TYH LV 8

The Yale Herald Volume LV, Number 8 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, March 29, 2013

From the staff My 7th grade history teacher once made each of her students explain to the rest of the class when he or she thought the use of military force against another nation was justified. My classmates went up one at a time and gave what sounded to me like very strategic answers to this question. I went up and said, quite earnestly, “never.” Not that it’s relevant, but I think my teacher was pleased.

My views have become more nuanced in the past decade—however, that idealist bone in me perked up when I saw the subject of this week’s front, written by Aaron Feuer, ES ’13. New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman’s progressive attitude towards minimizing gang-related crimes was especially refreshing on a day when my Twitter feed informed me that NRA materials were found among Adam Lanza’s possessions, and men with loaded rifles intimidated protesters at a gun safety rally.

While firearms may be a gross detriment to humanity, in no way does this invalidate some of the things people use them for—revolution, and social protest for example. In Voices, Maya Binyam, BR ’15, reflects on her father, once a social activist in Ethiopia, and over in Features Sophie Grais, SM ’14, reports on the fate of Tweed Airport’s air-traffic control tower in light of the sequester. And in a combative spirit all her own, Hilary O’Connell, TD ’14 argues that there’s more to gay rights than the battle for marriage equality. Meanwhile, Jin Gon Park, SY ’13, writes about flaring tensions between North and South Korea. And if you want to fight for your very own grading policy, get informed by reading our guide to the grading report, brought to you by Evan Walker-Wells, TD ’14, If, on the other hand, you are simply not in the mood for a fight, I promise there’s some fun stuff as well, like Gareth Imparato’s, SM ’15, review of Spring Breakers. Speaking of spring, I received an email a week ago informing me that I had officially survived winter. That fight is over, for this year at least.

Much love, Maggie Neil Features Editor

The Yale Herald

Volume LV, Number 8 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Mar. 29, 2013

EDITORIALSTAFF: Editor-in-chief: Emma Schindler Managing Editors: Colin Groundwater, Eli Mandel, Maude Tisch Executive Editor: Emily Rappaport Assistant Executive Editor: Olivia Rosenthal Online Editors: Marcus Moretti, John Stillman Assistant Online Editor: Micah Rodman Senior Editors: Sam Bendinelli, Ariel Doctoroff, Carlos Gomez, Lucas Iberico Lozada, Nicolás Medina Mora, Clare Sestanovich Culture Editor: Micah Rodman Features Editors: Margaret Neil, Katy Osborn, Olivia Rosenthal Opinion Editor: Andrew Wagner Reviews Editor: Elliah Heifetz Voices Editor: Sophie Grais Design Editors: Julia Kittle-Kamp, Lian Fumerton-Liu, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Assistant Design Editor: Madeline Butler Photo Editor: Rebecca Wolenski 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 you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2012-2013 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: Emily.Rappaport@yale.edu Web: www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

2

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 Aaron Feuer, ES ‘13, introduces

us to New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman and explores his new method of community policing that has a lot of people very excited.

VOICES 6

Will Theiss, BK ‘16, talks to Margaret Anne Tockarshewsky, director of the New Haven Museum—home to, among other things, Ezra Stiles’ diary .

7

Maya Binyam, BR ‘15, traces her scars and her father’s childhood in Ethiopia.

8

OPINION: Hilary O’Connell, TD ‘14, takes a closer look at marriage equality, and Jin Gon Park, SY ‘13, urges caution in relations with North Korea.

FEATURES 10

Sophie Grais, SM ’14, considers the repercussions of the announced closing of Tweed New Haven Regional Airport’s air traffic control tower. Also: the Herald breaks down the sequester and its effects on the FAA by the numbers.

17

Kohler Bruno, SM ‘16, sheds light on gambling addiction research being done at Yale and shifting conceptions of mental health.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Evan Walker-Wells, TD ‘14, guides you through the previously mysterious proposed changes to our grading system. Also: A profile on a recent winner of The Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize and a survey of Passover cuisine at Yale.

20

Gareth Imparato, SM ’15, analyzes Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Also: The Strokes, OneRepublic, Guided By Voices, Rilo Kiley, and the staff list.

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

THANk GOD IT’S FRIDAY The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the hit in IM dodgeball.

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr: The Spring Fling Website To the people who say that Yale doesn’t encourage technological innovation, you ain’t seen nothing.

The Spring Fling website has semitransparent drop down menus, videos that scroll sideways, and a logo that reminds me of my childhood obsession with Legos, but in a good way. I hope it gets a shout-out from Macklemore or Best Coast. I hope Presidentelect Salovey hires the Spring Fling Committee to bring some of that pizzazz to www.yale.edu, or at the very least OCS, because, let’s face it, those websites are barely fit for Internet Explorer right now.

D:

Anthony Kennedy Everyone’s profile picture is a red equals sign and we’re ready to deliver a smashing, withering blow to Prop 8. Anthony Kennedy, I know you aren’t the only reason that isn’t going to happen. It’s just easy to blame you because you are, to quote The Sound of Music, unpredictable as weather.

You’re the certified swing vote, the new Sandra Day O’Connor, the man of mystery. I know you think the Court shouldn’t have heard the case and you’ll let Prop 8 die quietly, like a dehydrated geranium. We just wanted a bloody beheading.

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

F:

Spring breakers I’m not talking about the movie starring James Franco, because if I did I’m sure he’d tweet an angsty picture about it like that one time when the YDN really pissed him off. (Well, maybe I am, because I would on principle fail a movie about girls in bikinis going on a crime spree to pay for a spring break trip. I mean, how do you plan to pay for the rest of your life? That movie was already made, it’s called Thelma & Louise, and we know how that worked out.) Anyway, the real spring breaker I hate is you. I’m glad you had an awesome time, drank awesome shooters, listened to awesome music, and then sat around to soak up other people’s awesomeness (thanks, Janis Ian!) in a country that had both NGOs and conveniently located beaches. However, the joke is on you because I finished all of House of Cards from my bed.

—Alisha Jarwalla YH Staff —graphics by Christine Mi YH Staff

BOOM/BUST INCOMING: Being Jew-ish At Yale, everyone is Jewish at Passover. Everyone already brims with tikkun olam, many a goy schlepped over to Wall Street seeking the culinary treats found at Slifka, and gentiles are reaping the benefits of toffee-covered matzo without having to give up other carbs. Did you know that Slifka will give take-out seder meals to anyone? With two bottles of wine per person?

Oy vey. Where do I convert?

OUTGOING: Harvard

After everyone’s Pope brackets went to shit (was anyone else rooting for Archbishop Christoph Shoenborn?), many sought redemption in their precisely thought-out March Madness picks. Harvard’s surprise defeat of the favored team, New Mexico, meant that Yale got to make cheating scandal jokes and everyone could question the institution of Ivy League athletics.

But that was short-lived, because a) Harvard lost their second game and b) maybe a third of campus could say what sport we’re referring to here.

— Austin Bryniarski

TOP FIVE

BY THE

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 40 The number of states that have banned gay marriage, in either their laws or their constitutions.

Most outrageous arguments against marriage equality

47 The percentage of Americans opposed to samesex marriage.

1,100

5 4 3 2 1

If the institution ain’t broke, don’t fix it. <3 tradition Social Security

The number of federal benefits for married couples.

646,464

The number of same-sex-couple households in the United States.

Homosexuals have been known to sex, drug, and rock ‘n’ roll it up. Save the children!!!

Giving people more basic, human rights isn’t “radical” enough.

What if Noah had let pairs of gay animals on the ark?

—Cindy OK YH Staff

7 The percentage of those households receiving benefits from the government.

0

The number of times Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked her Facebook for help with her argument.

Sources: 1) Huffington Post 2) NBC News 3) The New York Times 4) NPR 5) CNN 6) conjecture —Jake Orbison The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

5

SITTING DOWN WITH Margaret anne tockarshewsky

by Will Theiss Courtesy of the New Haven Museum A native of Flushing, Queens, Margaret Anne Tockarshewsky became executive director of the New Haven Museum just over a year ago. Since then, she’s overseen an exhibition on bicycles, a children’s workshop on sailboats, and just about everything in between. After a tour of the museum, the Herald sat down with Tockarshewsky to talk about life at a non-profit, the maritime history of New Haven, and Ezra Stiles’ private diary.

YH: You’ve been at the museum since last February. How did you choose to come here?

MAT: I started as a publicist, and I worked in the Hudson Valley out in Pennsylvania. I then started working for the Queens Botanical Garden and was the director of communications and marketing. While I was there I decided I wanted to go back to school for my graduate degree. So I became a consultant to the garden and went back full-time to school and went to Columbia for historic preservation. I graduated from that program and stayed involved with the garden. It was during that time I started looking at director’s positions, and I went to a couple of interviews, turned a couple of things down, wanted jobs I didn’t get, and then this came up. It just seemed like it would be very challenging but also seemed to be just the right-sized institution for a first directorship.

YH: What exactly were some of those challenges?

MAT: As with a number of non-profits, you never have enough resources, financial or human resources, and this organization is not unlike others in that respect. And it had what I’d call a series of hiccups over the past decade, and was undergoing change. I think I’ve come along at the right time because a third of the board changed before I came here—we have new board members—and people had wanted to move the organization forward and wanted to embrace change.

YH: Can you talk a little bit about what you do day-to-day, and what your responsibilities are?

MAT: It’s overseeing this organization. We also have different components to us. We are the Whitney museum, and the photo archives, and the museum collection, all in this building. We also have the Pardee Morris house, which was burned by the raid on New Haven by the British in 1779, and that’s out in Morris Cove, and that was actually given to us as a bequest in 1918.

YH: What types of programs do you put on at the museum?

