Volume 45, Issue 1

The New Journal

Volume 45, No. 1

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

September 2012

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM MANUAL LABOR? * THE NEVER-ENDING TASK: REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT September 2012

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Publisher Whitney Schumacher Editors-in-Chief Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Managing Editors Benjamin Mueller, Cindy Ok Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Online Editor Lindsey Uniat Senior Editors Nicholas Geiser, Helen Knight, Nikita Lalwani, Sanjena Sathian Associate Editor Eric Boodman, Sophia Nguyen Copy Editors Cassie DaCosta, Justine Yan Staff Writer Caroline Durlacher

The New Journal www.thenewjournalatyale.com To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph, e-mail: editors@thenewjournalatyale.com

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

Cover photograph: Ryan Caro; Design: Juliana Hanle 2

The New Journal

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

Vol. 45, No. 1 September 2012 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

and New Haven

FEATURES 10 Taking Refuge

A persistent advocate for the unsettled brings New Haven’s refugees home.

by Alex Chituc

20 Mind in Hand Is there a place for manual labor in higher education?

by Laura Blake

STANDARDS 4 Letter from the Editors 6 Points of Departure 30 Snapshot River People

by Eric Boodman

16 Photo Essay Old Guns

by Sarah Eckinger

34 Personal Essay Love, At First Sight

by Sophia Nguyen

38 Endnote A Conversation with David Samuels 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.

September 2012

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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Readers, This summer, one of The New Journal’s writers was accused of fabricating sources during her internship at a national newspaper. Our first reaction was surprise: why would an author fail to source? But the problem seems endemic to journalism, which raises questions about how publications should ensure readers trust what they print. Our experiences in the last few months made us realize the importance of fact checking in news and we decided to create a fact-checking process of our own at TNJ. TNJ published the article in question, Liane Membis’ “Dreaming On,” in the February 2011 issue, two editorial boards before our own. The piece’s veracity came into question in late June when Membis was fired from the Wall Street Journal. The Huffington Post had picked up “Dreaming On” soon after it was first published, and the news outlet removed the article from its site.

Soon after we found out about the accusations against Membis, we began fact-checking her work for TNJ. The article included testimonies from two undocumented Yale students and had received significant attention and acclaim for its relevance and honest portrayal. Membis had granted the two sources anonymity, which understandably raised further suspicion of the article. But TNJ independently verified both the existence and testimonies of the sources.

We contacted and received verifications from nearly all of the piece’s sources, with two notable exceptions. One source said she had never talked with the author. Membis told us this was a misattribution — an editing error — and we did independently verify that the quote belonged to another source. The second source has chosen not to speak with us, and there is little we can do about that. At the time of publication, we can neither confirm the accuracy of the piece nor refute it. The lesson seems clear: TNJ should have fact-checked before the piece went to publication.

So TNJ has decided to make a new commitment to its writers and readers. We are working to implement an effective but lightweight fact-checking system to cultivate a culture of accuracy among our writers. We have verified that none of the sources in the pieces published in this issue have been fabricated.

In handling allegations of inaccuracy, we are in good company. This summer, reporters Jonah Lehrer at The New Yorker, Fareed Zakaria at Time, and most recently Niall Ferguson at Newsweek came under suspicion for plagiarism or fabrication.

Why is this so ubiquitous? As Craig Silverman of The Poynter Institute reported, some of the most highly respected news outlets began to reduce or remove their fact-checking operations in the 1990s. Once a sign of a dedicated publication, a checking department is now a luxury.

Without a second line of factual defense, it is a writer’s integrity that compels him or her to report responsibly — integrity that editors at TNJ and at other publications have trusted almost absolutely. Indeed, we still have little reason to expect anything less than absolute honesty from our writers. We have no proof that our writers have falsified or plagiarized articles published in TNJ. But in light of this spate of accusations, we think it is important to have a support system to verify our writers’ work throughout the editing process.

Plagiarism and fabrication are often patterns. It is our responsibility to prevent them from our entering our pages. Every other month, we work with dedicated, intelligent writers whose articles highlight important issues for our readership. As people of the news, we are interested in truths.

Sincerely, Juliana Hanle and Aliyya Swaby Editors-in-Chief

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The New Journal

September 2012

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On the Fence “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.”

-Henry David Thoreau Uncertainty and chance are beginning to feel familiar to many Americans. The experiences of the last four years have left their mark on the American psyche and seem to be defining this fall’s coming election.

These conditions can also be fournd in one New Haven resident’s new board game. In “Generations,” a single roll of the dice can undo anyone’s hard-won success. Through a mixture of prudence, cooperation, and good luck, players chart the

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lives of their avatars, negotiating the advantages or disadvantages that they arbitrarily received at birth. They have power over their fortunes only to the extent that they have the power to vote.

Over the last nine months, J.R. Logan, the director of new media at the United Way of Greater New Haven, has been developing this more sophisticated, high-stakes version of “Life.” The paper-and-die game of life, death, or poverty offers far more futures for its players than the bourgeois options and risks that its precursor permits.

Logan’s game grew out of a tradition of pedagogical board games at United Way, where staffers often use simple games to explain the workings of charitable fundraising

to prospective donors. “I’ve always believed in the power of games to educate,” Logan said. For its part, “Generations” teaches players about the tension between present and future generations, and between selfinterest and the good of society.

When I met him at his apartment, he showed me the game’s earliest renderings—a simple spreadsheet printout, full of handwritten annotations and rule changes. Even after designing a sturdier version through MakeHaven, New Haven’s collaborative workshop for tinkerers and inventors, Logan and his friends are still adding to the library of events that may befall characters in the board game. “You are hit by a bus,” reads one of the more tragic cards a player might draw. Players can also die by skydiving. Players must choose among candidates with different rankings of priority on three major categories: education, health, and the economy.

In an initial “primary round,” players with more money automatically have more political power. The top challenger gets to face the incumbent in a general election, and each player gets one vote.

As with real elections, the game’s elections present both short-term and long-term choices for players.

For example, a candidate could reduce health care in the short run, while ensuring permanent wealth for players with incomes above a certain threshold. All candidates’ platforms make immediate changes to the society, but also change a separate, “baseline” measure of the three categories. The next round inherits the baseline resulting from the previous game, altering their starting conditions for the next round of votes.

In one particular instance, Logan recalls, players in one round kept electing leaders committed to improving education and health who were also negligent toward the economy. In the following rounds, The New Journal

Katharine Konietzko

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

players found they had fewer economic opportunities. They were annoyed by their new limitations, and didn’t understand why they should bear the price of an earlier generation’s mistakes. But that’s precisely the point: “Generations” works so that players are chosen for, choosing for themselves, and choosing for others.

The biggest difference between “Generations” and a real election is the absence of the party system in the game. “The candidates presented in the game are randomly chosen, so there’s more variation,” Logan notes.

“But the game reflects our actual political tradeoffs between short-term and long-term interests.”

Logan perceives two broad groups of players: “mechanical” and “principled.” Mechanical players are determined to maximize their individual outcomes, while principled players advance a particular ideology even to their own detriment. This second group “becomes very emotionally attached to the outcome of the game,” while the first group seems to stay cooler and detached, Logan said. Politically opinionated or partisan players do not necessarily fall into the second group.

Logan is Canadian by birth and retains only a hint of an accent in the way he says “about.” His enthusiasm for his native country’s politics shows in the game, for example, in the cards that offer a player the chance to purchase plush health insurance.

Logan freely admits the game reflects his political inclinations—if voters followed principle rather than selfinterest, they’d come to support the social democratic policies that he favors and believes realize everyone’s long-term interests. The principled player will eventually make the best choice, which, for Logan, means a social democratic agenda.

For this fall’s Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the “best choice” relies on entirely different September 2012

assumptions, but his campaign now seems to share Logan’s logic. He has specifically addressed the mechanical voter, asking individuals whether they are better off than they were four years ago. His campaign has hammered away at the public perception of the state of the economy in the hope of implicating President Barack Obama by association. This approach reflects a dominant view in social science that economic performance predicts the outcome of presidential elections.

Forecasting models largely

assume that the economic man, homo economicus, will be voting on November 6.

But in picking Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has shifted from his earlier reliance on pocketbook issues. His recent focus on welfare, entitlements, and deficits reflects the Romney campaign’s realignment with the principles of small-government conservatism.

Traditionally, candidates pivot toward the center in the general election to appeal to the median voter. But now the Romney campaign, wants to frame this election as a battle for the soul of the country, not just a referendum on four years of economic news, as noted in an August 28 article in the National

Journal. Will this new, ideological rhetoric appeal beyond his party’s own base?

It’s difficult to predict how appealing to voters’ ideologies will work out in the real elections, but the board game suggests Romney’s tactic may be a smart one. One of Logan’s most interesting observations suggests that even without parties, voters will still behave ideologically rather than self-interestedly. The question is, do this election’s undecided voters—the mystical 6 to 8 percent, according to Gallup’s daily tracking poll— vote like the non-partisan players of “Generations”? Are undecided voters simply principled non-partisans, or, are they lost souls, unsure of what is mechanically best for them?

Polls consistently show that a large majority of Americans feel the country is on the “wrong track” and worry that their children’s generation will be worse off than they are. Uneasy feelings, of course, don’t coalesce into votes on their own. It takes a narrative to interpret and give coherence to voters’ confusion. In elections like the upcoming November’s, there is opportunity for that narrative to recreate itself every few months. In the elections of “Generations,” voters’ decisions are made only minutes apart.

– Nicholas Geiser

Gateway Connection For ritual’s sake, it took about a dozen pairs of scissors to cut the blue ribbon and open New Haven’s newest institution of learning, located four blocks away from Yale’s Old Campus.

