The Yale Herald Volume LXIII, Number 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Feb. 24, 2017
EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-Chief: Oriana Tang Managing Editors: Emma Chanen, Anna Sudderth Executive Editors: Tom Cusano, Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, David Rossler, Rachel Strodel, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Luke Chang, Marc Shkurovich Features Editors: Hannah Offer, Eve Sneider Opinion Editors: Emily Ge, Robert Newhouse Reviews Editors: Mariah Kreutter, Nicole Mo Voices Editor: Bix Archer Insert Editor: Eli Lininger Audio Editor: Will Reid Copy Editors: Jazzie Kennedy, Meghana Mysore
From the editors
ONLINE STAFF Bullblog Editor-in-Chief: Marc Shkurovich Bullblog Associate Editors: Lora Kelley, Lea Rice Online Editor: Megan McQueen
Volume LXIII, Number 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Feb. 24, 2017
DESIGN STAFF Graphics Editor: Joseph Valdez Design Editor: Winter Willoughby-Spera Executive Graphics Editor: Haewon Ma
Greetings, When I started L1 Turkish last semester, I wanted to see if only studying Latin and Ancient Greek the past 10 years had killed that part of my brain used for still-living languages. Unfortunately, I found that old dogs indeed cannot learn new tricks. One Saturday, our professor arranged for us to visit the YUAG so that we could practice describing the paintings in Turkish. While the bright-eyed freshmen in my class were using complex sentences, I would point at a van Gogh and stutter, “Pembe çiçekler.” Or, “Pink flowers.” Although my Turkish did not improve much from looking at paintings, Eve Sneider, MC ’19, details the more successful experience of students from the Yale Nursing School. Utilizing a set of innovative interdisciplinary programs, the school rethinks how nursing should be taught. First years are required to learn to diagnose patients by describing paintings at the Yale Center for British Art and playing with body sounds at the Yale School of Music, among other collaborative initiatives. This approach trains human understanding: important, given that nurses are often patients’ first point of contact. We have a range of perspectives to match the nursing curriculum in the rest of this issue. Read along in Reviews as Clara Olshansky, MC ’18, praises Jesca Hoop’s newest album, while in Features Sonia Gadre, SY ’20, reflects on being a Kentuckian at Yale. Or go upstairs at Toads with Rachel CalnekSugin, SM ’19, in Culture to find out the truth behind the weekly emails that somehow end up in your spam folder. We at the Herald may not be able to teach you how to save lives, but we can all use a different perspective now and again (or so my liberal arts education would suggest). See you when I see you, Luke Chang Culture Editor
2 – The Yale Herald
BUSINESS STAFF Publisher: Patrick Reed Advertising Team: Alex Gerszten, Garrett Gile, Tyler Morley, Bedel Saget, Jr., Harrison Tracy The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2016 - 2017 academic year for 65 dollars. Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 oriana.tang@yale.edu www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2017 The Yale Herald. Cover by Joseph Valdez YH Staff
THIS WEEK’S ISSUE 12- COVER
Incoming
What does your body sound like? Eve Sneider, MC ’19, takes a look at the marriage of arts and science at the Yale School of Nursing.
Alien Life NASA astronomers discovered seven new earth-sized planets that could contain water and possibly harbor life, according to findings published Wednesday.
Outgoing
6- VOICES Meghana Mysore, DC ’20, pens a poem for a dream. In brief prose, Catherine Yang, TC ’19, reflects on swimming.
Life on Earth Boston, Cleveland, and Toronto all set new record high temperatures Thursday, reminding us that we might soon have to travel to those new planets.
8- OPINION Get out of bed and into the streets with Ashia Ajani, TD ’19, as she explores what it took to be a productive activist while not sacrificing her mental health. Learn how Yale fails to provide adequate funding for summer opportunities with Lydia Buonomano, DC ’20.
SCHEDULE Friday
TUIB ‘n’ Friends 8:00 p.m.
Saturday
Viola Question Alumni Show 7:30 p.m.
Saturday
Ivy Gymnastics Championships 1:00 p.m.
Thursday
Start-Up “Speed Dating” 5:30 p.m.
FEATURES 1016-
Learn what it’s like to be a southerner at Yale with Sonia Gadre, SY ’20. Brush your teeth—but do NOT floss!!—with Emma Chanen, BK ’19.
18- CULTURE Ever wondered who’s behind the Toad’s Place emails? Rachel Calnek-Sugin, SM ’19, peels back the curtain behind the dance floor to find out. Lora Kelley, DC ’17, asks Dana Schwartz, the comedian behind @GuyInYourMFA, about the trials and tribulations of a post-college writer.
20- REVIEWS Clara Olshansky, MC ’18, finds beauty in the simplicity of Jesca Hoop’s Memories Are Now. Marley Finley, ES ’20, appreciates the subdued Japanese reality show Terrace House. Carly Gove, BR ’19, finds beauty, if not quite satisfaction, in A Cure for Wellness. Take an interdimensional ride with Catherine Bui, SM ’19, as she traces the ups and downs of The OA.
Feb. 24, 2017 – 3
INSERTS
THE NUMBERS: Spring in February
A Comment Troll Love Story Dear @snowflakemelter34, I couldn’t help but reach out and congratulate your biting analysis of Thursday’s op-ed piece by another soft-underbellied Yalie. Even though I don’t believe in female literacy, I was impressed by your ability to articulate thoughts in a vaguely coherent fashion despite your brain being one-third the size of mine. It is up to people like us to put these millennials in their place, with their ‘spectrum’ of ‘sexual identity’ and ‘inclusivity.’ When I went to Yale, we didn’t have a word ‘privilege’: we just decided who had the most viable sperm by engaging in a series of to-the-death duels with the Bengal tigers stored in the Pierson buttery. Ah, those were the days. The feeling of a 550 pound beast ripping into your testes truly makes you all the more manly. But, I digress--back to you, and your ability to use the word ‘crybaby’ in verb, adjective, and noun form. I haven’t seen the English language used so eloquently since Strom Thurman’s 1957 Senate Floor triumph. You have a gift, and I thank you for sharing it with the world in this comment section. Yours, @skullandbones45
daily high-temperature records broken across
5294: the country from Feb. 1 to Feb. 20
1:
stoners who have to find a new place to
27: hotbox 11:
massive puddles on campus that are becoming increasingly difficult to jump across
34:
annoying people who say things like “I actually like it when it’s colder”
1:
groundhog (ahem, Punxsutawney Phil) who fucked up royally
Dear Skull and Bones, Thank you for your kind words! For so long, I had no one to share my opinions with besides my alt-right knitting club. When I started trolling the comment section of the Yale Daily News, I knew I had found my true calling. The blood racing beneath my skin when I receive a vitriolic response keeps me young, and doesn’t hurt my sex drive either. Even though I don’t read the articles, I have found that responding to them in the form of ‘pointed haiku with confidence’ seems to elicit positive feedback. My comment calling pro-vaxxers ‘aliens from the netherworld trying to poison us with their saliva serum’ got five upvotes! Anyway, I see from your profile picture of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that you’re also from the Cleveland area -I’d love to meet up with you! I haven’t left my house in twenty years, so my place? --snowflake Snowflake, you precious creature! I would love to accept your invitation; it will prove a welcome break from poring through obituaries and crossing out the deceased in my phonebook (so many deaths this time of year!) I have never met up with a former commenter ‘irl’ as the hip-hopping liberals say. I bet you are as beautiful as you are caustic! I shall clear my schedule for this event—and bring scotch and Trump steaks! They are truly the only thing that does it for me—very reminiscent of Bengal tiger meat, upon which we used to dine with vigor after hunting down the ones that tried to escape. Salty, sinewy, and full of nostalgia—just like me! Fondly, Your fellow bonesman ;) Wow, I cannot wait! My heart is racing almost as much as it does watching the bald men on C-Span— the spittle on the very corner of their mouths excites me so. I must warn you, it is a bit dangerous getting to my house because I don’t believe in big government—or their paving of roads. In any case, I await your presence longingly, envisioning the cold caress of your fingers, so swift to type every one of your rambling thoughts… Truly, snow
– Vicki Beizer 4 – The Yale Herald
snowman family of five that has to find a new home
SOURCES: 5294: http://www.livescience.com/57992-whyfebruary-is-so-warm.html 1: Snowman Housing Stats 27: The deep web 11: My wet feet 34: More sources than I’d like 1: http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/us/groundhog-day-trnd/ - Gian-Paul Bergeron
The protagonist of a romantic comedy is about to be late to his big date and totally runs right into you, ruining whatever was in your hands! Here are the TOP 5 worst things you could be holding: 1. THAT BIG VOLCANO YOU’VE BEEN WORKING ON FOR THE SCIENCE FAIR… MOM’S GONNA FREAK! 2. THE ORIGAMI HEART TRANSPLANT YOU’VE BEEN WORKING ON FOR THE LAST 3 MONTHS. SORRY AUNT JUNE! 3.YOUR ONE WAY TICKET OUT OF THE GULAG. 4. THE PRETTIEST, MOST POPULAR GIRL AT SCHOOL, WHO WAS FLUNG INTO YOUR ARMS ONLY ONE CHASE SCENE AGO AFTER SHE FELL OUT OF A 3 STORY WINDOW RIGHT INTO YOUR NERDY ARMS, AT WHICH POINT SHE KISSED YOU ON THE CHEEK AND SAID “MY HERO…” 5. A TRIPLE SCOOP CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM CONE THAT GOES RIGHT ONTO YOUR NEW TUXEDO… AND THE PROM’S TOMORROW! - Noah Ritz
sarah.holder@yale.edu oriana.tang@yale.edu
oriana.tang@yale.edu
VOICES
Apparitions by Meghana Mysore in this dream i rise from my seat and become a professor, standing at the front of the lecture hall. i’m not speaking but looking out at all the faces, and i think one of them is my own. i look at myself straight in the eye for the first time in my life, and immediately i want to look away. i see what others see in me—my eyes spilling fear, the scar on my left cheek, rising and waning like a star. i want to look away, and yet to see myself in truth, shrinking in my seat, trying so very hard to disappear. i want to see my skin, how it is ruptured and alive-my hands, the veined fabric, unraveling. all my life i have only seen myself behind the cloak of a mirror, and now, to finally see myself, to finally see yourself-the words scribbled on your lips, your mouth. to know that this is not a dream because you are really here, yes, you are really alive.
Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 6 _ The Yale Herald
Learning to swim by Catherine Yang
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eap in feet-first, head strapped in rubber and eyes wide open. Feel the cold seize your limbs and let your lungs contract from the shock. Break the fall with a swing of your arms and the curl of your torso. Kick—hard—and don’t stop. Writhe through slick open space, churning past the heaviness with well-practiced ferocity. The water crashes against your body with a rhythm that fills your ears and seeps deep into your brain. As the pool consumes you, forget all your past troubles and fight. Your body is designed to direct all energy to survival. Every inhale is calculated, every exhale instinctive. All the while the lines of your goggles grow deep and red, and sour chlorine sinks into your pores. The burn in your lungs is not a warning; it is a sign of success. You are here to fight the water with your body and your body with your mind—just you against one million liters of water and exhaustion, and no one else to pull you forward. Ten minutes becomes 10 hours, then 10 years—you take the plunge thousands of times, and you leave each day with the same red battle scars across your face. Each practice becomes a triumph over weakness, past and present. This is what it means to be a swimmer—each day, you fight to grow.
Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Feb. 24, 2017 – 7
OPINION
OPINION
Learning to care by Ashia Ajani
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ately, I’ve been calling my mom a lot, which is unusual because talking to her often makes me feel more stressed than relaxed. Tensions between us have been running especially high since the election. After it became clear that Trump had won, all she said to me was, “we survived Reagan. I have faith that you can survive Trump.” Holding back tears, I told her that I’d talk to her later. Besides talking to my mom, I’ve spent most of my time outside of class reading in bed or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race—anything to take my mind off of defunded Planned Parenthood, the Muslim ban or any other egregious, coded act of violence against marginalized peoples. In fact, though I’ve wanted to be a more engaged participant in campus activism—something that I know would make me feel stronger—sometimes attending talks, marches, and teach-ins can seem like a grab at social capital. When you feel compelled to attend everything, the rhetoric of “you’re not doing enough” can permeate activist spaces to the point that what ought to be an activity aimed toward benefitting the community feels more like a clamor to prove yourself. When I felt these things, I grew more and more cynical, which, in turn, only furthered my sense of apathy. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Moreover, it shouldn’t: being involved in community organizing should be empowering, not detrimental to your mental health. There’s no doubt that occupying activist spaces at Yale can make you scrutinize the behavior and motives of those around you. In times of great grief, we experience deep collective hurt, and sometimes that hurt manifests itself as elitism and ostracization. We love to say that “self care is a radical act,” but when we constantly ask ourselves questions like, ‘Who’s going to the most demonstrations? Staying in bed, depressed, the longest? Talking the most during resistance meetings?’ we ignore the fact that taking the time to take care of ourselves necessitates different paths and timeframes for different people. Many of us are still navigating the border of self-care and coping mechanisms. I have thought disparaging thoughts and harbored negative energy toward those whom I didn’t feel were doing enough. I noted those who didn’t show up to protests, were skipping teach-ins, weren’t reposting important information about water protectors and instances of racism and sexism on campus. I viewed showing up to activist spaces more as a means of proving one’s willingness to sacrifice than as representative of genuine concern for what was at stake. Attending campus resistance events has also made me analyze my own relationship with activism. Although I don’t advertise it, most people know that I have depression. My mother, however, doesn’t. When I tell her I’m sad—which is the word I use because depressed is too heavy on the ears—she tells me God is working. Sometimes it
hurts to hear such a vague response, but often the vagueness can turn out to be liberating. Since our last conversation, when I tried to disguise the fact that I was wickedly hungover, I’ve been carrying these words she shared with me: “find the joy in the small things.” To me, this means finding significance in what I am doing--not questioning who’s paying attention or whom I’m paying attention to, but simply immersing myself in what I have always loved to do. That means writing Black queer girl poetry because my art is my salvation. That means planning poetry workshops for New Haven middle school students. That means supporting the organizations that inspired my growth. My work at the Yale Women’s Center, despite all its flaws and a problematic background, has emboldened me to do more. But I also take breaks. I drink Arizona tea to calm my nerves before going to class where problematic white students nod at the problematic things my problematic professor says; I go home to loving suitemates who listen to me complain and help me find tangible ways of enacting resistance in class. I read Zadie Smith religiously and repeat whole poems from Sandra Cisneros’ My Wicked, Wicked Ways in the shower at 7:30 in the morning. I try to balance the good with the bad, and when the world gets too rough I take stock of every friendship and love I have to keep me going. I’ve begun to not just understand but accept that oftentimes we are limited by our own bodies and our own abilities to be present. I’ve learned to let my love transcend that boundary when my brain cannot command my legs to move. Activism isn’t about gaining social standing within a marginalized community. It’s about actually effecting change. We talk a lot about mobility of movements, about tiredness and cynicism, the feeling that we are constantly dropping things and picking them back up in a never-ending cycle of red light/green light. We are rightfully suspicious of the good things in our lives. We critique not because we are invested in just making something problematic thing less so, but because we feel betrayed by the fact of its existence. We tell our friends that our circles are growing smaller and smaller because the borders of our trust grow thinner and thinner with every heartbreak and new law and overworked love. Our lives are dynamic; we exude resistance in classrooms, in coffee shops, even at parties, when our black bodies are demonized against the “Black” music playing in the background. So I take joy in the small things. I reaffirm that God is working. One of my best friends shows me a video on how to have sex with a wig on. Another introduces me to a new musician. A girl tells me she saw my doppleganger, but I look better. It is another day and I am ready to love.
Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald
Funding fails by Lydia Buonomano
T
his week, applying for a summer internship in Morocco, I spent some time browsing through fellowship options only to find that many of the deadlines had already passed. This was surprising to me, as many of the internships that I was considering had only recently begun accepting applicants. With a bit more research, I began to feel I had been misled as to the scope and availability of the funding provided by Yale-coordinated fellowships. The university administration does not officially mandate any particular activity over the summer, but professes to encourage any plans students might develop for themselves. To connect students with professional and educational opportunities, the university supplies a number of resources exclusively devoted to the summer, such as a listing of coordinated internships and counseling opportunities through the Office of Career Strategy. But despite all the ways in which Yale demonstrates its commitment to student learning over the summer, one major deficit remains: the university’s funding policies fail to provide sufficient support for socioeconomically disadvantaged students. A quick visit to the fellowships page of the Yale Office of Career Strategy website reveals this generous invitation: “Find support for research, study abroad, public service, unpaid internships, and self-designed projects, in New Haven and around the globe.” The slogan appears to promise a reliable source of funding that will enable any student to pursue their particular passion regardless of their financial background. This, of course, would fit in with Yale’s professed commitment to providing equal opportunities to students of all means. In his 2013 Freshman Address, President Peter Salovey acknowledged, “Yale has seen socioeconomic mobility as a central pillar of its mission since its earliest days.” Despite this claim, the fellowship application process seems to run contrary to this mission. First and foremost, fellowship funding is merit-based rather than need-based. Applicants submit proposals detailing the circumstances of their summer plans and make a case for the importance of the professional or educational project they are planning. But details of the applicants’ financial backgrounds are not given any weight by committee members in the decision-making process. The result is a system that entirely forgoes its potential to level the playing field for students who might not be able to pay out of pocket for their accommodations in a program away from home. The OCS webpage further clarifies that “fellowships, whether Yale-funded or external, are always competitive. There is never enough funding to support every strong application received.” This, of course, creates the very real possibility that a student from a low-income household who has put together said strong application will be rejected in favor of a student with greater means to fund a summer opportunity without assistance. This fundamental weakness is further compounded by other quirks in the system. Notably, fellowships cannot be applied towards the Student Contribution Fee, a specified amount of money that students on financial aid are responsible for supplying towards their tuition each year. This unfortunately creates a situation in which a student is forced to choose between an unpaid internship or lab position, for example, and a summer job with which they would be able to earn the amount demanded by the university as their student contribution. From this point, the disadvantages for low-income individuals only grow larger. If a student in need mainly or exclusively relies on external funding for their summer plans, their options may be limited due to the timing of the application deadlines. Most Yale-coordinated fellowships have deadlines in early February or earlier. This is well before a student would receive notice of acceptance or rejection by high-profile summer opportunities like a laboratory position or an internship outside of Yale. Consequently, students whose circumstances compel them to rely on outside funding may be prevented from even considering certain experiences. Besides timing, the selection of opportunities that can be funded through Yale’s fellowship network is much more limited than it should be. Fellowships are funded by donations from alumni and other organizations committed to higher learning, and as a result, the causes they support are often highly specific due
to each patron’s personal sentimentalities. For example, many fellowships established to fund research projects require an additional element, such as the Jehiel R. Elyachar Fellowship, which requires a focus on Judaic Studies but expressly prohibits “topics researching anti-Semitism.” Under the current system, it is likely that a donor’s interests, rather than a student’s personal aspirations, will determine the student’s summer activities. If a student finds themselves in lucky circumstances, the three months between the spring and fall semesters may become a time to sharpen foreign language skills, form invaluable professional connections, or participate in groundbreaking research alongside celebrated experts in their field of interest. However, Yale’s current standards for awarding summer funding jeopardize the ability of some students to share equally in opportunities. If the university wishes to uphold its longstanding commitment to socioeconomic mobility for low-income students, it is time to at least consider a needs-based approach with a more appropriate timeline for application. The oversized influence of patrons on the types of opportunities available, while unfortunate, may be necessary to sustain their interest in donating. All the same, Yale would be wise to initiate an honest conversation with students themselves about the unfair burdens their fellowship funding policies place on applicants of varying economic backgrounds.
Graphic by Alex Wisowaty YH Staff Feb. 24, 2017 – 9
FEATURES FEATURES
Yale, y’all
*
Sonia Gadre, SY ’20, contemplates her experience as a Kentuckian at Yale.
