TYH LVI 2

The Yale Herald Volume LVI, Number 2 New Haven, Conn.

Fri., Sept. 13, 2013

From the staff Everyone has a library story. Some of them are horror stories, like when you woke up in the Trumbull library during reading week or stared down judgmental hipsters in Haas. Some stories are academic victories, some are romances in the stacks, and sometimes you say Box when you mean Bass (or vice versa). My library story is pretty simple. Freshman year, I decided I was going to study (or “study,” rather) in each Yale library at least once. After visiting eight different libraries and a trek to the Divinity School, I gave up and settled down in Sterling Memorial Library, which back then was more of a cathedral and less of a maze.

But from the widest-eyed freshman to the most seasoned tour guide, we all have our stories about Sterling, which itself is filled with stories (approximately 4 million physical volumes, in fact). In our cover this week, Sophie Grais, SM ’14, investigates the library’s yearlong renovation and restoration processes, while also taking a closer look at Sterling’s digitization programs and the role of libraries in the future.

However, Sterling isn’t the only new game in town. From new restaurants on Broadway to tons of new professors (holla, Political Science Department!), Yale is using 300 years of practice to keep things fresh, and likewise, the Yale Herald this week is chock full of exciting discoveries. In Features, A. Grace Steig, SM ’15, looks at Alzheimer’s research and activism in light of a groundbreaking study by Yale neuroscientists. We have culture pieces on Yale’s exchange students, student brand ambassadors, and a hot web series developed and produced by alumni. In Reviews, Aaron Gertler, TD ’15, looks at Janelle Monáe’s new album and Lucas Sin, DC ’15, takes on the cannoli truck. And in Opinion, Allison Mandeville, JE ’15, brings in an important perspective on the Syrian refugee crisis. There’s something for everyone—and unlike Sterling right now, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

So whether picking up this paper was your fresh discovery today or if you’re an old friend of the Yale Herald, sit down, take a break, and read. You can also check us out online and hang with our friends at the Bullblog. We’re excited to have you, no renovations needed.

Herald love, Alisha Jarwala Features editor

The Yale Herald

Volume LVI, Number 2 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Sep. 13, 2013

EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Maude Tisch Managing Editors: Micah Rodman, Olivia Rosenthal Senior Editors: Sophie Grais, Eli Mandel, Emily Rappaport, Emma Schindler, John Stillman Culture Editors: Austin Bryniarski, Katy Osborn Features Editors: Kohler Bruno, Alisha Jarwala, Lara Sokoloff Opinion Editor: Andrew Wagner Reviews Editor: Kevin Su Voices Editor: Jake Orbison Design Editors: Madeline Butler, Julia Kittle-Kamp, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Associate Design Editors: Kai Takahashi, Devon Geyelin Photo Editor: Rebecca Wolenski BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Shreya Ghei, Joe Giammittorio Director of Advertising: Steve Jozkowski Director of Development: Thomas Marano Director of Finance: Aleesha Melwani Executive Director of Business: Stephanie Kan Senior Business Adviser: Evan Walker-Wells ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Colin Groundwater Bullblog Editor-in-chief: Micah Rodman and Jack Schlossberg Bullblog Associate Editors: Austin Bryniarski, Kohler Bruno, Navy Encinias, Lara Sokoloff, Jessica Sykes 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 2013-2014 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: maude.tisch@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 Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 Sophie Grais, SM ‘14, takes

us behind the construction zone of the under-renovation Sterling Memorial Library to scrutinize the uncertain future of the way we store knowledge. Also: photos from Sterling’s storied past!

VOICES 6

Aaron Gertler, TD ‘15, discusses the LGBT movement and the difficulties of religion with Chris Stedman, Coordinator of Humanist Life for the Yale Humanist Community.

7

Dominic Coles, CC ‘16, lets us follow him through comic times and tough conversations and considers what it means to run away.

8

OPINION: Allison Mandeville, JE ‘14, questions the way we discuss Syria, and Evan WalkerWells, TD ‘14, contemplates the problems with grading and imagines an alternate solution.

FEATURES 10

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Sarah Holder, SY ‘17, gives us the scoop on the post-Yale web series life, while Anna Meixler, ES ‘16, looks into Yale’s Visiting International Students Program. Also: Yale’s hidden brand ambassadors.

A. Grace Steig, SM ’15, unpacks Yale Medical School’s recent Alzheimer’s discovery and examines related research and undergraduate activism.

20

Aaron Gertler, TD ’15, on Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady. Also: Man Man, Arctic Monkeys, the Cannoli Truck, and our weekly staff list.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

3

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:

Zip-off shorts “Is this heat wave going to continue? Is it going to be hot again tomorrow? Or should I be prepared for more a more temperate atmosphere? Ugh! What do I wear?!”

You’ve been there. It’s frustrating to have no idea what a day might end up being like and stressful not to know what you should wear! That’s why zip-offs are so cool. They keep you cool, they keep you warm and they make you look cool while making you look hot! There should be zip-off options for every other type of clothing.

The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM ping-pong.

D:

Air-conditioned spaces Before you think I’m stupid, let me just tell you that I love AC. But, there are problems that accompany a freezing cold room amidst a humid, horrible and sweaty day. First of all, the sweat from your shirt consolidates around the nipple and teet area when you first enter a cold room. Then, the sweat on your face pools around your upper lip.

Then, you are just so cold that you want to step outside for a minute to warm up! This is no way to live, although it is much better than not having AC at all.

F:

The overdue stop and chat It’s too late for “how was your summer.” When you see a friend on the street and you two have not yet had a chance to do a catch-up sesh, it’s so hard to figure out how your relationship is going to progress! Should you resign yourself to the fact that you guys aren’t that close, or should you renew your commitment? The move, in my opinion, is to make a tentative date to catch up later. Next Thursday? Let’s do lunch this week, yeah? Are you going out tomorrow? Will I see you at SigEp’s “Turn’t?” Coffee on Sunday? Find a way to make it work. Impossible is nothing.

—Jack Schlossberg YH Staff —graphics by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

BY THE

NUMBERS

BOOM/BUST

TYNG CUP STANDINGS

INCOMING: Miley, again We know we reported her as “Outgoing” last week, but how the heck were we supposed to know that the reason for her lull was that she was simply plotting her next world takeover! It’s like she’s riding the “Boom Bust” pendulum, more specifically, a wrecking ball. You may love her, you may hate her, but you definitely watched her new music video, “Wrecking Ball.” And what does that say about Miles? She’s back. And she’s back by swinging around nakey on a giant concrete ball. If you think that’s too controversial for the citizens of the world, whatever. It’s working. As I’m writing this, 47,659,238 people have watched the video. It reached 19.3 million views in 24 hours; that’s 13,194 views per minute! The middle school project you put on YouTube plateaued at 127, so I understand you’re bitter. However, your middle school project wasn’t directed by Terry Richardson, nor did it feature a slamming Cyrus in her skivvies. She’s turned the game around in one week and given the Herald a run for our money!

OUTGOING: iPhone 4 Here’s my theory: Apple has a giant red button in their Silicon Valley headquarters. When each new model laptop, phone, etc. comes out, someone pushes this red button. This red button causes the malfunction of every previous model of said technology. If you don’t think this is true, then you have never owned an Apple product (respect). The iPhones 5S and 5C are out, hence the button’s been pressed, causing the ruin of my phone. That being said, the 5 does have some crazy specs. I mean, the 5S has a fingerprint scanner!

And the 5C comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, black, and white. Also, it’s plastic! It’s pretty clear that with the fancy new versions of the iPhone 5, Apple is working on completing the next level of controlling the world. And with the colorful 5C, the audience for Apple products will get younger—we’re about to see every lil kid tote one of them around… So line up peeps! If not to buy the new phone then to preemptively make an appointment for your failing 4.

— Carly Lovejoy

TOP FIVE

Things to do in the Sterling stacks because you’d rather do anything than your assigned reading.

#

Berkeley Branford Calhoun Davenport Ezra Stiles Jonathan Edwards Morse Pierson Saybrook Silliman Timothy Dwight Trumbull

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

INDEX 12

Number of years since the 9/11 attacks.

422,000 Estimated number of New Yorkers currently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the 9/11 attacks.

9 Number of Yale alums who perished at Ground Zero.

5 4 3 2 1

Pretend to be a ghost by dressing up in old-time clothing and walking with an empty gaze.

2002 The last year Yale observed a campus-wide minute of silence in honor of the attacks.

Search for all the squirrels that have mysteriously gone missing from campus. But, seriously, WHERE ARE THEY?!

82.3

Blast Soulja Boy’s “Stacks on Stacks on Stacks” and twerk on a bookshelf.

Miles between the World Trade Center and Harkness Tower, from which students reported to have seen dust and smoke in the distance on September 11, 2001.

Order Insomnia Cookies and demand they deliver it to the book Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt. Give no explanation why.

Take a dump. (Expand your laundry room horizons, folks.)

Sources: a) n/a, b) nymag.com, c) Yale Daily News, d) news.yale.com, e) maps.google.com, Yale Daily News — Navy Encinias YH Staff

— Larry Millstein The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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SITTING DOWN WITH CHRIS STEDMAN

by Aaron Gertler YH Staff After a secular upbringing in Minnesota, Chris Stedman converted to evangelical Christianity when he was 11. He later spent several years speaking in front of religious audiences as a leading voice in the gay Christian movement before losing his belief in God and leaving the faith, and has since been working with a variety of interfaith initiatives to bring atheists and religious people closer together. He also published a memoir, Faithiest, at the age of 24, and has recently become the first Coordinator of Humanist Life for the Yale Humanist Community. The Herald sat down with Stedman to discuss his departure from religion, his interfaith work, and his hopes for the future of Humanism.

