The Yale Herald - Issue 10

The Yale Herald Volume LXI, Number 10 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Apr. 15, 2016

FROM THE STAFF Greetings, When I was younger, eating dinner with my dad was an intimidating experience.

During the week for nearly 40 years, he has basically only eaten one meal a day for no rational reason other than that he can. At dinner, he would go to town.

After he finished all the food my mom had prepared that night, he would make all the leftovers in the kitchen disappear. He would often tell us that he was the sole member of the “Clean Plate Club” at school, which apparently was pretty selective. Even now that I am bigger than he is, I still cannot keep up with him. In my family, there was never really a need for composting—my dad could work miracles.

Here at Yale, composting is an important part of reducing our environmental impact. We all see the composting bins in the dining halls, but very few of us know much about the other steps in the process of turning our food waste to useful compost. For this week’s cover story, Calvin Harrison, CC’17, visits New Milford Farms to see where our food scraps go after we dump them off our plates in the dining hall. At the compost piles, he reports on the downstream consequences of what we choose not to eat and talks to the workers whose jobs become harder when we contaminate the compost bins with regular garbage after finishing a meal.

There is plenty more content for you to check out while you join the Clean Plate Club. In Features, Will Nixon, PC’19, questions whether we should pay attention to YCC elections (why do none of their platforms feature composting?). And in Reviews, Emma Chanen, TD’19, revels in the products of a very different farm at Arethusa Dairy.

Yours, Luke Chang Reviews Editor

The Yale Herald Volume LIX, Issue 10 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Apr. 15, 2016 EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Sarah Holder Managing Editors: Brady Currey, Tom Cusano, Rachel Strodel Executive Editors: Kohler Bruno, Austin Bryniarski, Sophie Haigney, David Rossler, Alessandra Roubini, Lily SawyerKaplan, Lara Sokoloff, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Carly Lovejoy, Kendrick McDonald, Anna Meixler, Jake Orbison, Jake Stein Culture Editor: Lora Kelley Features Editors: Emma Chanen, Calvin Harrison Opinion Editors: Charlotte Ferenbach, Lea Rice Reviews Editors: Luke Chang, Joe Kuperschmidt Voices Editor: Olivia Klevorn Insert Editor: Elias Bartholomew Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Genevieve Abele, Alexander Mutuc, Allison Primak ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Zoe Dobuler Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics Editors: Haewon Ma, Claire Sheen Executive Design Editors: Ben McCoubrey, Kai Takahashi BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Russell Heller, Jocelyn Lehman Director of Advertising: Matt Thekkethala 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 2014-2015 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 sarah.holder@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 2016, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Haewon Ma YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming Untaxed revenue from the endowment

Cover

The State of Connecticut can’t tax us. And that’s a good thing – we’re a non-profit, after all. We’re free to spend the return on our endowment however we damn well please. Urban Outfitters has great deals this time of year.

Outgoing Ban-Ki Moon I’m here to set the record straight: on his Tuesday visit to campus, Ban-Ki Moon was in the Music Library in Sterling, where I work. Am I phased? Not at all, it’s just part of the job. Was I there when he was there?

Technically, no, but I can picture it, crystal clear, and they say a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Friday Take Back the Night Speak Out Cross Campus 1:00 - 3:00 p.m

Friday WYBC’s Antefling 2016 Toad’s Place 7:00 p.m.

Sat. - Sun. Small Worlds Becton Center 15 Prospect Street 3.00 p.m. - 7.30 p.m.

Sunday Groove Dance Company: Begin Again Off Broadway Theater 1:00 p.m.

12– Ever wonder where your leftover vegan hush puppies end up? Calvin Harrison, CC ’17, gives us the run-down.

Voices 6 – Ashia Ajani, TD ’19, brazenly speaks about race, love, and herself.

7 – Devon Geyelin, TC ’16, sits down with DJ Action.

Opinion

8 – Sarah Sutphin, JE ’17, addresses how communities of friends are affected by the stigma around sexual violence.

9 – Nolan Phillips, TC ’18, explains how clickbait is changing this election cycle and what happens next will shock you.

Features 10 – What’s up with the YCC? Will Nixon, PC ‘19, delves in to this year’s election.

16 – Let’s talk about sex! Romy Carpenter, CC ‘18, covers the history and future of sex ed in New Haven Public Schools.

Culture 18 – Philippe Chlenski, BR ’19, gives us the beat on the recent Music as Will conference.

19 – Sit in the audience with Emily Ge, BK ’19, as she absorbs the ­­ words and wisdom of performance art duo DarkMatter.

Reviews 20 – Nick Henriquez, BR’16, sets drones against cyborgs. Also: Dairy products galore, Distortland’s flop, and M83 experiments with irony.

Mar. 4, 2016 – 3

CREDIT / D / FAIL

THE NUMBERS Index 40 Percentage of millennial college grads

A pen that is clicky and hexagonal and has six colors

moving back into their mothers’ houses.

3

Congrats! You have one of these pens! Whether you got one from a Google promotional giveaway or stole one from your little sibling is completely immaterial because now you can write anything in up to SIX different colors! Did you hear me? SIX! This pen is far and away the best thing currently in your pocket. Want to draw the ocean? Blue! Want to draw rolling fields? Green! Want to draw the hatred you feel for everyone around you that you’ve bottled up for years, ever since the invention of Bop-It, which drove you mad in your attempt to master that nefarious game? Black! All in all, how could you go wrong with this fun, clicky pen!

Percentage of millennial college grads moving back into their mothers’ wombs.

$188,990

Average value of

a house.

$35,000 Average student debt obligation.

$262,000 of a healthy kidney.

Plankton

Average street value

$38,010 Spending money left over.

0 Reasons for millennials to complain.

A lot to love, a lot to hate, but easily the second best thing in your pocket.

Pro: Plankton are quite itty bitty, which means if your plankton buddy wants to be a hidden plus-one when you go to the MOMA on a friend-date, you can sneak him in pretty easily. Con: Plankton isn’t krill, which is somewhat of a huge bummer. Anybody who’s anybody knows how top-notch krill are.

Pro: Plankton never sleep or ask you to watch Rob Schneider films, which makes them great playmates, no matter the hour or mood! Con: No matter how much you want it to be, plankton still aren’t krill.

Sources: 1) Pew Research Center 2) Pew Research Center 3) Zillow 4) Wall Street Journal 5) WebMD 6) Math 7) Common Sense –Frederic Nicholas

Top five best times to check yourself 5–

Before you wreck yourself – a great option if you’re looking to avoid the hassle and drama of wrecking yourself.

4–

After your wreck yourself – an awesome opportunity to learn from how you wrecked yourself.

3–

While you’re wrecking yourself – pretty tough to accomplish due to the mental dexterity required, but very impressive.

2–

NOT on an empty stomach – no need to rush. Get some food in you, and then check yourself after.

1–

Any time! – checking yourself is extremely valuable, and only you truly know when the right time is.

A Wishbone I mean like come on! A wishbone! Psh. That is clearly the WORST thing in your pocket! When was the last time a wishbone ever did anything for you? You and your step mom broke a wishbone together and you got the bigger half and wished that the Grinch never stole Christmas but the very next year it turns out that he did! Ugh! What about that other time that you murdered a wild turkey, beheaded it, scooped out its guts with a trowel, and broke its wishbone, inspiring a wood nymph to descend from her home in the canopies to explain to you how imperialist capitalist ventures create epigenetic tags on the DNA of composers, who in turn write slightly worse symphonies? That was a negative experience for you!

A wishbone is a big no-no. It does not deserve space in your pocket.

– Gian-Paul Bergeron

– Charlie Bardey YH Staff

4 – The Yale Herald

sarah.holder@yale.edu sarah.holder@yale.edu

VOICES Soft p(s)alms

by Ashia Ajani I am the blunt The soft plague I am The tiny scar Under your right eye The little pimples on your buttocks I am the girl carrying Five wishbones in each pocket Religious But only in solitude The rosary gathering dust On your bedside table Water stained glasses Wilted flowers Crushed cigarettes The sullen bruja Smelling of sweet almond oil The black, black girl Dripping of clover honey And rose water The salt on your upper lip girl The taste you’ll never forget girl Soft and dangerous Like cinnamon Like the words you were Meant to say but can’t I am the non-potable water The split lip oozed shut girl The stings like soil and I love it girl The broken nail and waxy cheek I am the manic The somber I am the ache beneath the surface The “fix me doctor” trapped Behind your tonsils The last bit of sage You are trying to burn Without hurting yourself The flavor at the roof of your mouth Tragic, deliberate The rhythmic sermons The come-to-Jesus The soft heavy moans When you’ve forgotten all your love girl

The ‘I might leave mi chulita for you’ If only for the duration of this movie I of forgetfulness Of apologies ill-timed and shattered The glass stuck in your ankle girl The broken nose and broken once more The ‘we have a lot to talk about’ girl I Of smothered emotions And long-term self hatred Bursting like rotting honeysuckle Sweet and horrendous I Of lovely and blood and anguish And awfulness Of strands of gray hair in one hand And baby teeth in the other

I Look the devil in the mouth girl Find time to Devour your sadness girl The two miscarriages The incarcerated death The cigarette burn pathways up Stretch marked thighs The swollen tongue The dried crust of tears long forgotten The suicidal tendencies The romantic so sick, sick of love The bleeding fingertips Haunted and fragile I The please don’t go The hollow hum Of your own pain The reflection you wish you could see But never can

I The delirious laughter The coffee stain above Your two front teeth girl The monumental joy You feel so guilty for possessing The one more picture One more kiss One more cut The get drunk in the park and Whisper poems about reparations The pour out all your problems Into my bosom yes, yes you can I am the girl with the pink toenails The lipstick stain on your Adam’s apple The careful bruises on your neck The ‘that’s my girl’ The leave the lights heavy I wanna see what it looks like The damp, ghost palms you still Feel Rubbing against your belly The sensitive climax The pleasure that lasts In staccato The crowded panic that ensues after

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 6 – The Yale Herald

Behind the Booth with DJ Action

by Devon Geyelin YH Staff DJ Action is an artistic fixture at Toad’s Place, New Haven’s premier nightclub. He hails from Chicago and graduated from Colby College. By day he works as a physical therapist and by night he acts as the grand master of nightlife at Yale.

Yale Herald: Thanks for talking to me! You’re kind of a campus celebrity.

DJ Action: I feel like a lot of people know the name, but they don’t actually know who I am.

YH: How did you come up with the name?

