TYH LV 7

The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 7 New Haven, Conn.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

From the staff

The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 7

New Haven, Conn.

Thursday, Mar. 7, 2013

The dream was unrealistic in some ways. She made maple candies, she tended to baby raccoons, and she was freaking obsessed with Pa. She was Laura Ingalls Wilder and I wanted to be her when I grew up. Saturday mornings were reserved for TBS, Krispy Kreme, and episodes upon episodes of Little House on the Prairie. The dream may have been unrealistic but that didn’t mean I couldn’t try. Two consecutive birthday presents of mine were vacations to Amish communities my mom had found online because she promised that they looked just like where Laura grew up. (Ok, I honestly doubt Laura had to deal with fake outhouses or a creepy girl—Adrienne—staring at her while she milked a cow, but that’s beside the point.)

I got over responding to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with my girl Laura because the laughs got to be a drag. But fast forward ten years, and there I was behind a boy in his fanciest of Yale blue suits, waiting on line to shake President Levin’s hand, shamelessly eavesdropping as the boy told his awkward suitemate that he wanted to be the President when he grew up. I told myself that if this kid could be banking on 1600 Penn, I might as well tell Levin I was going to most likely be an Ingalls Wilder, but it was still up in the air. But the more I thought about it, the more terrifying it was to think that one of those ambitious poli-sci majors could be a real politician—or maybe it would be that quiet kid in your section who picks at his hangnails.

But isn’t it kind of awesome that for these kids, with their enviable hair, amicable personalities, and firm handshakes, childhood dreams might actually come true? Or so they hope. In this week’s Herald, John Stillman, SY ’14, analyzes the myth and culture that allows these students to think that Yale can play kingmaker just one more time.

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 BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Evan Walker-Wells Director of Advertising: Shreya Ghei Director of Finance: Stephanie Kan Director of Development: Joe Giammittorio Senior Business Adviser: William Coggins 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.

If politics ain’t for you, but if sounding informed for the spring break family gatherings galore is appealing, check out the opinion piece by Rachel Miller, DC ’15, on the sequester. And if you’d rather be pickling than politicking, we got something for you too. Look inside for a feature by Kohler Bruno, SM ’14, on the plans for a New Haven food incubator. Or get transported to a music and movie festival with Aaron Gertler, TD ’15, on South by Southwest.

So read the Herald and think about going into office. Or judging people who do. Or just think about the fact that The West Wing is now on Netflix (Rob, you’re right after Laura in my book).

Love 2 all, Olivia Rosenthal Features 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: Emma.Schindler@yale.edu Web: www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 John Stillman, SY ‘14, puts Yale’s nascent political elite in context with their illustrious forbears, exploring what has and hasn’t changed in a university once known for educating presidents, senators, and CIA operatives.

VOICES 6

Sophie Grais, SM ‘14, talks conflict and the power of music with Siwar Mansour, a member of the Israeli-Palestinian group Heartbeat.

7

Cindy Ok, PC ‘14, recalls her childhood migraines and what they taught her about pain and love.

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OPINION: Ava Kofman, TD ‘14, steps away from the airport X-ray scanner, and Rachel Miller, DC ‘15, looks beyond the sequester to consider its long-term consequences.

FEATURES 10

Jacob Osborne, DC ’16, investigates Fossil Free Yale’s divestment initiative.

16

Kohler Bruno, SM ‘16, scrutinizes the plan to convert an unused Gateway Community College industrial kitchen into a community food incubator for startups.

17

Alessandra Roubini, JE ‘16, checks out Yale’s new Windham Campbell Prizes for literature.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Cora Lewis, PC ‘13, dramatizes her viewing of the recent reading of Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s, SM ’13, long-researched play, The Givers. Also: Anna-Sophie Harling, DC ’16, digs into the Yale history department’s institutional focus on the French in North America.

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Aaron Gertler, TD ’15, anticipates South by Southwest. Also: Jack the Giant Slayer, House of Cards, Rhye, and the Staff List.

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM bowling.

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr: Charlie Sheen as Lindsay Lohan’s mentor This is really the best thing I’ve ever heard. It’s even better than when I was assigned to play the windchimes in my elementary school’s orchestra or when I had to stand in the water at my friend’s Japanesethemed birthday party because I was too tall to fit on the bridge for the photo. “Why, Isabella,” you might inquire, “is this the best thing you’ve ever heard?”

Well, because if Charlie Sheen can be a mentor, so can I. I have always wanted to be a mentor. I have so many things to teach. For instance, when you’re taking vitamins and the instructions are in Chinese it’s best to just estimate how many you should take. I usually go with about five pills, sometimes 12, often 18, depending on how sick I feel. And in class when you’re asked a question and don’t know the answer, just respond with Queen Elizabeth II and/or Gandhi, but usually Queen Elizabeth. And if you are assigned to play the gravedigger in your middle school production of Hamlet, remember that there are no small parts, only small actors—then quit because really that’s a dreadful part. So thank you, Charlie, for the inspiration!

—Isabella Huffington

D:

Going home and not eating at 5 p.m.

Leaving Yale for break is like leaving a senior citizen compound, except we play less bingo and have worse doctors. (And I mean five out of the five times I’ve gone to DUH—excluding the time I thought I had contracted a rare tropical disease, thanks to my complete confidence in Yahoo answers—they’ve misdiagnosed me.) When I’m at Yale, I eat dinner at an obscenely early hour. When I leave Yale, I don’t have jet lag, I have food lag. Recently I was having dinner with my mother. I told her I wanted to eat later; I meant around seven. Because, you see, I have gotten into the rather bad habit of eating at 5:30. But my normal mother assumed I meant 10:00. By the time my risotto arrived I was napping at the table. So while eating anytime past six makes me feel young and wild—kind of like a normal person feels when they take body shots off a Brazilian named Estefan—it’s also rather tiring because when I eat at 10:00 I can’t go to sleep at 10:00, which really throws off my spinster lifestyle.

—Isabella Huffington

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

F:

Homework over spring break I don’t think Yale quite understands the definition of a break, so I’m here to elucidate. A break does not mean you can assign me extra reading assignments and extra writing assignments and, since I’m currently enrolled in a math class, god help me, extra problem sets (really I was not actually assigned any extra math homework but as it takes me half a year to emotionally prepare for the humiliation of attempting to do math it always feels like extra) because you think I’ll have free time. I won’t have free time. I’ll be very, very busy removing my green, fluffy, terry-cloth robe from the trash—my mother has the rather annoying habit of throwing it away every time I take it off, which, granted, is not often, even though I have told her multiple times that my green fluffy robe is my soul (if you are wondering what my heart is that would be my pink pig Gilbert)—and eating pomegranate snow cones. So you see, Yale, I don’t have time for your extra assignments. I’ll be much too busy.

—Isabella Huffington —graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

BY THE

BOOM/BUST INCOMING: Instagram Whether people are actually doing something this spring break or just sitting at home doing nothing but wanting you to think they’re doing something, you better bet your bottom dollar that they’ll be Instagramming the shit out of it. People going to Tanzania to save the rhinos? Photos. People cuddling at home with their pets? Photos. Girls laying on the beach in Mexico with tanning oil and margaritas? Definitely photos.

OUTGOING: Cereal Trix are not for kids. They’re actually for Yale students who don’t want to eat the “Korean BBQ Tofu Tacos” in the dining halls anymore. About two weeks ago, I personally came to the point in the semester where every meal, without fail, ended in a bowl of Crispix. (That’s a lot of Crispix.) Spring break marks a hiatus in the reign of cereal—for two short weeks, it will be relegated to mere breakfast food status. But don’t worry, friends: you’ll be feasting on Froot Loops again before you know it.

— Lara Sokoloff YH Staff

TOP FIVE

NUMBERS

#

TYNG CUP STANDINGS 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

INDEX 85 billion The number of dollars last Friday’s sequester stripped from the $3.55 trillion budget for 2013.

Adjectives in place of good in “have a good spring break!”

2.14 million The number of jobs projected to be cut by the sequester, more than half of which are in the private sector.

5 4 3 2 1

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Purple Different, yeah so different

Marxist

Possible major calamities the White House predicts the sequester could bring about. The list includes higher rates of homelessness, slower natural disaster forecasts, greater risk of wildfires, crop and meat shortages, immigration backlog, air travel disruption, and benefit slashing for soldiers and veterans.

584

Insouciant

The number of days Congress heard the kettle whistle before it ran out of water.

Bangin’ — Cindy Ok YH Staff

Sources: 1) NBC News 2) Math, the CBO 3) Washington Post 4) ABC — Jake Orbison YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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SITTING DOWN WITH SIWAR MANSOUR

by Sophie Grais YH Staff photo by Juliet Liu An Arab-Israeli from Tira, Israel, 18-year-old Siwar Mansour is a violinist for Heartbeat, a pop music group that brings Israeli and Palestinian teenagers together through the power of melody. Mansour has traveled all over Israel and the United States with Heartbeat to raise awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the need for resolution. After the group’s recent performance at Yale, the Herald sat down with Mansour to talk about life in her home city, Arab love songs, and the battle against ignorance.

YH: How did you get involved in Heartbeat?

SM: I attend Seeds of Peace. The person who started Heartbeat, Aaron Shneyer, is also involved in Seeds of Peace…I had a music video on YouTube and he saw it and he invited me...

He took some tools, or whatever you want to call it, from Seeds and started something different, with music and youth.

YH: What exactly does Seeds of Peace do?

SM: Seeds of Peace is a non-profit organization that brings young people, youth from conflict areas—for example [from] Palestine and Israel, Pakistan and India—to meet in a camp in Maine. In [the] camp, you have dialogue sessions instructed by mentors who are professionals. These dialogue sessions are usually very intense, and it’s just an opportunity for young people to talk about the conflict, and it gives them space to say what they want to say without fear and judgment.

YH: How did your family and your community react when you started playing in Heartbeat?

SM: I come from a community that is very closed. It’s a small city in Israel, all Palestinian, and my family has been there for more than nine generations. I’ve been living there my whole life, and all my family lives there. And everybody knows everybody, everybody is in everybody’s business, and they are usually very interested in what people are doing. My community is something that has been hard to deal with. I come out of my community saying, “I don’t want to support this; I don’t want to be part of this ignorance or laziness in not doing anything,” and I get judged for it, and I get criticized. But my family is very supportive, which is very helpful.

YH: When people criticize your involvement in Heartbeat, is it out in the open?

SM: It’s hard for me to describe. People gossip a lot. They talk about each other. I come from a very conservative place. For

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

me, as a girl, it’s definitely different from being a boy in that community, and doing what I do—touring the states with boys and girls who are considered strangers to the rest of the people (they don’t know them, they don’t interact with them), staying in Tel Aviv for a lot of hours, going all the way alone—that’s kind of unacceptable with social codes....I hear people talking, and even if I don’t, I know they are because I know the community that I grew up in, and I know what’s acceptable to them and what’s not. But again, when you’re doing something that is life-changing and you’re stepping out, people will eventually start seeing what’s right, and that this is the right thing to do.

