Yale Herald Volume LXII Issue 2

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 2 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Sept. 23, 2016

FROM THE STAFF Three decades ago, my parents, each alone, boarded separate planes from separate regions of China to travel to the U.S. for graduate school. My father knew no one in America. My mother had only her older sister awaiting her at the airport. Yet, young and hopeful, they each blindly stepped toward an unknown land in the optimistic search for a better life.

My parents are not refugees. They were not pushed away from their homeland by crisis or war or famine. Though they arrived without a common tongue or much beyond the clothes on their backs, though they were sneered at by cruel strangers for their appearances and laughed at for their accents, they, like many other immigrants, developed a network of friends and relatives to dig them into American soil.

My parents’ struggles pale in comparison with those of refugees from Syria or the DRC uprooted forcibly from their homes, for whom finding a community is much more difficult. Refugees appear frequently in the news these days, often, as painted by Trump rhetoric, as a mass menace threatening American values.

But as a consequence it becomes easy to forget about their humanity or the fact that they exist right here in our own backyard. Eight hundred refugees arrive in Connecticut each year hoping to begin their lives anew. In this week’s front, Eve Sneider, MC ’19, explores the organizations in New Haven that play a pivotal role in refugee resettlement and reminds us that the topics of national debates still hit close to home.

Other pieces touch on our local community in other ways. Alice Zhao, DC ’18, paints a portrait of her suburban Arizona hometown. Stephanie Barker, JE ’19, questions whether our attitude towards the renaming of Calhoun College is just another example of trendy activism. And Cati Vlad, DC ’19, explores the way in which British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare makes historical British figures his own in a new exhibit at the YCBA. Take a breather from your midterms, flip through these (virtual) pages. We hope you’ll feel at home.

Cheers, Oriana Tang Managing Editor

2 – The Yale Herald

The Yale Herald Volume LX, Issue 2 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Sept. 23, 2016 EDITORIAL STAFF: Editors-in-Chief: Tom Cusano, Rachel Strodel Managing Editors: Victorio Cabrera, Oriana Tang Executive Editors: Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, David Rossler, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Emma Chanen, Emily Ge Features Editors: Frani O’Toole, Nick Stewart Opinion Editors: Luke Chang, Nolan Phillips Reviews Editors: Gabriel Rojas, Eve Sneider Voices Editor: Olivia Klevorn Insert Editor: Marc Shkurovich Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Dimitri Diagne, Drew Glaeser, Frances Lindemann ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Hannah Offer Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics & Design Editor: Haewon Ma Executive Graphics Editor: Claire Sheen Executive Design Editor: Ben McCoubrey 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 thomas.cusano@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 Isaac Morrier

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming Political “discourse” This Monday, Hillary Clinton, LAW, ’73, and Donald Trump, who didn’t go here, fight to the death.

Outgoing Political discourse RIP a More Perfect Union.

Cover 12– New Haven lives up to its name and steps up to the plate to accomodate refugees. Eve Sneider, MC ’19, probes what makes this possible.

Voices 6 – Alice Zhao, DC ’18, tours suburbia while Alex Tafur, SY ’17, blasts off into outer space.

Opinion

Saturday Women’s Soccer vs. Princeton Reese Stadium 4:00 p.m.

Sunday Laurie Santos: How to Think Different The Grove 1:00 p.m.

Thursday BREAK THRU: Sculpture by Richard Newton Slifka Center 5:00 p.m.

Thursday The Art of Dying Well Sterling Hall of Medicine 5:00 p.m.

8 – Steph Barker, JE ’19, wants to fill the room.

9 – Linus Lu, DC ’19, calls on us to walk the line between free speech and alienation.

Features 10 – Meghana Mysore, DC ’20, considers the impact of new construction on the Broadway District.

Culture 18 – Robert Newhouse, CC ’19, weathers the storm behind Bill Morrison’s new film.

19 – Sit with Will Reid, PC ’19, at the buzzy Windham-Campbell keynote. Meanwhile, Cati Vlad, DC ’19, tours Yinka Shonibare’s collection at the Yale Center for British Art.

Reviews 20 – Emma Chanen, BK ’19, confronts her obsession and disappointment with MTV’s The Challenge: Rivals III. 21 – Louisa Cone, MC ’18, reminds us why we should all binge-watch Stranger Things. Also, Isabel Mendia, DC ’18, on Southside with You and Nicole Mo, BK ’19, on Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound.

Sep. 16, 2016 – 3

YOUR FROCO GROUP GROUPME

THE NUMBERS Index 240 36

rectly

Members of Yale a cappella groups

Of whom can spell ‘a cappella’ cor-

13 Items in a baker’s dozen 16 Members of Yale’s Baker’s Dozen 0 Of whom can count Sources: 1) I counted at the Dwight Hall Jam 2) Generous estimate 3) According to the cashier at Bruegger’s Bagels 4) I am in the Baker’s Dozen 5) ATB ATB –Sammy Burton

Top five ways to stay fit and healthy in college 5–

4–

3–

2–

1– – Michael Holmes Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff 4 – The Yale Herald

Go to the Gym- And once you get there, walk back to your dorm. You won’t believe how many calories you’ll drop while you’re telling everyone about how often you go.

Take the Top Bunk- Build your upper body strength like a pro. It’s like mountain climbing every night!

Play Intramurals- Nothing helps you shed those pounds faster than an hour of losing the ball, getting dunked on, and sinking to your knees in defeat. For a bonus workout afterwards, try the brisk run to catch the 6:15 bus back to campus.

Give up that baby fat just like the other team gives up on winning once they see your jacked physique.

Go Vegetarian- Cut all of those fattening plates of Commons chicken stir-fry and Shake Shack burgers out of your diet! Instead, choose healthy meatless options like Nutella Waffles, a few dozen slices of Stiles Cheese Pizza®, or a box of Insomnia Cookies.

On Second Thought, Don’t Eat at All- Forget Paleo, Atkins, and Soylent; the best way to avoid unhealthy food is to just swear off food altogether.

Plus, imagine all the money that can be saved and put towards your next Woads!

– Michael Holmes

sarah.holder@yale.edu thomas.cusano@yale.edu

rachel.strodel@yale.edu

VOICES

About Home: Arizona Sketches

by Alice Zhao I. In high school, I cracked an egg on the road on the hottest day of the Arizona summer and watched it crust on the pavement. I don’t know why, but it’s the first thing I think of whenever anyone asks me about home, if it’s really as bad as they’ve heard. One hundred degrees before ten, they’d shake their heads, I’d take the humidity.

I want to explain to them that the heat’s a blessing, really.

Not like the stickiness, the clinginess of the East Coast in June, needy and desperate to soak in the armpits. The sun was a cruel lover in Phoenix, but at least it didn’t linger around, a moist smear behind the neck or on the backs of knees.

There’s something admirable about the directness, I’d say to them. That burn that can sear straight through the thick yolk and wet oil of an egg, dry it into a powder that can be rubbed so fine between the fingers. It’s a power so manifest that at noon I could see it over the sidewalk, a kind of shimmer that only comes when the eyes can no longer comprehend energy, when the light itself is warped by the stark rays of the sun.

Everything is so bright there in the summer, so naked that some might call it barren. And that day, even the sky stood sterile, no swollen clouds crowding the open space of the horizon. An endless world of blue, so pure and unaltered that it hurt to look at, a sacred thing.

Sometimes, I wish I could show them, these people who cluster and wonder: what is it like to live in a desert, where there is no relief outside besides the barest streaks of shade? But, it’s really more of a private affair.

II. My mother and I used to moon-watch at night. Eight o’clock, nine, we’d bring out the pillows, the blankets, the slippers and climb upstairs, out onto the deck of our house. She’d hold the hammock in place while I settled in, wrap me up deftly in a throw all the way up to the chin.

I’d hear her ease herself onto the chair next to me, a rustle of fabric, an involuntary sigh. I like to think that we both stared up at the same time, both tilted our heads back to look at the sky sprawled out above us. We’d be wordless and happy.

There’s something about suburbs that makes this kind of thing possible. In cities, a police siren will blare. A car will honk. There will be a mysterious sound, unidentifiable but very unpleasant. You will break your gaze from the moon above you, suspended by a power so immense

that the Greeks worshipped it, and you will find yourself surrounded again by tall buildings. They throw up lights so thick they start to haze the night, gas the stars.

I’ve always imagined cities as full of angry men and women. I want to describe this to them, then: People are able to see infinity. It’s lying down in a hammock in the quiet desert night, in the company of someone who does not feel the compulsion to speak. The world stretches out above them—in it, they can witness the birth and death of stars, galaxies, unclaimed worlds. They are spectators in a drama unwritten, they lord over a dominion so open and free that it’s impossible to fathom where the end is, if there’s an end at all. And the moon— I think about soft sand, quiet hills, wind that whispers in the ears.

III. It’s a vast kind of air. The kind of air you know that’s been somewhere, the peaks of mountains, the sweeps of deserts, wrapped up in the moist lick of clouds or baking in the hot gaze of the sun. It’s not the kind of air to run your fingers through—no. It’s still, it’s not like silk, and it’s dry and gritty and there’s this film of dust that coats the fingertips before the break of storms blown from Mexico, if you look carefully it might be red. Sometimes, it hurts to stand in—it is not comfortable, like the film of humidity in the South or the crisp frost of the North. This air was not meant to be settled.

