The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 1 New Haven, Conn. Friday, January 25, 2013
From the staff The thing about January is that it’s pretty rough all around. As the lady in front of me on the line at Dunkin’ Donuts said, “My face hurts!” I think she meant because of the cold, but I empathized on many levels. I won’t go into it, but it’s just like...January makes my face hurt, you know? And also it’s really freaking cold. But there is one great thing about January: the Herald is back for another run, and trust us—cold be damned—we’re heating up. Last August, we launched our new website, and showed everyone we could hang with the big kids, with pieces picked up by the Huffington Post, New York Magazine’s Daily Intel, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. We may not have a functioning printer (but actually—donations welcome) but who cares because we’re killing it on the web. Hello world! This se-
The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 1 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Jan. 25, 2013
EDITORIALSTAFF: Editor-in-chief: Emma Schindler Managing Editors: Colin Groundwater, Eli Mandel, Maude Tisch Executive Editor: Emily Rappaport Assistant Executive Editor: Olivia Rosenthal Online Editors: Marcus Moretti, John Stillman Assistant Online Editor: Micah Rodman Senior Editors: Sam Bendinelli, Ariel Doctoroff, Carlos Gomez, Lucas Iberico Lozada, Nicolás Medina Mora, Clare Sestanovich Culture Editor: Micah Rodman Features Editors: Margaret Neil, Katy Osborn, Olivia Rosenthal Opinion Editor: Andrew Wagner Reviews Editor: Elliah Heifetz Voices Editor: Sophie Grais Design Editors: Julia Kittle-Kamp, Lian Fumerton-Liu, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Assistant Design Editor: Madeline Butler Photo Editor: Rebecca Wolenski
mester, we’ll be taking our online presence to a whole new level, so stay tuned to yaleherald.com to see all the online content we’ll be uploading throughout the week, thanks to John Stillman, SY ’14, Marcus Moretti, BK ’13, and Micah Rodman, BR ’15. More Herald, less problems. Speaking of problems: as the federal government has finally begun to acknowledge, we have them, and they’re called guns. No matter how busy you are this week, make sure you read this issue’s cover story. Emily Rappaport, ES ’14 (former editor-in-chief and forever Herald queen) looks at the devastating levels of gun violence in New Haven and the innovative
BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: William Coggins, Evan Walker-Wells Director of Advertising: Shreya Ghei Director of Finance: Stephanie Kan Director of Development: Joe Giammittorio ONLINE STAFF: Webmaster: Navy Encinias Bullblog Editor-in-chief: John Stillman Bullblog Associate Editors: David Gore, Alisha Jarwala, Grace Lindsey, Cindy Ok, Micah Rodman, Eamon Ronan, Jesse Schreck, Jack Schlossberg, Maude Tisch
work being done by a coalition of concerned members of the community to combat what they believe is a public health disaster.
The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.
But don’t stop there! Read it all. And once you’ve read it, post it, tweet it, email your grandma, tape it to your ass—whatever it takes. We want the world to know! And then come back next week. And the week after that. Don’t stop, won’t stop. We’re here all day, night, week, year. We love to hang, so we hope you do, too. Thanks for reading. Have a nice day.
Emma Schindler Editor-in-Chief
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 2012-2013 academic year for 65 dollars. Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: Emily.Rappaport@yale.edu Web: 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 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day. Cover by Zachary Schiller YH Staff
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IN THIS ISSUE
COVER 12 Emily Rappaport, ES ‘14, re-examines the state of gun violence in New Haven in light of the Newtown massacre.
VOICES 6
Marcus Moretti, BK ‘13, sits down with Divya Narendra, co-founder of the social network that inspired Facebook.
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Cole Wheeler, SY ‘13, contemplates our need for escape and the vehicles we use to achieve it.
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FEATURES 10
Kohler Bruno, SM ’16, examines a venture capital firm started by two SOM graduates focusing on the marijuana industry.
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John Stillman, SY ‘14, looks into Yale’s mysterious new partnership with the Department of Defense.
OPINION: Julia Calagiovanni, SM ‘15, considers Roe v. Wade on the case’s 40th anniversary, and Leland Whitehouse, SM ‘14, goes home and reflects on the experience.
REVIEWS
CULTURE 18
Claire Zhang, DC ‘15, explains the origins of New Haven’s bookstore monopoly, and Amalia Halikias, SM ‘15, contemplates the best way to get into competitive seminars. Also: blurbs on the best Blue Book oddities.
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Wesley Yiin, PC ’16, on Kathryn Bigelow and the Oscars. Also: Girls, Toro y Moi, A$AP Rocky, and Pantha du Prince.
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM bowling.
CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:
Happy lamps Vitamin D drops and whatever else floats your seasonally depressed boat. For example, wear what you want as long as it makes you feel good. Pink floral skirts without tights underneath. Hair still wet from the shower. And when you slip and drop your caseless computer because your ankle boots were made in and for LA winters, just pop back up and thank your lucky stars for that youthful spryness. You might be walking around all day thinking, “I can’t live like this,” but at least you’re not letting weather take away your agency, you know? Just your capacity to feel feeling in your face. It’s important to complain about the weather five to seven times a day to remind yourself that a high of 25 is an unacceptable and unsustainable standard of living, and that you deserve much, much better. But avoid boat-sinking mechanisms like checking the weather in California or Hawaii. Just get that light therapy and Vitamin D supplement on—and don’t underestimate the gravity of hang time with your people, the ones who remind you that there’s warmth in the world. —Cindy Ok YH Staff
D:
Misleadingly sexy class titles You know the ones. If you talk about registering for it at a dinner party while trying to make small talk, people’s voices get high and excited and kind of jealous. But then when you’re actually in the class trying to survive it, the voice in your head gets bored and anxious and kind of vacuous. It’s like this girl I once knew named Dylan who sucked, but everyone expected her not to because it was 2005 and Dylan seemed like an awesome name for a girl. A poop by any other name smells just as poopy, and a bad lecture by a glamorous name makes you think it’s sweeter, but you can (surprisingly frequently) end up wasting multiple hours a day of your brutish shopping period because there weren’t evals and at some point it just gets too awkward to bail. Shopping period is hectic enough, we don’t need nominal deception in the mix too. —Cindy Ok YH Staff
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F:
Ungrateful bitches Here’s a pointer: if you’re an ungrateful bitch, don’t brag about being an ungrateful bitch loudly in the coffee shop where a Herald writer is working on this section. Don’t complain about the pain of having to choose five of eight wonderful seminars you got into, don’t chat in public about how you would totally use a Nalgene but that’s just, like, so inconvenient to carry around, and, you know, it’s just like they’re all so fugly, and don’t gloat about never needing Yale’s help with anything. In each of those eight seminars, five kids just like you got rejected for every one that got in. Seriously no one wants to hear about your or anyone else’s support of Poland Spring plastic. And not needing to use Yale resources constantly doesn’t mean they’re not great. Did you guys know that you can request a scan of any portion of any book in the entire Yale Library system and they’ll email it to you the next day? Have you looked at the fellowship and grants website?? Have you even looked at OCI, ever??? —Cindy Ok YH Staff —graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff
BY THE
BOOM/BUST INCOMING: Math You’ve probably noticed the Great Migration: the hordes of people venturing up Science Hill in skinny jeans and baggy sweaters. The poor souls who, after acing physics in high school, decided that Math is the opposite of Thought. Now they need a semester of “Do You Remember What A Denominator Is?” in order to advance to junior or senior standing.
OUTGOING: Resolutions The hard winter chill is bound to soften those promises you made to yourself over break. Three glasses of wine, one “loss of youth” existential crisis, and the persistent strain of parental criticism—of course you convinced yourself that this is the year of healthy habits. Now you’re realizing it isn’t—and that’s OK! It’s not like Achilles ever flossed. — Jesse Schreck YH Staff
NUMBERS
#
TYNG CUP STANDINGS 1. Pierson 2. Jonathan Edwards 3. Trumbull 4. Saybrook 5. Timothy Dwight 6. Davenport 7. Silliman 8. Branford 9. Ezra Stiles 10. Morse 11. Berkeley 12. Calhoun
422.5 410 402 374.5 370.5 353 331.5 311.5 296.5 283 217.5 75.5
INDEX 62 The number of mass shootings that have occurred in the United States since 1982.
TOP FIVE 5 4 3 2 1
Ways you can still get into that seminar
Program a friend as “Beyoncé” on your phone, then conspicuously receive a call from that friend during class. Hunger strike: you won’t feed your body until Yale feeds your mind. Find the real Beyoncé and have her lip-synch a televised national plea on your behalf. Reverse psychology: tell the professor that you will accept her as your teacher if she fills out an index
49 The number of those shootings in which the firearms had been legally obtained.
28 The number of countries surveyed for a 2011 report on civilian firearm possession conducted by the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project based in Geneva.
2 The number of surveyed countries that consider civilian ownership of a firearm to be a basic right (the U.S. and Yemen).
0
The number of mass shootings that have occurred in Australia since the nation passed gun control measures in 1996.
Become Beyoncé. — Jesse Schreck YH Staff
Sources: 1) Motherjones 2) Motherjones 3) Huffington Post 4) Huffington Post 5) The New York Times — Jesse Schreck YH Staff The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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SITTING DOWN WITH DIVYA NARENDRA by Marcus Moretti YH Staff You’ve probably already seen Divya Narendra—or at least a version of him. In David Fincher’s film The Social Network, and in real life, he was the co-founder—along with the Winklevii—of ConnectU, the site that inspired Facebook. Now Narendra lives in New York City, where he was born and raised, and where he runs SumZero, a communitybased investment information service he founded in 2008. SumZero bills itself as the “largest community of hedge fund, mutual fund, and private equity professionals.” It just launched Basic, a free weekly summary of two or three financial insights from its core community. Narendra gave a talk at Luce Hall tonight sponsored by the Yale Graduate Writing Center and the Herald got the chance to speak to him afterwards. YH: When did you first feel the spark of entrepreneurship? DN: It began with ConnectU, when I was a junior at Harvard. It’s funny—it didn’t work out at all as I planned it. I knew that I liked coming up with an idea, building a team, and the ownership of it. One of the nice things about being a business owner is that you’re always going to work on your business, whereas if you go work at a big corporation, sometimes you have issues where you’re not actually motivated to do anything. Or you don’t really want to get up in the morning. When you have material ownership in something, you’re so much more motivated. YH: You said in your talk that for a lot of undergrads at Ivy League schools finance and consulting is a default option. For you, though, it was a backup plan? DN: Yeah. I always knew it was an option because, at least at Harvard, our Office of Career Services (OCS) is built around finance and consulting, so there are all these firms that come to you—and this is true at Yale too, right? They come to your school to hire you, so you get a lot of people who aren’t necessarily passionate about it, but because it’s easy for them and there’s structure around it, they do it. But for me I knew when I went to [Credit Suisse after graduating] that I wasn’t going to be a lifer. It was only going to be something I did for a couple of years; most of these programs are only two-year programs anyway. YH: Some people, like Peter Thiel, now think that college is a waste of time and that 20 year olds shouldn’t be learning
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Rebecca Wolenski/YH Staff applied math or philosophy. Instead they should be out in the real world building companies with their youthful energy and creativity. DN: I totally disagree. In college you get exposed to a wide variety of things that aren’t necessarily related to your career, and that’s one of the best things about it. One of the things I regret is not taking music theory. Now I play the guitar and wish I had taken music theory then. But beyond that, the social growth that occurs in college is hard to replicate outside of that setting. When I got to school as an 18 year old, I didn’t know anything in the social sense. You learn so much because you’re forced to; you’re living with hundreds of people in a dorm, you’re sharing meals with 10, 20 people at a time, and that never happens again. It’s kind of like being on a big team. And the other thing about college is that it’s engineered to be diverse. So yes, there are some people who can start companies in high school, but doing so at 18, 19, or 20—there’s a cost to that.
