TYH LVI 7

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

Friday, Oct. 19, 2013

From the staff Everyone needs a support system, a person to talk to when you feel like shit or to ask for advice when you’re really lost. Someone you trust, someone who’s got your back. Maybe it’s your parents, or the people you live with. Maybe a sibling, maybe your dog. (I definitely consider my miniature schnauzer to be a part of my support system.)

Because it’s really, really hard to do this alone. It’s hard to go through the misery of midterms alone. It’s hard to live alone. Sometimes it’s hard to go home alone.

So we surround ourselves—or we try to, at least—with support, and at Yale we’re especially fortunate in this regard: from FroCo to college Master, we’re pretty much encircled by support systems just waiting to be tapped.

But not everyone is looked after in this way, and, for many, midterms are far from the direst struggles of the month of October. Julia Calagiovanni, SM ’15, looks at the difficulty of being a teen mom in the City of New Haven, examining along the way the various support systems available to teen parents.

In Features, we’ve got just what you’re looking for. David Rossler, MC ’17, dives into the groundbreaking research being conducted at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, which is attempting to redefine what it means to be smart, and Cody Kahoe, CC ’15, takes us from New Haven back to Turkey in tracing the origin stories of the owners of some of Yale’s favorite pizzerias.

Jessica McHugh, SY ’15, puts on the earphones for some Fall Out Boy, which we remember from middle school, and Noah Remnick, ES ’15, sits down with Drew Rubin, SY ’11, founder of Blue State Coffee, to talk brew and politics.

Read it all. Soak it in. We’re so close to break I can taste it. I’m itching to get home and see my schnauzer for some much needed support.

Love, Kohler Bruno Features Editor

The Yale Herald

Volume LVI, Number 7 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Oct. 18, 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 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, Jack Schlossberg Bullblog Associate Editors: Kohler Bruno, Austin Bryniarski, 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 Christine Mi YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 12 It takes a city to help teen

moms and dads navigate the difficulties of raising a child.

Julia Calagiovanni, SM ‘15, explores New Haven’s approach to helping its youngest parents succeed in high school and beyond.

VOICES 6

7

8

Noah Remnick, ES ‘15, sits down with Drew Ruben, SY ’11, founder of Blue State, to discuss the franchise’s ideological shift from progressive politics to local organization and agriculture.

Jacob Osborne, DC ’16, allows us inside his mind as he chronicles the difficulties and surprises that came with inhabiting his toughest theatrical role: Kafka’s Gregor.

FEATURES 10

David Rossler, MC ‘17, reports on the Yale Emotional Intelligence Center and examines how new research may change the way we think about intelligence.

16

Cody Kahoe, CC ‘15, takes a look at the shared experiences and common immigrant narrative of three Turkish New Haven pizzeria owners.

OPINION: Jake Dawe, CC ’15, considers the relationship between laughter and grieving.

Azeezat Adeleke BK ‘17, looks towards the future of the U.S. government, post-shutdown.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Charlotte Weiner, PC ‘17, checks out the inner workings of Choose Life at Yale. Thomas Yabroff, TK ‘17, stops by the Beinecke’s weekly lecture series.

20

Katherine Barnes, ES ’16, on Carlo Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet. Also: Cults, Fall Out Boy, The Men, and our weekly staff list.

The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

3

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

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:

Vests It’s finally chilly enough for you to sport that old (or new but made to look old) winter vest. I think vests are great. They keep you warm and cut the wind chill but don’t make you sweat like a down winter coat does. They also cover the midterm-haven’t-goneto-the-gym-since-shopping-period-stomach-bump, yet still show off your slender arms. And if your arms aren’t slender, you can just wear a baggy sweater underneath! If you consider yourself “hipster” (let’s be real, anyone who considers themselves hipster is, by definition, not a hipster), vests are not for you. I counted at least eight people wearing vests on my walk from Loria to Calhoun the other night, including myself. What feels better than being warm and looking like everyone else on campus? Let me tell you—absolutely nothing.

F:

Socks in the laundry Why are we so preoccupied with the problem of the ‘poopetrator’ when we’ve been ignoring a decades-old problem of losing socks in the laundry. Every time I fold my fresh, clean socks, there is invariably one or two that are nowhere to be found. Then I’m left with all these mismatched socks, a fashion faux pas if I ever saw one. Where can all the socks possibly go? Even if I scrounge the rubber interior of the washer for a hiding sock, one still manages to disappear from the washer-to-dryer or dryer-to-room process. When I was younger, my dad used to tell me the Sock Monster stole my socks, which assuaged my fears at the time. But now that I realize I am not the only person plagued by this problem, I think we must come together and solve this mystery occurring everywhere. And I refuse to enlist the help of Yale Police, because we all know how successful that’s been. So I’m taking it into my own hands and launching an all out investigation to catch the “Socketrator.”

—Lily Vanderbloemen

D: Summer internships Literally, what. the. fuck. Am I wrong in thinking that I just finished last summer’s internship? Because I’m pretty sure I am in fact, not wrong. If you haven’t started applying yet (or if you’re like me and haven’t even started a resume), then you’re shit outta luck.

Deadlines have already come and gone. You probably missed the coveted CIA summer internship deadline, even with the government shut down and everything.

Wall Street companies are doing most of their hiring for the summer right now, but who wants to have something lined up with Goldman Sachs anyways?!

Not me! Don’t despair yet—Undergraduate Career Services has released a comprehensive list of other Yalies who have had cool (and impressive) summer internships, so check that out if you want. Hey, if all else fails, you can always spend the summer back home scooping ice cream for minimum wage. That’ll look the coolest on your resume, anyway.

BY THE

BOOM/BUST INCOMING: TV marathons Fall Break is basically here, and I think I know exactly where we’ll all be in four blissfully short days: curled up on the couch with the dogs, tubs of ice cream and empty Oreo boxes, maybe a favorite sibling (we all know you have one), watching hours upon hours of television. As for myself, whether it’s Criminal Minds, Say Yes to the Dress, Law & Order: SVU, Homeland, or Scandal, I will be watching it all day, ‘errry day. Leaving the house puts me at risk for missing out on many, many life lessons. What if I never hear what words of wisdom Matthew Gray Gubler (AKA Agent Reid AKA hot-male-model-turned-actor) graces us with in the next episode of Criminal Minds? My life would essentially be over. I’m a man with priorities, and right now, TV marathons are number one. ­

OUTGOING: Salovey inaugural festivities So I did not go to the block party, and the “open house” just kind of sketched me out. (No, Dean Fabbri, I am not comfortable with randos wandering in and out of my common room). But, to my surprise, Yale really knows how to throw a Ball. Saturday afternoon, I thought about not going, but then decided that an excuse to dress up and get wasted while watching Peter Salovey play bluegrass was too appealing to turn down. As it turns out, I missed the bluegrass, but I did not miss Yalies young and old getting down and dirty on the dance floor. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. I really like Peter, and I hope he’s here to stay. But Petey, I’d like you a whole lot more if you planned a few more balls.

—Truett Davis

TOP FIVE 5 4 3 2 1

Things to do over Fall Break

NUMBERS

#

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

217 184.5 165.5 157 153.5 134 129 126.5 119.5 115.5 102 56

INDEX 16

Percentage of Americans who thought threatening a government shutdown was an acceptable way to negotiate the debt ceiling before Oct. 1.

16

Number of days the government shutdown lasted.

24,000,000,000

Find an inauguration in your hometown and attend it, because now you’re effing addicted.

Go to Wendy’s, because why isn’t there one in New Haven?

Estimated total impact on the American economy, in dollars.

21

Length, in days, of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

7

Go to SoulCycle, because why isn’t there one in New Haven?

Percentage increase in approval of the Affordable Care Act during the shutdown.

Follow me on Instagram, because NyQuil selfies, anyone?

79

Tell your Congressperson to pound sand, just because.

Number of times President Obama said “we” in his seven-minute speech Thursday on the budget deal.

— Emily Rappaport YH Staff Sources: 1) Wall Street Journal 2) iCal 3) Wall Street Journal 4) iCal 5) New York Times 6) I counted ­— Cindy Ok YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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SITTING DOWN WITH DREW RUBEN

by Noah RemnickYH Staff Drew Ruben, SY ’11, founder of Blue State Coffee, had not yet graduated before his store became a campus staple. Upon graduating, Ruben took a job at the hedge fund Bridgewater, until quiting this past February to focus on Blue State, new non-profit projects, and applying to business school. This week, he sat down with the Herald to discuss his new post as a CEO emeritus, the future of Blue State, and the process of starting a small business as a student.

YH: What motivated you to found Blue State? Was it politics?

Philanthropy? Coffee?

DR: The story for Blue State began in 2004. I was very upset with the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. I couldn’t believe that George Bush would win, given all that was happening in the world. Being an idealistic 16-year-old, I wanted to make a difference, and I was in a coffee shop talking with my dad. We thought, how better to make a difference than by creating a space for the community to get together to talk about progressive politics and donate money to liberal candidates. Hence, “Blue State Coffee” and our initial tagline, “Drink liberally.” Over time, our mission shifted away from politics and more towards non-profit organizations, mostly because that’s what our customers told us they wanted with their voting. Although I think we maintained our political activism to some extent in that we’ve held senators who’ve visited and Organizing for America phone banks.

In terms of coffee, that is, for me, a passion that I have learned over time. It wasn’t something I initially loved, despite the fact that I certainly drank a bunch of it in high school. What I was surprised to learn was that all these same questions about politics and policy are wrapped up in coffee too. That is, labor practices, environmental sustainability, transparent supply chain, etc. So coffee happened to be a great product for us to have picked to try to further political ends.

YH: Aside from the name and aesthetic, what makes Blue State a liberal organization? Because the organizations you give to a progressive, but aren’t necessarily Democratic or even political.

DR: I think that’s right. The way we think about it is that every store reflects its community. It’s there to improve its community, to inspire its community. Insofar as we are in a community that tends to orient around progressive ideals, that’s what Blue State Coffee’s all about. We definitely have shifted away from Democratic politics and more towards ideals that more people can get behind.

YH: What were the challenges involved in getting Blue State going at such a young age?

DR: I started Blue State as a senior in high school. The website launched in Sept. 2006; the first store was July 2007 in Providence. This one on Wall Street was Feb. 2009 when I was a sophomore at Yale. I never anticipated how difficult it is to run a small business. One of the biggest lessons for me has been the importance of the nuts and bolts. In the beginning, I was so wrapped up in the idea of a socially conscious business that I to some extent neglected questions like how manage our inventory? How do we price appropriately? How do we ensure that we have good training systems in place?

All of those things that really make or break the business.

