Volume 45, Issue 4—Waste

The New Journal Volume 45, No. 4

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

February 2013

The Perks of Procrastination | Fighting Tuburculosis: The State Takes Control | Fasting in the Mountains

The New Journal puts out a theme issue every spring. This year we’ve chosen “waste.” It’s a broad idea that produced many pieces exploring just the opposite of waste: subjects who care for and conserve the people and places around them. If the principle tenet of reporting is communicating stories and facts, then a tenet of engaged reporting should be to use these stories to point in positive directions. We hope you enjoy the issue.

—Aliyya Swaby & Juliana Hanle

Editors-in-Chief Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Managing Editors Benjamin Mueller, Cindy Ok Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Senior Editors Nicholas Geiser, Helen Knight, Nikita Lalwani, Sanjena Sathian Associate Editors Eric Boodman, Sophia Nguyen Copy Editors Cassie DaCosta, Justine Yan Staff Writer Caroline Durlacher Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh.

Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

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The New Journal

Cover Image: Ilana Haris-Babou; Cover Design: Susannah Shattuck

A Note from the Editors

Publisher Whitney Schumacher

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

Vol. 45, No. 4 February 2013 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

FEATURES 14 Wasting Away Funding cuts are making tuberculosis cases worse and more frequent.

by Eric Boodman

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One-on-One A New Haven detective brings the gangs to him, offering an open hand.

by Christopher Peak

STANDARDS 6 Points of Departure 10 Critical Angle In Search of Time Not Lost

by Cindy Ok

21 Personal Essay High Water

by Juliana Hanle

32 Profile Stearner Stuff

by Bijan Stephen

38 Interview Ted Hoagland

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

February 2013

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points of departure.

Pass the Grub

When they’re ready, the mealworms and crickets go in the freezer. This allows them something like a natural death, before Redford dries the bugs in a standard kitchen dehydrator and then, sometimes, pulverizes them in a coffee grounder.

Redford ate her first bug–a spider–in kindergarten.

Another child who took pleasure in slaughtering spiders refused to stop killing them unless Redford ate one, so she did. Now she is working to develop insect-based animal feed, and eventually human food, and in the process has become part of an expanding network of individuals around the world who are working to incorporate bugs into the Western diet.

According to a website titled “Entomophagy”— the scientific name for human consumption of bugs— twenty-four restaurants in the United States list insects on their menus. Though none are listed in Connecticut, five such eateries are listed in New York, including two frozen yogurt shops.

The idea of edible insects for the Western world has also caught the attention of the United Nations.

A March 2012 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report developed an action plan to move the issue higher on the international agenda. The report estimates that eighty percent of humans around

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Clare Randt

Squeezed between Ivy Noodle and Tomatillo on Elm Street, Kathryn Redford’s apartment features less conventional cuisine than either restaurant. Redford, 27, is the founder of Ofbug, a six-month-old start-up dedicated to the production and promotion of insects as animal feed. The bugs live in a few plastic IKEA boxes in the corner of her living room and die a few weeks later in her freezer, after which Redford dries and processes them into food.

“I really wanted to make a product that didn’t look like an insect and introduce it to the Western world,” Redford said. “We wouldn’t eat an insect if it looked like an insect. Nor would we eat a cow if it looked like a cow.” the world already include insects in their diets.

Afton Halloran, who works with the FAO Edible Insect Program, explained that producing breeding insects for animal feed is less energy-intensive than producing food crops. Bugs can be bred and massproduced in short periods of time, and they emit fewer greenhouse gases.

Redford and her husband, Paul Froese SOM ‘13, who studies at the Yale School of Management, share the apartment with the bugs, a pet hedgehog named Fangu, and various remnants of other animals: snakeskin and a coyote bone sit in glass vials on a side table next to a dried deer leg. When I visited the apartment in late January, only one of the bugs was alive. It moved lethargically across a bit of carrot that Redford had added to a glass of oatmeal. The bug was the sole survivor of a cannibalistic melee in which recently metamorphosed pupae had gone after one another.

Currently, Redford raises mealworms and crickets (an initial attempt to breed silkworms ended when a whiff of Paul’s cologne led to their untimely death).

The mealworm beetles grow in three plastic boxes, each corresponding to one of three life stages: larvae, pupae, and beetle. The larvae, which we would recognize as mealworms, are what Redford uses for feed, letting some grow to beetles for breeding. An entire generation grows and dies over the course of three weeks. Next to the larvae sit two plastic boxes for the crickets, one specifically for breeding.

When they’re ready, the mealworms and crickets go in the freezer. This allows them something like a natural death before Redford dries the bugs in a standard kitchen dehydrator and then, sometimes, pulverizes them in a coffee grounder. Freezing minimizes pain, she said.

Even so, she paused before she put in her first batch.

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“Oh my gosh, I’m going to kill thousands of lives right now,” she remembers thinking. “I don’t take pleasure in killing them or anything like that. I definitely have a conscience about it. My focus is on the greater goal here.”

Gregory Sewitz, a senior at Brown, has a similar goal but different approach. He is also concerned about food security and nutrition, and is developing an insectbased snack for human customers.

“You have to create the market for eating crickets,” Sewitz said. “Protein bars are the best way in.” Sewitz plans to market a protein bar that hides the insect’s taste and texture, one that would look and taste like other major brands such as Cliff Bar and ProBar. While chickens may have no objection to eating bugs, humans, specifically those in Western culture, are a different story.

“A lot of the stigma has to do with the look of insects,” Halloran said. “We’re naturally inclined to either squish the insect or say, yuck, that’s gross.” But we’ve gotten used to eating strange animals before, she added.

Shrimp and lobsters, which resemble insects, used to be low-expense foods for working people. Now both are luxury items.

“We’ve been eating our way around the true insect,” she said.

Even Redford experiences a visceral discomfort to eating certain kinds of bugs.

“I definitely–this is super hypocritical–I definitely don’t like legs and stuff like that on insects,” Redford said. “They’re twine-y, almost.”

She prefers mealworms, she said. “You can just pop them in your mouth when they’re dehydrated.” Scorpions and tarantulas are a no-go, but not because of the armored exoskeletons or hairy legs.

“I love them too much,” Redford said.

—Ike Swetlitz

Gilding the Lyric One minute at Lyric Hall and I was on stage, under the 1913 proscenium arch. Dim yellow chandelier lights gave the brawny columns a static glow.

I hadn’t played a piano with ivory keys since the old tattered one at my neighborhood music school. Rough on the skin, this piano recalled the other’s grandmotherly world-weariness. Plastic keys aren’t for John Cavaliere, the owner of the building and the proprietor of Lyric Hall Antiques and Conservation—they’ll never have the charm, the honesty of ivory. He’s built his business, his home, and his life on preserving that honesty, on reviving the old and celebrating the forgotten.

February 2013

Founded in 1913 as a vaudeville house by Italian factory workers, Lyric Hall now plays three roles: that of Cavaliere’s antiques and conservation business, that of a performance space, and that of his home. Cavaliere, who studied art at Connecticut College, is a master craftsman. He specializes in gilding, but also works with wood, metal and upholstery. He purchased Lyric Hall in 2006, and since 2010 it has hosted various theater productions, musical performances, and poetry readings.

When I walked in at 2 p.m. on a Sunday, Cavaliere, who has a slim goatee and curly hair that creeps onto a wide forehead like ivy, greeted me and brought me straight into the theater at the back of the building.

A teal 1930s cigarette machine offering Kents and Marlboros for 30 cents a pack stood conspicuously in the cold foyer.

The first objects to catch my eye were five golden, shell-like footlights that sat poised in a row upstage.

Traditionally, ornaments of this sort were used to shield stage-illuminating candles from the wind. At Lyric Hall, armed with electric bulbs, they are less practical.

Cavaliere laid new gold leaf on the old shells himself.

When Cavaliere bought the building almost a century after its construction, it was in ruins. “Nobody knew it was a theater for eighty years,” he says. All that remained from its vaudeville days was the proscenium arch. Light projected into the theater space through cracks in the walls and gaping holes in the ceiling. Cavaliere tore away strata upon strata of flooring and carpeting, each layer corresponding variously to the building’s days, post-vaudeville, as a bicycle shop, a flower shop, a joke shop. He and a revolving cast of friends, craftsmen, and hired help tore away the filth, repainted the walls, replaced the ceiling, and redesigned the façade. They began installing structures they found in antique shops or unused theaters and hotels. The building is a part of the antiques collection that it houses; you can almost feel the haphazard, stitched-together quality of the walls.

Cavaliere developed his love for old objects as a kid visiting his grandparents on Eld Street in East Rock.

They had bought their house, fully furnished, in the thirties. Cavaliere liked to play with the antique furniture and other paraphernalia stored in the loft of their back carriage house.

After focusing on portraiture in college, Cavaliere turned to antique restoration. “I learn from things that have been around, things that are well made, that tell a story,” he explained. After he found Lyric Hall—“it found me,” he insists—he moved his business to Westville and made restoring the building his raison d’être.

Cavaliere and his assistants do restoration work in

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Thumbin’ A Ride This January, Alison Greenberg ‘13 was driving through rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania with a friend when she saw two men standing on the side of the road.

One was tall with dreadlocks, the other smaller, unshaven, wearing baggy jeans, and eating peanut butter ravenously out of a jar. Greenberg and her friend kept driving, but knowing they’d be returning that way, Greenberg texted her friend Jesse Bradford ‘11 for advice.

Bradford knew a thing or two about hitchhiking.

The year after he graduated from Yale, he took a solo trip all the way around the continental United States, relying on strangers to get him from one point on the map to another. “Should we pick these guys up?” Greenberg asked Bradford. “Yeah!” he responded. “Don’t kill them, and don’t get killed.”

Greenberg erred on the side of caution in taking this tongue-in-cheek advice. Greenberg wanted her wouldbe passengers to know she would not be messed with.

She asked them their names and ages, and checked those against their IDs. She would drive them into Philadelphia, but had some questions for them first: Would they try to take anything from her? Hurt her or her friend? Trash her car? “No, ma’am,” they answered, again and again.

Just in case, Greenberg told the hitchhikers–Tom and Beef–that her dad was a Philly cop and that he was on speed dial if they tried anything funny. They didn’t.

In fact, Greenberg noted, Tom and Beef were exceptionally polite and grateful. They claimed it had been three weeks since someone had picked them up. In the meantime they’d been train hopping and walking and had the blisters on their feet to prove it. At a restaurant where Greenberg bought the hitchhikers burgers and milkshakes, Beef, who said he had ADHD and had (falsely, he claimed) been accused of rape, touched her knee. Greenberg felt extremely uncomfortable but shrugged it off: “I think he was just being sweet and had no bad intentions, whatsoever.”

Enthusiasts like Bradford are quick to say that the stereotype of the dangerous hitchhiker is false. In Ginger Gail Strand’s book Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate–which Bradford read while researching the history of hitchhiking–Strand claims that many Americans fear hitchhikers because of images spread by the F.B.I. and police. “The end result is that we have largely turned our backs on the obvious efficiencies—for our wallets as well as the planet—of ride-sharing,” wrote Strand in a New York Times editorial last November, advocating hitchhiking. “And we have lost a way to humanize the landscape of the road.”

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Clare Randt

the studio, which is filled with scattered tools, containers with viscous adhesive liquids, and brushes of all sizes. In a corner sits an old parlor stove, a gray boom box, and a fragment of an old car wheel. A piece is missing from an enormous King George frame; he’s in the process of reconstructing it.

He took me upstairs to a balcony that hangs over the back of the theater, which is adorned by a balustrade he’s had, in pieces, for years; he salvaged it from the deteriorating Hyperion Theater on Chapel Street. I didn’t need to see that Cavaliere sleeps there to understand: He is Lyric Hall.

We sat down in the kitchen. He painted me a picture: a night at Lyric Hall. After the show finishes, everyone mingles in the reception room next to the theater, drinking white wine among ancient ships that hang in ornate frames. Cavaliere, in a thrift store tuxedo, is running around greeting and introducing, laughing and joking. “When you get all these interesting people cheek by jowl,” Cavaliere told me, “there’s this wonderful spirit.

This place has this universal appeal that’s so sacred.” At night, in the shadow of the dusted and revived, Lyric Hall sustains a community. It’s a different kind of preservation.

But the hall was empty on a Sunday afternoon.

Cavaliere woke up behind the Hyperion balustrade, theater empty and the floors creaky, to show me around.