Phoenix is the sixth largest city in the nation, but unlike New York or Los Angeles, there’s hardly any cluster, the compaction of people and building and car, machine and man and waste. The air, by consequence then, is not busy or nervous or thick, smog and traffic and voices about the market and the divorce and the brunch place down 12th Avenue that has inexplicably closed. The air is not civilized—or, rather, it refuses gentrification.

Because, it knows that this is its claim. It can roam the streets whenever it wants, it can blast through the entire sprawl of the city in one gust if it chooses— there are no obstructions, no skyscrapers stopping it short.

This is the kind of power that is palpable, even just a few seconds outside. The air doesn’t move, but it’s not languid and not lazy. It’s a conscious choice, a deliberate refusal, and you can feel it just touch you at the curve of your shoulder or the graze of your elbow, a reminder that it’s there.

IV.

At the beginning and end of Doubletree Ranch Road, between the main cross-streets of Tatum and Scottsdale, there is a fake cactus, outfitted with a traffic camera and complete with tastefully painted woodpecker holes. When driving, it’s easy to believe that they’re real: they’re tall enough, wide enough, dusty enough. It’s a good lie, even if they seem, in that brief glimpse in the corner of the eye, a little too symmetrical, a little too smooth.

I suppose this kind of bedevilment, though, is common in Paradise Valley. Even along the residential stretch of Doubletree Ranch Road, there’s more to it than endless rows of classical mansions and contemporary monoliths, artfully paved driveways and impossibly lush foliage. In that straight walk from the beginning to the end—one fake cactus to its twin a mile away—any person could see past that display.

You will notice, after a few minutes into your journey, that there is no movement and no people. You will pass lines and lines of houses, and you will not see children, cyclists, or even dogs. All the windows have their curtains drawn, all the gates are closed. It’s true that Paradise Valley has almost 13,000 people. But after the recession, many of these houses were abandoned to rot. Of course, it’s 2016 and many of them have also filled up now, but some of those For Sale signs have been stuck in dry grass for years.

Keep in mind that it’s also a town that values its privacy, so much so that by law every lot must be at least one acre.

Residents mind their own business, and as you pass the golf course that demarks the middle of Doubletree Ranch Road with the molding pond and the dirt lawn that hasn’t been reseeded, you should remember that. People entertain by themselves here, and there is no camaraderie or neighborly obligation. It’s a recluse enclave, with a veneer of old-fashioned leisure.

Yet, if you go farther still, edging up near the second fake cactus, you’ll see what this place used to be, before it was domesticated into opulent bliss. Here, the houses are straight from the ’60s, short, bulky, anything but rich.

They have dirt yards, and pick-up trucks, and wooded pickets smeared brown from dust storms. They may own horses, but not for sport. Paradise Valley used to be cattle grazing land. It’s strange to think that decades ago, the ground these mansions stand on used to be inhabited by cows.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 6 – The Yale Herald

The radio waves ran fingers curiously along the struts that thrust skyward for them, caressed the wires that guided them in, kissed the gentle curves that reached up to wrap around them. They had travelled for five hundred years to feel an embrace like this, this welcome from a planet and a species so like their own, and they rejoiced in that fateful meeting of galactic lovers.

Had they been able to read they would have learned that they were expected. They would have caught the faded letters emblazoned in block capitals: the seductive curve of an S, the bold-lined statements of an E, the waving welcome of a T, the guideline of an I. An education in the history of human science would have told them that those four letters were the warmest welcome our species was capable of giving: “The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.”

Alone

by Alex Tafur

Had they been discerning in their inspection, they might have noticed the rust that clung to the metal frames they clambered over. They might have caught the disorganization, dishes pointing every which way. They might have seen the few dishes that had given up years ago, crashing to the ground and pointing no way at all anymore. But they could not help their blindness to the signs of neglect that clung to the dishes just as longingly as they brushed against the pitted metal. All the waves could do was quest inquisitively around metal frames, pound silently into the sun-hardened clay, and wait, ever hopeful, for cries of surprise, fear, delight.

Acknowledgement.

Silence. There was no one left to answer their greeting. There was no one left at all, nothing but a fence blown slanted fifty years ago, debris strewn against it: a blackened picture frame, house keys twisted into slag, half of a teddy bear. Perhaps a passing pronghorn might have perked up its ears for a moment, as if catching that subsonic message, fragile as birdsong, but there would have been nothing in that Siren call for them but potential prey or predator, revealed soon as mere silence.

devices, running his fingers over it and waving off Hume’s scandalized glance with a breezy gesture. “What? It’s not like satellite dishes are ever going to be considered cultural artifacts. Besides, these haven’t been working for years now.”

Hume frowned “Still, they would have been transmitting while we were en route here. Shouldn’t we have gotten the news? It would have made headlines all over the world!”

“We really don’t know when they were set up how long they’ve been transmitting for. It’s possible the signals actually haven’t made it to Earth yet. Besides, even if they’ve already established contact back home, they would have had no way to tell us when we were traveling near light speed. Even now we’re only getting the updates that were sent a few years after we left earth.”

“The benefits of near light-speed travel,” grumbled Hume, standing and straightening her uniform. “Sometimes I wish we could just go back to good old-fashioned rocket fuel.” Her fingers skimmed efficiently over her hair, resettling the neat brain over the collar of her uniform as she looked into the night sky. “I wonder if the signal’s reached them yet.”

“Do you think they’re celebrating, if it has?” Rigby’s voice was quiet as he asked. His own eyes followed Hume’s gaze trying to catch a glimpse of his native star among a stranger’s constellations, quickly losing their place in the unfamiliar sky.

“Knowing us? You probably have half the world’s governments trying to put lasers in space.” Hume snorted, extending a hand that Rigby took, helping her up from the clay with a grunt. The two of them began the short walk back to the ship and the rest of their crew in thoughtful silence. It was Hume who broke it.

“It’s kind of sad though, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean, Captain?”

Kepler 186f, some hours later Kara Hume, commander of Erikson 3 Mission for The Exploration of Earth-Like Planets, ran trembling fingers over the pitted remains of what was once a satellite dish. “They were looking for us too.” She had to swallow three times to get the words out. Alan Rigby, the crew’s engineer and physicist, stepped up behind her, eyes running critically over the rusted remnants.

“But they haven’t been for a while, from the looks of it.”

Grunting, he yanked the jagged edge off of one of the ruined

“Think about it. This civilization sets up an enormous project to try to find out if there’s any intelligent species out there, it turns out there’s someone listening and looking for them too, and their message actually makes it to our planet... but they die out before we can establish contact.” The two walked on in somber silence for a few more moments.

“Yeah, that is pretty sad.”

“Heartbreaking, honestly. The loneliness of it.”

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Sep. 16, 2016 – 7

OPINION

A table of five

by Stephanie Barker

“

I

’m glad you both came tonight,” he said. I half expected the words to echo around the empty room. Whether this was intimate or awkward, I couldn’t really tell. We were sitting around a table set for 30 or more, and there were five of us. Just five.

Last Sunday, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law John Witt, TD ’94, LAW ’99, PhD ’00, opened the Jonathan Edwards Conversation on Renaming by welcoming head of college Mark Saltzman, Dasia Moore, PC ’18, and two JE sophomores to the table. Of these five, Witt and Moore are both members of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, the group newly formed in August with the mission of creating a set of guidelines on renaming buildings and other campus structures. Despite the low turnout at the JE conversation, Witt and Moore set the tone for an honest and constructive discussion. But instead of feeling encouraged, I found myself distracted by the irony of the situation.

Each college was to have such a conversation with its head of college, Witt, and Moore in order to discuss how to ensure that student voices would be heard, valued, and included in future naming decisions. Yet given a room with people who were asking us, practically begging us, to share our thoughts and opinions, no one had showed up to speak.

Why was the room so empty?

Have people become disinterested in the renaming issues that incited so much passion last year? Or have they lost so much faith in the administration that any kind of conversation is now seen as a waste of time, likely to produce yet another disengaged report with no real impact on student life, present or future?

Before the meeting last Sunday, I enjoyed a hearty family dinner in the JE dining hall. It was a typical dinner that came to an end in a typical way: we all grumbled about the work we still had to complete before the upcoming week began. As we stood to exit the dining hall, I asked if anyone in our party was planning on attending JE’s Conversation on Renaming.

The answers went something along the lines of “p-sets to finish,” “so much reading to do,” or “a paper due tonight.” The verdict was in.

Completely understandable, I thought. It’s a Sunday and there are mountains of work to be completed. I must admit, I nearly ducked out of the JE common room before 7 p.m. to make a start on my own reading. However, I had already RSVP’d to the event, so I decided to stay and participate.

In his invitation to the conversation, Head of College Mark Saltzman had written, “This committee is asked to consider a question of importance to all of us: ‘What are the principles that should guide a decision for renaming a historical building?’”

He added, “We at JE are fortunate that Professor Witt will visit us at what I hope will be a convenient time for you: Sunday September 18 at 7pm. I expect that many of you will want to attend.”

Like Head Saltzman, I too had expected that many JE Spiders would be in attendance, since the principles of renaming should be important to all of us.

