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IL PRIMARY VOTER REGISTRATION GUIDE

FEBRUARY 26, 2020 EIGHTH WEEK VOL. 132, ISSUE 17

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JEREMY LINDENFELD

Native Scholar: Many Suffer from

State’s Attorney Vows to Meet Family

“Profound Loneliness” of Monogamy

of Former Student Charles Thomas

TallBear grew up on the Flandreau Santee Sioux reservation in South Dakota and in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, according to her biography on her website. She is also a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Environment, a position awarded to her by the Canadian government, and writes a blog titled “The Critical Polyamorist.”

During a town hall at the Institute of Politics on Thursday, February 20, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx agreed to meet with the family of Charles Soji Thomas, the University of Chicago student who was shot by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) in April 2018 while experiencing a mental health crisis. Thomas is currently being held in Cook County Jail awaiting trial.

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GREY CITY: ALUM, PRINCETON PROFESSOR TRIES TO UPROOT “TORTURE TREE” PAGE 17

VIEWPOINTS: STEM MAJORS ALSO DESERVE TO STUDY ABROAD PAGE 15

ARTS: MAYBE THE REAL GODOT WAS THE FRIENDS WE MADE WHILE WE WAITED

Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

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Uncommon Interview: UChicago’s First Cyborg it to pay for things and stuff. I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” Originally, I got it so I could put my UCID on it, but the school won’t let me do that. So I use it for other things—like if I scan it with my phone, it goes to my website.... I can also put my CTA [pass] on it, and it takes a little bit of hacking, but I can pay for things with it. CM: Was this talk at UChicago? JF: It was [at] the lab I work at...the Human Computer Integration Lab with [assistant professor of computer science] Pedro Lopes.

Fourth-year Jersey Fonseca shows off his implantation, which he used to open his website on his phone. ALICE CHENG By ALICE CHENG Senior News Reporter Fourth-year Jersey Fonseca, a computer science major with a specialization in human-computer interaction, installed a microchip inside his hand on January 26. Following the implantation, Fonseca intended to host an event, which he promoted on Facebook, where he would demonstrate the microchip’s function: to allow him to tap into the Regenstein Library or the CTA, by coding his cards or other functions to the chip. Ultimately, while 245 people expressed interest on Facebook, the event never went through, but Fonseca still has the implantation. The Maroon sat down with Fonseca to talk with him about becoming a cyborg. Chicago Maroon: Why exactly do you call yourself the first UChicago cyborg? Jersey Fonseca: Because there’s this little microchip in my hand. [Fonseca shows his hand] It was inserted through a needle through this little scar that’s still healing. CM: What was the original purpose for the microchip? JF: I went to this talk and there’s this community of people called biohackers and I learned about this specific microchip.... It’s pretty popular in Sweden and they put their transit passes on it and use

[Editor’s note: Lopes and the Human Computer Integration Lab were not involved in Fonseca’s idea to implant the microchip.] CM: What was the process of implantation like, and how much did it cost? JF: It costs like 60 bucks. [The implantation] comes with the chip itself, inside of a sterilized needle. It comes with gloves and gauze and all the things you would need. [The process] was pretty painful, more painful than they said it’d be. They said it would be like drawing blood. CM: It must have been a really big needle. JF: It was pretty terrifying. They recommend you go to a body piercer or like a doctor to do it, but I got my premed friend to do it. CM: This isn’t something you can just buy off of Amazon, is it? JF: You can. It’s from this company—I don’t like their name—but the company’s called Dangerous Things. I guess they’re appealing to a very specific demographic. CM: Were you worried about any health hazards associated with it? JF: It’s like the same type of microchips you put in like your pets. In terms of how my body would react, I knew that would be fine. The part I was most worried about is getting infected, because we did this in my dirty room.... It’s been fine thus far and I was worried it would hurt, but I can’t really tell that it’s there or feel it unless I’m going like this. [Flexes hand]

CM: How did you exactly decide where to put the chip? Are there any other places people typically put a microchip if they were to use it? JF: There’s also your forearm, but I just thought this was the most convenient way to go through my day-to-day. Also, the orientation is really important, so if I have to turn to like 70 degrees with my forearm, it’s a lot harder than just using my hand. CM: How does the mechanism work, exactly? Is it different depending on what you’re using it for? JF: So you can encode multiple different types of information [onto the chip]. You can code a URL and a serial number that’ll tap onto the CTA, but you can’t have two serial numbers [coded onto it] at the same time, so I can’t have my UChicago ID and my CTA [pass] at the same time. I would have to choose, and switch off between them, and I could write to it from over the air. CM: I just want to be clear on the premed friend. Was she just a premed? Did she have any experience? JF: So, even worse. She used to be premed. [laughs] She used to inject mice and stuff. Okay. She wasn’t totally down for it, but I ended up convincing her. She’s like my best friend. CM: How long do you think you’ll be using the [microchip] for? JF: Theoretically, when I graduate and I have my own place, I could get a lock that I could make compatible with this. If I have a car I could start it with this, a modern car, so: until death do us part. CM: What is the maximum capacity for [your microchip]? Is it one URL, one serial number, and that’s it? JF: Technically I could have two because this chip is twice the size of some of the others [on the market]...they have because there’s two frequencies...125 kilohertz and 13 point something. And those are just the two most popular, widely distributed throughout the world. So I have both and theoretically, I can have a URL and two serial numbers.... I can’t have two 125 kilohertz [frequencies in

the chip], but I can have one 125 and a 13 kilohertz. Imagine they’re like two different rooms and I could put one in each room, but I can’t put two in one room. CM: Is how the signal works similar to how Bluetooth works, or is it completely different? JF: It is [completely different]. What happens with [the microchip] is when this enters a magnetic field, which is constantly being emitted by the receivers that you tap your card onto, once that enters that signal and detects, it sends over whatever data is in it. That’s how radio frequency identification works. CM: How do you encode [the radio frequency] into your microchip? JF: There’s actually a bunch of apps for this. Can I show you? It’s literally called NFC tools.... I could just put in whatever I want to write to it. And the same way I can read by putting things up to it, I can write to it. CM: Do you foresee a future where you might want to alter your body even more? JF: Oh yeah, for sure. I definitely want more. I’ve been reading a lot about other cyborgs. I read about this guy who has a hotspot in his leg. It’s very sick, but then I looked at it, and it’s like this huge block and I was like, “Oh…I don’t want that.” There’s this other guy...he has an antenna coming out of his head because he was color blind, and depending on the color that the camera from the antenna sees, [the antenna] sends some type of signal that he can use to decipher color. I wouldn’t do anything that extreme unless it was pretty tiny and discrete. [There are] other [implantations] I was thinking of getting that sound kind of dumb, but [there’s] one that if you hover over a magnet, it’ll light up. I think that’d be pretty cool, but it’s totally impractical. It serves no purpose at all. Other ones I am seriously considering [are] like [ones that deal with] temperature and blood level. Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

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CPD Holds First Series of Community Conversations Since Consent Decree By BEZA DESTA News Reporter The Chicago Police Department (CPD) held a series of community talks at four different places around the city throughout the week of February 3, 2020. The Maroon attended the second event, held at Kennedy-King College last Wednesday. This is the first time that the CPD is holding talks promising reforms for its relationship with the community while being under the consent decree. The consent decree, approved by a federal judge on January 31, 2019, sets out

a detailed plan for reforms that must be implemented by the City of Chicago and CPD. The federal court will determine whether the City and CPD are following the requirements of the consent decree, ensuring that the CPD follows through with the promises it makes to the community. Split into two sessions, the meeting consisted of 14 table topics that each had a host, a documenter, and a policy analyst. Participants were prompted to join the table with the policy topic they most resonated with and discuss their concerns, needs and hopes for their community’s relationship with CPD.

The tables for Prohibition of Sexual Misconduct and Officer-Involved Death and Shooting Investigation were popular among participants. The second session contained topics suggested by participants apart from those provided by the organizers. Such topics included how to deal with veterans with mental health episodes, how police service young people experiencing homelessness, and how to take politics out of policing. “It is a good start; I am impressed with how the Chicago Police Department seems to be excited about it,” Crista Nowell said. However, Nowell,

a resident of Chicago for 59 years, also expressed concern, saying, “I am not impressed with the fact that these are supposed to be meetings that are inclusive of the community that is doing work around the consent decree and is still CPD–led.” Talking about one of the table topics she participated in, Nowell noted the absence of individuals from the transgender community at the Interactions with the Transgender Community table. Moving forward, Nowell said, “We are going to be there to make sure that they don’t break the promises and [that] this consent decree is successful.”

Visiting Professor Criticizes “Compulsory Monogamy” as a Creation of the “Settler-Colonial System” at Harper Lecture By CHLOE BRETTMANN News Reporter CONTINUED FROM COVER

TallBear began her lecture by dedicating her talk to “the many humans suffering [from] profound loneliness within their monogamous relationships, or due to other deprivation stemming from a compulsory monogamy structure.” The term compulsory monogamy refers to both social norms surrounding monogamy as well as the economic and logistical benefits of state-sanctioned marriage. TallBear’s lecture dove into the origins of these notions and their societal and historical consequences, especially for indigenous peoples whose relations before settler colonialism did not follow traditional monogamy. TallBear uses the term “relations” to refer to both relationships between humans and the relationships humans have with the environment and animals, among other things. “Historically, it has been straight white men, in general, [who are] at the helm of the religious, state, and scientific institutions. They largely assume that monogamy is a natural marker of civili-

zational and evolutionary advancement,” TallBear said. TallBear and her contemporaries challenge these notions, of monogamy as a natural maker of civilizational advancement, by putting science in conversation with social theory. “Co-production, or co-constitution, are social construction theories that work to not underplay materiality’s role in our reality,” TallBear explained. “The natural orders that science describes are co-produced with the culture or society that is doing the observing,” TallBear said. Throughout her lecture, TallBear illustrated how oppressive treatment of indigenous peoples by the U.S. and Canadian governments forcibly reshaped the ways indigenous people relate to each other and “more than humans,” which TallBear describes as entities such as “land, water, and other than human relatives.” Settler states and the construct of compulsory monogamy, TallBear said, “violently shape and suppress the sexual realities and relationships of indigenous life.” TallBear asks “if decolonized rela-

tionship forms cannot be exactly what our ancestors relationships forms were, can they be other than predicted on settler-imposed compulsory monogamy and nuclear family forms?” TallBear emphasized that monogamous relationships are closely linked with private property and the imposition of settler laws. “All of this was imposed to disrupt or steal indigenous relations,” TallBear added. TallBear also spoke openly about her own experience with monogamy and family. “Being married, squeezing myself into the box of a normative marriage, is the hardest thing I have done,” TallBear said. Despite ending her intimate relationship with her husband, TallBear remains legally married. “We have never legally divorced. I don’t care about the legalities. I don’t plan on marrying again. And we are both paperwork procrastinators,” TallBear joked. However, the fact that she remains in a legal marriage paints a telling picture about the benefits of state-sanctioned marriage, she added. “Perhaps we also stay legally married because, within the settler-colonial sys-

tem, state-sanctioned marriage, whether secular or ceremonial, provides benefits that make it easier to sustain kinship networks,” TallBear said, adding that “this was of course the point of its imposition: to support some family forms and to undercut others.” TallBear also referenced same-sex couples and their fight for marriage rights to explain why the right to legal marriage is so attractive. “Legal marriage facilitates health care privileges, next-of-kin rights, immigration [benefits], tax benefits, and child custody arrangements. These are reasons why same-sex couples have pushed hard for state-sanctioned marriage,” TallBear said. However, TallBear noted she would rather see these benefits “untethered” from the legalities of monogamy, rather than simply expanded to include a more diverse definition of marriage. TallBear finished her lecture by telling the audience, “May your networks of love and relations be many, and not caged within settler-colonial norms of rapacious individualism, hierarchies of life, and ownership of land, water, bodies, and desires.”