When the ribbon fell, the couple hundred attendees cheered. The celebrations, attended by an estimated total of eight hundred people, would 7

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Katharine Konietzko

continue for at least seven hours.

The public ceremonies August 29 marked the opening of Gateway Community College, whose student population is currently comparable to Yale’s in number. The main campus’s move downtown, to a building just four blocks from Old Campus, is expected to increase Gateway’s enrollment capacity to roughly fifteen thousand. It took nine years to plan and construct the 360,000 square foot space and the building is LEEDcertified, meeting US Green Building Council standards for sustainability.

At the ceremony, Gary Cole, a 1976 Gateway graduate, ate at a table outside where he could follow the festivities and compare the smaller Long Wharf campus to the new building. A disabled veteran in his late 60s, he said he attended school with fellow veterans who were all taking advantage of their benefits. Cole, who pays the Gateway tuition for his granddaughter, spent the grand opening talking to other Gateway alumni, appreciating those who remembered him and remembered their former professors.

“I hope they get involved with Yale,” he said of the school’s new campus. “Because it’s downtown, they can get affiliated.”

The question remains: how will Yale interact with the community college’s main campus move to the corner of Church and George?

One Gateway alumnus is sure that these new faces, while bringing business to downtown New Haven, won’t be wildly welcome to mingle with the Yalies.

“They always looked down on us,” said Sasha Lay, who graduated from Gateway’s North Haven campus in May and has started at Southern Connecticut State University. “Yale students really like to keep to themselves.”

The former Director of Career Services at Gateway, Robert A. Miles,

called Yale and Gateway “different universes.” The average age of a Gateway student is 29, he said, and the majority of students attend part-time to get their Associate degrees. Still, Miles, who retired in 2009, is hopeful that the two schools will partner— socially, philosophically, academically, economically—and that Yale will mindfully create space for Gateway in New Haven.

When asked whether Yale supports Gateway financially, Lauren Zucker, a representative of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, responded, “Yes, we are supportive of Gateway and continue to work closely with them.”

Hundreds gathered to hear speeches by many involved in the school, including executives involved in the construction, the President of the school, and politicians Mayor John DeStefano, Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, State Senator Martin Looney, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Malloy stressed that the celebration was in honor of “not bricks and mortar, but our future” and that the opening of the Church Street location was a step, not an end.

He spoke for Connecticut when he said, “we will have no progress in this state unless we throw our shoulder to the wheel, unless we produce the kind of product in this state that will allow us to compete with the rest of the world.”

While most listened to the series of speeches, many, like Cole, wandered the school’s halls, filled for the occasion with booths for various New Haven staples.

At one booth sat Peter Johnson DIV ‘02, who wore a bowtie, and said that he hoped to start Christian programming at the college.

Some smaller booths ran out of food, and free samples abounded. The cafeteria was also up and running. An older woman, wearing a cap, asked for the price of a sandwich. It was free, and, pleased, she ate her sandwich at an available table. For those who grew hungry, the Boar’s Head booth served a selection of packed sandwiches while Temple Grille took orders for custommade salads. One mother sat by the kiosks with her two children outside the auditorium, where only standing space was left. Inside, the Elm City Co-op Market laid out fresh apples across from a salon’s hair braiding The New Journal

station, and hushed chatter came from the new, high-ceilinged cafeteria.

The afternoon brought a series of group tours through the ninety classrooms, library, culinary center, and various other facilities. It looked very different from Gateway’s previous main campus—the tour attendees enjoyed pointing out different academic spaces.

Like Yale’s campus, the building creates its own unique space in downtown New Haven. The standardization of form and style that dominates its two blocks sets it apart from the rest of the neighborhood.

However, its spaces, unlike Yale’s, are centered around the indoors.

The city’s leaders hope the new addition to the skyline will become a symbol of community and hope for New Haven. “While there is another college downtown, Gateway Community College will be the first college they will see and it will be the college that will serve our families, our businesses and deliver our possibilities and opportunities,” DeStefano said at the event.

– Cindy Ok

September 2012

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Photos by Brianne Bowen

The New Journal

Taking Refuge

By Alex Chituc

A persistent advocate for the unsettled brings New Haven’s refugees home.

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Photos by Brianne Bowen

n 1989, a Palestinian extremist walked into an office in the West Bank and kidnapped Chris George. George had been working for Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization that provides food, medical care, and education for children in need.

“He liked me,” George said of his kidnapper. “He was just using me for political ends.” George was a

September 2012

prominent American, and the extremist had been to the organization’s office to discuss the construction of a kindergarten in the man’s refugee camp. After thirty-five hours, George was released and given a thirteen-page letter for then President George H. W. Bush criticizing US support of Israel.

The Israeli secret service killed the extremist a week later.

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After his release, George said in an interview, “They were nice to me.

I practiced my Arabic during this period, I ate my food – fish.” George handles things stoically, which has also helped him navigate the uncertain terrain of refugee resettlement in New Haven.

“Again? 3-2-1?”

“3-2-1.”

The documentary crew, three students from Southern Connecticut University, started filming outside the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services building, or IRIS. George, now IRIS’s executive director for the last seven years, was wearing white khaki pants, a gray shirt, black shoes, and a brown belt. He has gray hair, wears glasses, and has a mustache.

The pin on his shirt said “support refugees,” in bright pink letters. He wore a black digital watch and used the earbuds on his iPhone to make phone calls.

“Welcome to IRIS,” he said, “and we are your refugee integration service.” The crew stopped filming and they walked inside the building.

George started to clean up the mess in the front room, which was filled with plastic bags full of clothes and scattered papers and magazines.

“We get a lot of donations,” he said with a laugh. IRIS has served almost four thousand refugees from Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia over the past twenty-five years, and each year they work with about two hundred new clients, about a third of all the refugees who enter Connecticut, George told the filmmakers. Since 1980, Connecticut has resettled twenty-eight thousand refugees.

According to the US Department of State, three million refugees have come to the US since 1975, more than twice the combined total number of refugees accepted by the nine other countries with resettlement programs.

But the US still only resettles less than 12

one percent of the 16 million refugees worldwide.

Reading those numbers, I was struck by the enormity of the task of resettlement. I couldn’t help but think of the old tale about an old man who walked down the beach and saw a child returning washed-up starfish to the ocean. When the old man told the child his actions wouldn’t make a difference, the boy picked up another starfish and threw it back in saying, “I made a difference for that one.” I have trouble understanding how anyone can have that child’s attitude toward such astounding numbers. Where does that sense of duty and obligation come from? But George seems less interested in speaking to me about the source of his relentless commitment than about the necessity of this work for the refugees he assists. His steady approach helps his clients find routine in a process loaded with insecurity.

Inside the IRIS building, there were two Iraqi refugees sitting in the main reception office and four African refugees in a large room to the side, working with a volunteer to fill out applications. The Iraqis appeared to be husband and wife, middle aged.

George asked for their permission to be filmed, but they shook their heads. The camera crew moved into the office, and they started filming with the refugees behind them. “Our job is to help them be self-sufficient,” George said. “We are so fortunate to get incredible volunteers: high schools, synagogues, even our clients are volunteers.” In the food pantry down the hall, families can come in to get two bags of groceries every Wednesday. Since it was Thursday, the room was empty.

A woman walked up to George and said, “So far so good?”

“So far so great.”

The crew asked him to stand by a wall near the reception area and give them an introduction to the work IRIS does. George smiled and began

to deliver a speech on what they do at IRIS. A large part of George’s job is public speaking and outreach. He’s a comfortable and relaxed public speaker, but he stumbled at the end and the crew stopped filming. They asked him to try again, and George gave the same speech, word for word, the words seeming to come naturally: “A refugee is someone who has a well founded fear of persecution.

Hopefully, some go back to the country they fled from if the persecution ends.

Some integrate in the country they fled to. And some come here and work with us. We meet them at the airport, send them to a furnished apartment.

We help these new Americans get off to a good start. That’s our job, to make them self-sufficient. This is a lifesaving program.”

George let the film crew take some footage around the office and then sat down on a couch in the reception area next to me.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wish we were back to the no-press policy, but I just got off the phone with a major apartment complex. They’d never heard of refugee integration. They’re giving us a great price for a three- to four-bedroom apartment, and they want to do more business with us.”

George said this isn’t a typical day at the IRIS office, and I asked what a typical day would be like. He smiled and said that there is nothing routine about refugee resettlement.

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met George weeks earlier at a local café. His shirt-sleeves were rolled to his elbow and he was carrying a worn-out planner. He apologized for being late; one of IRIS’ clients had called because the client’s roommate, an elderly refugee from Iraq, had left without telling anyone where he’d gone. George went over to the apartment, but there was nothing he could do. All business, George opened his planner on the table: he would be at a refugee resettlement conference The New Journal

with three hundred other nonprofits all of next week, a meeting at Quinnipiac on April 10, a meeting in new London at 7 p.m. three days later, and on Monday, he would be welcoming a family of seven from Darfur.

“You could come to that,” he said. George gave me a list of his colleagues to talk to while he was away, and after second thought added Ron Berger to the list, his best friend since third grade. Berger knows him well, and was the only person on the list George didn’t know from work.

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George sighed. “I was abducted, I guess it was a kidnapping. It was only thirty-five hours. I don’t know if I’d call them terrorists. It was very short.

I would never ever put myself in the very unlucky number of people who were held for a long time. I was never tortured, they treated me very well.” It was an uncomfortable subject and he was visibly upset when he told me the extremist was killed a week later.