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ouisville, Kentucky,” I say, already anticipating what the response will be. “Sorry, what was that?” “Loo-uh-vl,” I articulate automatically. I slur my words as precisely as I can. “Y’all gotta say it like you’re drunk on bourbon. That’s how the locals say it.” Everyone at the dining hall table laughs. I am oh-so-cute and provincial! I even threw a “y’all” in there for good measure. These things stick out when you’re up North. You see people smile. Occasionally, you see them smirk. They most always ask questions. “Is the grass really blue in the bluegrass state?” “Do people in Kentucky marry their cousins?” “Do people there wear shoes?” I stop myself before I smack my forehead with the palm of my hand. I am from Loo-uh-vl, Kentucky. I wear shoes. I know zero people who have married their cousins, and the grass is actually a lovely shade of deep green, a coloration that occurs because of the fertile limestone soil. It’s perfect for grazing horses. “No, we’re pretty much like normal humans, and Louisville’s just like any medium-sized city. Nothing special––except for the Kentucky Derby. You know, the big horse race.” Internally, the students at the table are vi-
10 – The Yale Herald
sualizing that event they saw on ESPN as they were flipping channels, the one with the Longines sponsorship. Or perhaps they’re remembering the special edition Kentucky Derby Vineyard Vines tie they almost bought once. Whatever the case, when I mention these two words, everyone perks up and proceeds to ask questions about fancy hats and betting. I’m validated by the phrase’s five hollow syllables. Instead of the down-home hillbilly, I become a cultured local from a city that houses one of America’s greatest traditions––someone with worthwhile experiences to share. But when I say “Kentucky Derby,” it is not internal pride that I feel. In fact, I’ve never actually been to the Kentucky Derby. My one experience at Churchill Downs, the track where the annual race is held, was on the day of the Kentucky Oaks, the running of the fillies. To give you a little background, Oaks is the day when we locals go out to the track to do our excessive drinking and smoking and betting so that we don’t have to hang out with lame tourists who participate in reprehensible activities (i.e., excessive drinking, smoking, and betting). Don’t get me wrong, the event is wonderful in many respects. Churchill Downs partners annually with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in making the race a massive platform for breast cancer aware-
ness. Everyone wears pink, and there’s even a parade with survivors who walk around the track in one huge celebration of life before the races begin. The whole thing is quite inspirational if you have a good enough seat to see it––although perhaps the caveat should be if you are sober enough to see it. The food, though overpriced, is actually delicious. And of course, the people-watching is unparalleled. Women with hats that rival those of the royal family. Men wearing sharp suits in snazzy patterns and colors (if I had a dollar for every plaid blazer…). People with homemade hats complete with those charming glue gun cobwebs. Vomit stained T-shirts. When we come out to the track, we come out in all our glory. But to a gal who can afford only general admission to the infield, the area of trampled grass on the inside of the track, Churchill Downs can also be a very jarring place. Have you ever seen a 13year old smoking a cigar? How about a fully grown adult urinating in broad daylight? The Kentucky Oaks and Derby are supposed to inspire pride and camaraderie among locals, but that’s a hard sell when differences in socioeconomic status are as physically distinguishable as the difference between a towel in the infield and a seat in the stands. In my 18 years, I have never felt more aware of my demographic identity than at the racetrack. Every facet of my being was sud-
denly crammed into two boxes labeled “MiddleClass” and “Female.” Given how rotten I felt on the ride home from Churchill Downs, it is interesting that at Yale, I feel compelled to not only willingly place myself within these two boxes, but to cram myself into a third one labeled “Southerner.” People back home would laugh if they knew. But as I sit on the floor of a suite in Vanderbilt Hall and chat with a collection of Southerners, I realize that I am hardly alone in assuming a more pronounced Southern identity while at Yale. Carrie Dean, SY ’20, is from Laurinburg, N.C. and describes her town as a place nearly 100 miles from every major city in North and South Carolina. A town which is simultaneously racially diverse and racially divided. “Back home, I don’t really identify with any part of Southern culture––I was actually super excited to leave. But because [being Southern] is something that makes me distinct, because there are so few southerners here, I feel like it does become more a part of my personality,” she says during a late night conversation peppered with relevant subjects from southern politics to the objective superiority of Cookout milkshakes. “I’m the girl from North Carolina.” Others find that their increased Southern-ness is a product of nostalgia. Jazzy Fisher, SY ’20,
found herself buying Atlanta hats and stickers labeled “Georgia on my mind” over the winter break in spite of the fact that she never really engaged with the Southern culture of her native Marietta, Georgia. “Now that I’m here, being Southern is a part of my identity that I cling to, and I’ve decided it’s important to me,” she says. “Being in the North, I’ve grown in appreciation for the South.” Jazzy recounts stories of warm Southern hospitality, often taking on a sweet, syrupy Southern accent. She smiles when she says she wants to move back down to the South when she’s older. The smile is genuine. As the discussion turns to the ubiquity of Chickfil-A restaurants in the suburbs of Atlanta, I begin to feel as if someone is scrubbing off a thick layer of makeup from my face. Unlike Carrie, I am not from the south South. Louisville is just about as far North as you can get in the state of Kentucky. It’s five hours south of Chicago. That’s a mere five episodes of The Bachelor. And unlike Jazzy, I have no real desire to return to the South in any kind of hurry. I’m not trying to say my Southern identity is fabricated––I’ve lived in Louisville for 11 years. But like a layer of skin-toned makeup, it is still not completely natural. On the ride back home from Churchill Downs, in the midst of my disillusionment, the Uber driver struck up a conversation. My friends and
I learned that he grew up in a rural town marked by a gas station, a couple of fast food restaurants, and some half-lit neon signs. He told us that in his community, some could still remember the exploits of coal company bosses. These people did not purposely conform to stereotypes that I would later selectively pick and choose in a college dining at Yale University. “Y’all did the right thing getting out of there early,” he said. “The race is more fun to watch on TV anyway.” Y’all. It sounded so genuine, so natural. Somehow, when I say it these days, it doesn’t feel quite the same.
Graphics by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Feb. 24, 2017 – 11
COVER
SENSE OF OTHERS, SENSE OF SELF Arts initiatives help nursing students learn to see people in a whole new way. by Eve Sneider YH Staff
Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff
12 – The Yale Herald
I
f you’re anything like me, you don’t spend very long looking at paint- tion of her facial expression. Instead, Friedlaender says, she might ask ings in museums. A minute or two, three tops. I like art; I find it in- the student, “Tell me what you see that makes her look sad without using teresting, but there’s only so much I really feel I need to see. Orawan the word sad.” In turn, they might cite her droopy eyes, or the fact that Gardner, NUR ’18, is the same way. Raised nearby in Guilford, Conn., the corners of her mouth are turned down. she came to the Yale University Art Gallery often growing up, “a hundred Once the medical students have completed taking an objective “inventimes, maybe.” One painting she recalls fondly is Edward Hopper’s West- tory” of the painting, they move into the subjective phase of the exercise. ern Motel. She says she likes visiting galleries, enjoys looking at artwork, Now, they are asked to take all of their observations, all of the visual but rarely looks at one thing for very long. information, put it together, and craft a narrative for the painting. “What In 2015, during the fall term of her first year at the Yale School of we’re trying to do is to get them to find the words to articulate what it is Nursing (YSN), Gardner revisited the Gallery with her classmates. In they’re looking at,” Friedlaender tells me. small groups led by trained docents, they examined the artwork she had In Enhancing Observational Skills, the medical students then gather seen so many times before. They arrived at Western Motel. The nursing in a classroom, where they look at and discuss photos of patients; for exstudents spent ten long minutes looking at the painting in silence. The ample, those with skin lesions. The effects of the day are instantaneous. forest green car, the sun-blanched Western landscape, the stately woman “What we found is that there’s a common vocabulary,” said Friedlaender. looking dead ahead, and the blue pants draped neatly over the armchair “They talk about the color of the rash, the texture, is it raised, is it flat, is in the corner. it scaley, is it smooth, and these are the same kinds of words they can Gardner found herself thinking in terms of colors: blue, green, red, use to talk about the paint on the canvas that they’re looking at, or the brown, blonde. “Color is so thematic in the painting,” she points out. colors.” The goal is to identify and closely examine details. By looking When her group came together after the allotted time and each student at images of patients immediately after their gallery visit, the medical shared their own observations, Gardner was struck by the things her students can see the relationship between their conversation about art classmates pointed out. The time of day, the way the light is angled, how and that about diagnoses right away. the woman’s hand grips the edge of the couch. In the many collective Enhancing Observational Skills was the first program of its kind when minutes she had spent looking at Western Motel over the years, she had it began in 1999. Friedlaender and Braverman first did a three year connever noticed these things before. trolled study in which they found that students who spent three hours According to Linda Honan, MSN ’89, a longtime professor at YSN, this in the galleries with the program had far better observational skills than is a pretty common phenomenon: people do not see the same way. And those who did not. These results were published in the Journal of the while this has few implications on a leisurely museum visit—so what if American Medical Association in 2001, and in the years since, at least you missed the hand?