Yale Daily News — Week of Oct. 9

T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · VOL. CXLIII, NO. 6 · yaledailynews.com

University announces delayed start to spring semester, no spring recess

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

On Oct. 6, Yale finalized its spring term plans after the University’s Calendar Standing Committee submitted the idea to Peter Salovey, the University’s vice presidents and Scott Strobel. begins on Feb. 1, ends in May and does not include a spring break, administrators announced on Tuesday.

The spring semester will begin two weeks later than usual in a bid

BY MADISON HAHAMY AND ROSE HOROWITCH STAFF REPORTERS The University will have a modified spring term schedule that

to avoid the flu season. To account for the lost spring recess, the University will include five separate break days throughout the semester. Yale finalized the spring term plans on Oct. 6, after the Universi-

ty’s Calendar Standing Committee submitted the idea to University President Peter Salovey, the University’s vice presidents and University Provost Scott Strobel.

“The success we’ve had this fall

is what makes it possible to begin thinking about how we can continue that success into the spring,” Strobel told the News.

SEE SPRING PAGE 4

Simons gender discrimation Yale settles after underpaying cardiologists case to go to court

COURTESY OF THE YALE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Michael Simons MED '84, who is still a University employee, was found guilty of sexual harassment in 2013 by the UWC. ward in his case alleging that the University discriminated against him because he is a man by punish-

BY ROSE HOROWITCH AND BEATRIZ HORTA STAFF REPORTERS Cardiology professor Michael Simons MED ’84 can move for-

SEE LAWSUIT PAGE 4

RYAN CHIAO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The University has agreed to pay a total of $87,500 to four female cardiologists

BY ROSE HOROWITCH AND BEATRIZ HORTA STAFF REPORTERS

The University has agreed to pay a total of $87,500 to four female cardiologists after the U.S. Department of Labor

found the employees were compensated less than their male SEE DOL PAGE 5

New Haven takes on youth homelessness YLS student killed in car

BY THOMAS BIRMINGHAM AND BENNIE ANDERSON STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER When she was 16, Alexa Davila was kicked out of her family’s New Haven home by her own parents. Foster home after foster home after foster home came and went, but she still had no stability and nowhere she felt welcome. She moved in with an ex-boyfriend,

but soon faced domestic violence and once again was left to figure it out on her own.

And in March of this year, as Davila was shuffling from place to place, COVID-19 struck New Haven.

Davila is one of an estimated 4.2 million 18 to 25 year-olds that experience homeless every year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In January of 2020, the Connecticut Coali-

JAMES LARSON/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

As COVID-19 continues to afflict New Haven, the city’s youth homeless population is faced with unique challenges.

tion to End Homelessness counted 503 people experiencing homelessness in the city of New Haven in a single night. Amid the pandemic, Davila is one of hundreds of youth to confront new changes to the various programs they rely on.

In late spring, as the pandemic began to spread throughout New Haven, Davila said shuffling between friends' houses became much harder once people started to quarantine, so she called 211 — the social services help line. She said they were not able to provide her with aid for over two months.

When they did respond, they set Davila up with Youth Continuum, an organization designed to provide aid specifically to homeless youth.

“Every help I tried to get, they never led me the right way,” Davila said. “The pandemic made it much, much harder to get in contact with anyone. Everybody was locked in their house, no one wanted me to come over. I’m just blessed to have the opportunity to have a bed now.”

SEE HOMELESSNESS PAGE 5

CROSS CAMPUS

INSIDE THE NEWS

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1961.

YCBA

A few dozen Yalies join around 100 New Haveners protesting housing and job discrimination against Black residents of New Haven. The "sit out," organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, takes place on a Dixwell Avenue curb.

A new exhibition titled, “Love, Life, Death, and Desire: An Installation of the Center’s Collections,” is on view at the Yale Center for British Art. Page 7 ARTS

crash Tues. afternoon EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTER

On Tuesday afternoon, Keon Ho Lim, a 25-year-old Yale Law

School student from Medford, Mass., was struck by a commercial truck at the intersection of SEE ACCIDENT PAGE 5

ERIC WANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Keon Ho Lim was a member of Yale Law School's Class of 2022 and a native of Medford, MA.

BLACK HOLES

New research from a Yale alum reveals that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies are spinning nearly at their theoretical limit.

Page 8 SCITECH

NOBEL

Poet and adjunct English professor Louise Glück on Thursday won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her unmistakable poetic voice." Page 11 UNIVERSITY

PHASE II

The Bulldogs began Phase II on Wednesday, allowing teams to engage in a maximum of two hours per day of sport-specific training. Page 14 SPORTS

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION GUEST COLUMNIST HANWEN ZHANG

G U E ST C O LU M N I ST CA L E B D U N S O N

71 Whitney Ave

The emperor has no clothes

A

n “open” sign, ripped at its corners, clung to the fogged glass panes. As I pulled open the door, the blast of air conditioning — carrying the cocktail of unmistakably Chinese scents — wrapped around my parents like a long-awaited hug.

We wandered the aisles brimming with gaudy plastic packaging, through the rows of lobster chips, fruit cups and century eggs.

I picked up a box of Pocky sticks, torn between sugar cravings and health-conscious guilt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my parents stopping and starting every so often, as if reacquainting themselves with an old friend. They smiled.

Welcome home.

I’ve heard my parents’ stories about this place, passed down like bits of sacred lore, more times than I can even count. How 23 years ago, they’d drive to the Hong Kong Grocery Store in New Haven all the way from their rented apartment in Waterbury. How one September afternoon, they bought the biggest bag of blue crabs they ever ate. How they stuffed bags of bok choy and Chinese broccoli into their shopping carts and drooled over the liquid gold of soy sauce.

How they’d always linger just a little longer to take in the smell of the aisles.

That afternoon before my move-in day, my parents returned to the same narrow storefront for the first time since 1997, proud, graying, teary-eyed, middle-aged.

But I could still imagine them: two Asian immigrants making their hour-long weekly pilgrimage, weaving their way through mixing bowls and freeways in their clunker of a Toyota Corolla to the only Chinese supermarket within a 30-mile radius. Arriving at a little red-brick store with sun-bleached electric signage and fogged windows: a place of comfort, 7,000 miles away from their native country, that offered them the nostalgia of a culture they’d left behind.

At the Hong Kong Grocery Store, my parents slowly collected new English phrases along with instant ramen and mooncakes.

They dug into ice-stuffed cardboard boxes for yellow croakers, searching for the taste of a distant past. In those dim-lit aisles, my parents cobbled together the flavors of a new life.

As I sit in a dorm room just 0.3 miles away from 71 Whitney Ave., I can’t help but think of their tale of immigration. I’ve realized that their stories are not just about culture shock, resilience and assimilation. They’re about the small pockets of solace, the acts of unexpected kindness that can change lives. They’re about the many hands that hammer together the foundations of a community: the warmth of an open door, the power of a home.

We need to make homes more than ever. The pandemic of the century has upended our lives and stolen away the intimacy of a simple hug. Our country teeters on the festering pile of civil unrest, lost

D

voices and ideological balkanization. Apocalyptic disasters pummel our coasts.

Yet even in the storm, we choose how to confront our challenges.

We’re architects, faced with the unlucky constraints of 6-foot distancing and online classes, but still given the opportunity to lay forth a blueprint of the Yale we wish for.

And as I have begun to make my home in New Haven, I want to use the lessons my parents taught me.

It’s in the little acts where we can create a home for each other.

It’s in the courtyard lawn chairs and flickering webcam screens, in the post-midnight chats, the afternoon study sessions and quirky lunchtime conversations that span everything from psychology to geopolitics. We should not be afraid of both offering our shelter and seeking out help, for the truest homes might await us in the unlikeliest of places.

THEY’RE ABOUT THE SMALL POCKETS OF SOLACE, THE ACTS OF UNEXPECTED KINDNESS THAT CAN CHANGE LIVES. THEY’RE ABOUT THE MANY HANDS THAT HAMMER TOGETHER THE FOUNDATIONS OF A COMMUNITY: THE WARMTH OF AN OPEN DOOR, THE POWER OF A HOME. Through these little actions, we can begin to practice the ideals we want for our Yale. We can fill the campus quads with the sound of our voices and the steadying breath of our convictions. We can put our preconceptions and prejudices against the test of truth, open our minds to embrace new beliefs and our arms to different backgrounds.

Let us make a home where we accept each other for all our flaws, strange talents and everything we have to offer. Let us make room for missteps, memories and second chances — even enough space for the quiet, wide-eyed couple that has driven over 20 miles to arrive here and stepped onto the scratched wooden floors.

Because sometimes all it takes to create home is just a makeshift “open” sign.

HANWEN ZHANG is a first year in Benjamin Franklin College. Contact him at hanwen.zhang@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS PUBLISHING CO., INC. 202 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 432-2400 Editorial: (203) 432-2418 editor@yaledailynews.com Business: (203) 432-2424 business@yaledailynews.com

EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT Mackenzie Hawkins

CITY Emiliano Tahui Gómez Meera Shoaib

MANAGING EDITORS Jose Davila IV Phoebe Liu

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Charlotte Zimmer

PUBLISHER Susan Chen OPINION Miranda Jeyaretnam Rabhya Mehrotra NEWS Valerie Pavilonis Kelly Wei

CULTURE Freya Savla SPORTS Margaret Hedeman William McCormack WEEKEND Ella Goldblum Elizabeth Hopkinson Andrew Kornfeld

YTV Sevi Burget-Foster Natalie Kainz Maya Weldon-Lagrimas Nicole Westfall PODCAST Allison Park DATA Darwin Do Ashley Qin MAGAZINE Macrina Wang Isabella Zou DIR. OF FINANCE Graham Hardcastle

COPY Erin Bailey Maya Geradi Ako Ndefo-Haven Natalie Simpson Katie Taylor PRODUCTION & DESIGN Zully Arias Megan Graham Isabella Huang Louie Lu Annie Yan PHOTOGRAPHY Zoe Berg Ryan Chiao Lukas Flippo Vaibhav Sharma Amay Tewari

ILLUSTRATIONS Dora Guo Anasthasia Shilov TECH TEAM Julia Burgiel Yaa Owusu OUTREACH John Besche Crystal Cheung Lucy Wilkins DIGITAL William McCormack Laura Nicholas Eric Wang Maya Weldon-Lagrimas Lucy Wilkins Christie Yu Daniel Zhao

THIS ISSUE COPY STAFF: Joshua Gonzalez, Hailey O’Connor, Christopher Sung COPY ASSISTANTS: Mikayla Barber, Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind, Marissa Blum, Meg Buzbee, Lauren Chong , Isabella Dominguez, Jose Estrada, Olivia Fujikawa, Josie Jahng, Chris Lee, Margot Lee, Alexa Jeanne Loste, Lydia Monk, Galia Newberger, Emilia Oliva, Alex Ori, Isaac Yu, Yingying Zhao PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF: Crystal Cheung PRODUCTION & DESIGN ASSISTANTS: Jose Estrada, Rachel Folmar, Josh Gonzalez, Karen Lin, Victoria Lu, Naz Onder, Asha Prihar, Isaac Yu EDITORIALS & ADS

The Editorial Board represents the opinion of 12-15 members of the Yale community.

Other content on this page with bylines represents the opinions of those authors and not necessarily those of the Managing Board.

Opinions set forth in ads do not necessarily reflect the views of the Managing Board. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false or in poor taste.

We do not verify the contents of any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co., Inc. and its officers, employees and agents disclaim any responsibility for all liabilities, injuries or

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

damages arising from any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co. ISSN 0890-2240

SUBMISSIONS

All letters submitted for publication must include the author’s name, phone number and description of Yale University affiliation. Please limit letters to 250 words and guest columns to 750. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit letters and columns before publication.

E-mail is the preferred method of submission.

ADVERTISEMENT

(203) 432-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

(203) 432-2400 (after 5 p.m.)

COPYRIGHT 2020 — VOL. CXLIII, NO. 6

Direct all letters, columns, artwork and inquiries to: Miranda Jeyaretnam and Rabhya Mehrotra Opinion Editors opinion@yaledailynews.com Direct all comments regarding the fairness or accuracy of stories to: Mackenzie Hawkins Editor-in-Chief (203) 432-2418 Mary Chen, Serena Cho, Talia Soglin, Asha Prihar Public Editors public@yaledailynews.com

onald Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims since he entered office. He has thrown temper tantrums, launched verbal assaults and spewed hateful words. Most recently Trump has called veterans losers, egged on white supremacist organizations and blatantly lied to the public about the dangers of COVID-19.

And yet, there still exists this block of hard-line, unwavering, enthusiastic Trump supporters who hang on his every word.

There still exists a broad coalition of Republicans who refuse to challenge the president on his reckless and dangerous words, content to let him erode the fabric of our democracy.

Now, Trump, who has constantly flouted health precautions, hosted rallies that turned into superspreader events and criticized his political opponent for wearing a mask, has COVID-19.

It seems the emperor has no clothes.

Trump’s COVID-19 case is just one among many in a White House that has quickly turned into a hotspot for the disease.

With the majority of positive tests among Washington politicians coming from Republicans, the spread of this disease brings into question the reckless right-wing stance on COVID precautions.

However, each time Trump has pushed the boundaries of legality, political etiquette and presidential power, Republicans have engaged in linguistic acrobatics in an attempt to explain away his actions. When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, Republicans reaffirmed their belief in the election tradition, careful not to directly call out the president for his actions.

When Trump undermined infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci as COVID-19 cases soared across the country, Republicans helped bolster anti-Fauci sentiment. When Trump avoided con-

demning white supremacy during the last presidential debate, Republicans launched soft critiques and claimed the president misspoke.

Right-wing media organizations have consistently assisted with this political spin by presenting alternative sets of facts and drawing outlandish conclusions. This culture of misinformation and partisan propaganda forms the foundation of Trump’s coalition, which is seemingly impervious to facts. And this time, it has cost us over 200,000 lives.

But if things take a turn for the worse for Trump, whether through bad health or an unfavorable election outcome, what will happen to his supporters?

Trump’s illness may be enough to shake people loose from the echo chamber of lies and deceit his administration has carefully constructed. It might be enough for people to realize that the man they support is a con artist who has damaged American society, perhaps irreparably. This might be the end of Trump’s reign of terror, as his facade of competence collapses under the weight of his lies.

If so, there is an opportunity for the U.S. to move past the Trump presidency, framing it as an unfortunate misstep in the ultimate pursuit of a more perfect union. A commitment to objective truth and facts will reemerge, and our society will once again uphold compassion, empathy and compromise as its core tenets — but only if we remain committed to avoiding the mistakes that allowed Trump’s rule to come to pass.

However, there is much reason to believe that Trump contracting the coronavirus will be spun once again to make the president look bold, tough and strong. The president has already begun to downplay his infection, claiming that he has beaten the virus.

But the nature of this disease and the nature of the president’s preexisting health conditions are enough to reasonably predict that the long-term effects of the virus will not go away so soon, and it is hard to project a strongman persona if you are on your deathbed. Still, Trump’s potential defeat at the hands of COVID-19 may turn him into a martyr, giving rise to a new extremist leader.

There is a plethora of political opportunists waiting in the wings, like Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, ready to take up the mantle of Trumpism. If this happens, the integrity of our government will continue to be under constant threat. Demagoguery, polarization and hate will become mainstays in American politics, and truth will become nothing more than a symbol of our nation’s past values. Our country will be estranged with peace, and open hostility will seep into every aspect of American life.

The only people whose voices will matter will be those who can back their sentiments up with force and violence.

In the last few months, Trump’s political career has felt eerily akin to the final days at the People’s Temple, Waco or Heaven’s Gate. As the rest of the country watches in horror, his devotees have seemingly turned away from all logic and reason and willfully ignored threats to their safety to pledge their unyielding devotion to a false god.

One night, as we sat up late discussing politics, my suitemate said to me, “It feels like we are witnessing the final days of democracy.” On that point, I’d have to agree — and yet, I wonder if we will find the resolve to save our nation.

CALEB DUNSON is a first year in Saybrook College. Contact him at caleb.dunson@yale.edu .

G U E ST C O LU M N I ST JAC K T R I P P

The climate of our era A

lmost three weeks ago on Thursday, Sept. 24, I attended an event for Yale Forward, the pro-divestment campaign to elect climate activist and policy advisor Maggie Thomas ENV ’15 to the Yale Corporation. It was my first Yale Forward event and one of only a few I have attended concerning divestment. The Zoom event was oriented toward alumni and thick with campy nostalgia for bright college years come and gone.

But in hearing firsthand from the campaign itself, it became clear to me that the debate about divestment is not only about climate but also about power, equally about what gets done and whose voice is heard.

A few days prior, a friend had sent me an article concerning Harvard’s changes to their Board of Overseers election process.

The alterations include limiting the number of candidates who can be nominated by petition and were made after three candidates from Harvard Forward — Harvard’s own divestment campaign — were elected to the board. The decision has serious implications concerning decision-making processes in higher education at large.

Sometimes as a student I feel that it can be challenging to be both at and a part of Yale.

There’s a constant need to balance my conception of Yale as an institution entering its fourth century and that desire to feel that Yale can be “ours.”

Yale’s leadership has, of course, recognized the importance of addressing climate change, while disagreeing that divestment is an effective response.

The crux of the debate resides not simply in whether our institutions acknowledge the potential devastation of climate change. On a deeper level, our discussions concerning divestment are informed by how we — including students, administrators, alumni — see Yale and our role in living in, learning from, and perpetuating it.

I ultimately have faith in Yale and all of its component parts to advocate for what they think is right for the University

— in the students, yes, but also in the faculty, staff, administration and Corporation. But the people who make up those parts are at very different stages in their lives and in their relations to Yale. This was one of the strongest arguments Yale Forward alluded to at that Thursday night event. With age, alumni gain experience of the world, but the younger we are the closer we are to Yale. And we, as current students, are closer to this place than almost anyone.

IT BECAME CLEAR TO ME THAT THE DEBATE ABOUT DIVESTMENT IS NOT ONLY ABOUT CLIMATE BUT ALSO ABOUT POWER, EQUALLY ABOUT WHAT GETS DONE AND WHOSE VOICE IS HEARD. In their article, “The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations,” political science scholars Martha Finnemore and Michael Barnett write about how international organizations with extensive bureaucratic structures often institute rules that are self-defeating.

