Herald Volume LXII Issue 9

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 9 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Nov. 18, 2016

FROM THE STAFF My Fellow Americans (and foreign friends), After spending this weekend at The Game in one of the bluest states in the Union, I will be heading to my family’s Thanksgiving celebration in Iowa, where I will be a blue gal in a red state, surrounded by forty members of my extended family. It will be hard to play Cornhole and celebrate the anniversary of a meal hosted by a people whose guests then slaughtered them knowing that so much is on a one way train to shitsville. As bad as that sounds, I’ll be lucky to have a Thanksgiving meal at all.

In this week’s Herald, Sarah Holder, SY ’17, looks at the Patriot Housing Initiative, a Westchester program dedicated to housing homeless veterans. Holder documents the paths that three formerly homeless men took in the years after they were discharged. With the help of the Patriot Housing Initiative, they found homes, but thousands of men and women who have served in the American Armed Forces will not be so lucky this holiday season.

Elsewhere in the paper, the Herald contends with other pressing national problems. Will Reid, PC ’19, considers F*cking Decent, and the newly relevant issue of censorship. Isaac Scobey-Thal, CC ’19, rejects performative and ultimately unproductive allyship in the aftermath of the shocking election outcome, and Kat Lin, MC ’18, condemns the lack of diversity in the media.

It’s been a hard couple weeks, and the next one may not be better. But in the spirit of gratitude, I’m thankful to be on a campus ready, as always, to “push back on that a little.” Use this November break to rest and recuperate but also to call out Aunt Lucy on her racism. We’re not done and won’t be for a long time.

Happy holidays!

Unhinged, but getting it together, Emma Chanen Culture Editor

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Issue 9 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Nov. 18, 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: Bix Archer Insert Editor: Marc Shkurovich Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Dimitri Diagne, Drew Glaeser, Hannah Offer ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Hannah Offer Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics & Design Editor: Haewon Ma Executive Graphics Editor: Claire Sheen BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Russell Heller, Jocelyn Lehman, 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 Alex Swanson YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming Overrated food The country needs to come to terms with the fact that turkey is the inferior avian meat. Cornish hen is objectively more tender and flavorful, and I’m a vegetarian.

Outgoing Gratitude Once Thanksgiving is over, there are no more social norms stopping you from reverting to your vindictive and spiteful self for another eleven months. #blessup

Cover 12 – Sarah Holder, SY ’16, tells the stories of three homeless veterans as they get off the streets in Westchester County, NY.

Voices 6 – Stefanie Fernandez, TD ’17, pens a poem in the language of Reverend Jerry Falwell. Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, instructs us in the art of loneliness.

Opinion Saturday The Game Harvard Stadium 12:30 p.m.

Wednesday The day before Thanksgiving

Thursday Thanksgiving

Friday The day after Thanksgiving

8 – Kat Lin, MC ’18, raises her voice against Asian American invisibility.

9 – Isaac Scobey-Thal, CC ’19, asks white liberals to recognize their complicity in white privilege.

Features 10 – Nolan Phillips, TC ’18, spotlights Students of Salaam, a group that welcomes refugees into New Haven’s community.

16 – Rob Newhouse, CC ’19, meets a young mathematician—who is also a woodworker, piano player, actor, writer, philosopher, and Yale undergraduate.

Culture 18 – Oriana Tang, SY ’19, has a “Burning Desire” to get to the bottom of the Lana Del Rey craze.

19 – Will Reid, PC ’19, ponders F*cking Decent and history’s uncomfortabe relevance today.

Reviews 21 – Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, likes Arrival much more than he expected to.

Nic Harris, BR ’18, praises Common’s latest release, Black America Again for its lyricism and social commentary. And check out the Herald’s picks for the best songs of the season.

Nov. 18, 2016 – 3

CREDIT/D/FAIL – ESCAPISM

THE NUMBERS Index 19 – margin of victory of the 2015 contest; also,

Escaping to the future These are scary times, with scary realities to face: mimes are luring children into the woods with invisible candy, giraffe necks are getting shorter to escape the thickening ozone layer, and once a year for 24 hours, all crime, including murder, is legal. Even the Sharks and the Jets have gone back to the ocean and the atmosphere to escape the horrors on land.

But once you make it to the future, through your method of choice, temporal displacement will present plenty of fascinating diversions to explore, like seeing where Frankie Muniz finally ends up or witnessing mankind divide into two warring species. Neat! “But what about the past?” you might ask. “I know I would have thrived in the Roarin’ ’20s or those few centuries where leggings were fashionable for men!” Well listen here buckaroo, the past isn’t such a hot destination. Did you know it once rained for forty days and forty nights? If you stood out in the rain for all that time, you would definitely catch a cold! Yuck! Take my word, go to the future, buy a sports almanac, and enjoy yourself.

number of cranberries Harvard President Drew Faust can fit in her mouth at one time, five fewer than Yale President Peter Salovey.

9 – number of consecutive Harvard victories in The Game; or, cups of Boston clam chowder you can buy in lieu of purchasing a ticket to the tenth.

3 – number of quarterbacks Yale has started this year; coincidentally, also the number of points an average Bulldogs fan thinks a touchdown is worth.

26 – number of lunar cycles between now and the next time The Game will occur in Cambridge; three fewer than the number of Supreme Court Justices produced by Yale and Harvard Law Schools.

$9.99 – amount of money I spent on 1-month

Ford Escape

subscription to Tinder Plus to be able to change swiping location to Harvard Yard.

Listen, I wanted a BMW, but the car dealer told me that a handsome guy like me had no business in a Grandma car like that. So I thought yeah, I am a pretty handsome guy, forget the damn Beemer. So then I wanted a Lexus, but the dealer (nice guy, very kind) said my palms were too masculine to be driving a granny-wagon like that. Now I’m thinking I want a Buick, y’know, something reliable. But the dealer tells me, and I think I agree with him here, that with elbows as sharp as mine (“dangerous,” he calls them), I’ve got no reason to be driving a nursing-home-on-wheels like that. So then all that was left was the damn Ford Escape and a used Volkswagen Jetta. But the dealer told me the Jetta has a leaky roof, and basically offers no protection from the rain. And if you sit out in the rain all night, you’re gonna catch a cold. So the Escape it was.

99 – number of actual football fans that care about outcome of mid-major FCS clash between two teams not eligible for postseason play.

Sources: 1) Salovey’s dark web vlog repository 2) phone call with Mike, owner of Mike’s Diner, 3x winner of “Boston’s Shittiest Diner” award 3) the news, informal survey 4) Poor Richard’s Almanac and an abacus 5) my mom’s angry voicemail after receiving iTunes receipt 6) Twitter search of “harvard-yale” – Eli Lininger

Top 5 games that are more fun than “The Game”

Escaping within yourself The prospect of shrinking yourself and hiding within your corporeal body is tempting. There’s so much to explore: the spleen, the colon, the semicolon. But don’t be fooled by CDC propaganda film Osmosis Jones––most white blood cells sound nothing like Chris Rock. The truth is, only Bill Murray’s white blood cells sound like Marty the Zebra. A healthy human’s white blood cells are voiced by occasional funnyman and frequent Badger Milk spokesman Rob Schneider, while a sick person’s blood cells sound just like former actor and current mall cop Kevin James. The prospect of running around a fleshy labyrinth while antibodies chase you on Segways is a chilling one indeed. Besides, the inside of the body is wet and covered in fluids… and if you sit around in your wet clothes all night, you’re gonna catch a cold.

5 – Hide-and-Go-Seek Jenga 4 – Using only a Magic 8-ball to answer questions and ruining your relationship 3 – Pin the tail back on the salamander 2 – Chutes and Ladders 1 – Hot seat except the twist is that you make the person sit on burning coals

– Noah Ritz 4 – The Yale Herald

– Gian-Paul Bergeron YH Staff

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

rachel.strodel@yale.edu

VOICES

Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.

–Rev. Jerry Falwell, sermon to Thomas Road Baptist Church, summer 1981 In the dusk of stalled cars with open doors I weave my wreath from churches lit up like devotionals down 29 I, king of the armchair majority, rector of all unordered things.

In this state I preside over the revival of bodies in the dark in the river in the bed, wash yourself with and of the old words, ye vessel ye New Life I sing you tongues you can purchase at Walmart, I sing your television set, mothers in sweaters, children who eat what is inedible who eat passing over the foothills where I grip your American Religion and mobilize it. Sleep in this bed, says the Christ, I love you, in glowing trial at the dollar store and I urge you, believe what is secular in you, sterile will be taken up from the donation bin on the steps of this empty room and re-stitched, clean with this silence that floats nightly over the blue ridge

Notes on the State of Virginia from the desk of the Reverend Jerry Falwell

by Stefanie Fernandez

In these days, empathy must be our weapon, yes, empathy on the march back to the great assembly at the end of this world.

Shed your garments of the pretender who eats twigs, staggers drunk through the trees in a crown of deer antlers speak hopeless— sleep in this bed of linens and zoysia grass speak less let body fall from the scaffolding of sin and shit that lines the frontier, ye molded, take your body brave to the pulpit, deerblind and embraced.

Lock your doors ye militant let me crown you in all the old light

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 6 – The Yale Herald

How to be lonely

by Mariah Kreutter

I. Do not think about your loneliness as an entity separate from yourself. Allow it to consume you. Give yourself to it, but be gentle; it is more afraid than you are. There is comfort in oblivion.