YH: 24 is pretty young to publish a memoir. Do you have another book in you somewhere?

CS: I think I do. It’s very, very early in development right now.

I’m interested in what it means to have an interfaith conversation with someone who believes very different things than you do. In the sort of interfaith work where you’re already on the same page politically—I think that’s a valuable effort, but what is it like for an evangelical Christian and an atheist to find common ground?

The sad truth of the matter is that those stories don’t get told, at least not regularly. We live in a conflict-oriented world; that’s what sells newspapers and bumps cable news ratings. Stories about people working across the aisle are harder to get into print.

YH: In Faithiest, you mention that you were worried about accidental proselytization, turning people away from their beliefs, in the course of your interfaith work. But isn’t that what religions are setting out to achieve by working with atheists?

CS: I don’t know how it is at Yale yet, but at Harvard, we maintain a strict non-proselytizing code of conduct. But the distinction between outreach—letting people know you’re there—and proselytizing is fuzzy. What we do is a lot of awareness-building; we tell people who we are and invite them to think critically about what they believe. There’s an interesting and similar nuance among Christians. An evangelical friend of mine who works in interfaith gets nagged by his evangelical peers, because they think he’s not really evangelizing, but his feeling is that by being a decent human being and meeting people where they are, he might invoke their curiosity instead of turning them away from Christianity.

YH: That distinction brings to mind the one you made in your book between “diplomats” and “firebrands.”

CS: Yes! I see the parallel made a lot between atheist firebrands and LGBT firebrands, atheist and LGBT diplomats. The LGBT movement has found great success, in large part because there were people who said “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” and people who said “we’re just like you, we’re your neighbors, we’re your friends.” Where the parallel with atheism falls apart in my mind: the firebrand LGBT activists weren’t trying to end heterosexuality. They challenged privilege, they challenged heteronormativity, yet they didn’t try to convert anyone.

But firebrand atheists often announce the end of religion as their goal, which is a turnoff for a lot of people. Religions encounter the same problems, in that their intention is often to end all religions that aren’t their own. I think that a lot of the moves that

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

Jake Orbison/YH evangelicals have made over the years have helped to create a mass exodus from organized religion in the United States. One in five young people in the U.S. don’t belong to a formal religion, but the majority of those folks still claim to believe in God, and many still pray regularly. They just feel alienated from organized religion, and they disaffiliate because they see it as being too aligned with conservative politics, too aggressive.

YH: But just as LGBT groups helped people come out of the closet, maybe there’s a place for Humanist firebrands to help secret atheists express their beliefs?

CS: Exactly. It’s about changing the cultural attitudes around Humanism and atheism, to make people more comfortable with expressing who they are. If you look back to the LGBT movement, you’ll see that relationship-building was the most important move toward gaining acceptance.

In the last decade, 14 percent of Americans have changed their minds from opposing to supporting same-sex marriage, according to Gallup. The most common reason respondents gave for changing their minds was that they’d gotten to know a gay or lesbian person; only about two percent of the population changed their minds because they came to believe that gay people were born that way. So education helps, but it was visibility and relationships that made the difference. We need to be telling the story of atheists in a way that people can relate to.

YH: While many of the most notable atheists have a scientific background, your degree is in religious studies. How has that affected your contribution to the movement?

CS: This is something I’ve really enjoyed about being part of the Humanist community at Harvard, and it’s why I’m excited to be working at Yale. You have a group of people working together who have studied very different things, and you then get an opportunity to pool that knowledge together, to have a conversation based on the things people know. One of the things that will really benefit the atheist moment will be a diversification of atheism, of different people telling stories of where they came from. Right now, the media portrays atheism in a particular sort of narrow way, and people looking for a different entry point into the conversation might not feel that there’s a place for them at the table.

Diversifying will enable more people to see themselves reflected in this movement, in this identity, in this community.

YH: So what’s your story? Your book doesn’t go into much detail about how you chose to leave religion.

CS: What really happened is that I realized I’d converted to Christianity because I was interested in community and in having a framework for talking about ethics, for what it means to be a good person. And the evangelical moral framework was very easy to digest: those who behave badly, who harm other people and don’t repent, go to Hell, while those who are victims of violence can be redeemed.

When I realized that the desires I had to be part of a community and to help others had existed prior to my conversion, I realized that those things weren’t connected, and I started to think critically about whether there was a God or not. For a while, the

fact that I didn’t believe in God was very central to me. It’s still important, because my atheism is the basis for much of how I live my life. Believing there’s no afterlife, for instance, really encourages me to live in the moment, to aspire to be a good person—if there are no divine forces that are going to intervene to help us, it’s up to humans to work together and solve our problems. This explanation tends to resonate with religious people; we share the common goal of coming together to create a better world, even if we’re doing it for different reasons.

YH: Did you have a strong mystical life when you were evangelical? Many godly experiences?

CS: As I was writing Faithiest, I was trying to review that part of my life, how I felt at that time—and it just felt very distant, almost as if it had happened to another person. It was incredibly difficult to place myself in the shoes of 12-year-old Chris Stedman, even to understand how I’d once believed that there was a God. But this reminded me of the fact that these beliefs feel very real for people, and that makes it harder to callously dismiss them.

I always kind of felt like I was not a good Christian in some ways. One of my first Bible Study leaders told me that the only unforgivable sin was to hear the word of God and disbelieve. After I heard that, I was terrified, and I heavily guarded myself against doubt. But at the same time, I never felt like I was having the same experience as everyone else. My friends would tell me they heard God talking to them, while I never did. I thought that this was because I was gay, because God knew there was this sin in my heart. So I did have what one might call “mystical experiences”, but these were more the result of being in a group of people, all of whom were themselves having these experiences.

I never had a mystical experience while I was alone. Even while I was praying to have my sexual orientation changed, begging constantly—I just felt nothing.

As a progressive Christian, I had a different conception of God—not a voice in your head, but a force that worked upon the world in “mysterious ways”—but eventually I came to realize that I was trying to explain something that didn’t really make sense to me. And gradually, I said to myself, “I just don’t believe in this”. In Faithiest, I describe it as coming home from a long week of work and seeing that God had just packed his bags and left.

YH: Do you think that the tone of Humanist conversation about religion is changing?

CS: Yes! I’m so encouraged by the conversations I’ve been able to participate in. I didn’t set out to write some kind of authoritative book on what atheists should do and how interfaith dialogue should work. My goal in writing Faithiest was to contribute to an ongoing conversation and stimulate discussion. I put forth some propositions, but this was mainly to incite a discussion, in which others could put forward their stories, and we could examine how the intersections work between atheism, interfaith work, and Humanist communities. People who disagreed are now part of the conversation, challenging my work in really constructive ways.

—This interview was condensed by the author

RUNNING

by Dominic Coles

A

few years ago, I was walking home from the subway late at night, when I saw a woman walking toward me. The walk home at that time of night is generally a solitary one, which is why I was startled by this welldressed, high-heeled figure. I assumed she had come from one of those power meetings or business drinks or whatever.

Despite her killer heels, she was moving quickly, and made the turn onto 90th Street before I did.

I was walking only a little bit behind her and was trying my best to understand whether her dress was green or yellow. I looked down at my own shirt as a reference: blue? One block, two blocks, three blocks. It must be yellow; it would complement the color of her hair. Four blocks, five blocks.

Suddenly, I seemed to be walking so much faster than I had been only a second ago. So was she. Suddenly we seemed to be almost jogging down the street.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THREE MONTHS, THE FIRST time since going away to college, I was coming home. I was so excited: my mom’s food, my bed, my shower, my friends.

The beginning had been rough, and I felt inadequate. (Who else was to blame that I wasn’t having the best time? Not my friends, not the bed, not the food, not my mom.) It would feel good to be home.

I got out of the elevator and opened the door to my apartment. My mother, who’s even smaller than I am, came rushing out with a huge hug and the smell of cooking. We stood there for a moment as she appraised me (“You’re way too skinny; you’ve lost more weight”), and I happily began to move my bag and guitar into my room. We talked in the kitchen for a little bit as I made myself a snack and got some water.

“OH FUCK, THERE’S CLEARLY SOMEONE FOLLOWING us—why didn’t she warn me?” I thought. I threw a glance over my shoulder to check: nobody behind—dark street,

nothing at all; nothing but the shiny green dress in front of me. “WHY ARE WE WALKING SO QUICKLY?” Time passing, the distance between us shortening, and suddenly, the answer lurched out at me from around the corner we were about to turn. I finally realized: I had been following this poor woman for five and a half blocks.

“SO, DOMI, HOW’S SCHOOL BEEN?” I SEIZED UP THE moment she asked. I couldn’t tell her the truth. I knew how sad she had been to see me go, and I didn’t want to make her feel any worse. It might have felt good to talk about it with someone (it does, it turns out), but it wouldn’t have been right of me.

“Fine, yeah, you know, really great. It’s great.” I grabbed my phone and smiled through old messages. She looked at me skeptically as I backed out of the kitchen, into the living room. She followed, followed, asking more questions. I had to tell her how bad I had been feeling but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything at all. I moved out of the living room down the hall, trying to hide in the bathroom. She followed more, asking more. I left the bathroom and hid in my room, the refuge I could find. She stood by my door as she called, “What’s wrong, Domi? Is everything okay?”

