Herald Volume LXXXVII Issue 1

The Yale

Yale’s Most Daring Publication Volume LXXXVII Issue 1 January 24, 2020

Herald

Page 6

Paying homage to artist Paul Klee

Page 8

Loving crocodiles (a lot)

Page 10

Writing the state of the world

Page 12

Revealing the grim future of a New England virus

January 24, 2020

The Yale

Herald

EDITORIAL STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Kat Corfman & Eric Krebs

MANAGING EDITORS Rachel Calcott, Hamzah Jhaveri, Chie Xu (at large)

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Marina Albanese, Chalay Chalermkraivuth, Nurit Chinn, Fiona Drenttel, Jack Kyono, Laurie Roark

from the editors

INSERTS EDITORS Abby Lee & Kyle Mazer

☛ Dear beloved reader, So we’ve entered the third decade of the millenium. Three down, two to go. (Okay, maybe one.) But while we’re still here kicking and screaming on this sweaty rock we call home, what better time to read the Yale Herald?

This issue is full of firsts. It’s our first issue of the new decade. It’s the first issue that will be going up on our brand new, smokin’ hot website (yale-herald.com). In case you didn’t notice, Creative Director Rebecca Goldberg, MC ’21, cooked up this redesign. And its are first issu as Editors-in-Cheifs, so we hav no idea what were doing. So when it came time to narrow down a few select pieces to feature in this letter, we were stumped. But we can try.

On the cover, Krish Maypole, GH ’21, investigates the science and sadness behind New England’s 2019 outbreak of EEE virus. Mosquitoes brought a deadly virus to people in Connecticut this year, and no one was prepared. Due to climate change, it’s on the rise.

We sat down with Ben Smith, MC ’99, Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed News and Herald alum, to talk about the state of journalism and the world. To keep the theme of talking going, Edie Abraham-Macht, BR ’22, spoke with Peggy Orenstein, author of Boys and Sex. Finally, stay up late with Emily Tian, BF ’23, as she recounts the Pauli Murray All Nighter Music and Arts Festival. And while you’re stumbling back to your suite in the dark, take a pit stop and refuel with Ian Moreau, PC ’21, in an ode to GHeav’s Hungry Man Hero. Then, settle into your twin XL and enjoy Cats, courtesy of Dustin Dunaway, JE ’21.

We hope you enjoy your stay and that we see your beautiful face next week (online). Remember, this is just the beginning.

COPY EDITORS Marc Harary, Natalie Sangngam, Avik Sarkar

All the love, Kat + Eric Editors-in-Chief

FEATURES EDITORS Elliot Lewis & Macrina Wang

CULTURE EDITORS McKinsey Crozier & Caramia Putman VOICES EDITORS Lakshmi Amin & Edie AbrahamMacht REVIEWS EDITORS EDITORS Adhya Beesam & Isaac Pross SCI+TECH EDITOR EDITOR Krish Maypole

ARTS EDITOR EDITOR Farid Djamalov

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTOR DIRECTOR Rebecca Goldberg DESIGN EDITORS EDITORS Robert Samec, Kapp Singer, Xavier Ruiz

SOCIAL MEDIA Natalie Sangngam

BUSINESS STAFF BUSINESS MANAGERS MANAGERS George Hua & Michelle Tong 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 contact the Editors-in-Chief at kat.corfman@yale.edu and eric.krebs@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 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 ©2020 The Yale Herald.

week ahead ☛ Women of Yale Lecture Series: Art and Disruption Monday, January 27, 4 PM Yale Science Building, O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall ☛ White Nationalism: Lecture on Democracy in America Thursday, January 30, 4 PM Sprague Memorial Hall ☛ Manahatta Saturday, February 1, 8 PM Yale Repertory Theater

In This Issue

06 voices 12 front

Gianna Baez, Baez TC ’21, shares a poignant poem on family and loss.

Luca Scoppetta-Stern, Scoppetta-Stern TC ’22, pays homage to artist Paul Klee.

In a picaresque vignette of suburban life, Rebecca Goldberg, Goldberg MC ’21, tells the story of a wounded bird and its altruistic savior.

At the center of the issue, Krish Maypole, Maypole GH ’21, reports on a Connecticut woman’s fight with Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), revealing the grim future of the virus in the warming climate of New England.

08 18 sci+tech culture Eleanor Cook, Cook PC ’21, details a lifelong passion for crocodiles that changed her outlook on schoolwork.

09 arts Melanie Heller, Heller SM ’23, investigates the surprising history behind the University’s goat-themed architecture and the Yale mascot that could have been.

10,16 features Ben Smith, Smith MC ’99, is a journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed News.

Smith sat down with Kat Corfman, Corfman SM ’21, and Eric Krebs, Krebs JE ’21, to discuss the current state of journalism.

Edie Abraham-Macht, Abraham-Macht BR ’22, talks to best-selling author Peggy Orenstein about her new book book, Boys and Sex, and the conversation around male sexuality post-#MeToo.

A hungry Ian Moreau, Moreau PC ’21, drools over the most heroic sandwich of a beloved New Haven staple.

Ainsley Weber, Weber MC ’21, discusses boomers, zoomers, and the virtues of chunky sneakers Emily Tian, Tian BF ’23, recounts a well-spent all-nighter dancing to unusual music and enjoying unorthodox art.

20 reviews Dustin Dunaway, JE ’21, loves Cats and shares this steaming hot take.

Caroleine James, James BR ’22, celebrates the release of a complex yet bloodthirsty album.

Isaac Pross, Pross BK ’23, laments sitting on the floor during a crowded Shopping Period seminar.

In a new weekly segment, our good friend Harold details a quick review of 10 things.

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The Yale Herald

inserts

Top 5 More Marketable Names for the Beyond Burger

Will Wegner, MY ’22 YH Staff

“The Romans had a theory about the demise of woman, and that demise, was a man.”

I don’t know what to do anymore. Every day I come home to my beautiful house and there on the beautiful pullout couch I stole from my rich, recently deceased cousin is my man husband, gently caressing his sweat soaked Fortnite console. He is smelly and hot like a bear. He is wearing a latex human suit. On the computer screen, little children wearing latex suits just like my husband’s are dancing and firing their guns at the sky. I think of a quote by Dante: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.” There is no joy now. The Fortnite people yell on the screen, and I believe, just for a moment, that perhaps this is my own version of hell. The Romans had a theory

about the demise of woman, and that demise, was a man. All of a sudden my husband buckles to the floor like in the height of an orgasm that wasn’t even disappointing:“Victory Royale! Thirteen Kills! Bow down, LatexLoverScott69!”

Still, I prepare my husband a beautiful dinner with baked potatoes and ham. He does not come to the table. I sob. I shove the food off of the expensive dining room table I stole from my even richer, more recently deceased aunt. He does not look at me. “Where we dropping, bois?” He cackles at something Scott must’ve said on the microphone.

Am I nothing but a game to him? An avatar of my own demise? I break our bottle of wine, brandishing the glass.

“Floss like a boss,” I scream. I search on Amazon for my own latex suit.

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Bed, Bath & Beyond Burger: Like furniture? Like food? Don’t have time to shop for both? Find it between the Yankee Candles and heavy duty hand juicers.

Beyond the Sea Burger: It’s definitely not fish, but the customers don’t have to know that. Le Ger de Mer for our more European audiences.

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I am reckless. I am alive. “Where are we dropping?” I dissolve.

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I Lived It: My Husband Won’t Stop “Playing Fortnite”

Luna Garcia, SM ’22

Impossible Burger: Let’s be real—these taste much better than the Beyond Burger. If we use the same name we’ll get at least half of their sales by pure chance.

Burger: Nothing else. They won’t know what to do.

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Beyoncé Burger: An easy sell, although the accent aigu will probably cost us extra for printing.

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The Yale Herald

5

Help! Do I Have a Bad Roommate Or Is He Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos?

Sahaj Sankaran, SM ’20

☛ Every night he invites his weird friends over to sing a cappella in Eldritch tongues that were not made for the human mouth, and it’s getting really annoying. They’re not even in sync half the time. ☛ When I ask him to keep it down, he just laughs at me and says [SOUND OF A MILLION PLAGUE-BEARING MOSQUITOES BUZZING IN TERRIFYING UNISON]. I think this is uncalled for. ☛ One night, my tomato juice was replaced with the blood of a 10,000-yearold Egyptian priest. My roommate says it was Azathoth, the Blind God Who Dreamed The Universe. I say he is a liar liar pants on fire. ☛ When I accidentally ate a slice of pizza he’d been saving in the minifridge, he conjured an image in my mind’s eye of a vision of alien oceans, filled with unspeakable terrors that tore at my sanity and left me a gibbering wreck, forever cursed with demonic knowledge of which I could never be permitted to speak. This, I need hardly say, was a dick move. ☛ He bakes cookies on occasion. That is nice of him. ☛ You know, despite our disagreements, he and I get along pretty well, and I think we’re really becoming pals.

After all, as he often says, [SOUND OF A CHILLING WIND BLOWING ACROSS THE DECAYING CORPSE THAT CONTAINED ANY SMIDGEN OF HOPE THE HUMAN RACE EVER HAD].

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The Yale Herald

voices

Elegy for Alana Gianna Baez, TC

’21

I call Mami everyday after class and she gives me the rundown: work was fine, but some of her students are lazy and annoying, dad is working late, and they might go out this weekend, some chisme here and there about fulanita and other people I’ve never met.

Today she interrupts her routine speech, telling me how she wishes I could remember when all my old baby clothes became yours, how I traced my small hands over her bulging basketball belly, over what was you. Over and over again, giggling until I’d finally fall asleep. My head resting against the skin that covered yours.

