TYH LV 5 by The Yale Herald

The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, February 22, 2013

From the staﬀ I couldn’t tell you who any of the Catholic saints are, except for Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Tradition dictates that saying a prayer to him will help you find any item you’ve lost. As the uncontested king of losing stuff, I have a special relationship with Saint Anthony. He’s who I turn to when I can’t find my computer charger, or my class books the day before an exam, or my friend’s rare 50-year old French comic books that I borrowed. And the amazing thing about this Saint Anthony business is that it works every time. I’ll spend hours looking for something to no avail, only to, out of desperation, shoot off a little prayer to old Tony, and then immediately find what I had been looking for. I believe in Saint Anthony. There’s no reason for me to do so, though. As a Jew-turned-nonbeliever,

The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Feb. 22, 2013

EDITORIAL STAFF: 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

superstitions like this one are something I theoretically shrugged off long ago. But I can’t help but hold on to this little bit of faith, this occasional belief in the power of religion. For Gideon Mausner, PC ’11, faith is something entirely different. For him, it’s not something to occasionally indulge in when convenient, but something that needs to be constantly lived, every moment of every day. In our cover story this week, Clare Sestanovich, PC ’13, profiles Gideon Mausner, PC ’11, examining his dedication to his religion, and his attempts as a missionary to use faith as a tool for inner-city change, right here in New Haven. Elsewhere in the issue, Ava Kofman, TD ’14, writes a phenomelogical (and phenomenal) dictation-review of the “Katz X Katz” show, Lara Sokoloff, TC

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, Jack Schlossberg, Maude Tisch The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

‘16, takes us to Yale’s second-annual vegan conference, and Emily Rappaport, ES ’14, brings you her take on the Oscars. So sit down, take a break from your midterm cramming, and spend some time with Herald. And for those of you who are too stressed to even do that, just remember: Spring Break is just around the corner. Much love, Andrew Wagner Opinion Editor

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 Christine Mi YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 Clare Sestanovich, PC ‘13, traces the experiences that brought Gideon Mausner, PC ‘11, to King’s Keep, a New Haven community ministry on Kensington Street.

VOICES

FEATURES

Margaret Neil, ES ‘14, talks Instagram and pop-up galleries Eva Respini, associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Lara Sokoloff, TC ’15, heads to the second annual Ivy League Vegan Conference at Yale and discusses different approaches to veganism.

Marcus Moretti, BK ‘13, remembers a spinal tap and considers the way we talk about pain.

Julia Calagiovanni, SM ‘15, takes a closer look at SHARE’s group counseling sessions and the climate surrounding them at Yale.

OPINION: Kohler Bruno, SM ‘16, responds to Yale’s new grading proposal, and Sarah Giovanniello, MC ‘16, expresses displeasure with the current College housing policy.

Catherine Wang, SM ‘16, look behind the scenes at what goes into choosing a Class Day speaker.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Emily Rappaport, ES ‘14, gives the lowdown this year’s contenders for the best picture Academy Award.

Alex Saeedy, TC ’15, on Peter Hook’s autobiographical proﬁle of Joy Divison. Ava Kofman, TD ’14, on Alex Katz’s exhibit. Also: Iceage, Starfucker, Dee Thai, and A Glimpse into the Mind of Charles Swan III. The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

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:

“No Shame” Wednesday It’s like a plain Wednesday, but one where you just don’t feel any shame. It’s not yet a campus-wide ritual—pretty much just one friend and I commit fully to shamelessness each hump day—but I’m sure it’s about to catch on. Toad’s, of course, is here to facilitate. Same friend originally started with this thing called “No Technology” Tuesday. It’s like a plain Tuesday, but one where you just don’t use any technology. It turns out that didn’t take off because while she might have been living the luddite dream, the rest of the world was left to frantically gchat each other about her whereabouts. Plus, sorry, but we still love Snapchat. We love Snapchat everyday. “No Shame” Wednesday, however, is an institution from which everyone benefits. I, for one, have already sung in front of the entire Branford dining hall, called my “Genes & the Environment” professor “mom,” and gone to GHeav in my long underwear after a climbing trip without an ounce of shame. The last one actually happened on a Sunday, but that’s part of the vision of “No Shame” Wednesday—that everyday could, someday, be a “No Shame “Wednesday. Don’t think it’s possible? See Cee Lo Green, Honey Boo Boo, and the family that just named their baby “Hashtag.” The dream, my friends, is yet alive.

Credit card minimums

So, I feel a social responsibility to feign disgust when you wait for me to take a bite out of my fiercely mediocre chocolate chip cookie, and then say, “You’re not going to make the minimum.” As if the minimum is some kind of Divine law—like if I had spent a little more time in Sunday school I would have seen it sandwiched right between “Thou shall not murder” and “Thou shall not commit adultery.” “You shall not charge less than five dollars at Booktrader, even though it’s 2013, you only want a goddamn cookie, and you never carry cash because you hate the way it smells and are afraid of paper cuts.” Booktrader—you invented that minimum. God invented everything else. It’s pretty simple science. As for Koffee?, you also can’t trick me—I know that when you offer to “give me a gift card” for the rest of the $10 I didn’t spend on my tea, that doesn’t make it not-money. It makes it my money, just on a gift card. I took micro-econ freshman year, so kindly back the eff down. But, all of this considered, the good thing about the credit card minimum is, well, more treats. If I am forced, I will delight in that extra lemon square or magic bar from your scary plastic case. Also, this April 12, 2009, a New York Times article titled “It’s Hip to be Round” that I keep bookmarked said men with potbellies are/were in fashion. So, a reluctant thanks, minimums, for helping me with the look.

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Class on Saturdays In an email last Friday, DMM told us that the registrar’s office would make classrooms available to professors on Sat., Feb. 23 and Sat., Mar. 2. We were told that our professors could choose “whether they wish to follow this schedule or make some other arrangements.” This could be translated as: “whether they wish to roll in a giant pile of ‘well they were cool until Saturday class bullshit’ evals at the end of the semester.” Look, maybe I’m being overdramatic—lol, no. People like to go out on Friday and professors are people, too. (Also, Sat., Mar. 2 is my birthday. I’ll be 21 and in New York. TRY to get me into a seminar room. I mean, physically, I just don’t think it would be possible.) Also (unrelated): thumb rings. Take yours off. Are you tryina look like a warlock prince? I don’t like it. —Charlie Kelly —graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

BY THE

NUMBERS

BOOM/BUST

TYNG CUP STANDINGS

INCOMING: Razors This past week I saw three girls wearing skirts without tights and almost cried. To others, bare legs might signal the imminent arrival of a glorious spring; a well-earned respite from blizzards, hypothermia, and unflattering parkas. To me, the rising temperature only means that I now have to start shaving my legs more than once a month. Part of me feels like I should protest the patriarchal leg hair double-standard and throw away my razor in a gutsy statement for gender equality, but I signed an online petition protesting the use of Photoshop in Seventeen Magazine like a week ago, and there’s only so much protesting a girl can do.

1. Jonathan Edwards 2. Trumbull 3. Pierson 4. Saybrook 5. Ezra Stiles 6. Timothy Dwight 7. Davenport 8. Branford 9. Morse 10. Silliman 11. Berkeley 12. Calhoun

597.5 533 504.5 487.5 459.5 456 418 405.5 399 381.5 348.5 101.5

OUTGOING: The honeymoon period For the first month of the semester, I had it all. I read readings; I breezed through problem sets; I kicked up my heels at Wednesday night Toad’s. Yale and I were in love, and blissfully so. But if Nicholas Sparks has taught us anything, it’s that there can only be so many kisses in the rain before things take a turn for the dismal. Midterms are Yale’s very real way of telling us that love is a battlefield, and it’s not about to go about giving out casual diplomas like it’s some Wednesday night DFMO. Yale’s a catch, and dammit if it’s not going to make you work for that sexy, sexy education.

— Jenny Allen

TOP FIVE Ways to get through February

INDEX 33,000 The hypersonic speed, in miles per hour, of the meteor that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia last Friday.

53 The number of fragments the Russian Academy of Science’s committee on meteorites has found of the meteor, having exploded about 25 miles above the Ural mountains.

5 4 3 2 1

A spoon, a jar of almond butter and a jar of raspberry preserves. Back and forth forever and ever. Now try it in bed.

The number of atomic bombs it would take to equal the shockwave.

1908

Travel. Like get the hell out of New Haven. “Take a trip.”

The last time a meteor this big hit Earth, landing in Siberia, Russian Empire.

Remember February 2012. It sucked more, amirite?

0.000001

Happy Lamp it. Also, Happy Lamp Party. Gather your four friends and lamp together. Take a few “personal days”—days where you skip all your classes to just “do you” instead. I took two this week. Get at me.

— Navy Encinias YH Staff

The percent chance, according to Yale’s own Meg Urry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, that two meteors of this enormity would crash so close to each other.

0 Both the relatively balmy temperature and the number of lucky breaks the universe seems to have given to Russia. Sources: 1) ABC News 2) The New York Times 3) The Huffington Post 4) Fox News 5) CNN 6) Empirical evidence — Jake Orbison The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

SITTING DOWN WITH EVA RESPINI by Margaret Neil YH Staﬀ

Eva Respini is an associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Most recently, she organized the Cindy Sherman retrospective, bringing together over 170 photographs from the artist’s 40-year career. The Herald sat down with Respini to discuss the challenges of curating, the growth of pop-up galleries, and the culture of Instagram. YH: When planning your exhibitions, how do you choose whose work to show? ER: I think it is important as a curator to stand behind your beliefs—to choose artists that you think are doing something interesting, that you believe in, not because they are doing something that is trendy or happens to feel hot right now. I think inevitably if you don’t stand behind your choices, you sort of fail as a curator. I have to have faith in my knowledge base, my eye, that all of the things I have seen before are informing what I’m seeing now, my knowledge of the history of photography and the history of art. [I need to have] confidence that if I see something that I think is fresh, original, interesting, asking new questions or asking questions in new ways, and if I feel that those things are compelling, I need to act on it. YH: Once you’ve chosen a subject, what does the curatorial process look like? How does it change from one show to the next? ER: Working with a living artist is great because you can talk to them. You owe it to them to really get their perspective and flesh out what they were intending. With a group show [or a thematic show], it’s [more about finding] a fine balance between having the work speak for itself rather than stuffing it into a specific theme, but you want to make the theme salient, cogent. You want to really articulate certain ideas, but you want to make sure they are actually in the work itself. It is also about talking to the artist and doing the research, but maybe stepping back a little bit and thinking about creating and articulating a context in which to understand that work.

