Volume 43, Issue 3

The New Journal

Volume 44, No. 3

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven Winter 2010-2011

NUMBERS GAME: portrait of an obsession with food

NUDE MODELING SAVING BROADWAY WInter 2010-2011

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Publishers Samantha Ellner, Tim Shriver Editors-in-Chief Haley Cohen, Kate Selker

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

FEATURES

and New Haven

8 Talking Shops

The story of a street, a city, and a school.

Managing Editors Max Ehrenfreund, Jacque Feldman,

by Juliana Hanle

Production Manager Jimmy Murphy

14 Riot Girl

In 1996 Sara Marcus left Yale, after violent threats to LGBTQ students were shrugged off by the administration. How far has Yale come since?

Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Jane Long, Susannah Shattuck, Andrew Nelson Senior Editors Bob Jeffery, Eleanor Kenyon, Sarah Mich, Sarah Nutman, Maya Seidler

by Emily Rappaport

22 Numbers Game

Copy Editor Heeseung Kim

An investigation of eating disorders at Yale.

by Max Ehrenfreud

Business Director Helena Malchione Associate Editors Laura Blake, Julia Fisher, Helen Knight

STANDARDS

www.thenewjournalatyale.com To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph, e-mail: thenewjournal@gmail.com

Image Credit: Heeseung Kim: cover, 2, 25, 27-28, back cover Juliana Hanle: 3, 8, 10, 12 Andrew Nelson: 4-6 Sara Marcus: 14, 16, 18 Autumn von Plinsky: 20-21 Ellen Su: 20-21 Mellissa Johnson: 32-33 Jane Long: 34-35 Adele Jackson-Gibson: 36, 38 Susannah Shattuck: 40

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4 Points of Departure 20 Shots in the Dark

Online Editor Bay Gross

The New Journal

Vol. 44, No. 3 November 2010

The Elm City By Bicycle

by Autumn von Plinksy & Ellen Su

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong

30 Personal Essays

Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

32 Baring All

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, Josh Plaut, 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

The New Journal

Maps

by Haley Cohen d by Charlotte Kingston

36 Critical Angle

The Underdogs We Call Bulldogs

d

by Adele Jackson-Gibson

39 Profile

The Critic

by Jacque Feldman

43 Endnote

by Sanjena Sathian

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 2006 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. Seventy-five hundred 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.

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE Bric-a-Rack

Whether you come to belong to a place depends on how you get there. Sometimes you’re greeted with open arms, and other times—with a bar to the chest. That’s how, until recently, Bass Library greeted bicyclists.

“It’s absurd,” she said. “Almost in your face.” The silver-haired woman stared at a bar four inches in diameter and 42 inches from the ground. She had dismounted her bee-yellow Motobecane and, unwilling to lift the bike above her waist, now leaned it against the pink stone of the tomb entrance to Bass Library. The bar held a tangle of other bikes in the air, front tires suspended over the top and wrenched at tortuous angles.

“I guess racks aren’t designed by people who use them. But that’s true of so many things.”

Yale College dates from 1701, and the geared bicycle from 1885. Among the Gothic- and Georgian-revival architecture, whether and where bikes belong has not always been clear. In early photographs, bikes spread across campus , untethered to racks, and not likely to be rustled. But New Haven’s mid-20th century urban blight brought new threats. Theft rose, and so did the need for Yale students to secure their bikes.

Yale at last installed bike racks in the 1960s—more than a decade after the “trick knee” of Whitey Heist ’53 popped out of joint and kept him from finishing the famed 1952 “Beers and Bikes From Yale to Vassar,” and more than seventy years after F.A. Clark, class of 1891, won the two-mile bicycle race for Yale over Harvard. These primitive racks were metal bars hung between heavy wooden posts.

The domestication of bicycles to the Yale aesthetic became more deliberate in the 1990s, when 4

Yale charged landscape architect Channing Harris with designing new racks. Harris, who believes a successful feature should only be noticeable once removed, answered the challenge with a columns and cross-bar design. In the Georgian-revival residential colleges, he selected rough-cut granite for the columns, and in the neo-Gothic colleges, concrete posts that taper upwards to become spires.

His favorite “ornament” is in Berkeley College.

A repeating pattern of bike racks fences in the courtyard grass. The racks welcome bicyclists without alerting others to anything amiss.

But even as the racks became less visible, the bikes became more so. The design put style above substance, and at times seemed to achieve neither.

Without vertical pieces to prop them up, bikes could fall on each other.

And clumped on the crossbars, or left locked to trees or posts (as may be more convenient), they continued to resist the order that elsewhere defines Yale’s tradition.

The most delightfully improbable attempt to blend the bike rack into Old Gothic Yale was the pipe at Bass Library. No one who might have designed the rack for the library’s 2007 remodel claimed it when contacted: the contractor insisted that either the architects or the landscape architects specified its design, while they energetically denied having done so (the landscape architects on this project did not include Harris).

Until this semester, the metal rack continued to be cause for curiosity and discomfort.

“If you can ride a bicycle, you can lift a bicycle over this bar,” said Steven Garza ‘12, which he demonstrated with confidence.

But for Elizabeth Walker—“not Rider,” she clarified—this did not seem true. The 63-yearold woman left her yellow bike hobbled against the wall, a U-lock binding the front tire to the frame. While she descended into the library to use the internet, Yifan Chen ‘12 climbed up the stairs to unlock his bike. His only complaint about bike racks at Yale was how tall this one was.

But then, before complaining further, he reconsidered, and tried to impute an intention to the design. “I don’t know, maybe because there are so many bikes this is how they can best be organized,” he said. He looked over as another rider arrived and began awkwardly turning the heads of several bicycles to create room, struggling simultaneously to lift his bike over the bar with his other hand. “I’m not sure about the mechanics of it,” Chen said, “but I’m sure there is a reason.” (The steel bar, which seemed to have such forbidding permanence, has just this semester met its Maker).

Other racks at Yale worked better for bikers, but lacked Oxford charm. Like ladders set on their sides, aluminum racks once held bikes outside Harkness Hall.

Harris, the landscape architect, guessed that the maintenance staff had installed those racks without consulting campus planners. The incongruity of the choice felt oddly comforting; it felt human, and not institutional.

The dysfunction and disunity of bike racks on campus has once again prompted Yale to redesign them . This past year, Alice The New Journal

Raucher, facilities planner for Yale, worked with Kimo Griggs, a former professor of ornamental architecture at Yale, to make a rack that could embrace bikes where they have struggled to belong.

President Levin endorsed their solution as the new standard. The rack has less feudal rusticity, and more corporate polish. No longer a hitching rail, it’s an embellished U turned upside down.

The new racks are elegant and functional, but the old ones will be missed. There was

Rare Old Time During exam season, I don’t see much of the world except my computer screen. But one Saturday afternoon I shut my laptop, break out of my room, and go shopping. And not just any shopping—antique shopping.

The blustery New Haven wind blows me down Chapel Street along the edge of the Green, past Dunkin’ Donuts, past the other Starbucks, past Citibank, and past Evolution Tattoo Studio to the doorstep of one of the best locations for antiquing that New Haven has to offer: English Market. A colorful sidewalk display of dresses just outside the door presages the still more colorful wares that greet the antique shop’s customers inside. When I cross its threshold, I admire dining tables set with beautiful antique china plates and wonder how many Thanksgiving dinners they’ve served. I browse tie clips and imagine them at the senior proms of yesteryear.

Suddenly, from within my purse, my phone beeps, and standing in that mysterious, musty shop motivates me to do the WInter 2010-2011

unthinkable: for the first time all semester, I turn off my phone— and from within the normally businesslike, e-mail-answering Abigail Droge, my longtime doppelganger emerges. ‘Auntie Abby,’ as my close friends call her, is the part of me who’s always secretly loved arts-and-crafts.

Now, among shelves of fabrics, quilts, ribbons, handkerchiefs, and tablecloths—all of which would be perfect for the next project up her sleeve—Auntie Abby feels as if she has died and gone to heaven.

Store owner Carol Orr is sorting through her most recent purchases and gearing up for the Christmas season. Arranging bright red vintage ornaments peeping out from tissue paper, she tells Auntie Abby the story of the building that houses English Market, which Orr purchased with her husband in 2004. Unable to find a tenant, Orr decided to use the space to throw a tag sale with a friend in order to clear out her basement. Six years later, the tag sale’s still on.

English Market has since flourished and now brims with antiques of every shape and size.

Orr, who also maintains a second career as a landscape architect, explains that running an antique store allows her the perfect opportunity to indulge a life-long passion for shopping without having to keep what she buys. “I love stuff,” Orr says, recalling fond

childhood memories of going junk shopping with her mother.

Orr buys much of the store’s merchandise on her weekly visits to estate sales and also receives antiques that people bring in to consign. As we talk, a woman unloads consignment items from her car. “We like repurposing things,” Orr says, smiling. The Auntie Abby in me watches, impressed, as formerly unidentifiable, sprawling metal objects are immediately designated as perfect candidates for towel racks in a new display.

The brilliantly designed displays in the shop showcase Orr’s enthusiasm for décor-recycling.

Padding from one section of the store to the next, Auntie Abby is thrilled to encounter numerous examples of such turnarounds. A set of orange sports lockers have been converted into cabinets for glassware and crockery, a bed frame stands on end with skeins of beautifully colored yarn peeping out from each mattress spring, a couch flaunts cushions made from old newspapers stapled together, an oldfashioned wooden television set has been hollowed out to become a display case, and a set of library card catalog drawers now holds cutlery and other kitchenwares.

