The Dartmouth 10/11/17

MIR ROR 10.11.2017

DEPARTURES FROM CONSCIOUSNESS | 3

LEAVE YOUR EXPECTATIONS AT THE DOOR | 5

BUS STOP DISPATCHES | 6 TANYA SHAH AND JEE SEOB JUNG/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF

2 //MIRR OR

Editors’ Note

Homecoming Texts From Last Night STORY

By Dartbeat Staff

(713): Just saw someone walk of shame through the lib.

ELIZA MCDONOUGH/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

This morning, Annette, May and Lauren woke up refreshed from a great Monday of classes, like always, and rejuvenated after a healthy Homecoming weekend, like always.

In a shocking departure from the day-to-day grimness of their lives, they strolled into the offices of second floor Robinson Hall with smiles on their face and joy in their hearts. It is week five, and everyone was excited to challenge themselves by producing this week’s edition of the Mirror while also eagerly preparing for their upcoming midterms.

It’s fitting, then, that the theme of the Mirror this week is “Departures.”

The pieces in this issue talk about students departing from Hanover via the Dartmouth Coach and government professors evaluating the current political administration’s departure from norms. In addition, the issue includes an article on Tabard’s Lingerie as an alternative form of expression in the College’s Greek scene, a Q&A with psychology professor Peter Tse and a column on obsessive compulsive disorder.

Enjoy!

(401): It’s like being friends with you is the human equivalent of checking the box to get spammed while signing up for things and I can’t find the unsubscribe button.

(650): Today I booted before, during and after my 9L. (650): 9L? More like 9 L’s.

(347): Let’s just pour tequila all over ourselves and jump on the fire.

(206): Ughh I just melted my brand new pack of birth control and my student ID in the dryer, it’s going to be a great week.

(612): It was nice knowing you.

I’m gonna die. But thanks for being my friend during my short time in life.

(612): I’m the drunk person I hate when I’m sober. I’m sorry.

(612): I’m safe but everything is terrible.

(207): get a lighter (917): she says she’ll get TOW lvihersp (917): and give u one (917): wow (207): come come come (917): amazing we r at. Hidelt getting. Lighter.

(917): hidelt (917): high delt (917): high delta (917): wow

(585): does anyone have like a walking boot for my broken foot? the doctor just told me to groupme out to my sorority.

(513): When you take a hit from a bong you use all four elements. Think about it for a sec.

follow @thedmirror 10.11.17 VOL. CLXXIV NO. 126

(609): she’s cute! she was booting so demurely.

(201): Is there late night breakfast tn?

(603): yeeeAHHHWWW (603): L@te n1GHT brEAKfdt (603): Opens at (603): 1 (603): 0pm

MIRROR EDITORS LAUREN BUDD ANNETTE DENEKAS MAY MANSOUR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RAY LU PUBLISHER PHILIP RASANSKY EXECUTIVE EDITOR ERIN LEE PHOTO EDITORS ELIZA MCDONOUGH HOLLYE SWINEHART TIFFANY ZHAI

(612): I’m a student-athlete except my athlete part is drinking.

MIRROR //3

Departures from Consciousness: Q&A with Peter Tse STORY

By Maria Harrast

We all lapse out of consciousness every night when we sleep, but what happens when we depart from consciousness during our waking hours?

This week, the Mirror interviewed professor of psychological and brain sciences Peter Tse to learn more about the basis of consciousness and how people depart from it every day.

Could you explain the science behind how our minds form consciousness?

PT: Nobody knows the general basis of consciousness exactly, but we do know some things about it. We know, for example, that for visual consciousness, if I knock out the motion processing area, then people can’t see motion. If I knock out another area, they can’t see color, and if I knock out another area, they can’t see shape. We know it at that level, but we don’t have any general solution for the neural basis of consciousness.

The majority of processing in your brain is not conscious, and a lot goes into the construction of your consciousness — for example, when photons get to your retina. Your conscious experience of the world that’s based upon what hits your retina is not at the same time as it hitting your retina; it happens later, approximately a quarter second later. There’s a delay between retinal activation, or events in the world, and our conscious experience of them, and the reason for that is because our conscious experience has to reflect what’s going on in the world. The problem is what hits the retina is a pattern of pixel-level activations that don’t contain any information about 3-D shape or causation, so in the quarter of a second between retinal activation and your conscious experience of the world, there has to be all this processing that constructs a story about what’s happening in the world, based upon what happened at the retina.