Rebecca Wolenski/YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

YH: Speaking of living artists, Cindy Sherman is a prominent, almost canonical photographer—what made you feel like 2012 was the year to do a retrospective of her work? ER: Obviously she’s a well-known artist, and one that a lot of people are familiar with, but I felt it was time to look at her again. She hadn’t had a big show, a major career survey in the U.S. in about 15 years at the time the show opened

last year at MoMA. And that’s a long time, that’s a generation if you think about it. So while many people have seen the show in reproduction, seeing it all together in person, gathered, is a completely different experience. In many ways I wanted to do it last year because she feels more relevant than ever. There is something about the way she is talking about identity—the slippery nature of identity, the malleability of identity—that is very much of our time now, if you think about Facebook and Instagram and reality TV shows. These are issues that of course were salient in the ’70s and ’80s, but again, they talk so much to our daily experience and our visual culture now, which is so much about the sort of anxiety of the status of the self. So presenting her work, exposing all of her work to a younger generation, seems so on point.

being, you go to someone’s studio and there’s a Google Image search, things printed out. Photography is at the very beginning of so many different artistic processes. In that sense, if you think about what photography is today, it’s a really expanded idea. Often I’m working with artists that work with more than just photography: they’re making paintings, videos, they’re doing performance. That goes back to my fundamental belief that the wonderful way that photography is so embedded in our lives really allows it to be this expansive medium. In the work that I’m doing at the museum, I really hope there is a kind of opening up of the understanding of what photography is. It’s not just a blackand-white rectangle on the wall, but it could be a projector, a wallpaper, a painting that mixes photographic images; it could be film or moving images that incorporate a still element.

YH: How do you feel that that this visual culture, and the consequent ubiquity of images in our everyday lives, affects the viewer’s experience of a photography exhibit? ER: I think it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it breeds familiarity. For example, some people who maybe aren’t comfortable with abstract painting because they feel like they need to read something to understand it or they feel like they don’t know how to look at it because it’s not representational—with photography you don’t have that. Everyone knows how to look at pictures; everyone looks at pictures every day all day long. But the challenge is that people also take pictures every day, and so that very reductive line of “I could do that, my kid could do that, why is that so special” enters the conversation.

YH: What advice do you have for people interested in curating? ER: Especially now, with the job market being the way it is, there is great value in making your own opportunities. Making your own shows even if it is in your apartment, or your kitchen, or a pop-up space, or online. Forging relationships with artists, even if you are not a curator at an institution, but just being out there looking, seeing, and doing— not waiting for those opportunities to come to you but really making your own opportunities. I think the most interesting young curators that I’m seeing now are doing just that. They’re not at a space, but they are creating. They have interesting relationships with artists; they’re creating pop-up spaces that maybe are gone in three months; they’re writing interesting things online. Maybe they aren’t curating shows because they don’t have a space but they are writing interesting things. That also expands the idea of what curating is. You don’t have to be a curator at a museum to engage in ideas of art. You can do it in many different ways. The younger people that I see coming up now that are doing those kinds of things—I think that is the future of where we are going in the art world. Yes, there [are] the established museums, and gallery and commercial worlds, but there is a whole other questioning of the very profession of what it means to be a curator. Maybe it’s in part because of how the job market is, that people have created their own opportunities, but I think it’s exciting. —This interview was condensed by the author

YH: Is there a direction in which you personally would like to take the department? ER: I think photography is in a really interesting moment right now. It’s a moment of technological change. Photography has always been about technology, the next big thing being introduced, and that has resulted in artistic leaps. When the 35mm, handheld camera was introduced, a different kind of picture was being made. And I think we’re in that moment now as well. There are new tools, digital tools available to artists and they’re making different kinds of pictures, and they’re teaching curators different ways of seeing. The other thing that’s exciting right now is photography is at the heart of what every artist is doing. Whatever their work ends up

TAPPING EMPATHY by Marcus Moretti YH Staﬀ

ne night a few summers ago, I fell asleep fine but woke up dizzy and sick. My mom rushed me to the hospital. I was given a bed and an IV. The doctor introduced herself. “It might be bacterial meningitis, so we’re going to test for that right away,” she told me. “Otherwise, it could just be a summer bug.” She said she would return soon with a nurse and “equipment.” My mom bit her lip. “You’re getting a spinal tap,” she said. I had heard that spinal taps are among the most painful medical procedures. My love for the rockumentary of the same name strangely made it more daunting. A nurse came to turn me on my side. She spread freezing cream on the skin above my tailbone. The doctor returned, hands full. “This will sting,” she said. I looked for a place to put my anxious hands. An odd notion of corporeal economy persuaded me to hold one in the other. “Now keep perfectly still,” the doctor ordered.

“WHO CAN REMEMBER PAIN, ONCE IT’S OVER?” wrote Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale. “All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.” Think about a time you slammed your finger in a door. Or stubbing your toe. Anything more than faint? I do remember what I felt immediately after my spinal tap. The doctor slid the fluid-filled syringe out of my lower back, inducing a sort of post-pain, the fleshly equivalent of an afterimage. It was a harsh absence centered where the pain had been. I also felt relief and sadness, a peculiar sadness that reminded me of the indignation I felt in middle school when an older kid would punch my shoulder hard for no reason. My visceral circuits seemed to want to ask the doctor, “Why me?” Then came pride. I hadn’t squirmed or moaned during the procedure, only clenched (everything). But my pride was personal as well. Before the spinal tap my life had been easy, sensorily speaking. The two fingers I fractured at age four by jumping off the bed were the only bones I’d broken. The spinal tap was my first experience of Real Pain. So I needed to tell people right away. I threw manners to the dogs. At dinner with my family the night I came home from the hospital, I described the lumbar incision over pork chops and rice. I went out with friends and talked needles and blood as they bit into their burgers. What must have made my morbid monologues even more unbearable was my inarticulate performance. My memory of the tap was a shadow; the words didn’t quite flow: “It was piercing, you know. It went in at the base of the spine and—you know what getting a shot feels like. The needle went in, and the spine is very sensitive, so—it was like tenderness mixed with pain. Anyway, it came back negative. But you know, the worst part was the initial puncture...”

DESCRIBING ANY SENSE IMPRESSION IS DIFFICULT, but it’s especially difficult when the sense you’re trying to describe doesn’t get along with memory. How could you feel someone else’s pain if you struggle to recall your own? Communicating pain is an intellectual problem, but it has political significance. When it came out that the CIA was waterboarding detainees, the question became whether that meant America uses torture. The Bush administration’s definition of torture excluded subjective accounts of pain. It’s only torture, the administration argued, if it leaves permanent damage. If communicating pain is impossible, then the administration was right: the only verifiable markers of severe

pain are scars and brain damage, so the only workable criterion for torture is observable (i.e., permanent) harm. Is such communication impossible? There are several methods that don’t work, of course. “Tender,” “harsh,” and other abstract adjectives do nothing to the mind. They’re like fleas bumping into the side of a house. Analogies work better. They point the mind toward a sense-memory; at least it starts with something real. But analogies hit their heads on low ceilings. Spinal taps occupy a different class of pain from vaccinations. And what if you lack the experience that an analogy assumes you’ve had? Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded for a Vanity Fair piece, in which he wrote that the common description of waterboarding as “simulated drowning” is false: being waterboarded is drowning. It was a powerful description, but it means nothing to people who haven’t suffocated underwater—though people who have do exist. Even if you have had the experience that an analogy presumes, your memory of that experience has by now dimmed to a shadow. WHY DESCRIBE PAIN IN THE FIRST PLACE? WITH MY family and friends, it wasn’t that I wanted to give them the same pain I endured; that would’ve been sadistic, but also hopeless. Words can’t break the skin. Recognition was part of it, not all. The universal fear of spinal taps means that merely mentioning you’ve had one wins you prestige, and I knew this. Something else must have made me go into detail about the pain. I think when I left the hospital, I saw myself as a correspondent from Taptown, someone blessed with the perverse privilege of uncommon experience. I had been tapped. Thus enriched, I was compelled by a kind of noblesse oblige to redistribute the wealth. I wanted to bring other people as close to my experience as possible. I could make them feel like they were in the room with me. Isn’t this what we say about good description: “I felt like I was right there with you”? People in the hospital room with me saw, for example, the doctor “slid[e] the fluid-filled syringe out of my lower back.” Imagery like this makes you feel like you’re seeing it live. It makes you recoil, which signals empathy. This aspect of empathy—that it is activated only in the third-person—means it’s entirely otherdirected. It responds to the sight of someone else in pain, and it triggers a protective and sympathetic instinct towards him. This makes it an emotion essential for cooperation. But the reason why it sometimes fails, the reason for so much suffering, is that empathy requires the Goldilocks amount of imagination and memory, two faculties with inherent shortcomings. These shortcomings pile up in the spaces between people to block the communication of experience. Only concrete language can shovel the shit away so the message can make it to the other side. —graphic by Devon Geyelin YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

OPINION QUEER OUR HOUSING by Sarah Giovanniello Second semester is getting underway, which means housing draw is coming up very soon. Underclassmen are talking about the struggles of blocking in the correct suite configuration for their year and residential college, and suddenly everyone cares about gender-neutral housing much more than they did this past fall. Conversations have been popping up everywhere about whether or not Yale should extend this “privilege” to sophomores, after extending it to juniors just last year. Having listened to a fair number of these conversations, I cannot help but object to the way most of us talk about gender-neutral housing. The idea that gender-neutral housing is a privilege or a right to be earned is complete and utter nonsense. Indeed, the conversations we’re having about why we should or should not let sophomores live in gender-neutral housing are not taking queer or trans perspectives into consideration—and it is precisely the queer and trans individuals in our community who are most harmed by the lack of gender-neutral housing. Indeed, Yale’s housing system is a minefield for queer and trans students: as freshmen, they may be placed with homophobic or transphobic roommates, and they face a system that treats them as outliers and unnecessarily others them. Perhaps Yale’s housing system is so toxic for queer and trans students because how we talk about housing leaves these individuals virtually invisible. In a Feb. 14 article in the Yale Daily News, “YCC works to bring sophomores mixedgender housing,” Jonathan Holloway, GRD ‘95, chair of the Council of Masters, is quoted as saying the following about gender-neutral housing: “There was a feeling that developmentally, sophomores are not ready for mixed-gender suites. There are a whole host of cognitive and social abilities sophomores are still forming, and I think many are not quite ready for the interesting complications that may arise from gender-neutral housing.” Forbidding students of different genders from living together due to a lack of “maturity” is a concept rooted deeply in heteronormativity. In case people have forgotten, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming students exist at Yale, and they deserve to be comfortable here. To point out the obvious, genderqueer students feel extremely uncomfortable when the administration

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

forces them to identify and live exclusively with one gender over another. A bit less obviously, many of the “interesting complications” that Holloway is concerned about are irrelevant to Yale students having sexual and romantic relationships with people of the same gender. If Holloway fears that suitemates of different genders will become involved with each other, he does not extend this fear to queer suitemates. There are queer sophomores and freshmen who have made the unfortunate (or happy?) mistake of hooking up with a suitemate, and they have dealt with the various consequences like the adults they are. Why are they any different from their straight peers? Moreover, why are we more concerned with straight Yalies’ emotional stability? Even more disturbing, Holloway’s quote is evidence that we are still perpetuating the idea that men and women are different from and therefore dangerous to each other. Or, perhaps more accurately, that men are dangerous to women. Requiring students to prove their “readiness” for gender-neutral housing only perpetuates our campus’s negative sexual culture. (Yes, I know you’re all tired of hearing those words, but they’re still relevant.) By the age of 18 we should be able to treat our suitemates with respect, regardless of their gender. To prevent sexual assault on this campus, we must do the opposite of what gender-segregated housing seeks to accomplish: we must impart to students that men and women and people who identify as neither are human beings, and that they are not inherently different. Separating students of different genders to protect them from one another implies that their inherent differences make it difficult for them to understand or closely interact with each other. It provides a scapegoat on which to blame unacceptable behavior spurred by internalized sexism and rape culture. Come on, Yale. Continuing the tradition of (forced) gender-segregated housing does nothing to make students feel more comfortable. It both ignores queer students’ concerns and does absolutely nothing to better our sexual culture or how we perceive gender. Not to extend the option of mixed-gender housing to all four classes is to imply that half of the Yale student body is not physically capable of being decent to people of other genders. If that’s true, I don’t think we should be here.