THE INSTANT I UNDERSTOOD WHAT I HAD BEEN doing, I began to panic. She probably thought I was going to rob her. Here, I think that I should put in a few notes about myself: I have the tiniest wrists; when I was young, I tried to kiss my pre-K teacher, and when she laughed at me, I hid in my cubby for an hour; my glasses are thick and black; I peed my pants in the fifth grade, and, in order to conceal it, I dunked all my clothes in the sink and returned to class soaking wet and said the bathroom exploded; I am 5’8, 112 pounds. I thought about calling to her, to tell her that there was no chance that I would hurt her, that I was just coming home, the same as her. But if I called out to

her to let her know that, it would only make her more afraid, and she was already practically sprinting at this point, so I began to panic.

I brilliantly realized that the only thing that I could do to put her mind at ease was to overtake her. My extreme power-walk shifted into a jog. Now I was really moving fast—it took only moments before I was right behind her. A new wave of awful terror rushed through me as I saw just how egregiously weird I was being. What if she panicked, thinking I was closing in on her (which I was)? What if she cried out for help (which I would do)? Still I took every step, lost my breath, and I remember without a doubt that turning around had been off the table for a while.

I COULD’VE BEEN HONEST WITH HER, BUT INSTEAD I snapped, “Jesus, nothing’s wrong. I can tell you haven’t been up to much.” She closed the door quietly behind her, while I stayed sitting on my bed thinking about that night when, out of the goodness of my heart, I chased someone down a city street. I picked up my cellphone again, but then threw it aside. I stood up and went to open the door.

PANTING AND SWEATING, I MADE MY MOVE TO PASS her. As we were neck and neck, I quickly turned to look at her face, simply to smile, to let her know that I had never meant any harm, that I was a nice guy walking home. She was looking down at her cellphone, typing intently. She had a small grin on her face like she was looking at something funny. She hadn’t heard me pass, and while the smile on my face dissolved, she continued gleefully forward, oblivious to my movements.

SORRY. I’M TRYING TO OPEN THESE DOORS, BUT IT’S hard not to run.

—graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

9

OPINION TWO MILLION

by Allison Mandeville Two million is a big number. You know this, I know this, and the media definitely knows this. Every day, as the Syrian civil war booms and swells, at least one major news source will choose to plaster this number on its front page. “TWO MILLION REFUGEES” screams the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian. TWO MILLION. TWO MILLION. The problem with these headlines lies not in their dramatics, but rather in the distinct lack of follow-up in the accompanying articles. In most cases, these articles draw us in with big crushing numbers and then quickly use them to segue into the political debate surrounding U.S. intervention. Rare has been the in-depth and well-informed discussion and reporting, whether in the media or our dining hall debates, of exactly what is to be done for the two million. This is due not to a lack of interest in assisting refugees, but rather to a general knowledge gap on ways this may be achieved. In seminars, professors solicit opinions on airstrikes and question us on “red lines,” acting under the reasonable assumption that their students will have something to say. We as a public, witness to Afghanistan and Iraq, are familiar with certain mechanisms and truisms of war. Perhaps too much so, we consider ourselves experts, ready and willing to analyze the ghosts of American interventionism.

Not so with the refugee crisis. Beyond statistics, what does the general public know about international refugee assistance? What do we know about its mechanisms, its possibilities, its limits? Very little, it would seem, and so we divert our attention to the military and political debate, where we can articulate clear opinions, pull quotes from Samantha Power or Nicholas Kristof, or draw comparisons to Kosovo or Iraq.

Overshadowed by this more familiar dialogue, “refugee crisis” has been reduced to a buzzword, on par with “synergy” and “problematic.”

I write to implore that we ask more of ourselves, that we broaden and deepen the content of our sweeping Syria discussion and recognize that refugees are human beings of great complexity and courage, deserving of an equally complex and courageous response. As this response unfolds, we as a public should educate ourselves on the mechanisms of refugee assistance, so as to advocate for aid with the same vigor and nuance that we afford to the military debate.

What will this involve? In responding to refugee crises, there are at least two threads

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

of assistance to consider. The first is groundlevel support, aimed at allowing refugees to live temporarily, with relative stability, in regional camps or cities. Organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and the Red Crescent are working tirelessly to meet the alimentary and medical needs of Syrian refugees. But what else will the maximization of relief efforts require? Initiatives such as newly opened Anmar Hmoud Registration Center in Jordan show great potential and offer important examples for ways of improving the efficiency and accuracy of aid distribution. Through this UN Refugee Agency facility, refugees can register for assistance, articulate specific needs, and receive UN documentation, a process that used to take six to eight months, in a single visit.

Immediate effects of such efficiency include the enabling of refugee children to enroll in Jordanian schools in time for the new semester, an inspiring ground-level success.

The second thread of refugee assistance is that of permanent resettlement. This is a more drastic option, operating on the assumption that refugees cannot and will not seek to return to their home country. In the American context, refugees are resettled through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), a phenomenal program that nevertheless faces key inefficiencies. Intensified security checks, understaffing, and a backlog of applications all delay the admission of eligible refugees desperately seeking safety. As such, domestic resettlement agencies do not expect to see any major flow of Syrian cases to the U.S. until mid-2014, despite the recent screaming of the media. As we take a hard look at our immigration system, we must also focus our energies on the USRAP and consider how best to reallocate resources, restructure program infrastructure, and prioritize funding in order to meet immediate needs.

These are immensely difficult questions, of course, but no more so than the questions of airstrikes, of chemical warfare, of congressional votes, that the public already approaches with great fervor. What is missing is the familiarity, the foundation that would lend us confidence to begin formulating answers, or at the very least substantive debates, and allow us to follow up on our shouts of TWO MILLION. Here I offer just the briefest peek into the logistics of refugee assistance, with the hope of piquing interest, sparking research, and emboldening our campus and our country to stop screaming and start strategizing.

—graphic by Angelina Xing

NO TO GRADES

by Evan Walker-Wells YH Staff In the spring, the Ad Hoc Committee on Grades, a group of about a dozen professors, issued a report that suggested Yale eliminate the A-F grading system and replace it with a 60-100 point grading system. The report argued that this would combat the serious problem of grade inflation at Yale and, with a recommended distribution of grades, would make it possible for grades to more accurately reflect students’ performance. The report described the problems found with all grading systems: ensuring that grades are accurate and consistent—regardless of department or professor, the meaninglessness of universally inflated grades, and the pressure to get good grades influencing students to take fewer risks. My feeling is that there’s one best solution.

Let’s get rid of grades.

No grades, no As, no Bs, no pluses or minuses, or Cr/Ds or Fails. Well, actually we should probably still have fails and credits—but let’s get rid of the rest. Grades should be replaced with mid- and-end of the semester evaluations explaining how well a student did. A slightly less radical alternative would be to replace a final GPA with comprehensive examinations at the end of a student’s four years at Yale with three or four professors writing final evaluations, like recommendations, but critically examining a students’ performance.

Perhaps most importantly, professors and TAs would become more creative about evaluating students. What are they really trying to teach students? How can they communicate with students what they’re doing well or poorly? That’s a key part of what makes a good teacher, and is something that is really missing in the conversation at Yale. A no-grade system would also encourage more serious academic relationships outside of the classroom between professors and students.

Grades are arbitrary. Every professor or TA has a sense of what constitutes very good work, or mediocre work, or even bad work. But how to draw the lines between those levels means something very different to Physics and American Studies professors. Grades have the false appearance of enforcing a standard, but in reality discourage serious criticism and conversation between students and their teachers.

Currently, more than two thirds of grades at Yale are As or A-s, according to the Ad Hoc Committee. Yale students are very smart, but when people expect to, and do, get As and A-s in almost everything, those grades don’t mean what they’re supposed

to. Further, people who do really exceptional work—truly good work—don’t get any additional benefit. You might say that without grades, students won’t be encouraged to work hard or do well in class—but I haven’t met a Yalie who I’d say that about.

Consequently, the punishment for doing slightly worse is big. Since almost every grade is an A or A-, a B grade is a much bigger deal than it otherwise would be. People end up being punished for taking classes outside of their comfort zones. Were Yale to abolish grades, students would be much more free to pursue one of the key goals of a liberal arts education: to challenge themselves throughout their time here and to take classes in different disciplines.

What would Yale look like without grades? I think people would be much less worried about gut classes and much more interested in taking only classes that they’d learn something from. You’d see more students majoring in English and taking physics classes, and more pre-med Chemistry majors in philosophy sections.

Specialization at the age of 18 or 20 is bad for everyone. I think we’d all have a Yale where external validation matters less and personal interests would matter more. I think we’d have a happier Yale.

Instead of a quickly jotted note and a letter in a circle, professors and TAs should provide really substantive criticism and evaluation of assignments —a change that could be spurred by getting rid of grades. This is easier to do for the humanities and harder to do in calculus, but even in courses with right and wrong answers, I think that that kind of feedback could prove to be a substantial teaching moment.

The extreme version of this would be to try and introduce critiques, like art majors get, to other disciplines. Creative writing classes and workshops are an example of how this can work, and I think we could create a stronger culture of students talking, listening, and thinking with each other.

And besides, why should only art majors get to feel the pain and the glory of crits?

Animal stickers or scratch ‘n’ sniff fruit stickers might help—but abolishing grades would be more serious than that. Yale professors and TAs would become better teachers and Yale undergrads would become better students.

Yale is already special: students pursue what they love here more than at other schools. I think that eliminating grades would play to those strengths while making Yale a happier, more intellectual, and more passionate community.

