heraldlivissue3 by The Yale Herald

The Yale Herald Heral d Volume LIV, Number 3 New Haven, Conn. Friday, September 21, 2012

Pipeline dreams

From the staﬀ Earlier today, I saw that a friend and fellow Yale student had tweeted something in all caps that caught my eye. It said, “YO SHOUT OUT TO THE PEOPLE WHO DO THEIR JOBS. IF YOU DON’T DO YOUR JOB, FUCK YOU, OTHER PEOPLE WANT YOUR JOBS.” I showed it to another Herald editor, who also thought it was a really striking tweet. It’s not exactly breaking news that there’s an employment crisis in America right now. But did you know how bad it is in New Haven? Right now, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national unemployment rate is 8.3 percent—and the rate in New Haven is 13.6 percent. According to the New Haven Independent, there were 6,400 jobless people in the city by the most recent official count. It’s important to remember that the unemployment rate doesn’t account for all people who don’t have jobs—only for the ones who are actively seeking them. So officially “unemployed” people don’t just really need jobs, they really want them. Twitter gets you thinking. All of this is to say that this week’s cover story is by one of our favorite senior editors, Sam Bendinelli, BK ’13, and it’s about the organization “New Haven Works” and their new jobs “pipeline.” The project is intended to identify open positions at local businesses train jobless New Haveners to fill them. Take a look inside for the awesome, non-Sparknotes version. We’ve also got a whole bunch of other stuff for you—turn the pages to find hospitals, Constitution Day, the football team, the Robert Adams retrospective at the YUAG, and more. Also, make sure you’re checking out the Bullblog, newly famous for breaking the news that Chipotle is coming to the Have! We all want jobs, we all want burritos. Herald love, Emily Rappaport Editor-in-chief

The Yale Herald Volume LIV, Number 3 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Sept. 21, 2012

EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Emily Rappaport Managing Editors: Emma Schindler, John Stillman Executive Editor: Lucas Iberico Lozada Senior Editors: Sam Bendinelli, Nicolás Medina Mora, Clare Sestanovich Culture Editors: Elliah Heifetz, Andrew Wagner Features Editors: Ashley Dalton, Sophie Grais, Olivia Rosenthal Opinion Editor: Micah Rodman Reviews Editor: Colin Groundwater Voices Editor: Eli Mandel Design Editors: Serena Gelb, Lian FumertonLiu, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Photo Editor: Julie Reiter BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: William Coggins, Evan Walker-Wells Director of Advertising: Shreya Ghei Director of Finance: Stephanie Kan Director of Development: Joe Giammittorio ONLINE STAFF: Online Editors: Ariel Doctoroff, Carlos Gomez, Lucas Iberico Lozada, Marcus Moretti Webmaster: Navy Encinias Bullblog Editor-in-chief: John Stillman Bullblog Associate Editors: Alisha Jarwala, Grace Lindsey, Cindy Ok, Eamon Ronan, Jesse Schreck, Maude Tisch

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 20122013 academic year for 65 dollars. Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: Emily.Rappaport@yale.edu Web: www.yaleherald.com 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 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day. Cover by Serena Gelb YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 Sam Bendinelli, BK ‘13, surveys New Haven’s plan for a comprehensive jobs pipeline amidst the growing inﬂuence of organized labor.

VOICES

FEATURES

Pooja Salhotra, ES ‘16, sits down with Valerie Horsley, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.

Ariel Katz, MC ‘15, looks at the different cultures of entrepreneurship that are growing at Yale and in New Haven.

Natalie Wolﬀ, MC ‘14, reﬂects on medicine and life on Yale-New Haven Hospital’s neurology ward.

Kohler Bruno, SM ‘16, checks out the relationship between politics and religion at the United Church on the Green.

OPINION: Micah Jones, TD ‘16, on life away from Old Campus, and Noah Remnick, ES ‘15, on life away from Yale campus.

Aaron Gertler, TD ‘15, examines how the Yale football team will move forward after a series of major setbacks.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Alexander Saeedy, TC ‘16, and Elliah Heifetz, TC ‘16, explore the live-recording side of Yale’s a capella scene. Also: Toad’s and a School of Art critique.

Julie Reiter, BK ’14, visits the YUAG for the Robert Adams retrospective. Also: G.O.O.D. Music, Grizzly Bear, Kreayshawn, and Sleepwalk with Me.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:

Chipotle Okay, so this one is a no-brainer. With the construction of everyone’s favorite Mexican “Grille” underway (you heard it from the Herald first!), New Haven’s transformation from city to strip mall is nearly complete. But unlike Origins, which caters exclusively to hapless boys hoping to get their moms a nice soap because they just don’t know what else to do, Chipotle is the one chain we really need. For some reason, the other south o’ the border restaurants just aren’t cutting it. I want my chicken burrito with pinto beans and I want it now. —Ariel Doctoroff YH Staff

The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM bowling.

D: When your favorite coffee shop knows your name It is customary for the friendly man or woman behind the [insert café here] counter to ask for your name when you order whatever. And when he/she calls out “Chaifrappimochalatte for Ariel!” you are lulled into a false sense of familiarity, which is actually kind of nice and very helpful for identification purposes. And if you go enough, that foxy barista you have been eyeing might say, “Oh, no, don’t tell me, you’re Ariel.” Oh happy day! Right? Well, sorta. Yeah, the first name basis thing means that you know what it feels like to live in Star’s Hollow but it also means that you are spending too much time in one place and need to get a life. —Ariel Doctoroff YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

No love for the founders There are a lot of things I love about the United States and according to my parents and fifth grade teacher, that’s due to a little document I like to call the Constitution. Only in this great nation can so many certifiably crazy people serve in Congress! Only here can a robot run for president! Luckily, we get one day to celebrate our country’s founding. Too bad no one knows when it is, so we just spent the day bitching about reading responses and secret videos. Disclaimer: I tried to make this funny, but it’s just kind of sad. —Ariel Doctoroff YH Staff

BY THE

BOOM/BUST INCOMING Romney’s 47% remark Earlier this year, Mitt screwed up talking to campaign donors. Thanks to a newly-publicized secret video, he’s paying for his gaffes now. While your conservative friends are probably real eager to put this story behind them, it’ll be sticking around for a while. The footage may be from May, but the content is all too relevant today. Get used to it/develop astute opinions NOW.

OUTGOING Harvard cheating scandal After drawn-out investigations and discussions of a cheating scandal supposedly involving 125 of our Cambridge counterparts, there are honestly just not so many new things you can say about academic dishonesty. Until Harvard comes to a decision on this one, it seems to be on the back burner, as we focus on the weighty task of complaining about our own work.

NUMBERS

TYNG CUP STANDINGS 1. Pierson 2. Timothy Dwight 3. Saybrook 4. Davenport 5. Silliman 6. Branford 7. Trumbull 8. Ezra Stiles 9. Jonathan Edwards 10. Morse 11. Berkeley 12. Calhoun

57 50 45 40 33 29 29 23 22.5 22.5 11 6

INDEX 7.8 Thickness of the iPhone 5, in millimeters.

TOP FIVE 5 4 3 2 1

Places for “impromptu” Instagram photo shoots

Shake Shack

199 Retail price for a 16GB iPhone 5 with a two-year contract, in dollars.

2,000,000 Preorders placed for the iPhone 5 through Apple within its first 24 hours of availability.

Beinecke Plaza

The back row of the ECON 115 lecture hall balcony. Bonus points if Udry notices!

Percentage of current iPhone users who intend to upgrade to the iPhone 5 by the end of 2013.

Bass during peak work hours. The people giving you death glares are just jealous!

18 Number of countries with a 2010 GDP greater than Apple’s market cap.

Rite-Aid.

Sources: 1, 2) Apple 3) InformationWeek 4) AYTM Research 5) CNBC —Maude Tisch YH Staff The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

SITTING DOWN WITH VALERIE HORSLEY by Pooja Salhotra (Katherine Garvey/YH)

Dr. Valerie Horsley has been an assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the Yale School of Medicine since 2009. She recently received the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award, a grant given to two women every three years in recognition of their original scientific research. This grant, given by the Genetic Society of America, funds genetic research in humans and animals. The Herald sat down with Horsley to learn more about her current research as well as about the challenges and triumphs that researchers face in the lab. YH: At what point in your life did you first become interested in the biological sciences? VH: When I was 12, I took a life sciences course, and that just made me love biology. Trying to understand how our bodies work and how they are able to make us functioning beings is interesting to me. YH: Did you ever consider becoming a doctor, or did you always know that you wanted to do research? VH: Yes, when you are going through school, you don’t really know about all of the careers in science that are available, so I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor because that’s what I thought that you did if you were interested in science. That was basically my plan before I went to college. But once I started learning more about the experiments that went into what we know in biology, I realized that I was really interested in learning about how things work rather than just treating people who are sick. I still didn’t really know about research, so I thought I wanted to teach so that I could continue learning about biology. But when I went to grad school I just got hooked on research. And now I get to do both. YH: For you, which is more gratifying—teaching students or doing research in a lab? VH: They are different. Teaching gives you more interaction with students. I interact with students in the lab, but it’s different. YH: How is that interaction different? VH:In the lab I’m kind of like a mother hen. I guide them for a long period of time, and I teach them in lots of dif-

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

ferent avenues, but mostly I’m trying to get them to think like [scientists] and design their experiments. Research is also very frustrating, so I’m sort of their cheerleader at the same time—I try to keep them motivated. In teaching a course, yes, you have to keep it interesting. But most of the students in the course are already very interested in learning the material, so it just creates a different dynamic. YH: You mentioned that research can be frustrating. What’s the biggest challenge you face in the lab on a day-to-day basis? VH: I think in the lab what is most challenging is the fact that experiments don’t work all the time. So it’s frustrating because a lot of time is spent trying to figure out why they didn’t work. You just have to stay positive. YH: What is it like when you discover something new? VH: It’s very exciting! What we do is very passionate, so we are always excited about learning something new. It’s a fun job. YH: Can you talk briefly about what specific research is going on in your lab? VH: I’m really interested in the skin tissue and how it is able to form during development and maintain itself during our lifetime. We are studying the cellular and molecular pathways that are involved in that.