MAT: We have started to do family programs, and that’s something we’ve never done before. For example, we have a new painting in the New Haven Illustrated gallery that shows the harbor. And we’ve partnered with Schooner (a Connecticut youth organization). They do a lot of educational programs and maritime programs, and they have the Quinnipiac boat down by the water. So they were here for our 150th birthday party in November, and they got very excited when they saw all the boats and could identify them all from the painting that was from the 1860s. Michelle worked on a program for that in January, and we had 41 children come for that, and it was talking about sailboats, and then the kids could make their own model sailboat.

YH: Aside from families, are there any other demographics you’re trying to reach?

MAT: Well, I’d like to see our audience be reflective of all of New Haven. This past year that I’ve been here, I’ve really given Michelle and the staff the resources to go to the festivals and the farmers markets and just participate when other groups were having events so that we’d have a presence, and just get our name out there. The Cycle New Haven show is an example of a show that’s really brought in a whole new audience for us.

In a way, being from New York I expect to see a diverse audience that crosses all ages, and I was told that that’s not necessarily something that we’ve always enjoyed, so it was really gratifying to see so many people come out to that.

YH: How closely is the museum partnered with other Yale or New Haven institutions, if at all?

MAT: We really have a wonderful relationship with Yale China Association, and also the Council of East Asian Studies; they were involved this year with the lunar New Year celebration.

We’ve also had a cappella groups here and would love for them to come back. I actually would love to see us included as part of the orientation tours for new students. I really think that on their walk up the street to the Peabody they should stop in here—if we can be on the orientation tours for them and parents, we’d love to do that. Again, there are existing relationships, but they could be broadened, they could be strengthened.

YH: Do you think that there’s material here that would be interesting to Yale students and faculty?

MAT: We have in the past enjoyed some good relationships with Yale. In fact, we have several professionals from Yale on our various committees: collections committee, and the library committee. But it would be really wonderful to have more professors here who are sending students here; students do come to do research in the Whitney Library. We had a costume talk in the fall, and some people from Yale Rep came. That was exciting because we had a guest speaker, and she and they and I were looking at a military uniform jacket and just had wonderful things to say, and the insight and the exchange of information was so valuable.

YH: Do you have anything that represents Yale itself in the history of New Haven?

MAT: We do. As you saw, we have a few things in the New Haven Illustrate Gallery. We also have Ezra Stiles’ diary, president of Yale during the raid on New Haven. He recorded his observations from a steeple.

YH: What else do you have in the museum?

MAT: We were founded as the New Haven Colony Historical Society in 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, and these historical societies had been founded since the late 1700s.

We were the third founded in Connecticut, and basically at that time the intent in the historical societies was to preserve documents, so the papers and various sermons, that kind of thing—they were very scholarly in their approach to their collection. Gradually the city’s history was part of it, the directories and the maps and things like that. We have in our collection, which is on view at Yale in the Art Gallery now, a knife and fork that was taken from the tent of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

YH: How do you differentiate yourselves from other museums in New Haven?

MAT: We are the repository for the city’s history, and I think that that’s our niche. We really are the museum for the city’s history, or the history of greater New Haven. Tradition and change—I think we are both.

—This interview was condensed by the author

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

Scars amended

by Maya Binyam

I

have exactly two scars. Two small pink dots, dots the size of needle heads, one on each hand. They’re symmetrical and neat, though smaller than I’d originally hoped, and when I turn my thumbs into my palms to make a fist they hide between the folds of my skin.

I was seven or eight when I got them. They were mosquito bites then, bumpy testaments to the two weeks I had spent braving the wilderness at my sleepaway camp on Cape Cod. They reminded me of the small silver studs I wore in each ear, and though this mirrored imperfection was a small comfort, the bites also itched like hell. A friend—probably one who played soccer, I always considered my athletic friends to be wisest—told me that smearing toothpaste over my wounds would ease the itching and make them disappear before my parents came to pick me up. I took my travelsized Crest bottle and squeezed a blue-and-white-striped dab onto each bite. I was proud, then. Proud of my ability to mend what was broken, and proud of achieving a brokenness that required mending.

A few days later, the itching stopped. In those last sweet moments before my parents turned off of Route 6 and onto the dirt road, the Corolla creaking over each wooden hump, I washed away my bandages. They were crusty and dry, and as they slipped down the drain I noticed the two dots. My two smooth scars the size of needle heads.

Outside the pink sun folded into the kettle pond.

THERE’S A PICTURE OF MY GRANDFATHER ON MY MANtelpiece. The contrast of the blacks and whites is particularly salient, a stark opposition reflected in the sternness of his gaze. His skin is dark, darker than my father’s, taut about the cheekbones and loose like elephant skin around the neck. The corners of his lips turn into a precise frown.

His distaste is slight, his outrage looming.

This is how I imagine my grandfather looked when he asked my father, his middle son, to go buy him a bottle of liquor that cool, damp July afternoon. It was a typically humid Ethiopian summer, and the air hung heavy on the sorghum stalks as my father ran through the muddy roads to the usual street vendor. He ran, he glanced up at the clouds, he ran.

He bought a pint of Araki, a colorless distilled liquor made from dried gesho leaves. It was his father’s favorite, and as he walked home—his steps quick and exact, the bottle clutched tightly in his hands—he felt powerful.

By the time he got home his power had tipped into momentary audacity. Standing outside his front door, he lifted the heavy bottle to his lips and began to drink. It went down smooth, he tells me. Like the mouth of the bottle was an extension of his lips, the liquid slick and cool like spit.

He slipped down the stairs, the bottle still in his hands.

Heavy and hollow, it cracked into shards that diverted the fading twilight.

My father has lived a fractured life—one whose details, distanced and half-forgotten, are dangerously romantic. He grew up in Woldya, a small town in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, and for the most part, things were all right. It was the ‘60s, the country operated within a feudal framework, and my father came from a family of landlords. They were farmers, too, and a life measured by the growing seasons had constant potential for tumult. Predicted rains would erratically flood, the sun would eventually turn harsh.

In high school, after his parents fell asleep, he and his brothers gathered in his bedroom to read Marx and Mao. I imagine the four of them under the covers with a flashlight.

My father tells me they only had kerosene lamps.

They read, they read, and slowly they became bitter. Bitter about the empire, about poverty, about their father. Their negativity was surmounting, but it was simultaneously precise: rooted in self-awareness, pointed exactly at the crux of reform. My father’s originally slight audacity, accompanied by a communally critical discourse, gained momentum. He was part of a revolution.

LAST OCTOBER I STOOD IN THE LOBBY OF A NEW YORK hotel with new friends. They were French, I think. We were taking a break from the party inside. It was Halloween, and I was angry. Angry that I was dressed as a peacock, angry that the ice in my drink had melted, angry that the hotel charged such a high entrance fee. The walls were made of marble and the bathrooms had cloth towels. It was elitist, all of it. It was elitist, capitalist, distinctly American, and I was knee deep.

I was knee deep and angry, so I tried my hand at audacity.

I asked politely for a smoke, lit up, and took drags from my first cigarette, dropping gray ashes on the cold, hard floor.

ONE OR TWO YEARS INTO THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION, my father was identified as a subversive. He had graduated early from high school and returned the next year as a history teacher. Though he was actively recruiting and organizing students to join the cause, he couldn’t escape the link between his familial identity and the old, the tired, the oppressive.

The national radio station aired his name and he was arrested. The day was hot and slow, the usually noncommittal sun surprisingly violent. He was shuffled into a cell with 18 other men—men who were his friends, his teachers, his students. They were proud, all of them. They were proud but they were scared, so they talked. They talked about the revolution, their dreams, their childhoods. They talked to combat the quietness of the concrete, to keep the cooling air warm.

A year later those conversations were tired and stale, their voices too few to evade circularity. My father tells me he adapted to the silence. What he hated was falling asleep—closing his eyes, delighting in a moment of naïve refuge, and waking up with one fewer friend by his side.

He started smoking. First to keep from falling asleep, then to have something to do while waiting. He lit a cigarette, he smoked. He lit another, smoked again. He smoked and flicked his ashes, waiting for his name to be called.

Waiting for something to change.

I DIDN’T LIKE MY FATHER’S HOUSE AS A CHILD. IT WAS cold, the only snack was toasted barley grains, and the pictures on the walls had come with the frames—anonymous rolling hills, a neat vase of pink flowers.

Redemption came at bedtime, in those quiet moments before I was tucked in. I’d lay my head on the pillow and run my fingers down my father’s arms, asking him to tell me the stories of his scars. There were a few boring ones—typhoid shots and soccer wounds—but for the most part his injuries were exciting. He had been chased and attacked by a hyena once, leaving a large coffee-color circle on his right shoulder. He had scars on his legs, too—small red speckles circling his ankles. His family had kept pet lions, lions that liked to gnaw on legs. I showed him my symmetrical dots and told him how badly they used to itch.

I loved imagining this distant, ulterior life for my father.

He came from the country of 13 months of sunshine, where the grasses were tall and gold dripped from the trees like sap. I was gullible then, eager to indulge in a fantasy whose romanticism flattened the texture of my father’s otherwise fractured narrative.

On most days I’m comfortable with this naïve past self.

I’ve duped myself into believing that critical self-awareness is an inscrutable indicator of progression. That a performed negativity is the ultimate marker of intellect—the freshly painted welcome sign signaling my arrival at a version of reality at least partially reflective of the truth. I’ve smoked a lot of cigarettes, flicked a whole bunch of ashes, but I’m still knee-deep.

THE TRUTH IS THAT I DON’T HAVE ANY SCARS. THOSE two small pink dots—my perfectly symmetrical marks of resistance—faded sometime in the last few years. I was too busy to notice.