YH:When you’re assessing the viability of a startup or an idea, you mentioned in your talk that what really matters is the size of the market. DN: That’s step one. I’m not an investor. I’m an operator: I run my business. I don’t run a venture capital firm. But if I did, that’s something I would want to understand off the bat: What space are you playing in, and how big is it? Sizing the target audience and understanding the magnitude of their particular need is one of the first things you want to know about as an investor, and certainly as an entrepreneur. If you’re attacking a problem that’s too small, it’s hard to build a big business out of that. If it’s a problem that’s easily solved, you run all kinds of competitive risks, because you get all these different folks who can do the same thing. For example, we see that today in the daily deals space. There are so many daily deals sites or discount sites that there’s no barrier to entry, it’s just very hard to stand out in that market. It’s supersaturated. You want to be ahead of the curve.
YH: Your hands are full with your company, SumZero. But if they weren’t, where do you think the biggest problem is that an entrepreneur could come along and solve and win big? DN: I honestly don’t think that much outside of my current business. But the first thing that comes to mind is the huge amount of noise out there. There’s so much information out there from various sources, and a lot of that information is user-generated, and as a result it’s not clean. There’s so much information out there that trying to distill it down to what really matters, I think, is tough. Recently there was the announcement with Graph Search, Facebook’s new search tool. It’s trying to make more use of this massive pile of data that exists. Twitter’s an interesting example. People tweet all the time, but trying to figure out which tweets matter and which ones don’t, and how much credence to put in something that’s trending versus something that isn’t—it’s just difficult. I think the companies that try to make sense out of this huge pool of user-generated data will do well. That’s a pretty hard problem to solve. Everyone feels like they can be a journalist or a publisher of content now; the blogosphere is bigger than it’s ever been before. But as a result it’s hard to stand out. A lot of people have a tough time getting the answer they want given how much is out there on any given topic.
YH: Based on the number of times that you bring up Facebook in your talk, you seem to follow it pretty closely, which makes sense given your influential role in its founding. There are a number of people who over the past few years have predicted its collapse. Could someone come along and topple Facebook? DN: Right now I don’t see that happening to Facebook. The reason is one, huge network effects: it has a billion users, so it’s difficult to compete with that, as Google+ has seen, and two, it’s a platform. There are a huge number of applications that live on Facebook. SumZero does not. It’s important for us to own our own network. We’re not reliant on Facebook or LinkedIn or any other social network, and that helps us stand alone. The truth is, there are a lot of apps that sit on Facebook and are reliant on Facebook. That’s great for them. They’re almost like infrastructure for the Internet in a way. The more they do that, the more they become this operating system for the Internet, and that’s going to help them sustain. Some people think there’s fad risk to Facebook—that’s probably what you’re alluding to. I think because they’re so ingrained in people’s lives that it’s tough to see something else coming in and uprooting it. —This interview was condensed by the author.
THE FREEDOM TRAP by Cole Wheeler hen we finally met, Janis didn’t look quite as good as she had in pictures. Though she had always been up front about her age, she seemed older than I had expected. She was less sleek than I had imagined, boxier, and a little rough around the edges. Her journey eastward had caked her ivory body with dark grime, smeared in streaks by the rain that dripped onto the Wal-Mart parking lot. Still, she had come all the way from Colorado to Virginia for me. There was no doubt that she was cute, in a timeless way. She still had the potential to fill the emptiness, or at least distract me from it. This isn’t a story about love, after all. It’s a story about escape. Her grizzled driver, mustachioed in the Fu Manchu style, accepted my envelope of hundreds and drove off with the rest of his deliveries in tow. I spent two months searching the Internet for one just like Janis, and in May I finally found her on eBay Motors. She was a 1971 Volkswagen camper bus, and she was my ideal: rebuilt engine, original mustard-yellow vinyl interior, pristine ivory paint job. The classic hippie van. I was not initially fond of the name Janis, given to her by her previous owner, but I eventually decided that I had no right to rechristen her. She was 20 years my senior, after all. I began to need Janis in the spring of my freshman year of college. I was at my top-choice university with no responsibility but to carve out the sort of life I wanted for myself. I had ultimate freedom. Incongruously, my reaction was to fall into a deep depression. Maybe it was the academic shock of Directed Studies that caused me to turn inward; maybe the unexpected surgery and month-long recovery explained why I felt so isolated; or maybe my thoughts of the girl back home were draining college life of its color. But those things might have been bearable if not for my deeper sense of unease. Whether it was the long-term goal of medical school or daily rehearsal for a theater production, everyone around me seemed to have an innate motivation carrying him from one day to the next. I watched six seasons of Lost in as many weeks. I grew claustrophobic within the five city blocks that marked the boundaries of my existence. I imagined my daily walk to and from class grinding down a tread in the sidewalk, like the dirt track worn by the pacing of a zoo animal. I had numerous phone conversations involving phrases like “what if” and “gap year” as I tested the waters of parental sympathy. I needed escape. It had always worked before. I was raised to rely upon the saving grace of the well-timed getaway in times of strife or boredom. When I was growing up, my family’s consistent solution to the ennui of an empty weekend was a change of scenery. Some weekends it was the beach; others it was rambling adventures through the Virginia countryside. When flights were cheap, it was Disney World. No problem at home or school ever seemed so difficult knowing that, come Saturday, I would be somewhere completely different. Our greatest escape came when I was 13, after my parents sold their business of 20 years. Freshly unemployed, their lives had—temporarily—become a series of sevenday weekends. Naturally, then, they researched Virginia’s regulations on homeschooling, purchased an RV, and off we went. I complained halfheartedly about being uprooted from my school and friends, but truthfully, I hated my strict Catholic middle school and the exclusive friend groups of kids who summered together at their gated community pools. Instead of making friends and learning how to talk to girls and resolving my bitter feud with Tom Carter after
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that incident in gym class, I spent eighth grade watching the Newfoundland coastline and Kentucky bluegrass pass by the backseat window. Five years later, I was yearning for a way out. Unable to find anything good on Netflix (studying for exams was out of the question), I picked up a slim paperback called Into the Wild,
by John Krakauer. It was the true story of Chris McCandless, a brilliant college student who burned his money, broke contact with his family, and set out alone for the Alaskan wilderness. Disillusioned with the constant quest for the brass ring, Chris wanted meaning in the here and now. His gospel of freedom yanked me out of my fog into razor-sharp clarity: “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” A new and different sun. No commitment, no sameness, no boredom. Chris legitimized the plan that had already been brewing in my mind: escape. It had worked before, and it would work again. By the time I bullshitted my way through my term papers, I had bookmarked dozens of beat-up VW buses on Craigslist and eBay, searching tirelessly for the One. The idea of a gap year grew less and less hypothetical. I saw past the singleminded strivings of my classmates, so fixated and limited in their horizons of economics or music theory that they could not see the multitude of suns that beckoned in all directions. “Careers are a 20th century invention,” said McCandless. “Nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit of a man than a secure future.” For myself, I saw a future alone on the road. If the life in front of me had nothing to offer, I could simply leave it and continue searching. And so, that summer, Janis came into my life. Armed with a washrag and a toothbrush, I spent June making her beautiful. I worked for two hours with a Q-tip to clean the clotted gray gunk from her door hinges. My grandfather helped me replace her dry-rotted window seals and fix her loose fuel line. My father helped me repair her leaky sink. He patiently endured the jerks, stops, and foul exclamations of my early encounters with manual transmission. I scraped dishes all summer to help pay for her. My mom and sister and I ate powdered doughnuts while parked by the waving reeds of the river one morning, and we drove the winding parkway with the windows down. My best friends planned next summer’s trip to Joshua Tree. By the end of the summer, I had not camped out alone with Janis even once. Between hustling for tips at the restaurant, friends’ graduations, sangria-flavored evenings on the porch, a fender-bender, and a sudden funeral, life happened and Janis slipped into the background. I liked knowing she was there if I needed her, but inevitably something else was always more important. I only took Janis on one overnight trip, an August weekend with my girlfriend in the Shenandoah Mountains. We walked the green ridgelines and wiped our sweat with bandannas and cooked chili over propane and took photographs and heard or dreamt we heard the snuffling of a bear at night. We had to be home for work on Monday, but still it was America and freedom and happiness and reality. As the summer drew to a close, something had changed between Janis and me. Trying to recall what had brought us together in the first place, I reread Into the Wild. When I reached the final pages, it was as if I were reading the ending for the first time. For me, the story had concluded with Chris’s triumphant escape from society and transcendent communion with true Freedom. The second time around, however, I understood that Chris died trying to leave the Alaskan wilderness and return to civilization. This was no act of surrender; Chris was a determined and capable survivor. Rather, he had realized
that the meaning he sought couldn’t be found in the woods. Days before he died, cut off from civilization by a river that had burst its banks, Chris marked a passage in his copy of Doctor Zhivago: “Only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.” “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED,” he scrawled in the margin. I had truncated Chris’s story to make it what I needed to hear. My solo journey with Janis began and ended at “what if.” I am in my final semester now, set to graduate on time, and engaged in work that I care about deeply. For three years, Janis waited for me in the garage, and last fall I finally watched her ride away behind someone else’s truck. When it came down to it, in the summer after that difficult year, I had to sit in the driver’s seat with the keys in the ignition before I could understand the reasons not to leave the driveway. Chris McCandless discovered the same thing, only too late. As for me, the multitude of suns are still out there, but now I am unafraid to cast my lot with the one that seems brightest, for better or worse. Last I heard, Janis was with some guy in Pennsylvania – what his need for her is, I don’t know. I still miss her from time to time, but ultimately our affair was doomed. She taught me what she herself will never know: there is no worse way to be trapped than by the need to be free. —graphic by Madeline Butler