II. Long for the sea. How broad and deep and blue it is, how singular, how full of strange things! No man is an island; we are each of us an ocean on a different earth. Our separateness is not constructed but innate.

III. Walk among half empty streets. Allow your solitude to be conspicuous even as you go unnoticed. If it is dark, let there be darkness; if it is light, let there be light.

IV. Drink a glass of water and eat an apple. Marvel at the freshness of both. Leave the core inside the empty glass and allow it to rot.

V. Notice how blank spaces dissolve. A white wall becomes pinpricks of difference, shifting, moving, creating false texture. The universe is made of isolated points. There is no such thing as a line.

Graphic by Sheiran Phu YH Staff Nov. 18, 2016 – 7

OPINION Asian/American

by Kat Lin

L

ike many Yalies last Tuesday night, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, laptop hopelessly in front of me, eyes fixated on the election’s news coverage. I watched as news anchors tried to predict State results from county voting history and the amount of voter turnout in minorities. That was the moment when I thought I heard it. My heart skipped a beat. Could American national news have just uttered the word “Asians” on national television? In a serious discussion of America’s political climate? The answer was no. Not a surprising result (unlike the election), since Asian Americans are not seen as Americans because of a lack of Asian representation in media and entertainment. Even when left to speak up for ourselves, it never feels like a good time to talk about the struggles of Asian Americans when other minority groups are faced with more immediate and extreme prejudices.

That moment I thought American news anchors cared about Asian Americans was full of naive hopefulness. It was the same feeling I had when I went to Taiwan two summers ago and saw Asian-looking people on TV commercials or when I saw white people shop in Asian supermarkets. The concept of Asian culture being in any way a “normal” thing is just so unfamiliar. In that splitsecond reaction to mishearing the news anchor, I realized just how sad this situation was. Asian Americans don’t appear often in media, in movies, in theater, and in advertisements. If you learned about America by watching TV, you wouldn’t realize that there were over 17 million Asian Americans living here.

If you learned about America by reading through American history books, you would never have known about Japanese internment camps or the treatment of the Chinese when building the transcontinental railroad. We seem simply not to exist. The culmination of these effects all seem to point to the same message: Asian Americans just aren’t important enough to care about. This is how we end up with Asian American invisibility, seen as perpetual foreigners in our own country.

And as many people did on the night of the election, I, as a woman and person of color, went to bed feeling hopeless, scared, and unsafe. But I, as an Asian American from an upper-middle-class community, felt immensely guilty for feeling that way. Amidst the fear and tension for minority groups, I was lucky to be as safe as I was, sleeping in a dorm in one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the world. Who am I to worry, when I know I can be safe and when so many other people have much more to be afraid of?

Even if we are rarely spoken of, it’s safer to be invisible than to be racially profiled or cast as a threat: but being invisible has always been part of the problem.

There are too many ways to rationalize not speaking about Asian Americans. At just 5.8% of the population in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans certainly didn’t seem to have as much of an impact on the election results as Hispanics or African Americans. In the context of other movements, we seem to have it okay. The extent of prejudices against us, it seems, is the model minority myth. What could be so bad about being thought of as hardworking and smart? So even in contexts where we advocate for awareness about the struggles of people of color, Asian Americans seem to be forgotten or tacked on as an afterthought. We tend to forget that Asian Americans may also have similar concerns and troubles. For example, I know Asian American friends who have close family who are undocumented immigrants, now fearful of the policy changes that may come with the new presidency. Xenophobic policies are a threat to all races.

The invisibility of Asian Americans indicates a larger problem that we as Americans have: our inability to see people as people, not understanding that everyone, despite cultural and experiential differences, are the same at our core. This perceived difference is extremely dangerous. It’s hard to care about people that we don’t see as ourselves. That’s just the way we are biologically wired and America has never been very good at respecting or understanding other cultures. And while there is a disparity between the severity of problems that Asian Americans face and those of other minorities, it doesn’t mean that we should exclude ourselves from conversations about race. Just because our injustices are not as extreme does not invalidate our experiences. Nor does it mean that we can’t also help push for equality and respect for all underrepresented groups.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

An insufficient response

by Isaac Scobey-Thal

A

s the election results began to solidify last week, Van Jones—an AfricanAmerican news anchor for CNN—called America’s decision to elect Donald Trump a “whitelash”: an outraged cry of resistance against the legacy of a black president and the landscape of a changing country.

To argue that our president-elect devalues the lives of non-white Americans is unnecessary: it is fact, undeniable. It is equally obvious that white America was the engine that elected him: white Americans accounted for 73 percent of the electorate, and white people were the only demographic of which a majority voted Trump. But the whitelash is more than statistics. This election represents a deep ideological choice, one between inclusion and fear—and we have loudly and proudly chosen the latter.

And so, in the wake of an American tragedy so clearly defined by whiteness, I wanted to write about white people, and how we have responded to this moment.

In particular, I wanted to write about white liberals, us white people who somehow continue to fool ourselves into thinking that we are superior to the members of our race who uphold explicit prejudice.

White liberals constituted the community in which I grew up. They were my schoolteachers and soccer coaches, my oldest friends. The following piece is as much a self-reflection and critique of my own thought practice as it is of anyone else’s. I write this because my people have shown their true colors in response to the election, and those colors have, indeed, been troubling.

First, there were the lefty think pieces that tried to explain the election—and the entire scope of our country’s ideological civil war—in one cute paragraph. Then there were the op-eds calling for empathy towards the white American working class. Finally, there were the superficial and quite meaningless markers of solidarity, the Facebook statuses and safety pins.

Through and through, the collective response of us white liberals boils down to our effort to distance ourselves from white supremacy; that effort is futile because that distance is, quite simply, imagined. We are white supremacy, and white supremacy is every single one of us.

Take the safety pin, for example. Supposedly a marker of solidarity, the safety pin is meant to assure immigrants, people of LGBTQ identification, Muslims, and black Americans that the person wearing the pin is an alley: people may, in theory, see your safety pin and know that you’re a friendly face, that they are safe with you. Apart from the meaningless and empty nature of this gesture, the safety pin also assigns white people a responsibility that we simply cannot execute, because one cannot claim to know how to construct a safe space if one has never felt unsafe. Worst of all, collective responses like the safety pin assure us that we are doing something, anything to fight against misogyny and racism, and therefore permit us to dodge asking ourselves the most difficult and most important question engineered by this jarring historical moment: how do I contribute to the ruling machine of whiteness?

I do not have the answer to this impossible question, but am rather writing this because I believe that the act of asking it is essential. For in the wake of a politi-

cal tragedy so absolutely caused by our people, whites should not be spending time explaining results, proposing solutions, or lamenting the low turnout black vote: we should be questioning ourselves incessantly. We should be questioning the ways in which we wield our privilege, the ways in which we respond to it, the avenues through which we cash our political capital, and the many moments we have stayed silent, for our very existence is the fuel of the machine that so visibly reared its teeth on November 8th.

Please do not misread me as discounting the importance of vocal love and solidarity on behalf of everyone, including my fellow white people: those are radical and vital political acts, and we desperately need them. It is only that such vocalization is far less meaningful if we cannot, at the same, constantly place the effects of our own whiteness into question.

In almost all that we do, white liberals attempt to avoid this line of questioning.

Instead, we expend our energy asserting our superiority over the white people we see as truly culpable. We attempt to separate ourselves from the rural, racist white folk who really uphold racist rhetoric, and who really lost us the election. But the weight of ruling whiteness does not draw divides between racist whites and liberal ones, for it is upheld by every single one of us. And at its heart is the inconvenient truth that we white liberals have much more in common with the “rural racist whites” than we would like to think: we were formed by the same arc of history, nurtured with the same privileges, and plagued by the same inability to see. One must understand that our commonalities—though unconscious and unintentional—are inevitable. Let us not pretend otherwise, for to assert that we share commonalities only with our fellow Muslim, immigrant, trans, and black citizens is to commit a great act of historical amnesia. We can stand with them—and I do very emphatically encourage doing so—while still addressing the many ways that we construct and benefit from the very system that forces them to fear for their lives.

I cannot even begin to understand the weight of white supremacy because it will never put my life in danger. I do believe, however, that attempting to understand it is of absolute necessity, mostly because I am, in so many ways, complicit in its power. Until we white people find a way to acknowledge this—until we loudly lay claim to the ways that we stand at the very root of the problem—the solutions we try to engineer to fix it will continue to be as superficial, fragile, and meaningless as the safety pin.

Graphics by Haewon Ma YH Staff Nov. 18, 2016 – 9

FEATURES

Milo Robert Newhouse, CC ’19, meets a young mathematician—and artist, woodworker, piano player, actor, writer, philosopher, and Yale undergraduate.

M

ove-in day, 2015: after unpacking my clothes and debunking my bed, my mom and I leave Bingham to buy lunch.

He sits by himself beneath a tree. “I bet he’s some kind of genius,” my mom whispers, nodding her head and tapping my shoulder proudly, as if to say, This is what Yale’s going to be like. Next to him lies a pile of half-sharpened pencils and crinkled papers.

There is a notebook full of conceptual math: complex curves, charts, letters, and the occasional number.

He is beneath that same tree weeks later when I decide to approach him: “What’s the longest you’ve ever spent on one problem?”

“Four, maybe five months,” he says.

I am taken aback.

“Some problems are hard,” he continues. I giggle, but he isn’t joking.