—for nursing students this isn’t a day off. It’s a seventy other medical schools and museums have implemented simirequired part of their first year of professional school. lar programming, according to Friedlaender. From the start, she says, Nursing is traditionally a profession rooted in scientific knowledge and the program has been required for every first-year medical student at thinking. But at YSN, the integration of arts and humanities is helping Yale. These days, they also work with residents and fellows from difstudents learn to see, hear, feel, and understand their patients, their ferent departments, and even faculty from the School of Medicine who people, more completely. want to be able to reinforce the ways of looking that medical students are taught at the YCBA. I. Seeing WHILE THE PROGRAM ENJOYED EARLY SUCCESS WITH MEDICAL IN 1999, LINDA FRIEDLAENDER, THE CURATOR OF EDUCATION AT students, it really found its home with the School of Nursing. It all began the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), and Irwin Braverman, a profes- with a lecture on musculoskeletal trauma. Linda Honan was discussing sor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, found themselves talk- the lasting effects of breaking one’s pelvic bone on the body, when one ing about how Braverman’s students weren’t doing a very good job of of her students piped up and asked, “Did you ever think about using describing their cases. As Friedlaender put it, “We decided that medi- an image of Frida Kahlo to talk about that?” At the time, Honan says, cal students in particular needed to learn how to look more slowly and she did not even know who Kahlo was. (On the day Honan and I meet, more carefully when they are working with patients, and we thought that she is wearing bright red socks with Kahlo’s portrait on them, a gift if we brought them to an art museum and we had them look at paint- from her students.) But after class she made a visit to the YUAG to look ings they had never seen before and don’t know anything about” then at Kahlo’s artwork. “Frida Kahlo had fractured her pelvis and lived in that might help them hone their observational skills. Enhancing Obser- pain, and drew images of what she saw as her internal organs around her vational Skills, the flagship Yale program between the YCBA and the head,” Honan points out. This got her thinking about the use of art in School of Medicine, was born. teaching nursing. When medical students arrive at the YCBA to participate in EnhancHonan had heard about the work that Friedlaender and Braverman ing Observational Skills, a mandatory part of the School of Medicine were doing, teaching what she calls “the practice of deep looking,” so curriculum, they begin by dividing up into small groups of four to six she went to Friedlaender and floated the idea of developing a program students, each with its own trained volunteer docent. Together, the group specific to nursing students. They called it “Looking is Not Seeing.” sits in front of a preselected painting, its accompanying placard con- While the program for nursing students is similar to that for doctors, both cealed by a post-it, and for approximately ten minutes they observe in Honan and Friedlaender mentioned a few key differences. Doctors typisilence. Notepads are available for taking notes or sketching what they cally see patients when they make rounds in the morning and at the end see, but they aren’t required to write anything down. The only thing they of the day, and perhaps somewhere between if a problem arises. Nurses need to do is look closely. work on a shift, seeing the same group of patients all throughout. As After this period of silent observation, the group comes back together such, they have a very different relationship. Often, nurses are the ones and the students are asked to describe everything they see; to take inven- who notice subtle changes over the course of a day. tory of the painting, if you will. How many people are in the painting? “I want [my students] to look at the entire palette of the patient,” HonHow many objects? What colors do you see? There are three things they an tells me. “We don’t want to ignore other symptoms that may not seem cannot do: state opinions, draw conclusions, and make interpretations. to cluster with a diagnosis.” In other words, observe everything closely For instance, if a student looking at a portrait says, “This looks like a before drawing conclusions about what the diagnosis is, rather than obwoman who is very sad,” the docent stops them. “Sad” is an interpreta- serving with a particular issue already in mind. Honan calls this a “dif-
Feb. 24, 2017 – 13
ferential diagnosis.” Following their time in the galleries, the nursing students, who participate in the program during the fall of their first year, go back to a classroom with Honan and practice their deep seeing on actual patients with disease processes. Gardner remembers, with a laugh, how Honan included a photo of her own perfectly healthy father, to see whether she could trick her students into diagnosing him with something he didn’t have. Honan studies every educational initiative she tries out, and the results of “Looking is Not Seeing” have been staggering. After three hours of looking at art, she has proven that nursing students’ observations become more objective and they are able to write more of a differential diagnosis. They are less likely to rush to judgment, and to really see the people they are working with. Honan believes that using the arts to teach nursing has been particularly effective at a school like YSN. Yale’s nursing program was the first one to have no prerequisites required for admission. As a result, Honan says, 78 percent of the students at YSN, on average, come from nonscience backgrounds. Gardner is one such student. After graduating from Vassar with degrees in film and philosophy, she spent time working in film and television before she “got interested in doing something more meaningful.” Though she was admitted to other nursing programs, she chose Yale’s because she wanted to study alongside people from diverse educational backgrounds. G e n e r a l l y, prerequisites for nursing school are sciencebased—anatoDuffy, adjunct professor of music my, physiology, chemistry, and such. Honan praises a BA background because, unlike the often-deductive scientific model of reasoning, students in the arts are encouraged to think inductively. And, after all, a patient never presents with just one issue at hand. A diagnostician must consider biological problems and psychological ones, issues of access, sociological implications, and more. They need to think broadly. For this reason, Honan says an arts degree is “a perfect background for nursing.” Her students come in with the right ways of thinking already in place. Her task is to figure out how to teach them the information they need to know, and it has helped her to get a little bit creative. II. Hearing
sicians was a natural move for Honan. “Why wouldn’t we go to expert musicians or music scholars to say, ‘How do you figure out things?’” she asks. “Aren’t body sounds music in some way?” The program, called “Listening is Not Hearing,” is conducted during the first fall of nursing school, much like “Looking is Not Seeing.” In it, Duffy provides nursing students with “a visual, spatial, oral, and intellectual approach to what rhythm is and how we measure and divide the passing of time.” Rather than fixating on technicalities or terminology, he provides them with the fundamental tools to hear carefully and thoroughly. Bowel sounds, Duffy tells me, are the first he teaches because they are relatively straightforward. There are only three: normal, hyperactive, and hypoactive. The difference between the three is partly their pitch, but mostly it is a question of how many times the bowel clicks per minute. A normal bowel clicks between five and thirty times in a minute, where if it is hypoactive it might click only once. Lung sounds come next. Learning to hear these means paying attention to timbre and variations in sound, but rhythm is pretty unimportant. After all, lungs are binary: inhale, exhale. Duffy teaches heart sounds last. They’re the most complicated rhythmically, and require that one pay attention to timbre and pitch as well. Once nursing students have learned about each individual sound, Duffy also instructs them in picking one out of a chorus—simulating a real human body. Duffy synthesizes artificial samples of the bowels, lungs, and heart and plays them all at once, forcing his students to, as Honan puts it, “swim in and find the lungs,” or whichever body sound they are being asked to look for. Duffy remarks that these masking exercises are somewhat akin to listening for the voice of one’s spouse at a party “amidst the nonsense.” As with “Looking is Not Seeing,” the effects of Honan and Duffy’s collaboration have been remarkable. For every three hours nursing students spend with Duffy, bowel sound recognition goes from 10 percent to 75 percent, heart sound recognition from 20 percent to 40 percent, and lung sound recognition from 30 percent to 60 percent. Duffy recalls that after they released the results of the study, the control group insisted on getting the same training because it had proven to be so effective. Most nurses learn to hear the body well only after years in the field. But until you reach that level of proficiency, what do you do? Often, nurses end up ordering tests or taking x-rays when their patients are perfectly normal. So, Duffy says, if nursing students can learn to hear body sounds better and more quickly, “we can cut the time in half or a third,” and save a significant sum of money that might otherwise be spent running unnecessary tests. Honan agrees that poor hearing skills cost money. More importantly, it’s not a hard fix. Right now, she says, most programs are “not training you to use what God gave you!” Especially given that many of her students will go on to work in underserved communities that might not have the funds, time, or technology to run unnecessary tests, Honan sees this training as essential.
THE SUCCESS OF “LOOKING IS NOT SEEING” GOT HONAN thinking further about how else she could make use of her students’ creative backgrounds. Learning to listen to the body’s sounds, a fundamental part of nursing, can be incredibly challenging. Often, it takes years just to learn to hear a heart. Eager to accelerate this learning process, Honan emailed then-Dean of the Yale School of Music (YSM), Thomas Duffy, and paid him a visit. “I told him I had an idea, and my intuitive sense was this is going to rock, but I had absolutely no funding. He said, ‘Okay, no money, good idea, I’m in!’” Honan’s vision was to create a program, in collaboration with Duffy, in which her students would learn how to hear heart, lung, and bowel sounds better by learning to hear from a musician. Duffy recalls that when Honan first played him a series of heartbeats with anomalies, he told her, “The dumbest person in my marching band could hear the difference; this is low-hanging fruit!” For this reason, working with mu-
DUFFY WORKS WITH HONAN AND HER STUDENTS AT YSN ON HIS own time. It’s not exactly in the job description. But his work has been incredibly important. The “Listening is Not Hearing” program—in Duffy’s words, the Duffy-Honan Intervention—has gotten rave reviews from everyone involved. Developing it is “the first time I kind of felt that I had a primary impact on improving people’s lives,” Duffy tells me. Being able to hear a body well isn’t just a question of saving money, or even of diagnosing the patient more quickly and accurately. It’s also integral to developing the physician-patient relationship. If we have machines that can record and analyze body sounds, what’s the use of a regular old stethoscope? A doctor at the medical school told Duffy that the reason one uses a stethoscope is that “by moving in, we put our hands on people, and we get inside their personal space and break down that boundary.” “If we’re going to do that,” Duffy says, “let’s teach people how to do it better.”