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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OPINION ROE, RECONSIDERED HOME SWEET HOME by Julia Calagiovanni YH Staff New Haven’s Planned Parenthood, you might know, is just up Whitney Avenue, past Caseus, Fashionista, and the Peabody. Maybe that seems like a long trip if you live in, like, Davenport. But it might not if you live in Mississippi, which, along with North and South Dakota, has only one abortion clinic in the entire state. Tues., Jan. 22 marked the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which—in a nutshell—legalized abortion in the United States. Our generation has never known an America where abortion wasn’t on-the-books legal. Almost all women of reproductive age—defined as ages 15-44—have lived their entire lives in a post-Roe world. However, inasmuch as Roe was a legal milestone and remains a rallying point for the pro-choice movement, it is dangerous to conclude that reproductive justice has been won. Too many members of our generation take abortion’s legality for granted and assume that legality ensures access. In Connecticut, as in many other Northeastern states, getting an abortion is relatively simple: there are enough clinics so that it’s relatively simple to travel to one, and there are no state-level restrictions surrounding abortion. But in other states, things are more difficult. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, only 13 percent of counties nationwide have an abortion provider. In many states, people seeking abortions confront a web of laws devised to prevent them from getting the procedure. Since an outright repeal of Roe seems unlikely, legislators have turned to restrictions designed to make it difficult or impossible for someone to receive an abortion. These can include an invasive, mandatory ultrasound, parental notification for minors, or a waiting period between a consultation and the procedure, all of which increase expense and inconvenience. Some states may also mandate that patients be presented with information that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer (it doesn’t), causes the fetus pain (it doesn’t), or leads to mental-health problems (it doesn’t). A patient on Medicaid, a government health program for low-income residents, may or may not be able to get funding for the procedure — under the Hyde Amendment, no federal funding may be used for abortions, and states vary on providing funding themselves. Even if money is available—and it may not be, particularly for the uninsured—the logistics of traveling to a clinic,
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The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
finding childcare, and taking time off from work present additional challenges. Then, too, there is the huge amount of social stigma that still surrounds abortion. Even in more liberal states, someone seeking to get an abortion may be faced with protesters at the door. These protesters are not simply exercising their freedom of speech; they become a palpable threat to the patient, who is forced to face undue judgment and shame for their choice. So, on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, it cannot be stressed enough that abortion is not easily accessible for every person who may want one. Roe might have been the fight of our parents’ generation, but it’s not over. Sure, it’s frustrating—in the wise words of a sign I saw once at a march, “I can’t believe we still have to protest this shit.” But in the face of growing conservative opposition, it’s dangerous to remain neutral. There’s an iconic image, published in Ms. Magazine in 1973, of a woman crouched on a motel-room floor, a bloody towel underneath her hips, dead from an attempted self-induced abortion. We know that her name is Gerri Santoro, and that she died on May 8, 1964. But there are many more people whose names we do not, cannot, and will not know—those who are, under the law, guaranteed an abortion but will not be able to get one because of where they live, who they are, or what they earn. Many more will be forced to carry and bear children against their wishes. Even after Roe, their fates are still being decided by legislators who see them as abstractions, caricaturing them as irresponsible, promiscuous, or thoughtless: at best, careless, and at worst, murderers. But we know that’s inaccurate. We know they are our friends, classmates, siblings, and family members; they could even be us. But we shouldn’t have to name them or know them to support them; they are simply people seeking a medically necessary procedure, making the best decision they can at a particular time. Many of them face abusive relationships, poverty, racial discrimination, or responsibility for children. We can support them, most obviously, by voting for pro-choice politicians and then holding them to their promises. Volunteering with pro-choice groups or donating to abortion access funds are also helpful. Most importantly, the movement needs our voices, insisting that Roe must be more than just a law on the books.
by Leland Whitehouse YH Staff A month was a long time to be home. I hadn’t been in the house I grew up in for more than a couple weeks at a time since I was in high school. Like many of us, I’ve managed to fill my summers and winters fit to bursting, leaving only the logistical scraps for dear old Cleveland, Ohio. As a result, I‘ve got six, seven, eight days at home down: a couple days resting up and doing laundry, lunch with my old English teacher, several evenings’ worth of revelry with old friends, four or five solid family dinners, a black-and-white movie in the living room with mom and pop, then it’s pack a bag, “Love you guys!” and back on the road again. Thirty days, however, was a damned struggle. My profoundly empty bank account ruled out the possibility of jet-setting to some exciting place, so it was all home, all break. By Day Nine, my mood was lurching uncontrollably between profound laziness (eight hours of Netflix) and suffocating restlessness (half a tank of gas just to be out of the house). I was impatient and snappish, blindsiding my parents with a nastiness that was neither warranted nor precedented. I’d find myself lashing out at my dad for warning me that my plate was precariously close to the edge of the counter, or leaving the room dismissively halfway through my mom’s thought. Our poor folks take it on the nose. They’ve dealt with us at our worst since we were poopy-diapered howling toddlers, and now that we’re complicated young adults, they bear the brunt of our inarticulate frustration. Parents are a convenient scapegoat for the unpleasantness that can accompany going home, but for the most part they stand falsely accused. In reality, we have a hard time being around the house because Yale has warped our rhythms and preoccupations. Our brains and bodies have accelerated to the frenetic pace at which this school runs. It’s a dead sprint from breakfast to bedtime, lent direction and urgency by a steadily replenishing to-do list. We’ve become stimulus addicts. Efficiency junkies. But back at home, it’s hard to get your fix of caffeine-fueled synaptic wildfires, because that’s not what home is about. Home is, to a great degree, about your family. So, first, call a spade a spade. It ain’t your parents’ fault that you’re so grumpy. It’s that ol’ Yale crack pipe. Being happy at home means figuring out how to handle the stimulus DT’s without blowing up at your mom over nothing. Escape is quick relief. I’m an award-winning escape artist. I bought everybody I knew a Christmas
present. I snuck off to coffee shops and made playlists on my iTunes. I literally spent a night watching the Little Caesar’s bowl at my buddy’s house while he was asleep—I just wanted to be anywhere but in my house. But that’s no solution. Our parents love us and they don’t see enough of us anymore. They want to hang! They’d probably listen to us read from the phone book if we wouldn’t sneer at them the whole time. Putting in a little facetime is the least we can do for the people who’ve been dealing with our literal and metaphorical poopy diapers for 20 or so years. This doesn’t mean we’ve got to spend every waking hour breathing the same air as our folks, though. For the most part, they get it. We’ve moved away and developed an independence that doesn’t allow for the smothering presence of parents. That was their plan from the get-go—feed, bathe, drive to school, send to college, get some postcards, and visit the grandkids (more or less). It must feel like when we asked them to stop tying our shoes for us—proud, if a little sad. You’re allowed to want some space. In fact, you’re supposed to. What it means is that making yourself scarce every day for a month would be lousy. The trick is to find a way to kick it with your folks that doesn’t make you grit your teeth. It can take some work. Though I bungled about 90 percent of my interactions at home, the good ones were unquestionably worth it. I spent a memorably great afternoon baking bread with my dad, and a totally fantastic morning in antique shops with my mom, both of which were almost nice enough to redeem the rest of my botched attempts. As far as I can tell, the secret is a delicate balance of self-indulgence and humility. I let myself spend the rest of both days chugging coffee and watching pseudo-intellectual movies on Netflix (anything with Benicio del Toro is a win), getting my stimulus fix. As a result I was chipper and friendly around mom and pops. I also got off my self-important horse for a couple of hours and let them be my parents. My dad patiently showed me how to knead dough. My mom took me down a side street to a great shop I’d never have found otherwise. They had a chance to be the warm-hearted authority figures, full of helpful wisdom, that they’ve always been. Mostly, it’s about reminding them that we still need them. If only for a couple hours every once in a while. It feels good. It feels better if you’re caffeinated. —Graphic by Lian Fumerton-Liu YH Staff
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Joint effort Two School of Management graduates see promise in the emerging (legal) marijuana industry by Kohler Bruno YH Staff
’d put it at a 75 percent chance that there’s a pun in your headline,” Brendan Kennedy, SOM ’05, said when I interviewed him for this piece. Kennedy is the CEO of Privateer Holdings, a new private equity firm based in Seattle that invests exclusively in the emerging legal marijuana industry. NBC News couldn’t resist the urge for wordplay when they reported on Privateer Holdings, titling their Dec. 30, 2012 segment “High Profits,” with the headline written in green. Kate Snow, the anchor reporting for NBC, allowed a faint smile to curl across her lips. Nor could the Los Angeles Times stand to abstain: the headline of the paper’s Dec. 9, 2012 article read, “Plenty of smoke clouds the future of legalized pot in Washington.” Business Week boldly declared Kennedy to be “No Dope” in their coverage of Privateer Holdings, a comment on the disconnect between an Ivy League MBA and a career in the marijuana industry. For Kennedy, the press coverage’s humorous tone is one of the biggest hurdles that the marijuana industry faces today. He tried to guess what the headline for this article would be. “SOM grads have high hopes” was his best bet. “You can’t help it, but I’ve heard them all.” Kennedy co-founded Privateer Holdings two years ago with another Yale School of Management graduate, Michael Blue, SOM ’05. They stand at the helm of the new legal marijuana industry; Privateer is the first firm in the U.S. to focus solely on cannabis-related companies. The two want to direct the industry away from the stigma that stubbornly surrounds it; for two MBAs who want to present a legitimate business model, the tone of media coverage is critical. In fact, some venture capitalists declined
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The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
to comment for this story, as they did not want their names or businesses associated with the image of the marijuana industry. The industry is dogged at times by self-perpetuating stereotypes of strung-out stoners. “I’m waiting for the day when we can go to a conference, and you don’t have to listen to Bob Marley,” Kennedy said to the Seattle Times in a Dec. 2, 2012 article. He reiterated a similar sentiment in our interview: “Going and having a serious business
trolled substance with no currently accepted medical use and a strong potential for abuse. Other Schedule I drugs include MDMA, heroin, and LSD. This creates a glaring conflict between federal statutes, which on paper strictly prohibit the use of marijuana, and the laws of 18 states and the District of Columbia, which allow for the consumption of medical marijuana and the establishment of cannabis dispensaries. In the states of Colorado and Washington, residents
Nevertheless, many analysts see a long trajectory for marijuana legalization in federal law. “I think we will start to see other states legalize marijuana for adult or recreational use, but I don’t think all the sudden in the next couple years we’re going to see the whole nation move in that direction,” Chris Walsh, the editor of the Medical Marijuana Business Daily, told me. “It’s still going to be illegal federally,” he added. “We haven’t seen any indication that the federal government
“The biggest opportunities in the industry are clearly on the ancillary business side. It’s a lot less risk than when you’re dealing with a company that handles marijuana.” —Chris Walsh, editor of Medical Marijuana Business Daily conversation on Bloomberg is part of the transformation,” he said, “part of bringing the industry out of the shadows and into the light.” In his December 2012 interview with Bloomberg, Kennedy said, “The Berlin Wall of cannabis prohibition is crumbling down.” He repeated that language, almost to the letter, in our interview. “The Berlin wall of cannabis prohibition is coming down and cannabis re-legalization is inevitable,” he said assuredly. Yet, to be sure, there remain scores of skeptics, and their skepticism is grounded in cold legal realities: the U.S. federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I con-
voted last November to legalize adult consumption of marijuana for recreational use. President Obama has been non-committal on the issue of the legal conflict between the federal government and the states, but he has suggested he will respect state decisions on marijuana. “In Washington and Colorado you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue,” he said in an interview with Barbara Walters shortly after his reelection. “It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal.”
