Winter 2013

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NORTH BY

WINTER 2013

the

TUITION DEBACLE

(sign on the line)

PLUS:

Why the hipster doesn’t exist at Northwestern The new face of online education Sushi gets a makeover Norris turns 40

Breaking down the sticker price

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C R OU E F TS, AR TIS RE R G HE D A TIN S, AN GET A OU S PL NE RE OM Y TA PHE FR SS A ON OS OU CLA ING SP TM P Y T A NN O T O G IN T A ST GES PLA CE EL N O E N FE ERE R T UG ’R O AN ST IFF E N S OU NG D JU S D POW CA Y Y TRO S OL M E T S T OM OR R E N FFE TH T W IR NN GE E C O TIO O O VE BU D T A N IT TIR STR S S E N CA DI A , ’ H I S IFI TU T AS O YCL WH E E NOR ER G C OD S NO : TH O TH M CH AY TS CA 4 AND 2 L H GE M DY . EA M TA HI . 3 DS, . 3 WIL LTO FRO BO D E C PG N PG TS DE A ER ” A S IN . W D A D OU M S N ER S? USB LY DEN RI E RI ITY. D RI IN PU A D U SE EP M N N IL H N T EW G UN A A KE O CA KE U NA OST S O Y S A N ERA MM G’S NG TO T C ’S R M E AN R AV O ON T W NI RS SE HI AT GE AS IK , M G FO HE RE C STR BU .

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BY RLD COM TR E ND T F LET SEL Y DA AIN DO ES O E EN US A N’ G, UR GH AT. P V. SS S W OM NC O AIN DO IN YO OU RE ING PO NE N’ S CO T H G P OV. ORN NG THR K G MB G PO E N P I E O U IN ILL ER OR T I S M F O G O T O S N ON ES FIX GHE ST UMB G P AY T D UR U L AT EEZ I U M N D O O R M THW LD H L J N ZI UN N C . YO ICE F F CO OR EHO THE EL E AT REE T S LLY RTH SS AN T O OR --N US TH S W IC F F EX EA EA LO TH CKE E F E O I A N O N R N IR R IC RS L H L W HT HA ET K. ’RE O HE TE BU DV OU CA AL IG R T CK AC OU BO S T ET ST : A F C TI B M TE BU E P Y CE T’ S B RE LS , O AC ON OU ET ST IC W LA HA K EA AL G PR TT Y B E AT O P –T OR N E- IN A CO D– KS AR RE O N FUL ’T W HE UR ON IS A UN OR NE G , S ER SN KA T L C OIS OL AK RO W HE IT A TIC W OE OD E IN HO L P OH SO T A KA N T ES AS PO N D , V AC CO HO LC K, H I OD E I K PL ST O INT R F AL LCO Y, A OO IS T, V FAC MA AN MO ING PO OU A ICK E B SW IN R INT TH HE ITT NG K Y TR Y TH IST. G PO YOU PO ORS ET T E H EZI UN B NT IN K NG CT ! L U’R FRE D D DE EEZ DUN EZI DU UP YO ER AN FR ND FRE CON INK VER OW AD A W R DR OE S L HE LO ETTE CE? WH F IT O A B N IF O , G DA EN USE G IT EV CA IN BE RINK D

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NORTH BY Managing Editor | Anca Ulea Creative Director | Alexis N. Sanchez Photography Director | Brennan Anderson Senior Editors | Lydia Belanger & Susie Neilson Associate Editors | Eric Brown & Ben Oreskes Assistant Editor | Gabe Bergado Senior Design Editor | Priya Krishnakumar Designers | Christophe Haubursin Margaret Kadifa, Katy Kim & Chrissy Lee Photography Assistant | Sunny Kang Photographers | Ariana Bacle, Natalie Krebs, Priscilla Liu, Daniel Schuleman, David Zhang & Alex Zhu Illustrators | Sarah Lowe, Geneve Ong & Steph Shapiro

northbynorthwestern.com Editor-in-Chief | Julie Kliegman Executive Editor | Kim Alters Managing Editors | Denise Lu & Megan Thielking Assistant Managing Editors | Gabe Bergado, Eddie Rios & Connor Sears News Editors | Alex Nitkin & Dawnthea Price Assistant News Editor | Lauren Lindstrom Opinion Editor | Hillary Hubley Features Editor | Stanley Kay Assistant Features Editor | Yunita Ong Life & Style Editor | Saron Strait Assistant Life & Style Editors | Sarah Ehlen, Forrest Hanson & Nina Munoz Entertainment Editor | Christian Holub Assistant Entertainment Editors | John Hardberger, Inhye Lee & Susie Neilson Sports Editor | Steven Goldstein Assistant Sports Editors | Aric DiLalla & Hillary Thomas Politics Editor | Sylvan Lane Assistant Politics Editor | Ryan Milowicki & Preetisha Sen Writing Editor | Susan Carner Assistant Writing Editor | Amanda Glickman Photo Editor | Sunny Kang Assistant Photo Editors | Jenna Zitaner & David Zhang Video Editor | Jenny Starrs Assistant Video Editors | Christophe Haubursin Interactive Editors | Katherine Mirani Assistant Interactive Editors | Sam Hart & Nicole Zhu Webmaster | Tyler Fisher

North by Northwestern, NFP Board of Directors President | Julie Kliegman Executive Vice President | Kim Alters Vice President | Anca Ulea Treasurer | Yoona Ha Secretary | Megan Thielking

4 | WINTER 2013

Published with support from Campus Progress, a division of the Center for American Progress. Online at CampusProgress.org

Y O U R G U I D E T O L I V I N G S M A R T.

PLUS:

GENIUS FIVE-INGREDIENT FEAST pg.8 | GETTIN’ SAUCY pg.8 | THE ELEMENTS OF FLAVOR pg.9 FOR THE LOVE OF NEWSHI pg.10 | FIT AND DIRTY pg.11 | FROM DINNER TO THE D pg.12 THE EVERYPERSON’S GUIDE TO HANDIWORK pg.13 | SUBLETIQUETTE pg.14

Photograph by BRENNAN ANDERSON NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 5

GENIUS

Broke And Bourgeois B Y A LE J A N D RO VA LD I V I E S O

I

f you listen to frat boys and Homer Simpson, then all you know about beer is that it’s good. But there’s more to beer than its deliciousness and the vitamins that your dad insists it has.

Beers can vary by ingredients, aftertaste, coloring and price. It’s time to get yourself a little more acquainted, so you don’t embarass yourself next time you hit up World Of Beer. o

Party Time

This kind of beer means you’ve thrown in the towel and you’re just tryna get fucked up. Mostly pale lagers, these are best bought in bulk to be consumed by the 25 extra freshmen that showed up uninvited.

PABST BLUE RIBBON Type: Pale lager Average Price: $10 per 12-pack Taste: PBR is associated with everyone from hipsters to blue-collar workers who don’t know what hipsters are. This light beer is easy to sip with a musky aftertaste. It’s got a sweet taste at the beginning and lands with a dry finish, marking it as a cheap beer that is actually enjoyable to binge on.

MILLER LITE Type: Pale lager Average Price: $6 per six-pack Taste: It can be difficult to describe Miller Lite because of its watereddown flavor. It has a slight bitter aftertaste and a crisp feel on your tongue, making it one of the easiest beers to either sip or chug.

photo: brennan anderson

Drink your way up the beer ladder.

Check out the Booze Blog at northbynorthwestern.com

The Dictionary of Beer

First Paid Internship

For at least three months, you’re living large at your dream company. They’re paying the big bucks too, so you can splurge on some fine beers. Bring these suckers out for that hot date who’s only coming over to see the size of your, uh, bedroom.

ALE: This beer is made by a process of quickly fermenting yeast, which gives it a sweet, fullbodied taste. Ales are more complex, with a short aging process and the need to be kept at a particular room temperature. There are all kinds of ales, from brown ale with its slightly nutty taste, to pale ales with a more hearty, bitter feel.

GUINNESS Type: Irish dry stout Average Price: $9 per 6-pack Taste: The original taste of Dublin is creamy on the outside and malted and caramel-like on the inside, with a smooth and smoky taste. Plus, it’s heaven to lick that foam off your lips.

HOPS: Hops are actually flowers used as a flavoring and stability agent in the brewing process. They’re important in adding bitterness to a beer, which you know as that tangy aftertaste from a long sip.

DESPERADOS (SPAIN) Type: Euro pale lager Average Price: $20 per 12-pack, not including shipping Taste: A sweet beer that has the unexpected pleasure of being aromatized with tequila. Typically found in the distant lands of Western Europe, a sour kick balances this beer’s über-sweet taste. It’s the easiest tequila shot you’ll ever take, though its surprising mixture can lead to overconsumption and bad decisions.

IPA: India Pale Ales are known for their use of coke-fired malt and extra hops, giving them a paler color and added bitterness. They were created in the 1800s as a means of sending beer overseas without it spoiling from the long voyage.

First Paycheck

Welcome to the work force and to your first glorious, taxed paycheck. Now to put those hard-earned dollars from serving tables and CEOs toward some better beer. Soon, you’ll find yourself pairing these beers with meals, but try to limit it to one for breakfast.

LEINENKUGEL’S SUMMER SHANDY Type: Fruit beer Average Price: $12 per six-pack Taste: It’s the Fruity Pebbles of beer, just without the milk and nostalgia. Summer Shandy has an unusually sweet, citrus taste that could cause it to be confused for hard lemonade. It has a thin body with a touch of bitterness at the end of a sip, retaining that familiar beery taste.

photo: brennan anderson

DOGFISH HEAD 90 MIN. IMPERIAL IPA Type: American Double/Imperial IPA Average Price: $11 per four-pack Taste: Esquire calls this beer “perhaps the best IPA in America.” It’s a beer that deserves a double-take, as its incredibly bitter taste will hit you pretty quickly. It’s got a strong, hoppy aroma coupled with a creamy feel and a fruity aftertaste that stays on your tongue.

LAGER: Lagers are made with adjuncts, which are unmalted grains such as corn, rye or rice, as a means to thin the beer’s body. Lagers are brewed with a small amount of hops and best stored cold, a process that creates a crisp feel. There are two types of lagers: Pale lagers are lean, golden-colored beers characterized by their dry, subtle taste, and dark lagers are heavier beers with a slightly sweeter kick to them.

MALT: An essential ingredient in beer, malt is made by drying cereal grains, called barley, which is then germinated and killed to convert its starches to sugars. This sugar is the basis of the beer’s taste.

MALT LIQUOR: A pale lager made with less hops and more sugar, malt liquor has a higher alcohol content of about six to seven percent.

These beers taste strong and hit you harder, all with a non-bitter aftertaste.

STOUT: Strong, dark beers with an alcohol content of seven to eight percent, stouts are made with roasted dark barley, usually providing a brown appearance and a distinct viscosity. The taste is usually syrupy and coffeelike, with a strong and satisfying aftertaste.

WHEAT: Usually referred to as “white beers,” wheat beers are brewed with lots of wheat and malted barley. This pale-colored beer is light in feel and has an inoffensive aftertaste, making it easy to sip. Wheat beers can vary in taste, with some having a sweet, malty flavor and others having a sour and tangy touch. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 7

GENIUS

These recipes are as easy as counting on one hand.

BY TEO M UN GARAY

R

ecipes don’t have to be complicated to taste good. Why go through the effort of searching Whole Foods or D&D Finer Foods for hours trying to find an obscure ingredient? Keep it simple and delicious with a five-ingredient feast! In these recipes salt, pepper and olive oil don’t count.

Cold Corn Salad 1 bag frozen corn, thawed in fridge M cans beans, drained K half red onion, diced Italian dressing Garlic powder to taste

Gettin’ Saucy

Dip, dunk, delight.

BY M I CH ELE MOSE S

Baked Snapper with Olives 1 filet snapper (good substitutes include bass, grouper or any other medium meaty fish) 2 tablespoons parsley, chopped 1 clove garlic, minced 2 tablespoons olives, roughly chopped (green or black, to your liking) 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Drizzle a sheet pan with olive oil. Place filet on pan and sprinkle remaining ingredients and another drizzle of olive oil over the top of the fish. Season with salt and pepper. Bake for 20 minutes, or until firm and opaque.

Fingerling Potatoes with Lox 6 fingerling potatoes O cup crème fraîche or sour cream M slices lox or smoked salmon, diced K cup tomatoes, diced a K tablespoons capers Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Rub

potatoes with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake on a sheet pan for 20 minutes. Cool potatoes completely in the refrigerator. Halve the potatoes and scoop out a trough in each half. Discard or save the removed potato flesh. Evenly dollop each crème fraîche or sour cream into the trough. In a small bowl, toss together lox, tomatoes and capers with salt and pepper. Divide lox mixture among potatoes on top of crème fraîche or sour cream. Serve cold.

Stewed Apples 4 Golden Delicious apples (Their texture works best for this recipe, but other apples are fine to use.)

2 cups dry white wine K cup sugar Juice of half lemon Zest of 1 lemon Peel apples and cut into fourths. Cut pieces diagonally and remove the section of the apple quarters that contains the core. Dissolve sugar in the lemon juice and wine in a saucepan over medium heat. Raise to a simmer and add apples and zest to the saucepan. Cook until apples are tender. Remove apples and reduce wine to a syrup, at about a third of the volume. o

Sauces can transform a meal. Put them on top of some vegetables, pasta or chicken, and they turn simple dishes into delicious concoctions. And if you want to freshen up your cooking, you can prepare them yourself. o

Barbecue sauce:

Pico de Gallo:

Pesto:

Peanut sauce:

This grilling staple is surprisingly quick and easy to make.

Combine ketchup, brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, mustard powder, Worcestershire sauce and/or soy sauce in a saucepan. Cayenne pepper is optional, depending on your spice preference.

Simmer mixture for a few minutes, then serve.

Turn a can of beans and rice or a plate of veggies into Mexican food with the addition of this super-fresh salsa.

Chop tomatoes and onions and combine in a two-to-one ratio. Remove the seeds from a jalapeño pepper and mince. Chop a generous handful of cilantro. Combine these components. Season with salt, pepper and lime juice. Let the flavors mix and settle before serving.

Aside from its usual home atop pasta, pesto can also class up your eggs, sandwiches or salad dressing.

Blend a couple of garlic cloves with olive oil and chopped nuts.

These can be almonds, walnuts or pine nuts. Then pick basil leaves off stems and wash them. Add them and puree until smooth.

Grate parmesan cheese and squeeze lemon and add them into the mix. Blend together.

This sauce adds excitement to noodles or chicken skewers. It also makes a more wholesome meal out of a vegetable stir-fry by giving it some protein and healthy fat.

Scoop natural-style peanut butter into a bowl. Thin it out with warm water. Mince garlic and ginger. Combine with the peanut butter. Add white sugar, lime juice, soy sauce and rice vinegar. Whisk until smooth. For a bit more spice, add red pepper flakes.

8 | WINTER 2013

photo: brennan anderson

Five Ingredient Feast

The easiest of them all! Add beans and onion to the corn. Toss mixture with enough salad dressing to coat ingredients. Add garlic powder and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve cold.

The Elements Of Flavor Chicago restaurants bring chemistry to the kitchen.

BY JO H N H A RDBE RGE R

T photo: natalie krebs

here’s a new generation of Chicago chefs who seem more like mad scientists than cooks.

They experiment in their kitchens with liquid nitrogen, centrifuges and syringes. What emerges looks like it's right out of a contemporary art textbook.

These culinary experts unleash their creations on their patrons in restaurants like Next, Alinea and Moto. But sometimes the results of their experiments break out of the culinary bubble.

Molecular gastronomy is a branch of food science that seeks to reverse-engineer the chemical and physical processes of cooking, then use the resulting culinary building blocks in ways that challenge our understanding of food.

Basically, they’re doing alchemy with the edible, and their techniques are catching on.

Enter Homaro Cantu, executive chef at Moto, a Fulton restaurant.

Cantu’s aspirations extend beyond

simply putting some food on a plate and serving it.

“I want to create things never seen, heard of or tasted before,” Cantu says.

His culinary ingenuity has paid off: Last year Moto broke into Forbes’ list of “100 Best US Restaurants” at No. 44. But more important than the recognition, according to Cantu, is the potential impact his culinary experiments could have. Cantu is considered one of the pioneers of a strange ingredient known as the Miracle Berry.

“It looks like a little cranberry,” he says. “It contains a protein called miraculin that, basically, makes bitter food taste sweet.”

The Miracle Berry is completely organic, its magic protein naturally occurring. While it’s currently used mostly by food scientists in places like Moto (and its sister restaurant iNG next door), Cantu recognizes the berry’s broader potential.

“The implications for [people

with] diabetes alone are huge,” Cantu says. “We can make totally sugarfree desserts taste great.” Cantu’s favorite example is how the Miracle Berry makes lemons taste like lemonade, no sugar added. Beyond that, there are tons of applications for it.

“The ripple effect of getting rid of sugar across the board is a huge implication,” he says.

In a 2011 TED talk, Cantu and Moto’s executive pastry chef Ben Roche cited a venture in which they sent their kitchen staff around Chicago to gather non-toxic plants that had never before been used in highend cuisine. The staff returned with sour and bitter weeds, hay and crab apples, using taste-altering proteins like miraculin to produce a sauce that Moto's patrons swore was barbecue.

Cantu and Roche are currently developing new ways to use the Miracle Berry through the production of Future Food, an online television series that explores the applications of the Berry as well as other

gastronomic experiments through a series of culinary challenges.

Beyond the Miracle Berry, Cantu thinks his work and goals are closer to food science than the specific realm of molecular gastronomy.

He, like Louis Pasteur and other food scientists before him, uses the kitchen as a laboratory to create something new and, more importantly, useful.

To that end, Cantu and his staff developed an aeroponic garden, a sort of rotating indoor tower on which a variety of small plants can grow. It produces everything from strawberries to the mustard used in Moto’s menu. A larger version is currently in the works for iNG, which will have the potential to grow thousands of dollars of produce in a day.