Auntie Abby, for her part, imagines uses for vintage aprons, antique typewriters, and a beautiful old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. Running her fingers through silk scarves and admiring a pair of saddle shoes, she tries to picture the last sock hop they attended and wonders whether they’d fit her feet. By the light of old lamps, Auntie Abby peers at maps, concert posters, and artwork, including a painting of an old-fashioned dance with gowned ladies and tuxedoed 5

POINTS OF DEPARTURE men, complete with little holes for electric Christmas lights to poke through above the dancers’ heads.

In the clothing section of the store, she’s at home among antique wedding dresses, feathered hats galore, and sports jackets from the times of plaid and tweed. Mr. Plaid certainly never carried an iPhone in his pocket— in fact, he probably called up his girlfriend using a rotary instead of a speed dial. Maybe he sat at that antique desk in the corner to write a research paper by hand. Maybe he wore one of English Market’s skinny ties and slicked back his hair in front of one of the many mirrors now reflecting shoppers’ faces. Auntie Abby’s heart flutters in her chest at the thought. That dapper guy, once dressed to impress, has generously offered his jacket to allow its next owner to live out new stories.

Though filled with stuff, the store seems much larger inside than it appears from the street.

It’s crammed with interesting gadgets and beautifully preserved antiques, all of which suggest new potential as well as long and varied histories. Auntie Abby could spend weeks poring over these treasures, but it’s getting late.

So I turn on my cell phone to check the time, wave good-bye to

Dog’s Life

immortalized in iconography, Handsome Dan graces T-shirts, shot glasses and mugs: a blue and white swirl of protruding cheeks.

He frowns down from a bright yellow poster in the Berkeley College Dean’s Office and appears in black-and-white photographs at Yale’s Mead Visitor Center.

In real life, there’s Sherman, a beautiful dog with a silky coat, a muscular, proud torso, and large, doleful eyes. Yale’s seventeenth Handsome Dan, Sherman came to Yale at eight weeks old from an English Bulldog breeder in Tennessee.

He was aptly named after the tanks of the Second World War. Sherman’s owner and trainer, Chris Getman, has coached Sherman’s predecessors since 1983. Sherman’s strict regimen, which consists mostly of walking, preserves his fine physique. In Getman’s words, he’s built like a “linebacker, not a lineman”— powerful, but compact. Most bulldogs are fairly sedentary, but Sherman’s fitness is of the utmost importance. At charity auctions, people bid thousands of dollars for the opportunity to walk him.

Recently, I had the privilege of visiting Sherman and his trainer at their home on Whitney Avenue.

At one point Sherman came to my side, a rope toy in his wide mouth. I struggled to pull the toy from the grip of his powerful jaw. His muscles stretched taut

as he tilted his oversized head and stared me down in silence from behind calm eyes. A dog like Sherman does not need to bark.

The original Handsome Dan was purchased for $5 from a local blacksmith in 1889. Majestic even in death, his fine, taxidermized form still graces Payne Whitney Gymnasium’s Membership Services Office, where he is encased in his own glass cube next to a larger display of trophies.

I recognize his face from the plush bulldogs lining the shelves at the Yale Bookstore. From behind the glass, he keeps watch, his ears

Every Trick in the Book When Dave Duda first opened the Book Trader Café and Bookstore twelve years ago, he stood behind the counter and announced, “This is it. I’m closing the book here. This is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.” At the time, the store was one of four used bookstores in New Haven, each vying for Yale business. Today, it is the only one that remains.

My mother owns an independent bookstore and I’ve been browsing through books my whole life. And yet I am one of many students who resort to finding books online. With

The bulldog may not have a mane or know how to roar, but he’s still the most lionized animal in the New Haven jungle.

There are animals stronger in number—pigeons, seagulls, tiny brown birds that hop, and squirrels fat from acorns and pizza—but as far as notoriety goes, the bulldog is king.

Celebrated with fanfare and

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hyperlinks, pics, video clips, and, of course, cheaper prices, it is increasingly enticing to opt for accessible digital resources. But the sad truth is, as more and more people exchange the printed page for the electronic screen, more and more independent bookstores face financial decline.

But at 12:30 on a Friday, Book Trader is packed. A quick glance into the glass-paned, greenhouselike sitting area reveals no empty chairs. The line to the café counter at the back of the store is long, and the front door doesn’t stay shut for more than a minute.

Through the brick archway to the left of the entrance, there is little room to navigate between the high shelves, as people stand flipping through an array of books about art, architecture, poetry, drama, philosophy, and religion.

Duda’s career in used books began when he walked into a used bookstore on a job-hunt after college and was hired on the spot. At first, the job seemed like a waste of time, but in retrospect, Duda recognizes that it served as his apprenticeship: he developed the instincts for knowing what to buy and what to write on the price sticker.

Of the thousands of used books that sellers offer him weekly, Duda has to pick and choose which ones he wants to buy. “Some people think if you’ve got a one hundred year old book it’s worth something,” he explains.

“Most of the time it isn’t.” He calls this one of the most basic problems facing the printed page today. As more and more people want to sell their books and make a quick dollar, the market is flooded with used books, a phenomenon which drives down the price. Since his beginnings, Duda has seen the price of a used

WInter 2010-2011

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Great Organ Music at Yale Yale Camerata Yale Schola Cantorum and more

for latest calendar information call 203.432.5062 or visit www.yale.edu/ism 409 Prospect Street · New Haven, CT 06511

book fall from $10.95 to $4.95. “I wish anybody luck opening a new bookstore these days,” he says.

“There’s so much more media competing with the printed page.”

Many independent bookstores, including my mother’s, have responded to this price decrease by supplementing their literary stock with toys, stationery goods, and other knick-knacks. The number of books in an average bookstore has slowly decreased, and those that remain are hidden from view by other products. The store survives financially, not as a bookstore—but as a toy store.

At Book Trader, sandwiches, soups, coffee, and baked goods have, as of yet, kept the plush animals and artisan cards at bay.

Duda acknowledges that the café portion of Book Trader provides much of the store’s revenue.

When I tell friends that I’m writing about Book Trader, they’re more likely to bring up the Jane Rare, a delicious roast beef sandwich with horseradish mayo, or the amazing hot chocolate, than the books.

The café’s success is what allows Duda to pay a little more for books and sell them for a little less. But the edible bounty takes nothing away from the literary stock.

Unlike owners of other independent bookstores, Duda remains committed to keeping it about the books: “We think we’ve created something kind of special that people appreciate.

There’s a community of people that enjoy this establishment and what we’ve done. I don’t have too many desires about how to make it better.” The café brings in a lot of money, but the bookstore part of the business still draws in locals and out-oftowners alike, whether they want to buy books or, more often, spend an afternoon browsing.

Sadly, a time may come when Google Books and the Kindle become our primary media for reading literature. But there is a hope that other independent bookstores will learn to supplement their literary stock with whatever products allow them to stay financially afloat.

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FEATURE

T

Talking Shops

By Juliana Hanle

Broadway businesses in a photograph from a bygone era.

The story of a street, a city, and a school.

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he printer on the second floor of Tyco beats like the heartbeat of a marathoner gone aerobic. Founded by Michael Iannuzzi in 1971, the copying and printing company is one of the few small business that have seen the transformation of Broadway.

Educated Burgher is another. There, a 1984 map of New Haven’s businesses still hangs on the wall, faded and irrelevant.

Fewer than half of the businesses depicted still exist. There was once a movie theater, a wine shop, a record store, a bar, two more Cutler’s outposts, and a florist—but they’ve all gone under, most of their properties bought up by Yale.

Today, Campus Customs, Educated Burgher, Blue Jay Cleaners, Toad’s Place, Yorkside, and J. Press are all that remain from the old guard.

Therevolutionbeganwith the sidewalks. In the mid-1990s, Yale and New Haven partnered to make infrastructure improvements — changing traffic patterns and storefront signs, renovating buildings, burying utility lines, and planting elm trees — to combat what Iannuzzi classified as the sentiment that, as an urban area, “we were decaying, but not from the standpoint of the business.”

The New York Times put it more bluntly in 1994, stating that the area was “plagued by traffic congestion and rampant shabbiness.”

Yale’s goal was to make it more

welcoming—to students, businesses,andthoseinthecommunity.

According to Bruce Alexander ’65, the Vice President for Yale’s office of New Haven and State Affairs (NHSA), the transformation he initially imagined ten yearsagoisalmostcomplete—only the installation of a handful of fine dining spots remain. The change has been made possible by Yale’s careful management of inter-store competition. Yale, which owns most of the properties, leases to stablecorporatebusinessessuchas J.Crew, Origins, and Au Bon Pain.

The University began buying up properties from local New Haven families who wanted to sell, a process accelerated when university president Richard Levin hired Alexander in 1998. Alexanderaggressivelyrecruitednewmerchants such as Laila Rowe, Urban Outfitters, and Thom Browne, and brought in Ivy Noodle to serve latenight dining needs. In a 2001 press release, then-University Properties financial analyst Andrea Pizziconi ’01 said that to identify an appropriate 24-hour convenience store“we literally walked the streets of New York for days,” before deciding on Gourmet Heaven. “I don’t think the Yale community realizes it,”she said. “But Yale is doing some of themostinnovativeandaggressive development projects among universities throughout the country.”

One of the biggest changes was to introduce national corpo-

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Cutler’s Record Shop still exists today; David’s Cookies and Ice Cream, however, has long been replaced.

Kerin is not the only business that has failed in recent years.

Whimsel’s, a creperie owned by two Yale graduates, closed less than two years after opening.

Some things never change; Tyco Copy has occupied its current Broadway location for almost 40 years.