is going to change its position on that any time soon.” For Kennedy, the federal government’s hesitation to reform its policies towards marijuana falls in line with his vision of the way laws change over time. “State by state, step by step, patient by patient this is moving toward legalization. It’s inevitable,” he said. “Politicians and bureaucrats are always the last ones to change. They’re at the tail.” For now, though, the conflict between state and federal laws lingers, and this incongruity has affected the manner in which Privateer Holdings does business. The firm does not
invest in any companies that touch cannabis directly; rather, Privateer focuses on supplementary businesses that have begun to pop up as state marijuana laws have gradually been relaxed. “The biggest opportunities in the industry are clearly on the ancillary business side,” Walsh said. “It’s a lot less risk than when you’re dealing with a company that handles marijuana.” This business strategy is sometimes muddled in the public image of the
partnership. Sitting in the classrooms of 135 Prospect St., they absorbed traditional business lessons on management, accounting, and strategic investment, lessons which, half a decade out of the School of Management, they are now applying, if untraditionally. (Several SOM professors contacted for this article declined to comment on the subject.) After Yale, their paths diverged, with Blue working at private equity firms in Connecticut and Arkansas,
with a slight body high.” At the bottom of the reviews page, Leafly shows users where they can buy Cat Piss—or, if they dare, Super Cat Piss—and the price at which each nearby dispensary sells it. Someday cannabis is going to be like corn, Kennedy said: “Goldman Sachs has analysts sitting around a desk studying corn. There are commodity traders in Chicago trading corn futures. This will be the same thing,” he said.
“The Berlin wall of cannabis prohibition is coming down and relegalization is inevitable.” —Brendan Kennedy, SOM ‘05, CEO of Privateer Holdings company. With headlines like Marketplace’s “The business of selling pot…legally,” it would be easy to assume that Privateer’s business is the direct production or sale of cannabis. When I asked Kennedy about the way Privateer navigates the murky area between state and federal statutes, he dispatched a crisply rehearsed line. “Nothing we do is in violation of any local, state, or federal laws,” he said. Then he returned to his casual, self-confident candor as he discussed the potential magnitude of the marijuana industry. “It’s the biggest opportunity I’ve ever seen,” he said. Big enough, apparently, to drag two Yale MBAs off traditional career tracks and into an untested—and therefore untapped—arm of the U.S. economy. On the first day of classes at Yale, Blue and Kennedy sat next to each other and quickly formed a friendship, which transformed almost as quickly into a business
and Kennedy at a bank in Silicon Valley where he examined and evaluated startups, but they eventually reunited to form Privateer with a third partner, Christian Groh. Privateer’s first acquisition was Leafly. com, a website that compiles user reviews of more than 500 marijuana strains. Its glossy, sleek interface is emblematic of the direction in which Blue and Kennedy want the industry to move—appearances, like headlines, are important. Leafly is a sort of Yelp. com for marijuana, with thousands of user reviews and ratings, but Leafly is considerably more aesthetically pleasing. When users visit Leafly’s homepage, they are greeted by a featured strain, with a short description of its characteristics. One featured strain this week was Cat Piss, the inhalation of which, Leafly reports, “can result in a pleasantly mellow, uplifting cerebral state
“That’s the hardest part for people to get.” Business analysts are beginning to see the extent of the potential profit to be made from the cannabis industry. “We’re talking about a $30 billion agricultural product,” argued Morgan Fox, the communications manager for the Marijuana Policy Project, a lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C. The exact number is up for debate: Bloomberg, Inc., for example, projects the value of the medical marijuana industry in its entirety at around $50 billion, which is closer to the Privateer Holdings assessment. As Kennedy discussed the business side of the marijuana industry, he spoke clearly and strategically, talking through the types of opportunities he saw for his firm in the same way one would expect most SOM graduates to speak about their more conventional endeavors. But when I asked if there was any mo-
tivation beyond monetary returns, his tone switched slightly. “I feel like I have this moral imperative to succeed,” he said, keenly. “I feel like I have this moral imperative to end prohibition.” Though he always leaned toward libertarian principles, Kennedy never felt passionately about marijuana laws until he became involved in the industry, he explained. Now he’s disgusted by the rampant incarcerations. “In 2011, 870,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession or distribution, predominantly Hispanics and African Americans,” he said. “The whole thing is insane.” Those arrests won’t slow down until laws change in states across the country, a process that could play out over a few years, or a few decades, depending on whom you ask. Then, many argue, changes in federal laws will follow. “At some point there will be a tipping point where the federal government will pretty much be forced to do something about this,” Walsh said. “Everything is murky right now and I expect it to be murky for years to come. But you’ve got to think once at least half the states in the nation legalize medical marijuana, the federal policy is going to start changing.” For the time being, “murky” is a decent way to describe the relative legal uncertainty facing the industry, but that has not put off Brendan Kennedy and Michael Blue. Bullish, with degrees from Yale in their pocket and a set of optimistic investors in the bank, they’re in it for the long haul, and they’re excited about their prospects. Prohibition may not be over, but there’s legitimate money to be made nonetheless. —graphic by Madeline Butler YH Staff The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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The eight major causes of gun violence, according to New Haven youths surveyed by the New Haven Family Alliance and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars.
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Shooting in silence Emily Rappaport, ES ‘14, re-examines the state of gun violence in New Haven in light of the Newtown massacre.
he kids are not all right. This is the lesson that America learned the hard (tragic, unspeakable) way on Dec. 14, 2012, when a 24-year old with a chemical imbalance and a good shot took the lives of 26 people, including 20 first-grade students between the ages of five and six, at a suburban elementary school 32 miles northwest of New Haven. This is the message that President Obama sent loud and clear on Monday in his inaugural address when he declared that “our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.” The journey will be long, because the kids are not all right. Not even close. A 2011 report published in The Journal of Trauma stated that U.S. children between the ages of five and 14 have a rate of gun-related homicide 17 times higher than other developed countries. And nowhere are the statistics more jarring or the violence more of a quotidian reality than in inner-city America, which in Connecticut translates to Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. This violence is systemic, and it disproportionately affects youths, especially black males. In the quiet lanes of Newtown last month, how safe the young victims were from harm was not a function of how cared for or cherished they were. But on the streets of Detroit—or New Haven, for that matter—there is likely to be an intimate cause-and-effect relationship between how valuable and protected a child feels and that child’s chance of being involved in an act of violence, as either victim or perpetrator. In a 1991 New Yorker article called “Out There,” William Finnegan boldly states, “Virtually every black person in New Haven knows someone who has been shot.” He adds, “An inordinate number of the people
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getting shot these days in New Haven are teen-agers.” Sadly, more than 20 years later, we cannot yet look at Finnegan’s piece as a relic of another time. Alicia Caraballo, the adult education director on New Haven’s Board of Education, lost her brother to gun violence in 1981, and then her son to the same plague in 2008. “As a parent,” she said, “you worry every day. As parents, we all do.” In 2011, the homicide rate in New Haven hit a two-decade high. “We had 34 homicides,” said Pina Violano, the injury prevention coordinator for Yale-New Haven Hospital’s trauma department and director of the city’s gun buyback program. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there’s a freakin’ problem in New Haven,” Violano said. That same year, the city saw 133 victims of nonfatal shootings. Violano gave me
13 people between the ages of 10 and 24 are victims of homicide every single day in America, and 80 percent of them are killed by guns. This city has seen 51 homicides in the past 24 months. It’s a different kind of conversation, for sure, but why is it so much less inevitable? In New Haven, a group of people have banded together to initiate a forceful response to gun-related violence; they include New Haven Chief of Police Dean Esserman and his department, as well as doctors, psychologists, members of the education and health departments, Yale faculty, and concerned citizens. They are, in large part, looking at gun violence as a public health issue that requires an interdisciplinary response. In 2012, the homicide rate in the city was cut by half, to 17. No one I spoke to could pinpoint any one reason for the reduction,
1866 “Yellow Boy” carbine .44 RF, to be precise—was made at the Winchester Repeating Arms factory on the corner of Winchester Avenue and Munson Street, just on the border of New Haven’s Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods. These days, the 500,000-square foot brick and concrete complex that once housed the factory is on its last legs. When I visited the site, which is now known as Science Park, I could see through the windowpanes—the painted window glass is broken where it hasn’t fallen out completely—into the building, whose wooden floor is literally buckling. As he sat down to talk with me, Jonathan Gertman, a young development associate for Forest City residential group—the company currently in the process of converting this industrial carcass into an upscale office and residential com-
“There are new rules to the game. The law enforcement community and the rest of the community are saying that the violence must stop.” —Pastor William Mathis, Project Longevity Program Director a brochure issued by the Injury Free Coalition for Kids, Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, and the Connecticut Against Gun Violence Education Fund. The cover says, “Don’t Let These Shots Go Unheard. Protect Our Children.” At Sandy Hook Elementary School, Adam Lanza fired the shots heard round the world—shots loud enough to change the gun conversation in Hartford and Washington, hopefully once and for all. The reasons that conversation is necessary after a massacre like the one in Newtown are deeply intuitive for most people, regardless of their stance on the Second Amendment. But
but someone must be doing something right. The question is just how much difference local initiatives can make without state and federal help. But people seem determined not to let anything stand in their way. “We’re really not happy,” Caraballo said, “and we’re just not tolerating it anymore.” CAPTAIN KIRBY YORK, THE MAIN CHARacter of the 1948 Western film Fort Apache, is a classic American hero, an icon of patriotic masculinity. He’s a Civil War veteran. He’s a cowboy. He’s played by John Wayne. And if that weren’t enough, he carries a Winchester rifle. The gun—an
plex, per the wishes of the City of New Haven—mentioned that he had just found a homeless person squatting in the building, which is filled with asbestos and lead paint. The first leg of the redevelopment project is done, and the next part—the conversion of 200,000 square feet of factory space into rental apartments—will take about 14 months. As part of the renovation, Forest City is in touch with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., about getting prints of archival photographs of the Winchester factory to hang on the walls of the new complex, in commemoration of the place’s glory days.