In the kitchen, a 1924 Glenwood stove was heating up a teakettle; Cavaliere took milk from the ancient GE fridge. A modern electric heater, probably from Home Depot, sat on the floor by the kitchen table; we laughed at how out of place it looked.

As he began to eat his cereal, Cavaliere reflected on his new role as theater producer. His friends call him the “accidental impresario.” He broke off for a moment, looked at a wall. “Actors like working here,” he said.

They tell him the place has good ghosts.

—Gideon Broshy

Katharine Konietzko

The challenge to humanize hitchhiking pushed Bradford to teach a “Hitchhiking 101” workshop at the People’s Art Collective’s (PAC) New Haven Free Skool last fall. He decided to create a one-hour crash course, which he taught to two different groups of students from Yale and the New Haven community.

In the workshops, Bradford conducted role-playing exercises so the class could practice strategies for attracting and interacting with potential rides. Hitchhikers should stand in visible spots on highway entrance ramps and hold signs stating where they’re headed, Bradford explained. For safety’s sake, they should avoid hitchhiking at night, or in inclement weather. Ultimately, a hitchhiker must trust his or her instincts about drivers.

“You’re never under an obligation, just because someone pulled over, to get in the car with them” said Bradford.

New Haven native Liba Judd, 18, who volunteers at the PAC, started hitchhiking last year on her way back from an Earth First conference in Pennsylvania.

She says she is often asked whether hitchhiking is a more dangerous venture for women than for men, but, like Bradford, she is quick to point out that the same question applies to both driver and hitchhiker: Can you trust strangers? “If somebody’s going to take advantage of a woman, I don’t think it’s likely that hitchhiking is going to exacerbate it,” Judd said.

Of course, a hitchhiker’s success depends as much on drivers’ prejudices as his or her efforts to follow the hitchhiking code. While Bradford, who is white, said he could not speak for hitchhikers of other demographics, he emphasized the general importance of maintaining a clean appearance while on the road. “Every good hitchhiker or vagabond traveler knows that you wear dark clothes because they hide the dirt and make you look cleaner,” he said. “Also I could see how the time I would have to wait for a ride would get longer as my

February 2013

beard got longer.”

Yet what emerges from talking to Bradford and Greenberg was how the experience, whether hitching or driving, shaped their attitude towards strangers. “I think the true beauty of learning about hitchhiking and picking them up is life-affirming,” Greenberg said. “It’s saying to the world, ‘I’m not afraid to invest in a stranger and to trust them, and to really be vulnerable.’”

Bradford was amazed that single women with small children in their car would stop for him without a question. When he told middle-aged drivers that he regularly slept in ditches, they’d give him money for a motel room. (“Then you buy a beer with the money,” Bradford chuckled, “And you still sleep in a ditch.”)

Greenberg asked Beef and Tom if they would tell her stories, and they did. Tom spoke of the wife who had left him, of the car another hitchhiker stole from him on the way to a Phish concert, of an older woman who made unwanted sexual advances, and of the cousin in Maryland he was trying to reach. Beef came from a wealthy Allentown family and attended St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire, but his family kicked him out of the house. He’d spent time in jail for petty theft before hitting the road.

Bradford, who still lives and works in New Haven, plans on writing a book about his hitchhiking experience to “both share the stories and people that I’ve met, and also talk about the culture of hospitality and the culture of trust.” He picks up hitchhikers whenever he can.

As Judd said, “If you’re in a car with somebody for four hours,” or twelve, as she once had the luck to be, “you’re going to talk to them and get to know them, even if it’s not a really deep relationship.” And any hitchhiker will tell you, that’s much better than nothing.

—Benjamin Kline

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Out of Water I go to the shore whenever I can. I like to watch the light fall in tinselly strips on the rippled waves and hear it slosh against bridges or beaches. Over these past few years in New Haven, I have often found company there. In seaside parks and industrial lots where New Haven’s rivers converge, I have watched fishermen as they wait for the bend at the ends of their rods, hoping for a bite on the hook hanging into the sea. But in late winter, the shoreline empties. At all of the usual spots— the bridge, the parks, the underbelly of highways—no one is fishing.

When I walk into Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fair Haven on a Friday afternoon in February, I see seven fishermen sitting, standing, and leaning against counters around the shop with styrofoam cups of coffee. They shout about routes and exits and lakes and tides—was it route 7? Exit 34? Lake Wintergreen? What about that undertow?—and discuss the quality of ice in this pond or that one, debating whether you need a permit to fish in such and such a park.

Pete DeGregorio inherited this store from his father in 2005, who opened the shop with Pete’s uncle in 1956. Holding his sleeping granddaughter in his arms, DeGregorio asks if I want coffee.

DeGregorio explains that he has twice as many people hanging out in his shop during these cold winter months, but fewer customers than in the summer. At the counter, Mark Pelletier is crimping some of Dee’s 8

He chimes in to say that fishermen come to Dee’s when they can’t fish—because it’s too cold or the fish aren’t running— for the consolation of at least talking about fishing. as they talk, none of them buying. Above them, rods, minnow traps, eel pots, and crab baskets hang from the ceiling. Newspaper clippings and Polaroids full of smiling faces and big catches have yellowed and frayed on the walls. A bait menu and price list is tacked near the counter, advertising the night crawlers, wigglers, sand eels, and bunker chums.

Many small bait shops have struggled in recent years, suffering from competition with the increasing number of big box stores—DeGregorio says you can throw a rock from the roof of his shop to a Wal-Mart down the block—but Dee’s has something many of the other shops don’t: a volunteer workforce.

“If I get busy, customers jump behind the counters and grab bait for me,” DeGregorio says. “My customers are really pushy salesmen.”

Pelletier and others pass many days grabbing bait, making leaders, helping customers, painting the steps outside, giving casting lessons, cleaning up the front The New Journal

Katharine Konietzko

handmade leaders, steel wires that connect the hook or lure to the main line so that big sea fish can’t bite through them. He chimes in to say that fishermen come to Dee’s when they can’t fish—because it’s too cold or the fish aren’t running—for the consolation of at least talking about fishing.

“Some guys, only place they’ll come in the winter is here,” he says, stacking a leader in the pile on the counter.

The fishermen huddle around the checkout counter

yard, and more—all without pay. They teach wannabe fishermen how to reel in catch from the New Haven shoreline.

People may go to Wal-Mart for the cheap equipment, but there is often more to fishing than having a rod.

DeGregorio runs behind the counter and grabs a shiner that Wal-Mart had sold to a father-son pair who wanted to catch snappers a few years back. It was two inches too long. The snappers wouldn’t bite.

The extended family of fishermen also includes people with different reasons for arriving at his shop and the shore. One middle-aged man walks in to buy bait for ice-fishing. He grew up coming to Dee’s with his father, but now the roles are reversed: Today, the son is taking his dad out on the ice. DeGregorio recalls one single mother who, a few years ago, would come in every day, buy $1.35 of bait, and catch dinner for her and her kids.

Others dole out cash for sleek rods and fancy bait.

“That’s the magic about fishing,” he says, his granddaughter still wrapped around his torso. “You throw your line in, and the fish doesn’t know how much your rod cost. Anyone could catch a really big fish.”

DeGregorio is determined to keep that magic alive in Fair Haven.

“We’re here to stay,” DeGregorio says.

As long as Dee’s stays, young fishermen who find their way to the shop will also find their way to the water, where they will wait for that tug at the end of their lines.

I am no exception. Before I leave, a few fishermen give me their numbers. They say to call if I ever want to get on the water. Come March, they will help me find the fish.

—Diana Saverin

February 2013

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critical angle.

In Search of

Time Not Lost

By Cindy Ok With artwork by Andrew Sotiriou

Illustrations by Andrew Sotiriou

“I

have no time,” thought David* in the middle of reading week during his sophomore spring.

He was planning on acing his three papers due at the end of the semester in hopes of getting straight A’s. As he saw it, this would be an important affirmation during a period when his extracurricular, social, and romantic prospects were each stagnant and disappointing in their own ways. Wanting control over his final grades but lacking the necessary hours, David turned to Adderrall for the first time.

He’d heard the ADHD medicine could bring on a period of focus and “cranking it out” for as long as ten hours, but, in himself, he found it caused the opposite effect. He sat for hours and hours writing the same sentences over and over, perhaps tweaking a few words each time. Nothing could sound right, he explains, and he could no longer tell what was normal or meaningful.

As the Adderrall plan backfired, David realized that the question was not whether he would get straight A’s or fail. It was about whether he would finish the papers at all.

“Those thoughts just become overwhelming. Just as I couldn’t break free of the cycle of repeating the list of various failures in my mind, in this symmetrical way I February 2013

couldn’t let go of these sentences in the papers.”

T

he story of David’s reading week was at heart a story about lost time.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton Perhaps David felt the burden of the rising cultural pressure that insists that an unproductive minute is a wasted minute you’ll never get back, that all time is unredeemable.

In the common cultural vendetta against procrastination and the equally intense obsession with efficiency, time is cast as a villain: How dare it just pass like that, cheating us of our earth-given right to, well, infinity?

Time has never been my villain. But all around me are people convinced that they not only need this lost time but that they have some ultimate right to it.

They try to get it back, in part, to redeem themselves.

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They set up cycles of cue, action, and reward ending in gifts of food, sex, or fun in exchange for X amount of work. In dorm rooms and offices across the country, as I type these words, an unprecedented number of people are turning to various neuroenhancers like Adderrall and caffeine. They’re using binding programs like Selfcontrol and Freedom to shut down sites like Facebook for up to eight hours. The way to force themselves to write their papers or reports is to “free” themselves of distractions—like modern Odysseuses, preemptively restraining themselves from the sirens they know as Amazon and Netflix Instant.

In 2008, two Yale professors, Dean Karlan (Economics) and Ian Ayres (Law, School of Management), launched a website called stickK, on which clients give Y amount of money over to the company and only get it back once they’ve completed some task Z by a set deadline. Your present (lazy, procrastinating) self bets against your future (potentially satisfied, potentially disappointed) self, and if the former fails, your money goes straight to charity—a deal called a “commitment contract.” There is even an option to send that money to an “anti-charity” for further motivation; a queer activist, for example, may work hard to lose that last pound if she knows her $500 will otherwise go to a Christian fund against same-sex marriage.

These websites, apps, and other ostensible antidotes to procrastination continue to proliferate, in part because procrastination evidently really is on the rise and has been since the seventies. According to one comprehensive study, the vast majority of college students self-report problems with procrastination, perhaps along with the types of existential crises that David underwent his sophomore year. And the general population’s rate quadrupled between 1978 and 2002.

David’s fear that there fundamentally wasn’t enough time is familiar to me because of its prevalence at a place like Yale. But personally, I can’t relate. I have more often felt that I only have time, that I have endless hours to fill however I decide to. Deadlines never stress me out, but I generally make them anyway; I don’t tell people I don’t have the time to hang out with them, because the fact is that I do if I want to; I manage to have several-hour blocks of leisure time on any given weekday. And I’m acutely aware that these statements could be true for any of my procrastination-prone friends. In fact, I’ve often wondered why they aren’t.

It seems to me that the self-sabotage imbedded in procrastination is pervasive. The way my friends avoid a paper by skimming Facebook and losing a day to it makes them miserable but happens like clockwork. They continue to need days of doing nothing to proceed the 12

days of writing.

Distraction from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Eliot, 1935 Reasons for procrastination like self-doubt, sloth, fatigue, panic, boredom, fear of failure, and fear of success may apply to us as much and as easily as they applied to Eliot’s generation. And yet something has changed.

The widespread effect of mobile technology and the resulting “frequent and unplanned interruptions, coupled with growing expectations for immediate responses, challenge our cognitive control system at its very core,” suggests Adam Gazzaley, a University of California, San Francisco professor of neurology.

Though technology may make us procrastinate more, it also may make the ways in which we procrastinate more obvious.

Others suggest that the growing culture of continuous multitasking leads to greater distraction.

“The more tasks you add, the less efficient your brain is,” Teresa Aubele, Ph.D., and Susan Reynolds write, “and the less likely it is to focus on the most important task.” The neuroscience researcher and science writer, respectively, hold that juggling tasks eventually decreases creativity as well as decision-making and priority-setting abilities.

Are our addictions to multitasking and technology inherently unhealthy? I’ve never thought to look at the fact that I like to work on four projects at once as a weakness or that I’m always in the middle of reading seven different books as problematic. I see the losses that various technologies have caused as real and significant, but I also see the gains they’ve brought as compensatory. It follows that procrastination need not be altogether detrimental.

