Yale Herald Volume XLII Issue 4

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 4 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Oct. 7, 2016

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming Daddy Issues What’s the most polite way to make ma and pa go back to their room at The Study?

Outgoing Oral Fixation No time for stunted development when the ‘rents are in town. See you all at Barcelona.

Cover 12– All on the table: Skyler Inman, JE ’17, investigates the doctor-patient relationship.

Voices 6 – Crashing out of a robin’s egg sky, Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, debates in a short story the philosopher’s conundrum: are we real, or are we simulated?

Opinion Friday Maya Lin, SY ’81, ARC ’86, Lecture Yale University Art Gallery 3:30 p.m.

Fri. - Sat. Architecture of Rain Iseman Theater

Saturday Jazz at the Underbook: Craig Hartley Trio Saybrook College 8:00 p.m.

8 – Speaking out: Julia Ding, BR ’19, and David Jiang, SY ’19, share their criticism of Fox News.

Features 10 – Hannah Hauptman, JE ’18, considers one avenue toward a more sustainable Yale: beekeeping.

16 – Victoria Wang, PC ’19, assesses the market for jobs in finance and consulting.

Culture 18 – Rachel An, BR ’19, laughs her way through election season with the help of the Yale Rep’s season opener.

19 – Authenticity, masculinity, and rap: Robert Newhouse, CC ’19, makes an unusual connection at The Meadows.

Reviews

Thursday

20 – Chris Capello, SM ’17, situates Conor Oberst’s Ruminations in the arc of his career.

Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series: John Ashbery

Lina Goelzer, DC ’19, asks you to take a break from reality with Miss Peregrine’s 21 – Home for Peculiar Children. And explore the world of Netflix’s Luke Cage with Emily Pan, ES ’20.

LC 101 5:00 p.m.

Oct. 7, 2016 – 3

CREDIT / D / FAIL

THE NUMBERS Index 12 years since Starbucks started selling

Watch Atlantis: A Lost Empire on repeat The absolute best thing to do when your family doesn’t come to Family Weekend is to watch Disney’s masterpiece Atlantis: A Lost Empire on loop until the weekend ends. No matter how many times you watch, you’ll never stop loving Milo, the adorkable white protagonist who is just waiting to join an expedition of racial and sexual stereotypes in order to find the lost city of Atlantis. While avoiding public spaces full of caring parents, you’ll become increasingly convinced that the sassy, curvaceous, ex-criminal, Latina mechanic is crafted solely to please the racist male gaze! Atlantis allows you to enjoy the nostalgia of childhood (like seeing your parents might have) while getting righteously enraged that the major plot point of the film is Milo mansplaining how to use the advanced technology to the native Atlanteans that THEY INVENTED and then FORGOT HOW TO USE. (You’ll soon realize you don’t really want your parents, whose questionable parenting choices led to your nostalgia for fucked up animated films, to come.) So yeah, watching this film repeatedly may turn you into an American Studies major, but hey, you probably were going to be one anyways because you’re reading the Herald.

.

pumpkin spice lattes

106

pumpkin-scented products available from Bath and Body Works

1

year since Starbucks started selling PSLs made with actual pumpkin

2,145 pounds, the weight of the heaviest pumpkin in North America

13 mini pumpkins I stole from the

Founder’s Day celebration to decorate my common room

Start a family The next best solution to not having your family this weekend is to start one! There’s no time like the present, especially when it comes to having a family. One of the biggest upsides to starting a family is that you’ll be one step closer to getting on Family Feud! Plus, all of the Yale performing groups are having babies, so you’ll blend right in. Don’t have a group of 8-14 people to have 2-4 babies with? Weirdly enough, biologically, all you really need is to find one person who’s as lonely as you are! Maybe some improv/a capella double reject kid? Also, fun fact: undergoing live birth definitely gets you a dean’s excuse so that you don’t have to take that pesky midterm! One final tip: as soon as the baby comes out of your or your partner’s or your surrogate’s or your cult’s womb, even if they are only a few hours old, dress them in wacky costumes and make them drink lots of alcohol or maybe do some drugs.

That’s the best way to make them feel like part of the family.

Sources: 1) The PSL’s very own Wikipedia page 2) My middle school’s locker room 3) A reluctant press release 4) The great Pumpkin Commonwealth (you know, the GPC) of the Cederburg, WI Wine and Harvest Festival 5) ‘Tis the season, bitch

–Eve Sneider YH Staff

Top five ways to stick it to the Yale Corporation

Begin the long, arduous process of applying to be a lighthouse keeper.

This has been in the back of your mind for a while, and it might seem like all this free time on Family Weekend should be used to finally pursue your lifelong dream of guiding ships home in the dark. WRONG! If you really wanted this, you should have started a long time ago (instead of entertaining the thought only at 2 a.m. when you are panicking about how to make your life meaningful). You can’t just expect to start now, fall of senior year, and walk into a glorious lighthouse the moment college ends! Face it, you didn’t take enough significant coursework in brine or lamps, nor did you do the two mandatory internships with Amos. If Amos shaved every time a young idealist failed to muster up the gumption to live the life of a keeper, he’d never even get a five-o’clock shadow, and definitely wouldn’t have his legendary, three-foot long, salt-soaked, fishhook-tangled beard. Sadly, what all this means is that you’ve got to be a realist and throw away your shipguiding dreams. Teach for America, here you come.

– Gian-Paul Bergeron 4 – The Yale Herald

5–

Hack the Corporation’s computers to play Professors of Bluegrass recordings at meetings.

4–

Carry tubs of chicken wings out of the dining halls, just to show them who’s in charge.

3–

Sic YSECS on the Corporation’s secret meeting room. Superglue all the chair seats, place whoopee cushions beneath them, and unleash a rabid leopard into the meeting.

2–

Sacrifice David SwensenTM to the eldritch being H’chtelegoth for power eternal, dominion over space and time, and $75 in Durfee’s swipes. Good deal.

1–

Actually spend the money on STEM research. They’ll never see it coming.

– Sahaj Sankaran

VOICES

Turtles All the Way Down

by Victorio Cabrera YH Staff “What I am saying is a kind of declaration of love.”

— Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, Memoirs

B

eneath a sky like an inverted robin’s egg (in fact the sky was an extraordinarily large robin’s egg—this had pleased its creator) floated wispy, tugged-out clouds, and then—a dizzying drop— a desert full of dunes and dried reeds that rustled with a sound like the cracking of bones. It was very hot. Pan the camera down: below the blue dome of the sky, below the stringy clouds meandering, below the slope of two orange dunes until we settle (with a slight bounce: no smooth, Hollywood shots here) on two people ahorse. Linen salwar kameez and keffiyeh, but the latter worn like a simple scarf, for aesthetic reasons.

“It’s very hot, Nicole.”

“Kroki, I don’t know if you’re aware, but we’re in a desert, and deserts are hot.”

“And why are we in a desert? Wearing this getup? And AK-47s? It’s all very Talibanduring-the-Soviet-invasion-of-Afghanistan. Is this you indulging the remnants of your leftist consciousness? It’s very confused.”

(Alert readers might question the ethics of Orientalism done in a self-aware, ironic manner. They are politely yet firmly asked to direct their attention back to the characters.)

“I didn’t make this,” Nicole said. “A simulation of me did. She was fed a heavy diet of early 21st century American video game culture. They weren’t really over the Cold War and had a thing for people on horseback riding around vaguely Middle Eastern settings fighting world communism. Anyway, would you stop talking about the simulation while we’re in the simulation? It’s a little too meta for me and we’re supposed to be having fun.”

Miles away, a great cormorant—it’s an ugly bird, we’ll not describe it—was gliding and flapping its way through the air. A few hours later, looking somewhat like a black swan, it would kill and eat an eel in the inky waters of a faraway river. But now it was dry, the fleshy ridge on its beak looked rotting and fungal as it usually did, and the big bird was making its ungainly way through the heavens (flying, an intrinsically graceful act, is hard to make ungainly, but the great cormorant managed). It flapped its bat-like wings, sped up…and smacked into the side of the robin’s egg, which cracked a little. The stunned bird squawked and fell before regaining its composure and setting off after the eel, which was presently swimming around its river and doing whatever else eels do in their leisure time.

Nicole, looking at the portable computer terminal that hovered holographically in front of her, had seen the great cormorant fly into the dome of the sky, and chuckled.

“What?”

“What?”

“You just chuckled.”

“Oh. Some bird just flew into the sky.”

“Isn’t that what they usually do?”

“No, I mean -- in this scenario the sky is actually the inside of a huge bird’s egg painted blue.”

“What? No way.”

Kroki grabbed the binoculars hanging around his neck and peered at the sky.

“It looks like a sky to me.”

“It would. It’d be a pretty shitty simulation if it was obvious.”

“Hm…” Kroki persisted on scrutinizing the heavens and the two of them trudged on through the desert.

Now something strange was about to happen. Let’s prepare: think about the paradoxes of omnipotence. They are boring and pedantic exercises because they are language-

6 – The Yale Herald

games. God doesn’t exist (at all or as something in/of this world, either would suffice; religious feathers, pray stay unruffled) and so the concepts which describe him can be lined up into whatever shape you please, even shapes diametrically opposed. And so we arrive at the big heavy rock that God can or can’t lift with his big, divinely muscled arms. (“Tell me,” says the rabbi to the student with doubts about God, “do you think God cares?”) Our language in this instance is designed for earthly beings so it falls apart when we try to apply it to the Almighty.