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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And glorious they were. At one time, Winchester Repeating Arms was the largest manufacturing employer in New Haven. In his seminal work City: Urbanism and its End, Yale professor of management and political science Douglas Rae writes, “This was a colossus, reaching peaks in the range of 21,000 full-time workers during world wars.” The building at Science Park became the company’s permanent location in 1870, and by 1916, just before the United States entered World War I, Winchester controlled 104 acres of land for production, shipping, and storage. The brand was internationally recognized, and the Winchester Model 1873 rifle became known as “The Gun that Won the West” (hence the 1950 film Winchester ’73 starring Jimmy Stewart). Tens of thousands of people, especially Southern blacks, migrated to New Haven to work at Winchester and other industrial plants. You know how this story ends. Around 1920, big national corporations began to take over the management of these local firms, moving their headquarters out of New Haven. Winchester became a subsidiary of the Olin corporation. “To a locally grounded businessman, 91 cents in New Haven might stand up as an alternative to $1 in Houston or Atlanta,” Rae writes in City. “To a hired professional, whose loyalties have little to do with locality, $1 earned after taxes and expenses will invariably beat 99.9 cents with-
had time, Violano could recite all 967 of them. She put her arm over the victims’ names, but showed me the demographic information in the neighboring columns: African American, African American, African American, Other, African American, etc. “It’s gotta stop,” she said. A 2009 report issued by the New Haven Family Alliance and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars at the Yale School of Medicine called “Understanding Youth Violence in New Haven: A Photovoice Project with the Youth of New Haven” stated that although African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, they account for 49.3 percent of homicide victims nationwide. Homicide, typically by firearm, is the leading cause of death for African Americans and the second leading cause for Hispanics/Latinos. (As far as I could tell, the CDC’s online statistics for leading causes of death for African Americans haven’t been updated since 2009.) In a 1994 piece in The Atlantic called “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson writes, “The inclination to violence springs from the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor—the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use and drug trafficking, and the resulting alienation and lack of hope for the future.” That’s a whole lot of systemic circumstances, but the one that tends to get
Law enforcement in New Haven is adopting well-publicized measures to take on gangs. On Nov. 27, 2012, United States Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney David Fein, and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy officially launched “Project Longevity,” a national gang and gun violence reduction program, in New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport. The idea to implement the initiative in Connecticut came first in August 2011, when the state’s cities were experiencing what Project Longevity Program Director and local pastor William Mathis called “off-the-chain violence.” Fein came to Connecticut with David Kennedy, an author and criminologist who’d just published a book called Don’t Shoot, in which he lays out the protocols for this sort of program. At the same time, State Senator Toni Harp and State Representative Toni Walker, both of New Haven, were working in Hartford to make sure state resources were being allocated to combat this problem. In addition, New Haven was in the process of hiring a new police chief, Dean Esserman, who had recently implemented some of Kennedy’s strategies in Providence, R.I., to noticeable success. (I was not able to reach Esserman for this piece.) Through Project Longevity, members of gangs (or “groups,” as Mathis and his colleagues prefer to call them), are identified and then brought to a “call-in,” where, ac-
“We do not respond when problems are small—no matter how large they are projected to become—but rather respond only after they have become large and ‘violent.’” —Bandy Lee, psychiatrist and violence studies specialist out respect to place.” Corporate management was no longer invested in the needs of the community, because corporate management no longer functioned in the community. Middle-class people moved away; poverty spread. By 1943, Rae writes, the Winchester plant was a “hidden disaster.” In 1980, Olin officially shut down the Winchester Repeating Arms operation, which by then employed fewer than 1,000 people. At that point, “The city’s middle class, which had been trickling off to the suburbs since at least the First World War, started leaving in earnest,” Finnegan writes in “Out There.” He continues, “Poverty came to engulf large parts of the city. The 1980 federal census found New Haven to be the seventh-poorest major city in America. It is probably even poorer today.” With the desperation of unemployment and the onset of crack cocaine came the drug boom and its attendant bloodshed. Exit gun factory. Enter gun violence. “THIRTEEN, 13, 17, 18, 19.” Violano read these figures to me from the two very thick stacks of paper that comprise the list of everyone who has been checked into Yale-New Haven Hospital with a gunshot wound over the past six years. Those numbers are their ages. And if we
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The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
the lion’s share of public attention is drugs, and the associated problem of gangs. Kristin Horneffer, DC ’14, a Yale global health fellow who has spent a good deal of time studying inner city violence in New Haven, said that the way she sees it, the gun violence epidemic was born from the crack epidemic that began in the late 1980s. “You had literally an entire generation hooked on crack,” she said, “and that doesn’t only affect that generation, of course. It affects the generations after who are neglected. [These children] develop idols like everyone else, and who are your idols?” she asked. “People who have been successful by America’s standards of success, which is making money.” In “Out There,” Finnegan writes of his young drug-dealing subject, Terry, “The fact that his mother, his uncle, and his two aunts were all dope addicts made the drug trade a family tradition of sorts. His failures in school no doubt also help dispose him to try his luck in another area.” Violano recognized drug/gang/“respect”related homicides as one particular type of “kid violence,” noting, “Half the time, these kids don’t have any self-worth. They want quick cash, they can’t find jobs, and this is a quick, easy way to do it. Deal drugs and feel that whole status thing.”
cording to a Department of Justice press release, they are presented with three messages: “First, that group members are part of a community, that gun violence is unacceptable and that the community needs it to end. Second, that help is available to all who will accept it in order to transition out of the gang lifestyle, and that social service providers are standing by to assist with educational, employment, housing, medical, mental health and other needs. Third, that any future violence will be met with clear and certain consequences.” The final warning is that if a member of a group is linked to a homicide, the police will crack down on that group for any and all crimes. “There are new rules to the game,” Mathis said. “The law enforcement community and the rest of the community are saying that the violence must stop.” Until Tues., Jan. 22, the day I spoke to Pastor Mathis, there had been no homicides in New Haven since the launch of Project Longevity. But in the days since then, there have already been two. Both were carried out with firearms. Still, the program is clearly an effective step in the right direction. In implementing Project Longevity along with the strong new community policing initiatives ushered in by Esserman—which every person I spoke
to cited as a major factor in the homicide reduction from 2011 to 2012—New Haven can be proud of its attempts to combat gun violence from a law enforcement perspective. These efforts reflect the tenet of inner city gang violence that, as Mathis put it, “Those who are likely to be killed are also those who are likely to kill.” But there is another perspective to be taken. When 26 youths for the Photovoice project were asked who is in involved in gang violence, they did answer minorities, drug dealers, cops, and “hoodn.” But perhaps some of their other responses are even more telling: innocent people, any type of person, family, friends, children, young adults, parents, community, everyone. “The problem is so in everyone’s face that it becomes hard to talk about,” Horneffer said. “It applies to everyone. And the things they take for granted are not obvious to all people who aren’t in that situation.” This is where the public health approach to thinking about gun violence comes in— first off, in understanding that gun violence has a much wider range of implications and consequences than might initially be apparent. The Photovoice report notes that youth gun violence reduces productivity, decreases property values, disrupts social services, and increases the cost of health care. (The price of treating a gunshot wound victim at Yale-New Haven Hospital is about $90,000, Violano told me. Many of the victims do not have health insurance.) A 2011 report issued by the New Haven Health Equity Alliance called “Creating a Healthy and Safe City: The Impact of Violence in New Haven,” says that fear of crime can impact people’s attitudes about things like outdoor physical activity and neighborly trust, which are important factors in maintaining physical and mental health. “Community violence is a significant public health problem in New Haven that calls for a united response,” the report states. United is the key word here. The concept is that the problem is occurring on multiple levels, so the solution needs to be correspondingly multifaceted. Both reports present the general notion that gun violence has root causes on the levels of the society (access to firearms, poverty, racism, etc.), the community (concentration of poverty, community involvement, etc.), the family (delinquent peers, social support/isolation, economic stability, parental education, parental involvement, etc.), and the individual (substance abuse, academic performance, presence/absence of violent victimization, etc.). Bandy Lee, a trained psychiatrist and violence studies specialist teaching a class at Yale College this semester called “Causes and Prevention of Violence,” said in an email, “In general, the immediate trigger [of violence] is not the most important cause. Violence is not an event but a process, and usually there have been longstanding structural and cultural dispositions in place to set the violence off.” About a year and a half ago, Barbara Tinney, head of the New Haven Family Alliance and Georgina Lucas and deputy director of the Robert Wood Johnson program, started
a monthly New Haven violence prevention working group that has brought together members of the police department, city government, Yale-New Haven Hospital, and others in the community to come up with a united front against this problem. Kaveh Khoshnood, an associate professor of epidemiology and the director of the joint bachelors and masters of public health program at Yale whose focus has primarily been on HIV, has been attending these meetings for about six months. He is impressed. “Violence prevention is the ultimate public health issue in the sense that a reduction in gun-related violence is not something that medical people can handle on their own,” he said. “It’s going to require just about every sector of society to come together, from the school system, to the health department, to the tax department, to academia, community organizers, clergy, police. It truly has to be a wide-scale effort. And amazingly enough, that’s kind of happening in New Haven.” Think about it like an infectious disease. It’s an epidemiological model: isolate the problem and prevent it from spreading to other people. “By saying this is a public health issue,” Khoshnood said, “what you’re really saying is that this is preventable.” WARD 22 ALDERMAN JEANETTE MORRISON wasn’t surprised last summer when Gabby Douglas became the first African American to win the individual all-around gymnastics championship at the London Olympic Games. Morrison, who was raised in Dixwell, the historically tough neighborhood that she now represents, was a “Q House kid.” That is to say, she grew up going to the Q House, a now-shuttered neighborhood community center that was originally founded in 1924 to help migrant families who had come to New Haven for employment at places like the Winchester Repeating Arms plant integrate into the community. While parents worked morning, afternoon, and night shifts at the factories, children took refuge from idleness at the Q House. When Morrison was growing up, the center also served as a safe haven for her and her friends. “It brought to us programming that you wouldn’t necessarily see in the inner city,” she said. Morrison took gymnastics lessons, and her teachers told her and her classmates that they could go to the Olympics. So when she saw Douglas take the gold, she thought, “Wow, this could have been someone from New Haven!” It could have been a Q House kid. The center’s funding got cut drastically in 2000, and this year marks the tenth anniversary of its official closing. Horneffer thinks that if we want to seriously reduce gun violence in New Haven, it’s time to bring it back. “Lack of community center, more gun violence,” she said. “[Not having a community center] shows that the city isn’t investing in its people.” She thinks that developing infrastructure is a way that city government can show that it cares about its citizens’ quality of life. Last semester, one of her professors told her class that “the most sustainable places are the ones that we
larger one that needs to be implemented at the state and federal level.” New Haven, of course, can’t do it alone.