Recently, others have begun to agree with me.

Some use the term “intentional delay,” others “positive procrastination,” and not just as euphemisms. The bottom line is: Procrastination has its upsides. Not all time spent procrastinating has to be lost, or even wasted.

A 2005 study by Jin Nam Choi, Ph.D. distinguished between passive procrastinators and active ones, finding that maintaining agency makes all the difference in terms of stress and effectiveness. The conscious procrastinators who delayed but still completed tasks on time reported the same levels of procrastination as the passive equivalents, but academically, performed basically as well as non-procrastinators (and in some cases even better than them). Actively choosing to take The New Journal

the afternoon off to watch 30 Rock reruns and take a nap partially eliminates some of the disadvantages of that postponement of work.

One method to streamline this active procrastination is an invention of Stanford philosophy professor John Perry, what he calls “structured procrastination.” He encourages self-deception: Procrastinators should complete small, lower-priority jobs to build affirmation and energy toward the bigger tasks. In other words, postpone that term paper, but catch up on emails or on news in the meantime instead of sitting at your desk not writing your paper but not doing anything else. It’s simply productive procrastination.

Continuously grieving over the passage of time may well be an essentially human state, but there are ways to grieve intelligently.

Researchers point to the benefits of controlled and concerted indulgence in procrastination, and any layprocrastinator can tell you that a break, whether you spend it watching Seinfeld or spend it mind-wandering, can make the ensuing hours of work more productive.

David found himself stuck in loops of words that lacked meaning and logic, and fixated on seemingly impossible deadlines. He may not clearly have seen the value of food breaks his friends were taking, or their practice of switching off between subjects.

And anyway, punishing or disciplining yourself

February 2013

over a procrastination problem is not an effective way to eliminate the habit. In a recent study, Carleton University psychology professor Michael Wohl found that those who forgive themselves for one bout of procrastination are not only less stressed, but also less likely to procrastinate in round two. Because the selfforgivers were less likely to procrastinate, they also performed better.

Perhaps I do procrastinate, without calling it so— of course I don’t do every task I know I will have to do at the first possible point. My HBO Go account often gets top billing, and so does my naptime. But I don’t beat myself up over not being perfectly efficient, and I’m more relaxed for it (and my apartment is cleaner, and dinner with my roommate more delicious). That lost time, in other words, isn’t wasted in the end.

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time, Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after.

Eliot * The names in this article have been changed.

TNJ

Cindy Ok is a junior in Pierson College.

13

Wasting Away

Brianne Bowen

Funding cuts are making tuberculosis cases worse and more frequent.

By Eric Boodman

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The New Journal

February 2013

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M

ariana Ornagua did not seem like the kind of patient who would give a doctor trouble.

She had gone out of her way to be tested for tuberculosis in mid-November, waiting in line after her English class at the New Haven Adult Education Center to see the visiting TB nurse. A few days later, Ornagua took more time out of her schedule to get her results.

The tiny bit of TB protein that had been injected into her forearm had raised a dark reddish welt about the size of a penny: a sign that the disease was present in her body. The nurse told Ornagua that the Winchester Chest Clinic could determine whether or not her immune system was keeping the disease in check—whether her TB was latent or active. She followed the nurse’s advice and set up an appointment at the Winchester as soon as she could.

Her cooperation with the medical system continued: On November 30, she showed up for her appointment at the Winchester, located within Yale-New Haven Hospital. When she was given a bright green mask, she dutifully put it on and let herself be whisked into an examining room.

Ornagua is a slight woman of thirty-two, with a shy smile visible behind a cascade of hair. (To protect the patient’s identity, her name has been changed.) To most of us, there would be nothing remarkable about the image of her sitting in the examining room, her coat scrunched in her lap. All she had done was show up for a medical appointment. But in the eyes of the medical system, her presence at the Winchester on November 30th was a sign that she could be trusted.

The populations in the United States who are most likely to be infected with TB are the homeless, the alcoholic, the drug-addicted, and recent immigrants. If you don’t speak English, don’t have a permanent place of residence, are juggling two jobs, or have run afoul of the law, a hospital is a scary place, with its endless series of official forms to fill out and its hierarchy of orderlies, nurses, residents, and doctors, all of whom seem to wield a God-like power over what happens to your body. Once you enter, it seems that you give up whatever autonomy you had outside, and so you are unlikely to seek out a TB test. If you do get tested and are positive, you are unlikely to show up for your appointment. And if you do show up for your appointment and have active TB, you are unlikely to finish the course of your treatment, because the medications will alleviate most symptoms after the first couple of weeks and the medications have some nasty side effects, including vomiting, stomach aches, urine discoloration, extreme lethargy, and a potentially fatal inflammation of the liver.

Up to thirty-one percent of recorded TB patients

X-rays of patients with TB. Chest x-rays are a key tool for diagnosing active forms of the disease and allow specialists to see infection or holes in the lung tissue.

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in the US have refused to come in to their appointments or to take medication. For decades now, physicians and public health officials have viewed non-compliance as the single biggest roadblock in treating this country’s TB problem.

Once known as wasting disease, or consumption, TB is an infectious disease that has plagued humans since the Neolithic era. The disease is transmitted by the microscopic beads of liquid we release into the air when we cough, sneeze, talk, or laugh. If someone walks around with untreated TB, they are likely to spread it around their community. This sounds bad enough, but it gets worse: If the person has begun treatment and allowed it to lapse, the disease will have had the opportunity to become resistant to the drugs prescribed.

The beads of liquid the person emits with each cough or “How are you?” then carry a strain of TB that the standard regimen of drugs cannot cure. Patients who don’t take their medication could be creating ever-more-invincible strains of TB. This threat can feel very remote. Most of us think of TB as a disease conquered by antibiotics, an affliction of our forebears and of the Third World.

We cannot imagine anyone in our city wasting away because of lungs infected with tuberculosis bacteria. Yet people all over the US—people like Mariana Ornagua—suffer from TB, and their non-compliance could have very serious consequences.

The prospect of a TB epidemic is so scary that since the 1990s, the United States has implemented a treatment program that squelches any possibility of non-compliance. It is called Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), and it involves a public health nurse meeting up with patients every day to make sure they are taking their medication. This lasts between six and nine months, and patients have no choice in the matter: If they have contagious TB, the law requires them to fulfill their treatment. “The nurse doesn’t just ask them if they took the pill,” says Dr. Lloyd Friedman, a Professor of Pulmonary Medicine at Yale. “She watches them take it, and she watches them swallow it. They can refuse treatment, but we’ll put ‘em in jail. We’re pretty aggressive: If they disappear, we find them.”

The aggressiveness of DOT has brought TB to

its knees in the United States. The number of people infected with active TB is the lowest it has ever been—in 2011, there were just over 10, 500 reported cases in the US, less than a tenth of what it was in 1953 and less than half of what it was in 1991. Doctors and public health officials credit DOT with those happy statistics.

While DOT may be a public triumph, it can also produce private tragedies. With it, doctors and public health officials are trying to solve the problem of patients disregarding their doctor’s orders. But sometimes the doctor’s orders don’t take the patient’s whole situation into account. The word “non-compliance” brings to mind a hardheaded refusal on the patient’s part. Yet more often than not, the DOT regimen demands a debilitating commitment from the patient without providing the support that would make such a commitment feasible. And as TB funding gets cut, public health departments have fewer avenues to tailor treatment to the patient’s needs.

The beads of liquid the person emits with each cough or “How are you?” then carry a strain of TB that the standard regimen of drugs cannot cure.

Patients who don’t take their medication could be creating ever-moreinvincible strains of TB.

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A

s Ornagua waited on November 30th, Dr. Hilary Cain pulled up her chest X-ray on a computer in the clinic’s conference room. Ornagua’s ribs were a series of graceful arcs, broken only by the white ghost of her heart. But what Cain was interested in was an area at the

top of her right lung.

“An easy sign that things are normal is symmetry, and we have asymmetry here,” Cain said, pointing to a white lump near Ornagua’s collarbone. It had a pinprick of pitch black near its center, which Cain identified as a possible cavity created by TB. “If I were looking at this in a seventy-year-old smoker, I would say she had lung cancer. But in a thirty-two-year-old who doesn’t smoke?

It certainly raises the suspicion of TB.” Before Cain headed into the examining room, Ming Lai, the nurse who runs the Winchester’s TB program, handed her a turquoise mask like the one Ornagua was wearing. These masks—N95—are supposed to block out everything larger than 0.3 microns if used properly.

“The misuse of these N95 respirators may result in serious injury or even death,” reads a warning in fineprint on advertisements for N95.

Cain pulled both straps behind her ears, and molded the metal bar to the shape of her nose. “If you can’t The New Journal

breathe, you’re wearing it right,” Lai said wryly. This small patch of green fabric was all that would protect Cain from Ornagua’s germs.

But when she got into the examining room, she found that Ornagua herself had not properly put on her mask. It was upside down, with one of the straps hanging uselessly down her neck and the metal bar resting loosely against her chin. Not wanting to embarrass her patient, Cain made no mention of the misuse. “I am Dr. Cain,” she said, taking Ornagua’s hand before sitting down beside her.

Cain is a tall woman with a quivery voice. Her manner is gentle but firm, finely tuned to putting patients at ease. This is particularly important when dealing with TB patients because of their frequent distrust of the medical system. “There is a stigma attached to TB,” she told me before she slipped into the examining room.

“It’s important that the patient knows we’re here to support and not to criticize her.”

Cain felt immediately that Ornagua was a patient she could trust. Ornagua was good-natured and polite, answering Cain’s questions as best as she could through a Spanish-speaking interpreter in the examining room.

Her hands lay folded on her jacket and purse, which were piled in her lap, and she calmly maintained Cain’s eye-contact. Every so often, she jiggled her pink and white Sketchers, betraying her nervousness, but mostly she sat still.

Cain’s confidence in Ornagua was bolstered even further when she heard about Ornagua’s responsibilities.

Every morning, she got her twelve-year-old son ready for school before walking him to the bus-stop. She spent the rest of the day balancing domestic duties for her family with English classes at New Haven Adult Ed. Then, at night, she worked as a cleaning lady in an office building.

Ornagua was not displaying any external TB symptoms: She wasn’t coughing, losing weight, getting fevers, or being kept up at night by chills and abundant sweat. But the lump in Ornagua’s chest was worrisome enough for Cain to treat her for active tuberculosis.

“I’m still concerned that you have active TB, and so I’m going to start you on medication,” said Dr. Cain.

Ornagua nodded. The fact that her lungs were infected with a deadly contagious disease didn’t seem to scare her much.

“You’re going to have to stay at home for next two weeks. Is that ok?”

This was the first time that Ornagua’s composure began to crack, her eyes flicking from Cain to the interpreter and back again. “I am in school and I need to finish the semester.” Ornagua’s voice was plaintive, but February 2013

the interpreter’s tone stayed even. His expression never wavered from its baseline of discreet concern. He kept his hands folded demurely in front of him.

“I’ll give you a note so you don’t have to go to school,” said Cain, touching Ornagua’s arm and looking her in the eye. “You need to stay at home. It’s very important. And when I say stay at home, I mean don’t go out at all. No shopping, no laundry. You have to stay in your house. We are going to have a nurse come to your house every day to bring you your medication. We do this for everyone who has TB. It’s not that we don’t trust you—these are health department regulations.”

“Ok,” said Ornagua tentatively.

Cain left to begin filling out a prescription. “She seems responsible,” she said to Lai as they passed in the hallway. “I think she should come back in a month.”

Ornagua didn’t drink, use drugs, or live on the street. She hardly fit the profile of a non-compliant tuberculosis patient.

But when Lai went into the examining room to collect a sample of phlegm for testing, Ornagua said, “I can’t honestly tell you that I’m going to stay home.”

Lai came out to tell Cain, who rushed back into the room. She told Ornagua that she would have to be admitted to the hospital if she couldn’t stay at home, and Ornagua began to cry.

“You don’t understand,” she told Cain through her tears. “I’m going to lose my job. I have to pay the rent.”

When Cain mentioned the possibility of summoning a police officer, Mariana became even more upset. She had come to New Haven from Ecuador seven years ago.

Whether or not she had legal status as an immigrant, it could be disastrous for her family if a police officer showed up at their door.