Then she laughs a little, sighs—Ay mi’ja— and continues to tell me the usual: that my brother hasn’t called in days, that tío is still in the hospital, and she ends our call by asking when I’m coming home.

Joyful Mountain Landscape (after Paul Klee)

Luca Scoppetta-Stern, TC

’22

fishbone tree and orange yard this old sea is growing hard sun is yawning tired of day purple awning fades to gray stream is passing through the woods mustard grass and stubborn mud people laughing in its wake beavers lap and otters shake there is nothing to explain moon will always wax and wane wind will come and go too soon brain stays hollow as a spoon sky will wear the mask of night change to day and feel no fright ground will crumble like a cake soul divides it—toothpick stake clouds of chalk in naked sky form a flock and pass us by mouths agape and arms awry we pretend we too can fly

The Yale Herald

Anything But Living We sit on the curb with the bird nestled into the t-shirt I’ve balled in my lap. It does not take long for sweat to begin beading around the edge of my forehead and nape of my neck. If Shallow notices how red my face must be, she does not say anything.

“We’re going to have to take it in ourselves. The woman on the line said they don’t do pickup for animals like this. Only big ones. Raptors or bobcats or what have you.” She places her phone inside her purse and pulls out a pack of gum. She unfolds a piece and slips it into her mouth the way she always does: first biting it in half between her front teeth, and then biting the second half into a fourth before extending the open pack in my direction as the pieces conglomerate into a mush in her mouth.

“I can’t. I don’t want to move around and disturb it.” I’m convinced I can feel the bird’s heartbeat against my leg, though it might just be my own.

“I’m not going to feed it to you,” she says.

“Fine. I don’t want it anyway.”

She shrugs and throws the gum into her purse’s open maw. The first trickle of sweat runs down my back exposed to the afternoon sun.

“Do you think you can handle it until Tuesday? I won’t have the car until then.”

“My dad’s going to shit himself if he sees a wild animal in the house.”

“It’s a robin,” Shallow says, rolling her eyes as she stands up, crushing the neighbor’s newly-seeded lawn beneath her flipflops. “And it can’t fly. All you’ve got to do is poke some holes in a shoebox and keep it in a closet for a couple of nights. The wildlife lady says it helps with its stress. I think even you can handle that.” She pats me twice on the top of my head, the first affectionately and the second like the type of swat you’d aim towards a fly.

“Where are you going?”

“To meet my sister at the bus stop. It’s almost three.”

She hitches her purse a little higher on her shoulder. “You coming? She’d probably freak if she saw you holding a bird.”

“I just want to get it home,” I tell her, a little out of breath.

“Whatever,” she responds with a shrug, and heads down Sawyer Street without looking back. Her usual goodbye. My eyes follow her down the curb before returning to the bundle of feathers and fabric atop my thighs. We sit and wait together until the smacking sound of Shallow’s footsteps on the pavement grows quiet.

If the bird was not quivering, I might have thought it to be dead—the way it was curled in on itself, eyes closed, right wing cocked at an odd angle. I watch it for several seconds longer, unable to tell when it draws breath. Maybe it was already dead. Maybe I’m the one quivering. It’s true, my fingers are numb and trembling as I lower my hand into my lap and close my eyes. Its feathers are soft as silk and warm, too warm to be anything but living—fiercely, violently living against my clenching palm.

Afterwards, I continue to sit stiff, unable to loosen my grip or slacken my jaw. It is still warm, even now. I tell myself I cannot rise until it begins to grow cool, because only then will I know for certain.

Rebecca Goldberg, MC ’21 YH Staff

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The Yale Herald

sci+tech

I Love Crocs Eleanor Cook, PC ’21 I fell in love with crocodiles in third grade. Our big assignment that year was a presentation to our classmates and their parents about an animal.

Crocodiles scared me at the time, so I decided to focus on them.

By the time of my presentation, I was enamored with how sneakily such hulking creatures could slide through the water, only to surge up towards prey in an astounding display of force. The way mother crocodiles carried their newly-hatched babies in their mouth was adorable! I included an image of this phenomenon on my poster.

As an important aside, the mothers don’t eat their hatchlings. Parents expressed significant concern when they saw what they thought was cannibalism, but calmed down after careful explanation. Male crocodiles, on the other hand, have been caught eating their young, but that’s beside the point.

Crocodiles have been my favorite animals ever since, with alligators coming in as at a close second. Before you ask, as a broad generalization, the main differences are: crocodiles have narrower, pointier snouts, while alligators have wider, U-shaped snouts.

Alligators’ bottom teeth can be seen when their mouths are shut, and crocodiles’ can’t. Crocodiles can also gallop while gators, disappointingly, can’t.

Growing up in Maryland, the only big reptiles I saw were at the National Zoo. Coming into college, I hadn’t learned about crocodiles with any rigor, outside of my third grade project. When I was afforded the excuse to nerd out, I pounced–or perhaps surged, as does a crocodile out of a pond towards a zebra on the shore.

It was a Friday like most others my first year. I was in section for BIOL 104: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the final half-semester of the introductory biology sequence. The final paper was five pages on a clade (—a group of species that are all of the descendants from one common ancestor)— and a trait that has evolved within that clade. My immediate reaction: crocodiles!

I walked out of class in the basement of 17 Hillhouse to a bright but chilly early-March day. I thought about curling up under a blanket in my suite

and watching a movie. Instead, I zipped up my jacket and walked away from Old Campus, up Science Hill. I was on a mission: to find Gordon Grigg’s The Biology and Evolution of Crocodylians.

The order Crocodylia, whose members are called crocodylians, includes crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials. The book was located in the CSSSI. Determined, I faced the wind blowing down the hill and climbed toward KBT. For anyone who doesn’t know, the CSSSI (whenever you think you’ve said enough S’s, add another) or Center for Science and Social Science Information is a library in the basement of Kline Biology Tower, the ominous column that looms over Science Hill. Except for the atrium at the entrance, it’s a space with very few windows and many bright lights where very little sun gets in and time ceases to exist. In this basement is another basement. It is in this sub-basement where Grigg’s book was shelved.

I walked down the narrow staircase to the CSSSI’s bottom floor, phone in hand, my Orbis search open. I passed books on sharks and frogs and fish until finally, I got to the crocs. Scanning the shelf, I laid eyes on a large grey book with gold lettering. Eureka! In what was one of the highlights of my first year at Yale, I

discovered that Grigg’s book was a full, 649-page textbook. I teared up. Adrenaline rushed through my body as I took it down from the shelf and leafed through its pages. The foreword began, “Few animals are as charismatic as crocodylians, and as poorly understood by the general public.” “This book gets me,” I thought. Crocodiles are charismatic and so misunderstood.

Captions to pictures revealed that the authors thought crocodylians were just as cute as I did. One of my favorites is, “Fig. 3.25. A juvenile black caiman, Melanosuchus niger, shows a toothy smile.”

As I walked out of the CSSSI and back down Science Hill, I felt indestructible. I stopped everyone I knew to show them my book, which I clutched tightly against my chest. My fingers went numb from holding it in the cold, but I didn’t care.

That night, as the L-Dub courtyard became abuzz with partygoers and motorcycles roared down Elm Street, I made myself a cup of coffee, settled into my common room, and read. It was the first time in a while that I was reading without taking notes or making marks. I lost track of time. I stayed up later that night than my suitemates who had gone out. As I closed the book in the wee hours of the morning, I felt

satisfied with my night and excited for more reading later.

I ended up writing my paper on the evolution of snout morphology, or rather why different crocodylians have different head shapes. Here’s why: In short, crocodiles don’t chew their food, which means that if prey is too large to eat whole, they have to rip it into smaller pieces by gripping it in their teeth, rotating their head vigorously, and hitting it against the water.

This gruesome dance can exert a lot of torque on the jaw. The more triangular the jaw, the shorter the mandibular symphysis, which is where the two prongs of the jaw join together into one shaft.

If this shaft is too long, it can’t readily withstand the force of ripping up large prey. For some crocodylians, however, the most abundant prey are smaller and move more quickly. A slimmer snout can move more quickly through the water to catch small fish.

I spent hours reading Grigg’s textbook while writing this paper (and while I was supposed to be doing other work). If the grade was all that mattered, I probably should have spent more time studying for my final in the class then doing a deep dive on croc jaws. Fortunately, grades aren’t everything.

The first year of college is tough for everyone, but I think that I had set my expectations especially high coming into Yale, which had led to disappointment.

I felt like people at Yale were too cool, too artsy, too worldly for me. After going to middle and high school with mostly the same people, I found it frustrating to be constantly meeting people, often without forging very meaningful friendships. I didn’t realize that finding The Biology and Evolution of Crocodylians would turn out to be one of the highlights of my first year.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a piece about why you should like crocodiles — although they’re awesome and you should. What I learned at the end of my first year was instead how rewarding it was to lean into my interests and take the time and emotional investment to be genuinely excited about my school work. Reading Grigg’s book was the first time that school didn’t feel like work. I felt validated in my love of crocodiles.

With this validation, I gained confidence.

And I had a blast.

The Yale Herald

9

arts

The Yale Yales: Uncovering Our Secret Mascot

“They are just obscure enough that self-important Yalies can scoff and say “you wouldn’t get it” to those who ask about the tusked goat mascot.”

Melanie Heller, SM ’23 YH Staff All Yale buildings have details that are just waiting to be noticed by a keen set of eyes. While headed totowards Davenport to meet some friends for dinner, I noticed something strange: two goats standing guard over the York Street gate.

A full stomach later, I ventured back outside, only to be confronted by another set of goats holding up a pediment on the Georgian side of the York Street gate.

A Google search on my way back to my dorm revealed a majestical, mythical side to Yale.