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shocked, and now so was I. In the few weeks I had spent talking to George about the significant details of his life, he had never mentioned being kidnapped.

elly Hebrank started working at IRIS eight months before George took over as executive director, and has known him since he interviewed for the job. “From the beginning,” Hebrank said, “he made the impression of having energy.” She explained to me that the general attitude at IRIS had been that because immigration was highly controversial, they would work diligently, but quietly. George changed that. Though George had complained to me earlier about the elimination of a nopress policy, he was the one who had gotten rid of it. “Before Chris,” Hebrank said, “If I said I worked at IRIS, nobody knew what I was talking about.”

I asked Hebrank if she knew him outside of the office. She laughed and said, “We work a lot.”

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In the few weeks I had spent talking to George about the significant details of his life, he had never mentioned being kidnapped.

called Berger on a Thursday morning. “Can you hear me okay? I’m in my truck,” he said.

Berger teaches a course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and he drives there every week from his home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

He worked as a public school teacher for ten years, and works as the Chief Program Officer of Expeditionary Learning, an organization that opens schools and partners with existing ones in urban and rural schools to improve the quality of struggling school districts.

Berger said that even as a boy growing up, George was magnetic.

“Chris has a mythic and heroic quality,” he said. George was an all-American athlete and ran crosscountry before being recruited for the lacrosse team, where he was cocaptain and an all-star player, a state champ in high school and the first string all American midfield. “Every year,” Berger said, “Chris goes back to Montclair for the alumni lacrosse game. They play a game against guys who are twenty-eight or twenty-one.

He’s fifty-eight and plays against them.

He has this great 1970’s lacrosse shirt, the same shirt he wore when he was in high school. He’s playing this alumni September 2012

game in this old antique shirt.” His long-term loyalty to the team shows a doggedness of character, a man who never gives up.

Berger recalled getting into his truck in 1989, turning on his radio and hearing the first story on NPR. It was about George’s kidnapping. He had been the first foreigner kidnapped in Israel for political reasons, making it national news. Berger had been

stopped by George’s office a few days later. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings: a headline from the New Haven Register reads “Iraqi refugees find America challenging,” another, “Wars toll heavy for many Iraqi children,” and finally, “Afghan refugees now happily resettled.” An Indiana Jones hat sits on a basketball on top of a bookshelf in the corner. I asked why he had never told me he was kidnapped by terrorists.

“I don’t like the word terrorist.”

ater that day, George met with me in a small side room down the hall because two of his colleagues were having a phone conference in his office. George told me he wished IRIS had money for a larger building because they don’t have enough office space. Their last building, he said, was about a quarter this size. There was only enough room for their desks and virtually no room for meeting spaces for the refugees. We were in one of the meeting rooms for refugees, which has cinderblock walls, and George was 13

sitting at a white plastic table with folding chairs. He told me that he always makes a point of mentioning Montclair, New Jersey. “It really did have a formative impact on my life,” George said. “It’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now.”

George’s mother, a former nurse, and his father, a former broadcast journalist at ABC, moved to Montclair when George was in the third grade.

His classmates called the their home the “mad scientist house,” because it was giant and broken-down, believed to be haunted. Since George was eight, he would come home from school and work for hours, fixing it up with his father.

In 1972, during the town’s racial desegregation of high schools, George was bussed from the white to the black part of town for school. Navigating racial tension was an early practice for cross-cultural understanding, and it made him develop an appreciation for diversity and tolerance.

George studied history and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania , where he met his wife, Elizabeth, during the first week of school. After graduation, he joined the Peace Corps in 1997, assigned to volunteer in Oman. Elizabeth initially planned on staying in the US to pursue a career in art. “After a few months of desert in the Arabian Peninsula, we decided we did not like being apart.” George said. “Oman is a very conservative country. The only way she could come was if we got married.” They both traveled to Cyprus, where they married in 1978. Elizabeth went back to Oman with him and worked as a darkroom technician in George’s office.

“Montclair was my formative experience. For my children, it was growing up in the West Bank,” George said, referring to his stint there for Save the Children Foundation. The oldest is an associate producer for NPR. She has produced stories in 14

Iraq, Egypt, and in Libya during the fall of Gadhafi. George’s second child is twenty-four and works in Sierra Leon as a Peace Corps volunteer. His youngest studied drama at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, from which he recently graduated.

After two years in the Peace Corps, George returned to Philadelphia, working as a plumber, bartender, and substitute teacher. In 1982, George left for Lebanon, working with Quakers in housing reconstruction in Lebanese villages and refugee camps until 1984.

In 1985, George began working as a director of the Save the Children Foundation, and in 1986 became Director of the Left Bank in Gaza. He worked with Save the Children for nine years. He spent the first half of that time in the West Bank in Gaza, and the second half at the organization’s headquarters in Westport, Conn. After the kidnapping in 1989, Chris stayed for another year before moving back to work as the Acting Director for the Middle East Region. After leaving the organization in 1994, he became director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch until 1996. For the next four years after that, he was a director of the United States Agency for International Development’s legislative strengthening project with the Palestinian Parliament. Then, for three years on a USAID contract, George ran an organization that gave grants to Palestinian non-profits.

From 2003 to 2004, he did volunteer work, consulting, and writing in Connecticut on legislative issues.

George has been at IRIS since 2005.

George has gone back and forth from the US to the Middle East for the last twenty-five years. “You get stuck,” he told me, “Whether you like it or not, the jobs you’re qualified for are in the Middle East.” But George didn’t just get stuck. He has chosen to work in one of the most politically, religiously, and economically sensitive

areas in the world.

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he family of seven from Darfur had arrived at an apartment a few blocks away from a synagogue the night before we met them. Several women from the synagogue had volunteered to help them, and had spent the last week gathering dishware and utensils, arranging the furniture, and gathering clothes. The women had arrived earlier, and George was coming to welcome the family and bring donations. George meets with every refugee IRIS works with.

The apartment was the left half of a white two-story house in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven. A woman from the synagogue stood on the porch as the others grabbed the dinner from their car.

George knocked on the door, and a tall, dark, thin man with a moustache stepped out. He was excited to see George, and they began to speak in Arabic. They smiled, and the man welcomed us inside.

The family fled from Darfur to Egypt in 2006. The two youngest daughters, five-year-old Mariam and two-year-old Aya, had never seen Darfur. That’s how long it can take for a family of refugees to resettle in the United States.

The living room had hardwood floors and was nearly empty except for a sofa and a small bookshelf.

A tall woman wearing a long dress stood by the kitchen door, and a small child poked his head from behind her. George spoke with the woman, and then leaned into the next room, speaking English. The thirteen-yearold son, Badreldin, also spoke English, and George encouraged him to come out and say hello. Small and skinny, he slowly walked to the women. One of the women from the synagogue pulled a picture dictionary from a bag.

He showed it to his mother, and she smiled.

George spoke with the man in The New Journal

Arabic, pointing at the floor then at a table. Finally, the man pointed to the floor. George motioned to me and I followed him outside to the back of his Jeep 4x4. “We’re going to bring the TV inside.” We lifted it together and brought it to where the man had pointed. One of the volunteers was giving the wife a bag of food they had prepared for them. On each of the plastic containers, there was the name of the dish in English and then Arabic; one of the women from the synagogue had used Google Translate to make labels. After everything was brought into the home, the couple walked us to the door and thanked us again. The husband shook hands with George.

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s George drove me back home, I asked him what he had been saying to the family in Arabic. He said, little things, like where to put the TV, introducing the women, telling them they brought food. We were silent for a moment, and George said that they use the immigrant integration experience as a blueprint for refugee resettlement. It’s a difficult process, but it’s always that way. His job was just to make them self-sufficient, because IRIS doesn’t have enough resources to take care of them indefinitely. IRIS resettles them, and the refugees take care of themselves. It is the American Dream: self-reliance, hard work, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

“My grandfather was an immigrant,” George said. His grandfather’s last name was originally Georgacopoulis. “It makes us proud and strong. That’s how it is in America.

It’s very rare to say ‘He didn’t make it.’”

I asked about the missing Iraqi roommate. George explained that the man, who has since moved back to the US, had flown to the Middle East to try to meet with his family in Jordan.

But George wasn’t sure what he would be going back to. I asked if the man’s September 2012

George returns a phone call in his office. leaving like that was discouraging, but George responded stoically that it rarely happens. For a second, I thought I saw a look of defeat as George sighed and watched his boulder roll back down the mountain.

But it was only a second. I knew that whether it was at IRIS or anywhere else, George will always roll it back up again. George was expecting six refugees from Eritrea that needed an apartment, food, clothes, and tutors to teach them English. His refugees needed health insurance,

food stamps, social security numbers, and help filling out job applications.

They needed to learn where to buy groceries, that squirrels are not rats, that dogs are not wild animals, and that joggers aren’t running away from anything. There is nothing routine about refugee resettlement.

TNJ

Alex Chituc is a senior in Silliman College.

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PHOTO ESSAY

OLD GUNS The Winchester Arms Factory New Haven, CT

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Photographs by Sarah Eckinger

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These images were taken at the Winchester Arms Factory, which has stood in New Haven just north of Yale since the late 19th century.

“I think of these photographs as not only a documentation of urban exploration, but also an example of how sometimes the most beautiful images come from those things that have been long forgotten.” – Sarah Eckinger September 2012

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September 2012

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The New Journal

Mind in Hand Is there a place for manual labor in higher education?

Photos by Ryan Caro

By Laura Blake

September 2012

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here is an unspoken understanding that students leaving Yale will find employment that requires them to work with their minds. We didn’t come to this university to train for manual labor. But all my experiences—in the field, in the construction site, and even in the classroom—suggest that physical work can teach a depth of mental strength that we do not acquire in our academic studies.

