Yale Herald Issue 1

FROM THE STAFF It’s 2015! The Herald is celebrating the New Year about a month late, and we’re so excited to be back with you all.

I rung in the New Year a few weeks back, listening to a playlist that outgoing headman and my personal hero, Kohler Bruno, SM ’16, made me during finals.

When it comes to music, I always prefer other people to do the heavy lifting for me.

I don’t have any interest in Pitchfork, so I enjoy when my friends make playlists for me. I’ve never really thought much about song lyrics, but given my general disposition towards music, I would prefer someone explain them to me than try to figure them out myself. Thank god for Rap Genius—now called just Genius, since its content has expanded beyond rap music. In this week’s cover story, Kohler walks us through Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam’s, CC ’04, tumultuous personal history, rocky relationship with the company, and penchant for Holocaust references. Make sure to check out the online version of the article for genius annotations!

If you’re looking for more words in need of clarification, check out Culture to learn what “Plants and People,” “Movie Physics,” and other obscure science credits are really selling this spring. And for an explanation of the abandoned storefront on College Street, head to Features, where Rachel Strodel, JE ’18, takes us behind the closing of Anchor Bar. As always, there’s way, way more. Read Reviews for Yo-Yo Ma and Oscar-nominated movies. Read Voices for beautiful poetry. And don’t forget Opinion, where Rafi Bildner, DC ’16, explains why ADD might not be real. Read us in print, read us online. Read our annotations. This week, we’re aiming for true brilliance—genius, if you will—and we can’t wait to share it with you.

All my love, Lara Sokoloff Editor-in-Chief

The Yale Herald Volume LIX, Number 1 New Haven, Conn.

Friday Jan. 23, 2015 EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Lara Sokoloff Managing Editors: Sophie Haigney, David Rossler, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan Executive Editors: Kohler Bruno, Colin Groundwater, Micah Rodman, Alessandra Roubini, Olivia Rosenthal, Maude Tisch Senior Editors: Alisha Jarwala, Katy Osborn, Andrew Wagner Culture Editors: Jordan Coley, Sarah Holder Features Editors: Kendrick McDonald, Anna Meixler, Charlotte Weiner Opinion Editors: Josh Feinzig, Alex Kronman Reviews Editors: Carly Lovejoy, Jake Stein Voices Editor: Libbie Katsev Insert Editor: Jenny Allen Design Editors: Ben McCoubrey, Chris Melamed, Vincent Mitchell Assistant Design Editor: Kai Takahashi BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Aleesha Melwani, Karl Xia Director of Advertising: Pehlaaj Bajwa Directors of Finance: Kevin Chen, Ellen Kim, Andrew Wang ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Austin Bryniarski, Anna-Sophie Harling Bullblog Editor-in-chief: Carly Lovejoy Bullblog Associate Editors: Austin Bryniarski, Jordan Coley, Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran 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 2014-2015 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 lara.sokoloff@yale.edu 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 2015, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Kai Takahashi YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK

Incoming Kevin G. Math Enthusiast/Badass MC.

In this issue

Outgoing Devon G.

Cover

Herald Enthusiast/2016+ TC. – YH Staff

12 – What makes someone a genius? Kohler Bruno, SM ’16 profiles with Mahbod Moghadam, CC ’04, shunned Rap Genius co-founder.

Friday Mario Batali: In Conversation Whitney Humanities Center (WALL53) 3:00 p.m.

Saturday Yale vs. Brown in Women’s Ice Hockey Ingall’s Rink 4:00 p.m.

Monday Ferguson and Beyond: An Open Conversation on Race, Policing, and Ferguson William L. Harkness Hall (WLH) 7-9 p.m.

Wednesday Angélique Kidjo: Perspectives on Music and Activism Ezra Stiles College 4-5 p.m.

Voices 6 – Austin Bryniarski, CC ’16, talks with Michael Twitty, a culinary historian who studies the foods of African and Jewish diasporas.

7 – Mount Vesuvius and storms: poetry from Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, and Caroline Kanner, JE ’17.

Opinion 8 – Rafi Bildner, DC ’16, reflects on his personal experience of ADD culture and diagnosis.

9 – Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, weighs the ethics and racism of Charlie Hebdo.

Features 10 – Anchor Bar unmoored: Rachel Strodel, JE ’18, delves into the New Haven landmark’s closing.

16 – Korinayo Thompson, TD ’18, profiles a Yale-New Haven doctor who made Forbes’ “30 Under 30” for studying childhood disease.

Culture 18 – Madeleine Colbert, JE ’18, ventures into the world of “Movie Physics” with Professor Frank Robinson.

19 – Devon Geyelin, TC ’16, treks to Marsh Botanical Gardens and samples “Plants and People.”

20 –

Reviews Magd Lhroob, TD ’15, gets intimate with Yo-Yo Ma. Joe Kuperschmidt, CC ’17, goes Wild, plus all your Inherent Vice...s Jan. 23, 2015 – 3

CREDIT D FAIL

THE NUMBERS Index 362 Students shopping AMTH 160:

Party Facts

Structure of Networks as of January 12

Talking is hard! I totally get it. It’s why we’ve all been asking each other the same questions for the past week re: shopping period. Which is why I love my mental list of party facts. Example: Other: (says things I don’t care about) Me: Did you know Ke$ha is a certified genius?

Other: Really?

Me: Yeah. Her IQ’s over 150. She got into Columbia, but decided to go on tour instead.

Other: That’s so crazy.

Me: I know. I kind of respect it, though.

Like she totally just figured out how to manipulate the consumer market.

Other: I guess that’s true.

From there, the conversation can go literally anywhere, or you can leave. Did you know bison can jump eight feet in the air?

From a standstill. They’re like all muscle.

80

Percent who received an A of more than 500 students enrolled in the class last year.

100

Students who will be allowed to enroll in the popular QR class due to this year’s new enrollment cap.

2

Exams for the class this semester, which is two more than last year’s students took.

1

Carly Lovejoy’s, BR ’16, ranking in Structure of Networks’ 2014 “best connected students.”

Iambic Pentameter

Evelyn Economy Oh, Evelyn, you Bridgewater Recruiter, AOL Fembot, you. Thank you for the email offering me one of your limited number of spots. As if the stress of on campus recruitment isn’t bad enough, now I have you toying with my heart. While I agree that I am a high-potential-rising star, I would feel more flattered if I didn’t feel totally CATFISHED. Because I see you, Evelyn! You don’t even have a real name! If it is your real name, though, that reminds me of how people named Georgia are more likely to move to Georgia. But really—it’s not your name. You’re probably not even a real person. I know this, you know this. Stop being so silly!

– Devon Geyelin Foreign Correspondent

I’m unconvinced. I feel like anyone can take a sentence and decide to emphasize every other syllable. Often I read something that’s “in iambic pentameter,” and while it has 10 syllables, I’m thinking—this is an iamb because you make it so. To quote my poetry professor last semester, iambic pentameter is “more of a feeling” than a concrete thing. And while feelings are absolutely real, 100 percent, I still think iambic pentameter is the greatest urban legend of all. Which is why I’m giving it a D and not a fail: its centuries-long survival is very impressive, evolutionarily speaking, for something doesn’t actually exist. Iambic pentameter is this incredibly pervasive spiritual idea, and we all bought into it without asking questions. This blind acceptance has to stop. Someone should explore it for an AmStud senior project (Possible Title: “I Think, Therefore, Iamb: Iambic Pentameter as a Social Construct.”)

Sources: 1) ivy.yale.edu/course-stats/, 2) YD“N” http:// yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/01/13/aeoestructure-ofnetworksae-capped-made-more-rigorous/, 3) AMTH 160 syllabus, 4) AMTH 160 syllabus, 5) the grapevine.

– Joseph Tisch YH Staff

Top 5 Ways to Seduce Your TA 5 – Have an unexcused absence and see if they like it when you’re bad.

4 – Have James Franco be your TA. He’ll do all of the work.

3 – Show up to section naked. This works, like, 12 percent of the time.

2 – Stay after class to talk about your mutual love of second-hand sweaters and watch the sparks fly.

1 – Go to office hours and see if they’re down.

– Caleb Moran YH Staff

4 – The Yale Herald

Email keyang.xia@yale.edu

VOICES Sitting down with Michael Twitty

by Austin Bryniarski YH Staff

Michael Twitty is a culinary historian focusing on the culture and socioeconomics of food in the African and Jewish diasporas. He is the author of the upcoming book The Cooking Gene, which explores the connections between his personal history, the history of food, and AfricanAmerican history. He runs the blog Afroculinaria, where he writes about Southern food and the culinary traditions of his black and Jewish heritage. The Herald sat down with Twitty to talk about his professional life, food, and family.

YH: Tell me a little bit about the book you’re working on right now.

Twitty: A couple of years ago, I asked my boyfriend, “Do you want to come with me to the Deep South and we can go see these places where my family is from, and try to find my roots?” I thought it’d be some cute Julie and Julia moment, in a neat little package—hell no. It took three trips the year we did it and ever since then it’s been big chunks of my time in the Deep South. This is a South where the musical history and culture, the marketing of history itself, and food—where did it all come from? Slavery. When you talk about that in the South, what you find out really quickly is that black people are not part of any of this discussion. Part of it is not white folk’s fault, part of it is our fault, because we don’t own it. We don’t want anything to do with it. We’re scared of it. Ask a black person what they think about a plantation and they’ll give you a look, like, “I don’t want to go to a plantation.” But they ask that to me, and I’ll say, “But that’s your history.” I really wanted to challenge myself and others to look into that. You can’t say “teach me black history” and then run away from black history, so I wanted to confront that.

YH: Did you find anything surprising while researching your past and your family’s history?

Twitty: One of the things I set out to look for was family.

At first, blood family, but then all of a sudden “family” started to take on all these new meanings. Everywhere we went when there were other gay men in the Deep South—that was family. Everywhere we went that was Jewish, that was family. Everywhere we went where there were black people, they told us, “Thank you for doing this.” Even with Asian-Americans in the South who have been there for now 150 years—what is it like to grow up Asian-American in the South? This one Chinese-American friend of mine’s dad had never had Chinese food, but he grew up with fried chicken and pork chops and gravy and grits. That in and of itself—the fact that he’s eating okra and collard greens—says that we are connected in a way that me and someone in San Francisco’s Chinatown would not be. This idea about family really struck me hard. We’re not all the same, but we are all connected.

That was a big revelation to me.

YH: Were you always set on going into food? How does one enter the “culinary historian” profession?

Twitty: I skipped the part where you spend 30 years being an accountant then you decide to write about 6 – The Yale Herald

culinary history. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what some people have to do. I paid close attention to food but nobody told me I could study it or that it was even worth serious study. When I worked with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival I learned about the value and import of “foodways”—the interaction between a people’s food culture and the creation and performance of their identity. In many ways it was up to me to put the pieces together, especially for African American food culture, which was pretty much lacking a scholarly voice, save for the work of people like Psyche Williams-Forson and Doris Witt.