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rations to Broadway—the first of which was Barnes and Noble. Independentbusinessesownersoften fear that corporations will be aloof and dissociated. In the merchant’s association of Broadway, however, Iannuzzi said the bookstore is“progressive and aggressive in being a part of the community,” a refreshing reprisal for the smaller businesses. Despite this diplomatic courtesy, phrases like “elbow their way”

found their way out of the mouths of both Iannuzzi and Barry Cobden, manager of Campus Customs, when they spoke of larger companies. Iannuzzi observed that the arrival of stores like J. Crew on a city blocksignaledachangeinshopping culture — a decade ago, he claimed, they would have stayed in the malls.

“A lot of times you lose if you get a corporate coming in,” he concluded. That said, New Haven does not have a significant department store to draw in traffic, so Barnes and Noble now acts as an economic anchor. “The nice part about the area,” Iannuzzi continued. “Is that Yale has sort of wrapped around the idea that the environment is for the students and the city.”

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The newest addition to the Broadway Shopping District, Gant, opened this November. Founded in New Haven in 1949, the now Swiss-ownedpurveyorofAmerican sportswear has 590 stores worldwide, and likes the idea of “coming home,” said Ari Hoffman, CEO of Gant U.S.A. in an interview with the New Haven Independent in October. “Some people may say, ‘Paris, Milan, Italy.’ We say, ‘New Haven.’”

Gant’s webpage credits founder Bernard Gant with introducing the classic “button-down shirt” and outfitting“the good life and leisurely lifestyles on the American East Coast.” Mr. Gant arrived on that coast in 1914, a Ukrainian emigrant who found employment in New York City’s garment district. Yet the company uses definitively WASP iconography to woo its customers.

The New Haven Gant store displays Take Ivy, a photograph collection of Ivy League fashion in the sixties, at the register. The Gant catalogue narrates in saccharine stereotypes the lives Gant men and women living inWashington D.C., offering poetical summaries of lacrosse games and the social lives of politicians.

A reflection on “The Art of Networking”fills the back pages. When Gant’s imminent arrival was announced in October, Abigail Rider, Director of University Properties, said, “the addition of Gant to the retailers on Broadway reaffirms our connection with our New England traditions.”Gant’spresencesuggests that these are perhaps traditions of aspiration—though only time will tell if pricey flannel and football jackets will keep the store around.

After all, University backing does guarantee a business’ success. Establishing a commercial business remains an exercise in hope and crossed fingers. Even when all the operative variables are aligned, unexpected failures occur. Johnson,

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sessnearlyalltherealestate.Besides Yale, the largest landowner in the Broadway district is the Vitigliano family. These New Haven real estate magnates own the buildings where Campus Customs hawksYale gear, Urban Outfitters sells trendy clothing, and the Educated Burgher serves up greasy diner food.

In December 2003 the holdings of the Vitigliano family were placed in the care of a real estate investment group called the Yale Mall Partnership, which represents the shared property of the Vitagliano siblings, according to the online records of the New Haven town clerk. The

Long before ABP, Liggett’s Drugs occupied the corner of York and Elm. Iannuzzi, and Cobden spoke of Kerin, an pricy eco-fashion store that lasted less than a year at the southwest corner of Broadway and York in the space that Gant now occupies. “I think people just thought, well it’s Yale so we can go really high-end,” Johnson mused.

Kerin is not the only business that has failed in recent years. Whimsel’s, a creperie owned by two Yale graduates,closedlessthantwoyears after opening. York Square Cinema stopped playing films in 2005 after years of struggling with motion picture companies to obtain rights to blockbuster films. Cosi closed in 2008, citing a drop in customers.

The current make-up of the block reflects a comprehensive and systematic plan for the development and operation of the Broadway district by the two groups that pos-

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Coffee which has five locations in Boston, Providence, and New Haven, said he is not aware of any other landlord who does so much active marketing for their tenants.

Iannuzzi readily acknowledges that “Yale put together the plan to develop the area. They spent a lot of money and made the place look great.” That said, the extra-special treatment comes at a price. In exchange for its services,Yale requires adherence to certain standards of operation from its occupants. The commandmentsarefew:Storesmust stay open until at least 9 o’clock SundaythroughThursdayandtheymust

Jacobs ’98, Director of Operations for Yale University Properties in the early ’00s, put it. For example, in 2000, the University refused to renewtheleasefortheconvenience store Krauszer’s, citing its high prices and poor selection. University Properties also cited the failure of Bill Kalogeridis, owner of the Copper Kitchen on Chapel Street, to comply with safety regulations to explain why Yale never offered him the security of five-year lease contract instead of month-to-month payments. In an interview with the Yale Daily News, however, Kalogeridis suggested that the University

Yale requires adherence to certain standards of operation from its occupants: stores must stay open until at least 9 o’clock Sunday through Thursday and they must keep generous holiday hours. Gourmet Heaven has to display fresh fruit on the sidewalk.

Vitaglianos have worked alongside Yale’s urban renewal initiatives, enteringintomultipleagreementswith the University regarding leasing practices on the block since 2007.

From their University Properties office,Yale arranges extensive Broadway promotion, including College Night, which draws students from local colleges and universities for a night of discounts, live music, and prizes. According to Cobden, Iannuzzi, and Anne Johnson, the manager of Laila Rowe, the night provides increased profits for the stores that take part. All three credited Yale for planning and promoting the event--the university, in its role as landlord, even arranged for the sidewalks to be cleaned before and after. That dual act of promotion and maintenance is a part of the regular routine on Broadway. Drew Ruben ’11, owner of Blue State

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keepgenerousholidayhours.Gourmet Heaven has to display fresh fruit on the sidewalk.When a tenant breaks the rules, they pay a fine. Yet this strong discipline has strengthened Broadway’s renaissance.

Before Kerin, a fast-food chain claimed the southwest corner on York and Broadway, recalled Johnson. As he tells it, Yale “got them out of there.” The restaurant served lunch and dinner, sold liquor and played music for dancing. They vacatedthepremisesaboutayearafter the property transferred into Yale’s possession, according to Cobden.

He says the owners became“disenchantedwiththearea,”andthencautiouslyaddedthathedoesnotknow if Yale was involved in the move. It certainly wouldn’t be the only time.

The University has publicly used its ownership to ease out stores that “didn’t add to the district,” as Matt

wanted to force his business out to make room for another boutique.

Cobden acknowledged that the changes Yale has made along the way—the corporate presence, the rules—didnotalwaysfeelgood.But a relativist appreciation forYale’s involvement prevails. For now, BroadwaymerchantslikeCobdenareready to believe that Yale’s involvement is for the best. “This is not change that really hurts,” he explained.

The merchants are not about to bite the hand that feeds them even if it does demand some new dis-

TNJ

Juliana Hanle is a sophomore in Davenport College.

13

FEATURE

T

RIOT GIRL

In 1996, Sara Marcus left Yale, after violent threats to LGBTQ students were shrugged off by the administration.

How far has Yale come since?

ByEmilyRappaport 14

The New Journal

his fall, Katie Miller ’13 left the United States Military Academy at West Point in protest of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and transferred to Yale. “Even before I was interested in transferring, I knew it was LGBTQ friendly,” she says of the college.

After all, in 1986, Yale became one of the nation’s first universities to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination clause. The next year, an article in Rolling Stone dubbed the school the “gay Ivy”—an epithet that Miller finds appealing.

She has not been disappointed in her first term here, saying she has appreciated the support of the University as well as her friends and classmates.

Fourteen years ago, however, a young woman named Sarah Marcus transferred from Yale for reasons of sexual orientation. By her account, Marcus’ and several others were harassed and threatened with violence because of their sexual identity. Marcus felt the administration’s responses to these incidents were unsympathetic at best, and she left Yale for Oberlin College in Ohio after the first term of her sophomore year. Marcus’ and Miller’s stories run parallel, but in opposite directions: both transferred away from a school where they felt repressed, and both, to some extent, became spokeswomen for the LGBTQ community on campus.

What can their stories tell us about a movement, about the nature of civil rights activism, about the history of a school?

Today, Sara Marcus is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor for artforum. com, the online component of Artforum International Magazine.

She came out during her freshman year of high school in Maryland—

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“but I never really knew what I was coming out as,” she says. “Because at that time, bisexuality was like, Madonna and Sandra Bernhard—it wasn’t a legitimate subject.”

High school was tough, but Marcus believed that college would bring bigger, better things. She had visited her older brother at Oberlin, and what she saw there gave her “this vision that going to college meant everybody’s a feminist, everybody’s cool if you’re queer or whatever,

Gay people were exotic at best, even within a

community that prided itself on

its progressive-

ness. One in four,

maybe more? “It was completely

not true,” Marcus says.

people hang out in co-op kitchens late at night baking loaves of whole grain bread listening to punk rock.”

It never occurred to her that not all liberal arts colleges were as tolerant.

She had high hopes for Yale until she arrived on campus.

“And then, of course,” she says, “Yale was tremendously different.”

Marcus entered Yale a member of the class of 1999. She was assigned to Morse College—“it felt really freeing not to be trapped by this weight of history and classical pretension of the other colleges”— and involved herself in student

labor activism. By her sophomore year, she’d been arrested twice for protesting workers’ rights. Soon, however, her interest in activism was forced to take a different tack.

Self-defining as queer, Marcus joined the LGBTQ Co-op. At a coming-out day rally in October 1996, Marcus, then a sophomore, gave a speech condemning the recent passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, which declared that states were not obliged to recognize samesex marriages sanctioned by other states. Then, she went away on a weekend trip. When she returned to school, there was a voicemail on her answering machine from a man who had heard her speak at the rally.

“Hi Sara, you little dyke,” he had recorded. “I’m calling to say that I think it’s a shame that you’re a dyke, because personally, I’d like to fuck you. But I can’t touch you because you’ve been licked so much. So I’ll just take my fist and fucking tear you apart. Thank you.”