YH: Is that a national organization? VH: Each university has its own IACUC committee, which is made up of scientists, laypeople, and administrators. YH: How do we know that what works on the animals can be applied to humans? VH: We don’t. But it’s really hard to work on humans, so the best thing we can do is to try it on animal models. And many of the same principles that we learn about in model systems can be applied to humans—about 90 percent of our genome is the same. A lot of the therapies that come from biomedical research have come from model system. YH: What has been some of the most exciting research you’ve done? VH: One I mentioned earlier is the fat in the skin. People have ignored that forever. We found that in two days the fat can double in size in the skin, and that parallels how the hair grows. We found that if the fat doesn’t regenerate, you don’t get hair growth. We also found that if you wound skin, the fat needs to regenerate to get wound healing. Another project that’s really exciting is that we have been able to understand more about how keratinocytes— skin cells—form during development, and we are hoping that will give us ways to make more keratinocytes for burn victims by using human embryonic stem cells.

YH: You recently won the Rosalind Franklin Award. What research is that grant going to fund? VH: What I really want to do is develop some mouse models to study some of the things we are interested in. One of the things we just recently found was that the fat in the skin is really important for tissue homeostasis and regeneration, and so I hope to make mouse models that specifically mark those fat cells so that we can study them more in depth.

YH: How did you end up coming to Yale? VH:I was in New York doing my postdoc at The Rockefeller University, and then I just did a job search looking at different schools on the East Coast. Yale was really the best fit for me. I really like it because it’s such a collaborative and supportive environment, and the science is great.

YH: Have you ever faced any ethical dilemmas in the labs in terms of the use of animal testing? VH: I do a lot of paperwork to be able to use animals, and it’s a very regulated process. There’s a body called the IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) that oversees what we do, and they make sure that all of the experiments that we are using animals for are ethical.

YH: What advice would you give to students whose dream job is to be a scientific researcher? VH: Work hard, but not too hard. Stay positive, and have fun. And definitely start doing research whenever you think you can put enough time into it that you will learn from it. —This interview was condensed by the author

A NEUROLOGIST’S APPRENTICE by Natalie Wolﬀ ave you been to a hospital before?” the doctor asks me. “Not while conscious,” I joke. It’s my first day shadowing at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and I struggle to keep pace with the strides of the attending physician as we head from the lobby to the elevators. My attempt at humor doesn’t seem to go over well, so when the next question is, “Are you comfortable being around very sick people?” I just nod, and hope that I am telling the truth. As a child, being a doctor seemed unexciting compared to my true ambition. I wanted to be a magician. Not the corny kind that people hire for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, but a real magician, like the South African sangomas—to be politically incorrect, witch doctors—that I, born in Cape Town, had heard so much about. I emptied all of the bottles of my mother’s spice cabinet into a bowl of water to make healing “soup.” I practiced talking to my cat. I tried, Matilda-style, to move chalk with my mind. To my surprise, my magical powers failed to develop. As it turned out, I wasn’t even particularly good at ordinary magic tricks. I would invariably lose the ace of spades, and if I ever made a coin disappear up my sleeve, it was assured that it would not be found again. So, I settled for my backup plan. A battered black doctor’s bag, filled with real bandages and a fake stethoscope, replaced my top hat and deck of cards. I began to immerse myself in the lore of medicine, and found that it, like magic, had its own sages and lexicon. Galen and Vesalius sounded marvelous when muttered like an incantation, and Alexander Fleming, in a device as clever as any, turned moldybread into a vaccine. When I started to grow mold in a plastic bag, however, my mother at last drew the line. It was at about this time that I read the book that would set me firmly on the path to doctordom: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. A series of case studies by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, the book touched my heart and sparked my curiosity. I daydreamed about the poor Lost Mariner, sufferer of Korsakoff’s syndrome and unable to form new memories. I practiced saying the words: prosopagnosia, aphasia, proprioception. Neurology—the study of disorders of not just the brain, but also the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system—fascinated me. Ten years later, now a pre-med history of science and medicine major, I found myself at the career services office looking at brochures for different hospital shadowing programs. Most pre-med students do some kind of shadowing. The brochures

didn’t appeal to me, so I reached out to a physician at Yale-New Haven, and, requisite emails sent and connections made, was set up with a shadowing experience in, most wonderfully, the neurology ward. With first-day jitters gnawing at my stomach, I biked down to the hospital in sensible shoes and slacks, greeted my doctor-mentor, and trailed after him into the elevator to the sixth floor. I was handed a white coat and had to roll up the cuffs several times to make it fit. There were no Grey’s Anatomy-style lockers, just a conference room where I threw my backpack on top of a counter. Introducing myself to the team, my nerves settled somewhat as I saw that these neurologists, like most, fell along Sacksian lines: Jewish, balding, bespectacled, and equal parts quirk, intelligence, and compassion. I often think that my prospects in the neurology field may be limited by the fact that I will probably never be bald. Here, however, my presence was accepted without surprise. The residents begin discussing new cases and old problems with the attending physician. He doesn’t talk much, occasionally probing them for details or further explanations. At one point, he quizzes a med student about a particular disorder. She rattles off some facts as if reciting from a med school textbook. At another, there’s a mysterious scan pulled up on the computer; nobody really knows what’s wrong with this patient. “It’s GBS,” says the attending, and the residents begin to argue. Guillain-Barré syndrome is an acute polyneuropathy—rare, dangerous, and causing paralysis. The attending quickly cuts off the discussion. “Google Image it,” he says, and when the typical scan is compared to that of the patient, they look exactly the same. The residents are crankily respectful. I’m glad that nobody asks me anything, and amazed that doctors use Google Images. We do rounds, and I realize that the people here are not, by and large, the type to mistake their wives for hats. Yale-New Haven is on the cutting-edge of clinical trials and research on strokes and epilepsy: the Stroke Service cares for patients from all over New England, and the Epilepsy Unit takes referrals from around the world. Most of the patients I see have had seizures or strokes and now face varying degrees of physical and mental impairment. The doctors follow roughly the same pattern for each patient: press the hand sanitizer button outside the room, go in, talk to the patient, get an update, check the chart, make some recommendations, offer some reassurances, and go, hitting the hand sanitizer again on the way out.

The attending will occasionally peek into a room if he finds the case interesting. The residents have an undue amount of confi dence in my abilities; they show me how to test a patient’s patellar reflexes, and then let me do it, even though I’m terrified of whacking the person in the knee with the reflex hammer. They teach me how to do a basic neurological exam. “Don’t do this at parties,” a scruffily bearded resident warns. “It makes people nervous.”

Then another room, another reflex test, but this one is sadder somehow: the patient asleep, the light in the room dim and fluorescent. I look at his face, long and jowly like a bloodhound, and he reminds me of every old man I’ve seen in Florida, playing chess in the park or tottering around a golf course. I test the Babinski reflex, a softer test than before, stroking the handle of the hammer gently

along the sole of his foot. For a healthy patient, this touch would make the toes curl downward, or else stay still. His toes fan up and out, a product of the damage from his stroke. The doctors’ faces dim. We file out quietly. Like the people in Sacks’s book, these patients have their stories. There’s the sad tale of the man who has been there on the ward the longest: no speech or written skills, no identification, no health insurance, no family come to claim him. There’s the woman who shows me how she can now walk with a cane and brush her own hair; she’s going home today. I meet “the whiner,” a 30-year-old hypochondriac who thinks every headache means he needs to be checked into the hospital and who hits his nurse’s call button like he’s playing Jeopardy. The residents tell me about a wave of college-aged men coming in with numb groins, usually a symptom of something serious. But in these cases, the diagnosis is skinny jeans, and the prescription, roomier shorts. The doctors aren’t wizards; they can’t do everything. They can’t convince a wife that her husband isn’t going to wake up from his coma, or persuade the chronic diabetic patient to remember his insulin shots. They aren’t perfect. In some ways, I feel like I’m backstage, seeing how the magician does his tricks. There is the satisfaction of knowledge, and I am convinced that this is something I want to do, but there is also a tiny, indefinable loss. The mystery is gone. I’m not immune to the pre-med blues; from time to time, I consider whether putting up with the relentless requirements and grade-obsessed students—whom one doctor I know refers to as “dorkazoids”—is really worth it. I often feel that my courses focus too much on chemical interactions and too little on human ones. But shadowing and seeing patients, while rewarding, was emotionally draining. Perhaps it wasn’t just a full head of hair standing in the way of my medical career. Perhaps this dream, like my earliest one, would once again have to be set aside. At least, that was how I felt, until I met the last patient of that first day. I remember her vividly, an Irish grandmother type with a bubbly personality. As I was following the doctors out of her room, she said, “Goodbye, Dr. Wolff!” I turned around, horrified that I had somehow silently misrepresented myself. “I’m not a doctor,” I assured her. “Oh, I know,” she beamed. “But you will be.” Those were, well, magic words for me—better than any of my childhood healing brews. —graphic by Madeline Butler The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

OPINION TIMOTHY DELIGHT by Micah Jones

It wasn’t like this hadn’t happened to me before. In fact, it was the third time in the last 10 minutes and the tenth time today that I’d had this conversation. It goes a little something like this: “So you’re in TD huh? Not on old campus. That’s gotta be a lot of walking,” some freshman living on Old Campus says. “I mean how will you ever hear about the parties on Old Campus or, like, meet people?” She continues: “How will you get to class? That’s gotta suck! ”I temper my annoyance and make the same joke every time. “At least I won’t gain the freshman 15, right?” Really, though, I’d like to let them in on a little secret: there is a whole world outside of Old Campus where people live and breathe and socialize every day. And living in that world is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it comes with perks. For instance, I live right above the laundry machines, and the pleasure that I take in not having to worry about leaving a trail of lingerie behind me on the paths of Old Campus should not be overstated. Nor should the joys that come with having the dining hall a few feet away from my bedroom. And I can’t even describe how living two floors above sophmores has taught me self-awareness, particularly since the day I thought I was popping into a friend’s room on the second floor, only to discover I was actually on the first. These features alone curb my longing for Old Campus, but above all, TD has one thing Old Campus never will: silence. There’s a moment at night when no one’s throwing a party, and the guy upstairs has turned down the volume of his opera-and-rave mix, and no one is playing volleyball in the courtyard or practicing a cappella under a tree. At that moment, the only sound I can hear from my

