Herald Volume LXXXV Issue 8

THE YALE HERALD April 5, 2019 | vol LXXXV | Issue 8

Yale’s most daring publication since 1986

Anna McNeil, BR ’20, and Jordan Powell, MY ’21, investigate the CCE bystander training and the dynamics behind students’ decision to intervene.

FROM THE EDITORS Dearest Reader, April tends to mean showers, but this week gave us our first taste of sunlight and warmth in months, if only for a few hours. I crave more, as I’m sure you do, too.

On the bright side, if winter is over and spring is here, summer must be right around the corner!

Until then, we at the Herald hope that the amazing content in this issue brightens your day and warms your heart until good weather is here to stay. Camden Smithtro, ES ’21, literally lights up the Culture section as she ponders the fusion of fluorescent and natural light in the YUAG’s newest exhibition A Story in American Glass.

In this week’s front, Anna McNeil, BR ’20, and Jordan Powell, MY ’21, spotlight the flaws of bystander intervention on campus; and in Voices, Charlotte Foote, JE ’21, enlightens us with two short stories.

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at fiona.drenttel@yale.edu.

Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2019 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2019 The Yale Herald.

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

In Opinion, Allegra Brogard, PC ’20, illuminates a new genre of literature, climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” as a method of countering climate change. Meanwhile, Julia Hedges, SM ’20, Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, and Laurie Roark, ES ’21 shine a light on a new fashion crossover between Forever 21 and the U.S. Postal Service (yes, you read that correctly).

There is so much more content in this article I could highlight, but I will leave them to shine!

Warm wishes, Spencer Hagaman Opinion Editor

EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Fiona Drenttel MANAGING EDITORS Marina Albanese Chalay Chalermkraivuth

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Emily Ge, Margaret

Grabar Sage, Jack Kyono, Nicole Mo,

Marc Shkurovich, Eve Sneider, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang FEATURES EDITORS Joe Abramson, Jordan Powell CULTURE EDITORS Laurie Roark, Helen Teegan VOICES EDITORS Hamzah Jhaveri, Mariah Kreutter OPINION EDITOR Spencer Hagaman REVIEWS EDITORS Kat Corfman, Everest Fang, Douglas Hagemeister FUZZ EDITORS Matt Reiner, Harrison Smith INSERTS EDITORS Sarah Force, Addee Kim

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTOR Julia Hedges DESIGN EDITORS Paige Davis, Molly Ono

IN THIS ISSUE 6

Voices

16

Features

Charlotte Foote, JE ’21, reminisces on a now- Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, unpacks JÜV Condistant cousin and melted grape popsicles. sulting, youth culture, and the paradox of ethical capitalism.

Then, she thrills with a story on a tragic death.

8

Opinions

18

Culture

Camden Smithtro, ES ’21, takes us through light and glass at the YUAG’s latest exhibiAs the planet warms up at an alarming rate, tion.

Allegra Brogard, PC ’20, considers a new way to motivate people to fight climate change: Annie Rosenthal, SM ’20, dances in her bedroom mirror with Nathy Peluso. climate fiction or “cli-fi.”

Julia Hedges, SM ’20, Laurie Roark, ES ’21, and Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, discuss some whack ass Forever 21 collabs and what they mean for America.

10

20

Reviews

Fuzz

Jack Kyono, PC ’20, explores the nightmarish world of Billie Eilish’s new album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

Our editors sat down with Bix Archer to discuss her art practice, the modes of attention that objects demand, and the absences of shadows.

Join Helen Teegan, ES ’21, as she discusses the surprising emotional layers within Minding the Gap, a documentary on skateboarding and friendship.

12

Cover Anna McNeil, BR ’20, and Jordan Powell, MY ’21, investigate the CCE bystander training and the dynamics behind students’ decision to intervene.

In an examination of Solange’s two most recent albums, Eric Krebs, JE ’21, breaks down the craft of the mini-song.

INCOMING

Corn

OUTGOING

Still Corn

Week Ahead RADIUM GIRLS: 2019 FROSHOW THURSDAY, APRIL 4 - SATURDAY, APRIL 6 YALE REPERTORY THEATRE 50 YEARS OF ORGANIZING FOR ETHNIC STUDIES SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2:00 PM DWIGHT HALL AT YALE THE EX!T PLAYERS PRESENT: THE 35TH REUNION SHOW! SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 8:00 PM LC 101

INSERTS Golf Digest: One Man’s Journey WILL WEGNER, MY ’22

I

’ve never thought of myself as exceptional.

I’m just like any other blue-blooded American, born and bred in the Panhandle. I plod away each day down at the factory—attaching the ears to Mickey Mouse frozen waffles— and I spend my evenings planted on the couch in front of the idiot box. Up here, the Hallmark Channel shows the same eight Golden Girls reruns on an endless loop. It’s a simple life, but it’s mine.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when a new commercial popped up on the screen one night.

The ad was for a medication, Lutriphan. With the ad’s crisp colors, beautiful people, and tall buildings, I was captivated, even if I didn’t quite catch what the drug does. The commercial was over as suddenly as it had begun, and in the outro, six simple words appeared—six words that haven’t since left my mind: “See our ad in Golf Digest.”

My mind was left rolling. What secrets might Golf Digest hold? Were some facts about Lutriphan too sacred to be broadcast? Without the crucial supplementary information locked away in that elusive club-and-ball publication, I was left empty. I had to get my hands on Golf Digest.

I tried calling, but the operator was combative and reminded me of my father. I went to the gro-

cery store, but like I’d suspected—no luck. They only had Ranger Rick and a battered copy of Hustler that reminded me why I’d joined the Church.

There was only one thing left to try—to face my fears and leave the Panhandle. It’s a great big world out there, and with enough searching, I was sure to come across Golf Digest sooner or later.

For years I roamed, carefully inspecting every bundle, page, and scrap of magazine I encountered. I scoured papier-mâché piñatas. I perused the gift wrapping of cheap and sustainably-minded people. I stole kindergarten collages to no avail.

Instead of Golf Digest, I was met with Seventeen, National Geographic, and People—none of which held the secrets of the universe that the Digest touted. Then one day, plastered above the urinal in an Applebee’s bathroom—I finally spotted it. Golf Digest, and the centerfold, Lutriphan. And there, just below it, some indistinguishable fine print. I used my fingernail, gingerly removing the layer of hardened Elmer’s glue obscuring the hallowed words I’d traveled thousands of miles to read. I lowered my finger, peered in close, and suddenly understood. Written in a small font beneath the heading were the seven words I’d been waiting for: “See our ad on the Hallmark Channel.”

courtesy of Condé Nast

4

THE YALE HERALD

5 Yale Mental Health and Counseling Replaced

by Automated Busy Message CHARLOTTE POLK, BF ’22

N

EW HAVEN, CT—This Monday, Yale Health and Safety representative Patricia Newman announced some long overdue reform in the Yale Mental Health and Counseling (MHC) department.

According to reports, the department is now automated. Alexandra Peterson, TC ’21, a frequent visitor of Yale Mental Health and Counseling, reports no substantial difference.

“This might be better, actually. It’s much easier than being ignored by real therapists. This way, I can just tell myself that they’re ignoring everyone and it’s not because nobody could love someone with seven toes.” She declined to answer further questions, including whether that number referred to one or both feet.

Harry Cohen, JE ’20, spoke to the News about his experience with the reforms. “When I called, I was given several option: press one for seasonal depression and press two for normal depression,” Cohen said. “I actually only had to wait a few minutes to get to press nine for crippling fear of getting dick stuck in a Chinese finger trap.”

When called, Yale MHC’s outgoing message says, “Unfortunately, we are unable to take your call at the moment. We will maybe get back to you as soon as we can... Meanwhile, try yoga, or drinking more water, maybe.” The department’s staff reports no change in their current daily schedules.

At press time, MHC also spoke of potential plans to replace all staff with a single sun lamp.

Top 5 Ways to Get Your Kid Into College AIDAN SWIFT, PC ’21

5.

Offer a role on a B-tier CBS comedy to a faculty member.

Have them sit on the shoulders of two smaller, smarter people and put a trench coat on them. Smuggle the adorable gang into a test center.

3.

Tell your child you’re going on a road trip together and drop him off at a rural bee farm along the way. Let him figure out his way home! You’ll might miss him for a while but it’ll make a killer common app essay.

Throw a tantrum when you found out you paid 200,000 dollars for the same crime when someone got a deal for 50,000.