YH: Given that the members of Heartbeat come from such different communities and perspectives on the Israeli-Arab conflict, how does the group get along as a whole?

SM: We get along very well. You heard the music. [This tour has] been very emotional, and we all love each other very much...We don’t even think about that what we’re doing is unusual. This is why we had to sit down and [say], “People don’t understand what’s going on back home.” They need to understand that this isn’t something that [Israelis and Palestinians] do [there]. People don’t meet; they don’t play music together. They don’t sit down and talk.

YH: Have you ever had a performing experience with Heartbeat that stands out as especially emotional or unique?

SM: It’s all so meaningful and powerful. I think the greatest moments are when we feel so united on stage that when we make mistakes, or when we mess up or something, it’s just so much fun to know that people are behind your back. We laugh between us, and it’s that kind of connection that is just so unique and so special that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

YH: Do you have a favorite song to perform that addresses those themes of unity and peace?

SM: There’s something behind each song...Sometimes there’s an Arabic song that we play. It’s a love song; it’s not about [the conflict], but it’s really about the poetry of love and Arab music. Being able to play Arab music with all these people ([there are] Americans on stage…we have Jewish Israelis, and we have Palestinians) and to all play a very Middle Eastern Arab song, is also very powerful.

YH: What has American support for Heartbeat looked like on your U.S. tour?

SM: A lot of places that we’ve visited are very, very welcoming. People obviously don’t come up to me and say, “I don’t support what you’re doing. I disagree,” but sometimes you feel that people are not accepting the idea by their questions, or by the faces they make about our songs, the comments they make. I think this [U.S. tour] is actually more positive because a lot of people don’t know about the conflict.

YH: Beyond spreading awareness, what are your thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best way to work toward changing the current political situation?

SM: I think the situation is very, very bad. I come from a place that suffers from a lot of crimes and a lot of chaos.

Living in an all-Palestinian city [in Israel] is very hard because the police won’t step in—the government won’t do anything about it, they don’t care about the school system, they don’t care about anything... You can go and you can see, you can be totally ignorant to the situation and understand what’s going on when you walk down the street. I do hold an Israeli citizenship, and [we’ve] been there for nine generations… It’s amazing how people say, “There’s justice, this is democratic,” but you come there and you see that my city is suffering because of the inequality... If I want to apply [for a job at] a Jewish mall or whatever, when they hear I’m Arab, they would always respond with, “Oh, actually, we don’t need any employees.” At the airport I get treated differently. My message is to bring justice and to say that I’m not equal in my own country, in my own land. Of course, everyone comes from a different background in the group. Even if we have this unified message, we also each have messages that we want to share with the world.

As for the conflict, I don’t understand how we’re in the 21st century and people are still under occupation, still fighting over land and the separation... I think the only way that peace will happen is when we’re all equal and when someone breaks the siege. I personally don’t think it’s going to come from the government. It’s groups like Heartbeat who will step out and say, “Ok, I’m doing something, I’m going to change the situation, I’m going to change the world. I’m going to change where I live.” More and more people are going to say that, and I hope we are actually driving people to do something.

—This interview was condensed by the author

GROWING PAINS

by Cindy Ok YH Staff s a child, I went to extremes. I ran before I learned to walk. I was never tired and always hungry. Every summer afternoon I desperately needed to run in the grass and pick flowers for five hours, except when I just as desperately needed to read in my room alone for five hours. The perceptible helplessness of very old people made me cry hysterically in public, as did the joy on the faces of couples taking their wedding photos in the gardens by my house. I loved everyone, except when everyone was insufferably boring.

I was born with this extreme personality, at least according to my parents, who also hold that my little sister, with her normal amounts of crying, eating, and pooping, was a lovely palette cleanser two years later. But much of my emotional intensity also developed over time, largely because of a curse I carried from a very young age: the affliction of migraines.

They were nothing if not unpredictable. Sometimes I’d get three in a week and then go five months without even the hint of one. Whenever it came, I would inevitably break from the world I was in—the friends I loved at the time, the book I was reading, the thoughts I was having. In bed with a migraine, there was space for only the darkness and the silence, and maybe a cold towel on my head. Sounds, lights, and interactions with other human beings were excruciating, and nauseating. During a single episode I could simultaneously lose vision, sight, and tactile feeling.

At a certain point, my migraines became immune to the typical migraine medications and I moved onto Vicodin. At another point, my migraines became immune to Vicodin. These were not just awful headaches; they were disabling neuralgias.

I was seven years old the first time I thought about suicide. Being remarkably emotional never prevented me from being equally logical, and I was lying in bed for something like the fiftieth hour of a particularly bad migraine, close to but unfortunately not completely unconscious with pain. Out of this total haze came the singular vivid thought that if this state were my life—if I didn’t definitely know that the pain would relent eventually—the only reasonable thing to do would be to kill myself. It’s not that I ever really considered it, or understood what that even meant. I knew it would get better, because it always had and it always would and it always did. Still, physical pain drove me to the cliffs of existential awareness at such a tiny age, which, in retrospect, seems unfathomably unfair.

At the time, though, I really didn’t have any complaints. I was an extraordinarily happy child—“well-adjusted,” as they say—and it simply never occurred to me to complain about my migraines when they were over. On some level I must have assumed that everyone had her secret sufferings, ones that didn’t necessarily need to be discussed. Ironically— but also, in some way, unsurprisingly—these lapses in my brain chemistry most profoundly affected me by fueling my eternal optimism.

Every day without a migraine was a pure gift from the world with love and squalor to me. The sky, the trees, the faces, the words, the cake—everything I’d lost for a few days felt both real and mine again. Not being paralyzed meant freedom, that days were dazzling, that life genuinely felt so easy, that I was effervescent, sometimes disarm-

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ingly and sometimes annoyingly so. The fact that I could be rendered powerless without a moment’s notice to incessant and oppressive pain turned into gratitude. And into humility: because I didn’t feel control over these migraines, I never tried to create the illusion that I had control over anything. In accepting the world as unthinkably wild, I had no reason to worry.

I don’t know how many days I’ve lost to migraines in the course of my life, but I know that the hours spent in blackness and stillness were never truly lost; they’ve added up to something, given back. It was easy to be overjoyed when it

seemed like the only possible barrier was a bodily ailment, and to be fearless when the worst that could happen already had, and would again soon enough. The low lows, in other words, were worth the high highs.

Somewhere along the line, gradually but also suddenly, I stopped having migraines. I was intimately acquainted with physical pain when I could not yet handle emotional pain, and as I began to learn the latter, the former magically receded from view and from memory. I can only recall a few migraines in middle school, and not a single one from high school. During this same time, my seemingly boundless energy met its very real bounds, and my seemingly invincible happiness proved decidedly vulnerable to fissure.

I still tend toward empathizing and behaving extremely.

But the sad and thankful reality is that the pathological intensity of my two-year-old, 10-year-old, and even 18-year-old selves is peacefully distinct from myself today.

THIS SUMMER, I WENT TO SEE MY GRANDFATHER IN Seoul shortly after he suffered a paralyzing stroke. This was the man who taught me to ride a bike, to cook eggs, once made me an abacus, gave me my first lessons in astronomy. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. This was simply not the man who had told me countless stories of love and war, so many stories that they turned into numinous pools

of words and images that we treaded together like it was always summertime.

With blank, empty eyes, he showed no signs of life except via the brassy green lines on the vital signs machine. He could not speak, could not read, and was so thin and worn that I barely recognized him. And he certainly couldn’t recognize me, or anyone (not even my grandmother, his wife of 50 years). His right arm was bruised where the ICU nurses had tied it down to his bed to prevent his whacking away at his uncomfortable breathing tubes. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s going to kill himself doing it,” one nurse told us in Korean to assure us the makeshift cast was absolutely necessary.

Maybe trying to kill himself was indeed the only reasonable thing. We knew just as well as the nurses did that the pain would not relent for my 93-year-old grandpa. He was lost to the world, and not just for a day, or two, or even a week. He was definitely, plainly, wholly gone, which I realized then as I sat next to him silently in the hospital, holding his limp hand and watching him blink. I knew we were just beginning, beginning to wait for him to die.

I tensed up physically, forcing myself not to cry, not to break down, not to start grieving for him just yet. When my dad and I got back to the apartment we were staying in, I went straight to my room and, again, I did not cry. I had just spent time with a dying person I loved for the first time in my life, and my mind was tired. I fell asleep reliving a lazy July day that he and I had spent together in my backyard at home in California, picking the strawberries we’d planted months before and eating them without washing them, asking him to push me on my swing set even though I could swing on my own, walking to the park hand in hand and secretly wishing he didn’t have to walk so slowly with his sheeny oak cane.

I woke up in the middle of the night with an incapacitating migraine. I spent the next two days immobile with pounding pain, without even my thoughts, since I couldn’t bear to have any. But a strange and small part of me found this familiar aloneness refreshing. Like at lunch with a cruel but old friend, I couldn’t help but feel a nostalgic comfort. That endearment toward migraine, or at least my relationship to it, does not by any means exclude my revulsion at the pain it has caused. Yet the complicated, intimate combination of love and hatred that I harbor for migraine crosses time and space in an irreplaceable, precious way. In a way that’s otherwise unique to my relationships with my family—including my grandfather, who died in his sleep this winter.

I once read that acceptance is a small, quiet room. I know now that grief is a long, narrow hallway on the way to that room, and that it sometimes takes catharsis to brave entering the house at all. Because I repressed my weeping, that chaotic reservoir of emotion built up and left my body a different way. We all have our external outlets for internal heartache, don’t we?

Because I could not cry for love, love kindly stopped for me—the carriage held but just ourselves, and two old friends of my mind: my grandfather, and my migraine. One I adored and one I abhorred, but without even meaning to, I carry both their hearts with me.

I like to think that it’s always summertime somewhere in the world.

—graphic by Madeline Butler YH Staff The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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OPINION A SCANNER SCARY

by Ava Kofman What does a scanner see?...I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart?

Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly?

—Phillip K. Dick The surveillance state combines the defensive language of counterterrorism with the protective language of care. When and if you fly over spring break, the TSA will ask that you “Secure All of Your Personal Belongings.”

This piece of advice can be extended to include you securing your most fundamental of belongings: your self.

I’ve never participated in the full-body Xray scans at the airport. I first feared them because my parents feared them. And when they rolled into airports back in 2010, my parents feared them because they were unknown and new. They appeared overnight as a series of enigmatic blue monoliths: the Stonehenge of the Security Age. But these fears, first fueled by a general skepticism towards lobbying interests, were later confirmed by further research. An investigation by ProPublica last year determined that the TSA did not exercise proper oversight when installing and calibrating the X-ray machines. Nor did they disclose their full health effects. According to the National Academy of Sciences the use of radiation in X-ray scanners poses cancer risks, even in low doses.