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

window is the creaking of the chain on the hammock. Freshman year feels like watching a cassette tape on fast-forward. There are people wildly gesticulating, voices that ramble until they become incomprehensible, and sudden, disorienting changes of setting. It is a lot to take in, but in the daytime you’re too busy to process it all. At night, though, there’s just the sound of the hammock. In TD, the hammock is a kind of center of social life. Compared to Old Campus, with its expansive courtyard, and statues of old white men, TD is relatively small. You can see the entire courtyard, including the hammock, no matter where you are standing. It’s such an obvious focal point that people can’t help but gather there. Sometimes it’s a couple that starts out pretending to study, even though it’s pretty easy to see that’s it’s just an excuse to spend time together. Other times it’s a freshman perched on the edge of the hammock, clearly regretting his decision to take DS. One time, it was my friends and I who all piled in, wondering if hammocks have weight limits. I’ve heard people say that something is always happening on Old Campus. There’s always a party, a Frisbee game, or music playing from an upstairs window. No one has ever told me about the golden hour of peace and quiet they enjoyed there. We’re freshman, and we’re suddenly in this new place, with new people, and new things. We get into this mindset that if we’re not always joining a club or reading for class or doing something “productive,” then we’re missing out on the entire Yale experience. We need silence to realize that this is not high school, and school is not just our work environment. It’s also our home. We need access to hammocks all four years that we’re at Yale, but especially during our first.

CHICAGOLAND by Noah Remnick

When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut—or a boxer, or Michael Jordan, or a contestant on Legends of the Hidden Temple. But mostly an astronaut. Which is an odd thing to aspire to when the era of space travel was in decline. I remember resting my temples on my knuckles and solemnly nodding my head as I watched a documentary clip of JFK delivering his speech about going to the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. I remember watching the movie Apollo 13 with my brother and feeling jealous of Tom Hanks for even getting to pretend to go on that failed heroic mission. I remember gleefully hugging my mom the day I came home from school to discover that she had painted stars on my bedroom ceiling. I had little interest in astrophysics, or even sci-fi fantasies about extraterrestrial life, but the romantic idea of space travel, with its sense of limitlessness and bravery and purpose, stirred me. It was actually those memories of that innocent, fantastical dreaming, those moments of hearing an inspiring call, that helped me abandon caution, take a a leave of absence from Yale for a semester, and continue a summer job on the Obama campaign into the fall. I first began working at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago as an intern in late May, and by the time I began to see a new school year on the horizon in August, I knew that if I left Chicago and passed up an offer to stay on through the election, I would regret it. Falling out of sync at a place like Yale can be disconcerting, but the campaign had an overwhelming and undeniable draw. It wasn’t so much the feeling of wanting to make a difference, or even a desire to be a small part of something historic. Really it was the desire to do something real and do it now, something concrete and beyond books.

Every day when I walk into the office, I am surrounded by hundreds of people united by a sense of political purpose, people who are taking months, even years out of their lives to live in lousy studio apartments and work 15-hour days. They rarely see their friends and families, and many of the older volunteers and paid workers are putting off, or giving up, serious and lucrative jobs to work on this campaign. There are inevitable compromises and disappointments in politics; no matter how much the any campaign may at times falls short. Still, there is a common consensus among those working on the campaign that there is an enormous political and ideological gap between Obama and Romney, and that these differences matter. Passion is a word that we enjoy using (and overusing) at Yale, but it is a thrill to truly witness it, even experience it, the way I find myself doing at campaign headquarters. In our most cynical hours, life can sometimes feel like a series of decisions that weigh relative levels of potential personal disappointment. Every Thursday night at Yale, we’re faced with a choice between pangs of academic guilt as we gulp down a final beer at Box, and feelings of social regret as we toil away in the bowels of Bass. I’ll continue to miss both of those things for the remainder of this semester, and of course there’s something a bit mortifying about that. But at least for the moment, I don’t mind. Because I’m finally understanding what it feels like to be young and foolish and full of hope—and this sort of realization is really the most that anyone can ask for from an internship-turned-job. So while some part of me knows that all this latenight work and lofty idealism will meet with all kinds of disappointment along the way—no politician ever fully lives up to the promise of his or her rhetoric—that somehow doesn’t take the edge off the thrill. —graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

Hours Lunch Mon - Sat: 11:30 am - 3:00 pm Sun: 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm Dinner Sun - Thu: 5:00 pm - 10:30 pm Fri - Sat: 5:00 pm - 11:00 pm

148 York Street New Haven, CT 06511 203-776-8644 www.zaroka.com

Every Day Lunch Buffet Sunday special brunch with North and South Indian food

Start me up Entrepreneurship in Yale and New Haven by Ariel Katz

hen Brian Loeb, SY ’14, launched IntaBeta.com last year, he didn’t expect to spend part of his summer writing a fake paper for a nonexistent Yale class in order to gain the support of some prominent football bloggers. But that is exactly what he found himself doing, a task that required the same drive, creativity, and learn-as-you-go mentality demanded by the world of entrepreneurship Loeb was learning about, all on his own. These are the hallmark traits of the startup culture—a culture that is now taking root in both Yale and New Haven. “IntaBeta allows communities with shared interests to gather and rank links,” Loeb said. He envisions the site as a sort of Twitter for headlines, where users can aggregate articles into different interest categories, like “Dwight Hall,” “New York Jets,” or “Book Reviews.” Over the summer, the site needed exposure, so he emailed five different sports bloggers to see if they would be interested in using IntaBeta’s system. “Distribution is where most startups die,” Loeb explained. He didn’t get any replies—until he sent another email saying he was a Yale student writing a paper for a class. Within days, he got responses. Then, of course, he had to actually write the paper. “I wrote a fake paper, and included quotes from each [blogger],” he said. “I wanted to show them we’re all on the same page.” Writing your own rules, according to Loeb, is a staple element of the startup community, and one that makes it most appealing. Alena Gribskov, DC ’09, is the communications and

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

program manager at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), which helps support and fund student-led ventures. She says student interest in startups may have increased over the past few years because entrepreneurship is becoming an attractive alternative to other, more traditional career paths. Why sit chained to a desk at Morgan Stanley into the wee hours of the night, playing by someone else’s rules and schedules, when you could be the next Mark Zuckerberg? Ethan Carlson, MC ’12, was thinking along these lines when he took a fellowship at Ven-

tunities in VFA’s list of cities—a list that, at the time, did not include New Haven. Around when he was interviewing for positions, Claire Henly, CC ’12, called and offered him a position at Red Ox, an energy startup she had cofounded in New Haven. Carlson contacted VFA and asked if he could take the job at Red Ox and be a fellow in New Haven; VFA agreed, expanding their operations into the Elm City. Carlson was instrumental in bringing VFA to New Haven; however, according to Eileen Lee, COO of VFA, the organization already had its eye on the city and its

[already] a nontrivial number of students who stay, [and] this might continue to improve with gentrification of downtown.” As New Haven’s startup scene grows, the opinion across the board is that the city has begun to develop valuable resources for new businesses, slowly making it a more attractive and conducive location for entrepreneurs and their exciting ventures. A network of so-called startups for startups has begun to emerge. TechStart, a science park-based fund that helps entrepreneurs accelerate the launch of their businesses by providing initial capital,

Writing your own rules, according to Loeb, SY ’14, is a staple element of the startup community, and one that makes it most appealing. ture for America (VFA) last year, a national organization that pairs college graduates with startups. According to its website, VFA aims at “revitalizing American cities and communities through entrepreneurship.” The organization acts as a resource for college graduates looking to gain business experience, while also helping businesses to recruit quality employees. Carlson is VFA’s first fellow in New Haven, and chose VFA over a consulting job offer, saying that he would rather “take half the pay for twice as much fun.” Carlson was initially interested in clean energy startups, but there weren’t many oppor-

growing entrepreneurial scene. Part of New Haven’s appeal, Lee said, was Yale—namely, students who might stay in the community after graduation. Lee likens New Haven to VFA’s Providence site: both are cities with a support network of graduates who are becoming more interested both in staying in their collegiate urban surroundings and in entrepreneurship. Carlson agrees that the trend to leave New Haven for cities like Boston or New York might be on the decline. While he acknowledges that “a lot of Yale entrepreneurs might not be considering starting companies in New Haven,” he points out that “there is

is designed to help jumpstart innovations in technology. After taking part in a mentoring program for entrepreneurs, teams can apply for funding and receive up to $25,000 to help build their businesses. Another of these startups for startups is LaunchHaven, which organizes informal networking sessions at which people can pitch ideas, meet potential collaborators, and eat pizza. LaunchHaven holds its sessions at the Grove, which its website says is a “new kind of social space” that acts as a hub for New Haven entrepreneurs, providing them with meeting and office spaces at relatively low costs.