“Imagine the applications that [an indoor garden] like this could have for a church or a school, or in someone’s home,” Cantu says. “We want to create something that could be a great disruptive technology.” o

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 9

GENIUS

Skip the fish and try these rolls.

BY LA U REN LI N DST ROM

Breakfast Sushi (Part I) 1 banana, sliced 2 tablespoons peanut butter K cup cocoa crisp rice cereal For those who love the most important meal of the day, it just got much easier to get creative. Slice a banana, slather the edges in peanut butter and roll in cereal. Hint: You’ll feel more authentic if you use chopsticks.

VIDEO

TUTORIAL

Do we actually make all this food?

Yeah, check out how it’s done with our video tutorial online.

10 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

Breakfast Sushi (Part II) 6 strips bacon 3 eggs, scrambled Strawberries Cheese Here’s another take on breakfast sushi for bacon fans. Scramble three eggs in a frying pan. Fry bacon strips until they are slightly crispy but soft enough to shape. Roll bacon strips in circles and fill with eggs. Place rolls back in the pan and fry for one minute to ensure the roll will hold, adding cheese and strawberries in the last minute of frying. Possible additions: peppers or hash browns. Go wild!

“L

Fruit Sushi 1 tablespoon unsalted butter M cup mini-marshmallows 2 cups cooked rice (brown or white) Non-stick vegetable oil spray 1 banana, thinly sliced K pint fruit medley (such as strawberries, pineapple and cantaloupe) Thinly sliced mini chocolate chips and toasted shredded coconut for toping (optional) Special equipment: Nigiri sushi mold or plastic ice cube tray This sweet twist has all the fun of fresh sushi but none of the uncertainty of raw fish. To begin, melt butter and marshmallows in saucepan over medium heat. Heat mixture until completely soft. Remove from heat and stir in cooked rice until thoroughly mixed. Spray ice cube tray with non-stick spray and place fruit medley slices into each section. Spoon in rice and press gently into fruit. Remove from ice cube tray and top with chocolate chips and coconut flakes.

Mexican Sushi Bites 16 ounces cream cheese, softened K cup salsa, plus more for dipping 1 tablespoon chili powder N teaspoon salt 1 avocado, thinly sliced 1 tablespoon lime juice 8 8-inch flour tortillas 2 cups fresh baby spinach 1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced 1 yellow bell pepper, thinly sliced Head south of the border for this recipe’s inspiration. To begin, mix together cream cheese, salsa, chili powder and salt. In another bowl, slice avocados and sprinkle with lime. Cut tortillas into 6 half-inch squares. Put three tablespoons of salsa mixture onto tortillas. Create two rows of spinach in center of tortillas and add peppers and avocado. Roll up tortillas and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate rolls for at least one hour. Before serving, slice into half-inch pieces. Serve with salsa for dipping.

photos: brennan anderson; illustration: alexis n. sanchez

For The Love Of Newshi

et’s grab some sushi!” is a dinner invite reserved for those with an acquired taste for the Japanese delicacy. If you don’t to love spicy tuna and seaweed or are on a student budget, restaurant sushi isn’t always possible. Enter “Newshi,” a do-it-yourself alternative to going out for sushi, with nontraditional ingredients at a fraction of the cost. Those who squirm at the idea of raw fish, fear no more—there’s a variation for every taste and price range. Whether it’s a tasty twist from across the globe or the introduction of bacon into the equation, creativity is key. o

Fit And Dirty Fun runs go extreme. BY STEVEN GO LD STEI N

U

photos: priscilla liu

nderwater sludge tunnels. Military-style trenches. Fire, electricity and ice water, lining a 12mile path. At first glance, you’d think it was a mad dash for survival, a serpentine journey stocked with enough grime and grit to make Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption turn back.

But push through and you’ll find hot dogs and beer at the end.

These are mud runs, quirky triathlon-type challenges that are springing up in Chicago. Playing host to an array of physical and mental shocks, these obstacle courses are a unique challenge for runners of all abilities.

“Our goal is to push you to your limit,” says Erica Taylor, a marketing coordinator for the Merrell Down and Dirty National Mud and Obstacle Series. “It’s not just a race you’re getting, it’s a whole experience.”

Down and Dirty kicked off operations in 2010, in Los Angeles and quickly spreading across the country. Partnered with Operation Gratitude, a charity that sends care packages to soldiers overseas, the

event comes to Chicago on May 19.

Each mud run organizer offers its own nuanced course. Down and Dirty features Marine hurdles, a tire path for push-ups, balance beams and a colossal mud pit.

“Some of the obstacles are absolutely insane,” says Weinberg freshman Mark Davis. Davis is preparing for a spring run with Tough Mudder, an obstacle course designed by the British Special Forces, and he knows that training should not be taken lightly. In the months leading up to the event, Davis will engage in cardio workouts, conditioning, weightlifting and chin-ups.

Rob Dickens, COO of Rugged Races, recommends cross-training and alternating muscle workouts for the competitive participants. Yet Dickens stresses the ability to complete the run itself by preparing for strength challenges.

“A lot of people make the mistake of focusing on weightlifting, but if you can’t run three miles without stopping to catch your breath, you have a lot of work to do,” he says.

Still, no amount of physical training can fully prepare a prospective mud runner. Unlike standard triathlons and marathons, mud runs aim to build mental strength through a myriad of surprising twists.

Weinberg sophomore Grant Parr recalls swimming through a 10-foot long pool of ice water when he ran Tough Mudder last September.

“It’s stuff that challenges your mind, you can’t do anything to physically prepare for it,” he says. “By the time you got out of the water, you couldn’t feel your body ... that was a challenge.”

Not all runs are as demanding as Parr’s. Dickens says that while some participants want to be pushed physically, many are just looking for a new experience or a quirky day out.

“I’d say only 20 percent of runners are in great shape, everyone else is just out there for fun,” he says. “We’ll get groups of five or six friends all dressed in crazy costumes.”

Nick Ziebarth, the race co-

Want to know what training for a mud run entails? Check out the video on NBN’s website.

ordinator for Chicago-based Pretty Muddy, emphasizes confidence and accomplishment over daunting obstacles. A mud run exclusively for women, Pretty Muddy includes a beach ball pit, an inflatable slide and a bubble tunnel.

Pretty Muddy recently became affiliated with Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a nonprofit founded to fight childhood cancer.

Mothers with children afflicted by cancer run for free, while a portion of registration costs and concession sales goes directly to the charity.

“There’s a huge sense of accomplishment for a lot of these women.

The word ‘empowerment’ is heard a lot after the race,” Ziebarth says.

Nearly all mud runs conclude with a post-race celebration. While Tough Mudder gives runners food and drink, Down and Dirty awards first through third placers with a medal and a gift package.

Food and swag aside, mud run participants emerge with more than they can carry. Pushing competitors from start to finish, these unique challenges give a sense of accomplishment, release, charitable dedication and physical gratification. It’s an experience that stays with runners for a while, regardless of the hour-long shower that likely ensues afterward.

GENIUS

Hot For Teacher

From Dinner To The D

Turn your suave on.

BY LILY S. COHEN

When you think of suave, you think of the guy who managed to get the toughest reservation in town or the girl who covered her bed with rose petals. But in the college world of hit-or-miss hookups and uncomfortably undefined relationships, it’s something entirely different. Relationship limbo is a common part of college life, so being suave means having the balls to stick with common norms and expectations while still asserting yourself as an individual. Here are a few basic do’s and don’ts of “college suave,” keeping in mind that confidence often means just rolling with the punches. o

the flirt

Be the nice guy. One of the biggest mistakes people make in collegestyle courting is confusing “too cool” with “hard to get.” If your friends act obnoxious, step aside and apologize. If you see your love interest standing alone, offer to buy him a drink or compliment her outfit. Small acts of kindness might make the difference between getting a phone number and going home alone. Don’t be afraid of your love interest’s friends. Approaching your crush while they’re with their friends shows that you’re comfortable with yourself.

You’ll get bonus points if you can weave in a low-key compliment.

the big h-u

It’s barely impressive that you are able to unclip a bra with one hand.

Use both hands—there’s nothing sexy about 20 seconds of claiming you’re usually an “expert” at lingerie removal. Belts can be tricky.

Unbuckle the belt, but allow your partner to kick off their own pants.

Pulling off a pair of pants (don’t get me started on skinny jeans) requires a fair amount of maneuvering and there’s nothing worse than too aggressively pulling them over his potential, uh, roadblock.

12 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

THE TEXT the text

Avoid the double text when possible. If your crush doesn’t respond, don’t send another text asking, “U there?” or “HELLOO?!” Whether your crush is taking a nap or intentionally ignoring you, you’ll get an irritated reaction. When you text someone, try to have an actual conversation in mind. While it’s always nice to check in, make an effort to show that you’re interesting, too.“If I text someone first I don’t just say ‘Hey.’ I always have to come up with something flirty and fun to say,” says Communication sophomore Michelle Schechter. “I try to be kind of quirky and silly over text.”

real dating?

Pick a restaurant in Chicago or go somewhere you won’t run into your fraternity brothers, sorority sisters or exes. You’ll get points for creativity even if it’s only an El stop away. “I always like to sort of remove myself from the ‘Northwestern bubble,’” says Weinberg sophomore Nathan Frazer. “I think space is a very important way to get to know someone as a friend or romantically, to start to develop a relationship.”

the exit

Be explicit. There’s no reason to disguise your big move as sharing a cab home. If you’re at the point where you want to take your love interest home, be bold and tell him or her you want to keep hanging out in a more private venue. If you wait around for all of your friends to leave with you, you might lose the opportunity for alone time and risk getting cockblocked by your roommate. Girls: Run through a checklist at the door—phone, keys, wallet. Don’t rely on whoever you leave with to get you home safely because you don’t have your phone to call a cab or the money to pay for it.

Though popular culture has made the “taboo” teacher-student relationship all kinds of sexy (here’s looking at you, Pretty Little Liars and Never Been Kissed) the reality is far less tantalizing. Mired down by bureaucracy, going out for drinks with your instructor reads like more trouble than it’s worth.

The Rule According to University policy, instructors may not have “evaluative or supervisory authority” over students with whom they have been romantically or sexually involved. This kind of authority includes assigning grades, supervising dissertations and advising on employment or financial decisions.

If you hoped to keep such a relationship on the DL, good luck; existing or past relationships between TAs and their students must be reported to the dean or chair of the TA’s department, while other faculty members might have to report to Provost Dan Linzer. The school’s policy doesn’t outline the consequences if you don’t report the relationship, but you probably don’t want to find out.

The Rationale This type of policy is common at universities: The University of California system has a similar one, citing that “the integrity of the faculty-student relationship is the foundation of the University’s educational mission ... The unequal institutional power inherent in this relationship heightens the vulnerability of the student and the potential for coercion.” Meanwhile the University of Minnesota takes a less official approach, asserting that consensual relationships between faculty and students, “while not expressly forbidden, are generally deemed very unwise.”

The Verdict With the quarter system condensing everything into an eight to 10-week mad dash of papers and exams, you should wait until you are no longer under the University’s authoritative thumb to date whomever you want. Chances are the crush you’re nursing for the dapper-looking teaching assistant with the bow tie, or the lecturer with the silky voice, is better left untouched at least until papers are graded, exams are returned and you’ve earned your diploma.—Dawnthea Price

illustrations: steph shapiro

That extra credit might not be worth it.

The Everyperson’s Guide to Handiwork The key to pleasing your partner is at your fingertips. BY AMANDA GLICKMAN

W

hether you’re lending one (or two) to your partner or taking matters into your own, hands are magnificent, often underused and/or incorrectly maneuvered. These complex body parts are the Swiss Army Knives of sexual ecstasy—that’s if one knows what’s what in the world of handiwork. We’ll help you take fingering and handjobs from foreplay to artform.

Variance is key

photo: ariana bacle

Dan Savage, sex columnist and editorial director of The Stranger, implores all penis-grabbers to vary grip, speed and conditions when stimulating by hand (either alone or with a partner).

“Left hand, right hand, a little lube, a lot of lube, firm grip, loose grip. You don’t want to ruin [yourself] for partnered sex by using the ‘death grip,’” he writes. Clenching one’s fist tightly around the penis will make it, well, harder to experience the same-quality sensation with a mouth, vagina or anus.

Savage’s advice also applies to vaginas. Mixing it up in terms of speed, finger pressure, number of fingers applied, pleasure zones stimulated and vibrator/lube us-

age helps teach you how to come and come again under any condition. If you’ve gotten used to a vibrator, try taking a vibe-vacation for a week or two and reintroduce yourself to your own or your partner’s touch. Vice versa for those who find it difficult to climax with finger stimulation: Incorporate a teeny finger-vibe (CVS sells one by Trojan) or bullet vibe (the classic Pocket Rocket is available in most sex shops and online) into your routine. Use one of these vibrators in conjunction with some hand action and see if the combo makes a world of difference.

Work out to enhance the effect Exercising your pubococcygeus (PC for short) muscles while your partner digitally stimulates you intensifies your pleasure. This increases blood flow to the genitals, and the more blood that’s flowing, the happier (and easier) the ending will be for both of you. Doing Kegels involves squeezing and releasing your pelvic floor muscles. This will give you a toned pelvic floor regardless of your gender. To locate your PC, stop peeing mid-stream and notice where your downstairs clenches. For those with vaginas,

working these muscles out for a few minutes a day leads to stronger G-spot orgasms while being fingered. For those with penises, Kegels are proven to combat premature ejaculation and improve the overall strength of erections.

Multitasking makes everything better (as does lube) When contemplating the complexity of the vagina, don’t fear: The trick is to tease different erogenous zones and work up to stimulating everywhere at once. Start by tracing the labia lightly with your fingertips, and tease the clit with a few gentle strokes until your partner is adequately wet (if this is an issue, common for those on medications ranging from anti-depressants to birth control pills, water-based lubricant is your BFF!). Explore the much-neglected space between the clit and the opening itself, as well as the actual vaginal opening without penetrating it.

Once your partner wants more, use one hand to stimulate the Gspot by inserting a finger or two palm-up, and making a “come hither” motion about two-knuckles in. Use the other hand to stroke the perineum, press down on the pubic

mound (which isolates blood flow to the area and intensifies sensation) and/or make circular motions around the clit, taking care that the exterior of the vagina is just as lubed as the interior so that repetitive rubbing is smooth sailing.

In contrast, the penis is often treated too simply—a partner jumps right in, jerking the shaft off with a hand and that’s it. Instead, start with a similar approach to the one mentioned above: Tease the whole package with your fingertips, running them from the perineum (taint, people!) to the seam of the balls, up the shaft and around the head, making sure to pay attention to the frenulum (the tiny ridge underneath where the head meets the shaft ).

A dry handjob is never fun, so slather your hands with a longlasting silcone-based lube or saliva if you’re lubeless or your partner is cool with it. Use your dominant hand to make a corkscrew-shaped up-and-down motion on the shaft, with your palm repeatedly passing over the ultra-sensitive head. Increase speed and pressure accordingly. Balls need love too: Gently cupping them with your non-dominant hand provides a highly-enjoyable sensation. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 13

GENIUS

Subletiquette

SUBLESSORS So you're all set to jet off to study abroad in Spain, go on JR in New York City or otherwise escape Northwestern for a quarter or two.

You have a subletter to keep your bed warm and pay your rent while you're away. Now all you have to do is pack your suitcase and leave, right? If only it were that easy.

DO decide ahead of time how rent

It’s about more than handing over your keys.

BY ARIANA BACLE

S

ubletting seems simple enough: Someone leaves, someone new moves in for a bit. But beyond the official rules of subletting (aka those set by landlords), there’s some necessary etiquette to go by. Not sure how much stuff to leave in your room or how to switch sublets last minute?

We’re here to help. o

and all the other bills will be handled. You don’t want to get a frantic call from your subletters midsummer because the lights went out and they didn’t know they had to pay utilities.

DON'T

leave your room looking like a wasted toddler lived in it. I know, I know, no one wants to clean their room while they're wrapping up finals/celebrating wrapping up finals. But your subletter isn't going to be too happy if they move in and find your dirty underwear under the pillow or pizza crumbs on the desk.

SUBLETTERS You found a kickass apartment to sublet. Hooray! You've just made your sublessor's life a million times easier. But this isn't a pay-my-rentand-that's-all deal.

DO make a commitment and stick

to it. But, you ask, what happens if I commit to subletting one apartment... and then two weeks before I move in, I find another one closer to my pals? If you can't handle being an extra 10 minutes from your friends' beer fridge, find someone to replace you in the original apartment. This doesn't mean find a couple maybe-subletters and hand their phone numbers to the person you're bailing on, but rather finding someone who definitely wants to live in that apartment.

DON'T break anything. If you do,

fix it or replace it. The place should be in the same state its owner left it in, and if it's not, you should at least acknowledge the issues.

DON'T

have unreasonably high expectations. Remember: You're a college student and not a wealthy businessperson staying on the top floor of the Hilton. Your sublessor will probably leave things in the drawers, under the bed, in the nightstand and so on, so just work around that. Make sure to take out your own stuff when you leave, or at least leave cool things if you insist on leaving some souvenirs. Tip: Tube-top floor-length jumpers do not count as "cool things."

DO consider asking for a security

deposit if you're not going through the landlord. Make an agreement for subletters to sign before moving in and have them give you a chunk of money. If the apartment looks fine when you return, the money goes back to the subletter. If not, you'll have some cash to cover a new vacuum cleaner or, in more desperate situations, a maid service.

Your apartment or dorm room has been smelling funky lately.

Don’t worry, no judgment here.

It’s the end of Winter Quarter after all—those below-freezing days breed lethargy, making it hard to get out to buy cleaning supplies, do laundry or even hunt for the source of that stank.

But it’s spring now, so you’ve run out of excuses. People will start venturing from their own putrid holes, and some of them might end up in yours. Nothing stops sexy time like getting hit with a wave 14 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

of Eau de Roadkill when you walk through the door. Here are a few pointers to freshen up your place with common household items.