Horrified, Marcus sent an email to the Co-op panlist to ask if anyone had experienced anything similar.

What had happened to Marcus paled in comparison to the responses she remembers receiving. One student, Chrysanthi Leon, then a visible campus lesbian (she and her girlfriend had been featured in a Valentine’s Day issue of The Herald) and now an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, had also received threatening phone calls. She and her girlfriend had experienced other acts of violence, such as being surrounded on Chapel Street by men who spat on them, which they believed to have surged up from an undercurrent of violent homophobia on campus. Marcus thought, “I’m going to organize around this.” She pushed aside her work with labor

15

FEATURE of 1999 with an English major and American studies concentration.

Two other close friends of Marcus also transferred from Yale because of the climate for LGBTQ students, and two more accelerated so that they could graduate in three years instead of four.

Despite her activist role at Yale, “queer things” were never Marcus’s real interest. She loved Oberlin because once there, she could focus on her true passion: organizing within Jewish communities for economic, social, and racial justice.

At Yale, she felt that the battles of

16

Members of Marcus’ group again began to receive threatening phone calls.

Marcus had been planning since her arrival at Yale to spend her sophomore spring semester at Oberlin. Though she intended to return to Yale when she left in December of her sophomore year, she looked forward to the respite from Yale’s hostile environment.

Once away from Yale, she heard that other Yale students were beginning to ask how to address the problems with queer acceptance they saw on campus. She also heard that the situation at Yale was escalating.

Attacks on queer students—“and, like, straight [women] with short hair”—were intensifying.

“I was the object of a number of incidents—a strange death threat, harassment, and an act of confused violence—in the first semester of

though it kind of feels that way right now.” Since she has become a public figure, she has felt an obligation to use her influence to advocate for the LGBTQ community.

“If you didn’t have someone being very visibly noncompliant with current policies, why would there ever be a catalyst for change?” she asked.

“You can’t necessarily identify gay people by looking at them,” she added, “so it’s very important to come out publicly and make known that yes, you are gay, whether or not you identify strongly with your

When she returned to school, there was a voicemail on her answering machine from a man who had heard her speak at the rally.

Spring 1996, Old Campus activism to make room for a new project.

Marcus began by writing an oped for the Yale Daily News relaying some of these stories, quoting hate notes and the text of the voicemail she had received. As Marcus now summarizes the message of the column: “We think this is a super tolerant and accepting place, but look: there are problems. It’s not tolerant and accepting for everybody.” The News, however, did not publish Marcus’ piece. “We can’t run this kind of language,” they told her.

Marcus and her friends then made fliers that quoted explicit threats and messages people had received in 16-point font. While the conflicts may have been happening behind closed doors, Marcus’ and her friends felt they were a community concern, but not everyone agreed.

out day rally,” Marcus recalls wryly, “I didn’t tell my story of being fourteen and falling in love with someone. I was like, I want to talk about politics, and this is a coming -out day rally, so I guess I’ll say I’m a dyke, blah, blah, blah, and then give my speech. But I didn’t even really mean it.”

Marcus, who thought she wanted to be a labor organizer when she graduated from college, founded the Student Labor Action Coalition at Oberlin, and was active in the fight to protect need-blind admissions (which Oberlin, like many small

college. My dean refused to move me out of the room for a long period of time, after having already suffered quite a bit of pain and confusion and despite having asked repeatedly to be moved,” wrote one of Marcus’s classmates, who asked not to be named since “the actual story is really quite long and tangled.”

Untrusting in the dedication of the Yale Police Force in protecting her, Marcus became wary of her place at Yale. On a visit back from her semester at Oberlin, Marcus meeting with her Morse college dean to express her fears—she left no more comforted than she when she arrived. Ultimately, Marcus thought, “I need to keep myself safe, and part of that is that I’m not sure if I want to keep fighting this.”

So she stopped fighting. Marcus left Yale for good, graduating from Oberlin as a member of the class The New Journal

“Hi Sara, you little dyke,” he had recorded. “I’m calling to say that I think it’s a shame that you’re a dyke, because personally, I’d like to fuck you. But I can’t touch you because you’ve been licked so much.

So I’ll just take my fist and fucking tear you apart.

Thank you.” gender and sexuality were ones she had to be fighting simply by virtue of the fact that she was gay.

In reality, Marcus, who has mostly dated men for the past few years, has never really been comfortable labeling herself this way.

Too often, she thinks, political speech requires a sort of inflexible attitude—“Yes, this category is me, and I am it. And that is what gives me strength”—which can never be genuine or honest. “At the coming

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schools, has since eliminated). “The queer stuff was handled,” she says. “I didn’t have to do it. It was amazing.

I could just be a…human being.” At Oberlin, finally, Marcus was simply a college student, passionate about English and punk rock and social justice, who happened to be queer.

That is Miller’s hope as well. “I didn’t enter West Point thinking I would be a gay activist,” she said. “I didn’t leave West Point thinking I would be a gay activist forever, even

sexuality.”

M

arcus contrasts Yale today with Yale as she knew it. She was drawn to Yale in part because of its liberal reputation but still, in 1995 and 1996, “it was very strange not to be straight” at Yale. Gay people were exotic at best, she recalls, even within a community that prided itself on its progressiveness.

One in four, maybe more? “It was completely not true,” Marcus says,

17

Visit us online at www.thenewjournalatyale.com.

To write, edit, design, draw or photograph for The New Journal, email thenewjournal@gmail.com.

Spring 1996, New Haven Courthouse -

Marcus and her classmates after they were sentenced to community service for protesting inside President Levin’s office. Marcus is third from left in the front row.

though she likes to thinking things have improved.

Even so, this fall, the story of Delta Kappa Epsilon’s (DKE) freshmen pledges chanting, “no means yes, yes means anal,” on Old Campus made national news, and Marcus heard disturbing echoes of her time here.

It was as though, in spite of all the efforts she and students have made since to raise awareness and promote sexual respect, nothing had changed.

Marcus was only slightly heartened when she heard that administrative action had been taken because, she feels, “that doesn’t change the fact that the male culture of being a douchebag still persists.”

Miller, by contrast, said she feels safe here speaking out about her sexuality. “It’s great to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I was part of a progressive institution,’” she said.

18

Soon after she arrived on campus, she was receiving e-mails from the Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Co-op about phone campaigns to encourage congressmen to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And when Miller, who became something of a media celebrity after coming-out and leaving West Point publicly last spring, needed to miss class for an interview or for other advocacy activities, she found her professors were supportive.

Marcus thinks that if she had experienced what she did in 2010 instead of 1997, somebody might have listened. Seeing the mass of signatures on an online petition for the administration to take action in response to the DKE incident made her hope that the Internet has made it easier to “harness outrage” and publicize traumatic events.

Indeed, this year, the administration responded to the incident within a week by setting up a task force, chastising DKE, and holding a number of campus events. When Marcus was at Yale, “there was nobody to tell,” but this story, and that of Katie Miller, suggest things have changed. Still, at the same university where a story like Marcus’ took so long to come to light, there’s no way to be sure.

TNJ

Emily Rappaport is a freshman in Ezra Stiles College.

The New Journal

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19

SHOTS IN THE DARK

The Elm City By Bicycle “We took our bikes and explored areas around New Haven that people may not usually see. We documented our travels and ended up finding a lot of interesting places to explore.”

By Autumn von Plinsky & Ellen Su

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The New Journal

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21

FEATURE

NUMBERS GAME:

an investigation of eating disorders at Yale

By Max Ehrenfreud

81

calo

ries

21g

total carbs

163%

vitamin c

A

lex many

how calories are in an egg.

She knows how many calories are in a yolk, and how many are in the white. “That’s something I will know for the rest of my life,” she said. “That’s a raw fact. That’s like three times three for me.”

The number of calories is only one side of the equation, though.

The number of pounds is the other, and for a while, Alex wasn’t the only one closely tracking Alex’s body weight. Yale requires some students with abnormally low body weights

22

knows

to present themselves at Student Medicine once a week to be weighed. Students whose weights do not increase are asked to leave the school for medical reasons. Alex was weighed once a week when she was a freshman. At the clinic, she would list what she had eaten that week on a form, though not always truthfully, urinate in a cup so she couldn’t water-load to hide weight loss, and change into a paper gown so she couldn’t hide weights in the pockets of her clothes. Then she would step onto the scale.

For me, a young adult male of

average height and weight, it was hard to see why the school would consider treating Alex’s case with such draconian severity. In a society obsessed with food, what makes these particular students’ obsession with food so dangerous? And I was taken aback when Alex, who on the whole seems healthy and perfectly sane, revealed she could still recite caloric contents for so many foods.

Anorexia left a kind of scar on Alex’s mind; for just about every food she has eaten, the disease carved a number into her memory.

She had mentioned earlier

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that when most people hear about someone with an eating disorder, they want to ask, “Why can’t she just go eat a hamburger?” not realizing how little these mental illnesses have to do with the food itself. It’s the same question parents and friends want to ask when they first confront one of these illnesses— the simple, naïve, and desperate question: Why can’t you just eat?

For God’s sake, just eat!

A

lex is unusual in that she may be exactly what many people think of when they think of a girl with anorexia. (She has also been through periods of bulimia, exercise bulimia, and binge eating.) In high school, she was a valedictorian and a cheerleader.

“In Texas, we do cheerleading the way people do piano lessons,” she says. She started in fourth grade.

Cheer was a class in high school, in addition to practice after school.

She was also on a competitive cheerleading team unaffiliated with the school. “I was expected to be a certain way,” she says. The uniforms for her competitive cheer squad had low necklines and were cut just above the girls’ thighs.