Even so, this hasn’t stopped the bodies of millions of airline passengers from being exposed to radiation and to the wanton eyes of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents. In December, the TSA recalled the Rapiscan’s Backscatter Body Scanners, citing privacy concerns. But the Millimeter Wave body scanners, which use radio frequency waves, are still in use. By 2014, the TSA hopes to place these scanners—and possibly a brave new company’s version of the X-ray scanners—in every airport security station across the nation.

Opting-out of the scanners takes about an extra five minutes. I don’t find it detracts from the time I would otherwise be spending waiting for the plane. Besides, sitting in a terminal—as you may know if you’ve seen the terminally boring Tom Hanks movie The Terminal—is not very exciting. There are also other, better reasons to opt out. For instance,

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The Yale Herald(Mar. 7, 2013)

the scientific community has yet to conclude whether these millimeter wave scanners cause damage to cellular DNA. So while the scanners no longer subject passengers to ionizing radiation, their other carcinogenic properties are still uncertain. Why should we trust, in the name of national security that can be secured by other means, the use of these possibly unsafe and occasionally inaccurate machines?

Although the TSA’s vision may be darkly blinded by the big bucks of lobbying interests, they can still see our bodies all too clearly.

These invasive photographs of passenger’s naked bodies violate our right to privacy. That said, the patting and touching of one’s optedout body is not exactly a paragon of unobtrusiveness either. Privacy aside (since neither option is ideal), there’s another ideological concern at play in this interrogation of the body politic.

The scanners appear to work impartially.

On the surface, they seemingly function no differently from the mechanical movements of the airport’s baggage carousel. This is because they seem to be beacons of technological progress seemingly detached from direct human intervention. (Agents examine pictures of passengers, whom they cannot see in the flesh, from the other room.) In this way, the scanners blend into the background noise of our everyday ordinary. But in reality, the scanners’ claims to anonymity force us into new claims about the status of our anonymity as citizens.

While the X-ray is supposedly a neutral apparatus, its disinterested gaze is not fundamentally uninterested. These pervasive networks of supervision see every passenger as a potential culprit. The provisional logic behind these acts of supervision position the future as always already precarious. As you walk through the machine, you must accept your slightly-oxymoronic representation as a “potential threat.” The way in which this is different, though not dissimilar, from walking through metal detectors or being recorded by the increasingly frequent CCTV cameras in urban spaces is that the disciplined body is being turned into blank swaths of data. In choosing to opt out, you can advocate for a simple gesture of refusal, one that might reassert a commitment to a civil society that is predicated on more interpersonal, less hazardous, terms.

—graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

AFTER THE SEQUESTER

by Rachel Miller On Mar. 1, Congress threw up its hands and said, “Forget it.” After two years of kicking the can down the road, the sequester is finally upon us. Listening to the Democrats, you would think that the End of Days is nigh and that Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, and McConnell are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Listening to the Republicans, you would think that Obama was Chicken Little. The full effects of the sequester remain unclear, but it’s safe to say that they will fall somewhere in between those two extremes.

So far, the effects have been minimal. Indeed, Wall Street largely ignored the sequester, viewing it as little more than an inconvenience (the Dow reached an all time high just four days after the sequester was enacted). However, this short-term growth is far from indicative of the actual health of the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, if the sequester had not occurred, the GDP would grow 0.6 percent faster and 750,000 jobs would be created or retained. To conclude that the supposed doomsday had been avoided, then, would be premature.

But behind all the overblown rhetoric and the political calculus of the crisis, there lies a fundamentally flawed policy.

In an attempt to make the sequester politically unfeasible for both Democrats and Republicans, defense programs and social programs equally bore the brunt of the costs. However, the politically unfeasible has become reality and now we must begin cutting programs across the board. Among other programs, extended unemployment insurance, veterans’ benefits, and access to HeadStart preschools will be limited due to proposed cuts.

If we are going to make difficult cuts, they should at least be rooted in sound economic policy. The current narrative sees debt as ballooning wildly out of control, pressuring officials into immediately reducing the debt. If we do not take action right now, according to this narrative, interest payments will slowly overwhelm our GDP. The U.S., in turn, will eventually face a scenario where the government’s ability to pay is called into question, interest rates will skyrocket,

and the government will be unable to service its debt and will go into default. The cost of the default will be born by future generations, who will be paying for the excesses of the present.

There can be little doubt that the debt needs to be reduced—however, not in this time frame proposed by the sequester. Had we fallen off the fiscal cliff, the debt would have been reduced radically —but the economy would have been dramatically slowed in the process. In light of high unemployment and last quarter’s dismal GDP growth, a Keynesian would call for increased deficit spending and monetary expansion. The Federal Reserve is taking care of the monetary expansion part by keeping interest rates at record lows. But how can we increase deficit spending while keeping our commitment to reducing the debt?

The answer goes back to those difficult cuts. Rather than force government agencies to arbitrarily cut funding across the board, we should be targeting the thing that contributes the most to our debt: our skyrocketing medical costs. This would include malpractice reform, which would get rid of more inefficiency and waste than the sequester supposedly eliminates. Ideally, the health insurance marketplaces would create competition against the outdated employer model of health insurance, allowing the unemployed and those in lowincome jobs to obtain the care that they need. With increased access to health insurance, fewer people would use the emergency room as their primary source of care, driving down costs for everyone.

Targeted, specific cuts will accomplish more than sharing the pain across agencies will.

Ultimately, the sequester was a clumsy approach to solving the debt problem with more potential for harm than good.

We still have high unemployment, high medical costs, and a broken tax code.

As Congress turns its attention to passing the budget later this month, I hope they think less about scoring political points and more about the serious problems that are ignored in favor of this political farce.

sp

Write for the Yale Herald email emma.schindler@yale.edu

Earth and the endowment Fossil Free Yale invests in divestment

by Jacob Osborne

s last week’s sun did its best to erase all evidence of the previous season, Old Campus became a mess of disappearing snow and soggy earth. The warm air and expanding islands of grass signaled an early exit for winter, a trend that may soon become the norm. Printed in front of Lawrance Hall, however, was a message of a more straightforward nature: thick, block letters first stamped in layers of snow, now made prominent by the exposed soil beneath. It read: FOSSIL FREE. The phrase refers to Fossil Free Yale, a social and environmental justice group on campus that is advocating for the University’s swift divestment of its endowment from the fossil fuel industry, on the basis that the companies involved in this business are the primary contributors to the world’s current climate crisis. “[It] is a movement that attempts to raise awareness around what we see as the most urgent issue of this era, namely climate change,” Hannah Nesser, BR ‘16, said.

Though their efforts are varied and extensive, one central component of the Fossil Free Yale campaign is an open petition to the Trustees of the Yale Corporation, in which the organization condemns investment in this industry as being “socially irresponsible.” The petition asserts that Yale’s current portfolio supports the continued human consumption of fossil fuels and emission of harmful, heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, factors that combine to form “a serious threat to the environment and human welfare.” Ariana Shapiro, BR ’16, another member of Fossil Free Yale, remarked how these effects are becoming extremely visible to us here in the Northeast. “Climate change is an issue that affects every single person,” Shapiro said.

“We’re seeing it more and more. Things like Hurricane Sandy and Nemo are showing that climate change isn’t just reserved to island countries and warm parts of the world, but that even people in affluent parts of the world are going to feel the effects of it.”

Yale’s local campaign arrives as part of a larger, national divestment movement that

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began last fall and has now spread to over 250 college campuses across the U.S. This rapid escalation in activism stems primarily from the work of Bill McKibben, a leading environmental advocate, and his organization 350.org, which focuses on building grassroots movements globally to solve the climate crisis.

In July 2013, McKibben authored a landmark article in Rolling Stone that communicated three things in startlingly simple terms: there is impending grand-scale danger associated with the Earth’s changing climate; there is a threshold for future carbon emissions beyond which human life is unsustainable; and, finally, that the fossil fuel industry has every intention to burn far past this threshold. “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn,”

challenges of our generation down into a context that college-aged individuals can approach confidently. In his mind, this is why divestment is so interesting: “It’s suddenly made American colleges a key front line in the climate crisis.”

DIVESTMENT IS A STRATEGY THAT HAS been used to push for policy change in past, most notably during the 1970s and ’80s, when apartheid South Africa was at the center of discussion and controversy on many university campuses in this country. Students staged protests all over the nation, including some at Yale during 1986 and 1987 that involved over 300 participants. Demonstrators also constructed a mock shantytown on Beinecke Plaza, and local authorities intervened and made several arrests when activists resisted the administration’s demand

he finished by saying, “We get on top of it now, or it’s going to be on top of you most of your life.”

Students involved with the divestment movement have internalized this message, expressing that institutions like Yale are here to construct and maintain a healthy, sustainable world for future humans. “We do have this stake in the future, that’s why we exist,” Shapiro said. “Universities are here to train and educate this next generation of leaders… that’s why I think, as a university, we have a role in divestment.”

Yet while thinking decades ahead, Shapiro and the other members of Fossil Free Yale are working intensely in the present.

After a fall semester of brainstorming, networking, drafting, and research, the community has entered the spring term with force, hosting a kickoff event in early Febru-

“In 50 years the only question they’ll ask about our time is: ‘So, the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’“ —Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org McKibben writes in the piece. “We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.”

Seeking to embody that intervention, college students in every corner of the United States have set their sights on a tangible goal: endowment divestment. The excitement and momentum of this movement can be felt in dorm rooms, dining halls, and courtyards in every region of this country.

“I think the rapid spread of the divestment movement indicates there’s lots of passion,” McKibben wrote in an email to the Herald.

“Everywhere I go I see young people who are fired up to make a difference.” He noted that a great virtue of the campaign is that it reduces the potentially paralyzing global

that the “eyesore” be removed. Nationally, 155 universities had fully divested from all companies complicit in apartheid by 1986.

However, while Yale did adhere more closely to ethical investing standards during this period of student pressure, the University did not join these 155 institutions in complete divestment.

Legacy is an important motivation for many who do social and environmental justice work, and the students of the modern movement are eager to be on the right side of history. “Last summer the Arctic melted,” McKibben said. “In 50 years the only question they’ll ask about our time is: ‘So, the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’

And for students in particular—if you’ve got 70 years left on this planet, the bulk of them are going to be spent dealing with this crisis.” In a resounding note of urgency,

ary that drew over 80 students and included a Skype-in appearance by McKibben. They have been distributing flyers, tabling in some of the areas of campus, and flooding Yale’s online social networks with statuses and updates about the local campaign and the greater national movement. They have sent representatives to large, student climate convergences at peer institutions like Brown University and Swarthmore College, as well as the Presidents’ Day “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington DC, which saw the attendance of over 40,000 Americans protesting and urging President Obama to reject the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project that has been deemed “game over for the climate” by NASA climatologist James Hansen.