VINEGAR

It seems counter-intuitive, but vinegar actually absorbs odors. Fill a small bowl with vinegar and leave it in the corner of your room for 24 hours. That mysterious smell should go away.

COFFEE GROUNDS

Another odor absorber, coffee

grounds are great for small spaces like your fridge or closet. Fill a clean, old sock with a few tablespoons of dry coffee grounds and place it in the desired location.

Make sure you like the smell of coffee before doing this.

VODKA

Hear me out on this one. Let’s assume you’ve got a bottle lying around the house. Pour some into an empty spray bottle and spritz it on those stale spring clothes that have been in the basement all winter or

the rug that’s seen better days. It’ll kill bacteria, and it’s odorless so you won’t smell like an alcoholic.

SCENTED WATER

Once you’ve got the stink out, scent your room with liquid potpourri.

Cut up an orange or lemon, then add a cup of water and some vanilla or mint extract. Heat it up on the stove or in an uncovered slow cooker. Put the hot mixture in a bowl and leave it in your room to get it smellin’ right again.

-Anca Ulea

illustration: sarah lowe

S

r e t a l a mell y

WHAT ’S GOING ON AROUND CAMPUS

PLUS:

QUAD DIVIDED WE STAND pg.16 | NORRIS NOSTALGIA pg.17 | A THIRST FOR JUSTICE pg.18 ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER pg.19 | GET A LIFE pg.20 | BETTER LATE THAN NEVER pg.21 THE BIG CHEESE pg.22 | HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER pg.23 | BACKSTAGE PAST pg.24

photo: natalie krebs NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 15

QUAD

Divided We Stand

T

here’s the Greek community. There’s North Campus and South Campus. There are residential colleges, halls and communities. There are athletic teams and cultural groups.

There are six different undergraduate schools. With all these classifications and descriptions of NU students, what does it mean to be ‘One Northwestern’?

Housing

Miranda Zhao, president of the Residential College Board, says residential colleges comprise a “unique constituency of the Northwestern community” that is rooted in tradition. Residential colleges, many of which are interest-based or “themed,” have existed on campus for more than 40 years. This means that for decades, a significant portion of the housing options on campus have segregated students based on their interests in areas such as communications, international studies and performance arts.

Zhao feels that, although residential colleges have become less isolated over the years, they are 16 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

still a distinct part of Northwestern’s community.

“Without living in a residential college, you can’t really know what it’s like,” Zhao says. “It’s this shared experience among residential college people, but you have to experience it to understand what it really means and how it’s so important.”

Off-campus housing options also divide students, creating two virtually separate worlds.

Academics

The 2012-2013 Undergraduate Catalog opens by stating that Northwestern values interdisciplinarity. Many classes are open to students from any of the six undergraduate schools. Still, many students end up focusing on courses in their respective disciplines. Because many students meet their friends in classes, this reinforces social stratification.

However, the University is actively trying to overcome these divides between schools.

Nancy Cunniff, project coordinator for One Book One Northwestern, says that although each of the

undergraduate schools is “their own little silo,” OBON is interdisciplinary, meaning it fosters community between the schools.

“We try to do something that would appeal to people in the different areas,” Cunniff says of selecting the book each year and scheduling programming around it. Cunniff says that OBON, a program oriented toward incoming freshmen and transfer students, is a simple way new Wildcats come together. Last fall, OBON orchestrated a trip for incoming students to various neighborhoods in Chicago, to correspond with this year’s selection, Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz.

“It really doesn’t matter what school they are in, everyone is doing the same thing. Everybody reads,” Cunniff says. “OBON is targeted to freshmen so they can have a common conversation, but the program is really for the community as a whole, and everyone is welcome and invited.”

Greek life

Fraternities and sororities have been a significant presence at

Northwestern since 1859. With 42 chapters currently on campus, the Greek community has approximately 2,700 members—35 percent of the campus population.

The University’s “Freshmen Freeze” policy prohibits first-year students from joining fraternities or sororities until winter quarter and from entering Greek houses for the first two weeks of fall quarter, but the system is still a prominent part of Northwestern life.

Medill sophomore Jeremy Woo participated in fraternity recruitment but decided not to join. With close friends inside and outside of Greek life, Woo says he believes in the community divide, but that it’s not as significant as many think.

“I think it’s integrated. Do [Greeks and non-Greeks] often interact? That, I’m not always sure about,” Woo says. Woo adds that some fraternities and sororities perpetuate the divide more than others, depending on their exclusivity. He says much of the separation of the two communities stems from “a sense of interests.”

photo: natalie krebs

How can six schools make one Northwestern?

B Y M E G A N T H I ELKI N G

During Fall Quarter, the Interfraternity Council, Multicultural Greek Council, National Pan-Hellenic Council and Northwestern’s Panhellenic Association collaborated on the “…and I am Greek” campaign, which showcased the Greek community’s assets. According to the NU Greek website, “while everybody has a story, every member of the community is connected through the shared Greek experience.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean the Greek community is integrated with all of Northwestern.

The future

photo: northwestern university archives and ariana bacle

Jeffrey Porter (Speech ‘01), who chose Northwestern in part because of its “wonderful sense of community” and now works with alumni in the Los Angeles area, feels that Northwestern’s camaraderie is permanent.

The Northwestern community is a wealth of resources, Porter says, because “alumni are responsible for and dedicated to helping each other succeed” through sharing advice and information about jobs and internships.

“I just love the fact that all Northwestern alumni feel a strong connection because of the school,” Porter says.

Because of this, no matter what affiliations you have, what school you studied in, what communities you found or what communities you built for yourself during your time at Northwestern, one truism applies to all: Once a Wildcat, always a Wildcat.

“Having one Northwestern means that everyone can be happy where they are,” Zhao says. o

Norris Nostalgia Our beloved student center celebrates 40 years.

BY M ATT ZELLN ER

O

n Jan. 19, 1973, as if by magic, a “posh new hub for Northwestern community activities” opened on land that had been 40 feet under water a few years before. The dedication program advertised previously unheard of luxuries, from coffee and free telephones to “good music in the quadrasonic.” Norris University Center soon became an integral part of Northwestern life and—for its first decade— nightlife.

Before Norris, students frequented Scott Hall, across from where the Arch now stands.

But as the school grew, Scott Hall’s simple grill and offices grew inadequate and students began to call for new facilities. J. Roscoe Miller— Northwestern’s only chancellor to date—answered their call in his “Plan for the Seventies.”

Northwestern’s Department of Planning conducted intensive research on what students wanted in the new center, including surveying students at eight similar institutions. The research ranked possible elements for the new building.

Unique features such as a browsing and listening library, an art gallery and craft shops, all ranked in the top 10. Surprisingly, a “party room” only ranked 15th.

Many of these features, including the browsing library, were inspired by the University of Wisconsin’s student union. Despite Norris’ location across from University Library, the planners argued that “the more opportunity presented to students to find books readily, the better.” This logic swayed the Northwestern administration.

Norris also had other options for cultured students. “The union ... has also been found to be a very favorable place for a small gallery,” the planners noted, convinced by the Wisconsin gallery’s 842 visitors a day. The Dittmar Gallery would never get nearly as popular, but attracted sizable crowds in the ‘70s for the Art Bank. The Art Bank, the grandfather of the poster sale, allowed students to rent all sorts of art for only $3 a quarter.

Norris’ attractions weren’t all artistic.

While Norbucks, installed in winter 2007, has arguably been the most wellreceived feature in Norris’ history, the student center’s most controversial feature is a close second. Discus-

sion of a bar in Norris began as soon as Evanston became a wet city. In 1974, President Robert Strotz told The Daily that NU was “marching in the direction of having beer and wine at Norris.”

First, NU had to petition the city to let it apply for a liquor license. When the Liquor Board finally allowed the University to apply in 1978, it took just under three months for the application to be approved. With that hurdle cleared, plans crawled ahead.

Finally, in 1980, after a survey showed 95 percent of the campus approved of liquor in Norris, the student center began serving alcohol at special events.

Two years later, “The Gathering Place,” often called “The Bar,” opened on the ground floor of Norris. It was the only bar in Evanston that didn’t require “a tie and a heavy wallet,” according to The Chicago Tribune. Open until 2 a.m. on the weekends, it featured specials such as “Piano Bar and Happy Hour from 5 until 7” and “Screaming Orgasm” shots for $2.85.

Sadly, The Bar closed in 1992.

As NU began to crack down on alcohol on campus, the Norris bar was implicated in a drunk driving incident involving a 19-year-old freshman. It survived a two-week city shutdown, but would close for summer, never to reopen. It would be replaced with a Sbarro, in fall 2002, followed by Frontera Fresco in 2012, just in time for Norris University Center’s 40th birthday. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 17

QUAD

Students challenge immigration failures through a different kind of ASB trip. BY MA RG A RET KADIFA

W

einberg junior Katherine Sobolewski lounges on a couch in Norris. The student center is far from the desert she visited last spring, which was punctured by heavily armed border patrols. Guards brandishing large guns ran toward her. Helicopters flew low in search of illegal immigrants as she and her traveling companions warmed themselves by a fire.

Recalling the scene, her face tenses up.

“What we saw was really shocking,” Sobolewski says. She was part of a group of Northwestern students who, through an Alternative Student Breaks trip last year, volunteered with a humanitarian aid organization called No More Deaths, located a few miles north of the border in the Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.

The border, Sobolewski says, “has a militarized feeling—a literal war zone.”

For one week, the students camped in the desert with No More Deaths volunteers, hiking daily to leave water on the trails immigrants follow, hoping to save them from dying of dehydration.

No More Deaths volunteer Matt Johnson says the organization’s mission is to end death and suffering on the Arizona border. The primary way it accomplishes this goal is through a continuous presence in the Sonoran Desert.

“It is physically impossible to carry enough clean drinking water to safely hike in the Sonoran desert for the several days to two weeks or more it takes people to cross, particularly during the scalding summer months,” Johnson says, explaining that leaving water is essential to the immigrants’ survival.

Weinberg senior Allie Mayer was inspired to volunteer with No More Deaths after a high school church service trip, where she remembers watching a group of dustcovered, helpless migrants plead guilty in court to illegal immigration. The clinking of the chains that bound them echoed in the miniscule 18 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

courtroom. The injustices she observed in the legal system exasperated her.

She partnered with then-Weinberg senior Rebecca TeKolste to organize the No More Deaths ASB trip.

“The first time Allie talked about it, I thought that the idea of leaving water in the desert was a little crazy,” TeKolste says. “But then after thinking about how immigration can be seen as a human rights issue, I felt really drawn to the idea. People have to cross dozens of miles in 110-degree weather, and as soon as they get blisters on their feet, they’re doomed to die.”

The trip was so successful that it will happen again this year— which is unusual for an ASB program, according to SESP sophomore Karen Wilber, who helps plan ASB trips. TeKolste hopes the unique trip will become a yearly excursion.

“What’s going on within our nation is a political war zone,” Sobolewski says. She explains the trip provides immediacy to the political and physical turmoil facing our country and puts human faces on the illegal immigration issue. President Obama’s dedication to immigration reform, including signing an Executive Order in June 2012 to allow undocumented immigrants to temporarily avoid deportation, makes the trip even more relevant.

After spending time in the desert, Mayer began to question the effectiveness of borders. Her sentiments are mirrored by activist-turnedNorthwestern professor John Márquez.

“The only thing that borders really do is kill people,” says Márquez, who teaches African American and Latino/a studies. “Corporations don’t abide by borders.

Militaries don’t abide by borders really. Workers should have

No More Deaths the previous day.

“A lot of people at NU don’t know what’s going on with immigration policy and the people who are dying at the border,” Wilber says. “I can imagine these people must be suffering greatly, but the only evidence that seems to be left behind are the things they leave in the desert.” o

photo: priscilla liu

A Thirst For Justice

the same right to cross borders.” He gestures to a shirt in his office to illustrate his point that even capitalism doesn’t obey borders—odds are the shirt was made in Mexico.

The T-shirt further represents immigrants’ abandon of personal items on their journey across the border. Migrants hike through jagged desert mountains littered with rocks and cacti, leaving evidence of their existence along the trails, from abandoned backpacks to food containers to melted make-up packets to a myriad of shoes and now-empty jugs of water that were left out by

Actions Speak Louder One student group demands recognition of our founder’s bloody past.

BY BRE T T OW E NS

C

ommunication sophomore Aileen McGraw believes that talking is nice, but it won’t change the world. She wants action.

One of the founding members of the Native American Indigenous Student Association, McGraw’s call for action helped give rise to one of the newest—and most proactive— student groups on campus.

NAISA has taken its place amongst other organizations dedicated to multicultural interests at Northwestern. McGraw says the inspiration for this group came from a visiting professor and member of the Potawatomi tribe, John Low (who now teaches at Big Ten rival Ohio State), who encouraged his students to “create the space” for indigenous students at Northwestern.

“For me, I couldn’t imagine Northwestern without having a Chabat and a place that reminds me of home,” says NAISA co-president

Adam Mendel, drawing parallels to his involvement in the Jewish organizations on campus. “We want this to be the place for Native American students,” the Weinberg senior says.

In just a year, NAISA has already grabbed students’ attention.

The group played an active role in the “Dress for Respect” movement this past Halloween, encouraging students to be more racially sensitive when choosing their costumes.

NAISA sent volunteers to the local Native American Museum and brought in professors knowledgeable about Native American studies.

But of all NAISA’s initiatives, the recent John Evans petition was particularly influential.

Evans, Northwestern’s founder and governor of the Colorado Territory, allegedly ordered the massacre of more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans in 1864—most of whom were women and children—in what came to be

known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

The petition asks the University to formally recognize Evans’ role in the Massacre and also to take strides to make Northwestern more inclusive for Native Americans.

“I think it’s something we all can learn from,” Mendel says. “It’s hard for the University to grow without addressing its past.” If the motions the petition sets forth are passed, it will be a tremendous accomplishment for NAISA and Northwestern’s Native American population.

On Feb. 14, Provost Daniel Linzer announced the creation of the John Evans Study Committee. The committee, which will be chaired by professor of English and American Studies Carl Smith and comprises seven humanities professors, will work on unearthing Evans’ dark past until June, when a follow-up committee will determine how to act on it.

Even if NAISA can’t erase the past, it’s definitely getting the word

out. Several campus publications have covered this new organization and the topic it’s tackling—making it, in McGraw’s words, “a ‘we’ issue, not just a ‘them’ issue.” NAISA is also completely student run; faculty adviser Doug Medin says his role is minimal and that “NAISA has been driven by the undergrads associated with it.”

Northwestern prides itself on being a home for all its students, regardless of their ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds. Since Chicago (a word from the Miami-Illinois tribe’s language) is home to a large Native American population, it makes sense for the school to strive to include them, Medin says.

“I do think there is a common vision for making Northwestern a more Native-friendly environment,” Medin says. For now, the moral of NAISA’s success story is clear: Change happens when Northwestern students take action. o

photos: sunny kang; courtesy of nomadic lass, licensed under creative commons via flickr

MAKING AMENDS Members of NAISA want the University to formally recognize school founder John Evans’ role in the Sand Creek Massacre.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 19

QUAD

Get A Life University Career Services isn’t that scary.

BY MI R A N D A C AWLEY

C

areer and internship fairs don’t just provide Northwestern students with stacks of multicolored papers and existential crises. They also introduce students to University Career Services, Northwestern’s free career development center. Unfortunately, the relationship stops there for those who are unaware of the array of resources that UCS provides. Follow this guide to take advantage of all the resources it offers.

FRESHMAN YEAR: Freshman Career Group

SOPHOMORE YEAR: Industry Compatibility Assessments If a student still hasn’t chosen a career path by sophomore year, UCS administers industry career assessments to survey a student’s strengths and preferences and match them with compatible industries. The Strong Interest Inventory test assesses a student’s natural interests and matches the results with more than 100 occupations. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, on the other hand, determines the “natural preferences in our personality that are consistent throughout our lives,” such as “how you direct energy and make decisions,” according to Thomas. It then matches these personality traits to career fields that might be good fits.

JUNIOR YEAR: Internship Specialists UCS has several specialists across disciplines as well as general overview information that juniors who have decided on an industry or career can access. The office also stocks a full collection of The Vault Guides, downloadable eBooks that outline the different careers available in an industry, as well as specifics like how to be a competitive applicant. “[ The Vault Guides] really break down industries in terms of job functions and work environments,” Thomas says. “It gives students a really good picture of different kinds of industries.”

SENIOR YEAR: CareerCat For seniors who need to get serious about the BONUS POINTS: employment process, CareerCat helps them Career Ambassadors get started. CareerCat is a database mainUCS staff members are not the only peotained by UCS that is essentially the core ple on campus who offer free career help serof on-campus recruiting: It stores the vices. The Career Ambassadors are Northwestern job offers of career fair participants, students who are trained to give workshops, organas well as UCS events and workize outreach programs and provide resources for the shops. On CareerCat, students can rest of the student community. “We talk to [students] upload their résumés and cover letabout their résumés, give them pointers, review cover ters, schedule interviews and even letters,” says senior career ambassador Danny Kim, receive emails when a job opens in a Weinberg junior. “We provide them the resources one of their listed fields. This level of to keep going further and expand their careers.” customization makes CareerCat an The Career Ambassadors hold walk-in hours attractive resource for many students. from 11:00 to 3:00 in the Library Core on Weinberg senior Sophia BlachmanThursdays and Fridays for one-onBiatch is currently using CareerCat to apone résumé and cover letter ply for jobs and schedule interviews, and she reviews. likes that “you can tailor your search for positions that would be interesting for you.”

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Office Hours 101 How to win profs and influence grades.

BY YUNITA ONG Nearly every Northwestern professor sets aside a few office hours a week to meet with students about class or just to chat. But with the hectic quarter system and infinite extracurricular obligations, it can be difficult to remember the benefits of one-on-one interaction with your instructors. If you do find some time for office hours, here’s how to make the most of it.