Could you explain some of the science behind departures from consciousness, such as hallucinations, flashbacks, subconscious thoughts or daydreams?

PT: Let’s talk about the case of hallucinations.Thecaseof hallucinations is, in a way, not exactly a departure from your normal consciousness as it is a hyper exaggeration of what goes on in normal consciousness. You might argue that even normal perception is analogous to something like a hallucination, in that it’s not of what’s happening at the retina; it’s a kind of story about what’s likely happening in the world, given what happens at the retina. You might say hallucinations are a departure from normal consciousness in the sense that you start constructing things that are not really there, whereas normal consciousness involves constructing events and experiences about what is

presumably really there. It’s possible to hallucinate because the same constructive processes that create your normal consciousness can create wrong information.

How does daydreaming work, and how does it differ from hallucinations?

PT: A hallucination involves perceiving something that’s not really there.

Daydreaming is a very different kind of departure, in that you’re departing attending to the outside world, and now you’re attending to an inner world, so daydreaming is more like internal virtual reality. For example, you might imagine who to invite for dinner tonight and imagine a table with food on it and putting people at the table and deciding which food goes to who. Daydreaming is not so much about what’s going on in the outside world; it’s about what could happen in the future or what did happen in the distant past. Both daydreaming and hallucinations are a departure from your normal consciousness, but they’re very different departures — in one, you start constructing events that are not really happening, and in the other, you’re constructing events that could happen.

Are there certain stimuli that might instigate someone to start daydreaming or hallucinating, and what might they be?

PT: There’s some very nice work by two scientists — Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood — in which they gave people buzzers. The task was, anytime the buzzer went off, participants had to write down exactly what they were thinking, daydreaming or seeing. Based on that data, people spend half of their waking lives daydreaming.

Even when they’re supposed to be fully engaged, like a pilot landing on a runway, even then, people will be daydreaming as if they’re on autopilot.

I think daydreaming is not triggered by a stimulus — it’s more triggered by disengaging from what you’re doing. Boredom might actually be a reason we start daydreaming, so when a task is easy for you, then your attention is freed up; it doesn’t have to be allocated to the outside world. If something happens in the real world, like a deer jumps in the road, suddenly your attention has to be jerked back to reality.

A stimulus can bring you out of a daydream, but I don’t think there’s necessarily any stimulus that makes you daydream.

I would really put all these departures from consciousness in different categories. There are the ones involving shifting your attention from the outside world to the inner world, and that would include your imagination, dreaming and daydreaming, and there’s the one involved with hallucinations — where you’re seeing things that are really not there — and those can be druginduced, induced by fever or other stimuli. In a way, we are all subject to visual illusions. I think visual illusions are really interesting because, in a way, visual illusions are mistakes, and you’re seeing something you know cannot be real, and those mistakes tell us about the neural processing that goes into the construction of our visual reality.

What makes some people more susceptible to daydreams while others can maintain concentration more easily?

PT: I don’t know if there’s a single factor. I do know that some people are more susceptible to hypnosis than others, and those people who are the most susceptible to hypnosis are often those who are best able to imagine themselves in imaginary worlds where

they have a really rich fantasy life, so there might be a correlation between the kinds of departures you’re capable of and your makeup. Certainly, little children spend a lot of time in fantasy, and we call that pretend play, and fewer and fewer adults engage in it as we get older. We have to ask: why do children depart from everyday ordinary reality, in order to attend to this virtual reality of their own creation?

It might be adaptive because all mammals seem to play, but our kind of play is different because we have pretend play where we can pretend to be things that we’re not. For a baby tiger, it can pretend to pounce and pretend to be aggressive and pretend to be submissive, but it can’t pretend to be a dog. In humans, a little kid will stick his arms out and pretend to be an airplane. This kind of pretend play might be unique to our species, and it might be because we have the capacity to imagine things that are not the case and would never be the case, so we can be counterfactual whereas an animal cannot.

There’s a price we pay for that, which is probably various forms of madness where we imagine things that are in fact not the case. A schizophrenic may imagine, for example, that aliens are putting voices into his head, or he’s being controlled by thought-wave projecting satellites, which is seemingly kind of crazy, but it might be the price we pay

for having our kinds of imagination.

