e H l a e Y ra e Nov. 9, 2018
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YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986
from the editors
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Hey Hey Heyy, Thanks for reading the Herald! Has it been a wild week or what? On Tuesday, as I was walking down the street, a man shouted at me “Free loaf of bread if you voted!” I told him I voted, grabbed my free loaf of bread and devoured that son of a bitch before I even reached the end of the block. This week everyone’s been talking about a big election known as the “midterms.” Coincidentally, I had several midterms this week so I’ve been telling everyone, “Damn I’ve really got a lot of midterms during these midterms!” With blue-colored and red-colored waves, flipping seats and voter suppression, the whole thing has been very dramatic.
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THEAD S A M EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITORS
Jack Kyono Nurit Chinn, Fiona Drenttel
EXECUTIVE EDITORS
FEATURES EDITORS CULTURE EDITORS VOICES EDITORS OPINION EDITOR REVIEWS EDITORS STYLE EDITOR
Emma Chanen, Emily Ge, Margaret Grabar Sage, Nicole Mo, Marc Shkurovich,Eve Sneider, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang Marina Albanese, Trish Viveros Sara Luzuriaga, Tereza Podhajská Allison Chen, Julia Leatham Eric Krebs Kat Corfman, Everest Fang Molly Ono
INSERTS EDITORS
Sarah Force, Addee Kim
DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS DESIGN EDITORS
Julia Hedges, Rasmus Schlutter Paige Davis, Audrey Huang
And if you’re looking for more drama, you can go straight to our Front where Nurit Chinn, DC ’20, will take you through the colorful history of the Yale Cabaret. Hear from some of the artists involved with the Cab as they discuss its operations, meaning, and rich history! Can’t get enough history? You came to the right place, which is straight to our Features section! This week, the Herald takes you back in time, all the way to 1992. In a piece from the archives, Marny Helfrich, MC ’94, describes a time eerily similar to today, a midterm election following a heated Supreme Court senate hearing focused on allegations of sexual harassment. It’s a great read and an interesting reflection on how things have changed, yet remained the same. Hungry for more? We’ve got you covered. Just take the train straight down to our Culture section, where Nathan Kim, MY ’22, is cooking up a delectable piece on the various food events at the Asian American Cultural Center. Food from a diverse array of Asian cuisines will give you a taste of what home is like across the globe. But don’t go too far! Because Ariana Grande just dropped a new single, and Eve Sneider, MC ’19, is going to take you through it. It’ll definitely help you move on from your ex, and maybe teach you a bit about yourself along the way. You’re sure to be moved by the brilliance of this Nickelodeon actress turned pop-sensation! That’s it for now. Just grab a cup of joe, kick your feet up, and get ready for some sweet Herald classics! Love, Everest Fang Reviews Editor 2
THE YALE HERALD
The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at john.kyono@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2018-2019 academic year for 65 dollars. The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2018 The Yale Herald.
IN THIS ISSUE 6
10,16
FEATURES In the wake of Tuesday’s electoral success for women, the Herald dives into its archives to feature a 1992 article by Marny Helfrich, MC ’94, discussing the original “Year of the Woman.” Mark Rosenberg, PC ’20, gets to know Frances Skelton, a librarian who has worked at the New Haven Museum for 25 years.
VOICES Reflecting on the delicate balance between a full life and sickness, Helen Teegan, ES ’21, illustrates, in a prose poem, a close yet painful bond that must overcome illness in hopes of a better tomorrow. Ruminating over time—or the lack of it—Kara O’Rourke, ES ’22, reflects on her beloved timepiece, an old watch, and demonstrates the beauty of timekeeping.
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OPINIONS Sidney Carlson White, JE ’21, sheds light on Minnesota’s unique progressive rural past.
WEEK AHEAD A STAR IS CORN: AN EXIT PLAYERS MIDTERM SHOW
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Bringing new focus to an oft-overlooked challenge of winter, Emma Chanen, BK ’19, takes issue with the bodily function that plagues all our fashion choices in cold weather: winter sweat. An avid hater of jeans, Paige Davis, MC ’21, takes us through her journey of finally finding her perfect pair.
FRIDAY NOV. 2 @ 8:00 P.M. NICK CHAPEL, TRUMBULL COLLEGE
Nurit Chinn, DC ’20, looks at the historical and social changes taking place in the Yale Cabaret, a dine-in theatrical play-space managed by Yale School of Drama students.
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CULTURE Nathan Kim, MY ’22, shines a light on the variety of food-related events organized by the Asian American Cultural Center throughout this month.
Amelia Linett, JE ‘21, explores the cultural relevance of the revolutionary Kenyan movie Rafiki, screened during Yale’s Africa Week.
20 REVIEWS Reflecting on Ariana Grande’s compelling self-awareness, Eve Sneider, MC ’19, takes you through the ins and outs of Grande’s latest hit: “thank u, next.” Emma Keyes, PC ’19, details Hasan Minhaj’s recent entry into the realm of Netflix political talk shows with a review of Patriot Act.
216 PRESENTS: NEW MYTHS/ MANDALA/ POWERSNAP/ HERO MAGNUS
Nicole Mo, BK ’19, gives her take on Carly Rae Jepsen’s return to music with a review of the pop star’s new anthem to being alone: “Party for One.”
SATURDAY, NOV. 10 @ 8:30 P.M. 216 DWIGHT ST.
TUESDAY, NOV. 13 450 MAIN ST., HARTFORD, CT
COVER
After seeing the daring musical Spring Awakening, Amanda Thomas, SY ’21, tells us all about it.
STYLE
SOLIDARITY WITH THE PINOS FAMILY: A PRESS CONFERENCE AND RALLY
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presentatives
One taught me love: House of Re
One taught
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One taught me pain: Senate.
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INSERTS Mad Libs Letter to Home ADDEE KIM, JE ’21 YH STAFF & SARAH FORCE, SY ’21 YH STAFF
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ear Mom and Dad,
I just got your care package! Thank you so much. I really missed your homemade cookies and I can’t believe you sent me ( 1 ). So thoughtful! That helped me so much through midterms. It’s been a stressful time, especially with homework, practice, and writing for the (2), but I can’t wait for Thanksgiving! I’m excited to tell you about all my new friends at school. There’s Lisa, Sammy, and my best friend Hank, who we call (3). I’m starting to get more involved on campus like you said I should! This week I went to my first Yale Students Against (4) meeting. We all got dinner at Claire’s after and they seem like such a kind, funny, and (5) bunch of people. They even invited me to their (6) themed party this weekend! Anyway, how are you guys doing? I really miss living at home sometimes. My roommate and I get along, but she doesn’t (7) me like you guys do. I can’t wait to for Thanksgiving! I also have some things I want to bring back from home, like my sweaters, boots, and that (8) you gave me for (9) last year. Thanks again for the package. I almost forgot to mention how thoughtful it was to include that letter from (10). Give them a hug from me all the way from New Haven! See you soon. With love, Maddie
PROUD TO BE
(1) Favorite “sneakerhead” unboxing video (2) Yale’s most hated publication (3) Historically hung politician (4) Endangered, cute, keystone species (5) MEAN adjective (6) One of the members of the Black Eyed Peas that is not Fergie or will.i.am (7) FUCK (8) Psychological complex (9) Masonic holiday (10) Favorite state representative (11) Synonym for sex dungeon
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ays To W 5 S p o A f t er E l
l v o ed v n I y o n Da a y t cti e ELLIOT CONNORS, MC ’20
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Help your local media outlet color in all those maps.
Hang around the high school you voted at and make sure none of the kids are smoking crack.
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Offer to help polling officials go through the ballots to make sure each one was kissed for good luck.
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In one year, head on back for your Class of 2018 polling place reunion.
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Be the best goddamned rep Michigan’s Ninth has ever seen.
Why Being Hydrated Makes Me a Better Person
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I know what you’re thinking: “Ugh, Mariah, drinking water isn’t a personality trait!” I’ve heard it before. I get it. And you know what, fine—I don’t need anyone else to validate what I already know. Drinking water is a personality trait, and it makes me better than you.
wet stuff everywhere. Raising it to my lips is the only strength training I want or need. I have a 24/7 cool IV mainlining apricot La Croix right into my bloodstream. I walk around constantly pissing myself. And you know what, motherfucker? That piss is clear.
Because while technically everyone “drinks water,” not everyone drinks water, if you get what I’m saying. You maybe, what, have a glass with lunch? Stick a Nalgene in your backpack? Pour half of it down the sink at the end of the day? HA. Amateurs. I carry a three gallon jug of the
Because not only does my extreme hydration make me prettier, stronger, and more likely to survive a drought than you, it also makes me morally superior. My body is, like, 85 percent water at this point. That’s 15 percent more than you normies. AKA 15 percent more sweet, sweet H2O I can
return to the earth when I die. Oh, you recycle? You bike to class? You think you’re doing more for this planet than I am? Cute. Water is life, bitch, and my decomposing body is gonna make it rain.