DO: STOP BY EARLY IN THE QUARTER, EVEN IF THE CLASS IS JUST A DISTRO. “It forms a relationship that you can move forward with later on, and even if you never go again, it shows the professor you have a stake in this class.” - Medill junior Valerie King DO: COME WITH QUESTIONS. “Coming by with clear questions shows that you want to learn.

If you attempted the problem set and have something specific to ask about it, it makes the professor feel like you put in effort before coming.” - Weinberg senior Jason Hutcheson DO: RESEARCH YOUR PROFESSOR. “If you’ve looked at the professor’s biography on the Internet, it can make your conversation with the professor more focused.”

- Medill assistant professor Jon Marshall DON’T: SUCK UP. “Just showing up to office hours is enough to make a good impression. If you try to win the professor over by giving too much business away or showing off how much you know, it’s probably highly irritating and very obvious. Just be yourself and ask questions that will actually help you.” - King DON’T: USE YOUR PHONE. “You already shouldn’t be doing that in normal lecture time, but it can be annoying if people start texting in the middle of a one-on-one meeting.” - Chemistry professor George Schatz DON’T: BE INTIMIDATED. “Students need to be comfortable in office hours, and remember that the majority of professors are down to earth and human, and have your best interest at heart. Just relax and let them know what’s going on.” - King

illustration: geneve ong

This winter, UCS ran a workshop series called “First in Line” to help freshmen begin their career development journeys. This three-session career group “speaks mostly about the career decision making process,” according to Tracie Thomas, associate director of career development at UCS. At each workshop, staff members guide a small group of freshmen through career development topics, like choosing a major, career exploration and networking. Luckily, this opportunity hasn’t passed: UCS plans to run one more career group during Spring Quarter.

Better Late Than Never Challah at Hillel’s new rabbi, Danya Ruttenberg.

B Y N IC K I K O E T T I N G

D photo: ariana bacle

anya Ruttenberg could once be found hanging out at Kafein and Unicorn Cafe, sipping coffee for “hours and hours at a time.”

Now, the new Hillel rabbi has come full circle. Instead of sitting in Evanston coffee shops like she did when she was a self-described “punk” teenager growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she rests on a comfortable couch in her office, drinking water and cracking jokes

about how a former atheist somehow decided to become a rabbi.

“I thought we were praying to this big God in the sky with a beard and a thunderbolt and a temper tantrum,” Rabbi Ruttenberg says with a laugh.

Ruttenberg’s serious interest in religion began when she “sort of stumbled backwards into the religious studies department” as an undergraduate at Brown University.

She originally wanted to study philosophy, but found the subject too dry. She says she wanted to engage more with questions and experiences that people encountered in their lives.

After college, she moved to San Francisco and worked as a freelance writer for a few years. She covered religion, sex, gender and art, eventually joining a Conservative synagogue along the way.

And then Ruttenberg heard the rabbinate calling.

“I WAS AN ATHEIST TWENTY MINUTES AGO, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” “This small voice within—some people call intuition, some people call the voice of God; I think it’s both—said, ‘Rabbinical school,’” Ruttenberg says. “I said back, ‘Ha, I was an atheist twenty minutes ago, what are you talking about?’ And I shrugged it off. But the voice got louder and louder.”

Ruttenberg received her rabbinic ordination in 2008 from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles.

Since then she’s served as the Senior Jewish Educator and one of two staff rabbis at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and has written three books: Yentl’s Revenge: The

Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism and Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, a memoir about her own spiritual journey.

Last quarter was her first at Northwestern’s Hillel, and so far, she says it’s been a blast. Ruttenberg is working to achieve a slew of goals for Hillel.

She wants to start some informal Torah discussion groups, have more “hot topics in Judaism” discussions and start groups for seniors who are gearing up for graduation and the transition to adulthood.

“I want to continue to take part in the amazingness,” Ruttenberg says. “And if I have one real agenda for my rabbinate: to create spaces where people can talk about the hard and the messy, their hopes and their yearnings, their reckonings and their revelations.” o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 21

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HARDER, BETTER, FASTER For Hailey Danisewicz, the road to Rio runs through the Lakefill. B Y J UL I E KLIE GMAN

22 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

photo: daniel schuleman

H

ailey Danisewicz works out two to three hours per day.

Her end goal? Rio 2016. But a few years ago she wasn’t even practicing the sport she intends to compete in.

The SESP senior has a chance to participate in the first-ever Paralympic Games triathlon.

Danisewicz had an above-knee amputation at age 14. Although she beat bone cancer, several surgeries left her on crutches for two years.

“I figured I would be able to do a lot more with a prosthetic,” she says, laughing as she explains why she requested an amputation. “At first they were like, ‘Are you sure?

This is kind of crazy.’ But you know, once they realized that I had really thought long and hard about it, they were very supportive and it ended up being a great decision.”

Before her diagnosis at age 12, Danisewicz played basketball and volleyball and identified as an athlete. But after her diagnosis and amputation she was afraid to return to the sports she had always loved.

“It’s scary to go back to the thing that you once were good at knowing that it’s going to be a lot different,” Danisewicz says.

Although Danisewicz felt like she was a part of a community of cancer survivors, for years she didn’t have a network of people with disabilities.

She tried competitive sports like tennis and golf, but none of them stuck. She learned to love skiing as a hobby but still lacked the competitive outlet that basketball and volleyball once provided.

“I think one of the most important things is you’re figuring out what it is that

R, STRONGER

The Big Cheese Cheesie’s new manager serves up some sass. BY GABE BE RGADO

I you love and who you are,” Danisewicz says.

Triathlon satisfied that competitive urge. It started with a 2011 internship interview at Dare2Tri, a nonprofit organization that now helps 137 athletes with disabilities who are interested in triathlons.

Danisewicz met with Executive Director Keri Schindler, who offered her a position on the team and made her promise she would enter a triathlon. Danisewicz says it was on

“IT’S SCARY TO GO BACK TO THE THING THAT YOU ONCE WERE GOOD AT KNOWING THAT IT’S GOING TO BE A LOT DIFFERENT” - HAILEY DANISEWICZ

photo: gabe bergado

her bucket list, but Schindler, as her coach and boss, gave her the drive she needed.

Schindler saw Danisewicz’s potential at the first races she coached her through.

“She beat a lot of individuals even without disabilities,” she says. “You just kind of saw that fire ignite in her and that light in her to want to train harder and get stronger.”

Schindler notes that while many athletes she works with fall in love with the race, it’s rare to see Danisewicz’s level of success so quickly. Schindler confidently says that competing in the Paralympics is an attainable goal.

Still, it’s hard to know what Danisewicz needs to do to make it to Rio. Since the sport is new to the Paralympics, athletes don’t yet know how to qualify. But Danisewicz

is off to a good start. She’s already re-qualified for the Paratriathlon National Championship this May and she’s already proven herself in the international arena with a secondplace finish in last year’s championship.

With graduation, a career and Rio in her sights, Danisewicz says she’s in a great place.

“It’s funny because a lot of people will say, ‘Oh, you’ve been through so much.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, but at the end of the day, I have an awesome life. I have a great life and I love it. I’m a lot more fortunate than most people in the world. o

f Eva Carpenter were a dish at Cheesie’s Pub & Grub, she’d be “The Tenderizer.” With two types of cheese, two kinds of sauce, bacon and chicken tenders between Texas toast, the 25-year-old personifies the sandwich. The barbecue sauce represents her Missouri roots and the hot sauce embodies her spicy personality. And the bacon—well, everyone loves bacon.

“Everyone that orders ‘The Tenderizer,’ they’re just so surprised,” Carpenter says. “They’re kind of scared to try it. But once they get to know it, they’re like, it’s fucking awesome.”

The Cheesie’s manager found herself in Evanston after receiving a scholarship to intern at the Jump Rhythm Jazz Project in Chicago. When she moved into a sublet in September, she saw the Evanston Cheesie’s being built.

Carpenter called the restaurant’s Belmont location, went down for an interview and landed a job at the Evanston location. Since then, she’s been serving up grilled cheeses and has become one of Evanston’s most memorable personalities.

If you’ve ever been on a drunchie visit to Cheesie’s, you’ve probably seen Carpenter jamming out to the Spice Girls and taking orders from Northwestern students. A fan of cheetah print, the Warrensburg (just outside of Kansas City, Mo.) native graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance performance. She now dances with Jump Rhythm Jazz when she isn’t working at the late night hotspot.

Carpenter says that the Northwestern scene welcomed her with open arms. She currently shares a house with seven frat

“SOMETIMES I INTIMIDATE PEOPLE. THE TENDERIZER IS A VERY INTIMIDATING SANDWICH.” - EVA CARPENTER guys who planned a spaghetti dinner for her recent birthday.

Carpenter says she also enjoys working at a locale that Wildcats regularly visit.

Weinberg senior Michael Guhin is one of Carpenter’s housemates. “I immediately loved her.

She’s bright, energetic, hilarious.

She’s just really upbeat, chipper and a lot of fun,” Guhin says. He and another housemate recently stopped by Cheesie’s to quickly say happy birthday to Carpenter, but instead ended up hanging out for hours and even helped her clean up.

“We get a wide range of students. We get the students who feel like they’re entitled, but then, the majority of students, they’re great,” Carpenter says. “Especially in a town like this, they’re looking for a place where they can just like, chill, hang out, have a grilled cheese, have a beer if they want to. We’re cheesy here. So we’re singing to ‘Hakuna Matata,’ and like, all the other college students are like ‘fuck yes!’ And they’re also singing with us, and dancing with us. That’s what I love about Northwestern students. They’re here to have a good time.”

Going back to the sandwich comparison: “Sometimes I intimidate people. ‘The Tenderizer’ is a very intimidating sandwich. Not everyone will just dive right into ‘The Tenderizer.’ They usually just go for ‘The Original,’ which is great. But I’m not Plain Jane.”

But Carpenter’s most surprising trait is not her spicy but sweet personality—it’s that she’s lactose intolerant. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 23

QUAD

Standish’s own rock ‘n’ roll wall of fame is featured on our website.

Professor David Standish wrote his way through rock and roll.

BY SUSIE NEILSON

Y

ou can tell journalism professor David Standish is a successful rock ‘n’ roll journalist from the memorabilia adorning his walls: There’s a print by author Henry Miller he bought at a garage sale for a dollar, a psychedelic poster of the Doors and a winged corn on the cob.

His bookshelf is crammed with American classics—battered volumes of Mark Twain, Saul Bellow and Henry David Thoreau. “I was born into a classic American working-class family in the boring part of Cleveland,” Standish says. “I was the first person in my family to even look at a college.”

Standish began his unorthodox journalism career while studying English at Miami University in Ohio, where he launched a humor magazine with some friends, very little experience and no money.

They called the magazine Plague, after an Albert Camus novel.

“We were too stupid to know it should fail,” Standish says. Plague’s

24 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

first issue sold enough to cover printing, pizza and beer. By its 20th issue, it was attracting national advertisers.

Standish’s adventures in journalism likely would have ended with Plague and an American Studies Ph.D. from Indiana University. But halfway through his dissertation, he took a trip to Chicago—and stayed there.

“I went for the very best of reasons,” Standish says. “Chasing a girl.”

Once in the city, Standish was hired to select jokes for Playboy ‘s Party Jokes page.

“I was going from obscure seminars in Thoreau’s laundry lists to sitting in this windowless office ... stacked nearly to the ceiling with unread party jokes,” he says.

Standish’s first-ever interview was with Eric Clapton, when he was Cream’s guitarist, and it was a disaster. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he says.

The nervous Standish could hardly grip Clapton’s calloused fingers; he sweated alone on a giant couch across from Clapton and asked him very little. Halfway through their interview, Frank Zappa and Ginger Baker walked in from a night of wild partying. The pair

plopped on either side of Standish and conducted a surreal mock interview with him.

“Ginger Baker was a notorious speed freak back then, so his eyes were like pinwheels,” he says.

“Frank Zappa was strange enough that he didn’t need any chemical help. They asked questions like, ‘Why is the moon? What is cheese?

What is up and what is down?’”

Forty years later, Standish’s anecdotes are a testament to a lifetime of experience. Each chapter of his life has a decided ring to it, as though he figured out how these stones fit together a long time ago.

His innate sense of structure was especially helpful when, as a freelancer for the travel magazine Diversion, Standish found himself in Fukuoka, Japan without a story angle and decided to chronicle a seato-stomach journey of fugu, sushi made from a poisonous blowfish.

“There’s two schools of thought about eating fugu,” Standish, whose dangerous plate of sashimi cost $180, explains. “One is that it’s much ado about nothing. The other is ... even if it’s eviscerated properly, there’s still a trace of the poison that gets you high. And I think that’s true, because I wasn’t hungry at all when I sat down ... but I’m tell-

ing you, I cleaned my plate.”

Standish’s job has taken him to some amazing places. He spent a week on Willie Nelson’s tour bus with “cans of the coldest beer and clouds of the very best marijuana,” three weeks in Japan with KISS and a couple of weeks in South America with Queen. He’s interviewed Janis Joplin, Elton John and Jerry Garcia.

Lately, he’s settled down, and says he loves teaching full-time at Medill, his gig since 2000. At this point, he says, he’d rather cultivate talent in young people than write at home, “stir crazy ... just me and the computer and the cat.”

Standish has a wealth of wisdom for aspiring freelancers, including how to stand out from the crowd.

“Start thinking about a book,” he says. Standish himself has written two, one of which, Hollow Earth, was named an “Editor’s Choice” by The New York Times Sunday Book Review. “It will get you noticed better than the traditional apprenticeships nowadays.”

Given Standish’s track record, one may do well to heed his advice.

He’s certainly had a good time.

“Journalism is the best profession in the world,” he says, folding his arms across his worn wool sweater and grinning broadly. o

photo: brennan anderson

Backstage Past

Photograph by ARIANA BACLE

THE QUARTER IN CULTURE

PLUS:

SCOOP POPPIN’ TAGS pg.26 | COMMON THREADS pg.27 | SISTER ACT pg.28 | KING OF THE PARTY pg.29 | CHEERING FOR THE OTHER TEAM pg.30 | GONE FISHIN’ pg.31 | ON YOUR LEFT! pg.32 ALT CHICAGO pg.34

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 25

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ASK THE ACCESSORIES EXPERT: Now that you've found your thrift store steal, how do you make it new again? Agnes Miles, owner and designer of Love, Lulu Mae, offers a few tips to reinvent the look.

Poppin’ Tags Sarah Sherman’s got a thrift shop state of mind.

BY M ARY KATE CAMP BE LL

1. EMBROIDER. All you need is the essential sewing kit with a needle, thread and scissors. “I would add some appliqué or embroider a funky design on the sleeve,” Miles says. “Add a star or heart on the back. Something to give the shirt more character.”

3. ADD A SCARF. Try 1950s or 1960s silk neck scarves. “I will pair it with a crisp white button down,” she says. “I will tie it around my neck or tie it in my hair.

Sometimes I will braid it into my hair. I sew the scarves into little brooches for blouses and jackets, too.”

F

or many fashion-minded college students, it’s about what you wear, how you wear it and how you look in it. But for Communication sophomore Sarah Sherman, fashion is not an obsession with designers and trends. “Wearing clothes is like wearing an art collage on your body,” Sherman says. “The skin you are given is pretty boring. You have to do something with it.”

What’s her secret? Sifting through thrift stores and finding old, lace wedding dresses and hand-medown Boy Scout uniforms gives her that same aesthetic pleasure she gets from her favorite art. Channeling her favorite graphic novels like Ghost World, Sherman describes her thrift store style as something like “a scrambled egg kaleidoscope.”

Thrift store shopping doesn’t just offer unbeatable prices, according to Sherman. It also gives her the thrill of finding a piece of someone else’s history and making it new again. o

What does fashion mean to you?

Fashion and beauty is relative because I really like ugly, gross, sticky beauty. I don’t really keep up with anything at all. I am just fascinated by people who die and leave their illfitting, gross clothes behind.

What got you started in thrift store shopping?

In thrift stores, there’s always a story behind everything. It is interesting that when you buy it, there are leftover skin cells from someone, but it is a history. You will find the most offensive things in a thrift store and it’s amazing. I never channel those people’s personalities through the clothes. You repurpose it and take something really strange and put it into the real world. It is funny to me.

I genuinely like the way the sparkly cats on my sweater look.

How do you know when to buy something at a thrift store?

There is a lot of feeling in it. Just touch. Grab out a lot of stuff and whatever feels the weirdest, go for it. If you see an arm peek-

26 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

ing out of a coat rack that has a fox pelt on it, you have to try it on.

That’s yours.

Favorite Chicago thrift shops?

Unique Thrift Store, Hollywood Mirror and Belmont Army.

What’s one of your favorite thrift store finds?

There’s this jean jacket from Belmont Army. I call it your zombie Lisa Frank jacket. It’s as if I imagine a really angsty 13-year-old girl who is a bassist for her tween band crafted it in her basement.

Do you ever forget about any of the crazy pieces in your closet?

They all have names. They are all very important because each one has a story, and each one is its own work of art. No extra-extra-large Hawaiian shirt left behind!

What’s your advice on picking out your outfit everyday?

Don’t plan ahead. It’s impulsive. It’s still fun for me to wake up and see what terrible mess I can make.

photos: ariana bacle

2. GIVE IT SOME FLAIR. For a new purse, make sure it is clean and polished. “You could sew some antique buttons and replace the zipper,” the designer says.

Common Threads

What’s a Wildcat wear on game day? BY SARAH E HLE N

T

hough the Northwestern student body isn’t quite as big as some of its rival schools, its fans always bring passion to the bleachers with their game day attire. “The Northwestern stands are really passionate, but we want the purple to be prominent,” says Medill senior Kelsey Stokes, vice president of NU Wildside.

But what sets fans apart in the sea of purple are the custom touches each NU personality brings to its garb. Check out some Northwestern game day looks. o

The Frat Star: Several telltale features distinguish the frat star from the bro. A typical frat star outfit on game day might include trendy dark jeans or khaki pants for chilly weather, pastel chino shorts for warm weather, Sperry Topsiders (in rain, snow or shine) and purple polo or v-neck shirts.