DJ: I saw the paid-for campus jobs and I was like, “Yeah, nah, this isn’t going to work so well for me.” So I decided that, you know, I would hang out with a couple of the guys who DJed. And we’re sitting there, and we’re talking, and they’re like, “Wow, man, you know a lot of music.” They said, “Man, you should come out and DJ with us!” That’s what happened. So next thing you know, I’m dating this girl—back to dating this girl—and she’s like, you know, you’ve got to come up with a DJ name. And then she said, “You should be DJ Action Jackson!”

And I’m like, that is corny as hell. What if we just leave out the Jackson part? Anyway, it just kind of stuck.

(Phone goes off—the sound of turntables. And then­— “D... J... Action!”)

DJ: That’s my tone. I made it myself. Yeah, I’m corny like that.

Like when I’m out and my phone rings, I want to know it’s my phone, you know? Everybody’s got the same phone these days, so when my phone rings, that’s my phone.

YH: What’s it like, working here? What’s the community like?

DJ: Everybody’s just super cool. A lot of the other places you have owners or managers that pretend that they’re DJs, indirectly, telling you what to play, when to play it, and it’s like, whoa, time out. You manage the bar. Do I jump behind the bar and tell you how to mix drinks? No I don’t, you know, so why are you in my face about what I need to play? ‘Cause nine times out of ten, when they tell you what to play, you do what we in the DJ world call a “Moses”: you part the dance floor.

Pshhhhhhew. Everybody leaves and goes and sits down and you’re like, yep. There goes the manager being a DJ again.

YH: What does it mean to keep the dance floor rotating?

DJ: So the idea is you come in as a DJ, and maybe you just play all the hits, and no one leaves the dance floor. As a DJ you feel like, yeah, I did my job! Not necessarily. Let me give an example. Let’s say, if we take a percentage here, one hundred percent of the people are obviously the population of the club.

Twenty-five percent likes hip-hop. Twenty-five percent likes Top 40. Twenty-five percent likes EDM. The other twenty-five percent really doesn’t care. Well, if you’re playing hip-hop, then the twenty-five percent who likes it and the twenty-five percent that is kind of, doesn’t care, they’re probably going to stay on the dance floor. The EDM people and the Top 40 people, if it’s Top 40 hip-hop—like Fetty Wap, he’s Top 40 hip-hop, it’s just what it is—they might stay, too.

YH: Do you change up what you play at all depending on the Yale-to-another-school ratio?

DJ: Sometimes. You know, a good DJ is also a professional profiler.

YH: What have you noticed Yale students being really into lately?

DJ: You know, almost any electro-house with a solid buildup and a hard-hitting baseline pretty much works no matter what they’re talking about in the record. It just works.

YH: It’s funny because I feel like you, of all people, objectively can get away from the songs. Like you can just not play them.

DJ: Oh yeah, I do. I have little contests with myself sometimes.

Like last week I was like, I’m not going to play Fetty Wap. And I didn’t. I didn’t play him at all. And I got away with it! People were on stage, so I must have done my job halfway right.

YH: How do you make your sets? And when do you make them?

DJ: I pretty much make them up on the fly. I don’t ever go into a night saying, yep, I’ve got an hour and a half to play, this is what I’m going to do. Never do that. I just look at people.

Good DJs have all sorts of tricks. Some of mine, for example: I just watch how people react to songs. Like I said, professional profiler. If I play Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” there is a pretty good chance I can get away with Major Lazer’s “Lean On.” You kind of look at people and see how they vibe to a song.

YH: How have you seen the vibe change over the past ten years since you’ve been working here?

DJ: It kind of hasn’t. You ever seen Animal House?

YH: Yeah.

DJ: Is it really so different from what’s going on now? I mean, seriously, maybe they had a toga party, maybe you don’t do as many toga parties anymore—but the way people acted, it was the same. And what’s kind of cool is like every four years it refreshes itself. ‘Cause most undergraduates tend to stay in school for four years, unless they’re a super senior, or you have to take a year off or something. So no, it hasn’t really changed, except musically, more than anything.

YH: Do you recognize people week to week?

DJ: I do. I do, yeah.

YH: Do you have any memorable stories or moments from DJing here?

DJ: There’s a lot of them. I have some really good ones, I’ve got some that were like mmmnnnn, didn’t want to see that.

So I’ll give you a couple, ok? I want to say it was like an alumni weekend, and this place was going crazy—it was like super duper packed, you can’t move. And I kid you not, I forget what song it was that I played, but everyone got to yelling and screaming so loud they literally drowned out the PA. I’m like, that’s like a 30,000 watt sound system. That thing is loud. And the cheering alone drowned it out! I’m like, wow.

How about some interesting moments. I don’t believe they have it still—I haven’t walked in the Rainforest Room in like, years—I know, I’m here all the time but I very seldom venture around—we used to have a pool table back there. And let’s just say I saw a couple on that pool table... yep. Exactly. Ok?

Is somebody going to tell them they maybe need a room, or should I do that?

YH: What’s your experience been, or what’s your perception, of Yale students and dance floor make-outs?

DJ: They’re no different from anybody else. I think the difference is, certain other schools, they’re like, yeah I did it. What are you going to do about it? Whereas Yale students are kind of like, especially the girls, we’re Yale, we don’t do that. But Yale’s lightening up with that, honestly. You really are. And I’m seeing a lot more same-sex couples making out in public. So I guess, for me, that’s really cool because it’s kind of become the norm. It’s far more accepted, perhaps, than what it was years ago. And I would attribute that to various television shows—I mean, I’m showing my age here, but like Will and Grace. That was the first show I can remember that said, hey, yeah, this is a woman living with a gay guy, and it’s okay, it’s cool.

YH: What’s your favorite part of the night?

DJ: If we’re talking about a Wednesday, it’s about that 1212:15 timeframe because everybody’s here. If it’s a Saturday night, it’s almost packed the whole night anyway, so I don’t really have a favorite part. I guess my favorite part is when I’m DJing, ‘cause I have the most fun.

YH: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciated that.

One last question—why does it always end with “Living on a Prayer”?

DJ: That’s actually Brian! The manager insists on that. It’s a tradition.

Interview condensed by the Herald Photo by Devon Geyelin

Apr. 15, 2016 – 7

OPINION No more villains

by Nolan Phillips

I

n the nascent days of the 2016 presidential campaign trail—when Jeb (!) and Hillary were pundits’ fast favorites for the nomination—we expected somewhat of a showdown between two of America’s most deeply established political dynasties. Now that the race is closer to fruition, this is obviously not the case. Popular favorites have emerged, political outsiders like Bernie and Trump , whose exciting rallies and revolutionary agendas are attracting hordes of previously apathetic voters. The Bush family has sheepishly retreated from the political scene. Hillary’s campaign scrambles to tap into why The Bern has impassioned so many faithful Democrats. This election—vocal, angry, and splintered—is unlike any election in recent memory. Or, for that matter, it’s unlike anything in distant memory. Both parties are wildly fractured. And, of course, the host of The Celebrity Apprentice is leading in Republican delegates.

Summed up, this presidential campaign is full of idols and villains. If ___ wins, I’m moving to Canada.

Bernie or Bust. Hillary or Bust. Cruz or Bust. (I’ve never heard that last one, but who’s to say it’s impossible?) One voter’s idol is another’s Hitler. With such extreme positions—Cruz is widely viewed as the most Conservative member of the Senate, and Sanders is perhaps the most liberal—there probably is no American right now who isn’t terrified that their personal villain, whichever candidate that may be, could someday have the nuclear launch codes. Of course, anger will flare during any election year, when sensitive issues that inflame passions seem to hang in the balance. No doubt: advocates of universal healthcare were very angry in 2012, when Mitt Romney proposed to eliminate Obamacare. Conservatives, on the other hand, firmly believed that Obamacare was a useless financial blunder. But Mitt Romney was never anyone’s villain, nor was Obama. No one was going to Canada (except Ted Cruz, probably, to visit his hometown). So why 2016? I think the internet is largely to blame.

I’ve recently wondered why this particular election has generated such a culture of extremes—extreme stances, and extreme personalities. Certainly, America’s current sociocultural climate is a contributing factor. When a national security threat like ISIS instills fear into the population, strong reactions and staunch populism will emerge. But, in the grand scheme of things, 2016 is an odd year for such a People’s Choice Election. If war is the impetus for political fracture, why didn’t Americans choose divisive hardliners in 2004, when many of us were thoroughly dissatisfied with the Iraq War? Instead of choosing the Anti-Bush, Democrats ultimately stood behind an establishment centrist. If economic strife is the impetus for an election of extremes, why didn’t this happen in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession? Barack Obama was a radical change from

Bush, of course, but he was a classic moderate compared to some of today’s candidates. Today’s extreme candidates are not solely the products of extreme sociocultural conditions, then, but rather the byproduct of a larger, internet-driven phenomenon.

Social media was prominent in the 2012 and 2008 elections, so I do not suppose that our use of social media is a major factor in making 2016 the year of heroes vs. villains. However, the way we use social media has undergone a major evolution: journalism is condensed into action-packed microsummaries, clickbait, that appear enticingly on our Facebook or Twitter feeds. Sites like The Daily Beast provide news articles that are userfriendly, exciting, and very quick reads. Most significantly, much of today’s popular internet news caters to a particular political orientation. The goal is to generate the largest number of readers, so articles’ titles compete to be the most attractive.

I view this clickbait phenomenon, perhaps somewhat cynically, as a natural progression of journalism’s becoming a capitalistic industry. Before the advent of the TV, when there was one (at most two or three) different newspapers distributed in a given city, the news had to uphold a certain standard of objectivity in its coverage. Once the news no longer held a monopoly over local markets—that is, when TV news emerged—there was more room for options.

With several TV news channels from which to choose, news sources now had to distinguish themselves so that the public would prefer their product above others. The News had entered a free market. As a result, America witnessed the emergence of politicallymotivated news channels. Fox News is often seen as unfairly conservative, and many consider MSNBC unabashedly liberal. By pandering to viewers’ biases, these channels can successfully attract consumers.

We’re all more comfortable listening to someone who shares our opinions. When news entered the internet age, there is no reason to think the phenomenon wouldn’t continue.

Now there are hundreds of homegrown news sites, which compete for the most shares, for the most likes. To achieve this goal, they must say something that you really agree with, or really disagree with, to coax you into clicking the bait. While Fox News has often been discounted by liberals as unfairly biased, even Fox News has now been accused of being a phony mouthpiece for the political establishment by Donald Trump supporters . The sheer number of in-

ternet news sites allows them to be highly diverse.

Some are very liberal, some are very conservative, and most are just trying to find a faithful audience.

