The Education Issue

10.03.13 VOL. XLV, NO. 5

CONTENTS FORUM 3 The Emerson Strikes Back NEWS 4 For The Very First Time 7 Righteous Nitrous 8 Standing Strong 9 Solutions From Scandinavia 10 Lean on Me ARTS 11 A Common Casting 12 Megolomania 13 Football, Apple Pie, and Grinding?

14 The Magic of Masturbation 14 Write On! SPORTS 15 Marco?! (Water) Polo!

16 Da Bears As Harvard College's weekly undergraduate newsmagazine, the Harvard Independent provides in-depth, critical coverage of issues and events of interest to the Harvard College community.

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Cartoonist John McCallum '16 Business Manager Albert Murzakhanov '16 Columnists Aditya Agrawal '17 Michael Feehly '14 Jackie Leong '16 Andrew Lin '17 Madi Taylor '16 Shreya Vardhan '17 Senior Staff Writers Michael Altman '14 Meghan Brooks '14 Whitney Lee '14 Staff Writers Manik Bhatia '16 Xanni Brown '14 Terilyn Chen '16 Lauren Covalucci '14 Clare Duncan '14 Caroline Gentile '17 Gary Gerbrandt '14 Travis Hallett '14 Shaquilla Harrigan '16 Yuqi Hou '15 Cindy Hsu '14 Eldo Kim '16 Chloe Li '16 Orlea Miller '16 Albert Murzhakanov '16 Carlos Schmidt '15 Frank Tamberino '16

Forum

indy

Empathizing Why Emerson 310 is the place to be.

By LAUREN COVALUCCI

I

’m sitting at a massive wooden table, which is still glossy despite many spilled cups of coffee and generations’ worth of note taking. I’ve managed to maneuver my clunky chair into a relatively comfortable position, but my left foot still wants to fall asleep. The windows to my back are open to the sun, and the window to my right faces a tree that most likely feels ill-used as the subject of countless explanatory examples (philosophers love their trees). If we’re lucky, there are construction workers deafeningly attacking a nearby building. The Memorial Church bells start sounding out the hour, but half of the class is held to the table — as we always are — by the inertia of an unfinished thought, so we stay sitting and tie up the loose ends of the conversation — as we always try to do. Maybe, though, this is all just an extremely vivid dream; or maybe I am being deceived by an evil demon and can’t trust my faculties….

Or not. Welcome to Emerson 310. If you find yourself here, you’re either lost or in a philosophy seminar (NB, logicians: I’m using the inclusive ‘or’).

If the aphorism about moons and moccasins is true, I should know the room well. I’ve sat in Emerson 310 for what feels like two dozen moons, starting my sophomore year, when I began taking more serious philosophy classes. At the least, I would be there an hour a week in section; at the most, I would go there for three separate classes.

Formally labeled “the Tanner room,” 310 was named after a man called Obert, about whom I know nothing. I don’t know exactly how many hours I’ve spent there. I also don’t know how many lattes I’ve brought to class, how many times I’ve nodded off in front of my professors, how many questions I’ve asked, how many questions I should have asked, or how much better I could have done if I had tried a little bit harder. I don’t know that I deserve to be with the company I have in that room. I’m in luck, though — it’s a good place to go if you want to recognize the weight of your stupidity while feeling relatively unintimidated by the burden of it.

In the spring semester, the best time to have a class in Em 310 is during the last dregs of a weekday afternoon. At first, when you head home in January, you’ll push the heavy doors open into a darkened The Harvard Independent • 10.03.13

Yard, streetlights illuminating the paths spotted with stragglers heading home for a late dinner. The weeks pass quickly after that. I walk out of the building so absorbed in trying to piece together the last hour’s conversations that I don’t notice when spring creeps in — then, after our thirdto-last meeting I’ll finally realize that it’s light out again, the age-old rediscovery of early-evening daylight. Without a doubt, the worst time to be in Em 310 is right after lunch — about 1 or 2PM — on a day where the heat is cranking and you’ve only snatched five hours of sleep. You know what happens next.

I’ve been wondering lately if my younger self would be impressed with what I know now. (Achieving the status of mediocre wanna-be philosopher is still something to write home about, no?). I’ve read Descartes, I’ve written on Kant, and once in a while I’ll think of an idea that could be generously termed “interesting.” In reality, formerLauren would probably identify too much with current-model Lauren to admire her. At the very least, she’ll recognize my attachment to a Harvard classroom as the same kind she’s felt towards the classrooms in which she spent months at a time through elementary school. You can’t help feel attached to a place that stays the same while you keep growing.

What have I learned, in the end? How much is there to really know about a room? Epistemologists sometimes talk about the difference between knowing that and knowing how, the theoretical knowledge we use to invent a bike and the practical knowledge we use to ride one. I know that the Tanner room is on the third floor of Emerson Hall, home to Harvard’s philosophy department. I know how to walk up three dusty flights after an overly-brisk walk from the quad — both to step behind the foot-sized hollows that can only form on stairs regularly run-up and tramped-down by students. And to sip some water from the fountain on the third floor before I continue into 310, hoping there’s still room for me at my favorite side of the table.

Lauren Covalucci ’14 (covalucci@college) stayed up to write this article and just barely avoided falling asleep in class the next morning… in Emerson 310.

Photo by Lauren Covalucci

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Generation 1

The Indy interviews the Harvard First Generation Student Union.

S

eniors Daniel Lobo of Quincy and Jesse Sanchez of Adams sat down with

the Indy to discuss the formation, motivation, and mission behind the Harvard First Generation Student Union. They hope the group will gain official recognition this semester, but that’s not their only goal. From supporting first gens on campus to promoting educational access across the nation, HFGSU hopes their group will foster “a movement that’s going to change Harvard for the better.”

Indy: Can you tell me about yourselves and what motivated you to start the Harvard First Generation Student Union?

Daniel Lobo: I’m originally from East Boston, Massachusetts, and I currently live in Lynn, Massachusetts.

What makes me first gen is that both my parents immigrated to the states from Cape Verde in the late 1980s, and for a variety of reasons associated with the immigrant experience weren’t able to graduate high school. Throughout my schooling, that always served as my motivation: the fact that my parents weren’t able to achieve a level of education they hoped for. So I was sort of their last hope in that regard.

I was always super motivated in high school, and I remember applying to Harvard, looking at brochures, and realizing that there might be students like me going to a place like Harvard given the robust financial aid policy.

And I remember getting here and realizing that despite the fact that people looked like me, they weren’t really like me at all. And so that

largely defined my freshman year: that feeling of being out of place or feeling inadequate and being in an environment different than anything I was used to.

Aside from the fact that I was the first in my family to go to college, this was the first time I was in an area of concentrated wealth or that I was having to have intellectual conversations all the time. Just given my environment, I was used to turning that part of myself on at school and turning it off with my friends, so this idea of residential learning and always wanting to take advantage of the variety of thoughts and experiences that I was surrounded by was really difficult for me.

I never really came to terms with the fact that I was a first gen student until the end of my sophomore year. That’s when I was thinking about how rather than viewing it as a deficit, it was just an alternative form of social capital that I brought to Harvard and could use to educate people and to empower my own education. I stayed in touch with my freshman advisor, who was at the Bureau of Study Counsel, and she tapped me into some conversations the administration was having about first gens. I started meeting other first gen students, which was awesome, because I’d never known how to identify another first gen. So the first few meals I had with the other people that I got in touch with through these conversations were just amazing.

It was the first time when we were talking about things that we had all understood and experienced. It just feels good to know there are people on campus who went through similar things to you even though you can’t find them as easily.

I came up with the idea for a student group that could more easily facilitate this idea of peer support, networking, and allowing a means for first gen students to self-identify themselves.

Through the people I’d met, we came together to form this founding board, and now we’re seeking official recognition this semester, which is really exciting.

Jesse Sanchez: I was born and raised in City Heights, San Diego. It’s the probation capital of San Diego County, and it’s also made up of five of the seven densest census tracks in all of the county in a pretty small space.

Three percent of the residents have college degrees, so it’s a place that one might call the inner city, an underresourced community, etc. So coming from that experience to Harvard is definitely a bit of a culture shock, as Dan described. Just coming into a place that’s so distinct in its cultural elements: the way people dress, how much money people had, and how obvious that was in certain habits, like fancy meals, fancy clothes, and a lot of salmon colored shorts. It was really interesting for me to come to Harvard and try to find a place where I felt like all my identities were most supported and that I was able to connect with others.

My mom was born in Mexico, and she came over to the U.S., where I was born in San Diego, California, and for some of the reasons Dan mentioned as well as some structural issues, she never finished high school. She was a farm laborer in Mexico and since she has come to the U.S., she cleans houses — an honest day’s work. So one thing that I find really empowering about this movement is that it provides a space for an identity on campus that is so prevalent and is so important for this campus to recognize as well as providing a welcoming space for a lot of us. It’s also a way to create this space of understanding: understanding between classes, between races, between different people on campus. Because when I got here, there were a lot of different parts of my identity that I was able to continue exploring: I’m Latino, so I’m involved in all the different cultural groups here, as well as a lot of organizations revolving around education and youth empowerment.

But when it came down to really finding a support community for what it means to be first gen, that was really lacking.

My junior year I started a series focused on first generation college

students through social media as a way to empower the youth I’ve worked with in past programs, and that evolved to include a lot of the first generation college students on campus. So when I was doing that, I got to learn a lot about what it means to be first gen and this identity’s important role in empowerment.