The truth is that my father doesn’t drink. He really only likes a bottle of Corona when he starts it cold with lunch, finishes it warm with dinner, and takes a nap on the dock in between, the water pushing the light between the boards and onto his stomach.

—graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

opinion Greater than marriage

by Hilary O’Connell The Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest advocates for marriage equality in the United States, has corporatized and claimed the equal sign (=) so successfully that the blue-and-yellow sticker on someone’s laptop or car is ubiquitous in liberal circles. This week, you likely noticed the sudden influx of similar red equal signs in your Facebook News Feed—no accident, as the symbols were distributed by the HRC for what some described as “marriage week”: the Supreme Court hearing cases on both Prop. 8 and DOMA. The pictures were a simple answer to a seemingly simple question: a resounding “Yes” in answer to, “Do you support marriage equality?”

But when we reduce queer politics to an equal sign supporting marriage, we are ducking larger questions: is marriage even good for queers? And should marriage be the number one agenda item for LGBTQ+ activists? I want to argue, as a queer person who wishes to challenge multiple vectors of oppression and who has a vested interest in the elimination of discrimination, that though the extension of marriage to samesex couples may benefit many individual people, we must begin to find strength in the collective claim that we (queers and allies both) are greater than marriage.

To be honest, when we look closely, marriage doesn’t seem that great. From a structural perspective, affirming the importance of the dyadic family as the building block of nationhood and the marker of respectability has allowed the state to regulate and survey the practices and lived intimacies of its citizens, and to transfer the responsibility for economic subsistence to the family (and away from the state). An uncritical politics of marriage for LGBTQ+ folks neglects to question how marriage has been used to determine who is worthy of receiving assistance, benefits, and respectability, along lines of sexuality as well as race, economic status, and citizenship status.

And since marriage itself is a problem, activism which focuses its energy solely on the issue of “marriage equality” is ultimately predicated upon a politics of assimilation which desires to uncritically gain acceptance into racist, classist, homophobic, and heterosexist family structures and ideologies, all of which reinforce the marginalization of people unable to reap the benefits of American capitalism.

Of course, this issue is personal and

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

complicated. Say I’m 85 years old, watching my partner fade away in a hospital. Of course I want (and should have) the right to visit them. If I choose to have children, I want to know that they could be legally adopted by my partner. If my partner has health insurance, and I do not, I want to have access to those benefits. And if my partner is not a citizen of the United States, I want to be able to confer the material benefits of citizenship if necessary.

In short, I am not arguing that marriage is unimportant. Within a legal and cultural framework which holds marriage up as the ultimate relationship, marriage confers (and will always confer) an enormous number of material benefits which can become issues of life or death for many queers. But what if we could change that framework?

What if we had universal healthcare? What if we understood family as something that goes beyond blood ties and reproduction?

What if we pushed for immigration reform, healthcare reform, welfare reform?

I, and some of my friends, chose red “greater than” (>) signs for our profiles this week. Along with the picture, I posted an explanation for my choice: “Because queer activism does not end (and only questionably, tenuously should begin) with marriage; because queerfolk need more than what marriage provides; because there are other pressing factors dictating quality of life for queers of different genders, races, ethnicities, abilities, classes, immigration statuses, religions, and so on. Because progress does not always look the same; because we do not look like everyone else; because we should not have to want to look like everyone else. Because we do not all want the same things. Because this is important, but it is not nearly the end.”

I am not dismissing people’s attachments to marriage, and I am not dismissing its material importance. I am saying that marriage as an institution is problematic and marginalizing, and unevenly distributes benefits along the lines of respectability and economic prosperity. I am saying that we should be careful in our blind support of marriage equality. This week, more than ever, I am saying that we—the LGBTQ+ and allied community—cannot afford to be naïve about marriage equality, and we cannot continue to make it our most important point of advocacy in the United States.

—graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

planning for korea

by Jin Gon Park

When Kim Jong Un succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, as North Korea’s head of state in 2011, some hoped that this young, Swisseducated leader would prove to be different from his predecessor and begin to reconcile his country with the international community. But such hopes were dashed when North Korea conducted its third nuclear test on Feb. 12, despite strong warnings from both the United States and China. Additionally, since the UN moved to adopt tougher sanctions against North Korea early this month, the country has begun incessantly threatening South Korea and its allies with an all-out war and nuclear attack.

Despite these developments, most South

Koreans are surprisingly calm. They have become used to North Korea’s long-repeated threats and doubt that North Korea is seriously contemplating another Korean war. This doubt is largely backed by a strong faith that the US-South Korea military alliance would dissuade North Korea from taking such drastic actions. But once North Korea completes its nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile programs, it is very possible that the country will make a radically different strategic calculation. Capable of launching nuclear attack on both South Korean and American soils, North Korea might come to believe—mistakenly or not —that it can swiftly subdue South Korea while preventing any effective military intervention from the United States through threats of nuclear attack.

Indeed, an all-out war, even before North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities are fully developed, has become highly possible. Kim Jong Un, who has been in power for slightly more than a year, has yet to consolidate his power base. As such, he may regard militarily provoking South Korea to be

an effective way of securing the respect and loyalty of the hawkish North Korean military and diverting his people’s attention from domestic troubles. So it is not unlikely that North Korea will soon launch local attacks, as it did in 2010 when it shelled South Korea’s civilian-populated Yeonpyeong Island.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s response to any such attack is likely to be much more forceful than in the past. In fact, South Korea and the United States recently agreed to retaliate for any future attack from North Korea by bombing the origin of attack, supporting units, and the command headquarters. It would seem that local warfare could quickly escalate into a major conflict.

Meanwhile, diplomatic attempts to suppress these growing tensions are flawed. The UN’s threat of sanctions is unlikely to have much influence on the decision-making of a country that is already extremely isolated.

Another potential strategy is to persuade China to apply decisive pressure on North Korea, which depends heavily on its trade with China for survival. But even if China agrees to threaten North Korea with cessation of support, North Korea could very well doubt the credibility of this threat. Indeed, despite its strong disapproval of North Korea’s nuclear program, China still considers a stable North Korea an important strategic asset: a necessary buffer against the United States in Northeast Asia.

Ultimately, neither of these economic and diplomatic strategies may prevent a major conflict and both South Korea and the United States must start making plans based on this assumption. First of all, South Korea and the United States should carefully control the level of retaliation for any limited attack from North Korea. Above all, any retaliation must at once dissuade North Korea from future attacks while avoiding an all-out war—no easy feat. Also, once it is concluded that the North Korean nuclear program cannot be reversed, the United States must deter North Korea by redeploying nuclear arms in and around South Korea. Finally, South Korea and the United States should start strengthening their missile defense systems to further neutralize North Korea’s nuclear threat.

These second and third plans, which involve deadly and advanced weapons, might sound unpalatable to many. But we have arrived at a moment when unpalatable options are also our best.

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Passion and Resurrection Music for Lent and Eastertide

by Tallis, Lassus, Byrd, Victoria, Taverner and more

SATURDAY, APRIL 6 â&#x20AC;˘ 5 pm Marquand Chapel (409 Prospect St. )

Free; no tickets required Info at 203.432.5062 or yale.edu/ism

Up in the air The closing of Tweed airport’s control tower

by Sophie Grais YH Staff

I

t’s a quiet Wednesday morning for Tweed New Haven airport when I visit.

A few cars dot the short-term parking lot, a single security guard patrols the lobby. Tweed sits in East Haven’s backyard: across the street stand picket fences, white shutters, minivans parked by the curb.

A small gray building rises above the runway—the air traffic control tower, an odd hint of the space age in this otherwise suburban scene. A familiar sight for travelers, the tower houses switchboards, computers, and other technology operated by employees who ensure that planes take off, land safely, and navigate the skies smoothly along the way. But on Apr. 7, the lights in that tower will go out.

On Mar. 22, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced its plan to close 149 contract towers—which provide air traffic control—across the country as part of national budget sequestration. Because of this sequester, the FAA faces a loss of $627 billion in funding, and it chose contract towers as a primary target for cuts. According to the New Haven Mayor’s office, the FAA selected contract towers at airports with fewer than 150,000 total operations and fewer than 10,000 commercial operations. Towers at small regional airports were the first to go, and in spite of vehement opposition and an appeal from Connecticut politicians, Tweed’s

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small tower lost its battle. Though business at the airport will continue as usual, the closure of the air traffic control tower will bring immediate consequences to the city of New Haven and warns of the effects of the sequester that loom on the horizon.

necticut, and to the nation as a whole. Two such reasons concerned transportation in the event of medical emergency: Tweed’s close proximity to both Yale-New Haven Hospital and the U.S. Veterans Administration Hospital make it an invaluable landing spot for small planes transporting patients to these facilities.

Proponents of keeping contract towers open proposed alternate options to deter the FAA from such a drastic decision. Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) proposed an amendment to take the $50 million that the FAA would save from closing contract towers from other areas in the administration, such

“It’s clear to us that the administration has made the closing of control towers the poster child of sequestration.”

—J. Spencer Dickerson, executive director of the U.S. Contract Tower Association TWEED HAS BEEN A LANDMARK OF NEW Haven economic development, travel, and medical transport since it opened in 1931.

When the FAA publicized its decision to close the contract tower, Connecticut Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, along with Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, immediately sent a letter of appeal to the FAA, as did Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. and Mark Volcheck, chairman of the Tweed Airport Authority. These letters explained why the closure of the tower would prove detrimental to New Haven, to Con-

The letters also cited the risk of landing planes without coordination from an air traffic control tower—especially for the volunteer pilots who would transport veterans—and emphasized Tweed’s ability to remain open in the hurricanes of recent years, especially Hurricane Sandy. “When Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano needed to come to the area to survey damage, she flew into Tweed.