MARIAH KREUTTER, BK ’20 YH STAFF
VOICES
I Hope You Know That HELEN TEEGAN, ES ’21
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his is a full life. you are living. the birds chirping by your window. they are calling to you. can you hear them. singing their songs. humming. dancing in the morning dew. outside the sun has risen. but your room is still dark. don’t you want to. wouldn’t you want to. wake up. wake up. and smell the eggs. they are steaming in the kitchen. soaking in their soysauce broth. i’ve even brought you a spoonful. i know, you don’t want to eat. let me just. here. do you think you can just. try this. i know. it tastes horrible. i’ll take it all away. no it won’t go to waste. mom will eat it. or i will. does that sound. okay. you have a lot to do today. i know. it sucks. but the birds, they are chirping. and the sun, it is shining. can you feel that. i’m sorry this window is also a wall. i too wish we could sit together on the other side. let you feel the grass between your toes. the dew grazing your ankles. remember when you were twelve. i was four. we woke up huddled together in our tent shivering in the dampness of morning. i think i told you that we were going to be astronauts someday. is today that day. because. this is a full life. you are living. there are so many people here to see you. no, don’t worry. they won’t come in all at once. and yes, we’ll keep the window open. it does get awfully hot in here sometimes. but can you feel that. there is a nice breeze today. look. the cat has come in to say hello. isn’t he cute. and look. here comes Ruth. she says the nurses will be here soon. they are very nice, aren’t they. yesterday they discovered helium on an exoplanet two-hundred light years away. i can tell you more about that later. we can also read later. maybe the Vonnegut. or, how about this story i found the other day. i think you’d like it. i know. it is tiring. having so much to do in one day. but the birds. they are chirping. and the people here. they are singing. this is a full life. you are living. can’t you feel it?
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hy do I miss my old watch?
It lasted three years before the battery finally died, lovingly but scarcely held together with sewing thread and electrical tape. Despite my efforts and unreasonable attachment to the cheap patchwork instrument, I discovered it was disposable by design: the battery was impossible to replace, and my efforts with the screwdriver only scratched and marred the plastic that had molded to my wrist. I had rarely taken it off: I ran races and track meets, took tests, played violin, I even slept with it strapped against my pulse—a second heartbeat—for three years. Its replacement has a much sleeker design, with a large, pristine digital face that never smudges and adjusts for daylight savings time automatically. It displays the 12-hour time and date in gentle sans-serif pixelated font, and even in the pitch black, the screen glows with jarring bright light at the push of a button. But instead of the gentle maintenance my old one required—buffing the face clean in circles with the corner of a shirtsleeve—this relationship requires periodic separation. It needs recharging every other week, reminiscent of old mechanical watches that required periodic re-winding—but decidedly less romantic. A tiny battery icon on its face is a constant looming reminder that I must take it off soon to recharge; my odd dependency on this accessory holds me hostage to its electric needs. Something tells me the presence of a dead watch on my wrist or the absence of one altogether would feel as unnerving as trying to move an arm that has fallen asleep. That accessibility of information becomes such a natural extension of my mind and body that I feel pangs of frustration at its loss rather than wonder at its presence. Being unplugged from the calendar feels like having a phantom limb: I impulsively reach for the time or the date, flick my wrist like I would scratch an itch, and find nothing where there has always been a comforting weight. Running daily in high school necessitated a watch. Through constant training, I began to internalize a sense of synthetic time, to develop an internal metronome that corresponded with the commanding neon red digits beside the pavement. I could pace a lap to the second through intuitive pacing and strategic clock check-ins. But why did I wear my watch off the track, bring it into a brick-walled school with wall clocks in every classroom, keep it on the same hand in which I hold my smartphone and navigate my laptop? There’s no way I could even pretend to consider my patchwork watch a fashionable accessory. Besides specialized use such as in athletics, what really justifies a watch? For the first time in years, I decided to go without one. Just last month, I left my watch at home during FOOT. Without the reference of time, trudging up mountains blurred into hazy stretches of pain and laughter, marked only by hunger levels and shifting shadows. When we set up camp at nightfall, it was the reddening of the sunset that urged us to hurry. Although some days I had idly wondered how long we had been walking, or how early we had risen, I did so with conscious curiosity, not unconscious impulse. Time was receding as a societal construct and becoming something more wild, irregular, and innate. The pace of my ticking heart, my rising thirst, our velocity over the terrain, everything varied with the rise and fall of the mountainous landscape. Hours would crawl by yet all blur together over grueling stretches of trail, whereas afternoon picnics were suspended in light, almost time-less. It was time to repack our bags when our stomachs felt full, when the stories settled into quiet hums of contemplation, and when the caterpillars discovered the pineapple scraps on the rocks. I didn’t start to instinctually check my wrist again until the bus ride back to campus, as if returning to civilization reawakened some anxiety not only to physically re-assimilate, but to align myself with a societal timetable. Complex societies demand coordination; timekeeping was practically invented for that purpose. Perhaps that explains our curious cultural attachment to clocks: to the extent society is structured around time, we glorify the timekeepers. My parents still wind up the grandfather clock every week to hear it chime the hour, though our
KARA O’ROURKE, ES ’21
Consider Your Watch whole family wears watches ourselves. The tiny, all-but-useless front pockets on many jeans were originally designed for cowboys’ pocket watches, introduced by Levi’s in the 1800s. We silently ask strangers for the hour by tapping our bare wrists, as if to say, “Unfortunately, I am missing a watch; please, would you help me?” Back to the bus. After four days being disconnected, why did I feel it necessary at that moment to know the exact time? Sure, I knew it was morning, but if I could know it were specifically 7 a.m., my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table at home, nursing warm coffee and a newspaper. At 9 a.m., my little brother would be arriving at the library right as it opened, and at noon, the highway near my house would be congested with lunchtime traffic. Time is like a crystal ball of scheduled predictions in that way. None of these facts would affect my bus ride, half a state away, but it felt comforting to know, the same way one might crave to know how much time remains in a dull lecture, even if that amount is encouraging or discouraging. Having a handle on time gives us a sense of control over our lives, a way to manage expectations and align our experiences with the world in motion. For track, my watch was an instrument of confidence and control. Time was an objective marker of rank in the sport, by which you could compare high school athletes and Olympic medal-winners, as universal and fair as the human feet we run on. With a wristwatch, access to that objective measuring power was practically instantaneous, and I could always know where I stood. Cross country, on the other hand, was more flexible: because each race differed wildly in weather and physical course conditions, one’s time would fluctuate with such variables as humidity, temperature, whether the course had hills or gravel. Races were run more by feel, success defined not only by finishing place but by subjective feeling of exertion and mental effort. Despite relying on my watch for most other aspects of my life, from track season to daily calendar schedules, I found bliss in the freedom from time for cross country. The backpacking trip was similar, in that I could operate intuitively, pushing myself when comfortable and returning to time as a fluid measurement of the sun across the sky and the pounding metronome in my chest. How else, then, can one escape time? Would I want to? The watch feels so intimate because it’s strapped to my body; checking the time becomes physical gesture, a neural pathway the same way running is more of a general will than a conscious effort to move one leg after the other. Theoretically, I could do without a watch, since the time of day is accessible from any number of other sources. One 2017 study found, for example, that we check our phones about every twelve minutes, teenagers even more frequently. But it’s more difficult to absorb the time when the colors and social notifications distract us; often I go to check the time, get derailed, then set down my phone 10 minutes later never having noticed or remembered the time, so I have to pick it up again. I think there’s a reason smartwatches have been slow to take off, to their manufacturers’ surprise: to some extent, I fear having access to the internet attached to my wrist, the way Google Glass (an abandoned product concept where they embedded a computer screen in the corner of your glasses) always made me shiver. But to have the persistent, gently ticking time of day on hand is no more unnatural than a second heartbeat, a sixth sense. It’s a sliver of access into the human hive mind, a sense of communal belonging. I think I preferred my old watch for its imperfectections, its intimacy and reliability. Daylight savings jarred us both; manually resetting the dial was necessary for myself to adjust, too. My old watch was a comforting hand on the small of my back, a relay baton held just out of reach, a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, a future personal heirloom. Whenever I came back to it out of the woods I trusted it would still hold a charge (until it couldn’t).