“I’m Milo.” He extends a hand for me to shake.

Usually, places are named for the dead: Yale has Harkness Hall and Davenport College. But this bench outside Bingham, adjacent to a towering oak tree, has become Milo’s Bench—for Milo Brandt, TC ’19.

IT IS COLD WHEN I NEXT MEET MILO, AND HE picks at the icicles that have covered the legs of his bench. The sun is blinding, the air sharp. Milo wears a red shirt and blue pants, a brown sock on the left foot, and a red one on the right. Milo’s shoes have holes in them, but it doesn’t bother him, he says. His voice is gravelly and jumps a couple of octaves when he is excited.

He tells me about his upbringing in a quiet corner of Massachusetts, where he attended The Parker Essential School and prematurely completed its mathematics curriculum.

10 – The Yale Herald

“The teachers were just like ‘Yeah, Milo, do whatever you want. We don’t have anything for you,’” he explains, raising his eyebrows and performing bewilderment. Soon, he was writing 20-page research papers and theorems with “every possible detail you may want to know about trigonometric functions.”

“Everything Milo did, whether it was acting or playing with math, or writing poetry or building a pipe organ, he did with this joyful gusto for trying and learning and knowing and doing,” said Sue Massucco, an English teacher at Parker.

And indeed, Milo does much more than math. As Massucco noted, he built a pipe organ—“like, from pieces of wood,” Milo clarifies. Having played the piano since kindergarten, he undertook this task for his senior project in high school. Milo knew nothing about woodworking, so he signed up for a class at a cabinet-making school in Boston, took the train to the city every day, and returned to high school in the afternoon with the cuts and calluses that he had accrued throughout the day.

Milo filmed the entire process. After he posted a time-lapse video of the more than 300 hours of footage to YouTube, he was offered a job at an organmanufacturing factory. Milo accepted the offer, took a gap year, and built organs for nine months before matriculating at Yale.

“It’s hard to tell whether a piece of music is good.

In math it’s very easy. But what connects them is that in both, there’s a lot of potential for exploration,” Milo says.

To this end, Milo criticizes the more traditional approach that Yale’s math department takes. “Math seems like this directed field where it’s seen as more valuable to study a proof than to be able to put all the

time in necessary to recreate it,” he expands. “I feel like math should be practiced as an art, but I often see people practicing it as a science.”

Milo doesn’t work on math problems—he plays with them.

Over an hour into our conversation, another student approaches us. “You’re taking visitors now,” she jokes with a grin. Milo hesitates before playing along: “I guess so,” he exclaims, waving his arms.

This woman, Emma Green, TC ’19, was in Milo’s freshman counselor group. “If we can just get a premise going, the jokes can roll on forever,” Emma tells me of her shared sense of humor with Milo, remembering one instance in which they spent “a good 30 minutes discussing a scientific study in which we’d coerce the entire world into eating ceramic plates (he and I would, naturally, be the control group).”

I don’t know what “eating ceramic plates” means— and I don’t know why Milo and Green would be the control group. That, though, is part of Milo’s intrigue.

It begins to snow. Inspired by the growing numbness in my legs, I ask Milo what I’ve meant to ask him since the moment I met him: “Why do you do everything out here?”

“I just don’t like being inside,” he says. Then, after a pause: “It’s the closest bench to my room.”

“YOU MISSED OFFICE HOURS,” MILO SAYS TO A passerby who promptly apologizes and laughs. After she leaves, I ask Milo what class he shares with this friend—Rachel Kaufman TC, ’19. It is a fictional one, Kaufman tells me when I speak with her later: “Forestry & Environmental Studies 999,” in which Milo had enrolled her by sliding a hand-written acceptance letter to the course under her bedroom door.

“The class has since included a fill-in-the-blank test, on which I did not do so well, and an assignment, in which the instructions were to gather a leaf and write a 7-12 letter essay which described its ‘neobaroque qualities,’” Kaufman expands.

It’s November, and it’s been nearly a year since we last spoke. Milo has taken up residency on a new bench: not on Old Campus, but instead on Rose Walk, near his native Trumbull College. He still wears those same tattered shoes— “they’ve become less waterproof,” as he explains, but a smattering of duct tape covers gaping holes. His long hair has grown even longer, and his mom “hates it.”

Milo and I catch up—first, here on the bench; and later, over grilled cheeses in the Trumbull dining hall.

He tells me that he left the country for the first time this past summer to spend two weeks in Scandinavia with his mother and brother. “I admired how Iceland seemed to have their stuff in order in terms of social issues and the climate,” Milo notes, “but I really like New England.”

He then returned to New Haven—“to learn everything. I am about halfway done with this task, if you don’t account for the things that I don’t know about.”

“Everything” includes learning to play the Harkness Tower Carillon. Rejected from the Guild of Carillonneurs his freshman fall, Milo auditioned again this September and was accepted.

It includes improvisation, too, for which Milo tried out. He loves to act—and in fact, it was in a high school production of The Crucible that Massucco first saw Milo: “I was immediately struck by the joyful enthusiasm of one of the actors. He had this crazy cloud of blond hair, a wonderful and powerful voice, and, boy, was he having fun!” Milo enjoys theater because it allows him to collaborate “on helping make this cool work of art with all of these other people who are also pretty neat.”

“I take a more passive approach than most by trying to enjoy what I’m doing and that’s enough,” Milo tells me. “I like learning things and making things, and I like being outside, too.”

KAUFMAN TELLS ME: “MILO DETESTS PHYSICS AND enjoys benches. I do not remember how we met, but he is the kind of person who you see and who sees you and eventually you both fall into some sort of pattern.”

Many students on this campus are aware of this pattern that Kaufman observes: we walk from suites to Sterling, from Sterling to SSS—and each time, we pass Milo on his bench, his hair covering his face as he works.

Sometimes we wave. Usually we don’t. But as I’ve learned, Milo accepts visitors.

Massucco puts it best: “One learns with Milo; one does not teach Milo - and what one learns is to look with wonder at the world.”

Photo manipulation by Sheiran Phu YH Staff Nov. 18, 2016 – 11

Ground breakers

By Sarah Holder YH Staff

12 – The Yale Herald

T

he man had been sleeping in the bottom of the stairwell for years.

From the top of the parking garage staircase, one could hardly make out what was curled up in the V-shaped wedge on the first floor. But from the ground, when the bundles of clothes and food wrappers and blankets came into focus, it was clear that this was one man’s home.

He belongs to one of the most vulnerable subsets of the U.S. population: he is a veteran. Men and women like him, who have serve in the armed forces, often come home to suffer from the psychological trauma of war, combined with the physical degradation of battle. Some find it hard to maintain relationships and keep jobs.

Veteran’s Affairs Offices across the country are designed to help these veterans gain access to the services they need to get back on their feet. But often, what they need most is a place to call home—something that is hard to come by in a country where rent prices are rising and HUD subsidies are being slashed.

It is the compounding of these medical, psychological, and economic factors that have led to a national epidemic of veteran homelessness. And it is an epidemic: HUD estimates that in January 2013, 57,849 veterans were homeless on a single night.

Tonight, though, this veteran isn’t. After being found by outreach coordinators in Westchester County, he, along with more than 330 other veterans from the area, have moved into permanent homes. Hundreds of others are in transitional housing or supportive shelters. Not one is on the streets for more than 90 days.

WESTCHESTER’S NEW, ENERGIZED APPROACH TO REHOUSING homeless veterans is called the Patriot Housing Initiative, a county-wide antihomelessness campaign that began in 2013 as part of a national campaign called “100,000 Homes.” Launched at the 2010 National Alliance to End Homelessness conference, the four-year program was driven by Community Solutions, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness, and supported by local organizations, a data-driven social change nonprofit called Rapid Results, and government bodies like HUD and the Veteran’s Affairs office.

In 238 communities across the United States, key players in homeless organizing participated in boot camps guided by Community Solutions, learning how to build coalitions and improve efficiency in housing processes that had thus far been so halting and disjointed. The goal was simple: house 100,000 homeless veterans and chronically homeless individuals by July, 2014.

In Westchester, the goal was slightly more specific: drive the number of homeless veterans in the county to functional zero. And keep it there.

The Patriot Housing Initiative was developed by Karl Bertrand (a social worker, community organizer, and self-proclaimed “Village Dreamer”) after he participated in a Community Solutions Rapid Rehousing Boot Camp in August 2013. Together with co-chairs Felicia Ramos and Annette Peters-Ruvolo, Bertrand gathered a team of social workers, outreach coordinators, case managers, nonprofit heads, and government officials from 85 homelessness and veterans organizations around Westchester.

“All we have to do is work together in ways we never have, to do things we’ve never done,” Bertrand remembers telling the group winkingly at their first meeting. “To make change happen faster than we ever dreamed possible.”

Housing any homeless population is complicated, and even with expanded government services for returning servicemen and women at the VA, the path to permanent housing for veterans is usually long and frustrating. Applicants for shelters and public housing developments need a confusing cocktail of drivers’ licenses, Social Security numbers, medical records, and birth certificates. To get into some public housing developments, they need job history and references. And it helps to have outreach coordinators that can match them with the right type of housing, in the right neighborhood, with the right services.

Without an initiative like Patriot Housing to jostle the sticky cogs of government machinery into expedited motion, housing one person can take months, or even years. That means if a veteran suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues relapses, or gets laid off from their job, or goes to prison, or divorces their spouse, and subsequently loses their home, they could spend hundreds of cold nights waiting on the street or in crowded shelters.