Piece by piece A groundbreaking discovery at Yale Med School promises to revolutionize Alzheimer’s treatment

by A. Grace Steig YH Staff

A

t 6:30 p.m., on a Monday, in the Boyd Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, the fourth-floor lab is humming with graduate students looking at brain cells. Misha Kostylev, a Ph.D. student in Cellular Biology, saunters in, sporting a pristine white lab coat. After a break spent talking with me, he is ready to return to work on the research he loves: “You are not just pipetting liquids from one test tube to another,” he explained, “If you are pipetting it correctly, the advance will be in the right place.

[In the future] you potentially save millions of lives.”

Kostylev is the third author in a study published in the Wed., Sept. 4 issue of the journal Neuron. The study fills a missing piece in the quest towards understanding the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. The research, conducted at Yale Medical School in the lab of Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, discovered the important role played by a membrane protein, metabotropic glutamate receptor 5, referred to as mGluR5 in Alzheimer’s patients. For the first time, researchers will now have a target to aim for in treatments to halt or reverse Alzheimer’s. In trials on mice with brain defects similar to those of Alzheimer’s patients, treatments aimed at the membrane protein were able to reverse memory damage.

Alzheimer’s disease currently has no cure. It is the most common variety of dementia, a general term for a severe decline in mental ability. Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and affects roughly a third of people over 85 worldwide. Though people have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s as they age, certain forms of the disease manifest themselves in people as young as 40 or 50. Today 5.4 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s in

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the U.S., and as both population and lifespan increase, this number is expected to triple to 16 million by 2050.

BEFORE CHATTING WITH KOSTYLVE, I MET the study’s second author, Adam Kaufman, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Yale Medical School, wearing a yellow propylene lab coat and headphones around his neck. Upon meeting me, he ditched the lab coat, kept the headphones, and proceeds to lead me through three long rooms, connecting doors splayed open. We walk past lab tables and shelves packed closely together, piled with electronics and cardboard boxes. A lab mate, Jacqueline Heiss, has been working on studies using several mice now in a cage—“Those are all going to be euthanized,” she explains. Though

on the back of my hand as it takes a few steps in either direction.

“Just don’t show it if you are afraid,” Kaufman says, smiling at the mouse. “Show them calm energy, and they’ll be calm too.”

DR. STRITTMATTER’S LAB IS ONE OF MANY labs at Yale involved in innovative Alzheimer’s disease research. The research projects, though distinct, are all focused on proteins found in the brain that, when assembled improperly, lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

All brains contain a polypeptide known as amyloid beta, or a-beta. A polypeptide is a chain of amino acids, which are the building blocks of a protein. The polypeptide a-beta is 40 amino acids long. But for reasons still not known, sometimes a brain will have a chain that is three amino acids longer. Adding these

symptoms of Alzheimer’s, whereas others with severe forms of the disease may have brains relatively free of plaque.

This perplexing web of Alzheimer’s is tough to untangle – if not plaque, what causes the disease? Dr. Ya Ha, associate professor of pharmacology, believes the disease begins when the a-beta protein is initially formed.

The 43 amino acid sequence of a-beta is formed by cleaving off portions of the larger amyloid precursor protein, known as APP. Mysteriously, the reaction that cleaves off components of APP to form a-beta is hydrolytic, or must be carried out in water, but the process is currently thought to take place in a brain cell’s membrane, which is hydrophobic, or water-repellent. Ha’s lab aims to “create a picture” of this seemingly improbable process that creates a-beta.

In trials on mice with defects similar to those of Alzheimer’s patients, treatments were able to reverse memory damage. she warns him against lifting one, Kaufman does anyway, placing it on the back of his bare hand.

Kaufman describes himself as “the mouse guy,” and over his long career in research has only been bitten “thrice.” To prove my bravery, I also accept the cute rodent that he offers to my own hand.

The mouse is apparently unaware that both its purpose and its life are near their end. It also does not realize that many of its kin were involved in something much larger than themselves, a groundbreaking study that may greatly change the course of Alzheimer’s disease research and treatment. The mouse’s warm belly vibrates

amino acids changes the shape of a-beta, which causes the proteins to aggregate and form a plaque that is toxic to neurons, cells of the central nervous system; this plaque, or build-up of a-beta proteins, is a major identifying feature of Alzheimer’s.

But from here, the story gets much more complicated. The role that plaque plays in the development of Alzheimer’s disease is not well understood. Dr. Andrew Miranker, an associate professor of Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, explains, “When people talk about plaques, these are not really what’s really killing the cells. They’re really a kind of end product.” Some individuals’ brains that have a large build-up of plaque might not exhibit strong

Once a-beta is assembled, the next step is to understand the proteins. The labs of Drs. Andrew Miranker and Liz Rhoades, professors of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, have discovered the atomic structure of a segment of toxic a-beta. “It doesn’t look like we thought the plaque would look like,” Miranker notes. “It’s a new protein shape, and it’s a new target where we can design and synthesize small molecules.” The teams are also investigating the ability of a-beta to get across the membrane and damage cells’s mitochondria, the structures responsible for generating most of the cells’s energy—“that’s what makes cells sick,” Miranker adds.

The lure of discovery also draws undergraduates to study these cells. Both Miranker and Rhoades’s labs have positions for undergraduate students, one of whom is Juli Coraor, PC ’16. Though Coraor studies physics, this past summer she was drawn to this research in an untraditional path— using physics to investigate the physical structure of tau protein in the cells of a

mechanism that makes a-beta toxic to neurons and synapses? The Neuron paper helps to illuminate the answer to this question.

The study’s first author, Dr. Ji Won Um, has moved to South Korea. So Adam Kaufman explains the study’s first discovery to me. The Strittmatter lab had previously found that prion proteins, proteins that are improperly folded, and a-beta are both found

The two-to-four-year period of experimentation that went into the study unearthed “a little piece of evidence here, a little piece of evidence there,” Kostylev says. Finally, these findings joined to form “a much more coherent piece.”

The mice involved in the study had two different forms of Alzheimer’s and were already showing Alzheimer’s symptoms of memory

“You treat diseases one protein at a time.”

—Misha Kostylev, PhD candidate brain with Alzheimer’s. The composition of tau proteins is not essential to understanding the Strittmatter lab’s discovery, but the protein stabilizes the internal structure of nerve cells and is thought to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s.

She will continue to work at Rhoades’s lab this school year and is continually inspired by the implications of the research. “You’re nowhere near any patients. You’re not working with brains,” she explains, “You’re simply working with these clear liquids in a test tube. To think that that could give us information to understanding Alzheimer’s—and eventually curing Alzheimer’s—is pretty amazing.”

While Miranker and Rhodes study a certain toxic segment of the protein, Strittmatter lab’s discovery came out of a question posed about a process farther down the protein’s chain. If the brains of people with Alzheimer’s contain sick cells, they contain an even larger number of sick synapses, or nerves’ way of communicating with each one another. So, the team asked, what is the

on the membranes of neurons. The presence of both a-beta and prion proteins activates a messenger within the cell called Fyn, which decreases synapse activity. The Strittmatter lab has determined that the protein mGluR5 activates Fyn. This is the missing puzzle piece that scientists had longed to discover: “I’d say that we are, you know, really excited,” Kostylev, the paper’s third author, said. What’s significant about mGluR5 is that there is an existing drug called MTEP that targets the protein. mGluR5 is found in Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disease that leads to cognitive disability and behavioral challenges. MTEP has been proven to successfully regulate mGluR5 levels in Fragile X patients, and researchers hope it could do the same for Alzheimer’s patients.

At this point, Kostylev, a young man with curly blond hair and a confident smile strides in and claps Kaufman on the back, and then announces he’s going to nap on the sofa. This is how I first meet him. Kostylev feigns sleep for a couple of minutes before jumping into the conversation on their paper.

loss. They were given MTEP to target mGluR5, and their memories were tested again. As he nears announcing the final discovery, Kaufman grows more and more animated. He finally explains triumphantly: “Their memory had returned to baseline levels.”

The mice’s mental recovery marks an amazing and unprecedented result for Alzheimer’sinfected individuals, for which there has previously been no cure. Scientists do not study the disease merely for the prestige of discovery; the research can be very personal. Many of the scientists were drawn to search for a cure for the disease after having seen their own loved ones suffer from Alzheimer’s. Dr. Christopher van Dyck, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit and Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neurobiology, reflects that by the time he was in college, studying cognitive function, he “saw [Alzheimer’s] up-close, in my grandfather.”

The Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit now approaches a final, important step in their research: human clinical trials. These trials will be necessary to check treatments already

given to mice: Kostylev and Kaufman acknowledge that while genetically identical mice kept in lab conditions are relatively simple targets for treatment, humans are much more complicated. The Strittmatter lab often collaborates with Dr. van Dyck and will be working with him when they test the methods of the Neuron study on humans.

Beyond the lab doors, undergraduates are likely to see an upsurge in Alzheimer’s advocacy this year. The Yale Undergraduate Alzheimer’s Disease Initiative, which was established as a club last year, is newly revitalized with aims to increase its actions. Zobia Chunara, PC ’16, the club’s president, says she hopes that the club will to start volunteering with Alzheimer’s patients this year. When she was in high school, Chunara participated in a program that paired her with a woman named Millie living in a nursing home. Millie had Alzheimer’s, and hearing about her life experiences motivated Chunara to do research in the field. Another goal of Chunara’s is to host a symposium this spring to showcase the work of Yale professors, from various fields, whose work relates to Alzheimer’s. In two weeks, on Sept. 29, the club welcomes anyone to participate in the New Haven Walk to End Alzheimer’s.

Efforts such as the New Haven Walk hope to bring awareness and funding to the search for a cure, a goal still many years distant from researchers at Yale and beyond. The Neuron paper filled a crucial missing link by isolating the role of mGluR5 in Alzheimer’s, but scientists need political and economic support. Most of all, they need to continue working. Kaufman is cautiously optimistic, and Kostylev even more so. “I mean, it’s just a protein,” Kostylev muses. But, he adds, “You treat diseases one protein at a time.”