YH: How did you come to start cooking kosher soul food? What have you found from bringing these two traditions together?

Twitty: Southern Jewish food was invented by black women working in Jewish households. Or by Jewish women, right off the boat, who basically learned next to black women. There’s no such thing as Southern Jewish food without black people. How the hell did people get kugel? Moses didn’t know what a kugel was. There was no brisket when the Israelites left Egypt. So how did that happen? How do these two diasporas—Jewish and African—meld together, and what do they have in common? For me, the most unique part is moving beyond the simple fusions and going into international cooking. There’s not one corner of the world that is left unexamined between these two diasporas, and it hit me that memory is the biggest ingredient of this food. It’s about memory. It’s didactic. This cuisine is not there just because it’s good to eat, but because it’s there to teach you a lesson. That’s something special to these two food traditions. I haven’t heard of any other food tradition where, “because this happened to us, we eat this,” is an explanation for a certain dish. That is very black and very Jewish. Dishes are introduced with phrases like, “this comes from the days when…” and that’s a rare quality, specific to these traditions. I’m looking for how people think about food and memory. Humor, memory, the idea of survival against oppression—they keep on coming up. And the idea that food can adorn your life when life sucks—at least you can eat well.

YH: How can you employ the work you do to a social justice end?

Twitty: I got asked very early on, very smugly, “So how do you intend to solve the problem of food deserts?” And I said, “Really? I’m supposed to do that all by myself?” I thought, “This isn’t hard. It’s a matter of will.” Simple problems can be solved by simple means. And for me, that means that everyone has to be connected to food growing. There needs to be a field school system. I want people to go to Detroit and South Central L.A. and New York and grow food. That’s one thing about the project—I wanted to find people that were doing these really neat things. There was one gentleman in Montgomery, Ala. who took over a railroad yard and grew food there.

There was another gentleman, a Katrina refugee, who had done something similar in Athens, Georgia in an abandoned playground. All of that is important. It’s a

matter of taking every inch of soil we have control over and planting it. You have to have a community that sees the urgency of this to do it. It’s really hard for people in places where going to Whole Foods isn’t an option. That’s one of the biggest problems with the food movement in general: we’ve sold out, everyone’s obsessed with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but why aren’t we growing the damn food ourselves?

YH: How does your more academic approach to food affect the way you cook?

Twitty: I learned this stuff after a long hard look at everything. I grew up hating soul food. Hated it. It was smelly, it had animal parts in it, it was disgusting. I liked fried chicken and biscuits. I had to learn, because over the years of trying more stuff, I decided I didn’t like other people’s foods. I like the way I do my soul food.

Food is global, so why should we be limited? For a black chef to do sushi, and incorporate their own elements into Asian cuisine, or like what I do, with kosher soul food, it should really not be a surprise. It should be, “Where has this been the past 300 years?” And the truth is, it was already there, but in America, unless somebody made a successful business out of a new cuisine or culinary tradition, no one paid much attention to it.

YH: What’s your favorite dish?

Twitty: The problem with this question is that there are very few composite dishes in our tradition. Most of our food was cooked in one pot, boiled up, fried, or roasted.

You didn’t have space, time, or money to make a multiprocess dish. So, I’m not sure. I could say barbecue, but I don’t know if that’s what I consider a dish, because barbecue is a ten-hour ordeal. And that’s just the cooking part—there’s a whole ritual there. Barbecue is special to me because it’s the most masculine thing I do. To a Southerner without testicles, barbecue is not a thing. You learn barbecue from your father, and he learned it from his. It’s a very male-proud tradition. To me, it’s less about the flavor, and more about the end product, the ability to stand back and say, “I did that.”

—Interview condensed by the Herald

POEMS

by Sophie Dillon and Caroline Kanner Vesuvius

Impressions of Your Fourteenth-to-last Day

Storm Chasing

I I wonder which impression will spread its hot film over the place where today idles in my memory.

The morning began in San Diego—the end of a three-day-long respite from decline, from hospitals. There was a small wildfire burning up the coastline. The hills flung their temporary vermillion into the waves’ reflections, and, driving home to see you, I came close to the pliant flames but the windows kept me cool. The smoke spun itself around the tires for a moment as I skated by.

I come from a family of storm chasers.

Two hours north, shriveled birds of paradise loitered outside the gate that opened onto the driveway and past it the house in its bougainvillea armor, where you were waiting. Years before, I would boast to you that my feet never hurt when I walked barefoot on the driveway’s gravel.

You would grin and lift me high as the persimmons with hands still tennis-strong.

I have been in twenty-six storms.

Inside, you were living but living a little less.

Living in tissue-paper yellow—skin, eyes, fingernails.

Your chuckle broke into a wheeze as I stole past.

shot him with his arms up,

laughing and shouting and trembling

all at once.

II For example The base of a backyard redwood.

III It is something like a tentative Vesuvius whose humped back skims the underside of consciousness’s surface—oblivious even of its own capacity to spout; the people nearby oblivious too of its lazy potential to resurface the landscape with itself— accustomed as they are to its quiet almost-presence underfoot.

IV Example, continued When I think of my fourth year all I can recall with any certainty is

spools of water spilling

from my heavy little can

in the morning, in the spring,

dirt furious and swirling

over my toes on the frothy slick

moating a trunk whose branches

even the lowest branches

I wish I could raise

memory’s eyes to.

V And then a civilization of 16,000 vanishes— leaving nothing but 16,000 instant negative spaces beneath the unquenchable rock.

Recently, it was declared a national park.

The summit was opened to the public (Foot Access Only).

VI I follow my bare feet down instead, my mind a makeshift trowel.

In the living mountain’s shadow, I wonder at the hollow forms, the branches above eye-level.

I waited hours before joining you; we waded through the afternoon in separate rooms.

Our house eats itself by the hour, its machinery dense, lit-eyed,

beeping.

There are forty-seven weathervanes

on the roof, huddled like crows on wire.

My father likes the way they tremble all at once.

Four tornadoes.

One eye.

From the desperate calm I watched the wind suck an oak up straight.

My father slicked his hair and my mother got out the camcorder,

He looked like a paper doll, or maybe a question.

—Sophie Dillon

As the promise of evening pulled our shadows longer, I wondered if the fire was still burning. Still leaking in rivulets up that mountainside, the coast toward us. Quietly, distant constellations of orange and carmine replaced your yellow and outside, the last of the season’s persimmons, heavy with color, bowed their boughs.

—Caroline Kanner

—Caroline Kanner

Graphic by Anna Meixler YH Staff Jan. 23, 2015 – 7

OPINION

Debunking the disorder

by Rafi Bildner I remember the moment vividly, even though it was over a decade ago. It was near the end of class, when my teacher asked me to step outside into the hallway.

She is one of the most influential teachers I’ve had in my life. The classroom was engaging and always lively.

But only a few weeks into the school year, it had become clear to my teachers and parents that I wasn’t learning in the same way as my peers. I was constantly getting distracted, attempting to engage my classmates in conversation, or entertaining myself. I recall one reading class when I looked out the classroom window, and hypothesized the purpose of each passerby’s afternoon stroll. By the time I returned to my spelling test, the class was nearly finished. My teacher summed it up best, when she asked me, “Do you want to be here, Rafi? It always seems like you are ready to jump out of your seat.” In all honesty, that’s exactly how I felt. The classroom setting usually didn’t get my juices flowing, and the excitement I had for so many other things—my peers, violin lessons, and a budding competitive figure skating career—felt blocked by the monotonous track of the traditional classroom.

I don’t remember when I was officially diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, and it doesn’t matter.

Those that know me well understand my distractibility as a part of who I am. And the bottom line is, it’s not a bad thing at all.

Especially since coming to college, I’ve more and more understood ADD as a learning style and not a disorder, a personality trait and not a flaw in need of a cure.

There’s no point in reviewing the stories of all of the various doctors I visited through middle and high school, or medications tried and given up on. While many see pills as a way to treat “disorders,” I only found that medication subdued the part of my personality I was most proud of. When I got to high school, I realized it was necessary to challenge prevailing societal notions by accepting ADD as a part of my identity.

Of course, it goes without saying that I am speaking not as a medical professional, and it’s important to realize that ADD, like any psychological condition, produces an entire spectrum of outcomes. However, I believe that we have taken a misguided approach to how we treat young people diagnosed with ADD. Recent data from the CDC has shown that 11% of school-age children in the United States have been diagnosed with ADD, with two-thirds of diagnosed individuals receiving prescriptions for stimulants (Adderall, Ritalin). According to another study by a healthcare consulting firm (IMS Health), sales of these medications more than doubled from 2007 to 2012 (four billion dollars to nine billion dollars).

While a separate piece could be written on the politics of overdiagnosis and the rise of prescribed stimulants for ADD, when 11% of school-age children in the United States are diagnosed with a condition labeled a “disorder,” it’s about time we seriously rethink the mean-

8 ­– The Yale Herald

ing of “disorder.” After living with ADD for about as long as I can remember, and learning from the strengths and challenges that come with it, we should no longer think of ADD as a disability, or even a disorder. It is a personality trait that should not be stigmatized, but elevated and nurtured.

I am easily stimulated and find excitement and satisfaction in a wide range of interests. Is it hard to sit through class some of the time, and always absorb 100% of a lecture? No doubt about it. Are there times when walking through a library, and seeing peers hyperdialed into their work for hours at a time, makes me envious and occasionally frustrated at my own inability to always work for hours on end? Without a question. But at the end of the day, this supposed disorder is a huge part of what makes me tick. I’m constantly finding new things that interest me, and throughout my life, I have developed interests and passions as far flung as they come (whether it was knitting in the 4th grade, attaining my pilot’s license later in high school, or attending professional culinary school before I came to Yale). Because those with ADD can hyper-focus on activities that stimulate them, they can safely fly planes, for example.

As Dr. Richard Friedman points out in a recent New York Times op-ed on the subject, those with the disorder “are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that characterizes our modern world.” Friedman goes on to note, “People with ADD. may not have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match the expectations of our contemporary culture.” From personal experience, I could not feel more

strongly that Friedman is right. It’s time for us to start reimagining our conception of what having a learning disability means.

The services that those of us with ADD receive from Yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities are crucial in operating with this learning style in a rigorous and fastpaced academic environment. Whether it’s providing quiet spaces or extra time for testing, the work of the office helps us to thrive at Yale. But these resources should be distinguished from the medication: the Office on Disabilities works to support, not cure. Unfortunately, the heavy reliance on medication that society promotes to try to cure those with this “disorder” is not only often harmful to young people, but more tragically, prevents these individuals from revealing their full potential.

Just a few days ago, a friend casually mentioned that he had tried taking Adderall (without a prescription— it was purchased from another acquaintance on campus).

It was the first time he had taken it, as he didn’t see any other way to get a paper done. When I casually questioned him about the use of the drug, he said, “I mean, I probably have ADD.” It’s hard to fathom how we have come to a point when anyone who has difficulty focusing, even on just a single project, automatically jumps to the conclusion that they have a disorder that requires medication.