I’ve spent my summers at farms and summer camps; I’ve cleaned toilets, washed dishes, herded goats, stayed up all night with vomiting eleven-year-olds, picked green beans, braided garlic, and unloaded milk trucks. I’ve never held an unpaid internship or spent a summer at a desk. A month after graduation, I

boarded a plane to Sitka, Alaska, to join a group of Yale students doing construction work at Sheldon Jackson Campus, the new home of Alaska Arts Southeast.

The Sheldon Jackson College on Baranof Island, in the Alaska panhandle, first experienced financial setbacks in the 1980s. In 2007 it closed its doors, leaving the town of Sitka with a beautiful, empty, and quickly deteriorating college campus. In 2011, the campus’s twenty buildings and more than twenty of its acres were given to Alaska Arts Southeast, with the hope that the shuttered classrooms and dormitories would grow into a thriving center for arts and humanities. Hundreds of volunteers donated thousands of work hours and half a million dollars to restore 21

the school, which is now a National Historic Landmark. Jonathan KreissTomkins ’12, who grew up in Sitka, invited Yalies to join in the effort for the summer through a program called Bulldogs on Baranof Island.

This summer, as I watched many of my friends begin their working lives—as teachers, analysts, activists, journalists, law students—I couldn’t help but compare my own form of work to theirs. What was manual labor teaching me? What was I accomplishing? And what did it mean for an Ivy League graduate to choose to install insulation all day?

Two years ago, after a series of jobs on farms, I was certain that I wanted to be a farmer. I loved the work and thought it held important value for society. I knew that I preferred working actively with my body, hands, and mind (even as a summer camp dishwasher) to writing emails, making spreadsheets, and spending the entire day behind a computer screen.

But as I begin the process of building a career and working life, I’ve begun to worry that to choose to farm would be to shirk the responsibilities of my degree in some crucial way.

Though I have long held physical work to be an important part of education, I have come to distrust the rhetoric of “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” and “good work” that dominates many conversations about the value of elite students engaging in manual labor. In an attempt to clarify my own thoughts, I decided to ask these questions to other Yalies who had chosen to join the Sheldon Jackson work crew or had spent time doing manual work elsewhere.

Their answers were thoughtful, varied, surprising, and illuminating, and resonated deeply with my own

attempts to define education and ethical work over the past four years.

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laska is a place that people run away to. In Into the Wild, John Krakauer writes, “Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives.” Though my six-week sojourn to the city of Sitka in the mild, misty southeast isn’t

article “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” it electrified me. Crawford traces his journey from political philosophy Ph.D. to motorcycle repairman and, along the way, makes the argument that concrete work has an intellectual and ethical dimension sorely lacking in our information-age economy. Concrete work, he writes, “answers to a basic human need of the one who does it.”

Meanwhile, the country’s relentless focus on “mind work” and higher education (at an increasingly astronomical cost to students, I might add) is not serving its citizens’ minds or morals. Working with one’s hands cultivates “individual responsibility” in a way that abstract work never can. He wrote of “an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience.” According to Crawford, not only was my individual integrity at stake, but the fate of my community as well: “Work forms us, and deforms us,” he warned, “with broad public consequences.”

After a freshman year spent shuttling between the library, where I scrambled to keep up with my Directed Studies workload, and dorm rooms on Old Campus, where I scrambled to keep up with my classmates’ drinking habits, Crawford’s essay articulated much of the dissatisfaction I felt with my education and my lifestyle.

I’d always been most comfortable when making things, whether it was a knit hat, a clean room, or a wooden box. Yet I struggled to find a way to connect that tactile form of thinking and production to the work that Yale assigned and valued. That summer I interned at the Yale Sustainable Food Project, and spent seven hours a day seeding, weeding, planting and harvesting. I had never been happier.

The reality of repetitive manual work forced me to slow down, to be patient in a way I rarely had to be at Yale.

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comparable to Chris McCandless’s fatal journey into the Alaska bush, I share some of the idealism and escapism that made McCandless such a controversial figure. I like doing manual work because I lose myself in it. These humble tasks have their own unsullied enormity. Call it therapeutic, call it lazy, but I enjoy pulling up weeds for hours or sanding beams all day. There is an element of escapism in conducting hard physical labor— but it also cultivates its own life of the mind. We discovered that the mind and body aren’t so separate after all.

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n May 2009 when I read Michael B. Crawford’s New York Times Magazine

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Many students’ reflections on the work crew echo Crawford’s reasoning.

Again and again they returned to words like “concrete,” “tangible,” and “satisfying.” Manual work like painting, sanding or taking off a roof felt real in a way that schoolwork often didn’t.

Omar Dairanieh ’13 spent two months in SJC’s central auditorium, Richard H. Allen Memorial Hall, before the rest of the work crew arrived, leveling floors for dance studios and

painting brackets. The work, he said, “was exhausting and backbreaking, but it was extremely rewarding. I actually got to see a huge differences in the building; there was noticeable, concrete proof of the work I was doing.” This stood in stark contrast to his experience as a history major. “I spent the last three years at Yale taking theory-heavy courses that all came to similar conclusions: nothing is real or stable or relevant,” Dairanieh said. “As

CHELSEA ANDREOZZI ’12 SAWS BOARDS IN ALLEN HALL.

September 2012

challenging and as interesting as that critical approach may be, it was also really disenchanting.” His experience in Alaska was therapeutic, he said, and allowed him to re-engage in the material world. Manual labor reminded him that “things exist. It seems simple, but it was extremely reassuring.”

The reality of repetitive manual work forced me to slow down, to be patient in a way I rarely had to be at Yale. Roger Schmidt, director of Alaska Arts Southeast and organizer of this summer’s volunteer work, said that one of the main differences between concrete and abstract work is the amount of time it takes, with the former more time-consuming than the latter. Some students had a hard time getting used to the difference. Ira Slomski-Pritz ’14 found the repetitive motions of painting and sanding unenjoyable. “I felt useful because I knew these things had to be done and this was helpful to the campus, but I don’t think that given a choice and if I had more skills I would see much value in going back and doing those jobs.”

I was the kind of child who, when asked to name her favorite activity, answered, “unloading the dishwasher.” I have always found focus and enjoyment in repetitive work. One of the projects I worked on in Allen was sanding tall, laminated cedar beams that stretched from the floor to the rafters. When I flipped the sander switch, I felt vibrations quiver up my arm, from fingertips to shoulder. I pressed it to the wood and swept the machine in circles.

Slowly, the blackened surface of the beam wore away to reveal an amber cedar grain. I worked across the beam horizontally, then up vertically, circling and circling, making my way up the ladder rung by rung. Little piles of sawdust gathered on the floor and stacks of worn sandpaper grew on the worktable. After about half an hour my arm was sore, but as I worked 23

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Sitka Sound, as seen from a home near the Sheldon Jackson Campus.

September 2012

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,either the muscles adapted themselves to the motion, or I got used to the slight ache. The satisfaction came from the repetition, from the mere fact of continuing, from the action of going over every piece of the beam with equal attention. A cut corner would manifest itself as a visible blot. To do a good job, I just needed to be patient, to stick with it. Part of me feels proud of that patience and stamina. That part agrees with Schmidt when he said of repetition, “To me that’s kind of the essence of hard work.

If you want to do something well, you have to do it for a long time, and repetitively.”

But an equally strong part argues back that just because something is satisfying doesn’t make it worthwhile. Abstract work is often unsatisfying because it’s harder to reach a definite conclusion in a specific time frame.

Members of the crew were quick to point out that manual work often required sophisticated, abstract problem solving. We spent two days in mid-July clearing a roof of stones, moss and gravel, then removing waterlogged foam insulation so that the roof could be rewaterproofed and insulated in the coming weeks. A group of volunteers including SlomskiPritz devised a system for safely removing gravel from the roof. It took them three separate arrangements of tarp and cement blocks to create a functional system.

As I listened to Slomski-Pritz describe the process of building the ramp, two things became clear. The first is that it is ridiculous to describe manual work as mindless. The kind of problem solving he talked through is essentially the same as the kind I use when developing an idea for a

paper or solving a problem set. Try one thing. See if it works. When it doesn’t, figure out why not. Try again until you get it right. In the process, you discover something about how a text or a concept or a ramp works.

The second thing I observed is that, as totally unskilled amateurs, the crew had a lot to learn.

For some, construction work meant a chance to explore academic

thinking about how people work and the way groups interact,” Lovelace said. “Working on the construction crew, I brought my psych perspective and was paying attention to how the group worked, what people needed, and how people played off each other.” The work crew provided Lovelace with a group dynamic to explore that was different from the seminar groups and athletic teams she was used to observing at Yale.

She had the chance to observe a group figuring out how to use tools and resources to complete a concrete task.

Dairanieh specifically came to Sitka in large part to complement his work in the classroom, where he has been working with wood as a sculptor and artist for the past year. He was drawn to the renovations because he wanted to learn formal carpentry technique.

Dairanieh said he gained not just woodworking skills, but a sense of responsibility and belonging to the community as well: “I was given a to-do list, a deadline and basic instructions and I, an untrained outsider, was trusted—by the foreman,

by SFAC administration, by Sitka residents—to carry it out, to work on a project the entire community cared deeply about. It was beautiful and humbling.”

Indeed, proponents of manual work assert that one of its major benefits is that it teaches responsibility in an immediate way that abstract tasks cannot. When the product of your work is visible, and you are held directly accountable for it by people you know, you are more inclined—forced, even—to put in your best effort. The thought of embarrassment is powerful. It’s easier to dismiss a paper that you bullshitted

It is ridiculous to describe manual work as mindless. The kind of problem-solving he talked through is essentially the same as the kind I use when developing an idea for a paper or solving a problem set.