They write, “Bureaucracies are infamous for creating and implementing policies that defy rational logic, for acting in ways that are at odds with their stated mission, and for refusing requests of and turning their backs on those to whom they are officially responsible.” Although I cite this tangentially at best, it is easy to recognize that universities — famous for their bureaucracies — are also prone to these risks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I think that we are generally well cared for by Yale — in support for our clubs and initiatives, in the network of residential colleges, in the company of our teachers and peers and in general expectations for our potential. But when it comes to the long term, I wonder if the University’s leadership doubts whether we as undergraduates — who usually only spend four years here — have the foresight to look out for future generations of students. In doubting their students — 83% of students at Yale supported divestment as far back as 2013 — universities fulfill each of the above three failings of bureaucracies.

The primary argument of this opinion is not necessarily that Yale divest — although I do believe the sooner the better.

The main point of this piece is that the leadership of our institutions of higher learning could do more to listen harder, deeper and longer — especially to younger voices, who often do not have access to institutional channels.

The competitions for leadership ongoing at Yale and elsewhere are for seats at the table, but, maybe more importantly, they are about having a diversity of voices in the room itself.

In a chance convergence of events, I have been repeatedly reminded of a quote popularly associated with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “A court should never be influenced by the weather of the day, but inevitably they will be influenced by the climate of the era.” I think this can be applied to almost any institution that lasts long enough to see successive eras. In this context, I would amend it to make the subject Yale. To determine that climate, to make decisions responsive to the consensus of our community and of our times, conversation must continue in all forums. Otherwise, we risk sacrificing goals to rules, values to procedure, and ultimately much needed change to a comforting status quo.

JACK TRIPP is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College. Contact him at jack.tripp@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“I think life’s a bit of what you make it and a little smidgen of you being the jellyfish, and the tide’s just gently helping you along.” ANDREW BUCHAN TELEVISION ACTOR

Students demand that Yale reprioritize its spending

BY JULIA BIALEK AND JULIA BROWN STAFF REPORTERS On the heels of Yale’s most recent report about its financial health, students across the University are continuing to voice their demands that Yale reform its approach to spending.

The University recently reported that for the most recent fiscal year, Yale’s endowment saw returns of 6.8 percent, and the University had a budget surplus of $125 million despite costs and lost revenue associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, many students are calling upon the University to spend more money to support both the Yale community as well as the city of New Haven. The University expects to spend $1.5 billion of its endowment this fiscal year — the most the University has ever spent from its endowment, according to the Investments Office’s annual press releases.

“Yale is lying a lot about their ability to spend money during COVID,” said Endowment Justice Coalition member Alex Cohen ’21. “They like to use scare tactics around the endowment and make it sound like the endowment is this very scary thing that you can’t understand and you can’t touch. … It justifies them implementing austerity measures that hurt people and are totally unnecessary.”

According to Cohen, the Yale Investments Office is taking its spending policy to an extreme, participating in what he called “endowment hoarding.” In Cohen’s opinion, the Investments Office is overly focused on accumulating wealth and generating high returns.

In order to grow the endowment, Cohen said Yale invests in exploitative and extractive industries which shift money around the “worst places” in the economy.

Representatives from the Yale Investments Office declined a request for comment. University spokesperson Karen Peart declined to comment on Cohen’s allegation that Yale is hoarding wealth in its endowment and focusing more on generating high returns than on the well-being of the greater Yale community.

But according to Peart, because the endowment is a collection of gifts made to Yale over its lifetime, there are restrictions on how the earnings from the invested gifts can be spent with the requirement that they both support programs today and in perpetuity.

In an April 21 message to the Yale community, University President Peter Salovey outlined how the endowment is used and the University’s plans to respond to the pandemic’s financial disruption.

“We are investing in the people of Yale,” Peart wrote in an email to the News. “The spending cuts are not contrary to our commitment to supporting our community. It is precisely that commitment that makes us act prudently since we are bracing for the uncertain months ahead of us.”

Peart added that Yale has provided and continues to provide “extraordinary” financial and other support to the Yale community during this difficult time, citing the partial lift of the hiring freeze, as well as a 1.5 percent increase in salaries of full-time faculty and managerial and professional staff earning less than $85,000 per year.

Cohen said that he feels the people who control the University’s wealth — including Yale Corporation members, Investments Office employees and other administrators — are more concerned with growing the endowment than servicing the Yale community.

“This makes the University more like a hedge fund with a school attached, instead of a

school with an investments office attached,” Cohen said.

Another member of the Endowment Justice Coalition, Addee Kim ’22, called for Yale to invest more money in New Haven, saying that the University’s wealth hoarding is partly sustained by unjust tax exemptions on its properties. However, Kim added that the money owed to New Haven does not necessarily have to come out of the endowment.

Kim is part of the EJC’s reinvestment group, which they said extends the coalition’s divestment efforts and focuses on where Yale should direct the funds after divesting from “exploitative industries.”

“In our mind, a just investment is that in New Haven, given the history of segregated development in the city that Yale has directly contributed to through its wealth hoarding, its property expansion and its tax exemption,” Kim said.

But according to Peart, Yale has historically and will continue to spend substantial resources in New Haven. She said that due to Yale’s status as a nonprofit institution, the University is exempt from paying property taxes on its academic properties. However, Yale still remains New Haven’s third-highest taxpayer, paying $5 million in annual property taxes on its non-academic properties. She added that the University builds properties on existing land, so the city benefits through increased demand for construction, new opportunities for jobs and permitting fees of $5 million per year.

In the last fiscal year, Peart stated that the University paid $12 million in voluntary payments to the city of New Haven, which was the highest from a university to a host city anywhere in the country. Peart added that Yale spends over $700 million annually on New Haven and is the city’s largest employer.

MEGAN GRAHAM/PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

“The only way to ensure that Yale will continue to be able to fulfill its core mission, while also continuing to support the New Haven community, is to maintain a prudent level of spending each year from our endowment, based on sound economic theory and analysis,” Peart wrote in an email to the News. “This is as much as we can responsibly spend without unfairly taking from those who will come after us.”

Alexander Kolokotronis GRD ’22 is one of the leaders of the Concerned and Organized Graduate Students at Yale. COGS is an organization of graduate students created last spring to push for a universal one-year extension on funding for all doctoral students. The group says that the pandemic disrupted their ability to complete their programs in the time they were originally stipulated to receive funding for.

Like Kim and Cohen, Kolokotronis believes that the University should prioritize investment in its students and in New Haven, citing the hun-

dreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves as evidence that Yale has the resources to spend more money on the city and on the Yale community.

“We feel there is really no excuse for Yale to say that they can’t invest more in the community, they can’t invest more in graduate students, they should be even cutting into departments, such as the humanities,” said Kolokotronis. “It just doesn’t add up in either direction.

It doesn’t add up when you look at the endowment, and it doesn’t add up when you look at the operating budget.”

Although separate organizations, Kolokotronis said that COGS and EJC support each other’s missions in terms of reforming how Yale chooses to prioritize endowment spending.

The Yale endowment is currently valued at $31.2 billion.

Contact JULIA BIALEK at julia.bialek@yale.edu and JULIA BROWN at julia.brown@yale.edu.

Yale Coalition tutors NHPS students

BY CHRISTIAN ROBLES STAFF REPORTER A coalition of several Yale-affiliated groups is planning to provide virtual mentoring and tutoring services to New Haven Public Schools students from grades 6-12 this fall and spring.

In March, undergraduate students from the Yale Education Studies Scholars program mobilized to offer an after-school virtual study hall to NHPS students who were affected by the city’s decision to close public schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizers of this pilot program found that there were many students who needed academic support in the STEM fields. However, the Yale volunteers did not have the infrastructure to provide enough resources to these students. Organizers through the Yale Education Tutoring Initiative, the Yale Office of New Haven Affairs, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and other graduate student groups then came together over the summer to build on the pilot program.

“I am proud of the undergraduate and graduate students for coming together to meet the needs of the community,” Claudia Merson, director of public school partnerships, told the News.

Merson said the coalition of student groups and the Office of New Haven Affairs have been able to meet much of the STEM and general tutoring demand. For this semester’s tutoring session, Merson contacted the New Haven math supervisor Kenneth Matthews to provide prospective student tutors with knowledge about the city’s math curriculum.

In addition to the math supervisor’s support, Merson said that other individuals have proven to be valuable assets for the program.

Office of New Haven Affairs Pathways to Science Program Manager Maria Parente has provided organizers with logistical support — such as the ability to keep track of student attendance numbers and identify why some students may not be in attendance. Sarah Cussler, assistant director of undergraduate writing and academic strategies at the Poorvu Center, has provided

organizers with pedagogical support, including best virtual tutoring practices. Cussler is also hosting office hours to support tutors.

The coalition of organizations carried out their first two tutoring sessions last week after months of planning. The coalition matched students based on a variety of factors, including their schedule, academic needs, grade level and personal interests. They also publicized their initiative to principals, teachers and parents.

“We really encouraged our tutors, especially at our orientation, to use the first session to get to know their students,” said YETI student organizer Brooklin Ballard ’22. “They asked questions about [their mentee’s] interests and hobbies and used their time to set goals.”

The first week also served to ensure that mentees knew how to properly use Zoom features and had the appropriate learning equipment. Tutors were asked to fill out a feedback form documenting any technological issues their students had after the first session.

In a typical week, mentors will meet with their students twice

a week on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in the evening for roughly one hour, Ballard said. Alternatively, students can receive tutoring support on Saturday if they are unable to attend on weekdays.

Ballard said that 200 New Haven families have already signed their children up for tutoring services. This fall, roughly 70 Yale undergraduates and graduate students have signed up to tutor students. Due to immense demand and finite resources, the initiative has stopped accepting applications from families for now and plans to match NHPS students with mentors on a rolling basis.

The coalition also plans to work with organizers of the citywide community learning hub initiative, but the logistics of this partnership have not been finalized. Community learning hubs were born of a partnership between local nonprofits and the city, and offer a safe space for NHPS students who lack access to adequate technology to participate in virtual learning.

While graduate student organizer Rick Crouse told the News

that tutoring students in person at the learning hubs would be ideal, it may not be feasible because of the community compact and potential health risks. Nevertheless, the coalition is closely monitoring the public health impact of the program.

“We are staying plugged into the discussion [with respect to learning hubs] because even though the kids are going to be served by learning hubs, that does not mean they are going to have all the support that they need — so that’s where we think the tutors can help supplement,” said Crouse.

Going forward, Ballard said that the organization will focus on recruiting more graduate and undergraduate students. She told the News she hopes that YETI’s outreach to directors of undergraduate studies will increase the number of tutors available. Crouse said he hopes that the tutoring initiative will last at least through the end of the semester and into the spring.

Interested Yale students can apply to become a mentor.

Contact CHRISTIAN ROBLES at christian.robles@yale.edu.

Good Life Center goes virtual

KAREN LIN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Good Life Center, which is normally housed on the fourth floor of Silliman College, is offering a wide range of virtual programming opportunities.

BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER While the pandemic has closed off physical access to Yale’s Good Life Center, the center’s team is continuing to provide virtual programming for students.

The Good Life Center — launched in 2018 after Silliman Head of College Laurie Santos’ class “Psychology and the Good

Life” drew over 1,000 enrollees — is normally housed in the fourth floor of Silliman College. According to the center’s website, the Good Life Center is “a cultivated space to inspire, teach, and practice living the good life.” In a normal year, students could spend time in the center’s lounge, which features a tea station and physical comforts corner. They could also visit the study or the sandbox — a silent, tech-free

zone. Although students cannot use these spaces now, weekly newsletters from the GLC advertise various Zoom events.

“I think in some ways the virtual format has actually made our events more accessible,” GLC Woodbridge Fellow Alexa Vaghenas ’20 said.

“Students can easily pop into a workshop or guided meditation as they please, for instance, without having to travel to Silliman College.”

According to Santos, who founded the center, the GLC has been able to keep much of its old programming, including meditation classes, yoga and wellness chats.

Recently publicized virtual events include “Mindfulness and Gratitude Meditation” — which currently runs on Thursdays and Sundays — high-intensity interval training workouts and an upcoming workshop on how to feel “focused and organized” by paying attention to study space setup.

“We’ve also developed some new programming specifically for the current situation,” Santos wrote in an email to the News.

Santos explained that Vaghenas has designed a new series of events relevant to the current conditions on how athletes are

handling the change that comes with losing normal season programming. The program is a partnership with the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.

Emma Mangiacapre ’24, who is on the Yale gymnastics team, told the News that the uncertainty of the upcoming season has been stressful. The GLC’s new programming aims to address that stress.

“It gives me a lot of anxiety, personally,” she said. “And I’m sure a lot of my teammates and other athletes feel that too. Skillwise, we’re very behind. Normally, at this time, we will be starting official practice, which is where hours increase, and we can really start focusing in [on] our routines.”

On top of the new student-athlete programming, Vaghenas has been organizing various other social events, such as movie nights and dance workouts, Santos said.

More recently, according to Vaghenas, the center has partnered with the Yale University Art Gallery to lead a “Being Present With Art” series, which will include both guided meditation for students and art-inspired exercises, such as drawing and storytelling.

The GLC’s overarching theme

this year is “Compassion and Action,” which has led to a partnership with cultural centers at Yale to provide training in issues relating to race and inclusivity.

“By organizing wellness programming through this lens, the center hopes to promote compassion for people from all backgrounds as well as action against injustice through activism and allyship,” Santos said.

Now, the center is also beginning to provide some in-person events. For the next four weekends, Lulu Zhang LAW ’23 will host outdoor yoga for 10 people or fewer on Cross Campus.

Vaghenas noted that the challenges of this year have also called for the creation of a new committee — the Good Life Center Student Advisory Board.

“Student Advisory Board members act as liaisons between Good Life Center leadership and the broader Yale community, informing us about student needs for specialized wellness programming during these unusual times,” she said.

The GLC is normally located at 505 College St. Contact OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu.

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“A person without conviction is a weak, jellyfish type of individual who mindlessly follows the crowd.” RICK WARREN AMERICAN BAPTIST PASTOR

Spring semester classes will start on Feb. 1 eral. Yale’s COVID-19 dashboard shows 29 cases on campus since Aug. 1.

Though Martinello explained that the public health situation on campus has been “so far, so good,” he added that community members should remain cautious. The state of Connecticut, including New Haven, is currently seeing a slight increase in COVID-19 cases, Martinello said, and he is worried about a potential second wave.

AMAY TEWARI/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

According to President Peter Salovey’s email, sophomore, junior and senior undergraduates will be allowed to return to campus in the spring.

SPRING FROM PAGE 1 Students will begin arriving on campus during the final week of January. Like the fall term, they will participate in an arrival quarantine, and the first week of classes will be entirely online.

The University is currently finalizing student move-in plans, Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives Pericles Lewis told the News.

To avoid having students travel to and from campus, the semester will not include a spring break.

Instead, the University will introduce individual break days. The days off are Feb. 22, March 9, March 24, April 8 and April 23.

“We’re doing things to decompress the semester,” Strobel said. “[We’re] essentially distributing a week of holiday across the length of the semester.”

Classes will end on May 7, one week later than was previously announced, according to Strobel.

Afterwards, students will participate in a reading period from May 8 to May 12, before taking exams from May 13 to May 19.

THE RATIONALE In an interview with the News, Strobel and Lewis explained the rationale behind the decision. The delayed start date allows the University to avoid most of the flu season and the possibility of having to deal with dual pandemics — the flu and COVID-19. Additionally, by March and April, students may be able to spend more time outdoors, where there is less risk of coronavirus transmission, Lewis said.

“We would like to minimize the amount of time that is overlapped between flu season and the semester,” Strobel said. “We can’t do that perfectly, but every day counts.”

Richard Martinello, medical director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Hospital,

explained that if students show symptoms of a respiratory infection, it can be difficult to distinguish whether they have the flu or COVID-19. Doctors therefore have to treat patients with the symptoms as if they have the coronavirus.

Additionally, Strobel and Lewis explained that the University hopes to minimize students’ off-campus travel by getting rid of spring break.

WHO DECIDES? The University established a basic calendar last spring in consultation with the Academic Continuity Committee, one of the planning committees formed in response to the pandemic. The committee received input from students of Yale College and the graduate and professional schools, including both the current and outgoing Yale College Council presidents. Since making the decision, the Univer-

sity has alerted some faculty to the compressed spring semester schedule.

Strobel and Lewis explained that administrators told faculty members about the decision because faculty will ultimately be the ones to decide whether to teach in-person or online courses. Currently, some labs and art courses are taught in person, while the majority of courses are taught over Zoom. Come spring, the faculty will decide whether to move more classes to an in-person format.

“It’s variable across departments,” Strobel said. “But I would suspect most courses will be taught online.”

Strobel emphasized that this decision to have students return to campus in some capacity in the spring is only possible because of the successful fall semester, specifically noting that he is “thrilled” with how well students are following the community guidelines and how the semester is going in gen-

CONFUSION ON TUESDAY On Tuesday morning, Yalies first heard about the late spring start in an email sent to students in the ethics, politics and economics major, when Frances Rosenbluth, EP&E director, wrote that classes will not start until February of 2021.

Soon after, news of the email spread across Twitter and other social media outlets, prompting confusion and strong reactions from students. On Instagram, students posted screenshots of the email along with puzzled captions.

In a follow-up email about 90 minutes after the original, Rosenbluth corrected her statement and wrote that “I’ve just been told that there is no decision yet about Jan versus Feb start date for the spring.” In a Tuesday afternoon email to the News, she confirmed that Yale was considering multiple options, including starting the spring semester in February, but did not confirm that a decision was finalized.

Multiple other directors of undergraduate studies interviewed by the News on Tuesday morning and early afternoon confirmed that the February start date was under consideration, but none confirmed that a final decision was made. Salovey’s email announcing the new spring calendar was sent to the Yale community late Tuesday evening.

Sophomores can return to campus for the spring term, while first years will not be allowed to stay in residential colleges.

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu and ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu .

Judge rules prof gender discrimination case can continue LAWSUIT FROM PAGE 1 ing him twice for the same sexual harassment offense, a judge ruled last week.

Simons, who is still a University employee, was found guilty of sexual harassment in 2013. At the time, he was the chief of cardiology at the School of Medicine and chief of cardiovascular medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. He also held the Robert W. Berliner endowed chair.

When Berliner’s daughter objected to Simons’ chairship, the University transferred him to the Waldemar von Zedtwitz professorship. But after backlash from students, faculty and alumni, the University removed him from the position.

In October of 2019, Simons filed a complaint against Yale, University President Peter Salovey, former Dean of the School of Medicine Robert Alpern and unknown persons who leaked information to the media. The complaint’s nine counts allege gender discrimination, breach of privacy, breach of contract, wrongful discharge and emotional distress. In November 2019, the University filed a motion to dismiss Simons’ complaint, which a U.S. district court judge ruled against on Sept. 30.