i v s e s e B r l g ue o r p P SIDNEY CARLSON WHITE, JE ’21
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t was the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, who once quipped, “All politics is local.” I’ve never really understood what it meant, and quite honestly, I don’t know if Tip really did either. All I know is that it’s complete bullshit. If, on Wednesday morning, you took a good, long look at the national House map, you would have found that only three districts managed to switch from Democratic hands to Republican ones. Of those, one in Pennsylvania appears to be less of a GOP pickup then a swap engineered by the court-ordered redistricting that the state so desperately needed. The other two are in my own state of Minnesota, where I believe the rural-urban progressive alliance is slowly beginning to crumble, being dismantled by forces far more national than local. In short, two very rural Congressional districts, the First and the Eighth (my home), changed from blue to red Tuesday, much to the disappointment of many progressives across the state. The first reason for this, but ultimately the less relevant one, is simply the fact that the current DFL (or, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, as the Minnesota iteration of the Democrats is known) incumbent in the Eighth, Rep. Rick Nolan, decided to retire, and the Congressman from the First, Tim Walz, chose to make a run for the governor’s office. Because of their popularity and incumbency advantages, both almost certainly knew that they were the only DFLers capable of winning those House races. Walz, for his part, was elected Governor on Tuesday, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did so despite failing to win the DFL nomination over more progressive candidates (and being more of a Purple People Pleaser than a true Minnesota progressive). The real issue with these districts, however, goes far beyond the borders of the state itself. Turning directly to the two House races at hand, I was disappointed but not surprised to see the two new DFL
candidates, Dan Feehan and Joe Randinovich, lose their races on Tuesday night. These two individuals represented Minnesota progressivism in every sense of the word. Their platforms were in favor of labor rights and significantly raising the minimum wage. They both supported universal healthcare, and generally speaking, they had a deep understanding of what kind of representation their districts needed in Washington. There was nothing wrong about these two candidates, nothing that had condemned them to defeat. See, the unique thing about Minnesota, and perhaps the primary reason I love my home state so much, is that real progressive candidates have consistently been able to get elected in both urban and rural districts, as well as statewide. The fundamental reason for this is that our state Democratic Party and the more left-leaning Farmer-Labor party, originally formed as a coalition between the urban working class and farmers outstate, merged in 1944. As a result, even as political alliances shifted over the past 74 years, these progressive traditions have remained in our political zeitgeist. The union has produced leaders ranging from legendary Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, to his more contemporary ideological heir, the late Senator Paul Wellstone, to the newly elected Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis, the first Somali-American to serve in the House, or the candidates Feehan and Randinovich themselves. To me, it seems clear that it was not Feehan and Randinovich’s unabashed progressivism that sunk them in their elections. Rather, I believe that it was the fact that nationally, the Democrats have failed to embrace the progressive spirit in the same way. Voters in those districts did not respond to the DFL candidates themselves, but rather to the weak economic messaging of the national party. Now, to be quite clear, this is not another entry in the never-ending list of thinkpieces bemoaning the Democratic Party’s abandonment of
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OPINION
the mythical “white working class,” or, God forbid, criticizing the party for its “identity politics,” or really any related screed. As a black man from a rural district, I’ve found that line of thought serves to erase the voices of people like me rather than provide any tangible electoral benefit. Rather, it seems that national Democrats need to learn from Minnesotans, both urban and rural, and embrace the progressive (dare I say left-wing populist) politics my state has championed for many years. It is not enough to provide spineless neoliberal opposition to Donald Trump and the GOP from which his virulence is inseparable. Instead, we must provide a real political and economic alternative to it. Those championed by genuine socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, immediately come to mind, but we should not discount those of unfearing progressive leaders like Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke either. For the Left, it is not, as the punditry continues to remind us, about abandoning our focus on the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that we wish to eradicate from society. Continuing to fight these evils is an indelible piece of our struggle, as we must confront the hardships (both economic and otherwise) that working people face, whatever and wherever they might be. We must meet people where they are, just as Omar, Randinovich, and Feehan strove to do. This means confronting issues such as police brutality, mass incarceration, and the gender wage gap as well, not because these issues are economic (though they undoubtedly are), but because they genuinely matter to working people around the country. The neoliberal corporate Democratic agenda is no longer the way forward. It is time the party learned from Minnesotans urban and rural alike, and refocused on a truly progressive blueprint for the future, so we may not only be saved from Trump and the GOP, but so that we can build a bright future for working people across the country.
“It is not enough to provide spineless neoliberal opposition to Donald Trump and the GOP from which his virulence is inseparable.” 8 THE YALE HERALD
STYLE Winter Sweat W
elcome to winter, kiddos. The sun goes down at 4:15 p.m. The chill settles into your bones. You shed your skin like a slithery, sniffly snake, leaving human dust all over Sterling Memorial Library. But if I’m the driest girl in the world, you ask yourself, why am I sweating so much? Well, sweet summer child, you’ve encountered one of the many perils of the colder months: the Winter Sweat. Even if you aren’t an especially sweaty person, you’ve almost certainly experienced the pain of sprint walking (you know: fists clenched, arms swinging, just enough hop in your step to propel you but not enough to over-jostle your backpack, a seemingly impossible long-strided waddle) through the snow to your class in LC where you’re enveloped by the smothering embrace of radiant heat. You
PAIGE DAVIS, MC ’21 YH STAFF
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’ve never liked my clothes touching me. In my dream world, bunchy sweaters, tight shirts, bras, and skinny jeans would simply not exist. My shirt wouldn’t brush against my stomach and my pants wouldn’t choke my thighs. I’d wear a flowy, covering scarf that would magically float a centimeter above my skin. Unfortunately, fashion hasn’t quite caught up to my dream world yet. Accordingly, I’m forced—if I want to be clothed (which I do)—to wear things that inevitably touch my skin. And usually, I can deal with it. Except when it comes to jeans.
EMMA CHANEN, BK ’19 YH STAFF
make it to your classroom just as the minute switches from on time to late, and as you peel back the many layers that protected you from nature’s icy breath you find—what’s this?!—a sheen of sweat on your upper brow where your hand-knit earband once sat, dark circles under the arms of your last/cutest layer, the trickle of a single bead caressing your spine. This is Winter Sweat. The unfortunate reality about a Northeastern winter is that you will never, not ever, be a comfortable temperature. You can put on every single article of clothing you own, but step outside on a mid-February day, and you’ll feel the cold penetrate your body so thoroughly that you think the freeze is produced by your very own organs. If winter shorts are more your style, step into any classroom building, and you will feel like you’ve been
thrust into the fiery depths of hell or, alternatively, your grandma’s apartment, which she keeps at a cool 97 degrees (Kelvin). You may ask, what if I’m wearing a normal person outfit, you know… like a normal person? To you I say, good for you, normal person; you’ll still experience the Winter Sweat. And it will give you pneumonia. I’m not simply here to outline a problem, though. I love to offer solutions, and luckily Winter Sweat has a very simple one. In fact, the answer is in sweat’s very name: sweaters. Baggy, baggy sweaters. They won’t stop you from sweating, but they will catch enough of the salty drips to keep you looking as dry as the skin on the back of your hands. Head to any thrift store to stock up. You’ll thank me when the automatic doors very slowly seal you into the sultry heat of WLH.
The Perfect Pant While jeans are by far the most ubiquitous of pant options, many alternatives exist. My senior year of high school, I declared I would only wear flowy pants—jeans were a thing of the past. At the start of my sophomore year of college, however, having accidentally shrunk most of my flowy pants in the wash, I reluctantly packed my jeans and found space for them in the dresser of my dorm room. I hated my jeans drawer and dreaded the fall day when I’d have to open it up. I felt that way, until I found the pair. I was standing in the Target dressing room in Orange, Conn. I had tried on pant after pant,
with lackluster results. And then, my world changed. Suddenly, the lighting grew rosy and generic rom-com music started playing—or at least it would have, if my life were a rom-com. Look, these jeans are nothing special. They’re from Target, they’re black, they have frayed edges and a slightly wider leg. Nonetheless, they’re the first pair of jeans that don’t make me feel overwhelmed, swallowed, and confined. In this dark horse of a pant, I feel like I can do a flip. Or a summersault. Or, at the very least, make it through the day without changing into another pair of pants.
FROM THE ARCHIVES Year of Fewer Men Than Usual In the November 1992 U.S. elections, female candidates ran for and were elected to political office in unprecedented numbers. A record 47 women won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, 24 for the first time, and four women were elected to the Senate, among them the first African American female senator. Commentators labelled the phenomenon “The Year of the Woman,” and attributed the wave of support for female candidates to the anger and disillusionment following the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. One of the two female incumbents
in 1992, then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, objected to the media’s moniker, remarking, “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, fancy, or a year.”
have taken to calling 2018 “(Another) Year of the Woman.” As in 1992, the number of women elected has shattered records, bolstering arguments that Donald Trump and the Kavanaugh hearings have delivered an awakening to women, precipitating, in the words of The Washington Post, “A New On Tuesday, 100 women were elected to Era of Women in Politics.” the House, 12 to the Senate and nine to governor’s mansions. Among them were This week, The Herald pulls from its arSharice Davids and Deb Haaland, the first chives an article written by Marny Helfrich, Native American women elected to Con- MC ’94, discussing her skepticism of the gress, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, idea of “The Year of the Woman” in Octothe first Muslim women elected to Con- ber 1992, one month before the election. gress. In the wake of the results, pundits
The Year of the Woman? Maybe not quite yet... MARNY HELFRICH, MC ’94
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id you watch the political conventions this summer? If you did, you probably noticed the red, white, and blue bunting, the balloons, the donkeys and elephants. You may also have noticed Democratic unity and Republican discord, a reversal of the expected pattern. But whether you were focusing on the speeches or the spectacle, you must have noticed the women. Women running for Congress. Republican women for choice. Republican women for Clinton. Women with cookie recipes. Women with children. Women with AIDS. Women with children with aids. Hillary Clinton. Marilyn Quayle. Barbara Bush. Murphy Brown. Never before have women been so prominent in presidential politics, not even when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket in 1984. Democrats and Republicans, pundits and pollsters, all are calling 1992 “the year of the woman.” In many ways the name is deserved. More women are running for the Senate than have been elected in the nation’s history. The number of women in the House is also likely to increase dramatically. Similar changes
10 THE YALE HERALD
are happening in state and local government throughout the country. In this year of Congressional scandal and widespread discontent with the status quo, the fact that women are often left out of the political mainstream has worked to the advantage of female candidates. Though some, like California senatorial candidate Diane (sic) Feinstein, are experienced political insiders, many are newcomers, like Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and Lynn Yenkel of Pennsylvania, whose main qualification in the eyes of many voters is that they haven’t been “part of the system.” Last fall’s Hill-Thomas hearings, before the entirely white male Judiciary Committee, showed many people that a nation that is 52 percent women is not well served by a Senate which is two percent women. However positive these changes may be, the picture is not entirely rosy. First, even if every woman running for Congress won (which is guaranteed not to happen, since in several races women are opposing each other), neither the House nor the Senate would be even close to gender parity. There is still a long way to go.