Scrolling down my Facebook feed just now, I immediately glimpse an article from a far-left site called RAWSTORY.com (which I imagine to be headquartered in a dimly lit SoCal basement). Rawstory.com’s current homepage uses inflammatory vocabulary like “ludicrous” to describe Sarah Palin. A go-to conservative equivalent, thenewrevere.com (which I imagine to have been created in a dimly lit Iowa doomsday bunker), is displaying an article about the “Global Warming Hoax”. Using words like “ludicrous” and “hoax” in reference to today’s current events is not productive; it is pandering.

The political climate is, of course, sharply divisive, regardless of whether we choose inflammatory news sources. But we need to collectively be a bit more responsible in the links we share, in the journalism we read. Let’s take some time to consider whether RAWSTORY.com is fairly contributing to the political discussion, if it is an example of balanced critique and thorough factual investigation. If we all were a bit less self-serving in what we choose to read, America might still find itself with the fractured same set of presidential candidates. But I’m certain that, if we limit our intake to balanced and credible reporting in spite of the exciting amount of pandering available online, we will be better off. The candidates may remain the same, but they will have to moderate their views to suit a better informed public. If everyone agreed to read a column written by someone with whom we disagree, instead of clicking on a stimulating title that satisfies our preexisting views, the inflammatory slogans of 2016’s candidates could fade away. No more villains.

Graphic by Claire Sheen YH Staff

8 ­– The Yale Herald

Secondary networks

by Sarah Sutphin

O

n Fri., April 15, students will share different sexual experiences through testimony, poetry, and songs on Cross Campus as part of the Take Back the Night (TBTN) Speak Out. TBTN is is an annual campus movement to stand against sexual violence, and its message is a necessary one—an unhappy truth of university life today is the need to confront sexual violence. TBTN is especially important because it aims to empower not only people who have experienced this violence, but also engage and inform the broader community.

When sexual violence takes place within a community, the first response from peers is often, and rightly, focused on the person who has experienced sexual assault. Supporting survivors is essential, as well as a part of the collective healing process, but imagine a culture in which support could be offered to every person affected by sexual violence. What if we could create networks of support for not only survivors, but also for their friends and beyond?

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college.

Other figures estimate that nearly two-thirds of all college students report at least one experience of sexual harassment. Even so, fewer than 10 percent of these students tell a college or university employee about their experiences. But many of the students who experience forms of sexual violence tell someone about it, right? And, though less often considered, sometimes the perpetuators of sexual violence also tell someone what happened. These “someones” can be friends, family members, social organizations, or other community members whom these people trust.

Recently, the gap between people who have experienced sexual assault and their university administrations has gained visibility through the publication of campus surveys and increased media attention on the topic. The White House has launched several national initiatives, including the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, a new provision to send guidance counselors to every school district, college, and university that receives federal funding, and the It’s On Us campaign to change cultural norms and engage campus communities in prevention.

The White House website for the It’s On Us campaign says that the initiative “asks men and women across America to make a personal commitment to step off the sidelines and be part of the solution to campus sexual assault.” So what does this personal commitment look like? How do we put words into action? How do we uti-

lize our positions within our own social networks? One way to work toward healthier campus climates that engage with the issue of sexual assault is, in addition to providing resources for survivors, to offer more support to the peers and immediate connections of people who have been assaulted and those who have assaulted alike.

Two of the countless challenges that force sexual assault cases into the shadows are the stigma that surrounds the topic and the culture of denial that survivors often face. When someone experiences sexual violence, or when someone commits an act of sexual violence, they might first share the account with a close friend or group of friends in search of support or advice. A

true friend is there for you when times are tough; a true friend suffers from thoughts of your suffering. But ultimately, friends are not professionals, and they have complex emotions, too.

If your friend was the victim of another painful experience other than sexual violence, and you felt frightened or distressed by their account, it might not be too difficult to express your feelings to a third party. Given the stigma that surrounds sexual misconduct and assault, however, a similar avenue for self-expression is

denied to immediate connections that adopt the burden of a peer. The support of close friends may alleviate the suffering of survivors, but these close friends need support as well, from a secondary group of people who form the more extensive network that could help alleviate the stigma around sexual violence. While you might not know whether you are acting as this secondary friend, providing emotional support to your own friends might be helping more than just them.

For the friends of individuals who commit sexual violence, the consequences of stigma can infiltrate an entire group. In the current campus climate, a dichotomy has been established for perceiving a person who is accused of a sexual assault: either the person is guilty, evil beyond reproach, and should no longer be tolerated, or the person is completely innocent and should maintain his or her status in the community. It doesn’t feel acceptable to maintain ties with a friend who committed sexual assault—even if it’s your best friend or someone you’ve known your whole life.

This is where the culture of denial kicks in. If it’s wrong to be supportive of an assailant, then it’s easier for some to deny the validity of the incident. Rather than work through the complicated thoughts and feelings associated with realizing someone close to you might be an assailant—or be perceived as a person who aligns with a sexual assailant—individuals or communities will opt to discredit survivors’ stories and experiences because of this false dichotomy. If the friends of an assailant continue to be taught to believe that only the most horrible people are capable of rape, they’ll keep denying survivors’ stories. Helping people understand that it is ok for them to feel confusing and conflicting emotions after the revelation that a friend might be an assailant will therefore create a better sexual culture, one in which people who have experienced assault are more likely to be believed.

This week, many students participating in Take Back the Night events will be engaged in conversations about this very issue. Hopefully, these conversations can continue beyond organized events like TBTN and become a regular part of campus dialogues concerning sexual violence. Through encouraging more understanding and support for the immediate connections of those involved in a sexual assault, campus communities could not only build networks that support all persons affected by the incident, but also help alleviate the challenges of stigma and denial. I’m not exactly sure what the White House has in mind when it asks us to “step off the sidelines and be part of the solution to campus sexual assault.”

But these actions could be a good place to start.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Apr. 15, 2016 – 9

FEATURE

WhyCC? Yale looks for new leadership

by Will Nixon

A

t Yale, caring is cool. Students are celebrated for using their voices to The candidates had the chance to elaborate on and defended their platforms advocate for fossil fuel divestment, the hungry and homeless in New on Tues., April 12, at a debate co-hosted by the YCC and YDN. LC 102 was about Haven, to sing. When it comes to student government, however, much half-full when I took a spot just after seven. My exposure to the candidates until of the student body tends to tune out. A niche, albeit sizable, student then had been limited to a Facebook stream of shared YDN Op-Eds and Cross community prides itself on political engagement through various class and col- Campus photoshoots. All five candidates for YCC president have official campaign lege councils. Even Rumpus magazine took aim at these budding politicians in Facebook pages. Four of the five have posted photos of the candidate posing with their latest edition of Hook-Up Bingo: “Lame Duck YCC Board Member.” For one tagged students, usually featuring a flashy graphic (“Your Voice - Our Yale” - Peter brief spring week of campaigning, flyers, canvassers, and shared Facebook posts Huang for YCC President) or signature gesture (flexing arms on Sarah Armstrong dominate campus and elicit eye rolls from uncaring students. for YCC President and finger frames on Vote Diksha for YCC President). If votes The current Yale College Council (YCC) presidential candidates now face this were measured in Facebook likes, Sarah Armstrong, TC ’18, would be in the lead task—convincing apathetic, detached students that student government matters. with 547 likes, and Carter Helschien, TC ‘18, would be last with only 127. At The YCC was founded in 1972. Their website lists a number of milestone accom- press time, English’s old Facebook page had 513 likes. If public social media plishments through the years, including the establishment of an “Ivy Council” awareness continues to correlate with votes, Armstrong has a leg up. Despite her in 1984, the introduction of bathroom cubbies and two-ply toilet paper in Yale popularity, Armstrong lacks the endorsements that English commanded last year. bathrooms in 2002, and financial aid reform in 2007.

As co-debate moderator and editor-in-chief of the YDN, Stephanie AddenThis year, however, issues of comfort on campus extend far beyond bottoms in brooke, JE ’17, wields a powerful voice in guiding uninformed or politically disenthe bathroom. Last semester, on Nov. 9, students of color and their allies marched gaged students in their choice. Addenbrooke explained that the YDN’s Executive in resilience and later, on Nov. 12, hand-delivered a list of demands from NextY- Board of editors met individually with each candidate before the public debate, ale to the president’s residence late at night. Student organization Unite Against and she thinks the debate is a good way to bring those questions and the candiSexual Assault at Yale hosted a chalk-in on March 9 to encourage support for dates’ responses to the student body. Attendance at the debate is also required survivors of sexual assault. From the steps of Sterling Memorial Library, to the of each campus publication looking to announce an official endorsement. “As cultural centers on Crown, to the fraternities of High Street, students are de- student publications, we have a lot of knowledge about what’s going on,” said Admanding change. But the YCC, with its nascent president, may not be equipped denbrooke in an interview following the debate. “We frame questions in order to to provide it. help students make the best choice possible.” This year, the YDN released their All five candidates acknowledged that in the endorsement Op-Ed on Thursday morning, as onpast year, student activists have been the ones line polls opened. The YDN chose to endorse Peter to prove their ability to affect change and make Huang, SM ‘18, citing his familiarity with existing their voices heard. In the heat of election seaadministrative policies and extensive contextual son (limited to one April week), candidates’ platknowledge of talking points. forms fervently echo these activists’—and each Addenbrooke and her co-moderator, current YCC other’s—appeals to the administration in a caVice-President Maddie Bauer, began the Presidencophony of rhetoric surrounding “community,” tial debate about an hour after I arrived. Questions “advocacy,” and “transparency.” This week-long from the moderators and the audience centered on campaign, full of well-meaning, if monotonous, campus issues like increased support for students discourse, makes it difficult for Yale students to –Helen Price, co-director of Unite Against of color, faculty diversity, sexual climate and assort through the flashy campaign websites, whiteSexual Assault Yale sault policy, and the Student Income Contribution. board photo-ops on Cross Campus, and organizaNotable moments in an otherwise tame, occasiontion endorsements to decide where to place their vote. ally repetitive debate included Helschien’s comedic interludes (Addressing AdCurrent YCC President Joe English, DC ‘17, won last year’s race by a land- denbrooke: “Thank you for asking me that, we should grab a meal sometime!”) slide. English earned 1,225 of 1,795 votes cast. Still, only 1,800 votes cast by and a clash between Armstrong’s “one year at a time” method and Hochman’s a voting body of around 4,100 enfranchised underclassmen placed voter turnout immediate action strategy over the effectiveness of long-term platforms for a (or log-in) at less than 45 percent. English also carried the endorsements of the short-term position.