Is there anything else to add?

PT: The ultimate departure from consciousness is death. I think the majority of scientists operate under the assumption that consciousness is realizing brain events, and when the brain dies, consciousness ceases. That’s a fundamental assumption of physicalism or materialism in science. Now, a lot of people with a religious perspective would challenge that and would argue that when the brain dies, the departure is not the sensation of consciousness but the departure of the soul from the body.

We talked about hallucinations, and I would imagine that there are some real puzzles in the kinds of hallucinations or experiences that people report having as they reach death, like out-of-body experiences or seeing light-filled tunnels.

From my perspective as a physicalist, that could well be because visual cortical areas are no longer getting the oxygen they need, but an alternative view would be that is because you are in fact going down a tunnel as you leave your body. I don’t believe in that, but I can understand why some people would believe in it — the ultimate departure from our normal consciousness is the consciousness we have as we are dying.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

4// MIRROR

‘We All Have Problems’: OCD Awareness on Campus COLUMN

By Christopher Cartwright

When you think of obsessive-compulsive disorder, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? A year ago, I associated it with compulsive handwashing and cleanliness, just as many people do. But obsessivecompulsive disorder is a psychological disorder that is largely misunderstood by the public. The easiest way to describe it involves breaking down its name: the obsessions are fears that one’s brain latches onto, while the compulsions are mental or physical tasks that one repeats over and over to prevent those fears from coming true.

The compulsions have the opposite effect than intended, however, and they make the fears stronger. Although it may seem easy to simply not perform the compulsions, from the viewpoint of a person with OCD, it just has to be done. It is important to remember that usually the obsessions don’t make sense to outsiders — the brain distorts the obsessions and intensifies the fear for OCD sufferers. For example, the most commonly portrayed obsession in the media is the fear of contamination from germs, while the most commonly portrayed compulsion for this is excessive handwashing. While there are definitely people who suffer from this form of OCD, it is by no means the only form that OCD can take, and I learned that the hard way.

Last fall my OCD symptoms were at an all-time high thanks to the stress of high school and college applications, but at the time I did not know it was due to OCD. I knew I had exhibited some symptoms throughout my life but had brushed it off by saying that “everyone can be somewhat OCD.” My compulsions involved frantically researching articles online to prove to myself that my irrational fears would not come true, which in turn made my fears worse. That is, until I stumbled upon a Wikipedia article. It was entitled “Pure obsessional OCD,” and as I read it a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. This weight had been building

for the past 10 years, and one that spanned many fears and sleepless nights.

The first obsession I can remember began many years ago. I watched a film with my family about a woman who contracted tuberculosis, and the fear of that disease stuck with me. After that, every time a family member coughed, I took it as a sign that they had tuberculosis. I had to constantly ask my mom each night if everyone in our family was healthy, because if I didn’t I was afraid the person would die. Although I did not understand it at the time, I now know that I was using compulsions to try to neutralize my fear, which made that fear grow stronger.

My obsessions then shifted to chemicals and poisons, and I was terrified that the toys I owned contained lead paint and would poison me. As a compulsion, I avoided these toys as much as I could and would not go near the oleander plant in our yard, for fear that I would somehow ingest the toxic leaves. This is why OCD is so insidious: the disorder remains expertly hidden from friends and family. Compulsions can involve mentally repeating thoughts or phrases, or ruminating on past actions to check to see if one has committed some error, rather than more obvious physical tasks like checking and re-checking to make sure the doors are locked. On the outside, everything seemed normal, as I had many close friends and did well in school. But at night, I couldn’t sleep as intrusive thoughts invaded my mind, and I would perform compulsions like closing my bathroom door several times.

Contrary to popular belief, no one can be “a little OCD.” Despite what online quizzes say, you do not have OCD if you get frustrated when your day planner entries are not color-coordinated. I believed these misconceptions a little over a year ago and they did not seem harmful at the time. These misperceptions are harmful, though, because they interfere with people

understanding what OCD actually is, which delays them from seeking diagnosis and getting the help they need. Also, obsessions extend far beyond fears of contamination and germs. There are fears of hurting others or oneself, fears of one not being religious or moral enough, fears that one is gay or straight and fears that one doesn’t love their partner enough, to name a few. It’s also important to spread awareness about these forms of OCD so that people who have these intrusive thoughts can understand what is causing them and seek therapy to help overcome them.