One thing I love about the first gen community is that it intersects with so many different narratives. Dan and I share immigrant narratives in our families, I can definitely relate to a number of people from the Latino community, friends from the Black community who have very similar experiences, but also those who come from generations in the U.S. I think that one great thing the first gen movement we’re trying to start here is that it is bringing people from throughout campus to rally around this idea of equal access to opportunity and also inter-class, inter-race, interidentity dialogue.

Indy: Thank you so much. I think that’s great, especially to address people feeling left out or isolated. I think Harvard can be hard enough, and to have another thing on top of it can be overwhelming.

Can you speak to the representation of first-gens on campus? Or you can touch on the problem of identification that you discussed: namely, how hard it is to tell who is first gen.

DL: I think the main problem on campus is that there’s not a way for first gen students to self-identify. The fact is that this campus is apparently 13% first gen, and the incoming freshman class is more like 18%.

There’s a substantial number of us here. The problem is that we don’t know each other and don’t have any means to find out. That is inherently because it’s not something that comes to surface, but I think what can support and facilitate a process of self-identifying was if there was more institutional recognition of first gens.

I think a student group is a first step in that direction. Incoming freshman, Continued on page 5

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indy

Continued from page 4 when looking at the list of student organizations, will see a first-gen group on there, have that identity in their mind, and know that it’s represented on campus. But it also comes up when you think that a lot of our peer institutions like Stanford, Dartmouth, and Georgetown are doing a lot more institutionally with first gens, whether that’s the bridge programs for first gens who aren’t as well prepared from high school, whether it’s an office of diversity and inclusion, whether it’s an office of multicultural affairs that takes care of programming for first gens. We were just over at MIT on Saturday talking to their first gen group and their group is an extension of the office of undergraduate education.

It’s not really a student group. So they’re actually identifying incoming freshman as first gen based on their parents’ level of education as listed on their application, informing them about the group, and inviting them to come to this group’s programming. So there are steps that the university can take and make it easier for first gens to self-identify in addition to what we’re doing as a student group. That’s the biggest thing: we’re not going to build a community if we don’t know who each other are.

JS: There are three points on this idea of underrepresentation: the first, as Dan described, is that there’s no way to know if a person is first gen.

That can be a factor that can result in isolation between different groups.

You come in and have this experience of “Whoa, this is Harvard?” and you’ve never even visited a campus before.

And then when you get here you don’t speak out on these experiences because you feel out of place. Everyone else around you knows what’s up, everyone else looks like they know how to act and what college means to them. Their parents have gone to college, their family has gone to college for generations: this is what is expected of them. For some, not all, first gens, of course — the first gen experience is very diverse — these expectations of going to college may not have been as concrete as for others.

So the first point is that not having a place to identify and speak up with other first gens could lead to isolation.

By creating this space, a first gen student group is hoping to create a point of connection for so many people here on campus that want to pitch in and learn the perspectives of other first gens.

The second point is that our group is trying to defeat the stigma that might be associated with our parents not going to college. When I was a freshman, a lot of my friends would ask, “What does your mom do?” or “Where did your mom go to college?” or even “Where did your dad go to college?” and I don’t know who that guy is, he’s not even a part of my life.

So that was kind of weird, as was describing having my mom be the head of my family and the fact that she cleans houses and the fact that she has a sixth or seventh grade education, because where she’s from, she was in the fields working since age four or five. So this organization wants to create a space where we can defeat the stigma and acknowledge the strength that it took to get to this point as first generation college students. We need to promote the idea that first gens are pioneers and that it’s a very positive characteristic. It’s a beautiful bit of social capital we bring to the table.

The third point is to acknowledge the diversity of the first gen experience. If we think the first gen experience is this one thing — our own experience as a first gen — then I think we’re missing a lot of these other experiences: people with immigrant families, people from rural areas, people who come here from a different country to get their education. I think this organization is trying to do a lot of things with respect to underrepresentation, but those three things highlight our main goals.

Indy: What unique challenges do you think first gen students experience?

You’ve talked about some of those already, but can you think of some specific examples, perhaps from your own experiences?

JS: I think coming to such a new place when we don’t have other people we can really relate to, so the idea of being a first gen — and I’m only speaking to my own experience — a lot of my friends in high school didn’t go to college. They’re all first generation college students, but going to community college or working, so coming to a place like this was not an experience I shared with many of my friends. I didn’t have anyone to call to ask, “Hey, how’s your freshman year going?” I think my leaving for college actually created a bit of isolation back home, because no one else had gone to college. So when I got back to San Diego, some people would say things like, “You think that because you go to Harvard,” or “You don’t know what this

is like anymore because you went to this really fancy rich place.” So that’s one example. A second is coming to a place like the Northeast, especially speaking to my own experience and the part of San Diego that I come from, it’s very different than the culture here. So my style of dress, my way of speaking, my own perspective on the world was just very different, and then also, considering that my mother was unable to get a college education, we weren’t able to have the same kind of life as many of my peers have had, so my perspective was also different in that way. I had never traveled outside the country, I had never been on a family vacation to a resort or a theme park or whatever, so there were these really basic cultural differences that in my experience seemed to have created a bit of distance when I first got here.

DL: My first inclination is to pose some sort of academic difficulty I had, but I feel like that’s a common experience of a lot of people who come here whether or not they’re first gen.

I think the support system is a little different, but I try not to use that as my primary example of a first gen difficulty. What I experienced was a lot of what Jesse was talking about. I remember specifically last summer I was on campus and my parents came in to have dinner with me one night.

I was teaching during that time, so I had a lot of ideas going through my head. When I was having dinner with my parents, they were talking about something ridiculous my neighbor had done or something like that, and I had this epiphany at the dinner table that I’m never going to be able to have an intellectual conversation with my parents. And I remember getting really upset by it: thinking that I was growing so much in this place but I can literally feel myself leaving them behind. It’s this idea of a new language, this new way of thinking and speaking, and it’s like you’re losing the old ways of speaking and the old means of communication that you had before getting here.

And that’s really hard. I think that I didn’t do as good of a job through my college career to try to keep the two as close together as possible, and that came with other difficulties with being first gen. I remember to this day conversations with my mom, even though I tell myself not to get upset by them kind of upset me, because of how basic they are. She calls me, asks me how I’m doing, and I say I’m fine and then that’s sort of it. I

can’t go into details like I had this class and this really interesting point was brought up by one of my peers.

We can’t talk about that. That’s just further facilitated this disconnect. And it’s hard to be reminded that as a first gen that you’re cursed with being a code-switcher, you have to know how to cross these cultures and you have to be okay with that. That’s something I never thought about coming in that was particularly traumatizing for me.

JS: Just on the point of having to code-switch as a curse: I think it’s an additional strength.

DL: Yes — it’s definitely a positive.

It was just personally challenging for me.

JS: I think that it being a challenge is definitely true. Though I think we should also look at it in a different light, as it in the long run provides a means for us to connect to others in a new way and a more understanding way. I think it’s also important to emphasize — particularly when discussing these issues with family — that the reason these issues exist is because our parents never had access to the resources we do now. Something I always try to stress about my mother — my mother is one of the smartest people I’ve met in my whole life, even at Harvard. Because my family and a lot of other people, because they never had access to these resources or these opportunities, this distance is occurring. This brings up a really important point that we’ve already touched on, but one of our goals as the first gen organization is to encounter, acknowledge, and respect the variety and individuality of the first gen experiences.

Indy: Can you speak to some of the advantages of being first gen at Harvard?

JS: The first is this ability to cross between different cultures and different kinds of people and the ability to do so seamlessly. The second is that one of the best ways to grow is to experience a new environment.

So I think that coming to a place like Harvard, which is definitely a new environment, you get to understand, or at least try to understand, how you act in this new space and how you develop in this new space while stimulated by all these new, awesome things that are at Harvard. It creates an incredible perspective on ourselves Continued on page 6

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Continued from page 5 and on our actions in relation to other people and other situations. To see people experience such immense growth in such little time is one of the biggest benefits.

DL: Experiencing that growth is huge — I’m reminded of it every time I go on Facebook and see people I know from back home who got a new job at the mall or something like that.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but I have to check myself and say, look, I’m at Harvard, and there are some people my age who are excited about getting a job at the mall. In terms of a tangible benefit, for me at least, humility is huge, and I think that’s something that can be lacking at this institution. And so I feel that I try to keep my experiences under a veil of humility, because it makes me appreciate everything a lot more.

Because I know that given one change in my past, I wouldn’t have access to any of this. So I think that’s really important for me personally.

I also think another benefit is just the grit and self-motivation and resourcefulness that first-gens all have. In telling people about this group, especially non-first gens, I’ve had multiple conversations with people who can’t imagine not being set up to be here. They had the type of schooling and upbringing that set them up to be at a place like Harvard, and they can’t imagine being here without that. And so I think it’s hard because I don’t like to make it sound like we’re putting ourselves up on a pedestal above other people who are just as deserving to be here, but it is a huge accomplishment to get to a place like Harvard as a first gen. Our first try at college, we hit the top target.

That’s huge. And it’s something that most people don’t have the kind of lives where they have to demonstrate that sort of grit. It’s hard to teach motivation. So when someone gets it, it’s such a transferrable skill, and that’s huge.