The four levels on which gun violence can be prevented, from a public health perspective. love.” To Horneffer, that’s the answer. “You have to show interest and care in your community,” she said. “Thirty-four homicides is ridiculous. It shows that people don’t care.” She said, “If you’re a little kid and no one’s going to care about you, what incentive do you have to care about yourself? The people I’ve found who I think are most susceptible to homicide and suicide are the people who just don’t care about themselves, and have no reason to find hope in their situation. That’s what it is to me, a situation of hopelessness.” To use President Obama’s language, in this case more cared for and more cherished seems to translate to safer from harm. Too many children are not seeing the value of their own lives. The only thing more disturbing than how deeply terrified some people are of losing their lives is how resigned some others seem to that prospect. “I’m not afraid of guns, I’m not afraid to die,” one 19-year-old female said in the Photovoice report. “I been shot, but I ain’t afraid to get shot again. You know what I’m saying? I don’t fear that,” an 18-year-old male said. In “Code of the Streets,” Anderson writes, “True nerve exposes a lack of fear of dying.” For some, guns provide a sense of worth and protection that may feel impossible to find elsewhere. “Guns to these people mean something very, very powerful,” Horneffer said. “When everything else is taken away from you, you have no security, no hope in anything, and anyone at anytime can just come fuck with you. This gun is that one thing that can protect you. You cling to it, you know what I mean?” She brings up Cormac McCarthy’s dark novel The Road, the story of a father and son traveling through treacherous territory after an unspecified apocalypse. The safekeeping of his pistol is one of the father’s main concerns, and
(spoiler alert), as he dies, he hands it off to his son to take on his journey. “You know how he clings to that gun?” Horneffer asks. “Because even if he doesn’t have any food, that one bullet…that’s how some of these people feel.” Lee echoed this idea, cluing me in to a phenomenon she calls “catastrophic powerlessness.” “When one is deprived of power for prolonged periods, either as an individual or as a group, and is at the verge of losing one’s sense of dignity (human beings are symbolic animals, after all), something happens in the psyche that experiences it as catastrophic,” she wrote to me. “In other words, one will risk incarceration, punishment, even losing everything, in order to reestablish that dignity—more to oneself than to anyone else.” (This may be why “disrespect” is such an impetus for violence.) Lee continued, “When guns provide not only a legitimate but a glorified means of retaining that dignity, it will be very hard to take away—unless you replace it with something else.” That we need to replace it with something else seems unequivocal. The question is how. Local initiatives are important: the gun buyback program, initiated under Violano’s leadership in December 2011, which provides gun owners with safety training or a place to drop off unwanted guns, no questions asked; the nascent education program that Khoshnood is spearheading whereby students in New Haven schools will be trained in leadership and research skills as youth violence prevention ambassadors; Project Longevity. But on a legislative level, it’s hard to get things done. “In Connecticut, not a lot of power is given to municipalities to effect legislation,” said Justin Elicker, Ward 10 alderman and newly-announced mayoral candidate. “Ultimately, I think the solution is a
UNCLE SAM’S GOT A GUN FETISH. RICH, poor, white, black, urban, rural, you name it. From the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia—and even to the quiet lanes of Newtown, which is home to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry’s trade association—guns are readily available and culturally glorified. After Sandy Hook, there has finally been a sustained call to regulate them. In Washington, President Obama has announced his intention to put everything he’s got into expanding background checks on all potential gun purchasers and banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. In Newtown, of course, Lanza was using legally-acquired weapons of this (terrifying) sort. In New Haven, part of what makes guns so hard to regulate is that murder weapons, though they tend to be handguns and not assault rifles, are likely to be acquired illegally, rendering background checks useless and making it nearly impossible to keep track of who owns what. So although it’s these kinds of measures that have been the focus of our national, NRA-centric conversation, they’re only one part of a much larger picture. Khoshnood and Violano agreed that one of the most helpful steps that the federal government could take would be to allow the CDC to do research on gun violence as a public health problem on a nationwide scale. (Right now, Violano said, that work is being done by “us morons by ourselves.”) Since 1996, NRA-backed members of Congress have been writing prohibitions to keep the CDC from doing this kind of research. But just last week, President Obama directed the federal public-health service agencies to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it.” This action was less publicized than some of his other responses, of course, because this perspective is not the predominant way of looking at the gun problem. Hopefully, this will lead to some information that can help us address both massacre violence and daily street violence, different as they are. Because in spite of these differences, they are both products of a deeplyrooted culture of violence. On Jan. 16, a little more than a month after Sandy Hook, Obama took 23 actions related to gun violence under presidential authority. Why did it take him so long? “Perhaps one aspect of being a violent culture is that we do not respond when problems are small—no matter how large they are projected to become—but rather respond only after they have become large and ‘violent,’” Lee said. “It takes, for instance, the hurricane that recently devastated New York to trigger a serious discussion on climate change; serious action seems to require something even bigger.” This storm has been devastating America, especially its urban youth, for more than 25 years. Time for the serious action. Additional reporting by Maude Tisch. The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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Yale welcomes Special Ops Dept. of Defense funds training facility for Green Berets at School of Medicine by John Stillman
r. Charles Morgan III, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, sits in a thirdfloor office on Church Street. He splits his time between research for Yale and private practice, and has, along with Gary Hazlett, pioneered an interviewing method. The Special Operations Command of the U.S. Department of Defense has recently taken interest in his techniques, awarding him a 1.8 million dollar grant to teach the Green Berets his expert method. The money will anchor the creation of the US SOCOM Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience, which Morgan is slated to direct. Besides the interview training component, the center will contribute scientific research devoted to technology that the military can use, and answer questions about which defense innovations present the best investments of tax dollars. When the money arrives in New Haven, so too will the soldiers, from all corners of the globe—in some cases even combat zones—beginning as early as April. Morgan knew his skills as a clinical psychiatrist could impact US military operation when his partner, clinical psychologist Gary Hazlett, returned from Afghanistan—he had been deployed in the wake of Sept. 11—having witnessed firsthand the inability of American soldiers to distinguish between honest farmers and insurgents among the local population. Soldiers came across Afghani citizens who purported to make their living as farmers, but in reality, as Hazlett and his team would later find out, they were bomb-makers. Back in the U.S., the psychiatrist duo got to work developing a new methodology for
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The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
cross-cultural interviews. The system they introduced—Modified Cognitive Interviewing, they call it—“promote[s] a positive rapport,” in Morgan’s words, between the soldier and the interviewee, resulting in more reliably accurate intelligence. Morgan’s replaces traditional interrogation practices like polygraph testing with a more conversational approach; interviewers tease out detail by asking about specific memories and proceeding with follow-up questions. Adjunct professors will be brought into the program to look at the issue from different angles. The most notable among this
Morgan’s challenge is to convince the Green Beret’s to try the psychiatrist’s approach: he suggests that non-coercive conversation captures intelligence more effectively than playing hardball. “For years,” he says, “I’ve been telling the military folks, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could teach people to talk to people without scaring them?’ I think we’d win more friends and have more influence.” This task is harder than it sounds, and will require Morgan’s expert instruction in a hands-on setting. “When these guys are in the field, suited up with armor, they’re intimidating to people,” he explains. “But rare-
dence that people keep our soldiers safe and tell them where the bad guys are when they like them,” Morgan tells me. DETECTING DECEPTION TAKES PRACtice, but it is surprisingly straightforward. According to Morgan and Hazlett’s research on the topic, looking for sideways glances, blinking, or the touching of a nose isn’t the best way to spot a lie. The secret strategy, in fact, is no secret at all: if you listen to the content of what people say in conversation, you’ll be much more effective at separating the liars from the truth-tellers. The curriculum at
“In pickpocketing, you want to make people feel comfortable so you can steal their money. In psych, we want to make people comfortable so they’ll open up and we can help them. ” —Dr. Charles Morgan III, associate professor of psychiatry League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Apollo Robbins, the world’s best pickpocket. Robbins, who has famously plucked the engagement ring from Jennifer Garner’s finger, snatched the driver’s license from Jerome Bettis’s wallet, and thieved the badges from Jimmy Carter’s secret servicemen, will teach the Special Forces how to guide a person’s attention advantageously and how to make them feel at ease. Morgan explains the reasoning from the psychiatrist’s point of view: “In pickpocketing, you want to make people feel comfortable so you can steal their money,” he says. “In psych, we want to make people comfortable so they’ll open up and we can help them.”
ly do the people give them honest feedback, unless it’s a protest.” The training Morgan’s students will receive at Yale presents an opportunity for them to learn the importance of diplomacy in conversation. Morgan remembers working with one soldier years ago, whom he helped to overcome his militaristic tendencies. “I had to ask him, ‘Do you know you sometimes look intimidating? Do you know that you never smile?’” The soldier listened to the psychiatric advice, and when Morgan ran into him much later, he said he’d been practicing his smile. To the director of the Center of Excellence, this represents a step in the right direction: “I think there’s…evi-
the Center of Excellence will be based on a simple set of questions: What does the eyewitness remember hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling on the night in question? Can they walk you through their story backwards? In general, the liars struggle to provide cognitive detail, while the truth-tellers volunteer specific memories about the sound of the gun firing, the color of the getaway car, the smell of the exhaust, and the order of events. By reasoning through the full web of details, army sergeants as well as detectives, such as Jim Kline, can more reliably discard faulty testimony. Before I’d met Kline, Morgan told me about a friend who will be working at the Center of Excellence—a homicide detec-
tive biased by years of dealing with bad guys, so that he now “colors the world with bad people.” He later added, “He’s a lovely guy.” Kline’s resume reads like a list of headlines from Connecticut newspapers. He’s worked with Morgan in the past, and he will bring his practical experience to the Center of Excellence. He’s supervised investigations of financial and political crimes, homicides, and sexual assault cases. His work brought him onto Yale’s medical campus in 2009, when the FBI asked him to investigate the murder of Annie Le. Kline learned Modified Cognitive Interviewing from fellow detective Wes Clark, and he vehemently stands behind its efficacy in cases ranging from “10-dollar shoplifting to horrific homicides.” The detective played an integral role in the development of the methodology, participating in a series of tests that allowed the research team to perfect its strategy. Kline describes one study that took place at Yale that stimulated the threat of biological terrorism, carried out by lab technicians and research scientists in as true-to-life a fashion as possible. The scientists (having been briefed on their role in the simulation) were approached by a sketchy figure, who handed them a bottle of mysterious chemicals and asked them to grow it in exchange for cash under-thetable. Some were instructed to lie to investigators, while others were supposed to tell the truth.