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UChicago Candidate Support Groups Reflect on Iowa Caucus By CAROLINE KUBZANSKY Managing Editor–elect Four Maroon reporters covered both the caucuses and the final weekend preceding them as embedded reporters with UChicago’s three major student groups supporting candidates: UChicago for Bernie Sanders, UChicago for Pete Buttigieg, and UChicago for Elizabeth Warren. On caucus night itself, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (A.B. ’64) and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg took 26.1 and 26.2 percent of state delegate equivalents or SDEs, respectively. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren took third place with 18 percent of SDEs. SDEs are the proportional number of delegates a candidate receives from each caucus location, and are often considered the best measure of a campaign’s strength. Two other UChicago alumni also competed in the caucuses: Amy Klobuchar

(J.D. ’85) took 12.3 percent of SDEs and Joe Walsh (M.P.P. ’91) took 1.1 percent of Republican SDEs in a long-shot bid to challenge President Donald Trump. This year’s caucuses were fraught: A bungled last statewide poll before the caucuses left campaigns, supporters, and caucus-goers without a projection for who would win Iowa; and caucus officials faced difficulties using the app meant to collect and tabulate local caucus results, which delayed a full set of outcomes for days. At one point, the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) had to retract a batch of results due to an error that showed Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer having more support than they actually had. The IDP released 100 percent of the results on February 6, three days after Iowans caucused. As of February 10, the Associated Press said it was still unable to declare a winner, and the Buttigieg and Sanders campaigns requested partial re-canvass-

es on Monday. Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Party, also called for a re-canvass on February 5. Electoral chaos notwithstanding, UChicago for Warren is planning to build its support on Warren’s third-place finish ahead of the March 17 Illinois primary, where 184 delegates to the Democratic National Convention are up for grabs. “We plan on continuing to expand our grassroots support here at UChicago and collaborate with the Illinois for Warren team on the ground to ensure that we win the primary,” organizer and third-year Celia Hoffman said. Buttigieg exceeded his poll projections in Iowa, garnering 26.2 percent of support when he had been predicted, in the most recently published Iowa poll from January, to only take 16 percent of likely caucus-goers. “After a successful Iowa caucus, we plan on expanding our organizing on campus— putting on phone banks and canvasses, es-

pecially ahead of the Illinois primary later this spring,” second-year organizer Zander Arnao said. UChicago for Bernie, which brought about 130 student volunteers to Iowa for the weekend before the caucuses, has already organized a meeting to discuss their next steps. Organizers of UChicago for Bernie have asked for every member of their mailing list to commit to canvassing one hour each week until the primary. “With our experience from Iowa, UChicago for Bernie is excited to double down on our efforts to win the Illinois primary with near-daily canvassing, phone banking, and other events on and off campus. We’re also continuing to organize with students from around the region—on February 19, the first day of early voting in Chicago, we’re convening a large group of students to vote together for Bernie downtown,” Kirsten “Kit” Ginzky (A.B. ’15) said.

CBA Coalition Stages Sit-in at Mayor’s Office, Secures Meeting With City Staff By ALEXIS FLORENCE Senior News Reporter Members of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) Coalition protested Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration’s draft Woodlawn Affordable Housing Preservation Ordinance at City Hall on February 11. The CBA Coalition opposes the ordinance because they believe it would not do enough to protect affordable housing in the community. After about an hour and a half of chanting from community members for affordable housing, City officials brought Coalition members to the mayor’s office to discuss their concerns. Ultimately, mayoral staff agreed to a formal meeting with the CBA Coalition ahead of the draft ordinance’s introduction to City Council. The group stayed in front of the mayor’s office for five hours after the announcement of a meeting, according to CBA Coalition member Laurel Chen, who is also a member of UChicago Against

Displacement. In a written statement, the mayor’s office said, “We are committed to ongoing discussions with these stakeholders to make sure the concerns of the community are reflected in any affordable housing or economic development solutions for Woodlawn, while ensuring that there are no unintended consequences for the community.” However, Alex Goldenberg, a CBA Coalition member with Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), was not enthusiastic about the prospect of another meeting. “More meetings with staffers is nothing to celebrate,” Goldenberg said to the crowd. “They’ve known exactly what we want for three years.… What we’re doing matters. We are forcing them to address our concerns, they’re not moving the way we want them to move yet, so we’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing.” Patricia Hightower, a longtime Woodlawn resident and CBA Coalition member, shared the group’s concerns with what she

and coalition members see as a lackluster draft ordinance, from the City of Chicago Department of Housing and Department of Planning and Development. Hightower told the crowd that the City needs to commit to an ordinance that will address housing concerns in neighborhoods surrounding Woodlawn, set aside 30 percent of new development for affordable housing, and meet the other main requirements of the CBA housing ordinance that was introduced in July 2019 by 20th Ward Alderman Jeanette Taylor and Fifth Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston. “We know what we deserve. We’re not going to get pushed out by these developers,” Hightower said. Taylor showed up to greet and hug her constituents at the event. She helped to facilitate the meeting between CBA Coalition members and the mayor’s office, and reiterated that she will not vote for an ordinance that her constituents do not support. “We’ve been given some points, but we have not gotten the details of the or-

dinance they’re introducing.… I don’t have the ordinance. I have a PowerPoint presentation that hits the points of some of the things that came from the CBA [Housing Ordinance], and the CBA Coalition wants the details,” Taylor said to members of the press. In addition to Taylor, 25th Ward Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez and 49th Ward Alderman Maria Hadden, both members of the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estates, spoke to the crowd in support of their efforts. “They [the developers] have been writing the laws for way too long. This is our time.… Let’s make sure that we support the Obama Community Benefits Agreement and we’re gonna fight tooth and nail in every single community,” Sigcho-Lopez said. Goldenberg told the press the sit-in is the beginning of more actions from the CBA Coalition ahead of the introduction of the City proposal. The group is also hoping to rally more aldermen in support of the CBA Housing Ordinance.

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Sun-Photographing Telescope Could Help Detect Solar Flares By PEYTON JEFFERSON Senior News Reporter According to a UChicago researcher, the newly operational Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, on Hawaii’s Haleakalā mountain, might help save the world from the sun’s solar flares. Last month, the telescope, which was planned by a committee headed by University of Chicago solar scientist Professor Emeritus Eugene Parker, revealed the world’s most detailed, high resolution images of the sun’s surface. The telescope’s ability to take coronagraph pictures—pictures very close to the sun—is a unique feature that will help enable it to map the magnetic fields within the sun’s corona, the space where solar eruptions occur, that impact our life on Earth. The Inouye Telescope is the largest, most powerful solar telescope in the world. At 13 feet wide, it collects seven times more sunlight than any other solar telescope, allowing it to produce the clearest, most high-resolution images of our sun ever taken. Named after the late Hawaiian senator David Inouye, planning for the telescope began about three decades ago, but construction did not begin until 2010. Its first solar images were taken in late 2019. The telescope has been very useful to Robert Rosner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Chicago. Rosner is a theoretical physicist. Much of his time is spent using mathematics to develop and refine theories on the laws that govern nature: what leads to what, and why. The sun is a great playground for this, as it gives off the energy that makes life possible on this planet, but it also has its dangers and nega-

tive effects on Earth. “On the surface of the sun there are energetic events,” Rosner told the Maroon in an interview. “They are akin to explosions; they’re called solar flares. They release enormous amounts of energy, some of the energy comes out in very energetic particles (so electrons, protons, neutrons), and some of them come streaming down to the surface of the sun, and others come right at us [on Earth].” Solar flares do two things. The first is that these energy particles, carried by the solar wind, can hit satellites, severely damaging them. “There’s an enormous amount of mass in [the particles],” Rosner said. “When they hit satellites, they can destroy them. Typically, the satellites that we rely on, for example geostationary satellites, are outside of the magnetosphere [a protective shield around the Earth]. They are completely naked in a sense. And unless we do something, they will get destroyed. That’s one thing that can happen.” The second has just as much of a negative impact. “The other thing that can happen is that all of this mass hits the magnetosphere, and the entire magnetosphere sort of shakes,” Rosner said. “That induces currents on the surface of our Earth, in particular, the electric grids. These currents basically destroy the grid.” On March 10, 1989, there was an event just like this. A large mass solar flare ejection hit Earth’s magnetosphere and it took down the grid in Quebec. The entire Canadian province had no electricity for about six hours. Similarly, in 1859, there was a big solar event that took down the telegraph systems in both North America and Europe. While the electricity may return shortly,

A photo of the Sun taken by Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. these events often blow out any transformers, machines that transfer electric energy from one circuit to another, in the area— causing millions to be without power for weeks on end. “How much warning do we have? We have 12 minutes,” Rosner said. “That’s all we have, 12 minutes. In 12 minutes we have to now turn off all of the satellites. So the obvious thing is that you would like to have a little bit more warning.” This is where the Inouye Solar Telescope and its high-resolution sun images come into play. “What we’d like to do is study the precursors to these events,” Rosner said. “Studying [the images], we can understand what leads to little flares, what leads to somewhat bigger flares, until you get to the ones that really matter. And what we’re really interested in is ultimately being able to predict when the really big flares will happen.” “The satellite people right now have 12

COURTESY OF NSO

minutes,” he added. “They would love to have an hour. They would be overjoyed to have an hour.” The Inouye Telescope is not the only new technology that will benefit this project. On February 10 of this year, the European Space Agency launched a satellite called the Solar Orbiter. Its main goal will be to get close to the sun, and then push itself out and above the level plane on which most objects in our solar system sit. By sitting higher than all other satellites, the Solar Orbiter will observe the sun from an angle never seen before. “The idea is to combine this telescope’s coronagraph images with pictures taken above,” Rosner said, “so what we’d love to do is observe an event, to sort of make that connection directly, observationally, and then theorists like me can get busy and build models for this. Once we have this information, then we can start working on the theory of trying to predict.”

Professors Discuss Happiness at Veritas Forum Event By ANVI LOHIA News Reporter The Lumen Christi Institute and UChicago Veritas hosted “What Good is Happiness: a dialogue between Economics and Philosophy” on February 12, featuring Jennifer Frey, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, and Jonathan Masur, a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Moderator David Barnes opened the discussion with a question that was running through everyone’s minds: “What is happiness?” Frey and Masur had opposing views on what characterized happiness, but agreed on the notion that “everyone wants to be happy and fulfilled in their lives.” “A hard existential question is, ‘What’s actually going to make you happy,’” Frey said. She added that according to the philoso-

phies of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, “doing good” for others/morally (?) is the key to happiness. “Sacrifice and suffering can be beautiful and awe-inspiring,” she said. Masur disagreed with Frey’s ethical conception of happiness as essential to living a good life. “When I say happiness is constitutive of a good life, I don’t mean good in a moral sense,” she said.