JS: Just to add on to the first point I had about interacting with diverse communities, I think that when you think about the idea of going to Harvard, getting that degree, and having access to all these resources, I think the benefit of that experience is the ability to impact and inspire those who are younger than you to create social change. One amazing benefit the first gen community has

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is the ability to make social change.

We can often work with communities that others who haven’t lived those experiences are trying to go out and help and do amazing things for, and we have a unique experience in that we come from those places and can inspire those who might be the first in their families to go to college and create those avenues for the young people. Because we come from those experiences, we can acknowledge that when we see someone like that friend posting about getting a job at the supermarket, etc., we understand that they haven’t had the opportunity to reach a place like Harvard because the structure is set up so there are huge barriers to entry. And we can come from a place of understanding and faith for those people.

Indy: Do you think first gens have different concerns as freshman than as seniors? Do you have thoughts of what those first feelings of excitement and intimidation turn into as the college career continues and nears an end?

JS: I think the transition is very different. As a freshman, it takes time to feel comfortable and make this place a home where you can learn to grow and a place where you feel well situated. By the time you get to senior year, you’ve been through the ropes and you’ve gotten to this point where you feel more comfortable, hopefully you feel at home, and it is a time for you to come into your element.

One of the main objectives that HFGSU has is trying to make that transition even smoother, more efficient, and more supported, so first gens can get to the point that we are at senior year much earlier, discover new potentials, and do even greater things with that amazing grit and drive that first gens all have.

As a senior, when we’re looking for jobs and career advice, now that we have all these resources and eventually a Harvard degree, just having to decide what kind of career we want to follow is something that oftentimes is something I’m unable to go to my mom for. I can’t go to her and ask her how to format my resume or ask her if she knows any doctors or anyone in the finance industry.

Also, it means something to me to be able to understand what it means to be first gen and graduating from

an institution like Harvard, both in terms of what that means on a bigger scale and to me as an individual.

What does that mean to me and my community and to all of those who I could potentially help or to successes I’m going to see in the coming years.

That’s going to be a beautiful moment.

I’m making these decisions. And I find myself not making certain decisions because of the way it might affect my parents. So that’s something I never thought about coming into the experience that I’ve found holds a lot of bearing on my own agency.

Indy: Any concluding remarks?

DL: One experience that I had freshman year speaks to evolving in the first gen experience. It also relates to a conversation our board had on Sunday that is largely unfinished, or maybe we just have very different perspectives. I think it’s a testament to the variety of experiences that are part of the first gen identity. For me personally, I think it was really easy for me to vilify those of an upper class when I first got here, and seeing that things like salmon colored shorts are glorified or that being in a final club is seen as at the top of the social hierarchy or other things that weren’t part of my value system, it was easy for me to feel that I was better than that and think that I wasn’t going to try to adhere to that set of values. But over the course of my education here and meeting a lot of amazing people who are from the upper class and that there are still things to be learned from those people was something that I’ve learned through the process.

Something that I think about a lot in forming this group is that I never want it to turn into an us-versus-them mentality.

Another thing that I’m experiencing senior year that I didn’t think about at all freshman year what my relationship with my parents is going to look like after graduation as dictated by my career. I did the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program, and I decided that I don’t want to be a teacher, and a large part of it related to the fact that I can’t really explain to my parents that I went to Harvard and now I’m going to become a teacher. I just haven’t figured out how to do that, and I feel like there would be a whole lot of misunderstanding going on if I did. And that’s something to have to explain to people who aren’t first gen.

I’m lucky enough to have a job offer that satisfies my own motivations and the expectations of my parents, and with my parents, it’s never explicit, they’re not telling me what to do because they know I’m an adult and I can make my own decisions, but it’s always in the back of my mind when

JS: Through creating this community o n c a m p u s, w e ’ r e c r e a t i n g a n opportunity to promote social change for those who strive to be first generation college students. I think that creating a strong community is going to be an amazing thing for those who look at Harvard and see that it’s not what they may have thought and that there are people here who have experiences they can relate to, maybe in concert with some of the other efforts on campus like the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program and Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. The Harvard College First Generation Student Union is going to create another way for others to become inspired and feel that Harvard is accessible, not only once you get here, but before you even start this college journey.

DL: I think we’re starting something huge. It’s something that’s going to change this university. That sounds like a kind of selfish thing to say as someone who’s starting the organization, but what makes me okay with saying that is that in what we’ve done so far, I’ve realized there’s a huge demand for this. Originally, this is something that I thought would be a great idea, but now I’m realizing that there are tons of people on this campus that want this and that need this. And the fact that we can meet their needs and support them while also creating this institutional change — I feel like we’re actually starting a movement.

And it’s going to be a movement that’s going to change Harvard for the better.

Christine Wolfe ‘14 (crwolfe@college) is now an expert transcriptionist.

10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent

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Churn! Churn! Churn!

To every liquid nitrogen ice cream there is a season.

By CAROLINE GENTILE

E

arly this semester, I noticed a new addition to the Science Center Plaza. No, it wasn’t the farmers’ market on Tuesday, nor, despite its resemblance to a food truck, was it Benny’s Crepes, Whole Foods, or Bon Me. After walking past it a few times, I decided to investigate. I approached the pewterhued structure gingerly until I was finally close enough to decipher the words on the orange and blue logo: “Churn2: Superior Ice Cream.” A wave of excitement rushed over me. I had to try this ice cream. They definitely didn’t look open, but I noticed a crack in the front window, and saw movement. I poked my head under

Photo by Caroline Gentile

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the crack and asked, “When do you guys open?” To my disappointment, the voices responded, “Probably within the next three days.”

Being the ice cream stalker that I am, I came back every day for the next three days, wondering if Churn2 had finally opened. Sure enough, three days later, there was a sign boasting the opening flavors: Strawberry Lime and Bananas Foster. Today was the day! That afternoon, I ordered a small Bananas Foster, and my taste buds were in heaven. Creamy and smooth, with noticeably fresh ingredients, Churn2’s ice cream is damn good.

But this isn’t just any old ice cream. Churn2 makes their ice cream

to order using liquid nitrogen. Anyone who has ever taken a science course has probably made ice cream out of liquid nitrogen, but few have ever thought to turn this commonplace science experiment into a business.

The owner of Churn2, Ash Chan, is one of the few, but liquid nitrogen ice cream is not a novel idea to him.

“I’ve seen a few other [businesses],” he said. “It’s not super original.

However, this is the first mobile, liquid nitrogen ice cream shop.” The grey structure in the Science Center plaza is actually a 160 square foot, mobile shipping container. So how does one come up with the idea to open a liquid nitrogen ice cream shop out of a shipping container?

Chan, who lives in Los Angeles, was inspired by a similar business in San Francisco based out of a 40 foot shipping container. “I really wanted to build something out of a shipping container,” he admitted. “If you think about it, everything comes out of shipping containers. Churn2 was a test project to see if I could actually build a business out of a shipping container.” He could hardly contain his excitement.

And build a business, he did.

Churn2 has been wildly popular since it opened. I can attest to that, because I’ve been there at least twice a week. “The response has been amazing,” said Chan. “I’m really lucky to have hit Harvard at a time when they are seeking new opportunities, especially with all the food trucks.”

Despite Churn2’s successes, there have definitely been some roadblocks to overcome. Unlike the other food trucks that frequent the Science Center plaza, Churn2 does not have commissary space where they could get deliveries at one central location. As a result, it has been difficult for Chan to set up accounts where people are willing to deliver straight to the Science Center plaza, and so he has had to rely on keeping the ingredient list really simple. Luckily, though, Harvard has been able to assist him in sourcing ingredients; sometimes, Chan will piggy-back orders off HUDS. Harvard has also been a big help with staffing, which has been

another obstacle for Chan. In fact, Churn2 only has two non-Harvard employees. The rest are Harvard students, provided to Chan through HSA. Roland Yang, CEO of HSA, has called the venture successful so far.

Three students at a time work threehour-long shifts in the container. One takes orders, and the other two churn the ice cream. Any Harvard student can work at Churn2, and the training, provided by Ash and his team, is completed after one three-hour shift.

The one downside to having a staff full of Harvard students, however, is that they cannot work later in the day. “All the students can only work 3 hour time blocks and 20 hours a week,” Chan explained. “I have restaurants in California so I’m used to having people working much longer hours. But I’m amazed the students can even take time out to work on top of their academics.”

Even though Harvard is surrounded by ice cream stores — Ben and Jerry’s, Lizzy’s, J.P. Licks, Pinkberry, and Yogurtland, to name a few — Churn2’s ice cream stands out. Not only is it made-to-order, but the flavors change daily. According to Chan, all of the flavors are made on a whim. The popular “Apple Pie” flavor came from Chan simply buying apple pie and tossing it into the ice cream.

“Maple Bacon,” Yang’s flavor of choice, was a result of throwing bacon bits into the mixer, and “what came out was beautiful.” Unfortunately, this delicious ice cream will not be around for long. Churn2 is a pop-up restaurant, which means that after a few weeks, it will be gone. Chan predicts that Churn2 will remain open until mid-October, or as long as the weather cooperates. Luckily, he has a few ideas of what he would serve if the weather turns earlier than that. He even plans to come back next year, if Harvard will let him. I’m sure I’m speaking for many other icecream lovers when I say that I hope he does. After all, Churn2 is the only place to get liquid nitrogen ice cream in Boston, and I’m definitely going to need my fix.