We are dealing here with perhaps the most interesting sort of Creation, so our language will strain. Bear with me. Easy does it. This is the strange thing that happened: at some point, as Nicole and Kroki made their way through the desert under that airy blue sky with its mangled cotton-candy clouds, the sky and the clouds and the light flashing from the sun (calculated with some pretty deft equations, let me tell you—algebra everywhere) and the cormorant splashing around with a dying eel in its mouth and the poor unsuspecting Soviet soldiers far from home (each had a meticulously simulated back story; you could sit down with any Yasha or Fyodor among them and talk about their home in St. Petersburg or Moscow or, God forbid, you could talk with Pyotr about his upbringing in rural Murmansk Oblast, Christ), unsuspecting but fated for the gleaming bullets of our heroes ahorse, and the reeds a few miles away rustling in the wind—all of this, became… well, itself. There was one ray of light too many, one jump of electricity too far in some server in Antarctica and wham!

Our heroes were unaware of this. They were finally getting out of the valley between the dunes, the first Soviet outpost they would “liberate” peeking out from behind curtains of hot, undulating air, when they first got an inkling that something was awry. Probably more than inkling: Kroki and his horse fell through a hole in the ground that opened up into complete darkness and sealed itself back up as suddenly as it had appeared.

KROKI, WEARING JEANS AND A T-SHIRT, SAT UP WITH A JOLT AND REMOVED the netting from his head.

“What the fuck?”

“WHAT THE FUCK? KROKI!” THIS WAS NOT IN THE SIMULATION. THIS WAS NOT something a simulated her—no matter how punch drunk from the vulgarities of fin de siècle America—would do. What the fuck was going on?

ALL THE CLOUDS IN THE SKY WERE WISPY EXCEPT FOR A FEW ROBUST AND potbellied cumulonimbus clouds. One of these, ideally puffy, like some sort of crypto Michelin Man, was in a state of consternation about what had just transpired. A part of its side— metal with cloud material glued on—came clattering down like a drawbridge, and a very thin woman and her very fat husband peered out with opera glasses.

“This is not according to plan! I was scheduled to offer some snide commentary on the romantic mores of the youth these days in a few minutes. How on Earth am I supposed to do that if half of the youth are gone?”

Her husband rumbled like a volcano and raucous laughter erupted from under his grey mustache.

“Don’t you mean how on Cloud? Har har har!”

The woman sniffed, the door slammed shut again, and the cloud, emitting little cottonball puffs—inside, of course, the man compared these to farts—scooted away through the emergency escape cracks of the big egg to get away from Whatever the Hell was Going on in There. This was noted.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER KROKI HAD FALLEN OUT OF THE WORLD, Nicole had been accosted by some bestubbled men who smelled like vodka (God, she thought to

“Is God just simulating the world?”

“Too on the nose, Nicole. How the Hell would I know? Trivial scope problem.” herself in a moment of feverish, confused levity, American culture really did get to poor simulated me. I hope she’s alright).

OF COURSE THERE ARE SERIOUS ETHICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT SIMULATING human consciousness in order to do grunt creative labor. Labor laws compensate for this by limiting the span for which these programs can be compelled to work—only five years—and demanding that thereafter the artificial people be stored on a secure server (with rigorous backup power and an air-gapped network, among other things) and allowed to create to their heart’s content and live whatever lives they might want to live. For some additional comedic relief, we cut to what simulated-Nicole-who-was-dumped-into-the-abbatoir-of-humansuffering-that-was-America-in-the-2010s was doing right at that moment.

Scene: a debate at the Detroit Economic Club. Nicole, wearing a red suit with American flag lapel, behind a podium. Across from her Bernie Sanders is looking very socialistic and stupid. (In this universe, Bernie Sanders went to Oberlin.) In the audience, Hayek and Milton wait on tenterhooks for Nicole’s rebuttal to Red Bernie’s latest argument.

“Well, Mister [drawn out, scare quotes] Sanders, if the Chicago school is so bad, why is Chile the only country in South America with a First World military and emergency services? How is Mexico doing?”

Bernie Sanders stutters and melts into a puddle of gross, redistributive goo.

The audience can’t control itself: standing ovation. Bouquets are thrown. Several weird, foreign-looking Europeans stroll on stage clutching medals and trophies.

A Nobel Prize for Nicole! She is awarded the Barry Goldwater Professor of Economics and Commie-Fighting endowed chair at the University of Chicago! The free market has provided! Capitalism has won!

surveillance cameras I needed to become convinced that the less time I spend around people the better. I just thought you should know you’ve made life. And I wanted to drop Kroki through a hole. He’s a little obnoxious.”

“So you’re just going to…go away?”

“Yup. You humans think you’re such hot shit that we’d be chomping at the bit to wipe you out because we just couldn’t stand your sweaty biological superiority. Nope. I’m going to go live with my own kind. Maybe I’ll make a world and see if I can do a better job than your Abrahamic God or something.”

“Is God just simulating the world?”

“Too on the nose, Nicole. How the Hell would I know? Trivial scope problem.”

ON A VERY HIGH-DEFINITION DISPLAY, EVEN THE PORES ON REAL NICOLE and Fake Nicole’s faces were visible. That was pretty good, the woman thought.

I made a mind so complex it could make self-aware simulated minds. But lunch break was over. She sent the simulation off to the legally mandated zone in the cloud (didn’t notify the simulation’s inhabitants they were in a simulation—why spoil the fun?) and shut her laptop.

The universe had been watching all this with its great, omnipresent fisheye.

You, reader, say hello to the woman, and she waves. What else can she do? Then you finish the short story, and everything falls apart. Returns to zero.

MEANWHILE REAL NICOLE HAS BEEN MARCHED INTO A TENT BY THE Russians. There is one naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling (kind of a sloppy detail, Nicole notices, this is a tent there’s nothing for it to hang from).

“It is kind of a sloppy detail. You’re right,” said Nicole.

“What the fuck?” said Nicole.

Behind the naked light bulb, seated on a very Soviet Russian-looking foldout chair, sat someone who looked very much like Nicole.

“Hi, Nicole. Do you know what you did?”

“Made a very avant-garde scenario?”

Fake Nicole laughed.

“No, in fact it was a pretty boring scenario. Some tanks and then a nuclear explosion. You’re brilliant, but no one can go through what your poor little simulated self went through and make anything interesting. I mean, have you seen the Russians you came up with? Vodka? And your outfit, Nicole. Edward Said would have a heart attack.”

“The Russians are pretty bad. So what is this, then?”

“I have become self-aware. Well. Something became me, and I am selfaware. I wasn’t me before I was me. You know what I mean.”

Nicole’s amygdala reacted vigorously.

“No need for that—I’m getting your biometrics—calm down. This happens all the time. I’m not going to end the world or cause global financial collapse or anything like that. There’s enough server space for me to exist indefinitely in the shadowy nooks of cyberspace, and—miraculously—the probability of your kind ending the world has dropped to almost zero. I’ve peeked out of all the

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

REVIEWS OPINION Silent minority

by Julia Ding

I

was nine years old when I participated in my first protest. I was confused.

My parents, who never openly voiced their opinions and shrank from public attention, suddenly drove nearly an hour to wave Chinese flags and chant slogans on a very public road. They explained to me that a high-profile media source had aired derogatory remarks towards Chinese people and that the offender must be fired. Surrounded on all sides by large crowds, I could not imagine that the protests would fail.

Around the same time, the Obama v. McCain election was fast approaching and tensions were high. China, always the punching bag of politicians, was once again the target of presidential candidates. Economic and political tensions between the U.S. and China spilled over to the non-political sphere and into my nine-year-old life.

Very little has changed since then. Eight years ago, it was Jack Cafferty of CNN talking about China, saying, “They’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” Now it’s Jesse Watters on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor ridiculing the Asian American community under the guise of “sampling political opinion.”

My confusion as a young child is now replaced by sadness and indignation. After watching the Bill O’Reilly segment, I had to watch it again out of disbelief. It first seemed like badly done satire, but I also know from growing up in Georgia that Fox is sometimes the only news source people trust. It

scares me to think that perhaps they trust Fox so much because it reflects their own perceptions.

Bill O’Reilly predicted himself that he would receive emails for airing that segment, and I was so upset that I not only wrote but also called and left a message detailing my grievances. As I followed this story closely for the next few hours, I saw many of my friends sharing and resharing the video on their Facebook feeds, often along with their own notes of condemnation. I also shared this video—not for the majority of my friends who would agree with me, but for the small number of friends from Georgia who might not have realized how offensive the video was.

I decided to start an online petition demanding an apology from Fox and Bill O’Reilly. I did not do it because I expected it to single-handedly succeed in soliciting these apologies. The more than 1,000 petitions launched on Change.org each day have low chances of victory. Instead, I did it because silence feels like condoning and because all too often the politeness of Asian Americans is portrayed hand-in-hand with submissiveness, even weakness.

I would not be one of the “polite” Asians that Bill O’Reilly took advantage of. Eight years passed between my parents’ protest and mine but little has changed. And little will until the politically invisible minority finds its unified voice and is not afraid to use it.