"Dr. Simons is a Caucasian male," the complaint stated. "The defendants acted intentionally and in a discriminatory manner in regard to Dr. Simons for the express purpose of placating those #MeToo activists and sympathizers in the grip of moral panic and self-righteous indignation."

In an email to the News, Alpern wrote that he is unable to respond to the pending litigation. Simons did not respond to requests for comment.

Simons’ lawyer Norm Pattis told the News that he would not comment. “The ruling speaks for itself,” Pattis wrote in an email to the News.

In the complaint, Simons claims that the University removed him first from his positions as chief of cardiovascular medicine and tenured professorships due to public pressure from sympathizers of the #MeToo movement.

"Said activists generated an implacable intolerance to any perceived instance of sexual harass-

ment, inculcating an ethos requiring that victims be believed uncritically, and fostering a general climate of hysteria in which activists were unable to distinguish genuine acts of sexual misconduct from the sort of normal courting behavior customary between men and women, such as the love letter sent by Dr. Simons,” the complaint reads.

Simons also alleged that he suffered gender discrimination due to the fact that only Caucasian males have been punished twice by the University for sexual misconduct cases.

Ya l e ’s re s p o n se re f u te s Simons’ claim that he was doubly punished because of his gender. The University has not heard a sexual harassment complaint against a similarly situated female faculty member, Yale’s motion explains.

“Yale has an unwavering commitment to uphold standards of conduct essential to the maintenance of a safe, respectful, and inclusive campus,” University Spokesperson Karen Peart wrote in an email to the News. “These standards apply to all students, faculty, and staff, regardless of

race or gender, and we will continue to defend this case vigorously.”

Details from Simons’ case date back to 2010, when he sent a romantic letter to a female junior colleague, who subsequently told him that she did not reciprocate his feelings. According to Simons’ complaint, the letter was “a declaration of love and romantic interest of the sort men have sent to women from time immemorial.”

She started up a relationship with another doctor who subsequently faced professional difficulties, which the two alleged was due to Simons’ interference.

In 2013, the junior colleague filed a sexual harassment complaint with the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. Former Connecticut Superior Court Judge Beverly Hodgson investigated the claim and found Simons guilty of sexual harassment, and the UWC recommended he be suspended as chief of cardiology for five years.

Simons appealed and the suspension was ultimately reduced to 18 months.

But details of the proceedings surfaced in a subsequent New York Times investigation. Later in 2013, Simons resigned as chief of cardiology, and his complaint alleges the University forced his resignation due to the public outcry.

Simons continued to hold the position of the Robert W. Berliner chair of cardiology until Nancy Berliner ’75 MED ’79, the daughter of Robert Berliner and a former professor at the School of Medicine, objected to Simons’ professorship. In July of 2018, the University transferred Simons to the Von Zedtwitz Chair.

The action prompted public backlash, including an open letter from medical school students, alumni and faculty that amassed more than 1,000 signatures. The University then removed Simons from the position.

In October 2019, Simons filed a complaint against the University.

One month later, the University filed a motion to dismiss Simons’ case as time-barred, meaning that Simons filed the complaint too long after the alleged breach of contract for it to be considered in court. The alleged

breach of contract happened in January 2013. But Simons did not file the complaint until over six years later, in October 2019, Yale’s memorandum in support of its motion reads.

The University also claims that Simons failed to perform his duties as outlined in his offer of employment. The offer directed Simons to the University’s Faculty Handbook, which expressly prohibits sexual misconduct, the memorandum reads.

“The plaintiff therefore not only fails to allege that he performed; he actually alleges that he failed to perform,” Yale’s memorandum states.

“In other words, he breached what he alleges was a material term of the contract prior to any claimed breach by the University Defendants, thereby relieving them of their obligation to perform.”

Members of the Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine did not wish to comment on the case.

The University is represented by lawyers at Clendenen & Shea, LLC. Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu and BEATRIZ HORTA at beatriz.horta@yale.edu .

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Simons' Oct. 2019 complaints allege gender discrimination, breach of privacy, breach of contract, wrongful discharge and emotional distress.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.” MAY SARTON BELGIAN-AMERICAN POET AND NOVELIST

Yale-DOL settlement totals $87,500 DOL FROM PAGE 1 counterparts. The department released the settlement on Oct. 2.

While conducting a routine compliance review, the Department of Labor found that four female cardiologists were paid less than male faculty members of similar stature during the 2016-17 fiscal year. The four employees were clinicians in the cardiovascular medicine section of the School of Medicine. Per the settlement’s terms, the University does not admit wrongdoing and the employees sign away their rights to sue.

“We are fighting hard for women to have the same pay as men,” Elizabeth Jonas ’82, co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine at the School of Medicine, wrote in an email to the News. “I think the problem will never be solved until the University publishes all salaries and pays according to a scale set by rank and seniority.”

During its evaluation of the University, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found that Yale had violated requirements that employers not discriminate based on gender.

Vicki Schultz, professor of law and social sciences, said that she suspects the OFCCP looks for a “significant, non-random deviation from the norm,” when conducting compliance reviews.

“Here there were 4 women being underpaid, not one, for

example,” Schultz wrote in an email to the News. “The amounts were not trivial, and would be compounded over time through across-the-board, percentage raises.”

The University distributed the $87,500 among the four affected employees. Two of them received $27,500, while another got $20,000 and the last was awarded $12,500. These sums were calculated according to the back pay and interest that each employee should have received.

The four employees were hired when the Yale New Haven Health System acquired the practices where they worked. The practices’ compensation structures were kept intact during this transition. The previous contract led to the discrepancies in their salaries, the settlement stated.

Un ive rs i ty s p o ke s p e rso n Karen Peart underscored that the agreement involves only four employees out of more than 16,000 working at Yale. The OFCCP did not find any additional pay disparities, she added, and the cardiologists’ professional track has not existed for over two years. Instead, clinicians now work on the clinical track.

In the document, the OFCCP recognized that the hiring practice is no longer in place, and that compensation is now integrated into YNHH's own payment system.

To receive the compensa-

RYAN CHIAO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Two of the cardiologists received $27,500, while another got $20,000 and the last was awarded $12,500. tion, the employees had to agree not to file a discrimination suit against the University.

For its part, Yale must conduct internal audits and keep all records relevant to the violation.

Additionally, the University must fill out progress reports on any pay adjustments for employees in the clinical track until September 2022 and submit these reports to the OFCCP. Like other private employ-

ers, the University does not publicize faculty and staff pay, so many employees do not have a frame of reference for their salary compared to others in their field, Schultz explained.

“It’s almost impossible for people to know whether they are being underpaid relative to their peers based on impermissible criteria like sex or race,” Schultz told the News. “This is why measures to increase pay trans-

parency, begun in the Obama administration but opposed by the current administration, are so important.”

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was created in 2009 as a subdivision of the Department of Labor.

Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu and BEATRIZ HORTA at beatriz.horta@yale.edu .

Youth homeless population faces unique challenges HOMELESSNESS FROM PAGE 1 Tim Maguire, Director of Housing Programs at Youth Continuum, said the pandemic has forced everyone in his line of work to change their protocols. He said the organization immediately had to reduce the capacity of its crisis housing units at its shelter, which Davila and dozens of other homeless New Haven youth use. Youth Continuum was also pressed to open an isolation facility, a wing dedicated to newcomers so that they can quarantine before accessing the rest of the facility, and reorganize the layout of its shelter to accommodate state-mandated social distancing protocols.

“It was hard, but we never had to stop bringing young people into crisis housing,” Maguire said. “We got them in and got them out as fast as possible.”

Maguire also said he was impressed by the immediate attention the issue of homelessness received both city- and statewide once the pandemic first broke out. He said that thanks to the considerable government aid, which included increased access to testing and the formation of groups which helped organize sending those in need of housing to various cities, Youth Continuum has only had one shelter guest and a few staff members contract the virus since the beginning of the outbreak. Maguire added that none of these cases were contracted at Youth Continuum facilities and the organization was able to provide a space for the guest to quarantine within the shelter for a 14-day-quarantine.

Maguire said that during the past few months he has noticed an upsurge in community support to help for the city’ smost vulnerable residents.

“We were really worried about what this pandemic would do to our population and if it would run rampant,” Maguire said. “And the reality is that it did not.”

The Youth Continuum’s youth outreach group, the Youth Action Board, is made up entirely of youth who have personally experienced homelessness. Marina Marmolejo, the board’s leader, said that people often overlook the difference in experience between youth and adult housing insecurity — a difference that has only worsened during the crisis.

According to Marmolejo, homeless youth have suffered from the closure of so many businesses and areas they could use to stay warm, charge their devices or even just feel safe. Larger society, Marmolejo added, has failed to see that as society has ‘gone virtual,’ homeless youth haven’t received the resources needed to participate in the new spheres of education.

“A lot of young people who are unstably housed don’t have the technology that would allow them to participate in this new society,” Marmolejo said. “Overall I think policies and interventions and programs that are coming out have to be really conscious [of] who their entire audience is.”

Despite the expansive citywide response to aid homeless populations since the pandemic began, both Maguire and Davila expressed concerns about what the combination of COVID-19 and a New Haven winter might have on those experiencing homelessness. Maguire said his organization will have to cut down on capacity of the warming centers it usually offers during the winter and other shelter services. To combat this, he said the Youth Continuum is in the process of collaborating with fellow shelters

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

In January of 2020, the CCEH counted 503 people experiencing homelessness in New Haven on a single night and organizations that work with the city’s homeless community to establish more warming centers.

“I’m really worried,” Davila said. “With winter coming, I don’t want to be left out in the cold and get sick. There’s a lot of stuff I’m trying to prepare for and just don’t know how to.”

Dyuthi Mathews Tharakan ’22, Leader of Advocacy and Publicity at Y2Y New Haven, a student-run overnight program for housing-insecure youth, encouraged Yale students to work outside the bounds of on-campus organizations to contribute to the city’s efforts to combat housing insecurity.

“I see a lot of Yale students who want to give back to New Haven and get out of that Yale bub-

ble,” Tharakan said. “I encourage them to look beyond just the organizations Yale has to offer, because there are many across New Haven.”

Back at the Continuum, Davila has a job and resides within the shelter’s semi-permanent crisis housing unit. She said her experiences with homelessness and housing insecurity have heavily influenced her plans for the future. She said she wants to use the Youth Continuum’s programs to build up credit and start her own organization that combats homelessesness. She envisions an organization that offers shelter, education resources, day care services, job training — everything she wished she had for so many years. She wants to help every-

one in the city of New Haven to be treated the same, especially as this pandemic leaves homeless youth more vulnerable than they have ever been before.

“A lot of people like me that experience [homelessness] always go to the street life,” Davila said.

“They get comfortable in a life they think was chosen for them.

But that’s not true. My goal is to become better in my situation so I can help my youth and let them know they’re not alone.”

The Youth Continuum drop-in center is located at 924 Grand Avenue.

Contact THOMAS BIRMINGHAM at thomas.birmingham@yale.edu and BENNIE ANDERSON at bennie.anderson@yale.edu .

Lim collided with a box truck near YNHH ACCIDENT FROM PAGE 1 South Frontage Road and York Street. Lim was a member of the class of 2022, police said.

The accident occurred just after 4 p.m. at the intersection of York St. and South Frontage Rd. by the Yale-New Haven Hospital, according to New Haven Police Department Captain Anthony Duff.

A 10 p.m. news release from the NHPD indicated that Lim was traveling north on York Street in the far-right, rightturn only lane. He continued to ride straight through the intersection.

Meanwhile, the 35-year-old

truck operator was driving northbound in the center lane on York, which is both a straight and a right-turn lane. Lim collided with the truck’s passenger side as the driver turned right onto South Frontage.

Prior to the arrival of New Haven emergency responders, a passing North Branford Fire Department ambulance and a American Medical Response supervisor stopped to render aid.

After New Haven police and fire departments arrived on the scene, Lim was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The truck driver remained on the scene. The street was closed

to traffic for several hours following the crash and have since been reopened. New Haven police and the Connecticut State Police Accident Reconstruction Team are currently investigating the accident.

The location of the crash is the same intersection where a Yale Medical School student, Mila Rainof, was killed in 2008 and where a Yale-New Haven Hospital technician, Melinda Trancredi, was killed in 2017 — both pedestrians struck by passing vehicles.

Witnesses have been asked to contact the police at 203-9466316.

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

RYAN CHIAO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The York St. and So. Frontage Road intersection has seen a number of accidents in recent years.

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS First-year musicians form band during quarantine

BY ALEX ORI AND ÁNGELA PÉREZ ALEX ORI AND ÁNGELA PÉREZ CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS In Pauli Murray’s elevated courtyard last Saturday, Phil and the Blank — a band of three first years — performed a series of songs to a small crowd of students.

Gus Brocchini ’24, Ben Finkel ’24 and Peter van Vlaanderen ’24 formed Phil and the Blank during the two-week on-campus quarantine.

“We try not to make these performances too serious,” Grocchini said. “We don’t set high expectations. It’s nice to do it in this courtyard though, because if seven people come, it feels like a crowd.”

The group announces their performances through their residential college’s GroupMe chat. They have advertised their shows as Econ 115 “study sessions” and by telling students to “bring a good attitude and a bad friend.”

It was on this same platform — GroupMe — that the band members met a few weeks back. Brocchini and van Vlaanderen, who are suitemates, were practicing together in their common room when Finkel, who lives two floors up, heard them through his window. Finkel asked about the music on the college’s GroupMe chat, which led them to forming a band.

Brocchini says that the name Phil and the Blank is one he had wanted to use for a while. He said that his fellow band members wanted to name the group The Grape Bushes, after

the bushes in the elevated courtyard where they practice. Brocchini “vetoed” that name in favor of their current name, which is a pun on the phrase “fill in the blank.”

The band, comprising two guitars and a bass, performs with masks and without drums. Finkel is lead vocalist, van Vlaanderen plays bass and the three members “share guitar duties.” Finkel described Phil and the Blank’s style as a combination of alternative rock and singer-songwriter music. Members said their “different tastes [in music] mesh pretty well” to create new music.

The group’s performances

include both original compositions and song covers. Brocchini described Finkel as “a song-writing machine.” At their performance on Saturday, Finkel sang a song about members of the audience, coming up with lyrics on-the-spot.

The group has already created fun performance traditions such as the “one-legged Johnny B. Goode.”

During the relevant song, the musicians stand on one leg while playing the guitar and singing. This captivated the audience’s attention on Saturday.

“Pauli Murray already has such a great community, but when every-

one comes to watch them play, it makes it so much tighter,” said Tre Peterson ’24.

Aaron Weisman ’24 said he looks forward to future performances.

“It’s like a break in the day,” Weisman said. “It’s a time to stop doing work and to just enjoy music and other people.”

The group said that even though they are currently busy with academics, they hope to eventually record their compositions.

Contact ALEX ORI at alex.ori@yale.edu and ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

LILY DORSTEWITZ/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Artspace celebrates City-Wide Open Studios virtually

BY TANIA TSUNIK & BRYAN VENTURA CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS On Oct. 1, Artspace New Haven — a nonprofit organization for emerging contemporary artists — launched its 23rd annual City-Wide Open Studios festival.

The festival is a month-long event which provides artists across Connecticut with a platform to exhibit their work and build connections within the community. This year, due to the pandemic, CWOS is offering both remote and in-person engagement opportunities. Viewers can schedule studio visits with over 200 artists through the CWOS portal.

“Our first priority has always been to connect artists with potential clients, curators, or programmers,” said Lisa Dent, executive director of Artspace New Haven. “In that way, I hope that moving to the remote even presents some advantages and offers greater opportunities for them.”

This year’s theme is based on political scientist Robert Dahl’s book “Who Governs?”.

According to the Artspace press release, Dahl’s book serves as a “jumping off point” for artists to imagine public projects about city management and governance.

In the past, the festival took place throughout the weekends of October. Each weekend focused on a different neighborhood of New Haven, with audience numbers in the thousands. However, it was difficult to engage curators from all over the U.S. because of costs and traveling times.

Now, both artists and visitors are adapting to art appreciation in a digital setting. Because curators no longer need to travel to New Haven, CWOS now attracts artists that can host meetings over Zoom and Google Hangout.

Yet the main goals of CWOS remain unchanged.

Visitors who prefer in-person studio visits have the opportunity to do so, as long as they follow health and safety guidelines. They can use the website portal to book a time slot in advance.

Artspace has held its City-Wide Open Studios festival for 22 years, and most artists have continued to participate in this year’s festival despite its transition to a virtual format.

New Haven-based digital sketch doer Jason Ting found the festival’s virtual alternative convenient.

“It’s still a great opportunity to share my artwork with the local community,” Ting said.

“The online format makes it easier and more

accessible for artists and viewers to connect with one another.”

Eoin Burke ART ’09 and his wife Tracie Cheng have been part of the festival for years and look forward to its continuation.

“It is always a wonderful space where we can bring our community into the work we do and connect with others making art in New Haven,” Burke said.

With over 200 artists, the festival features a wide range of art mediums, encouraging a wide variety of art to be featured. Ting, for example, uses coding techniques to create digital animations, while Burke creates his sculptures out of epoxy clay — a self-hardening clay used by crafters and sculptors. Ting plans to showcase 10 works capturing the visual range of his explorations.

The festival, a yearly tradition that gives involved artists the opportunity to showcase any art they’ve been working on for the past year, will run until Oct. 30. It is free and open to the public.

Contact TANIA TSUNIK at tania.tsunik@yale.edu and BRYAN VENTURA at bryan.ventura@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF JASON TING

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

Yale artists and composers join forces in virtual music project

BY MARISOL CARTY STAFF REPORTER With live orchestra performances on hold because of the pandemic, Emery Kerekes ’21 and Jacob Miller ’22, artistic directors of the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra or YUCO, spearheaded an innovative project pairing student composers with artists.

Kerekes and Miller hope the project will foster new connections through virtual platforms.

Composers will write a piece specifically for the artist they were paired with. Together, the composers and artists will prepare pre-recorded performances to be showcased in a live virtual concert in December.

“We get to have many more composers showcase their music and that’s really exciting to me,” Miller said. “There’s so many people composing in different ways and many different styles on this campus and I’m excited to see what comes up.”

YUCO was originally formed with the goal of uniting composers and musicians at Yale. YUCO typically holds an orchestra concert in Battell Chapel every semester, which premieres new pieces by student composers alongside other classical works.

Last semester, YUCO and the dance group, A Different Drum, organized a ballet together, but the pandemic disrupted those plans.

To enlist students for the

project, YUCO members sent out a survey in September. Student composers will write specifically for the performers they are paired with, allowing the two parties to collaborate closely.

“We paired the composers

rative composition process that we’re looking to have.”