The Patriot Housing group has met each Friday at noon for the past two years in a small room in White Plains, N.Y., using their breadth of knowledge, expertise, and access to facilities to do the jostling. Together, they develop individualized housing packages for every single homeless veteran they encounter.

But the story of Patriot Housing lies not only with the team that used guerillalike force to push through the inert molasses of government bureaucracy. Nor does it lie only with the Westchester housing placement systems themselves, whose wheels are now so greased that any homeless veteran that pops up on the radar will be housed within 90 days.

“No one cares about how we did it,” Howard Charton, the program director at Breaking Ground, a VA transitional housing facility, says. It’s about what they did, and for whom.

GROUNDED Richard Anderson Richard Anderson tiptoed down the steps of his Mount Vernon home at 3:00 a.m. one morning in 1980, and left through the front door. When his family woke up the next day, no one knew why he had gone, or where he was going. “I wanted to do this on my own,” Richard recalls. “I didn’t want any feedback, I didn’t want any discussion, it was just what I wanted to do.” He slipped past his mother, shut the door, hopped into the car of a commanding officer, and drove straight to the airport. He was headed for an army base in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Richard was in his early 20s when he made this decision to join the military.

He was out of high school and stuck in a dead-end job at the post office that he hated. It was the Jimmy Carter era: 52 hostages were being held in Iran, and the Cold War was reawakening. In service of his country, Richard hoped to find a sense of direction, a purpose, an education. “It was my brain that I wanted to enhance, instead of my pockets,” he says earnestly. “Or, well, it was both.”

Richard was stationed in Fort Knox for a little under a year, until his right hand was injured in an explosion during training. He lifts it from the arm of the chair he sits in 40 years later, and flexes his fingers. “It’s ugly, it’s blown up. It’s hard to talk about.” Two of his fingers are swollen, the nails shriveled.

It still hurts.

After returning home with an honorable discharge, Richard wound up right back in the post office he had escaped, and began getting into trouble on the street without the structure of the military to ground him. The police gave him the option of jail or the Montrose VA, so he chose the latter. A 28-day program turned into a three-month program that turned into a yearlong program—eventually, it turned into a full rehabilitation, and a job in biomedical engineering with the VA office.

But then came the drinking again.

“What I don’t understand,” he begins. He gets up and adjusts his belt, pulling up his khaki pants and clearing his throat. “What I don’t understand is why I went to jail so many times.” He closes his eyes and when he opens them, they’re red.

“But I did. Something was telling me something back then, but... I really couldn’t stop drinking. I just couldn’t.”

Doug Ferguson When Doug Ferguson was 18, growing up in South Jamaica Queens, his father laid down an ultimatum: either you straighten up or you join the army.

So Doug decided to enter the Air Force as a military policeman in December of 1987. He spent the next few years traveling around the world, a blur of countries and army bases and “heading down the right path,” as his father had always wanted.

Doug met his wife, another Air Force officer, while stationed in Oxfordshire, England in 1976, and they married a few years later. When they had kids, they brought their two daughters and one son with them from base to base, settling in Pigleeson, Germany for most of 1986. While Doug and his wife worked and

Sept. 16, 2016– 13

their daughters were in school, Doug liked to send his two-year old son to an Oma and Opa that lived on a farm down the street, where he could play with the cows.

Doug’s wife had started taking their son to another babysitter, though, the wife of an active military man who lived in base housing. One day, at the babysitter’s house, Doug’s son fell off a chair. He fractured his larynx, had a heart attack, and passed away suddenly. “A freak accident, they called it,” Doug remembers, his bottom lip twitching slightly. Doug won’t say what he thinks happened; but accepting the Office of Special Investigations’ report that his son fell off a chair was impossible.

Fourteen years, 11 months, and 28 days after joining, Doug left the military, and his wife. “Two weeks after she moved him there, that happened to my son,” Doug says.

“And I shouldn’t have blamed her, but I never forgave her.”

His wife went on another assignment in Belgium, and Doug went to Omaha, Nebraska with his daughters, working as a corrections officer by day and a security guard at the local nightclub, Cleopatra’s, by night.

Things were going well, Doug says. Then came a call from his father laden with an unidentifiable tension that scared him—“I heard something in his voice and I could tell

“They say baby don’t cry, baby don’t get milk. There’s people that will help you, you just gotta reach out,” —Doug Ferguson, veteran

something was wrong”—so Doug quit his job and moved back to New York. Six months later, his father died of a heart attack.

“My world was really spinning then,” Doug says. “You know, first the broken marriage, then my father passed away... And he was the last one—my mother was gone, sister was gone, son was gone. He was the last one besides my older brother.”

One year after that, and five years after returning from active duty, Doug was locked up on Riker’s Island.

John Ellert John was never one of those guys who’d always dreamed of uniforms and guns. But then again, neither were most of the men on the plane headed to the Republic of South Vietnam with him.

It was June 1967, the anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy, and the biggest draft of the Vietnam War had just finished—John, age 21, had been chosen. His father and uncles and friends had all served in the military, and he didn’t have much of a say in the matter, so he went.

He arrived in South Vietnam in November, 1967— just in time to celebrate the Year of the Monkey in January 1968 with the launching of the Tet Offensive. The campaign pitted the Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam against the South Vietnamese, and the United States.

As a military policeman, John’s job was to work with local militia on “village pacification,” maintaining the integrity of small villages from Viet Kong infiltration. He paddled stealthily down streams in river boats and conducted ambush recon as the Viet Kong swarmed.

The Tet Offensive only lasted for two months, but John stayed in South Vietnam for 14 and a half—he remembers missing two Thanksgivings, two New Years, and two Christmases at home.

In January 1969, John returned to his home in Eulid, a neighborhood on the South shore of Long Island, near its border with Queens. John got his GED, went to community college, drove cabs, and unloaded trucks at the post office.

Being home was hard: anti-war sentiment was feverish, and John had a lot of difficulty fitting back in. “There was no ‘welcome home,’” John says. Peers were protesting against the war, not embracing those who had risked their lives in it.

By Christmas Day in 1970, John had dropped out of college and started working a new job on a loading dock in Hell’s Kitchen that he calls “a breeding ground for alcoholism and addiction.” He didn’t get out for 27 years.

THOSE WHO JOIN THE ARMY ARE UNITED BY A LOVE OF COUNTRY, a lack of fear, and a willingness to sacrifice. But they’re also united behind a wall of insurmountable obstacles they face once they return from fighting—I could have spoken with any

14 – The Yale Herald

three veterans, and they could have shared similar stories of pain. Nearly a quarter of all veterans suffer from some sort of mental health issue like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and traumatic brain injuries. Nearly a quarter of those also suffer from substance abuse issues.

These disorders often lead to violence and crime, which in turn lead to jail time—in 2012, Bureau of Justice statistics state that approximately 181,500 veterans were confined to prisons and jails, 16 percent of which were serving life sentences. Fiftyfive percent of incarcerated veterans have a mental health disorder, and 23 percent of them have PTSD. Richard, Doug, and John are products of these coalescing issues, even if not all of them have suffered from each. In retelling their stories they echo a similar phrase: Without Patriot Housing, I would have been another statistic.

LOSING GROUND Richard Anderson For 15 years, Richard was a bio-medical technician at the Montrose VA. He had a great paying job, a status, a title—but he was also hiding his growing alcohol addiction, and a full rap sheet of DWIs. When the VA found out about an upcoming trip to jail, Richard resigned.

After getting out of jail that first time, Richard started working the night shift at Home Depot, unloading boxes. After getting out the second time, they took him back, and made him a supervisor. After the third, he was promoted to manager. He laughs, remembering. “Yeah, it’s crazy,” he says, but they loved him there and he loved the work.

After that final stint in jail, Richard committed himself to finally overcoming his addiction, and regaining the stability he craved. But one night he was driving home from a friend’s house, and got caught for speeding. The police officer pulled up his information, and saw the long list of prior DWIs—Richard insisted that he hadn’t been drinking, and passed all the backwards-forwards-alphabet, walk-in-a-steady-line, stand-up-straight tests. But he refused to blow into a machine, because he didn’t trust the police officer’s accuracy or objectivity. “Take me to the hospital, I’ll get my blood drawn,” he said. They refused, arrested him, and handed him a court date.

“When I get to court, I knew I had to be getting out. But they said no. They said because there’s no proof that you weren’t,” Richard recounts. “There’s also no proof that you were....” That didn’t matter. At the defense stand in a country whose fundamental liberties he had pledged to protect, Richard was considered guilty when he couldn’t be proven innocent.

This time, he went to federal prison, and stayed there for two years. When Richard got out, he was $25,000 in debt, his credit was shot, and he had no apartment to return to.

Doug Ferguson After his father died, Doug continued living and working in Queens. His ex-wife had moved to Florida with the kids, and he was alone and dealing with the haunting effects of PTSD. He doesn’t mind talking about the hardships in his life, but likes to keep this part brief: “My wife’s brother came at me with a weapon and the weapon ended up being used on himself,” Doug explains, and leaves it at that.

“I was former law enforcement, with no record. Everybody knew the type of individual he was,” Doug says, extending his arm to indicate the length of his ex-brother-in-law’s criminal history. But he died, and Doug was convicted of murder in the second degree.