Despite our societal addiction to labeling and combating “disorders,” ADD is not a disability, but an asset. It’s time we start treating our young people with this “disorder” accordingly.

Evaluating Hebdo

by Victorio Cabrera

Earlier this month, a terrorist attack violently thrust Charlie Hebdo into the global limelight. In the days following the murders, along with the details of the attack itself, details of Charlie’s history and output rushed into the public eye. Narratives about Charlie Hebdo and its merits began to form. In large part, these narratives have tended towards opposite ends of a spectrum—Charlie is either characterized as a beacon of the free speech necessary for civil society or denigrated as bigoted. But despite our desire to impose clear narratives on such devastating events, the truth is more nuanced than either of these points of view might suggest. Those who paint Charlie as the ideal torch-bearer of free speech are wrong, but so are those who condemn it as nothing more than an Islamophobic fountain of hate. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists are not a monolithic entity, nor are their satirical outputs. It would be ignorant to discard these complexities in favor of a more digestible truth.

Charlie Hebdo has often dealt with Islam in a troubling, pernicious, and misguided way. The editor-in-chief, Le Charb, claimed the purpose of the magazine’s mockery of Islam was to make it “just as banal as Catholicism.” While this might pass as an acceptable statement in a vacuum, Charlie Hebdo exists in a broader context. The situation of Catholics in France, who make up 76 percent of the population, is nothing like the situation of Muslims in France, who comprise just five to 10 percent of the population. When Charlie published crude drawings of Mohammed that were grounded in racist stereotypes, they were validating the ostracization and homogenization of Muslims in France. This cannot be defended. While it is almost harmless to mock the Catholic Church, it validates the mockery of an oppressed group to attack Islam as a whole.

Furthermore, this kind of cartoon propagates the hugely destructive “clash of civilizations” narrative that widens the perceived chasm between

Europeans and Muslims. No matter what the cartoonists and staff at Charlie thought they were doing in defense of free speech by publishing this sort of cartoon, they were undeniably contributing to the oppression of Muslims in France, Denmark, and Europe as a whole by publishing cartoons that continued the narrative of conflict and divide.

But while these particular facts support those who hold that Charlie Hedbo is synonymous with Islamophobia, not all of Charlie Hedbo’s work contains such racism. Many of the cartoons convey more nuanced takes on Islam. In one cover, two racially neutral men grapple (their skin is Simpsons-yellow, facial features indistinct). One is the Prophet Mohammed, the other a Muslim fundamentalist. The fundamentalist is about to behead Mohammed. While the poor taste of this image is practically palpable, one must ask, “Does it fuel racist narratives or societal oppression? Does it convey a homogenous, purely derogatory view of Muslims?” The answer is clearly no. One would be missing the point entirely to come away from the cartoon with the idea that all Muslims are fundamentalist terrorists when the cartoon depicts a fundamentalist murdering the central figure of the Muslim faith. Indeed, this is a trope that Charlie Hedbo repeats in other cartoons which depict Mohammed saying things like “some who follow me are idiots.” While these are not deeply nuanced cartoons, they certainly do more than communicate the simple message that “Islam = bad, other.” The cover published immediately before Charlie’s offices were attacked had a largely unstylized depiction of al-Baghdadi giving holiday well wishes—a satire not against Islam as a whole but the violence committed by the Islamic State.

Some cartoonists at Charlie have even built their careers on mocking bigotry. Jean Cabut (pen-name Cabu), one of the cartoonists killed in the recent attack, rose to prominence with his creation of the character Mon Beauf, a caricature of a racist, uncouth, French provincial. Cabu’s

work directly challenged the sorts of narratives of racism and stereotype many now argue the magazine proliferated with Islamophobic content. For Cabu, the character most worthy of mockery was the one who had unswerving, arrogant, and unnuanced views on complex societal issues. Like Cabu, Charlie Hebdo identifies itself as a leftist organization and has satirized such unnuanced ideals.

Broadly speaking, Charlie’s work can be characterized as gouaille, a French “anarchic populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful.” This is why Islam as a whole, in its capacity as a religion that asserts its own sacredness, has often been the target of Charlie’s satire.

But religious institutions like Islam are prone to the disfiguring effects of absurdity, heavy-handedness, and, in some cases, extremism and violence. And Charlie has effectively satirized these respects of the religion as well.

Charlie clearly went wrong when they relied on racist shorthand for their cartoons and dealt with Islam in merely incendiary ways. They should have been more aware of prevailing French and global modes of discourse and their role as a publication inside them. But those who claim that Charlie was a strictly Islamophobic publication are wrong. Their satire was often poignant and fueled with genuine outrage at violence and intolerance, in Islam and elsewhere. The unacceptable aspects of Charlie Hebdo coexist with their socially progressive ones. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were at times pernicious and at times justified, Our view of them should be as complex as the publication itself.

– Graphics by Ben McCoubrey

YH Staff

Jan. 23, 2015 – 9

FEATURE

Anchor’s away

New Haven community mourns loss of 75-year-old Anchor Bar

by Rachel Strodel YH Staff

A

t 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 4, the manager of the Anchor Bar Restaurant screamed that she was shutting it down—for good. A hurried last call ensued. Angry employees snatched up half-empty glasses and rushed patrons out the door and onto the sidewalk.

Two and a half hours earlier, Jesse Richards, a photographer, filmmaker, and New Haven native, found out that his favorite spot would be closing down that night. Word spread quickly on Facebook as employees, who had been given only a few hours’ notice, posted the news. But Richards arrived at the scene minutes too late.

“Absolutely not, guys. We’re closed. Nobody’s coming in,” an employee told him at the door. A few people—likely employees—brushed past Richards and his friend.

“Except for those guys, huh?” Richard’s friend said, explaining that they just wanted a few pictures.

After a few moments of negotiating, the employee slammed the door shut.

THE ANCHOR’S CLOSURE CAME AFTER A period of inconsistent rent payments beginning in 2013. Karen Peart, a Yale University press secretary, said in a statement to CTNOW that Yale University Properties made efforts to keep the bar open. They made a court agreement in mid-2014 with DWN Enterprises, the agency that has managed the Anchor’s rental payments since 2012. After DWN continuously failed to make payments, University Properties notified DWN of a January 2015 closure.

Richards started an online petition on change.org in the wake of Anchor’s closure condemning what he calls a “slow homogenization/ gentrification that Yale University has been imposing on our hometown.” But he admitted that

10 –­ The Yale Herald

he can’t place the blame fully on the University.

The restaurant wasn’t abiding by an agreed-upon contract.

“Maybe restaurants that can pay their rents aren’t necessarily the ones we always want around,” said Will Hall, an undergrad who was somewhat of a regular at the Anchor. After its closing, he even wrote a personal essay (published on Yale Herald Online) eulogizing the bar and its unique environment.

The Anchor was different from most New Haven bars. It was 75 years old and “the kind of place you always assumed would be there,” Richards said. Maps, newspaper clippings, and old photographs of New Haven lined its

And there was the jukebox. Everyone who’s been to Anchor talks about the jukebox: an old fluorescent thing—a centerpiece, really—illuminating the shadowy space. Behind the rainbow lights around its exterior lay a trove of old tunes that often started conversations, and friendships. Richards recalls getting to know the previous owner, Marshall Moore, after playing a Bonnie Raitt song, “I Can’t Get Started with You.” Hall, too, said he would play a song and bond over it with the bartender. The jukebox was often free, so you could play song after song. Instant gratification, he called it.

The Anchor attracted a diverse group of New Haven residents. Locals and grad stu-

“Maybe restaurants that can pay their rents aren’t necessarily the ones we always want around.” ­­– William Hall, MC ’15 wood-paneled walls. Crescent-shaped booths with cracking teal vinyl could fit three comfortably—or squeeze in four or five. “Divey” and “weird” are among the words Hall used to describe the Anchor. “To be honest, it looked kind of shitty,” Hall says, “But I think that was the draw for me—the fact that it was so clearly not trying to appeal to me.” The tables wobbled. Two bathrooms occupied the basement, one for men, one for women, though Hall said Anchor was the kind of place where those signs were treated more like suggestions than rules.

dents mingled and chatted with bartenders.

Hall recalls that the Anchor welcomed homeless individuals to sit and drink at their booths, and the bartenders were always kind to them.

There were no tricks or deals or drink specials that catered to Yale students. “Maybe that’s just a hipster thing,” Hall said. “But I think it could be a human thing as well.”

FROM THE OUTSIDE, THE STOREFRONT IS STRIKING: a blue overhang bearing the Anchor’s name in fluorescent lights and an iconic yellow

anchor jut out into the street. The distinct front window is shaped like a pill capsule, which once offered a view into the cozy interior before the front pane was covered with a frosty residue post-closure, blocking the inside of the bar from view.

The New Haven Preservation Trust and Urban Design League hope to preserve the bar’s unique façade, which features “Art Moderne elements that are relatively rare in the city of New Haven and are worthy of preservation,” according to John Herzan, preservation services officer at the trust. Whether the restaurant front will be preserved onsite or moved to another location has yet to be determined, though Herzan says keeping the façade on-site is important to maintaining its authenticity. “When things get dissected and reassembled,” he said, “they tend to lose their meaning.”

from all over creating work together or at least discussing ideas. And that used to happen here. There was a greater sense of collaboration between Yale creative people and local creative people. It doesn’t seem to be happening anymore.” Richards said that the Anchor closing was the last straw in this long-standing problem.

The old 1960s photographs on the Anchor’s paneled walls reflect a time in New Haven’s past when the city was changing. They show the parking lots, playgrounds, and highways that Urban planner Robert Moses brought with him to usher the old city into a new landscape, a new vision of the future. Fifty years later, New Haven’s landscape is changing again. New retailers and restaurants have sprung up especially in the past five years, and Yale University Properties will likely have no problem finding a new tenant to pay rent on time.

Like everything else in the Anchor, these photographs of a city in transition will soon be removed and placed in boxes. They’ll be discarded or maybe sold to former patrons.

“[Anchor Bar] was the kind of place you assumed would always be there.”

­­– Jessie Richards, New Haven Resident Herzan says this particular type of preservation, called “commercial archaeology,” poses a dilemma: how do we preserve objects and settings—like the Anchor bar or even an old McDonalds—when they no longer serve their intended purpose? A business might be willing to open shop under a previous tenant’s storefront, but it depends on the tenant that University Properties chooses. “If it were another restaurant, they could adopt the name ‘Anchor’ and continue that legacy, but the merchant would have to see the name as an advantage,” Herzan said.

“Whether they do or not remains to be seen.”