Caroline Gentile ’17 (cgentile@ college) is currently accepting donations for the “Caroline Goes to Churn2” Foundation. harvardindependent.com

7

News

Malala Yousafzai: Humanitarian of the Year

Girls’ education advocate honored in Sanders Theatre.

By MEGHAN BROOKS

F

riday, the Harvard Foundation honored 16-year-old Pakistani girls’ education advocate Malala Yousafzai with the 2013 Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian of the Year Award. A full crowd welcomed Yousafzai to Sanders Theatre, along with her family and the neurosurgeon who performed her first operation. The awards ceremony was free to Harvard students, and the crowd’s size and enthusiasm indicated that students as well as community members and other Harvard affiliates were looking forward to hearing Yousafzai speak.

Although Memorial Hall may have been less impressive than the United Nations, where Yousafzai spoke in July, she seemed excited nonetheless as she filed onto the stage, dressed in pink and waving to a standing ovation.

Yousafzai had come a long way to stand on that stage. A student from Pakistan’s Swat valley, she became the center of international attention after the Taliban attempted to assassinate her last October. A target due to her pseudonymous column on girls’ education and life under the Taliban for BBC Urdu, which garnered her a New York Times documentary, a nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize via South African bishop Desmond Tutu, and fame throughout Pakistan, Yousafzai was shot in the head along with two friends as she rode the bus home from school.

After multiple surgeries in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, Yousafzai has made an incredible recovery, and is determined to use her prominence to advocate for women’s rights and girls’ education in particular globally.

Since leaving Queen Victoria Hospital in Birmingham, England, where surgeons continued the work of Pakistani neurosurgeon and Lieutenant Colonel Junaid Khan, Yousafzai has traveled widely. She has received numerous awards and considerable recognition from organizations the world over — she was awarded the Mother Teresa Award for Social Justice, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2013. In her native Pakistan, she was awarded the third-highest medal for civilian bravery, and a fund set up in her name has been dedicated to promoting girls’ education around the world.

Perhaps most significantly, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared her birthday, July 12, “Malala 8 harvardindependent.com

Day.” Her speech in the General Assembly was received well, and many hope that the momentum she has generated will continue to make girls’ education a priority topic on the global stage.

The idea that girls’ education is particularly important was not forgotten at Friday’s ceremony. Dr. Paula Johnson ’80 reminded the audience of the significant benefits societies accrue when they educate their girls and women, and her remarks, combined with Yousafzai’s powerful assertion that education is a universal right, reminded the audience how deserving Yousafzai is of this award.

As Harvard Foundation Director Dr. S. Allen Counter noted, Yousafzai is the most recent in an impressive line to have received the Humanitarian Award. The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, founded in 1981 by the late Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes and Harvard’s then-president Derek Bok, has honored exceptional activists and champions of human rights with its Humanitarian Award since its inception.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, and Martin Luther King Sr. are all counted as recipients. What all recipients have in common is that their work has changed the world for the better and inspired others to action. This year’s Awards were the second to be named after Gomes, who was also the long-serving Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the Divinity School and Pusey Minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church. Counter said of the award, “[it] is presented to a person whose work and deeds have served

“Instead of sending guns, send pens.

Instead of sending tanks, send textbooks.

Instead of sending soldiers, send teachers.”

to advance humanity, a person who is a symbol of diversity, inclusion, equal rights, and human rights for all.” Yousafzai, he continued, “[is] a refreshing new voice on the world stage that speaks to the inner core values of gender equality, justice, and individual human rights.”

When Yousafzai took the stage to speak, her voice rang clearly. She began by thanking the University for the honor, and then thanked those whose efforts helped saved her life, including Dr. Khan, who was seated on the stage. She told the story of the events that led to the shooting.

The Taliban had taken over Swat and issued an edict saying girls could no longer attend school. Yet Yousafzai and her friends pushed forward, hiding their books in their clothing so as not to appear as students. “The so-called Taliban were afraid of women’s power,” Yousafzai said, “and of the power of education.” She said of her schoolmates and father, a noted educator and girls’ education activist in his own right, “we did not keep silent. We raised our voice…we raised our voice for the right of education.”

Her determination almost cost Yousafzai her life, but as she explained, education may be the only way to break the circle of violence in her native Pakistan, to free children from child labor, early marriages, sexual victimization, and poverty, and to liberate women around the world. “But dear brothers and sisters,” she said. “We are not here to make a long list of the issues we are facing.

Rather, we are here to find a solution.

And the solution is one, and it is simple.

Education. Education. Education…if you want to see peace in Syria, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan,” she implored the ‘world powers,’ “then instead of sending guns, send pens. Instead of sending tanks, send textbooks. Instead of sending soldiers, send teachers.”

This line in particular drew the crowd to its feet, and the applause continued long after she finished speaking and local sixth-grader Maya Counter presented her with a bouquet, only to be silenced when Dr. Jeffrey Flier, Dean of Harvard Medical School, stood to present an Award of Appreciation to Dr. Khan. Flier described the difficult surgery — the bullet had pierced Yousafzai’s head, neck, and shoulder, and grazed her brain. “[Khan] fought valiantly and well to save Malala’s life that day. Their [the medical team’s] effort and results have been described as matchless,” he said. Khan accepted the award and, making his way back to his seat, laid his hand on Yousafzai’s head, a short prayer of thanks, perhaps, for the life of a young woman and humanitarian who is unafraid to fight for the rights of all women, and who will undoubtedly continue in her work to change the world for the better.

Meghan Brooks ’14 (meghanbrooks@college) is grateful for her education and excited to see what Malala does next.

10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent

News

indy

To Keep from A Norwegian How-To for Sp-Oiling: avoiding the Oil Curse

By MILLY WANG

On Wednesday, September 25th, 2013, His Excellency Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Norway, gave a public address at the Institute of Politics on Norway’s economic success at avoiding “the Oil Curse.” Stoltenberg has served two terms as the Prime Minister and has a background in economics and finance, having worked as a lecturer in economics at the University of Oslo from 1989 to 1990 and as the Minister of Finance from 1996 to 1997. He is a strong supporter of the United Nations and believes in fighting both poverty and global warming together.

The Oil Curse is the term used to refer to the many observed cases of countries that became wealthy from high revenues from natural resources, but eventually faced heavy debts and fell into financial ruin — hence the curse. However, Norway has managed to successfully avoid this curse despite its high revenues from oil and gas, and Prime Minister Stoltenberg was here to share why.

The first graph he showed plotted a country’s economic growth per capita against the percentage wealth that country obtains from natural resources.

There was a negative relationship. But why would more natural resources lead to lower economic growth per capita? This would seem counterintuitive, as more wealth should lead to greater economic growth. The simple answer, as Prime Minister Stoltenberg revealed, is too much spending. Countries who obtain explosive wealth from natural resources often spend too much too quickly. This overheats the economy and productivity decreases, and the country begins to function based on a structure of heavy spending. “This,” he declared, “is known as the Dutch Disease.”

Aptly named after the country in which this very situation happened.

So how can we avoid the oil curse?

Prime Minister Stoltenberg listed three main strategies that Norway adopted.

Strategy one: Keep expenses below revenue. Usually, it is good economic practice to have a balanced budget, as this would promote healthy economic growth. But in Norway, it was better to have an unbalanced budget. The revenue from natural resources was put in a fund, and the government only spent the financial income from that fund — the expected value of the natural real return.

Currently, that return is around 4%, but the government actually spends around 3%, which is less than what they could potentially be spending. This leads to a buildup of a Pension Fund, which has The Harvard Independent • 10.03.13

a 40% investment in bonds, and a 60% investment in equity. They currently invest in more than 7000 companies worldwide and their average ownership in each company is 1.75%.

This is the diversification strategy.

It is, all else equal, better to spread one’s wealth across multiple venues as opposed to just one. This is because if one of these multiple venues perform badly, you will not be as affected by the poor performance as you would if all of your wealth was invested in it. But with diversification, one will never outperform the market. Of course, this is just fine for Norway. Prime Minister Stoltenberg said that their goal is not to outperform the market, but to just do what the market does.

Incidentally enough, because Norway has set guidelines on 40% stock and 60% equity, they must spend money on these despite economic situations. But this played in their favor during the downturn of the economy in 2008. When prices fell, Norway ended up buying more since each dollar now had more buying power and they had a set guideline of how much they had to spend. And now that prices are rising once again, Norway has greatly benefited as the value of the fund increased rather drastically in the past few years.

The key idea to take away from this, as Prime Minister Stoltenberg says, is to not out-spend the revenue from natural resources.

Strategy two: Keep people at work.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg said that the value of labor is far greater than the value of gas and oil. Their current high employment rates, and in particular, a very high female labor employment rate, contributes more to their economy than revenues from gas and oil.

Norway has helped to encourage greater workforce participation, especially amongst females by implementing family programs. Kindergarten starts at the age of 1, allowing for parents to go back to work without having to hire someone to look after their child. Parents are also allowed to take a one-year leave. Fathers are, in fact, granted fourteen weeks of leave to look after their newborn.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg believed that these combined factors have helped to keep both employment and fertility rates high. Norway has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe.

The key idea to take away from this strategy is that the largest contributor to a country’s economy is labor.

Strategy three: Increase productivity.

Over the last few years, Norway has seen a stronger increase in productivity. It has a competitive business sector that is wellrun and efficient, and the state promotes private businesses. Overall, Prime Minister Stoltenberg says that the government has worked hard to create a good business environment.