Cain and Lai didn’t know what to do. They left the examining room and stood huddled in the white hallway of the Winchester, discussing their options.

They couldn’t send her home if they thought she would be exposing her community to TB—it would be both illegal and unethical. After all, their first duty was to make sure that Ornagua didn’t spread the disease.

But they didn’t want to call the police on her either, as they would be endangering the life she’d built in Connecticut over the last seven years. Forcibly keeping her in the hospital wasn’t much more appealing. Ornagua was their patient. Her well-being was their responsibility.

They were here to help her. But neither of them could figure out which course of action would cause the least harm.

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T

he dilemma that Cain and Lai faced was exactly the kind of situation that DOT was supposed to solve. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allocates a budget to each state’s public health department to cover TB care and meds. The program is designed to preclude a TB epidemic by providing the patient with free, humane, personalized treatment. For many patients, DOT has been just that.

If there is anyone who knows about the success of DOT in New Haven, it’s Maureen Bruce. Bruce has the build of a linebacker, and although her eyes are warm, they have a bloodhound’s intensity. From the early 1990s until 2009, Bruce was the public health nurse responsible for DOT in the city of New Haven.

Despite her dogged personality, Bruce was, to most of her patients, like a member of the family. Often she would go meet her patients at the Winchester Chest Clinic just after they’d been diagnosed with active TB. Unless Maureen and her colleagues were sure that the patients were no longer contagious, they would not let them leave the hospital.

(The verdict has changed since then: Doctors now feel that there is less risk of contagion if patients go home and stay there, given that the people they live with have probably already been exposed to the disease, which is not the case for everyone who comes to the hospital.)

Bruce used that first meeting at the Winchester to determine how she could find her patients once they were released, so that she could make sure they were taking their meds. For some that meant visiting their house, coming into the living-room. For others, she drove to the door of the factory where they worked, and they would come out, sit in the front seat of her car, and take the pills she gave them. For her homeless patients, she would meet them on a street corner or in one of New Haven’s shelters; often she would get the shelter to bend its rules so that the patient could stay and wait for her there after the other sleepers had been kicked out at seven AM. But her devotion went far beyond meeting up with 18

her patients at their preferred spots. She would drive them to their doctor’s appointments, take them out for coffee and a Danish, bring them groceries, or take care of their kids. “I had one man who was homeless,” she recalled, “and as long as I had clean socks for him, he would go to his doctor’s appointment. I would go to BJs, and I would buy bags of socks and keep them in my trunk. As long as I had a pair of clean white socks, he would get in my car.” Bruce lent another patient enough money for her to make the down-payment on a car.

Bruce is not handing out socks anymore. In 2009, her position got cut down to just nineteen hours a week, and she had to move to another position at the public health department to keep working full-time.

If the position of DOT nurse for New Haven were still a full-time job, at least Lai and Cain could have relied on someone other than the police to check that Ornagua was staying at home. But Bruce’s replacement only works half-days.

And yet, at its root, the problem is not one of

Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria (darker gray) in sputum.

enforcement. Rather, public health officials need to make DOT a program that a patient is able to comply with freely. If a doctor asks a patient to stay home, that means compensating for the patient’s lost salary.

For most Americans, the idea that the state of Connecticut pays for Ornagua’s TB meds and care is already impressive enough. But there was a time, when Bruce was still working as a TB nurse, that the Connecticut Department of Public Health would pay patients’ rents when they weren’t allowed to go to work.

That means that they were able to get treatment for TB without risking eviction.

These cuts—of the budget to supplement a patient’s rent, of the DOT nurse’s hours—turned out to herald a larger trend. This year, the CDC announced even further

The New Journal

cuts to the TB budget allocated to each state.

In the eternal fight for funding, TB lost a little ground because numbers of infection have been going down. What the people making the budget failed to realize is that these funding cuts will make cases like Ornagua’s not just more difficult to solve, but also more frequent.

T

B experts know all too well what happens when TB funding gets cut. The last time there were significant cuts was in the late eighties. TB numbers had taken a nosedive since the advent of drug therapy in the fifties, and with fewer and fewer cases of active TB, American public health officials believed they were well on their way to eradicating the disease.

The CDC and other public health organizations, always pressed for funds, could shift some of their TB money to the prevention and control of other illnesses.

Dr. Lloyd Friedman remembers that era well. His desk at the Milford Hospital Intensive Care Unit is covered in towers of articles and patients’ files, which are all linked to TB. One can’t help but think that his mind might look similar: endless reams of TB history waiting to be recalled with a scrunch of his chiseled face.

In the late eighties, Friedman was fresh out of medschool, doing medical screening at a welfare intake center in midtown Manhattan. “You go down this assembly line,” he said of his patients in his rapid-fire Brooklyn accent. “Get your ears tested, your eyes tested, your urine tested for drugs, blood drawn, EKG, skin-tests for TB, chest x-ray. We were seeing six to seven hundred people a day, and at least one case of TB among them.”

To Friedman, that number seemed higher than it should have been, and he became increasingly concerned that the US was heading into a TB epidemic.

But the public health officials remained steadfast in their belief that TB would soon be a disease of the past, and Friedman’s warnings went unheeded. “I came out with an abstract describing the problem, and nobody would publish it,” Friedman said.

Friedman’s inklings turned out to be right. Looking at the data today, you can see a spike in TB numbers beginning in the late 1990s and peaking in 1992 and 1993.

The spike was partially due to the AIDS epidemic, which allowed TB to piggyback on the virus’ destruction of immune systems, easily infecting people who otherwise

might have warded the disease off.

But for Friedman, funding cuts were at the heart of the TB epidemic of the 1990s. The cuts meant that there was not adequate care for these AIDS-TB patients, creating a deadly cycle of transmission. “The infrastructure to take care of TB just wasn’t there,” Dr. Friedman said. “As soon as the money goes away, then the rates go back up.”

In 1993, the World Health Organization declared that there was an international TB crisis. American public health officials could no longer ignore the number of TB cases within their borders. DOT became a part of American public health policy to counter that epidemic.

As the CDC allocated more TB money to public health departments, and as nurses like Maureen Bruce began to visit patients’ houses, the TB numbers began to fall again. By 1996, they were lower than they had ever been in the United States, and the trend has continued.

But the CDC is now falling into the same sinkhole it did in the late eighties. Taking the success of DOT programs as a sign that the disease is on its way out, the CDC has made over a million dollars in cuts and has reorganized the funding so that states where TB control has been deemed effective are not eligible for as much money as they received in the past.

Lynn Sosa, the deputy epidemiologist at the Connecticut Department of Public Health, is worried about the implications of these cuts. “There’s still a lot of work, and we feel we don’t have all the staff we need,” she said in a phone interview. “It means that TB patients will fall through the cracks and get more people infected. It’s a cycle.”

She sees that cycle progressing on a larger scale than just a few individual cases. “Our cases go down, we hit a point where they start cutting people, we don’t have the resources to maintain that low rate, and so our cases go up,” she said. “I see that happening in the next five years.”

Epidemiologists like Sosa are in the business of reading trends and speaking in statistics. But the problem with these funding cuts is not simply that they could spark another epidemic. They also fail to acknowledge that TB is still a problem for patients like Ornagua, and that the medical system is not doing enough to solve it. Some doctors have come to view the term “non-

Forcibly keeping her in the hospital wasn’t much more appealing, but neither of them could figure out which course of action would cause the least harm.

February 2013

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compliance” as a form of medical name-calling. It pins the blame on the patient, leaving no room to question the orders the patient is obliged to follow. There is no doubt that contagion needs to be prevented, and in DOT public health officials have found a very effective way to prevent it. Given that the program’s strength lies in the way it can be personalized, it does not seem that hard to extend that personalization one step further, so that TB treatment helps patients unequivocally, without posing any threat to their jobs or their families. Yet to do that, the CDC would have to increase TB funding instead of cutting it.

W

hen she went back into the examining room to discuss the options with Ornagua, Cain understood that forcibly keeping Ornagua in the hospital would not only be traumatic, but also pose a public health risk. Ornagua’s distrust would only have deepened if she were made to stay at the hospital, and she would have passed that distrust along to her friends and family. In keeping Ornagua in the hospital, Cain would essentially have been discouraging other people in Ornagua’s community from getting tested for TB. Ornagua was sitting against the wall, her eyes red from crying. “My friend told me not to get this skintest,” Ornagua said when she saw Cain. “She said, ‘If you get that skin-test and it’s positive, those doctors will make trouble for you.’ I did the test because I wanted to be a good citizen. Now look at the trouble I’m in.”

Ornagua’s regret was very real. Like her friend, she felt that having undiagnosed active TB would have been better than being forced into this treatment system which could potentially threaten her income and the well-being of her family. Despite her exemplary compliance when getting tested, in getting the results, and in coming to the Winchester, she saw the nurses and doctors at the clinic as people who were hurting her rather than making her better.

Cain tried to imagine other solutions that would allow Ornagua to stay home without losing her job.

She asked Ornagua if she had family or friends who could take her shifts at the office building. Ornagua said that she lives with her husband and sister, each of whom already works two jobs. They just didn’t have time to add other tasks to their list. But Cain pressed on: Perhaps they could take over for Ornagua, just until the TB medication took effect and she was no longer contagious? Wasn’t that better than being kept in the hospital or having the police show up?

Framed that way, there was no question. Ornagua agreed. Her husband would find the time to clean the office building at night, and her sister would take over 20

whatever household tasks that required leaving the house. Ornagua would stay home and wait for the DOT nurse to give her the prescribed meds. Calmer now, Ornagua provided a sample of phlegm, and was allowed to leave.

But the case still bothered Cain when I went to talk it over with her at her office a week later. She pointed out that the DOT system in place was very good at protecting the general public from TB, but that it could be tragically detrimental to the patient.

“In medicine, we have these multiple agendas,” said Cain. “We are fixing the physiology that’s wrong, but we have to fix it in the context of a patient’s life. Really, their family becomes our patient.” That was why she decided to send Ornagua home, hoping that she would keep her word and not go out. “I chose to believe her. But I’m still not sure that that was the right judgment.”

TNJ Eric Boodman is a sophomore in Branford College.

The New Journal

Juliana Hanle

personal essay.

High Water Over the course of three days the author fasts, drinks, and hikes into the feet of the Sierras.

By Juliana Hanle

I

might have had fifteen dollars after I paid the train fare. I surely didn’t have enough for a four-day road trip in the Sierras. But after half a summer in an office downtown, I craved pine and dark earth, laurel and thrush. For three days I hardly ate. Beer served as my bread, my meat, and my milk. Fasts, I’d been told, clarify the mind, channeling streams of thought into a single still pool.

At Modesto, my friend Abby* and I descended from the train. The sun of high summer pulled out sweat on my chest. Abby’s fast-talking curly-haired cousin showed up half an hour later with three friends. She drove us to the canyon where kids liked to smoke up. I watched rows of lush, green crops sweep by like grocery aisles. At some intersections, dusty flats pressed up catty-corner February 2013

to the ranches. I thought of all the carrots and cheese and strawberries and meat that shipped out from this region. We passed through the cousin’s town, moving in the width of a wall from dry groundcover to water fountains and grass lawns and back. We drove up into the canyon, past the boulder locals had spray-painted, past a car wreck, up to where the road climbs into a pass, and pulled over. When we climbed down, we saw that there was nearly no water in the creek bed.

We left Modesto later with Tess, Abby’s friend from the previous summer who worked in the Forest Service.

We slept those first two nights in the Stanislaus Forest on the floor of a ranger’s hut. My remaining money got me two slices of the first day’s pizza and beer. Abby and Tess had come out for a nostalgia trip and I had come 21

along for the land. Neither of the girls had money to spare—Abby and I lived off a tight stipend. I’m not sure if they would have bought me food even had I asked.

By the time we had decided to birthday suit a swim in a small, dammed pool nearly in the basin of one of the Stan’s valleys, I had begun to feel as if I was contracting, pulling out from my limbs and gathering in around my core. The pool lay a couple hundred feet above the valley floor. It was small—maybe twenty feet squared, and shallow. The water sat muddy and opaque.

That night we dined on the shore of another small reservoir.

A few stumps stood in the water, their caps clear of the lake. I perched on one, my feet drawn in and a brew in hand. For the next two days I would alternate between porter and stout. The first few times I had a Deschutes stout it was delightful—thick like a milkshake and bitter as collard greens. I felt its weight moving down me. I gripped the brown glass and wondered how badly the high water affected these woods.