Digital performances, both pre-recorded and live, introduce a new domain for composers and musicians. But they are creatively confronting the challenges posed

artworks — can supplement composers’ musical recordings. Kerekes said that by pairing composers with artists, he hopes to explore “beyond the bare concert minimum.”

YUCO board members Maddy

COURTESY OF YUCO

with the performers before a single note was written,” Kerekes said. “The composers are truly writing the pieces for performers that they were paired up with, and that’s the collabo-

by the virtual transition.

For example, this project is open to non-musical artists, including visual artists and dancers. Their creations — which include animations and

Tung ’21 and Jonathan Jalbert ’23 are involved in organizing the concert. Jalbert, who is working on a duet for clarinet and violin, explained that his group will record its performances separately

and then compile them into one video. He noted that the project requires composers and musicians to be more communicative.

“You have to be very intentional in advance to putting any of the music together, knowing exactly what you and your group want to do with the music before you record your parts separately,” Jalbert said. “I think that’s actually really helpful.”

Kerekes said this project offers composers and artists the unique opportunity to discuss ideas together, which does not always occur in typical performance seasons. Miller noted that the project preserves a sense of community among YUCO members while highlighting the talents of individual composers and artists.

In addition to giving composers and artists the chance to keep making music, the project aims to provide the concert’s audience with a sense of comfort.

“Going to an event, even if you’re logging on to the computer, reminds me of the way things kind of used to be in some small way,” Miller said.

“And I think music is one of these things that brings people together. It’s especially important right now. Even if it’s not fixing the problems of the world, it’s bringing us together in some small way.”

YUCO was founded in the spring of 2017.

Contact MARISOL CARTY at marisol.carty@yale.edu .

Love, Life, Death and Desire at the YCBA

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER On Oct. 1, a new exhibition titled, “Love, Life, Death, and Desire: An Installation of the Center’s Collections,” went on view at the Yale Center for British Art. The YCBA brings together Damien Hirst’s “In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays)” and 18 other works to show themes of love, loss, addiction and impermanence. The installation shows objects from a 1991 exhibition titled “In and Out of Love,” which has not been displayed in its entirety for many years.

The installation speaks to the uncertainties of the present time.

“What is the impulse to make art?” asked Matthew Hargraves, the chief curator of art collections at the YCBA. “Is the impulse behind all art ultimately to create something that will endure beyond death?”

The installation includes British art pieces that date to the 18th century alongside contemporary pieces. Hargraves said he hopes to show how British art has both evolved and retained artistic aspects over time.

The installation is a result of the YCBA’s unexpected closure in March due to COVID-19.

Hargraves believes now is an ideal time to showcase Hirst’s exhibition, since it encompasses the anxiety and loss brought by the pandemic.

Hirst’s exhibition was first shown in 1991 at the Woodstock Street Gallery in Oxfordshire, England. The exhibition was divided into two halves. On the upper level, live butterflies fed from bowls full of sugar water and flew free throughout the main floor of the gallery.

On the basement level, the objects on display included eight paintings, four white cubes with a hole in each side and a table adorned with ashtrays. Dead butterflies flit about canvases of Hirst’s paintings and the ashtrays lay filled with cigarette butts. The YCBA, which purchased these objects in 1997, currently has this half of the installation on display.

Today, the Hirst exhibition is as much about what is on display as what is not. The permanent half of the exhibition, with paintings, tables and cubes, remains thematically connected to its undisplayed second half.

According to Hargraves, the two halves of the exhibition reflect each other. In the basement, bowls of sugar water have become ashtrays while the butterflies are dead. According to Hirst, one half explores the romantic view of “being in and out of love” and the other half its harsh realities.

The question, he said, is which is which. The upper half, said Hargraves, is warm and comforting, but also fetid and confined. The lower half speaks about pleasure and conviviality, but also addiction, disease and mortality.

“We’re dealing with death and life,” said Abigail Lamphier, the YCBA’s senior curatorial assistant who assisted with the installation. “I just think [the Hirst exhibition] fits so beautifully with what’s going on in the world right now.”

Other works in the YCBA installation include two paintings from the 18th century, a 19th century landscape titled “A Scene on the Coast, Merionethshire — Storm Passing Off” and a 2015 piece titled “Kingdom” by contemporary painter Christopher LeBrun.

Like Hirst’s dead butterflies and abandoned

ashtrays, these works probe the line between art and life. They also touch upon themes of temporality, which Hargraves described as “the mortality of anything natural.”

In the press release, YCBA Director Courtney Martin GRD ’09 said the installation demonstrates how artists over centuries have engaged with “some of the most consuming themes related to the human condition.”

But envisioning the installation during a pandemic was not easy. Hargraves, Lamphier and others who worked on the installation not only imagined the project remotely, but also put it together from afar. Neither Hargraves nor Lamphier have seen the installation in person yet.

“Usually as the curator, you would install it with the art handlers,” said Hargraves. “We had to do new experiments like installing remotely using FaceTime.”

The YCBA’s architectural design also posed technical difficulties. Hirst’s exhibition has not been shown in its entirety for over a decade because of the building’s structure, which resembles a series of 20-foot cubes. But Hargraves said the current third floor is perfect for the exhibition. He added that the center had the walls painted white to resemble the original 1991 showing. “[“In and Out of Love”] is really a seminal work of British art,” Hargraves said. “It’s looking better than it ever has in our building.”

The YCBA’s installation will be on view until Feb. 28.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF RONNIE RYSZ

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY New study reveals black holes are spinning like crazy

BY ANNIKA SALMI CONTRIBUTING REPORTER New research reveals that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies are spinning nearly at their theoretical limit.

Tonima Ananna GRD ’20, who is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Dartmouth, is the lead author on a paper recently accepted in the Astrophysical Journal on the subject of supermassive black holes. In the past, the scientific understanding of black hole spin was limited by a lack of data on black holes obscured by dust.

But newly developed techniques allowed Ananna to obtain this information, and she successfully incorporated it into her new, more comprehensive model for all black holes. She found that black holes are spinning extremely fast. This implies that black holes grow mostly by devouring objects near them, as opposed to growing by merging with other black holes. Her results also begin to explain how the current universe was formed after the Big Bang.

“There’s this theoretical limit to the efficiency, to the spin of a black hole. And Tonima’s solution was quite near that,” said Professor Meg Urry, Ananna’s thesis advisor. “It was quite high and she kept saying, there must be something wrong.”

But their numbers were correct.

Black holes have three properties: charge, spin and mass. This study contains the first comprehensive estimation of black hole spin, according to Urry.

Black holes grow in two ways: by merging with other black holes and by accretion, which is the reeling in of other nearby objects. Ananna calculated how efficiently rapid growth supermassive black holes converted the matter they were eating into radiation.

A high efficiency value implies that the black hole is spinning quickly.

She explained that if their efficiency values were extremely high, that meant the black holes grow mainly by accretion. If they were very large but inefficient, they grew by two or more black holes merging with each other. What Ananna found is that the black holes were incredibly efficient, so they, therefore, must be spinning very fast.

Her study also begins to explain why certain parts of the universe’s early history are hidden from us. As light travels at a speed limit, the farther away we peer into the universe, the farther back we are seeing in time, Ananna explained. However, astronomers cannot see into the era right after the Big Bang, during which the universe was very hot. Light bounced around off of free electrons, and the universe was “ionized,” according to Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale. Therefore, very little light escaped, so it is not visible to telescopes today.

As the universe cooled down, however, electrons and protons combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms, so the universe was no longer ionized. Although more light

ANNA XU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

escaped than before, it was still a small enough amount that this era is referred to as the Dark Ages.

It was not until between 150 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang that the stars and galaxies seen in the universe today started forming. These new hot objects reionized the hydrogen by separating the protons and electrons, and light waves were no longer trapped. Astronomers can therefore look back and observe objects after this time period.

The big question is what contributed more to this reionization process: galaxy formation or a type of supermassive black holes called quasars.

“Every quasar is individually brighter than a galaxy because quasars outshine their galaxy,” Natarajan said. “But they’re rarer, so the question is always … to make this tradeoff and see which of these two populations of potential objects, which produce reionizing radiation get implicated in causing reionization.”

Ananna’s work contributed to answering this question because it included data from a population of obscured black holes.

Natarajan explained that with this additional information, one can confirm that galaxies are “significantly

responsible for reionization.”

Ananna’s model explains so much about black hole growth because it fits many types of supermassive black holes. She explained that the new data on dust-obscured black holes did not fit the old models, and her initial attempts to create a new model were failing.

“We didn’t have the mathematical machinery to do it,” Ananna said. “We were stumped for a month and a half. I was learning machine learning, from this course … so I decided to use that new machinery which wasn’t really used all that much in astronomy in 2017, 2018.”

The model she designed now fits all of the new data that has come out since she created it. She has continued to use it for her future research, including in other surveys of black holes.

“Tonima has the world’s best model now,” Urry said. “It’s state of the art, surpasses anything anyone else has ever done.”

Supermassive black holes are defined as black holes with a mass of more than one million times our Sun. Contact ANNIKA SALMI at annika.salmi@yale.edu .

New study points to gap in dark matter theory

BY ALEXA JEANNE LOSTE AND ELIFNAZ ONDER CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

VALERIE PAVILONIS/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

New research co-authored by a Yale astronomy professor suggests that there may be a large discrepancy between what scientists thought dark matter was and what it actually is.

In a study published in the Sept.

11 issue of “Science,” astrophysicists compared theoretical simulations with observational data on the spatial distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters. They found that the small-scale gravitational lensing effects of dark matter are 10 times stronger than predicted. This large difference points to two possibilities: there could be a key missing ingredient in the simulations or our current understanding of dark matter is fundamentally misguided.

“Clusters of galaxies are the largest repositories of dark matter in the universe, so they bend light very dramatically,” said Professor of Astronomy and of Physics Priyamvada Natarajan, one of the study’s co-authors. “You can look at other places in the sky, where there is not a lot of dark matter, so you know statistically what the undistorted shapes should be.”

The study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of theoretical simulations for a model known as the cold dark matter paradigm — the currently favored theory explaining the evolution of galaxies — according to the study’s lead author, National Astrophysics Institution of Italy researcher Massimo Meneghetti.

More precisely, the researchers compared a quantity called the Galaxy-Galaxy Strong Lensing Probability for each of these data sets.

“Our entire universe can be thought of as a trampoline, and the presence of matter causes these potholes in spacetime,” Natarajan said. “Light from dis-

tant sources, if you have foreground lumps of matter, carries an imprint of these potholes, causing the shapes to get distorted. The way we quantify this is by defining a quantity called Galaxy-Galaxy Strong Lensing Probability.”

The research uses distortions in gravitational lensing curvatures in order to provide insight on the mass distribution in galaxy clusters. Matter condensed into larger scale components, such as galaxies, make up the dark matter halo surrounding the entire cluster. Researchers’ current understanding of dark matter can only be informed by gravitational lensing effects because dark matter itself does not emit, absorb, reflect or interact electromagnetically in any other way with matter or light.

The simulations on which the research is based assume that dark matter is made up of weakly interacting, collisionless, massive particles, although scholars have yet to identify their exact physical nature. Yet, when these characteristics are assumed, “the particles that make up dark matter in the simulation are not able to produce these compact halos,” Meneghetti said.

After having calculated the GGSL for the simulations and observational data, the scientists found that each GGSL calculation differed by an entire order of magnitude, which, according to Natarajan, is “pretty huge.”

Meneghetti said that the discrepancy in the comparisons initially caused surprise in the research team.

Unless something, such as a missing ingredient, was wrong with the simulations, this meant that the team could be opening the door to something completely new. They checked for systematic errors in multi-analysis and ensured that they were not missing any key factors in the simulations. They confirmed that none of the possible explanations tested worked to solve the mismatch.

“We know that our theory of gravity is incomplete, that it is not integrated with the physics of the small, which is quantum mechanics,” Natarajan said.

“There is no unifying quantum theory of gravity yet. And so you never know, when you see a gap, [whether] it is giving you a clue that there is some other bigger thing that we don’t understand, or if the current theory just needs a little tweak.”

Piero Rosati, one of the study’s co-authors from the University of Ferrara in Italy, spoke about how this research was made possible by the cutting-edge spectrographic data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). With this data, the researchers can understand properties of the gravitational lensing.

“It’s critical that you know the distances between you and the lens, and the lens and the source to understand the properties of the lens,” Rosati said.

The team hopes to work with even better data in the future, with the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021.

The researchers also have plans to make new simulations to study how galaxies and clusters form and further explore the interaction between ordinary and dark matter. Other scenarios with candidate particles for dark matter, such as axions or non-colliding particles, will also be tested. This analysis will be extended over a much larger sample of galaxy clusters to increase the test’s statistical significance.

According to the cold dark matter paradigm, dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the universe, but the particles that constitute dark matter are yet to be discovered.

Contact ALEXA JEANNE LOSTE at alexa.loste@yale.edu and ELIFNAZ ONDER at elifnaz.onder@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

EEE and West Nile Virus return to Connecticut

BY SYDNEY GRAY STAFF REPORTER Connecticut scientists identified mosquitos carrying West Nile Virus and others carrying Eastern Equine Encephalitis in early August.

Researchers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, or CAES, identified the first mosquito sample to test positive for West Nile Virus on July 8. Since this time, 141 mosquitos carrying West Nile Virus, or WNV, have been identified, resulting in six human cases of the virus. The first mosquito that tested positive for Eastern Equine Encephalitis, or EEE, was trapped at Stonington High School on Aug. 3, followed by a second mosquito collected from the town of Hampton on Aug. 12.

“Both West Nile Virus and Triple E can cause neuroinvasive disease,” said Philip Armstrong, director of the Connecticut Mosquito and Arbovirus Surveillance Program. “Some people might develop a mild flu-like illness or no symptoms and make a full recovery without having to seek medical care. But for the individuals that develop neuroinvasive disease, it’s a very serious illness.”

Yale School of Medicine professor Joseph Vinetz described the symptoms of EEE in further detail. He explained that approximately 2 percent of infected adults and roughly 2 to 7 percent of infected children may develop encephalitis, a form of inflammation in the brain. Once these neurological symptoms begin, there is a rapid deterioration in the condition of the patient. He estimated that approximately 90 per-

cent of individuals with severe cases of EEE would become comatose, while half may develop seizures, signaling brain dysfunction.

While no human cases of EEE have been reported this year in Connecticut, Vinetz and Armstrong identified the populations that would be most at risk.

Armstrong explained that all age groups are susceptible to the disease, while Vinetz mentioned that young children and older adults are at an even higher risk of developing neurological sequelae after EEE exposure.

“Last year we had an unprecedented outbreak of Triple E in the region, and that included four human cases in Connecticut,” Armstrong said. “Three of the four were fatalities and the fourth individual developed very debilitating symptoms and is still in recovery. But as far as who develops the illness, it’s really all age groups, unlike say West Nile Virus … which tends to affect the elderly more severely.”

Joseph Fauver, a postdoctoral research associate studying arboviruses at the School of Public Health, described how people can protect themselves from EEE and WNV mosquitoes this fall.

He mentioned that the most effective way to reduce the risk of contracting either virus is to prevent exposure to mosquito bites.

“Wear long sleeve clothing … wear EPA registered insect repellents such as DEET and reduce mosquito breed-

ing sites around your home,” Fauver wrote in an email to the News.

Armstrong added that people should particularly limit exposure to shady, wooded areas and swamps between dusk and dawn when the mosquitoes are most active.

Though the CAES continues to detect West Nile Virus samples in their collections, Armstrong emphasized that the public need not worry.

He mentioned that due to the drought in Connecticut this year, much of the EEE virus activity has been curtailed in comparison to the 2019 cycle. In addition, the end of mosquito season is in sight, signifying a declining risk of WNV transmission.

“What you really need is that hard frost, that killing frost, that will shut things down. Usually, that is some time in October,” Armstrong said.

The most common species of mosquito that carries EEE is Culiseta melanura.

ANASTHASIA SHILOV/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Contact SYDNEY GRAY at sydney.gray@yale.edu .

“The schedule is crazy”: Sleep science and the impact of online classes

BY SIMISOLA FAGBEMI AND ANNA XU CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS For remote Yale students, dealing with sleep disruptions due to time zone differences can be a learning challenge.

Meir Kryger, a Yale sleep expert and Yale School of Medicine physician, and Suman Baddam, Assistant Professor of Clinical Child Psychiatry, co-instruct the course “The Mystery of Sleep,” which explores the relationship between sleep and well-being.

Disruptions to sleep schedules can negatively impact attention, memory and cognitive awareness.

Kryger said that there are a number of students in his class who study remotely and must battle time differences.

“When my class starts, which is 4 o’clock in the afternoon, in Taiwan it’s like 4 o’clock in the morning,” Kryger said. “And the student is actually there wide awake and

alert, participating in the class …

They seem to be asking questions when it’s appropriate. Even though the schedule is crazy.”

Alongside the ways that inconsistent sleep schedules can harm students’ well-being, Baddam also said blue light can impact circadian rhythms, which raises another concern for Yalies taking virtual classes at late hours.

He cited a study that showed that the light from a Kindle is enough to disrupt one’s sleep patterns in the evenings.

According to Healthline, circadian rhythms are changes in physical and behavioral patterns that follow a 24-hour cycle. These include the release of hormone melatonin, which makes people sleepy.

Remote students Mehmed Can Olgac ’22 and Sena Sugiono ’24 are located in Turkey and Indonesia, respectively. Because of the large time difference, Olgac and Sugiono must go to extreme measures to adjust.

“I have one class that ends at 1 a.m. in the morning on Mondays, so like by the end of that class I’m very exhausted,” Olgac said. “I don’t usually remember the second half of the class.”

Not only has Olgac faced difficulty staying awake for classes, he said his home responsibilities also make it more challenging to keep up with schoolwork and remember the commitments he has made. Yet despite the downsides of studying remotely, Sugiono said in an interview with the News that there are also some benefits.

Since his schedule is “reversed,” he can work with no distractions.

“Now, I’m actually enjoying it because I get to concentrate on my studies in a very quiet and tranquil situation,” Sugiono wrote in a text message to the News. “Just [because] no one is up [from] 2-4 a.m.”

He told the News that he sleeps from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time, while juggling extracurriculars in addition to classes.

DORA GUO/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

As a piece of advice to undergraduates abroad studying remotely, Baddam suggested creating a consistent schedule for oneself to avoid sporadic sleep disturbances.

“They should basically have their sleep time for their biological day as a shift worker and just stay up all night for the whole week,” he told the News, adding that while “it’s still bad,” it is less harmful than constantly changing one’s sleep schedule.