Yale Daily News, who called him “the most effective spokesman before the adAs presidential candidate Josh Hochman, BK ’18, stated in an impromptu, ministration,” and Rumpus magazine: “Joe English kills the game.” Candidates mid-canvas interview this past Tuesday, voters at Yale look at two metrics: “comthis year avoided criticizing English’s departing YCC administration, comple- petence … and an attractive personality.” Hochman’s friend, Fish Stark, JE menting his Task Force model and suggesting expansions or reinforcement of ‘17—who works on Hochman’s campaign—believes his candidate fulfills both of current policy programs. these requirements. In describing their strategy, Stark emphasized Hochman’s

“I think that YCC definitely has the potential to aid USAY and other organizations working for equality and positive change on Yale’s campus.”

10 –­ The Yale Herald

personality: “We wanted to make sure that Josh’s true self shines through.”

Joe English earned a personal vote last year from Chase Ammon, PC ‘18, who chose English, “because he is gay and I’m all about that solidarity.” Stephanie Barker, JE ’19, voted because her friend sent out an email advising her and a group of friends on which Presidential candidate to vote for. No recommendation went out for the Vice Presidential race, so Barker abstained. A Branford sophomore, who wished to remain anonymous, revealed, “I only voted for Chris [Bowman, for Vice President] because he’s my friend.” Ask your suitemates, your co-workers, the person you’re hooking up with; the answer may be worryingly similar. Elaborate policy proposals and community-embracing language take a backseat to personal connection in many student voters’ minds. Ultimately, when students log on to fill out a digital ballot, their impression of the candidate as a fellow Yalie could carry more weight than the logistics of their financial aid reform plan.

When—and if—Yale students decide to invoke their academic, non-partisan right to vote for the YCC’s next Executive Board, they face the question every voter faces in the voting booth or on YaleStation’s secure site: why vote? Does the YCC stand a better chance of pushing change through the Yale administration than the proven, independently-led efforts of NextYale, USAY, and other culturally representative groups? Only if the candidates remember to include these groups in their platform.

During the Vice Presidential debate, Co-Director of USAY, Helen Price, DC ‘18, raised her hand to ask why only three of the four candidates addressed Yale’s history of sexaul assault. In contrast, each of the Presidential candidates made sure to mention their platform on sexual assault, championing similar reforms to the reporting process. Price, reflecting on the YCC’s ability to aid organizational causes, said, “I think that YCC definitely has the potential to aid USAY and other organizations working for equality and positive change on Yale’s campus, by backing up their efforts and ensuring those issues remain high on the agenda of the administration. I think the past couple presidents have done a good job of this.” Armstrong, who also serves on the USAY board herself as a Campus Ambassador, has earned the endorsement of the Yale Women’s Center. Kevin Sullivan, MC ‘18, made his views on LGBTQ support central to his candidacy for Vice President, earning cheers and snaps from the debate audience after outlining his plan to expand resources and funding for LGBTQ communities.

With his focus on cultural groups and improving Yale’s sexual climate, Sullivan earned the endorsement of the YDN. Each year, candidates and members of the YCC alike take on the challenge of not only promoting themselves as the right choice, but the YCC as an effective undergraduate institution whose purpose is to act, advise, and make change in the student body’s best interest. Price sums election season up succinctly, “At best, YCC elections can prompt discussion of important campus issues and lead to tangible changes that benefit the Yale community; at worst, you see candidates paying lip service to issues like sexual assault with no real intention of following through.” Though the Yale community must wait until next semester for the President-Elect to prove how important these issues are in the context of Yale College’s student-run governing body, organizations like NextYale and USAY will continue to demand reform through their activist events and collective calls for administrative action.

In the debate, candidate Diksha Brahmbhatt, BK ‘18, described those grassroots activist organizations as “niche communities,” recalling, “I always see the same faces.” Some might say the same about YCC itself, which often seems like an insular body of Task Forces and committees and policy recommendations.

Whether voter turnout makes it to 50 percent this year or not, all of Yale College, including the thousand some-odd pre-frosh on their way next fall, will look to the YCC’s new President as an institutional guide for making real administrative change. This year, that task fell on the shoulders of student activist groups. Next year, perhaps the President and the vast resources at the YCC’s disposal, including a new six-figure endowment, will shoulder some of that responsibility and make democratic use of their direct channel to President Salovey and the Yale Corporation.

WHEN I RAN FOR STUDENT COUNCIL president at the end of seventh grade, everyone told me it was a popularity contest.

Then I told everyone we’d put our handprints on the cafeteria wall, and I won. There was no need for a platform or a stance on the issues. There were no issues—none that our Student Council could affect, anyway. My Vice President was the popular one; she thought I was weird for caring so much. But without a student body that cares, speaks out, and votes, the YCC serves no purpose. The impression student government made on my New Jersey middle school was tangible: a wall of colorful handprints that looked good, if I do say so myself. The impression student government makes on Yale matters more now than ever before, more, even, than two-ply toilet paper.

Graphic by Alex Swanson YH Staff Apr. 15, 2016 – 11

12 – The Yale Herald

COVER

From trash to treasure The dirty job of turning Yale’s food waste into fertilizer

By Calvin Harrison YH Staff

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It’s hard to see all the way inside the large barn at New Milford Farms.

On this cloudy Monday, not much light made it in through the plastic roofing, and the air was filled with rising steam. I followed the steam down to its source: five rows of rotting food, made up of black piles several yards high and a couple football fields long, filling the huge room with clouds of a pungent, almost sweet smell.

I had been warned not to wear clothes that I liked, to avoid ruining them with the smell. But Rod Thibodeau, New Milford Farms’ compost operations manager, gloveless and with nothing to cover his mouth, seemed unfazed.

“That’s why they let me stay,” he joked as we walked in between the mountains of rot, stopping occasionally for him to pick at it with his pitchfork.

New Milford Farms is a compost facility located about an hour and fifteen minutes from Yale’s campus, in New Milford, CT. Opened in 2007, they produce 7500 to 8000 cubic yards of compost per year from food waste. They are the only licensed food residue composting facility in Connecticut, and are permitted to process 58,000 tons of waste every year. From the composted food waste, they produce any number of blends of soil and fertilizer. Those blends are mostly sold commercially, as bags to home improvement and big box stores, or as bulk to landscaping companies and nurseries that will use the product themselves.

Just outside of downtown New Milford, tucked behind baseball fields next to a hill, this place is almost invisible. But despite its remove, this nondescript, corrugated metal barn is intimately linked to Yale’s elegant dining halls: every day, a truck brings Yale Dining’s food waste all the way from New Haven to this facility. Every uneaten chicken tender, every tea bag, everything students put into those brown bins in the dining hall ends up here. Out of sight and out of mind, it’s easy for Yale students to forget what happens to their waste. But even though it’s trucked away from Cross Campus, Yale’s apple cores and old Yankee Pot Roast actually go somewhere and, through real people’s work, becomes something else.

Describing himself as the “mixologist” of the compost, Thibodeau gleefully presides over the operation. After growing up on a farm and working in his grandfather’s construction business, he came to New Milford Farms three years ago as a seasonal worker and never left. Without formal training in the art of composting, he learned everything he needed to know on the job. While he is sometimes fuzzy on the finer details of the science, he can boil down his job into a basic formula: “I have to figure out how to mix it in to get the right levels of carbon-nitrogen.”

The delicate chemical balance needed to produce marketable compost requires a finesse that borders on a sixth sense. Thibodeau can’t really describe

what he does or how he does it, but he is always looking ahead to what the huge piles will become next. We walked past progressively more decomposed material—to my uninitiated eye, it all seems to be just varying shades of black, but he can read it, jabbing in his pitchfork to show how far along his compost cocktail is in its fermentation.

The road from initial waste to final soil, however, is long. The ten-minute walk down the almost 200 hundred yards had taken us from food waste to almost completed compost. “This doesn’t just happen like this,” said Thibodeau, snapping his fingers. “If you screw something up down there, it’ll come down the whole process.” He looked back towards the other end of the barn, where that day’s fresh food waste was sitting. Unfortunately, something down there is quite often screwed up. By and large, the food waste dropped off at New Milford Farms contains a number of non-biodegradable materials. “It’s contaminated every day,” said Thibodeau.

THE CONTAMINATION IS MOST VISIBLE IN THE “SPREAD,” THE BIG PILE OF fresh waste that gets dumped at the entrance to the barn. Sitting in a pile was Yale’s delivery from Saturday. A mound about twenty feet wide and a foot thick, it was easily recognizable as coming from Yale. The scraps of food spilling out of the green compostable bags were not exactly recognizable, and even the plastic bottles and Styrofoam boxes could have come from anywhere. But peeking out of the pile was a smoking gun: an empty plastic bottle of Kedem Grape Juice, fresh from Shabbat Dinner at Slifka.

Sitting between the spread and one of the long rows of compost was a collection of metal forks and plastic cups, different mementos found by the workers who go through the food waste each day. Everything in the bin was covered in dirt, but Thibodeau picked one of the pieces up and dusted it off: it was unmistakably a Yale dining hall fork. Looking closer at the plastic cups, I noticed the distinctive texture of Yale’s cups. Almost everything in the bin was from Yale.

“On average, one out of every eight yards is contaminated,” said Thibodeau.

Despite the meticulous logs he keeps of temperature, moisture, and other metrics, his eye does most of his measurements. The contamination comes in all shapes and sizes, from little fruit stickers to bottles to kitchen knives. “I’ve pulled out knives like this,” he said, holding his hands torso-width apart. “Big steak knives.”

It’s no surprise that so much of the contamination can be traced back to Yale: Thibodeau and Rafi Moura, the assistant plant manager at New Milford Farms, estimated that about a quarter of the waste the facility processes comes

Apr. 15, 2016– 13

from the University. With that much coming from just one source, what gets thrown into Yale’s compost bins ends up having a noticeable impact on the final product coming out of New Milford Farms.

The actual impacts of scraping food (or, too often, non-food waste) into the compost bins are surprisingly complex. “I think a lot of people understand sustainability as very environmentally focused and limited to the recycling bin,” said Amber Garrard, the outreach coordinator for Yale’s Office of Sustainability. “It’s really so much more than that… it’s really about looking at the social, financial, and environmental impacts of what we’re doing in an interconnected way.”

One of those interconnected impacts ist the real environmental effects of Yale’s compost stream. The food students throw out must be brought to New Milford, a process that emits carbon dioxide from the truck exhaust. Once at the facility, real

in with their food scraps. “If they had any idea how nasty a job that can be, I think they’d be a lot more careful,” he said. “It’s a really nasty job.” The labor is difficult and takes time and money away from other tasks at the facility.

And the spread is the most unpleasant looking part of the whole process, and certainly the smelliest. “Other workers in the facility, from the bagging end of something like that, come in for lunch… and they go, ‘no, I’m not eating my lunch next to you,’” said Jalbert of the workers who pick through the spread.