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interests in a new setting. Anne Lovelace, a psychology major who plans to attend medical school, at first found her choice to join the work crew difficult to explain to others.

“Construction in and of itself,” she said, “doesn’t really match with my academic interest or my career interest.” But to her surprise, the work crew offered a laboratory unlike any she had encountered at Yale. “A lot of my academic background comes from

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and never have to read again than to ignore a sloppy painting job that you see every day. Manual work forces you to exercise integrity and care.

And these are qualities that we would hope for in our leaders, people in the positions that some Yalies, and other similarly-trained students, may hold one day. Crawford writes, “Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?” Schmidt put the point more mildly, but the sentiment was the same:

“People who are positioned to make large decisions about other people, who aren’t grounded in the tangible activity of other humans, often make really big mistakes.” Powerful people, he argues, need to be anchored in the material world.

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he inherent value of working with one’s hands is complicated by the various situations in which people can execute that labor. I worry that writers like Crawford give too easy an answer to a complex question.

In one of the letters responding to his

article, Deborah Barnbaum and Gene Pendleton pointed out, “Matthew Crawford made it clear that his education and résumé afforded him a great deal of flexibility.” They also pointed out that he decides his own hours, rates, and pace: “Had he been clocking in and out on a factory floor, it is dubious whether he would have sung the praises of working with his hands,” they added.

Crawford comes out of a tradition of writers including Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey, who have advocated for the ethics and politics

Allen Hall, renovated in the early 2000s, has Historic Landmark status.

September 2012

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of working with one’s hands. Critics have condemned these kinds of arguments as removed from the reality of how manual labor gets accomplished today: namely, by machines or by factory workers in the developing world. And indeed two front page New York Times articles from the past week—“New Wave of Deft Robots is Changing Global Industry” and “Made in Bangladesh: Policing the Garment Industry”— support that argument. Crawford faults the “perversity” of the think tank where he once held a job, but he never engages seriously with the reality of most concrete production methods. At best, he is out of touch; at worst, he perpetuates a dangerous fiction that all manual labor is “good,” and good in the same way.

The politics of highly educated young people engaging in manual labor are complicated, especially where class and money are concerned.

The work crew in Sitka was compensated in room and board. All other expenses (including, in my case, a $976.38 roundtrip plane ticket) were our own. I took a month-long job at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp to cover my expenses. Some work crew members spent part of their summer working to finance their trip, but others did not. Work crew jobs certainly could

not cover the $2,700 annual student income contribution to financial aid.

The economic facts of the project raise questions about whether it was limited to those Yalies who were most financially secure, a complicated twist given the class divide between most Yale graduates and most manual workers.

Is there a disingenuous kind of class voyeurism inherent in elite students engaging in manual labor?

There is a host of damaging clichés about manual work—that it’s simple or pure or wholesome—that are important to contend with. I value tremendously the exposure my summers have given me to different viewpoints, lifestyles, and ways of thinking. I also can’t disown the fact that, as someone of enormous educational privilege, I get to choose to do manual work (and usually in beautiful landscapes and cushy circumstances) while many others do so from a lack of alternatives. A friend of mine once said to me, “Laura, people have been struggling to get their hands out of the dirt for hundreds of years. I can’t understand why you are going and putting yours back in.” My parents, a professor and a librarian, support my decisions. But were I from a different background, I imagine they might feel quite differently.

LEFT: YALE STUDENTS HELP PAINT THE YAW ART BUILDING; ABOVE RIGHT: RYAN CARO ’12 DRILLS IN ALLEN HALL. 28

Dairanieh, for example, whose family was uprooted from Kuwait during the first Gulf War, has felt pressure from his father to pursue a secure professional field. Working on Allen doesn’t fit neatly into that trajectory.

“Why a history major at an Ivy League university would choose to do manual labor during the summer rather than, say, pursue a prestigious NYC internship or dedicate the time for thesis research, was incomprehensible to him,” Dairanieh said.

By looking at manual labor exclusively as “good work,” we fetishize labor in damaging ways. Ideally, one would come away from concrete work caring deeply not only about one’s own capacity for responsibility and patience, but also about issues like safety standards, unionization, and fair pay. Putting on a breathing mask and gloves before stripping lead paint made me think more about exposure to potentially dangerous chemicals than I ever had at Yale. Wearing a hard hat while balancing on a ladder to paint a hard-to-reach bit of window trim made me consider preparation, safety, and consequences. Given that many Yalies will go on to make policy decisions that affect the working lives of others, I think these are important experiences to have. Simply put, the more time people who will be in The New Journal

charge of others spend doing manual labor, the fewer accidents we will have like the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion or the BP oil spill.

Once I began asking around, I found that a surprising number of Yale students have spent time doing physical work, whether by joining the custodial staff as movers at the end of the semester, volunteering as farmers through WWOOF, or working on a construction crew. Though no one I spoke to planned to pursue a career in those fields, many felt that their experience would influence their professional lives. Ben Singleton ’13 spent the summer between his sophomore and junior years working on a construction crew that built highend apartments in New York City. This past summer, he held a job that may well allow him to occupy one of those apartments in the future, working at a boutique investment bank. Though the two jobs were so different as to be almost incomparable, he values both as forms of hard work. Along with spending “literally eight hours a day swinging a sledgehammer,” Singleton found a niche for himself as an impromptu translator on the crew.

He speaks Spanish and Italian and so could talk easily with his Hispanic, Algerian, and Irish coworkers. The conversations were often eye-opening, as he learned how his co-workers had come to the U.S. and grew to respect how hard they worked. “I’ve sort of grown up in a bubble,” Singleton said.

“I’m from the Upper East Side.”

It’s easy to imagine how Singleton could have stayed in that bubble, gliding from Manhattan to Yale to a job on Wall Street. He intends to pursue a career in finance after graduation, but his summer working construction was more than tourism. At the investment bank, he explained, he helped companies raise money and reach long-term goals like building factories and creating job opportunities. Part of why he felt invested in the outcome September 2012

was that he had spent time with workers who would benefit from the companies’ growth. “Out of Yale, a lot of students end up running companies, taking important roles in management,” Singleton said. “The perspective of the worker is hard to understand if you haven’t worked construction yourself. You don’t fully understand what the lifestyle is like and what are the rules that should govern their employment.” From Singleton’s words, it’s clear that he knows that his work inside “the bubble” will have real implications for real people he respects outside of it.

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erhaps the most substantive thing I’ve learned from my summers is that the divide between physical and mental work is a false one.

Much manual labor is highly skilled and requires problem solving just as challenging as crafting a good thesis.

Weeding taught me focus and patience that I drew on during long nights in the library. I’ve also been lucky to spend my summers with many different kinds of people who ask different kinds of questions—about knowledge, about goodness, about life and work—than those I hear on campus. I’ve spent months with mechanics, farmers, and construction foremen. I have many friends now to whom the word “Yale” means little.

I’ve been reminded that there are innumerable ways to be smart and to contribute, with or without a Yale education.

In theory, concrete work expands the mind rather than limiting it.

It admits new perspectives, new habits, new ways of thinking about and solving problems. For me, it created a richer landscape of learning where once I saw only dichotomies: liberal arts versus technical school, mind work versus the trades. I feel committed to giving other people access to this landscape of learning, something that won’t be accomplished

by my painting a building all day but which I hope I’ll be able to do with more empathy, intellect, perspective, creativity and, dare I say, integrity, for spending hours with a roller, a wall, and a bucket of paint.

As Schmidt pointed out to me, the work at SJC embodies the cooperative collision of mental and physical work.

He explained, “We are restoring the campus so that it can be used for pro-human reasons: education, inspiration, art, culture, and science.”

The work of the crew and volunteers at the Sheldon Jackson Campus will eventually give more students access to the world of ideas, artists places to practice, the town of Sitka a more vibrant community art space, scholars a place to gather. Schmidt added, “We need simple, concrete metaphors like this to inspire us and remind us that we can make a difference.” At first I’m surprised to hear how he uses the word metaphor to refer to the physical plant of the campus, as though he has delicately switched the concrete and the abstract worlds. But the more I think about it, the more sense his phrasing makes. A restored campus can be a metaphor for a community coming together. The architecture of a building can be a metaphor for the structure of a poem or a symphony.

And as work continues on Sheldon Jackson, as volunteers sand beams, scrape paint, and build roofs, more and more students and artists and writers and thinkers will have a place to build metaphors of their own.

TNJ

Laura Blake is a 2012 alumna of Jonathan Edwards College.

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SNAPSHOT

River People I The Quinnipiac River Fund asks people to re-imagine their waters.

By Eric Boodman

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n the summer of 1978, North Haven resident Nancy Alderman and her husband were woken up nightly by a terrible smell wafting through the open windows of their home. One night her husband Myles got in the car to follow the stench to its source. He ended up at the chemical plant of the pharmaceutical manufacturing firm Upjohn, in front of over one hundred smokestacks and vents. “It was two miles from our house, but I had no idea it existed,” Nancy Alderman told me

over lunch. The plant was located on the banks of the Quinnipiac River, which would later provide a home for her environmental nonprofit—the Quinnipiac River Fund.

In many ways, the history of the Quinnipiac River Fund mirrors its namesake’s trajectory. Though at its source farther north, the river is a small brook, hardly visible on an aerial map, the river-mouth is impressive—a wide, dock-lined corridor crowded with lobster boats and spanned by a number of heavily-traveled The New Journal

Activist Nancy Alderman stands in front of the Cytec Pharmaceutical Plant in Wallingford, CT.