Hall says he hopes this type of revitalization occurs with Anchor—but noted, with trepidation, that similar ownership transfers in the past have not preserved the character of old-time favorites. Another beloved bar, Rudy’s, transferred ownership in 2010 and moved from its original building to a new location on Chapel St. where it transformed from a neighborhood bar to a swankier restaurant. According to the New Haven Register, two regulars of the original Rudy’s wanted to restore the bar’s grittier atmosphere and opened Three Sheets in the same location as the original Rudy’s on Elm St. When I asked him about preserving the façade, Hall said it seemed like a meaningless gesture that, if anything, emphasized the half-hearted attempt to preserve the past while racing forward to newer, more glamorous enterprises. “It seems like a good metaphor, he said. “like ‘let’s leave up the old brickwork’ but not really do anything about what’s going on.”

RICHARDS SAYS THIS PATTERN OF GRADUALLY swapping out of old favorites for upscale replacements is something that’s been happening in New Haven more frequently since the 90s. And according to Richards, with New Haven’s gentrification has come a decline in dialogue between New Haven locals and the Yale community. “I like college towns,” he said. “You get people

Graphic by Ben McCoubrey YH Staff

Jan. 23, 2015 – 11

COVER

A genius out in the cold

by Kohler Bruno

N

o more free Whole Foods,” Mahbod Moghadam, CC ’04, said. He was explaining how his life had changed since his departure from Rap Genius—now simply called Genius—the website that allows users to upload and annotate any text from Eminem lyrics to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. Moghadam co-founded the site in 2009 with his two best friends, Tom Lehman, PC ’06, and Ilan Zechory, TC ’06. The biggest change since his departure? No more free Whole Foods, which had been a perk offered to all the company’s LA-based employees. “I was scared to get it taken away, but it’s actually been the greatest blessing. Free food is not a perk. It’s a curse. Thank God it’s gone. I’ve lost weight.”

I’ve met Moghadam only once, when he, Zechory, and Lehman came to Yale for a Master’s Tea in Calhoun last March. We sat down for an interview after the talk and they explained that they wanted Rap Genius, which by then also included poems, full length novels, and lyrics of every genre, to become a sprawling database of information, a massive human intelligence project, as they termed it. All of Dickens’s published works are on the site, in full, with detailed annotations and notes; the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are on the site, with links to the Bible passages he so frequently alluded to; and the King James Bible is on the site, Old Testament and New, with in-text annotations and visual aids. “It’s like a giant CliffsNotes for life,” Dominic Basulto wrote in the Washington Post last year.

The site, which Moghadam called an “intellectual social network” during our interview last March, has frequently been compared to Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, the vast majority of the content on Genius is user generated, with millions of people around the world writing annotations and uploading texts to the site. Unlike Wikipedia, teams of moderators—company employees— regulate new annotations as they are uploaded, and all users are given usernames, partially ridding the site of the anonymity that Wikipedia features.

Users who annotate frequently and whose annotations are approved by moderators and “up-voted” by other users gain “IQ” points, which theoretically incentivizes users to keep working on the site.

In May 2014, things were looking up for Rap Genius. The company was about to announce a massive 40 million dollar investment from Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and it would soon rebrand itself as Genius, broadening its appeal beyond the world of hip-hop. The company was beginning its move from a series of makeshift offices in a residential apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a more traditional and more spacious office in—still hip—Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, Moghadam was recovering from brain surgery that he’d undergone the previous October; although he returned to work just weeks after the operation, he’s still feeling its aftereffects today. And then, on May 23, 2014, Moghadam wrote a series of distasteful annotations on a manifesto written by Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old gunman who had killed seven people, including himself, at the University of California, Santa Barbara days earlier. “I wrote some stupid shit,” Moghadam told me. He resigned the following day.

Over the course of the past six months, Moghadam and I spoke many times over the phone for this article, me in New Haven, him in LA. I had hoped we would be able to meet in person as I wrote my profile, but Moghadam can’t

12 – The Yale Herald

stand New York, and I couldn’t realistically fly out to LA for a weekend during the school year. So instead we talked over the phone, emailed, and texted.

One of the things we talked about often—more often than you’d expect—was Whole Foods. Moghadam assured me that the Whole Foods in Santa Monica was LA’s finest. “Venice and West Hollywood have hotter girls or whatever, but if you’re just talking about the food, Santa Monica is the place.” Little did I know, Whole Foods was—is—somewhat of a point of fixation for Moghadam.

A few months before that conversation, he had written an article for Thought Catalog reviewing every Whole Foods in Los Angeles. One entry reads: “West Hollywood—This is commonly referred to as the ‘pimp Whole Foods’— nowhere are there more beautiful ladies… The cool part is that they chop the kale up extra-fine (for the ladies)—also the smoothie makers here are Master Mixologists…”

But even if the free groceries that he’d been guaranteed when he worked at Rap Genius had become a curse, as he had told me, Moghadam found a way to recapture the glory days of free Whole Foods, publishing another article on Thought Catalog a few months later entitled “How To Steal From Whole Foods.” In it, he wrote, “I have probably stolen more from Whole Foods markets than any living person… When I started working on genius.com, Whole Foods was our first ‘angel investor’—without stealing all the food I stole from the Berkeley Whole Foods, I would never have been able to spend a year bootstrapping, working on the site full-time.”

Ever since Rap Genius was founded in 2009, Moghadam has attracted outsize attention for his antics; most notably, in February 2013 (just three months before he left the company), he made a splash after he was quoted in an interview saying Mark Zuckerberg “can suck my dick.” “Fuck that fool,” he added. The following month, when he, Zechory, and Lehman came to Yale for their Master’s Tea, he told the room that 2014 was “the year of humility.

The goal is to tell only one billionaire to fuck off this year.”

Now, more than six months after his departure, Moghadam is adrift, consulting here and there for tech startups around LA, writing here and there (he’s shopping around a book about founding Rap Genius—I read it; it’s funny and weird), and tweeting everywhere. Whole Foods responded from its corporate Twitter account to a tweet from Moghadam sharing his article about stealing from their stores: “Well that’s not very nice. Thanks for the heads up on your sneaky tricks. #noted.”

Moghadam tweeted back five minutes later: “you guys should give me a gift card for all the publicity I generate.”

“I think we’re doing ok, thanks though,” Whole Foods wrote back, 19 minutes later.

The article about stealing from Whole Foods has since been removed from Thought Catalog. After receiving a call from the General Counsel of Whole Foods, Moghadam requested for the article to be removed, and all his articles have since been taken down by Thought Catalog. Still, as of this writing, the article that caused all the fuss can be found in its entirety on Genius.com.

MAHBOD MOGHADAM’S FAMILY CAME TO THE UNITED States from Iran 33 years ago, just before Moghadam was born, hoping to escape the ravages

COVER of the Iran-Iraq War. The family sent Moghadam’s older brother, Michael, to Los Angeles two years before the rest so that he wouldn’t be drafted into the Iranian army.

Moghadam, who is 32 years old, grew up in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, nestled in a small community of other Persian immigrants.

“In LA, Persian Jews are all over the place,” said Moghadam, who is Persian and Jewish. “The rich ones live in Beverly Hills and the poor ones live in the Valley. I’m one of the poor ones.” His father worked downtown, in the diamond district with other Persian immigrants, while his mother stayed at home. The two never fully mastered English, and at home they spoke Persian with Moghadam and his siblings.

They gave all four of their children Persian names; Michael, Moghadam’s older brother, legally changed his name from Mehrdad when he was 18. As a child, Moghadam never liked his name, and he went by Matt from elementary school through the first year of college, when his “hippie friends” convinced him to go back to his Persian name.

Stanford, Dewey. Still, friends of Moghadam told me that he was never suited to the world of corporate law. Jessica Hubley, a friend of Moghadam’s from Stanford Law who went on to work as one of Rap Genius’s first contracted lawyers, said she was shocked he’d entered the corporate world at all.

“He’s very intellectually curious and intellectually capable, and I think it makes a lot of sense that he would choose to go to Yale and Stanford Law to have those discussions,” she told me. “But the big paycheck at the law firm, the kinds of things that people generally go to those jobs for, he had never cared about anyway.”

As it turned out, his time at Dewey would be short lived. In 2009, many major law firms began placing low-level associates on deferral—time off with reduced pay—to cope with the effects of the recession. The firms urged associates to seek out internships during their time off, and Moghadam landed one with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, Neb. For two years, Moghadam had maintained a blog under the alias Beneficent Allah,

around for a while, alternating between stays at his girlfriend’s apartment, his parents’ house, and Lehman and Zechory’s place back in New York.

Eventually, he contacted some of his law professors at Stanford and moved to Palo Alto to help work on some law review articles, but that didn’t last.

He became obsessed with Rap Genius, annotating and uploading texts all the time, and soon he left Stanford to fully commit his energies to promoting the site.

By 2011, Rap Genius had picked up enough momentum that Zechory and Lehman both quit their jobs to work on the site full time (Zechory left Google; Lehman left the hedge fund D.E. Shaw).

They applied to the tech incubator Y Combinator, a startup boot camp that helps to pair promising companies with investors, and they left with 1.8 million dollars in funding. One of their early angel investors was Ashton Kutcher. “When I met him he was mad at me for telling Mark Zuckerberg to suck my dick,” Moghadam told me. “He comes up to me and he’s like, Hey buddy, I have some advice for you, how about stop telling people to suck your dick? And I was like, Oh Ashton, I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. I don’t even ask my girlfriend to suck my dick anymore.”

By the time they left Y Combinator, the company was on the map. Millions of dollars began flooding in from marquis investors and firms, none more important than the 15 million dollar infusion in October 2012 from the tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Rap Genius used the money to hire more employees and expand their offices. And they bought a mansion in Bel Air, the west coast Rap Genius headquarters, where Moghadam spent most of his time.

Today, although Genius does not have revenue streams from advertisements or subscriptions (Lehman and Zechory have said that they are putting off introducing ads so that the site can remain cool, just as Facebook and Instagram once did), industry watchers estimate that Genius could be worth close to half a billion dollars. When Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner, decided to put 40 million in the company last February, he said his investment was based on an estimated value of the company at several hundred million dollars—the exact number is rumored to be around 400 million. In an industry in which high profile acquisitions happen almost on a monthly basis, with companies like Instagram topping 1 billion dollars in value, it is not far fetched to imagine that a Genius IPO—or a sale to, say, Google—could make Lehman, Zechory, and Moghadam all hundred-millionaires.

While neither Andreessen Horowitz nor the three co-founders will reveal the website’s precise traffic statistics, Moghadam has publicly claimed that it is the most visited hip-hop site on the Internet, and it’s consistently the top hit when searching for lyrics of any genre through Google. Moghadam told me that his departure did not affect the portion of the company that he owns, although it did cost him his seat on the board.

“The racist-ass reporters keep saying I got fired, but the simple fact of the matter is I resigned.”

–Mahbod Moghadam, CC ’04 He told me he liked Yale and excelled, winning a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France after he graduated. He was in the Independent party, majored in History and International Studies, and smoked weed. Senior year he moved off campus to an apartment in the Oxford on High Street, which he called “the high class part of campus. Howe Street and whatnot is like the bohemian part, that’s the Brooklyn,” he told me.