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Democratic women Senators in 1993. L-R, Patty Murray, Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Mikulski, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer
Many of the women are running largely on the strength of their records and positions on “women’s issues”, a situation that in the long term is bad for these issues and for women. Until we come to see daycare as a “children’s issue”, parental leave as a family issue, breast and ovarian cancer as a health issue, comparable worth as an economic issue, and reproductive rights as a civil liberties issue, we cannot address them properly. The increase of women in Congress may be dramatic, but it will not be large enough to demand for these issues the attention they deserve until they are seen as “human issues,” not just “women’s issues.” The association of women with these issues also means that female politics who are more interested in free trade than free formula or more concerned about B-2 bombers than about babysitters may have difficulty being taken seriously. Concurrent with the increase in women’s participation in national politics has been an increase in anti-feminist rhetoric, especially from Republicans. As a result of feminism and other movements, the world in which people rear their children today is very different from the one in which they were reared. It is not surprising
that many people, including those who have benefited from the women’s movement, remain fearful of “feminism.” The movement for gender equality has come far enough that to be openly anti-feminist is a political liability, but not far enough that political advantage can’t be gained by exploiting the fears of a changing society, as the Murphy Brown and “family values” rhetoric shows. As George Bush said, 1992 is a weird political year. For the time being, women are benefitting from the chaos. It remains to be seen whether women candidates will be able to hold onto their giant in a year without rampant anti-incumbent sentiment and whether “family values” and other subtly anti-feminist tactics would have more impact if voters’ attention were not focused on a troubled economy, The “year of the woman” is a remarkable and positive phenomenon, but as long as eight women running for the Senate is surprising, the Congress and the country have a long way to go.
A STATE OF PLAY NURIT CHINN, DC ’20 YH STAFF
L
ast weekend, I stumbled down the stairs of 217 Park Street into the isolated lobby of the Yale Cabaret (Cab, for short). It was 10 p.m., and I had arrived promptly for my dinner reservation preceding the 11 p.m. showing of TBD: A Festival of Rough Drafts. The lobby’s bright block-colored walls were splattered with signatures, inside jokes, and doodles—a mosaic of theatrical process. I stared at a clumsy silhouette of a body outlined in black paint on the west wall of the lobby. It was labeled “Disco Nap.” A Yale School of Drama (YSD) student appeared holding a clipboard, explaining the drawing’s backstory, “Someone was setting up a disco ball show and got tired, so someone else marked his place of rest.” She led me into the Cab’s empty stage space and seated me at large round table at the front. It was clear from the otherwise empty basement that I had taken my 10 p.m. reservation slot slightly too seriously. The Cab—small, intimate, casual—was not really a place where I had to be on time. Our friendly waiter, a YSD student getting their MFA in Acting, handed us the wine list, poking at their iPad and recommending desserts. Later in the evening, the waiter’s friend came up to say hi as they were handing us our appetizer. Confronted with the friend’s street clothes and informality, the waiter flashed us a smile, jokingly whispering to their friend, “You’re performing tonight, go backstage or you’ll ruin the illusion!”
fledged works. Each piece featured a YSD student working outside of their traditional discipline: playwrights as lighting designers, scenic designers as actors, actors as playwrights. Benjamin Benne, DRA ’21, and Sunny Jisun Kim’s, DRA ’21, opened the night with a textural exploration of shadow puppets, ending their piece clad in cartoonish masks lit up by LEDs. The performances closed with Mika Eubanks, DRA ’19, and April Hickman, DRA ’20, detailing nightmarish dating stories and unpacking “The Weaknesses of Men.” But these pieces only make up the bread of an eclectic sandwich. Between these were an animated staged reading, a digital avatar of Liu Xiaobo reciting narratives of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and a tap dancing man in a tuxedo whistling “Memory” from Cats. In some ways, TBD feels representative of what the Cab is all about: cultivating a meaningful playspace where YSD students can work across their disciplines to make theater, in whatever form they choose.
Each season is led by an artistic team, who apply with a specific mission and set of values and are chosen by the Yale Cab’s Board of Directors—a group made up of YSD faculty and students. Dean of the Yale School of Drama, James Bundy, DRA ’95, explains “One of the delightful things about the Cabaret is that each artistic director team gets to set the aesthetic agenda for the year, so the Cabaret always reflects the ways the sensibilities of those leaders meet the Cabaret student body. So the Cabaret is a transparent snapshot each year of the issues and the preoccupations of the current students at the school.” This year’s leadership team is focused on foregrounding the Cab’s legacy as a learning space. Molly FitzMaurice, DRA ’19, one of the Co-Artistic Directors for the Cab’s 51st season, explains, “We are particularly interested in artistic risk, in folks stepping outside of the ways that they’ve worked before or trying on new roles... in healthy process and the ways people work together.”
Prof. Suttor agrees that the value of the Cab is less in the “product” but in the joy of theater-making. “I check my judgment at the door. I truly never think after every show, The Yale Cabaret is now in its 51st season. Its walls are ‘that was good show,’ ‘that was a bad show.’ I’m just happy thick with layers of paint—Professor Matthew Suttor, to be there and happy that they’re doing what they’re dowho is both YSD faculty and the Chair of the Yale Cab- ing. Every performance is a triumph.” aret’s Advisory Board, notes, “If you chip them, it’s like an archaeological layering of production after produc- The Cab offers YSD students the unique opportunity for tion after production. There’s this sort of history literally total artistic freedom that students would not be able to A Festival of Rough Drafts—a debut for the Cab—fea- painted on the walls.” access otherwise. “I think that primarily I see the Cabatured short pieces still in the process of becoming fully ret as a huge strategic asset for a conservatory like ours,” ***
says Dean Bundy. He explains that students at YSD work mostly within an assigned repertoire, and all stages of their artistic process have consistent faculty oversight. “And so, as adult learners, they have a different kind of outcome [at the Cab] when they get to set their own agenda.” Latiana “LT” Gourzong, DRA ’19, this year’s other co-Artistic Director, comments, “There are a lot of things that happen at [YSD], where you might not actually see that person’s final vision, because so many faculty members told them to do it a different way. Whereas in the Cab… you can potentially really see the ‘I really wanted to do this,’ and then see the thing they actually wanted to do, as opposed to seven other versions of it.” FitzMaurice adds, “It is the space where you can do something you can’t do anywhere else.” The Cab puts on 18 shows a year, including an annual Drag show and the Satellite Festival. The Satellite Festival consists of various shows that take place over a weekend, featuring creatives across the graduate schools of Drama, Music, Art and other members of the Yale community. Unlike the rest of the season, the shows that make up the Festival are not confined to the Cab space. Gourzong details, “last year there was something on the loading dock, and in a car.” The 2017-2018 Satellite Festival was described on the Cab’s website as “a collective explosion of creative expression,” with “performances more unusual than the usual.”
All the regular shows in the season are decided through a proposal process. The season is determined on a rolling basis and curated in chunks, with various cycles of calls for proposals. Students first propose their pieces in written form, and then interview with the artistic leadership. There are various formal constraints for shows. They must be able to stage their piece with 75 chairs for audience members; 42 of which have to be at tables for diners; the show must run for fewer than 70 minutes; each show gets a budget of $350.
In a Cabaret proposal to lead the 1994-1995 season, YSD students described the Cabaret as “an aesthetic laboratory of creative adventure... a place which nourishes and is nourished by the larger Drama School community.” They continue, “The Cabaret should offer members of the Drama School community the opportunity—and the encouragement—to be aesthetically daring. And aesthetically exquisite.” The Cab’s history however, demonstrates how Drama School students often had to fight their institution to have this opportunity.
There are many advantages and excitements for this setup. “It’s often a lot of passion projects or works that folks don’t find they have room to do within their department or their curriculum,” FitzMaurice explains, “[but] they can do it in this basement.” The rapid turnover and curate-as-you-go structure allows people to create with a sense of urgency. Dean Bundy explains, “One of the most exciting things about the work is that artists in the Cabaret are able to speak to the current moment… at the Cabaret, I think people are able to respond very rapidly. In fact, there’s a long and happy tradition of people sometimes writing sketches for York Street that are performed the week they were written.”