Photo by Jacob Geiger

bridges. The Quinnipiac River Fund’s origins are similarly humble, but it is now a widely-recognized nonprofit that has financed countless environmental research and education projects. The non-profit’s existence, just like the cleaner water running in the Quinnipiac, is a testament to Alderman’s devotion to her surroundings. Her environmental work has created a community of researchers and activists who want to change how we interact with our landscape. As they continue to September 2012

confront environmental abuses after three decades of service, they are hoping that helping people develop personal relationships with the river will encourage them to protect it as well.

Alderman is a straight-talking New Englander, and she looks the part, with a penchant for thick sweaters and engaging eye-contact. She acquired a Master’s in Environmental Studies in 1997 and also serves as the founder and president of Environment and Human Health, Inc., a Connecticut non-profit that researches the effect of environmental factors on our health. When she and her husband discovered the Upjohn plant, she was 39 and had no such credentials. A stayat-home mom who dropped out of the Connecticut College for Women, she entered into environmental activism as a layman and concerned citizen. “At that time, women didn’t work,” she told me. “They were meant to get married and have children. But they did volunteer work in a very serious way.”

A large part of Alderman’s volunteer work took root in the days immediately following that night as she investigated what was going on inside the Upjohn factory. She tried to find out what kind of chemicals were causing the smell, but the managers of the factory rebuffed her. “What are they? They wouldn’t tell us. What are you making? Trade secret,” she said. Eventually she found that the

company’s system of open-air waste management allowed the toxins she had smelled to be released into both the air and water. In 1978, she teamed up with the newly founded Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE), an environmental law group that aims to ensure that recent environmental legislation is enforced. Ignored by the local Upjohn administrators, Alderman and the founder of the CFE, Fred Krupp, took the fight to the national level. That meant buying enough shares of Upjohn to allow them to speak at the company’s annual General Meeting at its headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

“There was no question it was David and Goliath,” Alderman said, and she worked hard to win the fight.

After years spent working on the case, Alderman and Krupp had won the support of 123,680 shareholders, whose shares totaled “a market value of over seven and one half million dollars.” They were backed by the United Presbyterian Church of America, the City of New Haven pension funds, the Union Trust Company, which is the third largest bank in Connecticut, Yale University, and First Bank, she said.

On May 19, 1981, Alderman spoke at Upjohn’s annual General Meeting. I read a copy of the speech.

Unexpectedly stirring, it incorporates her perspectives both as a shareholder of Upjohn and as a resident of North Haven. She referred to Upjohn as “our company” and to its policies as “our policies” while the Connecticut air and water remain “our air” and “our water” — despite the fact that the Quinnipiac River was hundreds of miles away from the Kalamazoo headquarters. In front of the meeting attendees, she asked: “How can The Upjohn Company expect to sell its pharmaceuticals to a trusting public when its chemical division 31

is acting in such a secretive and arbitrary way? If our left hand is appearing to make people sick, how can we expect people to trust our right hand to make them well?”

The leaders of Upjohn were shocked. The meeting resulted in major changes: the North Haven plant was shut down, and the court case that the CFE and the Natural Resources Defense Council had brought against the company for not complying with its water permit was settled. Upjohn had to pay $1.2 million over the course of three years, money that established a permanent fund administered by the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven. What began with a chemical stench disturbing Alderman’s sleep grew into the Quinnipiac River Fund.

ther aspects of the landscape of New Haven County bear subtle traces of Alderman’s work.

The Farmington Canal Greenway, a recreational path that cuts through cities and forests between New Haven and Granby, Connecticut, on the Massachusetts border, owes its existence to her. In 1987, she banded with other members of her community to prevent a large mall from being built in Hamden, looking for anything on the site that might halt the construction. They were hoping for wetlands; instead, they found an abandoned railway. It followed the route of a canal where mules used to plod along a towpath, pulling boats towards Northampton.

With some legal help, Alderman had a rail-to-trail project underway, which both prevented the building of the mall and created the Farmington Canal Greenway across the state of Connecticut.

Through her non-profit Environment & Human Health, Inc., she has convinced schoolbus drivers

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to turn off their motors when they wait for kids, persuaded schools to stop using carcinogenic artificial turf, and completed the largest study of well water in the United States. But the project that has brought about the most long-term changes—and created the widest circle of activists—was her work that led to the founding of the “Q-River Fund,” as it’s lovingly nicknamed.

My first glimpse of the Quinnipiac River was on a cool afternoon in early April. I had biked from downtown

“Nature doesn’t negotiate, it just responds, and I think that response will be very harsh.”

New Haven along Chapel Street, through the leafy neighborhood around Wooster Square, which morphed into towering mounds of gravel and sand beside dilapidated factories near the Mill River. As I crossed the drawbridge over the Mill, I saw white cylinders farther up the river. Then the industrial landscape gradually became abandoned-looking houses with faded vinyl siding and an enormous Mexican restaurant called Guadalupe La Poblanita, empty in the early afternoon.

Coming over a little hill where Chapel becomes Front Street, I had seemingly crossed into an idyllic New England village: just beyond a stand of trees was the Quinnipiac River, its wide surface flecked with white caps, and beyond that a low

green hill with a white spire. As I biked along Quinnipiac River Park, I looked at the Victorian houses across the river, ending at where Ian Christmann lives with his family.

Christmann is a photographer and part of Alderman’s community of activists. He received funding from the Quinnipiac River Fund to create a photography exhibit called “Consider the Quinnipiac” and in July turned it into an online gallery and virtual tour of the same name. The Quinnipiac River Fund tests water quality, measures soil erosion and quantifies invertebrate populations, but exists primarily to raise awareness about the river.

In living and working along the Quinnipiac, Christmann has come to know the river intimately.

He knows that five miles upstream it becomes quiet, with no boats, but much marshland and the occasional low bridge. He knows that half of the river’s length is tidal, and that fifteen to thirty million tires have been illegally dumped in the river near North Haven. He has photographed hundreds of secret moments of life along the river: a swan poking its head down into its stick-mound nest, a dusting of snow on the tugboats and docks, a fisherman looking out from the sleet-grey mountain of oyster shells on the deck of his boat. “Lots of people don’t know this area exists,” Christmann told me in his living room, which looks out over the Quinnipiac.

Ironically, this landscape is what first attracted the Puritans who set up the colony that would become New Haven. In 1637, Boston businessman Theophilus Eaton received reports of “the rich and goodly meadows of Quinnipiack” from captains who were fighting off the Pequot tribe and who hoped that the English would capitalize on the river before the Dutch did. After visiting the site, Eaton sent word to his schoolfriend John Davenport that he had no trouble The New Journal

imagining it as “a thriving Wilderness Zion,” as Rollin G. Osterweis puts it in Three Centuries of New Haven.

Davenport arrived one year later with 500 followers.

Christmann’s online gallery outlines the history of the Quinnipiac, explaining how the river remained central to the New Haven economy well into the 19th century. Its bottom was encrusted with jagged oyster beds so extensive that the area was known as “Clamtown.” The Quinnipiac port had a brisk traffic of merchants, fishermen and sailors, who called New Haven “Dragon” after the “sea dragons,” or harbor seals, that fed on the river’s fish and mollusks.

When his family first moved to New Haven, Christmann explained, “nobody was talking about the river.

We felt there was a negative stigma about it.” Part of that was due to the pollution that began with 19th century industrialization and continued into recent years. Christmann explained that people thought the river was unsalvageable because it repeatedly failed to meet state and national water quality standards. Over time, the generalized sense of apathy cleared the way for more dumping in the river.

Safety was also an issue, Christmann said. “Crime levels were higher here than downtown.” With the river’s reputation tarnished, the neighborhood surrounding it became less desirable and more dangerous.

People whose families might once have been closely involved with the river moved away, or retreated into their homes, disengaging from the community. So Christmann felt it was important that his project organize itself around locals reclaiming the river from different angles.

“Our intent was that people upstream and downstream learn about the conditions, both good and bad,” Christmann said, explaining that the fund took the exhibit on tour along the riverbanks, from town hall September 2012

to library to town hall, ending up in the Connecticut State Capitol building in Hartford. “It was great to have decision-makers see the exhibit,” he added. He seemed hopeful.

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lthough Alderman and Christmann both expressed worry for the health of the river, one activist in their community stands out for his extreme view on our relationship to nature, arguing that it may be too late to create a healthy environment. Since 2000, physician Jerry Silbert has been the executive director of the Watershed Partnership, an environmental organization that has spearheaded multiple projects relating to the Quinnipiac River, some financed by the Q-River Fund. Despite his success at getting several kinds of carcinogenic chemicals banned from being used on school lawns, he think it’s too late to undo the damage we’ve done to our environment. He says we should be focusing on “how to maintain a semblance of civilization” in the face of the ever-worsening environmental crisis. “Nature doesn’t negotiate, it just responds, and I think that response will be very harsh,” he told me over the phone, explaining that we now need to think about providing food through local infrastructure so that we are not relying on systems that require fossil fuels when those systems collapse. “I applaud the sentiment of sustainability, but I think one has to look critically at whether what one is doing is window-dressing or putting a band-aid on a hemorrhaging artery.”

He is particularly frustrated at how governments are doing next to nothing for the environment, and at how “the captains of industry don’t recognize what’s happening.” That disconnect exists on a worldwide scale, not just in New Haven County.

Even with increased interest in the Quinnipiac since the inception of the Fund, the river has still been making headlines for its precarious

condition. In January, local paper The Record-Journal reported that the Cytec chemical plant in Wallingford, just blocks from the river, had been listed as the second biggest releaser of toxic waste in the state of Connecticut.