Founded two years ago by Ken Janke and Slate Ballard, the Grove aims to foster social entrepreneurship. The organization’s mindset, according to Grove employee Mook Bordelon, is one centered on promoting a culture in which both people and what they do are valued. Annie Testa, who used the Grove’s resources to found a yoga company and is now a Grove employee, says that it’s a place people keep coming back to for feedback and support. Yale’s entrepreneurial scene has also become more cohesive over the past few years. This year, undergraduate entrepreneurial groups will even form a centralized Entrepreneurial Council, according to Gribskov. There is increasing alumni-student collaboration and support, and YEI is expanding its mentoring programs. Gribskov also mentioned the Venture Associates program, in which promising student ventures receive “short-term assistance” from students at the Yale School of Management. There is a similar centralization of resources taking place both at Yale and in New Haven, but the two blossoming scenes are growing somewhat separately. “Right now they’re liv-

campus gates, resources Koch said are “hard to find.” Startup culture in New Haven seems to be more focused on aggregating resources and providing an informal support structure for older entrepreneurs who are more established, and are looking at entrepreneurship as a supplement to, or replacement for, a current career. Yale startup culture, meanwhile, seems to be more focused on rigorous mentoring and training to prepare students getting ready to start entirely new careers in entrepreneurship. This divide, however, is not quite so stark—and is getting progressively less so. There is increasingly more intermingling of the Yale and New Haven entrepre-

“Right now entrepreneurship is better understood as a process.” —Alena Gribskov DC ’09 ing parallel lives,” says Derek Koch, an organizer for an event called New Haven’s Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend, a 54-hour event in November, is a community-based event where entrepreneurs are invited to pitch their potential business ideas. Teams form around the pitches that are voted the best, and then set out on what Startup Weekend’s website calls a “frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation.” This means a sleepless weekend for some, but it pays off when teams receive feedback from local entrepreneurs. Often, according to Carlson, many of the teams that form go on to cofound the businesses they pitch at Startup Weekend, or collaborate on other ideas. Koch brought Startup Weekend, a global organization founded in 2007, to New Haven in 2010. “Like most entrepreneurs that set up shop in a new city, I had to spend time figuring out who was who in the environment,” he said. “What seemed to be missing was a ‘roll up your sleeves’ session.” Like LaunchHaven or the Grove, Startup Weekend aims to centralize the growing community of New Haven entrepreneurs, as well as inform them about the sometimes hard-to-access resources that exist in the city and the state. LAST YEAR, PARTICIPANTS IN STARTUP Weekend New Haven were almost exclusively unaffiliated with Yale. Part of this may be attributable to the funding, networks, and opportunities for experience provided to Yalies through both YEI and the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES). Students find these resources more accessible than those beyond the

neurial communities, and Carlson says that YEI will be involved with Startup Weekend this year. This, he hopes, “will help integrate Yale a little more.” Similarly, YEI fellows who are Yale graduates sometimes partner with non-Yalies on entrepreneurial teams. Yale organizations like YEI and national organizations like VFA provide a sense of security that spaces like the Grove and events like Startup Weekend cannot; they take some of the risk out of the seemingly always-risky business of startups. If a company with which a VFA fellow is working goes under, VFA will rematch the fellow. YEI provides generous grants to the winners of its Lippmann Prize, as well as a strong alumni support structure. Money could be one reason for the separation of the Yale and New Haven entrepreneurial cultures: finding funding is difficult and, as Carlson said, sometimes accelerators are out to make a profit. Even honest accelerators might not have the equivalent of YEI’s business student and alumni network to help companies find future investors. This, too, may be changing—according to Bordelon, the Grove’s next project is the establishment of an incubator. The proliferation of this particular breed of startups—these startups for startups— both at Yale and in New Haven could be a reflection of a national trend toward the institutionalization and demystification of the startup process, some of which is happening at the Grove and YEI. “Right now entrepreneurship is better understood as a process,” Gribskov said—one whose steps can be learned and repeated in a practical way. For New Haven, this means aggregating resources for startups and creating a less dispersed entrepreneurial community through venues like the

Grove and events like Startup Weekend; for Yale, it means building programs like Venture Creation and Venture Associates to further clarify the steps between an initial proposal and its eventual execution. Integration of the two communities could provide a greater exchange of ideas and skills: Loeb hired a 46-year-old man from Greece to program his website when he couldn’t find a programmer within the Yale community. Most Yale programmers, he said, don’t know the right languages for website programming, or are too busy with their own projects to help out other classmates with their startups. But maybe he could have looked to the greater New Haven community. A merged community would mean more potential collaborators and opportunities for everyone involved. Bordelon agrees, saying that while he hasn’t seen too many student projects, he’d love if more students came to the Grove. —graphics by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

(Lian Fumerton-Liu/YH Staff)

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

Piping up Sam Bendinelli, BK ’13, looks at the development of a New Haven jobs pipeline in a time of unions’ growing inﬂuence.

enzel Walker wasn’t the youngest person in the aldermanic chambers during a public hearing on the New Haven jobs pipeline three weeks ago. But at 15, Walker, a sophomore at Hillhouse High School, was the youngest person to testify. As he sat facing the Board of Aldermen’s human services committee, he spoke of friends who’ve struggled to find work out of high school, and of the feeling of empowerment his mother experienced when, 13 years ago, she landed a job and was able to move out of public housing. Although he has his eyes set on college immediately after high school, Walker is just a couple years below the age where people can begin to take advantage of what one alderwoman called “one of the most important initiatives to happen in New Haven in quite some time”—a jobs pipeline that links candidates with employers, freshly-trained workers with newly-minted opportunities. The proposal was outlined in the New Haven Jobs Pipeline Strategic Plan, a 13-page report released earlier in August that called for the creation of a new agency, New Haven Works, to coordinate a set of programs that will collectively form a jobs pipeline. If it was violent crime that captured the city’s attention in 2011, it is a deeply related issue—joblessness—that has been

the source of countless trying hours in 2012. Despite a handful of local initiatives in place to connect residents with jobs, none has found a formula to signifi cantly reduce the number of out-of-work New Haveners: after dipping to 11.6 percent in May, the unemployment rate in

decade is a tale of two cities. Most visibly, and especially since the recession took hold, there has been high unemployment. New Haven’s rate has hovered between three and five percentage points above the national average, and by the latest counts, 6,400 New Haven residents are

talization of downtown and the expansion of the economy here.” What the jobs pipeline aims to do, then, is merge these two parallel chapters into a single narrative. The first public proposal for a New Haven jobs pipeline came from the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), a

“We spoke with a lot of people when we were running, and one of the key issues that came up was unemployment.” —Jessica Holmes, Ward 9 Alderwoman the Elm City jumped back to 13.6 percent this past July—the same level it had been in July of 2011. But leaders and citizens alike see this project as something different. The goal of New Haven Works is not to duplicate the work of organizations that already exist, but, as the report states, “to coordinate a comprehensive system of job training and placement programs to serve the New Haven community and respond to employers’ needs.” As Ward 1 Alderwoman Sarah Eidelson, JE ’12, told me, the proposal for a pipeline “grew out of us realizing that there is no one program or agency that is connecting all of those.” THE STORY OF NEW HAVEN IN THE LAST

actively seeking work. And then there are unemployment’s attendant consequences: low school achievement, spiraling levels of poverty, spikes in crime and violence. In 2011, there were 34 murders; it was the city’s highest tally in 20 years. Yet at the same time, New Haven’s job market is actually growing. In April, while Connecticut as a state dropped 4,100 jobs, the New Haven labor market expanded by 1,700 posts. “There are two very different stories going on in our city right now,” said Laurie Kennington, president of the Local 34, the union representing Yale’s clerical and technical employees. “One is about the economic downturn and joblessness and violence; the other is about the revi-

non-profit, grassroots organization affiliated with Yale’s unions Local 34 and 35. CCNE previewed the report at an event in December that was attended by over 300 people, including many local and state lawmakers. The report, titled “A Renaissance for All of Us,” was the product of several years of public opinion gathering through door-todoor canvassing and other research. The report listed three policy solutions of its own, but none resonated as strongly as its call for a “comprehensive jobs pipeline program.” “I think we were surprised by how well-received the report was,” said Renae Reese, CCNE’s executive director. “People were hungry for this kind of model.” The Board of Aldermen also took

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

notice, and they put specific language for a jobs pipeline in their 2012-13 agenda. In February, the term popped up again, this time in Mayor DeStefano’s “State of the City” speech. “It was shortly after our report came out that the mayor seemed to be almost quoting from it,” said Mandi Jackson, the primary author of the original

agenda, 20 of the 30 people sitting at the table had received some type of union support. Many people I talked with stressed that if there was an overlap between features of the CCNE’s report and what the Board of Aldermen identified as the major issues facing the city, it’s because those working

‘The pipeline grew out of us realizing that there is no one program or agency that is connecting all of them.’ —Sarah Eidelson, JE ’12, Ward 1 Alderwoman CCNE report. The Board of Aldermen, which had seen significant turnover in the prior election cycle, established a Jobs Pipeline Working Group to begin outlining the project. What they presented to the human services committee at the August meeting was the product of regular meetings between 19 people representing a diverse set of interests—everything from City Hall, Yale, and unions, to the Board of Aldermen itself. “We had input from all aspects of the economy,” said Mike Piscitelli, the city’s deputy economic development administrator. “Government representatives, business representatives, nonprofits, labor—[all] were at the table. And I think that made for a more cohesive document in the end,” he said. For the human services committee, Walker’s testimony added one more view. “I feel they need a youth perspective of the impact of the jobs pipeline,” Walker told me when I asked why he chose to voice his support that night. “And when I was there I noticed nobody else in my age group talking, so I figured, why not?” Five days later, the Board of Aldermen reconvened to vote on the issue. By a vote of 25-0, New Haven Works was created. THREE MONTHS BEFORE CCNE’S REport was released, Jessica Holmes, an eventual member of the Jobs Pipeline Working Group, was celebrating her victory in Ward 9’s aldermanic primary. On that night, Holmes was one of 14 union-supported candidates who won a race against a City Hall-backed candidate. It was an impressive number, considering the total board only comprises 30 seats. But it was even more impressive in comparison to the number of victories City Hall candidates managed to score over those with union support: one. “Union members have certainly won local elections before,” an analysis of last September’s primaries in the New Haven Independent concluded. “But at least in recent memory, no union has backed such a large slate of candidates, almost all of whom won, and taken effective control of a branch of government.” When the Board of Aldermen met to develop a legislative