Doug spent 2 years at Riker’s, 13 years at Sing Sing, and then 5 at the Fishkill Correctional Facility. None of his stays were particularly eventful, he insists: Doug avoided the “knuckle-heads,” worked long hours in the mess hall, and went to classes at Mercy College using the Pell Grant. After 20 years, he approached the end of his sentence with a dawning realization: he had no where to go once he got out.

John Ellert “I won’t get into the negative stuff so much,” John says, trying to breeze past 30 years of flop houses in the Bowery, abandoned buildings downtown, addiction, failed relationships. There’s a lot of other successes to focus on—a few degrees, a job at a non-profit, a wife—but his voice catches at the dark gaps in history until he breathes and gives in.

After beginning work at the loading dock, John’s PTSD began to worsen, and the flashbacks and nightmares gave way to self-medication and anger. He’d flit from house

to house and relationship to relationship. The only steady part of his life was his job at the loading dock.

“I lived like that until September 22, 1990,” John remembers. “That’s when I went to Indiana for PTSD and substance abuse rehabilitation.” The decision was his own, he says: he was beat up, he was sick, and he was toxically addicted. Miraculously, the rehabilitation seemed to work, and John didn’t use a drink or a drug for 21 years.

He returned to New York, stayed out of trouble, worked at a post office, and took an early retirement in 2000. He got married in 2001, then went to graduate school for an MS in Education and Rehab Counseling, and got a high-ranking job as the vocational coordinator and director of a non-profit that worked with the Manhattan homeless.

But the next chapter of his story is laden with a cruel irony that’s hard to process: like Richard’s, it’s a tale of hitting rock bottom and resurfacing, only to be pushed back under the waves. In 2014, John and his wife separated, and he relapsed. He moved out of the illegal sublet they shared, and back into a life on the streets and, depressed, sleeping in the shallow bottoms of boats, on friend’s dirty floors, outside.

After decades of sobriety and positivity, John had gone from helping homeless New Yorkers to again becoming one himself.

BREAKING GROUND Karl Bertrand sat down for breakfast on the second day of the Rapid Rehousing Boot Camp and scanned the room. It was filled with community organizers from across the country, and the national leadership of HUD and the Veteran’s Affairs office.

“Whoever asks the hardest question gets a five dollar Starbucks card,” the facilitator promised the group. Bertrand raised his hand defiantly. “How can HUD expect us to house veterans more quickly when they’re slashing homeless funding, Section 8 funding, and public housing funding?”

The contest was immediately declared closed.

In 2013, HUD funding had been squeezed for years by 2011 sequestration spending caps, which had cut important government programs and left thousands of families without access to Section 8 Housing.

Two years later, Bertrand’s accusation, and the deleterious repercussions of the 2011 Budget Control Act, still ring true. In his 2016 Budget proposal, President Obama highlighted a commitment to ending homelessness, calling for approximately $5.5 billion of federal funding in targeted homelessness assistance across multiple government agencies and programs. But a Senate bill funding HUD, approved in July 2015, has been accused of not doing enough to reverse the damage that the 2011 policies wrought on the HUD. According to analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this Senate bill cuts maintenance and repair of public housing by $132 million; cuts state funding for affordable housing from 900 million to 66 million; and does not replace funding for the 85,000 families denied housing choice vouchers due to sequestration.

In 2013, even without the knowledge of current hypocrisy, Bertrand was frustrated that HUD expected communities to pick up all the slack. Besides, “Government agencies always talk about ending things. Usually things don’t get ended, they just get ameliorated a little,” Bertrand says.

But by 2013, other communities like Phoenix and Salt Lake City had already met their housing goals, and Bertrand already had experience wrangling local organizers to achieve rapid change—he’d built the Yonkers homeless shelter in 14 days.

“Part of what happened that was really sort of magical was persuading us that it was possible,” Bertrand admits. But once he was convinced, he went into overdrive—and took the rest of Westchester homelessness organizers along with him. They embarked on their first 100-Day Challenge that same summer, giving themselves a deadline of 100 days to house every homeless veteran in Westchester County.

100-Day Challenges were a consistent push across every community that participated in the 100,000 Homes campaign, and the motivation behind them is self-evident: if you give yourself shorter deadlines, things happen faster. But they also imbue Bertrand’s retelling of the process with an odd, frenzied tone.

“When we first started, we’d be announcing the countdown. I’d beat my fingers like drums. It was exciting,” he says. We’re speaking over the phone, but I imagine his eyes are blazing. He tosses around exclamations like “We’re going to get this goddamned veteran housed if it’s the last thing I do!” and “If he’s not housed by Thanksgiving, I’m adopting him.”

The notion of competing against the clock instilled an unhealthy, obsessive quality to the 100 days, but the results were undeniable. To reach a high, aggressive miracle goal like this, feverish action is required.

“I’m like the guerrilla fighter that sort of races around doing new and outrageous things. I’ve been the inspirer, and the nagger,” says Bertrand. “But we managed to infect people with enthusiasm all up and down the chain of command.”

When Bertrand asked the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Social Services, Phil Gille, to find a way to expedite moving allowances for veterans, Gille invented a county government unit solely dedicated to service planning and case management for people who’ve been chronically homeless. When Bertrand asked the county for a new Homelessness Services manager, a new one was hired within a few weeks. When he asked Felicia Ramos, the Patriot Housing co-chair, to find a way to expedite the application process for special supportive housing subsidies, she found it. Now, if an application is submitted with all the right paperwork, she can issue a rent check in three days, and find an apartment in another three.

Westchester didn’t only need to build entirely new programs, however. Patriot Housing worked to revamp those that already existed, bring them closer together, and make them move faster.

Breaking Ground is one such program—a transitional housing service for homeless veterans based at the Montrose Veterans Association. The service provides on-site case management, health services, psychiatric help, counseling, and job placement to the 96 veterans that live there at a time. Breaking Ground aims to transfer every veteran into permanent housing and out of unemployment at the end of their stay, which averages eight months, and is at its maximum two years.

Howard Charton is the program director at Breaking Ground. He’s the chill to Bertrand’s frenetic: he has a full beard and mustache, and a just barely visible tongue ring flits between his teeth when he he smiles, which is often, or when he talks, which is calmly. He exudes a humility that’s refreshing, and a positivity that veterans who know him say is contagious.

Breaking Ground has housed over 4,000 veterans in its 25-year history, but Charton says they’ve completely revitalized their system of outreach and rehousing in the two years since Patriot Housing began. Veterans who go into Breaking Ground need specialized services—either they have so much debt they can’t afford a permanent house yet, or need 24/7 hospital access, or just don’t feel ready to transition into living on their own. At weekly Patriot Housing meetings, as the team discusses the idiosyncrasies of each individual veteran that needs housing, Breaking Ground representatives listen out for the cases that fit their program the best, and offer up a bed. Charton works with Bertrand to make sure each veteran has Section 8 vouchers, a landlord that accepts them, and funding for furniture to fill an apartment before they leave.

The program’s name was changed to “Breaking Ground” from “Common Ground” a year and a month ago—as Charton says, quoting their rebranding literature with only a trace of irony, “There’s nothing Common about us!”

Richard, Doug, and John can all attest to that. Richard was able to get rid of his $25,000 and get his own place and job through Breaking Ground, and Doug used it as a launchpad to get back on his feet, taking culinary classes during the morning and working at the VA in the afternoons.

“They say baby don’t cry, baby don’t get milk. There’s people that will help you, you just gotta reach out,” Doug says. “Without their help, I don’t know where I would have been. I didn’t have anything. I started all over.”

In December of 2014, John entered the Breaking Ground program. And a year later, John had a place of his own. While we talk on the phone, he’s slurping noodles at his very own kitchen table, and has just taken a walk around his very own neighborhood.

“I never really think I’m going to get the help I need, that’s kind of the attitude I had,” John says, but Breaking Ground was exactly that help he needed. When he got there, he was so depressed he could hardly speak. By the end of his time, he was best friends with his roommate, facilitating recovery meetings, and taking golf lessons. He got treatment for Hepatitis D at the VA hospital, and is now disease-free; he went to AA and Narcotics Anonymous groups three times a week, and has been sober for a year.

“I guess I’m the same guy I was when I got in,” John says, then pauses. “But not as much.”

Graphic by Alex Swanson YH Staff

Nov. 18, 2016 – 15

FEATURES

Meeting our newest neighbors Nolan Phillips, TC ’18, investigates what Yale students are doing to welcome refugees to New Haven.

T

he daily routine of a refugee in New Haven doesn’t seem so different from that of any other New Haven resident—a mother sends her child off to school, a daughter is reluctant to finish her social studies assignment, a son is struggling with the school bully. At the end of the day, everyone gathers around the dinner table to unpack their day over a home-cooked meal.

Of course, for a Syrian refugee, there’s an array of added obstacles to this routine.

Most refugees have little experience with English, making it difficult to navigate public schools and the job market. There’s also the cultural barrier—though most New Haven residents don’t express outright hostility towards their newly arrived refugee neighbors, culture shock and language barriers make it difficult for refugees to thrive socially. Even for New Haveners with a positive outlook on the city’s refugee influx, it’s all too easy to give these new neighbors a lukewarm reception, leaving refugees feeling isolated. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, with xenophobia sweeping the country, it is now more important than ever to make refugees feel at home.