In legend, there exists a mythical goat called a yale. “‘Yales”’ are not nearly as popular as unicorns or dragons, but they have earned their place in heraldic mythology. Sometimes spelled “eales” or “yaels”, or referred to as “centicores,” yales are four-legged creatures with boar-like tusks and large horns. Most depictions of yales include one horn facing forward and the other facing back, but yales can swivel their horns in any direction. Yales can attack with one or both horns pointed forward; alternatively, they point both horns back to signify peace. It’s these dynamic horns that make the yale a serious defensive force.

Most hybrid animals, like our dear goat with boar tusks, are the result of explorers trying to make sense of real animals that they haven’t seen before.

Pliny the Elder, a Roman philosopher and explorer, notes the yale in his Natural History as a beast “the size of a hippopotamus, with an elephant’s tail… with the jaws of a boar and movable horns more than a cubit in length.” When he saw this animal over his voyage to sub-Saharan Africa, what he saw was likely an antelope or water buffalo—not the supernatural yale.

Pliny might have been looking at an ibex, the mountain goat native to Afroeurasia, given that “yael” is its Hebrew translation. Male ibexes can be identified by their long, curved horns. Although ibexes have neither fangs nor the ability to move their horns, they closely resemble many depictions of the mythical yale.

Two British noble families found the

yale endearing, and adopted it as part of their coat of arms. The older Bedford yale is a slender creature with straight horns and a long tail. The better known Beaufort yale, however, is presented as a stockier animal with curled horns. Bedford yales tend to be black or brown, while the Beaufort variety boasts golden horns, tusks, and hooves, and a gold-spotted white coat.

With the historic record set straight for this magical goat, what is the link between Yale the school and yale the animal? Other than the pairs of yales adorning Davenport College, the animals appear on a few other parts of the campus. Two more yales support the Timothy Dwight shield on a stone pediment above its Temple Street gate. Yales also appear on two of the four quadrants of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences shield.

The yales on the Gothic side of Davenport’s gates grasp onto spears, giving them a ferocious aura. The bodies of the beasts are made of stone, whereas their horns are out of metal. These horns act as a secondary weapon. The beasts inside Davenport, however, are more dynamic with their whole body made of metal. While stone statues must be chiseled down to their desired shape, metal can be melted down into any form. These metal yales are freer to take any pose they want while the stone yales on the outside of the College are more stationary. Instead of guarding the College, these yales are rearing against the solid architecture. Those who want to enter Davenport must first confront the yales, then swipe their IDs. The Davenport yales take a departure from traditional yale iconography. These yales are notably missing their long teeth, and display both of their horns forward.

Although less common, yales have been depicted with bodies of horses, oxen, or even lions and tigers. These statues resemble horses more than they resemble goats—almost like a unicorn with two horns instead of one. This could be in homage to the coat of arms of the United Kingdom. On either side of the heraldic shield are a golden lion and a silver uni-

corn. John Davenport, the namesake of Davenport College, was an Englishman, and only moved to the colonies in his 40s. The move to make the Davenport yale look like a unicorn brings Davenport energy to the courtyard along with a colonial twist.

All this yale talk begs the question: why are we the Yale Bulldogs and not the Yale Yales? Although Yale was the first school to adopt the bulldog as its mascot, this short, fat, sickly animal is now the most popular mascot across all Division I football teams.

The original Handsome Dan was bought by a Yale football player in the 1880s. Dan was lead across the field before games and won the love of the student body. The bulldog only became the official mascot of the school after Dan’s passing. Handsome Dan I was truly a one-of-a-kind canine. Dan struck fear into the hearts of Harvard and Princeton and also went on to win Top Dog at the Westminster Dog Show.

Not only are bulldogs a basic mascot; they’re also are horribly inbred and sickly. It almost seems inhumane to subject these poor dogs to large crowds, loud noises, and constant attention. Of the 18 dogs with the title of Handsome Dan, six were retired due to stage fright or freak accidents. There is a difference between giving a dog love and bombard-

ing it with affection to the point of emotional instability.

Perhaps the most interesting yale motif is the yale mace. At each year’s commencement procession, a marshall carries a mace topped with a yale head.

The yale on the mace is depicted in the Beaufort style, with white fur and golden details. This yale, however, looks to be smiling, with his bright red tongue sticking out. The yale mace was designed in the 1950s by Theodore Sizer, an art historian and former director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Sizer also designed the shields for the original 10 residential colleges. In creating the mace, he proposed the yale would serve as an alternative mascot to the bulldog, endearing students with its droll demeanor.

Yales beautifully represent our student body. They are just obscure enough that self-important Yalies can scoff and say “you wouldn’t get it” to those who ask about the tusked goat mascot. On the other hand, pun-loving Yalies will love the neverending meme potential if it were the mascot. Mythical mascots are far from unheard of—think of the Phoenix of UChicago and the Drexel Dragons. Yales are far scarier than bulldogs. While Bulldogs are lovable balls of slobber, Yales are ferocious beasts with movable horns. If a 50-pound dog and a magical goat got into a fight, my money would be on the goat.

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The Yale Herald

feature

YH Alumni Interview: Ben Smith, MC ’99 Smith Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed News Kat Corfman, SM ’21, and Eric Krebs, JE ’21 YH Staff

Ben Smith, MC ’99, is a journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed News. A former writer for the Yale Herald and The New Journal, Smith has also worked at the New York Observer, the New York Daily News, and Politico. Smith sat down with Kat Corfman, SM ’21, and Eric Krebs, JE ’21, to discuss the current state of journalism. This is the first in a series of interviews with Herald alumni.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

KC KC: If you could give it an algorithm, how do you establish legitimacy as a publication, and even as a writer?

BS: BS Obviously for us, the main opportunity and the main challenge has always been that BuzzFeed has this huge brand and huge scale. And it’s entertainment. If you asked when I started, “Do you trust BuzzFeed?” it wasn’t a question that made any sense.

Like, no, we’re trying to win trust. And I guess my basic opinion is that you do it by doing stories that people have to take seriously. And the reporting gives you credibility.

Beyond that, when you’re challenged on a question, when you’re dealing with questions of whether people will trust you—which at this point every media brand in the country has, because the President is attacking the idea of trusting media—you really have to show your work and be transparent and publish documents. And you’ve got to be very explicit about how you got things to the extent possible, and allow your reader to replicate the way you got your information.

EK: Whenever I’ve gotten something wrong or had pushback from something

I’ve reported, it kind of stings—almost like a personal thing. Does that ever go away? Whenever you make mistakes or screw up, what’s the knee jerk reaction?

BS: I actually think you have to be grateful when people correct you. They are helping you be right. And one of the great things about the Internet is that you can really correct. In print, you can’t.

You could stick a correction on page three or whatever, but it would never fix the original harm. On the web, you really can fully, completely correct something.

I think people judge you mostly not— assuming you’re mostly getting things right—on “do you make the occasional error,” but on how you deal with it, and how you deal with it in a non-defensive way.

EK: Do you think that the immediacy of the way that we get our news and demand it create additional challenges?

BS: BS I think the biggest challenge, actually, is that reporters shouldn’t strive for consistency. You should be reporting what you see and what you can know.

And if the theory behind that contradicts what was sort of the theory behind your previous story, you shouldn’t adjust the reporting to fit your previous story. Like that’s not reporting.

It’s not a journalist’s job to project a huge, coherent theory about the world. And I think that there’s a real trap in trying to.

If you see your job as trying to create a narrative, you wind up doing bad reporting and missing obvious stuff.

KC: That reminds me of a question we wanted to ask about BuzzFeed News’ editorial standards and stance on activism. The Yale Herald is one of two publications that published editorials about this year’s Harvard-Yale football game

“It’s not a journalist’s job to project a huge, coherent theory about the world.

And I think that there’s a real trap in trying to.”

and the climate change protest and, in ours, we demand Yale divest from Puerto Rican debt and fossil fuels. We were nervous that the piece would hamper our credibility as an “objective” news source, which is why we were fascinated by the fact that BuzzFeed puts this on the website.

BS: BS: I wish I had like a better answer to this, but, honestly, we were trying to say something totally banal. If you asked The New York Times, “Is racism a story with two sides?” they would say no. And I actually think at this point, if you ask them that about gay rights, they’d say no. But it doesn’t mean that we take a position on House resolution acts that say something about bakers in Colorado, right.

We were basically just trying to make explicit the assumptions that are implicit for every news organization. I’m not sure that totally worked. I feel like I only get that quoted to me out of context or in bad faith.

EK: This is something everyone getting interviewed loves to have happen, which is putting something you said this week in context with something said 13 years ago.

BS: You really did your homework.

EK: We tried—I think it was a piece in The Guardian. You’re basically saying that every four years the media tries to reassess and apply its lessons from the last election. We’re probably already getting things wrong. I think it was in the 2008 primary, there was the discussion as to whether Hillary was an incumbent or not, and the dynamics that played in the race— BS: BS What did I say then? I have no recollection.

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EK: You wrote,“The case with Clinton is worth checking out. But there’s one near contradiction in there. That’s the central puzzle of this race. The central question is, is Hillary like an incumbent or not?” And Trump, at least to me, seems to be in the gray zone of incumbency. The Obama 2012 election feels different in terms of incumbency than Trump 2020. And I was wondering whether you think that the way that we’ll get it wrong this time—as we inevitably will—what specific effects the incumbency has on that.

BS: BS I don’t know. I mean, the way you often get that wrong—but this isn’t new—it’s just that people cover and get obsessed with the mechanics of Trump’s campaign, rather than covering the real campaign. It’ll be the White House, and what he does with presidential power to get himself re-elected, but I think that will get a lot of coverage, too.