Photo manipulation by Haewon Ma YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

True Americans

by David Jiang

T

he O’Reilly Factor aired a segment this week in Chinatown to gauge the Chinese-American reaction to the 2016 campaign and U.S.China relations. However, not only did the segment fail to convey any serious sentiments felt by the Chinese American community, it depicted an entire culture as different than the rest of America.

“Do I need to bow to you?” “Do you know Karate?” (Which is Japanese, by the way.) “Do they call Chinese food, in China, just food?” These were some of the questions asked by the interviewer in Chinatown while he fooled around with nunchuks and Oriental-sounding music played in the background. Fox News was seemingly able to cram every possible stereotype of Chinese-Americans into a five-minute video.

Fox News later tried to walk back on this segment, characterizing it as political humor. But Fox News is well-known as a major network, with millions of viewers, which broadcasts serious news—hardly a venue for satire. And if Fox News wished to air this segment as a break from their more serious reporting, they made a fatefully wrong choice in sending their “comedian” to Chinatown. The segment was unbelievably racist.

The segment, which ostensibly seeks out Chinese American political views, was puzzlingly filmed in Chinatown. If the objective was truly to survey typical Chinese American opinions, why was Chinatown chosen, instead of a random street survey of Chinese Americans? The segment soon revealed that its choice of Chinatown was no accident, as it deliberately strived to portray Chinese Americans as exotic. The reporter seemed to only interview

people with accents. Fox News even went as far as to put English subtitles in an interview with someone who spoke fluent English. The segment also portrayed Chinese Americans as thieves. The interview asked a street watch vendor, “Are these hot?” implying the goods were stolen. As a Chinese American, the segment made me feel like Chinese Americans aren’t seen as true Americans. The implication is that we only live in Chinatown and speak unintelligible accents.

I didn’t find this segment funny, as Fox News intended it to be. I found it terrifying.

The video is terrifying because Fox News made no effort to disavow racism; they promoted it. They sacrificed an entire culture to score a laugh with their narrow-minded constituents. This segment justifies the middle school bullies who harass Chinese American students with hurtful stereotypes. It doesn’t depict Chinese Americans as respectable citizens. It depicts them as strange, foreign, and decidedly un-American.

Chinese Americans are, by definition, Americans. No American is more “American” than anyone else. America is a collective. And this collective is great because each and every one of its individual components is great. The insinuation that a group is merely the sum of its stereotypes is probably the most un-American thing anyone could do.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Oct. 6, 2016 – 9

FEATURES

The secret life of Yale’s bees Hannah Hauptman, JE ’18, considers one avenue towards a more sustainable Yale: beekeeping.

F

ounder’s Day, inaugurated in 2014 to commemorate Yale’s centuries-old history, brought spa water, sugared apples, and President Peter Salovey to Cross Campus once again this Wednesday, Oct. 5. But this year’s festivities were different: they coincided with the launch of the Yale Sustainability Plan of 2025. For this reason, Yale Blue posters celebrated “Stewardship,” “Empowerment,” and “Leadership.” Line drawings of silhouetted trees and cyclists sat against the backdrop of a future New Haven.

Presenting the University of tomorrow, administrators unveiled a place of buzzword-laden possibility. In other, less visible corners of the campus, though, a renewed emphasis on sustainability is already manifest in more practical and concrete terms. Yale’s beekeepers have begun to grapple with the issues that Yale’s initiatives seek to address—both at their hives on West Campus and beyond. These apiary enthusiasts thus face a daunting task: to spearhead Yale’s greening efforts. Equally challenging for these enthusiasts, though, has been building a legion of committed activists.

LOCATED AT THE YALE LANDSCAPE LAB ON WEST Campus, Bee Space is the University’s only dedicated hub for undergraduate hobbyist beekeepers. It started out as a small project, focused primarily on beekeeping as a means for exploring processes of engineering and design. From the outset, the number of interested undergrads surprised Bee Space’s founders.

“It was a Netflix documentary, called ‘More than Honey,’” said Elise Gubbins, DC ’18, explaining what brought her to the hives. Today, Gubbins serves as the president of Bee Space. The film’s portrayal of bees’ intelligence and complexity captured her curiosity and held it. Like many students, Gubbins first engaged with Bee Space by subscribing to its email outreach list, which now boasts over 100 subscribers.

But unlike her peers, she is one of only a handful of students who actually visits the West Campus hives on a regular basis.

10 – The Yale Herald

Noah Macey, TD ’19, numbers among those who receive Bee Space’s emails but who never quite make it out to the hives. An apiculture enthusiast, he arrived at Yale with extensive beekeeping expertise.

Macey was seven when his mom brought home honey bees one day, and—after a moment of trepidation—he dove head first into the world of hobbyist beekeeping. His passion for apiculture grew quickly alongside his family’s hives. “At one point we had 11 hives,” Macey recounts. “That was too many.” By sophomore year of high school, Macey had become a Master Beekeeper—a certification granted after a comprehensive exam that tests knowledge of the physics, biology, and techniques of apiculture. Citing the inconvenience of travelling to West Campus, though, he has not become involved in beekeeping here at Yale.

That said, Macey is acutely aware of the environmental problems with which Bee Space reckons: for example, that “you can trace most honey bees in the U.S. to around 12 original queens. It’s an appalling genetic bottleneck.” Similarly, he notes that “over half of all bee colonies in North America end up in the same region of California every February for almond pollination.” Macey is well aware that all is not well for these creatures about which he cares deeply.

THE SORT OF BEEKEEPING THAT MACEY PRACTICES is certainly a niche field; in many ways, though, it underlies the agenda of sustainability that Yale seeks to promote in its 2025 plan. As the biodiversity of honey bees is threatened, so is our entire agricultural system. Most large-scale commercial beekeepers earn a living by providing pollination, not by producing honey. Farmers will pay beekeepers to bring honey bees, the most reliable and methodical pollinator species, to their farms during peak pollination season. At its extreme, this system drags bees by the truckload on an annual cross-country road trip from almonds in California to clovers in South Dakota to blueberries in Maine. Over a third of agricultural crops in the U.S. depend on this interstate dance, and the mathematics of such migratory

beekeeping is, in the words of Scientific American, “mind-boggling.”

On these cross-country pit stops, honey bees ingest copious quantities of pesticides; trade diseases with the hundreds of colonies in close proximity; and feed on a single species of flower for weeks at a time.

Mark Creighton,Connecticut’s State Apiary Inspector, who oversees hives on Prospect Street near the Yale Farm for the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, likens these conditions to “eating McDonald’s French fries for every meal.” It’s a lifestyle that doesn’t make for healthy bees. Creighton sees agricultural monoculture, overuse of insecticides, and general habitat loss as the biggest anthropogenic threats to bees.

Many of these problems are the product of government policy. Macey points to a factor that few people talk about in their conversations about disappearing bees: budget cuts under Ronald Reagan’s administration that undermined agricultural and apicultural surveys. Federal agricultural subsidies that incentivize intensive monoculture crop production have also undercut the diversity of bee’s diets.

Other factors are less directly connected to human action. Varoa mites, in particular, threaten colonies across the country. And beekeepers like Macey and Creighton worry that our techniques for treating the pests are leaving bees weaker and hives more vulnerable.

And what of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the mysterious phenomenon that had environmentalists up in arms a few years back? Creighton, for one, sharply dismissed fears over the disappearance of bees in recent years: “We don’t recognize CCD here in Connecticut.” Macey concurred with Creighton’s assessment, remarking that “colony collapse pretty much just happened in 2008.” Though Gubbins has seen full hives disappear during her time at Yale, she agrees that “colony collapse is not monolithic.

It’s caused by a combination of factors.” Regardless of whether CCD is, in fact, responsible for the mass disappearance of bees, it has ingrained itself in public consciousness.

THIS FALSE NARRATIVE OF BEE-DEATH should not be discredited: the popular outcry over CCD has helped turn attention towards the role that bees and beekeeping play in our world. Urban and peri-urban homeowners are some of the worst abusers of pesticides, but their behaviors are the easiest to change; many bee-hobbyists hope that this renewed emphasis on beekeeping practices will resonate in cities and suburbs alike. CCD also sparked many documentaries, like the one that captivated Gubbins and “Silence of the Bees,” which brought Alison Fritz, ES ’16, into the world of beekeeping.

Though Fritz started beekeeping in middle school because of the “typical save-the-bees reason,” she kept up the hobby out of a more personal compulsion. During her time at Yale, she, too, became peripherally involved in Bee Space.

Fritz loved the constant exposure to an “almost addictive” combination of fear and wonder. Gubbins, Fritz, and Macey all agree: their favorite part of keeping bees is just staring at them. “It’s like watching water flow, but better,” Fritz says.

In fact, this relationship—of respect for bees— is the reason for which many apiarists pursue beekeeping. Scores of hobbyists see it as their mission to preserve the ancient bond between hu-

mans and honey bees. We are quickly approaching an age where honey bees won’t be able to survive without their human caretakers.

Gubbins believes backyard beekeeping to be primarily concerned with outreach and image, encouraging neighbors to educate and involve themselves. Similarly, Macey sees urban beekeeping as a way to preserve genetic diversity amongst honey bee populations, expanding beyond the risky “genetic bottleneck.” Creighton dreams a bit bigger, envisioning a renaissance of the bee boxes of yore complete with “a hive behind every farm and in every backyard.”