He also noted that regularly getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night is something that any undergraduate can do to enhance their learning, even if they think they are doing fine, as “it’s hard to recognize how tired we are.”

Kyrger and Baddam teach their Cognitive Science course on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

Contact SIMISOLA FAGBEMI at simi.fagbemi@yale.edu and ANNA XU at anna.xu@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

“Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.” GENE TIERNEY AMERICAN FILM ACTRESS

New Haven names Teacher of the Year

BY CHRISTIAN ROBLES & JORDAN FITZGERALD STAFF REPORTER & CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The New Haven Board of Education presented Wilbur Cross High School teacher Kristin Mendoza as New Haven Public Schools’ ‘Teacher of the Year’ last Monday.

Mendoza is a twelfth grade English teacher at Wilbur Cross who works primarily with immigrant students, many of whom are English language learners. Since her start in teaching fifteen years ago, she has focused on these students. According to the school’s principal, 18 to 19 percent of Wilbur Cross students are immigrants, and Mendoza serves a critical role in preparing these students for success in their new country.

“She helps them not just in school, but to navigate life,” said Wilbur Cross Principal Edith Johnson in an interview with the News. “Some of our students are parents. Some of our students are working to help support their families, and she’s constantly providing them resources, information, even translation services and all those things to help our kids be successful.”

Every year, each New Haven public school nominates a teacher for the Teacher of the Year award and the selection committee of teachers and administrators selects 10 semi finalists from this pool of teachers. These semifinalists must then submit a questionnaire regarding their philosophy of teaching, perspective on education issues and their work within the community. The selection committee then narrows down these semifinalists to four finalists and interviews them before deciding who to award.

The award, said NHPS Senior Talent Recruiter Kanicka IngramMann, is meant to celebrate “excellence in teaching by recognizing teachers who have inspired a love for learning in their stu-

dents and who have distinguished themselves in their profession.”

Mendoza told the News that she was “surprised and flattered” when she was notified of her selection as ‘Teacher of the Year.’

She added that she has focused on setting her students up for success beyond the walls of Wilbur Cross.

“I think about making sure my students can access the language of power in this country, which is English, and teaching them to be able to do that effectively but certainly not at the expense of their first language, and their own culture and who they already are,” Mendoza said.

Aside from the English language, Mendoza ensures that her students leave the classroom knowing they can pursue post-secondary education — and with an understanding of the means to access this education, such as scholarship opportunities and their rights as immigrants.

At Wilbur Cross, Mendoza has co-advised Cross in Action, a student-led civil rights group.

The club played a key role in student Mario Aguilar Castañon’s release from ICE custody last year by participating in local protests and testifying at the state capitol in Hartford. The group has also held workshops for Wilbur Cross teachers to ensure that staff members are aware of how to best serve their immigrant students.

Johnson emphasized that Mendoza has similarly advocated among her own colleagues, sharing resources on immigration law, cultural sensitivity and post-secondary opportunities for immigrant and undocumented students among her fellow educators.

Mendoza said she believes that teachers want to help their students, but sometimes they lack the information to do so.

Mendoza’s dedication to lifelong learning and sharing new information with her peers has made her an invaluable part of the school’s faculty, Johnson said.

CAROLYN SACCO/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Mendoza has been an advocate for students at Cross during her time at the school.

Community members outside of Wilbur Cross echoed praise for Mendoza’s work with undocumented immigrants.

“Mendoza understands the undocumented community,” said New Haven Public School Advocates volunteer and Semilla Collective co-founder Fatima Rojas in Spanish, as translated by the News. “She knows and has seen what the undocumented community lives through and she is conscious of their struggle.”

Mendoza’s husband is from Guatemala, and she told the News she has learned a lot about the immigration process by watching him learn English and earn his own teaching certification. Mendoza has also demonstrated her dedication to multiculturalism at home, raising her daughter to speak

English, Spanish and the Mayan language of her husband’s youth.

At her Board of Education presentation, Mendoza used her platform to propose policy changes that would help undocumented students. She suggested an expansion of the state’s Medicaid program to include undocumented immigrants, the opening of local trade schools to undocumented students, an increase in scholarship opportunities for undocumented students and the creation of a pipeline that supports multilingual students seeking to become bilingual educators.

Mendoza noted that New Haven citizens outside of the public school system can also make a difference in the lives of immigrant students by pushing local legisla-

tors to adopt her policy changes; petitioning to expand HUSKY, Connecticut’s public healthcare system, to immigrants and supporting the Semilla Collective, a New Haven community organization dedicated to immigrant welfare, with their mutual aid fund and food garage.

“The whole community needs to step up and help figure out solutions for those things, and then the kids will do well in school because their families will be more able to support them,” Mendoza told the News.

There are 1888 teachers within the New Haven public school system.

Contact CHRISTIAN ROBLES at christian.robles@yale.edu and JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

Yale Corp candidates pass signature threshold, await verification

MARISA PERYER/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Ashe and Thomas passed the petition signature threshold by the deadline.

BY ROSE HOROWITCH STAFF REPORTER On Oct. 1, the deadline for Yale Corporation petition candidates to gather signatures passed, capping off more than six months and $40,000 spent on the two current campaigns.

The candidates, Maggie Thomas ENV ’15 and Victor Ashe ’67, had to declare their intent to run for the Yale Corporation — the University’s principal governing body — in March of this year. Over the next six months, they each worked toward collecting the 4,394 required alumni signatures to qualify for the Corporation’s ballot.

And while both candidates reached the threshold weeks ago, they have continued to campaign: Ashe estimates he has amassed around 7,000 signatures, while Thomas reported 4,642 as of Sept. 27.

The two will hear whether they have officially qualified for the ballot sometime in October, Thomas said, when Election Services Corporation, the thirdparty organization tasked with overseeing the election, verifies that there aren’t any duplicate or invalid signatures.

“The Corporation does have a lot of power and influence,” Alex-

andra Newman ’05, president of the Yale Club of Chicago and an engaged alum, told the News.

“They oversee the appointment of the Yale president, they have influence over the endowment and hiring decisions.”

Candidates can get on the ballot for the Corporation’s May 2021 election in one of two ways, either collecting the requisite signatures or by being nominated and approved by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. The processes play out in stark contrasts, with petition candidates running political ads and speaking at forums — similar to candidates running for public political office — and the nominated candidates adhering to a tradition of not campaigning or publicly sharing their views.

The two petition candidates have already outlined their positions, which differ widely on key issues, funding sources and outreach efforts.

Thomas, a former climate policy advisor for Senator Elizabeth Warren and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, is running on a platform of ethical investing, climate activism and improving relations between Yale and New Haven. Thomas has outlined a

detailed plan to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest $157 million of Yale’s endowment into projects that benefit New Haven.

Additionally, Thomas called for reform to the Yale Police Department, including disarming officers and examining the department’s budget and use of force.

Both candidates are promoting transparency within both the election process and the Corporation’s proceedings. But Ashe has centered his campaign on the issue.

Ashe, the former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee and former United States ambassador to Poland, spotlighted the issue of the Corporation’s meeting minutes being kept confidential for 50 years.

“I haven’t run into anyone who can offer a rational justification for a half century embargo,” Ashe said. “I mean, this isn’t the CIA or secret Korean War strategies.”

Additionally, Ashe identified free speech — how it is being “honored and handled” — and this year’s 3.9 percent tuition increase as areas of chief focus for his campaign.

He objected to the longstanding tradition that the nominated Corporation candidates do not reveal their positions on any of the key challenges the University is confronting.

E.J. Crawford, Yale Alumni Association senior director of communications and marketing, explained that the long-standing tradition of the alumni fellow candidate not campaigning stems from the fear that qualified candidates would not accept a nomination if they were expected to launch a campaign. Additionally, he said, the position is not a political one.

“Alumni fellows are going to be called upon to make decisions in the best interest of the university, not to represent a political ideology,” Crawford said.

Newman, who moderated a forum between Ashe and Thomas at the Yale Club of Chicago, said that the club did not endorse a specific candidate, but wanted to educate and engage alumni on the petition process as a whole. Choosing between the alumni fellow candidates who do not campaign feels like a “coin toss,” she said.

According to the Yale Alumni Association website, this practice helps ensure that trustees are not bound to particular factions or ideologies and helps avert an “arms race” to fund campaigns. But the petition candidates have already drawn lines in the sand and financed two expensive campaigns.

Ashe’s candidacy is funded by the Buckley Program, his own earnings and private individuals who have sent checks, said Harry Levitt ’71, who is active in Ashe’s campaign. In recent years, the Buckley Program — an organization promoting intellectual diversity at Yale and largely perceived as a conservative group in the style of its namesake — has provided financial backing for two petition candidates who had ultimately unsuccessful runs.

By contrast, Thomas is the candidate representing Yale Forward, a coalition of students and alumni focused on climate issues.

Her candidacy is fueled by alumni donations and grassroots organizing efforts. In the coming months, she plans to recruit a class champion: a member of each graduating class that will keep alumni engaged in her candidacy in the months leading up to the election.

Additionally, Thomas has hired three paid interns.

According to the two candidates, getting onto the ballot doesn’t come easy or cheap. For

Thomas and her campaign manager, Scott Gigante GRD ’23, it is a full-time job — and the two have other full-time jobs as well, Thomas added.

“You don’t reach 4,394 signatures for free,” Thomas said. “And it is a Herculean effort.”

A full-page advertisement in the Yale Alumni Magazine comes to $4,500, Ashe said. The Buckley Program sponsored one for Ashe’s candidacy, while Yale Forward sponsored one for Thomas’. The half-page advertisement Ashe submitted for a coming issue, which he paid for out of his own pocket, cost $2,250.

Additionally, Ashe has spent his campaign money mailing letters to alumni with an included pre-stamped return envelope.

Newman said she has received three letters written by Ashe that included his cell phone number and she has also received mailers from the Buckley Program that endorsed Ashe’s candidacy.

Additionally, Newman has seen Facebook advertisements for each candidate and has received text messages and emails from Thomas’ campaign.

According to Levitt, Ashe has sent out about 30,000 letters.

Each letter costs about a dollar to both mail and include the prestamped return. Ashe said he was unsure of the exact figure, but that his campaign has spent more than $20,000 to finance itself, while Thomas’s has spent around $20,000.

“I think that kind of highlights a problem in the system where alumni are spending that kind of money to petition to become a candidate,” Newman said. “I personally feel that the money could better benefit Yale in other ways, especially with financial aid.”

But the candidates both said they had to mount a full-scale campaign to get the necessary signatures, particularly because the University did not help them reach out to alumni. Yale did not provide them with alumni contact information, Thomas and Ashe told the News, so both candidates have devoted their time to scraping the alumni directory for ways to get in touch.

The last Yale Corporation meeting was held on Oct. 3.

Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

NEWS

“It would be spiteful to put a jellyfish in a trifle.”

KARL PILKINGTON TELEVISION PRESENTER

Undergraduate creates new student database website

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Erik Boesen ’23 created a controversial platform scraping data from the Yale Facebook and Yale Directory for easy student searches.

BY EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTER The digital footprint of Erik Boesen ’24 is bigger than most.

During his first year at Yale, the computer science major helped revamp the Yale Menus app, introduced an online GroupMe bot and debuted ComeThru, a party-finding app for Yale students, last spring.

In recent weeks, Boesen has turned his attention toward a new project: a sleeker, independent version of Yale Facebook, the existing Yale student directory. Boesen’s project, Yalies. io, debuted on Sept. 27 — the culminating effort of 11 days’ worth of programming.

“I thought the existing user interface could be dramatically improved,” Boesen said. “I like to see technology

that is well-designed and modular.”

The website scrapes, or gathers, the existing data that is currently available to holders of Yale email accounts from Yale Facebook and the Yale Directory. Like Yale Facebook, Yalies.io allows Yale College students to view a peer list of the entire undergraduate student body, complete with details about their graduation year, residential college, Yale email address and major. Students can also view headshots of their peers — the same photos documented on official Yale channels.

According to Boesen, the site had 400 users in the first two days following its launch, and more than 545 registered visitors have interacted with the platform as of Monday evening.

There are two additional features that Boesen has been able to inte-

grate into the new platform that are not explicitly discoverable on Yale’s official sites: site visitors are able to see whether or not students are on a leave of absence and whether or not they are an Eli Whitney student.

In order to obtain this information, Boesen compared a copy of last year’s Yale Facebook to the current one. He was also able to use graduation years to determine a student’s Eli Whitney status, since those students are the only ones listed without a graduation year.

“I just thought it was kind of weird that our NetID and the number from our swipe cards were on there, since I’d thought they were supposed to be private,” said Avery Brown ’23.

“Apparently they’re also published in the official student directory anyway though, so this isn’t really doing anything new besides making all this info easier to find.”

Boesen was quick to note that he’s not pulling any private data from Yale student accounts that isn’t already available online.

“My original instinct was that Yale provides this data, so I would provide this data,” Boesen said. “So any privacy issues are not on my hands.”

Nevertheless, as word about the new website circulated on social media platforms, some students openly criticized the site for breaching their privacy rights by hosting data such as a student’s room number and address on the website.

Boesen said that after reading social media posts and fielding questions from concerned peers, he changed his approach and decided to limit the kinds of personal information viewable on his site.

No longer does a student’s iden-

tifying housing information appear directly under their headshot.

Instead of their full addresses, the site lists a student’s hometown and state or country.

Boesen maintained that including room numbers on the site may be useful. For instance, during rush and recruitment events, upperclassmen and student organization leaders may frequently surprise new members in their suites, he said.

Still, he decided to remove suite and room information from each student’s display under their headshots, though it can still be gleaned from the website’s drop-down menus. That information, provided a student hasn’t already opted out, remains available on the official Yale Facebook.

“I realized I had a little leverage to encourage students to take control of their own data and be aware of what’s there,” Boesen added. “If anything, I’ve done more to draw attention to student privacy than Yale ever has.”

Now, first-time users logging into the site will see a pop-up window which clarifies the source and location of their personal information.

Also newly added on the site is a set of directions for individuals who wish to scrub identifying information from official Yale channels. Logged-in students can edit their display to exclude their photo, email, room number, home address, major and birthday — all information that is automatically available to anyone with access to Yale’s Directory.

Since Boesen’s web interface feeds directly from Yale sources, changes made to the student directory will immediately trickle into Yalies.io.

Through the federal Family Edu-

cational Rights and Privacy Act, the University is permitted to disclose basic “Directory Information” about students without obtaining permission, but students can file a request to withhold that information through the Registrar’s Office.

A past student-created platform ran into a thorny data policy dispute with the University. In 2014, CourseTable — a course selection site built

by Peter Xu ’14 and Harry Yu ’14 that allowed students to see course descriptions as well as student ratings and reviews — was blocked on University networks.

Neither Yale’s chief privacy officer nor chief information officer responded to requests for comment.

Boesen said he has not been contacted by any Yale administrators — yet. According to Boesen, he plans on continuing to maintain the website unless he encounters University pushback.

Boesen is also in the process of making a Yalies.io mobile app.

He does not plan for the app to include any new search criteria or features, though he noted that the Yale Facebook is “clunky” when accessed by phone.

Victor del Carpio ’23 also contributed to developing the user interface for the mobile app.

“I like the project because it’s something that’s useful,” del Carpio said. “The Yale Facebook’s searching capabilities are pretty antiquated and so I like that this project offers an alternative to that.”

The app is still in progress but may debut soon.

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

Yale offers $50k to improve Pearl St. intersection

BY NATALIE KAINZ STAFF REPORTER A new sidewalk near the Yale School of Management may soon improve traffic safety for New Haven residents and Yale students.

Last Wednesday, the Board of Alders Community Development Committee unanimously supported a proposal for a sidewalk on the section of Pearl Street between Lincoln and Orange. According to Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth ’90 LAW ’94, a $50,000 donation offered by Yale to partly fund the construction is pending approval by the full Board of Alders on Oct. 19.

New Haveners have been calling the intersection unsafe for several years, particularly after a Yale graduate student, Katherine Cattanach SOM ’20, was hit and concussed by a car last February. Roth has been leading proposals for greater traffic safety at the intersection for over a year now. She explained that the design of the streets is part of the problem.

“This section of Pearl Street is a major cut-through for people heading from East Rock to Yale SOM and that end of the Yale campus more generally, so there are lots of pedestrians and cyclists,” Roth told the News in an email. “The sidewalk

will be really helpful for improving traffic safety, as pedestrians will have a safe route from Orange Street to the SOM driveway.”

The intersection of Pearl Street and Lincoln Street currently has a partial sidewalk which only covers the south side. The proposed sidewalk would be installed on the north side of Pearl Street, where cyclists and students often walk on the road.

Roth, who is also a communications officer at the Yale School of Medicine, said the main stumbling block for the sidewalk proposal was its $90,000 cost. According to Roth, the city also has multiple other sites in need of sidewalks and repairs — for example, Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. While the University is proposing to cover over half of the cost, the remaining $40,000 will come out of the Elm City’s capital budget.

Representatives from the SOM and the Office of New Haven Affairs helped secure the donation from Yale. Anjani Jain, a deputy dean at the SOM, told the News that Yale’s financial contribution makes sense because the particular stretch of Pearl Street is used heavily by students, staff and faculty. Although it has been more than a year since Cattanach was injured, Jain said the sidewalk pro-

posal had to go through the due process of project planning.

“Though we all wish that the project had commenced sooner, I believe that the decision makers responded in a thorough and swift manner,” said Jain. “The project needed careful engineering assessment, and final approval, by the City of New Haven.

We needed to make sure there were no property liens on the designated parcel of land.”

Jain noted that the Office of New Haven Affairs had explored several alternatives to a sidewalk, including making the street one-way and painting additional crosswalks. The office ultimately concluded that the sidewalk was the safest option.

Cattanach, who has since graduated, has been advocating for greater safety at the intersection since her accident. Her efforts partially paid off when a stop sign and a zebra crossing were approved for the intersection in last April, but Cattanach told the News that she feels more is needed to ensure pedestrian safety.

“There are so many students that have had near misses there or close run-ins with cars, whether it be pedestrians or cyclists,” Cattanach told the News. “The stop sign and the zebra crossing have improved the intersection but it’s still not as safe as it could be.”

Transit chief Doug Hausladen opposed the proposal in 2019 for a stop sign. According to the New Haven Independent, he argued the frequency and type of collisions at the intersection did not justify an all-way stop sign but was overruled by commissioners of the Traffic Authority.

“It’s not an acceptable standard of safety to say that we’ve only had one person hit by a car so it doesn’t merit an all-way stop,” said Cattanach, who said she was crossing at the safest part of the intersection when she was hit. “While students would need to comply with that area … the [sidewalk] would at least bifurcate very clearly where pedestrians and auto traffic are meant to go.”