Yeah, I don’t know. If I knew exactly what we were going to get wrong— EK: Then we wouldn’t.

BS: BS —yeah, that’d be great.

KC: KC Is there a story that you wish you had caught onto earlier, that just sticks in your mind like, “Man, I really wish I had been on that”?

BS: BS You know, there’s so many. I mean, this is so random and small, but it’s just since you asked that today, it’s the one that’s in my head—a colleague of mine in Brazil said a few years ago: “There’s this guy, Olavo de Carvahlo, who lives in Virginia and the Brazilian right wing worships him.”

And I always thought, “What a cool, interesting story. I should interview that guy, what a cool story.” And then didn’t.

And then Bolsonaro was elected. This guy has become this totally central figure, and The Atlantic had a really great story on him last week. I was like, “Man, I would’ve been so far ahead on that one.”

And you get no credit for that. Like it’s negative credit, you know, when somebody else gets a scoop and you say, “Oh yeah, I had that one and I decided not to do it,” and you think that makes you look smarter—it does the opposite, it makes you look like an idiot. But I would say that, in general news, judgment is so much about when you think, “Oh, this is kind of interesting. I wonder if I should do it or maybe it’s too early.” You always do that story—there’s no such thing as too early. The other thing is too late.

EK: EK You said in a New York Times article about you that “political coverage that wants to be solely high minded is missing huge chunks of the actual

“I just think that one of the real features of Trump’s election is that nobody thinks that it’s a game, or that the stakes are low and it’s fun.” interplay of personality power that actually drives things,” which was about the idea of memes and entertainment in politics. Do you think that coverage that gives light to that plays into the idea of politics as a spectacle? And if it is a spectacle, does it have to be?

BS: BS That’s really interesting. I think the landscape has changed on us a little bit. I mean, it’s always a spectacle. I don’t know what that means, but I think the thing that people object to is that it’s like a game—it’s a sport.

When I was at Politico, we had a big audience who really, really explicitly were interested in politics as a game. And I just think that one of the real features of Trump’s election is that nobody thinks that it’s a game, or that the stakes are low and it’s fun. It’s not that they don’t care about who’s going to win or don’t care about tactics, it just means that, tonally and in the framing of the story, you have to make clear that there are real stakes.

EK: EK Yeah, I think I was thinking in terms of how we saw a lot of pundit coverage about the impeachment hearings, where the headline would be “Groundbreaking, but Boring,” right?

BS: BS Yeah... and honestly, that might be true. But people got upset about it because it felt like [the coverage] was making light of an important thing and covering it as theater.

EK: Yeah, that’s a better word.

EK KC: We had a few questions that were just KC specifically about your experience at the Herald. You were an opinion columnist?

BS: I wrote a column but I never went to BS the office. I was an opinion columnist, that’s all I was. I wasn’t actually like a big student journalist. I went to an or-

ganizational meeting at the Yale Daily News my freshman year and I thought, “These people are way too intense for me.” Yeah. I didn’t go back and was scared by them.

And then I wrote a bit for The New Journal and got a column in The Herald my senior year.

KC: KC This is always a fun one. Imagine you’re a senior in college again, seeing yourself in your life today. What do you think would surprise you most about your life and your career?

BS: BS I mean, just the fact that I became a blogger—a word I would not have known my senior year—for a series of publications that didn’t exist at the time, Politico, BuzzFeed, The New York Sun. Like most of my career has been spent at publications that did not exist at the time and would have been really hard to explain to a college senior in 1999.

KC: KC I couldn’t imagine explaining a blog before blogs were a thing— BS: BS —or explaining a publication that is rooted in social media when there was no social media.

When I was in college, the interesting part of the Internet was the Usenet, which was all bulletin boards, and I remember planning a vacation by going on some bulletin board and asking some people, “Is there a good state park in Georgia to camp in?” It was very sweet old Internet stuff. I did a paper for Linguistics about the use of language on singles bulletin boards on the Internet, about gender pronouns.

There was a service literally called “Finger,” where you could type in somebody else’s email address and see where they had last logged in. So you could sort of see if somebody was around. (laughs) EK: EK What do you think of the media’s ability to penetrate new audiences at this point? Do you think that that’s still the game?

BS: BS I think the era of really rapid growth is mostly over. I mean these new organizations like us and Vox and Vice, I guess. I think we’re all trying to build sustainable businesses rather than focusing on growth. And I think that we grew very rapidly in this kind of wide-open social media space with Facebook—we grew on the backs of Facebook and Twitter’s growth and they’ve stopped growing domestically and they’ve closed off those channels. I think it’d be very hard today to start a new news organization or media company and reach a massive scale fast. I mean, that’s not always true. You could start a platform like TikTok, right?

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But you don’t really see—there are no media companies being born on Tik Tok and I don’t think TikTok is gonna let that happen.

EK: EK Do you think this is sustainable, the way things are now?

BS: BS No, I mean right now the media business is struggling. I think there are some exceptions. A handful of these players that have gotten to scale and built real businesses—including us— will be fine. The biggest legacy brands will be okay. And then there are some very small things, little newsletter subscription things, that will be fine. Everybody in the middle is really struggling.

EK: EK And do you think in the shadow that casts, with local reporting as a check to local corruption and things like that, do you think there’s anything that other brands that are not struggling can do?

BS: BS I think with local in particular, nonprofits are an important part of the picture. I’m involved with The City, which is a big New York-based news nonprofit. My wife runs Brooklyner, which is a small Brooklyn for-profit news organization, so I’m very with that space. And I think there’s just nothing on the horizon to replace the kind of scale local newspapers have. That’s a real problem.

EK: EK Knowing the economic prospects of journalism and knowing the sort of attack that it’s under, what advice would you give to young people entering the field today?

BS: BS I just feel like reporting is the most fun thing—and that you should not go to New York. If you can afford it, try to get a job somewhere outside New York.

And actually, the woes of the industry sometimes mean that you, as a fairly junior reporter, can walk into a fairly hollowed-out newsroom and be doing really interesting stuff on day one because they’re desperate for a copy. I went to Indianapolis after Yale and really enjoyed it.

EK: EK —and then Eastern Europe, right?

BS: BS Yeah, then Eastern Europe. You know, you’re potentially in a time in your life when you’re unattached and can go cover interesting stuff—you know, away from the big media capitals. And if you do good work, you can always come back to the media capital and get coffee for people. And you can certainly work your way up through the industry that way, but it’s a lot more fun and you end up in the same place if you get out of the city. And reporting is really fun.

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front Mosquitoes brought a deadly virus to people in Connecticut this year, and no one was prepared. Due to climate change, it’s on the rise in New England.

A Viral Climate:

Krish Maypole, GH ’21

EEE and its unnerving future in New England

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Pat Shaw, 77, was enjoying retired life with her high school sweetheart, Jerry Shaw, when she came down with a cold in the middle of August. Pat felt mostly normal at first—all she had was a small headache. She would still join Jerry at their kitchen table to read the paper over coffee every morning. After breakfast, they’d feed their seven guinea pigs and play with their dog, Bennie. In the afternoon, Pat and Jerry might swim in their pool, go for a walk, or spend a couple of hours in the garden outside their home in East Lyme, Connecticut.

“We just enjoyed doing things together—being together,” said Jerry.

After about a week, Pat’s headaches got worse. She went to bed early, feeling exhausted. Overnight, she developed a 103-degree fever. “She got up in the morning and looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re growing a beard. I like it,’” Jerry remembered. “I’ve had a beard for fifty years.” He knew that his beloved wife wasn’t herself.

Jerry hurried Pat to the emergency room at their local hospital, where her doctors thought she was having a stroke, though her brain showed no signs of bleeding or damage. The doctors stuck a needle into Pat’s back to take fluid for testing. According to Jerry, her blood pressure skyrocketed, and her doctors were worried. They sent a heavily-sedated Pat to Yale-New Haven Hospital by helicopter.

Soon after she arrived at the hospital, Pat became unresponsive. She couldn’t breathe or eat without the help of machines. Her three sons and their daughters stood by her hospital bed, begging her to wake up, but MRIs showed worsening damage to her brain as August turned to September.

For two weeks, no one knew what was wrong. “Everything came back negative,” said Jerry. The doctors sent Pat’s spinal fluid to the Centers for Disease Control in Colorado. In mid-September, a scary diagnosis came back.

Pat had developed a viral infection from a mosquito that probably bit her when she was in her backyard. She had Eastern Equine Encephalitis—EEE for short. EEE is a rare, poorly understood virus that attacks the brain. “Who would have thought it would be one of us?”

Jerry said.

Pat’s EEE was part of an outbreak that swept across the United States this summer. In 2019, the virus killed fifteen Americans. The number of people infected nationwide swelled to 38, more than five times the average over the past ten years. Diagnosis of EEE is difficult, and treatment is often futile.

Its rise this year is a sign of what’s to come. A warming climate will generate a more favorable environment for mos-

quitoes, allowing more of them to carry and transmit the virus for longer each year. More people will get sick across New England, and no one is prepared.

Mosquitoes in the tropics can carry EEE year round because of consistently warm weather. Migrating birds fly to the tropics for the winter. There, they pick up EEE from mosquito bites.

Birds don’t get sick or show symptoms from EEE, but they carry the virus back to North America.

Diagnosis of EEE is difficult, and treatment is often futile.

Its rise this year is a sign of what’s to come.

When spring comes to New England, EEE-infected birds return. Upon arriving, many look for food along the Connecticut-Rhode Island border in swamps filled with large trees. The swampy water at the roots of these trees is a perfect breeding habitat for Culiseta melanura, the main mosquito species that carries EEE. C. melanura feeds almost exclusively on birds.