“BY MOVING IN, WE PUT OUR HANDS
ON PEOPLE, AND WE GET INSIDE THEIR PERSONAL SPACE AND BREAK DOWN THAT BOUNDARY. IF WE’RE GOING TO DO THAT, LET’S TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO DO IT BETTER.” Thomas
14 – The Yale Herald
This fall, “Listening is Not Hearing” was integrated into the curriculum at the medical school as well. Honan and Duffy have also travelled and given talks together, bringing the program to other schools. Thanks to the Yale-China Association, they even flew to Xiangya to conduct a three-day seminar. Over the next year, students there will start learning their beginning stethoscope skills with the Duffy-Honan Intervention. And hopefully, with more funding, Duffy and Honan will be able to expand the program further. Recognizing conditions associated with slight changes in pitch and mucus-related lung sounds are among the things that Duffy is looking to focus on next. “I’ve got to figure out how to do all of that stuff and see if we can make it more efficacious,” he comments, earnest to the core. III. Feeling
developing: creative writing. For a long time, Honan has urged her students to keep journals of their experiences. To this day, she says, she is haunted by some of her former patients, perhaps because she no longer remembers what their stories were. She does not want her students to be haunted in the same way. “I tell them I will do everything I can to help them be successful,” but in return “they will go out and get a 99 cent notebook, and they promise me that if they have nightmares about something that happened, or they’re even walking down the street and they smell their patient that they took care of seven hours before,” they’ll write about it. Honan eventually decided to ask her students to write her a story at the end of the year instead of filling out a course evaluation. Eventually, she had hundreds of stories. Catherine Gilliss, then-Dean of YSN, discovered this student writing, and she and Honan decided to make a point of celebrating creating writing and nursing. They first began recognizing students’ writing in 2003, and in 2004 three students were presented with the first Yale School of Nursing Creative Writing Awards. Every year since, students and faculty from YSN, and others, have come together on a Thursday in April for the presentation of these Creative Writing Awards to the top three writers at YSN, as well as an accompanying keynote address. A chapbook of the noteworthy entries is put together, and the three winners receive a cash prize. This year the keynote speaker will be Mary Catherine Bateson. One hundred and nine nursing students have submitted their writing to the contest. Beyond the annual contest, there are also voluntary creative writing workshops twice a month at YSN, facilitated by hematologist-turnedwriter Lorence Gutterman. Gardner has not submitted to the contest, but has attended some of Gutterman’s classes. He has even emailed her with prompts to respond to on her own time, like “I walked into the patient’s room and heard…” Lisa Rich, NUR ’18, one of the winners of the Creative Writing Award in 2016, remarks that “the act of writing helps me to process a lot of the feelings that being a health care provider brings up.” On Honan’s advice, Rich began keeping a journal while in her first year at YSN. Her award-winning piece was an excerpt from one of those entries. “If I’ve had a bad day at work, it’s because someone else has had one that will profoundly change the rest of their lives… I think part of it is definitely that those of us who go into these fields do so because we are ‘helpers,’ and inherent to that type of personality is this kind of taking on the mantle of other people’s problems.”
BEYOND EXPANDING THE HEARING PROGRAM, HONAN IS ALSO looking to complete the trifecta with a new initiative: “Touching is Not Feeling.” Her vision is to improve tactile clinical observation, specifically learning to feel and palpate heartbeats. We have pulses all over our bodies, she points out. “We even have little ones down [in our feet] that are really important for you to learn how to palpate.” Research shows that traditional methods of teaching palpation are woefully ineffective. This, in turn, means that clinicians enter the profession with “inconsistent skill levels and unpredictable clinical exposure.” So, in the fall of 2015, Honan teamed up with students in “MENG/ BENG 404: Medical Device Design and Innovation,” an advanced Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering undergraduate course in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In the class, “interdisciplinary teams of students [work] with physicians from the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital to address unmet clinical needs,” according to the course description. Honan’s vision was to create a device that would help students in nursing and medicine to practice feeling for pulses at different grades while also mimicking the color and temperature changes that accompany each pulse. Once the students in MENG/BENG 404 decided to take on her project, she brought them to the anatomy lab to see where the pulses that need to measured are on the body. Then, she took them to the trauma unit at YaleNew Haven Hospital and had them feel pulses on real patients. Once the engineering students felt people who “either had so much swelling they had to learn how to dig deep [to get the pulse], or had really poor circulation,” they understood how difficult it is to learn these tactile skills. WRITING CAN HELP THE STUDENTS PARSE THE DIFFICULT MOMENTS At the end of the semester, after working extensively with Honan and but also reflect on the deep connection they can feel with their patients. some of her nursing students, the engineering students presented the Beat- “The intimacy in our profession is sometimes more than between two lovers. Box. The box “features a silicone sheet to simulate skin and a speaker to Yet you’re a stranger,” Honan remarks. At its heart, nursing is a profession simulate the pulse,” and there is also “a layer of hydrogel to simulate all rooted in examining, understanding, and relating to people. As Gardner the tissues and fat that can make finding a pulse difficult,” according to points out, “Your patient isn’t just somebody who is a set of symptoms. the class’s website. There are four different grades of pulse that students They’re a person with a whole complex presentation that you have to intercan practice with. Zero is no pulse, 1 is barely there, 2 is normal, 3 is full pret, and then you have to treat them as a person.” and bounding, and 4 is “for those kids whose fingers really need a drum for At YSN, the understanding that patients are people is fundamental. Gardthem to feel it,” says Honan. Students can connect their smartphones to ner adds that while doctors treat the disease, nurses are the ones who treat the BeatBox to practice feeling these different pulses. the patient. “I think the idea that we’re getting people from many different This year, Honan is testing the efficacy of the BeatBox on her nursing backgrounds speaks to that ethos,” she says. Training nurses to see like an students. She pre-tested all 105 of her first-year students in the first week artist sees the way the light hits, to hear like a musician hears a sonata, or of the school year, asking them whether they could feel a pulse. Half of the to feel a beating heart, is brilliant in its obviousness. class then has two hours to go practice with the BeatBox by themselves, “I also think it’s great for the public to hear our stories,” Honan tells me. whenever they want to. In June, she will test all 105 students again and “You stay with us, do you know that? Do you know that your stories live on see whether these two hours on the machine made a difference. “When it in us, and are used to either teach the next generation or learn from to be finishes, then we really will have a curriculum that is tested and reliable for better? I don’t think you know that.” improving the perceptive ability of clinicians. It’s cool!” IV. Telling HONAN HAS ALREADY REVOLUTIONIZED SEEING, HEARING, AND feeling, but she is as committed to nurturing the whole person when it comes to her students as she is with her patients. In Honan’s time at YSN, there is one other interdisciplinary initiative she has been instrumental in
Feb. 24, 2017 – 15
FEATURES
Wins and flosses Emma Chanen, BK ’19, examines the Ivy League’s fascination with flossing.
T
wo months into my freshman year at Yale, I called my friend Benedict at Harvard to catch up and compare notes. We covered classes and suitemates, rattled off the list of clubs and activities, bemoaned the recent loss of our beloved Grantland1, but mostly, we marveled at how very different our new homes were from the one we had left back in Evanston, Illinois. Nobody uses our slang words or appreciates good chicken wings, we complained. The clothes are different, the language, the attitudes. “One weird thing,” Benedict cut in. “Do people floss at Yale?” Yes, I replied. Yes they do. I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THIS STRANGE phenomenon in my first moments on campus. My roommate and I had both returned from FOOT trips, and we unpacked together in our common room. She rooted around in a bag her parents had brought for her and remarked, “Ugh, all I want to do is floss,” as she pulled out a white box of dental floss. “Really?” I thought. All you want to do is floss? Of all the infinite exciting things to do on one’s first day of college, all you want to do right now is run a fancy mint string through the space
[1] A sports and culture blog known for long form journalism that was shut down by its owner ESPN on Oct. 30, 2015.
16 – The Yale Herald
between your teeth? But I dismissed it as a curious personal preference and continued to unpack. My dear roommate, though the first, was not the last Yalie I’ve found committed to pristine oral hygiene, however. In fact, I’ve run into almost every young woman on my floor at some point flossing away to her little heart’s content. I’ve seen everything from fancy floss gadgets to the daily disposables to the plastic floss men2 little kids get at the dentist. Many stay true to the down and dirty fingers and floss technique, though, which I guess I can respect. Even when I venture outside of my entryway I’m not safe from this maddening dedication to oral health. In the bathroom of my friend’s off-campus apartment, I found a Reach Access Flosser sitting next to an almost empty package of its disposable floss components. The apartment’s occupant was a serial flosser—I would never have guessed. Now I’m not averse to flossing every once in a while. We’ve all had cause to dislodge a rogue popcorn kernel or, back in Evanston, a tiny bit of chicken wing. But I just can’t get behind making a habit of it mostly because it feels unnecessary to me. I know abstractly that it is a good thing to do,
[2] For those unfamiliar, it’s a piece of plastic shaped like a tiny man with no arms that somehow holds floss.
but those who do it everyday seem to do it because of just that—they feel they must. Surrounded, as I am, by driven Ivy Leaguers, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that many blindly follow what 10 out of 10 dentists strongly recommend, but it still seems to me an improbable dedication to a bizarre brand of perfectionism. It’s as if they’re all pursuing that one extra A+ on their dental exam, a gold star for sucking up to the doctor, the plaque for most zealous plaque hunter. In 2013, the American Dental Association found that 50.5 percent of Americans surveyed floss daily, and 30 percent floss but not daily. To me that sounds like a straight up lie, but assuming it is true and I am simply a part of the “18.5 percent” who stubbornly refuses to floss regularly, the statistics for the Ivy League are still startling. Eleven out of 16 people on my floor floss at least semi-regularly, which is 68.8 percent3. If we extrapolate to the rest of the glorified athletic conference known as the Ivy League, it seems we’ve got a lot of flossers roaming around here. If over 46,0004 highly educated people are doing it, they must have some empirical reason. According to the first Google result for “benefits of
[3] I attended my Introduction to Statistics lecture semiregularly, and I’m pretty sure this is what we like to call “statistically significant.” [4] That’s 68.8 percent of the Ivy League’s estimated total undergraduate enrollment.
flossing,” “If you don’t floss, you’re more likely to have plaque build-up, which can lead to cavities, tooth decay, and gum disease. If left untreated, gum disease can be a risk factor for heart disease, diabetes, and a high body mass index.” These sound like good reasons to floss, but I know that the Ivy flossing epidemic isn’t because of the objective health benefits. It is the overarching attitude of achievement in my new home that sustains this strange practice. Yale attracts flossers and maintains them. I’ll admit that there were times in my life when I was a flosser. I would pledge perfection for a couple weeks at a time. These bursts of commitment to my gums usually coincided with equally unsustainable promises to put my laundry away rather than live out of the basket for a few weeks or do my homework at my desk rather than on the floor or in my bed. I have a secret flosser hidden away inside me, but I try not to let her control me. She nagged me about doing ACT flashcards and keeping a journal, about making my bed and taking vitamins. She wanted me to be the perfectionist that I just couldn’t be. Surrounded by flossers here at school, I realize, she is not me—I am not her.