In an email to the News, Hausladen explained that the issue over Pearl Street stretches even further back. He said he requested funding for sidewalks on both sides of Pearl Street from the SOM and the Office of New Haven Affairs in 2013.

This was during a final review for the new SOM building before it opened in January the following year. According to Hausladen, his request was not granted for two reasons: sidewalk improvements were not required for approval of the project, and Yale did not own the properties bordering the sidewalks. He said this was despite

the fact that “pedestrian traffic on that stretch of Pearl Street is entirely due to the SOM campus.”

SOM Student Body President Julia Frederick SOM ’21 SPH ’21 lives near the intersection. She told the News that she has seen several near-incidents in the area and called the sidewalk a “critical step” in ensuring traffic safety for pedestrians.

“While I have only been on campus for over a year, I know this stretch of Pearl Street has been a concern for several years,” said Frederick. “I’m thrilled to hear Yale has decided to assist in funding the construction of this sidewalk and that the City has agreed to accept the funding.”

Roth also noted that the construction of the sidewalk will only require one unhealthy tree to be cut down.

“It was apparent to me then, as it is now, that sidewalks are the greatest tool for equity in infrastructure,” Hausladen said. “I hope [the sidewalk project includes] both sides of the street for the entire length of Pearl Street for the sake of the pedestrians.”

The Resource Allocation Committee has already approved $40,000 from city funds to cover the remainder of the construction cost.

Contact NATALIE KAINZ at natalie.kainz@yale.edu .

Yale professor Louise Glück wins Nobel Prize in Literature

BY MADISON HAHAMY, RAZEL SUANSING AND BRYAN VENTURA STAFF REPORTER & CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS On Oct. 8, Louise Glück, Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale and adjunct English professor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee described Glück’s poetic voice as both “unmistakable” and “austere.” Following the announcement, Glück’s colleagues at the English Department and in the administration were quick to honor Glück for her excellent work.

“Yale celebrates a poet of the interior life, whose unsparing explorations of the self and its place in the world in volume after volume have created poems of beauty and revelation,” President Peter Salovey said in a Yale News statement. “We also honor a galvanizing teacher, who has given herself unstintingly to students who revere her.”

Glück has published 12 poetry collections and multiple essay volumes, for which she has received several honors in the past. These include the Yale Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the 2014 National Book Award, the 2015 Gold Medal of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Let-

ters and the 2016 National Humanities Medal. In 2003, Glück was the first U.S. Poet Laureate.

In a Thursday morning email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, echoed Salovey’s sentiments about Glück. She expressed her excitement and gratitude towards Glück, who she described as a brilliant poet and incredible teacher.

Gendler also shared one of Glück’s poems, titled “October,” and encouraged faculty to “revel” in its words.

Stefanie Markovits, director of undergraduate studies for the English Department, spoke directly to Glück’s skill as a teacher. In an email to the News, Markovits mentioned how Glück’s office was always filled with students, some of whom would spill into the hallway outside. Markovits recalled that Glück would not leave until she helped every single one of them.

Elisa Gonzalez ’11, now a New Yorker published poet, was a student of Glück’s “Introduction to Poetry” workshop during the fall of her first year. She remembers Glück as a “brilliant” and “sometimes oracular” teacher who was as generous with praise as she was with criticism.

“I can honestly and unreservedly say that Louise has transformed my life, and any path I have

followed as a writer would not have happened without her early teaching and encouragement,” Gonzalez said. “I’ve never learned as much from anyone as I have from her. I still learn from her whenever I return to her work.”

Lucy Teitler ’05, now a playwright and screenplay writer, noted that Glück’s work came from a place of effortless, near-cosmic clarity. According to Teitler, that was exactly how Glück approached her students. During the months Teitler and her classmates spent in Glück’s classroom, Teitler said they felt like real poets.

To Glück’s other Yale colleagues, her Nobel Prize comes as no surprise. Richard Deming, director of the creative writing department, said Glück holds a central presence in the Yale community. He said Glück worked with many student poets, providing them with both feedback and guidance.

“Her sense of community has touched us, and will continue to touch us, inspire us and challenge us to take the writing life as seriously as we must,” Deming said. “There is no one more deserving of this most dizzying of awards.”

English professor Margaret Spillane knew Glück was destined for success when she first read her poetry

YALE NEWS

Poet and adjunct English professor Louise Glück on Thursday won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her unmistakable poetic voice.” in a literary magazine, back in the 1970s. Immediately after, Spillane bought one of Glück’s books titled “The House on Marshland.” She has been keeping up with Glück’s work ever since.

Glück herself has mixed feelings about what the award represents for her. In a phone interview with Nobel Media, she said that she was unsure of the award’s personal meaning — but that winning the prize was nonetheless a great honor.

“Mostly, I am concerned for the

preservation of daily life, with people I love,” Gluck said. “The phone is ringing now, squeaking into my ear.”

In the fall of 2019, Glück taught the undergraduate English courses “Introduction to Writing Poetry” and “Advanced Poetry Writing.”

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu, RAZEL SUANSING at razel.suansing@yale.edu and BRYAN VENTURA at bryan.ventura@yale.edu .

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS Martinez and Enriquez lead women’s soccer W. SOCCER FROM PAGE 14 ing is self-directed and varies widely. Students are able to request lifting workouts from the team’s strength and conditioning coach, but are not otherwise incorporated into the team’s training routine. Martinez said many are practicing with their old club teams or with other college soccer players who are not able to return to their own campuses.

The coaching staff, headed

by Martinez, is also working hard to integrate first years onto the team, despite not being able to see each other every day or have the typical bonding experiences of bus rides to away games or team meals. Though she knows in-person contact cannot be replicated, Martinez is enthusiastic about the unique opportunity that a fall without games can provide for newcomers. “ I t’s s o m e t h i n g we ’ve always wondered: what would the experience be like for first years if they could get settled into school, train, and not have the pressure of games?” Martinez said. “For us, it’s something we’re really excited about. And I’m excited about the leaders on campus to guide them.”

Enriquez will spearhead the on-campus leadership. She was elected captain by her teammates this past April after one of the Bulldogs’ most successful seasons in years. The squad racked up 11 total wins for just the second time in the last decade, tallying 31 total goals and surpassing their 2008 record of 30 goals in a year. The Elis finished the season third in the Ivy League, tying with their highest finish since the 2009 season.

Enriquez also saw great personal success on the field in 2019, as she started all 16 games and played every minute of the Ivy League competition.

For the first time in her col-

lege career, she was an honorable mention All-Ivy selection for her superb performance on Yale’s defense, which posted six shutouts and allowed only 14 opponent goals last year.

“Over the years, I was practicing and working hard to earn playing time,” Enriquez said.

“And this past year, it meant so much to me to have been elected captain by my teammates. It was such an honor and I am so grateful that they trust me to be in a position to lead right now.”

Enriquez displayed tremendous growth as a player over her first three years.

She started her first year as a walk-on, appearing in one match and receiving the Captain’s Cup award. In her sophomore year, she appeared in 12 games and started in four. A successful junior year preceded the final stage of her rise from walk-on to Yale captain — last year, she played 1,449 minutes on Yale’s defense.

As she begins this unconventional season as captain, Enriquez said she is focused on enhancing team culture and cohesion. She is eager to build a strong foundation for next year through strength, conditioning and team bonding.

“She’s unbelievable in every aspect of her life,” Martinez said of Enriquez. “She finds her voice and leads each individual in the way she knows she can get the most out of them.

You just can’t say a bad thing about her, from her work on the field, to her vocal leadership, to her empathy and her ability to connect with people. She’s certainly the right leader at the right time for us.”

Martinez was appointed head coach in December 2019 after head coach Brendan Faherty left the University amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

Contact ALESSA KIM-PANERO at alessa.kim-panero@yale.edu .

“Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.” KOBE BRYANT AMERICAN BASKETBALL PLAYER

Yale Spikeball continues play despite COVID

COURTESY OF MAX MODEL

Students have been able to continue with club spikeball despite COVID-19 restrictions.

SPIKEBALL FROM PAGE 14 found excitement. Most of the team is back on campus, joined by many fresh faces who are anxious to get involved with Yale’s most elite spikeball team. However, after the Ivy League’s July 8 decision to cancel all athletic competition until Jan. 1, the club spikeball team has been unable to get back to competitive play despite being on campus.

The club has been searching for alternative ways to enjoy spikeball and strengthen the team for when competition is allowed to start up again. And thanks to spikeball’s minimal setup and ability to be played while adhering to social distancing, it has not been too difficult for the team to improve and stay connected.

“Over the past several weeks a few of our veteran members have been playing informal pick-up games with masks on around

Yale alums at Euro Champs

Yale’s residential college courtyards,” said Rohan Garg ’21, one of the team’s co-captains. “This year, we have been focusing a lot on individual skill development by conducting drills to enhance specific parts of the game [such as] serving, setting, receiving serves [and] defense.”

However, it is not just the vets who are excited to get back into the game. Every year, first-year players comprise a large percentage of the club, thanks to the club’s “no experience necessary” attitude, Model said.

Both rookies and experienced spikeballers are encouraged to improve their skills and participate in practices with returning members of the team. But COVID-19 has canceled practices and shifted most in-person meetings online, complicating how the club would recruit its incoming class and raising concerns over interest among new members.

COURTESY OF ELLA VON DER SCHULENBURG

W. CREW FROM PAGE 14 burg “was right there with some of the best athletes at Yale I have coached.”

Assistant coach Jamie Snider added that she “has a chance to make the Olympics” as well.

This weekend’s regatta will not be von der Schulenburg’s first time competing in Poznan, as she also rowed there during the 2018 World Rowing U23 Championships. The 2019 All-American honorable mention is looking to bounce back from what she considers to be one of her most disappointing race weekends in which she did not live up to her own standards. “[The U23 Worlds in Poznan] was probably one of my worst racing experiences of my life just in terms of my performance, so I’m kind of nervous going back to the place,” von der Schulenburg said. “I learned from that experience … I think ultimately that did help me become a faster athlete.”

Two years later, she will return to western Poland with a chance to show how she has grown.

Von der Schulenburg attributes a lot of that growth to her

time at Yale. While she learned crucial lessons such as leadership skills, communication and self-accountability, her biggest takeaway came very early on in her Bulldog career.

“I definitely re-fell in love with the sport again when I got to Yale,” she said. “It was so fun and everyone was just there because they really wanted to be there.”

Her presence on the team was certainly appreciated, as Porter highlighted von der Schulenburg’s drive and her no-nonsense approach to leadership.

He went on to say that prior to the coronavirus and the abrupt end to the 2020 season, the team under her leadership was poised for tremendous success.

“You see teams ebb and flow, rise and fall off,” Porter explained. “And we were certainly on a rise.”

Von der Schulenburg now finds herself on another young, up-and-coming team in the Swiss quad — only one of the four oarswomen has any previous senior team experience.

The team has taken on a grueling practice schedule in which they typically practice three

times a day, as opposed to the once- or twice-a-day workouts that von der Schulenburg was accustomed to in college.

They have found a way to break up the monotony of practice by traveling to France earlier this summer to compete in a few training races, which von der Schulenburg said were both fun and helpful.

Von der Schulenburg appreciates being at the helm of her national team’s endeavor onto the international stage. The Swiss, she explained, have not traditionally performed well in women’s rowing but have put more emphasis on the sport in recent years.

“It’s kinda cool to be able to be at the start of this project for the Swiss team,” she said.

Von der Schulenberg seeks to row this project all the way to the upcoming Olympics: Tokyo 2021 and Paris 2024.

But first, she will look to race past the competition in Poznan.

The 2020 European Rowing Championships run from Friday, Oct. 9, to Sunday, Oct. 11.

Contact JAMES RICHARDSON at james.richardson@yale.edu .

Contact JORDAN DAVIDSEN at jordan.davidsen@yale.edu .

Student-athletes begin sport-specific training PHASE II FROM PAGE 14

Von der Schulenburg rows with her Swiss teammates.

According to co-captain Matthew Li ’23, uncertainty when it comes to recruiting has not posed an issue for the spikeball team at all.

“The sport is growing very fast, and we actually had over 50 students — mostly first years — express interest in club spikeball in the Virtual Student Organizations Bazaar last month,” Li told the News. “Obviously, it is much harder to be active given the COVID situation and the absence of sophomores, but I have high hopes that the club will be much bigger and more active after quarantine ends.”

In interviews with the News, all three co-captains expressed optimism about the future of the group and a devotion to getting back to the sport they love.

Model founded the Yale club spikeball team in 2017.

carpool to the course most afternoons for practice and must fashion their class schedules around training, but they now have more flexibility this fall.

“We’re small in size so we don’t necessarily need to split up, but we are [splitting up] just to accommodate our schedules,” Yi said. “Our schedules are more varied this semester because of the fall season being canceled, [but] normally we would put more emphasis on not having class from 3 to 6 [for joint practice].”

Student-athletes told the News that there is currently no set timeline for when the transition into Phase III will occur.

At some other Ancient Eight schools, like Dartmouth, there exists a possibility that certain sports will enter into Phase III before others, as the Big Green’s Senior Associate Athletic Director Ian Connole told The Dartmouth last month. Cannoli explained that naturally distanced sports like tennis and

cross country could theoretically progress faster to Phase III. For schools and sports in Phase III, the Ivy League will permit up to 12 hours of sport-specific practice activity each week. The biggest difference between Phases II and III will be the size of the group allowed to convene for each practice, with the specific number left up to the discretion of individual universities and their own campus policies.

The current Yale policy bans all school-sponsored events that exceed 10 participants unless the school or department health and safety leader approves an application. In Cambridge, Harvard Athletics spokesperson Timothy J. Williamson told The Crimson he believes Harvard is unlikely to move to Phase III because of the school’s group guidelines.

Yale began Phase I on Sept. 21.

Contact EUGENIO GARZA GARCÍA at eugenio.garzagarcia@yale.edu and JAMES RICHARDSON at james.richardson@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Phase II marks the first time since March during which teams can partake in sport-specific training.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

BULLETIN BOARD ILLUSTRATIONS

VICTORIA LU is a first year in Siliman College. Contact her at victoria.lu@yale.edu.

ANNIE YAN is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

Contact her at annie.yan@yale.edu .

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College. Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

CROSSWORD

SOPHIA ZHAO is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College. Contact her at sophia.j.zhao@yale.edu .

MALIA KUO is a first year in Morse College. Contact her at malia.kuo@yale.edu .

WNBA Storm 92 Aces 59

MLB Braves 7 Marlins 0

SPORTS

MLB Astros 11 Athletics 6

MLS Toronto FC 1 Revolution 0

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

LISA BRUMMEL ’81 & GINNY GILDER ’79 OWNERS WIN WNBA TITLE Brummel, former Yale basketball player, and Gilder, former Yale rower and 1984 Olympic silver medalist, are co-owners of the WNBA team, the Seattle Storm.

Tuesday night’s 92–59 win against Las Vegas secured their third championship with Seattle.

DIVISION III NESCAC NO WINTER NESCAC COMPETITION On Thursday, Division III NESCAC presidents announced their unanimous decision to cancel conference competition and championships for all winter sports. The conference, which previously canceled fall sports for all 11 member schools, cited institutional policies and academic calendar changes tied to COVID-19 in their winter decision.

MLS NYCFC 4 D.C. United 1

Bulldogs to start Phase II training

“As coaches, our job is to be adaptable. We all coach young people with a myriad of personalities and from diverse cultures ... ” LAUREN HARLING YALE WOMEN’S GOLF HEAD COACH

Checking in with Yale Club Spikeball

W. SOCCER

BY JORDAN DAVIDSEN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The 2019 Spikeball Fall Sectionals were coming to a close, and the big matchup had arrived: UConn vs. Yale, two Connecticut powerhouses competing to advance to the end of the tournament. In the third set of the C-team matchup between the two schools, Yale fell in a heartbreaking 21–19 loss, costing the Bulldogs the series and relegating them to a fourthplace finish.

SPIKEBALL

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

That was just the beginning of Yale club spikeball’s 2019 season. The loss motivated the team throughout the season — in spring 2020, the team ended up attending its first Collegiate National Championship in Maryland.

But then a new opponent emerged, one much more intimidating than UConn or any other spikeball team in the country: COVID-19. When Yale made the decision to keep students away from campus after spring break, it was clear that the spikeball team’s season was over.

“We were bummed to say the least,” said Max Model ’21, co-captain and founder of Yale club spikeball. “At least for me, having already missed a national championship because of my ACL injury, this was not the first time that I had worked really hard for something and then been unable to compete for it. It’s definitely upsetting, but sometimes that’s just how it is.”

With news of Yale’s campus reopening for the 2020-21 school year, there was a rush of newSEE SPIKEBALL PAGE 12

The Yale women’s soccer team has returned to training on campus under the new leadership of Martinez and Enriquez.

BY ALESSA KIM-PANERO STAFF REPORTER Despite the cancellation of its fall season, the Yale women’s soccer team is continuing training under the new leadership of head coach Sarah Martinez and senior captain and defender Kristen Enriquez ’21.

The Bulldogs have returned to a regular training schedule under Phase I guidelines and will begin Phase II training this week with more weekly hours and the start of small group training, Martinez said. Coach Martinez and Enriquez emphasized that this time provides a unique opportunity for growth

and development without competition this fall. Martinez said the group’s approach has been to prepare for the fall 2021 season, viewing “any other opportunities we get” as an added bonus.

This fall, six new first-years began their Yale women’s soccer careers.

“As a first-year, I’ve been able to get more settled with the academic side of college without having a season this fall,” forward Meredith Phillips ’24 said.

“I am very thankful to just be on campus, meeting people and starting to explore everything Yale has to offer, while also getting the chance to start training

with the team.”

In Phase I, Martinez said the team trained on campus with strict guidelines, limiting sessions of either strength or conditioning to a maximum of one hour a day. These sessions consisted of team lifts three times a week and speed and agility training twice a week. In Phase II, the team will have extended training times of up to 12 hours a week. Martinez said that the staff will likely maintain their morning, outdoor practice times even as they head into the winter months.

For remote students, train-

Schulenburg ’20 to debut for Swiss senior team

BY JAMES RICHARDSON CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Add Ella von der Schulenburg ’20 to the long list of Bulldogs showcasing their athletic abilities at the highest level.

W. CREW The 2019-20 Yale women’s crew captain will be representing Switzerland’s senior national team this coming weekend at the 2020 European Rowing Championships in Poznan, Poland. She will be seated second in the Swiss boat for the women’s quadruple sculls event.