As I have done with the names of the other students in this piece, I’ve changed Alex’s name to write about her eating disorder, which began to develop when she was in tenth grade. In eleventh grade, her cheer coach told her she couldn’t continue at her low weight, but Alex didn’t make any effort to change her eating patterns. So when she came to Yale, the weekly weigh-ins made her eating unpredictable. “Numbers just make you more paranoid. If you gain a pound, you don’t see it as a good thing,” she said. “Unless you’ve made the decision to get better, you’re really pissed at yourself.”

If Alex’s weight increased WInter 2010-2011

during a week, she would be more restrictive in the following week.

Yet Alex wanted to stay at Yale, so when she lost weight, she would binge. “It’s the scariest situation,” she told me. “You just can’t stop.”

Alex’s case shows what mandatory weigh-ins can and can’t accomplish. Yale can effectively force students to accept treatment by offering them a choice between

Anorexia left a kind of scar on Alex’s mind; for just about every food she has eaten, the disease carved a number into her memory. going to the clinic and going home.

But since nobody can begin to recover from an eating disorder until he or she has decided that she wants to be healthy, the school can’t force anyone to be healthy. All the system can really do is prevent hospitalizations.

When I wrote Yale psychiatrist Dr. Carole Goldberg to ask about the weigh-ins, she responded simply, “Weigh-ins are necessary when someone’s weight is at a dangerous/life threatening BMI,”1 and added that students have the choice whether they want to see their body weights, in other words whether they step on the scale forward or backward. Alex noted that the choice is never made clear to students who are coming in to be weighed. She adds that if a person with an eating disorder hasn’t decided they want to improve, they won’t ask for their weight to remain

hidden, and even if they are given the choice, they might still want to know. A better policy might be to require Student Medicine staff to explicitly offer every student being weighed the choice of seeing her weight or even to disallow her from seeing her weight.

Alex is still alarmingly thin, and food can still be difficult for her. She is barely above the school’s minimum BMI right now, she confides. “I’ve been above and below the line so many times, I can’t count.”

I

t is almost impossible for a person who has not experienced an eating disorder to understand what it is like to suffer from one. Try imagining, I’m told, that someone follows you around everywhere you go, berating you for what she sees as your shortcomings.

This person also talks incessantly about food, telling you how many calories are in the food around you, calculating how many you’ve eaten, multiplying calories by servings, adding up meals and subtracting how long you’ve exercised and how many steps you’ve taken. She’s exact. She will certainly remind you about things like mayonnaise on a sandwich or the milk and sugar in your coffee (although people with eating disorders tend to drink their coffee black).

Or imagine that not eating for you is like cigarettes for a chainsmoker; that vomiting puts you in a good mood. Imagine that you have suppressed your body’s ability to feel hunger and satiety, that food is no longer food for you. A longtime family friend offers you a plate of homemade cookies, and when you take one you pick it up as you would pick up a spider. When you eat it, you pledge, “This is the last cookie I will ever eat in my life.” When you 23

wake up in the morning on a day when you know you won’t have time to work out, you start figuring out how you will eat less to make up for it. You never weigh yourself, because the last time you weighed yourself the amount of weight you had gained was so terrifying you didn’t leave your room for four days, nauseated with despair. It’s easier not to go to social gatherings than to go and refuse food that’s offered to you, and it’s easier not to talk to anyone than to have to answer questions about what you’re doing to yourself, so you spend a lot of time on your own.

You hide from your roommates so they don’t notice you coming back from your second trip to the gym in a day. You start measuring bananas to make sure they aren’t longer than the standard size for bananas used in calculating caloric intake.

Measuring bananas is important, because there are always numbers in your head.

Calories, grams, cups, servings, steps, miles, bites, pounds. Smaller numbers are good and exciting; larger numbers are frightening.

If it seems as though everything you know is falling apart, numbers are something you can control.

They reduce all your problems into one problem, like a math problem with one right answer, and losing weight is like solving the problem and getting the right answer.

That was the mindset of Aimee Liu, a junior at Yale in 1974, when eating lunch with Jen, a Political Science-African Studies double major, and Lia, an Economics major.

That day, Liu remembers in her 2007 bestseller Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders, Jen and Lia, both seniors, were planning out their lives after graduation.

“As Lia chewed her tuna fish sandwich,” Liu writes, “I was calculating that one bite 24

contained 50 calories, five grams of carbohydrates, and four grams of fat.

The mayonnaise made the waxed paper glint in the bright sun. I tried to imagine not noticing the oil, not thinking about the water weight the salt from the Fritos would cause.

I tried to understand how Lia could ignore what she was putting into her mouth and focus on her future.”

This was in 1974, although it might as well have been written in 2010. Liu was in the third class of women to graduate from Yale.

“There were a lot of us walking around campus with anorexia, and a lot of us, less obviously, with bulimia,” she told me. “It appalls me now to look back on what I squandered when I was at Yale.

The eating disorder had really stunted my brain. I couldn’t read properly, I couldn’t think properly, because my brain was starved.”

Liu has spent much of the intervening decades learning and writing about eating disorders. She asked me to make sure I mentioned the book in this article, since she feels that it offers useful advice on how to recover or help someone recover from an eating disorder.

Her own recovery took several years, and began, as she recalls in Gaining, with a love affair. In her junior year, she met a graduate student studying sculpture. People with eating disorders, she told me, need “friends, lovers, who are not judgmental, who have the patience to look past the eating disorder and really separate the person from the condition, who treat food as an expression of love and affection and acceptance,” who can help someone learn not to see food as being right or wrong.

An estimated percent of college students suffer from an eating disorder (most of whom are women—there are about seven women with anorexia or bulimia

nervosa for every man). Yet there are at least two reasons why students at a school such as Yale might be more likely to develop eating disorders, especially anorexia.

There’s a correlation between anorexia and personality traits that could make an anorexic high school senior more likely to attend a selective college. “Obsessional perfectionists are at increased risk for anorexia nervosa, so vulnerable individuals are often high achievers academically,” Dr. Angela Guarda, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, explained in an e-mail.

Other researchers noted that the stress of leaving home for the first time, which brings on eating disorders in many predisposed freshmen, might be compounded by the intensely competitive environment at a school such as Yale.

Eating disorders were not yet recognized as mental illnesses when Liu was at Yale. “There wasn’t any treatment,” she said. “I went to DUH (Department of University Health) and actually tried to get some help, and instead, people just said, you need to gain a little weight. Period. End of story.”

I briefly described Alex’s weighins for Liu. “The weighing thing is really tricky—it’s really really tricky, because it’s not the only barometer of health, and it’s such a humiliating exercise for people to go through, especially if they’re singling out certain people for this treatment,” she said.“It doesn’t sound like a great policy to me, but on the other hand I don’t have an easy solution or an alternative.”

S

ymptoms of anorexia are commonly described in medical literature of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but physicians then did not distinguish eating disorders from other psychological The New Journal

Pomegranate

Nutrition Facts: Serving Size - 282 g, Calories - 234, Calories from Fat - 28, Total Fat - 3g (5%), Saturated Fat 0g (2%), Trans Fat (0g), Cholesterol 0mg (0%), Sodium 8mg (0%), Total Carbohydrate 53g (18%), Dietary Fiber 11g (45%), Sugars 39g, Protein 5g, Vitamin A (0%), Vitamin C (48%), Calcium (3%), Iron (5%). *Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet conditions. They termed these behaviors melancholy, hysteria, or something equally nonspecific and chalked them up to the mysterious and unpredictable anatomies of women.

But as historian Rudoph M. Bell argues in his book Holy Anorexia, an epidemic which can now be identified as anorexia nervosa struck European convents in the late medieval period. The sisters aspired to an ideal of holiness as some anorexic women of today aspire to an ideal of beauty. According to Bell’s research, more than half of the 170 female saints who lived in Europe since the year 1200 and for whom a reliable historical record exists “displayed clear signs of anorexia”.

St. Catherine of Siena, born in that city in 1347, was “the classic anorexic,” in Liu’s words. She was also an active and influential figure during her life, tirelessly caring for the sick in convent hospitals and

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helping to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon, France, where the papal court had lain since 1309.

Her restrained eating habits were also well known, however, and many, including her family, thought she was possessed or a witch.

No one really understands the combination of social, psychological, and genetic or chemical factors that cause eating disorders. But fasting in Catherine’s day suggests those mechanisms predate our time.

“I

think this campus has a

terrible problem, and I think people need to talk about it,” Tonya had said at the end of our first meeting. We had been talking outside a coffee shop, smartly dressed graduate students and older, professorial couples with foreign accents going by on the sidewalk. The noise of construction

equipment came from across the street, where a university building was undergoing renovations. It was a warm fall day, the leaves just beginning to turn. At one point, someone Tonya knew to have an eating disorder walked past us. “This is not the best place to be in recovery,” Tonya remarked.

Eating disorders, particularly anorexia, can make people viciously competitive, driven to look thinner than the thinnest of their peers, to push unhealthy habits to further extremes. At Yale, this aspect of the illness has created a kind of invisible sisterhood whose members are often engaged in unspoken and potentially dangerous contests with one another. Alex called it “a gym cult.”“You’re running on the elliptical next to a girl,” she said, “and you’re like, ‘Her thighs are smaller, but oh, my calves are smaller, so it’s O.K.’ It’s a sick, sadistic competition, because really, you’re hurting yourself.”

25

Measuring is important, because there are always numbers in your head.

Calories, grams, cups, servings, steps, miles, bites, pounds.

Small numbers are good and exciting; larger numbers are frightening.

Today, Tonya is waiting for me just inside the cavernous maw of Payne Whitney, Yale’s castle of a gymnasium, at the base of its nine-storey tower. “So how do you envision this working?” she asks after we’ve gone inside.