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

Noah Remnick/YH YH: In terms of logistics, where were you getting the money and what sort of team did you bring in?

DR: This has been a family business with some family friends thrown in, initially. The company has sustained its own growth— we haven’t taken on any outside investors—which is why we’ve grown so slowly. We’ve had six stores over the course of six years, one store per year give or take. Early on there was a recognition that I really just didn’t know anything—I had to recognize I needed someone to manage the finances, to source the coffee, to manage the coffee shop. So my responsibility as the CEO became largely making sure that these people were working well together, and then over time to learn myself so that I could become knowledgeable in everything. It’s a humbling experience.

YH: Blue State has a commitment to philanthropy. I’ve seen that in the past figures up to 5 percent or 7 percent, but recently it seems that the company line has been to donate 2 percent of sales. How do those figures come about and evolve?

DR: It’s been difficult to strike the balance between profitability and philanthropy. Initially, I wasn’t looking at projections and I wasn’t watching the bottom line carefully enough. At the end of the day, if we are not profitable enough, we can do any good for anybody: nobody can work at Blue State Coffee; we can’t serve anybody coffee; no charities gets any donation because it simply won’t be there. So we’ve arrived at this 2 percent of sales figure, which make not sound like much, but you can also cast it in terms of 50 percent of profits, as it varies week-to-week, year-to-year. It is actual a substantial commitment, and I’d challenge you to find other companies, particularly small companies, that make such a large commitment at the outset, as a line item in the budget. So yes, the percentage has diminished but the amount we have given has increased because we have more stores and more revenue.

YH: How does Blue State maintain its small business ethos as it continues to grow as a company?

DR: Again, we think that every store needs to reflect its community. That is, we cant take a cookie cutter approach to how the store feels, what non-profits it supports, what the aesthetic looks like, etc. That is part of the reason we haven’t grown very quickly—we think essential to our brand and our mission is understanding and engaging with our community, which certainly is an overused word, but we mean it. We take the time to know local non-profit organizations, to form meaningful relationships with customers.

YH: Given that Blue State proudly and exclusively serves fair trade coffee, could you talk a bit about your own employee treatment with respect to things like wadges, healthcare, hiring opportunity?

DR: Wages we think about in terms of the Costco model. There’s a bit of a premium we pay against what would otherwise be a minimum wage position, plus tips so a person could take home a reasonable salary. We offer healthcare to all full time employees, at a low rate that they pay to enroll, which is more than most other small businesses offer. Obamacare will change that, to be sure. In terms of hiring practices, that is really left to the manager of each store. The guidance we offer the management of the company is that we need to hire people who are in line with Blue State Coffee’s mission, who offer excellent customer service, who radiate positivity, who will gel well with existing employees.

YH: You mentioned you worked at Bridgewater for about a year and a half, and there has been for some time a debate on campus about Yalies pursuing careers in finance. Did you find that your work there and your work at Blue State were cohesive or at odds with one another?

DR: I think everyone needs to make the decision that’s best for him or her personally. I do think sometimes people fall into the trap of going to these companies without really thinking deeply about what they’re passionate about or what they want to accomplish in life. For me, I had a clear goal going in: I was hitting a ceiling with Blue State Coffee in terms of my management capabilities, so I wanted to learn as much as I could about how to run an organization. Bridgewater seemed like a good place to accomplish that, and I do feel that in a year and a half I achieved that goal. Having now come back to Blue State with a somewhat more active role, I feel like I’m able to contribute much more now.

For example, one thing they do well is placing a strong emphasis on people—really being interested in what people are like, their abilities, their skills, their passions, before you ever put them in a role. Transiting that to Blue State, we are becoming much better at hiring: what are we looking for, how to test for it, and once its there, how to nurture it.

YH: I’ve heard that you guys have bought the rights to the name “Red State Coffee”?

DR: Whenever you start a business, you want to protect your intellectual property as much as possible, so that’s why we secured the rights to “Red State Coffee.” It’s something that we’ve played with over time. Like on April Fools a couple years ago, we had a Red State Coffee day, and pretended to donate money to non-profits that didn’t exactly blend with our ideals. But we own lots of different “Blue State” trademarks so the business may expand into other industries. No plans yet, though.

YH: When you started Blue State, were you at all worried about alienating conservative with the branding?

DR: Any business can’t win them all. Certainly we were worried that we might get the market wrong and alienate more people than we expected, but we have been pleasantly surprised that, as we’ve shifted from a partisan emphasis to a non-profit emphasis, by and large everyone gets behind Blue State Coffee.

If anything, the fact that we infuse our ideals into how we do our business wins us more business than it loses.

YH: Do you have any advice for any young, entrepreneurial Yale students looking to start a business?

DR: Well I’d certainly be very supportive of it. I think I learned as much from Blue State as I did in the classroom or at Bridegewater. You do need to surround yourself with people who will be honest with you, who will be supportive of you, who will help you know what you don’t know. It’s a more complex undertaking than I ever anticipated and if I didn’t have family, friends, mentors, and professors around me, poking at my ideas and picking me up when I was down, I would never have come this far. So don’t keep your cards too close.

—This interview was condensed by the author

THE GREATER MONSTER

by Jacob Osborne

O

N SIX SEPARATE OCCASIONS IN March of 2011, I awoke as an insect. Ripped sections of a business suit clung to me as I taught myself how to gulp in air through the holes in my sides. Each time, I registered a dim blue light from above and a wooden bed frame without a mattress below.

After that, I would scream three times.

I was trapped on my back—every rock and sway crushed my useless wings. I eventually flipped myself off of the bed and onto the floor. Two sensitive barbs above my back legs poked through the ruined trousers and translated every swish and pause of the air: “You are safe to lie still;” “There is a reason to run.” Within the crooked walls of my bedroom, I moved myself with a frightening, wonderful speed.

For weeks I would stay like this, though it may have been hours. Strips of refuse collected in a dish near the locked door. On one delusional break to the dining room, my father lodged his cane so deep into my back that I never stopped bleeding.

After that, I stayed in my room and slowly died.

Six times. When the lights finally faded to black on each awful, animal existence, the auditorium swelled with applause.

IT REMAINS THE MOST CHALLENGING ROLE I HAVE ever played, more trying than any I have taken at Yale: Gregor, Kafka’s man-monster, still human in character and yet unable to live with his family. I was given this assignment for a one-act play class in the spring of my senior year of high school—a character to push me to my physical and emotional brink when many around me were coasting towards the minimum wages and warm beer of late June.

It’s grimly comical to remember lying on my back for the first time in that basement classroom in January, wailing and wandering through the opening monologue as I auditioned. The lines were approximations, and my vague insect physicality consisted of wriggles and finger movements that I had tested for 15 minutes on the floor of my living room the night before. While skating through an earnest soliloquy, I noticed the two faces pressed up against the glass window of the classroom door—anxious freshmen trying to size up the competition. I nearly let an arrogant smile cross Gregor’s face. No matter how hacky or contrived my audition was, in the 300-person high school with only two part-time drama teachers, in my senior spring, I had this one locked up.

Rehearsals began with furious memorization and a unique, dual character development: I needed to first surmise the desires, insecurities, and life objectives of a German, middle-class traveling salesman. Then, once I was comfortable with that, I had to imagine what he would become on the morning when he awoke not human.

A few photocopied readings about acting had instructed me to identify the most general versions of my character’s emotional experiences, and then retrieve useful substitutions from the events of my own life. For example, if the character loses a brother in the play, the actor should recall how he felt on the day when his first dog was put

bled on to it, and continued up the wall behind it. The set designer had built a series of bookshelves and handholds that allowed me to keep myself five feet above ground in this moment.

“Come on, Mother. He’s not going to hurt you.” That was Eliza, speaking as Grete Samsa, guiding her mother through the threshold of the bedroom.

Underneath the stained button-up and threadbare brown pants, my limbs shook with the same mix of adrenaline and soreness that climbers thrive on. I watched over my shoulder as the actresses began to cross the stage towards the sofa that served as my normal hiding place.

“He’s… under there?” Gregor’s mother, my friend Lillian, said.

At this, I hissed so that the back rows could hear me. The two girls whipped in my direction, and then Lillian collapsed to the floor as Mother lost consciousness. Just as my fingers were about to give out on the wall, Grete exited the room at a sprint, and I lowered myself onto the bed to inspect the damage. down, and then publicly explode that sensation. You are reunited with a mentor after 20 years in an island prison?

Easy: running into your guidance counselor after summer vacation. Waking up as a six-foot-long cockroach, however, had me at a loss. I convinced myself that Gregor Samsa and I shared nothing except for a few hundred lines of theatrical monologue that Kafka didn’t even write.

Concerns like this have a way of opening the door to many more, and before long I was dismantling the whole of my artistic ability, piece by piece. I stripped away enough confidence to finally face my most fundamental anxiety, one that had been sitting and growing in my brain like an abscess since my very first acting class: I have experienced no pain, discomfort, or sadness in my life. I am the most boring, unequipped actor alive.

My task would be not substitution, but invention— fraud. If I drifted into the first performance without any grounded connections to Gregor, the play would be mediocre. Mediocre terrified me.

I decided that if I could not inhabit Gregor’s mind then I would force my way into his body. As soon as the lines were loosely in my head, I threw myself to the ground in savage experimentation. Hunching, stretching, and hissing my way through those weeks, I willed myself to sprout more legs, another set of jaws, and 2,000 lenses all over my body. I tested my exoskeleton; ignoring a patchwork of aches and inflammations, I bludgeoned myself with zeal from 7:50 to 9:30 each morning. My friends later told me that it was hard to watch.

I CURLED OVER THE BOWL OF ROTTING FOOD AND watched a bead of sweat drop into it from the tip of my nose. Gregor hadn’t eaten fresh food in five days, since no one had brought him any. I had chosen to skip lunch that day.

The cue of the door opening sent Gregor into a panic and me into motion. I charged the wooden bed, scram-

ISOLATION AND FATIGUE AND PAIN MAKE A FUNNY cocktail in a 17-year-old. I stopped showering. I cracked inside jokes that only I understood. I sat a few rows back during rehearsal because it was easier to forego interaction.

I preferred low light. Even my teenage libido was compromised—I could not recognize that Grete was touching my arm and smiling at me more than usual backstage. Gregor Samsa swallowed me up and spit me out as a disoriented, frustrated young man driven by only a compulsion to stave off failure.

I slipped into an unfamiliar calm and surrendered to my deficiencies. I hardly noticed anymore when the kneepads under my pants cut off circulation to my feet, or when they slid off of my knees completely. I continued to barrel around the room on bruised all fours. My back and joints pulsated like a drum. It scared me to no end, but the fear of disappointing the people around me was the greater monster. Six shows. Then I could work on dispelling Gregor from my body. I wrote the date of the final show in bold font on the last page of my notebook.