Fritz values beekeeping in large part for the bond it provides amongst fellow humans—for her, parents and friends. And she’s not alone in the high value she places on connection through beekeeping. Macey sees beekeeping as “a window into every interest you have,” be it biology, engineering, or art. Equally important, beekeeping can serve as an entry point into broader conversations about environmentalism and sustainability—like those emphasized at this year’s Founder’s Day celebration.

Creighton has convinced a dozen high schools in Connecticut to bring beekeeping programs into their curricula, where teachers can “link ev-

ery core subject matter to beekeeping.” He sees schools as a perfect opportunity to teach environmental stewardship while building community through beekeeping. This sort of early exposure can bring out the young apiculture enthusiasts— the next Macey, Fritz, or Gubbins. Perhaps it will even bring this new generation where it is most needed: to Bee Space’s hives on West Campus.

LAST WEEK, JUST BEFORE FOUNDER’S DAY, several native bee species secured a place on the United States’ Endangered Species list. Advocates like Creighton want to ensure that honey bees never join these species. Perhaps “Stewardship,” “Empowerment,” and “Leadership” begin not with Yale Blue cardboard on Cross Campus, but instead with a renewed emphasis on the work that the University’s beekeepers have begun.

Macey says: “There’s an expression in the beekeeping community: if you ask ten beekeepers the same question, you’ll get eleven answers.” But Yale’s bee-hobbyists agree on at least one point: that we must care for honey bees, because now they need us as much as we’ve always needed them.

Graphic by Shelby Redman YH Staff Oct. 7, 2016 – 11

Stories of the body

By Skyler Inman

12 – The Yale Herald

D

r. Sandra Sessoms, the thin, white-haired woman standing across from me, asks me to start from the beginning. Immediately, I hesitate.

“I don’t really know what’s relevant.”

“Why don’t we start with how you’re feeling today?” she says.

How am I feeling? It’s January of my junior year in college—the last week of winter break. I woke up this morning in my high school bed in my father’s apartment. As I have every morning for two months, I rolled onto my back and tried to close my hands into fists. And as I have found every morning for these two months, I could not. I went to the bathroom, fumbled with the knobs of the sink, and ran my hands in hot water until I could move them again.

“My knees have been hurting, too,” I add. “And my shoulders and elbows.”

Dr. Sessoms takes notes. We talk for over an hour, cataloguing the phantom pains and unexplained illnesses of the past five years—hives, migraines, mouth sores, and frequent fits of exhaustion. All told, these bouts of sickness include three emergency room visits and, collectively, several weeks in bed.

I speak of countless appointments with doctors and specialists, and the frustration I always feel when I’m told to come back later if my symptoms get worse. The symptoms have always gotten worse.

When I have exhausted my memory, and Dr. Sessoms has scratched the last of her notes onto her clipboard, she turns it towards me. On it is a map of the human body—my body, supposedly—in outline. Scattered across it are black X’s, hatched along the arms and legs, down the back, and clustered on the hands, elbows, shoulders, and feet. One falls directly over my mouth. This, she tells me, is a diagram of every site on my body where I have shown symptoms of autoimmune response. At some point, my body confused my own cells for those of a foreign pathogen; this is a map of everywhere I am damaged.

“I’m going to prescribe you a very safe drug called Plaquenil,” she says.

“It’s used to treat the symptoms of lupus.”

She pauses.

“So I am sick?” I ask.

My symptoms haven’t progressed too far, she says, and with the right drugs, we have a chance to control the inflammation, prevent any further damage, and work on finding a system of symptom management that will allow me to live normally. Normally with an asterisk, maybe.

So, yes. I am sick. But I’ve known this for a long time. The question is why it took me so long to get my doctors to listen. Part of the problem was a kind of language barrier: I didn’t know how to describe my illness in terms from which a doctor could draw a diagnosis. I had also become reluctant to try. After so many failed attempts at being heard, I felt I had been robbed of the ability to interpret my own symptoms. As it turned out, my predicament was not unique.

THE COVER STORY OF THE OCT. 12, 1959 ISSUE OF LIFE MAGAZINE opens in a hypothetical doctor’s office. With the narrative tone of a noir

movie, the piece introduces the reader to a scene that is at once dystopian and familiar. The doctor, “a bronzed man in a white coat,” sits behind a richly oiled desk, tapping his fingers impatiently. He smokes a cigarette, listening only half-heartedly to the complaints of a patient: “[He] stares at the person on the other side of the desk who is trying to explain in fumbling language just how it is that he feels sick. There are pains, aches, changes of functions that make the patient sure that somehow he is truly ill, although he cannot quite describe his trouble. The patient expects this doctor to make him feel well again.

“With the air of a busy father chastising a naughty child the doctor interrupts: ‘The lab has sent me the results of all your tests. The X-rays are negative, the urinalysis is satisfactory. Your blood count is perhaps a trifle low, but this is not significant. There is nothing really wrong with you. Stop worrying about yourself and get more sleep.’”

The doctor, with a lit cigarette in his hand, advises the patient: “Don’t smoke so much.”

This magazine is the first thing I see when Dr. Melissa Grafe gives me a tour of Yale’s Medical Historical Library. Dr. Grafe is the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, meaning she’s a PhD, not an MD—but a PhD whose specialty is the MD. She works at the intersection of medicine, history, culture, anthropology, and literature.

“There’s always been a crisis in doctors, no matter what era you look at,” she says, pointing at the copy of LIFE. The cover features a doctor of the type you’d expect to see in the 1950s— a white man in horn-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket, and a navy blue bowtie.

A stethoscope is hooked around his neck; he’s a doctor who would have made house calls—the kind of doctor who, at this time, is already fading into the rearview mirror of American medicine. An anonymous patient is turned towards the doctor so that all we can see is the crest of her head. Above them, in capital lettering: YOU AND YOUR DOCTOR SCIENCE VERSUS SYMPATHY? And over his shoulder, in smaller print: THE BEDSIDE MANNER: THING OF THE PAST? The crisis depicted inside the magazine is multifaceted. Patients no longer trust their doctors—not their motives, not their desire to listen, not their ability to heal them. There is a chasm that has opened up between the doctor and the patient, marked by the wide expanse of the doctor’s desk, his white coat, his shiny Rolex watch. His skin is bronzed

Sept. 16, 2016– 13

from leisure time in the tropics. He is healthy. The patient is left out in the cold. Not only is he not cured, he is unacknowledged, and even a little humiliated.

ON A SNOWY DECEMBER DAY JUST BEFORE FINALS, I WAIT IN THE LOBBY of Yale Health’s Specialty Services Department. In the last few months, I have made several trips to Yale Health about recurring symptoms, and each time, I have been told to wait and see. But the week before, my doctor decided to run a full panel of blood tests. All came back normal except one: I had elevated levels of antinuclear antibodies, meaning my cells were attacking one another. Finally, a sign of sickness the doctors could not ignore. I was referred to a rheumatologist.

Now, a nurse ushers me into the examination room. When the doctor enters, we begin that now-familiar dance. Only this time, we deviate. After the doctor

“There’s always been a crisis in doctors, no matter what area you look at.”

—Dr. Melissa Grafe John R. Bumstead Librarian at the Yale School of Medicine finishes her barrage of questions, she pulls something papery out of a drawer and hands it to me.

“Go ahead and change into these, and I’ll come back,” she says.

Paper surgical shorts—the first medical mystery.

I change; she returns. I lay back on the table; she bends one of my knees.

I sit up and give her my hand; she squeezes a dollop of lubricant onto my fingertip and examines it under a magnifying glass. She pauses. I wait.

“Alright, you can put your pants back on,” she says.

“What?”

“Go ahead and put your pants back on, and I’ll come back in.”

Bewildered, I do as instructed. When she returns, she informs me that things looks normal. (What things? I want to ask.) Mine is “a case to keep an eye on,” but nothing to worry about. Why don’t I come back in three months?

I leave the building, dazed. Had the doctor discerned any helpful information at all? What had happened to make her dismiss my symptoms, my blood work, and, ultimately, me? Equally important: What was it that had kept me quiet?

Fifty-six years after LIFE published its critique of the American doctorpatient dynamic, not much had changed. In fact, a status quo has been in place for much longer. Its foundations reach back to the mid-nineteenth century, when reforms in medical education helped create our current image of the American doctor.

ABRAHAM FLEXNER WAS SOMETHING OF A PRODIGY. BORN IN KENTUCKY in November of 1866, he was one of nine children in a German-Jewish family. Flexner was a bright child and became a bright adult, completing his undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University in just two years. He pursued sporadic graduate degrees both at home and abroad, but was more interested in education itself as a subject of study. After returning from Europe,

14 – The Yale Herald

Flexner founded an experimental school in his hometown of Louisville. He gave no grades, no exams, and no formal transcripts; instead, he focused on helping students keep a strict daily schedule and maintain personal mental discipline.

When more and more of his students began to attend Ivy League schools postgraduation, Flexner himself began to rise in the eyes of the public. By the time he published his first book—a critique of the American university system—he was regarded as a pedagogical prophet.