Below me, did roots soften and swell, split and lose the sense of their construction? The trees of the Sierras stand like the piers of a cathedral. Below them, the lake looked as odd as a warehouse floor in place of marble.

The valley we had hiked that day runs parallel to and north of both Yosemite Valley and her twin, Hetch Hetchy Valley. Since 1923, Hetch Hetchy’s three-milelong granite basin has lain below the Bay Area’s largest reservoir. Glacial valleys form in U-shapes, but this one, I realized atop my stump, must be sheered off.

The next day, we drove out of the Stanislaus, north.

I watched the colors and rocks grow stronger, colder, and more severe as we ascended to the crest, which was still capped by snow in the middle of July. Down out of Sonora Pass, now in the desert, we passed through a gold rush ghost town. The old wooden houses were so thoroughly dried by the high winds that they looked like the dust that they lay upon. At the edge of the bowl in which the village sits stood a few elbows of rusted steel, bent like monumental skeletal arms. They must have been leaning over the hollow wells. It took me an hour to properly think about them. I seemed to be pulling deeper into some point below my chest.

That evening we drank again on the shores of a lake. Mono Lake is twice as salinic as any ocean, and

it supports an ecosystem of just three organisms: algae, shrimp, and birds. The salt builds up in bulbous growths, constructing columns fifteen feet high in a weak, pasty grey. I looked out at the cold land and moved very little. My mind felt rather like those waters: still, accruing monstrous structures in its inactivity. My friends bought themselves dinner at the one restaurant in town. They were hungry, but I got a few fries. In the high altitude desert, temperatures were going to fall to just above freezing that night. We couldn’t sleep in the car. Abby ground up one of her blue ADHD pills, snipped about an inch and a half off her soda straw, and motioned how to snort the blue powder. So jazzed on her medication that we halfdecided to drive to Reno, Abby, Tess, and I followed some of the restaurant’s employees to a bar twenty miles away. In the very late hours of that night we walked a half-mile down a boardwalk over an enormous flat, grey and even wider, it seemed, than Mono Lake. I focused on moving forward. The boardwalk ended at a crater, which bubbled with sulphurous water. We stripped.

The hot water seemed to push at my flesh. I imagined my internal organs pressing together, my lungs straining from the pressure. I breathed light and fast. I felt like I was at the center of a balloon, ready to give. My fingers trembled and I slipped in the volcanic basin. I couldn’t feel the sides.

Abby helped me rise and cool off in the desert. She pushed two of my fingers together and said “just shove them down.” But there was nothing to come up.

On the return trip to the city the sky over the valley was thick and brown. I thought of the canyon and the lake and hot springs, and then I thought of the water. I would be ill for a few days. As I lay sweating on my cot the same murky thoughts washed through me. People lay waste to the land as they lay waste to themselves.

By the time we had decided to birthday suit a swim in a small, dammed pool nearly in the basin of one of the Stan’s valleys I had begun to feel as if I was contracting, pulling out from my limbs.

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* The names in the piece have been changed.

TNJ Juliana Hanle is a senior in Davenport College and an Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

The New Journal

e n O n O e n O

A New Haven detective brings the gangs to him, offering an open hand.

By Christopher Peak

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he night of Friday, June 17, 2006, was beautiful and warm as detective Al Vazquez and his partner drove through New Haven. The day’s work had been quiet, until they got a call over the radio, a disembodied voice saying a shooting had occurred in the Dwight neighborhood west of downtown. When he arrived at the scene, Vazquez was shocked to find EMTs wheeling a little black girl on a gurney. He watched as a paramedic hunched over her, vigorously pumping her chest. Vazquez didn’t need his decade of experience to know she was nearing death. Her name was Jajuana Cole. She was 13.

Around 11 p.m., Jajuana had been standing with Krystal Hammet, 13, outside of a party where they had some older friends. Three teenagers from the ‘Ville gang—a group modeled after Los Angeles’ Crips— drove down the street and noticed a member of a rival gang near the girls. Daniel Carter, 18, who was carrying a chrome handgun as he drove by, allegedly said, “There go some of them.” The boys parked on an adjacent block and took a shortcut through an alley. Tremayne Sanders, 16, had a black handgun, and Lamont Swint, 17, had a video camera.

Vazquez says the film Lamont shot is almost entirely black, with only pixelated silhouettes and muffled voices.

Through the darkness, Krystal screams first: “Please don’t shoot!” The muzzle of a gun flashes about a dozen times. Then, Jajuana’s voice: “Oh my God, no!” The camera lowers to the ground as the boys run back to their getaway car. Carter mumbles, “I think I shot a girl.”

The recording stops.

Krystal, whose back and leg had been grazed by bullets, dragged her friend to the second-floor landing of an apartment building. She cradled her friend while Jajuana pleaded, “Don’t let me die, don’t let me die.”

Blood stained the floor. Paramedics arrived within minutes to take Jajuana to Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Krystal begged to go to the same hospital, but the EMTs refused. Vazquez reached the scene as the girls were loaded into separate ambulances. The sight of the injured young girls reminded him of his own daughter.

Anyone watching Vazquez that night could not have known the shock and sadness and anger that lurked in his gut. He went about his work methodically: he asked the officers if there had been witnesses, and from the February 2013

growing crowd, found a girl who had seen the incident and had been hit with shrapnel. Vasquez then called for another ambulance, and instructed an officer to stay with her. When he retells the story, his voice grows louder: “Do not leave her side,” he told the cop. “No one else talks with her. Stay with her.”

Jajuana died early the next morning. Her mother did not have the $795 to pay for a tombstone to mark her grave at Evergreen Cemetery. Vazquez broke his one rule he had never broken before: He promised the mother he would bring the murderers to justice. He interviewed the targeted gang member, informants, and eyewitnesses, and within thirty-six sleepless hours, he had arrested four teenagers, who all either confessed or informed on each other. Carter, who fired the fatal shot, is serving a forty-year sentence in prison.

Six years later, in November 2012, Vazquez broke his rule against making promises for the second time in his career. Participating in Project Longevity, a new initiative to prevent gang violence, Vazquez promised gang members that if they killed one more person, each would be punished to the fullest extent of the law, pursued by the combined forces of local, state, and federal authorities. Vazquez’s thinking has changed considerably since his early days on the police force.

Where he once saw gang members as an evil force to be locked away, he now sees them as a group of misguided teenagers who lost their way, paying for mistakes with their lives.

Project Longevity is the latest initiative in the New Haven Police Department’s effort to improve its engagement with the community. Since returning to New Haven in 2011, Chief Dean Esserman has reinstated community policing, a model of partnership with community members Esserman helped craft as deputy chief in the early 1990s. Like many of Esserman’s recent projects, Project Longevity is not just punitive: It offers gang members the social services they might need to escape from a life of crime. Like Vazquez, the police department’s leadership now realizes that merely incarcerating gang members will not stop the violence, and they hope that these young men will take the escape route offered. But Vazquez knows he will have to follow through with a crackdown if shootings continue. If he does not, senseless deaths like Jajuana’s will continue to occur.

“Those images never escape you,” Vazquez says, as he remembers Jajuana’s little body on the gurney. He blinks, as if to push back tears from shining eyes.

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azquez could easily have been one of the shooters—or maybe the target—that night in June.

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Opposite page: photo by Emilie Foyer

Seargent Al Vazquez sits at his desk in the New Haven Police Department Headquarters.

But from a young age, he avoided life in a gang, rejecting rebuffs that gangs eventually stopped trying to persuade any of the attractions that the life might have offered, in him. order to pursue his dream of becoming a police officer.

Role models were rare in New Haven’s foster Born in Middletown, Conn., in 1968, he spent his homes and projects. Today, Vazquez says he wishes childhood shuttling back and forth between Puerto Rico the department had implemented community policing and New England. Unable to support him financially, when he was young. He wishes there had been a local his parents sent their two-year-old son to live with an cop, with whom he could have shared his difficulties, aunt in Puerto Rico. After four years he returned to someone he could have emulated. I ask Vazquez why he Middletown, but his mother and father fought often. was never tempted by the security and money joining a They separated when Vazquez was ten years old, and he gang could offer. He thinks for a moment. “I really don’t travelled back to Puerto Rico. know. I guided myself through. Sometimes answers are “I always wanted to be a cop,” Vazquez tells me. He simplistic.” fantasized about catching the “bad guys,” accelerating a Vazquez worked multiple part-time jobs to support police car with lights flashing and sirens shrieking. Either himself, first as an attendant at a Mobil gas station and in spite of or because of his chaotic childhood, Vazquez later as a mechanic at a Mercedes-Benz dealership. When saw the world in absolute terms of good and evil, and he he turned twenty-one, he applied to be a police officer. dedicated his life to being on the He was the first in his family to right side of the divide. enter a career in law enforcement.

From the moment he entered He passed the written, physical, Like Vazquez, the police middle school in Puerto Rico, and oral exams, and with thirtyVazquez was pressured to join a two others, all raised in New department’s leadership gang. He desperately needed the Haven, Vazquez was sworn in as a now realizes that merely money the lifestyle could provide, police officer on January 21, 1992. but he resisted their advances incarcerating gang members His first patrol sent and was severely and constantly him on a walking beat in the will not stop the violence, beaten for it. Instead, he took a Dwight-Kensington district, the job in construction during school neighborhood where he would and they hope that these vacations. Houses in Puerto one day investigate Jajuana’s young men will take the Rico were built anywhere space murder. Esserman’s community was available, sometimes even policing put cops on foot or escape route offered. on the edge of a cliff, so almost bicycle on beats around the all the construction had to be city instead of in patrol cars to done manually. As a 12-yeardescend on crime hot spots. old, Vazquez carried 50-pound “We are not exchanging hugs for buckets of cement up a ladder to lay as the roof. The handcuffs. We are doing both,” Esserman told me. “We labor was exhausting, but Vazquez was satisfied that he are building relationships on both sides of that badge.” made his money honestly. His classmates, who viewed When he first pioneered the model between 1990 and him as an outsider, referred to him as the “gringo.”

1997, crime in New Haven fell by forty-one percent, In 1985, Vazquez moved to New Haven, where compared to a ten percent drop in crime nationally. he has lived ever since. Neither of his parents could Abandoned houses lined the blocks of Vazquez’s afford to take him in, so he was forced into a foster beat, providing hideouts for gangs and places to stash home. He enrolled in Wilbur Cross High School, drugs and guns. Two groups dominated the area: the where gang members again tried to lure him into their Kensington Street Internationals and the Ghostbusters. lifestyle. They told him he had to sell drugs for them Corny as their names were, the gangs were ferociously in the projects near Ashmun and Webster, which have dangerous. Once, Vazquez and a partner were walking since been demolished and are now the site of the Yale their beat when shooting broke out at an intersection Police Department headquarters. Once, when Vazquez and the pair was caught in the crossfire. They could refused to participate, a gang member pulled a knife not see any shooters, and the echo of shots bouncing on him. Rather than back down, Vazquez prepared to between the houses prevented them from locating the fight him with his bare hands. Luckily, an older gang bullets’ origin. Vazquez ducked behind a car and called member intervened, telling the youngster, “Don’t touch for backup, but all he could do was wait for the gangs’ him. Leave him alone.” Vazquez was so adamant in his ammunition to run out.

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Using one of his favorite and oft-repeated phrases, Vazquez says he was “full of piss and vinegar” in those early years as an officer. After witnessing violence during high school, he was eager to clean up the streets of New Haven. At the time, he thought that meant “running after the drug dealers, the gangbangers, and the shooters, locking them up, seizing the guns and the drugs, and putting them behind bars.” Though he would later realize the situation on the streets was far more complex than that, Vazquez spent his rookie days thinking he was a soldier in an enduring battle against evil. Discord had broken his family, but Vazquez would not let lawlessness do the same to his city. He fought back this time, fiercely, as he assailed gangs with one arrest after another.

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fter a few years of walking a beat, Vazquez was recruited back to headquarters in 1996 for a temporary assignment to the detective bureau, the unit he would later oversee. Patrol officers routinely worked stints as investigators to get a taste of detective work, but also so the detectives, who Vazquez calls the “old-timers,” could have a connection to informants on the street. Vazquez was initially hesitant about his placement, thinking he would hate the work. Detective work is much slower-paced than a cop’s. After going from a uniform to a suit, you have to work methodically, thinking constantly about your next move rather than reacting to whatever the street throws at you.