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

on the report were knocking on the same doors as those running for public office. “We spoke with a lot of people when we were running, and one of the key issues that came up was unemployment,” said Holmes. (Though CCNE is associated with Yale’s unions Local 34 and 35, unlike them, it is a non-profit, and so cannot donate to or endorse political campaigns.) Jorge Perez, the president of the Board of Aldermen, said that new board members don’t come equipped with ready-made solutions to problems so much as they bring a fresh perspective informed by the wants and needs of the communities they represent. “The new board facilitates us taking on new ideas and thinking outside of the box,” he said. “But I think as important as that is, the fact is that people are clamoring for something to happen.” For many New Haven residents, the extraordinary number of murders in the summer of 2011 was a tipping point. “The violent summer is one of the things that brought urgency to the project,” said Jackson, the primary author of “A Renaissance for All of Us.” In her own campaigning, Eidelson noted that people she talked to

sketch a model of the jobs pipeline, they were careful to give virtually every major stakeholder a seat at the table and thus a say in the pipeline. “A year ago, there were approximately 20 candidates that we were actively supporting in the election,” Kennington, Local 34’s president, said. “Today, I think it’s fair to say it’s less of a significant distinction now because many members of the board, even [those] that we didn’t support, have been really active on this issue.” But while the support for a jobs pipeline has been strong, it took a certain level of political clout to put the proposal in motion. “A new set of people were elected who shared these ideas, and it makes it so that, for example, the board can unanimously adopt a legislative agenda that prioritizes these types of things,” Jackson said. Piscitelli suggested that the lack of subsequent resistance to the development of a pipeline might not reflect the towering influence of unions as much as it does the reality of introducing new ideas in politics. “It wasn’t one of those things people have opposition to, but you don’t always get the airspace to work on [things like] it.” PERHAPS NOWHERE IS THE LEVEL OF consensus surrounding the importance of a jobs pipeline better illustrated than in Yale’s new contracts with its unions. Building on the foundation laid by 2009’s peaceful contract negotiation—Yale had endured seven strikes in the 40 years prior and was widely considered to have had one of the worst relationships with labor in the country—the unions brought the issue of the jobs pipeline to the table over the summer and pushed for its inclusion in the new resolutions. Yale took a keen interest in the program, not only agreeing to include jobs pipeline-related language in the contract, but also appointing a full-time staffer, Diane Turner, to the head up Yale’s portion of the project. Kennington recalled Yale’s involvement in a small-scale jobs training effort in the 1990s. She said that while

who successfully complete the appropriate New Haven Works training program. “Yale—both its unions and the University—will be working to place those who’ve come through the pipeline,” she said. As the city’s largest employer, the University’s commitment to New Haven Works represents a major early victory for those who have laid the foundation for the pipeline. But, and perhaps no less importantly, it also functions as a symbol to other major employers in the area that New Haven Works will not only be good for job-seekers, but will pay dividends to job-creators as well. “Because Yale sees the benefit of strengthening the city—and being aware of the unemployment rate—it was decided that [the pipeline] was mutually beneficial,” Turner said. What is more, the pipeline’s job training arm could provide residents with the additional skill sets needed to make inroads in some of New Haven’s growing industries like biotech and digital media. Beyond the University, the involvement of the business community was a major point of emphasis for the Jobs Pipeline Working Group, which sought not only to develop a program that would assist in jobs training and placement, but one, as they noted in the Strategic Plan, that would “[prepare] the local workforce to meet the needs of the local and regional business community.” “We were effectively working with the business community,” said Ward 9 Alderwoman Holmes, “[and] so making sure that the program that we developed would be an asset to the business community rather than a liability.” Though Yale is the only major employer to have openly announced its participation, Perez told me that “there are a couple other entities that have semi-publicly stated they want to do it.” For many involved in Working Group, the engagement of the business community—both during the discussion and as New Haven Works prepares to establish a pipeline—is one of the major features that sets New Haven’s initiative apart from those of other cities

“The new board facilitates us taking on new ideas and thinking outside of the box. But I think as important as that is, the fact is that people are clamoring for something to happen.” —Jorge Perez, president of the Board of Aldermen were quick to draw the link between violence and unemployment. “New Haven residents know that if there were more jobs for residents, then we would see much less crime and violence,” she said. When the new Board of Aldermen took office in January, the idea of a jobs pipeline was gaining traction outside of union circles as a politically viable method of combating joblessness. When the Board of Aldermen established a Working Group to

Local 34 paid in full for the initiative, called the New Haven Residents Training Program, Yale was supportive in many ways, and that Bruce Alexander, vice president for New Haven and state affairs and campus development, had been talking about rekindling a similar project for some time. Turner, who will also serve as Yale’s representative on the soon-to-be appointed board of directors of New Haven Works, said that Yale will look to hire candidates

they examined. While some towns have programs that help to pair workers with jobs but don’t train them, there are others—both at the local and federal level— that prepare workers for jobs that no longer exist by the time training sessions are completed. “Occasionally, there are opportunities for people to enroll in job training and people get very exited and they step up and enroll in the course, [but] if these opportunities don’t materialize at the end

of the training that can be very discouraging for the candidates,” Reese said. But what is most distinctive about the process that resulted in the unanimous approval of the New Haven Works program was that from the beginning, all the key stakeholders in the city had a hand in shaping it. The composition of the Jobs Pipeline Working Group—with spots reserved for aldermen, major employers, mayoral appointees, charitable foundations, and others—was crucial. “It is unlike anything that I’ve seen in other cities, in that it has all of the stakeholders at the table,” Jackson said. “Employers, and city government, and labor leaders, and community members including unemployed people themselves—all came to the table

bad news is the hard work remains ahead of us,” said Kennington. At the hearing, Ward 26 Alderman Sergio Rodriguez, chair of the human services committee, was even more direct, saying that no one entering the pipeline would be guaranteed a job at the other end. In the coming weeks, a board of directors, similar in composition to the jobs pipeline Working Group, will be appointed to institute an interim leadership team and oversee New Haven Works. From there, a “front door” location and satellite access points will be established in neighborhoods where unemployment is highest. A major part of New Haven Works’ early operations will consist of outreach and recruitment, so that under- and unemployed residents

though even local employers who choose not to work directly with New Haven Works will have access to the pre-screened applicant pool. Funding will come from an independent endowment, overseen by the board of directors and drawn from employer contributions, public funds (New Haven has not yet said how much it will set aside for the program), private donations, and, with any luck, grant-money. (Officials are currently waiting to hear if New Haven Works is the recipient of a Bank of America grant specifically for job-training programs.) Reviews of similar programs have estimated costs between two and four thousand dollars per job placement, and based on the projected job growth of some of New Ha-

“There are two very diﬀerent stories going on in our city right now: one is about the economic downturn and joblessness and violence; the other is about the revitalization of downtown and the expansion of the economy here.” —Laurie Kennington, president of Local 34 together to figure out what the right solution would be.” WITH CONSENSUSES HAVING BEEN reached and unanimous votes cast, enthusiasm for the upcoming deployment of New Haven Works is understandably high. Three hundred people showed up to CCNC’s event in December, and I counted 90 to 100 people—many of whom had brought their children—at the public hearing in August. But enthusiasm does not come w i t h promises. “The

can attend orientation sessions and learn about available job opportunities. The sessions will be open to any resident of New Haven who is at least 18 years old and has a valid photo ID and proof of address. Through a case management system, applicants who pass a literacy test will either receive additional soft skills and job readiness trainings or jump ahead to direct job skills workshops and on-the-job training, including internships. Perez highlighted the individual attention that applicants will receive in the pipeline. “There’s a lot of job training programs that are lacking case management that New Haven Works will provide,” he said. At the other end of the pipeline, businesses will work to ensure that the skills taught are relevant and that there are a number of opportunities for those who complete the specialized training regimen. “Partner Employers” like Yale will assist directly with the program curricula and even create a list of “designated pipeline jobs” to fill from the prescreened applicant pool of people who have satisfied all program requirements and received a certificate of graduation. Businesses that decide to establish a more informal relationship with New Haven Works will assist by offering internships or training programs,

ven’s major employers, a goal of 1,000 job placements stemming from the pipeline in the next four year has been set. While 1,000 new hires would make a significant dent in New Haven’s swollen unemployment rate, the pipeline is hardly a panacea. “This will not be enough [to tackle crime levels]. This is one part—but a very important part—of a bigger puzzle to address several societal issues,” Perez cautioned. Asked about the challenges facing New Haven Works, Holmes told me that “what we have right now is a roadmap. You can have a map that’s good, and if people don’t stick close to it, then we will have troubles.” What is clear now, though, is that the roadmap is clearly one for New Haven. Because New Haven boasts a growing job market but suffers from stubbornly high unemployment rates, there has been a desire from the beginning, as Reese said, to “connect the work that’s here to the people that are here.” And so what has emerged, after a fast year of turning proposal into practice, is a New Haven Works that Piscitelli described as policy-driven for New Haven residents specifically. In a season of consensus, this feature was the result of the first of many.

—graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

Politics on Sunday morning Progressive thinking at the United Church on the Green by Kohler Bruno

hen John Gage, SY ’92, invited Omer Bajwa to speak at his church, most Americans had not heard the name J. Christopher Stevens. Gage, pastor of the United Church on the Green, wanted Imam Bajwa, coordinator of Muslim life at Yale, to speak to his congregation sometime around the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and the two began coordinating the event in the fall of 2011. A year later, on Sun., Sept. 16, Bajwa did deliver a sermon to the United Church on the Green, on the corner of Temple and Elm streets, but he touched on 9/11 only peripherally. Broadly, his sermon focused on compassion, mercy, and one’s relationship to God. About a minute and a half in, though, he addressed the elephant in the room: the violent anti-American protests that had roiled the Middle East and North Africa over the past week, resulting in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. “I stand before you as a Muslim, as a leader of the Muslim community, to condemn in unequivocal terms the violence supposedly done in the name of Islam,” Bajwa said Sunday morning to a group of about 60 people. “This is completely odious. Words escape me in how I can condemn it.” Members of the congregation seemed particularly moved by his words. “It was wonderful that he was here,” said Jo-Ann Sensale, who joined the congregation six

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

months ago. “It was certainly timely, but it would have been important to hear his perspective even without the turmoil in the Middle East right now.” In an interview with the Herald, Bajwa said he hoped the political message of his sermon did not drown out its spiritual centerpiece. “I didn’t want to make it political,” he said. “I don’t think sermons should be political, per se.” But Bajwa had found the right audience on Sunday; members of the United Church on the Green see no problem with the interplay of politics and religion. Indeed, in this congregation, the two subjects dovetail to a remarkable degree. THEIR POLITICS ARE LIBERAL—DECIDedly so. Last October, in a sermon entitled “Taxation and Misrepresentation,” Gage spoke about economic policy. “To the degree that we choose an economy of abundance and mutuality, of shared responsibility and, yes, shared profits, instead of fetishizing unregulated capitalism at all costs, God is with us,” he said. Rhetoric this overtly politically charged might be off-putting to some, but Gage sees it differently. “Politics is not something mysterious,” he said in an interview. “It’s how people relate to one another. It’s how we organize our lives.” Yale professor of psychology Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, BR ’82, who has been a member of the United Church on the Green for years—she and her husband were mar-

ried there—echoed her pastor’s sentiments on the relationship between politics and religion. “The way I understand the teachings of Christ is that it’s incumbent upon you to act in your society to see that people are treated the way they should be treated,” she said. “If that requires changing laws or speaking out against people in positions of power, then it just does.” In a sermon from this June, “The ‘War on Women,’” Gage spoke about the marginalization of women in American culture: “This persistent patriarchy and patronizing, this colonization of women’s bodies, this devaluing of women’s contributions and disregard for women’s experiences, disenfranchising women even and especially in a decisionmaking directly affecting their bodies and their lives—this is sin,” he said. GAGE READS HIS SERMONS OFF HIS iPad. He has tattoos. He even tweets, from the Twitter handle @TheIrrevRev. (For example: “Anybody got any good progressive church/social justice hashtags to share?”) He is also openly gay, which is the reason he left the Presbyterian Church—until very recently, they did not ordain openly gay priests. When he preaches at the United Church on the Green, he sports a rainbow stole around his neck. Gage makes an effort, he said, to ensure that his sexual orientation does not factor prominently into the substance of his sermons. When speaking politically, he focuses

elsewhere. Regardless of the casual attitude Gage and members of his congregation adopt toward the overlap between politics and religion, the politicization of sermons is a delicate subject. “One cannot and must not ignore the issues of the day because they impact us all and the world in which we live,” Yale Chaplain Sharon Kugler wrote in an email. “However,” she added, “the pulpit is a privileged place and must be approached with a certain awareness that it holds the power to at once illuminate and enlighten or to alienate and do great harm. Politicizing a sermon without regard for this ignores the very real truth that all religious communities are diverse within themselves, they are not monoliths.” Federal law bars churches from endorsing political candidates; if they do so, they lose their tax-exempt status. But this line can be fuzzy. “Churches are allowed to discuss candidates and political issues—we don’t have a problem with that sort of thing,” Simon Brown, communications associate at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a phone interview with the Herald. “We just don’t want them to endorse candidates.” Roger Adams, a member of the United Church on the Green’s Board of Deacons said the church is mindful of these restrictions. “The way the laws are set up, we never come close to that boundary, and we’re not tempted to,” he said. Yet that does not restrict the church from getting politically involved. When the Occupy New Haven encampment took over the New Haven Green, right behind the church, Gage set up a tent he called the Spirit Lodge. “[It was] a place that people could chill out, pray, meditate, and just have a time to reflect spiritually on what they were doing politically,” he said. Reflecting spiritually on politics happens often at the United Church on the Green. “Faith is an organizing principle in life,” Gage said. “Our faith is in conversation with our political life in the world.” Bajwa acknowledged that he saw opportunities, at times, for politics to interact with religion. “I don’t think that these things exist in a vacuum,” he said. As long as one “rises above petty politics, and partisan politics, and you speak about a higher calling of ethics,” he said, then links between the two subjects can be appropriate. The death of a U.S. ambassador seems, for Bajwa, to be a call for exactly this—for people to rise above petty, partisan politics and make a place for the political in a Sunday sermon. —photograph by Julie Reiter YH Staff

Ball so hard Despite road bumps, Yale football moving forward by Aaron Gertler ale football is used to national attention. Since its founding in 1872, the program has won 27 national championships and 865 games—the second-most of any college, after the University of Michigan—while famous coaches such as Walter Camp, YC 1880, have defined the rules and history of the game. More recent history has not been so kind. It’s been sixty years since a coach retired with a losing record, but our Ivy championships are few and far between. Moreover, in the past nine months a string of scandals have thrust us back into the spotlight. These incidents have also threatened team morale, and even that winning legacy. Last December, Head Coach Tom Williams resigned after it was discovered that

placement, announcemed that a freshman would take his place as starting quarterback in the season opener. With all these recent changes, even students who don’t usually follow sports have made an effort to keep pace with the news. So how has the team, missing a student captain and playing under a new coach, reacted? By beating Georgetown, 24-21, in the opening game of the 2012 season. Freshman quarterback Eric Williams, PC ’16, threw for just one touchdown and three interceptions, but that scoring pass play, at 98 yards, was the longest in Yale football’s history. Running back Tyler Varga, BK ’15, made an explosive varsity debut, rushing for two touchdowns. “I think we look great,” said linebacker E.J. Conway, DC ’15, who studies pre-med

were rewritten; the new no-huddle offense keeps foes on their heels, while a 3-4 defense puts extra pressure on opposing quarterbacks. Reno rearranged the team’s entire philosophy around three pillars: school, sport, and family. He works to run more plays in practice, calling for two hours’ “maximum effort” from every player. As he explains the strategy, I understand why I hear his players cite words like “fast,” “physical,” and “aggressive.” I wonder, though: is there any other way to play Division I football? Reno treads lightly around any possible criticism of his predecessor. “It’s just a culture change,” he said. What is this intense new regimen doing to team morale? Unsurprisingly, no player was willing to speak to whether there is any

“The main factor in us beating Georgetown was how we handled adversity.” —John Oppenheimer, BK ‘14 he had lied about being a Rhodes scholarship finalist in 1992, while he was a linebacker for Stanford. A month after Williams’ resignation, Patrick Witt, JE ’12, arguably the best quarterback in Yale history, was featured in a New York Times article after word of a sexual assault accusation reached the Rhodes Committee, whose scholarship interview he’d supposedly turned down to play in the Harvard-Yale game, a decision that garnered Witt considerable laudatory press coverage. This August, Will McHale, PC ’13, lost his captaincy as the result of a fight at Toad’s Place on May 15. McHale punched Marc Beck, SY ‘12, a former sports editor for the Yale Daily News. And finally, backup quarterback John Whitelaw, BR ’14, left the team just last Tuesday after head coach Tony Reno, Williams’ re-

off the field. He thinks about it and revises his statement. “Actually, amazing.” He grins as he discusses Coach Reno’s tougher practices and his focus on strict routine: study, play, sleep, repeat. Though it’s the grin of someone too tired to exercise his frown muscles, under it all, he seems filled with genuine joy. Reno is also “amazing,” according to Conway, and “a straightforward dude [who] will tell it like it is.” Conway mentions the word “hammer” several times, but it seems to be the productive sort of hammer. But before you build something up, you have to tear it down. Reno coached Bulldog receivers and defensive backs for six years, then ran special teams at Harvard from 2009-11. When I ask him about his readjustment to Yale, he doesn’t hesitate: “I started from ground zero.” The playbooks

general discontent, either over the intensity of practice or Reno’s social policies. (Team members are allowed one night out per week—no exceptions.) Conway admitted that the new regimen might have led to a few players quitting the team—though Yale’s roster always shrinks during the preseason—but insisted that even those who leave remain part of the tight-knit group, at least in spirit. This makes perfect sense: the level of body-mind exhaustion of Yale football is an experience few non-athletes have any hope of understanding. Take, for instance, a typical day’s schedule for center John Oppenheimer, BK ’14: weight room, class, game film, team meeting, two-hour practice, team dinner at 7:30 p.m., schoolwork, a few moments to relax—and then? “Get to bed to do it again the next day,” he said.

The Bulldogs have a long, hard road ahead if they want to contend for the Ivy League Championship. But Reno and his squad are prepared. “The main factor in us beating Georgetown was how we handled adversity,” Oppenheimer said. Over 300 miles from home, Yale was victorious despite five turnovers and 12 penalties—which, players and coaches repeatedly stressed, would have doomed a team with shakier morale. Wide receiver Brandis Yarrington, SY ’14, also spoke of the team’s performance in the face of adversity. He credited his head coach, who, he said, prioritizes mental toughness. Given his “straightforward dude” reputation, I was surprised to hear Reno deny any thoughts of his imminent return to Harvard Stadium. Wouldn’t thoughts of the Crimson, ranked fourteenth in Division I-AA by a national survey of college coaches, haunt him—or any Yale coach—while he looks to break our five-year Game drought? Reno insists that the final game of the season was his last priority upon returning to Yale. But before he hangs up the phone, I get one ominous, and possibly revealing, remark: “[The Crimson] really has no weak spots.” But if Harvard-Yale is the only thing we have to worry about, Reno is doing his job right, both as a coach and as an arbiter of discipline. Our latest round in the national spotlight is finished, which leaves the Bulldogs free to resume their quiet work on the practice fields, and prepare for those splendid Saturdays when 20,000 New Havenites pour into the Yale Bowl. Reno’s work has paid off so far, and the team’s young offensive leaders still have four years to mature. Curious to see the fast, aggressive, physical machine for myself, I asked the players which home games Yalies should prioritize this year. Common suggestions were Penn, on Oct. 20, and Princeton, on Nov. 10, but Reno refused to choose, suggesting we not miss a moment: “These guys play football the way it’s meant to be played.” —photograph courtsey of Yale Athletics