—graphic by Christie Ramsaran The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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Kai Takahashi / YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

Cyber stacks Sophie Grais, SM ‘14, examines the University’s recent digitization efforts in light of Sterling Memorial Library’s current renovation.

L

ight breaks through stained glass.

A vaulted ceiling thrusts skyward.

A powerful silence, and a majesty that propels you forward toward an altar: here, the circulation desk. This is the entrance—or rather, the nave—of Sterling Memorial Library, which architect James Gamble Rogers called “a cathedral to learning” when it was completed in 1931.

Though seemingly a metaphor, Rogers’ description was quite literal. He explicitly designed the Sterling nave to invoke the same awe of entering a Gothic cathedral and to guard the foundations of the University: its books. One step inside, and the power of the institution is clear. Herein lie the most sacred texts of Yale, pored over by the student body in worship of a higher power, something bigger than them. Here, that something is knowledge.

Now the site of a $20 million restoration, Rogers’ cathedral will see more than just the polishing of glass and stone. The changes to come will make the Sterling nave a space that emphasizes collaboration: more seating areas, more self-service digital technology, fewer barriers to get to the stacks. More than just the addition of a few new couches, this repurposing acknowledges a shift in the foundations of the goals of the University to maintain, distribute, and create knowledge, just as the previous design did for its time. No longer will the University’s body of knowledge be static, hard to access, tucked away in books and shelves—those boundaries are coming down and fast. When the Sterling nave, the must-see of any campus tour and centerpiece of one of the largest library systems in the country, reopens next fall, its façade will be the same and its interior shiny and new. The revamped Sterling marks a radical acceptance of the evolving nature of knowledge and a necessary embrace of digital technology. With this shifted landscape, the role of the library has yet to be fully realized.

Built to house 3.5 million volumes, the Sterling bookstacks—two thousand tons of steel and iron—are the library’s physical constitution. “The stacks, the shelving, is structural,” said Associate University Librarian for Program Development and Research Ken Crilly. “So literally, if you took the shelving down, the building would fall down.” The technique was trendy at the time: in 1911, the main branch of the New York Public Library opened at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, with seven floors of bookstacks supporting its main reading room. In 1933, James Gamble Rogers used the same method, tried and true in New Haven, for the construction of the Charles Deering Library at Northwestern University. In these libraries, take away the bookstacks, and all you’d have is rubble.

Fast forward to 2011, when planning for the restoration of the Sterling nave began with a $20 million gift from Richard Gilder, BR ’54, and his wife, Lois Chiles, in honor of former University President Richard Levin and professor Jane Levin GRD ’75.

Designed by Helpern Architects of New York, the project began this past June. Crilly explained that the work will include a full cleaning of all stone and stained glass, a reorganization of circulation facilities, updated security measures, and the introduction of new seating areas. Aside from removing the arms of the old card catalog to make room for a more inviting, social space, Crilly said, the restoration will not bring major structural changes to the nave.

Sterling’s facelift is just one chapter in a longer narrative of changes in the Yale library system. The Yale University Library, a network that extends from the Yale Medical Library all the way up to the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Conn., now boasts a cool 15 million volumes, nearly 500 staff members, and another 500 digital and physical databases. It’s massive. With one of the largest library systems in the country,

Yale is not alone in the challenges it faces.

As information becomes increasingly digital, libraries across the country and around the world must refashion and adapt.

In Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress plans to consolidate some of its reading rooms because of a lack of visitor demand. Going forward, it will instead emphasize online centralization of its catalogs. Similar changes are already underway in Paris, where the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has launched its Gallica library, a database that provides online access to its over 2.5 million documents. Once covering thousands of square feet, a library can now fit in the 13 inches of a laptop screen.

TO SOME, THIS SEEMS LIKE A THREAT. The reality of the digital age, with its emphasis on more universal access, is changing the significance of the brick-and-mortar library.

Professor R. Howard Bloch, who works with the artifacts of Yale’s collections for his Yale College course “Treasures at Yale,” said that he has noticed students go to libraries less often than they used to. “The library’s become despatialized,” he said. “I have my worries that the library will just become the museum of the book.” Bloch believes that the ability to do research remotely, from a dorm room or on an iPad, might deprive students of valuable experiences to be had in the library space. “If you go, actually go to the library and you go into the stacks, you not only see the books you were looking for, but you see what’s on either side of them and all around it,” he said. “Often that kind of serendipity is as valuable as what you think you knew and were going after. It’s a little like a digital watch in which you can only see the moment in front of you as opposed to the roundness of time in a regular watch. Things have become more available, but there’s a depth of knowledge in the library that you have to come into contact with by going there.”

Though they may not regularly venture into the stacks anymore, students still rely heavily on the resources that the library offers and the quiescence it provides. University Librarian Susan Gibbons contends that in her experience, the number of students going to the library has not decreased. “If anything, it is on the increase,” she said.

“That idea of being able to find a quiet study space or a space for a group of students to get together and collaborate on something is still really important.” Some professors also require their students to use library services; the History department, for example, mandates that majors attend a library tour. Given the seeming dominance of digital technology, Gibbons maintained that students still conduct much of their research using sources in print. Though earlier statistics were not publicly available, Gibbons estimated that in fiscal year 2012, the Yale library system circulated around 450,000 books.

When it comes to the future of libraries, the numbers game is important. Digital technology and reproductions have challenged the role of the physical book. When a new library is built today, its planners must consider the construction not only of its bookstacks, but also of a system to navigate cyberspace. What the Dewey Decimal System was to the nineteenth century, database structures are to the twenty-first, revolutionizing the way digital data is organized and accessed. The vast quantity of available digital information cannot float in a disorganized pool. The library’s task still lies in organization, but now in a different form. “The library used to just be a place where there were books and periodicals, and you could go in with a card catalog and thumb through them and find the books there. Now the library’s become a huge sort of rhizome, a kind of network, a reservoir of all kinds of information and knowledge,” Bloch said.

And this, as Bloch notes, is not to say that libraries will become obsolete, but rather that they will become more dynamic The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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resources. Anthropology professor Mark Turin said that the focus on accessibility is a key element of the library’s relevance going forward. “What I think is important, most important, is that the libraries are increasingly becoming sites of communication and activity… There are a lot of other things that libraries do. Students who make good use of librarians and library facilities are the ones who thrive in places like Yale,” he said. “The open access movement is something that’s being led by librarians. To me, librarians are part of libraries, so the digital transformation has not challenged libraries or killed them off. It’s enlightened them. It’s giving librarians a better, bigger role in research and in teaching.”

This semester, Turin is doing just that.

With the help of library and Instructional Technology staff, he has designed a new course called “Himalayan Collections at Yale.” His students will research Himalayan artifacts in university collections and then use Omeka, a web-publishing platform for digital collections, to curate an online exhibition. Ideally, Turin hopes to keep the exhibition accessible online after the semester ends. “I want those exhibits not only to live on after the class, but to become part of Yale’s own collections management and library tool study guide,” Turin said. “The

computers, computation, and other digital technologies. It’s hard to say whether those characteristics are present, especially exploring the perils,” he said.

Traditionally, subjects in the humanities hinge on close reading and scrutiny of contextual detail. At first glance, this is not the focus of Digital Humanities. It trades the qualitative for the quantitative, using techniques like algorithmic analysis and data mining for humanities research. In this way, the term “Digital Humanities” itself seems an apparent contradiction—because analyzing more pages, more data, more volume would seem to inhibit any kind of close reading. But in fact, the new field, in its own way, marries the concept of a targeted lens with attention to the bigger picture.

Recall the “Find” command in a Word document that allows you to search for every appearance of a specific word. Consider all that this tool enables you to do and how it changes the way you read and interpret information. This is what Digital Humanities can do. But this is also a form of close reading.

These are the questions that drive Leonard’s work. Together with Kirkpatrick and Turin, he worked closely on the design of the Himalayan collections course. On his own, he’s done extensive analysis of word patterns

ogy, Leonard can process massive quantities of data and distill his findings down to their most meaningful core. This isn’t just careful analysis. It’s an extraordinarily close reading of a large volume of work.

Leonard then compared these findings to scans of issues of Vogue from the 1950s, removing words that wouldn’t have existed in either 1896—like ‘television,’—as well ‘carriage,’ which wouldn’t appeared in 1950.

“What is left is kind of an intersection of 1896 and 1950… Now we have to take out some words, words like ‘one’ and ‘will’ are maybe not that important, but words like ‘white’ and ‘black’—it’s interesting, those are the colors that just never went out of style,” Leonard said.

His work may be very different from the experience of thumbing through dusty pages that Bloch remembers, but it promises incredible value for scholarship in the humanities. Leonard said he hopes that this type of analysis will enhance, not replace, the ability to study original texts. “We don’t ever want to replace the kind of thing that humanists are trained to do, which is to do close readings of a poem, or a novel, or a painting, or a music piece. What we want to do is see if there are any ways that we can help humanists, in this era of enormous amounts of digitization, to focus and target their close

“It’s a little like a digital watch in which you can only see the moment in front of you as opposed to the roundness of time in a regular watch. Things have become more available, but there’s a depth of knowledge in the library that you have to come into contact with by going there.”

— R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French idea is to funnel the knowledge back into Yale’s knowledge system. So it not only creates and endures, but actually becomes a useful asset for future students and researchers to use” He compared this idea to the use of sites like Wikipedia, where users can contribute their own insights. “It’s that model of scholarship: collaborative and enduring,” he said.