BEFORE I KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING, I WAS PRESENT in the darkened auditorium, shirtless, steeping in my own sweat, splayed out at center stage for the sixth time. In this final rendition, tears carved channels through the dirt on my face. It was the first time I was able to cry at the play’s climactic moment. The sadness was no longer conjured as my head, Gregor’s head, turned to the side and fell still on the stage floor. Blackout.

The following morning, in my bed at home, I awoke on my side with the sun on my face and a thick mattress underneath me. I lay quietly, expecting all the familiar pain to return. A minute passed, and I ran my hand along the curve of my back, half-hoping to discover a deep wound or a crumpled wing.

—graphic by Devon Geyelin YH Staff The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

7

OPINION LEARNING FROM CRISIS

by Azeezat Adeleke Given the number of self-induced budgetary crises and near-crises that the United States government has gotten itself into over the past few years, it’s easy get them mixed up. In 2011, the fight over raising the debt ceiling led Standard and Poor’s to downgrade our formerly pristine credit rating. In 2012, we veered dangerously close to the fiscal cliff, a term describing the simultaneous tax cuts and decreases in government revenue that would have kicked in on Jan. 1, 2013. And this year, we yet again squabbled in the face of catastrophe, allowing our government to shutdown for 16 days and come precariously close to defaulting on its debt. A crisis for every year— it’s like Christmas, except with fiscal turmoil instead of joy.

In fact, we already have a date for our next dance with the fiscal catastrophe devil: Feb. 7, 2014. The deal hashed out Wednesday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did not solve any problems, only extending the government’s borrowing capacity until that Friday in February. One can presume that all of the bickering, obstructionism, and total disregard for reality that were present in this crisis will play out next time, just like it did last time and the time before that.

That is, unless everyone has finally learned something from this two-week crisis. Congressional Republicans should learn the importance of preventing the far right-wing from dictating policy. Senator Ted Cruz, the freshman from Texas, demanded that government funding be contingent on defunding the Affordable Care Act. Given that the law has survived the judgment of a majority-conservative Supreme Court, the will of voters during the 2012 election, and numerous repeal attempts in the House of Representatives, Cruz’s efforts were doomed from the get go. In fact, as Cruz stood on his soapbox and drew attention to his antics, the Obamacare website went live to widespread technical difficulties.

The Republicans could have taken advantage of these technical snafus as an opportunity to push their healthcare messaging. Instead, the brunt of the public blame has fallen on their shoulders. As of this week, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that three in every four Americans disapproved of Republicans’ budget negotiating strategy. I would suggest that in February, Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell tell Senator Cruz and his Tea Party colleagues to sit on the sidelines and let the adults play ball. We’ll all be better off.

If that is the Republicans’ lesson, what is the Democratic take-away? For one thing, the

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

vivid images of essential government services being shuttered due to Republican obstructionism highlights the core of Democratic ideology: government is a source of good in our society. There were the World War II veterans turned away from the monument built to honor them. The patients who could not access medical care at the National Institutes of Health. The little kids who had to stay home from Head Start. Federal employees who were unsure of how to meet their next rent payment. The list goes on. When Republicans try again—and they will—to argue that government is the problem causing all of our social ills, Democrats can point to this crisis and say that the problems occur when government is disrupted by people who wish to see it fail.

For President Obama, the lesson is clear: don’t give in to hostage situations. The rightwing attempt to hold government funding hostage in exchange for a weakening of his signature legislative accomplishment collapsed in on itself in the face of public pressure. This gives the President a stronger hand to play in future negotiation situations—specifically in the weeks leading up to Feb. 7.

The biggest lesson here, however, is for the American people. Standard and Poor’s estimates that the shutdown cost us $24 billion in lost services, wages, and tourism revenue. That’s in addition to the damage done to America’s reputation as the model of a well-functioning democracy. Even after it was clear that the costs of the shutdown were too much to bear, 18 Senators and 144 members of the House voted against the funding bill. Every last one of them was a Republican. Americans must know that, even as the pressure reached a breaking point, the plurality of the Republican Party was still willing to plunge the country into fiscal calamity. They were not cowed by defeat or by their own consciences. And on Feb. 7, every indication says that the same lawmakers will vote the same way. If the American people don’t make it clear to Republicans that these annual self-induced national crises are totally unacceptable, we will find ourselves back here, yet again fighting the same fight.

—graphic by Maude Tisch YH Staff

KNOCK KNOCK

by Jake Dawe YH Staff My grandma worked as the head secretary of a cemetery for most of her life. When my mom was away as a flight attendant, my grandma would pick me up after school and bring me to work.

She would sit at a desk in the office and I, being a kid, would go explore the cemetery. I read the names on the grave markers and imagined what their lives were like. I skipped rocks on the pond. I went sledding during the winter. Sometimes I wandered by my great-grandparents’ graves to say hello.

Visitors drove in to leave flowers on a plot or sit quietly on a bench by a grave, whispering to a loved one who couldn’t whisper back. Not wanting to intrude, I’d shrink away and investigate elsewhere.

All of it happened in that cemetery. It never crossed my mind that it was a grim place for a kid to play.

Death was just a part of my life. My family had a whole repertoire of jokes about the place that always got my grandma, Nanny, to chuckle and roll her eyes.

“The cemetery? I hear people are just dying to get in.”

“Nanny? Oh yeah, she’s got a lot of people working under her.”

“Did you hear that? I think I just heard screaming from the crematorium. Are you sure they were dead?”

We laughed about death. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t respect it or that we thought ourselves immune to it. I think my family needed a way to manage the uncomfortable fact that we were often surrounded by grief, suffering, and loss.

My grandma died when I was a freshman here. I got the news when I was on tour in rural Vermont with my improv group, the Viola Question. My phone buzzed on a Sunday morning with a text from a friend that just read, “I’m so sorry about your grandmother.” My family knew that I was away with the VQ and wanted to wait to give me the news, but my friend was understandably not in the loop. I just sat down on the cold clapboard floor of the old farmhouse we were staying in and cried. I didn’t want the news to be a downer on everyone else’s

tour, so I kept it to myself and worried how I would contain the grief. Part of me thought I was going to implode at any moment and make a sobbing fool of myself in front of people I had only known for two months.

Instead, the VQ helped me grieve.

I dried my face and walked down the creaking stairs, expecting people to immediately notice my reddened eyes and make a big deal out of it. Whether or not people did notice, they kept on eating breakfast. The VQ kept poking fun at one another and at me, made obscure music and movie references I still struggle to keep up with, and filled that remote farmhouse with laughter.

The bursts of laughter they got out of me, unaware of the loss I was dealing with, shattered the sense of dread that was setting in. Of course, the grief was still there. It would still be there for months and, in some benign form, is still there now. Laughter, though, allowed me to engage with death. It helped me surrender my pretensions of control and discard the anger over the seeming unfairness of it all. I was attempting to bury my grief for my grandmother and my own discomfort with loss. Laughter released that anxious pressure and relieved me of having to keep it buried. Even if just for a moment, I was freed of death and lived beyond it.

Laughter, then, is a way for us to accept irrationality in the world and not go insane. It allows us to accept our own limits and not be destroyed or defined by them. When confronting forces beyond our control, comedy helps us surrender the need to understand. It makes us okay with accepting what we do not and cannot know. Extrapolate what you will if you think that also fits the definition of a religion.

This has been a tough week. The YCC released its disheartening mental health report, revealing how many of us suffer from stress and anxiety. The shocking death of the beloved Dean Leslie Woodard has left campus reeling and grasping to understand the magnitude and suddenness of the loss. I don’t want to bury myself in confusion and loss and forget to live. I want to accept that confusion and loss and engage with it. I’m going to do that through laughter. I hope you do, too.

The emotional quotient New Yale research highlights the role of emotional intelligence from preschool classrooms to social networks

by David Rossler

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n 1990, psychology professor Peter Salovey published a bold new academic paper with John D. Mayer of the University of New Hampshire. The study, which was titled “Emotional Intelligence,” opened on a decidedly defensive note: “Is ‘emotional intelligence’ a contradiction in terms?” the authors asked. “One tradition in Western thought has viewed emotions as disorganized interruptions of mental activity.” Twenty-three years after its publication, the paper is considered the foundation of the study of emotional intelligence, and Salovey, the theory’s co-creator, is the president of Yale.

On Tues., Oct. 1, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (CEI) reopened at its handsome facility atop Science Hill. The new institution is the successor to the Health, Emotion and Behavior Laboratory, which Salovey founded in 1986, and the name change signifies a shift in the organization’s goals away from pure research toward the concrete construction of programs related to emotional intelligence that are applicable in the real world. The Center has designed an emotional intelligence program for students from kindergarten through eighth grade, and it is developing similar programs for preschoolers and high school students. These programs aim to formalize the role controlling and understanding emotions play in the development of interpersonal skills. Additionally, Yale CEI researchers are now working with Facebook to attempt to combat online bullying, and studies are being conducted at the med school and school of management that might create a role for emotional intelligence in the admissions office.

Susan Rivers, deputy directer of the CEI, explained that the rebranding of the Health,

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

Emotion and Behavior Laboratory reflects the way research at the facility has developed and changed. “We’ve become more focused on examining emotion and how and why emotions matter and developing the skills people need to understand and manage them effectively,” she said. Marc Brackett, the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence, maintained that the word “laboratory” seemed to no longer fully describe the work being done at the center.

ally [when we noticed] this individual variability that got us thinking about whether in fact some people were just better able to understand their emotions and identify them, manage them,” Salovey recalled. “That got Jack Mayer and me talking about the idea of whether there is an emotional intelligence.”

Salovey, Mayer, and psychologist David Caruso developed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test in 2002 to quan-

vocabulary they need to express these emotions. Students and teachers plot their mood on a “mood meter,” a square divided into red (angry), yellow (excited), blue (sad), and green (calm) quarters to facilitate discussion.

RULER is currently in use in some public and private K-8 schools across the country and around the world.

Rivers pointed out that emotional intelligence is not tangential to the skills tradition-

“My original research in graduate school and when I first became a professor was on how the arousal of an emotion or a mood affected other psychological processes.”

—Peter Salovey, president of Yale University “Originally when Peter Salovey developed his laboratory, he was doing science and applied science,” Brackett said, “but it didn’t have a program it was supporting in terms of teaching people emotional intelligence.”