Why? Because none of the other airports in the region were operable,” DeStefano said in an email to the Herald.

as research. His efforts, however, proved unsuccessful. “The FAA could have elected to cut some nonessential programs like budget gimmicks in Washington,” said J. Spencer Dickerson, Executive Director of the U.S. Contract Tower Association. “We gave them a solution through the Moran Amendment to use unobligated money, unused money out of facilities. There are 50 million dollars that they could have used and they could have kept the towers open. They elected to close

continued on page 16

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A new kind of cop Aaron Feuer, ES ‘13, gets to know New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman and his innovative method of community policing.

O

ne Friday in November, New Haven’s police chief signed a “letter of free passage” for two of the most dangerous gangs in the city. The chief, Dean Esserman, was inviting each major gang to a community meeting of sorts at police headquarters, and he wanted to make sure that the most violent members, even those with warrants out for their arrest, would attend. The goal, Esserman explains, was to give kids an opportunity—plus incentives—to escape the “street families” that get them into trouble. His officers had spent the past four months compiling dossiers on every gang, including maps of their social networks and documentation of each member’s crimes.

With this intelligence, the New Haven Police Department would put on a show.

At each gang call-in, the invited guests would be like actors at a premiere: not just the audience, but also the stars. “They will see themselves on screen, committing all sorts of crimes,” smiles the chief. “We will show them the evidence we have against them.” But they would not face arrest—at least, not yet. Instead, around the room, gang members would see the two options they have. On one side would be family members, coaches, mentors, and neighbors—those who have close relationships with the troublemakers—as well as other civilians in the community who don’t have a connection yet but have something they can offer the kids, whether a job or a sense of belonging or activities that keep them

off the street. On the other side would be prosecutors and cops, with representatives from the city, state, and federal governments. (The Feds are particularly fearsome, with their mandatory minimum sentences and the power to send you to Iowa or Indiana or somewhere else far away.)

“We will tell them very clearly, ‘We want to give you a second chance. We want to give you a way out,’” explains Keith King,

person in the gang commits a violent gun crime, the police will crack down. They will arrest everyone they can in the gang and prosecute them as harshly as possible.

(The NHPD claims to know exactly who is involved with which gang.)

Esserman and King hope the carrot-andstick approach will encourage many youth to question their gang affiliations. “The levers we’re pulling…these kids, we own them,” Esserman declares. “We have something

rested, and it doesn’t feel like you’re ever getting anywhere.” Bold words for a police chief, especially when most Americans still think that a police officer’s main job is to arrest the bad guys.

Esserman, who took the job in November 2011, thinks he has a better idea. His solution lies in an old-but-also-new approach called community policing. Old, because America had community policing for hundreds of years before it didn’t,

“I have never arrested anyone who hasn’t been replaced. All we do is arrest the children of the fathers we’ve arrested, and it doesn’t feel like you’re ever getting anywhere.”

—New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman the Assistant United States Attorney in New Haven, who is co-coordinating the initiative. Gang members will get a simple offer: if they want to get out, the police and the community will do everything they can do to help. “Otherwise, there will be swift consequences,” promises King, a Howard University and Georgetown Law graduate who moonlights as the pastor for Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church, a 600-person congregation in Hamden. For now, the NHPD will ignore the evidence of minor crimes that it has collected, but if just one

on them.” He and King believe the threat of dire consequences for gun crimes will also create peer pressure, which will in turn decrease gun violence in the city.

They don’t want to arrest anyone, though. “I’ve prosecuted gang bangers and drug dealers and shooters for most of my time, and I don’t think that model works,” argues King, adding that making arrests “just buys us time.” Esserman agrees: “I have never arrested anyone who hasn’t been replaced,” he says. “All we do is arrest the children of the fathers we’ve ar-

and old because New Haven already tried something called community policing in the early 1990s, when Esserman was an assistant chief. But also new, because despite previous efforts, crime rates and quality of life today in many cities like New Haven is still unacceptable, and Esserman’s brand of community policing may become the model for the nation.

IT’S A WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT 6:30 P.M., and Esserman is handing out storebought gingerbread cookies to the seven The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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older women assembled in his conference room. “How is everybody?” he asks. “How are you? I can’t take the first one, come on, have one.” He attends these meetings monthly and looks right at home, even though no one remembers inviting him.

Esserman sits down, and Officer Jillian Knox, who is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt because she’s not on duty, begins the meeting. “We want everyone to remain inspired,” Knox says. “We want you to know that New Haven Police Department detectives are working diligently on your cases.

Ms. Lois, could you tell everyone what we were talking about earlier?” Lois’s son was the 27th homicide victim of 2011. She tells the group that the NHPD has finally caught his killer. Lois seems on the verge of tears, and Esserman holds her hand to comfort her as she is talking. She places her other hand on top of his, gratefully.

Knox leads—more accurately, she is— the NHPD’s Victims Services Unit, and this is the monthly meeting of the Homicide Survivors Support Group. They talk about their cases for a bit, but for the most part they discuss Bible verses and plan their upcoming Christmas party and talk about Barack Obama. As more people trickle in, Knox greets each of them by name and with

and cooperation from residents, officers can address the root problems underlying crime, and the deterrent effect increases as the police solve more crimes. Officers who know the neighborhoods well can also prioritize their police work more effectively.

And with intelligence from residents, police can arrest those responsible for the worst crimes, taking them out of the community.

Even the little things, like getting to know all of the kids in the neighborhood, can make a big difference, says Lieutenant Holly Wasilewski, district commander for the Hill North neighborhood, which includes the Church Street South housing projects. According to Wasilewski, most crime in that complex involves nonresidents, who are prohibited by law from entering the property. So she is able to identify troublemakers before they cause problems because she knows virtually everyone who lives there and can spot those who do not. When I accompany her on patrol in Church Street South, she points to people by name and tells me stories about them. Many wave to her. “Hi, Holly.” “Hi, Lieutenant Holly.” “Hey, Miss Holly.” When she sees a group of kids loitering in front of a particular convenience store, a known crime hotspot, all Wasilewski has to do is

and getting into trouble. (Brandon’s mother says that he was once arrested for mugging a Yale student.) But today, he is a victim, hit by a car that sped away. Joanne is touched to see Wasilewski at the door. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says. “It’s good to see you, Holly.” Wasilewski chats for a few minutes with Joanne and her 14-yearold daughter, who remembers “Lieutenant Holly” from a 2010 holiday party the police department hosted. Wasilewski promises to say a prayer for Brandon and to visit him at the hospital that night, and she asks, “Is there anything else we can do to help you?” Wasilewski’s words are more those of a friendly customer service agent than a busy district commander. Joanne responds that all she wants is the prayer; Wasilewski suggests that they exchange cell phone numbers, and they do.

“Community policing is all about establishing relationships with the people who live and work in your neighborhood,” Wasilewski tells me as we leave Joanne’s home. Sometimes, she says, people will call her cell phone instead of 911 to report crimes in their neighborhoods. They may not trust the police department—at least, not yet—but they trust her.

“When I go to a situation and tempers are high, I tell them, ‘I don’t want to arrest anybody. I just want to walk away from this situation. I need your help to do that.’ It’s all communication.”

—NHPD Officer Shafiq Abdussabur a hug. The people in the room are not community leaders, and their presence here tonight is unlikely to have a direct effect on crime in the way that a meeting with clergy might. Yet the chief stays for an hour. This is community policing in action.

THE PROBLEM WITH TRADITIONAL POlicing, King explains, is that “the community becomes opposition to law enforcement.” Esserman agrees. “The paradox is that no one’s happy,” he says. “You listen to pastors and parents, and they’re not happy with the police. Either they are angry with the police for arresting a child in their congregation or their family, or they are angry at the police because they know what’s going but the police are driving by and not doing anything.” This is the unsolved problem of urban policing in America. Esserman’s response presents a model for keeping the community safe while also avoiding arrests whenever possible.

There is no single model of community policing. New Haven’s approach centers on police officers developing relationships with citizens in order to improve quality of life. The idea is simple: if people have positive relationships with their police officers, the cops and the community can work together to prevent crime. With information

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ask them politely to move. They know her, and they obey.

With this focus on cultivating relationships, Esserman has devoted resources not just to criminals but also to victims. He wants everyone to know that the police department is there to help and that the cops care. That’s why he spends an hour at the homicide survivors meeting every month, and that’s why he goes to the hospital to check on every shooting victim. Last year, he began insisting that his officers conduct follow-up visits to crime victims. “Imagine you’re burglarized one day,” explains Sergeant Tony Zona, the district commander for Fair Haven. “And then the next day, two cops show up and check in. ‘Did you notice anything else missing? Did your neighbors notice anything else strange?’ It makes you feel safe.” At the NHPD’s large weekly meeting, Esserman hounds his officers after every incident they review. “Have you done a follow-up yet?” he asks.

When I ride along with Lieutenant Wasilewski, the Hill North district commander, our first stop is Winthrop Avenue, to visit Joanne, whose 17-year-old son Brandon is in critical condition at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Wasilewski explains that she knows Brandon and his family because he has a history of running away from home

IT’S 40 DEGREES OUTSIDE, AND OFFIcer Joe Bicki and his trainee, Brian Jackson, are at the corner of Chapel and High Streets, just beginning their 4:00 p.m. to midnight shift—on foot. They are on the front lines of the most visible and most talked about piece of Esserman’s community policing plan: the walking beats. The chief wants police to get out of their cars and talk with the community, like neighborhoods cops did in generations past. So he created 40 such walking beats across the city. Bicki, a veteran cop who requested the position, and Jackson, a rookie who was given the assignment, are both fans of the new initiative. “It’s trying to reverse the us-versus-them mentality by being available to people and making them feel safe,” Bicki explains. “When I’m in a car, going call to call, we’re multi-tasking.