But how does this relate to Dartmouth? First, about 2 percent of the U.S. population has OCD, whether they know it or not. That means that around 100 undergraduate students at Dartmouth probably have this disorder. These people look, act and seem like everyone else around them. They aren’t any more “weird” or “quirky” or “creepy” than the rest of us. I was nervous when I first arrived at Dartmouth because I worried that my OCD symptoms would flair up under the stress of starting college. I proactively began taking steps to manage my OCD and my life has since dramatically improved. Based on my experience so far, the College has done a great TIFFANY ZHAI/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF job of trying to promote a healthy atmosphere around such sensitive International Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Week runs from Oct. 8 to 14 and seeks to raise awareness topics as mental health. And we, about OCD and related disorders.

COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER CARTWRIGHT

as students, can and should continue to foster mental health-positive dialogue on campus because these problems are nondiscriminatory — they can affect anyone.

Mental health issues should be treated like physical illnesses: just because you cannot see the actual injury does not mean that it causes any less pain. If we are open in discussions of mental health and treat those who have mental health issues the same as anyone suffering physical injury, we would encourage more people to step forward, share their story and get the help they need.

Speaking up about the actual facts around OCD and other mental health issues can help end the stigma that surrounds them. If society refuses to talk about these disorders and to help spread accurate information about them, people will hide their problems and suffer alone, or even worse, not know that they have a disorder and suffer for years in confusion and isolation. I debated remaining silent and not writing this column. I’m only a few weeks into my first term at Dartmouth, after all, and I wondered what type of impression this would make on people I’ve never even met. But I decided that I would just be perpetuating the stigma if I remained silent out of fear, and I decided to go ahead and write. So if you ever see me and want to talk about OCD (or anything else for that matter, since OCD is only a small part of my life), feel free to stop me and say hello!

In the words of one of my favorite songs (“Carried Away” by Passion Pit): “We all have problems / we’re all having problems / and we’ve all got something to say.”

MIRROR //5

Leave Your Expectations at the Door: ‘Lingerie’ at Tabard STORY

By Kaijing Janice Chen

Whether it is a giggling sprint across a bridge, an interrupted final or a quick getaway in the stacks, the scandal of nudity has always played a role in shaping common Dartmouth experiences.

But acting out these traditions is always shortlived — most of the time you’re moving fast to avoid something: the wrath of Hanover Police, accidental eye contact with a professor or the (un)-conscious embarrassment of being naked in public. Adrenaline-filled and hasty, some Dartmouth traditions simultaneously recognize that being naked violates the social code of clothedness, while illuminating just how much the bare body is to be protected from the public eye.

At Lingerie, the termly burlesque-variety show held at Tabard gender-inclusive fraternity, nudity or other iterations of the body take front and center stage. The body is no longer a passing blur, but the very locus of performance itself. According to oral tradition, Lingerie originated as an in-house drag show twenty-odd years ago when the Wednesday meeting before a big weekend metamorphosed into a concentrated celebration of body positivity and queer culture by members of Tabard. Because Tabard meetings are open, Lingerie soon became a public event that welcomed the wider Dartmouth community to join in on the celebration.

Paul Vickers ’19, current president of Tabard, first performed in Lingerie last fall and has hosted the show every term since. Thinking back to his first experience on stage at Lingerie, Vickers talked about how it allowed him to step outside the confines of what is accepted and rejected as attractive or sexy in our proverbial understandings of masculinity.

“You have this model in your head about what sexy is, and I don’t fit that usually,” he said. “But on stage at Lingerie, I did, just for that period of time.”

Vickers strode onto stage last Wednesday in a black faux-leather catsuit and six-inch heels, donning deep magenta lipstick and midnight-blue false nails. Every time he hosts a Lingerie show, he likes to consider how he can challenge the audience to process and embrace new ideas and ways different people enjoy spending their time on campus.

“I like seeing someone who has never interacted with a drag queen, or has never seen one before, and being like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” he said.

“I think the audience questions a lot what they think coming into the performance, and, for the performer, it makes it fun to challenge them.”