1.

4.

2.

Just pay for a building, you cheap bastard.

VOICES Separations Anxiety CHARLOTTE FOOTE, JE ’21

I

am thinking of the tire swing. How you would push me all the way back to the concrete wall of the neighbor’s garage, how you would ask if I was ready and let go before I answered. Soaring over the garden bed and the patio, so high that I could see my own reflection in the second story window, I would screech and flail my little feet and hear you laugh behind me. After this, we’d switch roles and restart. Practically interchangeable, you and I. First cousins, but all our parents’ friends thought we were twins.

I am thinking of grape popsicles on the back porch, how we smeared them on our lips and called it lipstick and the purple dripped and splotched our favorite dresses. I am thinking of your steadfastness, three houses down the block. This was before your mother’s meltdown, before the splitting of our families. Before the lawsuit and the letters and your quiet, vacant house, there was the two of us playing fairy-spies every afternoon in the wood chip pile.

I am home and on my regular walk. I go to see it once, just once, each time I’m here. It’s still painted earthy brown with white on the window moldings. Same old front door, same scratched brass mailbox. I tiptoe down the driveway, press my chin atop the gate. Everything’s gone. The tire swing and the garden bed, the trellis with the honeysuckle vines, the wood chip pile and the patio. It’s just a giant bulldozed hole of dirt. Five years since the last time I saw you, I surprise myself by crying. After everything, somehow, it is this loss that feels most final.

6 THE YALE HERALD

FEATURES Outro CHARLOTTE FOOTE, JE ’21

H

e feels the heat before anything else. It’s blooming from the left side of his gut into his middle, blooming quickly. It feels the way your skin feels when you hold a match too long and the flame is burning just above your finger. Like this, but on his insides, and it’s spreading.

He registers the gunshot. The sharp boom and the blurring of all sound. He isn’t sure if there are more now or if it’s one shot ricocheting in his skull. It feels like a reverberation. But maybe that’s the music? It makes his ribcage buzz.

The heat is fierce and hungry and it’s filling up his stomach.

It’s eating at his hips and down the insides of his thighs, and he doesn’t want to stand up any longer. The floor, the floor is what he needs. He sinks until he’s kneeling. The floor is cool and maybe it will take some of this heat. Liquid is pooling round his kneecaps and he thinks that it is heat leaving his skin. He is relieved until he understands it’s blood.

He’s on his side now and the heat’s in his whole body. It pools within him, tired of moving. He is so heavy. The heat’s not hot so much as warm now, emanating, and he feels that he should sleep. Sleep—he should tell Jackson that he’s ready to go home now. Home to their big bed with the light blue checkered quilt. Where is Jackson?

A woman falls beside him, slack and quiet. He hears a thumping when her body hits the floor. The floor, so cool, he wants to melt into it. Melting. Popsicles in summertime on Auntie Tasha’s porch. The grape kind, sweet and messy.

Jackson, sweet and messy. Where is Jackson?

His eyes are going in and out of focus. In—a tall man cowering under the bar. Out—a smear of voices, flashing lights. In —Jackson, at last, above him, frantic. Out—he’d only sleep a minute, just a minute. He closes his eyes.

OPINION

ALLEGRA BROGARD, PC ’20 YH STAFF

I

n October 2018, the environmental community fell off its chair. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a special report revealing that humans must limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to prevent irreversible damage to our ecosystems. Already, the 2°C target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement seemed incredibly ambitious. All of a sudden, the task at hand had become even more gargantuan, and the world was not remotely prepared to tackle it.

kenstein’s creature did. As Generation Z becomes increasingly taken by social media, we look back to Huxley’s commentary about constant distraction blunting the mind. And most topically, as politicians like President Trump forgo norms of truth in favor of “alternative facts,” we are reminded of Orwell’s Party slogans: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery.”

If we cannot rely on the warnings of the scientific community to disrupt climate complacency, perhaps we must turn to tales of flooded cities, mass migraThough a choir of voices—including former Vice tions, and barren lands. After all, what’s more visPresident Al Gore, 15-year old political activist Greta cerally terrifying: the figure “1.5°C,” or a story about Thunberg, and UN Secretary General Antonio Gu- millions of people being swallowed by a hurricane? terres—urged immediate and radical action in light of the report, the world did not pause. In fact, glob- Dystopian climate literature might scare people into al CO2 emissions reached an all-time high in 2018. action. But it could also prove to be counterproducIt seemed that the IPCC report, hailed as a break- tive. When confronted with an existential threat so through call to action in environmentalist circles, did unfathomably grave as climate change, it is easy to not sufficiently mobilize governments, corporations, become overwhelmed, cynical, pessimistic—the opand citizens into action. In the U.S., a March 2018 posite of what needs to occur. There is a fine line Yale study found that while an encouraging 70 per- between a doomsday scenario inspiring action, and a cent of Americans believe that global warming is doomsday scenario prompting despondency. Besides, happening, only 21 percent feel “very worried” about who in their right mind wants to spend their free time it. If numbers like those advanced by the IPCC fail reading about climate catastrophes? to make people worried, we must find new ways to do so. I believe that the emerging literary genre of If cli-fi is truly to provoke alarm, I believe that it won’t climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” may be the key to turning be through inspiring fear. Rather, it will be through inspiring empathy. The type of cli-fi I’m imagining climate passivity into climate activity. does not feature sinking cities and crashing buildings; Dystopian literature has long been used to inform instead, it centers on the narratives of individuals. readers of impending threats. By drawing unnerving futuristic “what-if ” scenarios, books such as Mary As children, we love the Seven Dwarves for their genShelley’s Frankenstein, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New erosity of spirit, we fret at Red Riding Hood’s naiveté, World, and George Orwell’s 1984 frightened their we learn to respect others through Goldilocks’ reckless readers about the possibility of a world gone awry. example. In school, teachers prompt us to think about Decades later, their warnings still pervade popular how Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird exhibits consciousness. As artificial intelligence develops, we courage, or how Jean Valjean in Les Misérables strives talk of technology backfiring just as Victor Fran- for redemption. While reading novels, we are capable

of loving fictional characters for their qualities, crying for them when they suffer injustice, and feeling relief when they find a happy ending. Human stories foster compassion for struggles that are not our own.

So, what if writers started telling stories about characters affected by climate change? I imagine a world in which all children—in addition to the tales of Pinocchio and Rapunzel—would know the bedtime story of, let’s say, “Loopy the Bird,” whose nest is destroyed by a freak storm. I imagine a world in which teenagers in English class will analyze an Islander’s journey to save his flooded home. In this world, “habitat destruction” would not be a term learnt in middle-school biology, but a term every little child associates with a familiar fairytale character. In this world, “rising sea levels” would be a phrase every teenager would immediately understand as a threat to individual existences. Through cli-fi, perhaps the readers who think of climate change as abstract and unfathomable would be pushed to rethink it as a threat on individual lives.

The clock is ticking and we must convince seven billion people to care. For a minute, let us set aside phrases like “1.5°C,” “four foot sea level rise,” and “increasing number of extreme heat-days.” Instead, let us tell stories about a mother struggling to find food in a drought, a fisherman losing his livelihood due to acid rain, or a child whose teddy bear gets swept up by a flood. Writers have always had the power to shape popular consciousness. Today, they face the most urgent of challenges. For the sake of our planet, authors must unleash their imaginations and do what they do best: write some good stories.

After all, what’s more viscerally terrifying: the figure “1.5°C,” or a story about millions of people being swallowed by a hurricane?

8 THE YALE HERALD

9 Forever 21 X USPS JULIA HEDGES, SM ’20, HAMZAH JHAVERI, TC ’22, LAURIE ROARK, ES ’21 YH STAFF

F

orever 21 has released a collaboration with the United States Postal Services (USPS). We decided to take a look at this uncanny mashup and dig deeper into the trend of fashion houses collabing with unexpected institutions. What does it mean and why is it happening to us?

becoming relevant through literally selling out to fast afford- ployees but others not—are actually wearing government uniforms. We’re buying into and wearing nationalism. able fashion.

HJ: That’s a wack narrative. But like, what do you guys think of the other collaborations Forever 21 has recently put out.

Honda? Wilson? Taco Bell? Also, everybody’s been collabing JH: So, excitingly, I found a Fox News article reporting on this with and consuming NASA for years. That’s some retro-nerd important issue. Here’s what they said: “Having trouble fit- ass shit. ting yourself in the ultra-stylish flat-rate envelopes provided by your local USPS post office? Fear not, because Forever 21 LR: The NASA Vans shoes are pretty cute, though! You could is offering the next best thing.” walk on the moon in those.