Back home, the neighborhood kids always marched out into the dentist’s waiting room with a plastic bag, a clean new smile, and marching orders to start flossing everyday. Like the cheap chachki picked from the “toy box” at the end of the appointment, nothing ever came of those instructions. By the time I turned eighteen, I stopped lying to Pam—my dental hygienist—at the beginning of every appointment. “Do you floss?” she always asks. I used to say something like “not as often as I should” or “every couple weeks.” These days, I just go with “no.” I’m sorry Pam of North Shore Dentistry for Children, but I am an adult now and I don’t floss.
against flossers, but he’s already demonstrating weakness. Not me. I may make my bed sometimes or put my laundry away due to space constraints, but I am yet no flosser. My desk remains unused, my watch almost a full minute slow. I’ve bled for my cause5. I’ve stared gingivitis in the face, and I am not afraid. I’ll hold on to home by the skin of my teeth.
ON THE PHONE, BENEDICT SOUNDED PANicked. “Everyone in my suite flosses together every night. They all do it.” Stay calm, I told him; stay true to who you are. In this crazy new world we need to hold onto that rebellious Midwestern, public school cowboy within us—the non-flosser. “I don’t know,” my friend, the stats major worries: “With 10 percent more peer pressure, I think I’ll start flossing.” I hope it doesn’t come to that for him. I hope he stays strong in the battle
[5] Because any time I do floss, my gums bleed. Whoops.
Graphics by Joseph Valdez YH Staff
Feb. 24 2017 – 17
CULTURE
Emails on emails: getting Yalies to Toad’s by Rachel Calnek-Sugin
O
n Feb. 8, 2017, thetoad@toadsplace.com troduces himself as Brian Phelps, the “president and owner” aren’t going to be there—that’s basically the whole point changed the font of their Wednesday Night Dance of Toad’s Place since 1995, and an employee of the night- of Woad’s—so it makes perfect sense that he’d mention Party email from Papyrus to Georgia, the color club since 1976. it in his email. scheme from rainbow to black and blue, and the The Toad’s email, according to Brian, has been sent out But the inclusion of that sentiment on a SATURDAY graphics from ***DANCE DANCE DANCE*** to the offi- “since the beginning of the Internet” sometime in the mid- NIGHT DANCE PARTY email should prompt some sort cial Yale Bulldogs symbol that’s found on the sweatshirts late 1990s. It’s an advertising tool, and one that’s much of reckoning about how that attitude is now so mainof sports teams. Naturally, there was some outpouring of more efficient than the postering and “table-tenting” they stream as to be presented as neutral to an undiscriminatindignation: the Overheard at Yale post has 22 outraged used to do. Toad’s wants to let Yale students know who’s ing email list of nearly 7,000. It’s the same entitlement comments and 170 “sad” reacts, my suitemate Kate Cray, playing, and what the deals are. exuded by the group of seniors attempting to make Box SM ’19, replied to the email with a message that began: Brian won’t reveal how he gets the email address of every more like Woad’s, with ideas like a line-cutting member“I’m emailing to express my profound disappointment,” and student on campus. At first he says somebody “anonymous- ship offered for free to Yale students but with a price tag my friend Emily Ge, BK ’19, with the ultimate burn, came ly” mails them to him.When I press him further, he shrugs to everyone else. out with: “I thought it was from Payne Whitney.” I learned mysteriously and says, “It could be a fairy.” later that the switch was prompted by Toad’s’ shift from TOAD’S IS ONE OF THE FEW SPACES WHERE YALE Lyris to Mailchimp, which gave the writer of the emails the ON SAT., DEC. 10, 2016, BRIAN SENT OUT A SOAD’S students ever interact with students from other colleges opportunity to format them differently. The writer is not email with the subject line “Saturday Night Dance Par- in New Haven. Toad’s’ clientele, Brian says, is mostly not wedded to the new style, which should assuage the many ty- huge bonus for Yale students...” The email advertised Yale students. The Quinnipiac students come in on Dattco students who view the colorful weekly emails as a beloved “FREE ADMISSION for ALL students with YALE ID all night buses that park on the Green each Saturday night, and tradition: “This was one of few constants in my life,” one long!” The usual font colors, the usual original Saturday residents of New Haven and other Connecticut towns drive Overheard commenter wrote; another lamented: “the end night dance party photo, the usual promotion of penny in for the concerts. Toad’s may be smack in the middle of an era.” drinks. But wedged in the middle of the email, in size 9.5 of Yale’s campus, but it isn’t the University’s properfont, Brian added: ty. It’s actually one of the only buildings in the vicinity I ENTER TENTATIVELY. “HI,” I SAY,“I’M LOOKING “Special note: the turnout from other schools will be very that Yale doesn’t own. for Brian?” light because they start exams this Monday. There will be “Does that cause tension with the University?” I ask. Toad’s isn’t my usual locale—I can count my Woad’s ad- plenty of room to dance and not get hassled.” Brian pauses. “There are discussion points,” he says, ventures on my fingers, and save my first-ever night of colThis “special note” shocked me. It was a direct and shrugging his shoulders and speaking nonchalantly about lege, and (for some inexplicable reason) my 19th birthday, more-or-less explicit appeal to the disdain Yale students how universities and nightclubs sometimes have different I have never been to Soad’s—but I am here on a mission. have for our counterparts at Quinnipiac. As Daisy Massey, priorities. But at times, this discussion has taken on a “WHO?” one of the bored-looking bouncers yells over JE ’19, wrote so eloquently in her Yale Daily News column, more sinister tone. In 2010, Yale sued Toad’s over patrons’ the music, scrutinizing me and my backpack curiously. “Shaming Q-Pac? Shame on us”: “We openly act towards loitering, smoking, and littering in the Yale-owned walkway It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday night. There is a dance party, Quinnipiac women in ways we would never act toward adjacent to Toad’s that leads to Morse and Stiles. That litiDomino’s pizza, Stella Artois, and people actually using women at Yale.” The rhetoric with which the Yale student gation lasted years. Brian wrote in a Yale Daily News op-ed the coat rack. body (luckily, with many exceptions) talks about Quinnipiac in 2013: “Yale has virtually an infinite amount of money to “Is Brian around?” I try again. students drips with condescension, slut-shaming, and intel- spend going after me and it knows that I am going to incur “BRIAN OR RYAN?” lectual elitism. It’s an attitude that I am shamefully accus- very substantial legal fees defending my rights.” “BRIAN?” tomed to hearing amongst my peers: what surprised me was His account has its biases, but it does cast light on a There’s some murmuring between them. I begin to won- to see it articulated in red Papyrus font to a subscriber list larger pattern. What we see at Toad’s is a sense of entitleder whether perhaps one of these bouncers is Brian, or if, that, Brian tells me, includes 6,600 people. ment over the greater New Haven community that is leverperhaps, Brian doesn’t exist, and was simply the name “A lot of [Yale] students just don’t like the Quinni- aged by the corporate Yale and its student body alike. This assumed by the mysterious persona behind the weekly piac students,” Brian says with a shrug, “It gets more is by no means limited to Toad’s and Box. Yale has already Toad’s email. But someone grabs a phone, and after a mo- students down here.” faced criticism for glossing over the vital participation of ment, ushers me inside. “You can go upstairs,” he tells It’s hard to blame him for making the choices that most New Haven activist groups like Unidad Latina en Accion me with a shrug. benefit his business. It costs a lot to run a nightclub in New in the campaign to change the name of what was once Haven: between the taxes and the insurance, there are, he Calhoun College. A RED-CHEEKED, WHITE-HAIRED MAN GREETS ME AT says, “tons and tons of bills, so it’s nowhere what you’d The email Brian is most proud of is the one he sent the door to the office: a long room filled with Xerox ma- think we’d bring in.” It makes it harder that they’re basi- after this year’s triumphant Harvard-Yale game. He brags chines, coffee cups, and cardboard boxes that would be cally seasonal: bands don’t want to come in the summer to me about the unprecedented open-rate, complete abtotally indistinguishable from any other office space were when they could be in outdoor venues and when university sence of unsubscribes, and the speed with which he sent it not filled with toy frogs (plush, wooden, etc.) and liter- students aren’t around. Brian has to pay his 65 employees it—immediately after the score was announced—so that ally vibrating with Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.” The man appears (he says he has as many as 57 people working on a busy he was the one to break the news to Yalies all over the totally oblivious to the quaking floors and welcomes me in, night) and make back his investment on the new lighting country and world. Yale, the winning email states, is FANgesturing to a couch. He wears black ASICS sneakers, a knit and sound systems he purchased this summer, which cost TASTIC, SUPER, INCREDIBLE, AMAZING, POWERFUL, sweater over a blue collared shirt with folded wire glasses $100,000 and $250,000 respectively. He’s noticed that and TREMENDOUS. adorning its neckline, and a dark green TOAD’S PLACE cap more Yale students pay the entrance fee to his club and perched on top of his square-ish, white-haired head. He in- buy drinks at his bar when he specifies that Quinnipiac kids
Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff 18 _ The Yale Herald
From tampons to Twitter to trolls: an interview with Dana Schwartz Conducted by Lora Kelley YH Staff “Capitalism is a disease, and the only cure is a major publishing company giving me a book deal for a hardcover to sell at Urban Outfitters” reads the pinned tweet on @GuyInYourMFA, one of comedian/writer/cultural critic/ Twitter celebrity Dana Schwartz’s parody accounts. The Herald talked with Schwartz, now 24 and an Arts and Culture writer at The Observer, to hear about her experiences watching Netflix and crying, writing a viral letter lambasting The Observer’s (former) owner Jared Kushner, and cranking out a Young Adult novel, all in the two years since she’s graduated college. With bylines at publications including The New Yorker, Mental Floss, GQ, and The Guardian, and a BuzzFeed quiz-inspired memoir on its way, Schwartz has some thoughts to share with all of you on how to get what you want in a creative career right out of college. YH: How did you get your start? Were you always a comedian? DS: I auditioned for some comedy things the first year of college, and didn’t get them, and then was like, “Oh, I guess that’s not my thing.” So then did not do comedy, or even consider it as a career, until I got some external validation outside of college. I didn’t even apply again to do anything comedy related until after I had interned at Conan in LA and after I had the success of [parody Twitter account] @GuyInYourMFA, and then I was like, “OK, maybe this is something I can do.”