You can get harried. People can feel like you don’t think their problems are as important.

On a walking beat, it’s a slower pace…We can go into businesses and ask merchants, ‘What problems do you have and how can we help?’ That partnership, that building of trust, is important.” And the initiative has done more than just gain the community’s trust: “You learn a lot when you walk,” Jackson says. “With the information you get on a beat, you can be more proactive than reactive, so you don’t have a victim.”

Bicki and Jackson’s walking beat, just outside of Yale’s gates in the downtown business district, is relatively tame, and their conversations with members of the community involve directions to restaurants more frequently than kids with guns.

But in some of the tougher neighborhoods of New Haven, district commanders have seen significant results from their walking beats. “They get more guns than my car beats,” boasts Sergeant Vincent Anastasio, who runs the East Shore district. “And the criminals are more aware of us than ever before. With the walking beats, they don’t know who we’re talking to, so they’re a little more apprehensive about pulling the trigger.” In Fair Haven, district commander Tony Zona attributes his area’s sharp drop in homicides—one in 2012, down from eight the previous year—to his walking beats. “They have gotten a lot of firearms off the street,” Zona says. “They know everybody. [Troublemakers know that] if you commit a crime, we’re going to find you.”

SHAFIQ ABDUSSABUR IS AN NHPD OFFIcer and community leader known for taking at-risk New Haven youth—including those who already have a rap sheet—on camping trips. He is also the author of two books critical of policing in America, including A Black Man’s Guide to Law Enforcement in America. (He hopes “to be the guy soon who writes the book on community-based policing.”) “For many departments, community-based policing means designating two officers as community policing officers,” Abdussabur says. But, he argues, in order to be successful, community-based policing must be something the entire department practices; it’s something that must be engrained in the behavior of each officer, and it’s a cultural shift toward policing as “customer service.” “You have to treat [the community] like you’re selling them something,” he says. “If you’re going to arrest someone, you don’t have to act like you hate them.” Officers must carefully manage their behavior to get the best outcome from each encounter and avoid leaving “a bad taste in [people’s] mouth[s] about the police.” Abdussabur explains that officers do their best to avoid escalation. “When I go to a situation and tempers are high, I tell them, ‘I don’t want to arrest anybody. I just want to walk away from this situation. I need your help to do that.’ It’s all communication.” That, Abdussabur says, is how you build relationships and establish trust.

There seems to be broad agreement that improving police behavior is an important objective. “Police just need to be more thoughtful and respectful, especially to the kids,” says Barbara Fair, a seasoned community activist who is often critical of the police. “It’s not okay to curse people out.” Esserman recognizes the importance of getting each of his officers to embrace community policing behaviors like showing respect to civilians—and the challenges he faces in institutionalizing that culture.

“You know what the number one complaint we get about officers is? Rudeness,” he explains. “It’s hard for a young officer to understand how important this is. Some-

times, you need to be a little bit older and a little bit fatter to realize how much relationships matter.” His leadership is shifting the direction of NHPD to make relationship-building a central part of its policing mission, says Knox, the officer who runs Victims Services. “For some of us, this is how we’ve always done things, and before [Esserman], you could do it, but now, you have to do it.”

According to Abdussabur, a big part of the shift has been the chief’s public declarations about community policing.

And when he assumed the post, Esser-

yet.” With Wasilewski at the Church Street South housing projects, I see this firsthand when one officer looks a teenage suspect in the eyes and complains to the others officers at the scene, “I stop this fucking kid every fucking time!”

TO CHANGE HOW THE PEOPLE OF NEW Haven see their police department, Esserman has to overcome a history of community distrust and police abuse. The police chief before Esserman fled to Chicago to escape a corruption investigation. Ten years earlier, the department’s leader resigned

seems to capture the NHPD’s moment of transition. I ask them what they think of the police. “My cousin had the police dogs put on him,” reports Tia, 8. “I feel protected,” says Alajah, 7. “When kids are riding bikes and the police want something to happen, they bother them,” says Jonae, 9. “They say hi, a lot of them,” adds Jeonna, 12.

Still, it appears that Esserman has much to show for his efforts. In 2012, there were 17 homicides in New Haven, a staggering reduction from the 34 killings in the previous year. Violent crime overall is also down by half, and there have been reductions in

“When they have decades of officers occupying the community, not protecting and serving, you can’t run in one year and say the cops are good people now.”

—Barbara Fair, community activist man installed four new assistant chiefs who would support his community policing agenda. Assistant Chief Thaddeus Reddish, who oversees the police academy, revamped its training program to emphasize sensitivity, compassion, and relationship-building.

Still, the NHPD has a ways to go. “It’s far from perfect,” admits Wasilewski. “You constantly have to correct officers’ actions.” Abdussabur agrees: “It’s a work in progress. Everybody hasn’t been vaccinated

after fathering a baby with a prostitute. In 2007, FBI agents raided NHPD headquarters and arrested two policemen, including the head of the narcotics unit, for stealing money on the job. “When they have decades of officers occupying the community, not protecting and serving, you can’t run in one year and say the cops are good people now,” Fair says.

Fair introduces me to a group of children in Quinnipiac Terrace, and the conversation

every category. “The crime rate has gone down because of community policing and the cops walking a beat,” says Doug Bathea, a respected community leader who runs a drill team for at-risk youth and whose son was murdered in 2006. “It’s going down a lot, and the police are really working now,” agrees Celeste Thomas, 59, who lives in the Hill and attends the NHPD’s monthly meetings in her district. “Where I live, they really control the area, with their walking

beats. They talk to the tenants and try to get to know everyone in the community.

It’s a lot different under Esserman. Cops will introduce themselves. They be talking to children. The kids like the police. They didn’t always.” Barbara Tinney, executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance, which runs youth outreach programs across the city, is optimistic. “Progress is always slow,” she concedes. “But it’s beginning to change. The police department has shown a real willingness to engage the community, and Esserman is laying a foundation for change.”` Police work is unpredictable, and so too are the statistics and societal shifts that underlie a cop’s daily beat. Esserman’s community policing initiatives have been in operation for only a little more than a year.

Homicides could spike unexpectedly, or one wrong move on the part of a police officer or a citizen undo the community and the police force’s hard and earnest labor. That labor itself could turn out to be fruitless, bearing only superficial, cosmetic benefits.

But so far that’s not what the evidence says. With any luck the NHPD’s new methods—which are really old methods—will usher in a new era of policing and a new time of community stability. It will be years before such ideals can be fully realized, but for now police chiefs and city dwellers alike can only hope that the changes on New Haven’s streets are real and lasting.

—inside cover by Christine Mi YH Staff —graphic by Devon Geyelin YH Staff The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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Sequester cuts topple Tweed tower continued from page 10 towers instead on a massive scale. Instead of using a butter knife, they used a meat cleaver.”

In the end, the FAA refused to budge. The Connecticut government officials who had appealed the decision received no word that their claim had been denied until the FAA publicly released the list of towers scheduled for closure. DeStefano explained that flights would continue to land and depart from Tweed as usual, but he had expected to hear from the FAA before the decision was made public. “I am dismayed that the FAA would choose to notify us of the denial of the Tweed appeal through a press release,” DeStefano said in his email. “A strong case was made to keep Tweed’s air control tower open.”

ON APRIL 7, THE TOWER WILL CLOSE, but business at Tweed will continue. U.S. Airways has already declared that it will not stop its service to Tweed. “U.S. Airways is committed to stay, and they already land at quite a few airports across the country without staffed towers,” said Susan Godschall, senior vice president of the New Haven Chamber of Commerce. Though Tweed’s small runway will remain busy and travelers will not notice a difference in service, the closure of the contract tower may bring challenges for expansion in the future. DeStefano said that he anticipated difficulties in finding new business opportunities for Tweed after the closure, but he remained confident in the airport’s status quo. “While this decision will make it more difficult to grow Tweed the way we want to, it will not interrupt commercial service at Tweed…I think this speaks volumes to Tweed’s potential,” he said.

Business aside, the most immediate concern is safety. Dickerson explained that many airports currently do not have staffed

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control towers, but the closure of a tower can still be cause for concern. “Think of it as if Manhattan got rid of stop signs and traffic lights. In case of no stop signs or traffic lights, drivers have to be more vigilant and careful,” he said. “There is more distracted driving and that’s the same way in the pilot community. Pilots will have more responsibility to communicate with each other as opposed to the tower being the extra set of eyes and safety in the system.”

In the 31 years that Dickerson has been at the U.S. Contract Tower Association, three towers have been closed. In the next month alone, the association will close five times that number. Dickerson said that the FAA could have distributed cuts more evenly across various departments rather than

their letter of appeal to the FAA, Murphy, Blumenthal, and DeLauro called Tweed “a major economic engine…for the City of New Haven and the region.” In addition to the jobs of those who operate the tower itself, the loss of the tower brings uncertainty for the future of the aviation industry and the corresponding job markets. “Unfortunately, these losses make airport shutdowns more likely and will set off a chain reaction of job losses in cities and towns across the state,” Senator Murphy said in an email to the Herald.

THOUGH THEIR FIRST APPEAL WAS DENIED, Blumenthal and Murphy will not give up their commitment to this cause. On Mar. 23, they proposed an amendment to bud-

Mar. 1, and its consequences will be felt over the next ten years. The list of organizations subject to its cuts goes far beyond New Haven’s regional airport, far beyond the FAA: the military, FEMA, NASA, the federal prison system, the national parks, among many, many others, will all feel the effects of these reforms. Proposed as a solution to the debt ceiling, the sequester came as a product of the Budget Control Act of 2011. It was intended, though, to be a last resort: a threat rather than a reality, a series of drastic cuts that would take effect only if Congress could not reach a compromise in the meantime.