JH: The relationship between the uniform and the collaboration is super interesting. The Forever 21 clothing is literally the clothing version of the packaging, not the uniform.

LR: The packaging and the fast fashion clothes are equally disposable, then. You wash the crop top a couple times before it falls apart or it falls out of style. The Forever 21 x Taco Bell collection is only from a few years ago, but it’s already laughably outdated. I can picture my friends wearing the Priority HJ: Yeah, that’s a totally wack way of starting an article. But JH: Just like how you could totally ride a Honda motorcycle in Mail Biker Shorts, but not the Taco Bell white t-shirt that what’s even more wack is this collab. I’m looking at the prod- their nostalgia-driven Forever 21 bike shorts and racing jackets. says “TOO MUCH SAUCE.” ucts right now. Some of the clothes are actually pretty cool.

HJ: Okay, I’m going to say something deep now. These fast HJ: Do you guys think that these companies are self aware LR: Yeah, I’m looking now, too. There are tube tops that say fashion houses are really reminiscing on some interesting about the fleeting nature of trends? Like do you think they “PRIORITY” and “EXPRESS” and a $55 jacket with a full moments in history, and making them consumable to young realize they can put out wack shit and get away with it because shipping label on the arm, scannable and everything. A lot of audiences. Shiny packaging? Simple colors? Helvetica every- in two weeks there will be a new collection or collaboration the people who reviewed it say they work for the post office thing? I think they’re actually doing a pretty good job of push- out? and want to wear the collab as their uniform. Fox reported that ing these obsolete institutions. the clothes are not intended to be uniforms, but to produce LR: Yeah, fast fashion companies like Forever 21 are defined royalties for the dying public organization. Late capitalism JH: Mmmmm, yes, the nostalgia of things being shipped by by this ridiculously fast turnaround time, not even speaking to is real. USPS employees should wear them to work anyway, mail. In an era of internet communication I honestly think the terrible environmental and human impact of global fashprobably. people aren’t engaged with the mail like they used to be. USPS ion production. actually has to pivot or raise brand awareness as they begin to HJ: Why is Fox News our source, guys? collapse as an institution. Like, can this collaboration inspire JH: But what does this mean for USPS? This collab will be in people to start sending things by mail again? I’m going to say the cultural zietgeist— JH: Anyway, amazing colors, great energy, good font. Like, probably not. honestly wearable. I would buy.

HJ: Weltanschauung. That’s another German word!

LR: Redact the “Mmmmm, yes.”

HJ: Julia, nuance.

JH: As I was saying, no one will care about this collaboration two weeks from now. Who wins from a collaboration really? I JH: Redacted.

JH: Except, there’s some nuts futuristic drip, and I’m seriously mean, capitalism. wondering what narrative USPS is trying to push here.

LR: At least in 2013, Forever 21 was not shipping with USPS. The shipping information on their website mentions HJ: Yeah, obviously.

HJ: Those crazy cyborg, single band sunglasses, chain no company in particular, which means that they’re probably necklace set, and reflective platform sneaks. (Can I say still using private companies like UPS and FedEx, but we JH: Looks like the privatization and commodification of that? Like sneakers?) can’t be sure. You’d think the collab might make them proud American institutions is well underway. to ship USPS. You’d think they’d say something about it. So LR: Yeah, they seem to have accurately adopted a streetwear it seems like the collab is sort of surface level––while USPS LR: Is an H&M x EPA collab next? It’s absurd. fashion aesthetic. Fast fashion plus futurism plus working class? gets royalties from Forever 21’s sales, the fashion brand isn’t HJ: So we’re supposed to be consuming the bureaucracy for, saving American mail.

JH: Well, with working class brands like Carhartt or Dickies what? $14.90? Wack. or Champion becoming expensive and high fashion to stay HJ: Really, Forever 21 is pushing government logos onto its relevant, this is the new frontier. USPS, a government agency, consumers, and buyers—some of whom are literal USPS em-

FUZZ

YH STAFF Our editors sat down with Bix Archer, BK ’19 to discuss her YH: Is it more about a relationship to the collector, in a as this representation of an economic power. Whereas your art practice, the modes of attention that objects demand, and the sort of symbolic, associative way? Or is it something about paintings recently have been zero shadow, no sense of imabsences of shadows. the collection itself that is of interest? pending decay, or maybe that it feels okay that something is going to decay. It’s not like I’m going to try to eat the Yale Herald: So let’s talk about how you began your thesis BA: I think I have a better grasp on the relationship be- shallot, you know. and where you think you are now. tween the collector and the object, and what I’m trying to work out now is the relationship of the objects to one an- BA: Haha yeah, too far gone. Well, the shallots have been Bix Archer: I started by thinking about attention and how other. That feels more unexplored for me in my work. And brought to my studio, and because I have the corner stuan object asks for a certain kind of attention—how some- it’s something I’m trying to think about more formally too. dio, all the radiators are on my wall, so they just crisped thing can direct and record it in a certain way. I was interup. They didn’t rot or anything, because they’re just perested in looking at books of hours, which are manuscripts YH: I know you’ve done a lot of printmaking in the past, fectly dry. kept in monasteries that mapped liturgical hours and dic- can you talk a little about how you’re thinking about actutated prayers to be said throughout the day. They’re often ally making the work?

But I am thinking about these objects as they relate to illuminated and also sometimes have stories in them. So I memory, and constructing spaces from memory around was interested in that format, and how they ask for a really BA: A lot of what I’ve been thinking about in this most re- the objects. So it’s not like I’m looking at this thing and specific mode of being looked at and handled. cent work is layering and how that factors into the pictures painting a still life with accurate life and shadow. It’s like I’ve been making. So the prints I’ve been doing largely holding this object in my attention, and creating the scene Originally I thought I would make my own version, but have been monoprints on fabric, in a series where I’ll paint out from around there—thinking more about access to a quickly realized I had no idea what the content would be. with the oil-based etching onto a plate, run that through a space through an object.

I wasn’t going to make religious work, but anything that I press with fabric, and then on top of the ghost image create was going to put into a book of hours felt like it would have the next. There’s a layering that happens across time. And YH: Did you read the absence of shadows back into your to be hugely significant, and that was kind of suffocating. then within the paintings I’ve been making lots of images work as something to focus on?

I felt really stuck with that. But in the meantime I was of stacked objects, and thinking about layering there, and making images of objects around me that I had otherwise how transparency works into it.

BA: I think I read it back and realized that it actually works neglected or overlooked or forgotten. It started with this towards something that I hadn’t been explicitly thinking one painting that I did of this bag of shallots that I had YH: It seems like a lot of the objects you’re choosing ac- about, but something that I liked. So I am okay with it. But on my fridge—I’d bought them thinking it was so fancy cumulate this layering through neglect over time. I keep it also has made me think about being more intentional to cook with shallots, but they just sat there and eventually coming back to that relationship to time, and also this sug- about when I want to put in a shadow or don’t. sprouted all these tendrils. It was cool to look at, but I was gestion of it as you create iterations of these objects. Are also interested in how I could return my attention and care you thinking at all about time as you work through the YH: Are the memories more about the object itself, for this thing that I had neglected by making an image of relationships the objects have with each other? or more of a contextual question of how it fits within it. It lead to making other images of things—things I carry your memory? around, you know, emptying out my pockets, or making BA: I think the objects in the images respond to or hold prints of objects in friends’ bags. From there I was thinking time in different ways. Organic materials deteriorate BA: Maybe both in some way. I think I also have to recogabout these objects and the relationships between them. quickly, or grow, or rot. As opposed to this shoe that my nize that in using the object towards this work then it will Now I’ve been making paintings and some prints of these grandma passed down to me—this solid object. So the be reconfigured in some way. A lot of the work I was makobjects that are around me and putting them into a space, ways it shows time is different. I think that in the images ing this summer at Norfolk centered around one specific an associated memory space: building these spaces, with I’ve been making there is sort of this leveling view over object, which were these glove stretchers from my Grandthe objects in them; beginning with one thing, and build- them—that is to say, I don’t know if I’m treating those two ma, in part because I was interested in them as a form. ing a world out of it from there. What’s going into my the- things any differently in my actual rendering of them. But The images became more symbolic, an exercise in trying to sis show are a few different paintings of tabletops with col- I’m not entirely sure. see, through pattern and repetition, how I could get farther lections of objects on them, and maybe some other prints. away from the things themselves. I don’t know if the work When I’m painting I always forget about shadow. I don’t successfully did that for me though.