BEFORE THE MID-1980S, WHEN SALOVEY and Mayer began researching what would become emotional intelligence, the field was virtually nonexistent. “My original research in graduate school and when I first became a faculty member was on how the arousal of an emotion or a mood affected other psychological processes,” Salovey explained in an interview with the Herald. In conducting this research, Salovey and Mayer began to observe differences in the way individuals responded to the emotions that were stimulated. “It was re-

tify emotional intelligence. The test is an example of what is known as an ability test, Salovey said. “You get people to do things that reflect a skill so that you can measure individual differences in those skills,” he explained. This test established emotional intelligence as a quantifiable skill, worthy of real attention.

Today, the CEI’s main project is its emotional literacy program for students. In 2005, the Health, Emotion and Behavior Laboratory produced RULER, which stands for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotion. “RULER provides evidence based programming that helps schools integrate emotional intelligence into every day practice,” Rivers said. The program aims to help students discuss their emotions in a safe classroom environment and build the

ally developed in schools, but is directly linked to a student’s performance in class. She explained that emotionally intelligent students “can be more attentive to their learning, they can learn better and learn deeper, develop empathy, and choose behaviors that don’t put others at risk or hurt others.”

Robin Stern, associate director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence, said that there is no type of school more or less suited to the RULER method. “Our programs are effective wherever they’re adopted with fidelity and passion,” Stern said. “That includes private schools, charter schools, public schools, schools that have religious affiliation, schools that don’t, schools that are urban, schools that are suburban, and schools across the world.” She noted the successful

implementation of the program in Australian schools, and added that RULER trainings are taking place in elite New York City private schools such as the Dalton School and Lycée Français. “RULER is applicable to all students, from the most elite privates schools to children with learning differences in special education,” Brackett said. In fact, New York City’s District 75, which includes students who are autistic, learning disabled, and severely emotionally challenged, adopted the program in 2008. Brackett argued that although “you may need to spend more time with [a student in special education] developing a RULER skill,” the program does not need any major modification to be applicable to special education students.

Overall, the implementation of the RULER program has been deemed successful in District 75. “Before we used the RULER method in 2008, some of our schools had been labeled by the state as persistently dangerous,” said David Adams, District 75’s Social Emotional Learning Coordinator. “When we look at some of our information around growth,” he added, “we’re seeing a lot of growth with regards to the ability of our students to articulate what they’re feeling, to connect those feelings to scenarios, and connect them to reactions.” He acknowledged that some minor aspects of the program had been modified—for instance, “for students who are nonverbal we’ve worked with picture cues,” he said—but the fundamentals of the RULER method have been applicable and improved kids’ behavioral issues.

One guidance counselor in a District 75 school, who asked to remain anonymous in order to comply with Department of Education

regulations, said the consensus at her school has been that the RULER method is unsuccessful. She described herself as her school’s “point person on emotional literacy,” and recalled attending “many trainings at our district office,” some with Brackett. “It was very short on regulating your feelings,” she said, adding that many of the students she sees for counseling as “trauma models,” coming from backgrounds of extreme abuse. She said she felt not only that the program did little to remedy these students’ behavioral issues, but also that in some cases it would be inappropriate and harmful for students to share details of their extreme home dynamics with fellow students, both because it would make the student vulnerable and because it could be disturbing to others. She added that while she is trained in dealing with her students’ often extreme psychological backgrounds, classroom teachers are not, and she argued that the RULER program provides these untrained teachers too much leeway in negotiating this fraught emotional territory. “It opens up way too much for teachers who aren’t trained,” she said.

The District 75 guidance counselor estimated that the program was heavily used for a year or two at her school. Since then, enforcement of the program has precipitously declined.

Currently, “very little of that program is being implemented,” she said. “It’s almost nothing.”

ANOTHER MAJOR PROJECT THAT THE CENter for Emotional Intelligence is working on is its partnership with Facebook. Arturo Bejar, an engineer at Facebook, approached the center for help in decreasing bullying on the website.

“He wanted to make Facebook a more com-

passionate and kinder place for kids to be,” Stern, the CEI’s associate director, said. CEI studies at the found that even when kids felt uncomfortable with interactions or photos on Facebook, they were unlikely to file a complaint because the terminology of the website was so different from the way they would describe their uncomfortable interactions in their own words.

“One of the things that we learned is that kids don’t like the word harassment,” Stern explained. “They don’t relate to it. They wanted us to use words that described the experiences they were having, for example, ‘someone was mean’ or ‘disrespectful,’ rather than ‘someone bullied me.’” In accordance with these findings, Facebook changed its prompts, so that 13 and 14 year olds are no longer asked to “report harassment,” but rather are prompted in more familiar language. Fifteen and 16 year olds were also uncomfortable with the language Facebook used for filing complaints, although Stern noted that they “wanted to use the word disrespectful instead of the word mean.”

Researchers at the Center for Emotional Intelligence also helped to redesign the process of reporting an incident on Facebook to include more feedback about how uncomfortable interactions made users feel, and how intense those feelings were. “Even though the [system for reporting harassment] we built took kids a little longer to go through, more teens completed them than before,” Stern said.

“Some of the teens we spoke to about this told us that they thought the longer [harassment prompts] were more meaningful, and that they took the additional time to complete them because they felt Facebook took additional time to thoughtfully create them.”

According to researchers at the CEI, Yale University will also feel the effects of the rise of emotional intelligence testing. “We’re beginning to work with the medical school, and with the school of management.” Brackett spoke further about the project being launched with the Yale School of Management. “We’re piloting a program with admissions testing incoming students at the school of management and tracking them,” he said. Brackett and other researchers at the CEI expect to see that the students who do well on an emotional intelligence test will be more successful in school than their counterparts upon entering the School of Management. If this hypothesis proves correct, emotional intelligence could play a role in admissions at the school of management.

But Salovey struck a more hesitant tone, arguing that emotional intelligence gradients had yet to be extensively researched with respect to college performance. He noted that emotional intelligence “likely predicts positive behaviors in school, but it hasn’t yet been tested in a college admissions context.”

Even if emotional intelligence does not affect admissions at the university, it likely will impact the culture in some way or other. “I think it’s something that will spread out into the classroom, into the everyday lives of faculty and students as well,” said psychology professor June Gruber. “Symbolically, having a center like this, and seeing it as an important priority in the eyes of the nation as a whole is really marking the beginning of an exciting time.” Stern added, “Someday in the not-toodistant future Yale may be the first emotionally intelligent university.”

—graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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It takes a city Julia Calagiovanni, SM ‘15, gets schooled in the Elm City’s innovative programs to support teen parents.

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ld McDonald had a farm,” a teacher sings. “E-I-E-I-O!” It’s 9:12 a.m., and class is in session at New Haven’s Wilbur Cross High School. But no one has a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. They’re not learning algebra or conjugating Spanish verbs, either.

These eight students—Cross’s tiniest— are all younger than three. They spend their days at the Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center located in a converted metal shop in the basement of Wilbur Cross, New Haven’s largest high school. Some are toddling, some are crawling; some are shy, some are always up for a game of peek-a-boo. But they all have one thing in common: one or both of their parents are students in a New Haven public school.

While the children play in the center’s main room, I’m in the principal’s office. Lorraine Deluz, the center’s director, has been a part of Celotto for 19 years, serving on its board before becoming its director in 2004.

She explained that the students at Celotto have busy days, filled with visits to the playground, art activities, singing songs, and naptime. Their teachers also work on their fine and gross motor skills and language development. Celotto’s approach, Deluz said, is to create a “family” atmosphere. Her office features pictures of former Celotto students and their parents. She likes to keep in touch with them on Facebook, too. One student who spent her earliest years of education at Celotto is now a high schooler at Cross.

Deluz is part of the coalition of educators, policymakers, and healthcare professionals whose work in classrooms and beyond makes high school graduation and college attendance possible for many young parents. A lack of childcare and other supportive services once made it difficult for teen parents to stay in school. Two decades ago, New Haven’s teen parents didn’t have the option of sending their children to in-school day care—it didn’t exist. Now, it’s an integral

part of the city’s innovative efforts to support teen parents in finishing high school and attending college. However, their work can’t do everything, but it goes a long way in helping teenagers overcome social, personal, and economic obstacles that could affect their education and their child’s development. The community at Celotto is part of an ambitious city-wide effort providing a generation of New Haven’s young parents—and their children— with a brighter future.

For these young families, the day starts early. Ariana Estrella, a Cross senior with a 17-month-old daughter, Arieliz, wakes up at 5:40 a.m. to get Arieliz ready for the bus, which comes at 7. At Celotto, there’s a quick morning check-in for the the teachers to find out how the child’s night went and if there’s anything else they need to know for the day. Next, parents label their child’s bottles and put the day’s diapers away. (Older children—those who turn three before their parent graduates or leaves high school—are walked over to nearby Laila Day Nursery, which runs a program for older children.)

Then the parent heads upstairs to class at Cross, or, if they attend another New Haven school, gets on a bus to go to their home school—all by 7:30 or so. Estrella likes to stop by at lunch and visit Arieliz and her classmates, who might be playing outside on the center’s playground. She goes back to class until 2 p.m., and then heads home with Arieliz. By the time I talk to Estrella— and Arieliz, who Estrella puts on the phone so that I can say hi—on a Wednesday night, it’s the end of a long day—and another one will begin in just nine hours.

But to Estrella and other teen parents, it’s a familiar routine. However, in 1993, things would have been different. That year, Lori Nordstrom, LAW ’94, noticed a troubling trend. As a law student, her work in a legal clinic brought her to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. She and her fellow students noticed that many of these clients

were pregnant or parenting teenage girls who were not attending school. They wondered if that was a common problem, or if they had just found a few teens who weren’t in school.

They looked into the issue, and learned that there were more than 60 young women at Wilbur Cross who were mothers. These students could choose to attend the Polly T. McCabe Center, an alternative school for pregnant students, during their pregnancy and for a short time after their child was born. But after giving birth and returning to their home school, these new mothers’ absence rates were disproportionately high, often due to a lack of childcare options.

The group of law students approached Dr. Reginald Mayo, then the superintendent of the New Haven Public Schools, with the idea for an in-school childcare center. “We believed that the school had an obligation to provide services,” Nordstrom explained. “[These women’s] education was [negatively] impacted by their sex.” It’s a statement echoed by advocacy groups like the National Women’s Law Center, which emphasizes that Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in educational settings, thus prohibits discrimination against pregnant and parenting students.

Mayo was supportive, but said that the district didn’t have any funding available for a childcare center. Instead, the group created a nonprofit organization, Student Parenting and Family Services, and asked members from the childcare, education, and social services communities to serve on its board. They visited programs in Bridgeport and Norwich, CT, but neither offered the kind of comprehensive services—outreach, parenting education, and other essential support—that the group wanted to provide.