When the migrating birds reach the swamps, C. melanura mosquitoes first pick up the virus by biting them. Birds and mosquitoes then pass the virus back and forth in a game of hot potato. “If

more birds get infected, more mosquitoes get infected,” says Leonard Munstermann, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.

Munstermann focuses on insect-borne illnesses like EEE. He finds striking how quickly C. melanura can spread the virus. “For some reason, it is able to go through them like a hot knife through butter,” says Munstermann.

The knife is the hottest under the warm summer sun. During the summer, levels of EEE in C. melanura reach a high point.

When the adult mosquitoes die at the end of each year, their offspring some-

Jerry Armstrong in his lab.

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how carry the virus into the next spring.

Scientists don’t know how the virus manages to overwinter. But experts suspect that larvae spend the winter nestled in their forested wetlands, harboring the virus. In the spring and summer, mature mosquitoes can once again infect humans. Not only do birds bring EEE to New England anew each year—it also rolls over from the year before.

The virus spills out of the bird-mosquito exchange to infect humans during the rare instance when C. melanura bites a person. Although EEE does not affect birds, it causes severe brain damage and kills a third of the people it infects. Though EEE does not mean certain death, the disease is always life-altering and debilitating. Children and the elderly are especially susceptible to infection.

Philip Armstrong has watched the summertime risk of EEE infection in New England slowly rise over the past two decades. During that time, he has been the scientist in charge of Connecticut’s mosquito trapping and testing program.

Armstrong studies EEE for a living, but the mention of it makes him shake his head in dismay. “I never wish EEE on my worst enemy. It’s devastating.”

Armstrong is a tall, skinny man with ginger hair graying at the temples. His lab is teeming with mosquitoes of all kinds. Dead ones sit piled in glass

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front containers near microscopes. On the walls of the lab, there are illustrated comics and larger-than-life mosquito posters. Armstrong approaches a fridgesized incubator along one of the walls, where he keeps live mosquitoes for experiments. He opens the door to reveal a tower of Tupperware containers full of mosquito larvae that look like grains of rice floating around in murky water.

Armstrong bypasses the Tupperware, turning instead to a basketball-sized box covered in cloth.

Armstrong carefully removes the box from the incubator. He gingerly places it on a table in the middle of the room, lifting the cloth that covers it. Underneath, there’s a metal mesh cage. A small cloud of mosquitoes convulses inside.

Armstrong peers into the cage, running his hands over the mesh. He chuckles when the mosquitoes inside won’t bite him. “They don’t seem too interested. These are C. melanura,” he says. The buzzing cloud is made from the bird-biting mosquitoes that can carry EEE. These mosquitoes aren’t infected, but running experiments on them could help scientists learn more about the ones that are. The experiments are only possible here. Armstrong’s lab is the only one in the country to have its own colony of C. melanura.

Armstrong and his team collect wild mosquitoes from almost 100 locations across Connecticut each week. They identify each individual mosquito according to species. Then they check whether the mosquitoes were carrying diseases. “We really need to know what species we’re looking at and what viruses they’re carrying, which gives us a more informed assessment of the risk,” says Armstrong. He and his team trapped, identified, and tested almost a quarter of a million mosquitoes in 2019 alone.

Starting in June, Armstrong noticed a concerning pattern: “One species in particular, C. melanura, had numbers way above the historical average.” With more potential carriers of EEE, Armstrong worried about an outbreak. Sure enough, he and his team found lots of C. melanura infected with EEE in Connecticut during August. The largest number of infected mosquitoes came from their typical swamp habitat near the Rhode Island border. More C. melanura carrying EEE wound up in traps along Connecticut’s southeast shoreline, close to where the Shaws live in East Lyme.

In response, Armstrong worked closely with the Department of Public Health to develop suggested courses of action for towns in these areas. “The goal is to figure out how to best protect the public in a way that’s acceptable to the public and doesn’t disrupt people’s lives too much,” he said. Twenty-one local gov-

ernments in high-risk areas heeded Armstrong’s recommendations. They urged people to stay inside after dark, or to wear insect repellent if they ventured outside. Schools cancelled afternoon activities.

But no matter how much care people take during the summer to prevent bug bites, one unlucky bite from the wrong mosquito could mean big trouble. This year, the Shaws spent their 45th summer together in their blue-gray house nestled in the woods of East Lyme. Pat and Jerry had been aware of the risk of EEE during the late summer and early fall, so they never went outside without putting on bug spray. They burned citronella by their pool to keep the mosquitoes away. “But obviously, there was one time that it didn’t work,” said Jerry, with tears in his eyes.

When a mosquito carrying EEE bites a person like Pat, the virus slips into the body along with the mosquito’s saliva. It then finds its way into the skin tissue surrounding the bite, infecting nearby cells. These infected cells move to nearby lymphoid tissues, part of the body’s control center for fighting infection. There, the virus hijacks cell machinery in order to replicate itself. Leaving the lymphoid tissue, the virus travels through the bloodstream

in increased abundance, winding up in the brain.

When EEE reaches the brain, chaos reigns. The virus attacks neurons, the cells our brains use to send signals throughout the body. “They tend to target gray matter, the parts of our brains where there are neuron cell bodies,” says Firas Kaddouh, a neurologist at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The virus overwhelms the gray matter parts of the brain, its attack leaving behind neurons damaged beyond repair. As these cells die, fluid builds up in the brain and blood vessels swell up. A domino effect of inflammation follows from the buildup of fluid and dead neurons. Collateral damage ensues. Inflammation of the brain in this fashion is called encephalitis.

About a day after EEE makes it to a person’s brain, they may appear disoriented and even lose consciousness.

When people with EEE lose consciousness, they may never wake up. And if they do, the damage to their brain is catastrophic. Though the heart is still pumping blood to the rest of the body, the brain damage approaches destruction.

When Kaddouh was taking care of Pat, he and his colleagues knew that some sort of encephalitis was at play.

From scans of Pat’s brain, they saw that there was severe damage to gray mat-

ter on both the surface and the deep interior of the brain. But it took them weeks to figure out what was causing the damage.

Initially, doctors suspected herpes simplex virus, a common—and treatable—cause of encephalitis. “If you’re dealing with herpes, you’ll start to wake up,” said Merceditas Villanueva, an infectious disease specialist who took care of Pat at Yale-New Haven. Pat wasn’t waking up, and the test for herpes came back negative.

Her doctors ordered tests for about fifteen different diseases, including a preliminary test for EEE. All of the tests at Yale came back negative, so Villanueva and her colleagues sent Pat’s spinal fluid to the CDC in Colorado for more extensive testing.

Despite so many negative tests at first, Pat’s doctors were confident that some kind of virus was causing inflammation in her brain. After she had been at Yale-New Haven for about ten days, they gave her treatment to prop up her failing immune system. This treatment is called intravenous immunoglobulin—IVIg for short. The goal with IVIg is to contain a virus at its point of attack in the brain.

Had the doctors started Pat on IVIg even sooner, it might have made a difference. “It’s expensive, but it’s the only treatment that can be offered for EEE,” said Kaddouh. IVIg has stemmed the tide of EEE infection in other patients.

Three years ago, a man from Massachusetts on the brink of death made a full recovery. He had been nearly comatose from developing encephalitis from a mosquito bite. He received early IVIg treatment, and his condition improved rapidly. Within months, he was home again with his family. Because of IVIg, he had his life back.

The timing of the treatment is a key difference between Pat and the man who recovered. On September 15th, positive test results for EEE came from Colorado. Pat finally had a definitive diagnosis. “By the time the EEE test came back positive, it was too late,” said Villanueva.

Early treatment is a source of hope in the fight against EEE, but the difficulty of diagnosis makes it hard to achieve.

More effective testing for EEE could help. There were four confirmed cases of EEE in Connecticut this year, and they all ended up at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In all four of these cases, the quicker, preliminary test for EEE was negative. The CDC’s more complicated test was consistently positive.

No one knows exactly why the preliminary test for EEE has fallen short.

Testing for viruses is a complicated process. Doctors have guessed that the

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test may have trouble detecting some recent evolutionary change to the strain of EEE virus in Connecticut.

The CDC’s more complicated test works, though it requires both a higher degree of safety and more time than the preliminary test. The EEE virus grows in cells for two days. The state government sends samples to the CDC, where they join a national queue. It may take days or weeks to receive a diagnosis.

It’s possible that those days or weeks could mean the difference between receiving IVIg treatment and dying.

Kaddouh argues that doctors should use IVIg earlier on to treat people with even the slightest possibility of EEE infection. “If it’s in the season, one can get a spinal fluid sample, send it to be tested, and start a patient on IVIg immediately,” he says. Doctors adopting Kaddouh’s approach could give patients a better chance.

As the first two weeks in September passed, Pat’s sickness persisted. She had been comatose for two weeks, but

When EEE reaches the brain, chaos reigns. The virus attacks neurons, the cells our brains use to send signals throughout the body.

Jerry hadn’t given up hope. “I was hoping that the inevitable would not be what eventually took place,” he said.

On September 18th, Kaddouh sat down with the family to explain Pat’s situation. “When I heard, I knew what the outcome was going to be,” said Jerry.

During the conversation with Kaddouh, the rest of Jerry’s family realized that their beloved Pat wasn’t going to wake up. She died peacefully the next day, surrounded by her family.

Jerry went home to a house full of memories, with his dog Bennie and his guinea pigs for company. Losing Pat has been hard. “You live with somebody for 55 years, and all of a sudden they’re not here? That leaves a big void in your life.

A real empty spot in your heart,” he says.