Masur had a more psychological perspective on happiness, and described many types of emotions one might feel. “They’re all either bad or good, You want to seek out some emotions. You want to avoid some emotions,” Masur said. Elaborating on the different types of happiness, he contrasted the “deep content one might get after facetiming close friends; or the immediate pleasure you might feel afCONTINUED ON PG. 6

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“For a hedonist like me, this is a great tragedy.” CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

ter watching a good T.V. show.” “Happiness is synonymous with pleasure,” he said. Masur posed the thought experiment of a runner who dedicated her entire life to the pursuit of running a marathon. She knows that she will be happy and content once she completes the marathon, so she works incredibly hard during the process of training. But the marathon is terrible for the run-

ner, Masur continued, and she is miserable every step of the way. However, “she knows that once she reaches the end, she will experience great satisfaction.” Unfortunately, she stops dead of a heart attack as soon as she reaches the finish line. “For a hedonist like me, this is a great tragedy,” Masur said. Frey responded with an anecdote about her own marathon experience. “I enjoyed my marathon, I had all kinds

of reasons for doing it. But a life devoted to just doing a marathon is not a good life,” she said. “There must be a narrative arc and structure to our life.” Asked where we should look to discover the path to happiness, Masur responded, “Getting what you want is not the same as happiness, although there is overlap. People are not good at guessing what they want.” “Happiness is not competitive,” Frey

said. “My pursuit of happiness should not detract from yours.” Frey concluded with the point that not all happiness is immediate, and may take work to achieve. “Exercising and acquiring virtue will require suffering, but it is not meaningless,” she added. “If what’s guiding your life is just self-satisfaction, then you won’t know the higher joys [of life].”

Students Hold Vigil for Li Wenliang, Coronavirus Whistleblower By YIWEN LU News Reporter On Wednesday, February 12, a group of Chinese graduate students organized a memorial service to honor the late Doctor Li Wenliang, a whistleblower for the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, who died of complications from the virus on February 7. The vigil took place at Bond Chapel, and over 100 people in the University and Hyde Park community attended. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was among the first to spread the word online of the SARS–like virus spreading in Wuhan before the Chinese government released any information. In early January, he was disciplined at work and by local police for promoting “untrue speech.” On February 7, Li died of COVID-19, which he contracted while treating a patient who was later diagnosed as positive. By then, Wuhan had been locked down for two weeks. The death of Li triggered widespread mourning among Chinese communities around the globe. The group of students organized the vigil for Li on February 12, five days after Li’s death. In traditional Chinese belief, this day, called “Tou Qi,” is thought to be the day when the spirit of the deceased revisits its home. “I was inspired to organize this after I saw the news about a vigil at Central Park in New York City,” explained a Ph.D. student of comparative literature who wished to remain anonymous. “I was angry and sad when I received the news of Dr. Li’s death, so I wanted to do something.” She posted about the idea of holding a vigil in Chicago on Douban, a Chinese social networking site; the post was soon

censored and removed. She then decided to organize a vigil on campus with several other students. During her introduction of Li, another student who hosted the event commended his courage to continue speaking to the public after being forced to sign a police document admitting that he had committed an “illegal act.” “Dr. Li told us that a healthy society should not only have one voice,” she said. The audience read the poem “The Answer” by Bei Dao together. The poem is well-known among Chinese audiences for its defiant language against the Cultural Revolution’s civil restrictions. The group then mourned in silence for one minute. A second-year Chinese student in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), told The Maroon that her motivation for coming to the vigil was more than just about memorializing Li’s death. “I think there’s a responsibility that comes with being a citizen. If you believe that free speech is important, and if you think that the government could have done a better job during this kind of event, you would come to this vigil.” “The outbreak of coronavirus will completely change the lives of many, including my own. I don’t want to call Li a hero, but he’s an ordinary person who we’ve seen and understood in this revolutionary period. I wanted to remember him in my own way,” another MAPH student added. Benjamin Ross, a Ph.D. student in the sociology department, said he was interested in people’s response from a social-movement perspective. “It is an interesting historical moment, because Chinese people are very angry,” Ross said. “You can see the huge response in social

media. Meanwhile, the most fruitful thing that comes out of these activities is that you connect with people who have similar beliefs with you.” One of the organizers was a MAPH graduate who worked part time on campus and who wished to remain anonymous. Before the vigil, he had assisted with relief efforts for the outbreak by collecting information about nonprofits, civil society, and individual donors. “I finished doing that a week ago. This week, I felt helpless as I faced the news about the outbreak until I heard about Dr. Li’s death,” the organizer said. “I felt that it was something I could do. I didn’t think too much of it; I think that most people don’t think too much when they’re responding to huge events or disasters.” “We had originally planned to hold the vigil outside Regenstein Library,” he added. “We hoped that more people would be able to see and learn about the cause, even if they hadn’t kept up with the news.” The vigil was moved to Bond Chapel due

to snowy weather. The day after the vigil, Li’s framed picture, along with candles and flowers, was moved to an area in front of Regenstein Library. Sociology professor Dingxin Zhao used the vigil to reflect on the tense relationship between the Chinese people and their government. In an interview with the Maroon, Zhao said, “Li was not a whistleblower. He only warned his friends in private messages. He became a hero in the minds of people because we, as a society, needed a hero amid our overwhelming fear of the coronavirus.” Zhao pointed out that while many other significant people have died of the virus, only the death of Li has generated widespread outrage. “The sad thing that our memorial of Li has reflected is the distrust between the people and the government,” he said. “The Chinese people have never fully trusted their government, and this distrust has now reached new heights.”

Students at a vigil for Li Wenliang. JEREMY LINDENFELD

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State’s Attorney Kim Foxx Discusses Criminal Justice at Town Hall By AVI WALDMAN Grey City Editor CONTINUED FROM COVER

Second-year Alicia Hurtado, an activist with student group #CareNotCops, first asked Foxx if she would commit to dropping the charges against Thomas. While the University originally pressed charges, Foxx’s office is now prosecuting the case against Thomas on three charges of aggravated assault, with a hearing scheduled for March 4. #CareNotCops has been engaged in an email-writing campaign to Foxx’s office urging her to drop the charges, and they have attended Thomas’s previous court dates to support him and his family. Foxx said that she could not address Thomas’s case specifically, but she spoke to the need for the criminal-justice system to reform its approach to mental health. “We are really struggling not talking about [Thomas] in particular with the fact that we have [an] inadequate response to the mental health crisis in our country,” Foxx said. “This is one of those areas where our system hasn’t caught up. How do we hold someone accountable? What does accountability look like? How can we as a system not do further harm?… All the

things people need to be better and well, our jails do the opposite of that.” Although Foxx declined to go into the details of Thomas’s case, she agreed to a request by #CareNotCops activist Anna Kinlock that she meet with the organization and Thomas’s family. “I believe Kim Foxx will keep her word,” said Kathy Thomas, Charles’s mother, in a statement provided to the Maroon. “I would love the chance to discuss Charles’s situation with her and show he’s more than a booking number.” Students Working Against Prisons (SWAP), one of #CareNotCops’s parent organizations, said in a statement that the meeting is an important first step toward getting the charges dropped. “We’re very pleased that Kim Foxx agreed to meet with us and Charles’s family, and we’re grateful to the people who helped make it happen by calling and emailing her office with us,” SWAP said. “We’re proud to be holding Foxx accountable to her commitments on restorative justice along with allied organizations.” Foxx is running for a second term for Cook County state’s attorney in the Democratic primary against challengers Bill Conway, Donna More, and Pat O’Brien. During the town hall, Foxx detailed the changes she has made in her

time as state’s attorney, emphasizing her achievements as a “progressive prosecutor.” She mentioned the decision to stop prosecuting people in traffic court for driving with suspended licenses as one such accomplishment, and her decision to vacate marijuana possession convictions for 770,000 people whose possessions would have been legal after recreational marijuana was legalized in Illinois on January 1, 2020. Foxx also explained how her office reprioritized cases while working with limited resources. For example, moving lawyers from low-level retail theft prosecutions to work on gun crime. She noted that part of that priority shift involved investing in the work of the Conviction Integrity Unit, which reevaluates claims of wrongful conviction, especially in cases convicted by false confessions under what has been widely acknowledged to be police torture. As state’s attorney, Foxx is part of a wave of progressive prosecutors who have been elected in recent years, including Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Boston’s Rachael Rollins, and San Francisco’s newly elected District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was raised in Hyde Park. Foxx credited her own victory in the 2016 state’s attorney election and the policies

she has implemented since as crucial to the rising popularity of the progressive prosecutor: district attorneys elected on promises of reforming the criminal justice system, with policies like ending cash bail and increasing police accountability. “When I ran for this office, there was not the notion of a progressive prosecutor.… Larry [Krasner] doesn’t get to do what he does if the people of Cook County don’t show up and say this is possible,” Foxx said. “Where Cook County was once the butt of the joke in justice reform, we are [now] leading the country in what is possible in prosecutors’ offices and criminal justice across the board, and for that I’m extremely proud.” In response to a question about her relationship with the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Foxx claimed that her office has cooperated with CPD to share data on gun crime conviction rates and that accusations that she didn’t want to prosecute gun crime cases are not accurate. Foxx said that the relationship between the state’s attorney and CPD had changed, since her office was only charging cases with sufficient evidence to convict. “We’re checks and balances. I’m not a rubber stamp,” Foxx said.

New York Times Journalists Discuss Immigration at IOP By CHLOE BRETTMAN News Reporter On Monday, New York Times Washington reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear spoke with University of Chicago Law School Professor Adam Chilton at Institute of Politics about their new book Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration published in October 2019. Border Wars is an in-depth and behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. The story, as told by Davis and Shear, begins after the 2012 presidential election

with a group of three Republican politicians: Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon. Davis explained that, on their account, “the reason Mitt Romney lost was because a very important strain of voters–white working-class voters–had rejected him as a globalist, as an elitist, as somebody who didn’t have their interests at heart.” In an effort to connect with these voters, Sessions, Bannon, and Miller crafted a message which “rejected globalism, had a populist platform that was anti-immigration, and was about talking about ways in which immigrants could be a threat, security wise and economically, to native born Americans,” Davis explained.