When that fear became reality in December 2012, these sweeping cuts in federal programs were scheduled to begin

Though Tweed may be a small airport, when the tower shuts its doors next week, it will become a symbol of a much larger national problem—one that will remain on the national landscape for at least the foreseeable future. compromising safety with the closure of so many towers. “The rest of the FAA is getting a five percent cut, and the contract towers are getting a 60 percent cut. That doesn’t seem fair or balanced,” he said. “It’s clear to us that the administration has made the closing of control towers the poster child of sequestration, the first visible sign to the American people of how horrible sequestration will be. Aviation safety should not be politicized.”

The closure of the tower will not only place flight safety in jeopardy, but also pose new challenges for a city already faced with a high and steady rate of unemployment. In

get legislation that would make it easier to restore funding for air traffic control in the next fiscal year. The amendment passed unanimously in the Senate. “While it passed in the Senate, House Republicans have yet to act on it,” Murphy said in his email. “Nevertheless, we’ll continue our fight to restore federal funding to these towers that are critical to Connecticut’s economic well-being.” The closure of the contract tower at Tweed—and its consequences for New Haven and Connecticut, as Murphy explained— serve as a reminder that the wave of budget cuts both on a local and national level has just begun. The sequester took effect on

this spring. “Republicans and Democrats go back [and forth] on who to blame on sequestration and how bad it’s going to be,” Dickerson said. “Originally, sequestration was about making the pain so bad that no one would agree to it. And now we have it.” Though Tweed may be a small airport, when the tower shuts its doors next week, it will become a symbol of a much larger national problem, one that will remain on the national landscape for at least the foreseeable future.

—contributed reporting by Olivia Rosenthal YH Staff —graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

High Stakes Yale pioneers in gambling addiction research

by Kohler Bruno YH Staff

G

ambling is like cocaine,” Bob Cavenis told me. “It most closely mirrors cocaine, that is.” He was discussing the nature of a gambling addiction, a problem that affects more than two million Americans, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG). Cavenis is a recovered gambling addict who works at Williamsville Wellness, a residential treatment center in Virginia that treats gambling addictions.

“Gambling is an immediate high,” he explained. “That’s why it’s so addictive.”

Currently, the American Psychiatric Association categorizes gambling addictions separately from substance abuse disorders, like cocaine or heroin addictions.

This May, however, the association is set to release a revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard U.S. classification of mental health disorders). Dr. Marc Potenza, GRD ‘93, MED ’94, expects that in the revised version of the manual, gambling addictions will be grouped in the same category as substance abuse disorders.

The upshot is that an addiction to gambling is indeed more or less akin to an addiction to cocaine. This switch in classification is in large part due to work by Potenza and his team here at Yale, work that has earned him more than a few accolades. On Mar. 14, the National Center for Responsible Gaming awarded Yale a three-year, $402,500 grant to continue researching gambling. “We are honored to award one of the three-year NCRG Center of Excellence in Gambling Research to Yale University’s Dr. Marc Potenza and his research team,” Christine Reilly, the senior research director for the NCRG, said. “His research has really helped us to understand the neurobiology of gambling addiction,” commented Keith Whyte, the executive director of the NCPG.

Potenza teaches both psychiatry and neurobiology here at Yale and talks about gambling in decidedly antiseptic, scientific terms. “Gambling,” he said in an interview, “particularly the problematic forms like pathological gambling, does constitute a significant psychiatric, or mental health, condition.”

Potenza is, by all accounts, one of the world’s most important voices on this subject. “He’s always been right at the fore-

into servitude on a game of dice. “Nonetheless, most people gamble,” Potenza said, “and gamble without developing problems.”

Adolescents, especially college-age young adults, are at heightened risk to develop gambling disorders. “The inherent problem with young adults is that they’re used to gaming with video games, and they’re used to winning,” Cavenis said. “Then they get into a gambling situation and they don’t win and they don’t understand why they

front,” Cheryl Lacadie, a research support specialist at the Yale Medical School who has worked with Potenza for 15 years, said.

don’t win.” In gambling terms, “chasing” is when a gambler tries to recoup a set of losses through increased gambling. Young adults are especially susceptible to this temptation, Cavenis explained. “Once you start chasing your losses you can become an addictive gambler a lot faster,” he said.

Much of Potenza’s research has revolved around this issue of the vulnerability of adolescents to gambling disorders. Research

YET THE CHANGE IN CLASSIFICATION notwithstanding, pathological gambling is nothing new. Potenza cited a fable from the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian text written in Sanskrit, in which a prince gambles away his fortune and eventually gambles his wife

he conducted last fall, for example, found that adolescents who were given scratch lottery tickets as children were more likely to begin gambling earlier in life. According to the report, this early gambling may be a risk factor for more severe gambling disorders later in life.

Part of an adolescent’s susceptibility to the development of a gambling disorder is derived from the normal process of growing up, Potenza explained. “Adolescents, as compared to children and adults, may be particularly prone to engage in risk taking behaviors, and part of developing into an adult may involve a certain amount of risk taking,” he said.

But some observers also blame American culture for the problem, maintaining that the United States unduly promotes recreational gambling. “We’ve always been a nation of gamblers,” Whyte said.

“Some of our earliest forefathers were predisposed to take risks. We embrace risk, and that’s great in business, but this hasn’t always been a nation where it’s been so heavily government endorsed.”

He pointed to lottery advertisements as examples of the U.S. government endorsing a potentially addictive—and harmful—recreation. “The state of Connecticut is telling you to play the lottery, but you would never see Connecticut put up a billboard saying to smoke more Luckies.”

With addictive gambling on track to be classified as a mental health disorder, there’s no safe bet on what the future of gambling culture and gambling disorders holds. In the meantime, more than eight million March Madness brackets—many of which, it’s safe to assume, are linked to betting pools—were submitted to ESPN this month.

—graphic by Maddie Butler YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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CULTURE Grade report card

by Evan Walker-Wells YH Staff

O

n Thurs., Apr. 4, the Yale faculty will decide whether to overhaul Yale College’s grading policy. They’re looking at changes suggested by the Ad Hoc Committee on Grading that would include replacing letter grades with numbers and suggesting but not mandating grade distributions.

Dean of Yale College Mary Miller, GRD ’81, emailed the report to the Yale College student body on Feb. 19, (which was the height of midterms, for me at least). It seems like other students actually read the (only ninepage) report around then. At an open forum with two of the professors on the committee on grading, Danny Avraham, BR ’15, vice president of the Yale College Council, showed results from a survey of roughly 1,500 students conducted by YCC. A rather high 79 percent thought the proposed changes would be negative.

But, I’m going to operate on the basis that you, the reader, are not swayed by the multitude’s opinion. And after all, the Yale faculty will decide whether to change the grading system, not the students. The committee, which consists of eight faculty members and an associate director of the Office of Institutional Research, began its work last fall. By looking at Yale’s past grading policies and grade distributions, it concluded four things.

Grades are important.

This may sound like a no-brainer—though at a forum open to the student body on Wed., Mar. 27, two faculty members of the committee said they discussed schools that have no grades without seriously considering such a change for Yale. So why have grades? The committee believes that a fair grading system helps student do their best. From their report: “Grades serve educational purposes by signaling to a student strengths and weaknesses in performance….They also have a motivational function by encouraging, or not, activities of various sorts.” So grades are meant to help us learn—not to pat us on the back because we’re smart.

Yale used to be much stricter about giving out high grades. Now, over two-thirds of Yale College grades are in the A-range.

According to the Ad Hoc Committee’s report, in 1963, 10 percent of grades were high grades (then designated

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by the numbers 90 to 100). That all started changing along with broader social changes in the U.S.—by 1974, they write, 40 percent of grades were high grades. That rise hasn’t stopped. The committee writes that the data it looked at finds 68 percent of grades are in the A-range, and that practically no one gets anything lower than a B+.

To help people understand why high number of people are getting A-range grades, the committee writes, “Consider the pool of students in the bottom half of the class. 36 percent of these students receive on average an A-.”

This is bad for Yale.

The committee feels that this “grade compression,” means that grades no longer work. The faculty committee sees five downsides to the current grading policy. First, grade compression doesn’t tell students when they’re doing really great—and what they’re really good at. In other words, they worry that grades don’t help teach students.

Second, grades become less effective signals to the outside world because “excellence may drown out in a sea of abundant As.” Third, the committee fears students don’t take their work as seriously when it’s so easy to get an A-. Fourth, there’s currently a big grade distribution disparity between departments, and the committee believes that students adjust what courses they take based off of which departments have more generous grading policies. That’s because, fifth, the cliffs between each letter grade, each plus and minus, matters a lot more due to grade compression. This penalizes students who are on the edge between one grade and another, and makes the different grading policies of different professors matter much more.

Yale should fight grade compression: the best way to do this is to switch to a 60 to 100 point scale and have suggested grade distributions.