But by the time 7:10 rolled around and Professor Witt began the conversation by saying, “We’re happy to run this conversation in a way that works best for you two,” it was abundantly clear that Head Saltzman had been mistaken. Not that many of us had wanted to attend.

My first thought was that maybe some kind of boycott had been organized.

I’d had my doubts about the setup and functioning of this committee. On

learning of its creation, I’d believed that the committee was just another attempt on the part of the President’s Office to appear to be listening, when actually student silence and acquiescence were desired.

After the amount of pain that was shared throughout campus last year, it is almost unbelievable to think that so little has changed. We have every reason to be skeptical. We are allowed to be frustrated with the administration. But skeptic or not, I do not believe that any opportunity to participate in the conversation should be turned down.

I don’t want to shout. I don’t want to be upset with the people that didn’t come. I don’t want to shame people into going to conversations that will be held throughout the other 11 colleges over the course of this year. The decision to partake or not in these conversations is not one that I can or should make for anyone but myself. But what I would like is for someone to answer me, for someone to tell me where the fire has gone.

I remember attending a conversation in the former JE Head of College’s House a few days after thousands of Yalies had gathered in solidarity on cross campus. The small common room was overcrowded. There weren’t were not even enough chairs to accommodate everyone who had shown up to discuss, among many other questions, the potential renaming of Calhoun College.

Contrast that with a table of five. Contrast 1000 Yalies walking across campus less than a year ago, carrying banners, and crying a message of unity, with a table of five. Contrast the outcry and anger that were seen after President Salovey announced that Calhoun’s name would remain with a table of five.

Contrast the conversations, passion and pain that we saw last semester with a table of five.

People were willing to put away the reading and p-sets, postpone paper writing, and close their laptops to join public demonstrations. Hundreds of people enthusiastically made Facebook statuses, changed profile pictures, and echoed words of support. Many Yalies were ready to march and make bold public statements only a few months ago, but now that that activism has turned more private, we aren’t so willing to make the same sacrifices.

Today activism often seems to be more about following a trend than actually bringing creating change. Take the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls campaign, for example. The movement saw celebrities, school children, and political figures come together to voice their outrage at the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls. It seemed like everyone from John Kerry to Cara Delevingne was voicing their disgust at the gross violation of human rights taking place at the hands of Boko Haram. And yet, five months after the girls had been kidnapped, long after the #BringBackOurGirls trend had come and gone, not a single student had been rescued.

This incident is just one of many worrying incidents that imply that people seem to care more about being seen as activists than they do about the results of their activism.

I don’t want the important conversations we began on campus last year to fall into this category. I would like to believe that our passion meant more than trendy visibility.

If the committee’s findings reflect yet another declaration that the name of Calhoun will remain, there will undoubtedly be community backlash. In declining to join the conversation, we would almost certainly be giving up our right to claim that our voices had not been heard. A platform has been established, and it is our responsibility to step up to it.

Graphic by Julia Hedges YH Staff

8 – The Yale Herald

Hole of hyperbole

by Linus Lu

I

n a lecture hosted by the William F. Buckley Program on Wed., Sept. 21, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wasted no time in beginning his attack on the progressive agenda. The talk was aptly titled “White Privilege, Multiculturalism, and Other Leftist Myths,” and Shapiro made all his points in just as provocative terms. He specifically targeted buzzwords and trends that have been prevalent on campuses across the country, including diversity, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and of course white privilege. His talk began—probably to no one’s surprise— with an offhand dig at Hillary Clinton; he then promptly labeled the progressive agenda a bunch of “dumb stupid nonsense.”

Shapiro delivered his speech to a largely enthusiastic crowd in SSS 114, with cameras live streaming it to YouTube. Though many people expected dustups with protesters, the event was overall a smooth sail. There was just one shout of “Bigot!” from the lobby, to which Shapiro quickly retorted, “Well I haven’t said anything bigoted yet, so you might have to wait.” The audience responded with cheers and laughter. The rest of Shapiro’s speech was similarly relentless; he promptly declared that “facts don’t care about feelings, and neither do I.” It was a whirlwind of onslaughts, Shapiro barely taking breaths between calling campus activists “fascists” and citing a profusion of studies and research aiming to debunk claims of systemic racism. But through his brash language, edgy jokes, and occasional condescension, Shapiro’s message boiled down to a simple plea to restore the value of individual agency to people who feel oppressed. He argued that instead of blaming the system and constructing a narrative of victimhood, social justice warriors should focus on their own choices and decisions, and promote a culture of individual initiative. It was a message that I felt was important and relevant, but one that was articulated in too incendiary a manner to truly be effective.

Shapiro spoke at length about what he called a culture of “self-appointed victimhood,” where refusal to take responsibility for one’s condition leads to vicious cycles of hopelessness. According to Shapiro, the inclination to blame societal ills on systemic racism or classist institutions downplays the importance of individual decisions. I find this insight especially powerful and relevant. This is not to deny the continual existence of injustices and disadvantages that minority groups face.

The idea that I want to emphasize, however—and that Shapiro drove home—is that circumstances do not negate the power of personal choices. He referred to this idea as “decision privilege.” It is the inherent ability of individuals to make sound choices and subsequently get ahead, as well as people’s capacity to cultivate good decision-making. And this privilege is more powerful than any “white privilege” or socioeconomic disparity. The heart of Shapiro’s argument is that we can all do so much more with ourselves if only we stopped blaming our problems on skin color, economic disadvantages, and historic injustices.

Because I was so persuaded by Shapiro’s message, I quite enjoyed his speech.

Shapiro shared sentiments that are underrepresented on college campuses, which is vitally important. He was funny and articulate, organized and disciplined in his arguments, and he had no shortage of conviction in his delivery. I was glad that

my own (and many of my peers’) misgivings about last fall’s protests were being finally vocalized. Shapiro concluded his speech with an appeal to decency and shared values, including those set forth in the Constitution and in Judeo-Christian doctrine. That is what I, and many others, also want: to have a common currency of beliefs that allow us to empathize with each other and thereby enable meaningful and constructive engagement.

Despite Shapiro’s sound arguments, I was disappointed that they were drowned out by divisive language. Of course, the event would likely not have been so popular if not for Shapiro’s provocative reputation. Because of Shapiro’s sharply divisive tone, though, the speech was largely a missed opportunity for conservatives and proponents of free speech to effectively expand their voice to a larger audience.

Shapiro claimed that he was speaking, in part, to convince members of the Left to embrace a more libertarian and intellectually open climate, where debate was encouraged, not stifled.

But Shapiro fell into a hypocritical hole of hyperbole and viciousness. In his criticism of the Left’s dictatorial language and its attempt to isolate itself in “safe spaces,” Shapiro himself appealed to an echo chamber of eager conservatives with fiery language, electing to rile up his ideological base instead of really speaking to moderates and liberals with the decency that he allegedly preaches. Using phrases like “fascist Left” and constantly attacking the moral character of progressive activists is hardly a strategy for healing ideological animosity and bring about civil discourse.

I remain strongly in favor of Shapiro’s thesis, and I maintain that his argument for “decision privilege”, as opposed to “white privilege”, is a convincing one. And, like Shapiro, I am weary of progressives that refuse open discussion and reject conservatives’ right to free expression. However, conservative proponents of free speech are not exempt from similar faults. .

Ben Shapiro, proud to be inflammatory, veered into this territory. Many conservatives have been content to sit on their self-proclaimed moral high ground and belittle the concerns of student activists, preferring to mock and insult rather than engage, then covering their tracks in the name of free speech.

On principle, I respect their prerogative to use their right to free expression in that manner. But I argue that a more responsible use of free speech would not involve simply speaking one’s mind, but also listening to each other, and actually using both empathy and reason to come together and build consensus.

Shapiro’s lecture was a refreshing ideological balance to a college campus that too often neglects real intellectual diversity. He is, in my opinion, right in his central argument. But perhaps we have placed too much capital on being right.

Free speech certainly does not mandate respect. But for free speech to operate effectively, with honest and open dialogue, respect is a necessary component. I am critical of progressive activists who have repeatedly failed in living up to this; Shapiro also failed on Wednesday. Now is the time to be effective, and that takes respect and a willingness to listen.

Graphic by Julia Hedges YH Staff Sep. 16, 2016 – 9

FEATURES

Building on Broadway Meghana Mysore, DC ’20, looks at the impact of new construction on the Broadway District.

I

n early 2015, Provost Ben Polak informed the university community via email of yet another reconfiguration of Yale’s New Haven: the construction of a new housing complex for graduate students on Elm Street, which would move some residents of the Hall of Graduate Studies to the last undeveloped swath of land in the Broadway District. Here, among franchises of upscale brands, sat a final relic of the area’s less polished past—an asphalt parking lot, bordered on Elm Street by a rusted metal fence. This August, jackhammers and hardhats welcomed students old and new back to the Broadway District. The rusted metal fence was gone, and construction had commenced on the development at 272-310 Elm Street.

Come October, excavation work will begin; come early-2017, the mixed-use development will rise above ground. Just after the end of the next academic school year, graduate students will call the former parking lot home, and the Shops at Yale will stretch uninterrupted from one end of the strip of Elm Street between York and Park Streets to the other. Two floors of retail space will sit below four levels of two-bedroom apartments—41, in total.