Carlos Tifa Jr. ’19, who performed in Lingerie for the second time last Wednesday, feels similarly about the show, and views it as one of the many opportunities at Dartmouth where students can stretch their minds beyond what they already know about the world.

“In a way, it helps people grow,” he said.

“Watching up front a new experience and having to digest it then and there.”

Unlike some of the other acts, Tifa Jr.’s are never choreographed and performing is always a spur-of-the-moment decision. For all the audience knew, however, Tifa Jr. may very well have had rehearsed the piece for weeks, with its powerful questioning surrounding BDSM and queer masculinity. In many ways, Tifa Jr. embodies the spontaneous spirit of Lingerie — the show itself is never collectively rehearsed beforehand and the walk-on format means acts often come as a surprise to even Tabard members themselves.

“It’s kind of an organizational trainwreck from start to finish, and that’s the beauty of it,” said Jett Oristaglio ’17, a Tabard member and regular Lingerie performer.

As much as Vickers, Tifa Jr. and Oristaglio revel in the potential of Lingerie to challenge the audience, changing minds surrounding gender, sexuality and body positivity within the specific context of this show is not something they are looking to do.

“I don’t think we are focused on changing minds, but I think providing the space, and opening it up, and making it a safe space can at least open people’s eyes to the existence of other experiences besides their own,” Oristaglio said.

Vickers echoed this, adding that no experience level is expected as prerequisite to performing in or attending the show.

“We’re open to everyone having different comfort levels, different experiences,” Vickers said. “We’re all different. You go into the house knowing you’ll interact with people who are at different comfort levels than you, and you’re okay with that,” Although opinion-swaying is not built into the intent of the show, it’s rare that an audience member does not walk away from Tabard after Lingerie thinking through the thoughts and feelings that arose while experiencing the performances. Like any good art, Lingerie forces the audience into an active questioning of not only what is on stage, but what the performances reveal about themselves and their fellow audience members. In many ways, the show doesn’t stop at the stage but moves beyond and into the audience, where the hoots and cheers that spur on the performances become something to think about in and of themselves.

“The show doesn’t happen without a supportive crowd,” Oristaglio said. “Even if the people don’t necessarily understand the performance, the vast majority of them are still there with an openness and an appreciation of, ‘Hey, this isn’t my space, this is something that I’m a guest at,’ and they respect that.”

With that in mind, Oristaglio is also critical of how the public nature of Lingerie gives way to people who appropriate the space for their own needs.

“The experience of the audience is always dependent on where you are in the audience, and who you’re associating with in the audience, and also which performances are going on at the time,” he said. “Part of the challenge is also that opening it up to campus and making it an open show in one way is empowering to people who don’t necessarily have space for something like a queer-friendly cabaret, and in another sense opens the stage for a group of white frat-dudes to get on stage and awkwardly grind on each other because they think it’s transgressive as a persona that they can take on and be funky with.”

Tifa Jr. hopes that in participating in the show, some audience members might find the inspiration to continue the termly Tabard tradition.

“The role of the audience is to take part in the celebration of the body, because when I go on stage and when I perform, I want people to feel like they can do that too, here in this space, at that time,” he said.

Just as the Lingerie experience can never be passive for the audience, for many performers, it is an act of self-exploration and coming to

terms with aspects of themselves that the space “There is a problem with Lingerie in that of Lingerie is particularly apt for. it curates a very thin slice of queer culture, or Oristaglio, who has performed at every single specifically queer sexuality,” he said. “It’s not Lingerie that he has been on campus for, started necessarily the case that everybody who goes up off with more fun and purely performative acts has to do a highly sexualized, super subversive — his first was a tango to the song “Anaconda” by performance.”

Nicki Minaj with “some amount of leather”— but At the same time, however, he commented soon moved towards a more premeditated and on how Lingerie can only go so far in developing meaningful assessment of his own masculinity. visibility and understanding of queer and “As a performance, it’s provided an outlet marginalized experiences at Dartmouth. or a pivot point for me to understand my “That’s why I don’t think the show should own insecurities about control and sex and stand alone as a representation of queer culture relationships,” he said. “It’s helped me to on campus,” he said. “It’s not something that conceptualize the ways that my masculinity you have to do if you’re comfortable with your can be performative. It helped me question the sexuality. And this is not something that you have assumptions, and the taboos, and the ideas of to be comfortable with.” normalcy I have, and we as a collective society Lingerie, as it is now, represents a small kernel have.” of difference in dominant Greek life, an emblem of His performance on Wednesday was ownership and pride for the members of Tabard comprised of a dance with fellow Tabard member and parts of the queer community.