When he speaks and writes, Moghadam is relentlessly ironic, but the boundaries of his jokes are often blurry. He takes to Twitter and Facebook to air a lot of these jokes—in all, he has tweeted over 5,000 times, often many times per day. Last year, on Nov. 2, he tweeted, “MY REFLECTIONS ON 3 MONTHS OF HEAVY LOS ANGELES TINDER USAGE: the women of los angeles are beautiful and have terrible taste....” Later that day, he tweeted, “can’t wait until I have 1944 followers on twitter so that I can think about the holocaust more often........” Both were jokes, characteristically ambiguous in tone, a tone that has landed him in hot water on countless occasions. One month earlier, he tweeted, “THROWBACK THURSDAY: the original @ RapGenius twitter password was ‘69rapgenius69.’”

This, Moghadam told me, was true.

In the fall of 2005, after his Fulbright in France, Moghadam enrolled in law school at Stanford, and from there he took a job at Dewey & LeBoeuf, the ritzy—now defunct—corporate law firm then headquartered in Manhattan. It was quite the sought after and prestigious trajectory—Yale, Fulbright,

where he posted jokes, poems, and reflections. (He still posts to it today.) The night before he was set to leave for Nebraska, Moghadam got a call explaining that someone at Berkshire Hathaway had discovered the blog, on which he’d posted a joke memo to the “Ballstate Insurance Company,” a lazily cloaked reference to All State, which was a Dewey client.

“Then I got burned,” Moghadam said; Berkshire Hathaway rescinded their offer that night and Dewey fired him the following day.

Disconsolate, Moghadam sought refuge, as he often had, at Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman’s apartment in the East Village. He spent the night on a yoga mat on their floor. Moghadam and Zechory had been close at Yale, and although Moghadam hadn’t met Lehman until after college, they bonded quickly.

By the time Moghadam was canned by Dewey, the three of them had become a tight-knit group.

As Moghadam tells it, that same night he was fired, in 2009, Tom Lehman built the prototype for Rap Genius.

In the beginning, none of them took Rap Genius— or Rap Exegesis, as it was initially called—too seriously. “It’s not like Tom built it thinking that it was going to be a business,” Moghadam told me.

“He built it overnight because it was pretty easy to build, and I started putting songs up because I was depressed and I was bored.” Lehman built the site after he asked Moghadam to explain a lyric from a Cam’ron song.

A couple weeks after he was fired from Dewey & LeBoeuf, Moghadam returned to LA and bounced

Jan. 23, 2014 – 13

Once dismissed as a website for white people to translate black urban slang, Genius is now viewed by many as a potentially revolutionary service, a company that could change the nature of the web. That’s the goal—to annotate the world using the Genius platform.

According to Lehman and Zechory’s vision, eventually all websites will include annotations powered by Genius. Annotated articles using embedded Genius code have already appeared in the Washington Post, Forbes, and Business Insider. This month, Genius began beta testing a system that allows users to type “genius.com/” in front of any URL, and voila—the page becomes annotatable. (The online version of this article uses the Genius software for embedded annotations.)

Recently, Genius has made a number of moves aimed at shedding the label of a startup manned by brogrammers in order to rebrand itself as a more serious company. Its director of operations, Russell Farhang, came from a job at the hedge fund Bridgewater, and this month Genius drew Sasha Frere-Jones away from his job as the New Yorker’s pop music critic to make him the company’s Executive Editor. (Farhang, at 40, was the company’s oldest employee until they hired Frere-Jones, who is 47.)

As the company has matured, Zechory and Lehman, now the president and the CEO, respectively, have attempted to keep lower public profiles. They would not speak to me for this article, and, aside from a piece in New York Magazine earlier this month, they’ve successfully stayed out of the news, more or less.

Quite the reversal for the two, who once, along with Moghadam, comprised a trio of media darlings, willing to say or do almost anything to generate publicity for Rap Genius. In May 2013, for example, just weeks before Moghadam wrote the annotation that led to his departure from the company, the three spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference in New York.

Each walked on stage in a more ridiculous costume than the last—Lehman, in sunglasses, was clad in a pink floral blazer and high top Jordans, Zechory, in sunglasses, sported a coat one writer aptly described as “the top half of a bathrobe,” and Moghadam, in sunglasses, sauntered onstage in big multicolored high tops, carrying a gallon jug of water.

In the early days, Moghadam’s main role at Rap Genius involved spreading hype about the company.

He reached out to artists, bloggers, and writers, and he worked to build a community of users from the ground up. “You’d go by his computer and there’d be ten Gchat windows open,” Zechory told New York Magazine this month. “And it would be some 14-yearold kid in the Midwest saying ‘You fascinate me’ to Mahbod.” One such acolyte was Zach Schwartz, now a junior at Columbia, who took off the second semester of his sophomore year in spring 2013 to work as an intern at Rap Genius. “It was crazy, because I had wanted to work for Mahbod for years,” Schwartz told me. “I wanted to be friends with him, I wanted to get in touch with him because I thought he was, well—I looked up to him so much.”

In December 2013, Moghadam’s compulsion to promote Rap Genius blew up in the company’s face.

A tech blogger revealed a plot by Moghadam to inflate the company’s position in Google’s search results by offering to advertise various music blogs from the Rap Genius Twitter account in exchange for posts including links to lyrics on Rap Genius. The scheme, which aimed to subvert Google’s search algorithm and push Rap Genius links to the top of Google’s search results, violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, and on Christmas morning, Google slapped the company

14 – The Yale Herald

with a “minus-50 penalty,” which pushed all Rap Genius pages down 50 spots in its search results. It was a disaster, with traffic dropping from an average of 1.5 million visitors per day to 200,000. Frantically, the Rap Genius staff searched for all the problem links and removed them. To their credit, they had the site back on Google in less than a week.

But if the bad links were relatively easy to scrub off the Internet, the damage to Moghadam’s reputation both inside and outside the company was more difficult to repair. Through the years at Rap Genius, Moghadam always had a complicated, sometimes contentious relationship with Zechory and Lehman. He spent most of his time—often more than six months a year—living in the “Rap Genius Mansion” in Bel Air, where he directed a few interns as the head of the internship program. They threw parties, hosted rap groups who wanted to film music videos, and debauched. “It wasn’t an office, it was a house, and it was his fiefdom,” Dan Berger, MC ’05, Rap Genius’s first employee, told me. “It would just be in disarray every time you’d come. It would be in total disarray.” (Zach Schwartz, the intern who lived with Moghadam at the Bel Air house from February through April of 2013, said this characterization of the LA headquarters was wrong: “The parties that we had, they were just readings”— for Poetry Genius—“they were still for business. They were promoting the company.”)

Berger was close with Moghadam, Lehman, and Zechory in college, and he jumped on board just after Lehman designed the site in 2009. He left the company in 2013, about six months before Moghadam, and now works for MSNBC. He explained that over time, fissures started to open in Moghadam’s relationship with Lehman and Zechory. “As the company was becoming bigger, Mahbod’s role was becoming more nebulous, especially since he wasn’t in New York, and people got hired to do some of the things that he had previously done only himself, like the Twitter account and reaching out to artists,” Berger said. “He was competing with people and he had clashes because of that.”

Moghadam’s raunchy sense of humor caused problems as well—it always had. “Mahbod is also

can’t say this, you can’t say that, and that’s just not who he is. That’s not consistent with how he operates.”

In February 2014, as Moghadam faced health problems from brain surgery he’d undergone the previous October, he negotiated a change in his contract with the company he co-founded. From that point on he would work for Rap Genius only part time, and almost exclusively from LA, rarely traveling to Brooklyn. He was slowly walking away, it seemed. And then in May, just three months later, he was gone.

Moghadam insists that he was not pushed out, but rather resigned by his own volition. “The racist-ass reporters keep saying I got fired, but the simple fact of the matter is I resigned,” he told me. He’d annotated parts of a 141-page manifesto written by Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old gunman who went on a killing rampage last May on UCSB’s campus. In annotations posted on the site, Moghadam complimented Rodger more than once for “beautifully written,” “artful” sentences.

He speculated that at the root of Rodger’s sexual frustration, which Rodger outlined in the manifesto, was a sexual desire for his sister, who Moghadam guessed was “smokin hot.”

“I had written some stupid stuff and then I had gone to the beach,” Moghadam told me. “I get back from the beach and I had a text from Natasha Tiku, who works for Gawker, and I was like, Fuck. As soon as I saw the text from her I knew I was totally fucked.”

Moghadam said Tiku was asking about the annotations he had written on the Rodgers manifesto, seeing whether he wanted to comment for a story she was about to post.

In September 2014, Zechory and Lehman were invited back to Yale for another Master’s Tea, this time in Pierson, just six months after they’d come with Moghadam for a Master’s Tea in Calhoun. The majority of the hour-long talk was almost exactly the same as the one they’d given the previous spring. Then, toward the end, someone in the first or second row asked if it was weird to work at the company without their third co-founder. Zechory and Lehman gave a nervous laugh. Then Zechory said, “He is a very funny, brilliant, creative person. He’s also one of the most difficult people I’ve ever been around. He says insensitive

“I had written some stupid stuff and then I had gone to the beach...I was like, Fuck. I knew I was totally fucked.”

– Mahbod Moghadam, CC ’04 willing to go certain places with his humor where other people aren’t, where other people don’t even consider it humor,” Berger said. “I do, but that was a big issue, that he would do stuff that would have gone under the radar during the early years, but by the end everyone was watching it, looking for him to do weird things.

That caused friction.”

Paul Augustine, CC ’04, who lived with Moghadam freshman and sophomore year at Yale and remained close with him through college and after, said that as the culture at Rap Genius became increasingly corporate, Moghadam came to feel more and more stifled. “There was more oversight from investors and things became a little bit more corporate, and all the sudden he was—there were people telling him, you

things, he doesn’t care about consequences. Over time the horrible behavior added up.”

After his annotations on Rodger’s manifesto, Moghadam was barred from annotating on the site, which agonizes him to this day. After Lehman blocked him from the site, Moghadam made a second account, which Lehman eventually also blocked. In response, Moghadam tweeted, “Top 3 people who can suck my dick: 1. Tom Lehman 2. Mark Zuckerberg 3. Warren Buffett (in that order).”

MOGHADAM NEVER LIKED NEW YORK. NOW HE hates it, because he associates the city with a brain tumor that he had removed in October 2013. His hand had been shaking for months, but he’d put off

getting it checked out. “I was a total mess, I couldn’t go to the gym anymore, I felt nauseous all the time, I had headaches all the time, but that was, like, the most decadent period. We had a bunch of artists shooting music videos at the Rap Genius mansion, like every weekend would be a new music video, and they would all turn into parties, and I was getting like all this attention from girls. Right now, I’m a healthy man and I get zero attention from girls, but at this time, with my hand shaking and I’d gotten really fat, I was getting all this attention from girls. It had become a serious issue for me, how do I hide my shaking hand from girls?”

advanced. They can solve all kinds of mathematical, technological problems for you. But they have no sense of reality. They are so out of touch that they could not even understand what it means to have a brain tumor, to have brain surgery, and they expected him to work three days after he was out of the hospital.”