LEAVE PROFS ALONE by Kohler Bruno YH Staﬀ Yale is worried about grades. It’s worried that the grades it gives are too good, that it’s giving too many A’s, and that its professors are too lenient. In order to combat this tendency, some Yale administrators want to begin a comprehensive campaign of grade deflation, which would strip professors of the autonomy they deserve. I don’t like it. Specifically, Yale is considering a revamping of its grading policies: under a proposal submitted by the Yale College Ad Hoc Committee on Grading Policy, the current system of letter grades would be replaced by a 100-point scale, which would go into effect during the 2014-15 school year. To me, the concrete mechanics of the committee’s proposal seem innocuous. Transposing the letter grade metric onto a 100-point scale simply removes the “cliffs” between each letter grade—the drop between an A- and a B+ is softened—as Professor Ray Fair, John M. Musser Professor of Economics, the committee’s chair, has noted. I do, however, take issue with the philosophical backbone of the proposal, which is that grading policies must change because Yale is becoming too forgiving. In essence, some Yale College administrators and faculty members are worried that the college is awarding too many A’s, and officials want to begin applying downward pressure in order to correct this perceived imbalance. To be sure, the number of students receiving A grades has risen substantially: whereas in 1963, according to the committee’s report, just 10 percent of grades issued by Yale were in the A-range, that number had climbed to 62 percent by the spring of 2012. Thus, in the eyes of some Yale administrators, a policy change must go into effect in order to correct this trend of snowballing A’s. I disagree. In general, I think A’s should be awarded when students perform excellently; “excellent,” after all, is the word Yale uses to define A-quality work. If ten people in a 20-person English class all write A-quality essays, I think they should all be given A’s. In fact, I think if 10 people in a 10-person English class write A-quality essays, they too should all be given A’s. Fundamentally, though, my position is that professors should be given enough

independence to decide how they want to approach the issue of grading. The Committee released a suggestion for “grade guidelines” under the proposed new 100point scale: 35 percent of grades awarded by Yale College professors would fall within the 90 to 100 range, 40 percent in the 80 to 89 range, 20 percent in the 70 to 79 range, and five percent below 69. This is bad policy. Yale should let its professors handle grades, not limit their autonomy by handing down rubrics from on high. Although the grade guidelines are indeed only guidelines and not concrete quotas, Yale should acknowledge that grading is the prerogative of its professors. Some are stricter when it comes to grading and some are more lenient, but Yale College administrators should not be governing the manner in which professors evaluate student work. Interestingly, the committee notes that Yale’s grading policies have undergone dramatic shifts a number of different times since 1963. In 1967 grading was changed from a numeric scale to a measurement system based on Honors. Letter grades were not introduced at Yale until the fall of 1972, and it was almost a decade later that pluses and minuses were incorporated into the grading scale. Since 1981 the grading policy at Yale has remained static, so it seems indeed to be high time for a change in policy, but the idea that this shift should occur in tandem with a broad stripping of professorial independence doesn’t make sense. I don’t think that it is in Yale’s best interest to pursue a course of grade deflation—the idea of grade deflation, by its very nature, assumes that professors aren’t competent enough to assign appropriate grades without supervision. But the real issue that Yale must confront in evaluating the committee’s proposals is whether the autonomy of its professors should be preserved. Either professors get the final word on grading—and are allowed to continue to shape the Yale College experience on an individual, nuanced basis—or Yale’s robust administration begins to push professors aside and creep into every classroom and laboratory across Yale’s campus. For my part, I hope we keep placing our trust in our professors.

yale institute of sacred music presents

QU4RTETS works of makoto fujimura and bruce herman on display February 21–March 8, 2013 ISM Gallery of Sacred Arts · 409 Prospect St., New Haven

hours

Tuesday thru Friday 3–6 pm Saturday and Sunday Noon–4 pm or by appointment (closed Feb. 28)

Free parking. Tours available; call 203.436.5955 www.yale.edu/ism

artist reception and interdisciplinary event T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as Poetry, Music, Art Saturday, March 2 · 4–6 pm Bruce Herman, QU4RTETS No. 4 (Winter) 2012; oil and alkyd resin with silver and moon gold leaf on wood; 97 x 60"

yale institute of sacred music presents

Bach Collegium Japan masaaki suzuki, conductor

j.s. bach: motets sunday, march 3 | 5 pm Woolsey Hall 500 College Street New Haven, CT Tickets $20/$10 at music.yale.edu

Masaaki Suzuki

Proceeds to beneﬁt ongoing Japan earthquake relief efforts.

The US tour of the Bach Collegium Japan Chorus is supported by the and arranged by International Arts Foundation.

Fifty shades of green Yale hosts second annual Ivy League Vegan Conference by Lara Sokoloﬀ YH Staﬀ

n a hallway of William L. Harkness Hall, an elderly man in red polyester pants and a blouse decorated with lemons, oranges, apples, mangos, grapes, and flowers talked animatedly to a man in a blue sweater and blazer. Food consumed by animals to be slaughtered could be put more efficiently toward directly feeding humans, he explained. This year, Yale hosted the second annual Ivy League Vegan Conference, a follow up to last year’s inaugural conference at the University of Pennsylvania. From Fri., Feb. 15 to Sun., Feb. 17, a series of events featured talks from environmentalists, philosophers, activists and nutritionists, in addition to a career fair Saturday afternoon. Eitan Fischer, JE ’13, a Yale co-director, explained, “Our mission—and I think we succeeded in it—was to advance the discourse on veganism and plant-based diets generally, as well as secondarily bringing together a powerful network of activists who are also scholars, and who are the backbone of this international movement that’s very quickly growing.” Coordinated by representatives from all eight Ivy League schools, with one organization from each school serving as its primary representative, the conference brings together an array of perspectives on the value of veganism. About half of the hosting groups have the word “animal” in their name, while the other half have the word “vegan.” The groups’ names reflect their

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

varying motivations, despite their common cause. On Saturday, the series of lectures and panels addressed veganism specifically, including “Are Humans Designed to Eat Meat,” “The Environmental Effects of a Diet,” and a panel of four leading philosophers

rary factory farming pretty easily sees that you can’t claim the advantages you’re getting from eating a burger outweigh the suffering that’s imposed on

Although Kagan taught a class last spring on animal ethics, this subject does not form a major component of his research. However, the other professors who participated in the panel, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan University, Dale Jamieson of NYU, and Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University, do focus much of their research on animal rights, as well

“ I felt myself thinking, ‘you really can’t justify eating meat. I need to give it up.’ “ —Shelly Kagan, Yale’s Clark Professor of Philosophy titled “Contemporary Issues in Animal Ethics.” One member of this panel was Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy. Kagan was a graduate student at Princeton when Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation was published in 1975. Considered the foundational text for the animal liberation movement, the book argues that because animals can feel suffering, we must consider their interests. Kagan read the revolutionary book, along with other philosophers’ works on animal liberation, and found himself persuaded. “I felt myself thinking, ‘you really can’t justify eating meat. I need to give it up,’” Kagan said, adding, “I think anyone who becomes aware of the facts about contempo-

cows and chickens and the like.” Since then, Kagan has cut beef, chicken, turkey, and pork out of his diet, but continues to eat fish and other dairy products. Fischer also read Singer’s book, just before arriving at Yale in the summer of 2009. Like Kagan, he was easily convinced by the ideas Singer lays out: “I got to page 241, and I thought, ‘All right, this makes a lot of sense—I’m going to become a vegetarian. I became a vegan shortly after,” he said. When he arrived on campus, he founded the Yale Animal Welfare Alliance, an animal advocacy group with the ultimate goal of creating a “cruelty-free student body.”

as the health and environmental benefits of vegan eating. Fischer was particularly excited about the keynote speaker, Wayne Pacelle, JE ’87, whom he said is regarded by many as the leader of the modern animal welfare movement. The Sunday talk, co-hosted by Professor of Neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine Gordon Shepherd, looked at veganism through an entirely different lens. Titled “Plant-based diets and Recent Findings in Nutrition,” the talk focused specifically on the findings published in Shepherd’s recent book, in which he studied how the brain creates flavor. The research was not directly related to veganism

or animal activism. Shepherd, who himself is not a vegan or vegetarian, said that the conference leaders invited him to broaden the scope of the conference: “This group wants its meetings to reach out, to bring in many different relevant disciplines,” Shepherd said. The conference was not strictly academic, as it also included three discussions on law, finance, and career choices and their relationship to veganism and animal activism. The Law panel, titled “Ag-gag Laws, Un-

“But in fact, sadly, shockingly, appallingly enough, state legislatures make it illegal to go undercover and record these companies.” The career choices discussion, led by William Crouch, founder of the organization 80,000 Hours, was particularly popular among attendees, Fischer said. Crouch cofounded the organization to advise individuals seeking careers through which they might make a positive impact on the world. Many students, Fischer said, feel very passionate

of one’s earnings, you can do more good than by pursuing a career in the not-forprofit sector,” Crouch said in an email to the Herald. Nevertheless, the conference promoted jobs in animal and vegan advocacy, especially during the job fair Saturday afternoon. Each booth sought out attendees looking for further information on jobs and internships in the non-profit sector. Crouch’s booth at the fair was one of the few that didn’t relate directly to veganism

“By deliberately taking a lucrative career and donating a large proportion of one’s earnings, you can do more good than by pursuing a career in the not-for-proﬁt sector.” —William Crouch, founder of 80,000 Hours dercover Investigations, and the 1st Amendment,” focused on recent state laws that prevent advocacy groups from sending out undercover individuals to investigate animal farms. In the past, such findings have revealed inhumane treatment of animals. “You might think that what state legislatures would do in response is outlaw the abuse of animals and beef up the enforcement of animal protection regulations,” Kagan said.