Valentina Garcia Gonzalez ’19 and looked into “To me, it’s always been a place where I’ve themes of dominance and its implications for seen other queer people just having fun on stage,” masculine sexuality.

Vickers said. “It’s a celebration of everything that “For me, Lingerie has been about exploring makes Tabard different. We’re all different and questions about: Can you still be masculine while unique but we all feel how beautiful and sexual being dominated by someone who’s much smaller we can all be.” than you? Can you still be masculine if you are Tifa Jr. echoed that Lingerie exemplifies what being tied up, or if someone else has power over makes Tabard unique. you? What does it mean to have masculinity in “We operate as a sort of counter-culture to a way that’s not dominating or controlling or what is your normal Greek experience on this necessarily sexually oppressive? And then there’s campus,” he said. “We provide a sort of ... spice also: How can you have masculine sexuality that to Webster Ave.” is dominating, and does c o n t ro l o f the per son [ bu t ] i s n’t abusive, can be nurturing, is consensual?” he said.

Even as Oristaglio spoke about the importance of Lingerie in his life, he acknowledged that inherent in a show that seeks to break taboos and transgress societal norms is a danger that audience memberseither walk away with the false assumption that the performances at Lingerie are tantamount to the queer ex p e r i e n c e, or that queer individuals leave feeling alienated and misrepresented by what ISHAAN JAJODIA/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF happened on stage.

The Tabard, a gender-inclusive Greek organization, hosts Lingerie once a term.

6// MIRROR

Bus Stop Dispatches: A Look Inside the Dartmouth Coach STORY

By Kylee Sibilia

Seven hours and 55 minutes: that’s how long it takes me to get from my house in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado all the way to my dorm in Hanover, New Hampshire.

My friends from home are always appalled when I tell them that, and they haven’t even heard how long it takes to get here from Los Angeles or Seattle. The idea of taking not only a four hour flight, but also a three hour bus ride — just to get to school — is unfathomable to them.

Theoretically, students have options for how they make their way from their airport in Boston or New York to college in Hanover. There are Greyhounds, Amtrak stops and rental car services to choose from.

But for me, and for most of my peers here, the easiest choice, and the most convenient, is always the Dartmouth Coach.

It’s not every school that has such a large proportion of its students using the exact same method of transportation at the start and end of every term. During peak travel times, the Coach even has to offer extra buses outside of its normal schedule in order to accommodate all the students requesting tickets.

With demand so high, it’s inevitable

that Coach drivers interact with Dartmouth students.

Eric Anthony, a driver who has worked for the bus service for the past two and a half years, noted the friendliness and energy of the many Dartmouth students he has encountered during his time driving the Coach. Never has he felt that any of the students he has spoken to have embodied the common stereotype of the typical “snooty” Ivy League student.

“I can’t say I’ve had any experiences where the students have been disrespectful or degrading or anything in excess,” Anthony said.

“They’re a great group of students.

A lot of them are energetic. They talk to you, they look you in the eye and they respect you.”

Anthony spoke to the many benefits of working for the Dartmouth Coach.

“It’s a fantastic company to work for,” Anthony said. “It’s one of those jobs where coming in, everyone’s responsible for what they are doing, and there’s no micromanaging. Whatever you’re assigned for the day, you manage it. You go in, you prep your bus and there’s no one breathing over

ADRIAN RUSSIAN/THE DARTMOUTH

The Dartmouth Coach runs from Hanover to Boston every couple of hours and to New York City several times a day.

your shoulder.”

Anthony drives for both the Boston and New York coaches, which offer very different

experiences for Dartmouth students. The New York Coach runs nonstop from Hanover to Manhattan, and students provide different perspectives on what it’s like to ride each of these buses.

Because students coming from many areas on the East Coast take the Coach to New York, it can often be difficult for people to get a spot. Laura Walk ’20 said the demand for the New York Coach is often higher than the demand for the Boston Coach.