Most recently, on Mon., Mar. 4, the group held an event on cross campus as part of a

nationwide, student-organized “March 4th on Climate Justice” day. For half an hour in the afternoon, the members of Fossil Free Yale recorded videos and took photographs of Yale students showing their support of divestment and their solidarity with other environmental justice groups around the U.S. Members of Fossil Free Yale have been extremely excited by the initial response of the population. “It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” said Shapiro. “From my personal experience petitioning, I would say that 85 percent of people are receptive, and most of them sign the petition.” She believes that this trend of approval comes from both an “awareness of a national divestment movement” as well as “people being generally supportive of environmental issues here.”

Abigail Carney, JE ’15, explains that the collective passion and acceptance of the

years, we’re going to have a whole new generation of professional climateers who are psyched and capable of dedicating their lives to solving climate change.”

YET UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATIONS ARE not convinced by excitement and well-executed rallies, no matter how much momentum the campaign can muster. There are distinct protocols in place for making changes to the endowment portfolio, and Fossil Free Yale has worked just as hard within the lines of bureaucracy as it has outside of them. “[The group will] go through every legitimate channel [it] can before trying to move towards different tactics,” Shapiro said. “Again, the long-term goal is climate policy change, nationally, and the shorterterm goal is getting Yale to divest from the 200 top companies who hold the majority

the investment office—at an open forum in early February. Using the language of The Ethical Investor, they argued that there is urgent need to divest, that Yale is close in proximity to the climate change problem, that divestment would have a sizable impact on reducing the effects of this problem, and that the economic move would not cause serious harm to the endowment.

Though the ACIR was impressed with the students’ presentation and assessment, the future of the proposal is still uncertain.

Carney, a central member of the report team, voiced some concerns about next steps, saying that Jonathan Macey, chair of the ACIR and the Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law at the Yale Law School, “doesn’t think it’s plausible to divest from 200 [companies], and 200 still seems like

“The [administration has] emphasized [...] how much time these things take [...] That’s what worries me—we don’t have time.”

—Gabe Rissman, ES ‘16, Fossil Free Yale movement, both in these primary stages at Yale and also on a larger scale, arise at least partially because of the nature of divestment itself. “This is a really concrete thing that a lot of people can work toward together,” said Carney. “I think the environmental movement has been stuttering and struggling to find a cause to unite young people. It’s really hard to find ways to influence the big guys up top, and policy, but I think [the national divestment movement] really has the potential to do that, and that’s what’s so exciting about it.”

Bonnie Frye Hemphill, FES ‘13, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has been very encouraged by her experience with Fossil Free Yale. “What’s amazing to me is to see the unbelievable work coming from 18 year olds and 19 year olds….In three, four, five

of fossil fuel reserves.” Hemphill sees the administration as Fossil Free Yale’s “best possible partner.”

Pursuing these “legitimate channels,” a small research team worked during the fall to compile a lengthy, comprehensive ethical analysis of Yale’s investment in fossil fuels.

This document argues that the practice of investing in the fossil fuel industry, with all of our current knowledge about the perils of climate change, violates the Yale Corporation’s own guidelines for socially responsible investment, as stated in The Ethical Investor, a 1972 Yale report on University investment ethics. The team presented the document to the Yale Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR)—an advisory panel to the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, the body that makes binding recommendations to

an arbitrary number. So, the most difficult challenge, as they see it and we see it, moving forward, is how do you define which companies you want to divest from.”

Macey corroborated this in an interview.

“Fossil fuels make up a very important part of the world economy,” Macey said.

“If reliance on fossil fuels continues, then divesting could impose a cost in the form of foregone investment opportunities and foregone growth of the endowment such that programs at the University, and the ability to provide financial aid would be less than it otherwise would be.”

Macey outlined what he believed to be the two primary challenges of this particular campaign. “One…has already been met,” he said. “I think the student group pushing for divestment has been successful in establishing that global warming is a serious and

immediate problem. The second challenge is making the case that divestment from companies involved in fossil fuels will be likely to alleviate the global warming problem in some tangible or meaningful way.”

The members of Fossil Free Yale know they will have to work hard to maintain current levels of energy and interest while administrative and economic minds digest the proposal behind closed doors. Gabe Rissman, ES ’16, described a common response his report team has been receiving from members of the administration. “They have really emphasized to [us] how much time these things take; that for a decision like this, we have to get the entire university on board, and that we can’t afford to make any mistakes,” he said. “But that’s what worries me—we don’t have time.”

Yet amidst the calculations, rhetoric and politics of this divestment push, there is a distinctly human element that grounds everyone who is close to the movement. “Climate change isn’t just something that happens in graphs and tables and CO2 emissions,” Nesser said. “It’s something that happens to people, and even if I do not directly see the effects, there are people in my town, my region, in other regions of the world who are being affected on a daily basis.”

Shapiro commented on what lies at the core of the divestment movement: “The real goal is justice, and justice is something that affects people,” she said. “The way that climate change is happening… the people who are in marginalized communities, poor areas, are the people that are most affected by [it].

And that is an issue of justice. That is an issue that should affect all of us as human beings, as citizens of this country, and of the world.”

There is no way to know whether the administration will announce a decision tomorrow, a year from now, or not at all, but those concerned can take comfort in one divestment certainty on this campus: Fossil Free Yale is here to stay.

“I think this group gives people a moral calling to answer,” Hemphill said. “I think people are finding an identity in fossil freeing us, fossil freeing our community.”

—graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

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A time to lead John Stillman, SY ‘14, considers the long tradition and present direction of public service at Yale

t should not come as a surprise that Yale’s new political elite has a sense of the giants that came before them. They understand the history that permeates this place— the names of senators, justices, presidents.

But there is something different about Yale’s new generation of change-makers, something they have learned from their predecessors.

They exude a tactful reluctance. They’re fashioned after George Washington, it would seem—not in it for the power, but more than happy to lead the troops across the icy Delaware River. They’re ambitious, high-performance college kids, doing what they can to make a difference.

Amalia Skilton, CC ‘13, from Tempe, Ariz., founded Fierce Advocates at Yale group, is the president of YHHAP, and directs a group called SNAP that funded 35 students’ summer internships on political campaigns this past summer.

Joshua Revesz, CC ‘13, from Manhattan, was the chairman of the Yale Political Union (YPU) last year. He got his start in politics in the fifth grade, when he helped form Democratic Politically Active Kids with four of his prep school classmates.

Zak Newman, JE ‘13, is the former president of the Yale College Democrats. When I called him for an interview, he was in Washington, D.C. for a conference. He describes the distinguishing trait of the politically influential peers as the “x-factor.” There’s a larger, more driven group of Yalies now, he says, and to separate yourself from the pack, you have not only to care, but to do something about it. You oppose the death penalty: “Are you going to be the person to repeal it?” You support education reform:

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“Are you the person who’s going to help out in fixing Connecticut education?” These problems aren’t going to fix themselves, and the fact that you were admitted to Yale isn’t going to fix them either. It’s a matter of taking on agency.

Revesz expresses a similar sentiment.

Yale is selecting students for their merits, he explains, and the way to make a difference is to apply those merits to real problems. He aspires to “use the law to ensure a fairer world.”

For him, that means resisting the urge to ride

the institutional fabric. “That’s part of the culture at Yale—bigger, faster, higher—it’s a culture of superlatives.”

The Old Yale was of course a place of superlatives, as well. As Judith Schiff, Yale’s chief research archivist, tells me, “Nothing is new at Yale.” But the history books do not suggest the individualist striving that characterizes the politicos among today’s students. It was a place where the nobility of public service was inherent, and the Yale network was embraced.

follow in his footsteps. Another sizable cohort of Yale graduates would establish colleges across the nation—the alumni registry includes the founders of Princeton, Dartmouth, and Cornell, as the first presidents of Columbia, University of Chicago, University of California, University of Florida, and Washington University in St. Louis.

By the turn of the 20th century, the legacy of national leadership was already well established. This history provides the backdrop for what Jim Sleeper, DC ’69, professor

“We think of ourselves as being more like executives and less like laborers.”

—Amalia Skilton, CC ‘13 the coat tails of those leaders who came before. “I try not to use Yale connections to get jobs,” he says. “The fact that we, as people at Yale, have had opportunities that other people don’t have is a big motivator to make sure everybody has opportunities of sorts.”

The Yale education, he proposes, is not a confirmation that you’ve achieved something special, so much as a charge to go and do something with it. This is the essence of what he calls “Yale guilt”—perhaps akin to the “xfactor” Newman described.

These are the movers and shakers—the givers-back—and they go about their aims in a 21st-century way. According to Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, BR ‘12, current member of the Alaska State House of Representatives at age 23, these students’ drive is part of

BEFORE THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS A Yale student—at a time when the national republic was merely a glimmer in the eye of the American colonists—there was a piece of legislation. In 1701, the Connecticut General Court assembled, passing the Act For Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School, “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences,” in the hope that they “be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.” And so they were.

Once the school gained some momentum, it began to churn out these “Publick” stewards by the dozens. Graduating from Yale College at the tender age of 17 as valedictorian, Jonathan Edwards brought Yale some credibility in the church department, and dozens of missionaries, ministers, and bishops would

of political science at Yale, describes as the era in which the University sowed the seeds of American civil society. It was a national university, Sleeper claims, at a time when universities were primarily local.

The civic-republican era, as Sleeper calls it, preceded the Cold War period, when Yale began producing a different kind of leader. Theologians and college founders gave way to pioneers of the intelligence network. These were the heirs of Nathan Hale, YC 1773, the famous forefather of American spookdom, captured and hanged by the Brits in 1776, later cast in bronze and mounted on Old Campus—the one and only “State Hero” of Connecticut. Their ranks included Cold War architect Dean Acheson, YC ’15, James Angleton, YC ’41, chief of the

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CIA’s counterintelligence staff, the Bundy brothers (William, YC ‘39, and McGeorge, YC ‘40), George H. W. Bush, DC ‘48, and dozens of others.

A quarter millennium after the 1701 charter, University President A. Whitney Griswold, YC ‘29, spelled out for the class of 1957 the purpose of a Yale education—”To do good you must first know good”—commanding the graduating seniors to “Hold true to the purpose. No price, no mess of pottage, can equal its value to your country and yourselves.” The stronghold of Yale’s Good Shepherds loosed around this time, and the campus began developing a brand

LAW ‘84, notes that Kerry was the chairman of the Liberal Party of the YPU. “Actually, so was I, later on,” Amar says. “You know, there’s this amazing tradition.”

Gaddis Smith, PC ’54, who taught history at Yale for over 40 years, recalls Kerry in his seminar. The young professor forged a close relationship with Kerry. Kerry shared with Smith his doubts about serving in the army during Vietnam.

MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF TIMES THE name on a Yale College diploma has graced a political bumper sticker or yard sign. The faces that fill Yale’s yearbooks often reap-

the people who go there feel like they could actually influence the world,” he says. From Revesz, this is more a candid assessment of the stimulating political environment on campus than a confession of egoism. His immersion in the conversations and activism on campus springs from a genuine interest in the way government works. He came to Yale with experience—in addition to founding D-PAK, he worked on the Eliot Spitzer campaign (“before the sex scandal”). Last year, he served as president of the YPU, the sometime office of John Kerry. Amar would approve.

The way Amar understands it, this cadre

“We are all members of Dumbledore’s Army. Even if we weren’t at Hogwarts at the same time, we have the same teachers and the same traditions.”

—Akhil Amar, ES ‘80, LAW ‘83, Sterling Professor of Law of liberalism—in step with the larger national trend of the 1960s and 1970s, but fostered by the same people who would achieve prominence during the era.

Upon graduating from Yale College in 1949, William Sloane Coffin, TD ’49, DIV ’56, served the anti-Communist effort during the Cold War as a CIA officer for three years, before growing disillusioned and returned to Yale for divinity school. Divinity degree in hand, Coffin was named University Chaplain, a position he would use to catalyze progressive activism—he spoke out against President Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War and mobilized Freedom Riders to venture southward by bus, in solidarity with the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

Longtime Democratic Senator from Oklahoma David Boren would graduate in 1963, Joe Lieberman in 1964, current Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in 1965, George Pataki in 1967, and George W. Bush in 1968.

John Kerry, JE ’66, arrived on campus in the midst of this Golden Era of politicians, and he wasted no time before getting involved himself. Kerry is perhaps the most prominent liberal politician to walk Yale’s halls at this time. His legacy is held in high esteem by the many leaders of American government who would matriculate. Sterling Professor of Law Akhil Amar, ES ’80,

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pear, some years later, behind podiums, on stages, before crowds at state fairs, conventions, inaugurations.

This is Yale’s tradition—the prestige is palpable around campus. Portraits of the five former presidents to graduate from Yale College or the Law School hang at Mory’s; the inscrutable “Black Cup” can be ordered exclusively by presidents either of Yale or of the U.S. A couple years ago, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity made tank tops bearing the likeness of George W. Bush, former president of both DKE and the U.S. When you recognize the handful of presidents who attended your alma mater, there’s plenty of fun to be had. But to the Yale community today, the distinguished tradition of political service represents something more than mere trivia.

Revesz can point to the moment his political interest was born. It was the Bush-Gore election in 2000—specifically, the recount.

He also remembers his first contact with Yale’s reputation. “The first thing I knew about Yale was that George W. Bush went there,” he says. “I knew this in like sixth grade, before I thought about what college I could go to at all.”

Now a senior, Revesz’s understanding of the Yale experience is anything but trivial. “I mean, Yale is a college that obviously makes

of political stars is a staple at Yale—it’s a self-perpetuating cycle, in which high-achieving Yalies beget high-achieving Yalies, generation after generation. I ask him if he thinks it will continue in this way. “I hope so,” Amar replies. “That’s why I’m here. You know, I’m here to teach the next generation’s leaders.”

When I speak with those purported leaders, they acknowledge the influence of the leaders that came before them. “When you’re in classes and you hear [distinguished alumni’s] names, you know, it helps convince you that you can do whatever you want,” says Jones, a former Ward 1 alderman. Nate Loewentheil, YC ’07, LAW’ 14, who founded the Roosevelt Campus Network, says that the Yale tradition “allows you to envision goals for yourself.”

There is much more “rah-rah” in the older generation’s description of Yale exceptionalism. It’s a sort of team spirit. Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law School and Sterling Professor of Law, seizes on the quality of ingenuity that makes Yale alumni strong national leaders. “You see the people who figured out how to get the Bladderball over the wall,” he says. “And some years later, they’re figuring out how to do some similarly impossible thing.”

Amar imbues Yale pride with a patriotic air: his parents have preserved his childhood

bedroom, and after 35 years, there hangs the iconic banner above the tiny bed: For God For Country and For Yale. “So, that’s not subtle,” he admits. He adapted the slogan as the epigraph for his latest book, too.

“For me, yeah, it’s all about Yale,” he says. When he tells me this in his signature sotto voce, it actually sounds less goofy than it reads.

The new guard portrays the aura of alma mater in much less effusive terms. Indeed, their self-consciousness restrains them from labeling themselves leaders, much less Yale leaders. Given recent disparagements to the elitism associated with the Ivory Tower, this reluctance makes sense. Think back to Christine O’Donell’s ad during the 2012 senate campaign, which began with the proud declaration, “I didn’t go to Yale. I didn’t inherit millions, like my opponent did. I’m you.”

Of the students I interviewed, only one presented an overt aspiration to run for office. Mohammad Salhut, SY’14, said he hopes to run for “a seat in congress, or state senate—something like that, for sure.” But even Salhut made a point of characterizing the stereotypical Yalies with plans of the Oval Office as “assholes.” The one student whose presidential campaign has been the most talked-about since my freshman year informed me that he would not be able to talk on the record. (“Sounds like a great story,” he added.)

Revesz says he’d prefer to work behind the scenes, “and not have to go through the weirdnesses of getting elected.”

Nate Loewentheil tells me, “It’s a question of where I can have the greatest impact.”

Michael Jones, SY ‘11, was elected as Ward 1 Alderman in 2010, but explains, “I found it hard not to be involved.”

“It would be really fun to be on the school board someday, when I’m old,” Newman admits, “but short of that, I don’t really have any, like, specific interest in a specific office.”

Kreiss-Tomkins says: “I should clarify that I really wasn’t planning on running for office…”

WHETHER MEMBERS OF THE NEW POLItical vanguard are planning to run for office or not, there is little doubt that Yale furnishes them with a useful toolkit.

To start, the 36 credits required for graduation provide a solid foundation, at least. For Kreiss-Tomkins, it was only 35 (he walked across the stage in May, though, and doesn’t plan to return), and they were concentrated in what he considers Yale’s stron-

gest departments—the humanities. The root of that word, “human,” is crucial, he points out: “Politics is about people.”

Neal Wolin, SM ’83, LAW ‘88, deputy secretary of the United States Treasury, also emphasizes the enduring impact his courses had on the formation of his interest in government. Wolin recalls the macroeconomics course he took freshman fall, and one he took the spring of that year on free market policies, even citing specific material from the syllabus.

In recent years, some professors have initiated programs that hybridize the classical liberal arts education and a more modern, pragmatic approach. The most notable offering in this category is “Studies in Grand Strategy,” a seminar led by a team—cabinet seems more appropriate—that includes John Gaddis, Charles Hill, Paul Kennedy, David Brooks, John Negroponte, and Paul Solman. When I attended one of the weekly meetings—this one led by Gaddis—the class discussed Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, a text regarded as the 19th-century, Western complement to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which the students had read earlier in the semester.

Gaddis framed the discussion in historical context, explaining that George Kennan’s Cold War policy was informed by this same reading. “What’s the problem with total war?” Gaddis asked the group, a

curricular organizations, and residential colleges, their peers are immersed in the Yale experience—four quick years, at the conclusion of which they will become alumni.

“WE ARE ALL MEMBERS OF DUMBledore’s Army,” Amar tells me. “Even if we weren’t at Hogwarts at the same time, we have the same teachers and the same traditions.”

It’s an army stacked with three centuries of officers, most of whom live on in reputation, or as my grandfather puts it “on the other side of the sod.” (Assuming Kingman Brewster’s calculation, ”Yale will always graduate a thousand...leaders,” its ranks surpass that of most western nations’ current standing armies.) Whether this generation of Yalies actively seeks out the support of the network or not, it is there.

Recently, back in New Haven, Koh shared his insights into the D.C.-based cohort with me in his office. “If I go into a meeting and there are Yale people there,” Koh says, “I assume that they’re going to be my allies—they’re the ones who are going to get it.” He tells me about the necktie test: Koh would wear one of his many Yale-themed ties around the halls of the State Department.

Fellow alumni would react with enthusiasm, while “non-Yale people” often voiced feelings of distaste at his spirited wardrobe choices.

“It’s just a necktie,” he says.

School, who he describes as a “wizard” for his wisdom and magnanimity. Calabresi took an interest in Salhut’s background—he was born to Palestinian parents in Bronx, NY. “He’s sorta a father figure,” Salhut explains.

The frequent visits to campus by prominent public figures represents both a cause and effect of the Yale network. Drinks at Mory’s with Ann Coulter, 3 a.m. conversations with “the leading lights of the Conservative Movement,” dinner with Henry Kissinger: Michael Knowles, TD ‘12, has a veritable highlight reel of interactions with conservative luminaries, as a result of his involvement with the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, and the Student Initiative to Draft [Governor Mitch] Daniels, which he founded.

When Knowles jumped onto Jon Huntsman’s campaign in 2011, the candidate flew him and a fellow Yalie up to Dixville Notch, N.H.—the first town in the country to vote during presidential primaries—for a day of campaigning. Knowles was thrilled to meet Huntsman; he was floored when Huntsman informed him that he would be speaking at the candidate’s event the next day. “We introduce Huntsman, Huntsman introduces us,” Knowles recalls. The crowd went crazy, the media loved their speech, and when the New Hampshire results came in, Dixville Notch was the only town in the state in which Huntsman came in first (a tie with Romney).

“That’s part of the culture at Yale—bigger, faster, higher—it’s a culture of superlatives.”

—Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, BR ‘12 mix of graduate students and undergrads.

“What do you do once you’ve turned Russia into a parking lot?” A smattering of tentative responses. He proposed alternatives: Pacifism? Drones? “The ‘peace-by-scaringpeople shitless’ strategy?” The students invoked theorists from past weeks: Bismarck, Machiavelli, Augustus. “No one mentioned Thucydides,” Gaddis interjected. Then he gave the floor to a colonel in the U.S. military, a guest professor this particular week.

After the two hours were up, the group mingled with each other, approached the colonel to thank him for visiting, and then filed out of the classroom.

These are not the only budding Grand Strategists in the current student body.

Across a wide variety of departments, extra-

True, but it’s also a point of commonality.

It doesn’t require SONAR technology for Yale graduates to bump into one another. Wolin recalls an apparently standard run-in he experienced recently, when he sat down for the State of the Union Address one seat away from Senator Amy Klobuchar, JE ‘82, with whom he shared three years in New Haven.

Speaking with students, it’s easy to see how this sort of thing could happen regularly for them one day, and perhaps already is happening now. Salhut first met Howard Dean, PC ’71, during an internship the summer after his freshman year and came to see the former presidential candidate as a mentor and role model. Salhut also mentions Guido Calabresi, TD ’53, LAW ‘58, Federal Circuit Judge and former dean of Yale Law

“Yale teaches you to think on your feet.

Whether it’s in seminar when you haven’t quite done all the reading, or next to a presidential candidate in Dixville Notch,” says Knowles. “And I thought, Jeez, the Yale education really is something special.”