about animal rights or veganism but they are not sure how to translate this passion into a career. 80,000 Hours helps individuals by listing donation and volunteer opportunities. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Crouch did not focus his talk on non-profit work: “I wanted to get attendees thinking hard about how best to use their career in order to make the world a better place. By deliberately taking a lucrative career and donating a large proportion

and animal advocacy, and focused more generally on altruistic practices in businesses. Two booths away, Compassion Over Killing had set up shop. CAK works to expose animal cruelty in the food production industry and advocates vegetarian eating. Across from Crouch stood Plant-Based Solutions, a year-old firm that offers sales and marketing services to plant-based and

vegan food products. “We want folks who want to make a difference, and there are tons of ways to do that. There are so many skills needed to advance the cause,” said David Benzaquen, one of two employees of Plant-Based Solutions. Also present was Farm Sanctuary, which in addition to advocacy work to promote vegan eating and expose the ills of factory farming, owns three sanctuaries that provide refuge to around 1000 farm animals. As with the talks, each booth at the fair occupied its own niche, but they were all in support of the same underlying cause: vegetarian or vegan eating for the betterment of humans and animals alike. Nick Cooney, the Farm Sanctuary’s Compassionate Communities Manager, who attended the conference both years, was impressed by how much the conference had grown. The number of attendees had at least doubled since last year, he speculated. It was over 30 years ago that Peter Singer’s book first began educating individuals on animal cruelty, and Fischer shows that the same fundamental ideas continue to guide the movement today. A conference that works to represent the opinions of multiple groups shows how the ideas initially laid out have evolved, and how they can and will continue to grow in the future. —Graphic by Madeline Butler YH Staff The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

God is in the neighborhood Clare Sestanovich, PC ‘13, proﬁles Gideon Mausner, PC ‘11, and his work to bring community ministry to two city blocks in New Haven

here is an email in my inbox, subject line: “from the desk of Gideon Mausner.” The irony (and for all his profound sincerity, Gideon does do irony) is that the sender doesn’t spend much time at a desk—or, for that matter, any office at all. Gideon, PC ‘11, is a missionary, and missionaries like to get out and about. His email is a bulletin to a list of undisclosed recipients, and I wonder how long the list must be: my own friendship with Gideon amounts to half a dozen conversations, and a handful of failed attempts to meet and catch up. Indeed, the “update” required for some is not insignificant. “For those of you who don’t know,” Gideon writes, “a couple years back I had the profoundly life changing experience of meeting my maker, the God of love who dwells quietly below the surface of all existence.” This much I know already, because Gideon told me the first time we met two summers ago. He was retrieving a stockpile of Odwalla smoothies—the bounty from his latest dumpster diving trip— from the house I was subletting near downtown New Haven, where he had once lived. Gideon had just graduated from Yale, in May 2011, and was in the middle of moving from the well-insulated neighborhood of off-campus student housing to his new house on Kensington Street. He called it “the most dangerous block in New Haven”—and this was a point of pride. Pride is a loaded term in the Christian lexicon, but Gideon was boastful in a way that would never have struck me as sinful: like the luckiest of college graduates, he was filled with excitement for the new adult life he had planned. His was radically different from most—the call of ministry has

little in common with banking or teaching or freelance writing—but giddiness is giddiness, profession be damned. There were three things I learned about Gideon almost simultaneously. The first was that he had sawed a bike in half lengthwise and was holding onto it until he found the right person to give it to. The second was that his stomach housed extra strength bacteria, built up through regular consumption of dumpster-salvaged foods: semi-sour hummus and tray upon tray of ground beef that was browning at the edges. The third was that he was raised Jewish in Westchester County, but now loved Jesus.

who likes to think out loud, listen and learn from “wise people,” and get ever closer to humbly answering his questions about the world. Here is someone who shares nuanced thoughts like this in unexpected (and unexpectedly profound) emails: “I have become increasingly convinced of two distinct truths about influence and responsibility over the course of the year.” This is not just faith, this is philosophy— the kind of insight gained through the process of what Gideon calls “intentional community ministry.” His is a mission to “extend God’s family,” which, as it turns out, requires an unusual type of parenting. He is a mis-

but “the closest thing he has to one.” Gideon met Terrence five years ago, when Terrence was a troublesome 10 year old at Wexler Grant Elementary. Gideon and Terrence had been paired together through a Yale-run mentorship program, which meant they got together two afternoons a week for some combination of multiplication practice and jump-shot practice. From the beginning, Gideon went above and beyond when it came to being involved in Terrence’s life. When Terrence was told he should repeat eighth grade, Gideon scheduled a meeting with the principal to make a case on his behalf.

The new adult life Gideon Mausner had planned was radically diﬀerent from most of his classmates’—the call of ministry has little in common with banking or teaching or freelance writing—but giddiness is giddiness, profession be damned. Here was an easy, if eccentric, picture to latch onto. Rich kid turned poor. Boring life turned radical. The story of someone who went a little crazy—but not, in the end, a kind of crazy we haven’t read about before. In a country with tens of millions of Christian evangelicals, who doesn’t know about being born again? If you haven’t drunk the KoolAid, you’ve certainly heard about it. But the story “from the desk of Gideon Mausner” is not a bulletin from the deep end. If you are concerned about the tunnel vision of certain Jesus Lovers (I am), here instead are the measured reflections of someone

sionary three blocks from his old home, with a life and faith that look radically new. THE “TRUTHS” GIDEON’S EMAIL DEscribes have come in large part by way of Terrence, a 15-year-old boy who likes playing basketball, hates violence, and is always welcome to spend the night on Gideon’s couch. (Gideon has asked me to change the names of the young people in this article in order to protect their privacy.) Because in addition to becoming a missionary, Gideon has become one of Terrence’s primary guardians—as Gideon says, “not his dad”

Their mentorship relationship came with an expected expiration date: that day in May when Yale seniors move on and move up. The promotion from mentor to guardian is not the one most of Gideon’s former classmates are looking for. They have entered a world where afternoon tutoring no longer counts as doing good work. But Gideon has watched the expiration date come and go, and has put down roots in New Haven—because this is precisely the good work he believes God wants him to be doing. Two years later, Terrence is in high school. He lives with his mother and grandmother,

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

and sometimes stays with Gideon. Because, as Gideon says, “Terrence cares about material things,” Gideon provides more than just homework help or spiritual counsel. He bought a family cell phone plan and added Terrence to it. He pays Terrence $7.50 an

abandoned chair with its seat punched out that languishes in a side yard. Which is the better augury of the future ahead—bustling sidewalks or busted furniture—is hard to say, though Gideon and Lenny believe this neighborhood is on its way to becoming a

Gideon like a bold approach in keeping with his own affinity for radical communal living. It was a challenging new place to be, and Gideon’s enthusiasm didn’t preclude a fair share of anxiety. He says he spent that first year “ringing my hands and hoping I

“Part of my reason for wanting to move to Kensington was not for godly reasons, but because I wanted to be radical. I thought, we have to move to the toughest neighborhood and see God do transformation.” —Gideon Mausner, PC ‘11 hour for odd jobs around Kensington Street. Terrence is not a good student (he now attends a high school for remedial performers), but he is a determined one. Gideon puts it this way: “I say ‘if you go to college,’ and he says, ‘you mean when.’” There is something terrifying about this arrangement, and Gideon knows it. A white boy from wealthy New York pitches in to raise a black boy on one of New Haven’s poorest blocks. “I have realized how unprepared I am to discipline well, set and hold consequences, set boundaries, and even affirm him,” Gideon says. “I have thought, ‘what am I doing?!’ many a time.” On the one hand, Gideon says, “I have come to believe I am incredibly powerful.” He is a 23 year old strongly shaping a 15 year old’s life. For any aspiring change-maker, surely this is the paramount sensation: he is truly at the steering wheel. And yet, Gideon writes, “I have come to see that for the most part I am completely powerless.” Above all, Gideon identifies not as a mentor of children but as a follower of Christ—and the humility of powerlessness will always, I come to learn, be his bottom line. God is the change-maker here, and we shouldn’t forget it. Terrence is part of a problem that many people are talking about. The U.S. Census reported that in 2010 a third of American children were living without biological fathers, and 22 percent more were living without married parents than were half a century ago. Gideon is part of a solution that nobody is talking about. It takes place on just two blocks, with just 22 children. Its leaders never thought they would end up here, but they believe the Lord has delivered them for a reason. Gideon Mausner and his mentor Lenny Hernandez are here to introduce a fatherless youth to a Father who really means it when he says he’s here to stay. THE TWO BLOCKS OF KENSINGTON STreet that Gideon and Lenny have chosen for their “intentional community ministry” bear few obvious signs of being in the “hood,” as Gideon half-jokingly calls it. Around the time school is dismissed, the street gets busy: kids in uniforms, boys on bikes, women with groceries. If you’re looking, you can spot the houses in need of fresh coats of paint or mended gutters, or the

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

real community. Gideon and Lenny live on separate floors of a cheerful pink house. Lenny and his wife Britney arrived in the spring of 2009 at the behest of a pastor who persuaded the couple to uproot from their comfortable condo in Branford, Conn., a shore town 20 minutes (and a whole different lifestyle) away. Their new block was considered one of the top five crack spots in the city, and had once been the hub of a violent branch of the New Haven Bloods. They moved in April, and rented the entire house to make room for as many missionaries as they could recruit to their cause. Lenny might have blended in easily as a new neighbor on the block; he is Latino in an area split roughly evenly between black and Hispanic households. But he is also a pastor, and therefore an outsider. To get inside this community, and in turn to bring it together, he and Britney began their ministry fast and strong. King’s Keep, as the ministry is called, is meant for children, though Lenny’s early efforts were intended to earn the trust of all his neighbors. For six straight

would be able to meet people.” Gideon talks about these early days as someone who has learned better. “Part of my reason for wanting to move to Kensington was not for godly reasons, but because I wanted to be radical,” he admits. “I thought, we have to move to the toughest neighborhood and see God do transformation.” (The syntax of “doing transformation” is clumsy, but when Gideon talks, there is no verb God cannot gracefully perform.) Gideon has dispensed by now with the hubris of amateur do-gooding, and is quick to insist that his hands aren’t, of course, the ones that really matter: all the work that gets done here gets done by God. When Gideon first settled into Kensington Street, he was disturbed by one feature of the backyard where Lenny hosted his parties: dense barbed wire covered the fence on all sides. The wire offended a piece of scripture that Gideon cares about deeplyand paraphrases often: “in Christ, all dividing walls have come down.” For a white suburban boy searching for a home on Kensington Street, this is an important mantra. There are plenty of barriers

pressed, and Gideon is finally at home in the yard. MOST PEOPLE ON KENSINGTON STREET believed in God before Lenny ever got here. As he puts it, the kids who sit obediently on his blue tarp “already know the protocol [of Christianity]: what to say and when to say it.” This is what Lenny and Gideon call “legalism,” the rules and regulations that get packaged up and presented as good Christian faith. The kind of faith that abounds in the pink house looks and sounds very different. On the door into Gideon’s living room is a hanger that reads, “Caution, Prayer Warrior Inside.” The kitchen is stocked with Ezekiel 4:9 (the only cereal, Gideon tells me, with zero grams of sugar). The bookshelves in his bedroom are filled with titles like The Prodigal God, Mystical Prayer, and (Gideon’s favorite) St. Francis of Assisi. There is, in short, not a single corner that God has not filled, and that is precisely the point. “The same God we worship on Sunday is the same God we wake up to on Monday morning,” Lenny says. The point of this faith, however, is not just its hugeness. The heart of being a Christian, as Lenny and Gideon see it, is developing a personal connection with Jesus Christ. It means being his best friend. If this sounds quotidian, it’s supposed to. Gideon talks to God—conversationally— every morning, and God usually talks back. (God once urged him to help out a friend and “be her number one cheerleader.”) Twice as I sat across from Lenny at his kitchen table, his eyes welled up with tears and he was unable to finish a sentence. “Jesus,” he said. “Thank you, Lord,” he said. And I couldn’t help but wonder what conversation I was interrupting. But both Gideon and Lenny admit that getting to know Him in the first place is