Sophie Freeman, ES ’18, a student worker with the Office of Sustainability’s Sustainability Service Corps (SSC), echoed the sentiment that, perhaps, if students were more aware of the human effects of improper composting, they might be more careful. “I think if… [people] see what’s happening there to the things they put as contamination into the compost, I think that would change their behavior. I really do,” she said.

“You’re going to get a lot of Yale students who say ‘Sure, I get climate change…’ But [from the clean compost campaign] it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares what they’re doing.”

PREVENTING CONTAMINATION IS, ACCORDING TO JOHN GUNDLACH, VICE president of New Milford Farms’ parent company, Garick, “a matter of connection between the collection system and the education.” Compared to the other businesses that bring their waste to New Milford Farms (Whole Foods is another large contributor), Yale faces some of the biggest challenges in making that connection. While food manufacturers and grocery stores have a limited number of employees actually putting material into their bins Sophie Freeman, ES ’18, Office of Sustainability’s and so can properly train them, Yale serves thousands of students, Sustainability Service Corps (SSC) faculty, and staff breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.“That’s the challenge, especially with what Yale has. There’s so many people… it’s hard, it’s really hard,” said Gundlach.

In order to encourage a clean stream of organic material, New people have to pick through the compost to take out any contamination. And the Milford Farms fines suppliers of food waste based on a visual assessment of how final product not only returns nutrients to the soil, but enriches people’s lives by contaminated it is coming in. Yale has been facing these fines for a while, and being used in gardens and landscaping. currently pays $60/ton to send their waste to the facility. It would pay $87.50/ The biggest unseen consequence of contamination is the effect on the ton to send it to the New Haven Transfer Station, which handles municipal people who work there. “We’re not robots,” said Thibodeau. New Milford Farms’ solid waste. The administration has a financial and public relations incentive to composting process is, on the whole, surprisingly unmechanized. There are no continue sending clean food waste to the facility, but they are not ultimately the conveyor belts, laser sensors, or machines other than trucks and front-loaders. ones putting things into the bins.

But this human involvement in the processing and use of food waste elevates “I think it’s more the students,” said Thibodeau. “Just tell the kids to keep track contaminants from simple nuisances to something more sinister. “They’re of their stuff.” In light of the consistent fees and complaints from New Milford dangerous. They’re weapons,” said Thibodeau about some of the things, like glass Farms for delivering contaminated compost, Yale’s Office of Sustainability tried and cutlery, that he’s pulled out of the compost. If something dangerous comes in to do just that. In the two weeks following spring break, the office had students with the food scraps, it can threaten both workers in the facility and the ultimate monitor compost stations in each dining hall to make sure that students were users of the compost. properly disposing of their food waste and not putting trash or recycling into the “Picture this little piece of glass,” said Thibodeau. “It gets all the way through compost bins. Freeman, who is the sustainability coordinator for Ezra Stiles, was [the screening process], and when your mom opens her bag of compost in her one of the students who staffed the monitoring stations to engage with their peers garden, she cuts her finger… [The compost] gets in there, and they have to cut about what composting is and how to do it properly. off the finger. That’s a lawsuit.” To Thibodeau, protecting the consumer is the “You’re going to get a lot of Yale students who say ‘Sure, I get climate most important part of making sure the compost is contaminant-free, even while change…’ But [from the clean compost campaign] it doesn’t seem like anyone he acknowledges that clean compost is “better for the planet and all that stuff.” really cares what they’re doing,” said Freeman. This disconnect between students’ The first line of defense for consumers are workers like Julia Tenempaguay. understanding of larger issues and the real impacts of their actions perhaps isn’t She picks through the spread at the beginning of each day, before Thibodeau that surprising. “A ton of people had no idea that they’re doing it for—or that it uses his front-loader truck to mix the fresh delivery of waste with the carbon- was for—any environmental reason,” said Freeman. “It just said ‘Take your food rich plant material. Tenempaguay, who has worked at New Milford Farms for and put it in this bin,’ so they did.” about a year, still wears a gas mask as she uses a pitchfork to open up the bags Kamya Jagadish, SM ’16, who works for the Office of Sustainability as the of new compost and look for contamination.. She started this job after working team leader for the college sustainability coordinators, was even more cynical for seven years in a scrap junkyard. I asked her if she liked sorting compost in her analysis. “I think ultimately there is still that kind of divide between more. “They’re about the same,” she offered, then got to back to work, pulling people who actually care and people who don’t.” For her, the key to addressing pieces of plastic and glass out of the steaming piles. contamination in Yale’s compost lies not in broadening people’s understanding The human labor that goes into producing pure, marketable compost is easily of larger environmental impacts but in making the task as simple as possible for forgotten, and Jeff Jalbert, the outside plant manager for the facility, thinks people to follow. “It’s still going to just be following a task. Very few people are that contributes to people’s carelessness in throwing non-compostable material going to be actually thinking about the effects.”

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14 – The Yale Herald

Garrard, however, emphasized the power of connecting the issues to things people care about. “Helping people figure out why this is important in ways that relates to them, and what they think is important and valuable, is really key to having that effectiveness in messaging,” she said.

Regardless of whether the focus is on teaching students what to do while disposing of waste or how their actions tie into larger issues, it will have to be a sustained effort. “I think if it was a sustained campaign, then people would absolutely change their behavior,” said Freeman. “But if you do it once or twice and then leave… the vast majority of people will forget.”

Outside of that specific campaign, the Office of Sustainability aims to tackle these challenges through permanent signage in dining halls and on receptacles all over campus about what is recyclable, compostable, or trash. One of the most important aspects of producing material like this is finding the balance between messaging about how to dispose of waste sustainably and why it’s important. Garrard has had to deal with this issue in many different campaigns, from compost to recycling to dual-flush toilets. Any message delivered by the Office “has to be effective enough to tell you what to do, but also more importantly, why that’s important,” said Garrard.

This work is complimented by Yale Dining’s own initiatives. Arabelle Schoenberg, PC ’19, was part of Yale College Council’s Dining Hall Task force last semester. The group of six undergraduates spent the fall semester researching and compiling data on Yale’s dining halls in comparison to those of peer institutions. Schoenberg authored the section on Yale Dining’s sustainability initiatives. The report overall found that, while Yale Dining does highlight sustainability, there is still room for growth.

Sustainability at Yale Dining covers the whole food cycle, from sourcing to disposal.

Yale prides itself on purchasing its food from sources that are sustainable, as defined by meeting one of four criteria listed on its website: “environmentally sensitive, humane, fair, and regional/local.” In the 2014-15 academic year, 39% of purchases met one of those criteria, and at least 18% met more than one; 60% of animal proteins could be classified as sustainable under those metrics. On the other end of the process, in 2013, Yale sent 1,200 tons of food waste to be composted at New Milford Farms, making up 16% of the total weight of the University’s waste stream. According to the Yale Dining website, over 95% of waste from the university’s dining halls and food service operations gets composted.

While these numbers are encouraging, Schoenberg is hesitant to declare victory. “The language they use is pretty vague,” she said. “Whether or not they’re really doing a good job, they’re spinning it to make it look better.” The report focused on the sourcing side of sustainability, but Schoenberg and the task force also looked into the disposal side of the operation. “We found that… there’s been big problems with the sorting of recycling and compost and trash.”

In their final report, the task force pointed out that “the configuration of waste receptacles in some dining halls creates confusion,” and called for “clear, organized waste management.” In an interview, Schoenberg reiterated how important that is: “I think student awareness could be a first step… making students aware of the resources that are set up…and making sure people are using them properly.”

It’s not just Yale that can feel the economic effects of contaminated compost. While New Milford Farms and its parent company Garick are, in one sense, a waste disposal operation, they are also “a manufacturing facility that’s making products for sale to customers,” said Gundlach, whose position forces him to think at a larger scale than Thibodeau and other workers at each specific facility. “We’re trying to run a business and that’s what makes it hard,” he said. “It

makes it hard to run a business if your raw materials can be contaminated.” Even though the tipping fees help cover the extra labor costs associated with cleaning up the waste, any contamination that makes it past the workers can get into the final product and hurt the business.

“THERE MIGHT BE RATS AND CATS HERE,” SAID THIBODEAU, SMILING AT HIS fearlessness and my discomfort. We had entered the second barn, noticeably thinner and shorter, filled with only one row. Even as I looked around my feet for furry scavengers, there was something more pleasant about this barn. It hit me that I was breathing deeper; the smell of rotting food had gone and was replaced by that earthy scent that fills Home Depot’s Garden Center.

The barn we were in is the barrel room for New Milford Farm’s vintage of rotted food.

After spending 30 days in the larger barn, the compost is sifted through a large machine that Thibodeau could only describe as an industrial-sized version of “that thing from baking class.” Once the sieve separates out the pieces of wood and any large contaminants that made it that far, the compost that passed through is transferred to this smaller barn, where it sits for about 90 days.

The floor is grooved, and vents in the grooves blow air through the compost pile to dry it out and stop the decomposition. This barn was cooler than the first, and there was no more dripping from the ceiling. Here, the compost dries, cools, and waits to be mixed with other soils and fertilizers and sold.

Thibodeau walked right up to the pile and, for the first time, set down his pitchfork. He walked right up and shoved his gloveless hand into the black slope, still dotted with those tenacious little fruit stickers. He fiddled with the compost as it fell through his fingers, the way a kid would with sand at the beach. I got closer to the pile and started to put my hand out. But I couldn’t do it. I looked at a pile of garden fertilizer, but all I could see was chicken tenders, roasted cauliflower, and the mashed potatoes I couldn’t finish at Sunday dinner. I pulled back my hand and instead leaned in to smell the pile of dirt Thibodeau was holding out to me.

It’s here that Gundlach’s grand view of the broader implications of composting can really be seen. “We have an environmental mission, and we also have a quality of life mission,” he said, referencing the company’s motto: “Enhancing people’s’ lives and the environment.”

The soil and fertilizer mixes sitting in front of me prevent food waste from rotting and leaking methane in landfills, but their most visible effect is the flowers, grass, and trees that will grow from the nutrients its process recovers. “We are making products that are good for the environment, but it’s also for people,” said Gundlach. “We’re enhancing people’s lives because… they can improve what they see and live.”

It takes a lot for a plate of unfinished dining hall food to make it to someone’s garden and nourish a flower. There are 120 days, 40 miles, and a group of real people needed to complete the cycle and return Yale’s food to the earth. In the scheme of things, the few extra seconds it takes to throw the right things in the compost bins begin to seem pretty insignificant.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff

Apr. 15, 2016 – 15

FEATURES

Sex edit

New Haven Public Schools will finally implement a sex ed program

by Romy Carpenter

A

t New Haven’s Wilbur Cross High School, Martin Clark is known as “condom guy” or “Trojan.”