To fill the emptiness, Bennie barks a lot more than usual. “He really misses my wife,” Jerry says, seated on his living room couch. Pat’s smiling face presides over

the room from the mantlepiece, where Jerry keeps two candles burning. Her past works of needlepoint adorn the yellow walls. The living room window overlooks a tall stand of trees growing in the middle of a swamp.

In all likelihood, Pat’s EEE came from a mosquito living in the swamp next to her house. A small brook used to flow through the woods in place of the swamp, but the landscape has changed in recent years, becoming muddier. A warming climate is bringing more changes to Connecticut and the rest of New England, where it will increase the prevalence of EEE. Right now, cold temperatures are the only natural way to kill adult mosquitoes carrying EEE. “You really need temperatures 28 degrees and below,” says Armstrong. “That’s what you need to shut down mosquito activity completely.” With the first frost, adult C. melanura mosquitoes die, and infected larvae hunker down in swamps for the winter—out of commission, but

possibly harboring the virus. In most years, adult mosquitoes are gone for the season come October. In 2019, the summer was hotter than normal.

Armstrong and his team were trapping mosquitoes well into November.

“They’ve been active later in the season, thriving longer than they have been in the past. Our concept of seasonality is changing,” said Villanueva.

With changing seasonality and longer-lasting summers, spending time

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outside is already becoming risky for longer.

A hotter planet will also mean higher rates of evaporation, so more water from the Earth’s surface will wind up in the clouds. “There’s more water cycling through the atmosphere,” says Armstrong. Rainfall will become more plentiful as time passes, so groundwater will accumulate. With more water on the ground, swamps will grow in size, just like Pat and Jerry’s brookturned-swamp. More available swamp habitat will bring more C. melanura to Connecticut and the rest of New England. Mosquitoes will stay around longer, biting more birds and humans.

More people will get sick with EEE. EEE isn’t the only disease on the rise because of climate change.“We’re seeing a trend towards greater instances of mosquito- and tick-borne diseases,” says Armstrong. Most people think of the tropics as a hotbed for viruses like Zika, dengue, and malaria. Different, deadly infections are coming to backyards in the Northeast in larger numbers: EEE, West Nile and Powassan all infected people in New England in 2019.

There’s not much we can do to keep EEE and other diseases out of New England. They’re already here. “We’re trying to do what we can to mitigate them.

We’re never going to get rid of them,” says Armstrong. But with improvements to testing and treatment strategies, New England—and the rest of the nation— could be better prepared.

Doctors are already taking 2019 as a warning and starting to prepare for the future. Kaddouh and some of his colleagues at Yale-New Haven have agreed on a standard way to take care of patients who could have EEE. The formula is simple and aims to give patients the best chance possible: administer IVIg early and get the right testing done.

The lack of preparation for EEE showed in 2019, as the virus killed more people in the United States than it has in decades. Regardless of whether doctors agree on the best way to test and treat the virus, both testing and treatments are still far from perfect. The yearly number of deaths due to EEE is likely to rise barring rapid advancements.

Armstrong thinks EEE will be back in 2020, whether we’re ready or not. “I don’t think it’ll be as bad,” he says. “It’s a long-term and ongoing challenge.”

Though infections this year might not reach the outbreak levels of 2019, any EEE news is bad news. As long as the virus is around, everyone is at risk.

“You hear about the potential threat of EEE in New England,” says Jerry, turning away from the window that overlooks his and Pat’s backyard. “I hope you never have to deal with anything like this.”

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feature

Boys and Sex: An Interview with Peggy Orenstein Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author of the bestselling books Girls and Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Her latest book, Boys and Sex, came out on January 7th: Through interviews with boys nationwide who range from ages 1622, Orenstein exposes the lack of dialogue around young men’s sexual and emotional lives. The expectations for emotional expression established by a sexist society— for girls to share their feelings and boys to grin and bear it—disadvantage young boys just as much as girls by denying them space to frankly discuss questions of sexuality and intimacy.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

EAM What inspired you to write Boys EAM: and Sex? I know you wrote Girls and Sex first, and I was wondering why you decided to write this after.

PO: PO Well, I finished [writing Girls and Sex] and realized I only had half the conversation. The honest truth is, I can’t tell you how many people have been saying to me, “Remember when I told you to write this book?” Everybody is taking credit for my having written this book, because wherever I went after Girls and Sex came out, people said, “When are you gonna write about boys?”… And my basic response was, “Well, that’s really somebody else’s job. I write about girls.

But the truth was nobody was writing about boys and their perspectives on sex and gender and intimacy and masculinity. So I thought I actually had been in that world for such a long time that I understood the terrain in a way that most adults don’t. It seemed more natural than I would have imagined for me to give it a try. And then shortly after I started, the #MeToo movement explod-

Edie Abraham-Macht, BR YH Staff ed. It underscored the urgency of doing the work and understanding what boys were learning and how they were approaching sex and intimacy.

EAM: After reading the book, there EAM was a lot that surprised me about how boys felt, because they don’t feel comfortable talking about their emotions for a lot of the reasons that you outline.

What do you think is the biggest societal misconception about young boys and their feelings?

PO: PO That was one of the biggest surprises to me, too, how much they wanted to talk and particularly how much they wanted to discuss the things they’re not supposed to talk about. It really, I think, deep down was a struggle with vulnerability and what that meant to them, and avoiding it, and embracing it, and denying it. So that was the biggest misconception. That was shattered for me, too. Not only that boys have interior lives, but that they don’t have permission to express that. I think the impact on their intimate relationships is pretty profound, both in terms of their own ability to connect and in what that demands—if they’re straight—of their female partners in terms of doing the emotional labor in a relationship. Girls and Sex is so much about how girls are cut off from their bodies and their bodies’ responses. And Boys and Sex is very much about the impact of boys being disconnected from their hearts.

EAM: On that note, when you were EAM doing all of your interviews, was there a story that touched you the most?

And why was that the one that stuck with you?

PO: PO I felt so connected in so many ways to the guys I interviewed. The story that seems to really resonate with a lot of people is the story of Nate. His journey from feeling that he wasn’t supposed to actually connect with a partner, that the ideal for a guy is to have sex without feelings… As he said, when you’re a guy, you feel like that’s how you gain status. The girl is a means for you to get off and brag to your guy friends.

His journey through that to another place, where he felt a more authentic sense of who he was, of how he wanted to go forward in relationships and in sexual encounters, it really touched my

’22 heart… What if guys could have those conversations? How different would things be? For them and for their partners. Similarly, in that same chapter, there’s a part where I sit down with a group of students the morning after a party, and the girls are talking about having felt—not obligated, but you don’t want to disappoint a guy and, you know, various things. And the boy who’s in the room is just sitting there going, “I had no idea girls felt this way!” You know, they just don’t have those conversations. We talked for about an hour and a half or two hours, and at the end they said, “Can we do this again next week?”

EAM: When you were involved in an EAM advice-giver/mentor role, was it hard to strike a balance between that and your official role as an interviewer? How did that work for you?

PO: PO I don’t really give advice; I ask questions. In that conversation with Nate and the other boy, I was writing that down. I wanted to see what happened. It was journalistic. But with the girls, too: mostly it becomes difficult when trauma is involved. For both the boys and the girls, because there was sexual trauma for the boys, too. I try at that point to offer resources for people.

When I was doing the girl book, it was hard to talk to high school–age girls.

And part of it was probably that I wasn’t as well-known. But also with the boys, parents were flinging their sons at me.

When I would go out and give a talk or something, they would be like, “Would you interview my son?” All these people were offering me their sons all the time. I think they were hoping that the conversation would not just be an interview, but would also be an educational experience for them because boys are so little educated [on the subject]. One of the most common things—and this was true of girls, too—that guys would say to me afterwards was, “Hey, this was like free therapy!” Which is true, except that I’m recording and writing it down in a book. But it has that quality. And I think just the act of sitting down and having a protected space to explore your experience in a way that nobody ever gives you entitlement to do is huge.

EAM: When you heard boys admit to EAM doing questionable things—and may-

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be they hadn’t thought about it that way before—did anything change in your approach? Did you try to offer them resources for how to avoid that in the future, or were you mostly just listening?

PO: PO There were a couple of cases…

There’s one case in particular where I had concerns about a guy who wasn’t exactly admitting he had done something, but was saying that people said he had. And later I found out from his school community that that was a pretty credible accusation. I worried about that. But then a counselor at that school said that they were pursuing some… not charges, but some accountability with that boy. So I thought, okay, then that’s being handled. But, you know, if they were going to admit something to me, it usually meant they’d thought about it pretty hard. People didn’t admit it casually. But You know, the truth is with guys—young, old, everywhere in between—is that nobody thinks they’re a rapist. There’s even research on men who hold sex slaves in war zones: They don’t think they’re rapists. “The other guy over there, he’s the monster, not me.” It was one of the issues that was tricky in doing this book, that boys are not always reliable narrators around that. They tend to filter female behavior through their own wishes and desires, and therefore stretch their ideas of consent to fit that. So sometimes I would feel with some guys… just talking about a lousy hookup, “Gee, if I was talking to the girl in this…” It would almost feel like I could see a shadow behind them of this girl who was really angry or really hurt or would really have something to say about this. But she wasn’t there.

And in a couple cases—and this never happened with the girl book—girls contacted me after I interviewed a couple of boys and said, “You need to know some stuff about this guy. That maybe he didn’t tell you.”

EAM: I know that the book hasn’t fully EAM come out yet, but in terms of advance reads, what kind of feedback have you gotten so far?