“How can you connect with a Father who is good, perfect, greater than you can imagine, when you don’t even have a biological father?” —Lenny Hernandez, pastor weekends, he hosted elaborate block parties in his backyard, where music, free food, and sometimes just free stuff attracted even his more skeptical neighbors. At a certain point during each party, a blue tarp would be brought out and the Bible teaching would begin. This, of course, is the most important part. “I can give all these clothes out,” Lenny says, “but for me, if I don’t present the gospel of Jesus Christ, then all I am is a humanitarian. And I’m not a humanitarian,” he adds, “I’m a preacher.” Gideon arrived at the pink house a year later. He belonged to a group of missionaries organized by his church pastor, another Yale graduate whose mentorship first shepherded Gideon into the Christian fold. He was eager to join in Lenny’s efforts, which seemed to

that will need to be torn down. Gideon didn’t know how to remove the wire, but he worried and prayed about it. It had been there for 50 years, and there didn’t seem to be much of a chance of it ever coming down. Then, one day, within nine months of his arrival, the barbed wire disappeared, taken down by someone else in the neighborhood. Gideon never lifted a finger. “We chalk that up to God,” he says. “Light shines in darkness, and the darkness just disappears.” Soon, Gideon started work on a community garden behind the house. Kids on the block come to help him plant and water, and beautiful caterpillars have latched onto the stalks of leafy greens. This fall, he went around distributing vegetables. The mothers on Kensington Street are im-

hard—especially for the children of Kensington Street. “Most kids have grown up in church,” Lenny acknowledges, “but have never made that connection of what it means to know God.” Not only are they lacking relationships with Jesus, they tend to be lacking lasting relationships of any kind. Raised without fathers, the children of this community are, Lenny diagnoses, “physically and emotionally bankrupt. They don’t know how to be sons, they don’t know how to be fathers, they don’t know how to be men. People say I’m here for you, but how can they be trusted, when the first five, maybe six people said the same thing?” The consequences of this social trend are not usually measured in terms of its effect

on God. But for Lenny, faith is the most important measurement of all. “How can you connect with a Father who is good, perfect, greater than you can imagine, when you don’t even have a biological father?” Before King’s Keep can make any inroads toward real faith, then, it must make progress toward cementing real families. Britney puts on her wedding dress again and again and shows off for the kids, because gauzy veils and long white trains are part of a fairytale that doesn’t get told here. When the household next door crumbled apart (a longterm boyfriend walked out, a young mother’s life reeled) Lenny reached out with support. A few months ago, the mother announced she had decided to baptize her daughter, and asked Lenny to be the godfather. If their mission sounds like social work, Gideon is quick to insist I’ve got the wrong idea. “I don’t need to be the best service

ture of stable family life is a complicated web of religious narratives. Gideon’s mother grew up Catholic (her own mother occasionally spoke in tongues), and grew into an eclectic blend of Christian Holy Spirit and hippie free spirit—a strange hybrid that, by ’60s standards, was hardly strange at all. It didn’t take long for her to drop folk masses in favor of just plain folk, and, a decade later, she had somehow wound up arranging the carpool for Hebrew school. Gideon’s father, by contrast, has almost always practiced a blend of Judaism and Marxism. He holds a doctorate in psychology and philosophy, and considers himself an atheist. As a child, Gideon grudgingly tolerated Hebrew school but had no patience for religion in heavier doses. Most of his mother’s relatives had been born again—‘Jesus freaks’ of the evangelical movement that took off in the ’70s. Teenage Gideon had a

ity School, where he found he could turn an academic lens on his new fixation with community. The first syllabus he received explained that seminar discussions would be devoted to learning “how to be a better lover.” (In the Christian sense, of course, this objective is anything but corporeal.) But it wasn’t until one evening at a New Haven prayer meeting, that the whole way Gideon felt was transformed. He’d been coming to the “home group,” as these informal gatherings are known, for a few months at the invitation of a mentor he’d met at Yale. Gideon was tentatively calling himself a Christian by this point, but God the Father still sounded conceptual at best, patriarchal at worst. But that January evening, a well-known pastor was visiting the group from out of town. He offered to close the meeting with a prayer of his own, and the small group bowed their heads as he worked

“The same God we worship on Sunday is the same God we wake up to on Monday morning.” —Gideon Mausner, PC ‘11 organization for these people,” he says, “because as far as I can tell they don’t need services.” Gideon has not started reading parenting books at the age of 23 because he wants to mend the social fabric of America—though, all things considered, he wouldn’t object to some more widespread repair. Parenting gurus provide as much spiritual fodder, it turns out, as practical advice, because faith and family are so inextricably intertwined. “God’s justice doesn’t necessarily look like a secular vision of justice, and it definitely doesn’t look like a law and order version of justice,” he explains. “What it looks like is family.” Gideon insists that he is “not talking about family values at all”—though Lenny’s talk of reestablishing marriage can seem to tend in that direction. In Gideon’s paradigm, loving relationships are the only foundation and definition of family that matter. As he puts it, Gideon gravitates toward “the forgotten places with the forgotten folk: to live amongst them, love them, and be their brother.” Find the prodigal sons of the modern world, the mission seems to be saying, and welcome them in. Gideon says he is searching for “the uncle whose relatives say, ‘oh yeah, we haven’t seen him in years.’” “These people come from somewhere,” Gideon insists—and they can be found. THE SOMEWHERE GIDEON COMES FROM has little in common with the pink house and its surroundings. Yet in many ways, Gideon grew up with precisely the kind of family King’s Keep is trying to model. Most weekends of his childhood, Gideon’s family went to synagogue. His dad may have dozed off, his mom may have tried a little too hard to seem peppy and spiritually engaged, but there they all were: one family, before God. Add in the New Testament, and what more could Lenny ask for? It wouldn’t be fair to say their normalcy was a façade, but the backstory to this pic-

hunch that “no one believed in God anymore, except these conservative people who were very strange and weird,” and his relatives confirmed his unkind suspicions. He was convinced they were out to convert him, and quickly decided religion was not only dumb but dangerous. Gideon refers to this period as the heyday of his ‘militant atheism.” Gideon admits there was something pleasantly clarifying about rejecting the beliefs of others; his “identity was based on being not things.” But if his life as a teenager was defined by contrarianism, Gideon’s life as a college student was shaped by exuberance for extreme ideology. He got involved with a union organizing group at Yale and a racial equality initiative on campus. In both places, he met radical leftist Christians—a category of believers he knew nothing about. Gideon started learning about the politics of Jesus. He knew Jesus as a word you said when you stubbed your toe. Jesus Christ. Now he knew Jesus as a community organizer, radical thinker, and promoter of change: hardly things he would take in vain. By the end of the year, Gideon says, he “got a little bit down on atheism.” Books and drugs were changing his mind about big things. He read about feminism and Ubuntu, about Marxism and New Age paraphernalia. He “tripped balls,” decided science was “suspect,” and “touched plants.” He was never a stoner, but sometimes sounded like one. “At a certain point, I thought: I’m communing with a goddess when I’m smoking salvia.” He spent a semester studying in southern Mexico and fell in love with the way things were done there—farming, educating, protesting, and organizing all looked better when it was hands-on and communal. He came home with a zeal for spreading the Zapatista message, and made his “first converts” preaching new ideas to old high school friends. Urged on by Christian friends, Gideon started taking classes at the Yale Divin-

his way around the circle, pausing at each person to lay a hand on their backs or offer a word in their ears. When he touched Gideon’s shoulders, Gideon felt heat suddenly flood his body. “At first I was skeptical,” he says. “Just because I wanted certain things doesn’t mean my scientific side wasn’t incredibly skeptical of anything supernatural or out of the ordinary. But then: it was awesome. So I just let it come.” This was the Holy Spirit: “The heat was not just physical, it was emotional, it was everything at once.” When the pastor lifted his hands and moved on to the next pair of shoulders, the warmth was gone, but Gideon’s skin didn’t stop tingling for nearly an hour. THERE IS A SERIOUS PITFALL TO THE work of surrogate fathers like Lenny and Gideon. Perhaps they too will one day up and leave, and Kensington will become another closed chapter in their mission to spread the good news. This fear is not totally unfounded: pastors come and go in the pink house. A new roommate has just moved in, and outgoing boxes are stacked in a spare room I can see from the kitchen table. The shuffling will no doubt continue, and it seems likely that the boxes will one day belong to Gideon. For now, he sleeps on a thin futon on his bedroom floor and hasn’t yet found his “desk.” He might marry his girlfriend; they might found a school together. Gideon insists his uncertainty is not the ambivalence typical of many recent college graduates. It isn’t that he doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life; it’s just that he has to wait for directions from God. When Gideon was a freshman at Yale, he sometimes tutored elementary school students at the Dwight School, and he has always remembered two of his students in particular. They were full of spirit and tended to misbehave. Gideon felt an instant con-