A crewneck sweatshirt or a purple half-zip pullover sweater will top off the get-up. Though the frat star’s game day look is often preppy, one can also occasionally spot a frat star and his brothers sporting the shirtless, chest-painted-purple look ­­—but only if their muscles are nicely toned. “We always get a section of boys in the front row who paints up regardless of the temperature,” Stokes says.

photos: brennan anderson

The Bro:

That Noob Freshman:

The Parent:

The Girly Girl:

The term “bro” has a masculine connotation, but when applied to style it can describe either a male or female who exudes a certain chillness in how they act and dress. At a game, bros most likely wear the following: lacrosse pinnies (especially at sporting events that aren’t lacrosse), backwards snapbacks, wayfarer sunglasses in various neon shades and possibly sweatbands or bandanas. “You’ll sometimes see the guys with cut-off jean shorts on, or even see some ‘out-there’ costumes,” Stokes says. These different pieces may or may not be purple and white. To a bro, looking chill is far more important than repping Northwestern’s signature colors.

There are always those few freshmen who just don’t know what to wear to their first college football game. They can be easily identified in one of two shirts: their purple “Class of 2016!” shirt or that one free shirt with the school song on the back. The effort is there, as both of these shirts are solidly purple, but there’s definitely room to up the spirit and style.

Alumni or not, lots of parents attend Northwestern sporting events.

Besides not cheering in the student section, parents are fairly easy to spot at a game based on their attire. More than a few parents will be sporting an “NU Mom” or “NU Dad” sweatshirt, cap or jacket on game day. Sure, it’s a little embarrassing for their kids, but they’re parents—they don’t know any better. One might also notice that, besides wearing gear straight out of the Norris bookstore, the moms and dads will probably be wearing “sensible shoes.”

A couple of items summarize the game day outfit for most girls: purple tutus, cutoff shirts and leggings.

This outfit is sometimes accompanied by purple glitter, the “knee socks and ironic Crocs” style, face paint and more purple glitter. Of course, belly shirts and tutus generally aren’t ideal for cold weather, so cardigans, crewneck sweatshirts, scarves and mittens usually take over once the temperature drops.

“Outfits are often dictated by the weather, so you see a lot of girls in the standard leggings and Uggs,” Stokes says.

ONLINE

EXTRA

Looking for a personalized NU snuggie? Find out where to get one on our site.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 27

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Sister Act Maris and Bryce O’Tierney have a future in harmony.

B Y IN H Y E LE E

M

their instruments outside during the summers in their hometown, it’s clear that music represents something central to their beings.

“Growing up with nature, you learn how to share space in a different way, and that ties into music as well,” Maris says. They say the northern state was probably the most fitting home for them, as the majestic scenery “was humbling ... and really inspiring.”

They encourage each other to tell stories of their childhood and their many musical duets. “There’s something more empowering in collaborating with another person,” Maris explains. “And, you know, challenging. And that’s how music evolves­—in that sharing space.”

gether. “You don’t have to be alone as a musician,” Bryce says. “There’s so much joy in playing with other people.”

In the immediate future, Bryce says she hopes to go to Ireland on a grant for the summer and learn more about her Irish heritage. Looking further down the road, she’s open to a lot of different life paths, including possibly going to graduate school for violin performance in Holland or pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. Maris, meanwhile, is more interested in pursuing interests in political science and art history—although she wants to work on “a live musical collaboration in a gallery space for visual artists.”

The sisters agree that regardless of what the future holds, music will continue to play an important role in their lives.

“Music is something we do," Maris says. "I can’t imagine myself not doing it.” o

photo: brennan anderson

aris and Bryce O’Tierney share more than just DNA. These identical twins from Anchorage, Alaska are both juniors in Bienen with a penchant for music.

With her voice and talents on the piano and guitar, Maris has a broad musical repertoire. Bryce focuses her energy on the violin, which she took up at age six.

“Our mom says we sang before we talked,” Bryce says, laughing.

"But maybe it’s a myth.”

All myths aside, the sisters displayed talent at a very young age.

“Bryce and I would just sit ... and sing to each other as toddlers,” Maris recounts.

As they tell stories of playing

The two have previously collaborated at A&O’s Philfest, the Irish American Heritage Center and the Underground Wonder Bar in Chicago. “I like to think of music as this very patient sort of space that you can be in together,” says Bryce, who’s studying poetry in NU's Creative Writing Program.

While most of us are still trying to figure out what we’re doing with our lives, Maris has already released three studio albums—with lots of help from Bryce, who’s always in the studio with Maris when she’s recording. Bryce is also credited as a co-writer on the album, for which she employed her poetic talents (she is the poetry editor of Northwestern's PROMPT magazine).

As for future ambitions, both agreed that being close to each other and pursuing their interest in music is non-negotiable. The ultimate dream is to form a band to-

28 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

King Of The Party

J.J. JAVA JAMZ

It’s all about the music for sophomore DJ Mufasa, The Philofasa. BY KEVI N KRYAH

D

isc jockeying, according to Oluwaseun Olalekan Ososami, isn't only about putting on a show.

“It's the ability to not just control the party, but to give people a feeling that they never had,” explains Ososami, whose stage name is Mufasa, The Philofasa. “Because you control the music throughout the night, you’re like the driver of the party.”

But Ososami's life hasn't always been about steering parties to pleasant destinations. “I grew up in the ghetto of Nigeria,” the Weinberg sophomore says of his childhood in Lagos. He says his upbringing in poverty gave him a sense of appreciation for everything, especially music. He got his first taste of American music in his teens on a Nigerian TV channel.

His father won a visa lottery to work and live in the United States in 1998, but he wasn’t able to bring his family over until April 2006, after he had reached a stable living. Ososami says he was a little surprised that America wasn’t like the glamorous rap music videos he saw as a kid.

“I wasn’t expecting [American poverty], but then I said ‘All right, this is something you’ve been used to,’” he says.

Ososami's disc jockeying journey began the summer after he graduated high school. He was spending the summer in Wicker Park. Unable to play sports because of a torn ACL, Ososami decided to spend his time bar-hopping. Ososami’s friend owned one of the bars he frequented, the now-closed Plan B Bar & Kitchen. One night Ososami saw a DJ at Plan B controlling the music, presiding over the party, and he knew how he wanted to spend the

rest of his summer.

“For a teenager, being a DJ was like the ultimate pedestal,” Ososami says. “I was at the club, and I saw what [a DJ] was doing, and it was a great thing. At the same time, he was getting all the girls!”

Ososami quickly came up with a moniker, based on The Lion King and his love of philosophy, particularly Four Texts on Socrates. He began DJing that summer and continued when he enrolled at Northwestern in the fall. He self-promotes and has performed at events ranging from house parties to U NU Arts Night at J.J. Java Cafe.

Ososami is now spearheading Mufasa Times, where he will bring his talents to J.J. Java on the first and third Friday of every month. Dancing is the priority at Mufasa Times. J.J. Java doesn’t serve alcohol, but Ososami says that's how he likes it. He believes the sober environment is conducive to musical fusion.

“I want, with my music, to make a more robust, a more social atmosphere,” Ososami says. “You can always go to other parties and get free beer ... but I want a bigger sense of liveliness on campus without the need of alcohol or going to The Keg.” In Ososami's opinion, the music should be good enough that alcohol is unnecessary—you can feel euphoria straight from sound. “The ability to play across genres makes me a

good DJ,” Ososami explains. After being groomed on Afrobeat and traditional music at Nigeria, Ososami expanded his repertoire when he came to the States, bringing in rap, R&B, disco and more. “What makes music so great is that, every day, there will be more and more of it,” Ososami says.

By mixing genres, Ososami hopes to emphasize emotion whenever he DJs. “It’s not about the genre anymore," he says. "It’s about how you feel at that specific moment.” o

photo: brennan anderson

Near the Foster El stop, J.J. Java is a nexus where arts and community come together. At least, that has been Chinelo Oparaeche’s goal since she opened the coffee house in January 2012. The open mic stage is nestled in the front window and surrounded by couches, providing communal expression and the comforts of home.

“I was born in Nigeria, and community is such a wonderful thing there,” Oparaeche says. “When I came here, it was lacking, and I wanted to create a place where knowingly or unknowingly, people will come together.”

Every Tuesday, J.J. Java hosts open mic nights. A comedy routine called the Double-Shot Showcase is slated for Thursdays, while Oparaeche’s weekend evenings feature bands and DJs. “Here in America, people don’t even know their neighbors,” Oparaeche says. “But people come for a concert, and they say, oh hey, you’re my neighbor, you live just down the street!”

The cafe owner says she hopes to expand J.J. Java’s programming by incorporating poetry readings, book clubs or signings and foreign film nights. She’s collected board games for Wednesday game nights, and in the back of the warehouse-like storefront she has started a library.

“By the end of this year I want it to come together,” Oparaeche says. “I’m trying to make sure to remind people in a subtle way, it’s a coffee house, but it’s a house.

It’s my home, but they can claim it for themselves.

They’re a part of it.”

-Lydia Belanger NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 29

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Cheering For The Other Team

E

ach generation passes certain traits on to the next. They can be physical qualities or behavioral idiosyncrasies. Take my mom and I. We’re a lot alike. We both have brown hair and brown eyes and we both studied journalism at Northwestern.

We’re family, and with that comes disagreements and different interests, the biggest of which is sports.

Geraldine, my wonderful mother who loves me and raised me, earnestly cheered for the opposing team after a good play at my Little League games. She didn’t understand that wasn’t cool. Every year 30 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

when my dad and I watched our beloved Yankees in the playoffs, her patronizing inquiry into whether these were “the playoffs of the playoffs of the playoffs” masked her real question: “How many more godforsaken games could these children in pinstripes possibly play?”

Her willfully ignorant questions infuriated me. I interpreted them as contempt for the pastimes I adored.

What I didn’t really understand then is that my mom’s disinterest in sports dates back to her days as a cub reporter for The Daily Northwestern.

The Daily was my mom’s passion,

the fulcrum of her student life. Even as she hopscotched from one major metropolitan newspaper to another, a legion of Daily alums remained her closest friends.

In an era when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the closest things to journalism rock stars, she treasured the newsroom’s camaraderie, everyone working together to find scoops and produce a quality paper. When she was on The Daily’s masthead, one of the paper’s great journalistic triumphs was an investigative piece about how Northwestern’s then-tennis coach was taking kickbacks from recruits. She still boasts about this story as if she wrote it herself. It wasn’t that she enjoyed sticking it to these jocks, but she valued unearthing truths about a corrupt institution. Later in her career she covered the Catholic Church. So this was probably good training.

With Watergate in the rearview mirror and Robert Redford playing a beat reporter on the big screen, many consider the 1970s a golden age for journalism. But for Northwestern football, the 1970s was an awful decade. The team won a total of eight games in my mom’s time as a student. In the four years after she graduated, they won one game.

As the Wildcats struggled to win games, my mom rose up the ranks of The Daily. In the fall of her junior year, she edited and claims to have had a hand in writing “a series of articles on Northwestern’s status and role in the Big Ten.” The lede of the article echoes a sentiment that I heard too many times as a kid: “Faced with a football team that has not won a game in over a year, the Northwestern community may be asking itself whether Big Ten competition is too much to handle.”

My mom has never been a fan of

these teams and the resources they drain from the school. In her opinion, the school should devote that money to quality academics.

This season, Northwestern’s football team proved its mettle, but even with the terrible squads of the ‘70s, pulling out of the Big Ten was inconceivable. Whether it’s our basketball team’s futile quest for their first NCAA Tournament bid or our football team’s ulcer-inducing fourth quarter meltdowns, I always have hope.

Not my mom. She’s never cared.

The faith that I have in a group of men running around a frozen field in tights to pull off miracles, irrational as it may be, isn’t a quality I got from my magnificent mother.

That article about Northwestern and the Big Ten came out on Nov. 12, 1976. The next day, the football team went out and won their only game of the season beating Michigan State 42 to 21.

The story gets somewhat murky here. My mom claims that the entire football team marched into The Daily’s offices in Norris and reamed out the staff for this piece. Whether or not this is true only adds to the narrative and fuels our playful jousting over my sports fanaticism.

As our football team steadily improves, I dream of witnessing Northwestern play in the Rose Bowl. My mom, on the other hand, refused to go to Pasadena in 1996 when the ‘Cats made history and won the Big Ten. My dad, who graduated from a college that had no Division I teams as a result of an infamous basketball betting scandal, pleaded with her to go, talking about how much fun it would be to witness that history. Like in the mid-’90s, my Dad and I will ask her to come to their next Rose Bowl appearance someday. But I already know her answer: “No way!” o

illustration: steph shapiro

My mom and I will never agree on sports.

BY BEN ORESKES

Gone Fishin’ Northwestern’s best fishermen won’t be around much longer. BY ARIC DI L AL L A

A

illustration: christophe haubursin

s he steered the boat back toward the shore of Kinkaid Lake in Southern Illinois, Jimmy Morrow slammed his fist against the dash.

It was the final day of the FLW College Fishing Central Regional Championship and Morrow and his teammate Matt Kestufskie were heading back to the dock practically empty-handed.

“We thought we messed up big time,” Morrow says.

While football is a game of inches, bass fishing is apparently a game of ounces. When the rumors of another team’s highly successful day proved untrue, the pair of Weinberg seniors finished four ounces ahead of the second-place competitor.

They returned to Evanston $50,000 richer, with a brand-new boat in tow.

In the months that followed, Morrow and Kestufskie garnered the respect of big-time fishing schools like Indiana and Purdue en route to the National Guard FLW College Fishing National Championship.

The friends’ travels took them to places like Missouri, Arkansas and South Carolina, proving through a series of top-five finishes that Northwestern’s fishing program was to be feared and respected.

“All the top names in the country know who we are,” Morrow says, speaking hurriedly as he packs for a weekend hunting trip with the Northwestern Sportsman’s Club.

“They know we’re a threat.”

Still, Morrow and Kestufskie’s rise to fishing glory did not occur overnight. Just a few years ago, they were far from champions.

When Morrow arrived at Northwestern and enrolled in a fly fishing freshman seminar, he was no novice. He had been tossing

out a lines since he was a little kid standing on his grandfather’s dock.

His family didn’t share his interest in fishing, but he remained interested enough to compete in bass fishing competitions during his senior year of high school.

So when Morrow and Kestufskie met, after discovering they were hallmates and enrolled in the same

seminar, the two figured success would come naturally.

They were wrong.

“When we started out ... we realized that we sucked,” Morrow says. “We needed to find a way to get around this big disadvantage of not having any information.”

Morrow and Kestufskie began using a strategy that helped carry

them to a win and three top-five finishes. Before each tournament, Morrow emails a group of more than 300 fishermen who use the lake where the competition will take place. The responses he receives give details on everything from which baits to use to which spots to fish. The team narrows down the suggestions to a list of 10 possible spots during scouting trips, which they take up to a week before each tournament.

“This has really been the turning point for us,” Morrow says. “We’ve got that local, inside knowledge of the people who grew up on the lake. It’s kind of like data mining for fishing spots.”

The team gathered enough information to land a 10th place finish at the national championship.

Perhaps more importantly, after fishing in tournaments all over the country, the two believe they have gathered enough information to help Northwestern’s team succeed after they graduate.

“We want to make sure the two people we get are the best fishermen we can find,” Morrow says, making sure to emphasize the need for balance between skill and research. “It’s not like you just sit out there and throw out a bobber. It involves a lot of practice.”

Whoever they pick will certainly have large shoes to fill. Morrow and Kestufskie have won $58,000 while fishing at Northwestern, almost $15,000 of which they have donated to the university.

As the new team members board the boat, eager to get out and catch the biggest bass possible, they will carry with them the legacy of the two founders. Northwestern has long been a premier academic institution, but now it is something more: a fishing school. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 31

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On Your Left!

Burn rubber without breaking your neck. BY ME GAN SUCKUT to bike is the far right side of the street, making sure to leave enough room between you and parked cars to avoid getting “doored.” Take advantage of bike lanes on Church and Davis, or western Emerson, Asbury and Dodge for longer rides.

Communication

A confident bicyclist needs to know how to make a left turn. It may sound easy, but it means cutting through his or her own lane of traffic as well as the opposite lane. First check to make sure there’s nothing ahead to throw you off the bike so you can check your blind spot. Hold the handlebars slightly to the right to offset the natural curve as you pivot to the left and check on traffic behind your bike. Cross into the center of the street, using it as a left-turn lane, and take a left when there’s a gap in oncoming traffic.

Communication is key when riding in and around Evanston. The Illinois State Police recommends that all bikers use hand signals when changing speed or direction. Extend your left arm horizontally at least 100 feet before turning left, and do the same with your right arm before making a right. When you slow down to a stop, extend your arm downward. It also won’t hurt to make eye contact with nearby pedestrians or drivers.

As enjoyable as it may be to listen to music, Evanston forbids the use of any device that impedes awareness while biking.

Where to Ride

Bicyclists are not allowed on the sidewalks in Evanston’s central business district and they must yield to pedestrians even when they are permitted on sidewalks. The best place 32 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

In and Out of Traffic

Bike Maintenance

Once Evanston thaws, it’ll be tempting to hop on a bike for a nice spring ride. But before you go, the League of American Bicyclists recommends the ABC Quick Check. This will ensure that your tires, brakes and chain mechanism are all performing up to par so you can avoid any

surprising storage-related mishaps.

A: Air pressure Your bike’s tires may have deflated a bit during the winter, whether you can tell by squeezing them or not.

Printed on the sidewall of the tire is the recommended air pressure, so alternate between using a pressure gauge and a bike pump ($10 to 30 on Amazon) to get the tire pressure just right for a ride.

B: Brakes Can you squeeze your brake levers all the way to the handlebars? If so, your brake pads are either too loose or too worn down to stop effectively. Make sure there’s a half-inch of brake pad left and at least one inch between the brake levers and the handlebar. If your brakes need adjusting, either tighten the screws and bolts yourself, or just bring your bike to a local bike shop like Bucephalus Bikes or The Pony Shop for expert care.