PO: PO The book has been getting all kinds of great editorial stuff. Just today, Amazon made it one of the top 10 picks for January. Cosmo made it its very top pick for 2020. People haven’t really read

the actual book yet, but a lot of people read that Atlantic article [I wrote]. And that was really interesting to me because that audience is not necessarily the one that would naturally seek out the book. I was really surprised by how many emails I got from adult men in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. I was not thinking about that, partly because that’s not who would probably read the book. But that article, that piece of it about the constricting nature of definitions of masculinity and how that hasn’t changed for guys, that really spoke to a lot of men. And I got tons of emails from young men, like college-age and post-college. But it was really interesting to get these long letters, pages long, from men my age and older about how they felt harmed by that kind of straitjacketing.

EAM: So most of the feedback was EAM very positive.

PO: PO I mean, there’s the religious fanatics [who said things like] “If you just believed in Jesus, this wouldn’t be a problem.” There’s the people who are super right-wing who call me a feminist devil; there’s the people who say, “You’re an adult woman talking to boys, what’s wrong with you?” But it’s been surprisingly positive from adult men. I think, in a funny way, a woman needed to do this. I’m an outsider in terms of things that men might not find unusual or challenge, because it’s in them too.

The whole piece of men talking about the constraints of masculinity, I don’t know that boys would have done that if I were a guy. Maybe they would have, but not as readily. I worried that there would be stuff they wouldn’t say to me because I was female, and I don’t know that there wasn’t. But if there was, I think that for everything they didn’t say, there was something they did.

EAM: Once the book really comes EAM out and more people read it, what do you hope comes out of it? What is the takeaway you want readers to have?

PO: PO We can’t afford to have this silence around talking to boys anymore.

Girls and Sex really had a broad reach and the ideas in it created a conversation, at least in a certain sector of the population, that has created some change—has made girls’ lives and their

“They tend to filter female behavior through their own wishes and desires, and therefore stretch their ideas of consent to fit that.”

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ability to have full, mutually-gratifying sexual experiences more possible. I want that for boys, too. I want them to be able to respect boundaries, to be able to feel capable as they are, to have a right to connection and vulnerability. I want them to be able to see their female partners as equal. I want them to have mutually gratifying sexual and emotionally intimate relationships, whether their relationships last for five minutes or for fifty years. That they’re more benevolent about it. I want a whole mess of things.

But I think for me, as a thinker and as a writer, what I’ve always hoped I can do is spark a conversation. Bringing these voices forward allows other boys to read it and see some of their ideas reflected and maybe some of them challenged by looking at the experience of other boys.

And maybe they will feel more empowered to be who they want to be. You know, that’s the moon I want. But I think the basic thing, and what any book can do, is just nudge the conversation and get people talking. One of the things with The Atlantic piece that was amazing to watch was how quickly that starts a conversation. On The Today Show—I don’t know the names of the people—but three of the men sat at a table drinking beer and eating bacon with the article projected behind them, talking about masculinity to me for seven minutes.

It was kind of a goofy conversation, but nonetheless, I thought, well, I got that to happen. And that went out to a bajillion people. I guess that’s the bottom line.

What I wanted to do was spread ideas.

EAM: Finally, I’m going to write this EAM article and a lot of college-age boys are probably going to read it--or I hope they will! I guess I’m wondering: if every boy in America could hear one thing from you right now, what would it be?

PO: PO That’s a good question. What I hope is, in reading a book like this, that they feel seen and understood as well as challenged to be the best man that they can be. Be the man that we know they can be. I hope hearing other guys talk thoughtfully about sex moves them away from “guy talk” toward more meaningful dialogue with each other, with themselves. And ultimately allows them and their partners to have more gratifying, personally authentic experiences with sex, relationships, and life as a man.

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culture

Breakfast Gone Masc Ian Moreau, PC ’21 I go home to San Diego, Calif., only twice during the academic year: winter break and spring break. Though I always look forward to spending time with the sacred home-from-college triad of family, friends, and pets, the thought of Californian cuisine engenders even more excitement for me, as it does with many Californian Yalies. Non-Californian students are probably familiar with this phenomenon. After all, Californians love to flaunt the superiority of In-N-Out over Shake Shack and will frequently point out that there are few places in the United States that offer cheap Mexican food of such high quality. Fantastic Chinese food, excellent boba, and fresh sushi can be found all along the coast.

We really can’t be beat.

I mention all this to clearly establish my position as a West Coast culinary elitist. As the timeless aphorism goes, “West Coast, best coast.”

There is, however, one particular food item that I find myself missing while home—one that I’m unable to access in the bountiful gastronomic landscape of my Southern Californian city. It is the first thing I devour once back in New Haven, always accompanied by a bag of kettle chips and an Arizona iced tea. Excluding my first semester at Yale (before I had eaten from the tree of knowledge), I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than a week on campus without consuming one of these ambrosian items. It is, of course, the legendary “Hungry Man Hero” of GHeav—that most venerable establishment—that I speak of.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Hungry Man Hero, I can offer only a description, along with the urgent recommendation that you get off your ass and go order one. Bear in mind, however, that my words cannot even begin to capture a portion of the sandwich’s essence, its boundless delectability.

To start, the bread: a hero roll, dependable, simple, and filling. Next come three freshly fried eggs with melted American cheese.That’s right, three eggs.

Perfect for a post-workout protein load.

And say what you will about the flavor of American cheese, but once melted, the gooey texture is what makes it perfect for hot sandwiches and burgers. Finally, we arrive at the meats, another triple

play: crispy bacon, fried ham, and savory sausage. The plentiful meat, along with the name, makes it the “masc” version of the bacon, egg, and cheese.

Of course, the beauty of the sandwich does not end there. These are simply the sandwich’s requirements, its foundation. Like most GHeav sandwiches, the customization options for the Hungry Man Hero are nearly endless. Do you prefer cheddar to American? More power to you. What if you want avocado? I stand in solidarity with you as a Californian. Want some chipotle mayo or hot sauce for greater flavor? The sandwich is your canvas! By its very nature, the Hungry Man Hero is protean. Infinite. Interminable.

The real tragedy of my predicament is the complete lack of adequate substitutes in California. Certainly, there are plenty of restaurants and eateries that sell breakfast sandwiches. I would even go so far as to claim that some of these breakfast sandwiches are tasty.

But few to none match the Hungry Man Hero’s specific genius—never mind the problem that none of these sandwiches come from bodegas. This brings me to what is, perhaps, the most important element of the sandwich: the fact that it is made in a bodega, right in front of me. That I can order a Hungry Man Hero at any hour, day or night, from familiar faces.

Sadly, California has no bodegas to speak of. As far as I’m aware, they’re solely a product of the Northeast. There’s a sense of warmth and community in the GHeav on Broadway, as is the case in many bodegas. And despite my Californian elitism, I willingly accept that, in this instance, it’s something we can’t hope to replicate.

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How to Look Incredible in your Grandad’s Clothes

Eccentric Fare

Ainsley Weber, SM ’22 There’s no escaping my mother’s scathing jabs at my light-wash mom jeans every visit home. The irony of this recurring exchange never fails to amuse me. Does my mother take pride in refraining from the mom jean, the mark of style in my generation and what clearly indicates a lack of style in hers? Or is this part of the Boomer generation’s widespread adoption of younger trends like athleisure, leather goods, or big sunglasses?

Either way, Boomer- and Zoomer-chic have reversed their target audiences.

It would be generous to dub my mother’s combination of a graphic tank top, gathered sweatpants, orthopedic sneakers, and scrunchie for elementary school drop-off an “outfit,” but it bears remarkable semblance to certain Zoomer style icons’ recent ensembles. Billie Eilish takes the concept of orthopedic sneakers to the next level, cartoonishly standing in green Balenciaga sneakers almost half the size of her body. Any viral TikTok dance video features three smiling Zoomers sporting their best sweatpants and a carefully arranged messy bun. Eilish’s sneakers have the neon appeal that my mother’s lacked, and the TikTok girls put a little more effort into their makeup than my mother used to do before carpool. Nevertheless, the Zoomer generation definitively co-opted the off-duty Boomer look to suit its own needs.

On the other hand, a few weeks at home proved how well the older generation has learned to adopt rapidly changing trends. An intimidating posse of Boomer-aged women sporting their latest Lululemon leggings greeted me at a group-exercise class. I felt like

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Emily Tian, BF ’23

a washed-up grad student in my pitstained Yale Athletics t-shirt.

When I visited my grandparents, I complimented my grandmother on her new quilted beach bag. She’s come far since her Merrell sneakers phase. At Christmas dinner, my mother easily outdid my stale wool sweater, sporting a chic leather tank top that bordered on edgy without reading full-on biker gang (a look I wouldn’t recommend she try). Major brands know they can riff off younger trends and resell them to an older audience.

This fashion osmosis runs in both directions, with Zoomers adopting styles from an earlier generation. I used to critique my dad for wearing pleated pants that were loose behind the knee—a telltale sign of an out-of-touch Boomer. Now, on a quick scroll through Instagram, I’ll see countless influencers championing the same style—usually in plaid, and usually with a neon accessory to give the look some edge. Mom jeans and mid-calf dresses fall into the same category. My grandmother’s dowdy floral pieces used to give me severe secondhand embarrassment.

Now, Zoomers younger than me pride themselves on thrifting dresses like hers. What prompted the switch? Do we Zoomers steal our dads’ knit sweaters to recapture the parental affection so abundant in our childhood? Do Boomers adapt to younger trends in an attempt to relate to their “zooming” descendants who are too busy to slow down and enjoy a nice family dinner? Maybe these reversed trends reflect an intergenerational desire to connect and relate. Or maybe we all just enjoy the comforts of large, chunky sneakers.

All-nighters fall into one of two categories: either they are worth it, or they are not. Usually, they are not. Any sense of accomplishment feels spare and juvenile when one considers the god-awful migraine and impressive pair of dark circles to boot. All this is to say that one has to make a compelling case to convince me to pull an all-nighter. And there have been scant examples in my life where such a case has been made.