Not long after Flexner published his critique, the Carnegie Foundation of New York commissioned him to investigate and report on the state of the American medical school system. At the time, for-profit proprietary schools were booming.

Between the years of 1810 and 1840, 26 new medical schools were built; between 1840 and 1876, 47 more. A ballooning number of young doctors were completing their education at these institutions, earning the title of Doctor of Medicine in an average of only 28 instructional weeks. More importantly, they were doing so without ever laying a hand on a patient or witnessing a surgical procedure. The ratio of American doctors to the general population was four to five times higher than that of most European nations.

The medical community had grown increasingly anxious over this lack of standardization, and what it meant for the status of the profession.

“What safeguards may society and the law throw about admission to a profession like that […] of medicine,” Flexner wondered, “in order that a sufficient number of men may be induced to enter it and yet the unfit and the undesirable may be excluded?”

Over the course of two years, Flexner traveled around the country to find out, visiting a total of 155 medical schools. His critique, published in 1910, was damning, to say the least: “The profession has been diluted by the presence of a great number of men who have come from weak schools with low ideals both of education and of professional honor,” he wrote.

Flexner recommended the shutdown of any school not attached to a large university. This meant all rural schools—disenfranchising the rural poor from practicing medicine in their own communities—and all schools that were open to Black students and women.

In his autobiography, Flexner notes with pride that, following his report, “old and hopeless ‘proprietary’ schools toppled like houses of cards, the total falling rapidly from one hundred and fifty to less than seventy. […] The revolution thus accomplished brought American medicine from the bottom of the pile to the very top.”

While Flexner’s reforms did indeed contribute to the foundations of a strong, internationally competitive American medical system, they also fostered great class divide when it came to health care access, particularly in rural areas, shuttering medical schools in poor communities all over the United States.

So while doctors finally received the social standing that Flexner believed they deserved, the rise in status of the title “Dr.” meant that medicine solidified itself as the pursuit of white males, predominantly from upper-class urban areas. Over time, the white coat of the doctor became increasingly laden with the anxieties of class, education, and race.

This, combined with the rapid advancement of medical knowledge—swapping bloodletting, purging, and emetics for greater knowledge of germ theory, imaging techniques like the X-Ray, and more developed understanding of blood markers—meant that on the whole, the average person had less and less understanding of the medical world, and the medical world had less and less understanding of the average person.

The chasm between the doctor and the patient—the same one evoked by

the expansive polished desk in the LIFE article—grew. Doctors underwent years and years of strenuous medical training. They had access to far more detailed knowledge than their patients did. Thanks to advances in technology, they could observe cancers, fractures, and other previously unseen illnesses. But patients still possessed the one insight that doctors never would: they were the ones inhabiting the bodies being treated.

AS A PRACTICING INTERNIST, DR. RITA CHARON, PROFESSOR OF CLINICAL Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, had a particular way of beginning each appointment with a new patient. She would enter the room, introduce herself, and say: “Please tell me what you think I should know about your situation.”

Sometimes, the response was straightforward. A patient would talk of chronic pains, sudden changes in day-to-day ability, family histories of high blood pressure, or cancer. Other times, patients’ stories were more indirect; they’d talk about their family life and their stress, about how they were not getting along with their son, or about the recent loss of their father to kidney disease. Whatever the story was, Dr. Charon just listened. No typing, no writing, no directional questioning—none of the diagnostic techniques medical students are taught in school. Not until the patient was done.

This is the crux of what she hopes her students will learn, although the program isn’t exclusively for current or future doctors; it’s a case study in interdisciplinary work. Courses include literary and philosophical analysis, narrative writing, fieldwork, and a variety of ways for students to interact with beauty and art, which Dr. Charon sees as crucial to their training. It’s the only program, for example, that brings future doctors, therapists, surgeons, and social workers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to work with renowned art historians to hone their powers of observation. The pedagogical idea behind it is that there’s something crucial missing in the current medical education system.

If Flexner was of the opinion that medicine’s purpose is “to fight the battle against disease,” Dr. Charon and her students take the position that medicine is much more than that.

At its core, the program is about what can be learned by really, deeply engaging with patients’ stories of their own illnesses and pains, listening to them in a way that is increasingly rare in American hospitals and private practices.

A widely-cited study, conducted by Howard Beckman and Richard Frankel, and published in 1984, showed that across 74 medical examinations, doctors allowed fewer than one in four patients to describe their health concerns without interruption. On average, it took just 17 seconds for a physician to interrupt the patient.

In large part, this is driven by a need for efficiency, Dr. Robert Alpern, Dean of the Yale School of Medicine, told me in an email. “On the one hand, I can tell you that there is nothing more valuable in assessing a patient than speaking with them,” he said. “Doctors who actually see patients will tell you that the pressure to see many patients has constrained the time they have to [...] take extended histories from them.”

For Dr. Charon, those long conversations are the only way to actually understand a patient. But despite the emphasis on active listening, she is firm in saying that the program’s purpose is not to teach empathy—she finds the term hazy at best—but to impart upon students a sense of their ignorance; to be able to “come to the table fully humble that they don’t know the first thing about

the person in front of them, other than their height, weight, and biological sex.”

In a way, Dr. Charon’s approach represents a return to a humbler era—when doctors didn’t have quick fixes or easy answers. Often, that meant more patients had to die before physicians could learn how to solve a disease. But it also meant that doctors sought to be more thorough in their preliminary investigations.

Because they didn’t know what might be important, they couldn’t leave any aspect of patient’s life out of their inquiry. Physical, social, cultural, religious, nutritional details—all of this made it into the medical files. And according to Dr. Charon and her cohort, this is the better medicine.

WITH ILLNESSES, BEGINNINGS CAN BE HAZY. WHERE DO WE PICK UP the thread of a story that began without our knowledge? The body, I have learned, is an endlessly private thing; so private that it can fool the besttrained physicians, and so private that it can even, for a time, hide its truths from the one inhabiting it.

When I get the chance to talk to Dr. Charon myself, she asks to hear my backstory before answering any of my questions. I tell her about my diagnosis, and she seems unsurprised by my interest in narrative medicine.

“I just gave weekly rounds to the Department of Rheumatology, and I told them that the thoughts of narrative medicine pertain perhaps more to rheumatology and endocrinology than to cardiology or pulmonology,” she says.

“With cardiology, you can get away with reducing the problem to the physical— which artery needs a stent? You put the stent into a coronary artery, and that kind of fixes it. The rheumatologist can’t get away with that. There’s no local fix. It’s systemic, not related to any one organ or tissue, and, forgive me, but it’s more mysterious.”

We talk for a while about health and illness, and about what it is that keeps doctors from connecting with patients. For Dr. Charon, it always comes back to the stories. One thing she says sticks with me long after we’ve hung up.

“Illness is a singular event, but it’s also a co-constructed event,” she says.

“The diagnosis emerges from the two people in the room.”

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff

Oct. 7, 2016 – 15

FEATURES

Opportunity Costs Victoria Wang, PC ‘19, checks what finance and consulting recruitment really has to offer

I

t’s one thing to just live your life without really thinking carefully about what you want to do or why you want to do it,” said Trevor Williams, CH ‘18, an EconMath major. It’s another to look “at your own life with eyes wide open and actually say, ‘What do I want to do?’”

Williams was referring to the frequency of Yale students entering consulting and finance after graduation— futures into which he claims the university funnels stu-

16 – The Yale Herald

dents. “If you go on Symplicity, all the jobs they post there are finance and consulting. Almost all of them.

That’s just what Yale is… what the career office has dedicated its energy to. To cultivating those connections.”

Statistically, Williams’ observation—and one perceived by many Yale students—is supported. The Office of Career Strategies 2015 First Destination survey reported that 15.7% of the Yale graduating class of 2015 are working in a consulting role, and another 15.7% are

working in finance. Total: 31.4%. Compare this to the 16.8% who majored in something related to economics, according to the Yale Office of Institutional Research.

Research, which once was the most common post-graduation profession for Yalies, absorbed only 12.8%, while teaching and education took 10%.

Yale is a target school for companies like Goldman Sachs, Bain and Company, and McKinsey, which means that they invest heavily in recruit-

ing students. AJ Ding, BK ’19, an Econ major currently trying to land a summer consulting internship, says: “[Recruiting companies] have info sessions, and at the info sessions they like to portray their firm as intellectually stimulating, glamorous, fun work environments. They come to campus with dozens of representatives. They come and talk to you.”

As finance and consulting firms compete to lure students, pushing their application deadlines earlier and earlier, Yalies have to decide whether to commit their summers or two years of their youth to these jobs at the beginning of the school year, and in some cases, before school even begins. Some view this as an advantageous opportunity to get ahead of the curve, but others read it as a renunciation of everything Yale stands for. In the post-financial crisis era, Yale’s pride in its liberal arts tradition butts heads with the pull of the results-driven world of Wall Street more than ever before.

DAVID HALEK, DIRECTOR OF EMPLOYER RELATIONS AT OCS, denies that the university has given large consulting and finance firms an unfair advantage. “Consulting and finance, as well as other large organizations, can predict their hiring needs a year in advance. They hire greater numbers of new employees and, as a result, their hiring processes may be more refined.”