Turin’s project belongs to the field of Digital Humanities, a relatively new area of study that uses quantitative approaches to examine texts. Earlier this year, the Yale Library hired its first Digital Humanities Librarian, specialist Peter Leonard, marking the University’s commitment to exploration in the field. Leonard explained that the definition of the “Digital Humanities” is not yet crystallized. “It’s still being defined in conversation with Yale faculty members and students,” he said.

In an email to the Herald, Senior Instructional Technologist Trip Kirkpatrick explained his own murky definition of what the Digital Humanities really are. “To me, the defining characteristics of Digital Humanities, as a field or not, should be a relentless exploration of the possibilities, and perils of

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

in Vogue magazine to demonstrate the potential power and insight of this technology.

Since its first issue in 1892, Vogue has published 2,275 times. Conveniently, each of those issues has been digitized by ProQuest, an outside vendor. “One question we’ve asked is: What types of research methods can we use with a large corpus of 400,000 pages, that wouldn’t make any sense if you just had one issue in front of you at the dentist’s office?” Leonard said. Using Optical Character Recognition technology, which understands individual words as unique symbols, Leonard compiled data of the words that appeared most frequently in issues of Vogue from 1896. “Once you take out words that don’t have a lot of meaning, like ‘the’ or something… it turns out that the most common words in 1896 are ‘Miss,’ ‘Mrs.,’ and ‘daughter.’ That’s because Vogue in the 1890s was kind of a social magazine. It was about debutantes, it was about who was related to whom and who they were marrying,” he said. Other common words included ‘lace,’ ‘sleeve,’ ‘married,’ ‘society,’ ‘children,’ and ‘gowns,’ all of which might speak to the socioeconomic status of Vogue’s early readership and its audience’s societal concerns. With this technol-

readings on things that they might not have thought of, or things that they didn’t know were there,” Leonard said.

Leonard addresses a major issue of the digital age: the role of the original text when confronted with new technology. Rather than overshadowing the original document, in this conception, digital technology will serve a separate purpose. Director of Digital Initiatives Beth Beaudin GRD ’95, who received her Ph.D. in medieval Spanish literature, compared the technology available now to what she had for her own research. “We had to practically memorize printed concordances of Don Quixote and all of the literature prior to that, where that is entirely searchable now. Where is that taking our research?” she asked. “And in a digitized context, whenever we’re digitizing something in print, we should be keeping that text for data mining purposes in the future. So that you can do vector analyses and you can do particular word searches in ranges with other expressions, and do some serious exploration of the data as social scientists would.”

The future of the primary document is safe, and the reason why is simple. The value of a primary source can’t be replaced:

researchers will always need to consult them before even beginning to construct new theories and interpretations. Without that base, their work has no foundation. “I need to see the original, at a certain point in time,” Beaudin said. “What the digital is doing for me is saving time and effort. And money and difficulty. If I don’t have to fly to Spain until I need that one thing, then I’m doing much more.” Bloch reiterated Beaudin’s point, explaining the centrality of primary sources to his own field. “The humanities is based on a kind of shiver that one gets in contact with authentic things,” he said. “I think there will always be a sense of going to the library for something authentic.”

As it turns out, that “something authentic” might become more important than ever before. With digital technology as an obvious contrast, the role of the primary source becomes more starkly defined. Charlotte Parker, BK ’13, who curated an online exhibition for the Beinecke Library her senior year, explained the benefits of this technology for the study of historical objects. “It makes going to the archives easier and figuring out what you need to see easier, and it makes presenting what you find easier,” she said. “In that way, it makes the physical archives more important.” At the opening presentation of her exhibition, “No Purifying Fire: American Writers in Spain, 1936-1939,” Parker said she was surprised by the enthusiasm of her audience’s response. “People had amazing questions about the topic, about the process, about the intersection of the topic and the process,” she said. “I think having an online exhibit that people could look at simulated discussion in a way that a paper couldn’t. I think technology can facilitate inperson interactions with academia in a way that didn’t use to be possible.”

FIFTY YEARS AGO, IF YOU WERE WRITING a paper about Louis Armstrong, you would look for a physical recording. Maybe you’d go to a music library. Maybe you’d go to a record store. But now it’s 2013, and you’re writing about Kanye West. His records are all digital, so how would a library collect them? More generally, what happens when originals no longer come on paper—when it’s no longer a question of whether or not to digitize, but when our cultural artifacts arrive in digital formats in the first place?

The answer’s not just up to the library.

“What’s causing the change in the collections that we’re bringing in is the fact that publishers are now creating things in a digital format by default,” Gibbons said.

“So that’s what’s driving the change, is that the material is coming to us in a format that is digital, not that we caused it to be digitized.” According to Gibbons, excluding special collections and manuscripts, currently about sixty percent of library purchases are in a digital format. “So we are still buying physical books, and we probably buy about 60,000 physical books a year,” she said.

With this transition comes a complicated set of legal questions: license agreements, terms of use, special exceptions, and the like. “We all knew how to use a book. And suddenly now, using a book varies based on which e-book package you’re

Jin Ai Yap working with,” Gibbons said. The cost of license agreements varies with the size of the Full Time Equivalent (FTE), the number of potential users of the source in question. With the purchase of single books, those concerns aren’t even on the table. “Because before when there was, let’s say, a community of 200 students here, and then it doubled to 400, when it was all physical, it didn’t matter,” Gibbons said. “Now we think about new colleges, or we think about a growth in the School of Management: anything that adds to the FTE causes all our licenses to become more expensive, and we’re still just buying the same thing. So the whole economics of libraries has changed, and we aren’t quite set up to respond to that.”

It might not be there yet, but that response is in the works. Recently, Beaudin has focused extensively on these economic questions and experimented with different financial models for the Yale library system. “So if you want to put together the pristine, perfect, ideal digital collections program in the future, how do you budget for that?” she asked. “What are the type of activities that would take place to support digital collections from start to finish?” Beaudin explained that cuts in federal funding to the Department of Education have significantly changed the scope of realistic goals for the Yale library. Services like con-

tent quality control on digital projects—including the need to check that foreign languages have been scanned properly, that pages are oriented correctly—are now much harder to afford. “We don’t have that post-processing support still in-house. We have people around that know exactly how

and where it should expand, will remain hypotheticals without the funding to make them a reality. That’s not to say though that they shouldn’t be part of the current discussion. In August, the library published on its website a conversation about the status of digital initiatives between Beaudin and

this point,” Leonard said. “In 2013, I think what people are struggling with is the technology of 20 million books, which is what Google has scanned at this point.”

Subtract 19,900,583 from 20 million, and you’re left with 417: the number of books that Elihu Yale donated to the uni-

Librarians are part of libraries, so the digital transformation has not challenged libraries or killed them off. It’s enlightened them.

—Mark Turin, professor of anthropology to do it, and we still have software to do it, but that means borrowing time and people from their regular duties,” Beaudin said.

The questions of time and money are central to Gibbons’ larger vision for the future of the Yale library system. “If we’re inflating at seven to nine percent and our community is growing, and we’re not getting any more money, the end result is each year our collection gets smaller and smaller. Our purchasing power decreases year after year, and that’s where we have to start making harder decisions than I think we’ve ever had to before, because we can’t afford to buy it all,” Gibbons said. And she has a point. Because at the heart of it, after all, is money. The questions of what a library should be, of what purpose it should serve

Gibbons. Beaudin reflected on this interview, remembering that she had asked Gibbons about the logic behind pursuing costly projects in times of economic difficulty.

“And she put it in a nutshell,” Beaudin said. “You still have to plan ahead for that day when you do have the budget, and you have to have these answers ready so that you have an action plan.”

The hope is that that day will come, and the library will be able to continue to devote time, energy, and resources to projects that expand its digital presence and the ability of others to access it. As the face of Sterling is under construction, so is our idea of what a library can be and what purpose it should serve. “The technology of the book is pretty well understood at

versity that would come to bear his name.

In the early eighteenth century, books were this university’s beginning and the foundation that allowed it to thrive, just as the adoption of digital technologies is set to do today. When the scaffolding comes down next fall, the original stone will still be there, the beautiful windows still in place.

But they’ll look different: cleaner and restored, part of a historic structure equipped to tackle modern questions. Though the space may have changed, Sterling will continue to be a statement of the University’s goals and its commitment to knowledge, no matter what form that knowledge takes.

Standing at the top of Cross Campus, the library will remain what it always has been: an original.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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Snapshots of Sterling

Clockwise from top left: Construction of Sterling Memorial Library; two workers balance at the top of Sterling Memorial Library; workers line up for a fun photograph; Sterling Memorial Library undergoes construction.

All photos courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

Sterling Memorial Library opened in 1931, making it 82 years old— if you were 82 years old, you would maybe want to consider getting some work done too. Here are some pictures from the long-gone days of SML’s construction. Enjoy!

Clockwise from top: Construction of the High Street side of Sterling Memorial Library; chatting construction workers pause for a photograph; can you spot the construction crew at the top?

All photos courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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CULTURE Getting web-serious

by Sarah Holder Last winter, recent Yale grad Ari Berkowitz, BK ’12, found herself grappling with one of life’s toughest struggles: what to do with her bangs. The growing-out process seemed like a long road to recovery, and Berkowitz wasn’t yet sure she had used her fringe to its full potential. One thing she was sure about, however, was her desire to become a TV writer. So in January 2013, Berkowitz found a way to use her hair dilemma to chase this dream, using it as inspiration for a web series that dropped just this week.