The Yale Cabaret opened its doors in 1968, the day after Richard Nixon was first elected President of the United States. The Cab was founded and remained under the jurisdiction of the then-Dean of the Drama School, Robert Brustein. The Cab’s first ever production was A Kurt Weill Cabaret, performed by Martha Schlamme and Alvin Epstein. Neither Schlamme, a professional actor Brustein brought in from New York City, nor Epstein, a member of the Yale Repertory Company, were Yale School of Drama students. In fact, none of those who programmed, directed, or performed in this show were students. (Regardless, it was a success: Schlamme and Epstein continued to perform the show on Broadway in New York in the late ’70s.) Although the Cab was, from its inception, intended to function as an experimental space extending from the Drama School, the early days of the Cab paint a different picture.
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One of their central demands became autonomy over their work—the ability to make theater outside of the faculty’s approval power. And their eyes were on the Cab.
The Drama School, in the late 1960s, was in dire need of more space. By 1968, all classes, offices, and theater spaces had been confined to the University Theatre—a space also shared by the professional Yale Repertory Company and the Yale Dramatic Association. When the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity dissolved due to financial problems and lack of membership, Brustein won a University-wide bid to assume the space. The space’s basement was transformed from a fraternity dining hall into the Yale Cabaret—which, from its inception, was especially interested in the possibilities offered by a dine-in theater. For its first five years, however, the Cab was mainly a space controlled by Brustein to stage professional productions. Other than featuring professional performers from in and around New York City, the Yale Cab also became a second performance space for the Yale Repertory Company. The Rep Company, although not made of Drama School students, shared resources and spaces with YSD. As Amauta Marston-Firmino, DRA ’19, a Dramaturgy student and a historian of the Yale Cab, explains, “the Yale Cabaret was just another venue for Yale Repertory Theater… it was basically just a revenue model for [it].” In the early 1970s, the Drama School acquired the vacant Baptist Church on the corner of York and Chapel, which was transformed into what is now known as the Yale Repertory Theatre. By the 1970s, Brustein had three spaces: the University Theatre, the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Yale Cab. His Repertory Company had access to all three; Yale Drama students were more or less constrained to the University Theatre. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the question of the Yale Cab was caught in a web of tensions unfolding between students and administrators in the Drama School over the professional Rep Company. Many YSD students were aggravated by Brustein’s concentration on the professional company, which seemed to supercede his interest in teaching. The lack of opportunity for students in the Drama School grew into a kind of dissent. One of their central demands became autonomy over their work—the ability to make theater outside of the faculty’s approval power. And their eyes were on the Cab.
The Drama School students’ desire to assume the Cab extended beyond their academic hopes. Various things happened at Yale between the years of 1968 and 1973 that pushed students to fight for their chance to make their own theater and tell their stories. The City of New Haven was plagued by urban renewal campaigns, which succeeded in demolishing thousands of homes, often belonging to impoverished communities of color. A routine of riots unfolded in New Haven, including the 1968 city-wide riot centering around the Black Panther trials. At Yale, specifically, there were also a number of changes: in 1968, the African American Studies Department was founded and in 1969, Yale College became co-ed. In September 1968, the Living Theater company performed Paradise Now at the University Theatre, which involved undressing and running into York Street to protest. Eight performers were arrested. Marston-Firmino comments, “All of these things came together at the same time that really influenced the student population—not just at the University but specifically at the Drama School.” In 1969, Drama students organized a committee to lobby Brustein over control of the Cabaret. The inconsistencies in Yale’s archives make this committee slightly hard to track, especially in terms of its size. In different documents, the group is referred to as the Committee of 8, the Committee of 15, and the Committee of 21. Perhaps it kept growing. At first, Brustein rejected their proposal. In a Yale Daily News article from 1969 titled, “What’s Wrong in the Drama School?” Brustein is quoted exclaiming, “No Drama School student will direct, act, or design for any production on any public stage in the University without prior approval of me or my faculty.” (For context, it is worth mentioning that Brustein was believed to be a radical Dean of the Drama School, and introduced many initiatives that have shaped YSD and Yale for years to come. In this same article he is characterized as “the benevolent big daddy of the Drama School.”) Students kept fighting for control over the Cab until the early ’70s, when Brustein conceded and agreed to divide up the Cabaret’s space and grant Drama students production slots to put
up their own pieces. Until the mid-1970s, the Cabaret’s season was split between Drama School students and the Rep Company—both shared the space, alternating show after show. The 1972-1973 season marks the first in which students programmed and performed in the Yale Cabaret. And finally, around 1975, YSD students succeeded in taking over the Cabaret completely. “When that happened, the entire programming model of the Cabaret changed. It became this free space of experimentation. It wasn’t about making revenue for the Yale Rep Theatre, it was now just about allowing students to do things that they didn’t have the opportunity to do elsewhere.” What emerged was a kind of explosion of new and experimental work. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, students put up shows over four days a week. They produced musical shows, improv and sketch comedy, traditional cabarets, new plays, old plays, dance, performance art and more. Finally, in the late ’90s, the Yale Cab was formalized, and rules were introduced, codifying performance nights, show times, and audience capacities. Since YSD students began using the Cab space, it has served as an artistic center for both Yale and New Haven communities. Often surprising, radical, conceptual, and moving, the Cab remains an intimate place for coming together for dinner and a show. *** This past summer, the Summer Cabaret—a separate institution from the Yale Cabaret, with a separate board and structure—closed for a season because of an “internal conflict around issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion,” explained Marston-Firmino in an email. After the controversy, they’re restructuring their Board of Directors and the process by which they choose the Summer Cabaret’s student leadership. This event falls under a larger conversation regarding theater’s contested history as an exclusive artform.
“Several times a year I end up leaping to my feet and weeping buckets of tears because something has happened that is completely life-changing for me.”
The Yale School of Drama is constantly engaging with questions of inclusivity and representation. The history of theater and the history of Yale overlap in their traditions of inaccessibility, and YSD is combatting the double heritages of white cis men as they continue forward. Prof. Suttor explains how YSD and the Yale Rep are changing and expanding beyond “the voices of white heteronormative male playwrights.” However, there is still a long way to go. Suttor describes a conversation he had with one of his students about El Huracán, a play at the Yale Rep earlier this semester that focused on three generations of Latina women. His student described how “that was the first time I saw my family on stage.” Although the Rep and YSD are changing, the Cab has always been a place for students to tell their stories. Armando Huipe, DRA ’19, the Managing Director for the 51st season, explains, “We produce more work by, for, and representing queer people and people of color… If there’s an important political role we play on campus, it has to do with representation on stage.” It is worth noting that YSD and the Rep are making significant strides. The next season of the Rep is particularly exciting in terms of racial representation, featuring Good Faith, which concentrates on cases of racial discrimination in the New Haven Fire Department, an afro-futurist Twelfth Night, and Cadillac Crew, which tells the story of four Civil Rights activists. Recently, the Rep also announced the 2018-2019 No Boundaries Performance Series featuring WET: A DACAmented Journey by Alex Alpharaoh and What Remains by Claudia Rankine.
much trying to work this through. And it’s painful… we’re getting used to feeling uncomfortable. So I think these are big changes. In some sense they are political, but it’s not just about party politics, it’s about the body politic.” In theater, there is political significance in whose bodies are represented on stage, and who is writing, directing, and designing the telling of their stories.
“Some of the most memorable things I’ve seen in the theater anywhere I’ve seen at the Cabaret. Several times a year I end up leaping to my feet and weeping buckets of tears because something has happened that is completely life-changing for me. So I love going there, I love the surprises, I love the passion, I love the risk-taking, I love the immediacy.” Professor Suttor agrees: “It reminds me why I like doing what I do, why I fell in love with this, like the first productions I did as a stu*** dent, it was amazing, and then as a professional you Everyone interviewed for this piece can point to at least lose it. So the Cabaret brings that back.” one favorite memory at the Yale Cabaret. The Cab, which cares about the value of making more than the The Artistic Directors inform me that no matter how critical merit of what’s made, has a propensity for ignit- difficult or tiring the process, it’s always worth it. FitzMaurice exclaims, “This is the conversation, this is the ing memories accompanied by smiles or laughs. play, this is the process worth staying up until one in To offer one of my own: a few weeks ago, I attended the the morning for.” Untitled Kesha Project at the Cab, a musical production featuring many Kesha songs sprinkled with YSD inside There is a common refrain at YSD that rings whenever jokes that I can’t claim to have understood. Before the a student articulates a creative desire to make someperformance began I was asked whether or not I would thing of their own: “Put it in the Cab.” like to include my name in a bowl and possibly be picked to participate in the show. After agreeing, I sat nervously for the first 40 minutes of the show until, low and behold, “Nurit Chinn” was announced to approach the stage for a competitive dance. Not knowing anyone there was liberating but, I lament to say, I was still voted out first (BUT not after initially tying with another dancer, who I went head-to-head with for a small second round before I was publicly determined the worst of the two. I get it.) No hard feelings, though. Really.