“There you have it: the dead body. Figure it out,” he tells me. Sometimes you have eyewitnesses and sometimes you have nothing. On one chilly January night when temperatures sank into the negatives, Vazquez found a body in a parking lot with a gunshot wound to the head. Years later, the case is still cold. Other times, as with Jajuana’s homicide, you have eyewitnesses and suspects immediately, and the case can be closed in hours.

At the end of his three months, Vazquez had solved twelve of the sixteen cases he had been assigned. His new boss wanted him to stay on as a detective, but his union contract forced him back to a beat. Eventually, a compromise was reached and Vazquez joined the drug enforcement task force.

Vazquez says his first days as a detective gave him a new worldview. Although he did encounter cases like Jajuana’s, in which crime destroyed the life of an innocent person, the situation was often morally complex. Many of the homicides resulted from gunfights between gang members: chance alone determined who was the victim and who was the murderer. In some cases, the victim was a murderer himself. The categories of good and evil that he had sorted the world into suddenly seemed February 2013

overly romantic. It was often kids he was chasing down, young men who had fallen into gangs because the city offered them no alternative. “You realize it’s a different game,” he says now. “Nothing is that easy, that simple, that straightforward.” Though his investigations into crimes like child abuse deepened his awareness of how cruel people can be, Vazquez changed his objective. Life was more complicated than being a crusader for good against evil. He now aimed to protect “the innocent, the weak, and the deprived,” which included not only lawabiding residents like Jajuana, but also gang members who had made a few wrong choices.

Sometimes Vazquez is overwhelmed by each day’s cases. “People don’t realize the extent of evil in the world,” he tells me. He almost never discusses his work with his wife Ada or with his children. Unlike his tumultuous childhood, Vazquez wants to keep his family safe and secluded from what he has seen. But sometimes the silence worries Ada. When Vazquez leaves after a midnight call, she sits up, wondering if he is all right.

“Every time he walks out the door, I say a little prayer,” Ada tells me. “It’s nerve-wracking.” When her stress gets too high, she calls him, and he reassures her, “Don’t worry. We’re still out here looking for the guy.”

A year after Jajuana was murdered, Vazquez investigated the June 2007 killing of Angel Rovira.

Mitchell Joyner, 17, approached Rovira as Rovira walked home from work. A native of Puerto Rico, Rovira did not understand Mitchell’s demands for his gold chain, so he kept walking. Mitchell pulled out a semi-automatic handgun and fired two shots into Rovira’s back, hitting an artery in his heart. The victim ran to his apartment building a block away and fell down at the entrance. His wife and his four-year-old son found the body.

Rovira’s father flew to New Haven from Puerto Rico and began searching for the killer himself. When Vazquez heard this from informants on the street, he worried Rovira’s father would lose his life, too. Vazquez sat the family down and told them to not interfere. The father objected. Vazquez might have easily defused tensions with a promise to find the killer, but he was unwilling to break his rule.

Vazquez had information that pointed to Mitchell as the killer, but he needed a direct confession. In an interrogation that he said felt like running a marathon, Vazquez took advantage of Mitchell’s remorse. The teenager sobbed as he admitted he pulled the trigger.

“I can’t believe I just got this kid to tell me he did it,” Vazquez thought, as he put the boy in handcuffs. He was working not against the abstract, innumerable forces of gangs, but against one 17-year-old boy with true regret in his eyes. Vazquez felt no joy. He felt like the bad guy.

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legacy of its former resistance to collaborating with the first meet Al Vazquez on a snowy November evening community. Vazquez currently has only thirty-eight of at the police department’s headquarters. His dark the sixty-one detectives that are supposed to fill his unit. brown skin is striking against his white button-down. The In overseeing the division, he is doing the work of a first lines of silver mark his hair and the thin mustache lieutenant, but due to gaps in the department hierarchy, above his lips. He looks tired. The night before, he woke he remains at the lower rank of sergeant. up just after midnight to a phone call informing him of With community policing and Project Longevity, a shooting and a baby’s accidental death. He rests his Esserman is applying strategies he used to reduce crime hand on his holster as we ride the elevator to his thirdwhen he was chief in Providence, focusing on the small floor office. Most of the other cubicles are empty, but groups responsible for most of the city’s gun violence, the phones continue ringing nonstop. rather than targeting everyone in certain neighborhoods Vazquez has been nervously awaiting the verdict as potential lawbreakers. “I am not bringing a new in the trial of Troy Jackson for the 2007 murder of message or style to New Haven. I am bringing back the Julian Ellis. With community policing restored under old New Haven policing.” Esserman told me. When Esserman, the department is aiming for a personal he was deputy chief in New Haven, Esserman had connection with the community. After five years of created Connecticut’s first gang task force in the hopes negotiation, Vazquez had convinced a woman to step of negotiating with rival gang leaders to end conflicts forward as a key witness for the Jackson trial, even before their arguments became deadly. “We were one though she was deeply concerned of the centers of American about retaliation. When I first met progressive policing,” Esserman Vazquez, he was on the phone with says.

“We are not exchanging her, reassuring her and offering As one of many changes to meet at the courthouse before to the department’s leadership, hugs for handcuffs. We are Esserman she was set to testify the next promoted Vazquez doing both,” Esserman morning. His two other witnesses to head the department’s Major are less upstanding citizens: both Crimes Unit in April 2011, told me. “We are building are currently incarcerated. One, giving him responsibility for relationships on both sides supervising the investigation of who is doing time for drugrelated charges, “went south” last all homicides and shootings that of that badge. week, and now denies his earlier occur in the Elm City. “He is one testimony, presumably after being of the best detectives I have ever threatened by Jackson’s gang while met,” Esserman told me. “If I, in prison. He recanted his 2010 God forbid, ever had a family statement where he identified Jackson as Julian’s killer. member who was a victim of a crime, I would want Sgt. “The detective”—Vazquez—“told me what to say.” “He Vazquez on the case. I know he would bring justice to gave you all the details?” the state’s prosecutor asked. my family.”

“Yes.” Vazquez had often criticized the strategies former In November 2011, Esserman, who had served as chiefs implemented to fight against gangs, but they deputy police chief when Vazquez joined the force but refused to listen to his suggestions. Yet he and a few most recently worked as Chief of Police in Providence, others like Assistant Chief Luiz Casanova, who Vazquez R.I, was called back to New Haven. As the fourth chief trained seventeen years ago, never stopped practicing in three and a half years, Esserman had his work cut out Esserman’s strategies. “Community policing is the only for him. The department had gained a reputation for way to do policing,” Vazquez says. ““There is a mentality brutality and corruption, an enemy to the community that police work is just responding to calls. But there is it was supposed to protect and serve. The number of more than that.” Vazquez has been more than happy to homicides was skyrocketing, tying the record for the oversee the implementation of community policing in most murders in one year. By the end of 2011, thirty-four his unit. So far, it has been working: Last year, shootings had been murdered, and 122 had been shot. And after and homicides fell by nearly half. This year, there have years of attrition and poor management, the department been five non-fatal shootings, while by the time in 2012, was severely understaffed. Frank Cochran, the current there had been eleven. chair of the Civilian Review Board, said the department Yet the city’s gangs have not entirely disappeared. has had trouble recruiting officers from New Haven, a Yale University researchers working with the police have

Emilie Foyer

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The New Journal

Photos courtesy of the Cole and Ellis families

identified nineteen active gangs with nearly six hundred members, some of whom have already been incarcerated in recent sweeps. As the police department’s structure changes, the gangs also adapt, moving their operations underground. They no longer perform drug deals on street corners as they did in the 1990s, but instead tell customers to call a middleman who will set up a deal.

Their technology is more sophisticated. They have heavier firepower and clever new ways of storing drugs in cars’ hidden compartments.

Still, Esserman’s community policing model has been working so far. In January, after days of deliberation— usually a bad sign, Vazquez feared—the jury in Troy Jackson’s murder case returned a guilty verdict. Jackson raised his chin to the ceiling, as if readying for a noose, while the jury forewoman read him his crime: guilty of murder in the shooting of Julian Ellis. Another juror cried softly. In mid-February, Vazquez listened intently as the judge read Jackson his sentence of sixty years in prison.

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azquez’s changed perceptions of the gang members are epitomized in Project Longevity, where community policing is taken to its logical end.

It communicates directly with gang members, treating them as equal members of the community, where before they had been the enemy, terrorists, outsiders in their own neighborhoods.

At the end of last November, U.S. Attorney February 2013

Victims of violence: Jajuana Cole (pictured in the two photographs on the left) was killed as a bystander during a bout of gang violence in 2007, and Julian Ellis (pictured in the two photographs on the right) was shot by a rival gang member in 2006.

General Eric Holder, Gov. Dannel Malloy, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal gathered with local leaders in the tallest building in New Haven, the Connecticut Financial Center, to announce the start of Project Longevity. The comprehensive plan combined aid from social service providers — the carrot — with the punitive force of police, prosecutors, and the U.S. Attorney General — the stick. Similar programs have successfully reduced gun violence in neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and Cincinnati, the project’s backers say.

“Project Longevity will send a powerful message to those who would commit violent crimes targeting their fellow citizens that such acts will not be tolerated and that help is available for all those who wish to break the cycle of violence and gang activity,” Holder said from the podium.

A key tactic for Project Longevity is the “call-in,” a sit-down meeting between gang members, social service providers, and law enforcement. On a Monday evening in November, the Hall of Records was likely the safest and most dangerous place in the city as twenty-five members 29

JAJUANA COLE, 13

The Murders of New Haven: A Map

31 Dickerman Street, June 2006

Each marker on this map of New Haven represents a muder that took place within the last three years. The locations of Jajuana Cole’s, Angel Rovira’s, and Julian Ellis’ murders are highlighted in the pop-outs.

ANGEL ROVIRA, 30

JULIAN ELLIS, 17 The corner of Lloyd & Exchange Streets, Fair Haven, June 2007

Graphic by Susannah Shattuck; map by Google

Between 784 George St. and 135 Derby Ave, June 2007

of two rival gangs filed in for separate meetings. No longer relying on sweeps to incarcerate gangbangers, Project Longevity offered them a choice. It saw the teenagers seated before Vazquez as empowered moral actors, able to choose the right path if offered to them.

Cards were distributed, printed with one telephone number that could set up any social service necessary: job training, substance abuse therapy, counseling.

Though he says he is normally shy as a public speaker, Vazquez delivered an ultimatum to the gang members from the Newhallville and Dwight neighborhoods. “I am sick and tired of the calls,” he said to the groups. Vazquez laid out the two different paths gang members could take: One could save their lives; the other would lead them to rot in prison. If a single gang member is implicated in a shooting or homicide, local, state, and federal authorities will increase surveillance on each member of the gang. He could see the hurt in the young boys’ eyes as he spoke. “Aren’t you tired of doing this? You’re killing yourselves,” he told them.

After the first call-in, only three attendants called Project Longevity’s service providers, but the city’s violence quieted, with no homicides recorded between November and mid-January. The week of the second call-in, two people were killed: one in a botched commercial robbery that detectives are still pursuing leads, and one in a gang-related robbery that Vazquez’s unit quickly solved. (Vazquez could not disclose the name or gang of the suspect, since he is a juvenile.)

Yet some are betting against Vazquez’s hopes for Project Longevity, arguing that the program offers nothing new. Scot X. Esdaile, President of the Connecticut NAACP, told me that police have done stings on gangs for years. “I question the longevity of this project,” Esdaile told me. “The anti-violence initiatives last for a year or so, they start parading around, and then the violence comes back.” In the 1990s, Esdaile says police promised an end to violence when they locked up members of the Jungle Boys. But the shootings did not stop. Police went after the Kensington Street Internationals. Then the Island Brothers. Then the Newhallville Dogs. The strategy did not work. The city continued to bury its young. The solution, Esdaile says, is not only law enforcement and social services, but also jobs. “It is imperative politicians bring back jobs to urban areas,” he told me. “It’s the same situation in Chicago, in Detroit, Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven.”

He is especially concerned about the false hope Project Longevity’s social services may offer. If a boy “cuts his hair, gets rid of his dreadlocks, pulls up his pants, and shines his shoes,” but still can’t find a job, Esdaile worries he may return to the street bitter and more jaded February 2013

than before.

But Vazquez and the department believe this time is different: with the backing of the community’s leaders and service providers, the police department is no longer cracking down on gangs alone. They are not hoping to lock up every one of the city’s gang members: they goal of Project Longevity is that they will not have to lock up anyone.