A very interesting topic that he touched upon when discussing businesses was wealth distribution. It is commonly believed that countries with high incomes will have a high degree of inequality as the vast amount of wealth is actually distributed amongst only a few of the very wealthy. However, as Prime Minister Stoltenberg showed on another graph, there is both high income and a high degree of equality in Norway. Compared to the US, without oil and gas revenue, Norway falls a little below on income, but has higher equality. But with the addition of oil and gas revenue, Norway has higher income than the US, as well as higher equality.

It is with these three strategies, as Prime Minister Stoltenberg said, that Norway managed to turn their oil and gas revenues into a blessing, and not a curse.

Milly Wang ’16 (keqimillywang@college) is sorry her editor thinks she’s so slick.

harvardindependent.com

9

News

A Symposium Not to Forget Alzheimer’s from multiple perspectives.

BY KALYN SAULSBERRY

E

very Sunday morning, Virginia Marshall, a junior in Dunster concentrating in English, hops into a PBHA van and makes the thirty-minute trip to Hebrew SeniorLife Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale. HSL provides retirement communities for seniors throughout Massachusetts, and Marshall spends an hour there each week visiting Molly, a resident who enjoys playing chess and has Alzheimer’s disease. Marshall does this each week as a volunteer with the Alzheimer’s Buddies at Harvard College. There are forty-six volunteers, also known as “Buddies,” in this group, each assigned one person living with Alzheimer’s disease to visit with for an hour each week. The mission of this group is to respond to the “profound isolation and social disengagement experienced by people in the intermediate-to-late stages of Alzheimer’s disease.”

On Saturday, September 28th, the Alzheimer’s Buddies presented an interdisciplinary symposium on Alzheimer’s disease at the First Parish Church of Cambridge. The event was sponsored by Hebrew SeniorLife and hosted by Meredith Vieira, who was the original moderator of The View on ABC. The symposium was attended by a variety of individuals including Harvard undergrads, members of the Cambridge community, and families of individuals who live with Alzheimer’s disease and are served by the efforts of the Alzheimer’s Buddies.

The symposium was designed to allow experts from different fields to speak about their experiences and challenges in addressing Alzheimer’s disease. It opened with words from Jeffrey Robbins, the program advisor for Alzheimer’s Buddies, and Ryan Christ, the founder of Alzheimer’s Buddies. Speakers ranged from geriatricians such as Ruth Kandel, who gave an overview of the disease itself from a medical perspective, to Brendon Boot, an associate neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who showed videos of what happens in the brain when an individual develops Alzheimer’s and explained both the barriers and opportunities to treating the disease, for which there is no cure at the present.

Bruce Price, the chief of neurology at McLean Hospital, discussed the legal matters associated with handling an individual’s affairs and finances after he or she has developed Alzheimer’s.

Mary Moscato, the president of Hebrew SeniorLife Health Care Services and the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center, 10 harvardindependent.com

spoke about changes in healthcare and how these changes affect those with Alzheimer’s and their families.

Among the eight speakers and the host, Vieira, there was a diversity of backgrounds, but all shared the common experience of having their lives touched in some way by Alzheimer’s either by patients they treated or family members they cared or continue to care for. However, one speaker, Michael Ellenbogen, had a more direct relationship with the disease since he developed earlyonset Alzheimer’s when he was just thirtynine. Ellenbogen, five years after his diagnosis, delivered an inspiring speech about his own experiences and resulting career challenges, but he also issued a plea urging the audience to work towards eliminating the stigma of Alzheimer’s.

Following Ellenbogen’s speech, James Creasey spoke about the organization he founded called JiminyWicket, which allows volunteer high school and college students to visit retirement communities and play croquet with individuals living with Alzheimer’s. In contrast to the negative associations of Alzheimer’s disease, Creasey encouraged the audience to understand the disease in a different way: “It’s not just a problem — it’s an opportunity for hugs, for kisses, for smiles.”

The final speaker, Jennifer Carter, the manager of advocacy and community relations at the Alzheimer’s Association, urged the audience to take Alzheimer’s as an opportunity for advocacy and gave important tips to individuals wishing to change the way public policy treats Alzheimer’s disease.

It is not surprising that each of the speakers has dealt with Alzheimer’s in some capacity, since approximately 5.5 million Americans live with this disease today, and it is the sixth leading cause of death in America. With statistics like those, it is likely that everyone has been affected or at least knows someone who has been affected by the disease. As someone who understands the disease from a firsthand perspective because my grandparents live with Alzheimer’s, I was inspired to hear other people’s stories and the progress that is being made to make the lives of people with Alzheimer’s better.

During the intermission, I spoke with an Alzheimer’s Buddy named Tamanna Hossin, a senior in Eliot, who joined the group last spring. Like the rest of the Buddies at the symposium, Hossin donned a shirt that read “Ask Me About My Buddy!”, so I obliged. Hossin told me all about her ninety-two year-old Buddy named Venetia who, Hossin bragged, has an excellent sense of humor. Hossin explained that despite the challenges of building a relationship with someone who has Alzheimer’s, “as long as there’s a smile on her face at the end of the day, it was worth it.”

During this three-hour symposium, speakers and guests alike grappled with the most recent and pressing developments regarding Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is a peculiar disease — it’s not like a cold or the flu that you can take some medicine for and eventually get better. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s itself doesn’t get better. However, last weekend a group of individuals gathered together and formed a community dedicated to ensuring that each person living with Alzheimer’s could be guaranteed to have a few better moments each day.

Kalyn Saulsberry (ksaulsberry@college) was truly inspired by this unforgettable symposium on Alzheimer’s disease.

10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent

Andrew Lin | futures past

Ecumenopoli 101 An exploration of sci-fi planet-spanning behemoth cities and their artistic relation to us.

T

he city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to a thriving population of 106,000[2] or so Cantabrigians and our own fair Harvard College, currently stands as a teeming suburb more or less integrated into the fabric of Boston proper.

Cambridge, however, was not always a paradise resplendent in its indoor plumbing and Pinocchio’s and the bright neon signage of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Indeed, there once were men and women who, after months of sailing, arrived on the virgin shores of the Charles to build houses and churches and schools for ministers. While some of their descendants stayed on to build Boston into the city it is today, others instead forged new paths west, building a constellation of cities dotting the whole of the United States, a sparkling necklace of human civilization linked by tenuous chains of railroad and (a little later) asphalt.

The same familiar process, namely the continual creation of accommodations for the billions of people of the world, has dragged on the world over across centuries and continents. At least on a single-planet scale, all this urbanization and growth ends with the ecumenopolis, a term coined by urban theorist Constantinos A. Doxiadis in 1961 to describe a single universal city. Though Doxiadis’s idea of the ecumenopolis entailed individual urban centers (megalopolises) connected by suburban belts, science fiction and popular culture have since characterized the ecumenopolis as a city whose reach and sheer sprawl literally consumes the entire surface of a planet — Earth in our humble case. This, of course, is an astonishing technological and logistical leap from the gritty, poverty-stricken reality of urbanization in the modern world. Within that present impossibility, however, the artistic role of the ecumenopolis in popular culture enters in as well, for planet cities and their smaller megalopolis cousins have served as creative fuel for some of the most astonishing works of science fiction in the modern popular canon.

Writing in 1942, Isaac Asimov was among the first science fiction authors to conjure up the idea of a planet city with his own Trantor, the hub of the Galactic Empire and center of the Milky Way in his incidentally outstanding Foundation series. A planet city in the most literal sense, Isaac Asimov’s Trantor throngs with a population of some 40 billion, stacked vertically in huge enclosed domes and layers. Trantor as a planet city was more than mere window-dressing as well; Asimov depicts in the Foundation series the collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of space navies and falling planets, and in this role, Trantor was Rome itself, a huge conurbation doomed to fail by its own resistance to change. This idea of an ecumenopolis as the center of a great but doomed empire sounds familiar to any viewers of Star Wars as well, and with good reason: the whole idea of Coruscant, the sparkling planetcity capital of the Galactic Empire, echoes Trantor The Harvard Independent • 10.03.13

almost directly in its scope and function.

The ecumenopoli of science fiction, however, are not merely limited to planets in galaxies far, far away; Earth too is a more than viable setting for future megacities built by and for earth-bound humans. In this category Asimov again is a pioneer, depicting in his sci-fi detective novel The Caves of Steel an Earth of 8 billion (not too far off) in which New York City covers a vast swath of New Jersey and northern Pennsylvania as well, with underground dwellings beneath huge metal domes.

From that initial spark, the examples of Earthbound megacities in science fiction go on and on: the congested megalopolis Los Angeles of Blade Runner, the Mega-Cities of the comic-book series 2000 AD, and the Sprawl in the novels of William Gibson are all salient examples of megacities which, though not ecumenopoli in terms of sheer size, still embody the interconnected and expansive spirit of Doxiadis’s original vision.

It is certainly easy enough to view ecumenopoli as mere flights of sci-fi fancy, as fantasies dreamt up by writers, dreamers, and filmmakers looking to use glitzy neo-Googie architecture to make a quick buck.

Disconcertingly enough, however, the realization of something resembling an ecumenopolis here on Earth may not necessarily be all that remote, what with conurbations such as Tokyo and Mumbai housing well over 20 million people in huge stretches of organized (and disorganized) urban chaos. The urbanization of the world is certainly not limited to the mega-cities of Asia either; in his landmark study Megalopolis, urban planner Jean Gottmann designated the whole of the Northeastern Seaboard as a single titanic megalopolis, with an arm of superhighway and fiberglass flung out all the way from our fair Boston to Washington D.C and containing some 37 million people when the study was first published — namely in 1961.