“It was really hard for me to get a spot on the New York Coach at the end of spring term, and I ended up having to take the Boston Coach to South Station and then take another bus from there,” Walk said.

Mackenzie Stumpf ’21 pointed out the one difference she noticed between the two Coach lines.

“The New York Coach definitely has better food than the Boston Coach,” Stumpf said.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Coach is the way it forces people from all different walks of life to share a relatively small space for the span of three hours. Anthony said the plethora of different individuals he meets driving the Coach always makes the journey interesting.

“I like to kind of ask where people are traveling to,” Anthony said. “Dartmouth is a really diverse campus, so you get a lot of interesting places where they come from and back stories on them.”

While one would think that most of the Dartmouth students

Anthony interacts with would be exhausted from their many long hours of travel, but he claims that the young people he has spoken to have always been filled with enthusiasm. “ T h ey t e l l f u n ny j o k e s, ” Anthony said. “A lot of them have a ton of good energy.”

Anthony also explained the more intangible qualities of Dartmouth students en route to the place they call home.

“The students who are going there all have a purpose,” Anthony said. “They’re kind of the ideal passengers in my mind. They just want to get to where they’re going.”

Anthony also shared his craziest experience to date driving the Coach.

“I hit a bird last week, a big Canadian goose, and it shattered the windshield,” Anthony said. “I called Dartmouth Coach, they scrambled a bus to come get us real quick and it only really slowed us down by 15 minutes.”

There’s something special about a drive that happens at both the beginning and the end of every term a student spends on campus. It’s a time for rest, a time for relaxation, a time for students to look forward to what they want their term to encompass or a time to look back on what they loved about the term that just passed. Theoretically, having such a limited number of options for transportation to school should be a burden, but in the case of the Dartmouth Coach, it is just one more way that Dartmouth students are bonded to their school.

MIRR OR //7

Researching Political Game Changers STORY

By Jake Maguire

Although Americans disagree about President Donald Trump’s job perfor mance during his first eight-and-a-half months in office, both his supporters and his opponents agree that Trump has upended the status quo in Washington, D.C. However, many Americans also feel that recent events, from an increase in divisive rhetoric to a rise in attacks on transgender individuals and undocumented immigrants, have represented a departure from critical democratic norms.

In an effort to examine the recent deviations from democratic norms, government professors John Carey and Brendan Nyhan have been conducting a study alongside political science professors Gretchen Helmke and Susan Stokes from the University of Rochester and Yale University, respectively.

Carey and Nyhan initiated the study, which they have titled “Bright Line Watch,” after concern over various events over the course of the 2016 election cycle.

“We really started taking an interest in the health of American democracy of the course of the presidential campaign,” Carey said. “I wanted to determine and fully unpack whether there are particular areas of democracy under threat, because [these events] mean a lot of different things to different people.”

Nyhan particularly found Trump’s behavior to be alarming.

“We’ve seen violations of a series of norms that I didn’t expect to be questioned,” Nyhan said. “The list goes on and on: I didn’t expect a political candidate to be offering de facto endorsements of violence against their opponents, I didn’t expect a presidential candidate or sitting president to be attacking the free media and I didn’t expect a presidential candidate or president to refuse to release their tax returns in the post-Watergate era or attack a federal judge based on their ethnicity.”

Nyhan explained that this pattern of behavior raises a series of questions about how democracy works outside of the constitutional and legal system.

“There are certain norms that act as bulwarks for democracy, and we can’t defend them legally, but they are nonetheless important in a functioning democracy in order to hold officials accountable,” he said.

According to Nyhan, the purpose of the “Bright Line Watch” study, which has been featured in several media outlets, is to monitor how well experts think U.S. democracy

is doing in a series of areas. the Republican Party recaptured the “The idea of the study is to majority of the seats in the United identify areas of concern in as close States House of Representatives, to real time as possible,” Nyhan gained six seats in the United said.

States Senate and flipped control In order to achieve their of various governorships and state intended goals, Carey, Nyhan legislatures. and their colleagues have been By analyzing data, Nyhan found comparing the opinions of experts a significant statistical correlation to those from members of the between the Democratic-led general public and publishing Congress’s passage of the Patient quarterly reports. Carey and Nyhan Protection and Affordable Care Act have been somewhat surprised by in March of 2010 and the results of the results that these processes have the midterm election later that year. yielded.