Clark walks the halls with condoms on hand to distribute to his fellow classmates, or sometimes just New Haven residents who notice his Trojan hat. But this practice does not constitute a random act of safe-sex awareness—Clark is a part of the Planned Parenthood peer education program, Students Teaching about Responsible Sexuality (STARS). At his most recent STARS meeting, Clark asked his 19 fellow student safe-sex advocates what their sex education experiences have been like in school.

“No one was getting any form of sex ed in high schools that wasn’t from an outside source,” he said he realized.

For the past 20 years, the New Haven Public School District (NHPS) has lacked a standardized health education program. In the ’90s, the district cut funding for their existing program, erasing sex-ed from the curriculum and phasing out health teachers. According to Julie Lowenstein, co-executive advisor of Yale’s Community Health Educators (CHE), these cuts were a consequence of resource allocation struggles in the underfunded public school sys-

16 – The Yale Herald

tem. “When school boards are on such a tight budget, they need to prioritize,” Lowenstein said.

Because health education is not federally mandated, it is one of the few programs that some public schools can scrap with budget cuts. Just 24 states mandate sex education. Connecticut is not one of these states, but it soon will be, according to Althea Brooks, DIV ’01, the Director of Coordinated School Health in New Haven. Brooks says that Connecticut’s State Department of Education’s mandate for a half credit of health education by graduation will take effect in school year 2021. In the meantime, the SDE has begun to advocate strongly for sex education as part of a high school curriculum, describing it as “an essential component of students’ physical, social and emotional development.”

In 2013, NHPS committed to the Michigan Model for Health—an expensive but highly-praised curriculum for K-12 health education, currently implemented in 39 states to varying degrees. “The Michigan Model for Health is the district’s inaugural implementation of an evidencebased, comprehensive, sequential health education curric-

ulum,” says Brooks. “The Michigan Model for Health has been fully rolled out in our elementary and middle schools.

The goal is to roll out high school this upcoming school year.” But while the struggle to fund training and fine-tune a schedule that will work for all of the district’s ten high schools plays out, New Haven high school students’ sole sex education is provided by groups of outside volunteers, or by a few teachers who have worked it into their curricula on an informal basis. Some students are getting health education from a Yale-based program.

In 1999, a guidance counselor from Wilbur Cross High School reached out to a Dwight Hall Public School intern because she wanted to make sure that Cross’s students received some sort of sexual health education. She sought a comprehensive health education curriculum but knew that NHPS didn’t have the curriculum or the capacity to teach it, said Katie Rich, Lowenstein’s counterpart and co-executive advisor of CHE. “This [Dwight Hall intern] along with some of her friends created a curriculum for high schools at first and expanded that program and created a separate curriculum for middle schools.” This group became CHE.

“[CHE] is a really great way to connect with New Haven,” able to educate one group of people and then sort of seed said Lowenstein. “The students are really receptive and en- them out into the world then they’ll be a good source of thusiastic because it’s topics that they want and need to information,” Wilbur Cross alum and former peer educator, learn about. I always find that it’s a positive experience, the Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, said. Clark described the peer educakids are really excited about learning and answering these tor’s role by saying, “On a daily basis it’s really just walking questions that they’ve always had.” Through workshops at around the school, talking to people, being a resource for schools, CHE reaches out to 2,000 students a year—an im- people—pretty much just being a walking, talking sex ed pressive number but a small portion of the over 20,000 stu- classroom.” But one difference between a STAR and a sex dents enrolled in New Haven ed classroom is the more public schools. personal nature Alondra Arguello, SY ‘17, of the job. Clark who graduated from New Hasays a large part ven Academy in 2014, a relaof what he does tively sexually active school is “talking to peoaccording to Arguello, said ple one-on-one, that her high school sex eduanswering quescation was minimal, maybe a tions, everything week only one year. In the week we say to people long health education program is confidential.” that she did have, “We talked

—Julie Lowenstein, co-executive advisor of the CHE program about different STDs, STIs, DESPITE IMPORways to transmit STIs. We talked tant efforts from about drugs, we talked about ways to be safe when having STARS and CHE, outside sex education cannot entirely reintercourse [….] I don’t know how seriously people took it,” place a central, internal program. External programs simply she said. The teachers were from an external organization, do not have the same access to the students’ time. The but they were not well suited to the school. “My school con- Michigan model will, theoretically, reach all 20,000 stusisted mainly of minorities and I remember specifically that dents, but some are still dubious. According to Rich, “The [the teachers] weren’t that,” she noted. public schools don’t have the resources or the teachers to The high school peer educator Martin Clark hasn’t had teach it completely, and they don’t have systems in place any contact with CHE, but his brother, a freshman at Wil- since the schools haven’t been teaching health education bur Cross, has. Clark says that at his school, CHEs only K-12.” Looking beyond logistical issues, Lowenstein said, teach the class during a “flex period,” which takes place “It’s a good curriculum; it’s really comprehensive. It covers every other Wednesday. During this flex period, teachers a much wider net of topics than we were able to cover in can request to see students if they need extra help, so the the ten sessions [run by CHE].” Rich stands by the content students who are free to take the health education work- of the new curriculum but noted that it scales back some shops are the ones who are not flagged by their teachers topics that the CHE curriculum covers, including masturbato come in for extra help. “What’s even more problematic tion. “[The Michigan Model] is definitely a more conservaabout that is it’s only the students who don’t need help from tive curriculum than we were teaching, and it’s tailored to their teachers, so generally the smart kids are the ones who have homeroom teachers teach it,” said Rich. are exclusively getting taught,” Clark said. CHE works on a The Michigan Model casts a wide net with its six categoschool-by-school basis to figure out a schedule for their ten ries—sexual behaviors, intentional and unintentional injury, session curriculum. “It depends on the school. It’s never an poor diet, physical inactivity, alcohol and other drugs, and all school thing, it’s always in one classroom. So usually we tobacco. The conservative nature of the curriculum lies in will have relationships with specific teachers or a specific it’s three track options within the HIV & Other STI Prevenprinciple who assigns us to a classroom, but oftentimes it tion unit. Schools can choose to teach abstinence-only, abwill happen either during gym or science class time.” stinence-plus-condoms, or abstinence-plus-contraceptives CHE is not the only group of students attempting to edu- to grades 9-12; only the former two options are available for cate New Haven’s public schools. Planned Parenthood has grades 7-8. It is unclear which track New Haven will follow taken a grassroots approach to sexual education. Their peer in its high schools. education program, STARS, is active in nearly all New HaA key difference between CHE’s program and the developven public high schools. “The ethos of STARS is if you’re ing New Haven program is who is teaching the classes. CHE

“It’s a good curriculum; it’s really comprehensive. It covers a much wider net of topics than we were able to cover in the ten sessions [run by CHE].”

minimizes awkwardness by reducing the student-teacher age gap and having designated health education teachers.

“We’re able to talk to kids and navigate what could be a very awkward situation with them because we come in as peers and not homeroom teachers,” said Rich. The New Haven program, on the other hand, will likely be taught by homeroom teachers. In Rich’s view, the potentially uncomfortable dynamic is important to consider. “Sometimes homeroom teachers leave while we are teaching because they are hesitant to teach about male anatomy, or a wet dream, or periods to a mixed gender class,” Rich said.

Despite STARS’s strict confidentiality rules, peer education relies on classmates knowing who the peer-educators are and being comfortable enough to ask them questions.

But in high school especially, that can be challenging. Dillon notes one barrier she experienced with the STARS program at Wilbur Cross: “They just hired way too many white people,” she says. “Cross is really racially segregated.”

As the Michigan Model is implemented, CHE’s role is shifting. “Last year we stopped teaching our own middle school curriculum in most schools,” Rich said. “We are currently working with the New Haven Board of Education and some great people there to try and figure out how CHE can continue teaching in middle schools.” CHE teachers currently lead the puberty unit of the Michigan Model in four middle schools and continue to teach their own curriculum in high schools.

CHE and STARS have been crucial in filling in for the sex education that has been missing from NHPS’s curriculum for 20 years, but those involved will admit that their programs are not without flaws. CHE is only reaching a small proportion of the students, and racial and cultural barriers have, at least at Wilbur Cross, limited STARS’ outreach.

In the district-mandated Michigan Model, the integrity of a peer-taught lesson will be lost. STARS will likely continue working as it has, and CHE hopes to continue collaboration with the school district to best implement the Michigan Model. With the new curriculum coming to New Haven Public Schools, though, finally all New Haven students will have access to sex education.

Graphic by Sharon Phu YH Staff Apr. 15, 2016 – 17

CULTURE Music as will

by Phillippe Chlenski

I

arrived at The Space last weekend to find Nicholas Serrambana, long hair tied up with a purple bandana and a fanny pack stuck to his waist, fussing with tickets outside the venue. The Space belongs to a cluster of concert venues tucked away in a strip mall at the bottom of a hill in Hamden, CT. To get there from Yale’s campus, all it takes is a quick bike ride up the scenic Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.

“Music as Will: Artistic Utilitarianism Conference” held its inaugural 11-hour session on Sat., Apr. 9, at The Space. Serrambana, a 17-year-old high school student at Classical Magnet School in New Haven, felt inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer’s claim that “other arts speak only of shadows, of the products of the will, but music speaks of the will itself.” So he put together a conference aimed at exploring the implications of this conception of music. It means that music is a powerful force central to the human experience, certainly, but then what?

Serrambana coined the term “artistic utilitarianism” to refer to the idea of harnessing music towards altruistic and ethical ends.

Serrambana sold me a wristband for the afternoon session (admission for Yale students was half off), and then ran me through the workshops I could attend. For no particular reason, I settled on one titled “The Rock and Roll Life: Just Do It,” led by Miami punk-rock veteran Malcolm Tent. Tent also played bass for the New Paltz and NY black metal act Profanatica, and he runs the record label TPOS, which puts out records by such artists as Charles Manson and GG Allin. The workshop was held in a small green room above a guitar repair shop. Tent told us about his first concerts in South Florida, the worst vinyl pressing plant in the world, coldcalling artists for permission to release their music, and why it was punk to move to Danbury, CT. He has been self-employed since 1987 and is living proof, he says, that “the rock and roll lifestyle is still possible.”

The second workshop I attended, co-hosted by local experimental artist Id M Theft Able and Serrambana, was called “/ do / does / doing /” and focused on music as self-indulgence. Its point of departure was the observation that people are more willing to engage with experimental music as participants than as listeners. Id M Theft Able, a man with long orange hair and a giant beard, played music he made from strangers’ answering machine tapes purchased at Goodwill and talked about his childhood obsession with shortwave radio. He wore

shoes scavenged from a dumpster and spoke eloquently about jazz. Other workshops included guided meditations, discussions of Schopenhauer’s thought, and improvised music sessions. Serrambana led a workshop titled “Artistic Utilitarianism: An Attitude Adjustment.”