Mojgan told me that she called Zechory and implored him to force Moghadam to take more time off. “I said, ‘Ilan, everybody needs convalescence time, even after a toe surgery. He had brain surgery and you’re not giving him convalescence time.’ And he said, ‘No, no, he’s doing well. He’s functioning.’ And I said, ‘No, he’s

“Top 3 people who can suck my dick: 1. Tom Lehman, 2. Mark Zuckerberg, 3. Warren Buffet (in that order).”

– Mahbod Moghadam, ’CC ’04 on Twitter He and Lehman had been at the University of Michigan giving a talk, and when they got back to New York, Moghadam went to Beth Israel Hospital. The doctors ordered an MRI of his brain. When the results came back, they told him to go to the emergency room, which is on 1st Avenue, a five or ten-minute walk from the wing at Union Square. “To get to the emergency room I had to walk through Stuyvesant Park, and that’s my favorite park in Manhattan, and it was just so nice.

It was like perfect weather, and I was like, you know, for the first time in my life I was enjoying New York.

Then I got to the emergency room and they said, Look you’ve got a brain tumor, and they made me change into a gown.” He didn’t have his cell phone on him, so he called Lehman and Zechory to come and bring it to him in the ER. He had surgery the following day.

Moghadam had a benign meningioma, which, according to the website of the Mayo Clinic, is a tumor that arises in the tissue between the brain and the skull. Some meningiomas don’t require surgery, but Moghadam’s had grown and was pressing on the region of his brain that controls motor functions, causing seizures and violent tremors in his left hand.

By all accounts, including Moghadam’s, the surgery was an incredibly traumatic experience. “I think that the whole brain tumor was such a shock,” Masteneh Moghadam, Mahbod’s older sister, told me. “Finding that he had the tumor to having the surgery was such a quick turnaround, and he was so consumed with his work at the time that I’m not sure that he ever really had a chance to process what had happened to him. I think it’s still really hitting him.”

According to friends and family, and to Moghadam himself, the surgery has had a dampening effect on him, both physically and behaviorally. “On the one hand, I don’t need surgery again and my MRIs look good and stuff. On the other hand, it’s not like you ever truly fully recover from something like this,” Moghadam told me. “I think whatever he told you,” Masteneh said, “in the eyes of myself and my family, multiply it by one hundred. That’s how extreme it’s been. He’s barely aware how much this has affected him.”

Mojgan Moghadam, Mahbod’s other older sister, told me that he returned to work far too quickly after his surgery. She said she was shocked that Lehman and Zechory seemed to expect Moghadam to get back on his feet far faster than she thought appropriate. “These people”—Zechory and Lehman—“are so smart, they’re so intelligent,” she said. “They’re so technologically

functioning because he sees you want him to function!

You have to force him to take a year off.’” According to Mojgan, Zechory replied, “No, no, he’s fine.”

As we talked over the course of the last six months, the terms Moghadam used to describe his relationship with Lehman and Zechory changed. In some ways, it seemed that the relationship deteriorated. In the fall, I asked Moghadam if his relationship with them had been strained since his departure from the company. “We’ve never like actually gotten into a fight, you know, they’re my friends,” he said. “I make fun of them. I think they’re losers and I make fun of them, but I’ve been doing that for the past 10 years. They’re nerds, I always remind them that they’re nerds. They appreciate that. It’s been kind of scary to watch them turn into corporate scum, especially over the past 18 months, but that happens.

Genius is going to become a huge, huge company, so obviously someone has to be the Zuckerberg. He’s got to step up and turn into scum.” (In Moghadam’s mind, Lehman is the Mark Zuckerberg of Genius.)

“I’ve always been shitting on them,” he added.

So, you shit on them, I said. Do they shit on you?

“No, no, they look up to me in reverence,” he said.

“They really look up to me. I’m older than them. I was class of 2004 and they were both class of 2006.”

A few weeks later, we spoke again. “I’ll never—how can I ever actually be mad at them, you know? Like obviously I’ll fuck around with them, and they give me shit, I’ll give them shit. But I’m never gonna actually”— he paused—“That being said, we haven’t actually hung out for a long time. Like, I’m not—I have no plans to go to New York. I told you about my traumatic relationship with New York, and, you know, if they came out to LA I’m sure we would hang out.” He paused again. “I think we would hang out.”

I wasn’t sure if it would work to write this profile over the phone. To really profile someone, you can’t just listen to him. You’ve got to watch him speak, watch him eat—what’s he wearing? What shoes? What DVDs does he have on the coffee table? What’s his car like? Messy with fast food wrappers and stuff on the floor? Does he wear socks around the house or go barefoot?

Of course, we all have mannerisms that come through over the phone, and since I never got to spend time with Moghadam in person—other than the time I interviewed him, Zechory, and Lehman for this newspaper last March—I paid particular attention during our phone conversations to the way he spoke, the way he told stories. He always called me homie, or dog.

“Yooooo whattup dog!” he’d say when he picked up the phone. Then we’d talk about Gucci Mane, or he’d tell me about a story he’d recently read in the New Yorker.

One time he compared Kanye West’s most recent album to Picasso’s Blue Period.

To be sure, he’s also capable of being extraordinarily crass. Once, he told me about a poem that he’d written and addressed to his twin sister, who was miscarried.

“We had this guy who used to run Poetry Genius, and he was telling me about his twin sister, and I told him, Dude, if I had a twin sister, I would fuck all of her friends. I was like, You must have fucked so many of your sister’s friends. He’s like, Actually, I never fucked any of my sister’s friends. I’m like, Wow, you’re a nerd dude. If I had my twin sister, I would have fucked all of her friends. That sentiment inspired me to write the poem. The poem is like a letter to my twin sister.

I’m telling her she would have been really hot, she would have a good body, and I say she would have gone to Stanford.”

Without being able to meet in person, I was forced to spend my time trying to get to know Mahbod Moghadam over the phone, and I think I did. One thing I couldn’t get a sense of was where he’s going next, what’s his next project, what’s the next thing he wants to devote himself to. He says working full time is unrealistic. “I can’t go back to full time work, because, you know, I’m still fucked up from the brain surgery,” he told me. So he works part time—now he’s advising a company that’s developing a fashion app, which he’s excited about. A few months ago he told me he’d recently consulted for a company called Underground Cellar, which delivers wine. “They sent me three cases of bomb, bomb, like hundred-dollar wine, so yesterday I ordered a mini cellar on Amazon, the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever done, but I needed it—I have all of this baller wine. I want to do shit like that. I don’t want to do anything full time, but I’m sure there are a lot of small companies that I could help. I’m just trying to spread the love wherever I can.”

THE FIRST TIME MOGHADAM AND I TALKED FOR this article, I asked him if we could meet sometime when he was in New York. No, not going to happen. “I hate New York,” he told me. “Right now my attitude on New York is the same as my attitude on the Holocaust, which is never again.” I laughed. I asked if anything could drag him to New York. Would you go for a wedding? “No, actually I missed the wedding of one of my best friends,” he said. “He got married last month and I didn’t go, and apparently he was very hurt and very pissed at me, but I just can’t stand that place.

It gives me the creepy crawlies.” For Moghadam, New York has become “Ghost-of-Brain-Surgeryville, USA.”

Jan. 23, 2015 – 15

FEATURE

Thriving, and not yet thirty Yale’s Nicole McNeer tops Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for innovative cancer treatment research.

by Korinayo Thompson

A

n elusiveness surrounds the word “nanoparticle.”

Of course, the literal definition is quite obvious— a very, very small particle. But a true understanding of its applications remains hidden in years of high-level scientific study. I walked into the cafeteria in the St. Raphael annex of Yale-New Haven Hospital for an interview with Nicole McNeer, MD/PhD ’14, knowing little more than that she works with both nanoparticles and children. Other than that, I knew a fancy publication had put her on a prestigious list, one that I think most people on this campus either secretly or not so secretly hope to top one day soon—Forbes’ 30 Under 30.

five percent what you do and 95 percent luck.”

But McNeer’s “five percent” is certainly impressive.

And she’s been at this for a while, working in medical research labs since she was 14. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard College in 2008, she entered Yale’s MD/PhD track to complete a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering. At Yale, she began researching gene modification, developing HIV treatments. Her cutting-edge research

“[McNeer] usually gets more done in a few hours than most of us get done in a week or so.” ­­–Dr. Marie Egan Using nanoparticles, McNeer helps find cures to childhood diseases, focusing on pediatric cancers, cystic fibrosis, and inherited anemias. She told me she was flattered by the award, but with a certain sheepishness: “It’s a little bit embarrassing,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are deserving, and with anything that’s as subjective as this, it’s

16 – The Yale Herald

uses nanoparticles to edit the human genome. After completing her PhD in 2013, McNeer chose to stay at Yale for a pediatric residency, spending her sixth year in New Haven in both the lab and the exam room, focusing on childhood diseases.

As prestigious as the 30 Under 30 title is on its own, I felt compelled to really understand why McNeer’s re-

search is so groundbreaking. It turns out McNeer attacks a universal and fundamental question—how can we cure children of life-threatening diseases?—from an interdisciplinary perspective, separating her from her peers. She has worked in three different labs at Yale to study genetic cures for childhood diseases. She first worked with Dr. Mark Saltzman, focusing on drug delivery, then with Dr. Peter Glazer, on genome manipulation. McNeer then moved on to work with Dr. Marie Egan, combining methodologies learned from Saltzman’s and Glazer’s labs to apply her research in a clinical setting. “She has more energy than just about anyone I have ever met,” said Egan, “and usually gets more done in a few hours than most of us get done in a week or two.”

MCNEER CENTERS HER WORK ON A CLAIM THAT, AT first, seems unlikely—“A majority of pediatric cancers are actually curable,” she said. It’s this opportunity for progress that compelled her to stray from her physics, engineering, and HIV-related research—all fields she has explored in the past.

One of her goals is simple: to make treatments less painful for children to undergo. McNeer got to know a

number of her patients well, and she began to question the treatments that target disease symptoms without eradicating their causes. Often, these treatments tend to be painful for patients. “What patients go through to be cured is really heartbreaking,” said McNeer, who is especially sympathetic towards children—because, she said, they neither understand nor have much agency in selecting the treatments they receive. And so McNeer strives to “come up with more targeted treatments, to work in a more exacting way.” She wants to improve upon symptom-targeting cancer treatments that have become standard in hospitals.

McNeer still has ways to go in the medical world before accomplishing these goals; she hopes to finish her residency training in the next two years. She will balance this with her research on targeted chemotherapy, which she plans to explore in a lab of her own. She sees this interplay between research and clinical commitments as critical—and being a young intern has given her great access to young patients. Being under 30, it seems, has its benefits.