DS: Right? It was awful. And I wrote a piece on it because I didn’t even think that it was that personal other than it kind of involved my genitalia, but I thought it was a funny story, because it was, but that, as soon as I published it, my mom and my sister were like, “Oh my God, Dana, what did you do?” I think I humiliated my little sister, because they weren’t as used to it as I was, or weren’t as comfortable with that sort of writing as I am. But for me it was that’s a funny story and I wanted to tell it. I hope the reason that I overshare is because I hope that my story has larger relevance, that someone out there has gotten a tampon stuck and are like “Thank God someone is writing about this,” or at least someone will get a laugh out of it. YH: So do you think your writing hits home? Is it taken the way you want it to? DS: I have never been an investigative reporter, so I hope the people who read my stuff recognize that it comes with a bit of––God, it’s so gross to say your stuff has sass––but it’s not always 100 percent serious. I would hope that people who read [my work] understand my tone and where I come from. YH: Have you ever regretted putting something out on the Internet?
DS: Oh, yeah, hell yeah. The other day––a few weeks ago––I saw these two pictures. In one of them, Donald Trump’s hands look way bigger. And I thought it was hilarious, so I tweeted like, “Oh my God, lol, Donald Trump 100 percent Photoshopped his hands to look bigYH: How did you get started with that Twitter account? ger.” I hadn’t checked to see if he had actually Photoshopped them. Because I don’t think of my Twitter as DS: I was in a creative writing workshop, and I had a my journalistic writing. I just put funny things on the packet of pieces to workshop for the next day, and I was Internet with funny things I write. And then it got insane. flipping through them, and three out of four of them It got retweeted a ton of times and was all over the Interwere about a man who got on a train to leave his wife. net, and then somebody was like, “Oh, he didn’t [PhoAnd I was like, “Oh my God, this is the worst instinct.” toshop] them,” and here was the proof with whatever [Then] I was like, “This is something very relatable and pixels they did. something that I need to excise from my own bad habits,” and so a Twitter account was born! YH: Wow. What did you do? YH: How did you gain a following? DS: I definitely self-promoted. I cross-posted to my personal Twitter account, and I put it on Reddit and Tumblr. I think BuzzFeed wrote about it too, which helped. YH: What was the first publication that you got published in?
DS: I did what I thought was the right thing to do, which was [to] delete the original tweet, because it was getting shared around, and then say, “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t really mean it as a piece of journalism, just thought it was a funny image.” I kind of forgot that [the] people [who] follow me who aren’t just my 14 friends at college. YH: How did Twitter react?
DS: The Highland Park Pioneer Press in Highland Park, DS: The people who hate me––I think people who are Ill. No, but seriously, a non-school or local publication normal understood––but the crazy deplorables, people was Mental Floss, where I actually ended up working with #MakeAmericaGreatAgain in the Twitter bios got for a bit. I cold-emailed them when I was in college and furious at me, and were like, “You’re Fake News!” For gave them a bunch of pitches and begged them to let like a week I couldn’t go on Twitter. I made my boyme write for them. I was just really aggressive at email- friend change my Twitter password so I couldn’t log on. ing people and begging them to let me write for them. It was just too much; it was insane. How could people I would just write for anyone, do anything—because I not realize that that tweet is not the same thing as news? felt that I was late to the writing game and late to the Do people really think that that’s what news is? They’re comedy game, so I felt lucky to do literally anything. And like, “You work for a newspaper!” [and my response is] someone would be like, “I don’t know, you can write my “I write about TV! And most of that writing is jokes!” I grocery list,” and I’d be like, “Yeah, absolutely! And I’ll guess I’ve learned my lesson. You can’t put anything on have it before deadline.” the Internet that can be interpreted incorrectly. Even if I didn’t mean it that way initially, [I’m] still responsible YH: Did you write anything crazy early on? for the way it’s interpreted. I think I did the right thing by deleting it and apologizing. The other lesson is the DS: Early on before I really had my audience, I wrote this people who want to hate you will always hate you. The story—and it’s a true story—about how I had to go to the people who want to call me Fake News, and a liberal gynecologist because I got a tampon stuck. snowflake idiot, they’re gonna think that no matter what, and all you can do is be true to whatever moral compass YH: Nightmare. you have and ignore that garbage.
YH: You write a lot of funny stuff, but have also written real things about politics, particularly that open letter to Jared Kushner. DS: I started as a more politically-minded person before I was in the comedy world. I actually majored in Public Policy and American Institutions [at Brown]. I definitely am an impulsive writer, in that when there’s something I’m passionate about it just boils up inside of me, and I don’t really have the means to contain it. Basically the weekend prior to writing [the letter to Kushner] I’d been getting really disgusting, vitriolic, anti-Semitic hate mail, hate tweets online. And I was just kind of furious. So I wrote this letter in a fugue state when I got to the office on Monday, and I didn’t think twice. And I don’t regret it, I’m really glad that I spoke my piece, and it was really honest to my experience and how I still feel. YH: What was the aftermath? DS: It was incredibly gratifying to see the support that I received. Obviously [publishing this letter] also exposed me to a new audience of people who are not fans of me or my work. But again it was totally worth it. I think people assume that I had to sit across from Jared Kushner in the office and had to avoid him at the coffee machine, but the fact of the matter is he’s since divested from the paper when he moved to Washington. I’ve never met him; he’s never been to the office. YH: What’s next for you? I hear you have a YA novel coming out in May? DS: Yeah! It’s called And We’re Off. It’s about a high school senior trying to become an artist. She goes traveling around Europe before going to an artist’s camp in Ireland, but her mom tags along. It’s loosely based on when I graduated from college and didn’t exactly know what my direction was going to be. YH: Why did you write a YA novel? DS: The boring answer is that the good people at Penguin Razorbill reached out to me and were like, “Hey, have you thought of writing a YA novel?” And I was like, “I could try!” But then the long answer is also that it was very fun for me to write in a young voice. When I was growing up YA novels had such a tremendous impact on me that it felt like a gift to be given this chance to try to do that again. I think I had to confront my own snobbery about what a YA novel would look and sound like. There is that slight tendency that people have, and that I even have, to think that a young adult novel is less sophisticated and less worthy than other literature. And I think my goal in this was to say, “No, I’m going to tell the story of a young girl—like a young woman—and those stories are legitimate and deserve to be told in honest and compelling ways,” so that was my goal. YH: What else is next for you? DS: I’m working now on a sort of a memoir that is 100% more adult, so several themes not suitable for children. It’s actually like loosely based on a BuzzFeed-style personality quiz and it becomes a choose-your-own-adventure sort of. It’s a little weird, but it’s mostly about moving to New York and dating people, and I don’t know, trying to be a grownup when I still feel like a 14-year-old.
Feb. 24, 2017 _ 19
REVIEWS
REVIEWS Sad songs
by Clara Olshansky
SOURCE: http://music.mxdwn.com
I
n Memories Are Now, Jesca Hoop explores memory, loss, and fear. The album— Hoop’s first since her career-changing collaboration with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam— has a lot to say, if you’ll stay to listen. The songs are certainly substantial, with Hoop’s haunting harmonies, experimental rhythm, and constant vacillation in tone between intimacy and confrontation. The songs touch upon many of the fears we’re all experiencing at this moment in history: loss of control, betrayal, the hypnotic power of media, and the pervading sense of anxiety. Still, the album warrants a disclaimer: even at its best, Jesca Hoop’s music may not be your thing. There’s a spiritual quality to some of her songs that might make you think of tarot cards or dimly lit tea shops. All I can ask is that you try to see past that and give Memories Are Now the multiple listens it deserves. Hoop’s sound is fairly minimalistic, and the songs on Memories can run as long as six minutes. If you’re listening to Hoop for the first time, start with the more accessible songs on the album: “Simon Says,” for example, is a surprisingly cheerful take on humankind’s loss of autonomy with sunny, almost sing-along-worthy vocals floating above the layered guitars. From there, listen to the lovely “Pegasi,” a song sweet enough to bring tears to your eyes, or the title track, with its rich harmonies and driving bass line. If you’re with Hoop at that point, give the full album a try. Two related themes prevail throughout Memories Are Now: one is the struggle between man and machine, and the other, appropriately, is memory. The song “Animal Kingdom Chaotic” is explicitly the former, with lyrics like “Humankind wiped out by rising drones” and “You know you want to take back control.” “Simon Says” is similarly explicit, with the lyric “We’re hypnotized by TV sets.” Even “The Lost Sky,” which is ostensibly about lost love, includes the phrase “the bitter burden of a signal run cold.” The album’s anxiety about technology offers valuable context for the stripped down sound of the album. Aside from the occasional distortions, the album’s sound is pretty acoustic. Hoop’s voice is the most prominent figure throughout the album, suggesting the value she places on the human. As for the theme of memory, the past is constantly present, though Hoop’s relationship to the past changes from song to song. The title track, with its repeated “Let’s get up, get on, get moving,” is concerned with overcoming memory. Meanwhile, “Songs of Old” suggests a desire to enter and inhabit the history of music. The song repeats the image of entering old spaces through weathered doors, and cries “Empires are made this way / singing the rock of ages.” Still, there remains an ambivalent relationship to the past, with lyrics like “though this gold is marred by red.” Meanwhile, “The Lost Sky” reveals the feeling of betrayal that can come from reflecting on a happier time, with its chorus: “And when we said the words ‘I love you’ / I said them ‘cause they are true / Why would you say those words to me / if you could not follow through?” The album also
20 _ The Yale Herald
builds its own sense of memory through repeated motifs. Mentions of doors, dark stars, and fire permeate the record. By revisiting certain ideas, images, and sounds, Hoop creates a sense that the album is itself a reserve of memories from which to draw. “Unsaid” remembers the droning, rocking feeling of “The Lost Sky.” The final song, “The Coming,” remembers both the Christian themes and the understated, halting feeling of “Songs of Old.” The album both examines and demonstrates the act of remembering. Embedded in both of these themes is a frustrated sense of failed communication. The songs reverberate with images of lost love and forgotten words (after all, one of the songs is even called “Unsaid”). Still, the intimacy of the songs—the melancholy tone, the understated orchestration, the emotionally direct lyrics—allows the possibility that some connection might be found between the music and the listener. The album is successful in that respect; if you can listen to a song as moving as “Pegasi” without feeling a thing, you are impressively indifferent. Memories is certainly timely. While the first song, the title track, offers some hope, suggesting that we can move on from difficult times through hard work, it is the last song, “The Coming,” that truly resonates in this moment of civil and political unrest, ending the album on a note of confusion and fear. The song begins, “Jesus turned in his crown of thorns today and announced to the Earth and the heavens the end of his reign / He took a seat next to the Devil and said, ‘I need a new name.’” It then goes on to talk about losing religion and losing hope with lyrics like, “And I can’t turn a blind eye to centuries of conflict and wrongdoing in His name.” It’s the longest song on the album, and Hoop’s vocals ring out over a slow, distorted, resounding guitar. The bareness of the song brings out the eerie quality of Hoop’s poetry. While the vocals get more vehement over the course of the song, and the guitar starts to come through stronger towards the end, the song remains chillingly sparse throughout. The album ends with the lyric “And the Coming never came.” While ultimately the album declines to offer hope, it may offer some catharsis. In the end, Memories Are Now is a compelling album, but one that you might feel nervous about recommending to a friend. It doesn’t have the cheerful or hopeful quality of Jesca Hoop and Sam Beam’s Love Letter for Fire, which begins unabashedly with the lyric, “Welcome to feeling happy.” On the other hand, it is the most accessible of Hoop’s solo albums, the rest of which are even more esoteric and restrained. Many of the songs on Memories carry a kind of stripped-down, poignant beauty, and some of the lyrics are downright haunting. It’s definitely a better album for feeling melancholy in your room than for blasting at a party or while you’re working out. So set aside forty minutes, get some tissues out, and give Memories Are Now a listen.