C: Cranks, chain and cassette A properly functioning bike must have tight crankarms (aka the parts that keep the pedals attached to the chain mechanism), a chain that is clean and lubed and a cassette that allows you to cycle through all of your gears without losing the chain.

As a rule of thumb, if it’s a moving

part, make sure it’s tight.

Quick Releases

The quick release is there to hold your wheel on your bike, so keep it tight, secure and pointed back so that nothing catches it while you’re on the road.

Check It Over

Give your bike a final once-over just to make sure nothing is loose, and take a short ride to ensure that the brakes will stop the bike at low speeds. Once your bike has passed the ABC Quick Check, you’re ready to ride. o

INTERACTIVE

GRAPHIC Interested in hitting the trails? Scope out some of our favorites with the maps on our site

photo: natalie krebs

B

iking in Evanston and Chicago isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

Urban and suburban biking is all about accommodating the dense population of pedestrians, drivers and other bikers. Bikers should be aware of the general rules of the road as well as Evanston’s specific bicycle ordinances.

A Tale Of City Trails Screw fixies. These city routes will move your biking into second gear.

BY MEGAN SUCKUT

Spokes and Sculptures

Length: Eight miles from Fullerton Red Line stop and back The discerning bicyclist can find prime bike lanes, cafes and thrift stores on this loop through Wicker Park and Bucktown, perhaps the best biking neighborhoods in Chicago. To load your bike on the El, just ask the station attendant to let you

You’ll Bike It Off

Length: Six miles from Roosevelt Red Line stop and back Travel a bit further to explore some of Chicago’s best biking and food in and around Pilsen. Starting on Roosevelt Street, ride to South Halsted and into University Village, the neighborhood of University of Illinois - Chicago. Take a right onto 18th Street, and you’ll end up in Pilsen. Grab a cheap and delicious lunch at Nuevo Leon just past Laflin Street, then ride up Blue Island Avenue, through Taylor Street and into Little Italy. You’re already exercising, so enjoy some food, including Flirty Cupcakes Dessert Garage near UIC. o

Brak e

Br

d Pa

a

v ke Le er

Hipster Highway

through the swing gate (but avoid this during rush hour). Head west on Fullerton and turn south onto Damen, which connects with Milwaukee Avenue. You’ll ride past the Boring Store, a quirky spy shop. Take a right onto Division and stop at the Alliance Bakery for amazing macarons, then continue right on California. Complete the loop on Milwaukee, past the Congress Theater and to Armitage. Take Damen north to head back towards the Red Line.

e ddl Sa

Length: Seven miles from South Campus and back This loop takes bicyclists on a tour of the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park, an outdoor art museum perfect for a bike adventure.

Ride north along Green Bay Road to connect to the bike paths through the sculpture park. Enjoy the vibrant, abstract artwork and views of the north channel of the Chicago River before connecting back to Oakton and riding north to campus along Lake Michigan on the Lakefront Trail.

s

Cassette

Handlebars

Frame

Tire

Crankarms Ch

Qu i

photo: ariana bacle

c

le a k Re se

Pedal ain NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 33

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NBN’s site has some tips on getting inked and keeping your job.

alt chicago:

THE WINDY CITY GETS WEIRD.

DECORATE ME, PLEASE:

Whether you’re planning a serious body modification or just feeling spontaneous, here are four Chicago tattoo and piercing parlors to keep in mind. We may not have the power to stop you from getting Jabba the Hutt tattooed on your ass, but we can suggest a classy place to do it right. -Natalie Krebs

Lakeview The Chicago Tattooing and Piercing Co. 1017 W. Belmont Ave. El: Red Line, Belmont Stop Piercer: Rudy Prices: Piercings start at $40, plus the cost of jewelry ($20-$40). Minimum for a tattoo is $50.

Chicago Tattoo is one of the pricier places on this list, but it’s worth the splurge. I recently went in for a cartilage piercing, and I’m still pleased with the results. Unlike some parlors, Chicago Tattoo has a separate piercing room even for routine piercings. Rudy was friendly and fast, and his 17 years of experience were apparent. He provided extensive care instructions and tips for avoiding painful accidents. The piercing process itself was smooth and virtually painless—the only downside was the staff’s poor wait-time prediction, but you can skip that hassle by avoiding weekends. If you’re interested in a tat, Chicago Tattoo has tons of flash art and seven artists to work with you on a custom design.

Wicker Park If you’re looking for something more adventurous than an ear piercing, hit up Tatu Tattoo and ask for Steve. When I accompanied a friend last year for her nipple piercing, he was completely professional and refreshingly personable. Steve never rushed my friend, and he also made sure to explain everything down to Tatu’s sterile equipment policies. Tatu Tattoo itself was clean and comfortable. There are two other piercers besides Steve—and 11 different tattoo artists.

Tatu Tattoo 1754 W. North Ave. El: Blue Line, Damen Stop Piercer: Steve Prices: Piercings start at $30, plus the cost of jewelry. Minimum for a tattoo is $50.

uptown The Tattoo Factory 4441 N. Broadway St. El: Red Line, Wilson Stop Artist: Chris Prices: Piercings start at $25 for earlobes, but most are around $50 with jewelry. Minimum for a tattoo is $50.

Despite its industrial-sounding name, Tattoo Factory’s tattoos are anything but mass produced. The studio is spacious and the artists are refreshingly laid-back. McCormick junior Laura Sverchek chose Tattoo Factory for her second tattoo, then returned for a consultation with Chris to design her next one. Sverchek also recommends their piercing services: After a botched nose piercing at another parlor, the Tattoo Factory successfully re-pierced it. With three piercers, 15 artists and 16-hour business days, Tattoo Factory is a proven parlor with endless options for anyone in the body-mod market.

You get what you pay for at Speakeasy, the priciest parlor on the list. When my friend and I arrived on their doorstep at the Six Corners, we had to buzz up in true 1920s prohibition fashion. My friend spent weeks searching for a parlor willing to tattoo her desired design before finding Speakeasy. Instead of refusing, Speakeasy artists Heath and Sean suggested a few adjustments during a walk-in consultation. Heath resolved the design’s technical issues while preserving its integrity and satisfying my friend’s vision. Artists are often booked well in advance, so schedule an appointment. Their nine artists and passion for custom artwork will definitely make your wait worthwhile.

34 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

Speakeasy Custom Tattoo 1935 K North Ave. El: Blue Line, Damen Stop Artist: Heath Prices: $80 minimum Artist Philosophy: “Bold, illustrative imagery that firmly resides in the foundations of classic tattooing.”

photos: natalie krebs

wicker park

NOT YOUR AVERAGE NIGHT OUT Do you feel that? It’s the blood rushing back to your limbs while you thaw in the mildly warmer weather. Spring is just around the corner (theoretically), and soon you’ll be able to go traipsing around Chicago again without having to risk catching pneumonia. Instead of returning to your usual spots, plan an evening at these hidden gems located throughout the city. -Denise Lu

TUESDAY MONDAY

Porn and Chicken Dance Party at Evil Olive: Take your typical club scene, then throw in some porn and chicken, literally. On Monday nights, Evil Olive on West Division Street features all the free wings you can handle and XXX NSFW flicks playing in the background.

What the hell, right? Not for the faint-hearted, anything goes at the limitless Porn and Chicken, which features a different guest DJ every week. If you don’t believe the hype, go check out this real-life wet dream for yourself.

Relax Attack Jazz Series at the WHISTLER: It’s not news that Chicago has a rich jazz history, but today’s local scene arguably rivals the Golden Age. Catch some of Chicago’s biggest names in cutting-edge jazz on Tuesday nights at the WHISTLER, a cocktail bar, local record label and art gallery.

Free entry means you can explore the unknown abyss of new harmonies and textures and spend your cash on some of the Whistler’s award-winning drinks instead.

FRIDAY

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind at the Neo-Futurarium: The longest running show in Chicago, Too Much Light is currently in its 24th year. Even if you like theatre, the Neo-Futurists put on a unique show consisting of 30 plays jam-packed into an hour.

With a program that changes every week, the back-to-back plays are coupled with a sprinkle of improv and audience participation. Going along with the idiosyncrasy, admission fees are $9 plus the roll of a single six-sided die. Performances go on every weekend, including Saturday and Sunday, except the last two weekends of December.

photos: sunny kang, david zhang and alex zhu

Sabertooth Organ Quartet at the Green Mill: Tucked away in Uptown, the prolific Green Mill jazz club soldiered through more than a century of Chicago history.

Al Capone allegedly did business at the Green Mill, which is now a world-renowned jazz club that is still humbly grounded in its roots.

Here, the music is the focus and bartenders won’t think twice to tell you to shut up during a set.

On Saturday nights, join other serious jazz enthusiasts and catch the legendary Chicago quartet Sabertooth. The set starts at midnight and plays until 5 a.m.

SATURDAY

THURSDAY

Dusty Grooves at the Cobra Lounge: It’s almost ironic this lounge isn’t affiliated with Dusty Groove America, the Ukrainian Village record shop that slings rare Golden Age soul and jazz. Rather, Dusty Grooves (with an ‘s’) is a dance party every Thursday night at the Cobra Lounge. DJs spin the best of the oldies, meaning anything from the Beach Boys to unearthed funk cuts that haven’t seen the light of day since the ‘70s. It might be your mother’s music but these dance moves are anything but antiquated.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 35

even with an economy on its knees, american universities refuse to slow the brisk pace of rising tuition prices. how does northwestern stay affordable for as many students as possible?

story by MARK OLALDE

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photography by N

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36 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

“They were very generous with their financial aid, and if I were to look at it from the outside, even this year, they’re still being very generous with their financial aid,” he says.

However, their generosity was hardly unconditional. Madaus will graduate with thousands of dollars in debt, spending the money he budgeted for four years of college on three years instead. In order to graduate early, he won't study abroad or complete a second major.

“I wish there was a way for us to know from the beginning exactly how much this investment is going to cost so I can evaluate it against how much money I expect to benefit,” he says.

Madaus is one of more than 20 million Americans currently enrolled in post-secondary education. As tuition prices skyrocket and family incomes remain stagnant, students across the country are asking themselves—especially in the wake of the recession—how fair the cost of education is and how the hell they’re going to afford it.

dissecting the tuition problem

“i believe that all people— regardless of race, creed or color—have the right to be saddled with crushing student debt for the rest of their lives.”

— stephen colbert ichael Madaus doesn’t get angry. It’s just not his thing. But the Medill junior is frustrated, though he'll never claim to be a victim. Maybe the culprit is Northwestern, maybe it’s the government or maybe it’s the complex equations controlling his destiny.

Madaus just wants to get his degree and walk across the stage with the friends who have toiled beside him for the past three years.

Unfortunately for Madaus, his sister graduated from college last year, so Northwestern reacted by pulling the plug on half of his financial aid. Now he must graduate early because he can’t afford a fourth year of college.

“My parents are not suddenly able to contribute more because they had been hemorrhaging money for years and years,” he says.

Madaus chose to attend Northwestern because he calculated that the private school’s generous financial aid package would end up being cheaper than any in-state public school­—the Illinois resident didn't even have to apply to U of I to know that.

he root of the issue is simple. People make less, but college costs more. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the cost of attending any type of higher education increased across the board from 2000 to 2011 (adjusted for inflation) by an average of 35 percent. In the same timeframe, income dropped slightly for every part of the population, ranging from a 15 percent decrease in the poorest fifth to a four percent drop in the wealthiest fifth.

David Feldman is the economics department chair at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. and co-author of the book Why Does College Cost So Much? He argues that higher education can’t be looked at under a microscope. Instead, it needs to be viewed in the context of global market forces because it is an industry with its own characteristics. “Higher education is a heavily subsidized industry,” he says. “If subsidy starts to fall, then the price is going to start shooting up faster than cost.”

Subsidizing a student’s education means that the sticker price a student faces before financial aid (about $60,000 at Northwestern) is different from the actual cost for the school to educate that student (about $85,000). The difference is automatically subsidized, and then financial aid shaves down the sticker price. For public universities, state and federal government dollars mostly subsidize the cost.

For private schools a large portion comes from institutional financial aid—money the university gives directly to students.

Up until 2005, state grants rapidly increased. Then, all levels of government struggled with rising deficits, funding directed toward education slowed. For example, the Federal Pell Grant, given to lowincome students, covered 98 percent of in-state tuition for public schools a decade ago. Even though the maximum dollar amount awarded for the grant has gone up, it now only covers 64 percent of tuition. Unable to keep pace with the rate of tuition growth, it has fallen short.

Additionally, larger percentages of aid are going to merit scholarships instead of need-based ones.

“If [state schools] are going to increase their sticker prices, I think they need a commitment to increasing needbased aid,” says Northwestern president and economist Morton Schapiro. “Publics, unfortunately, over the last twenty years have taken more and more of their state financial aid dollars and redirected it

away from need into merit, and that’s because state legislators love to keep the valedictorians in-state.”

This practice not only helps some public schools stay competitive with high-ranking private ones, but also makes college less affordable for most students and often results in higher prices.

“The public universities are now faced with a bad choice," Feldman says. "They can either push to increase the rate of tuition growth to substitute for lost public money or they can watch the quality of their programming decline. And what most of them have done is a combination of both." Feldman says that because publics comprise two-thirds to three-fourths of total higher-education enrollment, they set the trend for the whole nation.

Ronald Ehrenberg, the director of the Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University, has chronicled one such example of the decline in quality of education. “The pressures of increases in financial aid are limiting the resources that are available to fund the rest of the university,” he says. A telling example is the decrease in hiring research and tenure-track professors because they are too expensive. Instead, universities are using more full-time or part-time faculty who may not be as qualified.

Not confined to public universities, funding issues are affecting private institutions too. “Private universities are subject to the vagaries of the market," Feldman says. "There actually has been a big decrease in private subsidies in the past three years generated by the financial crisis. Many private universities had their endowments hit badly in 2008 to 2009 and as a result had to choose between cutting back programming and raising tuition. Private universities were really

median household income vs. tuition costs for private four-year institutions $50,831

50 median household income

dollars (in thousands)

40 $32,617 30

20

10

estimated tuition costs for private 4-year institutions

‘80 ‘90 ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 year 38 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

stung by the decrease in endowment or income in the first two years of the crisis.”

Northwestern lost about $2 billion from its endowment when the recession hit. The disastrous combination of government deficits and a weak economy made the subsidies that support students—be they government or institutional financial aid—harder to come by, and almost no school in the country is immune to these market forces.

the ivory tower of the ivory towers

“

orthwestern’s in a very strong financial position,” says Vice-President for University Relations Al Cubbage.

Northwestern's situation is an outlier to nearly every other school in the country. While that’s a relief, it would make sense for tuition to stop rising so quickly here of all places.

Although the sticker price of attending Northwestern is increasing—at an average rate of four to five percent each year—it turns out the actual price that students pay is not. “We’ve been able to increase financial aid in double digit rates for the last at least three to four years even though we’re in a recession,” Cubbage says.

According to Schapiro, the tuition price tag is rising to meet what the richest students can pay. “If you come from considerable wealth, what percentage of that $85,000 should you charge the family?" he asks. "That generally has been rising faster than sticker prices with, more or less, the rate of growth of income for people who would have zero need-based aid." The sticker price is rising with the knowledge that it doesn't apply to about half of Northwestern's students.

Northwestern’s diverse revenue streams make this high rate of financial aid possible. Last year alone, the University reaped $1.8 billion from a combination of tuition, the endowment, royalties, grants, gifts and several other, smaller sources.

About $500 million of that came from grants that went directly to research, mainly at the medical school. Three specific sources of income help support financial aid: tuition revenue, endowment income and gifts. With money from those areas, the University handed out $296.9 million in aid.

Because Northwestern is need-blind, it meets all demonstrated need for domestic students. This means that students’ financial situations don’t affect their chances of acceptance. At many schools, students on the waitlist who can pay will get preference over poorer students so the school saves money on financial aid. Also, schools engage in a practice called “gapping,” in which a school offers a student enough money to incentivize coming to that school but not enough that it fills his or her demonstrated financial need.

But there are few universities that can afford to spend as much on financial aid. There is a group of 25 schools called the 568s that receive special anti-trust exemptions because they are legally bound to be need-blind. In addition to Northwestern, the list includes competitors like the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, MIT and Vanderbilt.

The group created a standardized formula for deciding a student’s financial need, which is more streamlined and generous than other currently used equations. Any school may use this formula. “I think that the 568 formula is a very generous, very fair formula and a lot of the things that morally that are a little difficult to deal with have been addressed over the course of the last ten years,” Schapiro says.

Northwestern's roughly $7.5 billion endowment ranks as one of the largest in the country. “An endowment is your savings account, and the university takes about 4.5 percent each year of that investment return and uses that to operate the university. A big chunk of that is for undergraduate scholarships and financial aid,” Cubbage says.

Northwestern's also struck gold with drug

(cost of four years tuition at northwestern) $173,520 (student health insurance) $11,368 + (one year, allison residential community double room) $7962 + (one year, 13-meals-per-week meal plan) $5,181 + (fees) $2,200 +

$200,231 royalties. The drug Lyrica, synthesized by professor Richard Silverman, paid out approximately $89 million to the school—and that's in 2012 alone. “It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime deal," Cubbage says. "That has enabled the university to do things that we couldn’t have, mainly to provide more scholarships because it’s just cash money coming in.”

Thus, Northwestern can afford expenditures such as $15 million per year in aid for student athletes. Also, Schapiro says he wants to raise $50 million to provide need-based financial aid for international students.

So is Northwestern’s price tag worth it? Signs point to yes.

While 45 percent of the student body gets some sort of financial aid from the university, the average debt of matriculated students is only about $25,000. A Northwestern University Career Services survey of three-quarters of last year’s graduating class showed that, following graduation, 61 percent were immediately beginning work, 16 percent were still seeking work, 16 percent were going directly back to school and seven percent were pursuing other paths. For students entering the business world, the average starting salary was $64,000, engineering was $55,500, communications and media was $38,000, and non-profit/government/law/education was $35,500, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These salaries are already close to the median for their industries, immediately following graduation.