And on July 31, The Hartford Courant reported a fire in a forging plant in Southington. Over 1000 gallons of oil are thought to have drained into the Quinnipiac. These events validate Silbert’s feeling that parties at all levels have to be engaged in protecting the environment.

That got me thinking about how interest in the Quinnipiac River is transferred from one person to the next. Educators and artists need to care to get residents thinking about the river; residents need to care to help make the lobbies successful at changing legislation; lawmakers need to care to listen to the lobbies; lawenforcers have to care to uphold new legislation; heads of industry need to care to actually change practices instead of looking for loopholes. You can string all those players together in any number of different webs, but it will always end up an intricate codependency.

Wherever Alderman, Christmann, and Silbert fit into that chain, there is no question that they have all inserted themselves into the ecosystem of the river to try to generate more care and interest. Yet I can imagine how associating yourself so closely with a river can make you as vulnerable to changes as the water and the bank.

Over thirty years ago, Alderman was awakened by a bad smell; now she needs something to rouse others.

TNJ

Eric Boodman is a sophomore in Branford College.

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PERSONAL ESSAY

LOVE, AT FIRST SIGHT Literary flings for an intern in the city.

By Sophia Nguyen

S

ometime during the second or third week of your publishing internship, your boss swivels away from her monitor and asks, “How do you feel about romance?”

You don’t feel anything anymore.

You have been photocopying foreign contracts for days, and this has made you numb. Peering meekly from behind a fortress of overstuffed manila files, you repeat, inanely, “Romance?”

Her gaze has already returned to her email. “Yeah. Regency.”

You do feel something about this genre; some might call it “antipathy.” While you grope for the words to express that romance is not, um, your favorite thing, a ream of paper is dumped into your arms, still warm from the office printer. Someone’s baby. Your first client manuscript.

On the commute, put aside your pious Anna Karenina and pull out the Regency romance. Your mouth is grim. You’ll find that within the first 34

two chapters, the duke senses that he could come to love this impudent chit, and though she thinks him a coldhearted rake, she feels an unwilling attraction. They collide on a windswept moor outside the estate. An ankle gets twisted, a skirt ruined, and they fall muddily into each others’ arms.

Gently, he tilts her face up. They kiss, their horses looking on approvingly.

Throughout, you make broad notes in the margins in red ink, punctuated by gleeful underlines and spluttering question marks. Fly through the story, rifling through until at last you turn over the final page, look out the window, and see the parking lot of your stop.

Your instructions are simple: write up a brief summary and analysis. Always lead with the verdict—do you recommend this manuscript for acceptance? Explain your reasoning.

Make suggestions, providing quotes and citing page numbers. And be nice:

this person might be our client, so there’s no point in being nasty. The agent might want to use your critiques in their editorial notes. Sternly, your supervisor warns that a reader’s report is not supposed to be beautiful prose.

Re-read your notes. Reluctantly rein in the snark. The villain’s revenge scheme is confusing, you opine, and he could probably kidnap the lady without stealing the identity of a dead naval officer and blackmailing a saucy tavern wench. The banter between the lovers needs to be cut in half. And perhaps the word “sexy” should be used more sparingly, given the novel’s historical setting.

In the spirit of “being nice,” write how you enjoyed the archery scenes and many of the supporting characters, which is true—you’re a sucker for a precocious little sister or an unexpectedly-progressive dowager.

Swaddle your critiques in qualifiers, padding each sentence with a “perThe New Journal

haps” or a “sometimes.” Before hitting send, add, “Improvements could be made to the relationship’s pace. It develops a little too quickly.”

T

his represents an upgrade from your first days at the office, in which you wrestled with the typewriter, played gopher, pushed paper.

You can’t believe this office has a typewriter. Your tour of the extensive and color-coded files (“Interns often find it helpful to draw a map,” your supervisor suggests) ends at the intern desk, where the slush pile of unsolicited queries is contained—for now— in the large drawer to your left. You flick through the envelopes, which are stamped with earnestly excessive postage. The oldest has languished for a month and a half. This pleases your supervisor. “We’re pretty ahead!” she remarks cheerfully.

Your job is to bump the hopefuls from this particular ring of purgatory, sorting them into Yeses, Nos, and Maybes. Your boss will check your work, but she provides some helpful guidelines: historical fiction should be pegged to immediately recognizable figures and events, or else it doesn’t sell. A thriller should elevate your heart-rate by the tenth or fifteenth page, or else it doesn’t sell. Nonfiction should have a platformed author, or else it doesn’t sell. Literary fiction doesn’t sell.

What does sell is romance, approximately $1.368 billion of it per year.

Interns generally come up with a 40:60 ratio of nos to yeses and maybes, your supervisor informs you, but eventually your ratio should shift to 70:30. Smile. She underestimates your ruthlessness.

For your part, you have underestimated the lengths to which people will go to secure an agent: the sample chapters painstakingly bound in plastic covers, the mix CDs and original soundtracks, the occasional, perplexSeptember 2012

ing headshot. Your supervisor sees fit to mention that the agency doesn’t accept anyone who sends hand-written letters. Or anyone in prison. These additional rules eliminate more manila than you’d expect.

T

he next manuscript lands you back in bodice-ripping England, with another eligible earl, another ravishing young debutante. Anna Karenina is deadweight in your backpack on your daily speed-walk through Midtown.

Over time you gather a vast lexicon of the tics of Romance, but inexplicably, you’re immune to irritation.

As you encounter them, you greet these clichés like old friends: childhood friends-turned-lovers, ladies compromised on balconies, yawning gambling debts, deranged kidnappings in the final act. Eventually you graduate to other worlds: Gilded Age, steampunk, super-hero. A nonfiction proposal and mystery cross your desk, but do not break your stride.

This is how the genre does so well—its readers want comfort, not novelty, and they will return again and again for the minute yet endless variations which each story can offer.

There’s a subgenre for everyone, each a thriving fiefdom unto itself: urban fantasy and paranormal, suspense and small-town, inspirational (i.e., Christian) and erotic, historical and “ethnic.” There are even series centered on characters’ professions, like “Harlequin Medical Romance” or “Stories set in the World of NASCAR.” Romances can be consumed in fistfuls, like M&Ms, a habit enabled by the e-reader, which razed the biggest barriers to consumption: embarrassment and difficulty of access. These books are priced to entice the impulse buyer: $5.99, $4.99, with a novella tossed in for free. In the digital age, no one has to wait for another fix. You are getting the raw stuff.

A

bruptly, you’re given a “special project”: a full manuscript that had been sitting in the inbox for a few months. Not a romance.

It’s good. The beginning is messy.

Its seams show. The scenes are layered in a way that makes the pace groan forward by inches. But the characters are alive, and for the first time that summer, you sit on the train and re-read a line, just to feel it hit you again. It’s always difficult to articulate why you like a given piece of art; it’s even harder when it’s not quite art yet. People talk a lot about love, but liking something is its own weirdly strong feeling. You think this story will speak to someone.

You think it speaks to you.

You heartily recommend it for acceptance.

Despite yourself, you’re a little in love.

I

f the publishing industry has been gutted, no one has told the writers.

Each day brings a fresh batch of query letters to add to the slush. The writers introduce themselves and their writing backgrounds, tell you about their families and hobbies. A speed date where you have all the power.

Occasionally it may occur to you—briefly, horrifyingly—that you are more likely to take a chance on a sweet query than any of the real live human romantic prospects of your recent past. Ignore this.

Doggedly chip at the slush pile.

It’s cathartic to clear out the desk, though you hold out hope that you’ll find something. Fish out a few proposals that look promising, nervously turning them over for inspection.

Your supervisor rifles through, looking deeply unimpressed, though she says she’ll take a look at them soon.

“From now on,” she adds, “You can just send out your rejections. You don’t have to run them by me. All of your nos have been spot-on.”

Not so much with your yeses, but damned if you will stop trying. In the 35

I

n an e-mail, a writer friend complains about some “love story for adults” she’s been duped into trying, a bestseller far more up-market than anything resting on your bedside table.

She jokes, “Do you ever get that fear that if you read enough bad prose it’ll get trapped in your ear, and you’ll start writing it? Horror of horrors!”

Actually, you fear that you’ve forgotten how to read. After four semesters of high-fiber, nutrient-dense hits of the literary canon, you had become a vocal advocate for cultural omnivorism. These days, you feel your slush diet eroding your palate, your appetite, your metabolism.

Painfully bore through your great Russian novel, never gaining enough momentum to absorb the text. You begin to resent the physical heaviness of it, just as an object. When it falls off your lap on the train, you wake with a start. Picking it up, imagine typing up a few recommendations for Tolstoy, in that peculiarly sunny voice you’ve come to own. “While I found the characters sympathetic (particularly Anna and Kitty!) the novel has a few major structural problems with regards to its pace. While the interrelated cast of characters is balanced deftly, the prose takes lengthy detours into farming practices and party vot36

ing procedures, and these grow somewhat dry at times. The book might also benefit from more fleshed-out and explicit scenes between Anna and Vronsky. As it stands, the interlude marked by the ellipse in Part One feels jarring and dissatisfying, especially since such ellipses do not occur elsewhere in the book. It feels accidental, then coy.”

Consider throwing yourself off the Aberdeen-Matawan platform as penance.

T

he manuscript you were rooting for is nixed. With terrible kindness, your supervisor deems the novel unfixable: too much narrative distance, confusing chronology. You’re not sure what “narrative distance” means, but you swallow her explanation.

It’s a heart-breaker. She asks that you draft a form rejection, with a nice note to say that the agency would be happy to look at future work, the agency equivalent of “I don’t think this will work out, but I hope we can still be friends.”