With hyper-urbanization creeping up behind the collective shoulder of humanity, it is certainly high time to comment on some of the issues with ecumenopoli that most certainly have come up in their various artistic iterations within science fiction. Certainly there are the usual concerns of resource management, waste disposal, and ecological impact that characterize the engineering concerns underlying any massive public works project. Isaac Asimov confronted these issues when describing the huge bloat of resource consumption on Trantor in his description of the thin jugular of the capital of the Galactic Empire, with fleets of merchant ships sending in goods, and waste disposal ships necessarily shipping out the trash. But there are deeper issues as well, lurking artistic problems with the idea of the planet city that indeed have also merited discussion in science fiction. The residents of Asimov’s various caves of steel suffered from extreme agoraphobia (as did Asimov himself in real life), becoming so divested from the very world — the

raw earth, the bright sky — that fed and nurtured humanity for so many years. Works such as 2000 AD employ the ecumenopolis as a means through which to parody the tedium of modern urban planning and pointedly criticize the inevitable divestment of humans from nature when in an all-encompassing urban environment. Even the aesthetics of planet cities in mainstream science fiction seem to capture that same claustrophobia prevalent in the built-up districts of many a downtown; the shimmering video billboards of Blade Runner have long since come to Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, and many other urban intersections.

Within most of these issues, there does run a single, continuous thread: they are extrapolations of present concerns regarding cities today, here and now. In his original presentation of the ecumenopolis, Doxiadis envisioned a universal city in which humanity could fully express its collective potential, a domain representing the best fusion of humanity and machine, with bands of urbanization crisscrossing the Earth – all to be constructed within 150 years from the heady theoretical year of 1968.

As with many of the idealistic urban planning experiments of that era, however, Doxiadis’s ecumenopolis has already come to fruition in an interesting way; the present sprawling suburbs surrounding most major American cities certainly are proof. Our suburbs, along with the slums surrounding some of Doxiadis’s various model cities – disasters in urban planning such as Brasilia, that is – are often hotbeds of socioeconomic instability, enervators of traditional city centers, and exercises in environmentally-unsustainable planning.

Cities individually are marvelous creations, aggregations of people that in and of themselves represent some of the highest human engineering and artistic feats ever achieved. So much of the popularity of massive cities in general and ecumenopoli in particular is derived from their sheer magnificence, of the power of skyscrapers piercing the firmament of alien and not-so-alien worlds, of humanity exulting in its collective capacity to remake the environments in which its individuals teem. The dream of the planet city radiates that same optimism, the same faith in human accomplishment above all else – a mindset certainly in keeping with the era during which it was first conceived. Whether taken to be the literal planet-spanner of Asimov and sci-fi or the hub-andspoke universal city of Doxiadis and starry-eyed urban planners, the ecumenopolis is ultimately here to stay — in both our lives and our minds.

Andrew Lin ’17 (andrewlin@college.harvard.edu) spent a sizable proportion of his FOP trip boring fellow FOPpers with long-winded ruminations on New Urbanism and urban development.

harvardindependent.com

11

Through an indian lens | ADITYA AGRAWAL

Grindin’ I It Up: Making the case for your beloved dance form.

12 harvardindependent.com

t was in the damp, dark recesses of a Quincy suite that I was truly initiated to the US of A. Strobes flared, beats blared and hips swayed: to music — and to second person pelvic thrusts. Grinding, I was told, represented a fleeting cultural phenomenon of young America. For me, however, it has come to represent a material art form encapsulating the quintessence of the American spirit.

Coming from a place as culturally straitjacketed as India, accepting the ‘dance form’ with all its subtle logistics was as much counterintuitive as it was antithetical to the belief systems I grew up internalizing.

Dance in India was an affirmation of the universally accepted assumption that we lived in a sedately demure society — an extension of the still larger assumption that ‘sex’ or indeed intimacy of any form became unbearably unhealthy when it transgressed the bedroom confines. Dance forms had, to them, a molded reserve: the women are expected to be grace incarnate and the men, Hercules represent. Tunes follow by-thebook conventions, as do specific steps. Truly every aspect has a purpose and a function: anything overshooting these bounds is ever so expeditiously excised.

Grinding directly challenges and seeks, unabashedly, to reverse these notions.

It strives to manifest a form of sacred intimacy out on the dance floor and on the street — in what is (arguably) a largely non-sexual context. The extended process of manifestation in a way that obliterates any space for inhibition forms the very reason why I consider it an edifice of art in first place. ‘Grinding’ projects the freewheeling, boisterous character that America possesses. It is, no doubt, the victory of effervescence over stasis, candidness over veils and expression over complacency — overarching qualities that have, for long, been the differentials of America in the world calculus. Grinding is — quite possibly —the first dance form that extracted from the national character these gems and applied them to a fairly healthy form of artistic interaction that could most directly involve two absolute strangers.

My support for grinding extends for reasons far beyond those too. In terms of its concept and mechanism, it appeals ever so gregariously to the entrenched feminist in me. It forms one of the few dance forms where females can claim to be ‘on top’; frozen moments in time when men are essentially reduced to passive participants. Few people will contest the contention that ‘grinding’ forms one of those rare structured activities where the beauty and aesthetics of the activity itself are determined by movements of the female. This stands starkly contrasted against more exalted forms like salsa or ballroom, where the patriarchy power syndrome once again comes into play — feminine presence serves largely to glamourize and supplement what are, in

essence, carefully structured rigmaroles of masculine acrobatics. In fact, such is the vitality of the female role in grinding, that even if masculine shadow were to be eliminated, it could still pass muster as a stand alone act — precisely the reason those delectable ‘twerks’ have become a ubiquitous sensation in America and beyond. (Fun fact: ‘Twerk’ was one of the few words that the Oxford dictionary decided to recognize in its online version on August 27, 2013.)

It is fairly easy to recognize where much of the highbrow disavowal of the dance form might spring form. Grinding is said to have originated in the Caribbean islands and its popularity in mainland United States first took off as a viral phenomenon amongst a small section of the Black population. The dance does not conform to Caucasian, elitist conventions of propriety and sobriety; it refuses to buy into the mold of an intrinsically ‘cultured’ American. Yeats probably encapsulated this white attitude best when he wrote: “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

In fact, dismissal of the dance by mainstream America could be compared to the widespread rejection of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the Zimmerman case by the same sample population. Her credibility was not only discounted but also intensely critiqued for the lack of ‘culture’ in the way she spoke, dressed and even wore her hair.

Much of the spasms of frenetic headshakes at the mentioning of the word itself, thus have a lot more to do with sub-surface cultural friction, than actual opposition to the dance form in itself. This makes it all the more culturally imperative for us to embrace this dance form as a people and as a society.

For all the responses it evokes or all the frowns it provokes, grinding — I am convinced — is a sublime art form that neither assumes nor requires. And you know it is not entirely wrong when coming from a purebred Indian traditionalist. It is the optimal celebration of all that we value in our culture and calls for no less patronage than the Constitution and Big Macs do.

Aditya Agrawal ’17 (adityaagrawal@college. harvard.edu) wishes he could finish the Big Mac in one go and write a delicious sonnet about it.

10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent

MADISON TAYLOR | BEHIND THE SCENES

The process begins — casting a show.

I

t seems that the cast of a show is one of the most important elements in its becoming a popular production. Whether there’s a well-known celebrity playing the lead or a friend in the ensemble, feeling connected to the cast of a show makes us more invested in going to see it. Casting is therefore incredibly important to its success. In the professional world, this process involves a casting agency holding either closed auditions for select actors in consideration for lead roles and/or open auditions to find fresh talent to round out their casts. Here at Harvard, however, our approximately twenty shows that take place each semester are cast through a crazy and wonderful week-long set of festivities known as Common Casting.

Common Casting takes place the first week of each semester. In the month beforehand, a schedule is finalized assigning each show to anywhere from two to four auditions slots throughout the course of the week in a space in one of three theater venues here on campus – the Loeb Drama Center, the Agassiz Theater, and Farkas Hall. Auditions are then held from six p.m. to twelve a.m. every night of the first week of the semester (so much theater!), followed by two days of callback auditions that weekend before the cast lists are finalized. It is a hectic and amazing week that, for me this fall, resulted in lots of amazing theater and very little sleep as I helped hold auditions for two shows. You might be wondering how exactly this audition process works; what do the actors have to do, and how do the directors decide who to cast? Having been on both sides of the production staff’s table in the audition room, I can give you a glimpse into what exactly happens behind the closed door.

When I decided to audition for shows my freshman fall, I remember being extremely nervous. Not only was I overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer number of shows taking place (trying to figure out how to make it to all of their auditions was it’s own adventure!), but I had never auditioned for peers before. Yet I soon discovered that the unique fact that Harvard theater is entirely student run, directed, produced, designed, etc. is a wonderful attribute, because as many students here both act in and staff shows, everyone supports you and can both relate to your nerves and offer you very helpful advice. The whole theater community, newcomers and old-hats alike, comes together to support each other for this The Harvard Independent • 10.03.13

week celebrating all that Harvard theater is and can be. As an actor, the directors want you to succeed and to feel comfortable, and this environment makes auditions not only much less nerve-wracking than I had expected, but fun! All that’s asked of you is to try your best and make choices about how you will approach the character you’re asked to play and stick to them. No preparation of monologues needed or an expectation you’ve already been in twenty professional shows (phew!).