I didn’t really have a plan. I just wanted to follow Tonya to the gym and work out with someone who works out obsessively.

“I just have to say,” she goes on, “cardio is the most solitary thing I do.”

Tonya’s symptoms, overexercise and daily alternation between binges and periods of restriction when she was in high school, fall into the category psychologists call “eating disorder not otherwise specified,” or EDNOS. She is healthier now than she was then, but she still counts calories obsessively, and she had recently gone to the gym at 10:30 at night because she was feeling anxious.

After working out, she felt better.

“I can never look in the mirror and know how I really look, because I can’t trust anything about my mind,” she had told me. When she looks at her abdomen in the mirror, “probably 85 percent of the time it’s this gross cellulity mass of disgustingness. I know that can’t be true—physically it just can’t be true.”

She has spent too much time in the gym for it to be true, and after we’ve taken the elevator to the fitness center on the fourth floor, I also wonder how she could ever think that it could be true. She walks past me toward the treadmills—her body is muscular and lean. “For 26

people I know who have eating disorders, it’s not about being thin or fit,” Tonya told me. She swam for ten years and played field hockey in high school, so she was always in good shape. She’s never looked thin, she told me (“I have a lot of muscle mass—thank God, frankly, because I would have been dead”) but I can’t imagine her ever looking fat either.

She talks rapidly, and I usually have to interrupt her if I want to ask her a question. “This is what it’s like when my eating disorder is in the driver’s seat,” she once apologized.“Talking so fast and from so many angles I want to scream.

Instead I just work out or deprive myself of food.” When Tonya says something darkly self-deprecating like that, it’s hard to know how to respond. On the one hand, her jokes can be very funny, and you have the feeling she’d like you to laugh at them. But you also know that she’s joking because it’s a way of dealing with what’s happened to her, with what she’s done to herself.

I step onto a treadmill beside her, and glancing at the numbers on her display, set the speed to one or two tenths of a mile below hers. I’m reasonably fit, but I have no desire to race Tonya, since I’m sure she would win. Besides, in the back of my mind there’s a story she told me about a trip to the gym in her residential college one day last spring.

The gym was busy, and there was only one treadmill free. Tonya left her wallet and keys on the treadmill to reserve it and went to the bathroom, but when she

returned another girl had moved her things off the treadmill and was running on it. The other girl was also struggling with an eating disorder, Tonya knew, by that frightening instinct many people with eating disorders seem to have for picking out others with similar problems.

Tonya and the girl on the treadmill began to argue and scream at each other. Later, Tonya wrote an enraged email to her therapist and nutritionist. “I hope she falls down five flights of stairs, breaks both legs, and gains 50 pounds,” she remembers telling them.

“That’s how I felt,” she tells me.

I look over at a girl stretching on the mats next to us. She is very flexible and bony, and I find myself wondering about her, though I wouldn’t have given her a second thought before I began reporting this article. I steal glances at her elbows, her hair, the tendons in her neck, and the knock of her knees, looking for anything abnormal.

That’s not how Tonya would see her, I realize, even if Tonya were still as sick as she once was. Would Tonya instead have admired the bones in her calves, the self-denial in her drawn cheeks? I can only imagine.

The gym is strangely quiet. It’s a big room, and any human noise is lost in the whirr of the ventilation and the machines. The girl on the mat leaves, and a while later, after Tonya has gone for a spin on one of the stationary bikes, she and I are on the treadmills again, cooling down.

“You caught me on an abnormally good workout day,” The New Journal

she says. “I’m not, like, dying.”

“I am, a little bit,” I admit.

The two of us run through some sit-ups and push-ups and get ready to go. “I have mountains of work,” Tonya says. The life of a Yale student: reading and studying until late tonight, at work until 1 tomorrow afternoon, and class at 2:30 until evening.

We walk down rows of people on treadmills, ellipticals, stair-steppers, stationary bikes, recumbent bikes, and rowing machines. Is this an especially healthy subset of the Yale population, or one that is peculiarly diseased?

“One more thing,” Tonya offers, as we descend the stairs down to the main floor. She takes the stairs down from the fourth floor fitness center, but she always takes the elevator up. “That’s my concession to myself, that I don’t have to do everything. Basically, I’m weird.”

I tell Tonya she seems quite healthy to me. She does, especially given some of the stories I’ve heard about people who are very ill.

“I’m working on it. I’m working on it, and that’s what counts.”

I

t can be difficult not to feel in awe of someone like Tonya and her inhuman routine of workouts and restricted eating.

As Kelly put it to me, “Anorexia makes you superhuman in ways that eventually make you die.”

A year ago last summer, Kelly decided to go for a run. She came home tired out after about five minutes. The next day, she ran for fifteen minutes. The day after that, she ran for three miles. She ran every day after that, adding other exercises to her routine and beginning to restrict her eating. She was anorexic before leaving for Europe for a term abroad at the end of the summer.

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Much of the time she was sick she does not remember. “It feels like a different person,” she told me.

“In a lot of ways I think it was. It is.”

Kelly remembers announcing to her friends one day in high school that she could never become anorexic because she would be too hungry. “I was a dorky kid who watched the Food Network,” she told me. As a teenager, she would throw fancy dinner parties at her house for her friends on her birthday, cooking and baking all day. Her mother was the sous-chef and her father, with a towel over his arm, was the waiter. I asked Kelly about her favorite dishes to prepare: squash soup, handmade gnocchi with homemade pesto and tomatoes and red peppers, crème caramels, trifles, berry compotes and coulis. “I loved macerating berries in alcohol.

That was one of my favorite things to do.” In fact, many people who suffer from eating disorders loved to cook as children or become fascinated by cooking, cookbooks, and cooking shows, perhaps as a way of vicariously enjoying food.

Now, Kelly is earnest and cheerful and deliberately, exaggeratedly sarcastic (“Oh, that’s interesting!”). When she came home from Europe in the middle of her program there, almost exactly a year before I met her, she was lifeless. Her physician explained to her family that her brain had enough energy for breathing and walking and not much else.

Kelly was able to return to Yale in time for the start of the spring term. Compared to many students here who have suffered from eating disorders for years, Kelly thinks she’s fortunate. Her recovery is indeed impressive. “This was a real disease, and I needed to make it better,” she said. “It’s not

just a condition, but a malfunction, and I could correct it.” She did.

Orange (raw, with peel)

Nutrition Facts: Serving Size - 170 g, Calories - 107, Calories from Fat - 4, Total Fat - 1g (1%), Saturated Fat 0g (0%), Trans Fat (0g), Cholesterol 0mg (0%), Sodium 3mg (0%), Total Carbohydrate 26g (9%), Dietary Fiber 8g (31%), Sugars, Protein 2g, Vitamin A (8%), Vitamin C (201%), Calcium (12%), Iron (8%). *Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet “I am a smart person. I know that not eating is not a smart idea,” she laughed.

I met Kelly’s parents the day they came to Yale to see her last a cappella concert, where they sat a few rows in front of me, her mother watching the show through her digital camera, even though the group records all its shows with professional equipment. Kelly is an alto. She had a cold that afternoon, but couldn’t bear to miss her

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Pear (asian, raw) Nutrition Facts: Serving Size - 122g, Calories - 51, Calories from Fat - 2, Total Fat - 0g (0%), Saturated Fat 0g (0%), Trans Fat (0g), Cholesterol 0mg (0%), Sodium 0mg (0%), Total Carbohydrate 13g (4%), Dietary Fiber 4g (18%), Sugars 9g, Protein 1g, Vitamin A (0%), Vitamin C (8%), Calcium (0%), Iron (50%). *Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet final show. She soloed on the closing medley, one hand in the air, wagging her finger at the audience. Sass is the only word for what Kelly has on stage. “Thanks so much for coming,” she told the audience as the singers continued behind her. In a moment the song was over, someone gave Kelly a bouquet for her last performance, and the lights came on.

A scene like that—the hall’s elaborate oaken ceiling disappearing into shadow near its high peak, Kelly in the center of a series of group embraces on stage—belongs in a Yale College admissions video. But the materials Yale sends out to tens of thousands of prospective freshmen each year do not include the stories of those students for whom an eating disorder is another central component of the liberal-arts college experience.

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y the time St. Catherine of Siena was seven, she was throwing meat under the table when her mother tried to force her to eat. This may not yet have been symptomatic of an eating disorder, but Catherine was almost certainly anorexic by her adolescence, when mother 28

wanted her to marry her sister’s widower and Catherine rebelled by fasting continually. Her family sent her to their priest, who told Catherine to eat once a day. She did eat, but she would always vomit afterward. This continued throughout her life and even after she joined a convent— others would urge her to eat, and when she ate she would purge, gagging herself with a twig of fennel or a goose feather. (She continued to take communion.)

Catherine starved to death at 33. Anorexia nervosa, that very real demon born of the human mind’s imperfections, is the deadliest psychiatric illness. Women with anorexia are twelve times more likely to die young than women without the disease. By the sixteenth century, asceticism was heresy, and the Church was burning anorexics at the stake.

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few weeks after I first met Alex, I had been taught quite a bit about eating disorders, but there was still something I wanted to try for myself. I had written Kelly an email after she had told me about a kind of tofu-based noodle with no carbohydrates called shirataki

(“because pasta—pasta has actual sustenance! You can’t have that.”). She replied with a link to a website offering women recipes with very-low-calorie ingredients.

According to the site’s author, Lisa Lillien, the noodles are “an AMAZING pasta swap…As long as you prepare them right. It’s really important to rinse them, drain them, and dry them. Sure they’re a little high maintenance, but they’re totally worth it. I mean—HELLO!?—they have only 20 calories per serving!!!”