On the 6:31 p.m. express out of Penn Station, entertain yourself by spying on your fellow passengers.

This is the summer of Fifty Shades of Grey. You are impressed by any novel that threatens to unseat Angry Birds as the commuter’s diversion of choice.

They can’t hide from you, these young women folding back the paper cover, the businessmen hunched surreptitiously over their Kindles.

Like everyone else, develop opinions on the book without having actually read it—its deadening prose, its Cinderella story so weirdly evacuated of eroticism—but your feelings lack the same bile. Honestly, you’re just a little bit dazzled. Who are you to argue with a book that has earned $50 million for its author in six months?

The people have spoken. It sells. And it sells film rights, soundtracks, and condoms.

Good romance novels are all

alike; every bad romance novel is bad in its own way. Keep reading the manuscripts as they roll in. You have become a mechanic of baroque Rube Goldberg machines, the characters spinning like sawtooth gears and extraneous plots rattling cheerfully, waiting for your tightening wrench, a little extra weight. You work with what you have. It soothes you to take a look under the hood and make it right, so that after an hour or so you can step back and say, “It ain’t pretty, but it’ll get you from Point A to Point B.” The end of the summer leaves you ambivalent about the book business. After months on the inside, you have come to understand the alienation that aspiring writers feel from the publishing industry — their sense that the gatekeepers’ choices are so inscrutable and idiosyncratic that they’re essentially arbitrary. You made your choices, guided by well-meaning mentors, according to prevailing industry logic. But you know the imperative to sell lucrative schlock in order to finance the elusive gem would eventually grind you down.

Finish your Tolstoy, which ends, to your surprise, not with Anna in the wheels but Levin under the stars.

Don’t read at all for a few days.

TNJ

Sophia Nguyen is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

The New Journal

Infographic text by Sophia Nguyen, design by Susannah Shattuck

last week, you feel like you’ve hit a vein of gold. In the slush pile, you pull out three or four decent options: a memoir or two, a dystopian road novel, a New England woman’s fiction which, if you squint at it right, could conceivably be an Oprah’s Book Club pick.

You are willing to overlook almost all faults. Their mistakes will be caught by the agent, or in editorial. Anything can be fixed. You are desperate for variety.

Yet in your heart, you know that if you saw these books in a bookshop, you can’t imagine you’d look twice.

Wonder if, in the publishing world, you’ve become a whore with a heart of gold.

ROMANCE NOVELS: PLOTTING LOVE

HERO & HEROINE

have a deep, dark secret

hate each other professional rivalry

for personality reasons he is...

she is...

spies

tense argument at a ball

a family member

HATE SEX

whom she adores

ANGST compassion from heroine

hilarious hijinks

traumatic close shaves

in a garden

BONDING

who actually isn’t his

problem solved!

rejection & assholery

simultaneous orgasm

they get caught and are forced to marry

he has a bastard child

pursued by the same villain

unlikely, grudging alliance

leads to...

in a library

an old lover

she isn’t a virgin

a comrade

after the same treasure/secret

a rake

pirates

who are...

tempestuously individual

uptight, sexless

SEX

he blames himself for the death of...

he calls her a whore

angry tears & fighting

“I can’t love you because I don’t deserve you”

but then...

kidnapping by a loathsome but sexy villain

“We will never speak of this again” the cycle

s/he loves me

wisdom dispensed by a dowager duchess

rescue a realization

“I couldn’t live without you”

s/he loves me not

enter shallowly attractive romantic rival

the endgame

MUTUAL REVELATION OF LOVE

innocent encounter with rival misconstrued

September 2012

FIGHT

“I couldn’t bear to see you with another”

HAPPILY EVER AFTER sequel featuring hero’s younger brother

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ENDNOTE

A Conversation with The New York Times called David Samuels “an elite narrative journalist, a master at teasing out the social and moral implications of the smallest small talk.”

He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He sat down with The New Journal at Theresa’s Polish Restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, where he lives with his two children.

The New Journal: You write on a sort of rotation between Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. How does that approach inform your work?

David Samuels: At this point these places have all become like different instruments that are available to me.

Do I want to play the guitar? What kind of guitar? The violin? I get flexibility and pleasure from being able to play different instruments in different places. Without entirely meaning to, I ended up with some real mastery of this very specific form – the long American magazine article. It ain’t Shakespeare’s plays or the grand 19th century novel. On the other hand it’s the one indigenous American literary form, and it strikes me as having no more or no less absolute literary potential than the sestina, say.

TNJ: You recently wrote an article for Harper’s about a strange undercurrent of racism – a sort of desire to eliminate the messiness of the real 38

world – at the Bronx Zoo. Talk about your process with that piece.

DS: If there’s a human value that I’m trying to get across in my work, it’s about an integration of thinking and feeling where feeling comes first.

Part of what I want readers to take from my work is the value of not knowing everything in advance, and not thinking that you do. Another part is the willingness and ability to be emotionally and intellectually open without feeling superior. I think that those values are largely absent from the culture of smart people who went to good universities who pretend to know all this stuff they actually have very limited real-world experience of.

That sense of entitlement to the experience of others has always rubbed me the wrong way, in part because I’m not a person who has a lot of confidence in my knowledge of things I haven’t seen or felt. The inherent assumption that I belonged to a common milieu with the people I went to school with, was the source of a lot of pain and anger for me in

the course of my own Ivy League education and afterwards, because I never actually felt like I belonged, or like I wanted to belong. I think I’ve found a relatively sophisticated way to express that hurt and that anger, but that is still the underlying animus of my work. So I have always trusted to this process of serendipity when I choose subjects.

With the zoo piece, I was going through a rough time in my life. I felt my marriage come apart, and I had two children who I loved very much.

One of the ways I dealt with this was to take my son to the zoo. It was a big strange park with tigers and giraffes in the middle of the Bronx, and it was a form of escape that I could share with my child. But there’s something weird about looking at all these animals in cages. Why do I want to do that?

What am I really showing him about the world, and about me? What is this communication about and how creepy is it that I’m doing this? I didn’t understand it. I just had these feelings about it.

The New Journal

Illustration by Andrew Nelson

David Samuels

TNJ: What finally led you to see the weirdness in the zoo?

DS: I was sitting in the zoo library, which took about three months for them to get me access to. The second or third day, I noticed this creepy oil portrait of a handsome man with a mustache peering at me from between some bookshelves. His name was Madison Grant. I discovered that he was the leading racist of early 20th-century America and the sort of godfather of eugenics and immigration restrictions. He also was the creator of the zoo and ran it for forty years. Suddenly I was like “Oh, the Bronx Zoo was founded by one of the more evil people to live in 20th century America.” He was also deeply involved with the racist German scientists who set up Auschwitz. So I realized that there was something very dark that was woven into the history and conception of this place—but it took a long time to find that thread.

All I had to go on was what I felt and the fact that I wasn’t willing to allow my purely rational faculties to shut off what I was actually feeling in that place.

TNJ: How do you feel about the state of magazine journalism today?

DS: I believe the catastrophe has already happened. The magazine world I entered almost twenty years ago was a broad, commercially-viable industry with a long and distinguished history. For a reasonably large audience of people, it was a fun way to spend two hours in the afternoon, as an alternative to TV and other forms of entertainment. That world is gone.

And yet in some ways, I feel more optimistic about the form now that the world I grew up with is gone.

I can look at the form now and feel that things are changing -- that’s there’s going to be a marriage of the September 2012

A Davenport College Talk with

Frederick Lamp Frances & Benjamin Benenson Foundation Curator of African Art, author of Connecticut By Bicycle: Fifty Great Scenic Routes

“Connecticut by Bicycle – a Little Departure from Movement Studies” Wednesday, September 19 7:30pm, Davenport Common Room

technology and the form I grew up with that may be even better in its mix of creative potential and audience and money. Long-form non-fiction, or literary journalism, or whatever you call it has been a vital American form for 150 years, and it’s already survived a number of technological shifts.

Each time, the form has become more robust.

TNJ: You come from an orthodox Jewish background. How does that background affect your observations of American culture?

DS: The Jewishness of my work is inherent in the posture I take and in my choices of subjects. I’m the first American in my family. I have the intensity of interest in American life of a typical first-generation immigrant.

It’s like Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural. He’s as Jewish a writer as there is, and yet he writes this great baseball

novel that doesn’t have anything overtly Jewish in it at all. In some sense, the intensity of his imagination of The Natural depended on his feeling that the thing that he was imagining was radically other what he was – something marvelous and strange and threatening. I think that a similar sense of distance and identification characterizes all my writing about America. Barack Obama’s not me; Mitt Romney’s not me; Kanye West’s not me. I find emotional resonances in all my subjects but there’s a distance there that comes from the fact that I’m situated elsewhere. When I think of myself in the larger sweep of some historical continuity, I think of myself as a writer first, and I think of myself as a Jew.

For a fuller version of this interview, please visit us online at

www.thenewjournalatyale.com 39

The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series Made possible by a gift from the Estate of Arthur A. Cohen presented by

Moshe Halbertal Moshe Halbertal

Gruss Professor of Law, New York University Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel All lectures will take place at Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, Rm. 127, New Haven, CT

“Nationalism, Liberalism & Religion in Modern-Day Israel ” “What is a Jewish Democratic State “ October 30th, 7pm

“On the Ethical Challenges of Contemporary Warfare: The Case of Israel ” November 1st, 7pm

“Judaism and its encounter with the State of Israel ” November 7th, 7pm

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Sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies For more informa on, please contact Renee Reed at renee.reed@yale.edu or (203)432 0843 The New Journal