When you enter the audition room, you’re immediately greeted with excited welcomes from the production staff and lots of candy.

After telling you a little bit about the show and the characters, the director will then give you a side (part of a scene from the show) to read — either a monologue to perform by yourself, or a scene to work on with a partner. You then have five to ten minutes to prepare the side and decide how you want to present it before you come back into the audition room and give it your best shot – that’s all there is to it! Using sides for auditions instead of asking actors to come prepared with a monologue is a really great idea, in my opinion, because it both puts everyone on a level playing field in terms of their familiarity with the script, and allows the director to see the actors actually playing the characters in the show instead of a character from whatever play their monologue might have been from. While Common Casting may at first seem a scary or anxiety-provoking event (twenty auditions in one week?) it is truly an exciting time for actors to see all of their theater friends, make new ones, and have fun taking chances with material from some pretty amazing shows. In fact, having spent lots of time on the production side of the table, too, I’d say that the whole process is probably more nerve-wracking for the staff than the actors!

For directors, stage managers, or producers, preparation for common casting begins weeks in advance. You have to choose sides, buy candy (everyone wants to be the audition room with the best snacks!), and figure out how to best explain the plot and characters of your show to the actors walking in the door. Before every audition, the excitement and nervousness of the staff are palpable in the room. We don’t know which actors are going to walk through the door, how they are going to read the sides (will it be like what we imagined in our heads when we read the play on our own?

Will they do something completely new and exciting?), and who will end up in our cast. And every time an actor walks back into the room to read their side, there’s a new wave of excitement — is this the one?

Since I am stage managing and producing shows this semester (more on these roles in a future article), I got to watch so many talented auditions; unassuming people took on larger-than-life roles and blew us away, others threw aside their inhibitions and took chances on characters far outside of their real personalities. This is the beauty of acting: actors are able to adopt completely new personas and breathe life into a character so different from themselves.

By the end of the week, we generally have seen anywhere from forty to one hundred auditions. Then comes the tough part: sifting through all of the notes we’ve taken during auditions, connecting names back to faces we saw, and deciding which actors seemed to best fit the roles. We then invite several actors to come to callback auditions for each role over the weekend to give them another chance to read sides for us, perhaps with new partners, so that we can see which people and relationships between characters bring the show to life. After a week of incredible theater, constantly shifting ideas about what our show can be (often thanks to new possibilities actors present to us through their auditions), and so much excitement, the producers and stage managers give the director their final thoughts as the director makes final decisions on which of the many actors are the best fit for the show.

I had never experienced anything like Common Casting before coming to Harvard, but I’m so glad I’ve had the chance to take part in both sides of such a unique and exciting event. It is a chance to appreciate our peers and their talent and to remind us of the beauty theater brings to our lives.

While just about everyone is quite sleepdeprived after a long week of auditions, I wouldn’t miss a minute of it. A single week brings a whole community together to celebrate doing what we all love — making wonderful art. And having seen the amazing cast lists for all of this semester’s shows, I know it’s going to be a season of theater to remember!

Madi Taylor ’16 (madisontaylor@college.harvard. edu) hopes you’ll check out some shows on campus this semester and come audition during Common Casting in February – everyone is welcome, no experience needed! harvardindependent.com

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Writing: An Art

SEX:

By RAYNOR KUANG

A reflection on writers’ challenges and obligations.

By THEODORA KAY

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riting is a fine art — it’s handcrafted, malleable in its form and content, and easily misinterpreted by each reader, like an empty frame hanging on a wall. You might say that it’s like a cross between calligraphy and painting; it’s time consuming, and requires effort and delicacy. The content on paper is the medium on canvas, either heavy in the lexical choice or light in the story. Writers are easily placed alongside the eccentrics, the crazies, and the mostlikely-to-commit-suicides, primarily because as an art, writing has its own plights to deal with: what to write about, the search for passion or inspiration, and most importantly — writers’ greatest fear — recognition.

In the same way that a painter doesn’t know if the abstract impression of a tree is good enough for a final project, the first trouble with writing is coming up with something distinctive to write about. Yarnspinners, bloggers, students, and even professors — yes, they’re human too — we are all vulnerable to the nasty “writer’s block” bug. The worst part is that it’s not even a seasonal syndrome to look out for like the flu. As writers, we spend more time thinking of new ideas and jotting them on the corners of our texts than we actually spend going through with the completion of a document. At times, we’re bombarded with so many thoughts at once that we don’t know which one is most vital to the story. Nothing ever feels good enough — it either lacks a strong beginning, a memorable ending, or a believable setting.

We should confess that as readers, we like to be drawn into a story. If the genre is to our liking, then reality seems like a distant island. Even when we put the book down, we tend to ruminate on the material we recently read, toying with it in our heads, guessing at the inevitable, and even arguing with ourselves about the possibility of a trilogy. This leads to another writing trouble — passion. As writers, we live, breathe, and search for something heartfelt, adventurous, mysterious, life altering, and above all, nouveau. Not just for us, but primarily for the readers. If the material doesn’t appeal to the person scribbling it, how would it appeal to the person reading it? We try to put a bit of ourselves — our thoughts, our memories, our experiences, and even our emotions — into what we write about. Think of the final written product as a tangible reverberation of the writer’s mind. The 14 harvardindependent.com

Don Jon has its turn offs, but it hits the climax.

reason why certain readers appreciate certain writers is primarily due to the level of passion that the writers place in their works, which appeal to the reader and thus create this silent and intimate communication between the individual literally “reading” the writer’s mind.

However, creating that sort of connection is another trouble for writers to overcome —recognition. As writers, we tend to think about the readers rather than about ourselves. What do they like to read? Why do they like reading it? Today’s public opinion on writers makes the majority of us feel wasteful even before we write our first work. We are somehow indirectly convinced that if a piece of writing doesn’t make waves amongst the masses, it isn’t valid writing. They say that all of us are exceptional because our minds contain memories and knowledge that no other being on the planet has access to. And yet, we desperately try to alter our styles, our genres, and even the formats that we feel most comfortable writing in for the sake of appealing to a hundred fans rather than to a few of them. So, we tend to compare our works to those of the past, to learn from the life experiences of writers long dead and gone, to copy their footsteps and mimic the tones and styles they wrote in, instead of searching for something that expresses our own rareness.

As writers, we forget that we are the vessels of finding and amplifying ideas in a lexical format. We should care and write about what we want the public to know.

If a few writers don’t like what we write or how we write it, it’s their loss — you can’t please everybody. It goes unnoticed, but slowly and gradually we have turned our art into a routine that lacks ardor and imagination. So by the end of the day, we are just the encyclopedias, thesauri, dictionaries, and reference texts for the public. Our talents go unrecognized — you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all — and our voices stay silent within the molded scent of paper and the inaccessible pixels of our computer screens.

Theodora Kay ’14 (kay@fas) hopes this was something you wanted to read.

Now that I’ve got your attention — to quote the Simpsons — let’s talk about Don Jon. These days it seems like sex is everywhere, on TV and the silver screen, in supermarket tabloids and cringeworthy Twilight fanfics. Sex seems like the one guaranteed way to catch attention, regardless of content quality.

Don Jon tackles that omnipresence head on, delighting in the flashy, indulgent ways of sex and all its appeals. The directorial debut of rising star Joseph Gordon-Levitt opens with a montage of svelte women in popular culture, ranging from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to grainy workout videos, and then moves to a blunt confession by protagonist Don Jon about that most enjoyable example of sex in media — pornography.

Jon (as played with coarse Jersey accent by Gordon-Levitt), a true lothario, takes his Don appellation from his sexual conquests, and yet he professes to liking porn far more. That interest alternates between a comic habit — at one point Jon masturbates immediately after having sex with a woman — and a chilling addiction, with Jon unconvincingly protesting “It’s not that I can’t stop.”

The real fun in Don Jon is how fully it embraces porn and sex as typical, even going to hyperbolic efforts to do so. Every time Jon hooks up at the nightclub, the soundtrack knowingly drops the bass.

The ringing sound of Jon’s laptop powering up presages pornhub. com and 360p videos (for the interested, yes: there are boobs). These references play like a joke, but the movie is making a real satirical statement about porn’s fetishized idealism. Jon, for example, is put into disbelief when told the people in porn are just pretending.

Porn isn’t alone under Don Jon’s microscope, though. Even more than nudity, Don Jon is replete with jabs at the romantic trope.

When Jon’s counterpart Barbara Sugarman (the beautifully cast Scarlett Johansson) walks onto their first date, she does so slo-mo, sultry hips sashaying, luscious locks a-bouncing, strings music in full pull. Barbara’s own addiction is the romance movie, which Don Jon turns into the Hollywood pastiche Special Someone, a movie Jon cynically calls the “pretty woman, pretty man, love at first sight” tale. The irony drips when Jon calls Barbara “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen” and again when he describes “f—ing — I mean, ‘making love’.”

It’s clear that Gordon-Levitt has a thesis in his direction of Don Jon, with definitely elaborated themes. Fortunately, Gordon-Levitt makes better use of his sexual and romantic implications than to merely attack them. The director undermines the tropes by subverting them. Jon cuts a noticeable arc of maturation during the movie, but by the unexpected route.