In many ways, this construction marks the apotheosis of University Properties’ gentrification of Yale’s periphery. It also marks a different kind of phenomenon: the continued blurring of the boundary between town and gown, as students relocate away from the heart of their campus and deeper into New Haven. And so when university officials dug shovels into dirt for a staged groundbreaking on August 24th, they affirmed Yale’s unchallenged transformation of New Haven into a neo-Gothic and red-brick fantasyland for its students and visitors alike.

YALE, FOR ONE, SEES THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS new housing complex as a realization of its vision for the Broadway District. “Where students live is an integral part of their graduate experience at Yale,” said Karen Peart, Deputy Press Secretary in the Yale Office of Public Affairs & Communication. “The goal is for them to foster deeper connections with each other, with Yale, and with their surrounding neighborhood and community.

The new building will be in the heart of New Haven’s downtown, close to the Broadway shopping district. This gives students an opportunity to live in a building that is central in terms of both the university and New Haven.”

10 – The Yale Herald

There is more to this “surrounding neighborhood and community” than meets the eye. This is a landscape of Apple Stores, Urban Outfitters and American Apparels. There is an outpost of Kiko Milano, whose website identifies the company as providing “face and body treatments of the highest quality, created to satisfy women of all ages.” Maison Mathis, with two locations in Dubai, sits near the corner of Elm and Park Streets. This is to say that the Broadway District serves as a gilded fringe to the blight of nearby neighborhoods, like Dwight and Dixwell.

But all is not well at the Shops at Yale: EmporiumDNA—an upscale clothing store with several locations across the United States—closed its shop at 1 Broadway last June after floundering since opening in 2014. Just across the street at GANT, retail associates mill about their under-frequented storefront. Manager Garrett Henson said: “We don’t see many students. They come and check things out, but not many of them buy clothes.”

From a safe distance, George Koutroumanis, the owner and manager of Yorkside Pizza, has watched this partial implosion of the Broadway District, which sits a block away from his own business. Koutroumanis noted: “In a nutshell, everyone’s trying their hardest to keep going.”

IT SEEMS, THEN, THAT THE BROADWAY DISTRICT has not succeeded in all the ways Yale intended. To this end, one of the area’s few recent successes has been Junzi Kitchen, whose location at 21 Broadway is the only property in the Broadway District that University Properties does not own. In fact, Lucas Sin, DC ‘15, Junzi Kitchen’s owner, attributed the restaurant’s popularity to his practice of inverting the neighborhood-building efforts of University Properties.

Sin said that nearby big-box stores have done little to recognize their siting here in New Haven. It is for this reason that he has emphasized “hyper-locality” in building a culture for Junzi Kitchen: “Yale students have a next-to-zero relationship with the real residents of New Haven,” he said. “I like hiring locals who are younger.

They’re all from New Haven and their work experience is working in a high school cafeteria or an old people’s home. They may be considered to have limited experience and prospects, but that’s not how I run kitchens. To me, the food that comes out is largely a product of the people who make it.”

In acknowledging the recent cultural sway of “hyperlocality,” Sin is onto something. Arethusa Farm Dairy, which opened its location at 1020 Chapel Street last spring and sources products from a farm in nearby Litchfield, Connecticut, often boasts lines out the door.

At Four Flours Baking Company just up Chapel Street, a husband-wife duo from Woodbridge, Connecticut sell popular, baked-from-scratch goods. In other words, the big-box stores of Broadway are out, and local establishments are slowly creeping in.

AND SO WHEN THE NEW GRADUATE HOUSING complex reaches completion in 2018, University Properties will face a dilemma: whether to pursue its Potemkin village of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel or whether to abandon this pursuit altogether and to subscribe to a new paradigm of development—of “hyperlocality” instead.

Sarah Eidelson, JE ’12, Alder to New Haven’s Ward One, where the development sits, hopes that University Properties adopts a strategy more in-line with Sin’s Junzi Kitchen: “It’s important that Yale is extremely thoughtful about what the residents of the area want to see and puts in businesses that are affordable and cater to the experiences of the people who live both in downtown and in other parts of the city.”

Some students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—who will one day inhabit the development—reiterate Eidelson’s sentiments. These students advocated for practicality over the sorts of showcase storefronts that currently line the Broadway District.

Miranda Sachs, GRD ’17, for one, said: “I think it would be really helpful to have a pharmacy or drugstore, as it would be helpful to have one a bit more central to campus.”

Eidelson and Sachs see the construction of the new housing complex as a chance for University Properties to revisit the identity it has long impressed upon the intersection of Broadway and Elm Streets. But not everyone is so optimistic: “University Properties is notorious for a long, arduous, bureaucratic process of vetting what businesses go into their spaces, in part because they want to make money from these businesses and they want to make sure that the businesses don’t screw up the culture of the space,” Sin said.

Perhaps, though, it’s this very culture that needs to change.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Sep. 16, 2016 – 11

Home in the making

By Eve Sneider

12 – The Yale Herald

A

t 1:30 a.m. on a warm night last May, Moutoni-Marie Ngaboyishema and her son Fabior Naurellio got off the Metro North at Union Station. The trip took more than a decade.

It began in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Marie lived with her family until eleven years ago when, faced with violence and instability, they fled to neighboring Rwanda. There, ten family members lived out of one tent in a refugee camp for eleven years. After making it through a screening process that often takes two years to complete, Marie, her husband Jean, and two other relatives, James and Anitha, made preparations to come to the United States.

On Apr. 26, 2016, Jean, James, and Anitha arrived in New Haven. There, they were met by members of the Jewish Community Alliance for Refugee Resettlement (JCARR) who would be sponsoring them and facilitating their transition to life in the United States. But Marie and two-year-old Fabior were sent to Indianapolis instead. JCARR was tasked with reuniting the family stateside. On the night of their planned reunion, Jean Silk, coordinator of JCARR, had planned for a celebration. Instead, she faced a logistical nightmare. She found herself racing around into the wee hours of the morning, calling on anyone who would listen to help her locate Marie and Fabior and deliver them safely to New Haven.

En route, Marie and Fabior made it all the way to New York City before running into trouble. Port Authority bus terminals can be overwhelming even for the American-born and English-speaking, and as soon as they stepped off the bus, the last leg of their journey became—like the rest of their voyage— roundabout. With Marie and Fabior disoriented and scared in the confusion of the terminal, it became an unexpected team effort.

There were the Port Authority police officers who kept an eye on them until an escort from New Haven arrived. One, who introduced himself to them as Officer Collins, even drove them to Grand Central in his police car. Local authorities, passers-by, and JCARR volunteers all played a role in Marie and Fabior’s safe delivery. “Even the security guard at Union Station was excited about their imminent arrival. Exclaiming in awe over the emotions of the moment, he took pictures, shared our tears of joy, gave me his phone number and offered to help JCARR at any time,” Silk recounts. She says that this night, though harrowing for all parties involved, demonstrates what America can offer: “an endless chain of people who went out of their way to ensure [the family was] safe, comfortable, and eventually, reunited.”

Now more than ever, America and Americans are responding to the global refugee crisis. Across the nation, resettlement agencies work to provide those in need with access to that sort of endless chain. In the last year, New Haven in particular has lived up to its name, resettling more refugees than even New York and Los Angeles.

JCARR IS A COMMUNITY CO-SPONSOR GROUP, ONE OF FIFTY IN Connecticut trained by and affiliated with New Haven’s Integrated Refugee

and Immigration Services (IRIS). IRIS was founded in 1982 as a program of the Episcopal Social Service of the Diocese of Connecticut; today, it is an independent nonprofit that works with two national resettlement agencies, Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) and the Church World Service (CWS).

Around the country, there are 350 local agencies—among them various faith-based groups, charities, and nonprofits, including IRIS—that are on the ground supporting and working with newly resettled refugee families. Each agency at this level is connected to at least one of nine national voluntary agencies. None of these are public programs, but all nine work closely with the State Department to resettle refugees. The State Department allocates cases, which they then delegate to local organizations.

There are an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide. Just last month, while Yale students were starting the fall term, the U.S. reached its goal of resettling 85,000 refugees in the 2016 fiscal year, of whom 10,000 are Syrian. Around 850 refugees of the 85,000 came to Connecticut, where close to 500 were resettled by IRIS. These numbers are impressive, even shocking, when compared to those of previous years. As recently as 2006, IRIS was resettling only 70 refugees a year. By contrast, they welcomed 68 refugees just last July, including 51 Syrians. In the last year, their resettlement rate has increased by 100 percent.

According to Chris George, the Executive Director of IRIS, these statistics were made possible by increased community interest due to a surge in coverage of the global refugee crisis. At that time, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security were sending more people and resources to refugee camps to help with screening, or what George calls “the most rigorous vetting process in the world.”

Once cleared, IRIS receives two weeks’ notice that a refugee family has booked a flight to the United States (usually financed by loans). Its case managers are the first people these families will meet upon getting off a Greyhound bus or Metro North train. These families will come home to New Haven apartments that IRIS has rented and, with the help of donations, furnished. During their first ninety days in the United States, IRIS works under federal guidelines to get each family settled. The kids must be enrolled in school. They must receive a health assessment within thirty days of their arrival. They must get an employment assessment within fourteen.