Miller, Sessions and Bannon “had this idea to take back the party--take over the party if [they had] the right person,” Shear explained. Davis explained that this effort to rekindle anti-immigrant sentiment in Republican politics coincided with Trump’s early efforts to involve himself in politics. “Trump was sort of flirting with the idea of getting involved in politics and this [kind of message] was very much an ingredient in public rallying cries that he would take around the country.” The convergence of Trump’s entry into politics and Sessions, Bannon, and Miller’s effort to redefine Repulican politics was what Shear and Davis refer in their

book as an “accidental marriage” that ultimately propelled Trump to the American presidency. Davis and Shear spoke extensively about the importance of Trump’s immigration policy proposals’ role in differentiating him from a crowded field in the Republican primaries. “One thing Trump had going for him, as a candidate, was a real sense of what entertains, what appeals, what gets a rise out of people,” Davis said. Trump’s immigration policy proposals successfully captured the attention of the country in the form of chants like “build the wall.” “What was pivotal in the primaries for CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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Trump was not so much the substance of his policy proposals on immigration,” Davis said. She added that “the essential thing to understand about Trump is that he understood that [these messages were] effective for him politically.” Despite their utility and effectiveness on the campaign trail, Trump’s immigration policy proposals lacked important logistical considerations that made actually implementing them difficult. Shear stressed that Trump’s team was “particularly effective at crafting an immigration message that had power in that moment, not so much for crafting an immigration plan.” “They made a lot of promises it wasn’t

clear how they could deliver on,” Davis added. Reconciling the grandiose nature of Trump’s campaign promises with the slow moving nature of bureaucracy often resulted in the chaotic roll out of drastic measures, like the Executive Order 13769 (the travel ban) and the family separation policy at the Southern Border. However, Davis and Shear also explained that there was a certain intentionality to the resulting chaos, especially as related to the travel ban, which was signed only one week into Trump’s first term. “The idea was to push through all these really extreme, drastic measures on immigration as a way of shocking the system, both externally–the political sys-

tem and the public–but also to shock the bureaucracy,” Shear said. Davis and Shear also spent time discussing Trump's family separation policy and the ways it illustrates the way his administration functions. “Some of these decisions that people made in the name of the Trump Administration were not necessarily things that they agreed with, but they were things ultimately that they were willing to do. And that is the name of the game when you work for an administrative like this,” Davis said. One example of this was Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of homeland security. Privately, Nielsen pushed back on many of the more extreme facets of

Trump’s policy but she ultimately signed on to the family separation policy. “Ultimately she decides she is going to be the face of it, but only because she’s worried that if she doesn’t do that Jeff Sessions was going to get all the credit.” Davis explained. “She wanted the bump-the reputational benefit--which means a lot with this president.” Shear explained that Neilson’s behinddoors resistance came from what she believed to be a place of reason, adding that “it wasn’t necessarily that she thought the ideas were immoral.” Her refusal to acquiesce to other extreme ideas and “her repeated attempts to stand up to him is ultimately what gets her fired,” Shear added.

UChicago Medicine Celebrates Legislation Aiming for Wider Participation in Cancer Clinical Trials By ALEXIS FLORENCE Senior Reporter The University of Chicago Medical Center hosted an event to discuss Illinois’s Clinical Trial Participation Act, a state-wide legislation that aims to increase participation of low-income populations and communities of color by allowing reimbursement for out-of-pocket patient expenses in cancer clinical trials. Senate Bill 1711, as it is known in the legislature, was signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker in December of last year. The bill states that reimbursing out-of-pocket patient costs is meant to increase the accessibility of clinical trials; it “does not constitute an undue inducement to participate in a cancer clinical trial” and “is not considered coercion or the exertion of undue influence to participate in a cancer clinical trial.” Kenneth Polonsky, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs at UChicago, opened a press conference on Monday where he expressed the need for clinical trials in advancing medical treatments. “Clinical trials are absolutely essential

if we are to advance medical care, and particularly if we are to translate basic science discoveries into advances in either diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease,” Polonsky said. Dana Dornsife, founder of the Lazarex Cancer Foundation, a national organization that helps patients navigate through the clinical trial process and provides assistance for travel expenses, described financial barriers for patients. “For patients who have been fighting cancer for a while, they are spent in every way—emotionally, physically, spiritually, and, in fact, financially,” Dornsife said. “That aspect of financial toxicity really enters into their ability to access medical breakthroughs in cancer clinical trials.” According to a 2015 study from researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, low-income patients earning less than $50,000 are 32 percent less likely to participate in clinical trials than patients earning more. Dornsife said that low-income communities of color are often left out of cancer clinical trials, meaning that possibly life-saving drugs are not thoroughly re-

searched in those populations. By allowing financial support for patients, Dornsife said, the bill removes the barriers to treatment for historically medically underserved populations, so that participants in clinical trials will more accurately reflect the population as a whole, “[translating] to equal drug development and access for all cancer patients regardless of their socio-economic standing.” Representative Bobby Rush, who serves Illinois’s first congressional district, reiterated the need to widen the pool of participants in cancer trials. Rush, himself a cancer survivor who was treated at UChicago Medicine, said he was emotional to see the signing of this bill in his home state, saying that many Americans are unable to receive breakthroughs in medical care available through clinical trials. Rush called the lack of access a double-edged sword, where patients are unable to receive potentially life-saving treatments and pharmaceutical companies are unable to collect data on how treatment interacts with more individ-

uals in the general population. “Cancer does not discriminate, and the Lazarex Foundation is making sure that in clinical trials there is no discrimination also,” Rush said. The Lazarex Cancer Foundation facilitated this legislation by first pushing the FDA in 2018 to change national guidelines to allow for patient reimbursement in clinical trials. Then, according to Dornsife, the foundation approached Rush last June to work on Illinois legislation allowing patient reimbursement. The bill then moved into the state legislature and was unanimously passed in both chambers. Dornsife thanked Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan for his efforts in the quick passage of the bill. Going forward, according to Dornsife, the Lazarex Cancer Foundation is working on a partnership with University of Chicago Medicine and Northwestern Medicine to support a program that helps provide cancer clinical trial patients with financial support during their treatment. The foundation is currently looking to secure funds for such a program.

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How to Vote in the Illinois Primary By NICK TARR News Reporter On March 17, the Illinois primaries will allow eligible voters to nominate candidates for positions like state senator, Cook County circuit judge, and president. Information on candidates and positions in the 2020 Illinois elections can be found here. Can I Vote? To register to vote in the March 17 Illinois primaries, you must: be a U.S. citizen; be 18 by the general election on November 3, 2020; live in your precinct for 30 days prior to the election; not be in jail or prison.

How Do I Register? Online Registration If you have an Illinois driver’s license or state ID, you may register online until 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, March 1. Early Registration/Voting Until March 1, early registration and voting will be held at the new Early Voting Super Site in the Loop at 191 North Clark Street. Those who register early must cast their ballot the same day. First-time registers must bring two forms of ID, one of which must show proof of address. For past voters, I.D. is not required. From March 2 to March 16, early registration and voting will take place at these additional locations. Polls in the

fourth, fifth, and 20th wards, those closest to campus, are as follows: King Community Center, 4314 South Cottage Grove Avenue; Jackson Park, 6401 South Stony Island Avenue; Bessie Coleman Library, 731 East 63rd Street. On-campus early registration and voting will take place at the Reynolds Club from March 11–13, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Same-Day Registration Illinois allows voters to register at polling facilities on election day. If you have not voted in Illinois before, or you registered by mail forms of identification, like a UChicago ID or driver’s license, to your polling location. One of these must show proof of your Illinois address. Firstclass mail from the University, like a bill,

transcript, or report card, is acceptable proof of address. Find a complete list of acceptable identification here. Where Do I Vote? On March 17, polling will take place at the following locations based on your residence. Polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.: Campus North/Max Palevsky/ Snell-Hitchcock: Ray School, 5631 South Kimbark Avenue; International House: The Cloisters, 5801 South Dorchester Avenue; Stony Island: 1700 East 56th Street Condo Association; Renee Granville-Grossman/Burton-Judson: Cornerstone Baptist Church, 1210 East 62nd Street; If you live off campus, find your polling location online.

After Iowa and New Hampshire, UChicago for Pete Brings Their Moderate Pitch Home to a Progressive Campus By ALEX DALTON Senior Reporter Editor’s note: The interviews in this article were conducted during the week before the Nevada caucuses. With the Democratic race’s first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada behind them, UChicago for Pete is looking ahead to the upcoming contests in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, as well as the March 17 Illinois primary. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg currently has the second most national delegates, 25, out of the Democratic candidates, trailing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (A.B. ’64), who has 45. After an unprecedented delay in releasing the results of the Iowa caucuses, Buttigieg seemed to emerge with a narrow lead in national delegates over Sanders with the two candidates taking 13 and 12 delegates respectively. Sanders won the popular vote by over 2,000 votes. The results of the New Hampshire primary, while not a victory, were an encouragement to UChicago for Pete. Sanders again took the popular vote, but he and Buttigieg both received the same number of delegates. Grace Wright, UChicago for Pete’s com-

munications coordinator, recalled the 2016 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, in which Sanders, a senator from a neighboring state, handily defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton with over 60 percent of the vote. “We definitely expected, I would think, a larger gap between the two candidates,” Wright said. “But we were ecstatic.” Wright sees the New Hampshire results as evidence that Buttigieg can perform strongly even in “Bernie country.” University of Chicago political science professor John Mark Hansen, a leading scholar of American politics, told The Maroon that without Buttigieg’s strong showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, “he’d be dead.” Saturday’s Nevada caucuses brought a far more decisive victory for Sanders, who took 47 percent of the vote and 24 of its 36 delegates. Former vice president Joe Biden, who came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, took the second place spot from Buttigieg, who finished with 14 percent of the vote and three delegates. “Nevada was a tough loss,” Wright said in a statement to The Maroon after the results came in, “but it only shows us how hard we’re going to have to battle going forward. Mayor Pete has consistently

out-performed expectations, and we trust he’ll do so going forward. UChicago for Pete stands behind Mayor Pete wholeheartedly, and will continue to spread his unifying message across the campus.” UChicago for Pete members had spent part of last weekend calling voters in Nevada in preparation for the caucuses. Second-year Zander Arnao, who serves as UChicago for Pete’s membership and recruitment coordinator, spent the summer working for the Buttigieg campaign in Iowa, and returned to the state with a UChicago for Pete delegation for caucus weekend. Given Buttigieg’s relatively robust performance in Iowa and New Hampshire, and “knowing that the campaign was probably going to be going for a while, at least through Super Tuesday,” Arnao told The Maroon. UChicago for Pete has taken stepws to shore up its institutional structure. “We realized there was a greater need for us to get organized, to take on more well-defined roles and to have action plans for doing things like phone banks,” Arnao said. The organization also plans to increase its on-campus presence in a bid to win support ahead of the Illinois primary on March 17. Arnao said that UChicago for Pete plans to hold “Pete-Ups,” small-scale

events where students can meet with the group’s leadership in a public setting, such as Regenstein Library. They also plan to station members on the quad and to potentially knock doors in the University’s residence halls. Winning support on the University’s campus promises to be an uphill battle for UChicago for Pete. While there is no polling data on the University specifically, Sanders has consistently outpolled his opponents among college students nationally. He also won a “mock-us” held by the University of Chicago College Democrats in January with 47 percent of the vote. UChicago for Bernie Sanders has by far the largest campus presence of any student campaign organization; it brought over 100 members to Iowa ahead of the caucuses and has been holding on-campus events since the fall. University employees have also demonstrated strong support for the candidate. In December, The Maroon reported that Sanders had received 26 percent of donations to presidential candidates by University of Chicago employees, leading Buttigieg by 6 percentage points and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren by 11 percentage points.