Thanks to Northwestern's very secure state, Schapiro says he doesn’t think the status quo will change anytime soon. “So far the Supreme Court has allowed privates to decide how we teach, who we teach, who teaches who, what we teach,” he says. “We’ve had those protections, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the private colleges and universities, not-for-profit, in this country are some of the best in the world.”

the search for alternatives

“

ou don’t have to go to expensive private institutions,” Ehrenberg says. “You can go to a wellpriced public. You can start out at a two-year college and then transfer to a four-year institution. If you are strategic, college still should be accessible to most students.”

Because of the current recession, students are becoming more and more attracted to non-traditional paths through post-secondary education. Among them, community colleges fill many students’ needs.

Just a 45-minute drive southwest from Northwestern, Triton College in River Grove, Ill., exemplifies the role that community colleges play for students unable to pay for four-year universities. Serving local students, Triton charges around $1,500 tuition per semester or $98 per credit hour. In the end, students end up paying less than $10,000 for a full year of education. Federal grant aid given to students with

financial need would be stretched thin at schools like Northwestern, but are able to cover 100 percent of their costs at Triton.

Pat Zinga, Triton’s associate dean of financial aid, explains, “Triton College serves a fair number of working class communities and for our students it is a more efficient pathway for them to begin at the community college and take two years—their gen eds—and then transfer.”

In this “two plus two” plan, students take two years to cheaply finish entry-level classes necessary to graduate from any college, and Triton has counselors dedicated to helping them plan for the next two years at a new institution. Triton has agreements with every Illinois state school guaranteeing students who finish their Associate’s Degree at the community college and are accepted will enter with junior standing.

“Most of our students transfer very successfully to four-year senior institutions to complete their program of study, but it gives them an opportunity to save thousands of dollars while they’re taking their gen eds,” Zinga says. In addition, 75 percent of the school’s students are part-time, so they are able to work while in school.

fight back or shut up? he issue of college tuition has many stakeholders.

The future of quality, prices and reach of college depends on the public, the institutions, the government and the media.

Ehrenberg already sees these diverse groups having an effect. “A few years ago the Senate finance committee investigated what universities with large endowments were doing, and they threatened to set minimum spending requirements in the hope of generating more financial aid from endowments,” he explains. “And that threat, accompanied by the institutions’ understanding that they were not enrolling as many students from relatively modest means as they should, led to the dramatic increase in financial aid policy.”

Legislation is not the only way to control prices, Ehrenberg says.

“I think there will be extraordinary public pressure for the private universities to remain accessible to students from all income groups, so I would expect that there will be some moderation in the rate of tuition increases in the future.”

With schools' endowments down and the government struggling to balance the budget, an upturn in the economy would do more than any new financial aid program.

Since the demand for quality education won't diminish, tuition prices won't decrease on their own.

“Demand goes away, that affects the prices, but right now, the rate of return is at record levels," Schapiro says. "The number of really qualified people who are trying to get into our kinds of schools is at record levels.” The quality of life that can be bought with a college degree is increasing. While 4.5 percent of people with a bachelor’s degree are unemployed, that number jumps to 8.3 for the section of the workforce with only a high school diploma, and those with a degree make 63 percent more than those without.

Although there are debates and fighting over college prices, factors ranging from markets to public sentiment will dictate the future of higher education. “I can’t say where we’re going to be ten or twenty years from now, but I can tell you it’s going to be a very different environment than we are now,” Ehrenberg says.

The question is just how different it will be. For Madaus, college is over in one quarter and he’s preparing to climb down from the ivory tower. With that Northwestern degree, he’ll have no problem finding a job soon. But what will live longer: the memories of having fun with his college friends or the debt hanging over his head?

The answer is unclear.

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1

hip•ster noun

informal |ˈhɪpstɚ|

Forget obscure. The Northwestern hipster may never have existed in the first place.

BY CHRISTIAN HOLUB photos by Brennan Anderson

JULIA ROSE DURAY’S HAIR

is red with aqua tips. Morgan Hecht is a campus rep for Sony who always has half a dozen newly released indie rock CDs in tow. Alex Beer walks around campus in form-fitting sweaters, skinny jeans and big boots.

Nancy DaSilva works on the Northwestern Art Review and has a Tumblr called "Nancy Standing On Things."

We call these Northwestern students “hipsters” because we need labels—student-athlete, Medilldo, frat star, etc.—to differentiate NU's 8,000 undergraduates. Like all labels, this one carries connotations— an aesthetic, a set of interests and, above all, an attitude.

But like all labels, this one is problematic.

How do Northwestern students define a hipster? Our video on northbynorthwestern.com might give some answers.

An Imagined Subculture Take Alex Beer, a Weinberg junior. There is a reflex to call him a “hipster” based on his clothing, and his position on A&O’s Concerts Committee amplifies this tendency.

Since A&O’s task is to bring musicians to campus for concerts like Fall Blowout, it’s easy to think of them as “hipsters.” They have extensive knowledge of indie music that we laypeople have never heard of.

Beer doesn’t see it that way.

“If I find music on a website that NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 41

I don’t think other people have heard, I want to share it with as many people as possible, and I want them to share as many things with me,” he says. “A real hipster would not want to share those bands. They wouldn’t want that band to get more popular because then they would lose ownership.”

A&O’s task isn’t just to bring cool artists to campus—it’s to sell tickets to concerts. The members of A&O have to bring artists that enough of the student population will know and want to see. In the last few years, A&O didn’t bring "hipster" bands like Animal Collective to campus; they brought Nas and Snoop Dogg.

“It’s a hard thing, because I’m definitely more into alternative artists right now,” says Communication sophomore Morgan Hecht, another member of A&O’s Concerts Committee. “But we can’t pick an artist that no one’s ever heard of because that won’t sell. We have to figure out what the student body wants.”

Even though the members of the Concerts Committee might know more about music than you and might dress in ways we associate with “hipsters,” they also work to make music more accessible for you.

This notion made a recent op-ed in The New York Times all the more jarring. “How to Live Without Irony” appeared on the front page of the Sunday Review on Nov. 18, 2012. Written

by Princeton French professor Christy Wampole, it offered a diagnosis for a generation of modern youth and the hipster, “its archetype of ironic living.”

Wampole’s lengthy description of the “contemporary urban harlequin” who “appropriates outmoded fashions, mechanisms, and hobbies” and for whom “irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt” should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Portlandia or scrolled through the Look at This Fucking Hipster website.

But the “hipster,” at least as Wampole and others see it, doesn’t exist.

The skinny jeans-wearing, vinylobsessed hater of “mainstream” culture invoked by people seeking to protect their tastes from condescension is now a shadow of a small subculture that may never have existed.

When describing this subculture, there are lots of qualifiers. That’s because the definition of “hipster” is hard to nail down, and debunking this definition is tricky, too. Beer says he thinks “the hipster definition has sort 42 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

of become a monster and gotten a life of its own.”

While it does make some good points, Wampole’s op-ed mixes all three of these concepts, which leads to an inaccurate portrayal of modern youth and their values.

The Irony Factor Jonathan Fitzgerald is the editor of Patrolmag.com, a website dedicated to covering religion and modern life. In his book, Not Your Mother’s Morals, he argues that modern youth, “Generation Y” or whatever the hell they call us, value sincerity way more than irony.

“Starting around [the] 2000s, virtues of sincerity and authenticity have become the highest virtue in our culture,” Fitzgerald says.

Interestingly enough, Fitzgerald and Wampole use similar evidence for their arguments: “hipsters”—and the art they value and produce. But where Fitzgerald breaks the hipster trope down, Wampole never directly mentions bands or writers. Her description of hipsters comes across as generic and ends up lumping everything her readers have associated with “hipsters” as purposefully ironic.

She’s not the only one who’s dismissed certain movies and albums because they seem “too hipster.” But Fitzgerald disagrees: Taking a second look at the art typically called “hipster” reveals it to be anything but ironic.

“If there are people in my life whom I would refer to as ‘hipsters’— behind their back of course—I don’t see irony as their greatest ethos,” Fitzgerald says. “As I was working on my book, the things I was remarking as New Sincerity were the main cultural output of ‘hipsters,’ like indie rock and Wes Anderson films.”

Then there’s Wampole’s interpretation of the cultural ethos of the 1990s. She looks back on the '90s with nostalgia, calling them “relatively irony-free” and remarking wistfully about how “the grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and attitude.” This analysis differs completely from that of fellow Generation X-ers, from Fitzgerald to music writer Steven Hyden.

“What was really bizarre about that article was that she said the '90s were irony-free, which is the biggest load of bullshit ever,” says Hyden, a staff writer for sports and pop culture website Grantland. “I went to college in the '90s, and if people my age are mad at your generation for anything,

“...IF PEOPLE MY AGE ARE MAD AT YOUR GENERATION FOR ANYTHING, IT’S BECAUSE OF THE EARNESTNESS. IN THE ‘90S IT WAS ALL ABOUT LOOKING DOWN AT MAINSTREAM CULTURE/POP MUSIC AND SNEERING AT IT. NOW IT’S KIND OF UNCOOL TO DO THAT.” -MUSIC WRITER STEVEN HYDEN

it’s because of the earnestness. In the '90s it was all about looking down at mainstream culture/pop music and sneering at it. Now it’s kind of uncool to do that.”

[Insert Obscure Music Reference] Hyden also frequently writes album reviews for Pitchfork, an online music publication that has become a lightning rod for discussions about the relationship between music and “hipster”-ness.

Pitchfork has garnered a reputation for snobbery over the years. In 2006, the site’s review for an album by Jet (a typical radio rock band) consisted solely of an embedded YouTube video of a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Meanwhile, they’ve given three separate albums by indie band Pavement perfect scores on their 10-point scale.

This has, understandably, led to the belief that Pitchfork’s writers are condescending hipsters evangelizing the superiority of their cool, indie taste to the rest of the world.

What the magazine chooses to review might point to a certain arrogance, but Hyden says that argument ridiculous.

“Most music fans I know are nerdy and have no pretense to being

cool,” he says. “Being in a band is cool, but being into music is nerdy. I never got a girl because I knew the name of a drummer in some shitty band or because I owned all the albums by Spoon. That never impresses anybody except other music fans.”

Like A&O, Pitchfork is associated with being “hipster,” simply because its writers are very passionate about music. In fact, the image of a hipster is very closely tied to music taste.

“It’s just a really easy jumping-off point and a really easy means of talking to people,” Weinberg junior Nancy DaSilva says of the close cultural association of music taste and identities like “hipster.” “It’s like a common vocabulary. When you’re getting to know someone, it’s like, ‘What kind of bands do you listen to? What kind of music do you like?’ Your music defines you.

People who love hip-hop have a certain culture. People who love classical music have a certain culture.”

So if a “hipster” is a certain type of music listener, it's still unclear what genre they enjoy. It's easy to say “indie,” but what the hell does that mean?

An artist signed to an independent label? "Indie" could refer to anything from Cloud Nothings' garage rock to Vampire Weekend's Afro-pop.

Thus, it seems that the consensus is that “hipsters” simply hate on mainstream music and listen to alternative artists. But even that has its problems, since ideas about what’s cool and what’s mainstream shift constantly. Hyden notes that in music critic circles, there’s been a backlash against the last decade's pervasive indie rock elitism.

“Now it’s kind of hipster to kind of love Usher or commercial music, as opposed to liking the Decemberists,” Hyden says, referring to a band whose storytelling opuses (one of their albums is a rock opera about fairy queens and forest creatures) are freqeuntly used to exemplify the excesses of indie music. “Whereas nowadays you’ll see these New York writers going really in-depth about Mariah Carey.”

DaSilva also noted that a disinterest in mainstream music doesn’t necessarily denote an interest in indie rock.

“I’m a Jewish girl from New York,” DaSilva says, confused by the hipster allegations often thrown her way.

“What do I know about alternative music? I enjoy listening to Simon & Garfunkel and my parents’ music.”

“WITH THIS MASS INCREASE IN On top of that, it’s hard to even tell what’s “mainstream” and what’s “alternative” anymore. Bands like Mumford & Sons and fun. could be considered “indie rock,” but both had songs on top of the Billboard lists. At this point it’d be hard to find anyone who isn’t familiar with “Little Lion Man” or “Some Nights.” It's become impossible to predict what you’ll hear when you flip on a Top 40 station.

“The other day, when I was home over break, I was listening to the radio in my car and heard ‘Call Me Maybe' played next to ‘Ho Hey’ [by The Lumineers],” Hecht says. “That’s just such a funny juxtaposition.”

Strictly drawn lines between different cliques of musical taste no longer exist, because in the Internet age every song ever made is free and a click away. Communication sophomore Julia Duray has been identified as a “hipster” since high school and says the “hipster” culture is a response to the volume of information accessible online.

“I think it’s heavily linked to the Internet,” she says. “With this mass increase in information, hipsters consider themselves the snobs who can pick out what of that is valid. I think

INFORMATION, HIPSTERS CONSIDER THEMSELVES THE SNOBS WHO CAN PICK OUT WHAT OF THAT IS VALID. THEY’RE LIKE THE ‘SIFTERS’ IN A WAY. IT HAS TO DO WITH A REJECTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY AND INSISTENCE ON EXOTICIZING THE PAST” - J U L I A D U R AY, C O M M U N I C AT I O N SOPHOMORE

they’re like the ‘sifters’ in a way, and I think that it has to do with a rejection of new technology and an insistence on exoticizing the past.”

This might explain the association between “hipsters” and nostalgia (think vinyl LPs and Polaroid cameras), which isn’t a false claim. Some even think that vinyl is the only true way to listen to music.

Rapid Proliferation The Internet has accelerated everything—not just the speed of technological innovation, but the rate at which the cultural dialectic absorbs fringe cultures. If “hipsters” like photography, what does that mean when everybody and their uncle has the Instagram app on their phone, making goofy camera phone shots look 50 percent more like trained “hipster” photographs?

The “hipster” stereotype is composed of bits and pieces, each of which is individually true. But that doesn’t mean those pieces always go together. Once, maybe, there was a “hipster” subculture based in places like Portland and Brooklyn, where people did all of these things. Duray seems to think there was. If so, it’s dust in the cultural wind now.

“Now I think it’s become another trend,” Duray says of “hipster” culture. “I think the fact that stores like Urban Outfitters are springing up in my rich, white Connecticut suburb hometown sort of speaks to the fact that it’s becoming less of a subculture and more of a fashion trend.”

Things that “hipsters” are supposed to like are still around, and people still enjoy them. However, Instagram and the Internet have made a lot of those interests popular and even mainstream. The pieces of this stereotype don’t fit together.

DaSilva says that when she met Beer in her art history class last fall, she immediately thought of him as a “hipster” only to watch that flimsy stereotype fall apart once they became friends.

“I immediately saw his aesthetic and thought, ‘He’s such a hipster,’” she says. “But now if someone asked me to describe him, the last thing I would say is ‘hipster’ because I know so much more about him than the fact that he dresses kind of trendy. It’s the last thing I would choose to describe him as. Not because he’s not that, but because it’s just like such an empty label. It doesn't mean anything.”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 43

A

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by katherine mirani students, a number more suited for a college stadium than for a classroom. When Coursera’s classes went live, millions of people gained access to the kind of education they had only dreamed of. Students could learn new skills while caring for a sick family member or living in a recession-torn region. With the increased attention, publications ran story after story about the disruption happening in the education world.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ONLINE EDUCATION

-------------emester Online is the opposite of a MOOC in almost every way. Only a very small group of students can enroll in a Semester Online course, and they must apply.

Students will pay about the same to take an online class as they would to take one on campus (at Northwestern, full-time undergraduates taking four classes pay $3,615 per class). In

s

the end, Semester Online students receive credit toward their degree.

MOOCs, which are open to all, require students to do the work on their own time. Real-time contact with professors is rare. The bestcase scenario results in bragging rights, but not degree progress.

Herein lies the problem faced by MOOCs developers: Only extremely self-motivated students end up succeeding.

Not all college students can learn in that setting. For students accustomed to the intimacy of a physical campus, even 200-person lectures seem huge and impersonal.

There’s not much one-on-one face time with professors, and if you need help you’re more likely to ask a friend than casually stop by office hours.

That’s where 2U comes in. The education startup created a system of online education programs comprising small classes—only 15 to 20 people max—that act like a

discussion section on a computer screen. All 20 students must show up at the scheduled class time to participate in a Google Plus-like classroom. Basically, you’re taking a class in the middle of the face grid from The Brady Bunch theme song.

That means no napping or texting during class without everyone seeing you. You’re on screen for your classmates and professor to see, so you better pay attention.

“You think online is less engaged than being in the classroom,” says Provost Dan Linzer, who has played a key part in building the cross-university program. “But this platform, you actually can’t tune out. You have to stay focused. Or your fellow students are going to go, ‘Yo, Jack! Get back in here!’”

The online classes can also be more thorough than more traditional classes.

“If you’re talking about some kind of scenario that you have in your head, and you want students to

photos: ariana bacle and sunny kang

s a Northwestern student, every time you want to spend a quarter away from campus, you face a hard choice. You’ve been offered an amazing internship. You want to study abroad in Latin America.

You’re recovering from surgery or dealing with a family emergency.

But no matter how incredible the opportunity or how pressing the need at home, the question still lurks: Will you be able to graduate on time?

In the past, you may have decided not to go abroad at all, to enroll in five classes for a few quarters or to accept staying a little longer at NU to finish your degree.

Not anymore. Starting this fall, Northwestern will provide a new solution—a program called Semester Online that offers small online classes for credit from a consortium of top schools.

Semester Online was developed by 2U, an education startup that has received millions of dollars in funding from investors.

The program transcends the online startups that have been popping up like weeds all over the Internet: Coursera, Udacity and edX all began offering MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, in 2012.

While online education has been part of the college landscape for years, top schools only recently started embracing their social responsibility to change the workings of higher education, by moving some of their most popular material online for free.