IRIS provides other services, too. Its modest East Rock office, awash in brightly colored maps and multilingual signage, is the home base to teams dealing with many of the intricacies of newly resettled life. Ashley Makar, outreach coordinator, wrote that “one visitor described [the IRIS offices] as Goodwill meets National Geographic meets the DMV.” There are daily English lessons. There are citizenship classes. There is the ever-active Employment Services office, which helps new residents build resumes, practice interviews, and find jobs. There’s a women’s group, a food pantry with halal meat, and even wellness sessions. As its storerooms— crammed floor to ceiling with dishware, mattresses, and microwaves—will

Sept. 16, 2016– 13

attest, IRIS has long relied on the support of volunteers (as the organization’s website delicately puts it, it receives only “modest” federal funding). And regardless of the devotion and wherewithal of its staff, there are limits to how many families IRIS can support.

The IRIS office is much like IRIS itself: awe-inspiring in its breadth, but a little concerning by the same token. Laurel McCormack, IRIS’s Acculturation Programs Coordinator, remarks that between green card and naturalization applications, reuniting family members left behind, and handling international travel, the legal team has “more than they can handle.” McCormack herself makes this comment while racing between various classrooms and offices, hugging young mothers in headscarves and laughing with their smiling husbands along the way.

THE LIMITATIONS IRIS FACES AS A SMALL AND MINIMALLY FUNDED organization, coupled with an outpouring of community interest and support, led its leadership to revitalize the co-sponsorship model. IRIS defines cosponsorship as “a shared commitment between IRIS and a community group to help a refugee family resettle in Connecticut and become self-sufficient.”

In essence, the co-sponsor group assumes most of the responsibilities an IRIS

and how welcoming the neighborhood is. Ask how they would feel about having refugees from the Middle East and Africa as neighbors. Jot down some of their responses. d. Familiarize yourself with the rental market in these neighborhoods. Talk to landlords. Ask: Would you be willing to rent to a refugee family? Would you consider a 6-month lease? Jot down some of their responses. e. If the landlord requires a co-signer on the lease, would your group co-sign?

N.B. do not make any rental commitment until you are assured of the arrival of the family (by IRIS –– we usually get 2 weeks notice or less from our national affiliates.)

Beyond location, there is the question of funding (can your group raise between $4,000 and $10,000, or enough to provide three to six months of assistance?) and that of language (do you have access to a translator? what about English classes for adult speakers of other languages?). Above all, the group must be, as George puts it, “large and strong.”

Once approved, the co-sponsor must work its way through IRIS’s 43-page co-sponsor manual and attend training sessions with case managers before arrangements are made to pair it with a family.

Often, it’s the minutia of case managers’ own experiences that proves most helpful to groups in training. Advice can be as simple as, say, reminding co-sponsors to bring water and snacks when they go to meet their family late at night when they first arrive. If a Connecticut Limo is dropping a family in New Haven, but their co-sponsor group is from all the way out in Danbury, little details like pretzels will ensure a smooth and easy last leg of the long, taxing trip. This, too, is a crucial element of the job of co-sponsors. Beyond logistical assistance, they aim to provide a community and facilitate a comfortable transition once a family arrives in America.

From 2012-2014, IRIS worked with two or three co-sponsor groups each year. In the 2016 fiscal year, this figure rose to fifty. The explosive surge in community interest and support led George and his team to take a risk and tell Washington to send them twice as many refugees in 2016, the same year President Obama vowed to increase the number of refugees taken in by the United States by 15,000. It was a huge decision. But, George jokes, “at one point, before the State Department agreed to send us any more refugees, I was saying in a kind of strange, joking way, saying we might not have enough refugees to go around and satisfy the need of these community groups.”

As it turns out, he had nothing to worry about. Of the 500 refugees resettled

by IRIS in the last year, more than 200 were placed with co-sponsors.

“Before you know it, the relationship really evolves into one of friendship and just helping your neighbor.”

—Chris George, Executive Director of IRIS case manager would normally. A typical co-sponsored family lives outside New Haven, in the same town or community as its co-sponsor group. According to George, “the classic co-sponsorship is that they’re in a separate school district, a separate employment environment, a separate community where they’re being resettled.” In the beginning, the family depends on the volunteers, but gradually they adjust and become self-sufficient. Ideally, “before you know it, the relationship really evolves into one of friendship and just helping your neighbor, not so much financial support,” he says.

This model has been around for years, but it has only recently become a keystone of IRIS’s operations. When George started working at IRIS eleven years ago, the office was moving away from co-sponsorship. “The director, my predecessor, thought it was more trouble than it was worth, that co-sponsors were going off on their own and doing anything they wanted to do,” George said. “She was fed up with it. So I went out and talked to people about it, and I learned that most of the problems were the result of the co-sponsors just not being trained and selected properly.”

As Executive Director, George has worked to revamp co-sponsorship, making it a viable option for refugee families and IRIS alike. Groups who are interested must apply, be vetted, and prove that they fit the circumstances IRIS requires of its community groups. It is not a quick or simple process. One question from the “Housing” section of IRIS’s co-sponsor application reads as follows: a. Identify 2-3 neighborhoods in your vicinity where there are affordable apartments (2 bedrooms for about $1,000/month; and 3 bedrooms for about $1,400/mo; or less) N.B. Please find housing outside of New Haven City Limits, unless most of your group is based in New Haven. And please research both 2br and 3br apartments. b. What are the names of these neighborhoods? Please describe them, especially in terms of safety (check crime records), general upkeep, number of abandoned homes, and diversity. c. Talk to a few people in these neighborhoods (residents walking down the street, people working in local businesses.) Ask them how safe they feel

14 – The Yale Herald

SILK DESCRIBES THE DECISION TO FORM A CO-SPONSOR GROUP AS A KIND of “swooping together.” It began at a meeting last fall. IRIS, inundated with phone calls from people looking to help amid the Syrian refugee crisis, arranged an information session for interested groups and volunteers. As Silk put it, “I looked around the room and I knew all the Jews!” Given the monumentality of a co-sponsor’s responsibilities, they decided to band together.

Silk, who had just been laid off from her job in cross-cultural education at Yale, was “looking for a new challenge.” Following the info session at IRIS, she spoke to the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven about stepping up to spearhead a new Jewish Community Alliance, a job for which she is paid “really a tiny bit of money.” Five congregations in the greater New Haven area hopped on board, along with the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation, and then the application process could begin.

This process of forming coalitions of groups is something IRIS encourages, according to Liese Klein, IRIS’s Development and Communications Director (those involved with outreach at IRIS are accustomed to playing matchmaker).

JCARR is one of many co-sponsors that started as several different groups.

As the leader, Silk brought together members of these separate communities.

In particular, she worked to create different task forces to deal with various aspects of resettlement.

“Our Housing Team finds an apartment; our Household Team furnishes, supplies, and sets up the apartment; our Welcome Team meets them upon arrival, shows them around their home, tells them how things like the stove and shower work, and provides a warm, culturally appropriate meal for their first evening,” Silk explains. And then there is the Education Team, the Healthcare Team, the Transportation Team, the Finance Team. JCARR even has a Cultural Orientation Team to “help them learn all the essentials to living daily life in our culture, from grocery shopping and banking to watching fireworks on the Fourth of July to going swimming in the summer.” And the Odd Jobs Network helps family members practice skills that will improve their employment prospects.

Recently, they cleaned up graves at a local Jewish cemetery.

As evidenced by the number of task forces alone that Silk has set up, she understands the importance of volunteers. She has come to see who is reliable and will do what they say, and has settled on a trusted team of close to thirty active community members from a long list of 130 volunteers. And the level of community engagement has inspired her time and time again. “The day we were moving furniture into the apartment,” Silk recalls, “I counted at one moment 25 volunteers in the house including some children, even a little boy scrubbing the bathtub, and it was emotional beyond my expectations just to see what a group of people can do.”

The co-sponsor group through Yale’s own Saint Thomas More (STM) boasts similar numbers. Jenn Schaaf, an assistant chaplain, explains that while the core team is technically comprised of twenty community members and three STM staff members, there are more than seventy people on their volunteer list, and more than 100 people who have donated funds or supplies.

And yet, one of the trickiest parts of co-sponsorship is realizing that at a certain point it shouldn’t take a village anymore. Part of the definition of cosponsorship is helping a family become independent. As Silk sees it, while a volunteer feels the urge to do as much as possible for the family, “that’s dealing more with our needs than theirs.” For example, it took JCARR volunteers two months of driving the family everywhere to realize that in the long run this was counter-productive. “We turned our attention to accompanying them on the bus until they became confident about using public transportation to get where they need to go,” she said.

Silk describes JCARR’s current phase as, “we’ll help you if you ask us for help.”

The goal with all co-sponsor groups is that eventually resettled families will go from being dependents to simply being community members, even friends. Both Silk and Schaaf were quick to point out how much they have enjoyed learning from and about their families’ backgrounds. And looking forward, there is hope that these families will help the ones that follow. According to Silk, JCARR has plans to resettle three families a year, one at a time. “I could see [our current family] helping with grocery shopping or adult education,” she notes.