The committee concluded that to combat grade compression/inflation, Yale needs to make a dramatic change that will signal its commitment to give grades in a fairer manner. At the open forum on Wednesday, Ray Fair and Tina Lu, professors of economics and East Asian languages and literature respectively, and both members of the committee on grading, suggested that there were two major reasons that changing from a letter to a num-

ber based grading system would be helpful. The first is symbolism; the second is accuracy. Lu was insistent that numbered grades would allow professors to indicate more precisely just how good a student’s work is: “That way there are more crayons in the crayon box and not just three” (meaning A, A-, and B+). Along with the switch to numbers, the committee recommends a distribution of grades that’s meant to recognize the high quality of most Yale students’ work. They’d recommend to departments that 35 percent of grades be 90 to 100, 40 percent 80 to 89, 20 percent 70 to 79, and about five percent below 70. These guidelines would make the mean grade at Yale 85.2. The policy would also change credit/D/fail to credit/fail. (What the Herald will do after such a change is anyone’s guess.)

Were the new policy implemented, its effects on Yale academic culture are anyone’s guess. Students at the forum raised concern about Yale’s ability to attract the best applicants or that numbers would do a worse job than letters when grading work in the humanities. One student expressed fear that it would make Yale much more competitive and force friends to fight over who got one point higher than the other; Lu, one of the professors on the committee, replied that she thought there was much more to Yale’s academic culture than just grades.

Fair said that when the committee on grading gave its report at the last faculty meeting, the faculty responded positively. The changes would take effect in the fall of 2014, so members of the class of 2015 and 2016 would have two GPAs on their transcripts from before and after the change.

Lu suggested that the very act of professors talking about grading was getting them to rethink how they evaluate students, so that might just mean that even before these changes take place, students will start to see professors grading differently.

So whether or not you think the changes would be good for Yale (and whether or not you think they’d be good for your GPA), what you think doesn’t count for anything at the faculty meeting next Thursday if faculty don’t know what you think. So email or talk to your professors—maybe talk to friends and get a new fashioned email letter writing campaign going. I’m willing to bet it won’t affect your final grade much.

—graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

Feast without yeast

Bunches of bird books Book collector William Freedberg, ES ’15, traces his preoccupation back to a childhood precursor: Pokémon. But as he matured, his collecting tendency became less about the desire to acquire—less “Gotta Catch ‘Em All”—and broadened into what Freedberg calls “needing that topic in your life.”

In his case, “that topic” is birds—and his book collection ranges from technical field guides to nature literature. His passion has earned him Yale’s 2013 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize, an award, worth either $1,000 or $700 (depending on the year of its recipient), conferred on the best student book collections. In Freedberg’s words, his collection captures the “breadth of ways of approaching the natural world,” an ambitious project too sprawling for any single book.

When I visit Freedberg to talk about his collection, the first thing he tells me is that I’ll be disappointed if I came to see his books in the flesh: his collection has been transplanted back home. In lieu of actual books, we begin by discussing book collecting in the abstract.

I ask Freedberg what value collecting books adds above and beyond reading.“All of these guys”—the naturalists who comprise his collection—“are working in some sort of context,” he says. The reader who reads blind to this context does so at her own peril. To illustrate this point, Freedberg relates how the Victorian naturalists in the latter half of the 19th century were not writing their field guides and treatises in a vacuum, but were reading their contemporaries and, more often than not, imitating Henry Walter Bates, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace. His collection embodies the importance of context in both writing and reading.

Freedberg also vouches for the property of gestalt, the concept that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. New truths emerge when books are juxtaposed, like Freedberg’s amusing realization that American conservationist Rachel Carson and French marine biologist extraordinaire Jacques Cousteau, two thinkers worlds apart, share uncannily similar writing styles.

“I’m proud of that idea,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

As the conversation turns from the abstract plane of book collecting to the content of the books themselves, Freedberg perks up and his voice takes on a dreamier quality. Freedberg gives me a rundown of the highlights of his collection. At his fingertips, he has the poetic Victorian excesses of P.H. Gosse’s A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica alongside the concision and precision of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. In Freedberg’s collection, the lifelike illustrations of Ridgely and Tudor’s The Birds of South America, which he describes as “suggestive of subtle movement,” share the bookshelf with Audobon’s famous illustrations, which he more sourly deems “overdone and contrived.” His book collection mimics the noisiness of competing visions inherent in any field; ideally, the field’s contours are matched by the contours of the collection itself.

While winning the prize is clearly an honor, Freedberg possesses a genuine passion greater than the quantity of his collection. Freedberg’s book collecting is a backdrop to his budding interest in ornithology, which takes the form of field expeditions (six in South America and one in Africa so far) and biology internships.

“I think collection takes someone who needs those books and who’s going to use their relationships,” Freedberg says. And this makes sense: with utility as your guide, what you need determines what you acquire. Freedberg says, “I do choose titles carefully, but it’s really a matter of ‘I need the book’ or ‘I don’t need the book.’” A book collection paired with a passion creates a dynamic duo, grounding the passion in erudition and breathing new life into the books.

Freedberg has collecting in his blood. His parents are antiquarians and formidable book collectors in their own right. His childhood was devoted to other types of collecting and systematizing nature, like insect catching, fishing, and orchid hunting. With his practical bent, however, Freedberg has veered from his parents’ antiquarian, good-because-it’s-old philosophy to become a different sort of book collector—more bird-watcher than bibliophile.

Freedberg’s secrets, then, to a good book collection are “a pathological obsession with the subject” and the dedication to scour yard sales and used book shops (and some Amazon on the side, but Freedberg prefers the romanticized image of yard sale discoveries). Though Freedberg is an avowed pragmatist, he is occasionally still a sucker for old editions and rare binding, which obviously takes a toll on the wallet. “I spent way more than I should’ve on an old edition of A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica,” Freedberg says. On that note, Freedberg is grateful to the Van Sinderen prize for the financial boost. The collection, after all, is still growing.

I admitted to Freedberg that the notion of Yale promoting and celebrating book collecting, a seemingly outdated hobby in the era of ebooks and James Patterson, struck me as a bit offbeat. Freedberg cleared it up for me: a book collecting prize is a fitting fixture at “a school of nerds.” And, by invoking nerds, Freedberg proves that, whether we’re considering Yale or book collecting, everything comes back to Pokémon. ­—Benjamin Weissler

There are three lessons that I learned about Passover when I was very young. 1) Matzah takes a major toll on the digestive system after only a few short days of heavy consumption. 2) The food served during the Seder (the festive meal that occurs on the first two nights of the holiday) is as good as it will get until Passover ends a week later.

3) The holiday can be trying even to the strongest of the faithful—it is essentially an eight-day-long culinary endurance test.

But, my Jewish sisters and brothers all over this campus, fear not! Eli Yale has you covered as you undergo the marathon that is the Passover holiday. Our ancestors walked the deserts of Egypt for 40 years, but in this day and age, we need not find the holiday is just as arduous our forefathers did. Here in the Elm City, we have some clear-cut tools to employ in the attempt to stamp a big fat “Kosher for Passover” label on your head for the next eight days.

As an avid outdoorsman, I like to look at the Passover holiday as a wilderness excursion. The number one rule of venturing out into the natural world is preparedness.

Many survival guides name “miscalculating risk” as one of the primary mistakes of wilderness survival. Here at Yale, risks are no different—it’s imperative to understand the risks before you encounter them.

This means avoiding all seductive smells. Of course, I’m mostly talking about the Caseus Cheese Truck. Luckily, the folks at Caseus are absolute tech wizards, and keep their Twitter and Facebook accounts updated by the hour with their current location, so I can steer clear. This strategy also goes for any location that I like to refer to as a “festival of bread”—Yorkside Pizza, Au Bain Pain, even the back entrance to Commons can be dangerous (the fumes from its bread bakery vents usually roar around noon).

It turns out that Yale’s Passover dining options are pretty stellar. Thanks to the Joseph A. Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, the kosher kitchen serves up delicious Passover fare, breakfast lunch and dinner, for the entire eight days. Some say the Slifka food during Passover is actually far superior to that served during the rest of the year—a recent meal saw a chicken stir-fry served with vegetable spring rolls, accompanied by a delicate mushroom soup. Waiting in line for food, it’s normal to hear comments like, “I never had Passover this easy at home,” and “I can’t believe this food is actually kosher for Passover!”

What makes the meals at Slifka even better during the normally brutal holiday? At any given moment, it seems like the entire Yale Jewish community fills the tables of the Kosher Kitchen—even that one suitemate who said he was a member of The Tribe, despite his constant late night bacon, egg, and cheese G-Heav binges, is likely to be spotted at Yale’s hottest Passover dining institution. At the other dining halls, I know many who utilize the salad bars to create a quick kosher for Passover meal. Along with a fruit smoothie (most of the dining halls now have blenders), this can work. However being around so many of your friends eating copious amounts of bread, pasta and pizza could prove to be too difficult. My advice about the non-Slifka dining halls: stay away.

Even the most faithful have a breaking point. ­— Rafi Bildner ­— graphics by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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REVIEWS Spring breakdown

by Gareth Imparato YH Staff

F

rench sociologist and cocktail party quotable Jean Baudrillard coined the term hyperreality in his 1981 masterpiece Simulacra and Simulation. It refers to the notion that in late stage capitalism the human existence is defined by perceptions of reality that are so influenced by media that we can no longer tell what is real, only what is perceived.

For example, if a number of former Disney empire actresses were to appear in an artsy film about lost innocence, it would be hard to tell where fiction ended and reality began. Similarly, if James Franco were to give a virtuosic performance as a rapper-gangster, next to an actual rapper-gangster from the region that he studied for the role, it might be hard to tell exactly who was which. Now, if the rapper Gucci Mane appeared in this same film simply as the kind of standard Mafioso that many rappers portray in their music, maybe we would have entered the realm of the hyperreal. All this is to say that when provocateur director Harmony Korine says of his latest movie, Spring Breakers, “This film is hyperreality,” he’s not bullshitting.