nection. When he moved into the pink house four years later, he discovered that one of the boys, Anthony, lived right next door. He was troubled and troublesome, and he knew it: he often introduced himself as “a bad kid.” He chafed at authority. Gideon suspects he knew demons. Then a few months ago, he came over to the pink house while worship and song were in full swing. Everyone in the room could suddenly feel God’s presence, as if he was right at hand. Something happened that evening. Anthony is “not an angel”—because no teenager is—but ever since the night he stood in Lenny and Gideon’s living room, he has been a new person. “Anthony is someone who has known spiritual things all his life,” Gideon says. “The devil has spoken to him, invited him to be part of his schemes, and he has said yes. And now God has spoken to him, invited him to be a part of his schemes, and he has said a bigger yes.” Anthony has found a new father, and has become a new child. FOR GIDEON, HOWEVER, THERE IS ANother question that awaits: what if these children do not become men? Because, he says matter-of-factly, “there are a lot of adults who are still boys.” Nowhere is this question more pressing than in Gideon’s relationship with Terrence. In some regards, Terrence is now just one of the many boys that Gideon mentors. Still, as Gideon says, “I have in my head a responsibility for him becoming a man.” Gideon has devised what he calls “manhood project,” which he plans to introduce to Terrence in a few weeks. There will be benchmarks along the way to maturity, and the project’s completion will be marked with the gift of driving lessons. When he agrees to begin the project (it is a contractual affair), Terrence will get an iPhone. Gideon’s story makes it tempting to believe that identities can change in the blink of an eye. If Gideon can become a Christian because of the right pastor, why can’t Terrence become an adult because of the right mentor? A few weeks ago, Terrence and a friend were on their way to play basketball in East Haven when they spotted an elderly white woman who had fallen down on the opposite side of the street. Terrence, whom Gideon describes as a natural “peacemaker,” insisted they cross the street. As the two boys helped the woman to her feet, she told them that dozens of cars had already driven by without stopping. To Gideon, this is what “doing transformation” is all about: “This is East Haven, one of the most racist towns, and here are these two black boys helping this old white lady. And maybe they are transforming her idea of race.” Gideon, too, has crossed a few streets and stopped to help. He may not be able to make Terrence and the boys of Kensington into men. But when driving lessons begin in a few months, he will put Terrence behind the wheel. There is no telling where Terrence will steer—away from God, or toward Him—but there seems to be a good chance he’ll be the car that pulls over when someone else is in need. —graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Circles of support SHARE introduces group therapy program by Julia Calagiovanni YH Staﬀ

f you make the trek to 55 Lock St. and take the elevator to the lower level, you’ll find, tucked into one of the building’s odd angles, the new home of Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education (SHARE) Center. It relocated here in September from a previous location on the first floor of Yale Health. The new offices are more discreetly located. Inside, they look like any well-furnished Yale waiting room: soft lighting, tables bearing copies of the Yale Alumni Magazine, a water machine bubbling in the background. Over the past few weeks, these new offices have also been host to a new series of support groups for survivors of sexual misconduct. Such support groups had been offered in the past, according to Dr. Carol Goldberg, Psy.D., director of SHARE, but they had only been formed after students reached out to SHARE. The center now feels that they are able to “promote a service, rather than wait for someone to come to us,” Goldberg said. To join a group, a potential student participant will first meet with a member of the SHARE staff to assess whether the group would be appropriate for him or her. If so, the student can then decide if it feels like a good fit. The groups are closed, meaning that once a particular cohort has started, no new members are accepted. They meet for six 75-minute sessions, with the potential to extend for six more as the group decides. The groups have the potential to bring together a diverse array of students. Often, Goldberg said, “Group members are in different places with dealing with their experiences.” A particular session’s discussion will not follow a set agenda, but will flow in response to group members’ needs. Members do not need to be in individual therapy at

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Yale Health, nor do the incidents need to have occurred while they were students at Yale. “They don’t need to have defined their experience, their friend’s experience, their childhood experience,” said Dr. Jennifer Czincz, Ph.D., SHARE’s assistant director. Within the safe space of the group, members can speak freely; SHARE’s staff does not keep records of the meeting, and, of course, all group participants are required to maintain confidentiality. But while students’ experiences are varied, and they are often at different stages of understanding their experience, Goldberg said that students “find it a very important resource to know that they can rely on others.” The support group model differs significantly from traditional therapy involving just a therapist and a patient.

The group also differs significantly from that of Yale’s peer counseling program, Walden. Walden counselors are trained in peer counseling, not psychotherapy; they help callers or visitors explore their issues, not treat or diagnose them. Most importantly, Walden does not create ongoing interactions, nor do its counselors share their personal experiences. A student who volunteers as a Walden peer counselor says that, for many of the students she counsels, “talking to a peer is a great first step,” and that Walden counselors can then help the caller “find the next right step for them.” For some, this student notes, this step “might be professional help”—for others, “talking to people who have experienced what they have” may prove to be most valuable. For survivors of sexual misconduct, support groups might be

their first opportunity to connect with a peer who has had a similar experience. Sean McAvoy, DIV ’10, realized the need for this connection firsthand as an undergraduate resident assistant at Boston College. Peers often confided in him that they had experienced sexual misconduct, and he realized that sexual harassment and assault were under-discussed among his peers. When he came to New Haven to attend Yale Divinity School, he found a similar lack of discussion, even as peers told him about their own painful experiences. On a campus filled with political talk of sexual misconduct, he said it troubled him that the survivors in the YDS community felt like they had “nowhere to turn” on more personal matters. McAvoy became increasingly aware of a pressing need for safe spaces for those affected by sexual misconduct. This led McAvoy and a friend, fellow Divinity School student Lyvonne Briggs, DIV ’12, to speak with Dale Martin, YDS’s director of graduate studies, early last spring. Martin was supportive of the idea of offering a survivors’ group at YDS, but in turn referred the two to SHARE, where they passed on their concerns to Goldberg. It was important to McAvoy, who says he “wanted them to know there was a community of survivors” for support. The discussions that form Yale’s understanding of sexual violence are sure to continue, as well they should—in FroCo meetings, over late-night egg-andcheeses, and through mid-class Gchats. But those discussions that occur in the privacy of the offices of SHARE among a circle of allies are as, if not more important to those who participate. They provide a much-needed safe space for healing and reassurance that survivors are not alone. —graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

Booking it A look behind the scenes: what goes into choosing a Class Day speaker by Catherine Wang efore journalist Barbara Walters took the stage to deliver last year’s Class Day speech, this year’s Class Day co-chairs Jonny Barclay, MC ’13, and Chantal Ghanney, SY ’13, were already searching for their graduating class’s Class Day speaker. “We wanted to make sure we could get started on the process quickly and efficiently,” Barclay said. The co-chairs, who are responsible for planning all aspects of Class Day, including arranging a speaker and selecting student speakers, consulted members of their class and members of the administration to compile a list of potential speakers. “It’s a balancing act between who students want and who the administration will find appropriate,” Barclay said. By tradition, Yale does not have a commencement speaker, so the school does not attract speakers with honorary degrees and speaking fees. The process to select honorary degree recipients is independent of the Class Day speaker selection process. “We do the speakers a favor by choosing them, but they do us a favor, as the speakers are not given any compensation,” Ghanney said. “It’s always an honor for us as an institution.” Some years’ Class Day co-chairs seek out distinct types of speakers, a particularly relevant individual or a representative of a group who may have been underrepresented in the roster of speakers stretching back to 1979. Last year’s co-chairs specifically sought out an accomplished female speaker who had experienced and witnessed numerous important events, Ghanney said. Walters was the

first female Class Day speaker since Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, GRD ’63, who spoke in 2005. In 2011, the year actor Tom Hanks delivered the Class Day speech, the Senior Class Council sought out a speaker from the entertainment industry. This year’s speaker, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, LAW ‘97, is the first African American to speak at Class Day since Norton, though Barclay said he and Ghanney were not looking specifically for an African-American speaker. Their main criterion for the speaker was “fantastic speaking skills,” Barclay said. They also focused on finding someone who would be relatable to young people and whose message would resonate with the class, Ghanney said. The co-chairs worked closely with Penelope Laurans, master of Jonathan Edwards College. Laurans has served as Class Day adviser to the senior class since 1997. She acts as a liaison between the co-chairs and the University administration. Booker was the co-chairs’ first choice from the very beginning of their search. “I watched the video of his commencement speech at Stanford,” Ghanney said. “I must say I was blown away.” In addition to his speaking skills, Booker’s accomplishments as a public servant, including reducing Newark’s crime rates and supporting the city’s charter schools, also impressed the co-chairs. The co-chairs got into contact with Booker through President Richard Levin, GRD ‘74, Barclay said. Despite the Class Day co-chairs’ excitement, the announcement of Booker as this

year’s speaker was met with some criticism from students on social media, Ghanney said. Disappointed students generally expressed that they wished the speaker was higher-profile. Negative responses from students are not uncommon after Class Day speaker announcements. Moreover, the selection of political figures is often divisive and polarizing. In 2008, a group of seniors calling themselves Yale Seniors Against the War planned a protest during former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Class Day address. In a May 24, 2008 opinion piece in the Yale Daily News News,, Yonah Freemark, SY ’08, and Lea Krivcheni, TD ’08, stressed that, “Class Day for us, like for everyone, is important…While Mr. Blair is no longer Prime Minister, he remains an influential figure in international politics. His speech will likely not address the Iraq War, but as students, it is our chance to directly voice our disapproval of his involvement in the war and to hold him accountable for his actions.” In 2001, graduating seniors circulated a petition asking signers to boycott the speech given by Hilary Clinton, LAW ’73. In a May 2001 op-ed by Yevgeny Vilensky, TD ’03, in the Yale Free Press exclaimed, “The Class Day speaker should inspire and unite the graduating class. What is Hillary going to inspire us to do?...At worst, she is a criminal. At best, she should be investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee. Either way, she should stay away from this years Class Day.” Though they did not send a class-wide survey during the speaker selection process, Barclay and Ghanney consulted students of

varied interest groups. Apart from the Class Day co-chairs, the only other seniors directly involved in the speaker selection process are the secretary and treasurer of the Senior Class Council. According to Laurans, Class Day was once known as Presentation Day, so named because the day began with the “presentation” of students who passed their final exams to the University’s president. At Presentation Day, orations were delivered by both a graduating student and the President, senior prizes were awarded, and a student-written ode was sung. Four selected students delivered class histories, which were often lengthy and prolonged, Laurans said. Later in the day, the students smoked “Pipes of Peace” to “seal their friendship and to heal any discord between them,” Laurans said. Presentation Day ended with the planting of ivy. “The day was a mixture of prizes, orations, nostalgia and celebration,” Laurans said. “So it is today.” The task of selecting the guest speaker has historically been granted to students. The select students responsible for selecting a speaker face no easy task. Not only must they please a wide array of students and administrators and live up to standards set by past Class Days, but they must find a speaker without offering a speaking fee. It’s no wonder that by the time Booker offers his words of wisdom to this year’s graduating class, a new generation of co-chairs will be on the lookout for next year’s Class Day speaker. —graphic by Devon Geyelin YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

CULTURE The Herald’s guide to the 2013 Oscars by Emily Rappaport YH Staﬀ or me, like for all cynical assholes, some things remain sacrosanct, even on my most cynical, assholic days. Those things are—you guessed it!—presidential election returns, the Olympics, and, most importantly, award shows of all shapes and sizes. Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, can’t get enough. (Look out, ESPYS, I’m coming for you when I retire.) I’m the kind of person who tweets at the New York Magazine culture blog about who got snubbed when nomination lists come out. My friends and I (aged 20, 21, and 22, respectively) made Oreos covered in gold sprinkles for this year’s Golden Globes. The point of all this is to say that I give the Academy Awards—musical performances, sound mixing awards, 1991 victory of Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas and all—the benefit of the doubt. But you don’t have to be an asshole to be cynical about this year’s lineup. It was definitely not an awesome year for movies—for one thing, after a brief stint of postThe Departed-era sanity, we seem to have returned to an age of 120-minute duration minimums—but the Oscar nominations don’t even accurately reflect what (very real) merit there was in this season’s batch. You always expect at least a couple of what I’d call “Dreamgirls nominees” (not good, but Hollywood spent and made a fortune on them so Hollywood honors them). This year, snubs are not the exception but the rule—the list is blatantly bastardized. But (some of) the best stuff still has a shot, so bring some dessert over to my place this Sunday and we can cross our fingers and rave about Helen Mirren’s skin together. Below are my thoughts on the best picture nominees. Read it if you want to know who I think should win and why. But even if you don’t, say it with me now: Not Lincoln, not Lincoln…

N.B.: As you probably know, the best picture category was semi-recently expanded to include 10 nominees instead of five; however, there are still only five best director nominees, and since best director and best picture tend to go to the same film, the five movies in the best picture category that correspond to the five best directors are generally viewed as the five legitimate contenders. I have marked those five with asterisks.