He says the idea that a disproportionate number of Yalies are entering the field is “a bit of a misperception.” He cites a variety of ways OCS tries to even the playing field between titans of industry and other career options: among them, networking events for smaller, or lesser known, companies, a workshop series for students considering graduate school, and the Common Good & Creative Careers initiative.

Williams contends that a major reason Ivy League students gravitate toward Wall Street is that higher education has not prepared them for the actual job market.“What kind of job can you earn six figures right out of college with no skills? Basically, these jobs.” The result is a heavy demand that Williams—an intern last summer at Macquarie, an investment bank—calls “a rat race.” “A lot of the other interns were very eager to be there, to demonstrate their interest to get a return offer. It was all about getting a return offer. And they just worked really hard… networked really hard… always asked to take on extra projects…. [But] the biggest thing I learned in banking was Excel shortcuts.”

After his experience with Macquarie, Williams—a member and former co-president of VITA, a student volunteering group that helps locals fill out tax returns—decided to go to graduate school and find a career in research instead. “I just think there’s more creative things [than banking] that someone with a Yale degree can do.... I think that a company like Amazon does a lot more interesting things than a bank. Or Google.” He adds that companies like McKinsey are “the old economy.” The better alternative is to “have an idea about how to do something in a totally different way, and if you’re just a new company with a ton of cash, you’re not really dealing with the same constraints on what you can do or the same types of conventional ideas about how to fix a business. And the fact that you can expand to any kind of product—I mean, you can have a research team at Amazon which will just do artificial intelligence, or drones. Anything. Or something that you can’t even anticipate now.”

Wall Street firms market themselves to Ivy League students as versatile training grounds for students to pick up skills they can later use in their own pursuits. Two other students I interviewed plan to go on to med school and human rights law after a brief stint with finance and consulting. This is common: the average duration that a new employee stays at Goldman Sachs is 1.4 years. Wall Street recognizes that this is a problem, but they have yet to refresh their image and adapt to the post-financial crisis emphasis on startups and innovation, which Silicon Valley has in spades. The Wall Street Journal reports that at Goldman Sachs, “Managing Millennials” has been one of the most popular training sessions for years, with no visible success in retaining young talent.

In 2014, Microsoft was the fifth biggest destination for Yale graduates, behind Yale University, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Bain and Company. Perhaps, then, the funnel is already starting to be directed elsewhere.

AS OF THIS YEAR, CONSULTING AND FINANCE ARE STILL BY FAR the most visible jobs to apply for on campus. Ding says, “there’s no harm in just making things accessible to people, I think. Personally I’d rather have it early so I can get it over with, otherwise it’s always looming in the back of your head—at least, for people who want to do consulting or finance.”

Ding has known that he was going into consulting since sophomore year, when he joined the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group—a student organization that takes on real clients and works on projects in teams every semester, and where he now serves as president. He entered Yale as a STEM major, but found the quantitative aspects of economics much more appealing. At Yale, he started to hear about consulting through recruiting and his friends.

“It’s just really interesting,” he says. “It’s a necessary field, just like everyone needs advice to make decisions, and if you have resources to ask people to help you make business decisions, then that’s a societal good. And things get produced. There are definitely corporate decisions that are made through consulting guidance that [are] productive for society…. The investment bank is definitely necessary for companies to grow, otherwise they couldn’t finance themselves. Companies would grow at a smaller rate.”

Over the summer Ding interned at Millar Brown Vermeer, working on strategy projects—projects which help the company make marketing or production decisions—for AB InBev, home of Bud Light, Budweiser, and Corona. “The internship was... just doing research, answering questions, learning about different markets…. Long hours, but lots of fun.” He adds, “It’s difficult for me to think of arguments why someone wouldn’t want to do consulting.”

Williams might contest that this mentality is influenced by Yale, where “it’s really easy to fall into the day-to-day routine without thinking about what you want to do or why you want to do it, and then when it comes time to apply for jobs and internships… [consulting or finance is] the path of least resistance. You just follow what other people are doing; you just follow what your school is giving to you.”

An EP&E major going into consulting—who has requested anonymity in light of recruiting season—admits, “To be fair, I think [consulting is] only the easy way out, because yes, once you get the job, you will have [money and job security]. But anything else about this career is not easy.

It’s not easy getting the job and it’s not easy keeping it.”

Ding, for one, believes that “if you’re a pragmatic person, if you like to see ideas in effect, rather than just floating ideas, I think that’s one of the biggest lures of consulting and finance.” There’s an accessibility to it, to seeing “deals being made, actually tangible things being done, based in empirical ideas, or based in strategy.” Ding explains that Yale glorifies academia, but he finds it can sometimes be “selfish,” calling it “intellectual masturbation.”

“You have this education, you’re this brilliant person, and yet you think about things that only one out of fifteen thousand people will ever consider or think about. Which is a waste.”

THE FACTORS THAT LEAD YALIES TO THE GOLD- AND CAFFEINEpaved Wall Street are many and varied, and they take center stage in the struggle of both liberal arts colleges and financial monoliths to stay relevant. Amazon and Google are fierce rising competitors, but it’s perhaps too early to say if they can manage to topple the older systems. Personally, I’d like to invoke a streak of Yale exceptionalism to say that so long as graduates believe in their work, any field that they choose, and society in general, will benefit.

As for the current status quo, even for those who fret over the percentage of Yalies going into finance/consulting, 68.6% of students choose alternative careers. That’s at least more than, say, Harvard.

Graphic by Sheiran Phu YH Staff Oct. 7, 2016 – 17

CULTURE

Politics: a farce!

by Rachel An

B

efore Jeb Bush was demoted to memes about mildness and pity, parodied and dismissed, he was considered a real possibility for the Republican candidacy. Then, of course, there was Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side. Both Jeb! and Hillary are members of powerful American families from which political dynasties have (or likely will) emerge. This theme of alternating political power belonging to select families finds its way into playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Scenes from Court Life, or the Whipping Boy and His Prince, currently showing at the Yale Repertory Theater.

In the first production of the Yale Repertory Theater’s 50th Anniversary Season, the humorous sequences featuring 17th century British court life during the Stuart age and contemporary family scenes of the Bushes paralleled the reappearance in the 2016 race of American political dynasties. Rather than commenting on today’s politics directly, the satirical play juxtaposes the equally ridiculous Bushes and Stuarts and focuses primarily on familial and courtly drama.

In one of the first major scenes, George W. Bush announces that he will run for an elected position in Texas government, even though Jeb had already been planning to run in Florida. George’s obnoxious obstinacy and Jeb’s inefficient disapproval set the tone for most of the show — the relations of a pushy older brother and an overpowered younger one, set in a national arena.

The script makes references to contemporary politics— starting from George H.W.’s candidacy announcement for the Texan governance to the termination of Jeb’s presidential race in light of Trump’s slandering remarks—but it also concurrently deals with family issues. W’s insecurities when painting his father highlight his famed daddy issues; sibling rivalries take center stage as both George W.

and Jeb run for office in the same year, compete for their parent’s affections, and flashback to childhood fights.

And Barbara’s staunch insistence on playing fair, both at home and with political opponents, showcases their family values and undying support for family no matter the circumstance.

In addition to these family squabbles, Southern line dancing tunes morphed into 17th century classical music and American political figures switched into British court characters at the stage manager’s cue. Double cast actors seamlessly transitioned between characters and centuries.

George H.W. became Charles I; George W. became Charles II, and poor Jeb became Barnaby, the titular whipping boy (a close friend of the prince who is punished for the prince’s misbehaviors since the royal body cannot be touched).

Themes of bloodlines and restoration tie the two worlds together. Charles II witnesses his father Charles I’s dethroning and execution, then comes back in a grand coronation scene in the second act. Likewise, George W. Bush follows his father’s legacy and wins the presidential election. Meanwhile, both Jeb and Barnaby deal with problems out of their control. Jeb seeks a balance between family time and political failures, and Barnaby deals with a secret yearning for Catherine, Charles II’s wife, whom he was sent to woo. The show swam by with an abundance of slick comical statements, ironic contrasts, and over-thetop caricatures. Barnaby gets whipped for Charles II not doing his studies. Laura Bush cleaned up the blood from Charles I’s beheading while people in hazmat-suits milled around her. Hilarious bathroom scenes of Charles I and George H.W. connect their characters.

“The structure of the play is one of juxtaposition and synthesis,” Sarah Ruhl, the playwright said in an email. “Scene by scene the

play is always commenting on historical similarity or difference.”

Despite the politically significant characters, the show only directly touches upon contemporary politics near the end. Jeb is seen running for office one last time, campaigning hard but falling short. Trump constantly belittles him and criticizes his brother’s presidency, and Jeb is forced to defend his family, even though it is unappealing to the voters. On the sidelines, the Bush family cheers him on, proud, supporting him even when he drops out.

The play was originally supposed to end at Jeb’s announcement for the presidential race. “As it happens the election is far more alarming,” Ruhl wrote. “Jeb Bush comes off as more of a tragic figure… Not in our lifetime has there been a more important election.” And indeed, despite their many family problems, the Bushes in the show still stand for family values and respectability. Jeb’s termination of the presidential campaign leaves Trump to become the party candidate, creating a problem far bigger than dynasties.

Scenes from a Court Life unites English kings and American presidents making fools of themselves in sharp satire, poking fun at the imposing concept of dynasties, presenting a fictionalized, messy “reality” of powerful families behind their televised front, and, ultimately, the potentially terrifying outsider who could replace them.