Since many of the children would be coming from underprivileged backgrounds, the program needed to be of the highest possible quality—staffed by trained, full-time teach-

ers, not volunteers nor student interns. Also, providing free door-to-door transportation was essential. They chose Cross to house the program because it already had a strong school-based health clinic. To plan the redesign of the former metal shop, which hadn’t been used in years, an architect donated his services, while state funds helped cover the cost of the renovation.

By 1995, the center—named after Elizabeth Celotto, a longtime principal at Polly McCabe, an alternative school for pregnant adolescents—was up and running. The initial community response to Celotto was mostly positive; while some suggested that having childcare in schools would promote teenage pregnancy and encourage early sexual activity, Nordstrom said that most people had a more pragmatic approach. “[They] focused on the needs of the infants and toddlers,” she said.

Even with community support, keeping Celotto financially afloat is no easy task.

Funding is a constant challenge. “You get cut almost every single year. You get cut and you get cut,” Deluz explained. To fund the school, they combine grants from organizations such as the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the Board of Education and the state Department of Education with childcare subsidies like Connecticut’s Care 4 Kids and a community development block grant while soliciting donations from private donors. It’s hard, she said, to keep the program’s high quality while meeting the budget.

Funding aside, Celotto is a promising model of an effective in-school childcare center for high schools across the country.

Deluz is proud to say that it is accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which she called “quite an accomplishment.”

This means that the program has passed a rigorous evaluation of its facilities, curriculum, and teachers’ qualifications, among other criteria.

The Yale Herald (Sept. 20, 2013)

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Quality is important, but so is accessibility. The distinctive feature of the program, Nordstrom said, is that it is located within a school. Other programs dedicate slots in other childcare centers for the children of teen parents, but at Celotto, “the staff sees parents on a daily basis,” she emphasizes.

“Teens can come down to the center and

pecially if it [prevents] them from getting through school, through life.”

Statistics show that parents are more effective and their children are healthier when they receive these kinds of services.

The mothers are also less likely to have repeat pregnancies—a major barrier to high school graduation, for some young women.

The results of these programs have been promising. But, in 1999, New Haven Public Schools’ work to prevent unintended teen pregnancy faced a major setback. That year, budget cuts eliminated the district’s health education program, which had provided important information to help teens avoid unintended pregnancies.

“We see where they’ve struggled... we admire them for coming in [every morning] with the books, bags, babies. They make it, and they have to be commended. They could have given up. ” —Lorraine Deluz, director, Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center talk to the teachers about early childhood education.” The idea is catching on, and advocates from other cities have come to tour Celotto, she said. “They say they need services in their town, and they’re looking at our program as a model.”

The need for these services is particularly clear to former teen parents, who know firsthand the difficulty of raising a child on one’s own without such resources. Elizabeth Torres, a former teen parent who is now the executive director of Bridgeport Community Trust, had a daughter at 16, and her daughter had a son at 17. Torres dropped out of high school and “drifted” for a few years until she entered a program that helped her get her GED. With her mother’s encouragement, her daughter also got her GED while parenting—a helpful alternative for many teen parents.

High school is stressful. Add other complicated problems—troubled relationships, an unstable housing situation, a lack of transportation, keeping the house stocked with formula, the college admissions process—and it’s clear that parenting as a teenager is more than changing diapers and handling nighttime feedings.

This reality is why programs like Celotto have to be more than a place for infants and toddlers to learn. Their parents have their own lessons to learn—how to budget money, help their children learn language, keep an eye on their health and their child’s.

Thanks to specialized outreach, more fathers are more involved in their children’s lives. Often, Torres said, teen fathers “take flight.” But at Celotto, there are fathers who have taken on the sole responsibility of getting their children to school. Deluz thinks, generally, that these days more teen fathers are getting the message that “it’s all right to take responsibility” for the child.

The school’s staff can also refer children to the state’s Birth to Three services if they show signs of disabilities or developmental delays; the children of teen parents often struggle with health problems. Many of these parents will experience homelessness at some point during the year; many live with aunts, uncles, or friends, “doubling up” on a temporary basis. To address the problem, a Celotto case manager can help with the housing search or with benefits applications.

They attend several parenting classes a week at the center, and a social worker holds a monthly support group. A nurse practitioner is available to answer health questions.

“Anything they need,” Deluz explained, “es-

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The Yale Herald (Sept. 20, 2013)

Education and support, Torres said, are important to help teen parents escape a “cycle of poverty.”

Most teen births in New Haven occur among black and Latina girls, but Torres, who has spoken on the issue of teen pregnancy in Latino/a communities, emphasized that the issue is “linked to race, but it’s bigger than that.” She said that “the root issue is an issue of poverty… and all of these issues are usually found in neighborhoods that are not good places to live.” In these neighborhoods, “you find a lot of minorities in substandard housing.”

While there will always be a demand for supportive services, advocates and service providers adapt to changes in their community’s needs. For example, Celotto’s class size is down from its capacity of 32, which Deluz attributes to the economy. “When there were plentiful jobs,” she said, “everyone

Until Rhythm Campbell, 17, was attending the Polly McCabe Center while pregnant with her daughter, Ali’se, now 18 months old, she hadn’t received health education in a formal school setting. Her mother had provided her with information, but in school, “They don’t talk about sex,” she explained.

“They don’t talk about pregnancy, they don’t talk about contraception.” Estrella’s middle school class had “the talk” about “girl stuff,” and her freshman seminar program at Cross addressed issues like drugs, drinking, and birth control. In the absence of a standard, district-wide program, curricula appear to vary by school.

To fill the need, a Yale student group, Community Health Educators, formed soon after the 1999 budget cuts. Since then, trained undergraduates have been delivering lessons on topics ranging from nutrition to mental illness. Their curriculum also discusses healthy

agency now as much as one that teaches academics.” Since then, New Haven has, in many ways, been ahead of the curve in its efforts to provide health services, especially as they relate to sexual health or pregnancy. At the time when Mayo discussed the district’s commitment to support students socially as well as academically, AIDS was spreading in New Haven at an alarming rate—particularly among young people. In an effort to slow the spread of the disease, condoms were made available in schools to students as young as fifth grade, along with information on abstinence and safe sex. At the time, the move was the most far-reaching plan in the country to make condoms available to teens, according to the Washington-based research Center for Population Options . (Generally, condoms are still available in NHPS schools.)

The condom plan created controversy among religious and community leaders, who were concerned that it would encourage or condone sexual activity. Encouraged by local leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to organize community opposition, Arthur J. Bosley was the only school board member who voted against the plan. In a Wed., July 28, 1993 New York Times article, “Condom Plan Is Authorized In New Haven,” Bosley was quoted as saying that the move was “inappropriate… it can and will send a message to our youngsters that we are sanctioning their activities.”

But, faced with the threat of AIDS, the Board of Education passed the measure six-to-one. Shortly after, Celotto opened its doors. The work continued in 2007, when Mayor John DeStefano convened a Teen Pregnancy Prevention Task Force, which

The psychological burden of parenting is much harder to bear without help. This is why the school system does its best to lend a hand. was looking for daycare.” Now, many young children stay with unemployed grandparents during the day. Some attend the Early Head Start at LULAC, which reserves spots for the children of teen parents. Programs like Polly McCabe and Hillhouse High School’s Support for Pregnant and Parenting Teens, a new state program to support teen parents in the five CT cities with the highest teen pregnancy rates, can help them find other child care centers as well. But for those who need its services—especially the added support from a comprehensive, in-school program—Celotto is a crucial part of their educational success.

From 2002 to 2007, 99 percent of teen parents whose children were at Celotto graduated, compared to 50 percent of teenage parents who didn’t have access to “interventions.” Last year, 16 of the 17 teen parents eligible to graduate did. To Deluz, watching them cross the stage is like seeing 16 sons and daughters graduate. “We see where they’ve struggled… we admire them for coming in [every morning] with the books, bags, babies,” she said. “They make it, and they have to be commended. They could have given up.”

sexuality. In an email to the Herald, CHE CoCoordinator Alison Vivinetto, MC ’14, wrote that the group “works hard to provide students with information they need to prevent unwanted teen pregnancy.”

Their lessons for high schoolers cover both birth control and abstinence. Another activity has students discuss the impact that being a teen parent would have on their lives. Middle schoolers learn about puberty, healthy sexuality, STIs, and the “responsibilities and consequences of having sex,” along with information about pregnancy and contraception.

Other health education comes from a hodgepodge of sources: Planned Parenthood, families, doctors’ offices. However, some, but not all, schools have school-based health centers. Maria Damiani, director of maternal and child health for the city’s health department, believes that now adolescents are better informed about their health—and attributes the drop in teen pregnancy partially to more accessible health care. The city’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council continues emphasize the need for a “comprehensive sexuality health curriculum.”

In 1993, then-Superintendent Mayo noted that the district had “become a social

soon became a council. According to a 2012 report by the council, teen birth rates across the country had been falling since peaking in 1990, despite a small rise between 2005 and 2007. In 2006, around the time the task force convened, New Haven reported a teen birth rate double the statewide average. Since then, rates have continued to fall. In 2010, the council won a big victory: securing access to hormonal contraception (the “Pill”) in the school-based health centers beginning in the school year 2010-11 for students who had parental permission to use the center’s services.

The council’s three areas of focus—reproductive health education, access to health care, and support for pregnant and parenting teens—demonstrate their belief in the importance of preventing unintended pregnancies while also supporting teens who are already parenting.

“There are no easy answers” when it comes to teen pregnancy, Damiani said.

There is no one-size-fits-all.” A member of the task force since its inception, she pointed me to its first report, published in 2007.

It began with the following quote from sexuality educator Dr. Michael A. Carrera: “Hope

—graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff is a powerful contraceptive. The way to help young people avoid pregnancy is by providing them with real evidence that good things can happen in their lives.” It’s a message Damiani returns to often as we talk. The issue of teen pregnancy is as much philosophical as it is logistical: she attributes the drop in pregnancies to the wider availability of contraception, but also to the fact that more teens feel that “good things can happen in their lives… they feel that they have a future”—especially teen girls.

THIS MESSAGE OF HOPE IS AN IMPORtant philosophical underpinning of the council’s prevention efforts. But it’s equally, if not more, relevant to teens who are already parenting—especially those without strong family support. For these students, the city’s programs work to fill in the gaps.

Campbell has the support of her mother and her child’s grandparents, but, even so, she says that the SPPT program is like a “family” to her, and that her mentor (case manager) “adopts [the parents] as if they were her own child.”