The product of this education, students suggest, is that you emerge someone special. “Yale is one of the signal achievements of the experiment that is America,” Benno Schmidt, TC ‘63, LAW ‘66, said in 1985.

“It is a treasure of Western civilization.” If students are getting the Yale education, they are part of this achievement. There is the danger, according to some, that Yalies will become convinced they deserve that treasure. Not that it’s an institutional secret or anything, but Yale instills a winning at-

titude.

The sense of Yale guilt—previously noblesse oblige—is to some extent at odds with the notion of Yale meritocracy. If students are earning their admission—stellar grades, top scores, track records of high achievemen—then what do they owe back?

For some, this conundrum is a matter of reconciling Yale students’ winning attitude with the ethic of public service that the University espouses.

Loewentheil sees a connection between the egoism and the vanishing sense of duty.

The private sector has effectively stolen members of the intellectual elite from the public sector, he argues. “There’s this idea that we’re the shit, we got into Yale…we’re sort or kings of the world. There’s no sense of owing it to other people.”

Sleeper agrees, adding that the Yale education has increasingly become a means, rather than an end in itself. He worries that students view Yale as a point of access: “[They] really want to get their hands on the brass ring,” he says. “They want to make it.”

The new form of entitlement is distinct from the type we associate with Old Yale.

Some argue that it’s fueled by the ideology in the academic community that encourages students to think like a president. Newman says his classes in oratory are accompanied by the suggestion that the material will come in handy when the time comes for your Senate confirmation; when he learned about clean energy for one class, the purpose was “so you’ll know what to do as president.”

It may work out for a few lucky Yalies, but Skilton takes issue with the presumptive nature of this approach. “We think of ourselves as being more like executives and less like laborers,” she says.

The conversation these students are pushing is about which floor Yale students ought to enter on. Without a doubt, the tradition of high-placed civil leaders offers access to those who follow greatness to Yale.

But the current generation notes a distinction between service and leadership—its members are a self-reflective bunch, perhaps as restrained as they are ready.

—inside cover by Devon Geyelin YH Staff —graphics by Lian Fumerton-Liu YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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Community cooks A plan for a New Haven food incubator

by Kohler Bruno YH Staff

epurposing an unused industrial kitchen might not seem like the kind of high-energy proposal that would generate an “enormous amount of excitement,” but that’s exactly the kind of atmosphere surrounding New Haven’s new Food Incubator Project, said Kelly Murphy, New Haven’s economic development administrator.

The proposal aims to transform an empty kitchen in the old Long Wharf campus of Gateway Community College, which moved to a set of new facilities downtown last fall, into an incubator for local food businesses.

The transformation of a now-deserted industrial kitchen into a bustling community space, where pickle-makers, pie-makers, and tomato sauce connoisseurs alike will work side-byside is enough to make city officials enthusiastic about the project, talking about it the way one might a landmark legislative program.

“Everyone has been really excited about it,” said Murphy. “You don’t always see that level of enthusiasm.”

The excitement comes from the conviction that the Food Incubator Project can concretely and meaningfully impact New Haven’s food sector. City officials hope that Gateway’s kitchen, once it’s converted into a rental unit, will invigorate the city’s growing food industry, which Murphy called “an extremely strong sector of New Haven’s economy.” The kitchen boasts multiple ovens, stoves, refrigerators and freezers—it even has a proofer, which is a machine for making bread.

Patrick Palmieri, a third generation New Haven tomato sauce-maker, said the entry into the food sector is not an easy one and a plan like this could help prospective food entrepreneurs. Palmieri said that becoming a part of the Palmieri Food Products business was a choice to “stick to the stuff I know: the red tomato sauce,” and to carry on his grandmother’s decision in 1920 to turn her homemade creation into a commercial product. He said that for new entrepreneurs, however, the hardest part of getting into the food business is getting started. “No one person is going to appear in this business without someone helping them,” he said.

Officials hope that the new food incubator could provide that initial help. The aim is that New Haven foodies, from startup bakers

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

looking to experiment with new recipes to established local restaurateurs in need of extra kitchen space, will jump at the opportunity to take advantage of expanded facilities at a reasonable price.

The current plan for the incubator stipulates that rent for the Gateway kitchen will be subsidized by the city in order to keep prices down so that startup companies can afford to use the space. Michael Melillo, a farmer at New

want to be food entrepreneurs, or for people who want to grow and expand their business,” Murphy said. The specifics of the plan, however, remain somewhat fuzzy: according to the proposal, businesses would pay for membership to the space, which would allow them to negotiate which weeks or months they would like to rent out the kitchen, but rates remain unspecified.

Helen Gaynier of Something Sweet Inc., a

Mercies Farm in Lyme, Conn., said he was optimistic about the prospects for the incubator to decrease costs for new food businesses. “I took a tour of the space back in December or January and I thought the potential was encouraging for small farmers like myself,” he said. Access to a certified kitchen is hard to come by, he said, adding that “the cost to have your own is prohibitive.”

Enter the Gateway Food Incubator. “We’re trying to establish a space for people who

bakery located near the old Gateway campus, explained that Something Sweet hoped to potentially use the space as a test kitchen for new products or variations. “We have enough production facilities,” she said. “It’s more for having a test kitchen to try a new formulation or bake samples.” For Melillo, the space represents a place he could use to transform his highly perishable fruits or vegetables into “value-added products”: “I could turn the fruits or vegetables I can’t hold on to into jams, tomato

sauces, or even baked goods like fruit pies,” Melillo said.

City officials also hope that the Food Incubator Project can help New Haven food entrepreneurs navigate the logistical and legal sides of opening a new small business. Tagan Engel, the head of the New Haven Food Policy Council, said she hopes that the incubator will provide technical business support for New Haven’s foodies. “We’d like for it to provide business support services so that people can learn about writing a business plan or navigating the legal processes,” she said.

In the 2012 New Haven Food Action Plan, a document drafted by Engel’s New Haven Food Policy Council, the group laid out its approach to changing the food culture in the city.

One of the council’s principal goals is to stimulate and fortify the city’s food businesses in the hopes that they expand and hire new workers locally, and Engel saw the incubator as a direct expression of this goal. “We’re trying to create a support system for small businesses to scale up,” she said.

The general feeling is that New Haven’s food scene is firmly on the up and up. “A lot of restaurants are opening right now in New Haven, tons of them,” remarked Palmieri. “That’s the biggest change in New Haven.” And the city hopes that the incubator will help to seed this fertile ground. “New Haven is a vibrant and creative community, and having a kitchen will open that up to all kinds of possibilities,” Melillo commented. “People will start producing things they otherwise wouldn’t.”

But with much of the project still uncertain, some aired notes of caution. “Right now we like the idea in theory, but we haven’t gotten down to the point where it’s a little bit more concrete,” said Gaynier. Murphy explained that the city is still hammering out the logistical issues surrounding the incubator. “We want to be flexible to meet different needs,” she said, “but we also want to be managing a project that can support the costs of running the facility.” If city officials are able to appropriately strike that balance (Murphy seemed certain they would) New Haven’s new Food Incubator will open this fall. Who knows—maybe Yale’s next favorite restaurant will be born in the old kitchen at Gateway.

—graphic by Lian Fumerton-Liu YH Staff

Funding lit Inaugural Yale prizes of $150,000 go to nine writers around the globe

by Alessandra Roubini YH Staff

arly one morning in February, nine unsuspecting writers received a phone call. The speaker on the other line had news that would prove to entirely alter their paths in the literary world.

On the morning of Mon., Mar. 4, Yale University conferred on nine emerging writers the Windham-Campbell Global Literary Prize. The ceremony took place within the translucent walls of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which also administers the award. The prize, in its first year, bestowed to each of its inaugural winners an award of $150,000, totaling $1.35 million. This award joins the lineup of prestigious literary prizes offered

by Yale, such as the Bollingen Prize and the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

The nine winners were split evenly among three categories: Jonny Steinberg, Jeremy Scahill, and Adina Hoffman for non-fiction; Naomi Wallace, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Stephen Adly Guirgis for drama; and Zoë Wicomb, James Salter, and Tom McCarthy for fiction. Of the recipients of this global prize, six are from the United States, two from South Africa, and one from England. The prize was limited to English-language writers. The other requirements of the recipients are that

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they must have one published book (or one professionally-produced play), accept the award in person, and participate in a literary festival on the Yale campus. The festival will take place from Sept. 10–13, 2013.

President-elect Peter Salovey, GRD ’86, who presented the awards at the ceremony, said of the program, “I think what I love about this prize the most, and why I think it will play a role in world literature, is the focus on emerging writers, where recognition can make a huge difference publicly and where financial support can make a huge difference personally.”

The funding for the award came from the estate of Donald Windham, who left his fortune to Yale for the purpose of creating such a prize. In his speech at the beginning of the awards ceremony, Michael Kelleher, the director of the program, said that Windham made the donation with very few stipulations. “When he left his estate to Yale in 2010, Donald Windham made very few demands,” Kelleher said, “other than that the awards be made annually in amounts sufficient to provide the recipient with the resources to pursue his or her writing for a year without having to be concerned with outside support.”

The selection process for the award is extremely rigorous: first, a group of

nominators “selected for their experience in the literary field,” according to the program’s website, choose an initial list of candidates. The prize does not accept applications or nominations from anyone other than their official nominators. Then, the nominees are judged by one of three juries (one for each category), each with three expert jurors. The finalists are then judged by the selection committee, four of which were named as life-time members

by Windham’s will. The other five members are selected by the president of Yale. In the highly confidential process, the prizewinners are not aware that they have been nominated until they are told that they have won. “[The award] allows me to not have to worry so much.” Hoffman said. “Basically, this will sustain me through most of the remnants of my books, if all goes well. So it relieves a kind of pressure, but I should say, it’s not just a financial thing, it’s also a psychological thing. It makes it easier to sit down at your desk in the morning.”

Hoffman, whose work has mostly revolved around Israeli relations with the Middle East, splits her time between Jerusalem and New Haven. She described the focus of her work as “deeply involved in the life of the Middle East, in particular the lives

of people who are often overlooked in more conventional accounts of what happens in the Middle East.”

“Impossible,” said Wicomb, a South African fiction writer who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, in her official press statement upon receiving the award. “For a minor writer like myself, this is a validation I would never have dreamt of. I am overwhelmed—and deeply grateful for this generous prize. It will keep me for several years, and it will speed up the writing too since I can now afford to go away when the first draft proves difficult to produce in my own house.”

As the prize concludes its inaugural year, Kelleher is looking to expand the reach of the program. “We’re going to have a literature festival here in September, and my hope is that we really are going to make this festival part of the fabric of student life here on campus.”

He added, “We’re going to have a book club that runs throughout the school year; we’re going to recommend one book from each author on our website throughout the year, in the hopes that students will be encouraged to read it, and that faculty will be encouraged to put some of these books on their syllabi.”