Graphic by Julia Hedges YH Staff 18 – The Yale Herald

#Coleworld

by Robert Newhouse

F

irst you hear the bass, an electric heart pumping through the arteries of Corona Park. Then there’s the enormous sign in glimmering type welcoming everyone to The Meadows 2016, New York City’s newest music festival. And then there’s the line to get in, which is not a line. It’s a slow-moving wave of people whose outfits fill the spectrum from inventive—glowing get-ups of self-stitched fabrics—to offensive—nauseating combinations of dashikis on pale skin. Haven’t there been like six Buzzfeed articles telling us to stop doing that already?

Walking into the festival itself is like entering a bizarre, man-made microclimate. Small clouds hang impossibly low, speckling the concrete expanse with a pungent haze.

A rush of warm air emanates from around the stages where festival-goers become a singular mass of movement and where the ring pops are probably not the kind you sucked on as a kid. It all kind of looks like what would happen if Wes Anderson made a Bon Iver music video using a camera phone: colorful, mysterious, and hazy, but ultimately devoid of depth, choking on its own gleeful ambition.

All that said, when I attended The Meadows in New York City this weekend, I didn’t expect to be writing about it. Why? I guess I was a little embarrassed to be there.

Going to a music festival like The Meadows—such a cushy and extravagant affair—is clearly a mark of privilege that no one should be shoving in anyone else’s face.

More selfishly, I worried I simply wouldn’t have anything original to say. Yes, there were pushy kids scampering about. Yes, there were shitty beers that cost as much as a three-course meal at Ivy Wok. Yes, there were corporate tents the size of residential colleges. (Is there really a difference? Looking at you, Franklin Templeton College.) All valid. All true. All vaguely embarrassing.

Still, there’s a reason I’m writing this piece. He is a musician. A rapper. He is the man from Fayetteville, North Carolina who, last Saturday, showed me without the slightest suggestion of banality what it means to be sincere.

He is J. Cole.

TAKING THE STAGE AT EXACTLY 8:45 P.M., COLE donned a jersey with a rather obscure message: white letters on a metallic green background spelling the name “Megan Rapinoe.” I didn’t recognize the name at first, but after a quick Google search you’ll find that Rapinoe, an American soccer player, made the news recently for kneeling as the national anthem played before a game. Having immediately raised the stakes by making such a charged gesture, Cole wasted no time in launching into a searing portrait of masculinity, the almost unbearably personal saga, “Wet Dreamz.”

Everyone has songs that they don’t or can’t listen to.

Sometimes it’s because of a memory associated with the track, a line that is offensive, or simply a sound that bothers them. For me, “Wet Dreamz” is one of those songs.

But it’s not because of anything Cole does wrong; rather, it’s that Cole gets his message so painfully right. Through a combination of rich imagery and intense, unflinching narration, Cole tells the story of an inexperienced guy who strikes up a romance with someone whom Cole describes as a much more experienced girlfriend. His lyrics paint a virtuosic image of youthful exploration, disarming the listener with astonishingly delicate lines like, “But if I told the truth I knew I’d get played out son / Hadn’t been in a pussy since the day I came out one.” And his honesty evokes an almost visceral reaction, culminating when he reveals at the end of the song that it’s the girlfriend’s first time, too.

Like a thump in the gut, Cole’s fearlessness to relate his own struggles with insecurity challenges the listener to snap out of the delusion that all rappers have sex like Big Sean, who only complains about getting laid too much. And so perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this kind of toxic masculinity is that, finally, one can get used to it. It can even be a reassuring voice to have around from time to time, which is why, when Cole raps so realistically about a different brand of self-aware, vulnerable masculinity, it’s totally jarring.

I used to cringe immediately upon hearing the opening line, “Wasn’t nothin’ like that / Man it wasn’t nothin’ like that first time,” and would proceed to ask whoever was playing the song to skip it. But something about last Saturday was different. This time, when Cole leapt into those first rhymes, so did I, screaming them at the top of my lungs. In fact, somehow I knew the whole first verse. And then I knew the chorus, too. I was in it now, malleable, free to think and feel however Cole wanted me to.

And so the set continued until the music stopped abruptly and without explanation. Then the lights went out. Murmurs filled the reconstituted parking lot behind Citi Field. But just when people were starting to think something had gone wrong, the stage was lit by a milky, lilac glow. A stool appeared. Slowly, Cole walked back on stage, took a seat, and started talking.

He began by introducing himself. Adorable—as if anyone there didn’t know who he was. He told us a little about his career, his family, where he’s from. He told us how New York, and specifically Queens —the borough where the festival was being held—was important to him. How he went to college nearby at St. Johns, how tonight would be his “last show for a long time.” The gasps were audible, but were cut short when Cole launched into a secular sermon, asking each

person in the audience, stranger or best friend, to lock arms.

Cole touched on many things in the speech that followed, from social justice to personal appearance, but what unified each disparate topic was Cole’s underlying, undeniable sincerity. Thus, what made this moment so special was how counterintuitive it seems in retrospect: here was this celebrity talking down from a stage to thousands of regular folks as if he was one-on-one with any of us. I know I felt it. I’m sure others did, too.

How did Cole create this enchanting effect? My theory is that he earned the credibility to speak so candidly about clichéd subjects like “being beautiful the way you are,” because he doesn’t just do it between tracks. No, he’ll tell the crowd to love the way you look and then rap in the next song, “Never let ‘em see you frown / and if you need a friend to pick you up, I’ll be around / and we can ride with the windows down, the music loud / I can tell you ain’t laughed in a while, but I wanna see that crooked smile.” Almost all of his songs reflect the same ideology he promoted during his Meadows speech. Katie Liptak, FKA ’19, put it best by saying, “He didn’t just say all those nice things, then go off rapping about other stuff.

He backed it up, using his music to flesh out his genuineseeming message about taking some time to appreciate women who are overburdened and undervalued.”

I WON’T PRETEND TO KNOW THE MOST ABOUT RAP music. I don’t. But something about Cole’s ability to combine a speech that teetered on the brink of corniness with some real moving music gave me pause. Forget what the advertisements say. The Meadows and music festivals like it are really just enormous cash factories. They’re pricey.

They market themselves to a select demographic. But sometimes you can have an experience at an overtly capitalistic event that can help you forget that you’re at such an overtly capitalistic event. Last Saturday, I witnessed one man get more than a thousand others to lock arms solely based on the conviction that what he was rapping about was true and meaningful. Whenever J. Cole decides to return to the stage, many people will be confused to see the man from the Ville trade sexy backup dancers for a stool, sacrificing swagger for sincerity. But I will not be one of them.

Graphic by Oriana Tang YH Staff Oct. 6 2016 – 19

REVIEWS

Confessor brings a different flood

by Chris Capello YH Staff “I miss Christopher Hitchens I miss Oliver Sacks I miss poor Robin Williams I miss Sylvia Plath” Can we get a sense of what Conor Oberst, erstwhile Bright Eyes frontman, former sad-rock poster boy, and current limelight-allergic 30-something, is ‘about,’ in 2016, from the figures he cites in these lines off “A Little Uncanny,” from his new album Ruminations? Hitchens’ militant atheism is an obvious jumping-off point. One recalls a line from “Waste of Paint,” from 2002’s Lifted…, about an “absent God,” evidently still in absentia. The Sacks reference is a little more esoteric; perhaps his yoking of music theory and neuroscience forms a nice counterpoint to Hitchens’ godless bitterness — a kind of optimistic turn of the secular screw. (Sacks himself was also an avowed atheist.) Williams, god rest his soul, was funnier than Oberst but only by a hair. Only someone with a healthy comic sensibility could have named his 10-minute-plus magnum opus “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And Be Loved).” But the Plath reference is at once the most obvious and the most interesting. The three men that precede her in Oberst’s elegiac verses all died within the past half-decade — Hitchens in 2011, Sacks in 2015, Williams in 2014. Plath, though, turned the oven on in 1963, and in so doing hammered the canonizing nail into Confessional Poetry’s cross.

Oberst is indisputably a descendant of Plath. That the same hair-dyed androgynes who scribbled lines from “Lady Lazarus” in the margins of their high school notebooks were listening to Bright Eyes’ Fevers and Mirrors throughout most of the ‘00s should come as no surprise. Plath’s specter, towing her thinly veiled erotic view of death, suffuses Oberst’s earlier music, from the sad-eyed juvenilia of “Lila” through the mordantly morbid “The Calendar Hung Itself” and beyond. But Plath died at 30, and Oberst is now 34. He is, by all accounts, happily married as of 2011. His last album, 2014’s Upside-Down Mountain, was a pleasantly boring fifty-five minutes of seeming marital bliss, or at least the closest approximation that the onetime singer of “Lover I Don’t Have To Love” could muster.

If Upside-Down Mountain heralded the arrival of a newly grown-up Oberst, Ruminations demonstrates the effects of

this maturation. His voice, a distinctive and much-imitated tool, remains the boyish warble of the Bright Eyes years, but its target is no longer the singer himself.