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

CULTURE The do’s and dah’s of recording a cappella by Alexander Saeedy YH Staﬀ and Elliah Heifetz YH Staﬀ September at Yale means a few things—adjusting back to the idea of homework, slowly realizing that summer is over, and, most importantly to some, a cappella rush. Take a trip to your favorite dining hall and inevitably you will find innocent freshmen surrounded by a group of upperclassmen clad in a cappella apparel. A cappella members comprise a small percentage of Yale students, but it is safe to say that come September, Yale has a strong case of a cappella fever. Few people may know that the a cappella scene goes beyond courtyard concerts and annual jams and into the studio. Nearly all groups here at Yale record a studio album every other year; already this year, the Duke’s Men have released an album, Busted, and the Baker’s Dozen and Something Extra will soon follow suit with their new releases, Guarantee Not and Caught Red-Handed, respectively. But if the thrill and challenge of a cappella group performance is, as current business manager of Something Extra Hallie Meyer, SM ’15, puts it, “best met and appreciated live,” why record a cappella to begin with? According to Meyer, it’s mainly for the group members themselves: “[CDs] are a great way for [a cappella members] to have a souvenir of their time in the group.” This is reflected in how Something Extra chose to record their album: the group recorded Caught Red-Handed with all members singing at the same time. Of course, this left room for error in terms of pitch and tempo, but “the beauty of a cappella,” Meyer said, “the way to celebrate it, is to replicate the live sound as best as possible—even all the things you do wrong.” This is in contrast, then, to Busted, for which the Duke’s Men took individual recordings of each singer on each song, and layered them during the post-production stage, a process known as compiling, or “comping.” This made it so not all members of the group had to be there to record, and also means that not every member is on each song. “This gives [us] a lot more control in how we edit and produce our music,” Duke’s Men album manager and current Whiffenpoof Reuben Hendler, CC ’14, said. In fact, Hendler pointed out, “Most contemporary a

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

cappella groups record this way. The Duke’s Men tend to strike a balance between the best of Yale’s choral, groupsinging tradition, and expanding and experimenting with a cappella arrangement and production.” The Baker’s Dozen, however, found a middle ground, recording each voice part separately in groups (for example, all of the baritones, or all the tenors), and using editing and comping techniques similar to those of the Duke’s Men. BD member Max Gordon, SY ’15, felt the group’s process reflected the intention behind recording the album: “A Baker’s Dozen album should represent the group as a whole, so we want everyone to contribute on every song.” Gordon also felt that an a cappella CD—or at least a Baker’s Dozen album—is meant for both “people out of and in the group.” For those in the group, Gordon believes it should “represent the group at a certain time”; for their audience, the CD “exists as a state of hyperreality.” In other words, the recording isn’t meant to be a replication of a live performance, but is still meant to embody the group’s sound. “Editing and pitch correction create a musical world that’s more real than real life,” Gordon said. He then put it in simpler terms: the Baker’s Dozen records so that “people can experience the BDs without the BDs, in the same sense that a Katy Perry recording is not her live, but is still Katy Perry.” Perhaps an easier question than, “Why record?” might be, “Why not record?” Because, well, a cappella recording is quite the hassle. Recording usually begins around March, when a group picks its track list for the album and singers are called in to record. Some groups, like the Duke’s Men and the Baker’s Dozen, use on-campus studios; others, like Something Extra, go to off-campus professional studios to record. After months of recording and comping, once all of the voices are layered together, the music then has to be edited, which takes a good deal of time and money. Editing involves—strictly—the pitch, rhythm, and harmony of the song. One of the drawbacks of comping is that there are minute differences in tempo from one track to another: when all the voices are compiled together,

they don’t always match up to the same rhythm of the whole song. After editing comes mixing, in which volume levels of the recording are adjusted, and the voices are blended to achieve one coherent sound. Finally, the mixed and edited tracks are sent to a professional for mastering, and then are burned onto CDs. The production process is entirely financed through performances the groups book during the school year and on tours. Benji Goldsmith, CC ’14, pitch of the Duke’s Men during the recording of their new studio album Busted, estimated that the album alone cost between $10,000 and $12,000. That’s no small sum of money; fortunately, these CDs are much more than just souvenirs for group members. Rushees seeking to hear the works and styles of each group can use these albums as samples of groups as they are now, and new albums allow groups to keep in touch with their alumni. On top of it all, people actually listen to a cappella. Of course, not all people—one undergraduate who wished to remain anonymous said he would probably never listen to an a cappella CD, and felt it was best enjoyed live. But J Wise, TC ’15, felt differently. “I definitely listen to a cappella for its own merits,” he said. “For example,” Wise pointed out, “some a cappella versions of songs are better than the originals,” citing the Duke’s Men’s take on The Barenaked Ladies’ “What A Good Boy” as one example. Hendler has been listening to a cappella recordings for the last 10 years, and has music by over 90 groups on his iPod. “What makes recorded a cappella different than any other genre of music performed live and then recorded?” Hendler asked. Opinions certainly differ throughout the a cappella community at Yale. But for one reason or another, every group records—so no matter what approach they take, they are establishing recorded a cappella as a Yale tradition. —Ed. note: Heifetz is a member of the Duke’s Men. —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

Paintings in the Pit

Securing Toad’s “I don’t like having to get physical, but it’s part of the job,” said Greg Hannah, a bouncer at Toad’s Place. A classic concert venue since the ’70s, many students know Toad’s from the club’s weekly Wednesday and Saturday night dance parties. In an interview, Hannah spelled out his relationship with the storied club. Hannah joined the ranks of the 28-person Toad’s Place security staff after a friend helped him get the job in February 2008. This squad of burly, often mustached and tattooed gentlemen works in close conjunction with the New Haven Police Department. “If there’s a situation we can’t handle, they take care of it,” Hannah said about the security staff’s relationship with the police. “We’re there to support them.” As any student knows, incidents and fights regularly break out at Toad’s. According to Hannah, things can get contentious when different groups of people meet on the Toad’s dance floor: “Each college on [its] own can be very mellow. When you add different people—if you add two rival football teams—that can create issues.” The bouncers make their work a team effort, sharing in the responsibilities of “securing the crowd,” checking IDs, and making sure everything runs smoothly. While they often divide up shifts, all 28 bouncers are on duty on what Hannah called “crazy, hectic” Saturday nights. Wednesday nights are less challenging. “On Wednesday, it’s actually a little bit more laid back,” he said. “We know we’re not going to run into [any major] issues with the Yalies.” When Hannah emerges from the sweaty venue, he returns home to prepare for work the next morning at his other job. He works in loss prevention—that is, catching shoplifters by watching cameras. Unlike at Toad’s, however, things at that job never get physical. —Jake Wolf-Sorokin —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

At 6:15 p.m. last Tuesday evening, I cross the sterile, concrete lobby of 353 Crown St., walk past a haunting portrait of a redhead holding out her severed ear, and descend into the Pit. Since its construction in 2000, the Pit has hosted a weekly critique for painters in Yale’s Graduate School of Art. The work of two MFA candidates is discussed each week, and the often harsh criticism has been known to devastate some to the point of tears. In a 2006 article in the New York Times, one former MFA candidate likened the “Pit Crit” to a sort of trial, like “standing nude [on a scale] in public.” Another called it “a gladiator spectator sport.” Luckily, in the words of Maximus: paint washes off a lot easier than blood. In person, the Pit doesn’t quite live up to its reputation as a spiritcrushing, blood-soaked Roman amphitheater. Of the forty-or-so attendees (most are flannel-clad, some tote bottles of Blue Moon, and one carries a to-go cup that reads “Hello, my name is Moose”), the “most likely to get into a brawl” award goes to a Vitamin D-deprived first year in a denim shirt, emphatically reiterating the wonders of Adderall and 5-hour Energy to his less enthused friends. With the exception of the faculty critics, who on this particular Tuesday include professor of art Robert Reed, ART ’62, Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking Anoka Faruqee, SY ’94, lecturer William Villalongo, and lecturer Jeffrey Stuker, ART ’05, most attendees sit sprawled on the concrete floor, limbs straying dangerously close to the artwork, basking in the dizzying smell of turpentine. Besides a comment that one painting is “’60s tie-dye,” and another that a different painting “horrible to look at,” the Crit is disappointingly tame. Reed speaks so softly that I can’t make out anything he’s saying, but the laughter his remarks elicit suggest it’s not the biting criticism he’s infamous for. There is a lot of talk about how the works “feel”— often, they feel like playfulness refined. The work of John Szlasa, ART ‘13, is saturated with fictions of the utmost specificity: paper that mimics concrete, paint that mimics oxidation. As we dive into a critique of Szlasa’s central piece, a gravity-defying sculpture in which a wooden chair juts horizontally from a crude concrete circle balanced on edge, no one seems to mind that Szalasa’s work is, for the most part, not painted. Eventually, the Pit itself becomes a sort of playground, with painters shifting and rearranging, zooming in on certain pieces, touching others, and commenting on all. It’s as if the work was created and assembled specifically for this space and their communal exploration of it. The critique turns to the work of Meena Hasan, ART ’13: psychedelic paper cut-out topographies of indigo and tea-colored stains, overlain with intricate ink pen drawings, which hang like pelts. Hasan begins: “I’ve been trying to make my own animals…” —Katy Osborn —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