Campbell has always planned on going to college, and she is looking forward to graduating from high school this spring and tackling college in the fall. But during the semester she spent at Polly McCabe, she realized that many of her fellow teen parents might be headed down different paths. Even though the stress of pregnancy and transferring to and from McCabe can disrupt academics, Campbell was determined to stay on track. She attributes this to the example of her mother, whom she calls her “rock.”

Estrella’s mother also played an important role for her, emphasizing the importance of education and promising to help Estrella to do “whatever she needed to do” to pursue her education.

But both Estrella and Campbell know other teen parents who weren’t so lucky.

Some have a second child, which makes it especially hard for them to finish school. If the mother didn’t know who the father of the baby was, she couldn’t get child support. Or a teen mother might not have the support of her parents; some were homeless, lived in foster care, or stayed with family on a temporary,basis.

Without a parent as a role model, Campbell said, some teens have to “go into being a parent blind.” They don’t have the benefit

of a parent’s support or the experience of seeing a parent overcome the challenges of being a parent themselves. Estrella remembers knowing a teen mother who was emancipated from her parents at a young age and didn’t have contact with her mother. This young woman had a child at fifteen.

Estrella hasn’t seen her in school, and imagines that she has dropped out. Similarly, a close friend of Campbell’s, whom she calls her “best friend,” also had a child at 15.

Her friend “struggled with herself and who she was as a person. She beat herself up.

She felt like her life was over.” In comparing herself and her friend, who received less parenting support, Campbell can see the difference that the support of family members and programs like SPPT make.

In other words, the psychological burden of parenting is much harder to bear without help. This is why the school system does its best to lend a hand. “Teenagers have been having babies forever,” Deluz said. “It’s their choice. How can you help them now to get through the system?”

Many other cities take a different tactic: New York City caused controversy in March 2013 with a series of subway ads featuring wide-eyed toddlers next to messages like, “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen,” and, “Honestly, mom…chances are he won’t stay with you. What will happen to me?” Seventeen magazine runs PSAs from the Candie’s Foundation, which aims to “raise awareness about, and motivate teens to prevent, teen pregnancy.” Teen mom Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin, appears in a Candie’s ad that reads. “I never thought I’d be a statistic.”

Carly Rae Jepsen, of “Call Me Maybe” fame, appears in another: “You’re supposed to be changing the world. Not changing diapers.”

But New Haven’s advocates for teen parents clearly believe that it’s possible, if not easy, to do both. It seems that the coalition of educators, caregivers, advocates, and health professionals have realized that shame is not the solution—support is.

New Haven’s teen parents can find support to help them get through high school, but life after graduation can be even more complicated. Most of the students, Nordstrom said, get accepted to college—mainly nearby schools like Gateway Community College or Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU).

When they’re in high school, it’s relatively

easy for teen parents to find care, but when they graduate, they could lose this benefit.

Care 4 Kids, the state’s childcare subsidy, is available to “parents receiving or transitioning off Temporary Family Assistance, teenage parents enrolled in high school, and working parents with incomes below 50 percent of the state median income.” That means that it “will pay for [daycare for] you to work at McDonald’s for four years, but not to go to college,” Deluz said. Head Start and Early Head Start programs are encouraged, but not required, to give priority to the children of teen parents when allotting their limited spots. Other benefits are available through New Haven’s School Readiness program, but only for older students—those who are already three. SCSU doesn’t offer childcare, and Gateway has a preschool, but not a program for infants or toddlers.

Some colleges, like Pennsylvania’s Wilson College and Massachusetts’ Endicott College, have specialized programs to accommodate parenting college students.

These programs allow students to live in separate dormitories with their children and receive childcare. Like Celotto, the concept is a promising model for other schools. However, private colleges like Wilson and Endicott can be prohibitively expensive for many teen mothers.

The majority of New Haven’s teen parents face a more complicated path to a college education. Campbell will commute to Central Connecticut State University, where she hopes to study criminal justice and eventually become a lawyer and a judge.

Campbell’s mother and Ali’se’s paternal grandmother will be able to look after Ali’se.

Estrella is hoping to send her daughter to LULAC’s Early Head Start next year. It’s important to her that Arieliz gets a highquality education, too. “Daycares are good,” she said. “They have a set schedule and activities, and [Arieliz can] interact with other kids. If they stay with their grandmother at home, they might just be watching cartoons all day.” Inspired by the nurses who cared for her while she was giving birth, Estrella wants to study nursing.

New Haven has been a national leader in promoting the importance of attending and completing college. But the city’s flagship program to enable college attendance, New Haven Promise, can seem out of reach for some teen parents. During high school, they

would have had to meet a 40-hour community service requirement, attended school 90 percent of the time, and maintained a 3.0 GPA or better—challenging for many students, but particularly so for those who are balancing parenting with school. Besides the absences due to pregnancy and giving birth, “They’re not only out when they’re sick,” Deluz said. “They’re also out when their children are sick.” Campbell said that all of her absences were excused, her GPA was a 3.5, and she had already fulfilled the community service requirement, mentoring children at MicroSociety School.

But it doesn’t appear that New Haven Promise has a coordinated policy about accommodating teen parents. According to Ellie Stewart, New Haven Promise’s Engagement Officer, the criteria apply to all students, “regardless of the problems they may be facing.” Stewart did not know of a particular policy for teen parents, but did note that there is an appeals process for students who are rejected from the program for not meeting its stipulations. Because of this, they don’t get the financial aid that the program offers. Celotto is able to offer small scholarships to a few of its graduating seniors each year, but not as much as New Haven Promise could.

Title IX promises teen parents an education, and New Haven has programs to ensure that teen parents won’t have to face the task of parenting alone. But the bigger goal—to make it through high school and go onto college—is a harder promise to keep, especially for students with big obstacles to overcome.

Back at Celotto, it’s time for the staff to buckle the students into triple strollers for a mid-morning walk. As I head out of the center, I notice a poster on the wall. It reads, “esta casa que hemos hecho,”—“this home we have made.” For seven hours a day, five days a week, these eight students have a place they can call home. For teen parents whose lives aren’t quite on stable footing, a community of advocates in New Haven has stepped in to make the journey easier. With help from families and outside agencies, many teen parents are successfully navigating the difficulties of teen parenthood.

“People say you’re a stereotype or a statistic,” Campbell said. “I don’t mind being a statistic, but I’m a positive one.”

—Graphic by Jin Ai Yap YH Staff The Yale Herald (Sept. 20, 2013)

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A slice of Turkey The common origins shared by the owners of A-1, Alpha Delta, and Brick Oven Pizza

by Cody Kahoe YH Staff

Y

alies are obsessed with pizza. Alpha Delta, A1 Pizza, and Brick Oven Pizzeria are popular late-night stops after a night of partying or cramming in the library. These places have two things in common. First, the pizza is excellent. Second, and less commonly known, all three pizzerias are owned by Turkish immigrants from the same town of Giresun, on the northeastern coastline of Turkey’s Black Sea region.

a Turkish Club denizen, Etem Erol, explains, “These clubs pop up wherever Turks are. It reflects the village culture, and it provides a place to blow off some steam with your compatriots.”

Three members of this club include the owners of some of Yalies’ favorite late night eateries: A-1, owned by Ali Yaglidere, Alpha Delta, owned by Cengiz Killic, and Brick Oven Pizza, owned by Kadır Catalbasoglu.

pened,” in a characteristically concise manner. After he chose not to pursue higher education in Turkey, Yaglidere saw America as his only chance to make a living. “The great mistake of my life was not getting an education,” he said. “I thought all of America was like [the television show] Dallas.” Starting over, too, was difficult. “I was very frustrated being here at first. I told myself, ‘go back, go back,’ but eventually I got more used to the hard work. People in Turkey don’t under-

“I was the first [Turk] to show that you could own your own place. I just showed the rest of them that it was possible.”

—Kadir Catalbasoglu, owner of Brick Oven Pizza ABOVE THE OLD ARMSTRONG TIRE PLANT in West Haven, 30 men holler at the television broadcasting a Turkish soccer match.

On more formal occasions, they gather with loved ones to celebrate marriages within the community. And for more casual affairs, they simply munch on traditional Turkish treats, remnants of their homeland. Colloquially referred to as “The Turkish Club,” this gathering space has no formal name, but rather serves as a space for the men to escape the constructs and expectations of American immigrant life. As Yale’s Turkish professor and

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IN 1985, ALI YAGLIDERE MOVED TO America to join his father, who was already living in the United States. A friend in Connecticut helped him find a job washing dishes at Frankie’s Diner in Bridgeport. Arriving via Greece and Canada, Cengiz Kilic joined his uncle in Bridgeport in 1987. The most recent to arrive, Kadır Catalbasoglu moved to Connecticut in 1992.

For A-1’s Yaglidere, moving to America represented an escape from a limited future in Turkey. When I asked him how he wound up in New Haven, he replied, “It just hap-

stand the hard work here. They don’t come because of that.”

Kilic of Alpha Delta also saw America as a chance to escape a dead end on the shores of the Black Sea. “We came for the money,” he said. “Where we came from, we were poor.” But money was only part of the rationale. “America is the greatest country in the world, my friend,” he said. “You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t bother anybody. You have opportunity. If you work, you can change your life.” And, like Yaglidere, he did. After working for years as

a cook at Alpha Delta, Kilic earned enough to acquire the home of the Wenzel from its Greek owners in the early 2000s.

The youngest of seven children, Catalbasoglu claims he is the only child who could have made it to America. “I was the youngest. I had more dreams, more energy. My brothers and sisters had all settled their lives,” he said. He also began by washing dishes at other people’s restaurants. After a few years working at a diner, he was robbed at gunpoint—“That day I was so scared, I didn’t want to work. I asked for a day off, but my boss would not give me off that day.

I was shaken. So I quit.” Shortly after, he noticed a local pizza shop listed for rent. He bought the shop with his savings and founded the A-1 franchise. “I was the first [Turk] to show that you could own your own place.

I just showed the rest of them that it was possible,” he said, visibly satisfied with his trailblazing.

After a few years, Catalbasoglu noted that there was no Turkish restaurant in the entire state and founded the Istanbul Café, located on the corner of College and Crown. From there, he opened and sold multiple restaurants, including selling A-1 to Yaglidere, until he saw the opportunity to create something new. He thought to open Brick Oven Pizza, with its signature oven, on the corner of Elm and Howe in 2008. “I wanted to do something different,” he explained. When I told him I’ve always liked Brick Oven’s thin crust, he insisted that he “gets the crust just right.”

Not to lose an opportunity to advertise, he also insisted that I write that down.