A new student organization at Yale, Students of Salaam, is making an effort to bridge the intangible divide between refugee families and the New Haven community.

The group takes its name from the Arabic word for peace, a word which is ubiquitous in the Arabic language’s colorful greeting conventions. Instead of a simple “hello,” Arabic speakers often say the equivalent of Peace be upon you. The response: And may peace be upon you, as well. It is fitting, then, that Students of Salaam has incorporated this salutatory term into its name—the group’s mission is to forge interper-

16 – The Yale Herald

sonal connections, and to facilitate the peaceful coexistence of refugees within their new community.

IN SEPT. 2015, STELLA SHANNON, BK ’18, AND AAMINAH BHAT, BR ’18, saw an opportunity for Yalies to make a positive contribution to New Haven’s growing refugee population on a micro scale. Both Shannon and Bhat have experience with the Middle East, the Arabic language, and work in immigrant communities, so involvement with New Haven’s refugees was immediately relevant to them. In describing the inception of Students of Salaam, Bhat says she was driven by a desire to “make a sustainable, lasting impact” in the New Haven community—to leave behind something valuable after her four short years here.

Since its founding last year, Students of Salaam has expanded to provide a wide array of services to the New Haven community. According to Shannon, there are two central focuses of the organization: tutoring and community-building. Both intend to break cultural barriers and foster inclusion in New Haven, according to the group’s mission statement. Tutoring takes place in New Haven public schools, but it doesn’t focus on the minutiae of English grammar—it’s all about making refugees feel confident and at home in their new city. As Shannon puts it, “We want to devote the time to engage in self-expression, and liberal arts and creative writing, because those are the things that have been really important to us [Aaminah and I] in personal growth, and we recognize that these students are very smart and they’re also experiencing

lots of change… They need a way to express that.” This alternative approach to tutoring was at first greeted tepidly by teachers who were hesitant to give up class time, but it quickly gained popularity among pupils and teachers alike. For many of the K-8 students served by Students of Salaam’s “ambassadors” (the term Students of Salaam uses to refer to their community outreach volunteers), spending time on self-expression has led to noticeably positive results in the classroom.

Tutoring intends to alleviate some of the cultural and linguistic barriers faced by young refugees, but for Students of Salaam, refugee resettlement is not simply a process of assimilation: educating the host community is equally as important. The organization has put together public library screenings of films that showcase Arab culture and gave a talk about democracy. In an upcoming Syrian cooking class, New Haven residents will be given the opportunity to take home a bit of their new neighbors’ tasty cuisine. According to Bhat, just as Students of Salaam aims to help refugee families with their transition, an integral part of the organization is to access community members “who don’t really understand what it means to be a refugee, and help them understand.”

DURING THE YEAR THAT STUDENTS OF SALAAM HAS BEEN ACTIVE IN New Haven, the group has been warmly received equally by refugees and native New Haveners. Though the group is new, its 30-or-so ambassadors have already made a splash around New Haven. After noting the success of Students of Salaam’s tutoring initiative, a local high school reached out to the organization to give a “peace talk.” The New Haven Register picked up on the event and contacted the group, interested in publishing an article highlighting Students of Salaam’s next public film screening.

But the slew of anti-refugee rhetoric accompanying the recent presidential election has raised fears that Students of Salaam will face new obstacles to fostering inclusion. Shannon surmises that most New Haveners currently have a neutral opinion of refugees; up to now, it’s been Students of Salaam’s goal to turn that neutral opinion into a favorable one. The protracted anti-refugee rhetoric could create much more resistance to attempts to change minds. Some of the younger refugees have also expressed concern and uncertainty about the election.

But Students of Salaam generally remains hopeful that America’s turbulent political year won’t pose major difficulties to their mission.

According to ambassador Malak Nasr, many refugees and ambassadors have experienced comparatively “much worse” political upheaval: coups, dictatorships and civil war. From this perspective, New Haven remains a safe community where Students of Salaam can continue its interpersonal outreach, regardless of what’s happening in politics.

At the end of the day, Students of Salaam’s co-presidents are optimistic, too. Shannon explains, “We’re not pushing for policy... Even the most averse to bringing in refugees, all we’re saying is we’re going to make life better for everybody involved once they get here… We’re just trying to provide support.”

pay home visits to newly-arrived Syrian refugee families to tutor children and provide company. The families welcome the gesture, especially because so many Students of Salaam ambassadors speak Arabic, Farsi, and other languages spoken by New Haven’s refugee population.

Nasr, an international Yalie from Egypt, points out how crucial it is that so many Students of Salaam ambassadors are fluent in refugees’ native languages. Shannon underscores the importance of matching refugees with ambassadors who can speak their language. “Most of them [the ambassadors] are refugees or immigrants themselves, or children of immigrants,” Shannon said. Yale’s diverse community, then, has a unique ability to make newly arrived refugees feel welcome in their Connecticut home. Many Yalies, like Nasr and other ambassadors, come from similar cultural backgrounds as the refugees. The fact that Students of Salaam ambassadors are so well-versed in the refugees’ culture, as well as the English-speaking American cultural sphere, gives the ambassadors a singular ability to make New Haven feel a lot more like home.

A NEW ORGANIZATION WITH BIG GOALS, STUDENTS OF SALAAM IS recognizing the unique ways in which we, as a diverse community of Yale students, can make a meaningful impact in our home community.

Students of Salaam acts on a small scale, but works toward long-term results. The operation—commissioning its ambassadors to work with just a few children at a time, or one family, or a small group of high school students—may seem unassuming. The community engagement activities are not calls for sweeping political change, but, rather, movie screenings and culture workshops open to any passersby.

But ambassadors and the two co-presidents firmly believe in the lasting positive effect of micro-level community engagement. Ambassadors like Nasr have noticed previously reticent students becoming increasingly confident and cheerful as the recent Americans navigate the beginning of their new lives. With regularity and attentiveness, ambassadors help the refugees navigate the peculiarities of American pronunciation, and the surprising pickiness of American eaters. Students of Salaam recognizes that Yalies, especially those with relevant cultural and linguistic experience, have a unique opportunity to welcome New Haven’s newest families.

Beyond the language barrier, New Haven’s refugee families are “just like us”—and that’s the simple message that drives Shannon and Bhat. Refugees experience the same daily victories and setbacks as everyone else, alongside everyone else, but with superficial language and cultural barriers that get in the way. Bhat explains that she doesn’t even like to refer to our newest neighbors as “refugees.”

“Because guess what? They’re immigrants,” she says. “They’re Americans now, too.”

STUDENTS OF SALAAM ISN’T JUST BREAKING BARRIERS BETWEEN New Haveners and their new refugee neighbors—it’s helping Yalies become active and integrated into the Elm City. Nasr leads Students of Salaam’s in-home tutoring program, through which a few Yale students

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Nov. 18, 2016 – 17

CULTURE

Siren song

by Oriana Tang YH Staff

F

or years I hesitated to listen to Lana Del most recent album, Honeymoon, sold over 200,000 Rey because a friend once told me that too copies in its first week alone. The poet Megan Falley much of her will make you suicidal. “It’s wrote an entire chapbook of poems about her. A quick the way she sings,” she said. “Like she’s search will unearth articles analyzing her appeal, tryunderwater. Like she’s drowning.” ing to put words to her aesthetic, in Salon, in the Drowning, I discovered, is a good way to describe New Yorker, in Zeteo: “The Existential Genius of Lana it. Lana Del Rey’s songs are full-bodied and often Del Rey,” “Lana Del Rey Is Exhausted,” “The Meanstring-heavy, her throaty voice rippling through the ing of Lana Del Rey.” There is something alluring instrumentals. With headphones in, the music con- about her, something addictive about her mythology sumes your body. It drags you under, makes you forget that lies beyond the attraction of her words and her yourself. Pausing the playlist after a long line of Lana voice. The persona she presents in her music touches songs is like waking up from a drugged sleep of silk some nerve of interest. We like—or at the very least, and honey and heart-shaped sunglasses. are drawn to—this girl, this sad, sad girl who wishes This effect may be due, at least in part, to the way that she “were dead already,” this girl who can sit Del Rey’s music soaks you in her persona. Her songs on a throne decked in jewels and stare indifferentdefy typical pop convention: they’re slow (maybe 50 ly at the camera. She is an alcoholic, a druggie, a beats per minute), sensuous, and most of all, sad— mistress. She is post-pain: she hurts so much she no bouncy dance floor bass lines for Lana. “You don’t can’t even care anymore. She is a symbol of the imwant to get this way, / Famous and dumb at an early moral, seedy underbelly of all-American girlhood— age,” Del Rey croons in “Carmen.” “I am alone in think of her wrapped in an American flag aiming a the night, / Been tryin’ too hard not to get into trouble, machine gun, lying under the bright Las Vegas lights. but I / I’ve got a war in my mind,” she sings in “Ride.” She is Jackie Kennedy scrabbling on the convertHer music videos, too, shy away from sunlit cheeri- ible’s hood after her husband has been shot. She is ness, instead portraying a sense of dispossessed sexu- woman as wound. ality: Lana Del Rey stalking neon-lit streets alone at Many have tried to account for Del Rey’s magnenight, Lana Del Rey with a man’s hand spread over her tism. The French academic Catherine Vigier turns a thigh, Lana Del Rey smearing soap and cherry lipstick feminist lens on Lana and claims that her popularall over her mouth. The videos—and Del Rey herself, ity is because she “is representing and speaking to a in interviews and photoshoots—glamorize movie stars contradiction facing thousands of young women today, and money, daddy culture and death. “Kind of a vin- women who have followed mainstream society’s pretage Americana honey aesthetic,” one of my friends scriptions for success in what has been called a postsays. Del Rey herself calls it “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” feminist world, but who find that real liberation and or “Lolita lost in the ghetto.” genuine satisfaction elude them.” Writer Amanda PeIt’s a persona that has faced heavy criticism. Femi- trusich equates Lana’s fame with her “embodiment of nists accuse her of defining herself through her rela- California’s dizzying, orphic appeal”—Lana Del Rey tionships with men. Music critics denounce her songs attracts us in the same way the Golden State does, for sounding identical; concertgoers declare that as a destination for escape and the realization of our she has no stage presence; bloggers complain that darkest dreams. she sounds bored when she sings; reviewers charge But to me, it seems to be simpler than that. Dethat she had secret plastic surgery but won’t admit spite the knocks on Del Rey’s authenticity—her name it. People say that her success is due to her father’s change from Lizzy Grant to Lana Del Rey, her move machinations, that she slept with record label heads from New Jersey to Los Angeles—the obvious conto make her way to the top. That her success is due structedness of her persona is what appeals to us. Afto her beauty and not to any talent. That she doesn’t ter all, no one knows who Lana Del Rey really is. She have any talent. That she’s a fake. Most of all, they speaks with wide eyes of how much she hates being say that she’s a fake. famous, but the radiance of her smile at concerts is Despite the barrage of hate, many are still fasci- unmistakable. She turns her head away coyly during nated by Lana Del Rey. On YouTube, her music vid- interviews to imply that yes, maybe she did really run eos regularly garner over a hundred million views. Her with a biker gang when she was younger, but her ac-