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ARTS Maybe the Real Godot Was the Friends We Made While We Waited By KENJIRO LEE Arts Reporter

“That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other!” Estragon (David Silberthau) declares. And so the hurling of insults commences. “Moron!” “Vermin!” “Abortion!” “Curate!” “Cretin!” “Critic!” Wait…was Vladimir (KD Bevil) looking right at me when Estragon said “Critic”? (I asked KD afterwards. He was.) Samuel Beckett’s 67-year-old tragicomedy Waiting for Godot is near-ubiquitous in the theater world. This strikes most people as odd given that, as Vivian Mercier once put it, this is a play where nothing happens… twice. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, and—spoiler alert—he never shows. Yet, the play has remained popular to the point that it was once voted “the most significant English language play of the 20th century.” It is safe to say this is a play that defies casual criticism—its conceit is literally the title, so you know what to expect when you see it. And if you find it boring, well, don’t see it. Perhaps I, a playwright who dabbles in theater criticism, am not qualified to review this play. After all, a critic once complained about a play I wrote, arguing that it faltered in its conception and execution. But then again, that same critic said my play lacked a lot of action between the characters, which in some ways makes me extremely qualified to review Waiting for Godot, simply because there’s literally no action at all. Full disclosure: I’ve never really liked

Waiting for Godot. I first saw a production of it six years ago on Broadway starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, but for the longest time, the reason for its endurance eluded me. Even now, I think it’s an example of an old play written by a white playwright, firmly rooted in a theatrical past that theater companies seeking to break the mold should move on from, partly because it’s so hard to do anything new with it (lest you get in trouble with the Beckett estate). That was on my mind for most of this production: Sure, Bevil and Silberthau’s chemistry was charming, Carlos Garcia Martinez’s Pozzo brought some engaging charisma to the proceedings, and there were multiple points in the show that were just downright hilarious. However, it’s hard for me to understand why this show continues to get produced so much. It was only about halfway through the second act when it finally dawned on me: The audience is on exactly the same page as Vladimir and Estragon for the entire play. They don’t know where they are, they don’t know who these people are, and they don’t know when or if Godot will arrive. In most plays the audience won’t know what’s going on, but the characters will fill them in on all the details. But in Godot nobody—neither our main characters, nor the interrupters Pozzo and Lucky (Geoffrey Baring)—really know what’s going on. For everyone involved, that’s terrifying. And under Robert Carhuayo’s direction, boy did this production play up the terror. The aesthetic of this production evoked a post-apocalyptic setting, one that Tess

Gundlah’s costume design suggests has a hierarchy, judging by the tattered clothing of the protagonists in contrast to the Boy (Marc de Fontnouvelle), who, in an inspired choice, wears light-up sneakers. Sound design by Gigi Hancock leaned heavily on static and the occasional song from the ’30s that sometimes emerged without prompting from an onstage radio, adding to a sense of unease that I would not have normally expected from Godot. Central to the aesthetic was Melaina Leung’s set design, the centerpiece of which was a tree built from discarded items so intricately detailed that audience members came down to inspect it during intermission and after the performance. Discarded items that stood out to

me included a hospital badge and a Hungry Hungry Hippos game. Toward the end of Act I, Estragon asks Vladimir how long they have been together. Vladimir responds, “I don’t know. Fifty years maybe.” It has, in fact, been nearly 70. There have been hundreds of productions—thousands, maybe—of Waiting for Godot , yet this production takes a unique approach to old material in a way that really sticks with you. That’s why this play has endured for so long: Despite its length and relative lack of action, it stays with you long after you’ve left the theater. And let’s be honest, what more could you ask for from a student production?

Waiting for Godot. NATALIA RODRIGUEZ

Living and Obsessing in the Time of Tame Impala By WAHID AL MAMUN Arts Reporter

Five years is a long time in the music industry—just ask Kevin Parker. The driving force behind Tame Impala has catapulted into the spotlight since the release of the critically successful Currents in 2015,

rubbing shoulders with the likes of Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and Travis Scott in this intervening period. Rihanna even covered Currents’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” in 2016’s Anti. Parker has certainly come a long way from fiddling with studio gear in his bedroom, now finding himself to be a bona fide superstar. The

Slow Rush, Tame Impala’s much-awaited follow-up to Currents, cements his position as perhaps one of the best producers alive, and makes the five years well worth the wait for fans old and new. Time is Parker’s main anxiety on The Slow Rush, and he grapples with this anxiety almost in real time throughout the record.

In “On Track” about halfway through, he laments about how he has yet to finish the album on schedule, even though “I know it’s nearly August.” Like the best of Tame Impala’s previous records, The Slow Rush offers the listener a window into Parker’s introversions and anxieties—we move with Parker CONTINUED ON PG. 11

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in an arc throughout the record, from his carefree optimism in “One More Year” (“If there was trouble in the world, we didn’t know”) to his circumspect retrospection in “One More Hour,” which concludes the record. Parker’s lyrics have never lent themselves to great poetic quality or profundity—here, this is a strength, as he refuses to dress this slow devolution up in any artifice beyond the music. It is not as though Parker has not engaged the theme of time before. Much of Tame Impala’s back catalog makes reference to the alienation and fear of stasis in the face of change (“My world is turning pages/ while I am just sitting here”). However, superstardom places him in a curious predicament with an added urgency; he can operate on his own timeline as a musician independent of pressure from any big label, yet also invariably holds himself to impeccably high standards that place him in bouts of creative paralysis. This has been the central ambiguity that has blighted the release of this record, which was originally slated for a summer release last year before Coachella but was repeatedly delayed as Parker tinkered with the album’s sound. Some of the final product reflects this almost neurotic obsession with perfection—“Borderline,” released last April as a single, underwent a minor facelift in the record version, with a slightly heavier bassline and almost infinitesimal changes to instrumentation elsewhere. “Patience,” released last March, failed to make the cut at all. This is not to say that obsessive perfec-

tionism is a wholly bad thing; for the most part, The Slow Rush is all the stronger for it. Every single sound in the record seems as though it has been mulled over a thousand times in Parker’s head. And there are so many types of sounds, too—Parker delves deep into genres as wide and varying as house, Philly soul, and R&B to construct a sonically textured record, with almost unerring execution. Consequently, some of the standout tracks on the record are extremely different from the foggy psychedelia of InnerSpeaker (2010) and Lonerism (2012) that first shot Tame Impala to repute. “On Track” is an arena-friendly ’80s pop ballad with a piano backbeat that would not sound too out of place in a Whitney Houston record, whereas “Glimmer,” barely clocking in over the two-minute mark, is a successful experiment in constructing an infectious acid house beat. The very best of the record mixes these influences with Parker’s idiosyncratic production style—“One More Year” mixes a conga-infused techno-house beat with a “Gregorian robot choir,” a layered-up, slowed-down audio clip of Parker saying the title of the track. Parker’s knack for production ensures that The Slow Rush finds life beyond an eclectic, esoteric set of musical references and truly thrives as its own product. Perhaps the only criticism one can level against a record that sprawls across such an expansive set of genres and sounds is that The Slow Rush sinks at times into triteness and lacks the airtightness of both Lonerism and Currents. Some of the tracks suffer from over-articulation, as Parker shows his hand

COURTESY OF CONSEQUENCE OF SOUND

just a little bit too much. “Posthumous Forgiveness,” in particular, almost overstays its welcome in its two-part structure, as it modulates from funk-infused psychedelia to down-beat pop within a single track. However, these moments of disjointedness are few and far between, and come as natural territory for someone who takes as many creative risks as Parker does. Parker has previously said that he wants

to be a Max Martin–type producer. The Slow Rush is not going to push him into mainstream sugar-pop territory, but perhaps it is all the better for that. This is the sort of record that will be equally at home at the United Center as at some grotty apartment party, and is definitely a sign that Tame Impala will be sticking around for a long time.

The Bauhaus Movement’s Complicated Chicago Story By MILES FRANKLIN Arts Reporter

When Nazi Germany forced the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Germany to permanently close its doors in 1933, many of its members felt that their revolutionary work in design was unfinished. Resolved to continue the work begun by the Bauhaus and its famed professors, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Gropius, a group of instructors took root in the United States, taking particular interest in Chicago and the American Midwest. Among these trans-

plants were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and László Moholy-Nagy, who were both invited to teach at the New Bauhaus, now the Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (ITT). Beginning in the mid-1930s, Moholy-Nagy and Mies created a modernist legacy in architecture and the arts with the help of their pupils and contemporaries. Their influence is still deeply felt in Chicago to this day. Because the media has extensively covered superstar figures such as Moholy-Nagy and Mies, it is quite refreshing to see an exhibition focused largely on the works

of their previously anonymous students, emerging a century after the founding of the original Bauhaus. Importantly, many of the lessons taught at both the original Bauhaus and its American schools dealt with the qualities and characteristics of individual materials, favoring intimate interaction with objects and great design over formal artistic or architectural training. As such, many of the pieces on display in the small but densely populated space at the Art Institute are vaguely architectural but maintain a deeper focus on the simple form and materiality of everyday objects within

the industrial context of the 20th century. This philosophy is readily apparent in works such as “Institute of Design Foundation Course Wire Exercise,” in which a delicate wire-framed sculpture vaguely references industrial hallmarks, like skyscrapers and metalworking. Similarly, “Hall of Sport and Culture, Collage,” dated from the early 1970s, features a football player, a pair of dancers, and a crowd set within the context of what appears to be a sort of building, itself resting on color blocks. In fact, the work was equally inspired by a building in Detroit as it CONTINUED ON PG. 12

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was by modern art, film, and the emerging technique of collage. The exhibit also seeks to correct for the historical lack of recognition of the many women who studied in the Chicago Bauhaus schools. One such figure who is featured prominently is Dori Altschuler, whose work during her time at the ID recently received recognition from several national publications, as well as from the journal Arts & Architecture in 1952. Altschuler’s use of recycled shopping bag materials to make architectural sculptures is particularly interesting within the contemporary context of natural resource conservation, as it seems that she—and the Bauhaus movement in general—was well ahead of her contemporaries in understanding the existential threat that urbanism and modernization posed on the planet’s natural resources. Despite their innumerable contributions to design, architecture, and art, the

Ah, eighth week. The perfect balance between a subdued courseload and the impending doom of final papers. Why not keep your mind off things for a bit with a dash of the celebration of diverse world culture? Wednesday [2/26] Éliane Radigue: Occam Ocean Bond Chapel, 8 p.m., free Musicians Julia Eckhart and Nate Wooley join the Renaissance Society and Frequency Festival 2020 in an ethereal performance of acoustic electronic music. Meditative, intriguing, and complex, Radigue’s music in collaboration with both musicians will be performed on the trumpet and viola. RSVP on Eventbrite Friday [2/28] Mihaela Mihailova: Computer Generated Ideology: Lecture Logan Center, 4 p.m., free Cinema has always been a medium for social criticisms and political statements, blatantly obvious on-screen or not. But

Bauhaus’s insistence on unified, homogenous urban spaces master-planned by privileged Europeans and Americans allowed for the creation of troubling projects, notably on Chicago’s South Side. Enacting a plan that eerily recalls Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s classist transformation of Paris during the 19th century, Mies and IIT demolished large tracts of land on the South Side, displacing large populations of low-income Black families and businesses under the guise of “urban renewal.” The effects of this process are still glaringly obvious today, when the de facto segregation of wealthy, white Chicagoans and low-income Black Chicagoans remains an unsolved issue. Standing almost as an allegorical testament to this shameful period, Mies van der Rohe’s School of Social Service Administration, completed in 1965 for the University of Chicago, sits prominently along 60th Street, which has long represented the border between the vast property of the University and its wealthy

inhabitants, and the Woodlawn community occupied primarily by low-income residents of color. Viewing the contributions and controversies of the Chicago Bauhaus era in equal proportion, Bauhaus in Chicago: Design in

what does the world of animation offer to discussions of social justice and world conflict? Through movies such as Frozen II (2019), Zootopia (2016), and the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy (2010—2019), Mihaela Mihailova connects visual aesthetics to the ideology of film producers to demonstrate how animation has transformed the way we introduce pressing political issues.

performance, creativity, art, and design every winter with their annual fashion show. This year focuses on industriousness and its intersectionality with design aesthetics. See Facebook event for more details. Tickets sold on UChicago Arts.