Thinkers and educators have prescribed online education as the antidote to a host of ills—the rising cost of a university degree, the difficulty of finding access to a good education in remote parts of the world and the way out of the quagmire where the value of college seems to have disappeared. Media has widely questioned whether or not college is worth it. It’s outlandishly expensive and doesn’t always offer the easy path into the middle class that it once did.

Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller hoped to solve the first aspect of the equation when they left to start Coursera, “a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free,” according to Coursera’s website.

Just one of Coursera’s courses might enroll more than 100,000

get in their head, can we create that scene and shoot it,” Linzer says. “So they’ll hire directors and actors and script a five to ten minute film. And create that scene.”

2U doesn’t take the task lightly—or cheaply. They expect the program will cost a total of $35 to 40 million. This is almost four times more than the typical cost to launch one of the graduate programs they previously developed.

They will shoulder most of the financial risk for creating the program, and they believe it will pay off, according to Jeremy Johnson, president of Undergraduate Programs at 2U. The high quality of the classes (consortium members include Duke, Emory and Washington University in St. Louis), combined with the value they provide to both students and instructors, makes Semester Online a compelling offering, attracting enough students to pay for the investment in full.

WHO THE MOOCs ARE GOOD FOR

-------------ne of the biggest criticisms of Semester Online is that it doesn’t accomplish the goal online education traditionally seeks to achieve—expanding access to a much larger and more diverse group of students. Despite their drawbacks, MOOCs have attracted elite schools and ambitious students since they began singing their siren song just one year ago.

Gaurav Jhaveri, a college sophomore in India, is the poster child for MOOCs. Interested in programming from a young age, in college he realized that the computer engineering track was inflexible and too easy for him. An independent learner, he already knew most of the material and his assignments didn’t challenge him. Then he discovered online learning through MOOCs. Since then, he’s taken online computer science courses from Udacity,

o

edX and Coursera and is currently enrolled in an HTML game development course through Udacity.

“I don’t want to waste four years just receiving instruction, doing the assignments that I already know,” he says. “There’s no point if you’re not pushing yourself.”

But Jhaveri is not a typical student. He blithely talks about how fun his online game theory course was (“There is so much to learn!”) and acts like it’s no big deal that he’s taken five or six in addition to full time university classes. His college work has been too easy because he taught himself so much during high school. Even without online courses, Jhaveri claims he would be learning on his own.

When there are 100,000 students in a class, there’s no one watching to make sure students finish their work. Udacity courses in particular are self-paced with open enrollment. Anyone can join at any time, and if they finish the work by

the end of the class, they will pass.

But even Jhaveri appreciates the power of a passionate teacher.

“I really want the instructor to not look like there has been a gun put to his head, he’s forced to teach,” he says.

Students like Jhaveri are the success stories of MOOCs, but it’s the flaky learners that have garnered MOOCs their greatest criticism— the outrageously high dropout rates.

An article on The Atlantic’s website estimated that only about 20 percent of students graduated from one Coursera course, while a July New York Times interview reported that one edX online class, “Circuits and Electronics,” had a pass rate of less than five percent.

MOOC providers also haven’t found a way to create revenue—and there’s only so much educators can do for free.

“If they are paying as much as a normal student will pay, then I imagine the discussion may be

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-------------he idea for Semester Online program started with the Provost of Washington University in Saint Louis, Edward S. Macias. 2U had been

t

“

—Jeremy Johnson, president of Undergraduate Programs at 2U

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think a little bit more broadly about what is possible as an undergraduate experience,” he says. “Expand the notion of your campus to all campuses.

The world becomes your campus.”

INTO THE FUTURE

-------------emester Online courses will likely begin at Northwestern in fall 2013. Faculty members have been submitting course proposals, and a few will be chosen for a pilot year, Linzer says. The courses take six months to develop and take valuable professors away from their responsibilities on campus, so there won’t be too many courses initially.

As the universities get a feel for how students and faculty respond to the courses, they can roll more out.

The process hasn’t been quick or easy. The consortium schools operate on different schedules and use different credit systems, creating challenges for the provosts as they try to build classes that will benefit students at all of the participating institutions. Because they’re starting small, Linzer is adamant that Semester Online is far from replacing a physical Northwestern education.

“We’re not talking about moving the residential experience online,” he says. “This is an enhancement to the residential living experience.”

Northwestern has held multiple faculty forums, where Linzer says some expressed skepticism, others were excited and all were curious.

Mary Finn, the associate dean for Undergraduate Academic Affairs and the head of the Faculty Distance Learning Workgroup, has been involved in much of the planning and discussion around getting Semester Online off the ground. She says that both faculty and enrolled students wonder what they can gain from online classes.

“There are lots of concerns about it,” she says. “If you teach at a place like Northwestern, if you go to Northwestern, you value sitting and talking and being in the same room with your professor, everyone recognizes that.”

Would Finn teach an online class? Yes, she says, but only because she wants to get some experience with what so far has been only a theoretical concept. Finn stresses that because Semester Online hasn’t started yet, no one can predict whether it will end up being a long-lasting part of Northwestern’s offerings or just a blip on the radar.

“I teach English, and you know, I can tweak and adjust as I’m go-

s

ing through, and do,” she says. “So those are the kinds of things—how well do those discussion groups and synchronous small groups work [online], I’d be interested to know how they actually turn out. Whether or not that format engenders the kind of conversation that a good professor can engender in a class is an open question.”

Weinberg sophomore David Ryan, who is the Academic Chair of Willard, worries that even in such a small model as Semester Online, no online classroom can compete with its physical alternative.

“I’m a little hesitant about the quality of the education being created by a computer screen,” Ryan says. “I don’t know if it’s like this nostalgia, or being conservative about it, but I think there’s something to be said about all being in the same classroom together, with the professor. If anything, it might make it harder for people to pay attention, because there’s a lot more to distract you in your dorm room than actually in a classroom.”

Recently, Ryan planned an event where Finn would come to Willard to discuss the new programs with students. However, the event hadn’t happened yet, and Ryan knew only what he had learned in discussions with other students and Willard faculty fellows. That is, barely anything—about as much as the rest of the student body.

“The words Semester Online themselves I’ve only seen from researching people like Dean Finn,” Ryan says.

Finn agreed that the student body has been in the dark about Semester Online so far, and she says she hopes that will change as the program moves forward.

“We need to make sure we have good policies and we have good practices,” she says. “To get those things in place and have good transparency, going forward. This all happened kind of quickly; we’ll hope for more transparent processes.”

According to Linzer, this kind of experimentation has been the exciting part of planning Semester Online: Embracing technology not to destroy traditional education, but to make it a better fit for today’s students.

“We’re in the business of trying to educate students, and if we can explore new ways of doing that education, that’s part of what we should be doing,” he says. “It’s fascinating to rethink the fundamentals of what a classroom is.”

illustration: priya krishnakumar

AMBITIOUS BEGINNINGS

developing a graduate program there when Macias asked why they had never created an undergraduate program.

“Our answer to [Macias] was we only want to build things as a company that we believe are going to be as good or better than the best schools in the country,” Johnson says. “We didn’t know if that was going to be possible.”

They realized the best way to make an undergraduate program was through a collaboration between a group of universities, where highly ranked schools worked together to “create a resource for their students that would be unparalleled in terms of access,” Johnson says.

The idea was not only to create a way to open educational opportunities at elite schools to thousands of students, but also to give students already enrolled at these schools access to more courses in more flexible ways. Johnson gave the examples of students studying abroad or staying home due to a family emergency or health issue. Semester Online would give them the opportunity to keep up with degree progress while away from campus.

Linzer described the goal of online classes as a way to expand students’ scheduling choices, as well as “giving faculty at our institutions opportunities to play with new learning methods—new tech, new approaches to delivering content and engaging students in discussion, to see if that would improve learning.”

Johnson talks often about expanding access and maintaining the standard for students who are used to a high-quality education.

“The notion is for our students to

“

more lively, more open-minded and creative than a free discussion board,” says Tony Wan, an editorial staff member for edSurge, a weekly online newsletter that covers all aspects of online education and education technology. “[Semester Online provides] more intimacy and a shared commitment to what’s being taught.”

Jhaveri agrees that the small class size that accompanies a tuition payment would make for a better overall experience.

“The biggest benefit of this would be the small size,” he says.

“Normally in these MOOCs whenever you come across some problem or something you just go to the forums and you’re asking other students around. And it’s fine, there’s a million other people to help you. But there’s no better way to have your queries solved rather than from the professor himself.”

Don’t discount MOOCs just yet.

Northwestern anticipates launching a plan to offer them soon, separate from the Semester Online program.

While their flaws have been revealed, they are far from dead.

“There are still a lot of things they haven’t figured out yet,” Wan says. “I feel like the media is still going to be all over [covering MOOCs].

The people behind MOOCs, they’re professors themselves, so they fully know the clock is ticking.”

ONE LAST THING.

AIN’T NO THANG BUT A CHICKEN WANG pg.48 | DOUBLE SHOT pg.49 WHERE ARE THEY NOW? pg.50 | CONCERT CALCULUS pg.51

Photograph by DAVID ZHANG

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 47

We stack up Evanston’s top fried delights. B Y K K R EBECCA LAI A N D T I FFAN Y CHA N G

I

f you’re into juicy, tender meat and fingerlicking goodness, here’s the ultimate guide to fried chicken in Evanston. All items judged are bone-in, deep-fried chicken or buffalo wings.

Cheap and classic fried chicken. Chicken Shack is as close to Grandma’s fried chicken as you can get in Evanston, with crispy skin, flavorful seasoning and moist meat. The one downside is that the chicken is extremely greasy. The shiny residue on your lips will make you feel like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers—the word “moist.” But this meal is perfect every once in a while for when you need to treat yo’self.

GO-TO GO-TO PICK PICK

CRISPINESS TENDERNESS SEASONING OVERALL

Buffalo Joe’s

Buffalo Wild Wings Six-piece Traditional

Single Order Mild Buffalo Wings ($8.49)

Wings with Mild Sauce ($5.99) The nation-wide staple for buffalo wings, B-Dubs doesn’t disappoint. While the wings themselves may not be the biggest, what makes this joint fun is the variety of options ranging from sugary sweet sauciness to bleeding-out-your-butthole bastings. Keep in mind, celery and dipping sauce are 60 cents each and fries aren’t included.

The wings from Buffalo Joe’s are tiny. The breading is extremely thick and there’s hardly any meat on the bones. That being said, this joint’s buffalo sauce is a no-fail classic, as their name might imply. So in terms of flavor, Buffalo Joe’s is still quite the treat.

48 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

CRISPINESS

CRISPINESS

TENDERNESS

TENDERNESS

SEASONING

SEASONING

OVERALL

OVERALL

Wings Over Evanston

Hecky’s Barbeque

10 Jumbo Wings Puddle Jumper ($7.49)

1/4 Fried Chicken ($4.80)

For all the saucy fans out there, Wings Over slathers its chicken in a generous coating of buffalo sauce. Wings and drumsticks from this establishment are of decent size with a good fry-job to add to their crispiness. The meat is moist and actually tastes like chicken, unlike some other highly processed options. Sidenote: Their chicken does not come with fries, so the price might go up a bit if you’re looking for the traditional combo.

The fried chicken from Hecky’s Barbeque has a dry, thin skin of seasonings. It’s an alternative to the traditional dish, where the crunchy skin is as important as the chicken itself. Hecky’s chicken is somehow greasy without being moist and its blend of seasonings overpowers the wing. With that said, their offering is pretty cheap, so if you’re in a bind for cash, it’ll do. But overall you should stick to their great barbecue items.

CRISPINESS

CRISPINESS

TENDERNESS

TENDERNESS

SEASONING

SEASONING

OVERALL

OVERALL

photo: david zhang

Ain’t No Thang But A Chicken Wang

Chicken Shack Four-piece Wing Dinner ($6.32)

Double Shot Advice for common ailments by Captain Morgan, M.D. B Y J O N OLI VER

E

very year, unlucky undergrads land in the hospital after a crazy night out. But their emergencies aren’t necessarily from alcohol poisoning—Northwestern’s worldclass campus offers ample opportunity for improvised late-night parkour. While avoiding serious injury may be tricky, alcohol is a practical fix for some common ailments.

BURNS Chilled or frozen liquor can be your best bet for burns. Because of its lower freezing point, vodka works better than ice at numbing pain and fighting inflammation. So the next time you forget to blow out that Flaming Dr. Pepper shot before drinking it, go ahead and dunk your face in the nearest bucket of freezing Popov. Don’t forget to breathe every now and then!

HEADACHES TOOTHACHES This old wives’ tale is actually true: Alcohol works wonders for toothaches. If you want to do it by the book, soak a cotton ball with the highest concentration alcohol you have and apply it to the sore tooth. Of course, if you really wanted to play it safe, you’d go to a goddamn dentist.

Swish it around—you might as well just get drunk already.

This one might seem counterintuitive, but as with burns, alcohol’s low freezing point makes it a great ice pack. Next Sunday morning, let that half-empty bottle of Smirnoff cure your hangover instead of just causing it. Glass bottles are better conductors than plastic ones, so you’re really not doing yourself any favors the next time you get that “Vodka” brand vodka to save a couple bucks.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER illustrations: steph shapiro

Can’t dance? Drink up! Let the most powerful placebo on earth course through your veins and light that dance floor on fire. The ghost of ‘70s John Travolta will smile upon you favorably, even if whomever you’re hitting on doesn’t—that’s their loss.

You look great. Dancing Queens: Could you do us a favor and just go along with it? Thanks.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 49

Where Are They Now?

We’ve kept tabs on NU’s famous alums. BY MALLORY BUSCH Despite the fact that Chicago is only the third-largest media market in the United States, a solid group of alumni represent Northwestern in American television and cinema. Legends like Charlton Heston and Patricia Neal graced the silver screen for decades, while David Schwimmer of Friends and Seinfeld’s Julia-Louis Dreyfus were staples of 90s sitcoms. In the pop culture world of 2013, NU alumni are as prominent as ever—directing cult classics, shaping satire and providing comic relief. From Zach Braff to Jason Moore, here’s a look at what Northwestern grads and dropouts are doing today. o

Willard resident and Phi Gamma Delta brother, Seth Meyers graduated from NU’s School of Speech in 1996. As head writer on Saturday Night Live, Meyers is known as the “Weekend Update” anchor, delivering the week’s top news and strangest stories with charming wit. In a 2009 interview with North by Northwestern, Meyers claimed that being a member of MeeOw “is absolutely the reason I am in comedy today.”

SETH MEYERS

50 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

most likely to become a fake republican

Before she was breaking hearts in (500) Days of Summer or collaborating with M. Ward in She & Him, Zooey Deschanel attended Northwestern. But she dropped out of school after seven months in Evanston to pursue acting, telling Allure last year that her “specialness is not appreciated in this place.”

JASON MOORE

ZOOEY DESCHANEL

ZACH BRAFF

One of the most recognizable faces in television, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report graduated from Northwestern with the School of Speech class of 1986. Colbert became interested in improv through the group No Fun Mud Piranhas, which was revitalized this year.

In his 2011 commencement address, Colbert remarked that NU “represents humanity at its best ... and on Dillo Day it represents humanity at its worst.”

STEPHEN COLBERT

Moore is a ‘93 graduate of Northwestern’s School of Speech who majored in Radio, Television, Film. He went on to direct the musical Avenue Q on Broadway, which earned him a best director Tony nomination in 2004. Moore also directed the 2012 college comedy Pitch Perfect, his big-screen debut.

Zach Braff graduated from NU’s School of Speech in 1997. A brother in Phi Kappa Psi, Braff was the brain behind the critically-acclaimed indie flick Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in. This March he returns to the big screen in Oz the Great and Powerful as the voice of a flying monkey.

most likely to direct teen flicks

Most likely to become a doctor

illustrations: alexis n. sanchez

most likely to drop out

MOST LIKELY TO end up on snl

Concert Calculus

Is that show worth the trouble?

BY SANDRA SONG

When the readings get heavy and Chicago becomes colder than Lana Del Rey’s smile, it’s hard to decide whether you should roast in a room filled with sweaty, teenage pheromones or stay home in your fugliest sweats. Luckily, North by Northwestern brings you a handy guide to help determine whether or not you really need to see the Biebz in Rosemont or if you’d be just as cozy watching Breaking Bad with Ben & Jerry’s from the C-store.

Start here:



*Hiccup*

How much of your monthly budget has been blown on booze?

I got enough pregame funds.

Important: How little shame do you have?

Turntable? I can barely work my iPod click wheel.

illustration: priya krishnakumar

You hooked up to this band’s first big single, but do you really want to relive that squishy sweatiness?

Skip it.

What’s the point if the hookup pickings are slim?

I don’t do sweat.

Yes...

I got everything from Burzam to Mark Bolam.

This band has 100+ plays in your iTunes. Buy tickets before the tweens beat you to it.

Uh...you still listen to Turquoise Jeep?

Two hours on the Blue Line.

Crowds?

Seriously?

Vinyl collecting: Y/N?

Near Dan Ryan somehwere?

Do not accept any drugs at that house rave.

I plan on keeping most of my dignity intact.

Maybe I should bring my flask...

Time for a silent disco in 4N.

Where’s the venue?

Humboldt Park

I’mma twerk on dat table 2nite.

Unfortunately.

Nah.

Forty-five minutes on the Purple Line Express.

You should probably just stick to sneaking into Purple Haze shows

Is it finals week?

Do you have a stupid haircut and/or harem pants?

All my tumblr friends do too...

This band got BNM’d by Pitchfork.

Go grudgingly for the organic microbrew.

I can’t dance with cockatoo hair and a diaper.

This band has your default party jam.

Remember to bring that vodka bottle to the venue.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 51

Summer is a great time to catch up, get ahead or try something new.

• • • •

Choose from more than 300 courses.

Immerse yourself in an intensive language or science sequence.

Get ahead on credits toward your degree.

Experience all Northwestern and Chicago have to offer in the summer.

Registration opens April 8. Classes begin June 24. www.northwestern.edu/summer