companying laugh is hesitant. Online, few traces of Lizzy Grant exist independent of Lana Del Rey. Her persona seems ephemeral, a superficial construct.

Who doesn’t envy such a complete image overhaul?

Those who criticize her for being a fake are missing the point. That’s what she is supposed to be.

In many ways, art is the creation of myth. There is no movie star or singer who isn’t a construct in some way, molded to be marketed. Just look at Miley Cyrus’s high-budget antics or multiple piercings and tattoos: you think those aren’t publicity stunts, calculated efforts to erase her past as a goody-goody Disney Channel pawn? What about Kim Kardashian’s dramatic relationships and on-screen tantrums? Or Gordon Ramsay’s creatively foul mouth? The difference with Lana Del Rey is that her persona has hairline cracks in it—just enough to provoke us, to make us wonder. She discloses her pain but doesn’t give us specifics. She sings about money but once lived in a trailer park. She’s a California girl but grew up on Lake Placid. Mythology—that’s the real all-American ideal. She is a self-made woman, Jay Gatsby with eyeliner. But the vulnerability of Lana Del Rey’s mythos captures something darker, something more unstable about the American dream. Its construction embodies the transience of youth, the rapid mutations of personality in adolescence, the recklessness of living fast and dying young. Perhaps YouTube commenter Sammy, writing about “Ride,” puts it best: “The first time I listened to this song I was in high school, in those crazy years of hookups and sadness and crazy wild parties. So many lines of this song stuck in my mind and I would repeat them over and over again. Now listening to this song it makes me cry remembering those uncertain times, glad that those years made me into the person I am today. Thanks for this masterpiece Lana.”

Lana Del Rey drags us into the darkness with her. How can we ask for authenticity when the very dubiousness of that authenticity is what lends her music its power? Nobody knows if Lana Del Rey—or Lizzy Grant—really knows anything about sadness or wealth, glamour or death. But then, neither do we.

And so we follow her into the depths of her fantasy, and drown in its glorious sound.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 18 – The Yale Herald

Indecent roots

by Will Reid YH Staff

A

t 10 p.m. on Tues., Nov. 8, the country found itself glued to TV screens and Internet streams. The election had taken center stage, and it looked tighter than many of us had dared to imagine. But for the Democrats among us, hope remained: a long night lay ahead, and the Republican presidential candidate at least still looked like a buffoon. It was easy to see him as part of a piece of political theater that would soon reach the end of its run. How could he win? Still, we anxiously waited on results from Detroit, from Broward County, from Fairfax.

On another stage, a very different form of theater had begun to play out. F*cking Decent, a Theater Studies thesis conceived and directed by Eliana Kwartler, SM ’17, was in its final days of rehearsals, and at this moment, Emma Speer, BK ’17, the sole performer of this one-woman show, had just taken the stage, looking forward, along with the others in the theater, to celebrating an assured Clinton victory. By the time the rehearsal was over, the unthinkable demanded recognition. A Trump victory had become the likely outcome. All of a sudden, the piece took on new meaning. It dawned on Kwartler, “this is not history, this is what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

F*cking Decent revolves around the story of four solo performance artists (Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller) singled out by Republican legislators for having used funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to create “obscene” works of art. These artists, once linked only by a shared performance format and a penchant for pushing the boundaries, came to be known as the NEA Four. The resulting controversy led the NEA to revoke their funding and Congress to pass the socalled “decency clause.” In theory, the new regulation would prevent the NEA from supporting a work that might offend the sensibilities of the taxpayers whose dollars it depended on. In practice, the ambiguously

worded clause amounted to a discriminatory restric- to its success was its unabashed star. “As you probtion against any sympathetic portrayal of life outside ably could guess, I have no qualms with anything,” the American sexual mainstream. Hughes’s work, for Speer said in the first few moments of our interview. example, concerns her sexual empowerment, lesbian Kwartler reflected on how lucky she was to have found identity, and close relationship with her mother, who, such a performer, given the requirements of the subin a scene performed in the show, gives her a lesson ject material. Speer first walks on stage completely in female anatomy. undressed, setting the bar for a performance in which “Try as much as you can to play this moment with she has simulated sex with a cardboard cutout shaped a sense of wonder. It will probably come off as incest. like the state of California and buries her nude body There’s nothing you can do,” Hughes warns in the in a pile of dirt, among other acts. stage directions.

It’s easy to take these moments out of context, to The NEA controversy raised issues of censorship, write about them as if, in isolation, they accurately of mainstream rejection of marginalized experience, characterize the pieces in which they appear. But this and of white conservative backlash against progres- is precisely the approach that allowed legislators to sive values. Its leader in the Senate, Jesse Helms, fashion the works into political weaponry aimed at had risen to power in 1972 on a wave of white resent- their creators. By focusing on the acts and not their ment and fear following the turbulence of the previ- meaning within the works, the moral critics opened ous decade. He triumphed, in part, due to a campaign up a rhetorical space to make whole identities repslogan that implicitly cast doubt on the American- resented by those works invisible through censorship. ness of his opponent (who had a Greek name): “Jesse To bring this point into the present day, Kwartler and Helms: He’s one of us.” The election cycle that put her production team decided to replace the final clip him in office also saw Richard Nixon capture 96.7 of audio. The President-elect’s voice, recorded at a percent of Electoral College votes, continuing his call campaign rally, rings throughout the theater with the for “law and order,” a racially charged phrase that may same bite as Jesse Helms, yelling for Speer to leave. sound familiar.

And she does. Kwartler’s work thus sounds a warning.

Kwartler’s production sought to revitalize this his“There’s a Gertrude Stein quote,” Kwartler said. tory. Between excerpts from the artists’ work, per- “She’s like, ‘Here’s the thing that History teaches. Hisformed by Speer, audio clips of the testimony against tory teaches.’” them brought Helms and other moralizing critics, Recently, the problem with history has been that it many of whom had never actually seen the works, into won’t stay in the past. But if bigotry persists, so too the theater. does resistance. Speer, in the final scene, returns to “I was really interested in what happens when the stage and affirms her place in the American soil. you put both stories—the stories of the actual per- After leaving the stage in response to shouted instrucformances and the stories of what was being said tions from the President-elect, Speer returns with a [about them]—in the same performance space and tarp of dirt. “I will plant myself in this world,” she force people to confront both at the same time,” repeats as the lights dim. If we are to weather this Kwartler said. storm, we would do well to put down roots like hers.

The project took seven months to come to fruition, with rehearsals starting in late August. The key

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff

Nov. 18, 2016 – 19

REVIEWS Speaking (of) alien(s)

by Victorio Cabrera YH Staff

I

t’s really tempting to be flip about Arrival. Oh man, aliens have arrived/encountered us/ knocked politely with the smiles of Jehovah’s Witnesses/etc. and no one knows what to do! We must ask the Very Attractive Scientists to save the day! And, to some extent, Arrival does fall into tropes. There is the scene where the scary army officer—Colonel Weber, played just a touch creepily by Forest Whitaker—shows up unannounced to recruit the heroine, linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams, who is fabulous). There is the scene where the dashing scientific counterpart—Jeremy Renner, making a heroic effort to leave Hawkeye and Aaron Cross (the guy he played in The Bourne Legacy, but really who cares) with the confidence and carriage of a much less attractive man, flirts with said heroine, awkwardly, by reading her own book at her. But these are, on the whole, acceptable failings, because Arrival is the best sci-fi to come out in recent memory. Look. I’ll say it: Interstellar sucks, and Arrival is better in every way.

The alien situation this time around is much like the alien situation last time around (cf.