“As a school we’re grappling with all these sorts of is- Speaking to faculty revealed the energy present in the sues,” Prof. Suttor comments. “And students are very 217 Park Street basement. Dean Bundy described,
FEATURE BETTER
THAN MARK ROSENBERG, PC ’20 YH STAFF
O
ne moment, Frances Skelton reaches into a wide-shelved black filing cabinet and pulls out a 19thcentury Sanborn Insurance Map with an ornate New Haven seal and neighborhoods color-coded pink, yellow, and sky blue. The next, she scurries into a back room and returns with copies of The Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post-Boy on bluetinted linen paper dating from the 1760s. Look up and she’s disappeared again, off to grab a manila folder filled with materials on the New Haven District Telephone Company, which became the first commercial telephone exchange in the country when George Coy founded it in 1877. Skelton has volunteered in the New Haven Museum’s library for 25 years. These days, you can find her perusing maps, manuscripts, or microfilm every Tuesday through Friday from 2 p.m. to 5. She’ll be smiling as she peers out from under a wild nest of wispy white hair through thick glasses with round wire frames. She’ll probably be wearing a trim blazer over a black or purple button-down with a silver necklace and pearl earrings. And she’ll whip out something for you to read before you can squeeze a sentence in. The New Haven Museum’s library is a sunny room painted a faint yellow with white neoclassical door frames. Around the edges, L-shaped bookshelves form alcoves for wooden desks and chairs. Black filing cabinets with wide drawers line the center, housing maps and drawings. In the back, past the microfilm viewer, wooden doors marked “Staff Only” lead to filing cabinets and towering stacks of books and boxes housing old newspapers and other archives. The collection primarily attracts locals hoping to trace their genealogy or conduct in-depth research on New Haven. According to librarian Ed Surato, the jewel of the library’s archives is its manuscript collections, donated by families, businesses, 16 THE YALE
GOOGLE social clubs, and other organizations, which number over 330. There’s a digital finding aid to help sift through the collections, but Skelton doesn’t use it. In fact, she doesn’t use computers at all. “If someone asks, ‘Gee, I need to find out something about this organization or this person,’ I go to the catalog. But Frances can run to the shelf and find it,” said Surato, who has worked at the New Haven Museum for two and a half years. “I could search through the catalog for a long time and not know that there’s something on a page in a book that Frances found, and she remembered it.” Occasionally, if Skelton needs to jog her memory, she refers to a set of non-digital finding aids kept in binders on a rack in the front right corner of the room. Then she’s off. Her straight-backed walk is almost as fast as Google, and when it comes to New Haven history, her knowledge seems more comprehensive. When I first interviewed Skelton for this story, I told her that I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the Revolutionary War began. Within a minute, she’d brought out a Connecticut Journal newspaper clipping from January 21, 1778 reporting on British troop movements under General Burgoyne. The next day, when I returned, she had, at the ready, a list in calligraphy of the New Haven militia who traveled to the Battle of Lexington, including Nathan Hale, James Hillhouse, and Benedict Arnold. “We have newspapers from the 1700s, or the 1800s, but they’re not indexed,” Surato said. “Frances will remember that this event took place, and if you go to the Daily Herald from 1842, she’ll go to the right page. Her memory is unbelievable. She’ll remember things she’s found, it seems like years ago, that she pulls these things out of thin air.” Skelton is from Texas. She grew up “in the panhandle where it’s dry, near Pampa and Amarillo,” she said, her voice thin and gravelly. She remembers German prisoners of war sweeping the streets of her town during World War II. Her father, who was a metallurgical engineer with 12 years of higher education, gave her a love of history. He developed howitzers during the war, and then designed ceramic shields to protect American spacecraft when they reentered the atmosphere. She went to University
of Texas and got degrees in teaching and library sciences, then worked in the local public school system. Her husband was from Connecticut, so they moved north after he finished military service. They raised six kids, who grew up and left. “All of a sudden I had nothing to do,” Skelton said. So she started volunteering at the New Haven Museum. One afternoon in early November, Skelton took a manila folder, measuring about two feet by four feet, out of a filing cabinet and laid it on a shelf. She pulled out a series of New Haven maps. The first dated from 1641, when the city was little more than the original Nine Squares. She pointed out the names of property owners, written above their plots of land in ornate calligraphy, pausing at Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport, the co-founders of the colony of New Haven. She traced her index finger over a river running through present-day State Street. “Now, when people complain of wet basements, we know why,” she said. The next map was drawn by Ezra Stiles in 1775, during his tenure as the seventh President of Yale College. She pointed out the delicate contour lines in New Haven harbor and the wooden raft where ships used to queue up to come into port. Her mind seemed to flit from one archival fragment to the next. Stiles climbed up the steeple of First Church on the New Haven Green to watch British troops coming to shore, she recalled. “In those days, people went to Sunday Mass twice,” she said. “They built Sabbath Houses on the Green for people who come from far away to stay in.” Many of the researchers who ask Skelton for help are interested in studying the American Revolution and the Civil War, she said. Some, however, hope to
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study less-trodden topics. On another recent afternoon, Skelton and Ainissa Ramirez, a former mechanical engineering professor at Yale, leaned over an 1879 city map drawn, in black ink, from an aerial perspective. The map, which Skelton believed was drawn by someone in a hot air balloon, contained individual houses with their rooflines, shingles, and the friezes above their doorways all sketched in careful detail. Ramirez peered closely at a small house located off Goffe Street, northwest of downtown. This was what she had come to see: the home owned by Sarah Boone, an African American woman who invented the ironing board.
Skelton is reluctant to talk about herself, but she loves chatting with researchers. In a way, the archives are her medium. She pokes and prods and sifts through, seeing what stirs her memory. Sometimes, it’s little oddities that do it. Standing next to a series of shelves filled with tiny wooden drawers, she explained to me that this was the New Haven Index, holding alphabetized cards that catalogue books the Museum has published, probates, newspapers, and unusual deaths. “People running across railroad tracks was the primary cause of that, for some reason,” she said. “I don’t quite understand the rationale of that.”
“Back then, you put a wood plank over two chairs,” explained Ramirez. Boone designed a cheap, collapsible board adapted to make it easier to iron the sleeves and bodies of women’s garments. A former slave, Boone couldn’t read when she was 48 years old, but was literate and held a patent 12 years later. “In another time, she could’ve been a NASA engineer,” Ramirez said.
The Index is an analogue for Skelton’s encyclopedic mind, each little drawer leading to stories and memories dating back centuries, many of which Skelton has helped compile herself. Over the course of each afternoon, she pinballs around the library, returning intermittently to the front corner to consult the Index and manuscript finding aid, which propel her back out again. Sometimes it seems, as she bounces around the room, that she can barely contain how much fun she’s having. After we finished looking at the Index, she paused for a moment. “Things you enjoy, you’ve got a good memory for,” she said, a grin on her face. Here, in the library, she remembers it all.
Ramirez has been working to document Boone’s life for almost a year, but the archival information about her is scarce. “If there’s biographical info, you can [research] inside-out,” she said. “Here, I’m going outside-in. What was life like in New Haven for a former slave who couldn’t read?” Skelton showed Ramirez where Boone lived and what her house looked like. Then, she pulled out another 19thcentury city map, with houses color-coded pink (brick) and yellow (wood). The affluent neighborhoods around Yale’s campus were mostly dotted with pink. Farther northwest, they faded to yellow. Next to one house, at 30 Winter Street, sat a small signature: “S. Boone.” “Without a patent, and without a home, there would’ve been no evidence that she existed,” Ramirez said. “That almost teared me up.”