“As interns, we are the lowest on the totem pole, but we are also the ones who spend the most time with patients,” McNeer said. “We get to know families well. We

As McNeer heads home, she drives me back to Yale.

Before we leave the parking lot, she gets a call from her husband. She tells him to buy a piece of fish and some vegetables. He’ll pick them up and she’ll make dinner.

As we drove home, I guess I realized the specifics of her research were not as salient as I had once thought.

Her real secret, it seems, is an artful balance. A balance between optimism and scientific practicality, between bench work and logging hours at patients’ bedsides. And maintaining that delicate balance—between innovative nanoparticle therapy with massive potential to change the world and the micro work of clinical consults with her patients at Yale New Haven—are essential to her continued success, at 27, at 30, and beyond.

“What patients will go through to be cured is really heartbreaking.” ­­– Nicole McNeer, MD/PhD, ’14 see kids throughout the entire process of their diagnoses and treatments, and hopefully their recoveries. It can be both humbling and rewarding to see people through their hospital course.”

McNeer explains that failure has been critical to directing her research. “Even the bad experiences and outcomes, patient deaths, unfavorable diagnoses—even those can be very rewarding experiences in learning from families,” says McNeer.

So her clinical practice feeds into her research, which will hopefully benefit her patients in the long-run. Her former boss, Saltman, commended McNeer for this holistic approach and “her uniqueness in her ability to excel simultaneously in so many areas.”

THERE IS, OF COURSE, A TOLL TO ALL THIS WORK. SHE readily admits it. “I know that I don’t have the greatest work-life balance,” McNeer said. McNeer is married—to someone who works nine-to-five at a small hedge fund in Greenwich. “I guess I’m glad that one of us has a normal person’s schedule,” she said. Hers is less than normal and involves many days that last at least 12 hours.

Still, she said, she met her husband the first year of college, when he was 19 and she was 16. “We sort of grew up together. He’s always known that work is important to me and he’s always been very supportive of that,” she said.

Graphics by Chris Melamed and Ben McCoubrey YH Staff

Jan. 23, 2015 – 17

CULTURE Robinson, Frank Robinson Inside PHYS 101: Movie Physics

by Madeleine Colbert YH Staff Have you ever wondered how James Bond could drive a speedboat off a ramp, flip it in midair, pierce your soul with his blue eyes, and ride away with hair still perfectly coiffed? What about that amazing parkour (PARKOUR!) scene from Casino Royale, arguably the best Bond scene of all time! Haven’t you ever been curious about whether or not that was even remotely possible? Have you ever taken a QR that has made you bang your head against the wall until you doubt every decision that you made that lead you to this point in your life?

Well have I got the class for you!

Movie Physics, my friends, is a gift from the god that is Professor Frank Robinson. Not only is it a QR, but also it’s a QR that is actually interesting (Look, math is not my thing guys, sorry)! Robinson got the idea for the class while reading a review for a book called Physics in Hollywood Movies, and has taught the class 5 times now. When Robinson started, he aimed to get students interested in analyzing movies in a quantitative way, instead of just saying, “Hey, that’s a crap movie.”

“It’s empowering to be able to make a quantitative argument,” Robinson explained.

Robinson began his research for the class by binge watching all 36 James Bond movies in the Film Studies Center.

“I came out of that genuinely feeling like I was James Bond for a while; it took almost a week to shake it.”

Next he picked just basic action movies: the Speed movies, Transporter, Marvel comic stuff. He also focuses on Sci-Fi movies, which allow him to discuss some of the physics of space like the black hole in Interstellar. He went through over 150 movies last summer to prepare for the class. One of his favorite movies to teach is 2001: A Space Odyssey. In his estimation, the physics in the movie is totally accurate, and he feels that is one of the reasons people respond so strongly to the film. One of the other films he likes to teach is Hancock (Yes, Hancock, the movie with Will Smith and the totally out of place ending.)

Apparently the physics in that is really good too! When he jumps in the air the ground rips up behind him, which actually makes sense in terms of the physics. In class they

actually measured the strength of asphalt and…you know what, I’m giving too much away. That’s just a little preview for you guys.

One of the blessings of the class for Robinson is that it allows him to change his material every year, which normally doesn’t happen in a physics class. However, every year the major aim of the class is always to teach students the skill of “guestimation.”

“When you watch a movie clip you’re not given any starting information like you get in a physics problem, you have to guess that initial information and then move forward.”

Robinson hopes that students don’t see the QR requirement as a burden, but actually something useful. If years from now one of his former students can watch an ancient Bruce Willis flip over flaming garbage cans onto a motor boat and accurately explain that that “actually is total bullshit” to his friends then Robinson has done his job.

ASTR 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics

MCDB 109: Immunity and Contagion

I took Frontiers because I want to be a woman in STEM and also want to learn how to spell Frontiers.

—Emma Goldberg, SY ’16

It’s in Loria—I’ve never had a class north of

For real I’m taking the class because the first day I went the professor told us the sun does not orbit the earth in a tone that suggested she thought we didn’t already know that.

—Rianna Johnson-Levy, JE ’17

a Junior.

Davies. I also need a Science credit to become —Jacob Stein, DC ’17

MCDB 123: Genes and the Environment I wore denim on denim to the first lecture.

HIST 228: Vikings

—Patrick Doolittle, SY ’17

At one point, the professor minimized the PowerPoint window on his laptop and sheepishly apologized for revealing to the entire class that he plays Railroad Tycoon in his free time.

—Aaron Berman, SY ’16

18 – The Yale Herald

AMTH 160: The Structure of Networks Brady’s footballs might not be getting inflated but my grade in Structures certainly will be.

—Alex Goss, TD ’17

Planting the seeds

The “E&EB 145: Plants and People” experience by Devon Geyelin YH Staff

A

t 10:30 a.m. on the Fri. morning following Theta Date Night, it was not yet clear whether I would make it to the third (and my first) session of E&EB 145, Plants and People. The science course, offered for the first time this year, was slated for 11 a.m. at the Marsh Botanical Gardens. This was a 25-minute brisk walk away from my bedroom floor, where I was nursing something I might have pulled in my thigh.

I arrived a minute late; sweaty, concerned, and invigorated from my hike.

Upon entering the greenhouse, my feelings were both dampened and lightened: dampened, because of the humidity control; and lightened, because the room was filled with a collection of ripe Plants and eager People, many of whom were wearing fun pants.

The 30 students lucky enough to be chosen from the 93 applicants (plus me, an interloper who admittedly doesn’t even go here) would be split into groups. Half were to stay with Professor Linda Puth in this back room, and half were to go with Eric Larson, the manager of the Botanical Gardens. Larson appeared behind me, wearing a newsboy cap and holding a child-sized branch.

The class period was a blur of fantastical plant names—“Dreamsicle Sundew,” “Cobra Lily,” “Miracle Fruit, “River She-Oak” (I identified with all of them)—and moments that I’m confident are permanently snared in the mental flytraps of all those in attendance. Standing by a shrub, Puth revealed that wasps live inside figs—sometimes so many at a time that fights break out between residents. Female wasps can leave, pausing on different fig fruits to implant their eggs within, but males stay in place, living their lives between cellulosic wallpapers before traveling into one’s stomach, often via Newton. And in the carnivorous plants room, we watched as Larson stroked a Venus Flytrap with the tip of his pen. It was, we were told, a bit “sleepy,” and wasn’t tempted to snap shut on its potential prey.

Josh Feinzig, CC ’16, was the class’s obvious rising star. An EP&E major and an Opinion editor for this publication, Feinzig made his first power play in the desert room, when Larson asked the group why they thought the two cacti he pointed out had long, thick, blond hair. “To absorb the mist,” said Feinzig. Later, he was the first to answer a question Professor Puth posed to the class, clearly referencing the previous session’s lecture. “What are the plant growth forms?” she asked. We were silent for a moment too long before Feinzig stepped forward and said, “Tree.”

It was Feinzig, too, who later called the class’s attention to a momentarily confusing revelation: “So palm trees aren’t trees?” he asked. They aren’t, Puth explained, because they don’t have a woody central stalk—instead, they are big forbs, as are ferns and geraniums.

When the class officially ended, students stuck around to look more closely at the specimens, and to ask Puth lingering questions on leaf patterns and trunk structures. Puth has been at Yale for over 10 years, teach-

ing Conservation Biology and Field Ecology, while simultaneously doing her own research. “She’s like Professor Sprout,” said Feinzig, who likened the class to the Herbology courses offered at Hogwarts. “I’m just waiting for something crazy to pop out. I’m like, on my toes the entire class.” He used the Venus Flytrap, whose cameo was Feinzig’s favorite part of the recent field trip, as an indicator of future experiences. “Even though it didn’t really close its mouth the fact that they tried to get it to close its mouth got me really excited for the rest of the semester.”

Puth seemed a bit taken aback at the overwhelming demand for Plants and People. When she realized that the final applicant pool more than tripled her class’s capacity, she and one of her TAs, Maddy, devised a plan to choose most of their students by lottery, after first plucking those whose academic paths fit best with the class’s content and structure. The three weekly meetings, typically including one field trip, will cover plant-people relationships from biological, historical, anthropological, and artistic perspectives. Feinzig’s application dovetailed with that of classmate William Hall, MC ’15. They both focused on their curiosity regarding the possible sentience of plants, specifically in terms of locating moral value in plant life. Other admits included a passionate cook, who was interested in the prior lives of his ingredients, and a designer of t-shirts, who displays his art on organic cotton.

One sophomore History of Art major and another editor of this publication, Jacob Stein, DC ’17, was bitter from his ultimate rejection from the class. A previous semester’s coursework on decorative arts had piqued his interest in the flax plant; Stein wished to continue exploring its cultural role. “It really factors into the gender roles and labor structure of societies that produce linen garments,” Stein said. “It’s this really fibrous plant that requires a number of different, very specified processes, and tools for these processes, that change who and how the labor of creating linen is structured. So there’s some genuine plant-people interaction that I’d encountered in the past and wanted to maybe take the next step, and see why flax is so fibrous, and how that makes the resultant fabric so particularly well-suited for hot climates.”

This reasoning was not enough to get Stein a spot.

“I was certainly disappointed,” said Stein. “I did make it into the lottery, so I wasn’t one of those people they weeded out, so to speak. It was just the result of chance, which doesn’t make me feel too bad. If others in the class hadn’t been so proud of—you can’t even call it an achievement; their luck—then maybe I’d have more positive feelings.”

I left the class feeling conflicted. I was happy, because I had just spent 50 minutes learning about plants in one of the most fun academic environments I’d ever breathed in; but also sad, because I wouldn’t be able to spend this semester taking a Science credit that includes a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery. It was when I’d made it halfway to my other favorite terrarium (the eating room in Book Trader Café, where I was, incidentally, headed to meet someone on the class’s waitlist) that I found what must have been, if anything, a sign from God. A small cloth leaf had inexplicably planted itself inside my coat pocket. From this I took two things: 1) I should spend more time with plants, and 2) everyone should write to Tom Near, the E&EB DUS, so the department holds Plants and People again next year. (He can be reached at thomas.near@yale.edu.)

