the subject of study is our happiness. First has a deeply religious Orthodox Jewish background; he transferred to Yale from Yeshiva University, a school in New York whose motto “Torah umadda” means “Torah and secular knowledge.” There, the students study the Talmud, thinking about how to translate the text’s conception of happiness and the good life into their own rules to live by. It was typical of professors at Yeshiva not only to teach the class material but also to offer their values or perspectives on life. Most of the forums at Yale, First notes, don’t address topics like finding the good life. Leaving out a few eccentric exceptions, most professors refrain from sharing their worldviews during class time. A broader and more interesting explanation of why we’re drawn to practices espoused by positive psychology relates to another trope of our age — the post-religious and relativist climate many of us have grown up in. We’ve lost our sense of awe, the sociologists say. And, at a place of learning, it’s possible that the disappearance of religion from our rhetoric has left room for new ways to grapple with the larger questions — for instance, the individual search for meaning, happiness and the good life.
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ne November evening last semester, in the cold days leading to finals period, Linsly-Chittenden 101 was filled to capacity with students sitting crosslegged in the aisles and crammed into doorways. They weren’t there for a class or for any required purpose — they were there to partake in a panel discussion presented by the magazine Vita Bella! that sought to address “Fear and Living the Meaningful Life.” The panel included philosophy professor Shelly Kagan, psychology professor Laurie Santos and mathematics professor Michael Frame. Santos said in an email that her main concern following the discussion was how relevant this question of a meaningful life is to Yale students. She agrees that forums for such questions are scarce and hopes to teach a lecture class that will address how psychological research can inform the way we think about happiness. Harvard has a history of such classes. In the early 2000s, Tal Ben-Shahar’s renowned “Positive Psychology” class drew 845 people, according to a 2006 Crimson article. During a session of Ellen Langer’s GRD ’74 “Health Psychology,” a Harvard class similar to “Positive Psychology,” the class watched a video clip from one of Langer’s experiments. The study placed elderly people inside of a house with an environment fashioned to resemble one from two decades earlier. The age experiment seemed to show that talking, acting and living as if they were younger restored qualities of youth in the subjects, such as physical strength and vigor. One segment of the video, sophomore Annie Giebelhaus remembers, zoomed in on the subjects as they struggled to move their suitcases up a flight of stairs. Some elderly participants stopped trying altogether, but others divided up their luggage piecemeal, eventually reaching the top flight with all of their belongings. For Giebelhaus,
that lecture’s takeaway focused on overcoming your fears, allowing yourself to believe that you can accomplish a difficult task by breaking up its steps into manageable parts. She doesn’t hesitate to say that this principle can be applied, for instance, when speaking up in class seems intimidating or when she’s training on the varsity track team.
believes that such steadfast dedication to “being positive” breeds, among other ills, a morbid obsession with smothering the negative. Phenomena like Yale Compliments run the risk of mutating the object of pursuit into something else — another burden or a prize to show off. The most obvious irony of studying or promoting happiness through
It’s always seemed to me that the body of rules and rituals adopted purely for the purpose of making us happy is, from the outset, doomed to failure. Near the end of our conversation, Giebelhaus jokingly wonders if “Health Psychology” would attract more students if its listing in the course catalogue appeared as “Secrets to Happiness.” But do the means to happiness lie in simply making small behavioral adjustments that are based on what you’ve learned in a class? The working definition of happiness espoused by some positive psychologists alludes to feelings of joy and satisfaction combined with the feeling that one’s life is purposeful. It’s not a far stretch to see how stress from school, pressure from extracurriculars and feelings of loneliness tend to brush elbows with more existential worries — where do I belong? What should I strive for? (Is it even worth trying?)