I find the noodles at a small grocery store around the corner from my dormitory where Kelly directed me, along with a small wheel of low-calorie cheese that she suggested in her email “(which, P.S., if you have only 35 calories YOU ARE NOT CHEESE).” While the clerk swipes the noodles, cheese, and a can of tomato sauce, I ask if the shirataki are popular.

He restocks them every week.

I’ve arranged to use my friends’ kitchen this evening.

Before the apartment’s tenants leave me with a key, my notebook, and my very-lowcalorie food, I have to ask one of them to look up a word for me.

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Next to the logo of Lillien’s web site indicating her endorsement, the instructions on the back of the packages of the shirataki read, “Parboil for 2-3 minutes to remove authentic aroma. Dry very well.” To parboil just means to boil partially, although, according to Wikipedia, “Parboiling can also be used for removing poisonous or foul-tasting substances from foodstuffs.”

The noodles are packaged in liquid and need to be drained first in a colander in the sink. They are weirdly white and gelatinous, sitting in the colander, but otherwise unremarkable. I lift a forkful to my nose to see if I can pick up the “authentic aroma.”

It’s certainly there—faint, but entirely nauseating, like rotting fish, but sweeter. The noodles go into a pot of boiling water, and the smell fills the kitchen for a few moments before dissipating. I let them parboil longer than the recommended two to three minutes to be safe.

It’s not long enough to cook them, though, and it’s now apparent to me that the noodles must be edible directly out of the package and that boiling is only necessary to eliminate the smell. After straining, rinsing, and drying, I throw some of the noodles on a plate, ladle tomato sauce on top, and sit down.

The sauce is too red, the noodles are too white. And there is still something sickly sweet, papery, and foul about the smell—I feel my gag reflex when I raise my fork to my mouth. Kelly definitely didn’t warn me about this. The noodles have no flavor, though. Apparently shirataki, like some other Asian foods, smells much worse than it tastes. Except that when you bite the noodles as you would pasta, they squish WInter 2010-2011

but don’t quite come apart.

You have to slurp them down your throat or chew for a longer time than feels comfortable.

The second course is the “horribly fake alfredo” Kelly mentioned in her e-mail, made with the cheese that is not cheese.

The noodles don’t smell as much, presumably since they’ve had a little more time to dry. But the cheese tastes just a little sharper than cheese should. It’s a chemical flavor. And you’d never know how much flavor plain pasta has unless you were to try shirataki.

It’s very filling. Since I’m not anorexic, I made sure to eat a healthy dinner before coming here, but I should have listened more carefully to Kelly—the noodles don’t have many calories, but they take up space in your stomach. It’s like drinking too much water.

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week after her concert, Kelly and I had agreed to meet up outside of Froyo World (110 calories per K serving, I later learned). But there was a bit of a chill in the autumn air that afternoon, and Kelly was still getting over her cold, so instead we decided to walk a couple of blocks to a bookstore and café where we had met before. Kelly apologized and suggested the two of us have dinner sometime when she was feeling better. Not wanting frozen yogurt because you have a cold shouldn’t be anything to apologize for. “If I were a normal human being, I would just do what I wanted,” she said.

As long as she can’t without second-guessing herself, she hasn’t recovered entirely. “It’s not something that just goes away,” she told me. Her boyfriend had been asking about her eating since she’d come down with the

cold. That week she had also asked her Biological Anthropology T.A. to be excused from an assignment on human diet that involved keeping track of everything she ate for several days. “I can remember being so normal, and then this block of crazy, and now I’m here.”

Few people would call students at a school such as Yale or the environment in which we work and live “normal,” but that does not mean we all have eating disorders.

When Kelly says she is not normal, she means it differently. Yale students are more susceptible than the general population to the common cold, because we don’t sleep enough and spend much of our time in close proximity to one another. That does not mean a person with a disease is healthy, that there is nothing that can be done to prevent the spread of illness, or that people who are sick can never get well. That much is true of eating disorders as well as colds.

Like Kelly’s, my nose was running earlier this fall, too. But I have never had an eating disorder, and no matter how much I learn about obsession and addiction, about prevention and treatment or about the complicated arithmetic that is Kelly’s illness, I will never really be able to understand what she has experienced. Tomorrow morning I can eat something nutritious and tasty and enjoy it, as I will at lunch and dinner and at breakfast the next day.

For some, every meal is as repulsive as thisone.

TNJ

Max Ehrenfreud is a junior in Davenport College and is a managing editor of The New Journal.

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Personal Essay

Maps ByHaleyCohen

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ustin stared straight past the Rolos, Snickers, and Skittles at the New York City subway map taped to the newsstand window. When I called to him, he merely blinked and continued tracing the map’s lines with his eyes. I took his hand and tried to pull him down Third Avenue, but he dug in his heels and screeched.

Reaching into my pocket, I fished out two quarters and plonked them on the counter. “Here you go, Columbus,” the vendor joked as he slid Austin a flimsy paper map.

“Happy exploring.”

At home, I watched Austin unfold the map on his floor, next to his perfect column of Hot Wheels.

Red, green, and orange lines dashed through the map’s ochre boroughs and gray-blue waterways. At the top, in the Bronx, they diffused like a child’s outstretched fingers, curving to their respective termini: Van Cortlandt, Woodlawn, Wakefield, Eastchester, Pelham Bay. Austin gazed hardest at upper Manhattan, where the routes straightened out and were joined by the cobalt A-line. Like many autistic children, Austin has always preferred straight to twisting.

Straight is predictable. Straight is safe.

Below 59th Street, south of the mossy rectangle of Central Park, the

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red, green, orange, and blue routes bisected cross-town yellow, gray, and purple routes in such a jumble Austin had to use his finger to keep himself on track. At Manhattan’s southern tip, the lines extended through the East River, splitting suddenly when they hit Brooklyn’s shore and dispersing inland like capillaries.

The map quickly revealed Austin’s obsessive study habits.

The lines became sticky: he had paved them in syrup as he traced their contours over breakfast. The starchy paper wrinkled and ripped: he often slept with the map under his pillow, as if hoping its contents would osmose into his memory.

The bottom eighth of the map was torn away: Austin had inadvertently submerged the Upper Bay in real water during a bath.

After a few weeks with the map, Austin knew how to travel from Columbia to NYU, the Financial District to Harlem, and DUMBO to the Upper East Side. He could tell you the 6 train’s every stop, where the F crossed the East River, and the exact street where the 1 merges with the 2 and 3. And yet he had never actually traveled by subway.

Though he has become more flexible, Austin once responded to unexpected situations with the virulence most save for lifethreatening emergencies. Abrupt noises led to howls, surprising sights to foot-stomping, and unanticipated contact to head-banging. Exposing

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Austin to the subway, it seemed, would not be wise. If it weren’t the blaring jazz bands, the jostling businessmen, or the homeless panhandlers, something was sure to set Austin off.

But one day, Austin and his babysitter, Bara, had no choice. Late for Austin’s therapy appointment, they rushed from our apartment building to find it was pouring and there were no available taxis. Braving the

“See,” Bara said, more to herself than to Austin. “Not so bad.”

The train jolted out of the station, and a woman holding a cat carrier lunged forward, steadying herself by pressing a wrinkled hand against Austin’s knee. Bara braced for an explosion --—Austin abhorred being touched, even by our mother— but it never came. Instead, he stared blankly at the woman,

obsession has included imaginary maps. When I come home from school, he insists that we play The Game of LIFE with my middle brother, Jared. He doesn’t fully understand the rules but gleefully plops his plastic station wagon along the serpentine track. He reminds Jared and me to “STOP!” at the red spaces signifying major life events: JOB SEARCH, GET MARRIED, FIND A HOUSE. According to the game’s rule

Like many autistic children, Austin has always preferred straight to twisting. Straight is predictable. Straight is safe. subway was the only sure way to be on time.

As he tiptoed down the slippery steps of 76th Street station, Austin held Bara’s index finger with his left hand and covered an ear with his right, trying to muffle the din. When they reached the platform, commuters stared as he rhythmically shifted his weight from foot to foot and compulsively clicked his tongue. After a few interminable minutes, the 6 train rolled in and he released Bara’s hand, bursting into a flurry of arm-flapping.

“Calm hands, Austin,” Bara pled. They sidled into the smooth plastic chairs, still warm from their previous occupants, and he continued flailing. As he reached around for a safety belt out of habit (in the subway, there are none), Austin glimpsed something familiar: a huge subway map hanging behind his seat. He faced forward and rested his hands in his lap. Under his breath he muttered the stops he knew came next: 68th Street, 59th Street, 51st Street, Grand Central Station.

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then calmly turned his gaze back toward the map, his sliver-thin lips pursed in contentment.

He knew where he was going.

Austin’s experience on the subway fueled his fixation with maps. Like a safety blanket, a map came to mean comfort.

Maps made him master of the unforeseen.

After digesting the subway’s 24 lines and 468 stops, he memorized the meandering metropolitan highway system that connects New York City to our grandmother’s nursing home in Rye. By his first visit to Yale, he could instruct me to walk down Chapel Street past College, Temple, Church, Orange, State, and Olive to meet my family at Pepe’s, a pizzeria over a mile from central campus in an area of New Haven I had never explored and he had seen only on a map.

After inhaling a mozzarella pie, he navigated as my Dad drove his SUV through the Elm City’s byzantine network of one-way streets back to Route 34.

For the last few years, Austin’s

manual, “players must stop on these spots “even if the spin is greater than the number needed to land on them.”

I’m not an expert—in my own life I’ve yet to reach the first of those red squares—but I know that real life doesn’t resemble either a LIFE game board or a subway map. Journeys get derailed, paths change, and there are no scheduled stops. This is particularly true for Austin.