ACROSS THE NATION, IT IS MOSTLY CHURCHES THAT USE THE COMMUNITY co-sponsor model. JCARR and STM alike cite religious reasons in their decision to become co-sponsors. For Jenn Schaaf, Pope Francis’ request that Catholics take in refugees was a major contributing factor. For Jean Silk, it was the Jewish tenets of tzedakah, or giving back to the poor as an act of justice, and tikkun olam, which means world repair.

Religious groups have been a major proponent in refugee resettlement in Connecticut. “When I give a talk at a church or a synagogue, some of the older people in the congregation will say, ‘I remember when we resettled a family from Southeast Asia.’ Or, in a synagogue they’ll say, ‘Yes, we resettled Soviet Jews who fled persecution from the former USSR,’” George remarks. Both Klein and George explain that while they encourage any sort of community group to get involved in co-sponsorship—as George put it, “We can’t let religious people have all the fun!” —it happens that most co-sponsors are faith-based groups.

Faith-based groups aren’t the only ones with a history of helping refugees resettle in a city that terms itself a Sanctuary City. Silk cites this legacy, mentioning the Elm City Resident Card program as something that marks New Haven as a leader in immigrant rights. “Continuing that tradition feels right,” she says.

In a recent statement, Mayor Toni Harp ARC ’78 stated that, “New Haven will continue to welcome new residents from other countries and embrace their positive contributions in our community.” As her Director of Communications, Laurence Grotheer, says, “Mayor Harp often points out that with the exception of native Americans, every single New Haven resident has ancestry from outside the United States, is descended from immigrants, and cedes the high ground trying to deny entry to new immigrants.”

This commitment to immigrants places New Haven at odds with those who are less keen to take in refugees. Last November, for example, Chris George and his team at IRIS agreed to take in a Syrian refugee family at a moment’s notice after Governor (and now, potential vice president) Mike Pence barred them from coming to Indiana, where they were originally to resettle. An article published in the Connecticut Mirror on Nov. 18 referred to the family as “unwitting pawns in a national post-Paris ideological argument.”

Yet on the other side, the voices of Mike Pence and others opposed to opening the United States’ doors are louder and more vehement now than ever. A letter to the editor printed in the New Haven Register not three weeks ago, on Sept.

7, argued that taking in more Syrian refugees is ill-advised for many reasons, among them that “we are currently witnessing… Islam’s mandatory migration for purposes of waging jihad.”

ON A RECENT SUNNY AFTERNOON, THE CORNER IN FRONT THE IRIS office teems with chatty men and cigarette smoke. Laurel McCormack stands on the stoop. “Yalla, guys!” she calls out, gesturing for the men to come inside.

“And don’t smoke! It’ll kill you!” It is time for the day’s Cultural Orientation (CORE) session to begin.

The two and a half days of CORE sessions are part of the government’s requirements for resettlement. Families resettled in the last two months by co-sponsors and IRIS case managers alike crowd into a small classroom for today’s class, which will cover education, child abuse, and employment.

Small children reach for the Chex mix while their parents pick at rice from styrofoam takeout boxes, and exactly twelve minutes behind schedule the session itself begins. Three translators and two instructors work sentence by sentence with the families, most of them Syrian, to discuss the basics of sending your child to school. This is what a school break is. This is how the school bus works. Sometimes you need to write a note for your child, here is what it should look like.

It takes a while to get through the material. The classroom is cacophonous; the students all chatter. There are babies crying and children running around and the rustling of near-empty bags of Famous Amos cookies. Each sentence from a translator triggers a stream of questions. The parents lean forward in their seats and scribble notes. A few rush up to the instructors during the fifteen minute breaks. What if the bus doesn’t stop very close to our house? What if my daughter gets sick? What if my son needs help with his schoolwork?

The room is abuzz with confusion—about the finer points of raising children in America, and also about where the second package of graham crackers went.

But there’s a calmness, too, evident in the way one couple holds hands atop the table, or in how a young man swings around in his cushioned swivel chair.

After the first break, the CORE instructors move into discussing the challenges children will face in the coming months. Adjusting is hard, they emphasize; it takes time. As they speak, a young girl runs in from the children’s playroom, tears in her eyes. Her father scoops her up, kisses her cheeks, sets her down on his lap. Then he returns to his notes.

Graphic by Isaac Morrier

Sept. 16, 2016 – 15

CULTURE Center for semiBritish art

by Cati Vlad

Intellectual stampede

by William Reid

B

y 6:55 p.m. on Mon., Sept. 19, Sprague Hall had nearly reached full capacity. The crowd babbled with anxious anticipation, and an announcement was made asking those located near an empty space to raise their hands. Professors and punks in cotton suits and denim jackets rubbed shoulders as they shuffled down the aisles. The electric atmosphere of the room seemed to herald a rock concert. And yet, projected behind the podium on stage, large serifed lettering reminded everyone of what they were attending: “Windham-Campbell.”

The Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes, now in their fourth year, honor nine writers of the English language—three each in fiction, nonfiction, drama, and starting next year, poetry—for their collective works to date with a grant of $150,000, intended to help fund their future writing careers. As prize director Michael Kelleher noted in his opening remarks, the awards’ benefactors, authors themselves, recognized that what writers need most to work is mental space and time, resources constrained by everyday concerns, like how to pay the rent. The prizes’ selection process reflects that ethos.

“We’re looking at people who deserve a wider audience,” Kelleher told me on Monday morning over the phone. “We’re looking to have an impact on their careers.”

That’s a praiseworthy goal, and treatment well deserved by the prizes’ recipients. On the Windham-Campbell’s slow march to international recognition—for the first time this year, its announcement was covered in most major metropolitan newspapers in the English-speaking world—it has grown more equipped to alter the trajectories of the prizewinners’ careers. Still, perhaps the festival’s organizers felt that to truly launch the recipients into orbit, it needed a little publicity rocket fuel.

Enter Patti Smith. The legendary singersongwriter, performer, and author—with a few literary prizes of her own—gave the festival’s opening lecture and drew many from the Yale community and beyond to Monday night’s event. Many (if not most) came for her, not the authors. A graduate student I spoke to had never heard of the prize, though he’s been on campus since its inception in 2013. A married couple seated near me had come from upstate New York (by train!) to see their musical idol speak. As Kelleher took the stage to start the introductions, the husband whispered in my ear, a little guiltily, “So what’s the prize for?”

So it was an odd, if not unproductive, partnership. Presenting the WindhamCampbell opening lecture is a great honor to Smith’s growing literary achievement and, perhaps, an auspicious sign; one of this year’s recipients, Hilton Als, gave last year’s opening lecture. What’s more, her lecture is due for publication later this year as part of a series called “Why I Write” by Yale University Press. Her fame can only lend more publicity to the prizes, and her lecture––a beautiful meditation on how writing allows one to delay the inevitable existential end-point of the self––was a fitting paean to the activity that they honor.

As Smith concluded, we write, “because we cannot simply live.”

Still, like any marriage, the partnership had its tensions. After Smith finished, a few in the audience stood up to leave. Encouraged by these intrepid deserters, many more soon followed. Kelleher, for his part, tried to stem the tide. “You should feel guilty,” he admonished from the podium.

“We’re all looking at you.” The WindhamCampbell had hitched itself to Smith’s celebrity steed, but on Monday evening, it looked as if it couldn’t hold on for the ride.

A

n alcove-like room in the Yale Center for British Art houses photographs, costumes, and sculptures by the Nigerian British Artist Yinka Shonibare. Shonibare’s work at large explores the themes of cultural and national identity in a world affected by colonialism. The pieces in this exhibition are no exception. While the work is centered on the life and death of Admiral Nelson, a British flag officer in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, Shonibare’s choice of materials and colors reimagines the subject matter in a tribute to West African artistic traditions.

One of the most striking pieces is the maquette for Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a sculpture that was exhibited in London’s Trafalgar Square from 2010 to 2012. The work in part celebrates Nelson’s legacy; it is a model of the HMS Victory, the Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. But Shonibare uses his signature batik fabric for the sails, thereby recognizing, within his homage to Nelson, Africa’s history in colonial commerce.

The rest of the displayed works can be seen as parodies of typical Western motifs: Shonibare reimagines acclaimed Western artworks in a manner that incorporates African artistic elements.

Self-Portrait (After Warhol) 2 is a clear example. Directly mirroring Warhol’s Camouflage Self-Portrait, Shonibare replaces the pop artist’s figure with his own. The key elements of Warhol’s aesthetic persona are replicated in a novel manner. The spikes of the pop artist’s wig, for instance, are replaced with

Shonibare’s messily arranged dreadlocks. The piece manifests the double identity of Shonibare, who was born in London in 1962 but spent his childhood in Lagos, Nigeria.

In another piece, the first in the series The Death of Chatterton – Henry Wallis, whose source work is also on display at the Center, a lifeless body, clad in patterned fabrics and neon orange stockings, sprawls across a bed. One can’t help but notice the constructed nature of the scene, and the dissonance of having these two intersecting cultures in a period much too artificially early in art history. (Nelson’s death was in 1802 while British colonization of Africa only commenced at the end of the 19th century.) This is perhaps the exact reaction that Shonibare wished to elicit in his audience: one of amusement but also of intrigue regarding how easily ‘famous’ works of art, or notable historic events, can be personalized and adapted include a broader global-historical context.