—graphic by Devon Geyelin YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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CULTURE Scenes from The Givers

by Cora Lewis nplanned, a baby begins to gurgle midway through the first act of a reading of The Givers, a new play by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, SM ’13, on Sun., Mar. 3. The noise-making kid in question is real, the offspring of an audience member—not an animatronic doll or trick sound effect. At first, the coos and babbling make the playwright nervous—the cries might disrupt the reading.

What’s more, the subject of the show is abortion, and the child makes it seem as though a stage-prop gun is suddenly loaded with live ammo. But when the rest of the performance plays out sans tantrums (except the occasional verbal ones depicted onstage by Chandler Rosenthal, CC ’14, as an idealistic and egoistic college-grad-brat), Kauder Nalebuff reflects that the infant’s presence only added to the performance. “Part of the message of the play is that these issues are live and not just subjects for debate or even art...so having a real baby in the room making baby giggles and sneezes and cries, I thought, grounded the story I’ve worked hard at making feel dynamic and real, in total unequivocal reality,” she said.

In order to do research for The Givers over the past year, Kauder Nalebuff shadowed doctors, abortion providers, activists, and workers at clinics in Connecticut and four other states. She spent time as a resident writer at Planned Parenthood, attended the National Right to Life Convention one weekend in Washington, D.C. and interviewed all the friends and acquaintances she knew to hold anti-abortion views.

The play follows a doctor and her hairdresser as they deal with the private and public implications of changing abortion law in the present-day U.S. Scenes of grimness and pathos are laced with humor, alternately warm and prickly. At times the connection between the tragic and the comic is made explicit: “I’m funny because I’ve suffered,” says Andrea, a beautician and avid (bordering on manic) anti-abortion activist whose young daughter dies of a heart defect (played by Bonnie Antosh, PC ‘13).

What follows are condensed scenes from Kauder Nalebuff’s writing process, based on an interview with the playwright. “There was so much narrative potential there,” she said, of the project. “Though this play was an amalgamation of three doctors I spoke to, set in North Carolina around a particular 20-week ban, each doctor I interviewed had enough stories for a play.”

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SCENE 1: Uncertain what she wanted to do after graduation, Kauder Nalebuff decided to shadow an obstetrician in Yale-New Haven Hospital late in the fall term of her junior year. Some of her experiences there would add new texture to the pro-choice position she had occupied for most of her life up to that point.

The setting: Winter 2012. An office in YNHH in which a female patient rests in bed, groggy and un-

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

der covers. Enter obstetrician, followed by Kauder Nalebuff. Slowly, the doctor explains that when the woman came in last night, four months pregnant, she had an infection that spread rapidly, and her husband had to make the decision, while she was unconscious, whether to keep the baby or save her life. The woman becomes visibly stricken.

PATIENT My poor baby in heaven. I’m so sorry. It should have been me.

Initially surprised by this reaction, Kauder Nalebuff would witness other similar moments of decision and judgment that would complicate her thinking about the range of reasons for pro-choice stances, many of which made their way into The Givers. Kauder Nalebuff next followed an abortion provider in Bridgeport, Conn., that same year.

SCENE 2: Spring 2012. Outside a medical building in Bridgeport. Enter doctor, followed by Kauder Nalebuff. As the two walk into the clinic, protesters emerge and spit at them. Others try to sprinkle holy water on them. A security officer holds the door and accompanies the duo inside.

Within the clinic, the officer demonstrates for the doctor how to hold a gun, and how to carry and conceal it.

The doctor is also advised to take a different route to work each day.

“So much of what these doctors described, which I felt I couldn’t convey even in drama, was a constant sense of paranoia that they learned to live with,” Kauder Nalebuff said of events like this one.

SCENE 3: Returning home from work, one of the doctors Kauder Nalebuff has been following finds a 10-foot wooden cross erected in her backyard.

In The Givers, a medical professional, read by Willa Fitzgerald, JE ’13, is subject to similar scare tactics and harassment. In one scene, the fictional doctor learns to take in her mail promptly, to avoid displaying her address. In another, her daughter returns home to find their housecat’s throat has been slit.

One of the show’s main narrative threads concerns Fitzgerald’s character’s sacrifices of time, energy, privacy, and possibly safety, in order to testify in a court case, while trying to care for her own daughter. In parallel, Antosh’s character finds herself distracted from the day-to-day well-being of her nephew, Will (Gabe DeLeon, JE ’14) by her concern for the pro-life cause. DeLeon sensitively depicts a young man whose own experience of the abortion debate is colored mostly by his loneliness, ambiguously muted sexuality, and desire for love and acceptance from his aunt.

Despite her expressed wish to convey both sides of the conflict, Kauder Nalebuff said her considerable feelings of gratitude toward and admiration for the doctors she met during her research made it difficult for her to sympathetically depict the anti-abortion perspective.

“Those arguments were harder for me to humanize, because I’m less familiar with them,” she said. “In some ways, I found myself blind-sided to the pro-life perspective after speaking with these doctors and seeing what they were put through.”

In an attempt to keep the play from becoming onenote or lopsided, Kauder Nalebuff attended the National Right to Life Conference in D.C. SCENE 4: Sitting in the audience at the RTL Conference, Kauder Nalebuff observes a moment of silence for “the lives of the unborn.” She listens to the speeches of a highschool competition in rhetoric on the subject of abortion, and copies down portions of the dialogue. She feels like a spy.

“That was an idea that pervaded the conference— ‘the lives that are missing around us,’” she said. “I hadn’t encountered that before.”

SCENE 5: Kauder Nalebuff sits with a representative of Planned Parenthood, after a six-month background check and vetting process to be allowed access to interview workers.

PLANNED PARENTHOOD REPRESENTATIVE The doctors will speak only on the condition of anonymity. You mustn’t reveal their identities, describe what they look like, or write down where they live. You can’t use idioms, expressions, figures of speech, or phrases that may give away anyone’s personality or character. You must password protect your computer at all times and destroy all your notes once you’ve completed your research and writing.

One of the most worrying insights from her time at Planned Parenthood, Kauder Nalebuff said, was that policy experts there feel that Roe v. Wade is not in a place right now where it can be challenged or tested.

“The main takeaway for me,” she said, “was that huge hits have been made in the past few years to women’s access to abortion in this country, but people aren’t necessarily talking about it, because they’ve been done in piecemeal ways, on a state by state basis. There’s not one big, sexy front we can march against.” Rather, small bills and pieces of legislation chip away—whether requiring sonograms, extending bans and waiting periods, or calling for parental approval—to the same effect.

The intimate scale of The Givers speaks to this trend, in which the debate over abortion plays out at the local, interpersonal level, rather than in the political arena.

—graphic by Madeline Butler YH Staff

Out of place

by Anna-Sophie Harling

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ale was, and still is, an Anglophile place,” said Jay Gitlin, CC ’71, MUS ’74, GRD ’82, History lecturer and the associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders. He pointed to the Elizabethan Club and the bulldog mascot as signs of the University’s English heritage.

After all we are designed after Ox-Bridge, which serve as a referent for the structure and design of many of the residential colleges.

There’s very little that’s “French” about this place.

However, within the illustrious history department of this university resides a cabal of professors that are dedicated to studying the French presence in North America.

Gitlin’s office in Davenport is enough to make anyone want to study North American history—with a specific unexpected focus on the French in North America. Books like West From the Appomattox, The Franco-American Overview, and Buffalo Bill fill every inch of the room, floor to ceiling. Gitlin’s passion for the subject is equally infectious: within five minutes of speaking to him, I was convinced I wanted him to be my senior thesis advisor.

While history has long been a popular major at Yale, the department has quietly assumed its place as one of the world’s leading institutions in the study of French North America. This is in large part due to the work of Gitlin, John Mack Faragher, GRD ’77, Howard R. Lamar Professor of American History, and Ryan Brasseaux, GRD ’08, dean of Davenport College. This team of academics has published some of the leading works in this field of study. Faragher is the author of A Great and Noble Scheme, a book that documents the expulsion and genocide of the French-Acadian people from North America.

Brasseaux, of Acadian descent, will soon publish a work on French influence on 20th-century America culture, which Gitlin assured me “is going to be a big deal.”

“We have now gotten the reputation as the primary place to study French North America,” Gitlin said. This was not always the case.

According to Gitlin, In the 19th century, “before Yale became this Canadian studies presence, if you wanted to know about French

Canada or French North America, the seat of that knowledge was really at Harvard,” Brasseaux said. There, the expert in the field was Francis Parkman, an American historian known best for his sevenvolume France and England in North America.

“The momentum shift[ed], in a way, from 19th-century Harvard to 20th-century Yale,” Brasseaux said, in part due to Robin Winks, who was a prominent history professor at Yale from 1957 until his death in 2003. Winks served as a mentor to Gitlin, who himself majored in history as a Yale undergraduate student. Gitlin first became interested in the subject of French North American history because his roommate in Calhoun was of French-Creole descent and from New Orleans. His senior thesis, titled “Forgotten Frontiers,” was inspired by Howard Lamar, former president of Yale and expert on the history of the American West. He went on to write his dissertation on French North America, specifically, the French Midwest. This semester, Gitlin is teaching a class titled “Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.”

As Yale’s scholarly prowess in the study of French North America began to emerge, so too did the opportunities afforded to those studying the subject. This began in 1976 when Yale, through the efforts of Winks, received a bicentennial gift from Canada to establish a permanent visiting Canadian professorship. This year, the spot is filled by an expert on the underground railroad in Canada. There also exists a Canadian Studies Committee, which supports research in Canada, as well as a University prize for the best essay written on Canadian history. Yale’s Canadian collection is among the best in the United States, with resources in both the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library as well as the Beinecke.

Needless to say, this appraoch provides a perspective on American history that is different from the norm. “History looks very different from [the French] perspective,” Gitlin said. “It’s a whole different slice of North America.”

—graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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REVIEWS South by Northeast

by Aaron Gertler YH Staff

s you read this, 60,000 people who aren’t usually in Austin, Texas are in Austin, Texas. The South by Southwest Festival (SXSW), a sort of American Mecca for aspiring rock stars, “hackers,” “creatives,” and anyone else who has trouble explaining their job to their parents, is here. Incidentally, SXSW is the largest music festival in the world: bands, brands, and strange ideas will encounter an audience of shrewd critics, venture capitalists, and sharply-dressed locals in the temporary hipster capital of the world.

But should you care? At first glance, massive culture conferences don’t offer the best value proposition to Yalies. We’re already surrounded by more live music and speakers than any person can absorb; our classmates are the kinds of people who will themselves be conference-speakers in 10 years.

On the other hand, if you can find a friend or stranger to crash with, it’s cheaper than a cruise or Cancun. Free food abounds. Organizers warn you to bring an extra suitcase to carry back your load of free stuff—and unlike the Yale career fair, the companies handing out merchandise don’t want your soul or your resume. Just your attention.