When the center launches, Kline anticipates being involved in more scenarios like this one: he listed a public bombing, a nuclear chemical threat, a cyber-threat to the financial system and other situations as possibilities. He’s excited to share his
nificantly less helpful when applied in the international context. Thus, Morgan’s plan for the new center: “I want students to be interviewing someone they can’t necessarily identify with,” he says. As he’s done in his past research, he will draw many of his sub-
name…But I bring some who accept the idea.” He explained that they volunteer in the study for a number of reasons, one being the compensation Dr. Morgan provides: a minimum of $50 for one hour of their time, and up to $100 in bonuses if they
One Connecticut detective says he has used Modified Cognitive Interviewing in cases ranging from “10-dollar shoplifting to horrific homicides.” knowledge with the Special Forces personnel. “I believe in it,” he tells me. “I believe in what Dr. Morgan is doing.” THE FOREMOST OBJECTIVE OF THE US SOCOM Center of Excellence for Neuroscience is to improve the quality of military intelligence. If soldiers can learn to have the kinds of conversations Morgan wants them to have with the civilians they encounter on the job, the Special Forces will know whom to trust, and they will assemble a more accurate picture of the nation, village, or neighborhood in which they’re stationed. Most research in this area, Morgan points out, fails to account for the variables that make one culture different from another. Studies in deception detection are usually performed on predominantly white, Englishspeaking student populations at American universities. The results may be helpful in identifying the plagiarist, but they are sig-
jects from New Haven’s immigrant communities—this includes Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians, and others. Morgan will recruit roughly 50 interviewees for a team of 10 Special Forces members that he’ll train each week. “They’ll go meet someone in their shop or in their food stand, or at Blue State or Willoughby’s,” he tells me. I was able to speak to a man who has been a subject in roughly seven of Morgan’s studies over the past seven years. The man, who immigrated to New Haven from the Middle East in 1999, requested that his name and specific country of origin be withheld, but he spoke with general enthusiasm about being a part of the studies. As a contact in his ethnic community, the man has introduced Morgan to between 50 and 100 friends from the Middle East. “Some of them,” he says of his friends, “they accept it. Some of them, they get afraid. Some of them, they don’t like to give their real
successfully deceive the interviewer. The man I spoke to indicated personal satisfaction in advancing Dr. Morgan’s scientific knowledge: “They learn to figure out who’s lying and who’s saying the truth,” he said. “So you don’t take innocent people…If he’s doing something, you know, you find out.” As the date of the Green Berets’ arrival draws closer, Morgan expresses optimism about the potential for his program to make an impact. The timing, he says, is convenient: As the war in Afghanistan winds down, the Special Forces will be withdrawn from what Morgan called the “front and center,” where they were “deployed to hunt down bad guys.” They will return to their original role as behind-the-scenes operatives, and this will require an adaptation of their skill set. “After a decade of training people for direct action,” Morgan says, “we have to return to our people skills.” —graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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CULTURE
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Class act
Canada
“No,” my friend responds, handing back my draft. “You won’t get in. Say you visited Uganda and saw all these things first-hand.” It’s shopping week, and I am writing a “brief statement of interest” for an introductory science course that has a capped student enrollment. The professor wants to limit the course to 25 students. On the first day of shopping, over 60 kids showed up. Worried I might not get into the class, I seek out a couple friends to give me advice. “That class is super competitive,” explains one Silliman senior who asked not to be named, patting me on the shoulder. “My roommate didn’t get in the first time. The next semester he lied, and said that half his family died from mass flooding. That did it.” Another friend—who also wanted to be quoted anonymously—chimes in: “Competitive policy seminars are the worst; everyone seems to have experience working on presidential campaigns or volunteering with congressmen. Telling the professor ‘your class sounds interesting’ just doesn’t cut it.” Granted, both of these stories could come off as hearsay (especially the first), but do either of them seem really that ridiculous? Shop and apply for any seminar, and you’ll begin to notice a pattern: in order to get into competitive classes in some departments, you should have volunteered in local politics, built houses for Mongolian children, experienced natural disasters first-hand, or invented mini-lasers. If you haven’t done those things…well, everyone else has, so it might be time to use your imagination. I am sitting in front of my laptop, staring at the simple prompt: “Please post 2-4 sentences on why you want to take this class.” In Yale’s extremely competitive environment, chock full of impressive and accomplished individuals with highly focused interests who have the resources to fully pursue them, figuring out the right way to respond to this deceptively simple question can be much harder than it seems. “There’s definitely a trick to it,” one sophomore tells me. “I know people who always get into every seminar they want, and I know people who have never gotten into a single one.” These small-enrollment courses are often the most interesting and the most competitive. As a way to streamline the course selection process, Yale College has instituted pre-registration applications for creative writing, history, freshman, political science and Yale College seminars. And oftentimes, upperclassmen receive preference, isolating younger students, especially sophomores, in large lecture courses. So for Yale students, getting into seminars and capped classes has become a skill to be honed and perfected. “I don’t want to lie,” explains one Calhoun freshman who did not want to be named. “But if I don’t and everyone else does, there’s no way I will get to take the class. It’s game theory, and each person has to look out for themselves.” The big question is: How far are we willing to go? Sure, everyone exaggerates a little—someone who read an article or two about the Middle East will describe her interest as a “life-long passion,” or someone’s high school English teacher becomes his “literary inspiration.” But where should the line be drawn? Should Yale just be a place that teaches us to “play the game”? Does this cycle ever truly end? A Calhoun FroCo answers some of my questions, with a laugh: “This is nothing. Just wait until you start applying for jobs.” — Amalia Halikias —graphic by Devon Geyelin
Jay Gitilin, CC’ 71 MUS ‘74 GRD ‘82, lecturer in history and associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, is trying his hardest to make Canada interesting. He teaches a course on the history of Canada titled “Quebec and Canada: 1791-Present” that features a midterm field trip to a French-Canadian restaurant in Manchester, not to mention a gumbo party to finish off the term. When asked about his unique syllabus additions, Professor Gitlin reflected on his time as an undergraduate at Yale: “I remember being in class, especially in discussion sections, which we all know can be dreadful, and no one wants to talk, and the only ones who do talk are the section assholes.” Gitlin wanted to create a sense of community in class sections. He adds, “Every class I’ve ever taught has done field trips.” And to really get into the French-Canadian spirit, the class takes a trip to a Yale hockey game during the semester, but only after learning the correct pronunciation of select French curse words to scream at the opponents. Max de la Bruyère, DC ’13, who took the class his sophomore year, remembers the course fondly as “one of the most fun classes I’ve taken at Yale.” —Alyssa Miller
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
Humility The syllabus of the much talked about course entitled “Humility,” taught by New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks, features a humble surprise: assigned readings from Brooks’ own works. According to the syllabus, the course is a survey on a character-building tradition that emphasizes modesty and humility, examining figures from Moses and Augustine to Burke and Niebuhr. Perhaps the course is an examination of the failure of humility, or maybe Brooks himself is on par with Moses and is just being ironic. Either way, he will be faced with an interesting challenge justifying this not-so-humble addendum in his lecture. —Alyssa Miller —graphic by Devon Geyelin
A textbook monopoly
Fire If you’re considering focusing on firefighting within the Political Science major, or you’re just one of those people who like to watch the world burn, consider skipping on over to the Yale-Myers Forest. Taught by Ann E. Camp, senior lecturer and research scientist in the School of Forestry, “Fire: Science and Policy,” is a course that examines the role of fire in American society, especially modern forestry. Wear something flame-retardant, though, because part of the course is a fieldtrip to said forest—to set it on fire. According to FES Professor Timothy Gregoire, GRD ’85, “A prescribed fire is a forest management tool that gets rid of underbrush in a controlled manner.” This manmade event is often used as a means of reintroducing nutrients while at the same time preventing larger fires from occurring. Just as frequent egg-and-cheese sandwiches prevent more catastrophic visits to GHeav’s hot-foods bar, prescribed fires help prevent more disastrous forest fires. Sadie Weinberger, DC ’14, wanted to take the class until it was cancelled due to an enrollment problem. The only undergraduate enrolled, Weinberger mentioned that her dad works in the Fire Service and she felt she needed to learn more about fire. With or without the class, though, prescribed fires occur annually, set and monitored by FES students. All Yale students can attend. So just in case, I recommend forgoing all midterm studying, and focusing on more appropriate last-three-monthsto-live activities. —Austin Bryniarski —graphic by Devon Geyelin
At Yale, we shop for everything. A funny student will shop by weighing out the pros and cons of joining a given improv group. A great singer will do the same with a capella. But regardless of specific talent, we all shop for courses. When the semester begins, “shopping” essentially means “options.” But shopping period comes to an ironic end when we literally go shopping—shopping for textbooks—and have no options. There is only one location to purchase textbooks in New Haven—the Yale Bookstore. It wasn’t always this way. A small independent bookseller, Book Haven, once occupied the space that is now Flavors on York Street for 27 years. In 2005, Labyrinth Books, which has another store in Princeton, NJ, took over. Then it, too, shut its doors, in May 2011. Michael Denning, GRD ‘84, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies and English, finds the lack of an independent bookstore particularly saddening. “For 30 years, I always ordered my books through Book Haven or Labyrinth for all my courses,” he said in an interview. “Last fall was the first fall where there was no bookstore in New Haven. There’s a profound sense of just loss. Some part of Yale is no longer here.” Denning lamented Yale’s lack of support for Labyrinth. He shared an email from 2006 from the Office of the Provost. Professors were asked to reject a discount Labyrinth offered to Yale professors who ordered textbooks through the independent retailer. Denning found this email strange and “emblematic” of Yale’s attitude. “This was one of the few [bookstores] where we would walk in and there were the new books in anthropology and the new books in literary criticism and the new books in history and not just you know, Yale t-shirts,” he said. Denning notes aspects of a serious bookstore that are essential to any “intellectual community,” such as a university. While might argue that this community can’t exist without a bookstore in its fabric, there is no denying that brick and mortar bookstores themselves are a sort of social institution—part of the “intellectual community.” Labyrinth, for example, regularly hosted readings and discussions, often with Yale professors. “Your local independent bookstore is most likely owned and curated by a thoughtful, intelligent, well-read person who cares about literature,” Emily Barton, a Yale lecturer in creative writing who has worked in two independent bookstores, wrote in an email. “She might keep stock in areas of particular interest to her and to your community. Even if she doesn’t, she’ll talk with you, order in any book you need that’s in print, and be able to suggest new authors and titles for you to explore.” Barton concludes, “There’s simply no replacing that personal connection.” Yet, considering the raising costs of a Yale degree, students may not be able to afford spending extra money at small community bookstores, if they even decide to buy books at all. “[The cost] puts a lot of pressure to get the hours at my job to pay for the textbooks and adds to the whole stress of the semester,” said Sophie Mendelson, BK ’15. At the Barnes and Noble Yale Co-Op Bookstore, the store with the university sanctioned monopoly on textbooks in New Haven, prices can be high. Akhil Amar, ES ‘80, LAW ‘84, Sterling Professor of Law, offered to buy the textbook for his Constitutional Law course for any undergrads unable to afford it, lest price become an “insurmountable obstacle” to the course. “Professors sometimes can be insensitive to price, because they’re not buying the book. I think we all need to be sensitive to the costs to students,” Amar said. The price obstacle might mean less business for bookstores. Denning however points to the partnership that Princeton formed with Labyrinth Books. Princeton students receive 30 percent off all course books and can order online through Blackboard. “If every one of the Ivy League Schools no longer had a bookstore, then I would be very pessimistic. But when I go to [the University of] Chicago, Seminary is a place I will go to. When I go to Harvard, I immediately go to Harvard Book Store, and there are other people in them.” Denning and other faculty members believe that as institutions of learning, universities should support book culture through independent retailers, and other schools’ actions indicate that “it’s got to be possible.” “Princeton is actually steering the business to an independent bookstore, and we’re steering our thing and getting a souvenir shop in return,” Denning said. —Claire Zhang YH Staff —graphic by Devon Geyelin The Yale Herald (Jan.25, 2013)