Viewing the Shonibare exhibition at the Yale Centre for British Art is an exercise in examining cross-cultural history.

The works are a cry for the acknowledgment of colonialism as a significant influence on the threading of British political and artistic history. They are a cry for the representation of historically colonized cultures in what is today deemed “Western art.”

To complement the exhibition, the event “A Conversation with Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)” has been organized and will take place on Tuesday, October 25th at 5:30pm in the Yale Center for British Art.

Graphic by Yanna Lee Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff 18 – The Yale Herald

Baptism by the blues

by Robert Newhouse

T

he rains began in the summer of 1926. By Christmas Day that year, the Mississippi had reached historic levels, leaving 27,000 square miles of the American South under nearly 30 feet of water.

Then, the levees broke. 145 of them, to be exact. 246 perished, and almost 630,000 predominantly AfricanAmerican people were displaced. And it only kept pouring.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 had such catastrophic consequences that you would expect its film rendition to have CGI waves engulfing CGI people living in CGI houses. Instead, the film that charts this remarkable natural disaster is “The Great Flood,” the third featurelength documentary by esoteric director and multi-media artist Bill Morrison.

Morrison, who attended last Sunday’s screening at The Whitney Humanities Center wearing jeans and a black baseball cap, has the general appearance of an artist who has decided long ago to let their work and not their personal appearance be of main interest. What he lacks in personal fashion, Morrison soon makes up for with his inventively vague introduction of the film as “an elliptical work,” that aspires to put the viewer “on a raft of visual information.” Elliptical work? Raft of visual information?

Looking around at the crowd of fifteen or so other screening-goers, I wondered: What have I gotten myself into?

But then the lights vanished, someone coughed, and the first, grainy image flashed on screen.

Using a combination of decayed newsreels and aerial footage, Morrison relates the cataclysmic flood without so much as setting a scene, shooting an original frame, or even voicing a word. But the film is by no means silent; Morrison’s assemble of vintage footage is accompanied by an original score crafted by the guitarist and composer,

Bill Frisell and recorded live by Frisell, Ron Miles, Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen. While Morrison’s imagery tells the external story of the flood, Frisell’s score demonstrates its musical implications.

A mix of what Morrison called “rhapsodic arias” and good old blues, Frisell’s score reflects the forced migration of roughly 200,000 mainly African-American sharecroppers as well as the musical transformation that followed them north. Among those who made the trip were renowned Delta Blues artists, Big Joe Williams and Freddie Spruell. Their musical style, which included explosive guitar parts combined with poetic storytelling, would soon inspire the next generation of blues artists in Chicago, where both settled after the flood of ‘27. On a broader level, the influx of African-American artists to Northern cities created a more centralized market for the distribution of recorded blues music, which had once been an almost exclusively live genre. This transition laid the foundation for the growth of blues from a regional dialect of country music into the musical soil that sprouted perhaps the most influential musical genre of the 20th Century: rock and roll.

Frisell’s score and Morrison’s imagery share a tone surprisingly absent of misery in a film that deals with such tragedy. In steady, unhurried shots, the first rains of 1926 are shown swallowing up and soothing the land as though the water were a liquid blanket and not an unstoppable wave of destruction. The melodic guitar and trumpet piece that accompanies these images only furthers the odd sentiment that, somehow, this flood is something worthy of reverence, not mourning. And most startling of all are Morrison’s depictions of the people affected by the flood: contrary to what you might expect when watching a

film about a natural disaster, there are no scenes of families grieving their lost homes.

Despite the optimistic tenor of the film, Morrison is no sadist. He does not delight in the leveling of entire towns or in the collective sorrow of a mainly African-American population affected by the flooding. Instead, he conveys its liberating effect on its survivors. With the inhumane practice of sharecropping as the backdrop for the film, Morrison portrays the flood as a catalyst for social change of biblical proportions. As the director mentioned in his post-screening remarks, “the flood gave people working on sharecropping plantations an opportunity to leave. Everything was destroyed and so no one was making any money anyway.” And leave they did: the second half of the film follows the subsequent migration up from the Mississippi Delta. The footage, which earlier had been marked by a constant level of decay, becomes clearer and surer of itself, as if a veil has lifted. So, too, the tentative guitar strumming of the first part of the film is replaced with driving, momentous chords as the Delta Blues become the Chicago Blues and, in so doing, presage rock and roll.

After a whirling sequence in which images of folks boarding trains are overlaid on a reproduced map, the camera finally settles on a single African-American woman. The sense of renewal is palpable. Morrison has been building this ethos since the first shots of the movie, those that show the flood rushing in gracefully, a liquid path to freedom from the horrors of sharecropping.

This woman is, finally, a microcosm of Morrison’s conception of the flood as a constructive event: In the face of destruction, she does not despair. She dances.

Graphic by Shelby Redman YH Staff

Sep. 16, 2016 – 19

REVIEWS

The Challenge gone Bananas

by Emma Chanen YH Staff

E

ven a casual fan of MTV’s long-running realitycompetition show The Challenge knows the one word that can strike fear into the heart of any Challenger: Bananas.

Having watched seventeen of the twenty-eight seasons of The Challenge, I am no casual fan, so when I heard that Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio was returning for Rivals III to be partnered with fellow Challenge heavyweight Sarah Rice, I knew the only possible outcome for this season was the two of them with a check on top of some beautiful mountain.

What I could not have possibly predicted was the sharp decline in quality of this season. I have long longed for the glory days of The Challenge when there was less complaining and the challenges were more athletic. The show started to go downhill when MTV allowed players from its reality dating/game show Are You the One? to compete in Challenges; barring a few exceptions, these kids are less athletic, less interesting, and more likely to start stupid drama and/or quit during a challenge. Though past seasons have felt ridiculous, however, none have felt so purely fake as this one. Justin Booth, who served as executive producer for most of the lifespan of my fandom, was replaced this season by Lisa Fletcher. I can’t help but think that this change led to some of the phoniness of the season. The drama of the season grew increasingly preposteƒrous, building up to what amounted to racist and misogynistic bullying and a disgusting final twist.… But I’m getting worked up.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND FOR THE UNINITIATED: THE Challenge, originally The Real World: Road Rules Challenge (you see why they changed it), is a spin-off of the iconic reality series The Real World (1992 - present). The premise of the show was to take members of old Real World casts and have them compete on a show like the Real World but with athletic competitions and for cash prizes. They kept the nice locale, unlimited booze, and sexual tension of the original show, but added competition and money. Genius. And these aren’t silly, elementary school field day style challenges either. Think more American Ninja Warrior than Disney Channel Games (RIP). Celebrated sports analyst Bill Simmons calls The Challenge “America’s Fifth Major Sport” (which means if you watch the NFL you super can’t judge me for my fandom!). It’s an airtight premise, but what really makes this show worth watching season after season is that though old people leave and new contestants come every season, there remains a reliable cast of players who have created a narrative arc to follow. We follow their stats and their spats. It’s what makes a theme like Rivals III, where competitors are partnered with people they hate, even possible.

JOHNNY BANANAS IS THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF THE

Challenge. This season, Bananas snagged the elusive sixth ring (they don’t actually get rings), making him even with MJ. Before you set this paper on fire in response to the comparison I just made, let me qualify. The NBA and The Challenge are two different ball games in that one is not a ball game at all. Challenges range from the impossible (scaling a 14,000 foot mountain on no sleep) to the inane (licking peanut butter off a plastic board to reveal a secret combination for your team’s lock). Though certainly silly, the game also involves strategizing and politicking to stay out of eliminations, and occasionally great depth perception or tangram chops or some other wildcard skill. The Challenge is unpredictable, which is why it is so extraordinary to have such a standout player. Bananas is so good that the only time his arch nemeses, CT and Wes, have beaten him in a final is when they were partnered on Rivals II. He’s had various Scottie Pippens along the way—Tyler on Rivals (season 21), Camilla on Battle of the Exes (season 22), his whole boat on The Island (season 16), and Sarah of course—but that’s where the MJ analogy ends. He’s pocketed almost $700,000 in prize money over the course of his 13-season career, which is impressive for a Challenger but nothing on Michael’s career millions; he wasn’t always the MVP on his winning teams, and good ole 2-3 never stabbed his teammates in the back to win extra prize money…. But I’ll get to that.

POOR SARAH HAS BEEN PLAGUED BY TERRIBLE CHALLENGE partners. After making it to the final in her very first season (and losing to a Bananas armed with a ridiculous squad) she got Vinny on Fresh Meat (season 12) who lasted two episodes, then lazy Katelynn (season 21), then Vinny again who got them DQ-ed for fighting (season 22), then Trishelle whom everyone called “Trashelle” because she’s a certified garbage human being (season 24). Sarah’s reputation on The Challenge is the lovable camp counselor. When everyone is bored in the house, it’s Sarah who comes up with the games and the parties to keep them occupied. When grown-up adults are peeing themselves about doing heights or water challenges, Sarah’s telling the confessional camera how excited she is to do something she’s never done before.

And when it’s time for Sarah to get it done, she kicks ass.

Two seasons before Rivals III was Battle of the Exes II (season 26), and Sarah and her badass, one-handed partner Jordan were dominating. Sarah & Jordan and Bananas & Nany were the frontrunners out of the gate, and I expected to see both teams in the final. But in the final elimination, Sarah had the chance to basically guarantee a win by sending her friend and ally Bananas in. So she threw him into a physical elimination against a much bigger team, and Bananas and Nany lost and went home.