YH: Can you talk a bit more about these relationships be- know why. In one of the crits in the class that I had a few tween these objects? semesters ago someone mentioned that there were no YH: So it was somewhat of a process of abstraction. Is shadows; it’s really like this ghost memory space, and I was it always?

BA: I guess I’m not sure I can fully pin down what that like, “Oh fuck.” means. But my thinking about that has largely been inBA: I think the work is sort of like a vessel—I was making formed by how I was thinking about objects in work YH: It’s occurred to me that some of your paintings, par- all these images of nets; I was interested in nets as a containI was making this past summer and before that had a ticularly the still lifes, are kind of the opposite of the Dutch er which simultaneously holds and fails to hold on to this lot to do with items that are collected by family mem- vanitas paintings. And I think the shadow is part of that. thing that it captures. And I think the exercise in painting bers of mine. They’re not objects that have any inherent The Dutch paintings are infused with this very specific these objects is analogous, also an attempt to capture a movalue, but they gain value because they’ve been chosen shadow and contouring, and they’re all about the impend- ment or place which fails to be kept in similar ways. for whatever reason, and then accrued it en masse. They ing decay of objects that are worth something materially, have this weight to them.

10 THE YALE HERALD

ART BY BIX ARCHER

11

BREAKING A SCRIPT, BUILDING A CULTURE ANNA MCNEIL, BR ’20, AND JORDAN POWELL, MY ’21

B

efore Deborah Ramirez, PC ’87, publicly announced her allegations of sexual misconduct against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ES ’87, LAW ’90, she reached out to a former classmate, James Roche, MC ’87. Did Roche remember her mentioning that “something bad had happened to her during a night of drinking,” their freshman year? Roche didn’t recall any such conversation—in an interview with the New York Times, he attributed this, in part, to Ramirez’s faded memory, “clouded by that night’s alcohol use.”

The alleged incident took place in Lawrance Hall on Old Campus. Many students were present and even now recall witnessing misconduct. Ramirez told the New Yorker that she was disappointed by the inaction of her male classmates, who witnessed Kavanaugh expose his penis in front of Ramirez’s face, and did nothing.

“They’re accountable for not stopping this,” she said.

From the scenes featuring “the Bartender” to “the Roommate,” the film’s takeaway is that any individual has the power to disrupt a dangerous situation.

Though the video depicts one specific scenario, it points out the many instances throughout the night when various bystanders could have intervened.

For some students, this generally positive tone is empowering: the workshop equips students with The workshop begins with a screening of Who Are the social tools they need to identify and interrupt You, an eight-minute video that follows an intox- sexual misconduct. icated woman during her night out. She is taken home by an unnamed man, identified only as “the But others still found the session’s overall messagStranger.” Brief shots of the woman lying unre- ing inefficient and indirect, and left feeling that the sponsive across the bed and “the Stranger” undress- workshop was uninformative at best, and misleading above her cut abruptly to a plain door. A voice ing at worst. “I feel like I really didn’t learn anybreaks the four minute soundtrack: “Sexual assaults thing in terms of new strategies,” remarks Valentiare happening to young women and men, and one na Connell, TD ’20. “I feel like whatever bystander intervention strategies we talked about, I already more is too many.” [knew]. I had used those bystander intervention The second half of the video rewinds to its be- strategies from day one of Yale. And [I] had friends ginning, this time slowing down to focus on each use those strategies on me.” For those students who interaction the woman has with other characters have felt at risk from day one, and who have already throughout the night. This time, they intervene. developed defensive strategies accordingly, “Breaking the Script” is too little, too late.

In the fall of their sophomore year, every Yale undergraduate is required to attend a session of Bystander Intervention Training, a means of “Breaking the Script of Sexual Violence.” The training is offered by Yale’s Community and Consent Educators (CCEs) and directed by Melanie Boyd, SY ’90, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs.

Methods of intervention commonly used among students center around the idea of offering people outs. Coral Ortiz, ES ’21, and her friends have a “go-to signal, or statement.” “I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh do you want to go to Moon Rocks?’” Ortiz laughs. “No one goes to Moon Rocks. So that’s a way of being like, ‘Get me out of the situation,’ or [asking] ‘Do you want to leave?’” “[I] often ask someone if they want to get fresh air,” adds Elaine Lou, DC ’19. For many, intervention and discretion go hand in hand.

Though many students routinely perform bystander intervention at Yale, many also express anxiety about initiating intervention. First-years, who have not yet gone through the CCE training, could be particularly uncertain bystanders without the tools provided by CCEs. “I think there’s always hesitation [to intervene],” explains FroCo Sara Speller, DC ’19, “especially when they’re first-years here, because everyone is so afraid about making friends.” Social unease will often incapacitate students, especially younger students who

have not yet formed reliable support networks.

Still, Speller encourages her first-years to “check in” casually, telling them “[to] make sure you’re still looking out for each other.” With regards to anxiety on the part of the bystander, Speller insists, “I believe, as a FroCo but also as a friend, that it is better to be safe than sorry.”

“My first year, it was hard to find a way of navigating social spaces. I felt like I was more vulnerable… it was hard to find a way out,” remarks Ortiz. A year later, she feels more empowered to intervene, and to ask others for help when faced with a potentially harmful situation. “I feel like Yale is more my space than I did last year. So I’m more comfortable outright being like, ‘This isn’t cool.’”

The social challenges of intervening are twofold: difficulty in distinguishing between consensual behavior and misconduct, and in determining what intervention tactics to use. “It’s difficult navigating,” Edwina Kisana, ES ’16, a former FroCo explains.

“Am I projecting my thoughts or fears or concerns

onto this person, or are they really in trouble?” Kisana elaborates, “I think the hardest step is trying to figure out whether it’s your place to intervene. I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck.”

Bystander Intervention Training attempts to confront and overturn the social norm that conflates intervention with trespassing, with the crossing of an invisible line between a stranger’s private life and one’s own. The workshop suggests that people are more likely to intervene if they can do it subtly, a view iterated on the CCE website: “We focus on low-level techniques and approaches that include enlisting the help of others, because we know that people will intervene earlier and more often if they can keep the stakes low and casually offer someone an easy way out rather than explicitly interrupting an encounter.”

The “Breaking the Script” pamphlet mentions “sexual pressure, unwanted attention, or disrespect,” excessive drunkenness, and “worried looks” as signs to look out for. However, following this detection,

“WHEN I’M NOT ON THE DECKS, I’M JUST EAGLE EYE, MAKING SURE THAT PEOPLE ARE HAVING FUN.”

the next step offered by the supporting materials is not so clear. The next step, titled, “Should someone intervene?” offers students two cues: “Is the situation heading in a bad direction?” and “Does someone need help?” Following the second question, the pamphlet suggests that students “follow their instincts.” If the best advice that Bystander Intervention Training offers is for students to follow their instincts, why was it necessary in the first place?

vention, recalled a potential aggressor whom he identified as such because “he seemed very aggressive and drunk and I was worried that something bad could happen in terms of sexual assault.” To bystanders, severe intoxication can flag someone as a potential victim or a potential aggressor. Though a red-flag for intervention, intoxication also makes intervention difficult in spaces where drunkenness is the norm.

I

In this way, intoxication is woven into the complicity that blankets certain spaces. Walker recalls that relatively minor forms of assault are so normalized in certain spaces—frats, in her experience—that intervention rarely occurs. “I know there have been so many nights where I … or other people around me have been grabbed and not consented to it,” she says. This rampant sexual misconduct engenders “a lack of a feeling like it’s the wrong thing because it’s just the norm,” Walker points out about herself and her peers, especially during her first semester at Yale. “But,” she insisted, “that doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

n the immediate context of party culture, “deciding” when and how to act is not always easy—even if students are generally aware of the importance and demonstration of consent in sexual encounters. Incoming FroCo Ry Walker, SY ’20, is optimistic about the legibility of consent among students. But she wonders if the training gives students the proper tools to use this understanding to intervene in party contexts. Walker explains that, while the CCEs in her workshop “gave accurate information, it was hard to see how [the training] was applicable to an actual college student’s life.”

Who Are You transpires in two locations: a bar, and the victim’s home. But social spaces proliferate on college campuses as individuals find their niche throughout their four years. Interventions at Woads, versus a frat party, off-campus home, or suite, all have the potential to look as different from each other as those captured in the video.