Electronic Format Location TBD (Twitter: @whpk_chicago), 10 p.m., $5 in advance, $10 at the door ($5 after 2 a.m.) Join WHPK for their Electronic Format debut, featuring music from UChicago student DJs. Genres include house, Chicago house, shaabi, and footwork. Studio MODA: The 2020 Winter Fashion Show Zhou B Art Center, 8 p.m., prices vary Note: Only general VIP and standing tickets left. MODA challenges the illusory limits of

the City presents perhaps the most comprehensive and most progressive retrospective on the movement. On view through April 26, 2020 in Gallery 283 of the modern wing, this show is not one to miss.

Petal Occasional Table by Richard Shultz for Knoll Associates. MILES FRANKLIN

Saturday [2/29] Java Jive feat. Blue Maroon Ida Noyes Library Lounge, 7:30 p.m., free The Chicago Swing Dance Society will collaborate with Blue Maroon for one glorious night of swing dancing. Beginner lessons start at 7:30 p.m., and general social dancing begins at 8:30 p.m. KSO: Goblin Mandel Hall, 6:30 p.m., $10 in advance or $12 at the door (dinner and show), $5 ( just show) With this year’s theme inspired by smash-hit K-drama Goblin, KSO hosts a night of dinner, dance, and musical performance in celebration of Korean culture. See the Facebook event for more details.

OBS Presents: Throwback! Ida Noyes Theatre (third floor), 7 p.m., $10 in advance, $12 at the door The Organization of Black Students celebrates the final days of Black History Month with a cultural performance. Enjoy the show and definitely stay for the music, food, and pictures afterwards. Tickets on sale February 24—28, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Reynolds Club. See the Facebook event for more details. Sunday [3/1] UChicago Presents: Russian Renaissance Logan Center, 3 p.m., $10 student ticket with UCID 2017 M-prize competition winner Russian Renaissance comes to UChicago to kick off March. Weaving the traditional and the modern, the ensemble consists of balalaikas, the domra, and the accordion and spans the diverse genres of tango, classical, and folk. Tickets are sold on UChicago Arts.

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VIEWPOINTS

The Magic of Campus Coffee Shops Campus coffee shops serve as a window into the culture of a university and are fantastic places to build community By NOAH TESFAYE When I got to college, I had three goals: to immerse myself in the social sciences and humanities, make some incredible friends, and be a barista. Yes, that last one was one of the more important items on my college bucket list. Since becoming a true coffee fanatic in the summer of 2017, I’ve always wanted to make coffee to earn some extra money. When I was applying to colleges and visiting different campuses, I actively sought out all the different student coffee shops, hoping to get a sense of the students who frequent them. I like to think that you can learn a lot about the student body of any given school just by visiting a coffee shop: You hear their music taste through the speakers, see how studious or non-studious the people are, and, most of all, you pick up on the conversations the students have with one another. When I first visited UChicago in April of last year during the admitted student overnight, I toured a few shops, and, honestly, it was those ambiences and spicy discussions I observed about the state of nature or the latest political news that helped me realize this was the right place for me. And within

the first few hours on campus, I knew that I wanted to be a barista here. In the weeks leading up to O-Week, I applied to every single shop that had applications open. Fortunately, I ended up landing my first choice, a moment I remember vividly because I started jumping excitedly in the middle of Baker. The naïve first-year in me initially focused too much on the superficial, less significant benefits of the job. I was excited for free drinks and a chance to bring my enthusiasm for coffee to every person I served. I was eager to have a dedicated goto study space with the aroma of espresso grounds wafting in the air, and I was excited to have some money to bankroll my foodie aspirations. These were the overwhelming thoughts I had as I began my first few shifts. But, a quarter and a half into my job, those factors seem unimportant compared to the reasons I love my job today. There is almost nothing I have enjoyed more being at UChicago than going to work. What surprised me more than anything else was that the reasons I admire my job are the relationships I’ve forged. Having never worked in a service job before, I had no expectations when I showed up to my first shift. Instantly, though, I

recognized that my coworkers were the funny, energetic, optimistic kind of people I didn’t realize I needed, the kind of people who make me feel like I can be myself. Although I knew a few upperclassmen before I got here, having new friends who have gone through many of the same challenges I’m going through helps me better reflect on what’s important in life. Beyond just upperclassmen, having a group of people who all hail from separate social circles and have different interests yet are united by one job exposes me to so much about what’s happening on campus, like guest lectures or new clubs. Perhaps above all else, being a barista has given me a real sense of respect toward those whose full-time jobs are in the service industry. It goes beyond the fact that now I always make sure to tip baristas at every shop I go to. I acknowledge the privilege I have to be able to have this job solely as something I am passionate about. For some people, this is their livelihood, this is all they have. With this in mind, I have a firmer sense of respect and appreciation for those who make a substantive effort to serve us. Here at UChicago, there are literally thousands of people who work to give us

the support and service to be able to be students here. I don’t know what they may think about our student body as a whole, but what I do know is that we do not do enough to appreciate and be grateful for the work they do. Working a service job at UChicago has allowed me to garner not only a more nuanced admiration for those men and women but ultimately has left me looking for more ways to always be happy and respectful when interacting with them. I may not know what their day has been like, but if I can just give them at least some joy, that can be the first simple step we can take to show our gratitude. RSOs like the Organization of Black Students already take steps to formally send out thank-you cards, and that is also another step to take as well. At this point, my friends are probably at least a bit annoyed at how incessantly I talk about my job. And maybe they’re right. But there’s just some magic, some sort of entrancing experience I have whenever I walk into the shop. It really has become my home on campus, where I am always myself, meeting new people, and keeping up healthy banter with my Harper family. Noah Tesfaye is a first-year in the College.

Who Makes the Syllabus, and Who Makes It on the Syllabus? Black History Month should inspire us to reflect on how race is addressed in our classrooms By LEENA ELSADEK One of my fondest memories from my time as an undergraduate at Duke University is witnessing Maya Angelou speak. I arrived an hour early just so I could sit in the front row. I was surprised that many present did not even know who Angelou was. Angelou’s words set the crowd afire.

She was a contrarian—to speak as boldly as she did during an era of high censorship and unforgiving racial mores was brave. Among other lessons, Angelou urged us to turn to poetry to understand humanity. “Poetry encapsulates so much of what the human being has gone through, goes through and is yet to go through,” she said. “The poem is written for all of us...all of the time.” Maya

Angelou passed away less than three years after that lecture, but her lesson is as relevant now for students at UChicago as it was for me and my classmates almost a decade ago. I thought about this lesson last week in my civil rights class at the Law School. The professor is a white woman whose résumé drips with Ivy League accolades.

She seems to be well informed on the major arguments, narratives, and theories of the civil rights movement. Every week, we discuss the assigned readings, usually a dense text detailing some aspect of the civil rights movement. For our first assignment of the quarter, we read books by historians and compared them to poems and short esCONTINUED ON PG. 14

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says by notable writers of the civil rights movement, such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and even Maya Angelou. This assignment revealed a frustration that I’ve harbored for many years: Even with our education, we privilege the privileged, ignoring the contributions and scholarship of people whose experiences outside the classrooms are important to our understanding inside the classroom. In many classes, like this one, primary sources are offered as a mere complement to secondary sources written by historians. In some classes, primary sources aren’t read at all. As I completed the assignment, I wondered, what would a history class look like if we only read primary sources? What if professors’ syllabi were more representative of the history that they described? If edu-

cational institutions are sources of knowledge production, what is UChicago doing to ensure its fidelity to giving students an honest education, not just a polished, peer-reviewed one? At the start of this Black History Month, I reflected on where we are and how things have changed since Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and others decided to preserve their truths in their enduring works. At the University of Chicago Law School, there are no tenured Black professors. There are no senior Black administrators. We’ve been forced to memorize theories by scholars who have, at best, benefitted from racial inequities, and at worst, promulgated them. Many law students graduate from the best law schools in the country without having to take a single course discuss-

Lee Harris, Editor-in-Chief Elaine Chen, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Deepti Sailappan, Managing Editor Peng-Peng Liu, Chief Production Officer Miles Burton, Editor-in-Chief–elect Emma Dyer, Editor-in-Chief–elect Caroline Kubzansky, Managing Editor–elect Jessica Xia, Chief Production Officer–elect

ing critical race issues. When we talk about racism, it’s not just the blatant racism that manifests in discussions and behaviors. It’s also the racism that is birthed in our education—it’s the privilege we are affording to dead white men while ignoring the very real lessons and truths from Black, female, and non-Black educators of color. This is not unique to professors’ syllabi. Classroom discussions are also guilty of lacking honesty and representation. We’ve witnessed many hot takes. The devil’s advocate polemicist. The hubris of students who talk at length but contribute so little to classroom discussion. Classrooms are sacred spaces in which we straddle the line between artifice and authenticity. Classroom discourse does not exist in a free market. Professors have a responsibility to become barometers of integrity when they decide to afford platforms to loud, albeit not always correct, students. Com-

ments are not made with impunity, and what is said in the classroom can have rippling effects. Students must remain vigilant. Who makes it to your syllabus, and who doesn’t? Who is afforded space and time in classrooms, and who isn’t? Who is being promoted and tenured, and who isn’t? Students are at the forefront of driving this change, as we saw with the Black Law Students Association’s success in confronting a professor’s use of racial slurs in the classroom. Until our education is representative of the world we are learning about, we cannot stop advocating for our collective inclusion. Among the many writers included in the anthology I read for class was James Baldwin. Regarding the importance of writing and preserving truths, he said, “One writes out of one thing only— one’s own experiences. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can

possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” I came to law school to make sense of this world, in hopes of contributing to meaningful change. If many people I lived with at Duke didn’t show up to listen to Maya Angelou in person, an opportunity not afforded to many, then surely, they’re not taking advantage of her experience and wisdom in the written word. People choose not to invest their time in seeking education from disempowered figures, which makes it even more important for universities such as UChicago to use their power to educate on what students are not educated on. It’s about time UChicago starts teaching with intellectual honesty and ensures that classrooms and syllabi are representative of the world they inhabit. We owe it to the unrecognized leaders, scholars, and teachers who never make it to our

Ode to the CTA Despite cost, UPass remains fundamental to UChicago student experience