Bananas famously once said, “This is a dirty game, bro.

I’ve always said, all is fair in love, war, and Challenges.”

He must have forgotten that after Sarah’s power play because after he lost the elimination, there was bad blood.

When Bananas and Sarah returned for Rivals III, they were portrayed as mortal enemies because of the Exes backstab. I saw through it from moment one; that was the first red flag. I didn’t think twice about it before the season began, but when the premier started I immediately sensed the difference. Johnny was butt hurt, which makes sense; he had lost a lot of money. But he now had the best female partner currently in The Challenge game, and if he didn’t like her anymore he certainly still respected her. Bananas and Sarah weren’t even good at pretending to still hate each other on camera, but the producers still followed that storyline. There are plenty of reasonable critiques I could have leveled at The Challenge over the years, but contrived drama was not one that would have even crossed my mind. With the entirely phony fights that spontaneously erupted throughout Rivals III to the fact that Bananas and Sarah dominated almost every Challenge, this season was mishandled.

That brings me to the twist. The producers decided that in the final challenge, the Challengers would not only be competing against other teams in the final but also against their partners. The partner with the most individual points at the end would get to decide whether to split the prize money with their partner or take it all for themselves. This twist was incendiary but ultimately stupid and could have a real-life effect on the spurned partner. For all three teams, the male partner ended up with more points, which made the end reveal of split it or just split feel grossly gendered.

Spoiler alert: Johnny took the money. He left Sarah crying at the top of a mountain with zero dollars. After an entire season spent “repairing” their “broken” relationship, which was broken because Sarah threw Johnny into an elimination, Johnny acted the hypocrite and stabbed her right back. If it was real, it’s all kinds of wrong, mostly because within the framework of the show there’s nothing really condemning this obviously terrible act. But it also looked so fake. I would bet the value of the many hours I’ve spent watching this show on the fact that Fletcher took Bananas aside and said, “If you take the money we’ll pay it all and give Sarah her share too,” just to create drama.

I was fine with a show where people got drunk and yelled at each other or threw their best friends into physical combat, but I’m not really okay with a production that allows for the emotional terrorizing and actual robbery that took place this season. With Bananas’ likely retirement postcash out, it may be time for this Challenge fan to hang up her jersey as well. If truly all is fair in love, war, and MTV Challenges, maybe I’ll start watching Unreal instead.

Image courtesy of MTV

20 – The Yale Herald

Film: Southside With You

I

n an American society where biographical films often present presidents as caricatures (Oliver Stone’s 2008 W.) or tragic heroes (Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln), there is something incredibly refreshing about screenwriter and director Richard Tanne’s feature debut Southside with You (2016). The film captures Michelle and Barack Obama’s fateful first date. And with a fair dose of slowly building romantic tension, it’s a delightful film—fun, politically aware, and properly hopeful.

Tanne makes the unusual choice to base the film on almost uninterrupted talking between two people, something rare in a Hollywood obsessed with constant action. The only film I’ve ever seen that successfully carries the same tone is Richard Linklater’s beloved indie Before Sunrise. For both of these films, conversation is the simple and effective vehicle through which the characters struggle with ideas of love and happiness over the course of one day.

Of course, a movie that creates an entire relationship out of a single date unavoidably contains some moments that are in danger of being too formulaic, of presenting a couple whose instant match is too good to be true. But the film’s lead actors effortlessly carry the conversation throughout the film, keeping it believable in a way that recent romantic comedies can’t match. Tika Sumpter embodies the grace and brightness of the First Lady, and Parker Sawyers, a new face in Hollywood, captures all the sweetness and charm of the real Barack.

The movie never forgets where this young couple will eventually end up, and when Sawyer’s Barack gives a speech at a community meeting, it feels like we’ve been given access to the start of something special. Tanne’s script here seems brilliantly self-referential, since Barack discusses the first black mayor of Chicago by saying that, “he had to face the great truth of our country: it’s not easy to get things done… [but] we have to let go of judgement…. That’s where things get done—that’s America.”

We know how Barack and Michelle’s story will end from the very beginning of the film, but that doesn’t keep it from being an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. And if you’re feeling predictably lost about your future, then let the intelligence, passion, and light-heartedness of Southside with You serve as proper inspiration.

-Isabel Mendia

TV: Stranger Things

Y

es, Stranger Things really is as good as your friends have been telling you. The eight-episode Netflix original series debuted last July, but has already been renewed for a second season. Luckily for some (and agonizingly for others), you still have almost a year to catch up in case you’ve been living under a rock all summer.

Alternatively, maybe we can petition for director and producer Shawn Levy, a Yale alum, to hook us up with an early screening. Your move, Yale.

Stranger Things is set in 1980s small-town Indiana, where locals are rattled by the mysterious disappearance of 12-year-old Will Byers. His mother, friends and the local police all investigate—discovering a monster-ridden second dimension, uncovering a government conspiracy and befriending a peculiar, psychokinetic girl named Eleven in the process. The plot is airtight, yet consistently surprising. Everything is connected, but many questions have been left unanswered for future seasons.

Before writing this review, I decided to rewatch a few minutes of the first episode to refresh my memory. Eight hours later, I still had to remind myself I was watching a television show and not a major motion picture. The production quality is stellar and every scene could easily be from a Spielberg movie. Indeed, the show tips its hat to many films from the ’80s—Stand by Me, E.T., The Goonies—and has Winona Ryder in a career-reviving performance to boot. She is convincing enough as a mother who will stop at nothing to find her son, but the real stars of the show are its young actors. Newcomer Finn Wolfhard is a natural as the sweet, loyal Mike Wheeler, in addition to Barb (Shannon Purser) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who’ve emerged as fan-favorites.

Stranger Things doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s something we haven’t seen in a while, especially from television. Too charming and nostalgic to be considered sci-fi horror, but too dark to be a children’s show, Stranger Things defies genre.

The result is a Stephen King-esque series with universal appeal.

Bottom line? Stranger Things gets an Eleven out of ten.

-Louisa Cone

Music: Freetown Sound

D

ev Hynes, the artist and producer behind the “Blood Orange” act, released Freetown Sound less than three weeks after the Orlando shooting. In a post on Instagram, he dedicated it to the marginalized: “My album is for everyone told they’re not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way.” Hynes weaves their stories into his own unflinching self-portrait, delivered across 17 masterful tracks that glide from synth-pop to new-wave funk to electronica R&B.

Hynes’s voice is prominent in vision and craft, but he takes the backseat on vocals, letting female artists dominate his songs. Co-writer Lorely Rodriquez takes charge on the breakout single “Best to You,” singing, “I feel my bones crack in your arms,” from the perspective of a girl whose toxic relationship makes her feel like an expirable object.

Hynes layers Rodriquez’s crystalline voice over a dance-inducing beat; the song represents his trademark melancholy party pop at its finest. Drag queen icon Venus Xtravaganza is sampled in “Desirée,” a chillwave funk groove relating the transactional life of the ostracized sex worker to that of a suburban housewife. Freetown Sound’s diverse list of collaborators also includes Nelly Furtado, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Debbie Harry. Hynes directs an ocean of voices: where a lesser artist would falter into cacophony, he locates an ethereal harmony.

The result is a rich tapestry illustrating life as a minority in a society that fears and threatens you. “Love Ya,” a cover of Eddy Grant’s eighties jam “Come On Let Me Love You,” transitions from galactic electronica to a jazz-house trumpet solo to vocals backed only by piano chords, spanning over a century of music defined by black voices. Hynes’ version ends with an interview sample of Ta-Nehisi Coates recounting how he, as a young black boy walking to school, agonized over his grip on a baseball bat. The cover of a Guyanese British musician’s song is interwoven with West African and reggae influences–– Bob Marley’s granddaughter Zuri is even featured on vocals. The song, interspersed with diverting interludes, never culminates in an apex, and Coates’ excerpt itself is abruptly cut off: Hynes paints the journey of black existence, but it’s far from finished.

For the cover of Freetown Sound, Hynes chose Deana Lawson’s 2009 photograph “Binky and Tony Forever.” It’s an image of a man and a woman intimately intertwined, with the man seated on a bed and the woman standing, her face turned to stare defiantly at the viewer. A Michael Jackson poster hangs on an otherwise bare wall; the presence of the icon calls attention to Hynes’s own barrier-breaking work. The photo is polished, provocative, and lush, infused with raw emotion. In other words, it’s the perfect preface for Freetown Sound.

-Nicole Mo Upper left image courtesy of Miramax and Roadside Attractions Upper right image courtesy of Netflix Bottom left image courtesy of Domino Sep. 16, 2016 – 21

EMAIL thomas.cusano@yale.edu or rachel.strodel@yale.edu

WRITE FOR THE HERALD

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST mealy apples

What we hate this week

they should be crisp as fuck, what gives?

lipograms also liposuction tbh

so labored

pregnant pauses or go

orgo

brambles

Pages awful in your cereal honestly the whole iWork suite

probably killer bees

the number of bees on this campus

black mold

I prefer my mold rainbow

Sep. 16, 2016 – 23