Bystander Intervention Training suffers from a dearth of imagination.

Confronting this norm begins with more successful and sustained examples of speaking out. But this can be hard, too. It is unsurprising that students often feel more empowered to intervene in spaces where they feel comfortable. Branson Rideaux, ES ’20, says, “There are some spaces in which I feel very unempowered as the bystander. And it has to do with my uncomfortability in the space.”

Successfully challenging a toxic normative culture, therefore, seems contingent on creating more spaces where individuals feel comfortable enough to intervene. Elaine Lou, DC ’19, member of Miss/Chief, a non-binary and womxn of color DJ collective, explains some of the ways in which the group seeks to make their party spaces more inclusive. “When I’m not on the decks, I’m just eagle eye, making sure that people are having fun,” Lou remarks.

The mismatch between representation and real life, according to Walker, stems from the environments presented by popular social spaces at Yale, which are different from the one shown in the video. Walker believes that “there’s just a lot of uncertainty” in typical college party spaces, like large off-campus fraternity parties, in contrast to the workshop’s focus. “The examples that [the workshop] gave were very clear about how someone is Miss/Chief sets clear rules about party behavior on acting and how to intervene,” she remarked. But its Facebook event descriptions. We say “no racism, usually this clarity is lacking. no skeevy behavior, none of that. Keep that out the door. We always do that,” Lou says, in comparing Intoxication can muddle social meaning. Connell this explicit precedent of behavior set by Miss/ remarked that the role of alcohol in Who Are You Chief to a typical campus-affiliated event. “It’s was interpreted differently among her peers who pretty much a standard at New York and Brooklyn attended the workshop. “I’ve heard people also say parties… That’s not something I see being implethat [the video] seems like it’s putting blame on mented at Yale in the near future.” the victim for being too drunk,” she mentioned, though that wasn’t her impression. Johnny Gross, Rideaux expresses similar frustration as Lou reMC ’21, in his own approach to bystander inter- garding a Yale-specific culture: “There’s a sense of

BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING IS A MISDIRECTION OF RESPONSIBILITIES: ONCE MORE, WOMEN DISPROPORTIONATELY PICK UP THE MANTLE FOR KEEPING THEIR FRIENDS SAFE.PULL

“YOU HAVE A LOT OF CONTROL OVER WHAT YOU DO AND WHAT YOUR FRIENDS DO, AND THE CONVERSATIONS THAT YOUR FRIENDS HAVE.”PULL QUOTE PULL QUOTE PULL QUOTE anonymity; people don’t really feel responsible for it/D/Fail, [where] just showing up and not sleeping each other and to each other... That doesn’t really through it would be enough to pass.” exist, I don’t think.”

But beyond training expansions, how can students hold each other to high enough standards of respect n October 2018, the CCE program expanded and mutual care? On a peer-to-peer level, Rideaux to include a new mandatory Title IX train- offers a place to start: “You have a lot of control over ing for juniors and seniors. In contrast to the what you do and what your friends do, and the consingle workshop offered for first-years and soph- versations that your friends have.” Rideaux stresses omores, juniors and seniors may choose from a the importance of “making sure that your friends variety of options from “Community Values and are not only aware of, but are actively talking about Accountability,” “Disrupting Disrespect: Advanced [sexual assault and sexual harassment].” Connell Bystander Intervention,” and “Making the Party: also suggests that “cultural shifts” can be as minor Hosting Skills for Creating a Safe, Welcoming as “lowering the stakes of checking in with someSpace,” to name a few. one after they’ve had an encounter, and [asking], ‘How did that feel for you?’”

What the CCE program doesn’t do, despite this increased variety, is question the structure of re- On a larger scale, a cultural shift might require sponsibility that these workshops imply. Miranda extending bystander interventions beyond the Coombe, SY ’21, says the workshops “feel like giant immediate circumstances of an assault. AttiBand-Aid.” In focusing on risk management strat- tudes and behavior surrounding misconduct egies, the trainings fail to directly confront sexual need to be confronted elsewhere in order for the assault. “When they ask where the responsibility culture to change. Helen Price, DC ’18, who lies in these situations—where you’re somewhere founded Students Against Sexual Misconduct at with your friend and you see that someone is mak- Yale (SASMA)—formerly Unite Against Sexual ing your friend uncomfortable... the responsibility Assault Yale (USAY )—believes bystander interis supposedly with you to intervene in the situa- vention is only the first step of many to improve tion,” she says. “That just completely ignores the Yale campus culture. real cause of the problem: sexual assault. It’s tricky because I understand where CCEs are going with Price remarks, “Bystander intervention, as a conthat—to try to make the community more proac- cept, should be extended to include calling peotive—but they don’t really question any of the un- ple out for messed-up comments and jokes they derlying causes of actions or the spaces in which make—since things like that, which might seem [assault] often occurs.” insignificant, actually lay the groundwork for the normalization of sexual disrespect.” Speller echoes Furthermore, intervention may be met with vary- this sentiment, noting that as a FroCo, she’s already ing degrees of credence or praise depending on the seen the positive attitudinal effects of discussing gender of the bystander. “Usually when men inter- the importance of bystander intervention. “There vene,” Coombe observes, “they’re taken far more have been moments where somebody has told me a seriously.” Coombe juxtaposes these more socially story and it turns into a conversation about making recognized interventions with the extensive, but co- sure that they and the people around them are lisvert “whisper networks” commonly associated with tening and respecting [each other].” female friend groups. “It’s often female friends who look out for their other female friends.” Bystander “Breaking the Script” limits the relevance of byIntervention Training is a misdirection of responsi- stander intervention to an immediate social conbilities: once more, women disproportionately pick text, where the stated standards and procedures for up the mantle for keeping their friends safe. intervention are routinely difficult to apply. The By way of alternatives, other students suggest that workshop fails to address the reality of Yale stuYale College mandate additional, multi-installa- dents by inadequately addressing numerous student tion training. Gross suggests that a consistent, se- arenas that nuance the way this script is written, mester-long course could be a more useful way to performed, and inscribed. Intervention is not an ensure the traning’s message reaches all students. event; it’s not a physical action or even an attitude.

“I thought [Breaking the Script] was positive, but It occurs before and after the fact; it’s a culture in [it’s] possible people slept through it.” He imagines and of itself. “a mandatory, consistent class that you take Cred-

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FEATURES

MARIAH KREUTTER, BK ’20 YH STAFF

T

he American teenager was invented in the aftermath of World War II by businessmen who realized they could make a killing off the pocket change young people had, now that they weren’t being sent overseas to kill each other.

Teenagers were suddenly “a big and special market,” as a 1944 Life article put it. They had automobiles to drive and rock & roll to listen to and milkshakes to drink, in tandem, using extraordinarily long curly straws, and all of it meant spending money, money, money that businesses were keen to nab a piece of.

In spring of 1944, a Chicago high school senior named Eugene Gilbert noticed that the shoe store he worked at wasn’t marketing their sports shoes to teenagers. He pointed this out. The store ran some new ads, and it made some money. While in college, Gilbert parlayed this talent for obvious solutions into a company called Gil-Bert Teen Age Services. By 1958, Gil-Bert Teenage Services had become a million-dollar-a-year business, Eugene Gilbert & Co.—perhaps the first youth consulting company.

Seventy or so years later, it happened all over again.

In 2016, Ziad Ahmed, then a junior at Princeton Day School, founded a company called JÜV Consulting with some friends from a Cornell summer program. JÜV is staffed entirely by 14-22 year olds, and bills itself as a Generation Z consulting company that “give[s] voice to those responsible for the viral.” JÜV offers a range of services, from the self-explanatory “social media work” to the some-

16 THE YALE HERALD

what baffling “curation of experiences.” It has been featured in the New York Times and Bloomberg. Its clients include Viacom and Unilever. And its business model, despite the decades that have passed, is virtually indistinguishable from Gilbert’s: both companies rely on decentralized networks of teenage consultants to explain young people to old people.

UN speaker: unwavering eye contact, enthusiastic hand gestures, and a fondness for rhetorical escalation. (Perhaps unsurprising, since in his scarce free time he competes with MUNTY ). “And whether that’s an all-male panel policing women’s bodies, or a head of a department who doesn’t identify with that ethnicity, or a bunch of executives deciding what young people like—and they’re not all analAs Ahmed’s executive bio puts it, “the teen voice ogous in terms of severity, I’m not trying to equate is profound, powerful, and profitable, and no one them—but I am saying that no group of people should be sleeping on us.” should be talked about without that group present and centered in the conversation.”