SITTING IN A-1 PIZZA IN THE MORNING, before the afternoon rush of customers, Yaglidere tells me he worries New Haven has lost its vitality. “Outside, the streets used to be packed with people,” he said, pointing desperately at A-1’s wide glass windows to the empty sidewalk along Broadway. “Now, people are too worried about taxes and parking tickets to come. And many people are unemployed. If you don’t have money, how are you going to go and buy food from a place like this?” But when I asked if he has ever considered returning to his family in Turkey, he admitted, after a pause, “I am a stranger in Turkey now.” But he remains optimistic—“One day, I will save enough money and travel across the United States. Now everything is too busy, but that will be good.”

While Yaglidere was despondent about the prospects of New Haven’s economy, Kilic was eager to share both his generosity (I had to turn down multiple offers for complimentary food, coffee, and cigarettes) and his enthusiasm. “New Haven is like Manhattan for me, nobody ever sleeps. So many people are always coming in and out.

It’s a good place to do business.” Of course, he was quick to admit that that success comes at a price—he has centered his life around his work. “Look across the street at Elm Bar. When I came here, every day I saw people spend their lives over there. Not me.

I cannot drink. I have to work.”

Yaglidere agreed that Americans’ obsession with work makes socializing difficult.

“In Turkey, people could simply talk for hours for no reason,” he replied. “Here, you

work to death, and everyone is rushing all the time.”

RESPONDING TO THESE FRUSTRATIONS, Catalbasoglu created the Turkish social club in West Haven. There, an entire generation of Giresun-natives, most of whom did not even

smile, Catalbasoglu regaled me the story of his rise to prominence, and how he went from asking Kilic to help find a job early on to later providing Kilic with a position at one of his own locations (before Kilic took over Alpha Delta). “Now, we are in war, you know?” he added with a laugh. “When you

When I asked the three men how Americans have treated them since their arrival here, they agreed that they have never felt singled out or unwelcome here.“The law is for everyone here,” Kilic said. Nevertheless, their moves were challenging at points— Catalbasoglu told me he regrets missing the

An entire generation of Giresun-natives, most of whom did not even know each other in Turkey, has created a community for Turkish men in New Haven that has grown since the late 1990s. know each other in Turkey, have created a community for Turkish men that has grown substantially since the late 1990s. When I told Catalbasoglu that the other owners had mentioned the Turkish club as their only source of activity outside of work, he said, proudly, “I see more. These people have no place to go. I just want to unite them, just want to have a place to socialize and hang out and talk about our businesses, our problems, our community. I saw an Italian club. I saw a Polish club, you know? It was important to put everyone in one place.”

Catalbasoglu takes pride in what he sees as the cohesion and inspiration his club provides, but a slightly tense history filled with competition and debts between the three pizza owners bubbles beneath the surface. With more than a hint of a

are outside, you are friends, but it is different at work.”

THE THREE MEN’S TURKISH ROOTS manifest differently in each shop. Kilic insists on customers remembering him for the quality of his food, not for his Turkishness. His back office is decorated with flags and portraits of Turkish leaders, the only remnants of his homeland. “I don’t want people to know about me. I want people to know about Alpha Delta. If people don’t like my food, that means I lose everything.” Catalbasoglu, on the other hand, embraces his heritage publicly, with paintings of the Turkish coastline and decorative ceramic tiles hanging on the wall of the Brick Oven and Turkish music playing behind the counter. “I play Turkish music—I am Turkish, so I figure, what the hell.”

death of his father in Turkey. “I could not go to back there for the funeral,” he said. “It just hurts me. I still have that. It would be very easy for me to cry right now.”

Although they are thankful for the opportunities they have had, none of them wish a life in the restaurant industry on their children. “I want my kids to get an education—I wish I had gone to school,” Yaglidere lamented. Kilic agreed. “I don’t want my child to do the pizza job. I want him to be educated.

He’s going to be a lawyer, engineer, whatever he can, except the restaurant job—in this job, you have to work hard.” Catalbasoglu’s oldest son, at 15, has already set his standard high. “He wants to go to Yale. Nobody has ever gone to Yale from my hometown. I would be very proud of him.”

—Graphic by Jin Ai Yap YH Staff The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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CULTURE Mondays with Beinecke F

our notebooks lay open-faced on a table.

Eager readers pore over their jaundiced pages filled with a near-illegible script. Though hard to decipher, these tomes happen to be inscribed with original drafts of John Donne’s satires.

After a few minutes of watching the curator, Kathryn James, carefully turn the pages while murmuring to herself about her favorite lines, she begins to explain how these 17th-century notebooks came to sit along with the 100 or so guests in the Beineke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library lobby.

This event was not a section of Major English Poets or exclusive to English

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The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

majors; it was an open event to the general public of Yale and New Haven. Talks and teas, similar to this, happen in this same place at the same time every Monday at 4 p.m., sharing a different bit of the collection and providing a forum for discussion on whatever artifact the speaking curator or professor has chosen to dig out of the archives.

This year, topics have ranged from a comparison between Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue and a 16th centur y

map of the Mediterranean to the illustration process of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, and the history of oneof-a-kind Donne manuscripts.

Discussing these works makes Mondays particularly gratifying for some viewers like Lauren Beversluis, CC ’16. “I enjoyed learning about illustration techniques while being able to see those techniques used in the works we were shown,” she said during a discussion on The Pickwick Papers.

Each week, 20 or so

people regularly attend these talks, be it to discover a new oddity about Victorian printing, or the compilation process of Beinecke’s newest exhibit. English professors, Ph.D candidates in the humanities, and erudite New Haveners alike all come out of the woodwork for these Mondays. But, as I’ve noticed after a semester of consistent attendance, a surprisingly few undergrads join the melange.

The next Monday afternoon you’re spending lounging in Bass, remember that Beinecke beckons for your attention.

—Thomas Yabroff YH Staff

Vita et Veritas

T

hey first appeared on the night of Mon., Oct. 14. Bulletin boards across campus displayed pictures of smiling, unassuming Yale undergrads clutching dry-erase boards marked with black pen. “Pro-Life Hiker,” read the sign of one student; another, “ProLife Scientist,” and “Pro-Life Freshman.” Anna Wichorek, SY ’15, president of Choose Life at Yale (CLAY), is featured on one of these fliers as a self-proclaimed “Pro-Life Feminist.”

“Our publicity campaign just went up tonight,” said a pleased-sounding Wichorek, in the post-dinner quiet of the Jonathan Edwards dining hall.

“It’s the idea that you can be interested in a lot of different things and still be pro-life. I think having these [posters] on campus will be good.”

CLAY, Yale’s undergraduate pro-life group, meets every Tuesday to discuss aspects of the pro-life movement ranging from current legislation to how ancient philosophy relates to pro-life arguments. In addition to weekly meetings, the group holds a candlelight vigil for the unborn every spring semester. On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, they organize a trip to Washington DC to attend the March for Life. Two years ago, CLAY organized a demonstration in which they set up a poster board on Cross Campus showing a timeline of pregnancy and early childhood and prompted students to mark on the timeline where they thought life begins. When President of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards, came to Yale last year, members of CLAY sat in on her talk holding signs that read “It’s a Child, Not a Choice,” in what CLAY member Elena Gonzalez, PC ’15, described as a “mini protest.”

Now, from Thurs., Oct. 17 to Sat., Oct. 19, CLAY will be holding Vita et Veritas,

the first pro-life conference of its kind hosted at Yale.

“The idea was floated a long time ago…but CLAY wasn’t large enough to take on the project,” said last spring’s CLAY President Courtney McEachon, PC ’15. With CLAY continually growing since its founding in 2003 (it now has approximately 15 core members, as opposed to two students a decade ago), the student group is pursuing more ambitious projects. McEachon began to “lay the groundwork” for the conference last fall. “The biggest worry wasn’t that we didn’t have enough manpower,” Gonzalez said. “We were worried about if we had enough contacts to get people to come from outside of Yale [and] if we had enough places to get funding from. This has never before been done at Yale or by CLAY, but hopefully it will work out.”

The conference will consist of nine talks and panel discussions featuring speakers with a range of perspectives relating to the pro-life movement. On Thurs., Oct. 17, Dr. Hadley Arkes, a political science professor at Amherst College and a drafter of the 2002 Born Alive Infants Act, will deliver the opening lecture. On Sat., Oct. 19, Sally Winn, senior communications specialist for Feminists for Life will deliver a talk entitled “Refuse to Choose: Reclaiming Feminism,” which CLAY’s former Secretary, Ryan Proctor, SY ’16, said he is most looking forward to hearing. “The Feminists for Life want to point out that abortion is not just an undo button,” Proctor said. “The feminist movement needs to make sure we have a society that is accepting of the fact that women get pregnant and are going to have children, as opposed to making them kill their children in order to survive in the workforce.”

The conference’s closing talk is on Saturday afternoon, “The Secret Agenda: a Former Abortionist Speaks Out,” will be given by former abortion doctor and OB/GYN Dr. Haywood Robinson. “He’s going to talk about his journey from being an abortionist and the inside of the abortion industry,” McEachon said. “He’s seen it from the other side. It’s a money maker, and a lot of people go into it for that. He will be exposing what the industry is really after other than its surface views and goals.”

ACCORDING TO MCEACHON, WOMen’s rights groups generally dominate CLAY’s pro-life stance on Yale’s campus. “But the reason that we decided to host this conference and hope that it’ll continue is because we think that there is great intellectual depth on the pro-life side,” McEachon said. “It isn’t just a religious argument. We’d like to see our campus engage with it more. The talks were chosen specifically for this weekend to draw in people with other philosophies, other mentalities, to show them that what they believe in also supports the prolife side.”

Proctor added that, in comparison to pro-life groups on other Ivy League campuses, CLAY has “fared pretty well.” Brown does not have a pro-life organization, and when students held a vigil for the unborn at Dartmouth, their presentation of 546 miniature American flags to represent the 54.6 million lives of babies lost to abortions after Roe v. Wade, was plowed over by a student driving over the flags with his car.

In contrast to this flagrant antagonism, Proctor said that because of the general acceptance of its stu-

dents that he describes as “institutional relativism,” Yale has been relatively open to CLAY. The organization receives funding from the University, and this semester, it became a member of Dwight Hall, Yale’s umbrella organization for public service and social justice activities. Among CLAY’s public service efforts is a new initiative to send volunteers to Saint Gianna Pregnancy Center, a Catholic crisis pregnancy center in New Haven.

“CLAY will hopefully be volunteering [at Saint Gianna] and holding drives, doing more work with women in need and outreach,” Wichorek explained.

Still, Proctor conceded, “Some people in Dwight Hall weren’t happy with [our joining].”