The movie is an approximated acid trip, a mess of repeated dialogue and images, color washes, and extremely stylized violence. Even more interestingly, this tour de force film is built around the public personae of its stars. Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens each play archetypical versions of their public selves; Hudgens, the grownup bad girl, Gomez, the teen caught between worlds.

That, coupled with a culture jamming ad campaign that pitches the movie as a dumb spring romp, makes for a potentially winning strategy. Because the movie that comes out is provocative, in a way that very few are. It has extreme sex, extreme violence, and a focus on race and class that adds a sense of weight, even menace, to its otherwise mischievous tone.

Harmony Korine is of course no stranger to controversy and scandal surrounding his work. His career began with his screenplay for 1990s indie classic Kids. That film’s technique was simple but compelling: to show young teens engaging in extremely dangerous behavior during the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Since then he’s floated around the art house world, producing mostly outsider art projects with small

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The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

to shoestring budgets. Spring Breakers, however, has brought him back into the zeitgeist, and for good reason. The film makes it clear that he’s a true directorial talent, with a style that feels uniquely of our time.

The genius of Spring Breakers is that it ties together two narratives of contemporary American life that are both obviously symbiotic and rarely connected: the hard partying college lifestyle and the gangsta extravagance of so many rappers and hip-hop wannabes. Of course, the connection between these two worlds is evident in every dorm room pregame framed by pictures of Biggie on the walls, but Korine literalizes the relationship. He grounds the ability of the picture’s four central friends to go on spring break in their willingness to execute an armed robbery, the proceeds of which finance their trip south. Then, halfway through the film, he ups his ante, allowing the group to stay with James Franco’s brilliantly conceived rapper gangster. The movie ends in a frenzied bacchanal of violence, and the bodies that are pile up in quick succession at the end are those of the black gangster’s posse.

For this reason some critics of the film have accused it of racism, but Korine’s intent seems to be to call light to the casual racism inherent in narratives like this, not to celebrate it. Korine has created a universe that is hyperreal not simply because it ties our reality into fiction, but also because it shows the real implications of the narratives by which contemporary youth culture is defined.

Spring Breakers is a movie about media. It both satirizes and celebrates the crudeness, the limitations, the sensualism of portrayals of youth culture. It will (probably) make you horny, happy, amused, disgusted, and intrigued, mostly at the same time. Korine has created a film that is a fun house mirror, reflecting today’s reality through a distorted lens. Everything is hyperreal, nothing is true. There are only signs, reflecting other signs, forever. Right now those signs are former teen queens, rappers, indie auteurs. Together they’ve created a film that might just be the most fun you have in a theater all year.

Music: Guided by Voices An old steel tractor that has enough confidence to sit and be forever broken.

I wrote that sentence this morning when I first listened to Guided By Voices new single. I’m not sure what it means except that I was half-asleep and trying to describe the solid sounds of “Trash Can Full of Nails.” Those iron-clad strums of guitar and Pollard’s gruff and unblinking delivery. Clocking in at 3:37, it’s on the long side for a GBV song. And it’s a good, clever song but nothing to write home (or this review) about. However, the second bonus track on the single, “Build A Bigger Iceberg,” made writing this review worth waking up to. Suddenly, you are driving in your car past so many stringy Ohio fields and you remember the Byrds and how psych-pop is the only pop that matters. This week’s single is the third of the five coming out every two weeks until April 30th when GBV will release their full album, English Little League. Buy them all.

—Ava Kofman YH Staff

Music: Rilo Kiley Rilo Kiley’s new track, “Let Me Back In,” is as much a plea to the band’s old fans for re-acceptance as it is a overdetermined indie jangle. Yawn. The song is the foursome’s first since 2007. It was released to increase our anticipation of their forthcoming Rkives, which is a compilation of rare tracks and B-sides. These sorts of “non-album” albums are a well-worn model that bank on turning your nostalgia into ca$h. Fittingly, then, the music video is an exercise in recycling. It includes uninteresting tour footage (a nondescript room filled with randos) and shots of the palm trees that line Jenny Lewis’ blanched L.A. dreams. “I’m sorry for leaving,” she sings. It’s unclear whether her apology is genuine or a marketing calculation or matters.

—Ava Kofman YH Staff

Music: The Strokes It is impossible to listen to Comedown Machine, the fifth studio album by The Strokes, without a kind of giddy, childlike hope that the band might excite you the way it did when you first listened to their earlier albums Is This It and Room on Fire. Unfortunately, Comedown Machine gives little hope that they will ever return to those glory days.

In this latest effort, The Strokes continue experimenting with their sound and venture deeper into the 80s than ever before (compare “One Way Trigger” to Aha’s “Take On Me”). In spite of their experimentation, however, the album exudes a total lack of urgency; complacency with merely sounding different rather than sounding good plagues the album’s thankfully short 40 minute runtime. It’s clear that the band simply played it safe, throwing a guitar solo here, or letting Julian Casablancas croon for a little there. Songs such as “All The Time” and “Welcome to Japan,” start off accelerating from 0 to 60 within their first seconds only to calm to a tepid 30mph by the end, sometimes with Julian Casablancas’ awkward falsetto or forced shouts slamming on the brakes entirely. Others such as “80s Comedown Machine” and the aptly named “Slow Animals” never get much of a start at all.

But, worst of all, the real problem isn’t the tempo or the lyrical content—Casablancas often rocked the “bored” look extremely well in his best days. But, unlike on Comedown Machine, he and his band were never boring.

—Kevin Su YH Staff

Music: OneRepublic All the evidence shows that songwriter and producer Ryan Tedder, best known as the front man of the pop rock band OneRepublic, knows how to write a top-40 hit. He’s penned some of the decade’s iconic pop favorites, including Beyoncé’s “Halo,” Jordin Sparks’s “Battlefield,” and Adele’s “Rumor Has It.” On Native, OneRepublic’s newest album, Tedder is chasing down his next smash hit, and a number of tracks indicate that he may very well have caught it. Unfortunately for Native, however, Tedder doesn’t stop going when he’s out of good ideas: the second half of the album features misses cringe-worthy enough to counterbalance the first half’s hits.

“Counting Stars,” the album’s opening track, is spot on. Its infectious dance beat and incremental stacking of voices and instruments make it likely to be this spring’s radio anthem. “What You Wanted,” another success, features three-note vocal earworms and catchy synth loops, though the song is suspiciously reminiscent of OneRepublic’s 2009 hit, “Marching On.” By the second half of the album, the relentless repetition of chart-topping techniques—beats dropping out, vocals repeated an octave up, orchestral instrumentation—starts losing its impact. What really dooms the later tracks, though, is the attempt at profound lyricizing to compensate for the shortage of exciting new hooks. “Something I Need,” a poor imitation of the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done,” features the unintentionally disturbing hook, “If we only die once, I want to die with you.” The greatest disaster on Native, though, is “Preacher,” which features a gospel choir singing, “When I was a kid my grandfather was a preacher. He’d talk about God; yeah, he was something like a teacher.”

Squeezed into an awkward meter, the line is bluntly sentimental and makes for an amateurish track.

Thanks to Tedder’s ability to crank out platinum records, OneRepublic has new hit songs on their hands. Native, however, makes it a little too obvious that it took them 12 tries to get there.

—Helen Rouner YH Staff

Staff list:

Here’s what we’ve been up to What we’re watching: Game of Thrones Winter is coming on Sunday to answer all the questions you’ve had since Season Two ended last June. Will Robb finally give Joffrey the ass-kicking he so thoroughly deserves? Will John Snow have a fling with that feisty redhead from north of the Wall? What’s going on with those ugly ice zombies? I don’t know, but I’m excited to spend my last five Sundays at Yale finding out.

What we’re listening to: “Diane Young” and “Step” by Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend’s new single “Diane Young” and its B-side “Step” remind us all why they’re headlining Lollapalooza this summer. The former is an upbeat, two-minute jam destined for your summer playlist, the latter an pensive track exemplifying how far Ezra Koenig and crew have come in the five years since their debut. Modern Vampires of the City, the band’s third album, drops May 14.

Start your countdown.

What we’re reading: The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Like me, you probably missed the opportunity to read this over spring break. It’s a damn shame, since Joyce Carol Oates worked on this book for 28 years and it’s proving to be well worth the wait. A massive, convoluted novel about Princeton University, smalltown life, and the devil, The Accursed is quickly making a name for itself as one of the best reads of the year and, in the words of Stephen King, “the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel.” I know how I’ll be procrastinating this month when I’m not watching Game of Thrones.

What we’re eating: Grilled Lemon Chicken Salad from Atticus Our favorite kosher option within a block of the Herald office. Happy Passover.

—Colin Groundwater YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST If you’re feeling 22, don’t make a music video for 14 year olds. But the thing is, we love you unconditionally.

This will be blacklisted until conditions improve.

Thought we might as well blacklist them now.

SOMESOM It’s still Where it rains academic papers and happiness is catching a hat.

RL Grime

For sounding so much like R.L. Stine but not being R.L Stine. I want R.L. Stine to play Spring Fling.

This is cruelly inopportune timing.

cold

Taylor Swift’s “22” video

Harvard Senior Spring Video

Netflix releasing Season 5 of Mad Men with a month until finals

TA

Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito

Getting stood up by potential employers FellFe

Don’t call me, maybe?

Finding out things you’ve been eating all week aren’t K for P

My Chemical Romance breaking up

Popcorn? Come on.

R.I.P. My middle school years.

The Yale Herald (Mar. 29, 2013)

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T H E G O R D O N G R A N D F E L L O W S H I P A T YA L E

HowTomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Technologies

Will Shape Your World Craig Mundie | Microsoft

Senior Advisor to CEO Steve Ballmer 4 pm, Wednesday, April 3 SSS 114, 1 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT info: 203-432-2317