Now a sophomore at Yale, Ahmed came up with the idea for JÜV after the nonprofit he founded The idea that teenagers are a profitable resource in ninth grade, Redefy, started to get some buzz. isn’t new. But the idea that teens constitute a marRedefy, an organization loosely centered around ginalized identity? That wasn’t around in the fifsocial justice awareness, has a mission statement ties. There are now a number of glossy startups and two words shorter than the TL;DR summarizing media outlets based around the idea of proportionit, and garnered Ahmed some serious recognition. ally representing young people: perhaps the most “I found myself in rooms that I never dreamt of,” cogent is Helena, the nonprofit founded by thenhe explained—rooms where he was often the only Yale student Henry Elkus with the central ethos young person. Ahmed explained, “JÜV consult- of bringing together “brilliant and capable leaders,” ing grew out of the idea that if anyone should be half of them under twenty-five. (Helena was also making money off of young people, it’s us”—young the subject of a 2016 Gawker piece called “I Have people, obviously. He was unimpressed by the fif- No Idea What This Startup Does and Nobody ty-something “youth experts” he met through his Will Tell Me.” In fairness, they seem to have rework with Redefy (which earned him speaking gigs, branded slightly since then.) media coverage, and a visit to the White House, all while he was still in high school).

Ahmed (whose website, Twitter, and Instagram all use the handle “ziadtheactivist”) first became “I don’t believe we should talk about any group of known for his social justice activism with Redefy, people without that group present, and not in a which was his main focus until about a year ago. He folding chair to the side,” Ziad told me emphatical- now takes classes for a day and a half every week, ly. His manner reminded me of an earnest Model serves on Redefy’s board, and spends the majority

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of his time in New York working at JÜV. But “the work comes from the same place,” he said, whether it’s Redefy or JÜV. So perhaps it’s natural that he talks about age as an identity category, not unlike race or gender.

In fact, Ahmed sees many analogies between his nonprofit and his for-profit. He describes most of what JÜV does as a kind of sensitivity consulting: “Make that ad less heteronormative. Make that ad less toxically masculine,” he said, acting out an address to a corporate client. “We teach them what they/them pronouns mean!” Even explaining memes to corporations has an ethical component: “In every Gen Z crash course that we do, we show vernacular words like ‘tea’ and ‘shade’ and we give a whole spiel about how it’s co-opted from black queer vernacular. And every time we show the Spongebob meme, we say that this is explicitly making fun of disabled people.”

Many progressive students at Yale see consulting and activism as diametrically opposed. The Yale meme page, for example, frequently hosts jokes comparing students who intern at McKinsey or Bain to snakes. Ahmed, who describes himself as “deeply skeptical of capitalism,” is aware of this. “I wanna be clear, this is something that I definitely ask myself,” he told me. “And I would hate for this article, or for anything, to pretend like I have all the answers, because I don’t.” Ultimately, Ziad believes that it is possible for profit and purpose to align, and that his particular skill set is best suited to working “in the system.”

“Business is going to exist, and it’s going to make people money. Dammit I hope it makes the world better. Dammit I hope that we can make money and do the right thing at the same time. And so if they can make money by doing the right thing, it sounds good to me.” JÜV is also apparently willing to put its money where its mouth is: according to Ahmed, many of their contracts require the company make

a donation to a nonprofit, and JÜV once turned down a contract with a company that wanted help selling colored contacts to people of color. While he admitted that JÜV works with companies whose ethics he quibbles with, “we ultimately believe that we at least don’t make the world worse.” Even so, Ahmed has doubts about his involvement: “It doesn’t mean I don’t ask myself, you know, should I stop doing this and devote all my time to figuring out what to do about the Rohingya crisis?”

In addition to rigorously examining their place within global capitalism and Myanmar’s human rights abuses, JÜV doesn’t claim to represent all of Gen Z. (Probably a savvy choice, since one executive’s bio lists “surfing through LinkedIn” as one of her hobbies, and another describes himself as “an avid collector of wines and cigars.”) I spoke with one JÜV consultant — an independent contractor who attends a large public university and asked to remain anonymous — who was critical of the “Ivy lackeys” culture that, in their view, dominates the upper echelons of JÜV and is inaccessible to the relatively few “public school kids” at the company. For a budding mogul, Ahmed is remarkably willing to admit fallibility. He describes himself as “most often the wrong person to be talking to” and emphasizes the “twelve-hour, fifteen-hour” board meetings JÜV has had about diversifying their executive board’s overwhelmingly Ivy League credentials (as well as gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background). What fruit those fifteen-hour board meetings have yielded is unclear: seven out of twelve executive board members attend Ivies, with a UChicago student and a Johns Hopkins grad for good measure.

As much as JÜV seems to want to diversify, there’s one area in which diversification seems destined to take root: age. JÜV’s website proudly explains that “we are not proclaimed ‘teen experts.’ We are something far simpler, yet far more profound”—apparently a favorite adjective for JÜV—“we are teens.”

Except, well, they’re not, or at least not necessarily.

Ziad is twenty. In five years—not that long a time span for a growing start-up—he’ll be twenty-five, and so will most of the current executive board. As gymnasts, models, and boy bands already know, there’s a danger to building one’s brand and career around youth. How do you sustain a company that you will inevitably age out of?

When I asked Ziad this, he emphasized that JÜV is a Gen Z consulting firm, not a youth consulting firm. “We’re on the older end of Gen Z, which means people are aging into our company every year. The minimum working age is 14. The youngest Gen Zers are 9 or 10.” What happens after that?

Ziad’s not sure. There are still millennial consulting firms that consult on workplace environments.

Maybe JÜV will do something like that. “Maybe we’ll become a disruptive consulting company more broadly,” he said. “Or maybe it’s something else. I don’t know what that something else is, but I know that I love what I do right now.”

Eugene Gilbert made it work back in the fifties.

He kept up his reputation as a teenage expert well into adulthood—and with it his profit margin. In the digital age, though, culture is more nimble than ever: memes can last as little as a few hours before sinking into irrelevance. The prognosis for an aging youth consultant gets grimmer every day. Similarly, the vision of ethical capitalism and corporate activism that Ahmed advances is one that a growing contingent of Gen Z doesn’t share. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, only 45% of young adults have a positive view of capitalism.

Democratic socialist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have achieved massive popularity among young voters, and in the Age of Trump, centrism—the worldview in which being a young professional is somehow “disruptive,” in which the sphere of identity politics is the consulting-industrial complex—is beginning to seem as obsolete as Dat Boi.

“Business is going to exist, and it’s going to make people money. Dammit I hope it makes the world better. Dammit I hope that we can make money and do the right thing at the same time. And so if they can make money by doing the right thing, it sounds good to me.”

CULTURE Reflecting on American Glass CAMDEN SMITHTRO, ES ’21 YH STAFF

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n the Sunday afternoon I visited the fourth floor of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), light glowed to its best effect. Illumination from overhead lights mixed with natural sun that made the glass filling the room sparkle. On view from March 29 through September 29, 2019, A Nation Reflected: A Story in American Glass is an undergraduate-curated exhibition, formed under the guidance of the YUAG’s curator of American Decorative Arts, John Stuart Gordon. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see the pleasant blue and red toned walls throughout the gallery that indicated the changes in topic within the Story of American Glass, an exhibition that formatted like a well-structured conversation.

The exhibition itself is divided into six sections. The first “History, Politics, and Collecting” centers 18thand 19th-century collectibles and political momentos––an ashtray, a flask depicting the Marquis de Lafayette or George Washington.

Against the opposite wall, however, are the exhibit works that break the mold expected of historical glass pieces. In between hanging Native American beads is a stained glass window––the glass window from Hopper, then Calhoun, College that Corey Menafee, a Yale dining hall staff-member, broke in 2016 to protest its display of racist imagery. What remains of the stained glass––shattered into pieces, much of it missing––is laid out on a backlit display. Among the meticulously maintained early American collectibles, the violence of the smashed window is shocking.

I arrived at Yale after Calhoun was renamed and after the window was broken, but the history still feels current. To see our own recent history memorialized in the same space as glass from eras I had only seen in textbooks jolted me into a new sense of apprecia-

18 THE YALE HERALD

could have possibly done it. Wondering leads to wandering, leading the viewer to “Innovation in Glass” where Pyrex and Mason jars are displayed. Again, the spirit of the previous section filters into the next, so you can’t help but look at a Mason jar with some of the same awe that you were filled with a moment ago.