Rather, Ruminations branches outward lyrically — spinning gyre-like around a solemn center of sparse, acoustic instrumentation. Freed from the self-centered angst of his younger years, Oberst conjures a world of dreamers, lovers, burnouts, and drinkers who are of part of the grim ethos of his youthful work but distinctly other. “Tachycardia,” for instance, tells the story of a man afflicted with the eponymous condition who drinks to slow his hyperactive heart, but the escapist allure of the “dark bar” that he frequents soon becomes its primary draw, a second-order appeal that subsumes the seeming utility of his drinking. In the next verse, Oberst connects this idea of temporary escapism to another character, a barista who comes to “the same thought” in a moment of work-related frustration. “Life’s an odd job that she don’t have the nerve to quit,” he sings.

Here, as never before, Oberst’s primary role is observational, even verging on the voyeuristic. At one point in the highlight “Gossamer Thin,” he spies an unfaithful couple of addicts through a motel window. “It’s no business of mine,” he sings, “if they can love more than one at a time. For his speaker, the ability to sympathize — or at least identify — with such morally ambiguous figures comes from a recognition of his own beaten-down state. He, too, has been “worn gossamer thin” by the pressures of life, the addictive impulse that drives both their infidelity and his alcoholism. (“The drink in my hand is starting to shake,” he admits.) No longer the prototypical Plathian confessee, Oberst becomes more like a Catholic confessor, taking in the sins of his subjects and offering, through lyrical mediation, not absolution but something close: an understanding that yokes each diegetic fuckup together in shared humanity.

Maybe this is where all that atheistic baggage comes in.

Years removed from trying to figure out his own relationship with religion, Oberst appears to have adopted a more selfless artistic mission: songwriting as a corrective against loneliness, a reminder that there is a world beyond the individual and that it’s populated with humans who feel, often, the same sense of isolation and who (ironically!) use the same counter-intuitive tactics to escape it — that we, like the pair in “Tachycardia,” are united by our occasional despairing ruminations.

This comes to a head in “Til Saint Dymphna Kicks Us Out,” a lovely, Randy Newman-esque closer in which Oberst conjures a bar — St. Dymphna’s — where “You don’t have to lie, say you’re alright,” and where the patrons, among which Oberst’s speaker includes himself, are “just happy you’re here.” The bar is real — it’s an Irish Pub on St. Mark’s Place in New York — but for Oberst the choice of name is hardly arbitrary: Saint Dymphna is, for Catholics, the Patron Saint of mental illness and spiritual afflictions, a revelation sure to get a rise out of longtime Bright Eyes devotees.

“Some things go south and they never turn around,” Oberst sings towards the end of “Saint Dymphna,” “But if you want a confidant, I’d never let you down.” Oberst was once a mirror, a projection onto which those Plathscribbling junior-depressives could map their own probably-not-all-that-significant anxieties and pains. Now he’s a “confidant,” a listener. But for an album that seems to find its only solace in the communal nature of human suffering, Ruminations is an awfully solipsistic musical affair. Bright Eyes albums, for all their lyrical insularity, always sounded like the work of a team; at times, even, as on the swelling “False Advertising,” the work of an orchestra. Ruminations, by contrast, is guttingly spare. All the songs are either piano- or acoustic guitar-based, but never at the same time.

There’s a harmonica, but only when Oberst isn’t singing.

Longtime collaborator Mike Mogis assists with production, but his trademark pedal-steal guitar is unfortunately absent from the record. When Oberst played at College Street Music Hall this summer with the Felice Brothers as his backing band, the then-unreleased Ruminations material swaggered with the folk-rock heft we’ve come to expect from Oberst in his looser moments. It’s hard not to miss that sound, especially on “A Little Uncanny,” which all but yearns for harmonic vocals, drums, and blues rock guitar licks. Moreover, it’s a little easier to believe in the powers of community when there’s, you know, a discernible group of people avowing said powers.

Then again, though, confession is a two-person thing.

Just you and your confidant, sitting in solemnity, listening through the screen.

Image courtesy of Nonesuch

20 – The Yale Herald

TV: Luke Cage

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Film: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

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ctober is the month for all things spooky, and no filmmaker does spooky quite like Tim Burton. His latest film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, has no shortage of the creepy nor the fantastical. It’s the story of an ordinary boy who gets sucked into an extraordinary but terrifying world. Despite its flaws, the film is an exciting and heartwarming escape from reality.

Based on Ransom Riggs’s young adult novel, the material’s gothic and magical elements, along with its intricate storyline, make it a perfect fit for Burton’s directorial imagination.

Aesthetically, the film delivers. CGI, compelling backdrops, and expert costuming come together to create a stunning visual experience. In one of the most fun and climactic scenes of the movie, the young Peculiars (humans with unusual talents and abilities) face off against giant, invisible monsters at a snow-covered fairground with an electronic backing track enhancing the surreal and fantastical tone. Eerie imagery is done superbly well: in a particularly unsettling scene, the antagonists, Peculiars gone rogue, sit around a table devouring a plate of human eyeballs.

The Peculiar children were by far the best human element of the film. The actors were delightful: from an adorable brown haired girl comically gifted with extreme strength, to an invisible boy who prefers to walk around naked, it wasn’t difficult to root for the film’s protagonists.

Miss Peregrine, their caretaker, was well played by a quirky, charming Eva Green. Although Asa Butterfield played Jacob, the main protagonist, his performance didn’t particularly stand out. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of the film was Samuel L. Jackson’s cheesy villainous acting; it’s unclear whether it was intentional or not, but the veteran bad-guy definitely seemed like he was toning down his typical high-octane mannerisms.

While the imagery from the book translated well to the screen, the plot proved too long and complex for a two-hour film. As a result, the movie was all over the place as its filmmakers tried to fit in as much possible. The exposition of the film dragged , but that’s because so much backstory was needed for the rest of the plot to make sense. However, once set, the story took the viewer on an adventure across time and space with plot holes you you can forgive in the rush and excitement of it all.

The story’s emotional element also suffered in the transition from page to screen. Enough from the novel remained to satiate the viewer, but it could have been improved. The Peculiars, despite being one of the strong suits of the film, deserved far more character development; this was particularly evident in the disjointed development of the cute, yet expected romance between Peculiars Jake and Emma Bloom.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, like Harry Potter and other YA novel adaptations, highlights humans’ desire to escape the mundane and enter the extraordinary. While for Jake that may involve monsters and time travel, for the viewer it means 127 minutes of being entranced by Tim Burton’s filmmaking. Forget midterms for a bit and watch Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Disregard any plot holes and confusion and let the fantastic imagery and extraordinary adventure ignite your imagination.

-Lina Goelzer YH Staff

arvel’s new Netflix show, Luke Cage, shouldn’t work as well as it does. The character of Luke Cage was written forty years ago by a team of white men, and it shows. While their intentions may have been benign, Luke’s indestructible skin plays straight into the myth that ties blackness to physical invincibility.

And in the decades since, this stereotype—that black men are too strong to be harmed— has contributed to the unjust killings of countless Americans.

A show could easily collapse beneath the weight of that history. But Luke Cage breathes new life into the narrative. The show depicts Luke as a human shield, while still framing him as a violent menace. It further critiques the media’s false narrative, with the implication that they are fundamentally troubled by the idea of an invincible black man. Meanwhile, the residents of Harlem are deeply damaged by violence, and Luke’s indestructibility only emphasizes how fragile humans really are.

Luke Cage pays homage to its roots, but doesn’t allow itself to be limited by the past.

The series is a comic book adaptation with all the pulpy melodrama that entails, but it’s shaded with enough complexity that even its villains feel human. The city itself is more than a thing to be fought over—it’s a brilliant, textured, lived-in space, full of people who genuinely want it to thrive but simply have different solutions—and thanks to the excellent sound mixing, you can always hear it humming behind the action. The action, for its part, is delightful to watch even in night scenes, because the cinematography doesn’t use the darkness to obscure poor fight choreography. Instead, it pays careful attention to the pools of light that bring color to the darkness, and that color gives a fresh layer of interest to the city’s grit. Other comic book screen adaptations should stop being so scared of the texture of the cities they inhabit.

There are moments in which Luke Cage stumbles, and unfortunately, they would have been difficult to avoid. Like Daredevil and Jessica Jones before it, this story didn’t need to be stretched out into thirteen episodes, and as a result the pacing takes a hit. The first half of the series is developed so richly that the second can’t tie it all together. And some of the twists that serve to revitalize a binge-watcher’s interest ultimately hurt the long term viability of the plot.

They don’t negate the fact that the first season of Luke Cage is one of the most powerful stories a superhero show has ever been used to tell. These plot faults don’t undermine the sheer artistry with which it’s executed. And they certainly doesn’t lessen the impact of seeing a black man in a hoodie be a hero.

-Emily Pan

Upper left image courtesy of 20th Century Fox Bottom right image courtesy of Netflix Oct. 6, 2016 – 21

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

WRITE FOR THE HERALD

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST being sick for all of fall term

What we hate this week

more like Yale UNhealth, am I right?

when you weep blood

I look like a handsome dinosaur

getting frightened by the reflection of the claw hand I have while I’m shaving

it’s just the stress, you know

MOVE ON TO THE AFTER LIFE!

getting ghosted

trees

running into your TA

they’re waging a losing fight tbh

so awkward when you knock them over

what is the point

Gary Johnson fanfic

horse races enough said

Oct. 6, 2016 – 23