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By ELIZABETH WINKLER “Why do we even have U-Passes? CTA sucks and no one uses them!” This is a sentiment that has been echoing across campus since the University started its unlimited Ventra program in 2017, and it doesn’t seem to be changing. As recently as this past January, I saw a complaint on the UChicago Secrets Facebook group about how much U-Passes cost, and I’ve heard similar issues raised in conversations with friends as well. While I do

understand the urge to complain about being required to pay for something you feel you may not use, that little blue card has been one of the most positive parts of my UChicago experience, and I believe that this can be true of pretty much every student on UChicago’s campus—all it takes is a shift in perspective. Cost inefficiency is one of the most common complaints I’ve heard about the U-Pass. And, it’s true, the pass is expensive, there’s no doubt about that. For each quarter of unlimited

CTA rides, students who pay full tuition are charged $95 (the U-Pass is fully covered for students on financial aid). At $2.50 per train ride, each student would have to take public transportation almost four times a week every quarter to make this cost worthwhile, which, for many, is probably not realistic. A M a roon Ed itor ia l, “U-Pass Is Inefficient, So What?” (5/11/18) suggests some potential solutions to the problem of wasted rides and of the CONTINUED ON PG. 15

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University’s net monetary loss on the U-Pass program. For example, the University could change how they charge students. Instead of a blanket $95, they could periodically refill students’ Ventra cards when the balance drops below $5 or $10. This way, students still wouldn’t pay for their rides out of pocket, but they also wouldn’t be forced to pay for more rides than they will realistically take. In my year and a half here, I’ve taken the CTA two to three times a week on average—for general recreation and, last year, to see a therapist downtown once a week. This means that I am not breaking even with the $95 the University charges for the U-Pass; dividing that cost by my approximately 25 quarterly rides shows that I’m paying $3.80 per ride, which is higher than CTA’s rate per ride. Despite these “wasted” rides, the U-Pass is still a very economical option for students of all backgrounds and helps minimize socioeconomic differences. Having the U-Pass fully covered for students on financial aid expands access for stu-

dents who might not otherwise be able to afford transportation, while students who pay the $95 out of pocket will be incentivized to break even by using their U-Pass more often. Thus, students of every socioeconomic background are motivated to use CTA to venture outside of Hyde Park for fun. If the U-Pass’s price still seems excessive, think about how this cost compares to the prices of car services like Uber or Lyft. Even while not breaking even—taking approximately 25 trips each quarter—I’m only paying $3.80 per ride. By my math, whether you take CTA four times a week or only about as much as I do, public transportation is a much better deal, monetarily, than taking a car service. For example, a trip from Campus North to Wormhole Coffee in Wicker Park would cost one student around $20 plus tip (more or less depending on the time of day) in an Uber. CTA is clearly the more economically sensible option, and the University helps encourage students to take that option with the U-Pass program. But monetary cost is not the

only factor to consider. There is a significant time-expense disparity between CTA and car travel in Chicago, and this should not be ignored. That trip to Wormhole Coffee will take around an hour on public transportation, while a car will get you there in 30 minutes; you can halve your travel time—it just costs 10 times as much. I’m sure there are students for whom the time-cost is more prohibitive than the monetary one and paying extra for Uber or Lyft may be a worthwhile tradeoff for them. By this same logic, one student’s priorities can change depending on where they’re going and how much time pressure is involved, and they might sometimes accept the cost inefficiency of Uber in favor of its speed. For the most part, though, I believe that the inclination to take Uber over CTA is a product of our culture’s obsession with efficiency—faster internet, faster shipping, using every moment of our day to be as productive as we can—and choosing to take CTA, the unarguably slower transportation option, means going directly against

this culture. And that’s a good thing. When I was adjusting to college last year, I felt like I should be working constantly, a feeling common among most of the college students I know, especially at UChicago. When I wasn’t, I became very uncomfortable. I felt like I was doing something wrong, wasting time, being unproductive—I had forgotten how to relax. Taking the CTA for some off-campus alone time a few times a week forced me to lean into this discomfort. Reading on the train tends to make me motion sick, so I physically could not do schoolwork for the 30 minutes to an hour I was traveling. At first, this made me anxious: Should I have just stayed on campus? This time would’ve been productive if I’d just gone to Ex. I could be done with that reading response for Hum and the whole week’s reading for my English class. As time went on, though, I realized how good these outings were for my mental health. The more I left campus, the more my ideas of what constitutes a “valuable” use of time changed. Getting out of the bubble of

UChicago, having time to myself to do something that I enjoy—like reading and working in a coffee shop with a scone and an oat milk cappuccino—is incredibly valuable for my mental health. As I became more conscious of that, I began to enjoy my time on the train. Now, instead of running through a list of all the work I could be doing, I look out the window and admire parts of Chicago I wouldn’t see from an Uber. I talk to the woman seated across from me who is on her way to her first job interview after having a baby. I am part of the city in a way that is impossible from a car. UChicago is a stressful environment for many students, and the University acknowledges that stress with programs like the U-Pass. Sure, it’s not perfect, but by making CTA a more economically attractive option than Uber or Lyft, it encourages students of all socioeconomic backgrounds to take a breath and re-center themselves mentally. I love my little blue card and, with a little practice slowing down, I know that you can come to love your U-Pass, too.

STEM Majors Deserve to Study Abroad, Too UChicago needs to make studying abroad more feasible for its STEM students By SYLVIA EBENBACH Several students come to UChicago for its unique study abroad programs. However, for STEM students, studying abroad is not necessarily a reality. Many students planning to major in STEM come to UChicago with hopes of travel only to realize that it is practically impossible to do so because the classes required for their

majors are offered only during specific quarters, need to be taken in a specific order, or are just too demanding to leave for a quarter or a yearlong sequence. Studying abroad is an essential part of any college experience. It is not every day that you have the opportunity to move to a different country, immerse yourself in a new culture, and perhaps even learn

a new language. Given all the benefits of studying abroad, there is no reason why STEM students should miss out. In fact, many universities make studying abroad possible even for those students pursuing a STEM degree by allowing students more flexibility with direct enrollment, while UChicago has a specific list of schools from which it accepts credits. The University of Chicago thus

needs to expand opportunities for STEM students to study abroad. For many, studying abroad is a chance to learn a new language, fulfill Core and major requirements in a new environment, and explore a new place. Indeed, college represents the ideal time to study abroad: After graduation, it is significantly harder to travel because of work obligations and finances.

While it is true that students still have to pay the hefty program administrative fee, at UChicago, students retain their financial aid while studying abroad in College-sponsored programs. UChicago will also start administering a needbased $1,200 stipend to cover the cost of flights and the administrative fee in the 2020– 2021 academic year. CONTINUED ON PG. 16

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Given the range of study abroad options, from Paris to Hong Kong, and the fact that financial aid travels with you on UChicago-based study abroad programs, it is vital that not just social science and humanities students are able to study abroad. I interviewed Caitlin Krantz, a second-year computational and applied math major, who expressed disappointment about not being able to study abroad. The computational and applied math major, along with several others, including biological sciences and chemistry, contain sequences that limit the possibilities for travel. Several majors require that students take year-long sequences that make it virtually impossible for a student to leave to study abroad. Others have classes that must be taken in a particular order but are only offered in specific quarters, making it hard to plan study abroad. For example, the chemistry major requires five yearlong sequences to be taken throughout the student’s four years in college. Caitlin said, “If I wanted to study abroad for [a Civilization program], I would have to plan it out extremely far out in advance with my advisor.” Moreover, she said that she would have to get her first-choice program in order to stay on track with her academics while abroad. While there is a math study abroad option in Paris, it is only offered in spring quarter and satisfies only the elective requirements of the major. Given that very few of her major classes are actually electives (the major requires 1800 credits total, only 300 of which are electives), studying abroad—even in a math-based program—isn’t always feasible. Other STEM majors have similar experiences. After speaking with other STEM majors, I found that, in general, students were originally drawn to UChicago partly due to the study abroad programs available. Understandably, they felt frustrated once arriving at the school and realizing there was great difficulty studying abroad given their majors, especially at a university that touts

its unique and accessible study abroad opportunities. Furthermore, students who change majors (and many do) have even less time to complete required classes and the chance of going abroad is even lower. UChicago prides itself on its flexible timeline for declaring a major (students don’t have to declare a major until their third year), encouraging students to explore a wide variety of fields. However, failing to make study abroad programs accessible across all majors negates this sentiment. In most cases, taking the time to explore different fields can make it harder to study abroad. By the time a student who explored their options settled on a major, they would likely struggle to fit study abroad in given all their other major requirements. While direct enrollment at a different university is an option for some, it often requires fluency in the language of the host country, making this option much less feasible for students without the necessary language background. STEM departments are also notoriously picky when it comes to accepting credits from other universities, making this option even trickier. While there is the option to study abroad with UChicago over the summer, there is only one UChicago faculty–led summer program that counts for civilization core requirements, which is located in Paris. The program is small and therefore more selective than UChicago’s normal study abroad programs, meaning that not all interested students can participate. Moreover, given the widespread expectation that students pursue an internship over the summer, many students don’t want to forsake an internship opportunity in favor of summer study abroad. Thus, the University should expand opportunities for STEM students to study abroad. It could do this by creating programs that do not interfere with common STEM sequences. While the University already offers September programs, such as Florence: Living with History and Paris: Law, Letters, and Society, these programs do not confer Civilizations credit. The University

could make these programs fulfill the Civilization requirement or pair with on-campus Civilization programs to allow STEM students to study abroad. It could also expand its summer offerings. One possible solution is UChicago could allow third- and fourth-year students to study abroad and fulfill upper level requirements for their degree at a different university. If the University was able to find a way to allow STEM

students to incorporate study abroad into their studies, more students would be able to reap the benefits of studying abroad. Study abroad is an incredible experience for many students at UChicago. It is only fair that STEM students should be able to study abroad, too. Sylvia Ebenbach is a second-year in the College.