The inspiration for his event, Serrambana says, came jointly from various theater festivals that he attended

and from X-Fest, an experimental music festival in Holyoke, MA. The format of the workshops derives from his high school’s seminar model.

At 5:20 p.m., Music as Will proceeded into its second stage: live performance. There were seventeen acts in total. Malcolm Tent played an acoustic hardcore punk set. Id M Theft Able played experimental music on instruments he assembled from parts he found while dumpster diving. Serrambana played as Big Nurse, his experimental music/performance art moniker, in a duo with The Carapace, an electronic artist. Each set lasted twenty minutes.

The event closed with the release of a music cassette and two magazines. The cassette, released through Montreal punk/experimental label Misery Loves Co., featured music from artists involved with, but unable to perform at, Music as Will. It included a pamphlet glossing the concepts of “music as will” and “artistic utilitarianism.” The first magazine was a literary compilation addressing the relationship between free markets and musical expression. The second was an art sampler with an open submission policy aimed at showcasing local talents. All proceeds from the event benefitted the Ana Grace Project, a charity “promoting love, community, and connection for every child and family.”

Serrambana told me that he worked on organizing Music as Will “about an hour every day for four months,” reaching out to various local artists via Facebook, rehearsing his own contributions, and coordinating logistics with The Space in Hamden. He raised approximately $2,500 on GoFundMe to cover expense. Going forward, he would like to make the event an annual conference, although, he tells me, “that depends on college plans.” In the future, Serrambana hopes to secure 501(c)(3) taxexempt status for “Music as Will” and secure grants to provide it with a more stable financial grounding.

I left Music as Will ruminating on the workshops and feeling impressed with The Space and Serrambana’s resourcefulness. The turnout at the event included Serrambana’s family and friends, figures in the local music scene, college students, and others. The only other Yale students I saw were the ones I came with. Serrambana was pleased with the “egalitarian assortment” the event drew, but will continue to work to make the event more inclusive and universally appealing. In addition to bringing together as many creative, thoughtful, and conscientious people as he can, he is trying to increase diversity among the acts and attendees. “It was great,” he says, “but I want to reach out to a wider group of people. I would love it if not everyone was wearing flannels from Goodwill.”

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff 18 – The Yale Herald

We out here: Dark Matter at Yale

by Emily Ge YH Staff

R

ewind my body. Rewind my body until there’s nothing left but the dark matter that gave birth to us.”

On Mon., Apr.11, DarkMatter, a trans South Asian performance art and poetry duo, performed for a packed house in SSS 114.

Before the poets came onstage, singer Shagaysia Diamond stood up. She led the crowd in clapping and grooving to her soulful voice. (I Am Her, Diamond’s new EP, comes out soon.) From her very first note, everyone in the room channeled their focus to the stage. The air seemed to hang in powerful tension.

As Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, the New York-based artists who make up DarkMatter, walked onto the stage, there was a collective hum of gratitude. Wearing fluorescent lipstick, pearl earrings, and bright red clothing, Vaid-Menon and Balasubramanian leapt straight into a powerful spoken word poem.

They held nothing back in their opening piece, “Rewind my Body.” The poem called out western patriarchal paradigms, a colonial history of subjugation, and membranes of segregation. From the start, the crowd had a sense of what was to come: a strange and stirring blend of art and activism, of poetry and politics, and the boldness of a quest to retake history and narrative.

Once DarkMatter had us in enthralled silence, they cut the pressure in the room by transitioning from speaking about sodomy laws in Asia to lampooning Hilary Duff as model for cis hetero white women (Balasubramanian, with a straight face, suggested we interpret The Lizzie McGuire Movie as a feature-length lesbian porno). This between-poem banter would come to be a pattern for the next two hours. Alternately ferocious and provocatively playful, Balasubramanian and VaidMenon found a perfect balance between brutal truth (including kicks to the teeth on police violence, deportation, the criminalization of sex work, and white imperialism) and humor that was cheeky but still challenging (a socioeconomic takedown of Dan Savage and an “Open Letter to all the White Bitches at Hogwarts” from Padma and Parvati Patil come to mind).

At one point, in the span of a few minutes, Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon transitioned from a fearless criticism of Judith Butler—equating the foundation of gender with that of colonialism—to “I Don’t Take Shit from Anyone,” a poignant meditation on poop therapy, gut microflora, and the limitations of human empathy (“I want to populate your insides / I want the world to move through you simple like it moves through me”). Then came some hilariously specific mockery of white people (fresh-pressed coffee in NPR mugs, fresh-pressed New Yorkers, voting for Bernie Sanders, ugly sweaters, and David Sedaris).

Balasubramanian and Vaid-Menon didn’t shy

away from attacking the audience, either, wanting to push back at the crowd for being more aware of white gay issues than those impacting non-binary people of color. The two poets criticized the audience for knowing about Matthew Shepard, a white victim of a homophobic murder, and not about Jennifer Laude, a trans Filipina woman strangled to death by a U.S. Marine, her head left to sink in a toilet bowl.

The duo called out Yale specifically, citing the events of last semester by saying that “white culture is the scariest Halloween costume” and humorously deriding the terrible outfits of the white men canonized in paintings on the walls of SSS. They asserted that keeping the name of Calhoun College was an emblem of the university’s inability to acknowledge its financial investment in slavery and genocide. They went on to question Yale’s identity as a “safe space,” pointing out that the university has done substantial work to gentrify New Haven, pushing out the city’s black trans population. Vaid-Menon and Balasubramanian also criticized Yale’s lack of faculty diversity, making the incisive point that queer and trans people of color like them are accepted as entertainers on Yale’s stages, but not as professors in our lecture halls.

DarkMatter played the role of both educator and entertainer for their audience. The duo called the gay liberation movement an appropriation of both the trans liberation and black civil rights movements, and they remarked on the hypocrisy of using the acronym LGBTQ as an umbrella for rich, white, gay men. Interspersed between devastating poems about 9/11 (“I watch American invent a heart- / call it New York,- / beat its fists against the whole entire world. . . because it doesn’t matter what America does- / because America had its heart broken”) and the myth of the Asian-American model minority (“Bring in brown to keep black down. . . this model minority holds a scantron like a mirror- / recognizes that his body has always been filled in as an answer- / when the white man said jump- / we said: how many grades?”) were a series of hilariously desolate nursery rhymes, including “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.- / Jack fell down and broke his crown- / And Jill said ‘fuck this’ and became a lesbian separatist.”

Vaid-Menon’s final poem was “dedicated to all the loneliness in the crowd.” As a recent Stanford graduate, Vaid-Menon said that they could understand the isolation created by white liberalism at elite universities.

Before beginning their last poem, they said, “There is no dignity in being a Yale student if Yale does not name its currency as blood.” They went on to describe

happiness as an ignorant lie of the unaware, and they claimed that feeling anger and sadness is proof of truthful, conscious living. They spoke out against the idea that “Pain is a ritual we are to conduct in private,” and they exclaimed, “I love you more than Yale loves you. I love you more than white culture loves you. I love you more than America loves you.”

Balasubramanian’s final poem was a tender, abstract portrayal of the necessity of beauty, secrets, and skeletons. They spoke about Noah’s Ark and whales and about the reflection of the ocean into the sky, saying that the octopus has the most alien DNA of any known creature. “Fish became stars, and whales became metaphors. . . to survive an apocalypse, become an idea.”

They asserted, “What has happened has happened before,” and offered the “whale’s tongue” as a model, putting forth the notion that the past and the history of thought itself can be used as a mode of escape. Balasubramanian portrayed this reconquest of historical oppression as a potent tool for transforming the present.

After two hours of urgent healing and resistance, DarkMatter proved that poetry is a site of revolution, political protest, and continuation. By reclaiming a historical narrative that has systematically oppressed and murdered the spirit of marginalized peoples the world over, DarkMatter succeeded in exploding white colonial expectations of human beauty, desirability, and worth. In arguing that gender is an imperialist construct never meant for people of color, DarkMatter penned a love letter to the violence and hurt done to the bodies and souls of gender-nonconforming people of color. Through their loving acknowledgement of this social terrorism, they offered new possibilities for survival. In DarkMatter’s transcendent poetry, a specific, painful grief has found a new and powerful voice.

We out here We been here We ain’t leaving We are loved.

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff

Apr. 15, 2016 – 19

REVIEWS On Drones and Cyborgs

by Nick Henriquez YH Staff

O

n Apr. 1, the New York Times published a frontpage online feature titled, “Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?” asking readers to watch short body-cam videos of police-civilian altercations and answer questions about what went on. Two films, Eye in the Sky and Hardcore Henry, offer the audience a similar experience of viewing violence, but they take very different approaches. Eye in the Sky, directed by Gavin Hood, portrays modern warfare at its most diffuse and remote, compellingly dramatizing the difficult interpretive, ethical, legal, interpersonal and intergovernmental decisions that go into the execution of a drone strike. On the other hand, Hardcore Henry, directed by Ilya Naishuller, attempts to reimagine the ultraviolent sci-fi action film by filming it entirely in ‘first-person’ using GoPros, but the end product fails to meet its ambitions.

Chief among the accomplishments of Eye in the Sky is its deft orchestration of suspense in a film that is nearly entirely composed of people looking at screens. It opens with Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), waking up in the middle of the night, walking through her English estate, and logging into a laptop. When her workday begins in earnest in a top-secret underground war room, she’s video-chatting, monitoring camera feeds from various drones, barking at her staff, and instant messaging with Lieutenant General Benson (Alan Rickman, in his final on-screen role), the military’s liaison to members of Parliament. Powell runs an antiterrorist operation, tracking down UK and US expat Islamic extremists in Nairobi with the aid of a US drone, remotely operated from a trailer in Nevada by Steve Watts (Aaron Paul).

The mission changes from “capture,” using the drone just for surveillance and the Kenyans for engagement, to “kill,” using missiles from the drone because of a bomb threat; but when their target is near an innocent little girl, final approval to pull the trigger bounces up and down the chain of command in a game of pass-the-buck via FaceTime. The plot

is essentially the trolley problem, except the switch is thousands of miles away, it’s uncertain who or how many will die if it is pulled or not, and it’s even less clear who should pull it—or rather, tell someone to tell someone to pull it. With the audience viewing the scene through the perspective of the military personnel, unable to change anything in the perpetually changing ground situation, Hood demands that the viewer decide for themselves when the time is right to strike.