Congressional “We expected Democrats ex p e r t s t o b e “Members of the who voted more alar med public are generally against the about the state ACA tended to alarmed about U.S. of American perform about democracy than democracy, whereas 5 percentage members of the experts are more points better general public during the b e c a u s e t h e re confident about the 2010 midterm is a widespread strength of democratic elections than perception Democratic that [political institutions.” incumbents scientists and who voted for a c a d e m i c -JOHN CAREY, PROFESSOR the Affordable professors] are Care Act. more liberal than OF GOVERNMENT “Democratic members of the members of American public Congress who at large,” Carey voted for the said. “However, Affordable we discovered the exact opposite. Care Act suffered considerably Members of the public are generally during the 2010 elections in alarmed about U.S. democracy, marginal districts,” Nyhan said. whereas experts are more confident “There was an unusual level of about the strength of democratic accountability in that election. Our institutions.” data showed that the passage of the Although the testimony of Affordable Care Act helped to cost experts has been reassuring for both Democrats the House.” professors, Nyhan emphasized that Nyhan is skeptical that the current violations of democratic Republicans will face a backlash norms are still problematic. based on their efforts to repeal the “We can’t formally prohibit every ACA, however. type of bad behavior by a candidate, “Americans react generally but we rely on informal norms in to the thrust of policy, but not order to defend conventions in always to specific legislation during our democratic society,” Nyhan midterm elections,” he said. “Also, said. “We’ve seen that our sanction even though the Republican health process is weak, and, due to care plans were very unpopular, extreme partisanship and political they ultimately failed to pass. polarization, individuals haven’t It’s unlikely that Americans will been holding members of their own remember that particular episode political parties accountable often over a year from now.” enough. That needs to happen However, Nyhan predicts that more ­— the strength of American control of the United States House democracy depends on it.” of Representatives could be in play However, the 2018 midterm as a result of Trump’s approval elections could provide the public rating. with an opportunity to hold both “Republicans are vulnerable political parties accountable, because the president’s party Nyhan said. Although Nyhan has typically suffers during midterm not researched or performed polling elections no matter what, and about the 2018 midterm elections, because President Trump is he analyzed the outcome of the unusually unpopular for a first2010 midterm elections extensively. term incumbent,” Nyhan said. “We In that election cycle, which don’t know precisely why President occurred two years into former Trump is so unpopular at this point President Barack Obama’s first in his term, but it is unusual for a term amidst a sluggish economic president to have approval ratings recovery from the Great Recession, in the low 40s when the economy

is doing well.”

Furthermore, Nyhan added that “demoralization among the Republican base” as a result of the G.O.P.-controlled Congress’s “failure to get anything of interest done, when coupled with a surge in Democratic enthusiasm and tur nout” could lead to significant turnover during the 2018 congressional elections.

In addition to conducting research about American elections and violations of democratic norms, Nyhan has also studied public opinion in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which battered Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands in mid-September.

On Sept. 26, Nyhan and his Dartmouth colleague Kyle Dropp, a co-founder of Morning Consult polling and a lecturer in the government department, wrote an article in The New York Times about Americans’ opinions about providing aid to Puerto Rico.

While writing their article, “Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens,” Dropp and Nyhan found that Americans were more likely to support providing foreign aid to

Puerto Rico if they were aware that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.

“When people were randomly informed that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, it increased support for federal aid in the aftermath of [Hurricane Maria] by about 4 percentage points among all Americans, with significant gains among Trump supporters and Republicans,” Nyhan said.

Unlike many other colleges and universities, Dartmouth prioritizes b o th teach i n g an d res earch among its professors. The College provides significant funding for professors to conduct research.

“Teaching and research are both essential parts of being a p ro f e s s o r at D ar t m o u t h , ” said gover nment department chair and professor Dean Lacy.

“Teaching and research are mutually reinforcing, we hope.”

Nyhan is grateful for Dartmouth’s prioritization of public engagement.

“Dartmouth has been very supportive of me doing public eng agement in an academic context,” Nyhan said. “That isn’t always true [in all universities], so I’m appreciative of that.”

8// MIRROR

Escape PHOTO

By Saba Nejad