In the meantime, said Stein, “Those who did—by pure chance—get into Plants and People need to check their privilege.”

Graphics by Devon Geylin YH Staff

Jan. 23, 2015 – 19

REVIEWS An intimate conversation

by Magd Lhroob

I

n my four years at Yale, I’ve rarely seen all of Woolsey’s 2,600 seats fill up. For Morgan Freeman, Angelique Kidjo, and Yale Political Union debates the hall almost fills up, but not quite. This past Tuesday, however, Woolsey Hall was totally full—for Yo-Yo Ma’s benefit concert. I doubt most members of the audience knew what the concert was benefiting—when I bought my ticket, I certainly didn’t—and I doubt most cared. Later, I’d learn the concert was for the Yale School of Music’s Cello Enrichment Fund, which funds cellists during the start of

music. When the Sonata’s melody devolved, he looked a little sad; when the music picked up, he seemed genuinely delighted. The entire audience seemed to be leaning towards him and the music. When the Barrière piece came to an end, there was a pause before we began to applaud.

Maybe we’d all needed a moment to realize where we were.

While the stage was being re-arranged for the next piece, I turned to my neighbor, a 93-year-old woman celebrating her birthday. This Yo-Yo Ma concert was her gift to herself.

She had teared up as he played. I didn’t really want to ask

The entire audience seemed to be leaning towards him, gravitating to the music. When the Barrière piece came to an end, there was a pause before we began to applaud, as though we all needed a moment to realize where we were. their careers. It wasn’t until later in the concert, when Ma introduced Aldo Parisot that it became clear: the concert was also an excuse for these two cellists and old friends to take the stage together.

Alongside Yale School of Music Professor of Cello Ole Akahoshi, Yo-Yo Ma teased the audience with Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s Sonata in G major for two cellos. The Adagio—a tempo marking that translates to “at ease”—seemed to welcome us to the concert. Most likely, we wouldn’t be able to handle his solo performance without this introduction.

He was accompanying Akahoshi as much as Akahoshi was accompanying him. There was counterpoint and unison between Ma and Akahoshi, and the transitions were seamless. By the end of the piece I was completely absorbed, not only by the music, but also by Ma’s stage presence. From the second row, less than 10 feet from the stage, I could see Ma’s facial expressions change with the 20 – The Yale Herald

her what she thought, but before I could say anything, she answered: “Wasn’t that delightful? And there’s still more.”

Unlike the Barrière piece, I knew the next piece almost by heart: the Bach Cello Suite No. 3 in C major. This was the piece Yo-Yo Ma had perfected on his 1983 solo cello album. Two years later, he won a Grammy for it. It made sense that Ma was performing this deceptively difficult piece, because he plays it effortlessly. Its tempo is seriously important, and to stay faithful to Bach’s composition, the artist must play without rubato. Done well, it sounds almost elemental. I had the absurd thought that maybe I could play it. It was as if Ma was sitting in my living room playing and all I wanted was for him to hand the cello over to me so I could do it too.

By intermission, the entire concert hall felt alive. I was now friends with the 93-year-old woman beside me, making plans to visit her so we could talk more about music. As

we talked, we wondered why Yo-Yo Ma was performing at Yale now. When the second half of the concert began, and Ma was presented with one of the Yale School of Music’s Sanford medals, I thought I had the answer. But when Ma sat down to interview his longtime friend Aldo Parisot, a critically acclaimed cellist in his own right, and one of the School of Music’s most beloved teachers. It became obvious that the concert was just as much for Ma’s friend as it was for him.

For a little over half an hour, Ma interviewed Parisot.

At least, the concert’s organizers wanted an interview.

What they got was an intimate conversation. There was no filter, and the entire room laughed when Parisot, at a rare moment when the microphone was positioned correctly, complained about the chair he was sitting in.

Ma is someone I’ve always admired, and so it was moving to see him interact with someone he admits to admiring himself. As the conversation dwindled and Ma thanked Parisot for his contributions to music, he winked.

Catching Ma in the midst of an intimate moment made him all the more charming.

When the conversation ended, Ma performed, alongside Parisot, with the Yale Philharmonia Orchestra. Seeing the two friends play side-by-side was seeing two musical geniuses communicate in their native language.

Film: Inherent Vice

Film: Wild

Inherent Vice is a mighty feat. It is the first adaptation of a novel by Thomas Pynchon, an author whose reclusive nature and complex writing style previously complicated any translation to film. Director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) was up to the challenge. In all his films, PTA clearly pays as much attention to every frame as Pynchon pays to each word, and the hard work pays off.

In his second leading performance in a PTA film—the first being 2012’s The Master— Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, a hippie PI in early 1970s Los Angeles. During the opening scene, Doc is smoking dope in his beach house. Then his ex-gal comes in with a case that brings him into conflict with Asian drug empires, corrupt cops, cults, and the chance to renew lost love.

PTA is really an actor’s director; his films are admirable for their unique characters and the way each actor excels at embodying their roles, major or minor. Working well alongside Phoenix are the man’s man Josh Brolin, relentlessly sensual Katherine Waterston, and a cocaine-fueled Martin Short. There are several scenes in Inherent Vice where PTA establishes multi-minute long takes, letting the action between the characters play out as if it were a stage production.

Together with the perfectly curated costume and set design, this is a visually beautiful movie.

I would appreciate kicking back and watching the film progress even on mute.

A perpetually humorous tale about a pot-smoking private detective, the film invites comparisons to The Big Lebowski—and rightfully so. Vice’s tone also had strong echoes of another Coen brothers project: 2008’s Burn After Reading. Both are ensemble-cast pieces meant to be quirky, dense, often-fantastical tapestries of ridiculousness rather than coherent stories that give the viewer final and fulfilling omniscience once the final credits begin rolling.

In one scene, Doc writes an observation in his detective’s notebook: “NOT HALLUCINATING.” For him, as well as the audience, it’s hard to make sense of everything that happens on screen as it unfolds; the film’s pacing and grand sense of scale often make the viewer feel like we’ve been puffing the reefer with Doc the whole time. I would venture to say that’s what PTA intended: to properly bring us all into the psychedelic 70s. Inherent Vice is meant to be enjoyed time after time, in various altered states of mind. Let it ride, man.

At one point in Wild, a new film by Jean-Marc Vallée, a group of young hikers calls Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) the “Queen of the PCT.” They are poking fun at Strayed’s preferential treatment from several men throughout her voyage on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), but in a way, the nickname is a compliment. Performing a feat that probably deserves royal status, first-time hiker Strayed conquers the PCT, a nearly 3,000-mile monster that challenges even the most experienced adventurers. Wild, based on the best-selling memoir of the same name, devotes itself to Strayed’s trek, and anchored by two captivating performances, Strayed’s journey is a compelling physical and emotional self-examination.

At its most basic level, Wild succeeds at making a story centered on a woman walking alone into an entertaining film. Reflective voiceovers and flashbacks give structure to Strayed’s hike and enrich her character. Rarely do these elements feel forced or jarring.

Flashbacks arise almost organically, as the natural sounds and images of the PCT blend with echoes of Strayed’s former life before the scene completely places itself in the movie’s past. And Strayed isn’t completely alone during her trip. She encounters several fellow adventurers and strangers in interactions often punctuated with effective humor. Perhaps the film would have benefited from more silence and focus. Its successful efforts to keep the audience engaged sometimes detract from the intense feeling of isolation Strayed presumably experiences.

As Strayed, Witherspoon is raw and uninhibited. Witherspoon also served as a producer for Wild, and her wholehearted commitment to the project is evident in her performance.

While it would be odd to say Reese Witherspoon, who seems to be a solid fixture on Hollywood’s A-list, has made a comeback with Wild, the film acts as a reminder that Witherspoon should be taken seriously as an actress. Witherspoon is supported by Laura Dern, as Strayed’s mother Bobbi. Though she has little screen time, Dern’s nuanced and delicate performance is one of the films highlights. Wild is a refreshing film that is unafraid of simplicity. The twists and turns come not in the plot but literally in Strayed’s path, one that both she and Witherspoon seem confident in traveling.

— Joe Kupershmidt

— Jackson Blum YH Staff

Film: Foxcatcher Steve Carell is widely celebrated as a comedic actor. In his best performances—The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Evan Almighty, Anchorman—he uses his capacity for stillness to surprise the viewer by suddenly bursting with energy. In Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, we find Carell still eminently skillful, but now investing his talents in historically accurate psychodrama, rather than comedy.

Carell plays John Eleuthere du Pont, the sole heir to a chemical company who launches an athletic training facility on the grounds of his Pennsylvania estate. He recruits two erstwhile icons, Mark and Dave Shultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, respectively). Mark won a gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics, the same year that his older brother rose to the top in a lighter-weight class. Both men have retired from wrestling; Dave has settled down with his family, while Mark has been scrambling to make a living by showing his medals to schoolchildren.

Miller has coaxed extraordinary performances from his two male leads. Tatum’s Mark is a dome-shouldered bear, as inarticulate and gullible as he is noble. While Carell steals the show in this film, Tatum injects the movie with ponderous grace. Ruffalo, too, is near perfect, playing a well-meaning father who tries to balance his duty to his wife and kids with his responsibilities as Mark’s older brother.

Foxcatcher charts the perverse relationship between Mark and his patron du Pont. Carell is unrecognizable as the millionaire coach—ashen-faced, corpse-eyed, a creepy dweeb with an oversized nose and a need for control. He shuffles around the gym like an ailing Mr. Burns, fixated on securing victory for his charges.

The language in this movie is primarily physical; long stretches of film play out with little dialogue. Wrestling scenes are peaceful, their participants rutting like stags to mournful, drawn-out notes of music. The movie is visually gorgeous, set in a fall that seems endless, until the drama of the final scene casts an icy pall over the closing minutes and du Pont’s relationship with the boxers reaches crisis point.

Staff list: what we’ve been up to What we’re watching: Impalas jumping.

What we’re rutting like: Stags.

How we’re keeping in contact with our parents: Trivia Crack.

What we’re eating: “Spicy Peppers” What we’re over: Man buns.

What class we’re taking: The Problem of Evil.

— Herald Staff

— Leaf Arbuthnot YH Staff Graphic by Jake Stein YH Staff

Jan. 23, 2015 – 21

Lara.sokoloff@yale.edu

Lara.sokoloff@yale.educom

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Who bought up all my domain names in 2004?

5-year-plans

Aren’t feathers supposed to be soft?? Why would you hurt me?

“What will you contribute to this seminar?”

Professionally, but Stalin’s weren’t great either.

Domain names

I’m gonna put the recipt card in my scrapbook.

The little feathers in your pillow that poke your face.

Nothing.

Printing out your schedule Vulnerability

Especially via email.

Mercury in retrograde There goes potty productivity!

Cold Macbooks on your bare thighs

My money horoscope SUCKS!

Jan. 23, 2015 _ 23