ALVIN SHI

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Uprooting the Torture Tree In his new book, Laurence Ralph explores the deep-seated problem of police torture in Chicago By JOANNE WANG Grey City Reporter

In his new book, Princeton University anthropology professor Laurence Ralph’s (Ph.D. ’10) poses the question: “Is torture... justified when the criminal actually did commit the crime?” Ralph, who earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2010, published his second book with the University of Chicago Press, The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, last month. Through a series of open letters addressed to victims of police torture, targets for racial profiling, public figures, activists, future mayors of Chicago, and the reader, Ralph traces the history of racism and police violence in Chicago through government institutions and back to its roots. The book is the product of over a decade of research and interviews with Chicago residents, culminating in a comprehensive and thought-provoking account of the “horrific” effect of past and present police torture on the future of Chicago and its residents. Moving to Chicago for graduate school brought Ralph into direct contact with police abuses for the first time. Just two weeks after moving to the city, Ralph witnessed a group of police officers stopping and emptying the backpacks of two teenagers on the corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road. “I was afraid that I was witnessing an altercation with the police that I, too, might eventually have,” he writes in The Torture Letters. “At the same time I was afraid because I was seeing the past.” Ralph, who is Black, explained in an interview with The Maroon that, growing up in Baltimore and Atlanta, his elders would give him lessons to avoid police racial profiling. Ralph said, “Even older people

who I didn’t know would sometimes say ‘take your hands out your pocket’ and you don’t know why they’re saying that to you.” Moving from his mostly Black high school to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which was almost entirely white at the time, Ralph found the racial disparities jarring. “I only had one Black professor the whole time I was at college,” Ralph said “That was a bit of an adjustment, [I felt] a little isolated.” Later, he moved to Chicago to complete his Ph.D. in anthropology, and once again was faced with another drastic change in environment. In the interview with The Maroon, Ralph described the University of Chicago as a “generative space” that fed his curiosity and helped him develop as a thinker. “There’s so much going on intellectually and it was unlike any environment in terms of my intellect,” he said. “There were talks I wanted to hear, lectures I wanted to see, classes I wanted to take.” But living south of Midway Plaisance at that time, he received shocked comments because that area was considered underdeveloped and dangerous. This reinforced the way the University felt like a socioeconomic bubble. “I got the same sort of feeling of living in a bubble where you have this wealthy university surrounded by poverty.” Inspired by his time in Chicago, Ralph began his research into the past of police violence in the city and its suburbs. After all, as Ralph writes in the introduction section of the book: “Of the ten most populous cities in the United States, Chicago has the highest number of fatal shootings involving the police from 2010 to 2014.” Through his research, Ralph developed the idea of the “torture tree.” As a visual thinker and writer, Ralph imagined the intertwined themes of the complicity of people in power propagating torture and the United States

of America’s history of violence against populations dominant society perceives as threatening to it. Rooted in the American history of lynching and slavery, Ralph describes the tree in Chicago as “a network of people and institutions that were connected to each other that kept growing branches and extending out…. [People already in power] were getting more and more power in city government.” Ralph uses the word “torture” carefully. In his book, he writes that “the danger is that such description can titillate readers and contribute to what Karen Sánchez-Eppler calls the ‘pornography of violence.’” He writes that he uses it both in the motif of a torture tree and in the title of his book because the victims Ralph met with did not want their stories to be shrugged off as a victim being “roughed up.” Ralph explains in his book that he doesn’t want to attempt to censor the stories of the victims, but wants the reader to react to the stories of the victims. Prisoners were electrocuted, cut, beaten, and brought up to a roof and threatened to be pushed off. They were suffocated, held at gunpoint, and other treatments that can only be classified as torture as defined by Ralph. Medical reports described injuries like “multiple bruises, swelling, abrasions,” “blisters…consistent with radiator burns,” and “a battered right eye.” Ralph focuses the majority of his book on the power of city governments, the amount of resources allocated to policing, and the militarization of the police. Ralph emphasizes how governments prioritize policing, noting that Chicago uses $1.46 billion annually, about 40 percent of its budget, on policing. “The militarization of the police,” Ralph writes, “is often used to describe the way that military equipment once used overseas eventually are allocated to local police stations in small and large cities

and towns across the United States. But less-often discussed is how alongside this military-grade equipment comes a military mindset wherein the police treat residents as if they were enemy combatants, as if their job were to occupy and patrol a war zone.” Soldiers are trained to “start with the highest level of force and work their way down the continuum” while police officers are trained to “start at the lowest level of the continuum and then work their way up.” Most Chicagoans Ralph spoke to believed this distinction no longer exists. In an interview with The Maroon, Ralph argued that the solution to police militarization is not as simple as preventing soldiers from becoming police officers. Instead, he said, police officers need to stop receiving training that tells them to see policed populations as hostile. “The deeper issue lies in the particular ideologies and particular training that allow both soldiers and police officers to see whole populations as enemies, and then act in ways that are outside of the law,” Ralph writes. One of the letters tells the story of Andrew Wilson, a Black man who shot and killed two police officers in 1982, and was the victim of torture by a police officer and former soldier, Lieutenant Jon Burge. Burge used a device called the black box to electrocute Wilson. After being tried and found guilty of the murder of the two police officers, Wilson filed a civil suit against Burge and the City of Chicago for his unconstitutional torture. During the trial, one of Wilson’s lawyers, John Stainthorp noted, “When Wilson discussed being tortured, he always ended up crying.... The black box was a psychological weight in Wilson’s life.... He still felt that electricity running through his veins.” Burge did not face any charges. “The knowledge of Burge’s torture opCONTINUED ON PG. 18

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“I got the same sort of feeling [at the University of Chicago] of living in a bubble where you have this wealthy university surrounded by poverty.” CONTINUED FROM PG. 17

eration has disappeared, just like Burge’s torture device, buried at the bottom of a body of water, never to be seen again,” Ralph writes. “They would talk about how horrific it was for particular torture survivors to have gone through what they went through,” Ralph said of his conversations with police officers, politicians, and Chicago residents. “But oftentimes there was a caveat: There was an image of a really evil person who had to be tortured, and it was always there lurking in the background.” In a letter to Wilson in the book’s conclusion, Ralph writes, “Even the guilty have the right not to be electrocuted. Even the guilty have the right not to be suffocated and beaten within an inch of their lives. That belief—that every human being has the right not to be tortured—has changed my life.” After telling Wilson’s story, Ralph steps back and approaches the same story again—but this time from the perspective of the other police officers who witnessed Wilson’s torture but did not say anything. In his research, Ralph found that the actual participants in Wilson’s torture numbered fewer than 10 members. But through testimony or reports in at least one of the torture cases, the survivors identified a total of 67 officers who had direct knowledge of the torture. Ralph said he finds it important to focus critiques on the position police officers are put in rather than the people themselves. Ralph recognizes that the police officers who knew about the torture were in the difficult position of choosing between coming forward about the actions of a superior or advancing their career. “Even if someone’s not directly involved in the violence, there are so many complications that prevent them from coming forward and exposing it,” Ralph said. However, he points out that there are certain circumstances where people have to take risks. The issue, then, is motivating people in these positions to have the agency to come forward and speak out: “There are certain circumstance where people have to take risks and I’m trying to point out the necessity of taking risks when we don’t know what the repercussions would be and trying

to motivate the people in these positions to take risks.” Ralph said he chose to organize the book as a series of open letters to participate in an “unfinished” and ever-evolving dialogue with the people and groups implicated in the social problems he studies and to force himself out of the typical, discipline-imposed shell of objectivity. The book uses researched facts and information from testimonies but is not particularly objective. Ralph carefully chose whom he wrote letters to in his book. When asked to elaborate on why he did not write one to the torturer Burge, he admitted that he drafted many letters, but all of them felt fake. “I wanted all the letters to feel genuine and authentic,” Ralph said. “I realized all the letters sounded fake because I didn’t believe that [Burge] cared. Nothing in the public record would suggest that he ever cared.” Ralph’s later letters cover activists who were part of a movement called We Charge Genocide. A few of the activists were friends and family members of victims of police torture who honored their lost friend, daughter, son, sibling, mother, or father by fighting for a change. The last few letters pivot to focus on torture in the context of the war on terror, specifically the torture Richard Zuley inflicted on Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Guantánamo Bay because Slahi was suspected of planning terrorist attacks at Los Angeles International Airport and the Toronto CN Tower on behalf of Al-Qaeda. Andrew Wilson’s torturer, Jon Burge, was a soldier before joining the police force in Chicago. Zuley, however, was a police officer for the Chicago Police Department before being recruited to Guantánamo Bay. To demonstrate the similarities between being a soldier and being a police officer, Ralph focuses on both Wilson’s and Slahi’s stories. One of Ralph’s current research projects is a series of lectures he is publishing on the stories that particularly Black people tell about police violence and how retelling these stories is a way for black people to feel connected to each other. Another ongoing project is centered around New Orleans and its consent decree, in which a city police department comes under federal monitoring. As a former graduate student at the

University, Ralph said that he empathizes with University of Chicago students who have been racially profiled or targeted by the police like the girl and boy on Cermak and Lawndale whom Ralph saw being targeted by the police when he first moved to Chicago. “It can change your idea of social belonging, and you can feel like you don’t belong. I would like to say that you do belong. I’m sorry this happened to you but you do belong and this is your space,” he said. Ralph, the father of a three-year-old girl, hopes his daughter grows up in a world dif-

COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

ferent than the one in which he grew up. “I hope she lives in a world where people who make mistakes in their lives are not subjected to a punitive system that takes away their prospects for social mobility,” Ralph said. “I hope the world changes, and I believe it can change in the way that we allow people to make mistakes. I hope [the world] allows them to transform into better people.” He hopes that The Torture Letters will challenge all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support police violence. “Torture is always wrong, and let’s move on from there,” Ralph said.

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The swimmers, poised for competition, take their starting positions during the UAA Championships at Ratner Athletics Center.

Fourth-year swimmer Byrne Litschgi rests between races.

NYU diver Hunter Whitbeck pauses and prepares for his dive.

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SPORTS

In the beginning of the race, the swimmers perform a rare act of synchronity: the dive.

Diving and Swimming Excel at UAA Meet By BRINDA RAO Sports Reporter

The athletes watch the scoreboard with anticipation. ALL PHOTOS BY JEREMY LINDENFELD

The Maroons dominated at the 2020 UAA Championship swimming and diving meet. Hosting the UAA Championships, the men’s team placed second out of eight teams and the women’s team placed third. The men’s team lost the UAA title by 16.5 points, having spent most of the weekend meet hunting win after win in determination to topple Emory University’s 21 straight UAA titles. The Maroons performed excellently, with rookies and seasoned players alike breaking records, winning races, and cheering each other on. The meet concluded with several individual UAA honors for members of the team, including the coaching staff. Head coach Jason Weber and assistant coach Nicole Kaupp were named UAA Men’s Coaching Staff of the Year. Head diving coach Becky Benson won the title of UAA Women’s Diving Coach of the Year. In preparation for the meet, the swim team began to cut down the length and intensity of their practices. Having ramped

up drive, since their preseason training, members of the team were at their peak performance leading up to the UAAs. On the other hand, the diving team continued practice at a consistent intensity for the rest of their season, only tapering the number of dives two days before the meet. In addition, the teams had dynamic advantages due to their home-meet location. Benson explained, “To host a meet is advantageous because the UChicago swimmers and divers are comfortable with the facility and they get to sleep in their own beds.” Her comment reflects on the psychological nature of high intensity meets such as the UAA Championships. Seemingly simple comforts, like sleeping in one’s bed, can make a world of difference in mental preparation for competition and performance. Weber elaborated on the advantages of hosting a meet: “Hosting is a distinct advantage, not only because we are more familiar with the boards, blocks, walls, etc., that come into play when competing, but we don’t have to spend time or have the added stress of traveling, missing classes, etc.” The UAAs also saw the Maroons set-

ting records throughout the weekend. First-year Morgan Simon set a new school record in the 1,650-yard freestyle race. She broke 17 minutes with her exceptional time (16:55.34). First-year Arthur Kiselnikov set both a UAA and University of Chicago record with his impressive 100-yard freestyle performance in 44.30. However, Kiselnikov proceeded to break his own record in the following 400-yard freestyle relay with his split of 44.29. These excellent first-year performances were complemented by wins from upperclassmen; fourth-year Byrne Litschgi secured a victory in the 200-yard backstroke with a time of 1:47.17 and thirdyear Margaret Wolfson won the 200-yard breaststroke with a time of 2:19.04. Looking to the future, the swimming and diving teams are gearing up to compete at the NCAA DIII Swimming and Diving National Championships. Over the next few weeks, members of the teams will try to secure qualifying times for the NCAAs. Swimmers having competed this weekend at the Midwest Invitational, the diving team will compete at the NCAA Diving Regional in Granville, Ohio.