Then, just when you’ve almost given up on trying to figure out the how? of glass, the exhibit explains just that, with a section on glassmaking as a science. It is Just like the first section, “Glass in the Home” and rewarding, at the end, to finally be allowed to touch “Glass on the Table” felt engaging not because of the examples of different styles of glass, and to see the beauty of the objects, but more because of the trivia very opaque rocks that transform into translucency. surrounding them. Glass, it seemed, could have two lives: the initial, pragmatic use of a mirrored sconce As I finished touring the exhibit, I wondered if A Naor a dolphin candlestick, and then a second use by tion Reflected did, in fact, reflect a nation. The curaa collector. The exhibit’s attention to both of these tors did an excellent job of pulling glasswork from all lives, the work of curation itself, constitutes a third different eras and walks of American life, and a good life for these pieces. The gallery setting forces viewers job as well of coaxing the viewer into thinking about the glass in the exhibit, first as objects of historic valto reinterpret these glass pieces. ue, by emphasizing historically significant glasswork The fourth section, “Glass as Art” is all art, no func- such as the shattered window, and then as art. The tion. Here, the objects are arranged not historically contrast between a piece like Mega World and a disbut by color—making you notice the sheer vibran- play of Pyrex poses the question of whether or not cy of the glass, which is lit beautifully by the giant our kitchenware could count as artistic. I’m not sure windows and clean spotlight lighting. Mega World by that A Nation Reflected presented a unified image of Josh Simpson immediately stands out, a luminous, America through glass, but I don’t think it needed gorgeous globe pulled from glass and metal leaf. to. Unifying the exhibit around such a commonplace Anyone who’s ever taken a selfie gathers around Earl material such as glass allowed for the diversity of exReiback’s Through the Looking Glass (which I officially periences in this country to shine through, including recommend for your next Instagram post), and even the incredibly mundane. those who haven’t will be drawn to admire the seemingly infinite mirrored rows of light. The whole section feels playful, designed to make you second-guess what you’re looking at and how, exactly, it was made.

Modern glass blends in with Ancient Roman works, and cases become muddy with tiny handprints from children pointing out their favorite piece. The first half of the exhibit was designed to educate. This piece is a chance to explore, and to wonder how the artists tion. The shattered window contextualized the rest of the works for me. As I walked around the first three sections––“History, Politics, and Collecting,” “Glass in the Home,” and “Glass on the Table”––I imagined drinking from the fine glassware or trying to use the glass rolling pin. As I saw glass in its place in our lives as both material objects as well as art, the exhibition began to feel more engaging.

illustration by Paige Davis

19 Hips, Lips, and Instagram ANNIE ROSENTHAL, SM ’20

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ne afternoon this August, I was wasting time on the Instagram Explore page when a strangely magnetic video stopped my finger mid-scroll: a young woman with short, wavy brown hair slink-strutted around an outdoor stage in a white bralette and big orange pants, singing. The banner said her name was @nathypeluso. She was sexy––and also sort of unhinged. She lurched forward, thrusting the mic at the audience, snarling. The audio didn’t match the video, and I couldn’t make out the words, but her song was plaintive and yowling in a way that made me think Amy Winehouse.

I watched the clip like five times, then Shazamed the song.

It was called “Gimme Some Pizza,” and its lyrics consist almost exclusively of the line, “Gimme some pizza, pepperoni, man.”

Sexy and ridiculous––that’s Nathy Peluso’s brand. The 24-year-old Argentine rapper and singer has 422,000 Instagram followers; a year off her second EP, La Sandunguera, she’s selling out shows in Spain, where she lives, and around Latin America. She’s often compared to Rosalía, the Spanish 25-year-old whose flamenco-inspired R&B/ pop album, El Mal Querer, propelled her to international fame after its release in November. Both artists are part of a growing wave of young Latina and Spanish women making inventive music while cultivating highly stylized online images––people like Bad Gyal in Spain, and Princess Nokia and Kali Uchis in the U.S. These artists traffic in the glamor of indulgent Instagram photos. Of Peluso’s 1,325 posts, many are concert stills and well-lit selfies in which she sports huge hoops, flamenco tops, and flowers in her hair. What stick out to me, though, are the least flashy of her posts. Peluso’s feed is full of short iPhone clips, taken in what looks like a normal apartment: there’s a couch, a TV, a house plant. In each video she’s alone, dressed in a tiny tank top and sweatpants or underwear, listening to music and gyrating in front of the camera.

Her moves are exaggerated and reckless. She flops her head around, kicks her feet in the air, bares her teeth and windmills her arms. She licks her fingers and thrusts her pelvis at the camera to Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” purses her lips and runs her hands along her figure to Duke Ellington’s “Montevideo.” She’s so deeply committed to the hypersexuality of the motion that I’m almost embarrassed to watch. And yet the videos also convey a self-awareness.

Peluso looks up from her hips and grins derpily at us, without shame. It’s like we’re sitting inside of her mirror.

As a wizened consumer of social media, I’ve learned to be wary of what looks carefree or uncurated. Her routines are unchoreographed, but Peluso is clearly a really good dancer––her rhythm is perfect and she’s in complete control of

her body. In fact, she studied dance theater and publicity in college––so presumably she knows exactly what she’s doing. I wonder sometimes whether she’s using her front camera for these videos: can she see herself while she dances? I imagine her cropping the clips afterward, uploading them to Instagram, captioning. The process is so active, so demanding of effort. And yet, while Instagram loads, I firmly believe that she laughs and smacks her lips.

Maybe I’ve been duped, but I think this is exactly how she’d act sans witness.

Latina from one of Latin America’s whitest countries..... gurllll smh.” Another, on a similar selfie last April: “I love u but this is a mess.”

I’m convinced because the way she moves is the same way I move when I’m dancing alone (with the caveat that Peluso is a former ballerina and gymnast, while I learned to touch my toes in ninth grade). It’s a ritual I’ve performed for years––first developed as a 14-year-old with my own bedroom for the first time, now executed in front of the mirror in a pink bedroom in a rickety house on Dwight Street––admiring the swing of the inelegant parts of my body post-shower, popping my hips forward, waggling my tongue at myself. Being a young woman in A Room of One’s Own, you figure out what it means to be a sexual actor, to be seen and understood through the lens of your body but to exert some control over what that entails. In the mirror, I am totally gross, and totally shameless, and it makes me feel absolutely powerful. But while I’d never dare exhibit the same behavior in public, Peluso has decided that she wants the world to see.

This much she seems to recognize––her Instagram functions like an annotated bibliography. Unlike most celebrities, Peluso hasn’t deleted her pre-fame IG posts; scroll back to 2013 for a blurry photo of her high school choir with 33 likes. Alongside dramatically filtered duck-face photos, this archive offers up a life history of Nathy the Fan. Here she is 2014, holding up a Louis Armstrong record; geeking when Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound came out; captioning a Lauryn Hill photo “ma sexyqueen and inspiration [sic].”

One post is a black-and-white clip of Nina Simone singing “I Put a Spell on You.” The caption, in Spanish, reads, “When I feel that so much stimulation and paraphernalia contaminates me, I return to Nina to remind me of what’s really important in all of this. My vanishing point, naked and completely pure, like a glass of water on my forehead.

Thank you Nina thank you thank you I love you…”

Sexy and ridiculous–– that’s Nathy Peluso’s brand.

What does it look like for a light-skinned Latina woman to responsibly pursue a career in hip hop? First and foremost, it probably means recognizing your privilege and staying in your lane. It also means citing your sources. Peluso’s music couldn’t exist without Black woman artists, from Ella Fitzgerald to Celia Cruz to Missy Elliott.

Nothing demonstrates Peluso’s love for the music that has shaped her own better than her dance clips, though. A song like “La Passione,” the final track on La Sandunguera, owes nearly everything to Erykah Badu; in one sweaty video, Peluso rolls her body to “In Love With You.” Among the 25 or so home videos I tallied on her account, we find her moving in absolute bliss to Destiny’s Child, Joao Gilberto, and Gloria Estefan. She’s said her heart belongs to salsa, but on one clip, Peluso acknowledges that she’s from a country where the genre “no es protagonista.” “I’m not an expert, the little that I know is pure admiration and love for the salsa culture, and living with friends from Cuba, Dominicana, Puerto Rico and Colombia who have made my soul shake,” she writes in Spanish. Here’s hoping she’ll soon extend the same self-awareness to her relationship to Black American music.