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ut I’m still unsure of whether or not this crop of clubs targeting happiness — as a subject of study or a subject of desire — can deliver. There is an implicit irony in SWP’s decision to schedule and plan a Random Acts of Kindness Week. Barbara Ehrenreich, who bitingly critiques the positive psychology movement in her book “Bright-sided,”
extracurriculars is that these activities themselves can induce more stress, aggravating the cycle they’re meant to relieve. Columbia senior Steven Castellano says that during SWP’s early stages, the group found itself adding to the manic horde of activities on campus. Then the group hit on a new idea: instead of only holding events that students would need to fit into already packed schedules, SWP’s members decided to go straight to the students. They storm the library during midterms, passing out tea bags and candy with encouraging words. They roll a large whiteboard onto the central lawn and encourage passing students to write positive notes on it. Some happiness groups at Yale have also adopted this model of delivering surprise bursts of pleasure. Yale Compliments once dominated students’ news feeds, showering users with anonymous words of praise or confessions of love. HappyHap, a publication and website founded by Sunnie Tolle ’12, included a Web platform that let users dedicate a happy video or message to someone. Its members once delivered 500 flowers to students across campus. “Sharing happiness is easy,” the
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cover HappyHap website says. The positive psychology definition of happiness, we should note, demands more than a mood of contentment or joy. Aspiring to happiness also means aspiring to a life imbued with meaning and worth, and based on the worries voiced during the Vita Bella! panel, this burden feels not only demanding but also troublingly vague. Not long ago, I was doing homework at a coffee shop when I felt something light hit my left elbow. It was a yellow packet of Splenda, and above “Splenda” someone had written, “Joy Shan is sweet like ___.” I confess that I was soaring as I walked home that night. But even as I smiled at strangers and skipped up the stairs, a voice in the back of my mind reminded me that this happiness could very well just be a temporary state of being, contingent on a chance occurrence. Was it nothing more than a mood?
somewhat unsettling. Placeboes, after all, don’t have properties that actually cure the disease. The analogy also hints at the possibility that I may, in fact, be deluding myself in some way, accepting a veil that hides the actual state of things. (Another part of me wants to tell the doubt, “Screw it.”) Perhaps in the case of happiness, it’s hard to differentiate between imagining that you’re happy and actually being happy. Rubin acknowledges that when she’s lying in bed at the end of the day, she’s still at about the same level of happiness as she always was: a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Her experience of life is better — less boredom, less anger, more fun — but the 7 is part of her nature. At the Flourish meeting, I learn of a colloquial joke called philosopher’s depression, which, in terse terms, is a suspicion — frequently on the
Phenomena like Yale Compliments run the risk of mutating the object of pursuit into something else — another burden or a prize to show off.
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chief principle of positive psychology is the role of mindfulness in finding happiness — that concentrating on what makes you happy can make you better at being happy. I’ve slowly awakened to the fact that I cannot try to understand the happiness movement without reluctantly joining in myself. The profound contentment that has followed has made me deeply suspicious that I’m simply deluding myself. A common theme that pervades Langer’s research is the effectiveness of placeboes. Part of me finds this analogy, comparing the rituals and practices to find happiness to a placebo,
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part of thinkers — that every quest is meaningless from the beginning. It is the terrifying suspicion of a norm, a norm that would nullify all hope and all striving. How many of us have been here? Such a suspicion would make the work of happiness groups, then, feel only like bland little distractions. Lately, though, I wonder if the products of these happiness groups — the anonymous compliments, the regimented exercises in positive thinking — do more than simply create a good mood. Perhaps they also briefly reveal the state of things, a state that is good. If the trope of our generation is true, if our framing of the world is relativist without the
comfort of a grand designer, these brief hints at a wonderful norm are incredibly reassuring. Members of the group InspireYale, “an initiation for spreading a happiness revolution,” parked themselves on Old Campus one morning in March. Blocks of frozen snow still dotted the grass, but groups of friends lingered outside on their way back from brunch. InspireYale was filming a video for release in April in which students were asked, “If you could talk on the phone with yourself from five years ago for 30 seconds, what would you say?” Some students urged their past selves to break up with a girlfriend, to sleep more or to get a haircut. The overwhelming response, however, was something along the vein of, “I know you’re scared and worried about the future. But things will work out, and everything will be okay.” It’s the same statement I repeated to myself in the past, but this time, I can’t help but believe that it’s actually true.
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he rooms of the Wellness House are empty as of now, awaiting the conversation and clutter its new residents will bring. The windows are black, but will soon emit the glow of lamps burning late into the early morning, the silhouettes of crouching figures against glowing laptop screens. Its future is unclear. What I’ve ended up with is the same as when I began: an exhausting disarray of floating bits from poll data, psychology, philosophy and stories people have told me. But I’m not worried, for the moment. We have the rest of our lives to parse through all of this, and in this disarray, I’ve also left enough room to rearrange the parts and change my mind.