Attention is, of course, the Internet’s most precious resource, and even as a music fest, SXSW is as close to walking around the Internet on two legs as you’re likely to get before Google Glass becomes the new Gmail. If you can think of something you’ve stumbled over online in the last year, it’s probably the subject of a keynote speech. Randall, of “Honey Badger Don’t Care,” will be signing books, alongside Nate Silver, Guy Kawasaki, and the author of something called Gluten Is My Bitch. That guy who used a 3D printer to help make a gun will give a speech addressing “whether software will eat the political world,” which sounds bad. Can we shoot the software with our print-guns?

Will that make it stop?

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(SXSW Facebook)

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

(SXSW Facebook) Still, though it lacks a guiding theme, the festival’s everything-goes mindset is key to its lasting value. Cowboys and journalists and programmers get the rare chance to hear each other’s perspective on climate change and social media. Record labels of every variety come looking for musicians—and in a world where labels are losing ground to the god of almighty buzz, musicians have the chance to play for an audience 10-times anything they’ve seen before. Directors gain a launch pad for their work that isn’t as cluttered as Sundance or Cannes; Kathryn Bigelow premiered The Hurt Locker at SXSW 2008, to such wide acclaim that some thought she’d locked up her Best Picture Oscar then and there. Without SXSW, there’s no “MMMBop,” no mumblecore movies, and no John Mayer. (Well, he’d be alive somewhere, I assume, but not necessarily famous.)

Alas, in every department, not everything about SXSW is Oscar-worthy. Specifically, though, some of the movies premiering at SXSW range from the story of a man learning to live with the demon inside his large intestine to a documentary featuring Baltimore’s reigning motorcycle gang. Each of these movies is launching its “WORLD PREMIERE” and has “LIMITED INTERVIEW SLOTS AVAILABLE.” (Most notably, “Big Ass Spider!”)

But the music at SXSW is promising, and also the most accessible part of the festival. There are big names aplenty—the Flaming Lips, Third Eye Blind, Icona Pop—but from the samples I’ve heard, even the underdog artists have talent to spare, not to mention stories. Crew Peligrosos (“Dangerous Crew”) spits the raw truth of life in urban Colombia, but also devotes time to teaching local children the basics of hip-hop.

DJ Pharris rose from nothing to become an official representative for Ciroc Vodka, renowned for his ability to “connect with the targeted demographics.” (I quote, readers, directly from his artist page.) And neo-soul group Fitz and the Tantrums’ “recipe for success” includes “six killer musicians” and “five dapper suits”; with any luck, their concert fee will finally let them all afford matching clothes.

And seriously, there are some great tunes coming out of South by Southwest—its status as a vital place for new music is justified. To get a taste for the festival’s diversity, consider sampling: the jagged dance-pop of Shiny Toy Guns, the Yeasayer-evoking synth anthems of The Pass, the old-school New York rap of Action Bronson, and Farzad Golpayegani’s instrumental rock, which bundles Mogwai and the Middle East into three-minute chunks of the best movie soundtrack you’ve never heard.

Final verdict: even for Yalies, who live in a constant festival-like campus bubble, SXSW is a worthwhile destination. So whether you’re seeing it in person or using it to distract yourself from mom’s request that you spring-clean the garage, you should spend some time in Austin before it’s back to just being Texas again.

Music: Rhye Spring is here, and the Los Angeles duo Rhye (Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal) is calling back the sun to its proper height with their stellar new album Woman.

Until the record’s release, Rhye shunned as much media and publicity as possible. As Hannibal and Milosh expressed on NPR, “We made a conscious decision to stay out of things. We just don’t want to be in the imagery of our music, because we don’t want to interfere with the individual experience of our songs.”

What remains, then, makes up one of the best albums of the year so far—because while Rhye has decided not include themselves on Woman, they include just about everything else.

Rhye crafts elegant and endearing music; its presence entirely surrounds its listeners. The album is a mix of smooth jazz, ephemeral dream-pop, and sleek production. Rhye has invited many apt comparisons to minimalist indie pop bands like the xx, Beach House, and Chromatics, but Woman isn’t nearly so held back or restrained as its predecessors. “The Fall,” Rhye’s debut single from October 2012, expresses Woman’s sound more exquisitely than any track on the album, but Woman experiments in all the right ways. “3 Days” quite casually flirts with disco, and is accompanied by a mixture of low-tone synth lines and a symphonic mix of violins, flutes, and clarinets. “One of Those Summer Days,” by contrast, is a slow and dreamy track that lingers through a labyrinth of reverbs, mournful guitars, and hushed voices.

Despite this variety, nothing on Woman feels missing or out of place. After finally parsing through the incredibly satisfying layering of sound and emotion in Woman’s ten tracks, it’s quite clear: everything that Rhye includes in Woman simply belongs there. Rhye never ‘interferes with the individual experience’ of the music on Woman: they make that experience a complete one.

—Alexander Saeedy YH Staff

Movie: Jack the Giant Slayer When I went to see Jack and the Giant Slayer, my only point of reference for the classic fairy tale was my third-grade production of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which mostly included lots of singing and low production values. Take that last part, add spurts of blood and gore, throw in a love interest, and you’ve got Bryan Singer’s Jack and the Giant Slayer.

When searching for a word to describe the film, I came up with “kramp”— kitch, crap, and camp all melded together in a seamless manner. I think this is an apt descriptor for a whole genre of movies that has recently been gaining prominence—fairy tale flicks like Red Riding Hood and Snow White: Kristen Stewart Angst Version. Jack follows in much the same vein, but I have a few reasons for believing that it is a cut above.

For starters, a (forbidden) love interest is established almost instantaneously.

Jack falls for Princess Isabel, who looks past his poverty to see a go-getter with the wit of Odysseus and the doe-eyed innocence of High School Musical-era Zac Efron. Better yet, Jack and his ladylove finally kiss at the ideal one-hour mark.

Just-delayed-enough gratification: check. Did I mention that Isabel is fiercely independent and not afraid to give you a piece of her mind? Resemblance to latter-day liberated Disney princesses: check.

Of course, the movie has some holes. Although the story takes place in a vaguely Arcadian medieval England, English accents are hard to come by and mostly laughable (the sole exception to this is Ewan MacGregor, who plays Elmont, head of the King’s elite guard). Besides the lack of cultural or linguistic consistency, the movie can’t decide what it wants to be: it runs the gamut from earnest fairy tale to monster flick. The result is a pretty lopsided and sometimes unsavory viewing experience.

That said, don’t dismiss Jack too quickly. The sheer simplicity and dichotomous division of good versus evil makes this film solidly watchable. Indeed, Jack’s naïveté makes for a sort of B-movie poignancy. The cherry-on-top is the wholesome and slightly cloying message that Jack spells out at the end of the film to Isabel: “No one’s useless, least of all the princess.” It’s a palatable blandness that doesn’t aim too high, but leaves one feeling dissatisfied and a little swindled.

—Andrew Koenig YH Staff

TV: House of Cards With Netflix’s first original series, the drama House of Cards, the medium has until now overshadowed the message. Netflix has released the entire first season all at once, satisfying the binging habits of contemporary TV watchers, and this business strategy has sent ripples throughout the blogosphere. But all of the industry hubbub has obscured talk of the actual quality of the show. This ultimately may be because House of Cards is a decidely mediocre cable TV drama.

The marketing ploy here is clear. Unlike network TV, Netflix’s biggest hits tend to be critically acclaimed shows with rabid cult followings. Therefore in creating original programming that would draw viewers to their network, Netflix turned not to trashy reality television or a cheap sitcom, but rather to a paint-bynumbers “quality” drama. To be fair, the show made two inspired key decisions in picking its creative team: pairing David Fincher’s brilliant, dark, but sharp initial art direction with Kevin Spacey’s winning performance as Francis Underwood, a coldly pragmatic politician, was an excellent move that paid strong dividends. Unfortunately, neither the rest of the casting nor the show’s writing live up that potential.

The series is surprisingly slow-moving for a show that presumably could have had any episode quota they asked for. Roughly two thirds of the series are spent laying pieces for the final few episodes, and when the final revelations do come they are ultimately unsatisfying. The plotline—an intrepid young reporter, Kate Mara’s Zoe Barnes, uses her sexuality and skills to rise quickly through the journalistic ranks—seems dead-set on employing as many tired clichés as possible.

Character motivations that are meant to be “complex” throughout the season come out as simple ethical ambiguities or shock moments that only ape the actual emotional investment of earlier, groundbreaking TV dramas.

It is interesting to watch a pawn in a commercial game have pretensions towards true quality. Perhaps next season, with some sharper writing, the series will mark a real artistic threat to the successes of cable drama. Until then, however, the big news will remain Netflix’s corporate ascendance, not the quality of the series.

—Gareth Imparato YH Staff

Staff list: Here’s what we’ve been up to What we’re watching: RuPaul’s Drag Race What is objectively the best reality show ever is back, and somehow RuPaul has managed to bring the absurdity to a whole new level. What makes RuPaul’s so great? It’s the one reality show I know that is fully self-aware, making fun of how mindless reality television is while at the same time treating it as the most important thing in the world. Additionally, if you’ve never seen a “Lip-sync For Your Life,” you haven’t lived.

What we’re listening to: Odd Furniture EP by Salva This is the sort of dance music I never knew that I’ve always wanted: addictive bangers with a dark edge that makes them all the more enticing. Rave music for 5 a.m.

What we’re eating: Mamoun’s Baba Ganoush sandwich I know Mamoun’s seems an obvious choice, but too many people overlook this incredible sandwich. The falafel doesn’t even come close. I normally hate baba ganoush, but somehow, Mamoun’s makes it taste delicious. (And, weirdly, it’s only this Mamoun’s—I ordered it once from their NYC location and it was a totally different recipe.) Do yourself a favor and try it.

What we’re looking at: Yale School of Art MFA theses The Green Hall Gallery’s started exhibiting MFA theses from the four departments (painting and printmaking, graphic design, sculpture, and photography), and the results are both weird and beautiful. The painting shows are over, but currently up are sculpture theses, and what I’ve seen is striking. One room pairs transparent cutouts of wrecked-cars with a giant photograph of a beached whale. Plus, you might just see the work of tomorrow’s art-world superstars.

—Andrew Wagner YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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write for the Herald make new friends email emma.schindler@yale.edu

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Actually, just Facebook in general.

I cannot identify any of these quotations because I did not read the book, sir!

When will we shake that off?

SOMESOM

Quote IDs

It’s been so long that it just feels foreign and awkward.

People who use Facebook to “stay in touch”

TA

Feeling anxious about the Ides of March Miami Heat fans

Remembering how to drive

UCS newsletter

FellFe

You know everyone is just waiting for you to lose now, right?

Coordinating spring break plans with your parents

“Don’t forget to network over spring break!”

Dorm mice

Need we say more?

“Let’s hook up with Grandma in Boca!”

The Yale Herald (Mar. 7, 2013)

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