“I’m very excited,” von der Schulenburg said via FaceTime from the Swiss Training Center prior to departure for Poland. “It’s the best thing ever to go to a competition with your teammates … and show others how strong you are together and how well you can work together.”

Another Yale rowing alum, former men’s heavyweight captain Paul Jacquot ’18, will also be representing Switzerland this weekend as part of the men’s four.

While this will mark von der Schulenburg’s first time rowing with the Swiss senior team, it is not her maiden voyage in an international competition. The 2018 Ivy League team points champion has experience with the national team at the Junior and U23 levels dating back to 2015.

This weekend, however, presents a whole new challenge as she moves from the U23s to the senior team.

“Nobody is ready for how fast they are at seniors,” von der Schulenburg said.

Women’s crew head coach Will Porter stated that, in a long list of rowers containing numerous Olympians, von der SchulenSEE W. CREW PAGE 12

SEE W. SOCCER PAGE 12

Yale Athletics start Phase II

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

In Phase II, teams can now engage in a maximum of two hours per day of sport-specific activities and strength and conditioning training.

BY EUGENIO GARZA GARCÍA AND JAMES RICHARDSON STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER As Yalies enter their second full month of classes, student-athletes across all sports began Phase II of the Ivy League’s three-phase plan for the resumption of athletic activities on Wednesday.

PHASE II

COURTESY OF ELLA VON DER SCHULENBURG

Ella von der Schulenburg ‘20 (pictured in stroke seat) trains for the 2020 European Rowing Championships.

STAT OF THE WEEK

1,449

COURTESY OF MAX MODEL

As sports across the Ivy League come to a screeching halt, Yale’s Club Spikeball team keeps their heads high and continues to grow.

Phase II allows teams to engage in a maximum of two hours per day of weight training, conditioning and sport-specific training, as opposed to the one hour a day of strength and conditioning allowed during Phase I. Phase II policies require student-athletes to wear masks during practice and all participants to social distance during activities — although spotting is allowed — according to Associate Athletic Director for

Strategic Communications Mike Gambardella.

For the first time this year, in-person team meetings of up to 10 people will also be permitted as long as student-athletes and coaches follow social distancing protocols.

“The athletic department has progressed to Phase II and each program is practicing in accordance with sport-specific Ivy League and NCAA regulations and also in accordance with our department’s and campus’s health and safety guidelines,” Gambardella said.

Phase I, which began twoand-a-half weeks ago, allowed student-athletes to participate in one hour of daily strength and conditioning training under proper social distancing guidelines. The first phase also permitted virtual team and individual meetings.

Phase II will mark the first

opportunity for teams to partake in sport-specific activities together since March. It will also allow student-athletes in the class of 2024 to practice their sport with teammates on campus for the first time. The Yale football team, for example, has started using helmets and balls, the volleyball team will start doing repetitions with a net and Yale gymnasts can now use beams and bars.

“We’re all so excited to get back to playing the sport we all love,” volleyball outside hitter Cara Shultz ’24 said. “Throughout Phase I, we’ve been getting reps in without volleyballs and without a net … [but] it hasn’t really been the same.”

Athletes across many of Yale’s 35 varsity teams seem to share Shultz’s enthusiasm around Phase II. Cross country runner Emily Horgen ’24 added that while her sport is not drastically affected by Phase II since running is socially distanced by nature, she is “very excited” for the opportunity to “spend more time with the team during the week.”

Phase II’s restriction on hours has created unique challenges for some athletes, including golfers. In Phase II, the two-hour daily limit for sport-specific activities means that golfers do not have enough time for a standard round of 18 holes, which typically takes anywhere from three to four hours.

To get around this, men’s golfer Sean Yi ’21 said he and his teammates may be able to play the Yale Golf Course as students, recreationally, but not as varsity athletes. In a normal year, golfers SEE PHASE II PAGE 12

THE NUMBER OF MINUTES YALE WOMEN’S SOCCER DEFENDER AND CAPTAIN KRISTEN ENRIQUEZ ’21 PLAYED LAST YEAR AFTER WALKING ON AS A FIRST YEAR.

// DORA GUO

WEEKEND

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020

Defining essential

Yale clerical, service and graduate staff try not to fall through the cracks of the University’s pandemic policies

// BY MAYA WELDON-LAGRIMAS

Being essential during a global health crisis As soon as Shayrhonda Wellons leaves to work in Trumbull College dining hall, she prepares for the moment that she will come home again.

“I have two toddlers … With them I’m extra, extra, extra, extra cautious.”

Wellons does essential work during a global pandemic which necessitates some level of personal risk. To ensure the safety of herself and her family, she goes through her day making sure that she follows any and all precautions that will reduce the transmission of a deadly virus.

She describes her co-workers as a family who operate under this same mindset that they need to take the virus “really, really seriously.” On her eight-hour shift as an assistant chef, Wellons sanitizes tables and chairs, prepares meals and closes the dining hall for the night. “We’re on timers,” she said in an interview with the News. “Every 20 minutes washing hands. Every five to 10 minutes using hand sanitizer.” All dining hall staff also receive a COVID-19 test once a week.

When she gets home around 8 p.m., she takes off her shoes and work jacket before going inside. After washing her hands and showering, she feeds and bathes her two kids, aged 5 and 7. Then she helps them with their homework, reads them a story and puts them to bed. Her work never really ends.

“I’m always moving, I’m never resting. …

I’m always thinking ahead,” she said.

However, this pace of life is not new to her.

“I’ve been doing this whole COVID situation since mid-March,” she said. When Yale first closed to the majority of the student body in the spring, she was a part of the staff who worked to provide meals for the small percentage of students who stayed on campus.

However, when the University confirmed that she was going to return to work in late August, she had to quickly figure out how to work her professional schedule around new demands the pandemic created within her home life.

“It was making sure that I was able to get a babysitter for my kids because they are not in school. … That was my biggest concern,” she said.

To help with her kids’ learning, Wellons works weekends so that she can stay home on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. “On my days off, I’m front and center running from one computer to another computer, making sure they’re both on task,” she said. “Even when I’m at work I get FaceTime calls from

my daughter to help her with something she can’t get through or the babysitter can’t get through.”

the virus under control. This feeling even exists among those who initially felt that a fall reopening was the wrong decision.

While Wellons said that being employed through the pandemic has “been a bit of a struggle,” she also feels that she is adjusting to a new way of living and working. She gives Yale a lot of credit for providing a safe work and living environment to their students and staff. “I feel like they took every precaution necessary.”

Jordanna Packtor — author of the popular op-ed “Yale, please close,” which ran in the News last month — reflected on her initial assessment that opening campus to the majority of the student body was a shortsighted move. “I feel slightly less worried,” she said in an interview with the News. “We have seen a couple of universities … where rigorous testing and frequent quarantine have kept the case count down. And that is very similar to what Yale has been doing.”

She went on to describe how being careful has become a new normal. “I wouldn’t say that [the virus] is dying down,” she said.

“But everybody is getting more well adjusted to this situation. … Everybody is working it into their new lifestyle. … Everybody is making it work for them.”

Wellon’s story exemplifies the experience of a worker that Yale has deemed essential enough to maintain a full-time position. In an email to the News, University spokesperson Karen Peart said that the protection of Yale staff continues to be one of the University’s top priorities. She described the measures the University is taking to achieve this goal, including free voluntary testing for all employees and mandated weekly testing for staff who work closely with residential college students.

Individual departments within the University have also been upholding the University’s priority to keep staff safe. In a coordinated statement, Yale Hospitality detailed how they prepared for all possible courses the virus might take and aligned University policy with shifting health guidelines. Yale Hospitality Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications Christelle Ramos said that the University started preparing for an emergency years before the development of COVID-19: “Beginning in March, we commenced our emergency response protocols, as institutional plans had been established many years ago in the event of a pandemic.”

Daniel Flynn, director of asset renewal and planned projects for Yale Hospitality, also weighed in on the process of reopening amid great uncertainty. “There continue to be so many unknowns with COVID19, and one of the main challenges was the ever-changing guidance from CDC,” he said. “We really spent hours and hours each day mapping out the different scenarios and solutions, so we were prepared to go in many different directions.” Flynn thanked colleagues from Yale Environmental Health and Safety, who advised his team through what he calls a “safe and successful reopening.”

The plans Yale has put in place to prevent students and staff from contracting COVID-19 has led to a widespread, albeit cautious, feeling that Yale has the spread of

She said that she has “no stake in Yale failing” and that she “would love to be proven wrong.”

However, she also recognizes that the University has only had half of a semester to evaluate their policies. She warns that being overly confident that things won’t get worse from here is premature. “Winter is coming, people will be moving indoors,” she said. “I am optimistic right now, but I wouldn’t bet against 2020 getting worse again.”

When Yale decides their employees are nonessential While the University has shown that it takes its responsibility to prevent the spread of COVID-19 seriously, this is only a fraction of their response. Equally important is the protection of Yale staff ’s livelihoods through a global crisis. In this responsibility, the University has fallen short, some say.

Peart wrote, “Yale refrained from taking any drastic cost-cutting actions that would result in furloughing employees, reducing their salaries, or reducing the university’s contributions to employee retirement plans.” However, some employees have fallen through the cracks of Yale’s policies.

This is the experience of Packtor and her co-worker Amber Suess. They both worked full time as library service assistants for the Sterling Memorial Library stacks shift and Bass renovation projects in March. When Yale first started adapting to the COVID-19 emergency, they deemed this work nonessential. As a result, both Suess and Packtor were laid off.

Packtor, who was eight months pregnant at the time, is happy her maternity leave and benefits worked out. Throughout the summer, she maintained hope that she would be able to return to her full-time position.

“There’s just no possibility of that anymore.

It’s completely gone,” she said. As a result of her layoff, Packtor will resume work in Yale’s interim employment pool, or IEP, when her maternity leave ends at the end of this month.

The IEP allows employees who have lost their jobs to work temporary positions while they search for another full-time position.

While they are in the pool, employees get paid and maintain their health care benefits. Peart told the news that in addition to the IEP, Yale clerical and technical staff who have been laid off have access to the staffing and career development team and 18 months of priority in the hiring process.

Though the IEP provides many nonessential workers with a safety net, former full-time employees don’t get much choice over the temporary positions they will be assigned to. Packtor described most temporary positions offered in the IEP as “frontline service positions that aren’t available for remote work or flexible work.” Most of these positions are in person and related to health.

“Ultimately you have to go where there is work available,” she said.

This has been the case for Suess. She has been navigating the IEP since May and has worked a temporary position at Yale Health.

In an email to the News, she highlights gaps of University policy in providing adequate compensation to workers during the pandemic.

When Suess contracted a fever and called out of work, she had to self-isolate for a week, even after getting a negative COVID19 test. She calls this a “good and reasonable policy,” but also worries that because she had to use a week of her designated paid sick leave during the isolation period, people won’t be honest when they have symptoms.

“I had to do this twice while working at Yale Health, and now I only have six hours of sick time left,” she said. “I’m not sure what I will do if I get mildly sick again.”

Suess is not the only one who has gotten sick while working in a temporary health position. “I have coworkers right now who are working with the Yale Health plan and coming home with symptoms,” Packtor said.

Soon, sick leave won’t be a primary concern for Suess. Instead she will be facing a much more daunting reality — unemployment. An employee’s designated time in the IEP is limited and determined by how long they’ve worked for the University. As a result of the University’s hiring freeze, she has not had any luck finding a permanent position.

“Yale has been forcing departments to make huge sweeping budget cuts even when they’ve made huge amounts of money during this pandemic. They’ve instituted a hiring freeze, which has made it almost impossible for me to get another permanent job at Yale, which means I’ll be without a job and without health care at the end of this month.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B2

WEEKEND HEALTH

// DORA GUO

Suess and Packtors’ stories are not unique — the livelihoods of hundreds of former Yale employees rest in the hands of the administration. Throughout the pandemic, the University has not guaranteed that it will make an effort to protect all of their workers’ jobs and health care benefits. To combat this fact, Yale’s affiliated unions — UNITE HERE locals 33, 34 and 35 — have been working to protect the rights of their workers.

Packtor said that her union, Local 34 — which represents clerical and technical workers — is “pushing back against this idea that all these jobs have to go, that Yale is hurting for money in some way.” The union has focused on making sure Yale doesn’t cut employment or raise health care costs for employees.

Similarly, Local 33, which organizes graduate teaching assistants and research assistants at Yale, has outlined their demands on their website. Their demands criticize the way Yale has been protecting its endowment through the pandemic.

They write, “Yale’s austerity mindset over the past decade has disproportionately harmed scholars of color. We join calls to extend the contracts of contingent instructional faculty through the next academic year. We know Yale has the money — in fact, Yale’s $30 billion endowment has a history of targeting assets that are likely to be profitable in times of crisis, including distressed debt and home foreclosures.”

Local 33 is not only working to extend contracts, but is also making sure their members can access medical care through a global health crisis. They demand that Yale offer another year of full health coverage to uninsured graduate workers at no additional cost.

These demands come after the Office of the Provost outlined the initial implications of the pandemic on University finances in an April letter to the Yale community. The update included the announcement of a hiring freeze that would last until June 2021. University Provost Scott Strobel explained lost revenue as a result of transitioning to online learning and making Yale spaces available for medical personnel and first responders. Despite projected revenue declines, he maintained that the objective of the University was to support “existing faculty, students and staff.”

In a more recent update on the University’s finances, Yale reported a 6.8 percent investment return, leaving them with a $125 million surplus for the fiscal year. In an update to the Yale faculty and staff on the state of Yale’s finances, Strobel and Senior Vice President for Operations Jack Callahan ’80 said that financial returns were better than expected. In light of this fact, the update said that the University would institute a partial lift on the hiring freeze for faculty recruitment in the spring and gave a 1.5 percent salary raise to all full-time faculty and managerial and professional staff earning less than $85,000 per year.

While these updates are positive, there is a glaring hole in the University’s immediate financial plans for Yale’s service, maintenance, clerical and technical staff. The unions have mobilized through the pandemic to mitigate this gap.

In addition to putting pressure on the University to change their fiscal policy, they are also doing front-line work in sending out resources and information to their members.

Wellons, who is a part of Local 35, the union of service and maintenance staff at Yale, said that they are “sending flyers home, sending letters home, posting stuff on our websites … They were great at getting the information out to everyone.”

An incomplete response to a global health crisis?

While the pandemic has been a logistical challenge for everyone, Yale has shown that they have the ability to expertly navigate shifting health guidelines. In an email sent to the Yale student body detailing plans for spring semester, President Salovey wrote, “We have been able to contain the spread of COVID-19 on our campus to date while preparing the next generation of thinkers and leaders.” The email added that there have been 21 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since nearly 9,000 students were welcomed back to campus a month ago.

Salovey’s email added, “Even with strong adherence to physical distancing and

mask-wearing this semester, students are nonetheless sharing knowledge, connecting with one another, and conducting research.”

Wellons expressed a similar sentiment: “Even though it’s not the experience that they expected … I think Yale College students are adjusting very well.”

However, for the majority of Yale staff, the impact of the pandemic goes beyond the logistical gymnastics, the development of contingency plans or the pursuit of knowledge. Their lives and livelihoods are at stake each time the University announces a new policy.

On their website, Local 33 writes, “Yale must use its financial resources to support the university’s least secure employees and marginalized communities.” Packtor expressed that she doesn’t believe that this is Yale’s primary goal.

“I’ve been working at Yale for six years, and my mom has been working at Yale for years before that, and it’s one of those things [where] over the time I’ve felt a lot of frustration,” she said. “Their response to the pandemic demonstrated a larger underlying issue in the University that tends to be incredibly slow moving, incredibly top heavy and really focused on looking good instead of doing the right thing.”

Contact MAYA WELDON-LAGRIMAS at maya.weldon-lagrimas@yale.edu .

Take Out: Ricky D’s Rib Shack

// MARLENA RAINES

// BY RACHEL CHANG AND MARY CHEN In our series “Take Out,” we will spotlight Black-owned restaurants in New Haven. Through this, we hope to introduce Yale students to new eats and experiences across Elm City and support local Black-owned businesses.

When we first walked into Ricky D’s Rib Shack, it was hard not to miss the red walls adorned with plaques, college pennants and paintings. Despite the lack of indoor dining, the ’90s hip-hop music in the background and the energy from the employees tailored a personal and ambient dining experience. We walked up to the counter and placed our order, Combo #1, a platter of beef brisket, pulled pork and ribs with two sides and cornbread. Within 10 minutes, our meal was ready.

We didn’t open our to-go box immediately. Instead, we sat down to talk with Ricky Evans, the owner.

Ricky didn’t start out in the restaurant business. For years, he had been climbing the corporate ladder in New York City before realizing that he wanted something different from his life. He recalled his forever love for backyard barbecues and cookouts for his friends and family — with “good people, good energy and good vibes.”

Just from a quick glimpse of the restaurant’s interior, Ricky brings this lively

and welcoming atmosphere that he enjoyed throughout his life into this restaurant.

His journey began seven years ago when he moved to New Haven and bought his first food truck. After three years of success, Ricky was able to open his brick and mortar storefront. When the restaurant first opened, the walls were empty. The first thing Ricky did was paint “Everyday’s a Cookout” on the wall — a testament to his mission to recreate the familiar vibes of his fun family gatherings.

Ricky managed to keep the rib shack open throughout the spring despite the COVID-19 outbreak severely hurting the restaurant industry. He’s had to adjust his business model to focus on grab-and-go takeout, delivery and UberEats. But social distancing guidelines have restricted his ability to cater large events like usual, and Ricky misses seeing his customers dine in. He told us stories of loyal customers calling to make sure that Ricky and his restaurant were both doing well throughout the pandemic.

Despite the pandemic halting his usual flow of business, the restaurant is still going strong for almost five years now. Ricky is incredibly grateful for the longevity of his business. However, he

notes that some people automatically assume that Black-owned restaurants and shops will quickly go out of business.

According to Ricky, before entering a Black-owned restaurant, customers generally assume “they’re walking into a hole in the wall, or walking into an unprofessional environment … [and] the product isn’t going to be consistent or isn’t going to be good, so a lot of people just don’t even bother.”

Ricky takes pride in his recipes and stellar ratings from local residents and government officials, proving these stereotypes wrong.

The ribs, pulled pork and brisket were some of the most tender and juicy meats we’ve ever tasted. The smokiness of the meats paired with the savory in-house barbeque sauce elevated the flavor to another level. It’s difficult to properly describe without actually letting your tastebuds experience the flavor. Coupled with corn on the cob, mac and cheese and cornbread, Ricky’s is traditional soul food like you’ve never tasted before.

We had leftovers from our dinner, so we took it back to a suitemate. And they described Ricky’s food as “dangerously good” — the leftovers did not last very long.