I was, then, reasonably skeptical of the social media posts circulating throughout the second-ever All Nighter Music and Arts Festival in the Pauli Murray Lighten Theatre on Jan. 17. Running from 8 p.m. the first Friday of the spring semester until 8 a.m. the next morning, the music and arts festival included a lineup of over 40 student performers and artists, an organizational feat by Michael Gancz, MY ’21, and Parker Redcross, MC ’21.

When I arrived a little past eight, the foldable chairs were emptier than the Facebook event page had led me to expect. I worried that the blistering cold and collective exhaustion of shopping period had kept the crowds away. Yet, as the night went on, I was grateful that the bi-level venue was never totally packed.

No raised platform set apart performer from audience in the dimly lit Lighten Theatre; some performances felt as intimate as a gathering of close friends.

Scale & Bones, Yale’s only trombone octet, performed the first set of the evening. This was eccentric fare. They were so earnest and committed to music-making, so wildly exuberant about their unwieldy instrument of choice, that I couldn’t help but tap along. The performers of the evening were so engaged with the audience that any distance between us dissipated. The personable, irreverent metal band Goat Druid, who

played just around midnight, brought audience members to their feet, as did the punk band Window Seat.

The sheer output of music being produced and consumed makes it difficult to take us by surprise. But I have never seen or heard anything quite like Michael Chang’s, MY ’21, original composition on the hand-flute, as he produced the airy pitches of a ballad by blowing air through his cupped hands. One of the most astonishing performances of the night came from Alvin Chung, SM ’21, on the marimba, who breathed new life into a mainstay of grade school music classes. As Chung set aside his nimble, buoyant work with the mallets to perform a thunderous drum set, it took a few seconds after his performance ended for me to be lifted out of my stupor.

Despite the occasional technical difficulty, the Arts All-Nighter was part fever dream of virtuosic performances, part zany celebration of student artistry—and certainly worth staying up for.

“The foldable chairs were emptier than the Facebook event page had led me to expect.”

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reviews

Cats (2019) Was Good Dustin Dunaway, JE ’21 YH Staff

Cats (2019) was good. You read that right. Yes, I am in my right mind, and yes, I will die on this hill. When watching Cats in theater for the first time, I laughed, I cried, and I cringed—all three vital responses to Cats. Had this film been well-received, it would’ve been a loss.

Had film bros given Cats the attention they gave 1917 or that new Tarantino movie, it would’ve been all for naught.

This movie isn’t supposed to be “good,” the CGI wasn’t supposed to be “realistic,” and the plot wasn’t supposed to be “clear.” This is Cats we’re talking about, goddammit, and we got exactly what we asked for.

From the opening scene, you see these cat-humans perform impressive dance numbers. If just for a second you could get over your furry-phobia and recognize that you are watching skilled performers execute difficult and mesmerizing dance numbers, and listen—just listen!—to the jovial voices sing infamous showtunes, you may just have a damn good time. If you applaud for every superhero movie that Hollywood shits out, you sure as hell better give a standing ovation to Skimbleshanks, the railway cat, as he taps his furry ass down the tracks.

It’s a disservice to creatives everywhere to discount the work these dancers and singers put in just because a little furry cat titty makes you uncomfortable. Grow up! You don’t have to like the movie, but you cannot discredit all of the performances…well, some of the performances.

However, no movie is without its flaws. I will grant Cats one single fault: Taylor Swift should not have been cast.

I spent the entire movie braced for impact, waiting to see her feline image float onto the screen (that’s when I cringed, and only then). It’s a shame that Jennifer Hudson had to share the soundtrack with Taylor Swift. She brought nothing to the film besides a big name; and even then, there are plenty of talented singers who would’ve outshone Swift in the role. But I understand that Swift paid a lot of money to be a part of this film, and giving her the sallest role is ultimately fine.

If not Taylor Swift, though, who? A game I’ve been playing since seeing the movie is “cast them in Cats.” Take any celebrity and imagine them playing a character in this movie. Blake Shelton could be Bumbleskootin, the country cat. Timothée Chalamet could be Tiktockery, the e-boy cat. Zooey Deschanel could be Tinderella, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cat. Hillary Clinton could be Trouser, the TERF cat.

Imagine these stars in CGI fur and twitching ears. Imagine them prancing around. Imagine…

Cats was fun! It was nice to see serious performers give serious performances in one of the most ridiculous films of the last decade. Tom Hooper executed something so masterfully wicked, so terrifyingly on par with the unease of the musical, something so iconic that my grandmother admitted she’d “have sex with that Idris Elba fella, in or out of the fur.”

clipping.’s

“There Existed An Addiction to Blood”

Caroleine James, BR ’22

On the track, “Blood of the Fang,”—the song whose chorus gives There Existed An Addiction to Blood its name— Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton fame) raps, “it doesn’t mean a thing because that body really meat.” This line sums up one of the central messages of experimental hip-hop group clipping.’s— most recent project: a 15 track album in which body parts are served á la carte, the skin of victims stretched across the wall, and blood seeps into wooden floors, making them sticky and soft. The album intro ends with a jump scare: a low, scraping note that accelerates into a shriek in the final second of the track. Although abrasive, this effect feels fitting and appropriate as many of the songs are written in the deeply intimate second person. Listening to the album is akin to starring in your own personal horror film. You’re stuck in a trap house watching your friends fall dead on

the ground as police raid the building. You find an abandoned tape of a woman’s voice, explaining how she was attacked by the devil. You crouch in a dumpster—an unknown liquid covering the floor—while you’re stalked by a vengeful, bloodthirsty woman. The musical production adds to the experiential effect of the work. Heartbeats and rhythmic, ragged breathing make you intensely aware of your body while you listen to these songs. Low, droning notes rattle your chest on tracks like “Nothing is Safe” and “La Mala Ordina.” The album is confrontational and enticing. The dissonant static, shivering reptilian beats, and shocking lyrics delivered in ever-changing time signatures dare you to keep listening and the sheer spectacle pulls you in.

There Existed An Addiction to Blood turns you into a demon crouching in the shadows—a creature of awesome terror who answers to no moral code.

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Sitting on the Ground for Two Hours to Get into a Seminar During Shopping Week Isaac Pross, BK ’23 YH Staff

Ten things we’ve been listening to, watching, reading, consuming: ☛ Jaime — Brittany Howard (2019) ♫ The former Alabama Shakes frontwoman gives us a musically warm hug. ☛ Parasite — Boon Joon-ho (2019) Total Oscar snub for sure—a witty visual masterpiece for those smart enough to read subtitles. ☛ Uncut Gems — Safdie Brothers (2019) Daniel Lopatin’s score makes you feel like a little kid in an arcade.

Also, the film begins with Adam Sandler getting a colonoscopy—if that doesn’t attract you, idk what will. ☛ Ideas/Demos/Songs From 2013 — Jon Bap (2020) ♫ Groovy and raw songs from this enigmatic LA beatmaker, psychedelic guitarist, and whimsical singer. ☛ “My Favorite Shapes” — Julio Torres (2019) Hilarious stand-up, mind-blowing endless glitter, and sparkly silver jumpsuits from the Brooklyn comedian. ☛ The L Word: Generation Q Not quite prestige TV, but quirky enough for a good love-hate watch (homophobic if you don’t enjoy it). ☛ Sex Education: Season 2 A horny, deeply nuanced, and thoughtful journey into the vibrant and diverse realm of high school relationships. ☛ Miya’s Sushi - 68 Howe Street It’s closing at the end of 2020, so pour one out for the bois. ☛ The Soundcloud of the Founder of Snackpass Listen to these tunes as you gift bacon emojis to your friends. ☛ The r/ambien subreddit Peak humor.

Harold Recommends...

I’ve spent all of winter break training for today: squats, yoga, daily aerobics.

I strategically enter the classroom in WLH six minutes early. My water bottle is full and my shoelaces are tied, ready for battle. Creaking along the craggly floorboards, I enter. Instant horror prevails: every seat is already taken around the wooden Harkness discussion table. I glance around the room, the clock ominously ticking, as hoards of frenzied shoppers snag chairs from

nearby classrooms. My stomach feels slippery and my forehead feels faint as I recognize the reality of the situation. I must hide my defeat from the ferocious competition as I kneel down, unrobing my backpack and winter coat.

As sweat trickles down my neck, I feel vulnerable to the dozens of older and wiser shoppers. I sit cross-legged on the ground as I embrace my fate for the next two hours.

It’s twenty minutes in. My foot hasn’t fallen asleep yet, but my back yearns to find support. Uh-oh. My bladder starts to tremble, whispering to my feeble mind, undermining any and all endurance. We’ve barely started a two-hour seminar that meets once a week—it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Now is my only time to impress the professor. Biting the edge of my lip, I nervously tap my finger against my thigh, eyeing the clock while making sure to keep my phone away from the professor’s sight. All of a sudden, the professor miraculously announces, “now is the time to leave,” for those shoppers already sure that this class for them. However, do I stay and steal a seat that opens up or dart to the restroom?

Next thing I know, I’m flushing the urinal and smiling, sighing in relief as I sprint back up the miniature stairs to the classroom. Fearful that the professor saw me disappear for two minutes, I make sure to raise my hand at the very next moment possible, even if my comment sounds premature. Sitting crisscross applesauce for the homestretch, I tighten my core and feel myself burning calories. Two hours later, I stand up wobbly, triumphant in the success of my shopping shenanigans.

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—things we hate this week

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Yale Today Gone tomorrow.

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Big data It’s not the size, it’s how you use it.

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Think about it.

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TikTok Ke$ha did it first.

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