Of course, for all the equivocating of the higher-ups, the true burden falls on Watts, who is in the unenviable position of being the person who must ultimately pull the trigger—and Hood and Paul leave no doubt that Watts is tortured by the responsibility, despite the situation being ultimately out of his control. The acting is deft despite the relatively obvious motivations of the characters, and Guy Hibbert’s screenplay moves along at a fine clip. Despite a somewhat heavy-handed conclusion, the fact that Eye in the Sky’s ethical quandary is more “when” than “if” saves it from becoming overly moralizing.

While Eye in the Sky could be easily pigeonholed as “the drone movie,” Hardcore Henry comes a lot closer to replicating the experience of being a drone. Despite being marketed as “a first-person action film,” Henry feels more of a kind with Jay McInerney’s second-person novel Bright Lights, Big City. Henry, a cyborg super-soldier, has no voice and is driven by simple carrot/stick motivations—namely, a comely blonde wife (Haley Bennett) and the ruthless telekinetic industrialist who threatens him. While the plot lacks depth, the main acting attraction is South African sci-fi staple Sharlto Copley as Henry’s fairy-godmother-like friend Jimmy—in about a dozen guises and personas. Unfortunately, Jimmy’s energy frantically overcompensates for the fact that Henry has all the personality of a GoPro. Clearly imitating the video game genre of the first-person shooter (FPS), Henry’s physical presence on-screen consists mostly of a tattooed arm, fully extended, gripping a gun.

Yet while the video game player has some degree of agency and an established set of possibilities and goals, Hardcore Henry spends the bulk of its 90 minutes scrambling to compensate for the nonsensicality and incompatibility of a first-person film. It also targets the testosterone-fueled FPS audience, particularly in a pointless shootout in a strip club, bare breasts and bullets everywhere. Clearly, though, even teenage boys would rather be playing than watching.

Eye in the Sky and Hardcore Henry both revel in the cinema of exhaustion. The former builds emotionally draining suspense through deferred action just as the latter grows monotonous through ceaseless action. In both, the problem is that the only action, the only medium, is violence: for the soldiers in Eye in the Sky, the missile is the only form of communication between war room and front line. For Hardcore Henry, Ilya Naishuller’s willingness to embrace violence as the only medium is by far the greatest fault of a frenetic mess of a film.

Henry has no relationship to anyone save ‘kill X’ or ‘kill those who want to kill X.’ Hardcore Henry proves that violence for the sake of violence becomes shallow and mindless if it fails to bring up the sort of difficult questions Eye in the Sky asks.

See these films and others at Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in New Haven, 86 Temple St. Call (203) 498-2500 or visit www.BowTieCinemas.com for advance tickets.

Left image courtesy of STX Entertainment Right image courtesy of Entertainment One 20 – The Yale Herald

Music: Junk Expectations were high for Junk, M83’s first studio album following their Grammy-nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Junk’s cover art is telling of the album’s sonic contents: tacky WordArt, Microsoft Paint, and oddball Happy Meal toys unite in outer space to create a collage of ’80s pre-adolescence and underlying cynicism. Despite being inspired by cheesy television shows like Punky Brewster and Who’s the Boss?, Junk is less optimistic than the ambitious Hurry Up. The dizzying combination of rippling anger and desperate nostalgia muddies the elegance of M83’s sound, but if Anthony Gonzalez wants this incongruity to force the listener into critical reflection, he succeeds.

M83 establishes a state of unapologetic disarray within the first few bars of the album’s opening song, “Do It, Try It.” Its jaunty ragtime piano starkly contrasts with heavily synthesized vocals. From this track forward, the 55-minute album embodies organized chaos, a hypnotic amalgam of smooth saxophone, glittering percussions, and mystical vocals. “Go!,” a galactic fist-pump anthem featuring French singer Mai Lan, draws strong similarities to M83’s hit “Midnight City.” “Sunday Night 1987,” gorgeous in its intense melancholia, is perhaps the strongest song on the album, but an exhilarating guitar solo in “Walkaway Blues” and lush vocals in “Atlantique Sud” also stand as testaments to Gonzalez’s talents as a musician and producer.

Standalone magnificence aside, Junk might confuse and even frustrate some listeners with its dogged dedication to reviving ’80s synth-pop. The aggressively dorky “Moon Crystal” feels trapped at a disco roller-rink in 1986, and Lan’s robotic countdown in “Go!” blurs the line between emulation and parody. The effusive ballad “For the Kids” features stunning vocals from Susanne Sundfør, but it echoes Fleetwood Mac to the point of rote replication, with the exception of a bizarre voiceover from a young child waxing macabre poetic. M83 thrusts listeners into the heartland of unflinching nostalgia, but Junk is as much a critique of modern art as it is an ode to 80s electro-pop. Discontent with modern music and culture gives Gonzalez’s schmaltz an ironic edge. It’s not clear, however, whether this newly acquired dissonance breathes refreshing realism into his epic music or wilts his cinematic masterpieces.

Junk’s complete disregard for subtlety makes it harder to listen to in one sitting than Gonzalez’s previous works, but taken in short spurts, it’s entirely entrancing. Shades of jaded cynicism now populate Gonzalez’s kaleidoscopic sound, yet his sincerity is still preserved. Pleading “Take over my dream/ Walk into a feeling” on “Do It, Try It,” Gonzalez maintains the belief that music can change the world. His latest attempt at affecting this change succeeds in making a splash, but possibly at a cost of easy listening.

—Nicole Mo

Food: Arethusa Dairy That’s Veronica. She’s worth over a million dollars,” the young woman behind the counter at Arethusa Dairy told me. She pointed to the large, framed photo of a cow that hangs on the wall of the black and white dairy shop that opened in March on Chapel. All of the dairy in the shop comes from the hundreds of cows at Arethusa Farm in Litchfield Hills, CT, and everything that isn’t from the farm is imported from Italy. The cows of Arethusa, who churn out everything from rich ice cream to savory hard cheeses, are spoiled: “We treat our cows like family here—we know the name, personality and specialized needs of every lady in the barn or on the field,” their website boasts. Clearly, happy cows make happy people; everyone you pass in the immaculate cow-themed shop seems to be in a daze of delicious dairy.

When I first stopped in, I got a waffle cone of the mint chocolate chip. For $3.25, they pile a small mountain of ice cream into a crispy waffle cone—certainly more than a single scoop, but I was not complaining. Upon taking my first bite, I was overcome. I almost had to lie down on the checkered floor to take it all in, but I didn’t want to embarrass the people I was with. So instead, I ran around the shop sampling everything they had laid out. (Pro tip: you can sample anything in the store—cheese, milk, ice cream, their own brioche bread. All fair game). In addition to the heavenly ice cream, the Bella Bantam cheese and the coffee milk were definitely highlights of that first visit.

I went back two days later to grab one of their five-dollar grilled cheeses. They make it with their three main hard cheeses (Bella Bantam, Crybaby, and Europa) on brioche bread, and grease the grill with Arethusa butter. I chatted with the friendly staff and watched it melt on the griddle before I let it melt in my mouth. Absolutely unreal. I stopped someone on Old Campus and made her try—it it was that good. (A little swissy maybe, but warm and melty).

I swear I wasn’t trying to butter the staff up for free food, and I don’t want to milk this too much. But I promise, if you can tolerate lactose, Arethusa Dairy will be a rich experience. Even if you think that’s cheesy.

—Emma Chanen YH Staff

Music: Distortland Distortland, the latest release from Dandy Warhols, an alt rock band from Portland, may have artistic integrity, but what good is artistry if the album is too difficult to enjoy?

Distortland is a haze of muddily mixed rock songs drowning in their self-consciously lo-fi production. The band has received praise for sticking to their artistic vision on this album, rather than pandering to listeners by churning out more pop-rock hits like 2000’s “Bohemian Like You” and 2003’s “We Used to Be Friends.” However, Distortland feels about twice as long as it needs to be, which is unfortunate for an album that runs only 34 minutes. Sticking to one’s guns is all well and good, but, to the lay-listener, Distortland is just plain boring.

The first two tracks, “Search Party” and “Semper Fidelis,” are atmospheric garage rock, a remarkably unpleasant combination of genres. The third, “Pope Reverend Jim,” has a lot going for it. The first minute and a half sound like a fun punk rock song, if somewhat overwhelmed by the loudly mixed monotone guitar. But the track continues for another two minutes without adding anything. It’s obnoxiously repetitive. In a turn for the better, “Catcher in the Rye” is the first legitimately listenable song on the album.

The laidback groove verses build to an almost catchy chorus. Even the hazy production, which distracts from so many of the other songs on the album, effectively serves the relaxed sound of “Catcher in the Rye.” The next couple of tracks, however, are a slog. “Styggo” (an acronym for “some things you gotta get over”), shoots for the same cool groove feel of “Catcher in the Rye,” but with much less success. Clocking in at 4:18, “Styggo” feels like it’s said everything it wants to by the time it finishes the first chorus at 1:17. “Give” could be a sweet, moving, contemplative song if it weren’t lost in its fog of psychedelia; the sounds are too blurred to do its songwriting justice.

The next track, “You Are Killing Me,” is a good, simple rock song with up-tempo syncopated drums and guitar, a solid verse-bridge-chorus structure, and a refreshingly angry feeling in contrast to the lethargy that dominates the rest of the album. “All the Girls in

London” the following track, works in the same vein, but falls short. For all the excitement of its energetic verses, its chorus feels too anticlimactic.

After the mediocre “Doves,” Distortland ends on a disarmingly intimate note with “The Grow Up Song.” The song is understated, but it works. Because it’s so short (just 1:39) and so candid, it definitely earns its place as the last song on the album, closing with the poignant lyric, “I’ve got to admit I’m too old for this shit.”

So check out “Catcher in the Rye,” “You Are Killing Me,” and, if you’re about to graduate, “The Grow Up Song,” but don’t waste a full half hour of your life on Distortland. The album requires a lot of effort without much payoff. Most of its songs have trouble commanding a listener’s attention, and on the whole, the album drowns in its obnoxious production. Save for a handful of highlights, it seems that, in avoiding the temptation to pander to commercial success, The Dandy Warhols have eschewed almost everything that made them fun to listen to.

—Clara Olshansky YH Staff

Top left image courtesy of MUTE Top right image courtesy of The Shops At Yale Bottom image courtesy of Dine Alone Records Apr. 15, 2016 – 21

sarah.holder@yale.edu

peop

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST when ur genuinely confused and then they mansplain

What we hate this week

zamn zaddy

whiteboard campaigns more like high quality pic low quality friends ha

go to class

“low quality pic, high quality friends!!!!” sarah holder

people whose last names are words warm water

blisters slightly below room temperature is ideal

especially pus

get woke

Pi Phi Phanny Packs

#sleeprevolution Haha!

Phuck oph!

Mar. 4, 2016 ­– 23