While Gonzalez agreed that the group has faced relatively little backlash, he admits to being not exactly welcomed with open arms. “There is some hostility,” he said. “I remember a lot of people were upset when we did the [Justice for All] board on Cross Campus. On such a liberal campus, there is this gut reaction that, ‘Oh, you’re pro-life, you must be bigoted or prejudiced in some way.’

“Obviously, the grand goal of the pro-life movement is to stop all abortions,” Gonzalez said. “But rather than beating a message into someone’s head—saying you have to believe this because it’s immoral to do this—we are just trying to get rid of this knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people who identify as liberal or a Democrat hold.”

For Gonzalez, CLAY’s most important message is not so much campuswide agreement as it is dialogue. “We want to start conversation.” ­— Charlotte Weiner —graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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REVIEWS Stilted Shakespeare

by Katherine Barnes

T

wo households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona where we lay our scene.” You know how the rest of the story goes: rival families, star-crossed teenaged lovers, confusion, banishment, and finally, death. On the surface, Carlo Carlei’s film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet seems to live up to the grandeur of its source material.

The period costumes are beautiful. The two pouty-lipped leads are gorgeous. The Italian locations are stunning. Unfortunately, that is where the film’s splendor ends.

Carlei’s period-piece interpretation of Shakespeare is in stark contrast to the recent trend seen in other recent Shakespeare adaptations such as Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2013) and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Both of these films use modern-day settings to reach out to their audiences, but they manage to accomplish very different goals from each other and from Carlei’s film. Whedon’s crisp and casual Much Ado About Nothing merged modern style with Shakespearean language in a way that was seamless, making the dialogue seem as though they were conversations you could hear walking down the street. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, on the other hand, created a discord from the combination of Shakespearean dialogue and a modern-day setting that was simultaneously jarring and captivating. In both cases, the filmmakers succeeded in finding the moments in the text that address crises of identity, love, and envy—matters that remain relevant and resonant to today’s audiences—and in bringing them to the foreground. They rejuvenated what could have been just old stories with funny-sounding language and and proved them to be timeless and relateable.

Sadly, the moments when Carlei’s adaptation could be moving and resonant to modern moviegoers are in fact, the worst. A large part of the problem is that the lead actors do not seem capable of properly handling the complexities of Elizabethan English. Hailee Steinfeld, whose performance in 2010’s True Grit proved her talent and earned her an Academy Award nomination, is a disappointing Juliet, as she is seemingly overwhelmed by the material. Douglas Booth, who plays Romeo, is generally more successful than Steinfeld in his performance but fails to consistently carry the weight of the drama’s heavier moments.

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Thankfully, a few supporting performances stand out. In particular, Christian Cooke (Mercutio), Paul Giamatti (Friar Lawrence), and Lesley Manville (Nurse) give excellent performances; their delivery is smooth, unwavering, and emotive in all the ways that the execution of the titular pair falters. Unfortunately, these supporting characters are just that—supporting—and as such, they cannot save the lack of chemistry between Booth and Steinfeld. Consequently, the scenes that are supposed to make the audience feel something—passion, intimacy, or sadness—only made me squirm in my seat.

However, the blame for this awkwardness should not completely fall on the actors: the screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, deserves culpability as well. Fellowes alters and adds to the Bard’s text with his own original scenes and made-up pseudoShakespearean dialogue, and in so doing, he commits a crime worse than the actors’ flat delivery. His additions are clunky and over-complicated, and his dialogue does not sound natural today, nor would it have in Shakespeare’s time. There is nothing inherently wrong in taking liberties with a play or book when adapting it for the big screen; directors and screenwriters commonly remove, add, or liberally interpret some material here and there to ensure that the story translates well and says something new to contemporary audiences. However, Shakespeare’s plays are written in such a particular and rich style that most writers today simply cannot replicate it well. When not done well, such additions are glaringly faulty.

In other adaptations, rather than changing the text, directors have used the editing, setting, cinematography, and sound design to better translate certain scenes and emotions from the page to the screen. Carlei tries to restore the emotional impact where it is non-existent by relying on sweeping, saccharine music; cheesy slow motion techniques; and awkward close-ups but is unsuccessful also in these attempts.

These moments have very little narrative or stylistic precedent or justification, and the editing is haphazard in a way that ends up rendering the fairly familiar story strangely confusing. Where there should be energy or passion, there is none. Where the film should sizzle, it sputters out.

It makes sense that movie directors would want to adapt Shakespeare’s plays.

With their archaic and dense language yet completely relevant themes, they present a challenge to the modern day filmmaker: a successful adaptation could lead not only to a sense of well-deserved self-accomplishment for a director, but also to career changing acclaim. Romeo and Juliet will not be that film for Carlei. Instead of investing completely in the visuals, Carlei should have put more emphasis on what would resonate with his audience. Hopefully, future directors will use this film as an example of how not to adapt Shakespeare.

Music: Cults Static isn’t that bad of an album. I swear—it’s not. The real problem might be that Cults isn’t all too great of a band. Don’t get me wrong—their self-titled debut album from 2011 was my J-A-M. Cults hit you perfectly: trippy ambience, strong vocals, and great production coalesced to make a damn good dream-pop album.

But none of these are to be found on Static. It’s a shift from upbeat, happy-sounding dream-pop to some murky cocktail of shoegaze and rockand-roll. Where are my cute xylophones and happy grooves, eh? It’s as if Cults forgot how to make pop music. There were one or two moments where things started to look up, especially in the first 20 seconds of “High Road.” Bass-lines move effortlessly, the faded electronics cascade in ohso well. Then lead singer Madeline Follin begins to sing, and things go straight downhill. Compared to Cults’ debut, Follin’s vocals in Static just sound awkward. The album lowers her usually high-toned voice to an untidy alto range that muddles up the group’s usual sound.

But here’s the thing: Cults’ didn’t have that diverse of a sound to begin with; Cults was one aesthetic that was iterated into 12 great songs, but by the time Static came along, they had run out of rope. And so, aiming to be more than just that one hipster dream-pop band, they took a risk and shook it up. That risk did not pay off.

—Alex Saeedy YH Staff

Music: The Men The Men’s new release Campfire Songs is more low-fire than it is lo-fi, with tunes that seem to come out as the coals are burning red. The best way to listen is all in one go, letting the tracks blend into one another organically.

The album lights up with The Men’s reworking of songs from their last album; “I Saw Her Face” and “The Seeds” are stripped down from their previous, classic rock incarnations. In “I Saw Her Face”, there is no longer any drumming—only the heat of guitars and harmonizing. Chummy “ohoh’s” float around, and chords fall into place alongside each other. “The Seeds” is the richest, warmest piece on the album—this is the only song with audible words, and where the acoustic element is downplayed.

The latter three songs are smokier and harder to define. “Water Babies” is a familiar, gentle song whose words you won’t remember but can hum along to. Nothing especially exciting happens in “Turn Your Color”, and maybe the title is a clue: in a forest of timber, they turn through different timbres, without rushing to reach any specific place. “Patience”, the final track, fittingly lingers for six minutes.

There’s a barely discernible lyric in “The Seeds” that sums up the album well: “So the music goes/ Not even background noise.” Words are hard to come by in the songs, and by the end of the album there is no background or foreground noise, just heated and hypnotic strumming. The individual pieces may be largely indistinguishable, but the ambience of Campfire Songs is a richly crafted, textured one.

As winter rounds the corner, there’s something very appropriate about this intimate and undemanding album. You can’t help but accept the invitation to accompany The Men to their cabin upstate, to huddle around and to hold your palms warm above the crackling flames.

—Dalia Wolfson

Music: Fall Out Boy In Pax AM Days, the follow-up EP to this year’s Save Rock and Roll, Fall Out Boy makes a concerted effort to sound more punk. The product of the band’s evolution, however, is certainly not going to save rock and roll. Even though the attempt to deviate from pop songs about wet dreams and girls who listen to Britney Spears towards something grittier is respectable, the actual result leaves much to be desired.

Listening to the album, with its pounding drums and frenetic screaming, feels like being trapped in a fun-house that has not been fun for quite some time. The album continues along one frequency without much variation between songs until everything, from forgettable lyrics like “Love! Sex! Death! Till there’s nothing left,” to the composition of the songs, starts to run together into an indistinguishable mess.

The repetitive nature of the album is the result of a half-baked understanding of the punk genre. Punk forefathers The Clash (sorry to bring you into this Joe Strummer), may have done a fair amount of drum banging and angry shouting, but their songs also had wild instrumentals and a sense of story, no matter how convoluted. While listening to PAX AM Days, on the other hand, I was so disoriented by everything from the lack of rhythm to the mumbled lyrics that I found myself questioning whether English was even my mother language. I salute Fall Out Boy’s desire to shed their middle school garb in favor of something cooler, but they have a ways to go before they can rock the clothes of their rebellious older brother.

—Jessica McHugh YH Staff

Staff list:

Here’s what we’ve been up to What we’re listening to: “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You).” If you think this got old, you are wrong. Christina is and will always be the queen, and her sentiment rings true 13 (!) years after this jam swept the nation. (Fall break, all I want is you.) Plus, it sounds brand new when the cool kids in A&A don’t know that’s what you’re listening to. Let’s keep it our dirty little secret.

What we’re late-night snacking on: Fruits for our labor. Thain Family Café already closed? Can’t be that one of your friends who still goes to GHeav? Midterms may get you down, but Durfee’s will always have your back. The thing is, they have fresh raspberries. I’m sure they’re not organic, and there is no way that they are seasonal, but they’re there and they’re ripe and they make a desperate sunrise cram sesh just a little less sad. Also, you won’t get tired of them before fall break.

Where we’re withdrawing cash: The Bank of America ATM in Bass. Convenience, people-watching, theoretical productivity. No further explanation needed.

What’s saving our relationship with our roommates: Disposable plates. I took the plunge, I bought them, and now it’s not awkward that I never do dishes.

Off-campus living just got so much easier. (Bamboo plates are disposable AND environmentally friendly, so spare me the lecture.)

—Maude Tisch YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Especially professors who use these to emphasize a point. Gross.

And the accompanying knowledge that we are conformists.

You’re no one until you’re Catfished.

Bananas are breakfast dot com.

Having a Barbour jacket

Chairigami

SOMESOM Mouth

noises

Lame as fuck.

When the dining hall only puts out bananas for lunch

TA

YSO ticket drama

Not having someone steal our Facebook identity

Those cake shakes from Claire’s

What happens when it gets wet?

People who are done with midterms and say they’re “basically already on break”

People who display empty liquor bottles in their suites

Get cake. Or get a milkshake. Get both, even. But this is much.

We basically hate you.

What if we did this with old food packages? “This is the carton of a Chobani I ate last year…”

The Yale Herald (Oct. 18, 2013)

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