Amour* directed by Michael Haneke I hate to undermine my credibility from the get-go like this, but I didn’t see Amour. I promise that I will, just as soon as I’m done with these here midterms, but for now you’re on your own on this one. (I did see Haneke’s last movie, The White Ribbon, and that was very good! Sigh.)

Argo directed by Ben Aﬄeck Maybe I’m just a sucker for ’70s period-piece costumes, but I loved this movie (based on a true story, about the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 19791981). Affleck proved himself very worthy as a director, the ensemble cast was cohesive and convincing, and I was on the edge of my seat till the last (yes, even and especially during the tarmac car chase scene). Argo is a gripping, funny, linear movie with a (spoiler alert if you don’t know about history!) happy ending. A friend of mine told me that she didn’t like this movie because she thought it was “safe”—Affleck didn’t step outside the box or experiment with the form at all. That’s a fair criticism, but I’d say that these days, so few people are making safe movies well—so that they’re both respectable and genuinely enjoyable—that I think the movie didn’t need to do much more in order to be a serious accomplishment. Affleck got snubbed for best director, but in a big fat middle finger to the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press awarded him and Argo their highest honors at this year’s Golden Globes.

Beasts of the Southern Wild* directed by Benh Zeitlin I saw the trailer for this movie, about a young dreamer (Quvenzhané Wallis) living in a hurricane-stricken, isolated Louisiana bayou community, and decided not to see it in theaters because I was worried it was going to be something along the lines of Tree of Life. I was so wrong. Beasts of the Southern Wild isn’t pretentious and plot-less—it’s probing and poignant. It’s beautiful-looking, Wallis is a superstar, and though I don’t think this movie has a shot at winning, it does a little to mitigate the presence of Life of Pi in the category.

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino Oops, Quentin did it again. A multi-minute scene of an evil dog eating a slave alive. A graphic image of Kerri Washington taking a whip to her back. Leonardo DiCaprio ordering a slave to bash another slave’s head in with a hammer. Super violent (do NOT ask him about whether his movies might encourage real-life violence, I learned watching him on Letterman), super historically inaccurate. But (almost) fun and fast enough to warrant its 2 hours and 37 minutes. It’s no Pulp Fiction (or even Inglourious Basterds), and it’s not fit to win best picture, but it’s very solid, and at this point there’s pretty much no question as to whether Tarantino’s got his formula down.

Silver Linings Playbook* directed by David O. Russell Jennifer Lawrence, please! Did you know she was born in 1990? Follow-up: did you know anyone who’s basically our age could be so exquisitely beautiful? In all seriousness, Lawrence is the best part of this movie—a knockout in all ways. Bradley Cooper is super melodramatic, which I found grating, but his performance is still impressive. Russell is nominated for best director, which bothers me because I thought direction was exactly what was lacking in this movie. It’s very long, it’s rambling, and it felt a bit lacking in vision—almost like Russell didn’t focus on the best parts of the film because he wasn’t quite sure what they were. Plus, it frustrates me to think about him sitting in a room in Philadelphia “directing” Robert De Niro (who probably didn’t even have a script) as a die-hard Eagles fan, while not-nominated Kathryn Bigelow was in a helicopter over Pakistan directing a Bin Laden capture scene.

Life of Pi* directed by Ang Lee This is the one on the list that really gets me. Ang Lee was nominated for best director, which in theory makes Life of Pi one of the five real contenders for best picture category, which I know is ludicrous just from the number of floating candles in the trailer (that’s right! Didn’t see this one either). Yes, the CGI looks cool, but that’s why there’s a visual effects award. Plus, this has got to be Lee’s eighth best movie, or something, which is one reason why it’s criminal that he’s nominated for directing instead of Kathryn Bigelow, for whom Zero Dark Thirty is a career-defining achievement.

Lincoln* directed by Steven Spielberg As a cinematic response to the end of slavery, Lincoln is just about the polar opposite of Django. It’s super epic, super cheesy, super Hollywood. A grand score; a Civil War surrender scene with a majestic white horse, Daniel Day-Lewis looking pensively out a window; Tommy Lee Jones playing a white senator who tearfully hugs his black wife when slavery is outlawed. The material is powerful, as are Day-Lewis’s and Jones’s performances, but if it was going to be corny, I wanted to really cry when the Thirteenth Amendment passed, and I just couldn’t get there. Plus, the character named “Mr. Slave” watching Lincoln walk down the long White House hallway toward the distant light on the horizon was much too much. This movie does not deserve to clean up on Oscar night, but it very well might.

Les Miserables directed by Tom Hooper Member the thing about me being a cynical asshole? Nothing— nothing—could stir that beast more than Les Mis. My taxi got into a little accident on the way to the movie theater, and I should have seen it as a sign of the train wreck I was soon to behold. I can muster some praise: for example, it’s impressive that so many nonmusical people were able to master an entirely (entirely!) musical script. But I think at the end of the day, Hugh Jackman covered in fake poop in a Paris sewer singing from the bottom of his heart either floats your boat or it doesn’t, and I’m one of the doesn’ts. Also, whether you like the music or not, it’s unbearably loud in IMAX.

Zero Dark Thirty directed by Kathryn Bigelow A friend said to me, on the subject of Paul Thomas Anderson not getting nominated for The Master, “It’s criminal, but expected.” The snubbing of Bigelow is criminal and unexpected. Under the supervision of some directors, Zero Dark Thirty could have been little more than a glorified episode of Homeland with a “Fuck yeah, America!” message. But Bigelow makes it extraordinary, and extraordinarily gripping. From the opening shot of a blank screen with 9/11 911 calls playing in the background, to the torture scenes, to the Navy SEALs on the plane to Osama Bin Laden’s compound, to Jessica Chastain’s muscle movements, her work is masterful. Hell, if the Oscars had a “best female director” category, they might even have included her. Hopefully Zero Dark Thirty will break the trend and bring home the best picture award even though Bigelow can’t get what she deserves.

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

REVIEWS In the divide by Alexander Saeedy YH Staﬀ ndie legends of the 20th century like The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac, and Oasis seem to blossom for a moment and then fade away into oblivion. For a moment, they represent everything that defines their time—but that’s never an eternal guarantee of fame and success. Whenever these artists attempt to reenter the foray, they try to assert themselves as contemporary artists whose work still belongs. But the public never really wants them—NME will continue to give Noel Gallagher and Robert Smith their annual “Godlike Genius” award for having made genre-defining music, but ultimately cease to care about what they continue to make. New Order is surely one of those bands. Though the group’s contemporary work goes largely unappreciated, today’s hipsters idolize the ‘80s new-wave tour de force. And a look into the recent “tell-all” memoir of their bassist (and bassist for the band that preceded them, Joy Division), Peter Hook, might explain why this is true—and perhaps why it should not be. Though Peter Hook won’t be winning any awards for “Biographer of the Decade” for Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, the book is a wonderful way to get a firmer hold on the origins of the “indie” music scene. Bassist for both Joy Division and New Order, Hook has always been one of New Order’s most outspoken members. After a prolific career in the 1980s, including five studio albums and over sixteen charted singles, the group began to lose steam and took a break in 1993. While New Order reconvened in 2001 to make their guitar-driven Get Ready and again in 2005 for Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, their music continued to get worse and worse. In lieu of their traditional club-electronic tracks like “Fine Time” or “Blue Monday” from the 1980s, New Order offered over-synthesized tracks with saccharine vocals in singles like “Krafty” and “Crystal.” By 2007, Hook left the group (again) while Sumner and original NO members Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert continued to make music. This month, Hook published an autobiographical account titled Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, which details the group’s origins in Manchester in the mid 1970s. In 1976, Hook and long-time pal Sumner went to a Sex Pistols concert in Manchester and immediately knew they had to start a band. After a number of fights, run-ins with the police, and lines of cocaine, Hook and Sumner met Ian

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Curtis, future Joy Division frontman, at a Manchester punk venue. By 1977, Joy Division was formed and playing small gigs throughout the post-industrial scene in Northern England. Most of Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division is made up of scattered conversations and playful (although often quite bitter) banter between Hook, Curtis, and Sumner. Chapter titles include “It was like The X Factor for punks,” “Stop fucking moaning Hooky,” and “He’s possessed by the devil, that twat.” Hook’s writing style matches his public persona—crass, upfront, and bold. Even through Joy Division’s relative ascendancy to fame in 1978 and 1979, Hook reminds the reader of the band’s personal side. Even when describing the recording of JD’s most famous singles and albums, Hook treats them as individual projects that came together at the spur of a moment. In “I Remember Nothing,” the haunting closer on Unknown Pleasures, Sumner actually plays the wrong chord on his new Transcendent 2000 synthesizer for the whole recording—but the disharmony it gave to the song was too good to pass up. Hook’s work demystifies Joy Division in ways that have never been done before. Biopic films like Control and 24 Hour Party People depict Curtis as a dark and brooding genius, but Hook makes him out to be a “pretty regular bloke.” If anything, Hook takes his time to remind us that music is not simply conceptual—it’s a man-made product. In a whirlwind journey through the gritty punk scene of late 1970s England, Joy Division ceases to be the inevitable beginning of post-punk and New Wave, but is a group of teenagers who got together to make music. Hook didn’t know from a young age that he was destined to play the bass—he stole one at age 16 from a music store in Salford and never learned how to play it right. We can list Closer and Unknown Pleasures as two of the definitive albums of the late 20th century, and deem Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris to be “Godlike Geniuses,” but we still won’t know anything about who Joy Division was. As Hook’s narrative tells us, the music world in the 1970s was a very different place than it is now. But the story of a band looking to score girls, snort coke, and get famous will always remain the same—no more glorious than today.