Vazquez sat in the audience at the second call-in.

After the talks ended, he spoke to one man in his late twenties, whom Vazquez had met years before. The man was hunched over from a back injury. “I don’t know why I’m here,” the man said in Spanish, adding that he had abandoned gang life long ago. Vazquez told him Project Longevity could provide medical aid for his back pain and any other help he needed. Not everyone was there because they were still involved in gangs. “We want you to hear the message,” Vazquez told him, “and we want you to bring the message to your boys.”

Vasquez wanted to help them, and he was optimistic some would change. But he also knew that just one failure was likely to undo an entire group. He didn’t want to bring the force he had gathered against the boys, but he knew he would soon have to. In an odd take on the prisoners’ dilemma, where two prisoners have been replaced by the police department and the city’s gangs, each side has entered into mutual promises; each side depends on the other not abusing its trust. It’s a significant gamble, bet with the lives of New Haven residents: if successful, Project Longevity may save people like Jajuana Cole, Angel Rovira and Julian Wells, but if the violence continues, police will need to devote already strained resources to monitoring the killer’s group.

“If these kids failed to take advantage of what had been offered, I have to do what I have sworn to do for twenty-one years: uphold the law,” Vazquez tells me.

“Whether I like it or not, I will do what I have sworn to do.”

But more than simply a gamble with the city’s safety, Vazquez is making a wager about human nature.

Vazquez wants to believe that if given a chance, people are fundamentally good, that if things had somehow been different for Daniel Carter, Mitchell Joyner, and Troy Jackson, none of them would have pulled the trigger. Vazquez’s faith may seem ideal—quixotic, even—from one who has held the dying and sat across from their straight-faced killers.

With so much at stake, we can only hope he is right.

TNJ Christopher Peak is a senior in Morse College.

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profile.

Kamaria Greenfield

Stephen Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, sits in his office on Science Hill.

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tearns, this is bad philosophy and it’s bad science. Defend yourself.”

It’s the early 1970s, in a small classroom at the University of British Columbia. Halfway around the world, the Vietnam War rages on. In our quiet corner of Canada, however, there’s nothing but the sound of agitated footsteps as Stephen Stearns ’67 paces, waiting to know whether his outrageous Ph.D. proposal will be accepted. The topic is the main problem: Essentially, what Stearns has written proposes the formalization of a completely new area of evolutionary biology—life history evolution.

If the committee decides against him, his career as a scientist is finished before it’s even really begun. ife history evolution theory defines the stages of organisms’ lives and aims to explain why they invest different amounts of time and energy in development, fertility and death. Organisms allocate limited resources intelligently—energy used for foraging, for example, may decrease the amount available for reproduction.

Researchers study traits including age of maturity, age at first reproduction, number of offspring per birth, and duration of juvenile development. Natural selection, the theory says, ultimately works to ensure the largest possible number of surviving offspring.

In a sentence, life history theory is the realm of biology that tells the story of life itself.

Currently the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, Stearns has made some of the most significant contributions to the field.

Just last year, he and his collaborators found evidence that humans are still evolving. They analyzed existing data from a long-term study and concluded that women are evolving to “be on average slightly shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause later than they would in the absence of evolution.” In other words, they found that selection is making sure we have more opportunities to reproduce.

“I walked up and down in the hall for forty-five minutes while they talked,” Stearns says, referencing his extended wait while the Ph.D. committee made their final decision. “The usual time was five to ten minutes.”

It’s a frosty afternoon in January, one of the coldest

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The biggest figure in modern evolutionary biology finds his work and ideas taking on new life in his students.

By Bijan Stephen February 2013

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days we’ve seen this year. We’re sitting across a low table from each other, on worn leather loveseats; he’s wearing a dark blue vest, a lighter blue oxford, a bluishgray sweater, blue jeans, and brown shoes. All the blue complements his faded blue eyes, which smile a bit at the memory.

“When they came out, they said, ‘Well we’ve let you through, but, you know, there were some really serious doubts,” he remembers. (In his quasi-memoir, Designs For Learning, Stearns phrases his conversation with the committee a tad differently: “We cannot tell from this document and this examination whether he is a fool or a genius. I suggest we take the risk and pass him.”)

As he relates this, he begins to fiddle with the pale floral coasters stacked on the table; at first, it seemed like an odd tic for someone generally so poised. His thumbnails, however, with their broad and craggy steppes, betray a nasty habit of nail-biting.

“I sent the introduction to the Quarterly Review of Biology,” Stearns continues. “George Williams, who was editor, published it. It became the most cited paper in life history evolution. Ever.”

That first paper would catapult Stearns to international prominence. (The rest of his Ph.D. thesis—the more conventional part—would not be accepted for publication for another eight years.) Once an undergraduate at Yale, he is now one of the most accomplished evolutionary biologists in the world. Over the course of his long career—which isn’t over yet, not by a long shot—he’s trained and inspired an entire generation of biologists. He’s founded two journals, authored over one hundred papers, and written four books. According to Google Scholar, his papers have been cited 18,513 times.

Aside from scientific research, Stearns takes great pride in his teaching. When I asked him about his former students, he spoke for twelve full minutes, recalling each person’s achievements in detail. Stearns’s students have gone on to important positions in science, in disciplines that range from anthropology to ecology. If—as biology asserts—the point of life is to continue life, then, intellectually, Stearns hasn’t missed the mark. Nowadays, he’s got academic grandkids.

Stearns’s own life mirrors his research. As a budding

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Wikimedia Commons

A mid nineteenth century printed illustration of the stages of a man’s life. The idea of life history evolution began with the work of Charles Darwin.

biologist myself, I like to think of it in evolutionary terms: his influence is as inexorable as the law of natural selection. From his cyclical journey through Yale and back again, Stearns knows that life is best marked by its uneven steps, that the key moments in one’s own life history—juvenile development, finding a mate, age of first reproduction—occur in unexpected places and times.

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tearns’s own story begins in the northwest corner of the island of Hawai’i. He was born in December of 1947, at the end of World War II, and grew up on a sugar plantation beneath the shade of Kohala Mountain, the oldest volcanic peak in the area. (Now, as a Yale professor, Stearns wears Hawai’ian shirts when the weather cooperates, a reminder of home.)

He comes from a family of educators. His aunt Mary had helped the Chinese government set up primary schools in China. When she was kicked out by the Japanese invasion, she went back to Hawai’i and helped the Hawaiian state create its primary school system. His mother was a teacher in Oklahoma—she then moved to Hawai’i, and was a schoolteacher before she met Stearns’s father.

Steve Stearns attended boarding school at Hawai’i Preparatory Academy (HPA)—they count our current president, Barack Obama, as one of their alumni—after fifth grade. HPA has a very good record of sending their students to top colleges on the mainland. Stearns was no exception, enrolling at Yale in 1963 at the tender age of 16. (He skipped sixth grade.)

Stearns grew up at Yale. His life as an undergraduate played out against the turbulent backdrop of the Vietnam War. The atmosphere on campus was incredibly patriotic, maybe even jingoistic, and Stearns had friends on campus who left to go to the front. “In ’68, it was

The New Journal

good to be against the war; in ’66 and ’67 it was not good, he thought would jolt me out of self-sabotage. at Yale, to be against the war. Yale was conservative that Stearns is aware of Yale’s insularity, and the danger way,” he explains to me. that knowing everything (i.e., terminal narcissism) poses: Despite the climate, Steve was an early war protestor.

“I’m especially sensitive to the capacity that Yale has to The fallout drove him out of his society, St. Anthony’s convince ambitious young people that they know what is Hall, and cost him nearly all of his friends during his best for the world. And I think they’re very dangerous.” final year. “I felt a great release when that happened,” he Immediately after he graduated from Yale in 1967, says. “And basically I threw myself into my academics, he won a prestigious fellowship from the National and I had a great semester academically. I really loved Science Foundation to get his Ph.D. in marine biology my courses.” from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, Four years after matriculating at Yale, he received California. He lasted a full six weeks before dropping his bachelor’s degree in biology, graduating with honors out. He didn’t think the requirements were worth as one of the top three students in biology. completing.

“I would say that the basic thing that happened to “I was very aimless,” he said. “I traveled back and me at Yale was that, yes, I did get a good education in forth across the country—I actually drove, in my car, all some things, but Yale made me into a snob. And that the way across North America.” wasn’t good for me,” he says. “I don’t see Yale as an After his brief Kerouackian detour, Stearns moved unmixed blessing by any means.” back to Hawai’i and lived with his Perhaps Stearns found the parents. He got a job at a medical culture of Yale in the sixties clinic in Honolulu, helping to “I think that I was young, stifling or overly intellectual. As a computerize its medical records. sixteen-year-old college student, He was fired after three months insecure, arrogant, he was much more sensitive to because his behavior was and made inappropriate the striking effect Yale’s name apparently disturbing the nurses. often has for people outside its “I think that I was young, insecure, comments,” he said. walls. arrogant, and made inappropriate “So, that was comments,” he said. “So, that was Listening to Stearns talk a kick in the head.” about Yale reminds me of a kick in the head.” our own experience here, and It’s this arrogance, really, that raises a larger question: after defines Stearns. He’s convinced— four short years, what have we and always has been convinced— actually learned? This year, Stearns is my senior thesis that he’s right. I pressed him. advisor. In May, I’ll be graduating in Branford College, “That was where I started to realize that Yale had in the same courtyard where Stearns received his damaged me and that I would have to change what I undergraduate diploma four and a half decades ago. had become at Yale if I wanted to be on good relations I find it an odd parallel, representative of the cyclical with the people I worked with,” he said. “However, I still nature of institutions. Forty-six years hence, will I be a have scars, and I still try to avoid the sorts of experiences Yale professor with a neatly trimmed white beard? (It’s at Yale that damaged me.” He didn’t say what those not outside of the realm of possibility, but I don’t think experiences were.

I’m nearly professorial enough.)

That earlier arrogance, though, has mellowed over I don’t yet know how Yale will affect my life the years. Really, it’s become what it always was: relentless history—my future partner, family, and career—but, so dedication to truth. far, my experiences have been almost uniformly positive.

Life history evolution might say something worth Stearns has been a large part of that. As a mentor, he’s noting, here—it’s explicitly concerned with marking not afraid to be brutally honest. “Get your fucking life life’s milestones, experiences that transition an organism together,” he told me at one of our meetings this year. into the next stages.

I had fallen behind with research for my senior essay During the course of Stearns’s humbling nonand spent most of my time on less academic activities scientific wanderings, there was a bright spot: Steve instead of on reading papers. He apologized later, at met Beverly. A friend and fellow environmental activist, our next meeting, but I told him there was no need.

Tony Hodges, advised Steve to give her a call. On June I think he saw some of himself—perhaps one of the 19, 1970, the two went on a blind date to a Grateful more desultory parts—in me, and reacted in a way that Dead concert. They’ve been together ever since.

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Meeting Bev gave Steve purpose, I think. He found an anchor at a time when he needed centering, when hopping between different jobs and locations wasn’t enough. Life history tactics—and romantic novels— suggest that their meeting was a turning point in both of their lives.

Another turning point: their first son, Justin, was born during the last nine months of Stearns’s Ph.D. research at UBC. Their second, Jason, was born two years later.

Jason is now a writer living in Africa; he’s an expert on the Congo, and his book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters explores the sensitive subject of the seemingly endless civil war. He’s just had a son (Stearns isn’t only an academic grandfather), and is busy ensuring that his life history will indeed evolve. Despite his full schedule, Jason found time to shoot me a short email about his dad.

“In many ways he hasn’t changed much at all––he still comes home every afternoon before six, doesn’t work on Sundays, watches football with the sound off (he hates advertisements and doesn’t like the commentators much), beats us all at chess, and cooks a mean steak.”

Now, I’ve never had a Stearns steak, but I can only assume they’re made with love. Stearns loves his work, but he’s always put his family first. He’s never worked nights or weekends, and has always been there for his boys.

“I was home with my boys when they were growing up; we didn’t have a TV, we read to them at nights, I was with them for Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and all of that kind of stuff. And that’s irreplaceable,” he said.

“Things happen to you when you get out of college that cut much closer to the bone of what life and death are all about.”

When Jason and Justin were 9 and 11, respectively, the family crossed the Atlantic, leaving their home in Portland and settling in Basel, Switzerland.