Ricky’s dedication for Black visibility is even more apparent when you look at the walls. The college pennants aren’t just any pennants. They’re from historically Black colleges and universities. Ricky Evans went to Virginia State University, and several family members went to Howard University. The paintings are all from a local Black artist named Chris Ferguson. Ricky helps sell Ferguson’s artworks by offering the restaurant’s walls as display.

For students and residents who have not ventured up to Science Park, you are missing out on the best ribs in town.

And it’s just a quick shuttle ride away — take the Red Line to 25 Science Park, and it’ll bring you straight to Ricky D’s.

After our interview, we were finally able to open our to-go-boxes. We were silenced by the first bite.

Contact RACHEL CHANG and MARY CHEN at rachel.chang@yale.edu and mary.chen@yale.edu .

Take a break from Yale Dining or your cooking, and try Ricky D’s bestselling beef brisket sandwich, or get a combo sampling of their ribs, brisket, wings and so much more.

ONLINE THIS WEEK: WKND RECOMMENDS Sniffing hand sanitizer.

THE BEST WAYS TO HOLD EACH OTHER: Angela Perez ‘24 recommends four different types of hugs.

PAGE B3

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND SHOUT

Until the bitter weather passes: Reflections on Pinsky’s “Pleasures” // BY KYUNG MI LEE

// CLAIRE MUTCHNIK

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

— Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” “Essential Pleasures,” edited by Robert Pinsky, is a 500-page collection of words that sound good. Pinsky challenges us to engage our aural appetites; he is there, as he writes in his introduction, to help us find the pleasure in “an organism of vowels and consonants and cadences flirting with an organism of meanings, playing with it, agreeing with it, arguing with it, converging, departing, twisting, energizing, goofing, weeping, punctuating, ironizing” — to help us understand the essential pleasures of poetry.

Seven form or genre headings divide the 285 poems: “Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes” or “Ballads, Repetitions, Refrains” or “Parodies, Ripostes, Jokes, and Insults” and so on. The order of the poems themselves reveal no recognizable pattern. The book gives us nothing but the poets’ name and their birth and death years, an informal presentation celebrating “the variety and depth of poetry.” Under “Love Poems” you will find Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) before James McMichael (b. 1939), and after a four-page layout of T.S Eliot’s (18881965) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes the short and sweet “Days”

by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Some poems you know. Some poems you read in high school English class: “Five years have past; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!” and you realize five years have passed since you last read that poem. Some poems are new. You repeat the lines to yourself over and over: “We real cool. We / Left school.

We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We” I have spent exactly 92 days in a newly rented Howe Street apartment. Like many Yale students, I have been struggling to find a sense of home. Having booked an emergency ticket back from my study abroad in England, I returned

WKND RECOMMENDS Filling out the census.

to a foreign New Haven — few cars, closed shops and no students jostling to class. I decided to take the year off, partly because I couldn’t imagine sitting through hours of online lectures but mostly because my day-to-day misgivings about the security of my future suddenly lay bare, stripped of their Ivy League pretensions about one’s ability to be hired upon graduation. The fig branches of hope and opportunity that dangled with fruit over my head had collapsed. Wilted and died. I grew restless with the creeping dread that all things had come to a halt.

The pandemic sucks. You know it sucks. We all know the feeling of that impenetrable insomniac stress lurking in our subconscious, and we worry about how to reassure our parents that “Yes, I am washing my hands. No, I am not going out.” We tally the hours we can clock on student employment and feel sexually frustrated, because how do you satiate lust in the age of a pandemic? Lying awake late at night, it suddenly occurred to me: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.”

“Essential Pleasures” reminded me of why I fell in love with poetry and taught me how to reconfigure my relationship to verse.

When you walk into the foundational courses for the English major at Yale, your professor will sit you down in front of Milton. You will spend many weeks slogging through “Paradise Lost” — the creation, the apple, the pandemonium — and then your professor will say, “Choose one passage. Copy-paste it into a new document.

Stare at it. Stare at it hard, until something innate in the way that line breaks calls out to you, the way the couplet rhymes, the way the meter falters. Notice it. Wear your best blinders. Trot on like a diligent horse.”

There is something so familiar about the Yale English major slaving away at a line of Milton. The term “close reading” is ubiquitous across the humanities, and the image

of a young scholar enraptured by a text feels enticingly democratic to us. Any undergrad, the theory goes, can and will spit out a cogent five-page paper about Eve’s fall in “Paradise Lost.”

Close reading, the all-American adaptation of I.A. Richards’ practical criticism, was born out of a movement to find an organized, critical method of analyzing literature. It was created as a tool, not in service of some final aesthetic value to be determined by, as some might call them, the “dead white men” of yore, but for the students of poetry — for you and me — to uncover our own meaning through poems: to learn, to grow and, I would argue, to find solace through tribulations.

While we are busy fretting about how to convince ourselves whether a poem is worth our time, we miss what Milton meant in his quandaries with good and bad, what he felt “On Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three,” experiences that can feel so profound and enriching that it make us feel so seen. (Milton too felt insecure about his prepubescent appearance with the blasé coolness of youth! Milton sees you!) When we fail to feel the essential pleasures of poetry, we miss the point entirely and bore through the message that can uplift us from our fears and quiet our innermost anxieties.

In his introduction to “Essential Pleasures,” Pinsky writes, “Analysis and understanding can heighten appreciation. Sometimes, however, they obtrude: trying to force knowledge before pleasure has a chance. Pointing this out is not sentimental or anti-intellectual; on the contrary, the goal should be to encourage intellectual precision by putting it in a stringent, fitting relation to the actual experience of the poem.”

The actual experience of “Essential Pleasures” is full of hidden revelations.

“Choose a number from one to 489,” I say to my friends. Those are the pages in the anthology. The poem on the page reveals a secret only the book can tell.

In these few short months of posses-

sion, “Essential Pleasures” has hauled me through a quarantine breakup. It has carried me through the lulls of passing days with nothing to do but stare blankly at my computer screen. Poetry transcends the years printed under poets’ names, resonates with us deep in our bones and speaks to our present moment.

What Langston Hughes can teach us about the cultural identity of the Black American in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; the way an asterisk at the bottom of the poem redirects you to Carl Phillips’ “The Hustler Speaks of Places”; how to yearn for a long-lost lover many years after separation in Robert Hass’ “Then Time” — these are a few of the things I’ve been pondering during my time in lockdown. I cry. I pace about the room. I read the news. I watch endless episodes of the “Gilmore Girls.” I look outside to see the empty streets. These are the beats of our actual experiences, and more often than not, they feel sad. They feel laden with a certain heaviness that we are too young to know. Flipping through the pages of “Essential Pleasures,” I travel through time to gain the wisdom of my elders. I gather the strength to send myself to bed.

I wake up the next day and remind myself: This is the time to be slow Lie low to the wall Until the bitter weather passes Try, as best you can, not to let The wire brush of doubt Scrape from your heart All sense of yourself And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous, Time will come good; And you will find your feet Again on the fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind And blushed with beginning.

— John O’Donohue, “This is the time to be slow” Contact KYUNG MI LEE at kyungmi.lee@yale.edu .

ONLINE THIS WEEK: IS MEDICAL CARE MOVING TO THE FOR YOU PAGE FOR GOOD? Annie Sidransky ‘24 considers the pros and cons of doctor Tiktok.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B4

WEEKEND LIMERICK

STRANGERS:

// STEPHEN IRONS

Dr. Stephen Irons, the Bard of Science Hill // BY JESSE ROY

When friends ask Giovanna Truong ’23 why she chose to major in physics, they need not wait long to hear the name “Stephen Irons.” Dr. Irons is the director of lab instruction in the Physics Department, and his love for the field helped ease her doubts about pursuing physics over chemistry.

Soon after meeting Dr. Irons, Giovanna — who is a reporter for the News — realized she had found an engaging lunch partner and a friend. Although he may initially come off as reserved, Giovanna said, “If you can get him to talk, he’s really funny.” She added that “if you can get him to write, that’s something incredible.” Irons’ quiet demeanor conceals his poetic verve, which occasionally compels him to pen email replies in rhyming verse.

As it turns out, poetry writing is not in Dr. Irons’ job description. As the director of physics labs, his official roles include managing lab materials, fine-tuning courses and teaching lab enrollees.

He also coordinates the department’s online collection of demonstrations, which in the time before COVID-19 lent demo kits to students and faculty. Outside of college academics, Irons manages the annual Yale Physics Olympics, an outreach program that welcomes students from over 30 Connecticut schools to compete on campus. He also advises the Physics Department’s Girls Science Investigations, a program aimed at enriching middle school-aged girls’ involvement in science.

Over the course of his 20 years at Yale, Irons has been unafraid to flout conven-

tional teaching methods in order to meet the needs of students. When Yale first hired him, the predominant genre of lab instruction — the “cookbook style,” he called it — laid out precise, clear-cut steps for experiments. Although the approach made labs easier to set up, Irons believes it also limited students’ agency. Over the years, he has distanced himself from “cookbook” labs, instead making room for students to navigate experiments more independently.

Irons’ student-led educational model only became more attractive to the Physics Department this fall. With nearly all physics lab sections moved to Zoom, students have gained a new degree of independence: Equipped with wireless devices studded with 23 sensors each, they can carry out complex measurements from home. Bedrooms have turned into laboratories. Yet even with educational norms disrupted, Dr. Irons’ core objectives haven’t wavered.

“I want to demythologize physics,” he said. “It’s a discipline like any other, and looked at in the right way it’s no harder than any other subject.”

He fears, though, that even among confident students physics has gotten the reputation of an “ivory tower discipline,” only accessible to members of a “mystical sect of brainiacs.” On the contrary, Dr. Irons believes that just as someone can enjoy good music without being a musician, any student can learn enough physics to understand its beauty.

To Dr. Irons, the pleasure of studying physics lies in its capacity to reveal Earth’s predictability. When the tides of our world

seem so volatile, physics can open students’ minds to a universe governed by laws and mathematical models, calculable by the human mind. “The sheer amazing fact is that the world is understandable… and if you study it carefully enough, you can understand how the world really works — not how you think it works, or not how you might hope it works,” he said. In the world of epidemiology, physics also plays a crucial role: The mathematical models undergirding physics shine a light on the dynamics of disease propagation, a topic into which the Physics Department has delved deeper since last spring.

As the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the rhythms of professional life, Irons leaned into extracurricular pursuits that have long been sources of community for him. This summer, Claire Sattler ’23 crossed paths with him in a virtual Anti-Gravity Society meeting. When she saw him juggling in his front yard, the prospect of taking PHYS 205L suddenly seemed much less intimidating.

But Irons’ community engagement is not limited to lighthearted pursuits. Since 2001, he has volunteered for the North Haven Fire Department, where he now serves as a lieutenant firefighter. Irons joined their ranks on a whim 20 years ago, at the urging of a volunteer captain. Then new to North Haven, he was drawn to the special bonds between firefighters, as well as the fulfilling work of community service. Over the years, firefighting has come to play a significant role in Dr. Irons’ life. The job demands that he always remain prepared for a life-or-death emergency, and he keeps a pager alert by his side 24/7. Irons occasionally gets to point out physics concepts on the job. He always has a water pressure lesson up his sleeve, and he sometimes smuggles a Geiger counter to the firehouse to demonstrate radiation detection.

As for his poetry hobby, Dr. Irons admits that it might seem unlikely for a physics professor. Yet his interest in writing dates back to high school, where he composed short stories. As a freshman at the College of William & Mary, he enrolled in a short

story writing course, where he met his wife.

Poetry, however, did not become a favorite pastime of his until adulthood, when the anxiety of family gift-giving led Irons to reject the consumerism of the tradition.

Limericks, he decided, would make a more original present for his friends and family members. When Dr. Irons’ father recently celebrated his birthday, a poem awaited him: “To grow older is surely no crime / We all do it and it’s totally fine / 79’s just a number / over which you shouldn’t lose slumber. / What’s cool is it’s also a prime!”

Now, Irons also uses limericks as an educational tool. As Giovanna was walking past his lecture room last year, she noticed a poem pasted to the windows of the hallway: “It was something like, ‘When you’re measuring a set of data, be sure to take uncertainties, you’ll need them latah.’” Before long, the two began exchanging poems.

Inspired, Giovanna soon wrote a limerick dedicated to Dr. Irons. The next weekday, Giovanna was greeted again by a poem posted on the wall — this time addressed to her. “I think that was the moment I decided to be a physics major,” she said.

If you ever find yourself on the fence about studying physics, perhaps Irons’ poetic musings can help guide you, too: What joy resides in examining life?

It’s wet, and foul-stench’d you must needs agree In ev’ry result uncertainty’s rife There’s naught but despair in biology.

In messing with flasks, here’s my reaction, What fun could exist in such industry?

Cooking up unholy toxic concoctions Love can’t be had where there’s bad chemistry.

Do not go astray worshipping number.

Choose not its false logic ’tis but the wrong path.

It’s proof that this pick could not be dumber.

You shall derive no peace in chasing math.

What choice but to succumb to the lyrics Of the seductive language of physics.

Contact JESSE ROY at jesse.roy@yale.edu .

Reuben Induced Reflections: // BY AMINA NIASSE Black Joy in the Age of Cancel Culture That moment of weakness is always triggered by a midnight burst of Zoom fatigue.

I’m sinking into my L-Dub couch after a day of formulas, lecture slides and biology reading. Sentences from my reading float out of my screen — set to the lowest brightness setting possible — and begin crashing into each other. My lids touch for a second, then a minute, then two. As an unknown song from a random lo-fi playlist fades deeper into the background, I oscillate between giving into temptation and honoring the strong moralistic version of myself that I claim exists. So deep into my couch that anyone would mistake me for another cushion, I know it’s time.

I open and close the app a couple of times.

My dress is casual — sweatpants. This should be quick. The brick cold that greets me outside my entryway wakes me up, bringing me back to the bitter work that waits for me after what will be a 10-minute affair.

Four minutes and three shadowy crosswalks later, I arrive at my destination. A tender pull of flesh lies under a rough exterior.

Teeth circling menacingly until they pierce the surface. A deeper dive is met with the familiar sour tang. Then that eager ooze… of dressing — Russian dressing. Finally, a satisfying sigh. Mission accomplished, I wrap up the leftovers of my GHeav Reuben. My suitemate waves the cashier goodbye as she packs up her monthlong stock of almond milk.

What a successful study break!

Months ago and 600 miles away from campus, I resolved never to shop at GHeav. During my short stint enmeshed in Yinsta culture, I was bombarded with calls to spend money anywhere else but this Yale classic — and rightfully so. I was disgusted but not surprised by the establishment’s racism over the summer, and I’m too disillusioned to be impressed with their quick fi ring of their employee, so my

decision to abstain was made.

A late-night study session would uncover how shaky my resolve really was. Back on Elm, flashes of social media posts circulated in my head, and I was increasingly aware of the corn beef stirring in my digestive tract.

Self-condemnation bubbled in my stomach as I was reminded of an earlier moment of guilt.

It’s a hazy Friday night, and I’m FaceTiming my friend, who I’ll call Tim. His college-student™ LED lights flash on beat to Doja Cat’s “Cyber Sex.” My torso innocently grooves to Doja’s crooning.

The familiar tune that defi ned my fi rst year of college, only to be ripped away from me by an internet scandal, tugs on a deep reflex we both share. In a moment of realization, our eyes meet, and I try to put an end to this fl awed moment. We agreed not to stream Doja! But the entire “Hot Pink” album is already queued and no catastrophes occur after we press play (it helps that he’s on a private Spotify session). David Duke hasn’t appeared outside my window. At this moment, it’s hard to remember why I so profusely vowed to practice self-denial in the first place.

After our FaceTime, I text him jokingly apologizing for the judgment, confessing that I’d streamed Caroline Polacheck — another singer who I vowed to sacrifice after a public display of anti-Blackness — while showering that morning. Tim and I send a couple “sksksnfjff”s in the chat and all is forgotten. The celebration that characterizes Black joy isn’t always pro-Black, but our joy is.

That same joy overlaid the shame I previously thought I should have felt while tearing that Reuben up. The fun of a jittery late-night outing or my suitemates gleeful exclamation upon finding the

thing that guarantees her cereal breakfasts for a week or Tim and I sobbing over our first-year soundtrack, miles apart from one another — aren’t they worth more than the moralistic stake that I have in… whatever? What a falsehood it would be though, to claim that I am completely removed from the ethical conundrum that comes with monetarily supporting a business that hasn’t supported me. Even after ordering food and acquiring the precious dairy-free goods, my suitemate and I whimsically discussed the urge to shoplift from the same establishment that shunned our skin in June. Wouldn’t that be so funny?

My pop-culture obsessed mind has become a database of canceled and greenlit. Was there a change in leadership?

Notes app apology or Instagram Live with their publicist’s shadow in the frame?

The only exception is Nicki Minaj who floats around in some grey un-cancellable space (“Roman Reloaded the Re-Up” basically defi ned my childhood). But the thing about holding a mental database is that it’s only useful once your hypervigilant inner voice masters its controls.

The ethical worry that I’m co-signing anti-Blackness every time I dance to a problematic artist in a (socially distanced) dorm room on Friday night or shop at questionable establishments instead of giving my bi-weekly check to a Black-owned business is only aggravated by some sense of respectable obligation.

In my head, I am the last line of defense, struggling to wade off the precariousness that colors non-Black people’s anti-racist commitments.

Often, I imagine the sadistic look of victory that crosses some lofty oppressor’s face, overlooking me from their lair

while I succumb to capitalism and begin building my perfect Reuben on Snackpass or press play on Spotify. All eyes are on me and waiting for my judgment: canceled or greenlit. I reject that unwavering responsibility — the love child of pro-Blackness and respectability politics. My actions don’t announce when something is canceled or when it isn’t or serve as some metric of “problematic” or “OK.” Fresh shower suds sliding down my back, I will still judge the hypothetical white girl on my floor who plays Caroline Polacheck’s new single (hypothetical because the suite across from me is empty; we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, people!) even if it was removed from my playlist only yesterday. I’ll wonder if, before the situation was addressed, the packs of students in GHeav ever planned to boycott — while simultaneously picking up my ramen. Because the thing about practicing Black radical joy is that the ultimate objective — liberation — is so freeing that it can look like hypocrisy.

Contact AMINA NIASSE at amina.niasse@yale.edu .

ONLINE THIS WEEK: WKND RECOMMENDS Dominic Fike’s music.

WHAT HURTS MORE THAN MIDDLE SCHOOL LONELINESS? Melissa Adams ‘24 reviews the latest season of PEN15.

AN //

AS

TH

A

A SI

SH

I LO

V