Keanu Reeves’ The Day the Earth Stood Still) except this time there are 12 spooky, monolithic ships, and they are mostly harmless. These ships—colossal, awe-inspiring pebble-Stonehenges—descend in aesthetically pleasing silence on various locales and hover there. Every 18 hours, they open up a hole in the bottom of the ship and let some tiny little earthlings in.

Governments around the world promptly freak out. The United States looks to Louise Banks to crack the question everyone wants to know: what the heck are these weird, floating space squid (actually they’re heptapods) getting at, coming here in their big, mysterious ships?

Every trope of the alien-contact storyline is updated slightly in ways that are often striking and unsettling. When the alien spaceships descend all over the world, we see the societal unrest they cause mostly through the standard array of television talking heads. They serve their usual purpose, which is to move the plot forward and condense outside events into a digestible package, but they also feel self-aware. “ALIEN CRISIS DAY: 4,” they blare on the chyrons, neatly labeling and quantifying what is going on and turning it into an event. When we briefly see the real, non-mediated world for ourselves, the usual scene of disarray is tinged with the unease of the modern police state: men in SECURITY vests watch the chaos from a bridge above the scrum and sleek, hyper-modern fighter jets roar by. Early in the movie, as Banks lies in bed, a flying object hurtles toward her house from the horizon, looking just like an alien ship. It is a military helicopter.

Amy Adams, playing Louise Banks—linguistics professor, erstwhile government expert, grieving mother—delivers an emotionally stirring performance which reminds us that masculinity, in addition to being toxic, is also just plain boring. The movie opens with a soft, feathery montage of her daughter’s childhood, adolescence, and eventual death from cancer.

Banks’s grief is the center of the movie, and it never quite goes away. Part of this is because the movie is interspersed with flashes of her life together with her child. But her grief also functions more subtly as the undertone of the entire movie: even when Arrival is at its most cerebral, or beautiful, or riveting, everything always feels just a bit muted, just a bit sad.

Look, dude, this movie has super cool space stuff, but also feelings.

Language is the conceptual center of the movie. Donnelly, in his nerdy courtship with Banks, actually quotes some pretty cool work of hers: language, she wrote, is “the first weapon drawn in a conflict.” Later in the movie, the entire world almost blows itself up be-

cause the aliens got the words “weapon” and “tool” mixed up, which, you know, happens.

Colonel Weber tells Banks that he reports to a group of men whose “first and last question” for him is “how can this be used against us?”, and the world inches closer and closer to conflict as the alien spaceships throw everything into disarray. But the point is made most effectively the first time we see the alien spaceship that landed in the United States. The camera begins aimed at the ship, forbidding and monumental-looking suspended above a field as mist spills over the mountains to its right. The view pans over to the camp beneath it, which looks like rows of tanks. But there are no cannons here; only antennae, pointed and arranged in a neat battle-line.

The pacing of Arrival is, broadly speaking, in two parts. The first half of the movie is solemn and deliberate. Then there is the second half, which apparently drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Eventually, despite the explosive interference of some renegade soldiers who bought into the Media (this film literally has an Alex Jones analogue), Banks learns the heptapod language, which turns out to be trippy as fuck. In a sequence that plays out like Inception (another overrated film; bite me) meets Slaughterhouse-Five, Banks becomes unstuck in time, and mind-bending ensues. Your head will hurt, and it will be awesome. I almost want to talk about Nietzschean eternal recurrence.

What’s especially remarkable is that unlike in aforementioned, inferior films (Inception sucks), this time-space loopiness drives the emotional arc forward and leaves you devastated, instead of only being a neat narrative trick. Just like Banks’ life, which by the end of the film she experiences simultaneously instead of linearly, the movie’s scenes make sense as a collective experienced all at once. Like one of the heptapod’s inky, circular sentences, the movie ends where it begins: with Banks and her child. We are reminded of her haunting words in the opening scenes: “Come back to me. Come back to me. Come back to me.”

Upper right image courtesy of Paramount Pictures 20 – The Yale Herald

Music: Black America Again

I

n Black America Again, venerated Chicago MC Common provides a poetic and honest examination of blackness in America today through what are mostly compelling, soulful tracks. Common’s exceptional ability to observe and articulate issues in the black community and his role within it, along with the album’s beautiful, gospel-inspired production, makes Black America Again a triumph of the mind and spirit.

The album begins with the forceful “Joy and Peace,” in which an excerpted church sermon is followed by the rapper’s own interpretation of God’s glory and the comparative ignorance of man. Whereas other artists tend to drive listeners away when they attempt to invoke religion, Common avoids being preachy while fully expressing his ideology. He shares similar wisdom on the next track, “Home,” which warns against the earthly pitfalls besetting mankind on the road to either Heaven or Hell, in a powerful follow-up to the album’s strong opening.

The intensity diminishes in the middle of the album as a result of some mellow interludes and forgettable odes to love. But Common regains his energy by honing in on the album’s most crucial theme: race. In the title track, “Black America Again,” Common fills a jazzy backdrop with references to well-known black figures, such as Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Serena Williams, to highlight how inequality between blacks and whites has persisted to this day. Here Common also brings up the issue of mass incarceration, which he characterizes as being part of the so-called “new Jim Crow.” While prison, politics, and institutional bias are clearly troubling the Windy City rapper, he refuses to lose hope. In “A Bigger Picture Called Freedom,” for example, Common raps from the perspective of a man behind bars, spitting, “My life story is written in a prison sentence / Wonder if this cell got room for forgiveness,” only to resolve the verse with the line, “Still I love.”

While black gospel elements certainly infuse some of the album’s best songs, Black America Again draws inspiration from other genres as well. Common has made a career of lacing soul and R&B tracks with his unique brand of lyricism, and this album is no different. “The Day Women Took Over,” for instance, features a slow, laidback beat and melodious horns reminiscent of the Isley Brothers and Barry White. Other songs, like “Pyramids,” (interestingly similar to Frank Ocean’s song of the same title), incorporate the futuristic-sounding synthesizers he has also dabbled with on earlier albums like Universal Mind Control (UMC). The variety makes for an eclectic listening experience influenced by a wide swath of black music, which I would highly recommend. Black America Again may not take climb the pop charts, but it is a rich and vibrant album worth hearing.

- Nic Harris

Herald Picks: Our Favorite Christmas Carols

“Silent Night” To be real, we still mumble the lyrics past the opening until the very last lines. But we do it with gusto!

“Santa Baby” It’s almost Thanksgiving, which means the six weeks of We love Eartha Kitt’s original recording, but if you want talking about how it’s almost Christmas are almost upon us. to remedy the implicitly homophobic horror that is Michael Here at Herald, we’re feeling prematurely merry. There’s Buble’s version of the song, “Santa Buddy” (we get it, man, already talk of investing in a pint-sized Christmas tree (or you’re not gay), we suggest you watch Cyndi Lauper and maybe just a Hanukkah bush, or even a Festivus pole) for Rosie O’Donnell’s rendition. the office and we’ve got carols playing at full volume. Our top picks…

“All I Want For Christmas is You” Easily, positively, without a doubt the greatest Christmas “Jingle Bell Rock” carol of all time. Frankly, if you haven’t listened to this at Popular on the Walgreen’s store soundtrack, Jingle Bell least twice this month then you need to get with the program.

Rock is the perfect song to shimmy past all the holiday- We wouldn’t be surprised if Mariah could support her life of themed accoutrements you never knew you needed. Ani- opulence and grandeur on the royalties from this song alone. mated christmas trees? An ice skating Snoopy? Eos Limited Check out the Extra Festive version while you’re at it.

Edition Holiday Lip Balm Sphere 3-Pack in honey apple, wildberry, and passion fruit? They’ve got it all.

“Feliz Navidad” America’s best known (only known?) Spanish Christmas “Carol of the Bells” song! And some of us here at the Herald contend that this is This one is ominous and sinister and we love it. Senti- actually the greatest Christmas carol of all time. Unlike “All ments like “gaily they ring while people sing songs of good I Want For Christmas is You,” this track is a Grammy Hall of cheer” have never sounded so goddamn creepy. We can’t Fame inductee. Take that, sexy Mariah in a Santa costume… help but think of a young Macaulay Culkin racing home in the dark. We can’t decide how this one makes us feel but “Christmastime” we’re into it.

We are, of course, talking about the Smashing Pumpkins classic. Could anyone think of a better combination of merry “Last Christmas” cheer and dark, angsty existentialism for the holiday season?

Ugh ok to be honest this track is pretty polarizing – some No. The answer is no. So when Corgan sings “There’ll be toys of us think it’s fun but others can’t get over how simultane- for everyone” (not kidding, an actual line in this song), we’re ously depressing and catchy it is. At the very least, we hope sure these toys are engraved with Edgar Allan Poe poetry. writing and singing it helped George Michael (of WHAM! fame) get over what must have been a truly gnarly breakup.

- YH Staff

Upper right image courtesy of Def Jam Records Bottom left image courtesy of Columbia Records Nov. 11, 2016 – 21

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

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What we hate this week

Turducken what the founding fathers said when they created the electoral collge

punks

tur-da fuck out of here

people who hate puns it aches

the word “tummy” “the dark Web”

vegans

buy-oneget-one-free kidneys sacrifice quality for quantity imho

you made this mess yourself

unless your home is a restaurant that’s cool

people who go to restaurants for Thanksgiving dinner

casseroles

I just don’t understand them

Nov. 18, 2016 – 23