“Me and Zooey D” centers on a young Zooey Deschanel look-alike who has an unusual (maybe creepy) obsession with the wide-eyed, full-banged actress, and travels all the way to Hollywod to win her friendship. In each three to four minute video, we watch as the heroine, Alex (played by Berkowitz), carries out some new scheme to grab Zooey’s attention. These plans usually involve Alex frequenting cupcake stores or roaming LA’s streets accompanied by her best friend in the hopes of casually (maybe creepily) running into the future, better BFF of her dreams.

It took a long time to bring Alex’s baby doll dress and chunky glasses to the screen. After developing the concept, Berkowitz took the first episode’s script to Hunter Wolk, SY ’12, a friend from Yale who ended up directing the series, and together they put a team together. They cast recent grads Brittany Belland, who graduated from Ohio State in 2012, and Ben Smith, who graduated from Harvard in 2012, as the two other co-stars.

With the team in place, the next step was raising the money to finance their project. Using Kickstarter, the web series actually exceeded its original budgetary goal, collecting more than $3500. After months of pre-production and planning, the series was finally shot from beginning to end 4-day span in April.

Beyond Berkowitz and her quest for a new BFF, several former Yale students have hopped on the trend of creating web series. Stuey Pliskin, BR ’13, developed “Business Time” in 2012, a four-episode series about an unemployed guy named Fitz, a sort of modern lothario who helps his friend, an heir to a rat extermination fortune, to talk to women. Kurt Schneider, CC ’10, produced and directed the “College Musical” videos, starring Allison Williams, MC ’10, and Sam Tsui, DC ’11. The videos got noticed by Gawker in 2010, and were just the start of Schneider’s prolific YouTube presence. In recent years, Kickstarter has overflowed with proposals to develop new web series, as more college graduates decide to make it in television.

It seems that this phenomenon is at least somewhat inspired by the recent prominence of web series, and by the popularization of Kickstarter.

“We got 900 views on the Kickstarter video alone,” Berkowitz says, a figure that suggests viewership on the finished web series has the potential to soar.

Assuming they are adequately publicized, Berkowitz insists, web series are an effective way to get your work out into the world with a small crew and a miniscule budget. For Berkowitz and other independent creators “who want to get their voice and their story out,” these shorts can build resumes or land jobs.

After nine months of work, six episodes, and countless gluten-free cupcakes, one of Berkowitz’s most satisfying triumphs relates to her coiffure rather than her career. “I grew out my bangs and dyed my hair blue,” she laughs. Maybe Zooey won’t recognize her kindred spirit on the street anymore, but with more than 1,000 views on the first episode already, the rest of the world might.

—graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

Abroad, at Yale

Making the brand According to Jessica Sykes, SM ’14, brand ambassadors are commonplace at state schools. “There’s someone on every single corner handing out Red Bull.” They are the “popular” kids that everyone knows. Their job: “trying to get people to like them“ (and in turn, their brand).

Just because you aren’t being handed a Red Bull at each street corner at Yale doesn’t mean representatives don’t have a presence on campus. It just means they’re a little harder to find.

Sykes is one of a group of 45 representatives throughout the country working for Universal Music Group (UMG). Reps at state schools, she claims, definitely have an advantage. “[Students are] used to it and expecting it,” says Sykes. “[Yalies] are really wary of being marketed at.

People don’t want to feel manipulated.” (A reaction, no doubt, rooted in experiences like the extracurricular bazaar.) Sykes tries to keep the label of “College and Lifestyle Marketing Representative” as far away as possible from her own identity to make the events and the artists they promote as authentic as possible.

UMG’s national network provides one model of college campus branding. A “brand embassy” exists just across the street from Saybrook—Jack Wills, while closer to home, also has a campus presence in Ethan Karetsky, CC ’14.

Sporting Jack Wills attire, Instagramming promotions, and spreading the Jack Wills gospel are all Karetsky’s responsibilities. “It’s about breaking any sort of gap that might exist, and really connecting it to the Yale experience.” He does this through having an impressive party attendance record.

One of Sykes’ events was a pizza party at the Yale Farm. “We just... listened to the album. A lot of people came, and when they got there, they were like, ‘Why is this themed? Do you just really like the album?’”

The fact that the event was not conspicuously connected to a brand allowed students to reserve judgments about the event being solely for marketing purposes. “This was much better than ‘Universal Music is on campus!’” Sykes elaborated. “People would just be like, ‘No, I don’t want to be sold something.’”

Sykes recently held an event last Sunday at the Morse-Stiles Crescent Theatre where Yale students watched a live streamed concert from the band Disclosure at the iTunes Music Festival. Students could enter to win free merchandise and enjoy a band they may or may not have been familiar with. Entertainment and free stuff? I’m sold.

—Nicole Clark —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

Luca Lum wears leather pants, even in Tanzania’s intense heat. As an English Literature and Film major at the National University of Singapore (NUS), she never expected to find herself on a Yale Reach Out trip.

I met her last school year on Spring Break. Lum, ES ’14, was one of 19 in the Yale Visiting International Students Program (Y-VISP), an honors program started three years ago that now has partnerships with the University of Hong Kong, Tecnológico de Monterrey, NUS, Waseda University, and Universidade Esadual de Campinars.

This year, 25 Y-VISP students are Yale juniors. To get here, they had to undergo an extensive application process. Through NUS, for example, students complete applications, receive nominations, submit test scores, and interview with both NUS and Yale. These students pay for airfare, NUS tuition, and part of Yale’s tuition and fees. They are not eligible for Yale scholarships or student fellowships. Some are rejected from extracurriculars because they can only commit two semesters to these student groups.

They came for what they think of as the quintessential American collegiate experience, to explore liberal arts. “In Hong Kong, you choose your major in high school,” said Rosa Yee Lee, SY ’15; all noted how refreshing it is to engage in discussion-based seminars with professors who work to know their students well. They’re integrated into residential colleges, and feel like “pieces that fit well into the Yale puzzle,” said exchange student David Alatorre Lopez, JE ‘15. “We’re kind of like freshmen-seniors,” said Montserrat Legorreta Luna, Calhoun ’15, a student from the Tec de Monterrey. Luna said that while everything feels new and exciting and daunting (dining hall farro! Penny shots! The Saybrook-Branford Room labyrinth!), they all share a sense of urgency to take advantage of their time here. “We only have two semesters to squeeze in all that we want to do,” said Lopez.

Y-VISP-ers don’t share that freshman enthusiasm about alcohol accessibility. Many are of legal drinking age in the US or were in their home countries, so guzzling Dubra at DKE is less than enticing compared to Mexico City clubs. YVISP students are also adjusting to Yale punctuality (“in Mexico, 8 p.m. really means 10 p.m.,”) a different sort of friendliness (“you don’t just say hi to random people on the street here,”) and “definitely, definitely the importance of a cappella.”

But YVISP students are bold. They’re selected, perhaps, because they’re “incredibly curious people,” according to one of their four Peer Liaisons, Stefan Palios, TC ’14. Lum, one of last year’s exchange students, lead our scrappy group in Tanzania’s Eastern Usambara Mountains to produce a documentary. She wrote poetry for Yale’s Undergraduate Journal of Comparative Literature and had an impressive photography exhibit with work from Iran, Tanzania, and New Haven in the Stiles gallery.

This year’s YVISP students are also excited about Yale’s “dynamic and artistic culture,” says Luna. While Lee (University of Hong Kong) spoke of Yale Faith and Action, Luna is checking out the Women’s Leadership Initiative and Lopez will try Ultimate Frisbee.

In Tanzania, Lum spoke to me about feminist artists, the fox tattoo she covets, and her favorite comics. Like all of us, her tastes are influenced by the communities in which she has lived. Yale is no exception. She says she was taken by the “sheer devotion Yalies have to what they do. An American style of bravado seeps into the school’s culture.” Having returned to NUS, Lum “tries to maintain a sense of continuity from [her] experience.” She continues to work on documentaries, noting, “My time at Yale made me braver, more decisive, and trustful of my instincts.”

Non-Y-VISP students can’t get in on their group texts or Yale-sponsored trip to Six Flags, but can get to know transfer students during their year on campus. They have weekly Wednesday dinners in Trumbull; lurk and you’ll meet students eager to learn about others, with much to share about themselves.

—Anna Meixler —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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REVIEWS R&B’s android queen

by Aaron Gertler YH Staff

O

n her EP Metropolis, Janelle Monáe came out of the closet as a robot. She proceeded to write one of 2010’s best rock songs (“Cold War”) and the year’s very best R&B song (“Tightrope”) on her debut LP, The Archandroid. With that concept-album, Monáe’s boundless creativity and flawless ear for melody launched listeners into space, starting a revolution in the year 2719 almost as an aside (she’s part Afro-futurist, as in Parliament Funkadelic, and part Futurist, as in Isaac Asimov).

But on Monáe’s latest album The Electric Lady, Cindi Mayweather, her alter ego for the proceedings, is on the run, and the revolution seems to be on hold. True to form, Monáe did the last thing I ever expected—she headed back towards Earth; while her talent remains apparent in every meticulous arrangement, Archandroid’s successor doesn’t live up to that record’s wild energy or experimental flair.

That said, this is still a damn good slice of R&B/rock/funk/pop, and it is a testament to Monáe’s talent that such a fantastic mishmash feels ordinary coming from her. The opening overture (her albums are symphonic in scope and layout) is pitch-perfect Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, with low string lines that evoke Hans Zimmer’s work on the Batman films. Monáe is, if anything, a bigger badass than Bruce Wayne. As Cindi Mayweather, she is the hero of a world wherein androids and humans struggle to coexist, although her superpower lies in her pop music prowess. Case in point: once the intro fades, she duets with Prince on “Givin’ Em What They Love” and outshines him without breaking a sweat, seducing a woman with her charm along the way.

