NYU’s Daily Student Newspaper
washington square news Vol. 40, No. 6
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012
nyunews.com
High School students join OWS
SexPosed bridges gender gap By Sydney Wu
By Emily Yang
Clothing as a vehicle for individuality and self-expression was the theme at last night’s second-annual fashion show, SexPosed. Following the success of last year’s event, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study hosted the show to emphasize the important role of gender in fashion. The 10 featured collections dismissed the notion that gender is communicated by what a person wears. “You don’t necessarily have to express your gender all the time,” said Rachel Plutzer, director of special events at Gallatin and organizer of the show. “We wear different outfits to express different sides of ourselves.” Plutzer added that the gender divide in both fashion and society is clearly evident.
New York City high school students walked out in solidarity yesterday afternoon against the city’s school closings and budget cuts. They converged with supporters from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square. Last month, Mayor Bloomberg announced he would close the 33 lowest-performing schools in the city and reopen most of them with new teachers and names. During his administration, classrooms have become overcrowded, and schools have experienced many budget cuts. Gregg Lundahl, the United Federation of Teachers chapter leader at Washington Irving High School, said Bloomberg made these policies to cheapen public education and lower tax burden. “We believe that the mayor ought to be shut down, not these
Kristina Bogos/WSN
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Gallatin entertained last night with a gender-neutral fashion show.
Spacey wows crowd and rules in ‘Richard III’ By Kayla Epstein
At long last, director Sam Mendes’ thrilling production of “Richard III” has come to conquer New York with Kevin Spacey leading the charge as the eponymous tyrant. “Richard III” is the last of Shakespeare’s eight plays chronicling the English War of the Roses. After nearly a century of conflict, the house of York has come to power and the dust seems to be settling. But the disfigured Richard, duke of Gloucester, isn’t ready to quit fighting, as evidenced by his vows to “prove a villain” and scheme his way to the throne. At its heart, “Richard” is the study of a psychopath. Thus, Mendes and set designer Tom Piper fashions the
English court into a setting fit for a horror movie. Walls lay bare save for decaying white paint. Myriad doors line the walls of the set, representing the lack of both privacy and escape. In the final two acts, the back wall is pulled away, revealing a tunnel of infinite darkness, evoking the sense that everyone in the play is slowly being swallowed by a black hole. Spacey is the deadly star around which the production orbits. Rather than treat the tyrant’s hump and withered limb as a handicap, Spacey’s jerks and contortions lend Richard an inhuman presence. He is also one of the funniest Richard III’s
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Alumni convert change for a cause By Jessica Littman It always feels like a waste to toss a MetroCard that still has any amount less than $2.25 on it, but there is little else to do with it. Three NYU graduate students have come up with a solution: a machine capable of donating that unusable change to charity. Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May, second year students in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, have designed a machine that reads and recycles old MetroCards. The device scans the card’s magnetic strip and displays the remaining amount which the user can donate. “We thought that if we collected cards as donations, that the amount of small value collected at different locations had the poten-
Rachel Kaplan/WSN
MetroChange hopes to use old MetroCards for charity. tial at scale to really add up,” Hoffman said. MetroCard holders throw away cards with spare change adding up to $52 million per year. This statistic is the driving force behind the MetroChange organization, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
“The crux of the MetroChange platform is that small donations have the potential to add up with a system that makes donating easy,” Hoffman said. “We want to make it so that donating is part of people’s daily routine, just like taking R METROCHANGE continued on PG. 4