The move was difficult for the family. His sons in particular did not acclimate to the new school system, struggling with learning in a different language. They had moved to the city because Steve had taken a new job there, and he felt guilty that they had trouble adjusting.

As he cooked dinner one night six months after they had arrived in Basel, Steve had a heart attack.

At the time, he didn’t know what had happened, and shrugged it off. But the next day, he couldn’t walk to work and was sent to the ER. He was hospitalized for three weeks. The doctors told him it was due to stress, which wasn’t surprising: in addition to the move, Steve’s father had recently died and Steve’s job required him to be able to lecture in German within two years.

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In Swiss culture, academia is highly regarded; professors are like tiny gods, with complete power over their domains. Naturally, this leads to god-sized expectations from subjects. Managing this academic pressure along with many others, Stearns was overwhelmed. His work was taking a toll on his health.

“While recovering from this near-death experience I realized that one of the reasons I was so stressed was that I was unconsciously responding to the expectations of my students and staff that I ought to fit their picture of a ‘Herr Professor Dr.’,” Stearns said. “I was not a Swiss professor; I was a kid from a sugar plantation in Hawaii.”

After 17 years of teaching at Basel, he left. In 2000, the Stearns family moved back to Yale at Bev’s behest. Jason and Justin were both in college on the east coast—Jason was an undergrad at Amherst, while Justin was just starting grad school at Princeton—and Bev, a journalist, wanted to stay in one place long enough to hold a salaried position.

“I gave up my job in Switzerland, which was better than my job at Yale in many ways, to give her that last chance to have the reward of recognition in a career,” Stearns said. They miscalculated, however—the print industry was in freefall, and journalism jobs were scarce.

“Within a year of our arrival, Jason was in the Congo and Justin was in Cairo, and Bev was not able to find the job she wanted. We made the best of it.”

S

tearns rarely does original research anymore.

Instead, he primarily teaches. For him, it’s a form of immediate gratification: The way a teacher affects his students is very quickly apparent.

Nowadays, he focuses on the burgeoning field of evolutionary medicine, the intersection of evolutionary biology and medical science. As a discipline, it promises new treatments and therapies for many different diseases.

He teaches both a seminar course and a lecture course on the subject at Yale, and they’re perennially rated very highly on those all-important course evaluations.

In many ways evolutionary medicine is a natural segue from life history evolution. If life history theory tells the stories of life, then evolutionary medicine uses these stories to inform centuries of medical science.

The breadth of application is stunning, and potentially life-saving. For example, researchers have discovered a new method of treating autoimmune diseases—multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, among others—using worms generally found in pigs.

At Yale, Stearns’s methods of instilling the joy of discovery in his students have received university-wide praise. In 2011, he was awarded the DeVane prize for The New Journal

student interaction with research—not simply through distinguished undergraduate teaching, given solely on reading papers, but also in discussion with the authors the basis of student nominations. themselves. When the authors visited, students were His skill as a professor is the product of years of required to attend dinner immediately following class, experience, from places as diverse as UC Berkeley, Reed with the notion of speaking about concepts discussed in College, and the University of Basel. He has pioneered class in a more informal setting. new teaching methods, which he uses in the evolutionary Like Gregg, I took the yearlong seminar in the spring medicine seminar, all designed to allow students more of my junior year and fall of my senior year. During autonomy over their own learning experiences. my conversation with Gonsalves, we reminisced about Perhaps more importantly, his students and the course—guest professors, favorite topics, Stearns’s colleagues love him. On a snowy afternoon in February, classroom manner—and I was surprised to note that the I spoke with Gregg Gonsalves ’11, an AIDS activist course’s DNA had not changed.

Gonsalves and I got and Eli Whitney student. When I met him, his face was the same thing out of it, I think.

We were treated as full wrapped up in a multicolored scarf to protect it from colleagues, and expected to take the same amount of the cold. He’s shorter than me, maybe 5’8”, and speaks pleasure from learning as our teachers. with a very gentle voice. As an undergraduate at 40, he For Stearns, the course fuses teaching and research took Stearns’s introductory biology lecture course and in a way that satisfies his unbridled curiosity. He may was immediately hooked. And benefit more from it than we do. he was in the first cohort of the “After about a decade and a evolutionary medicine seminar in half of feeling like a butterfly in 2010.

The breadth of application a harness trying to change the “I’m almost double your direction of a supertanker, I’m age. Over the course of your life, is stunning, and potentially discovering that the supertanker you meet lots of mentors,” he life-saving: for example, is starting to change direction said. “Steve was one of the most itself,” he said, when I asked him important ones.” researchers have discovered about how he saw his role in Gonsalves is currently a new method of treating advocating evolutionary medicine. working on mathematically “I’m not sure that the butterfly modeling infectious diseases. autoimmune diseases— had anything to do it, but there’s It’s hard science, and he credits multiple sclerosis and at least more movement.”

Stearns—specifically the But Steve’s accolades, seminar—with helping him realize Crohn’s disease, among impressive as they are, don’t that intensive scientific research others—using worms totally describe who he is.

Two was within his intellectual reach. things drive him: his ability to “Steve basically sucked me generally found in pigs. effect change in the world for into the world of evolutionary the better, and his dedication to biology and evolutionary inspiring the same desire in his medicine, and I found it students. absolutely transfixing,” he said. “I “What I really believe in, as a faculty member, is mean, I was about to go and take my partner and move that we gain tremendous leverage on the kind of impact to Europe, work in a lab, live in some Parisian garret, we have on the world, if we can change young people’s and work on HIV tolerance in monkeys. Steve had that minds and emotional states for the better, when they’re kind of force.” He didn’t end up going, but he’s stayed young,” he said.

“That affects the whole rest of their life. in New Haven to pursue a PhD in the epidemiology And I now, at the age of 66, know that it actually works!” of microbial diseases and take a position as co-director Fitting, I think, for a guy interested in telling the of the Yale Law School/Yale School of Public Health stories of life.

Global Health Justice Partnership.

Stearns teaches the seminar with a number of other professors from different areas (though most are from E&EB). The guest professors are a selling point for the students, said Paul Turner, the chair of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department and co-director of the TNJ evolutionary medicine seminar. The class emphasizes Bijan Stephen is a senior in Branford College.

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interview.

Andrew Nelson

An Interview with Ted Hoagland

On January 2, Ted Hoagland sat down with me in his house in Martha’s Vineyard. Our conversation ranged from his work with animals in the circus as a young man to his travels to places including Alaska and the Sudan—and his writing process. For six decades Ted Hoagland has keenly observed the intersection between the natural world and the constructed one. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Hoagland has received numerous awards including a National Magazine award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. His contemplative essays often dwell on the disappearance of nature and animals in daily life—what has been called “the end of nature.”

Juliana Hanle: As an author of more than twenty novels, essay anthologies, and works of non-fiction, what advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Ted Hoagland: I’d emphasize finding what you love and seeking it out, because you’ll find that there’s not a whole lot of competition for what you love.

For example, when I wrote [Cat Man], the novel about the circus, there weren’t a whole lot of people looking to write books about the circus. And when I wrote [The Circle Home], my boxing book, there weren’t other boxing books that took my view of it.

And when I wrote [Notes from the Century Before], that travel book in British Columbia, there was no one else doing that. The year was 1966, before all the development, all the logging, had screwed up what was virgin when I was there. There wasn’t anyone else travelling around. There was no competition.

The book I wrote about Alaska is very different from [essayist John] McPhee’s primarily because mine is 38

a love story. I fell in love with a nurse there who was in charge of all the tuberculosis in the state—in charge of patient care. We landed on rivers in floatplanes and on snow in ski planes. There was a lot of hostility toward white people in a lot of these villages, so if I had landed there alone I would have been beaten up. It’s a joyful book; it’s very personal.

When you find out what you’re interested in (and I’m not talking about scientists here), for an artist, when you find what you love, there’s no competition. It’s just yourself.

JH: In the essay collection Sex and the River Styx you write, “dissent is essential.” How would you suggest incorporating political dissent into journalism?

TH: I wouldn’t want to be a newspaper reporter.

One of their founding principles is that they have to interview everyone in a non-partisan way without insulting them. If I’m interviewing someone whose The New Journal

views I find repulsive I don’t want to have to keep a neutral face and ask a neutral question and then write down an answer that I find offensive.

JH: So, if you use the tools of a magazine essayist to write a story about a particular issue, could you do the same thing as an activist?

TH: I write angrily and powerfully as best I can on the end of nature all the time.

I mean, it’s not going to accomplish anything—I understand that. If it’s in The Nation it will be read by 60,000 people or something. It won’t win any votes in Congress. It’s not going to reverse sea rise or save the rhinoceros or elephant from the ivory trade. But at least I’m speaking out.

JH: Is writing about the end of nature inherently hopeless?

were so rich and wonderful and fascinating that I realized, “This is so good that I should just focus on this journal. If I go back to New York and try to convert this into a novel I’ll just screw it up.” I was smart enough to realize that this book should not be sacrificed to some future dream.

As soon as I finished [Notes From a Century Before], instead of picking up my pen to write a great American novel, I started writing essays about New York. I wrote about my neighborhood in Greenwich Village. I wrote about tugboats. I got the publicity guy to let me spend two weeks on a tugboat, night and day.

In fiction you invent the world; in essays you describe the world.

TNJ Juliana Hanle is a senior in Davenport College and an Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

TH: It’s complex. For the red wolves that I’ve written about, for example, it’s very sad. It’s an elegy and the ending does fit my title of “Lament the Red Wolf.” But on the other hand, the title of my short story “The Final Fate of the Alligators” turned out not to be accurate. You know at that time in the seventies it seemed they would be extinct because it was legal to hunt them for their hides. But organizations like the Audobon Society, World Wildlife Fund, Sierra, and the Wilderness Society managed to pass federal and state laws to stop the hunting.

JH: Around 1969 you realized you were an essayist not a novelist—what was that process like?

TH: I was still trying to write a great American novel, a twentieth century great American novel. A friend of mine pointed out to me a very simple thing: we already had a great American novel written about the sea, namely Moby Dick, which I’ve taught many times, but we don’t have any great American novel written about the frontier.

So I looked on a globe of the world and I found a town called Telegraph Creek in northwestern British Columbia. I found this little town, it had two hundred people but it showed on the map because it was the only town for hundreds of miles around. It was only reachable by riverboat, 165 miles up river. I didn’t make any preparations, because that’s part of the story, you parachute in, so I got off the boat and told people, “I need a place to stay.”

I worked eighteen hours a day. These interviews February 2013

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the rest is commentary: new work on ancient jewish texts April 28, 2013 • Greenberg Conference Center, 391 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT

8:15 – 8:45 am Breakfast

1:30 – 2:45 pm Lunch

8:45 am Welcoming remarks

III: Chair: Dale Martin (Yale University)

9:00 am Hindy Najman (Yale University) Loren Stuckenbruck (University of Munich) I. Chair: Joel Baden (Yale University)

9:15 am Matthias Henze (Rice University) Towards a History of Early Jewish Literature: 2 Baruch in the Context of Early Jewish and Christian Writings 10:15 am Liv Lied (Norwegian School of Theology) Textual Transmission and Liturgical Transformation of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra in Syriac Monasticism II. Chair: Christina S. Kraus (Yale University)

11:30 am Hindy Najman (Yale University) Robin Darling Young (University of Notre Dame) Between Ezra and Uriel: The World of 4 Ezra 12:30 pm Karina Martin Hogan (Fordham University) Burned Books and Fiery Inspiration: Ezra as Restorer of the Scriptures in 4 Ezra and Later Traditions

3:00 pm Loren Stuckenbruck (University of Munich) Postscript on a Commentary: 1 Enoch as Moving Text 4:00 pm Annette Reed (University of Pennsylvania) The Astronomical Book, the Book of the Watchers, and the History of Jewish Writing IV: Chair: Gregory E. Sterling (Yale University) 5:15–6:45 pm Participants: John Collins (Yale University) Ben Wright (Lehigh University) Adela Collins (Yale University) Steven Fraade (Yale University) 6:45 pm – Closing Remarks Steven Fraade (Yale University) 7:00 pm Drinks 7:15 pm Dinner

For more information contact Renee Reed 203.432.0843 renee.reed@yale.edu To register please visit https:/yalesurvey.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9SIDGBpyLpk1xUp Co-sponsored by the Judaic Studies Program at Yale and the Department of Religious Studies Conference made possible by the William and Miriam Horowitz Fund

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