On “Katz” in real-time by Ava Kofman “Katz X Katz” is a retrospective-in-miniature of the work of the New York painter Alex Katz. It is currently on view at the Yale University School of Art’s 32 Edgewood gallery through Mar. 10. The following review-in-miniature was recorded in real-time into the microphone of an iPhone and edited only for the purposes of clarity and concision.

I am dictating my experience in order to provide a real-time phenomenological account of what it feels and looks like to see this show. [The guard greets me and gives me a sheet with dates and names of paintings. He leaves.] I am no longer self-conscious because I am now the only person in the room… Micah Rodman/YH Staff [The show takes place in one large room.] …except for the two bodies standing up next to me. [It is a cardboard cut-out of two bodies.] Every time you walk by the building it seems as though there are two museum-goers already inside, standing back to back, dressed in smart, hip clothing, looking at each respective wall of the show… At first glance, it seems to be a show about love, about two-ness, about paintings of friends and lovers. A bit in the style of photographic realism, except with the framing conceits of photographs in mind and without the realism… The first painting, “Lisa and Brooks,” details a couple in harmonious matrimony? marriage? married to a backdrop of painted flowers. There’s an air of kitsch to this painting as well as to the painting above it and the painting next to it. I can’t quite put my finger on [the kitsch] but I think it might be that the backgrounds don’t seem to quite believe in themselves: brown and pink clashes, references to Japanese like gardens in business-y offices. It feels more like a cartoon than precise… [While examining some more images of coupling:] Vincent and Anastasia are another couple depicted. So are Vivian and Vincent. Vincent likes to get around… I’m now walking around the room, taking in the paintings a little more, and now I see the best one. It’s called “Seated Alex” and it looks so much like a copy of a Matisse: cut-outseeming shapes, patterned bamboo in the background, orange and yellow hues and a blue window, the persistence of flat solid color… In a lot of these paintings, it’s a lot about the clothing: pinstriped suits, striped shirts, a cardigan, a funky blazer, pink and beige plaid probably from the ‘70s, so too the green sweater… If you walk down the corridor into the downstairs area, which I didn’t realize existed, you pass slightly gauche photos––sorry, paintings––of flowers until you come onto something that’s absolutely beautiful. It looks as though Joan Mitchell and Phillip Guston’s color pink had a lovechild that was the strange unending vision of Richard Diebenkorn’s American landscapes…I’m realizing that’s a lot to say at once in a sentence but that’s where I went. There’s green stuck in and onto the smooth grey forms and blue at the top and green again at the bottom and then there’s this one spot of pink so deliberate, yet anxiously accidental, it could make a person crazy. I think this painting is so good [you’ll know it when you see it] that I’m confused why the painting to its left—a large tumescent orchid––is not… Continuing down this hallway, there are two more stunning paintings of yellow flowers flanked with green stems. It’s as though you are feeling what it’s like to close your eyelids at night and see all the different colors press themselves upon the lids of your eyes. The brushstrokes of this painting [the first you will encounter on your way down this hallway] are deliberately brushstrokes. By that I mean to say: no attempt is made to capture the actual shape of the petal. There’s only a fidelity to their unassorted casual arrangement across the field. Two millimeter-wide by about four to five inch long brush strokes scatter around to show a vision of depth––not a vision—a…[long pause]…the idea of where depth might be if someone later wished to find its possible positions. It’s a schematic, a sketch, rather than an illusionistic representation of depth. No attempt is made at actual verisimilitude and that’s why it’s beautiful, that’s why it’s a pattern. The background, I should mention, is this sort of beige purplish violet grey…. And now I’m walking back up this hallway, because it ends in a door… [As I’m about to leave, the guard at the entrance again greets me. He tells me to look at the large portrait on the wall directly above our heads.] “I actually want to point your attention to this one,” he says. The painting, called “David, Robert, and Irving” shows three men whose eyes seem to survey and watch over the entire room. “That’s actually the Dean of the Art School, Robert Storr, and he’s the reason why we had this show because he used to work in the City for MoMA and he knows this artist personally. He curated the show. So that’s him and two other guys who I don’t know. I would definitely call his office for a quote because it might give some weight to the story.”

The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Music: Iceage You know what you’re in for after 10 seconds of You’re Nothing, the second album from Copenhagen punk prodigies Iceage. Guitar and bass twist into an amorphous, fuzzed-out battering ram. The hi-hat skitters around like a rabid centipede. And a moment later, lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt wanders in, moaning. Or perhaps howling. Wailing? My thesaurus gives me “yawp,” “ululate,” and “bay at the moon,” each of which describes at least one song here, but Bender, who recorded his first single at 15 (and would be a college junior today, had he applied to college), is too multifarious a vocalist to be fenced in with any single verb. He’s an expressive singer whose vocal range spans about an octave, excluding the occasional scream. He doesn’t lean back from the microphone to breathe. For most of the album, his lyrics and delivery bring to mind a man clinging to the side of a lifeboat while a giant squid tries to pull him off. “Pressure! Pressure! Oh god no!” he, um, vocalizes, on lead track “Ecstasy.” Things get worse on “Coalition”: “All my senses are leaving me! I don’t know where I’m going!” You’re Nothing is a sensory overload—four tempos in one song, jangly guitar melodies blurring into sudden storms of feedback, an interlude that could be licensed as the intro for a post-apocalyptic Western. Sometimes, without warning, Bender stops yelling at the world and starts on us: “Don’t leave me!”; “We’re running out of time!”; “Where’s your morals!?” (That last one might have been to the giant squid. It’s hard to tell.) And it’s almost all fantastic. Twelve songs in 28 minutes, no instant catchy melodies, but nothing you’ll want to skip (save maybe “Rodfæstet”, sung in Danish and otherwise unremarkable). There’s the jangly “In Haze” for your good moods, the morose “Morals” for your bad moods, and in the final, title track, a middle finger to the many giant squids of the world: “You’re nothing! You’re nothing!” —Aaron Gertler YH Staff

Food: Dee Asian Kitchen Cheap pan-Asian food is fast. Fast food is gross. Food is necessary. By the transitive property, cheap pan-Asian fast food is fast, necessary, and gross. BUT WAIT. Dee Asian Kitchen on Temple Street is adjacent to Chipotle and exponentially more worthwhile, delicious, cheap, diverse in offerings, and quick in service. It’s the kind of warm, savory-smelling pan-Asian place that inspires overtly sexual food dreams. The women who work at Dee’s cash register look like they want to serve you your food while simultaneously asking how your day went and if you’d please enjoy a complementary $1,000 worth of puppies and ice cream, all of which they’d provide had they free time or ample trust funds. But they have neither. They do, however, have incredible shrimp jade shu mai, pillowy soft taro buns, and sumptuous noodle soups. Their dim sum style dishes are $2.75 across the board. Bubble tea’s just under $3. Their mochi, unlike The Mochi Store’s, does not taste like rock solid milk enrobed in cellophane topped with dried and flaked cat saliva. Just a few caveats: 1. If you think you’re hungry enough for two dishes, order five. What the hell, you deserve it. 2. Bring at least four friends. This place gets recreational after your 23rd dumpling. 3. The salad with the avocado dressing and the shrimp balls. My god. A religious experience, especially for any self-respecting Jew around the holidays. The moral of the story is this: the transitive property doesn’t always work. So is it still a property? Who cares! Have a shu mai. —Alison Greenberg

22 The Yale Herald (Feb. 22, 2013)

Movie: Charles Swan III A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is thoroughly cute. A dream-like picture of one man’s struggle to cope with the loss of the love of his life, Charles Swan is the perfect breakup film for those with an affinity for Wes Anderson quirk. (Not surprising, since the film is written and directed by Roman Coppola, Anderson’s frequent collaborator, and includes two of Anderson’s go-to actors, Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray.) The movie, an 86-minute journey into the thoughts and memories of protagonist Charles Swan (played by the ever-controversial Charlie Sheen), takes us through a fanciful world of vignettes that range from tap numbers to a Portuguese singing duet to a hilarious segment about imported Russian calamari. Some scenes are innovatively beautiful. In one recollection of a fight with his girlfriend Ivanna, the camera follows the car of the arguing couple as they move through a carwash, soap, water and washers punctuating their passion. Swan’s fantastical memory of his relationship with Ivanna, accentuated by picturesque mise-en-scene, is coupled with offbeat dialogue that ranges from biting to precious. “You were nice to the toothbrushes, but you were a bitch to me,” Swan bemoans to Ivanna. The actors’ performances are unsurprisingly spectacular, as one would expect from the spectacular cast (namely, Charlie Sheen and Bill Murray). Swan’s reckless, self-destructive behavior might often reflect the actor who portrays him, but his eccentricities and genuine (albeit messy) love for Ivanna make it hard not to love him. Indeed, Sheen delivers a touching performance in Coppola’s portrayal of the endless possibilities that abound after a painful breakup. The film offers a vital thought: that life goes on, and yes, it is still sweet. —Cosima Cabrera

Music: Starfucker Starfucker’s latest album, Miracle Mile, isn’t very good. It’s not that it’s particularly bad either, but the latest effort from the Portland-based electronic rock outfit never really gets going. The band’s star has been rising since their formation in 2007, with their first two projects, a self-titled LP and the EP Jupiter receiving critical accolades and some commercial success. Their last album, Reptilians, didn’t get quite as much traction, however, even as the reputation of the singles from their early releases continued to grow. Miracle Mile comes at an important point in the band’s career, as they attempt to turn indie buzz into legitimate critical and commercial cachet. Unfortunately for them, and for those of us who were excited by the infectious energy of songs like “Medicine” and “Myke Tyson”, the new album fails not with a bang but with a whimper. The indie world has been looking for a spiritual successor to MGMT, both in terms of sound and crossover success, for years now. Starfucker seemed well positioned to take up that mantle despite their deliberately anti-commercial name. Miracle Mile has done very little to advance that cause, however. It’s not just that lead single “While I’m Alive” fails to pop like previous hit “Boy Toy” or their fantastic cover of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Nor is it simply that the production style of this overstuffed 15 track album trends more towards electronic wall of sound than their previous more synth-pop influenced albums. What sinks Miracle Mile is its ultimate unwillingness to take a risk, to surprise. This is Starfucker spinning their wheels, hoping that they’ll happen upon a hit out of sheer luck. Unfortunately, on Miracle Mile, luck isn’t on their side. —Gareth Imparato YH Staff

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Grandfather in the A’s, plz?

Because some actual psychopaths go here, and it’s your responsibility to know how to spot that shit in a Common App essay.

Really nothing more to say on this one.

The grading report

Yale

Thanks for reminding me that 1. I’m hungry and 2. I have no spring break plans.

Because literally fuck February.

People comparing which February is worse, 2012 or 2013

SOMESOM Lint

Dry skin

No one should ever have to shop at Origins.

People talking spring break diets

FellFe

Professors who apologize for emailing one more time

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Snowbanks Bite me.

Also, professors who email one more time.

Killing my jaywalk game.

The Yale Herald (Jan. 25, 2013)