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REVIEWS Oscar gets controversial by Wesley Yiin YH Staff
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s of Jan. 22, 2013, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s long-awaited film covering the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, held a score of 93 percent on review aggregator Rottentomatoes.com. But on the morning of Jan. 10, when the nominees were announced for this year’s Academy Awards, the Best Director category surprised nearly everyone by passing over Bigelow—a predicted lock-in. This was a snub of considerable magnitude. Zero Dark Thirty, which was once considered a frontrunner for this year’s Best Picture accolade at the Oscars, has had its awards chances significantly diminished. While it’s still possible for the film to take home the night’s biggest honor, it is extremely unlikely without a nod for Best Director—the last movie to do so was Driving Miss Daisy (1989). As a work of art, Zero Dark Thirty is technically impeccable, with gorgeous imagery, wonderful performances, and a tightly-framed plot. Moreover, it is a daring film precisely because of the neutrality it maintains toward its rough subject matter. It is perhaps the fairest portrayal of an event in American history in recent memory. Given the film’s artistic merit, many critics were left perplexed by the Academy’s refusal to nominate Bigelow. Some believe they did so to ensure that a different director has the chance to win, as Bigelow won the award just three years ago for The Hurt Locker. Others simply cry sexism. But if there is a singular cause for Bigelow’s misfortune, it would probably lie in the controversies the film stirred up. Throughout its production, Zero Dark Thirty saw everything from allegations of improper access to classified information to claims that it was pro-Obama propaganda. Most prominent, of course, were the countless charges from critics, journalists, and fellow filmmakers that Bigelow’s movie attempted to justify torture and exaggerated its role in bin Laden’s capture and defeat. The Academy is known for making conservative choices in both its nominees and winners, so snubbing Bigelow was an easy method of avoiding alienation. It is imperative for those who still desire to see the film to form their own opinions of its controversial scenes. However, in light of the many commentaries that have emerged on both sides of the debate, a few clarifications must be made concerning some of the rumors, inconsistencies, and untruths present on the Internet. First, the violence in Zero Dark Thirty is minimal. The worst scenes take place at its beginning, and they essentially consist only of waterboarding and solitary confinement—a walk in the park compared to parts of similarly-themed TV shows like 24 or
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The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
Homeland, not to mention another recent release, Django Unchained. Bigelow has frequently proclaimed herself to be a pacifist, a viewpoint that strongly showed in The Hurt Locker. She believed that the scenes had to be present in the film, as the torture not only lends validity to the plot, but also, as an aesthetic move, sets the dark tone for the remainder of the film. Furthermore, the film in no way implies that torture elicited crucial information about Osama’s whereabouts. The oft-cited scene in which CIA agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, uses sleep deprivation in order to force a detainee into revealing information also has her watching countless tapes in which many other men reveal exactly the same piece of intelligence. Most of these men were not tortured—the session that we were shown was just one of many confirmations. Of course, the scene, if based on truth, would still cast a dark spot on American history, but yet again, Bigelow felt that it was her responsibility to film it in order to root her narrative in realism. Lastly, what’s most surprising about many of the disputes surrounding Zero Dark Thirty is that there is so little discussion about the film as a piece of art. Many viewers have been quick to dismiss the film simply as journalism or docudrama, but to do so diminishes the value of the artistic decisions made by Bigelow, including the choice to feature torture so prominently at the start of the film. Superficially, Bigelow’s film is like any procedural, espousing themes of perseverance and passion. But, like The Hurt Locker, it shies away from the gung-ho, pro-American standpoint of most war movies and takes an unconventional stance on the morality of the war being fought. Depicting brutal torture effectively accomplishes this. More intriguing, though, is Bigelow’s decision to follow bin Laden’s death not with scenes of celebration but rather with shots of blood pools and Maya crying. With this denouncement, Bigelow does the seemingly impossible, taking a factual and relatable story of epic proportions and spinning it with humanistic grace. Both Bigelow and Zero Dark Thirty, as a film of cultural significance and technical mastery, deserve more recognition. Whether it is sexism, politics, or simple misunderstanding that caused Bigelow’s misfortune is uncertain. Still, regardless of the film’s performance at awards ceremonies, Zero Dark Thirty is essential viewing for anyone living in post-9/11 America.
Music: Toro Y Moi
Music: Pantha du Prince
It’s always difficult to articulate the genre of the music of Toro Y Moi. Crafting a distinct fusion of R&B, electronica, jazz, and ‘chillwave,’ Chad Bundwick’s project as Toro Y Moi (TYM) has produced a spectacularly diverse array of music over the past three years. However, no matter where it goes, Toro Y Moi has always seemed to land on safe (and quite enjoyable) ground. But this is harder to say about TYM’s January release, Anything in Return. There are some unquestionably good tracks here, perhaps some of Toro Y Moi’s best: lead single “So Many Details” and outstanding track “Harm in Change” seize upon Bundwick’s growing comfort with electronica while steadily returning to some of his earlier R&B styles. Midway through, the album’s tone shifts from trendy Seattle bistro to stoned summer roadtrips (with songs like “High Living”), introducing the strongest presence of Bundwick’s vocals ever with a more pop-centered appeal. But there’s something fundamentally lacking. Bundwick’s songs aimlessly wander in Anything in Return, and it feels as if the album lacks real direction. The few outstanding tracks are scattered intermittently among mediocre filler songs. And even when Bundwick strays from his self-proclaimed “pop” album style, he incorporates his past musical ideas in uninteresting ways. Some of TYM’s stylistic synthesis falls flat here, and it’s really too bad. What was perhaps best about Toro Y Moi was that each record was a suprise—but when it comes to Anything in Return, Bundwick is growing predictable. —Alexander Saeedy YH Staff
Black Noise made it clear that Pantha Du Prince was a genius of minimal house. (Make a note to go buy or stream that album right now and listen straight through.) But with his latest album, Elements of Light, Pantha limits himself in a new and somewhat unpromising way: pairing a 50-ton carillon with his understated beats. (On the plus side, he can totally rock Spring Fling this year, with a little help from Harkness Tower). Does Pantha pull it off? Very nearly so. After the least rock-star countdown in the history of music, “Wave” kicks off Elements with a bright, charming melody straight out of the Philip Glass playbook, adding a hint of ripple or drone or double-time chime whenever the tune grows monotonous. “Particle” takes 15 minutes to stretch out, moving from Monolake-inspired percussion that rattles like a rusty pinwheel to a rollicking house jam. (Who knew bells could be so funky?) The album’s transitions are immaculate; Pantha’s electronica helps the Bell Laboratory call forth rain, harbors, and a bustling city without ever sounding forced. However, the smooth, danceable “Photon” runs out of steam halfway through, and while “Spectral Split” cohesively integrates two very different musical ideas, it takes eight minutes to become actually enjoyable. “Quantum”, the final track, is little more than aimless chiming—a lackluster finish to a spirited collaboration. Elements of Light is ultimately two-thirds good, one-third lazy. Listen if you like bells, or Pantha, but don’t be afraid to skip ahead or pull out early. —Aaron Gertler YH Staff
TV: Girls
Music: A$AP Rocky
With its gender-studies baiting name—and its creator Lena Dunham’s tendency to assume that she and her selfish, deeply confused on-screen alter-ego Hannah are one in the same—Girls is a show that breeds controversy. Now, its second season seems more than ready to pick up its zeitgeisty mantle: new additions include a gay roommate for Hannah, a painful job loss for her usually successful best friend Marnie, and complex romantic liaisons aplenty. Of course, these episodes haven not been perfect: the first suffers from an embarrassment of riches, with Dunham introducing so many new plot lines that some scenes feel shortened or awkwardly ordered. But most of these plots are quite well drawn. Impressively, in the first two episodes of the second season Dunham has managed both to engage with the critical discussion that surrounds her work, and make an argument for why her show transcends it. Perhaps the most surprising new character is Donald Glover’s Sandy, a black Republican love interest for Hannah who seems deliberately designed to deal with critiques of lack of diversity. That storyline’s climax, both riveting and somewhat painful for the viewer, is indicative of the talent Dunham displayed at her best moments last season. And the following immensely tense scene with Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Adam suggests that the second season’s peaks could be even better than the highlights of last season. As it matures, Girls’ quality may soon overwhelm its criticism. —Gareth Imparato YH Staff
A$AP Rocky has a pretty inflated image of himself: “Yes I’m the shit/Tell me, do I stink?” he raps in “Goldie,” the first single from his new album Long.Live.A$AP. As his major record label debut, Long. Live.A$AP must prove that A$AP lives up to his own hype. Ironically, however, it is often not A$AP himself who makes the album successful, but rather the people he enlists to flesh out his ideas. As a rapper, Rocky still leaves much to be desired. His decent flow collapses under his shaky lyricism. Too often, there are lines egregious enough to pull the listener’s attention away from what might otherwise be a perfectly captivating song. Some lines are simply dumb (see first sentence), some are excessively juvenile (“She got drunk as fuck and swallowed all my kids in”), and some are irritatingly repetitious (all of “Fashion Killa”). Thankfully, Rocky displays a keen taste for production. While Clams Casino still lends his hazy, ethereal style found on much of Rocky’s acclaimed Live.Love.A$AP mixtape to the tracks “LVL” and “Hell,” the album’s other producers range from Hit-Boy (of “Niggas in Paris” fame) to Skrillex (of “WUB WUB WUB” fame), keeping the record fresh and exciting throughout. A$AP generally displays a knack for working well with others—and this shows when in spite of his lyrical shortcomings he can release an album made up of interesting, and occasionally even great, songs. —Kevin Su YH Staff
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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a big ‘stache to fill
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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Two weeks of going all-out finally caught up with us. Is this lifestyle not sustainable or something?
The one extra month we got to study will result in one extra correct answer. If that, even.
I honestly don’t really want to, but do you have a better suggestion?
SOMESOM
Beginning-ofsemester colds
TA
Our make-up stat final
Or rather, people who judge us for our scarf snot.
“Going-out clothes”
If I don’t take off my coat, no one can tell I didn’t change. Right?
Last time we checked, comics were supposed to be funny. Not, you know, like, racist?
Scarf snot
“Why do you want to take this class?”
Thinking about taking the semester off, like, finally—and not doing it
The YDN’s deeply offensive cartoon mocking MLK’s dream of, you know, like, equality
Or doing it.
FellFe
Working in empty libraries
Being told to “walk like a penguin” in a university-wide health & safety bulletin
I always thought I hated working in full libraries, but this is making me feel weird.
It may be too cold to bike, but it’s never too cold to be patronized by school administrators.
The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)
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