CULTURE FINDING HOME IN FOOD NATHAN KIM, MY ’22
Walk down High Street on any given night and you may find yourself drawn to the delicious smell wafting from the Asian American Cultural Center. If you’re a fan of Asian food, you’ve come to the right place—home-cooked dinners are some of the most popular events held at the AACC. The recent Chinese American Student Association (CASA) Hot Pot night attracted 73 students to sign up. “Tastes Like Home,” hosted by the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students at Yale (Alseas), ran out of food midway through. Riding on this wave of success, the Vietnamese Student Association (ViSA) plans to hold Pho Night on Nov. 9, and Korean American Students at Yale (KASY ) will organize an upperclassmen Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 15. Both events are expected to be as popular as Hot Pot night and “Tastes Like Home,” with Pho Night having 64 people officially signed up so far and KASY’s guest list having completely filled up only in a few short days. Asian cultural clubs help bring their cuisine and culture to Yale to enrich it—and, thankfully, students seem to be embracing this effort with all their might. These events really flourish because of the diversity within the “Asian food” umbrella—no evening is too similar to another. The inaugural KASY First-Year Dinner in September, for example, had a massive variety of traditional Korean food from spicy pork belly to scallion and kimchi pancakes. On the other hand, CASA and ViSA’s events distinguish themselves by focusing on specific, iconic dishes of Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. Hot pot and pho are both comfort foods, and their familiar appeal is almost surely a major contributor to their popularity. “Pho just makes me feel good inside,” comments Anna Tran, TD ’22, who is planning to attend Pho Night. “I had it a lot when I was at home.” Home is a recurring concept these events explore, with Alseas’ “Tastes Like Home” addressing this topic explicitly. “The title reflects a longing to recreate the gustatory experiences of ‘home,’ that we do not often find at Yale,” a representative of Alseas reported in a text exchange. Yale Dining’s representation of Asian cuisine is indeed an oftcriticized topic, and their efforts definitely aren’t comprehensive enough to replicate a feeling of “home” for most Asian students. Tran says she keeps an eye out for events at the AACC because of “the lack of general authentic Asian food options in [Yale’s] surrounding area.” Although several restaurants like Mecha Ramen and Bonchon are popular for their Asian food variety, New Haven lacks a Chinatown area that would promote the growth of such local restaurants. Within Yale itself, the presence of Asian food is similarly noticeable but mostly “inauthentic,” as first-year Philena Sun, MY ’22, comments. Although Sun appreciates the efforts of Yale Dining, “it’s definitely not [her] mom’s cooking”. 18 THE YALE HERALD
These events also help connect similar cultural clubs and their members. “Tastes Like Home” in particular had a specific goal as a multicultural partnership between Alseas and ViSA, Malaysian and Singaporean Student Association (MASA), Student Association of Thais at Yale (SATAY ), and the Indonesia Yale Association (IYA). According to the board of Alseas, “Tastes Like Home” was intended to be “an opportunity for the Southeast Asian student groups to come together and expose each other and the wider Yale community to the culinary cultures of their respective countries.” They also commented that these groups and cultures had a distinct “cultural, economic, and political interconnectedness” that was rarely explored or embraced. As well as facilitating connections across cultures, these events serve as social spaces for the creation of friendships within single cultures. Some events, like the KASY FirstYear Dinner, aim to help attendees meet new people associated with the club. KASY Social Chair Jiyoung Kang, BF ’21, remarks, “at least for these first-years, we wanted to create a larger community in KASY.” CASA’s Hot Pot night, on the other hand, marketed itself towards forming closer bonds in small groups called “families” that received a discount over individual sign-ups. These “families” have nothing to do with blood relations—they are groups of upperclassmen and underclassmen paired together by CASA with the intent of forming a close relationship over the course of the school year. Through a shared love of food and Asian culture, both Hot Pot night and KASY First-Year Dinner were created to bring people together. Although Yale Dining’s Asian food may not be truly “authentic,” cultural club events on campus bring a little hope by reminding students of their own home. Their popularity never fails to show, and many events like JASU’s Takoyaki night and TAS’s Mid-Autumn Mooncake Festival boasted attendance in the hundreds. Students understandably want new social spaces and fresh ways of making intercultural connections. These events promote acceptance of niche cultures and a space for Asian students to be comfortable many miles from their own homes. As Kang exclaims, “Warmth! Home! Family! Community!”
JUST SOME TEENAGE DIRTBAGS AMANDA THOMAS, SY ’21 At that age, it’s about seeing things with a keener, more critical eye. Spring Awakening definitely doesn’t shy away from criticizing everything. In one song in the musical, deftly called “Totally Fucked,” Melchior, a sexpositive German boy, realizes he’s in a tough spot. As a solution, he bursts into song about the hopelessness of the situation. There seems to be none. He realizes he is totally fucked. Who has never felt like that? One line is “Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah,” which the chorus of teenagers repeat with as much contempt for the unfair and corrupt school system they’ve been placed inside as they can possibly muster. While Melchior and others sing, the entire cast breaks out into odd movements, contorting their arms and legs into positions that make them look like they’re having an orgasm, more intense with every second. As the performers dance in a claustrophobic, chaotic manner, you’re forced to realize that being a teenager isn’t all just fun, worthy of our nostalgia. Melchior’s sticky situation leads to his expulsion after the school administrators decide his sexual knowledge could corrupt other students. There are people and institutions that simply do not want people to be informed, even if it’s their job keep them educated.The cast’s commitment to contorting around the stage with loose limbs, belting out expletives, and being open about sex before the audience is honestly refreshing. It’s a play that finds the right balance between being grounded and being embarrassed. It exudes an awkwardness that makes it sit with you in both comfortable (you know this feeling!) and uncomfortable (you wish you didn’t know this feeling!) ways. One of the musical’s most important messages is that everyone should have the right to an education. Not just formal education, but the right to know things about their bodies, their life, and the world they’re living in. It is the lack of education about her own body that ultimately leads Wendla, one of the protagonists, to pregnancy and a tragic ending. If one of the fun things about being a teenager is that you are discovering everything with a new, maturing eye, one of the scarier things is that if you don’t know practical and helpful information about your body and others aren’t telling you, you’re only hurting yourself. Go see Spring Awakening to think about what it’s like to be a high schooler, or just someone who lives in ignorance. Or maybe to think about how privileged we are to have access to accurate sex education, or just education about our bodies and health. Or maybe to be thankful we don’t live in 19th century Germany. Or maybe to laugh, cry, and dance in your seat for two hours. Whatever the reason, Spring Awakening promises to entertain.
TENDER, DEFIANT, UNMISTAKABLY AFRICAN
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AMELIA LINETT, JE ’21
There’s nothing quite like watching a bubblegum pink movie about lesbians after a tiring day at school. Sure enough, on Tuesday, close to 50 students gathered in Pauli Murray’s Lighten Theater to watch the new queer Kenyan film, Rafiki, and talk with one of the lead actresses, Samantha Mugatsia. This event, sponsored by Yale African Students Association (YASA), marks the first time their annual African Week has incorporated queerness into their celebrations and discussion of African culture, politics, and identity. The movie follows Kena, whose daily life of playing soccer, working at her father’s shop and hanging out with her friends is suddenly disrupted when she falls in love with another girl, Ziki. That their fathers are bitter political rivals, competing for election to the same post, further complicates a relationship already dangerous in a country in which LGBTQ people face intimidation and discrimination on a daily basis. Throughout the film, we see the relationship between Kena and Ziki blossom despite these conditions—but we also see it nearly destroyed under the threat of ostracism from their families and the violence that ensues when neighbors find them kissing. There is a substantial lack of representation of African voices in the international film setting, and even more so when it comes to African films featuring queer and trans characters. It took the director, Wanuri Kahui, 11 years to make the film, seven of which were entirely spent searching for funding: clearly, there are serious barriers facing African filmmakers who are trying to tell the stories of LGBTQ folk in their own communities—not a topic the government or mainstream agencies are eager to support. Rafiki, which has gained international recognition (including a 10 minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival), marks a huge achievement for the Kenyan film industry, for Kahui herself, and for queer Africans who can now see at least some version of their story reflected in film. Back in Kenya, however, the picture is far from optimistic. In the post-film Q&A, Samantha Mugatsia admitted that she thinks her country just “isn’t ready for [the movie] yet.” Despite growing activism and resistance, Kenya still upholds the ban on gay sex established during British colonial rule,
and people found “guilty” can be sentenced to up to 21 years in prison. Although the government lifted the ban on Rafiki for seven days to allow it to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, it has been received with mixed reviews in its country of origin. When Mugatsia returned from touring abroad, the cast, crew and their friends set up a system of safe-houses to ensure that she and her co-leads were safe in their own cities. That said, she also described being constantly bolstered and moved by accounts from people in Kenya who saw the film and felt their own struggles reflected in the violence, pain, and love within the story. For many students, Africa Week presents an opportunity to reclaim the image of their continent, to tell a story of the diaspora that reflects the diversity of cultures, experiences, and perspectives that are often flattened and not afforded the time and space they deserve, both at Yale specifically and in the West in general. Openly discussing experiences of queerness within this diaspora is part of YASA’s goal to support all groups in Africa and, through dialogue and connection, create an Africa that every member of the diaspora can claim as their own. After all, the title of this year’s Africa Week is, “My Africa Is: Mine.” For LGBTQ people living and studying in the US, this film reminded us of the privilege and relative safety many of us have, while at the same time reaffirming the importance of continuing to advocate and fight for equality even after it seems that many battles in our own country are close to being won. For queer Africans, the film is part of a movement towards greater acceptance, marking an important precedent in bringing one particular story, in the midst of an incredible complexity and range of experiences, to light, in a place where it would’ve been easier to let it stay in the dark. As a queer, black, trans person who advocated tirelessly for women’s, LGBTQ and civil rights, Pauli Murray would surely approve.
When Mugatsia returned from touring abroad, the cast, crew and their friends set up a system of safe-houses to ensure that she and her co-leads were safe in their own cities.
REVIEWS thank u, next C
A
s it turns out, the best way to win the breakup is not to talk shit about your ex, get with someone new first, or chop off all of your hair. Ariana Grande schooled the entirety of the sentient world on Saturday when she dropped “thank u, next,” her first release since the end of her very well documented whirlwind engagement to manboy praying mantis Pete Davidson. “thank u, next,” the first track off what Grande says will be an album by the same name, is everything you don’t expect from a breakup song, especially when the relationship in question was so laden with spectacle. For Grande to release a cheeky, passive-aggressive anthem would have been trite and predictable. Instead, she hit us with a song that is benevolent, earnest, mature, and delightful to listen to.