Terrace House
A
merican reality TV is known for its “guilty pleasure” reputation: networks like Bravo, E!, and TLC draw in millions of viewers with housewives, Kardashians, and pageant moms. There is no doubt that drama sells. However, a modest Japanese reality show called Terrace House, distributed worldwide by Netflix, is challenging this status quo. Terrace House, which first aired in 2012, depicts the everyday lives and interactions of six young adults who live together. It really is as simple as that. Each season begins with three boys and three girls who have never met moving into a luxury home and going about their daily lives. While romantic relationships are frequent and account for a significant portion of storylines, they are not explicitly central to the show. Participants’ career developments, hobbies, and uneventful trips to the grocery store also occupy much of each 30-minute episode. While parallels to MTV’s Real World are evident, there is no overlooking the stark contrast between its drama-packed content and Terrace House’s respectful, down-to-earth appeal.
In addition to documenting the lives of the housemates, Terrace House features a group of six entertainers who watch and make hilarious comments throughout each episode. They characterize and sympathize with the participants just as at-home audiences do, reenacting funny moments and excitedly predicting what’s to come. The balance between the often slow and simple storylines in the house and the sharp humor the entertainers derive from them make for a unique experience. Viewers feel as though they are watching the show with their funniest friends and thus become further invested in the housemates’ lives. The commentators also provide an important degree of consistency, since participants come and go throughout the season. When housemates leave, they’re replaced, bringing in people who offer new lifestyles and potential romance. During the first season available on Netflix, Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City, a total of 17 housemates join and leave the show. The longest stay lasts 36 episodes; the shortest last only eight. This turnover provides an ideal mix
of old and new to sustain the show’s entertainment value for several months. A new season called Terrace House: Aloha State, set in Hawaii, premiered this January. Cast members have so far included a musician, a carpenter, a sales woman, and an aspiring actor. All fluent in Japanese (which remains the show’s primary language), participants come from both Japan and the United States, appealing to Terrace House’s growing international audience. In spite of some noticeable cultural differences between the newest season and the previous two, which were both set in Japan, the show maintains a genuine simplistic charm that offers audiences of all backgrounds a comedic and wholesome glimpse into the lives of others around the world. The entire season of Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City and the first eight episodes of Terrace House: Aloha State are currently available to stream on Netflix.
by Marley Finley
A Cure for Wellness
I
’m thinking of director Gore Verbinski’s (of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean fame) new movie A Cure for Wellness not so much as a cohesive film, but as a collection of wellcurated obsessions. Throughout the film’s twisting plot, the same notes are played over and over again, perhaps to the film’s credit. However, the film’s scatterbrained plot finds strength in the way it creates the impression of unfolding as neatly as a puzzle. The film follows its hero, Lockhart–a despicable fratty-post-grad corporate jackass played masterfully by Dane DeHaan–on a mission to storm into a wellness clinic in the Swiss Alps, guns blazing, and extract his company’s rogue CEO. While there, he’s quickly embroiled in the strange, cultish world of the clinic, particularly as it becomes clear that the events transpiring in front of him bear an eerie resemblance to a local tale about the property the clinic is built on. The story, as we first hear it, goes that angry peasants once burned down their baron’s castle as punishment for the incestuous sin of marrying his sister (all their anger is directed at the baron–his sister’s consent is not mentioned at all for the first two hours of the film). As the story progresses, both stories develop–the one of the old world and the one of the modern day.
The parallel is deliciously satisfying, mostly because we learn about each story at the same pace, and details from each inform the other. Still, I want to be careful to emphasize that A Cure for Wellness creates the impression of unfolding neatly, and not the reality of it. I realized soon after the film ended that most mysteries of the story didn’t end up being at all as fastidiously tied up as I had originally thought, or even explained at all. In addition, a lot of Lockhart’s behavior makes no sense— he bounces frantically between being taken in by the clinic’s shtick and seeing right through it with almost no explanation. Still, the film manages to find at least the echo of solid footing through its aesthetic consistencies. It has an admirably unvarying color palette that never feels boring or ugly, despite all the sickly greens and whites. Every shot deals in delightfully contrasting blocks of dark and bright space, of shadow and light. It reminded me of an old black and white noir film, a genre famous for its unabashed infatuation with dramatic lighting. Ironically, the film also achieves an impression of consistency through its commitment to fragmentation. A Cure for
Wellness uses every method you can possibly imagine to isolate different pieces of the human body. Scene after scene gives us new ways to make normal human anatomy look less like the manifestation of a person and more like a rough, mismatched collection of body parts, jumbled and disjointed. We’re given distorted views of parts of people through mirrors, gallons of water, magnifying glasses, fog, murky glass tanks, masks, and even those metal things dentists use to stretch your mouth open when you’re getting teeth pulled. The effect of all this movie magic is to make everyone in the film feel foreign, strange, inhuman–ideal for Verbinksi’s disturbing, semi-scary thriller. A Cure for Wellness hits its audience with a lot of unnecessary shock factor. There’s a pretty disturbing sexual assault scene towards the end of the film that, much like the movie itself, felt a lot longer than was perhaps strictly necessary. By the conclusion of the second hour of this 146-minute film, you will almost certainly be checking your watch. If you don’t have that kind of time, miss it. Still, if you get the chance, A Cure for Wellness isn’t a bad a film—it’s just not spectacularly good, either.
by Carly Gove
The OA
L
ess than six months after the release of its smash hit Stranger Things, Netflix quietly dropped another fascinating sci-fi series about interdimensional travel. Well… kind of about interdimensional travel. It’s also about a mad scientist, a family of misfits and interpretive dance… but I won’t spoil too much for you. The elevator pitch version of The OA is that a blind girl named Prairie Johnson goes missing for years and then comes back with her sight, much to the confusion of everyone in her hometown. How all the aforementioned elements fit into that narrative is for you to find out. There are plenty of reasons to watch The OA: developed characters, non-traditional yet fully believable relationships, beautifully crafted worlds, and a manipulation of suspense to rival the best detective stories. The plot, revealed through flashbacks triggered by the words of a potentially unreliable narrator, requires active analysis from the audience rather than a simple suspension of disbelief. To top it all off, the casting directors just get representation: for example, the
Vietnamese-American transgender character is actually played by a Vietnamese-American transgender teen, something that is (sadly) refreshing. Still, there are areas where the show is lacking. One of the more frustrating flaws is all of the “Jack and Rose could have both fit on the door!” moments in which the characters fail to take the obvious course of action. For example, the protagonist does not seem to have any problem lying; yet, when people bombard her with questions about her disappearance, she acts mysterious and even goes around insisting that everyone call her “The OA” without explanation. Additionally, the show consistently baits viewers into expecting a big reveal and then lets them down: either the reveal turns out to be rather uninteresting, or it just never happens at all. Even the season finale reveal, which has been the point of much criticism due to its portrayal of a disturbing event, appears out of place and shallowly rooted. The logic of the story also seems questionable in many aspects—how could the OA have known about a meet-
ing between two characters if she had never been anywhere near it? It seems that, at least part of the time, these apparent flaws are intentional artistic choices. After all, the show does seek to explore manipulation in storytelling, and many of the plot holes could be the set-up for a possible second season. Still, the show contains so many iffy details that, for now at least, I’m convinced that these problems are an indirect consequence of the ambitious concept and plot. In the end, I would recommend giving the show a try. Even though I’ve emphasized a lot of what still feels confusing or unsettling to me here, the show’s good moments tend to rival and even to outshine its bad ones. In watching it (okay, binging it), I was fully invested and felt the whole range of emotions. Sure, the show had its frustrating moments and I think that the writers could have done better in some parts, but overall, it was a unique and surreal experience.
by Catherine Bui Feb. 24, 2017 _ 21
OR IA
NA .TA NG C @ ON YA TA LE CT .ED : U
a
BULLBLOG BLACKLIST any food that isn’t jackfruit
if you haven’t tried it, you don’t know jack
WHAT WE HATE THIS WEEK
non-epistolary novels not enough letters
the world is dying
frustratingly good weather in February
a flop
undercooked hash browns ovens
covens let me in
let me out
this always happens in the nave
randos who say hi when they sit near you in the library
when someone blesses you before you sneeze you know what you’re doing
Feb.24, 2017 _ 23