It’s not radical for a skinny, light-skinned woman to dance sexy in front of a camera. But it is radical for her to do so in a way that’s organic, aggressive, self-indulgent, mocking the performance of femininity and seduction demanded of her. Peluso doesn’t cater to anyone else’s desires. She doesn’t ax the unflattering facets of her personality. She just frickin’ In the meantime, there’s the visceral pleasure of watching goes for it––and then dares us to say we don’t like it. someone good at dancing do so for herself, to music she Not everything about Nathy’s self-presentation is quite so loves. So rarely do I close the Instagram app and feel more easy to swallow. In the music video for “Natikillah,” her fulfilled than when I opened it; since I followed a pop star newest single, she wears her hair in cornrows. She’s post- who posts videos of herself cackling alone, I’ve felt that way ed pictures with her hair styled similarly before. One such so, so much more. selfie, from June 23, is captioned, “LATINA CHOCOLATA.” Several fans commented approvingly, but others responded with appropriate skepticism: “when u white

REVIEWS

JACK KYONO, PC ’20, YH STAFF

B

illie Eilish makes me feel old. 17 years old, blue-haired, most frequently clad in outrageous Gucci jumpsuits, Eilish is the first major pop star to feel like she’s from a whole other generation from me. She’s like Lorde, who was 16 when “Royals” debuted, but for the generation who grew up on Pewdiepie and unboxing videos. She’s probably the first artist born after 9/11 to have a platinum record.

To talk about the darkness of growing up in the age of screens, Eilish’s gorgeously produced debut studio album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? chooses horror as its aesthetic. Its tracks are sullen and nightmarish, but, like most horror movies, deeply comic. If Tim Burton made a movie about teenage depression, this album would be the soundtrack.

The title comes from the chorus of the album’s major hit, “bury a friend.” On the track, Eilish’s ghostly vocals float just above her brother Finneas

20 THE YALE HERALD

There are also some unfortunate moments, such as the cornball, dubsteppy “you should see me in a crown,” or the annoying interludes littered throughout the album. But the most confusing choice of WHERE DO WE GO? is a track halfway through the album, titled “wish you were gay.” It’s a love song, ostensibly to a straight boy.

His love is apparently so painful for Eilish that she tells him in the chorus, “I just kinda wish you were gay.” Eilish makes her instructions even more clear in the second verse: “Don’t say, I’m not Wedged between WHERE DO WE GO?’s your type / Just say that I’m not your preferred thumping, horror tracks are softer ballads, like sexual orientation.” “xanny.” It’s about being the only sober person at a party: “On designated drives home / Only one It’s weird, it’s kind of problematic, and it’s a who’s not stoned / Don’t give me a xanny now distraction from the rest of the album (and or ever.” It’s a different stance on party culture from the song itself, which otherwise, is totally than that of, say, Bhad Bhabie, who is the closest there). Eilish is still a maturing artist (she is 17, in age to Eilish in popular music. But it’s also I say again!) but her debut is well-crafted, and a reevaluation of drug use in the music industry frighteningly, darkly stylish. in general, especially after the deaths of Lil Peep and Mac Miller.

O’Connell’s hypnotic production. Sounds of broken glass and Slasher-like screams break up her lyrics, which, at times, are troubling: they are somewhere in the gray area between youthful exaggeration, and honest vulnerability, with lines like: “Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now” or “Bury a friend, I wanna end me.”

It’s hard to tell: how much of this gloom is just instrumental to the album’s dark ornament, and how much is really Eilish?

21 Solange and the Craft of the Mini-Song S

olange Knowles’ last two albums, When I Get Home and A Seat at the Table, have garnered overwhelming critical acclaim and widespread adoration largely as works best consumed in full. Often, albums that put the “long” in “long-playing record” feature a standout track or three surrounded by filler. Solange’s music is unique, however, in that even the most bite-sized of tracks are beautiful both as particles and parts of even greater waves.

Solange’s records are peppered with mini-songs, all under two minutes, and among them are some of her most memorable tracks. For context, pop songs are short, but not that short. Right now, only three songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are under two minutes, and one of them is “Baby Shark.”

To understand how Solange encapsulates the beauty of her expansive, meditative music into 120 seconds

or fewer, let’s look at the opening tracks of her last walks the thin line between hypnosis and semantic two albums, “Things I Imagined” and “Rise.” satiation. This goes on for 90 seconds until it reaches its climax, rewarding our trust in the song’s elusive Structurally, the two are remarkably similar. Both groove and ambiguous harmonic direction with its follow an AAAB song structure—three verses that final refrain. Solange finishes the sentence she’s been repeat a central motif to its boiling point, and then singing the entire time, triumphantly exclaiming her a final Coda that delivers a payoff both lyrically and dependent clause, “taking on the light.” Up, up, and harmonically different. Between the final refrain of away into the rest of the album. the A section and the beginning of the B section, there’s a transition. In “Rise,” this takes the form of Whereas “Things I Imagined” feels like being a four-second pause, allowing the listener to take blindfolded, spun around, and sent into a pitch in what they’ve just heard and prepare for what’s to black room only to find yourself somewhere within come. “Things I Imagined” achieves the same effect Solange’s hippocampus, “Rise” focuses on orientation with an instrumental refrain of the previous verses, rather than disorientation. It’s an outstretched hand, allowing synths to bubble up and burst. inviting its listener to crumble—as long as they wake up, rise, and pull up a chair thereafter. Amid “Things I Imagined” spirals around its titular phrase, a landscape of made-for-streaming albums that put shifting keys over cascading chords and percolating the “L” in “LP,” Solange crafts digital albums that synths. Shifting time signatures and accents keep are impeccable from the first byte to the last. you from getting truly comfortable, and its repetition

Minding the Gap T

he best documentaries create a sense of intimacy without feeling clichéd. In his debut feature, Minding the Gap, director and cinematographer Bing Liu perfects this balance. He maintains an uncontrived closeness with the main subjects of his documentary—Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan—because they are, in fact, his real-life friends. All three grew up in Rockford, Illinois, and all three turned to skateboarding to escape, or even attempt to heal, heartache accrued at home. What emerges is a searching look into the cycle of domestic violence and the complexities of masculinity framed in a seamless skate movie.

ERIC KREBS, JE ’21 YH STAFF

his friends grapple with at home. Mulligan struggles to accept the demands of a being a new father, not quite feeling grown himself. Johnson weighs the love he holds for his deceased father against the lingering emotional trauma of his father’s abuse. While training an unapologetically inquisitive camera on Johnson, Liu tells him, “I’m making this film because I saw myself in your story.”

This is why Liu returns to Rockford a decade later to make this film. The film makes clear that, for Liu and his friends, the process of making it was itself therapeutic. We want the characters’ maturations to match the progression of the film, even though Liu In Minding the Gap, Liu does not rest on the aesthetic never promises us this. pleasure of watching his friends skate. Experimental skate videos Liu filmed when he was a teenager and Liu does, however, give us a glimmer of hope that this long takes of Johnson and Mulligan gliding down film will give its characters a chance to move forward. unobstructed roads on their skateboards bookend In one of the documentary’s most moving scenes, we sobering interviews, which probe at the harsh realities watch Liu interview his mother about the domestic

HELEN TEEGAN, ES ’21 YH STAFF

violence that marred his childhood. The series of shots in the scene—a close up of Liu behind his own camera, the image of his mother staring right back at him, and pans covering the space between the two of them—capture the intensity of a conversation that is equal parts painful, unavoidable, and cathartic. When the camera trained on Liu zooms out, we see that this pivotal interview takes place in his living room, a place that marked the trauma that riddled his childhood.

The emotional layers captured in this living-room scene, as well as in the rest of the documentary, let us glimpse at how much Liu has at stake in the making of this film. Perhaps even more than that, they let us see how essential the making of this film is to Liu himself. The combination of narrative and exposition make for a documentary that embraces the personal without ever becoming misguided by sentimentality.

OUR KIND Patron T. Spielberg Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Molly Ball Christopher Burke Silver Contributor Dan Feder Brian Bowen David Applegate Fabian Rosado James Rubin

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Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy Julia Dahl Maureen Miller

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Depends on which one

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What are you? In Fight Club?

Start-ups

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Shut down

I like Club Penguin more

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