When Prince leaves, Erykah Badu enters to guest-star on “Q.U.E.E.N.,” one of the standout tracks on Electric Lady. The pairing works better than Prince’s feature; the girls complement rather than compete with one another. Monáe joins her faithful backup singers for a thoughtful track on either homosexuality or the souls of robots (“Will your God […] approve the way I’m made?”) over a slinky bed of synth. Badu jumps in on the fourth verse and just destroys, rapping about either race relations or human-android relations (“here comes the freedom song […] been droids for far too long”).

If you assume that Monáe isn’t just discussing robots (though she might well be— she’s an ambiguous android), then she doesn’t shy away from social commentary.

In various interludes on a radio show hosted by DJ Crash Crash, callers keep us updated

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

on the state of the droid society. Some espouse tolerance (“clones and humans welcome after midnight” at a robo-party). Others are less gentle. But whether it’s a droid calling for violence or a human arguing that Cyndi Mayweather “Isn’t even a person,” Crash Crash maintains a strict anti-bigotry policy, disconnecting haters without a second thought. Monáe and her supporters aren’t going to hurt you, but that doesn’t mean they care what you have to say. Monáe’s secret weapon is that she preaches without preaching, speaks her mind without breaking the groove.

Her lyrics are more subtle than the interludes, but express the same message: don’t hate, appreciate. Gone are the war and violence referenced in Archandroid; Monáe still addresses the victims of violence and intolerance, but she isn’t going Gaga to write pro-gay songs or aping Macklemore’s “Same Love” sermonizing. Instead, she tells us that if we dance with abandon and fall in love, everything will be all right.

But is that the message we need to hear? Monáe can be a very sharp songwriter, so it’s a little disappointing that her only advice for the persecuted subject of “Ghetto Woman” is to “hold onto your dreams” and “let love be your guide.” That song also includes a ferocious autobiographical rap and is a worthwhile detour from her sci-fi storyline, but her other departures from robots (or whatever they stand for)–“It’s Code” and “Can’t Live Without Your Love”— are largely forgettable ballads of love and loss.

After the political firepower of “Q.U.E.E.N.” and the call to arms in “Givin’ Em What They Love,” these sappy songs take the proceedings in an unwelcome direction.

Maybe Monáe—or Cyndi Mayweather—simply can’t decide who she wants to be.

“Sally Ride” features a telling line: “I tried and heard the pride, but… who can I trust?” Does Monáe like girls? (She is on record saying that she “only dates androids” and that she is a “sapio-sexual.”) Does her alter ego? Is either entity willing to take a stand, whether in 2719 or 2013, and bring forth a thoughtful revolution? Or are the politics purely conceptual, just one more page of her story?

As brilliant as she—and her album, in many places—is, Monáe seems at times to be lost in her own fantasy. But if she keeps recording songs like those on The Electric Lady, I’ll gladly get lost alongside her until the revolution arrives again.

Music: Man Man Man Man’s best work channels the wild, gritty imperfection that makes their live shows so unforgettable. Their experimental rock succeeds when they effectively translate the frenetic joy of their concerts into their studio recordings. Unfortunately, On Oni Pond, the band’s fifth record, seems a conscious step away from this fact. The melodies are more accessible, and the lyrics more direct. Man Man cleans up, but at the cost of the grime that made their music compelling.

On their best album to date, Six Demon Bag, Man Man played with chaos, but in a carefully controlled cacophony. Listening to Six Demon Bag is like visiting a honky tonk in a haunted house, or seeing a vaudeville show in a Lewis Carroll nightmare. On Oni Pond, on the other hand, is a polished affair. The album opens with an elegant orchestral swoon then moves into “Pink Wonton,” an insufferable track riddled with hackneyed doo-wops.

In the single “Head On,” lead singer Honus Honus sings “hold on to your heart, never let nobody take it over,” Man Man’s simplest, most direct, and most trite chorus to date. On the whole, Man Man has traded in their crazy and has come back with camp.

Nonetheless, Man Man is too talented to deliver a complete disappointment.

None of the songs are excellent, but most of them are fun, such as the undeniably catchy “Loot My Body.” Really, it’s easiest to understand On Oni Pond as a career move—this is a textbook crossover album. They’ve traded in their magic for fans, but can they gain more than they’ve lost?

—Colin Groundwater YH Staff

Music: Arctic Monkeys Arctic Monkeys’s tongue-in-cheek streak seems to reach its zenith with their fifth album AM. Never a band to take itself too seriously, the Monkeys‘ new record boasts a “No. 1 Party Anthem,” while another song title asks, “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” Unfortunately, AM lacks songs with heft to balance out the levity.

AM’s mood is that of the late-night/early-morning hours, as club beats mix with post-hookup melancholia, although it focuses more on rhythm and riff than on contemplative moments. The Monkeys’ new favorite song formula— driving midtempo beat, slinky guitar, distracting falsetto harmonies—works best on the opener “Do I Wanna Know?,” but it grows stale after its seemingly endless repetition. “Arabella” or “Knee Socks” might have stood out as other highlights if the album were not already saturated with mediocre versions of songs like these. At the same time, both of these tracks do find strength in prioritizing Alex Turner’s lyrical and vocal performance, a stylistic hallmark of the Monkeys’ earlier records.

Throughout, the Monkeys’ creative drive feels tapped out: attempts to incorporate piano ballads (“No. 1 Party Anthem”) and “ooh la la” vocals (“Mad Sounds”) seem taken from a checklist of tired musical tropes. Influences are painfully obvious in parts: Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age has shaped the band’s sound ever since he produced their 2009 album, Humbug, but now “Fireside” practically lifts the vocal melody from Homme’s own “Leg of Lamb.” Luckily, the sun rises on the album’s night out with “I Wanna Be Yours,” a bare-bones crystal of a song. Cheesy lyrics aside, the song’s plaintive refrain creates an emotional immediacy conspicuously missing from the rest of the album.

In initialing the record AM (a move that Turner concedes is derivative of the Velvet Underground’s VU), Arctic Monkeys attempted to put a personal stamp on an album that ultimately lacks just that—personality.

—Chloe Lizotte

Food: Cannoli Truck The cannoli is an institution. The tubeshaped pastry filled with a sweet ricotta stuffing was once only found in Sicily, but today it has become a staple of Italian American cuisine. Along the way, it’s been simplified, sweetened, deep fried, and now, served from a food truck. This summer, the cannoli arrived in New Haven on the aptly named Cannoli Truck.

The mobile bakery truck is in fact an extension of a family-owned Italian bakery in Guilford, Conn. named Meriano’s Bake Shoppe. Since 1988, they’ve been hailed the local cannoli champions, and their food truck venture, though new, has garnered a robust following in greater Connecticut.

On first glance, it’s not difficult to see why: every pastry comes out of the truck looking deliciously thick and fried to a perfect goldenbrown. In one variation, a vanilla, ricottabased filling oozes out of its sides. In another, the entire roll is dipped in milk chocolate. And in yet another, chocolate chips and strawberry are swirled into the tube.

Unfortunately, the taste does not quite meet the promise of the presentation.

These cannolis are unapologetically sugary and creamy to the point of unpleasantness. The strawberry and chocolate chip filling is particularly bad; eating it feels akin to drowning in cheap liquid milk chocolate and strawberry Yoplait. The traditional filling, while not nearly as distressing, still suffers from being overly sweet. It would only be tolerable in half-portions. The pastry shell itself is generally unremarkable and tastes faintly of oil residue.

It seems that the Cannoli Truck mistakes quantity of flavor with quality and in doing so will turn off anyone who prefers even a little subtlety in their desserts. For my part, I anticipate a lengthy period of palate conditioning, or at least recovery, before (or if) I ever venture back for my next cannoli.

—Lucas Sin YH Staff

Staff list:

Here’s what we’ve been up to What we’re listening to: Glass Popcorn. Don’t you think it would be fun to be a rapper? But also still be exactly who you are right now, rapping brilliantly about what it’s like to be your old, introspective, boring self? Glass Popcorn thought so too. And thank God he did because it’s awesome.

What we’re watching: the trailer for Gravity. Over and over and over and over, around and around and around. It’s the most suspenseful movie trailer we’ve ever seen. The hype for the feature-length is unreal, but we expect that it just might pan out.

What we’re using to cook lunch: George Foreman grills. The fat actually does drip out of the meat. I know you probably didn’t think that George Foreman grills were chill when you first heard about them, but if you got one, you’d realize just how chill they are.

What we’re observing: Yom Kippur. So we can’t hang Friday night or Saturday until sundown. Apologies in advance, goyim.

Who we want to chill with: Stephan. Whatsup dude? Are you free to hang on Saturday? Oh wait, sorry. It’s Yom Kippur.

—Micah Rodman YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Sept. 13, 2013)

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Because it feels like we’re living in someone’s mouth.

It wasn’t terrible—we’re just bad with change.

That Thai Taste now puts carrots in their coconut lime soup Okay, we love this, but what is that thun thun anyway?????

For being too cute.

The heat/humidity combo TA

Corgis “Don’t Drop That Thun Thun” Maison Mathis

A-

Friday the 13th

Iced green tea

Superstition sucks, but so does Friday the 13th.

I already have my favorite place to spend $8 on a baguette with a tomato in it, and it’s called Atticus.

GPSCY

Specifically, when the ice melts and then it looks like you are drinking a cup of urine in seminar.

Let my 20s be anything but that.

The Yale Herald (Sept., 13, 2013)

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