Despite Gordon-Levitt’s lofty goals, however, his amateurism is evident. When I say Jon noticeably matures, it’s in cherry-picked scenes with little continuity. For a film otherwise enjoyably devoid of the technique, subtlety could be made to good use. Furthermore, Don Jon ends unsatisfyingly, falling into its own censures. The movie may mean to suggest happiness doesn’t depend on certain preconceptions, but a concluding shot of sunlight streaming through curtains makes the previous totality of the movie feel worthless.

The whole message risks adulteration; ironic clichés are still clichés.

Nevertheless, Gordon-Levitt’s freshman effort is worth the watch.

Don Jon approaches the introspective, but remains an entertaining story of a man and his porn. The movie had moments of genuine humor and interest that kept me watching despite an eventually predictable plot. For being willing to challenge tropes, and in a loud, brash way, the director should be applauded.

But maybe it’s best to let Gordon-Levitt himself explain why to watch the movie. When asked the same on a reddit AMA (in haiku!), Gordon-Levitt commented: “fap fap fap fap fap / fap fap fap fap fap fap fap / fap fap fap fap fap” Raynor Kuang ’17 (raynorkuang@college.harvard.edu) thinks that porn is a totally normal, natural habit that he would of course never engage in.

10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent

Sports

indy

Crimson Crushes Competitors

Men’s varsity water polo secures three wins in one weekend.

By DOMINIQUE LUONGO

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alking into the Blodgett Pool, I was overcome with the potent (and by that I mean completely overpowering) smell of chlorine, stale water, and eventual victory. Walking down the steep staircase to sit in the bleachers, I was entertained by loud shouts of “SHOT CLOCK” and the intense roar of twelve athletes swimming as fast as they could into position in front of the goal.

If you haven’t been to a water polo game, I highly recommend it. Water polo games are extremely fast paced — having all of the fierceness of a football game in an hour match.

There is something quite captivating about watching a water polo game: they can be brutal with players seemingly trying to drown one another every time the referee turns his head. Don’t let the little bows tied under the chins of the players fool you.

They mean business when they dive into the pool.

Harvard dominated in their match against Connecticut College on Saturday afternoon, easily securing a 16-3 victory that started with an 8-1 lead in the first period, resulting in Connecticut’s coach shouting “You suck!” at his already downtrodden team.

Photo by Dominique Luongo

The Harvard Independent • 10.03.13

In the second period, Harvard senior attacker William Roller, Harvard freshman attacker Viktor Wrobel, and Harvard sophomore attacker Austen Novis all scored, solidifying Harvard’s lead over Connecticut.

In a dramatic turn of events, Harvard junior utility Max Murphy stole the ball from Connecticut’s Henry McMillan, securing the ball for Harvard’s sophomore attacker Christopher Miao to score with two minutes and five seconds left in the third period.

With half of a minute left in the third period, a shot by Connecticut was blocked and Harvard was able to regain control of the ball, allowing sophomore attacker Blake Lee to score with 14 seconds left in the third period.

Connecticut scored early in the forth period with six minutes and 58 seconds left to the game. Harvard’s Wrobel scored with five minutes and 29 seconds left to the game, destroying any hope Connecticut had of gaining momentum.

With their seemingly effortless victory over Connecticut, Harvard set themselves up as a force to be reckoned with later that night, pulling out a 6-5 victory over Ivy-League competitor Brown.

Attendance to Harvard’s rivalry water polo game against nearby college MIT offered undergraduate students the possibility of earning student reward points and obtaining a free Department of Harvard Athletics t-shirt.

Even with the outright bribery temptation offered by Harvard College, attendance to the game was pitifully low on Harvard’s end, as it seemed that more fans turned out to support MIT’s Beavers than the Crimson.

Entering into their third game of the weekend undefeated, Harvard seemed confident, but MIT proved to be competitive in the first period, and with both teams’ scores staying relatively neck and neck, neither was able to take a definitive lead early in the match.

After MIT scored with 6:13 left in the first period, Harvard sophomore Lee stole the ball and scored with 4:52 still on the clock.

MIT tried to immediately score with 4:33 left in the period, but the shot was blocked by Harvard’s sophomore goalie Colin Woolway.

After Harvard freshman attacker Joey Colton attempted to score with 57 seconds left in the period, MIT was able to recover the ball, enabling

MIT’s defender Zach Churukian to score with 45 seconds left to the period.

In the second period, MIT’s Ory Tasman was able to score the first goal of the period with 6:08 left on the clock. Harvard’s Wrobel was able to return the favor with 5:45 seconds left on the clock.

Harvard sophomore 2-meter defender Ben Zepfel was able to block a shot attempt by MIT and Harvard’s Colton was able to score with 4:17 left to the period.

A successful penalty shot by MIT with 3:09 left to the first half of the game kept the game close at 5-4, but two shots scored by Harvard’s Lee and Wrobel brought the Crimson to a solid 7-4 lead at the halfway point of the game.

MIT was able to gain some energy in the third period, with MIT’s Churukian scoring within a minute of the beginning of the period and then using this energy managed to score two subsequent goals to tie the game up.

In a dazzling display of ability, Harvard’s freshman attacker Viktor Wrobel was able to score twice within roughly thirty seconds, putting Harvard two points ahead of MIT. It was one of the many highlights of Wrobel’s performance on the water polo team; he performed splendidly and seems poised to help lead the Crimson to many future water polo victories in this season and in upcoming years.

In the forth period, MIT was able to score three times, twice by utility Kale Rogers and once by defender Jack Clark. Harvard’s Wrobel, Zepfel, and sophomore attacker Noah Harrison were each able to score, preserving the Crimson’s lead over MIT. With 56 seconds left to the game, Zepfel was able to score one final time for the Crimson, seizing a goal left wide open when MIT goalie Ian Zaun abandoned his position.

With three consecutive home wins this weekend, the Crimson is looking very strong for this upcoming season and guarantees exciting games.

Try to make it out for the next one — trust me, you won’t regret it.

Dominique Luongo ’17 (dominiqueluongo@ college) is an admitted fangirl.

harvardindependent.com

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Sports

Wiping the Ground with Brown Harvard opens the Ivy League with a win.

By SHAQUILLA HARRIGAN

T

he Harvard Crimson isn’t playing any games (well, except for some excellent football) when it comes to defeating its opponents. Coming off of a 42-20 win against San Diego in its season opener in San Diego on September 21st, the Crimson was ready to take on Brown on Saturday, September 28th.

Droves of students, faculty, parents, and alumni went to Harvard Stadium to cheer on the football team during their 7:30 home opener against Brown. Under the bright stadium lights the Crimson (affectionately known as “The Gold Pants”) came in like the sandman and put Brown to sleep with an impressive 41-23 win in their first Ivy League tournament. Saturday also served as a homecoming for Conner Hempel ‘15 as he made his home-field debut as quarterback.

Despite Brown scoring two touchdowns in the first quarter of the game, the Crimson handily answered Brown by scoring four touchdowns in a row during the second quarter, taking the game to 28-13. Conner Hempel scored the first touchdown with a one yard run. Two of the next touchdowns were scored by running back Paul Stanton, Jr. ‘16 with one yard and sixteen yard runs. Defensive back Jaron Wilson ‘14 scored a third touchdown with a fifty-one yard interception return.

During half time, the Harvard Band lightened the mood of Harvard’s pounding of Brown. The band’s performance centered on Harvard’s recent capital campaign launch. As they were playing music, two members carried a giant 6.5 billion dollar check.

Post musical interlude, the Crimson was ready to resume its pummeling of Brown. Early in the third quarter kicker David Mothander ‘14 scores three more points at the start of the third quarter with a 36-yard kick. After Brown made another touchdown to bring their score to 20, wide receiver Ricky Zorn ‘15 received a sixty-seven yard pass from Hempel for another touchdown. Mothander’s kick was good, giving Harvard the extra point.

In the last five minutes of the game, the Crimson closed the game with a final score of 41-23 thanks to another one of Mothander’s 36yard kicks. Saturday’s win not only continued Harvard’s thirteen-year streak of winning home openers, but it was also a good kick-off to head coach Tim Murphy’s twentieth year at the helm

of Harvard football.

Game standouts include Hempel, who finished the game with 16 completed passes and 296 yards. Other highlights of the game include linebacker Eric Medes’ 16 who had the most tackles, coming in with eight and a half. Defensive tackle Nnamdi Obukwelu’ 14 recovered a fumble to help the Crimson maintain passion. Stanton led the Crimson squad with the most number of running yards, coming in at 91 yards, while Zorn had the most number of receiving yards, coming in at 112 yards.

The Crimson as a whole had 296 passing yards and 155 rushing yards. Currently, Harvard is tied at number one with Yale in the Ivy League Standings. In other Ivy League news, Zach Hodges ‘15 and Mothander both received Ivy League awards this week. Hodges won “Defensive Player of the Week.” Mothander snagged “Special Teams Player of the Week.” In the Brown game, Hodges made four tackles, including one sack.

Mothander holds the Harvard record for scoring as a kicker and is 5th in Ivy League standings.

Next week Harvard hits the road to take on Holy Cross at 1:00 p.m. Harvard’s next home game is October 19th against Lafayette at 1:00 p.m.

Shaquilla Harrigan ‘16 (sharrigan01@college) thinks gold pants look tacky on anyone but the men of the Harvard football team.

Photos by Shaquilla Harrigan

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10.03.13 • The Harvard Independent