Grande spares no one in “thank u, next,” least of all herself. On the song, she discusses herself with the same commitment to openness that she applies to her past partners. In the song’s second verse, she acknowledges that some say she moves on too fast—a comment that came when she started dating and got engaged to Davidson immediately following her split from Miller. Despite this, she says, she has a new love interest: herself. She expresses her wishes to get married, and get married only once. Grande also addresses her estranged father, a topic that does not often come up in her music. And in a sweet moment that has flown largely under the radar, she even describes her mother walking her down the aisle. Throughout, she displays a genuinely impressive level of self-awareness.
In fairness, the song’s origins trace back to a catty tweet from Grande, deleted almost as soon as it hit the web on Thursday last week. After Davidson broke the silence on their breakup and mocked their shortlived engagement in a promotional clip for that week’s episode of SNL, Grande offered her own eviscerating commentary online. “for someone who claims to hate relevancy u sure love clinging to it huh,” she wrote, and then: “thank u, next.”
“thank u, next” is a treat for the way Grande lays bare her reflections on relationships and self-love.
The saga could easily have ended there, with Davidson behaving schmuckily to protect his bruised ego, Grande bitching him out for it online, and neither party looking particularly good in the public eye. Instead, two days later, less than an hour before SNL aired, Grande released “thank u, next.” From the song’s twinkly outset, it is clear that Grande is flipping the script. While the title could read as flippant or glib, in the song Grande is heartily sincere. Rather than hint at her exes, she names them outright—Sean, Ricky, Pete, Malcolm—and thanks each for all she learned from being with him. The chorus rings out: “Thank you, next. I’m so fucking grateful for my ex.” That Grande addresses the men in her life and sings about them plainly is a shockingly gracious decision. In the world of breakup songs, allusive language tends to loom large (think Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” or ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All”). Of course, Grande is no stranger to naming names; after all, a track on Sweetener, her last album, bears the title “pete davidson.” But spelling out her past relationships in this way—especially her relationship with Mac Miller (“Malcolm”), whose death many people on the internet blamed on Grande—seems to be a bold statement about cutting through the clutter. Grande is advocating for frankness and transparency, a stance that makes sense when you consider that she has been an endless source of fodder for celebrity gossip generators, Twitter wars, conspiracy theorists, and meme lords in recent months. 20 THE YALE HERALD
EVE SNEIDER, MC ’19 YH STAFF
For Grande to release a cheeky, passiveaggressive anthem would have been trite and predictable. Instead, she hit us with a song that is benevolent, earnest, mature, and delightful to listen to. But it is also just lovely to listen to. The song is very much in Grande’s wheelhouse; her voice is buttery and melodic on another confident, pop-inflected R&B ballad. We know to expect the crooning chorus and the impressive belts. Her voice really is incredible and everyone knows it. Still, “thank u, next” is far from her splashiest work. It is mellow, calm, and collected. Grande is not trying to prove anything, to us or to herself.
PARTY FOR ONE NICOLE MO, BK ’19 YH STAFF
E
verybody loves a good breakup song. There’s something about it that captures both the best and worst in us, whether it’s the mourner or the forgiver or the pissed off car-keyer. And while there’s a time and place for those bleak lost-love songs, my favorite breakup genre by far is the celebratory one, the dancing-on-my-own, never-needed-a-man-in-my-life one. Lucky for me, that seems to be the theme of this year, as we’ve been gifted with a treasure trove of warm, loving songs exploring some of the ugliest emotions. Among the biggest hits in recent weeks (including Robyn’s new album and Ariana Grande’s fantastic “thank u, next”) is Carly Rae Jepsen’s return single, her first since the critically-acclaimed Emotion came out in 2015. “Party For One” is anthemic, blissful, and—exactly as the name suggests—an unapologetic celebration of being alone. Ever since she released “Call Me Maybe” in 2012, Jepsen has developed a reputation for crafting stupidly catchy pop songs that turn foundational emotions into the best sing-along tracks. “Party For One” doesn’t stray far from this formula, and while you could fault Jepsen for staying within her comfort zone, you could hardly argue that she doesn’t dominate it. The song starts by acknowledging the difficulties of moving on—“Tried to let it go and say I’m over you / I’m not over you”—before the repetitive riff takes a backseat to lush synths, crisp percussion, and Jepsen’s increasingly confident declarations of self-reliance. The glossy production builds on Jepsen’s ownership of being alone, making it sound more attractive with every verse.
“You don’t want my love / If you don’t care about me / I’ll just dance for myself / Back on my beat,” she sings on the chorus, with a slight rasp and carefree nonchalance. It’s not just a song about self-love; it’s a song that makes selflove sound cool. “Party For One” all but makes explicit the physical aspects of romantic independence (“Making love to myself / Back on my beat”) but it’s not just a song about masturbation, in the same way it’s not not a song about masturbation. There’s a lot involved in self-care, both physically and emotionally—all Jepsen seems to be saying is that it should be fun. The music video for “Party For One” starts with Jepsen checking into a hotel, majorly channeling Margot from The Royal Tenenbaums. Once the song starts, it becomes a montage of vignettes looking in on Jepsen and the other idiosyncratic characters letting loose in the privacy of their rooms. From the older woman packing a dildo to the man eating spaghetti by the handful in the bathtub, everybody dances, cries, and finds freedom of expression in their solitude. At the pre-climactic bridge of the song, the power cuts out and forces everyone down to the lobby: a dozen individual parties converge on a moment of communal revelry as the song explodes in the background. But the video doesn’t end there, instead concluding with the cast silently taking the elevator back to their rooms, Jepsen closing her door and happily sliding to the floor. Both the song and video are a reminder that we’re not alone in feeling alone. But more importantly, they also remind us that even when given the chance to be with others, there’s value in choosing to dance by and for ourselves.
PATRIOT ACT WITH HASAN MINHAJ U
p until now, Netflix’s success foraying into political talk shows has been marginal at best. My most effective illustration of this? I didn’t watch a single episode of a single one of their original political talk shows until the premiere of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. To be fair, I am more familiar with Minhaj’s comedy work than with the work of the other hosts on Netflix, but I do like Michelle Wolf, for example! Why didn’t I watch her show? Why did I tune into Patriot Act within a week and a half of its premiere? Maybe I don’t have the self-awareness to totally know the answer, but the show got great buzz from critics that I like and follow and so I checked it out and immediately got hooked. In the opening episode, Minhaj tackles affirmative action. He focuses specifically on the people of various Asian backgrounds who are trying to eliminate affirmative action in the admissions process at Harvard and other universities around the country. Minhaj structures the episode as almost a letter from him to other Asians. This approach gives the episode a sense of community and cultural specificity while still being widely accessible to non-Asian people. If Minhaj were a white guy talking down to Asian Americans, he would be the worst—but because he is a member of the community, he is making a vital contribution to the discussion surrounding affirmative action. Minhaj’s jokes always draw from a deep well of cultural knowledge that speak to people with shared experiences while still being
EMMA KEYES, PC’19 YH STAFF
funny to everyone else. If you watched his stand-up special Homecoming King, you’ll understand what I mean. Minhaj’s grasp on comedy needs no improvement. The other two episodes that have come out so far (a new episode is released every Sunday) center on Saudi Arabia and Amazon—and both do excellent deep dives into the scary undercurrents of these subjects. A major part of Minhaj’s effectiveness is that he’s hilarious while being incredibly informative, which brings to mind the heyday of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, although Minhaj doesn’t do interviews and rather than focusing on the given news of the day, he focuses on one topic per episode. So the show is actually more like Last Week Tonight than a daily political commentary/comedy show and the formula works very well with Minhaj’s commanding stage presence. Minhaj uses his presence to keep the audience’s attention throughout each episode; he’s up on stage entirely by himself and he doesn’t even have a desk to hide behind. That ability to make the stage work for him allows Minhaj to deliver incisive and biting political commentary at the same time that he’s cracking jokes. Up there in front of the audience, he can get away with anything and everything. Patriot Act is both a show for our particular political moment but will no doubt adapt itself to many more moments to come.
Yale University
FALL 2018 GRADUATE STUDENT SEMINARS IN
JUDAIC STUDIES PRESENTS:
Jewish Thought Colloquium
November 7th , 12:00pm Mara Benjamin Mount Holyoke College CHAIR OF JEWISH STUDIES; IRENE KAPLAN LEIWANT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JEWISH STUDIES
Medieval Jewish Studies Workshop
November 14th, 12:00pm David Stern Harvard University
HARRY STARR PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL AND MODERN JEWISH AND HEBREW LITERATURE AND PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES
Medieval Jewish Studies Workshop
November 28th, 12:00pm Ephraim Kanarfogel Yeshiva University
WHERE
Judaica Collection Reading Room Sterling Memorial Library 3rd Floor, Room 335b
For more information contact Renee Reed @ renee.reed@yale.edu or 203-432-0843
E. BILLI IVRY UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF JEWISH HISTORY, LITERATURE AND LAW CHAIR, REBECCA IVRY DEPARTMENT OF JEWISH STUDIES
Jewish History Colloquium
December 6th, 1:00pm Alma Heckman UC—Santa Cruz
A LIGHT KOSHER LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED Patron T. Spielberg
NEUFELD-LEVIN CHAIR OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES HISTORY DEPARTMENT, JEWISH STUDIES
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Silver Contributor Dan Feder David Applegate Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy
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