REVIEWS Robert Adams and critical distance by Julie Reiter YH Staﬀ

ou need not read Photography for Dummies to imagine the advice the guide might give to beginning photographers: avoid harsh light and extreme contrast, don’t waste too much of your composition with negative space, frame your images to be rid of distracting objects jutting into the frame, et cetera. If Robert Adams were to read such a beginner’s guide, he might rip it up and eat it. Adams is a rule-breaker. He ignores at least one—and sometimes all—of the above-listed instructions in every single photograph. When he does everything wrong, why does it feel so right? Robert Adams: The Place We Live; A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, at the Yale University Art Gallery until Oct. 28, features a stunningly diverse collection of more than 250 black and white prints covering two floors of the YUAG representing the culmination of four decades Adams spent photographing the American West. Every subtle decision made by the curators—Gallery Director Jock Reynolds and Assistant Curator of Photographs Joshua Chuang—if not in direct collaboration with Adams himself, seems a remarkable feat of ventriloquism of Adams’ voice and heart. The exhibit, arranged into sections named by Adams himself, seeks not to overwhelm the viewers by the sheer quantity of images, but also to remain faithful to his vision by grouping the work in the manner that Adams intended. Adams’ photographs are relatively small. I practically push my nose against the glass to view one of the first photographs in the first section of the exhibit, entitled “Eden 1968.” Adams depicts a suburban landscape that we typically only glimpse through the window of a speeding car. In this photograph, the end of a truck juts into the frame from the left and nearly covers the entire horizon line. In the distance behind the truck sit two cross-like telephone poles, connected by telephone lines almost too faint to perceive, and a construction zone. There is no human presence: no driver, no construction workers, not a soul in the expanse of negative space. Yet Adams suggests human presence. Somewhere there are construction workers, hammering away at the environment, transforming the natural landscape into a scene from a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Adams does not show the workers—but they’re there, just out of frame. Adams does not merely fall back on eliciting pathos (e.g. photographing a bulldozer crushing a puppy) in order to communicate his ideas. Adams places himself and his viewers in the position of a detached scientist observ-

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

ing the scene. By choosing to photograph from such a removed position, Adams risks alienating viewers. However, Adams’ physical, psychological, and emotional distance is essential to his photographic critique. His critical distance attempts to illuminate a truth that has been disregarded: mainly, that the destruction of the natural world has become numbingly routine. As Intermediate Photography Professor Joseph Maida, ART ’01, aptly emphasized during a visit to the retrospective, Adams does not simply hold us responsible for destroying the natural world and excuse himself. The YUAG website for the retrospective highlights a quotation from Adams himself: “We’ve got to go look at what we’ve done, which is oftentimes pretty awful, and see if we can’t make of this place a civilized home. We’ve in a sense built a house, but we haven’t made it a home.” In the “What We Bought” section of the exhibit, it is we who bought the natural world, who bought into the concept of manifest destiny, the land-grab mentality, and commercialism—and what we receive in exchange seems to be nothing but waste and destruction. What Adams forces us to realize is that what we cannot buy is far more precious than what we can. As the exhibit continues and Adams moves about the world, seeing more and more ruin through his camera’s lens, his images become less subtle. Instead of the end of a truck, there’s a cluster of trees, their reflections blurred in the water below them, which Adams describes as “A farm pond about to be destroyed by earth-moving machinery, the north edge of Denver, Colorado, 1973-74.” The image is jarring, like the picture of a loved one who has passed away. I wonder, here, if there is a point to revealing such tragedy—does Adams simply present a war-ridden world with no hope for improvement? But what he reveals in this same image, printed with technical precision, is the beauty of that same world: I can’t help but marvel at the glory of the sunlight, the reflection of the trees melting together on the pond’s surface. Adams depicts natural beauty as redemptive, as liberating us from the artificiality, monotony, and alienation of suburban America. Adams’ retrospective forces us to wonder at a world that continues to carry on despite what we do to it. It is that cautious hope for something better that makes his work so heartbreakingly valid. —Photo by Robert Adams (Creative Commons)

Movie: Sleepwalk With Me

Music: Grizzly Bear

The first thing Mike Birbiglia tells you in Sleepwalk With Me, a film he wrote, directed, and produced, is that the story he’s about to tell you is true, as though anticipating that the plot is so unbelievably absurd that we need to know right away that it’s true. But after the film’s done, his based-on-a-true-story opener rings more like a sort of apology, like, “Sorry, this is as good as a true story gets.” Birbiglia, perhaps because of his faithfulness to the actual events of his life, has created an anti-Hollywood-cliché movie that succeeds in stripping away all the exciting and watchable elements of standard cinematic storytelling. One might argue that the more commercial trailer is actually better than the actual film; in fact, it gives away all—not even most, but all—of the movie’s funny punch lines. It even contains the bulk of the movie’s plot: a wannabe stand-up comedian with sleepwalking problems, and even more problems with his girlfriend of eight years (played by Lauren Ambrose, a delightful mixture of Rachel McAdams and Katherine Heigl), learns how to be funny by turning his personal life into jokes. The only one of my friends with positive impressions of the movie was the one who hadn’t seen the trailer beforehand—Sleepwalk With Me is itself as forgettable as a frivolous dream. —April Koh

It’s more or less certain that Grizzly Bear can do no wrong. Remember? they seem to say with every move on Shields opener “Sleeping Ute,” which rips and clatters, thundering, out of the gates. They have a knack for spot-on LP-openers (“Southern Point,” “Easier”), and this is the most forceful ignition yet; put simply, it rocks, which is peculiar and thrilling when it comes to Grizzly Bear. But what they give us three minutes in—a pause, then a nimble acoustic coda with cello swells, “And I can’t help myself, And I can’t help myself, And I can’t help myself”—is another thing entirely. The track trails off into an ether that’s something like the space of Grizzly Bear’s early recordings, or like the doldrums of rest and sense-making between 2009’s Veckatimest and now. Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and company took time off, regrouped, and even recorded and scrapped most of another LP before releasing Shields. Throughout the record, we hear and feel this curious rhythm of starts and stops, of exultation and retrospection. Track two, “Speaking in Rounds,” rises out of the same synth-haze as the opener, and it also rocks. Praise be to the V12 motor march of the Grizzly Bear rhythmsection, vital as ever, and to the distinctive click-on-click of strings and picks (is there any sound more kinetic in rock today?). But again, it recedes in a synthy wash. An instrumental track, “Adelma,” is the song’s elongated and necessary echo. The tracks you’ll hear about (the up-tempo ones) are good: “Yet Again,” “A Simple Answer,” “gun-shy.” But please don’t forget what’s between them, and especially closing track “Sun In Your Eyes.” These are equally good, and perhaps more important. This album is hopeful, it’s instrumentally lush, forward and hard-hitting, by turns large and small. It may lack the instant captivating power, which you could call a kind of magic, that was everywhere in Veckatimest, but Shields’ is a different power. Like “Sun In Your Eyes,” this is the sound of a thinking band’s uncertain future. Grizzly Bear can do no wrong; can they constantly make magic? Shields is a fine meditation on the question. —Vince Tolentino YH Staff

Music: G.O.O.D. Music With his 2010 release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West created a bona fide modern classic. For an artist defined by two traits—sincere self-reflection and a boundless ego—this moment of triumph marked a potential watershed moment for both his career and his uniquely personal and high-profile public image. His releases since then have remained typically unpredictable, but also oddly commercial in a way that much of his earlier output was not. It is as if after reaching the heights of critical reception, Ye became bored with the whole affair. How else to explain G.O.O.D. Music’s Cruel Summer, the predictably uneven compilation album released by Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music label? There are standout tracks on this front-heavy album, notably, “Clique” and the early single “Mercy,” but there are also unexpectedly deep disappointments like the offensively bad Kid Cudi song, “Creepers.” Most notable, however, are the curating choices made by the man behind the curtain. Given his available resources, the decision to sideline Common to a single verse on a bloated song, “The Morning,” and to leave Mos Def off the album entirely seems misguided, if not inexplicable. Yeezy’s decision to fill their space with DJ Khaled, Pusha-T, 2 Chainz, Ma$e, and, perhaps most surprisingly, 17-year-old Chicago phenom Chief Keef, borders on the criminally insane, artistically speaking. Ultimately the album sounds less like a cohesive realization of an artistic vision and more like a mid-career play for rep and mainstream urban radio airtime. Cruel Summer is not commercial in the slickly impressive style of Watch the Throne. Rather, it’s an album that is more a symbol than an artistic unit. It seems that Kanye, the sensitive superstar whose own path to hip-hop greatness largely eschewed the gangsta ethos and its path to success, wants us to know that he has not forgotten the booming, industrial tones of the street side of mainstream rap. One is simply left wondering why. —Gareth Imparato YH Staff

Music: Kreayshawn Kreayshawn isn’t incapable of charisma. Unfortunately, few songs from her debut album Somethin’ ‘Bout Kreay serve as any proof of this. “Gucci Gucci,” her viral single from over a year ago, is still by far the best evidence that she has any genuine talent and charm. On the rest of Somethin’ Bout Kreay, Kreayshawn sounds like an awkward girl reading off a prompter, which exacerbates the already cringeworthy rhymes (“Can we go to Hawaii/So you can roll my blunts when I get too high?”) that plague much of the album. Even worse, however, are her misguided attempts at singing in “BFF,” or the absolutely atrocious album closer, “Luv Haus.” When the guests on “Ch00k Ch00k Tare” and “Like It or Love It” take over, the songs instantly become more likeable without Kreayshawn’s grating voice intruding on the beat. Other than these guest verses, the most successful moments of the album are found in tracks like “Twerkin!!!” and “K234s0nixz,” where the production is catchy and hard-hitting enough to distract from Kreay’s lackluster rapping. The sad truth is that Kreayshawn’s greatest obstacle is her own voice. “Gucci Gucci” showed that it could be overcome for at least three minutes—Somethin’ ‘Bout Kreay proves that it can’t be for 44. —Kevin Su

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST It probably isn’t a good sign when your little sib is “double booked” with club meetings and therefore can’t eat with you.

Does it never end?

This is truly disgusting. It’s not sanitary for anything that’s been in Commons to be released into the outside world.

SOMESOM Rug

fuzz

Successful freshmen

It always seems like a good idea until it’s Thrusday night and all you want to do is watch The Borrowers on Netflix.

Birds ﬂying in and out of Commons

INdTHe

Friday class

A capella

Fluctuating temperatures Cold at dawn + warm by noon = moist feet all day. TMI?

I’m not bitter because I didn’t get tapped; I’m bitter because I can’t sing.

What were your goals?

Sophomores at the Yale Career Fair

FellFe

Intensive intro language classes

“Miss you!” wall posts

TAs who “go outside the lecture material” You’re not a professor yet, homie. Give it a couple years.

How am I? I’m frustrated, exhausted, and confused, but since I can’t speak at a level greater than that of a small child... I’m good. How are you? That’s nice.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 21, 2012)