Maybe one day he will experience the rites of passage LIFE demands of its players.

Maybe, as he has done in the game, he’ll buy a Victorian mansion, find a wife, and land a job as an airplane mechanic. Or maybe he’ll live with one of us—a small blue action figure in one of our station wagons. We just can’t know. There is no map.

TNJ

Haley Cohen is a senior in Davenport College and is co-editor-in-chief for The New Journal.

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Personal Essay

Baring All

The naked truth about nude modeling ByCharlotteKingston

I

started taking my clothes off for money when I was eighteen. In my first year of college at Cambridge, I was trying on some personality traits, throwing off others, always to make an impression.

I’d march off to sessions with borrowed bathrobes, cheerfully passing friends and letting them know where I was going.

I was proud of this new hobby and all that it entailed: my body, my confidence, my difference. From the earliest days to what is now my fifth year of modeling, my frequent nudity hasn’t ceased to be a talking point for others.

In England, where I’m from, people call it ‘life modeling,’ but as a graduate student here at Yale, I’ve discovered that, in the U.S., this term doesn’t carry.

Instead, I’ve learned either to grapple with the ambiguous ‘art’ or ‘figure’ model

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used here, or embrace more loaded terminology. It was a real surprise when a fellow Yale student, not getting my drift, exclaimed, “Oh! You do nude modeling.” To me, nude modeling meant pornography.

Yet I reminded myself of the words of the brilliant twentieth-century art historian, writer and broadcaster Kenneth Clark, whose book, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, I read in my first term at Cambridge. His bold opening makes this claim: “The word ‘nude’...carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.

The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body.”

Clark, however, was concerned with the artistic depiction of human nudity, the alabaster statues and the Raphaels. But when I’m on that pedestal, I may be “nude” to everyone drawing me, but I’m “naked” to myself.

The first time I modled was a

nightmare scenario right out of a Freud reader. As a musician, I had brought along my violin (which I can play) and a borrowed cello (which I cannot). The art class met in Cambridge University’s engineering department, which, as an English student, I’d had no cause to visit before. The vast lecture hall was dark except for two ferocious spotlights.

What was a lecturer’s desk by day had been turned for this evening class into my platform. It was far higher than I had been expecting, raised for the display of scientific utensils. But, mustering my courage, I unpacked my instruments, and slipped off to a restroom to undress.

I returned in a long scarf wrapped around me—an arrangement that unfortunately did not allow me the casual dropping of a robe from my shoulders. I clambered onto

When I’m on that pedestal, I may be “nude” to everyone drawing me, but I’m “naked” to myself. the high platform and paused, feeling my knees lock and my pelvis tighten. The lights were bright and the auditorium cavernous and dark.

I could see no one. I felt suddenly, shockingly, undressed, hyper-aware of my nipples, my underarms, my vagina. I could hear the artists’ preparations—paper reams unrolled, leads sharpened—even if I could only catch the luminescent outline of their backlit heads. The soles of my feet were alert to the surface of the bench as I picked up the violin at my feet and began to play.

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The music helped. It gave me something to focus on and allowed me to lose track of time. Even so, I never forget that I’m naked and, unsurprisingly, it is those most secret parts of my body that I think about most.

But in my experience the artist’s model, is protected by her naked state and the depersonalization of the drawing process. My modeling does have a sexual charge, but it’s mostly inside my own head. The class members will not often know your first name and will never know your last. That kind of identity is superfluous to them. It is rare for a model to be addressed by a member of the class; you can converse afterward, if you like, but invariably you begin the dialogue. At times I have asked for a break just to speak, to have my voice breach the silence of the studio. I have witnessed the class’ attendant shock. When I am naked in this way, no one expects me to have a voice or a personhood; stripped of those qualities, I feel my sex appeal is radically diminished.

Usually I don’t talk. Usually, I stay still. It’s harder work than it looks. Staying still is, paradoxically, a physical activity that involves sweating, muscle fatigue, and a raised heartbeat for the majority of the session. We begin with standing poses, maybe three or four, sometimes with a longer one at the end. Don’t point your toes, don’t lift your hands above your heart for two sequential poses, remember to change the weight from one side of the body to the other between poses.

Then we switch to a seated pose, and it’s a relief to get onto the floor. I try to remember the poses I’ve seen other models do, or run through paintings of nudes in my head. Often I spend much of each pose working out the next one. Which limbs do I want to

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preserve or rest, and which can take the strain? And you know if you’ve made a wrong choice immediately, but it’s usually just a touch too late to change. So your muscles twitch

I slowly became aware that a girl had positioned herself directly facing my pudendum, now revealed at an angle that I had certainly never seen with my own eyes. involuntarily. Your inner joints feel physically large, made of flesh and metal, capable of piercing pain. You spend time sucking the pain out of one limb and into another, mentally, imagining the tendons relaxing though they don’t move. You try to ground yourself in your buttocks when your wrist is giving out. You try to stop your trembling thigh by imagining a pole thrust into the floor from your heel downward, for stability.

Life modeling forces me to see my nakedness in a new way. Countless times I have stood or sat, conscious of my own heaviness, my physical mass, and how it seems to root itself to the platform, only to be surprised by the ephemerality of the images scattered across the floor of the studio afterwards. In these images I am small, airy, smudged. I am barely there. Other experiences are more intimate. During one session with a group of high school students, I arranged myself on my side with my knees drawn up to my chest,

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one slightly higher than the other. I slowly became aware that a girl had positioned herself directly facing my pudendum, now revealed at an angle that I had certainly never seen with my own eyes. Ferociously aware of the underside of my vagina, I was initially embarrassed, then curious to see what kind of drawing she would produce, and then not a little impressed by her audacity.

And though the point of view was lewd—at best Egon Schiele, at worst hard-core porn—the image she drew, whilst remaining vulva-like, was powerful, abstract, unusual. In drawing what was, to me, the most private, vulnerable part of myself, she carried it outside of that realm and gave it an aesthetic. The power of transformation belonged to her.

As the model, you willingly submit to the most intense gaze in human society: the artist’s. It is easy—too easy, really—to imagine the paintbrush, charcoal, inkbrush, or pencil tracing your outlines as a hand upon those curves. I like to

watch my artists (at least, those I can see) and watch what they do when they come to my erogenous zones. Some are stoics, others flinchers. I find it amazingly erotic to be the subject of so much attention— worship, even. As the drawers mill around searching for new materials, sometimes they set things down by my feet, and I am met with a string of people rummaging for charcoal, leaving their dirty deposits on the bench as offerings.

But for the most part, they see right through me—it is apparent in their concentration. For them, I fluctuate between existing as a naked person and a series of shapes, contours, and shadows.

It depends on what they are looking for that day and on how I am lit or presented.

When the break comes, the atmosphere snaps, and I am no longer the center of attention. Tired of looking at me, their object, the artists step back to look at their easels, and examine their own hands.

TNJ

Charlotte Kingston is a graduate student of English.

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Critical Angle

The Underdogs We Call Bulldogs:

Yale Women’s Soccer

By Adele Jackson-

T

he Beautiful Game. The game said to bring the whole world together. I watched this summer’s World Cup in Paris, France; I have never seen much

terraces; thousands sat in front of JumboTrons; wine glasses and beer mugs clinked after victories. There were hurrahs, yipees, and profanities.

Sometimes, there were riots in the

across the world wore the flags, shirts, and jerseys of their home country— and could proudly tell you their own team would win. Americans, however, were quieter about their allegiance.

“There are athletes that choose not to come to Yale because it’s too much academically, and they’d rather go somewhere they can coast through their four years while focusing on sports. It’s often overlooked, but it’s a rare breed that is willing to compete academically with non-athletes,” fervent passion, pride and celebration surrounding the game of soccer.

There, banners and flags waved from

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streets. Before the kickoff, bets were high on Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands. Nevertheless, folks from

Bold as our country’s reputation may be, we aren’t quick to proclaim soccersupremacy. We have yet to win a

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World Cup. The fact of the matter is, in the soccer world, America does not get much respect even from its own citizens. When it comes to baseball, we’ve stepped up to the plate. At basketball, we’ve made a slam-dunk.

For football, we need no Hail Mary.

Soccer, however, is a whole different ballgame.

Some Europeans say our weakness lies in the way we train our players.

In Europe, kids are sent to rigorous soccer training schools in hopes of someday scoring in a professional club contract. Often, they push education aside. There, passion for the game is inseparable from a drive to win.

In America, where professional soccer takes a back seat to other sports, the primary stage for the sport’s higher levels are on college fields.

There, players often prioritize school over sports, especially at rigorous schools like Yale. But the teams’ passion for the game runs strong regardless of the score.

I am a sophomore on Yale Women’s Soccer team, and I’ve witnessed our season— the growth and the disappointments.

Our competitive line-up proved difficult, stacked with nationally ranked teams: Duke, Boston College, Illinois, UConn. It was a tough road to travel as we faced many losses.

While an outsider might use more colorful adjectives to sprinkle salt on our turf burns, many of these games were close (1-0, 2-0). Against such great competition we began to develop our style of play.

Our coach, Rudy Meredith, provides his wisdom. “Number 1: We want to play against the best.

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Number 2: This way we have a better understanding of where we are. Maybe we scheduled too many tough games in a row, but it is the best feeling in world when you can get such an upset,” he says of facing difficult opponents.

The odds are against us. Since Yale holds high academic standards, and it doesn’t offer athletic scholarships as many of its counterparts do, we’re at a disadvantage in recruitment.

“Stanford has the best model,” Rudy explains. “They have good academics and scholarships and they are top five in the country. And they went to the Final Four last year too. If we

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had scholarships we could be just like them.” The academic standard for Yale’s prospective recruits is only increasing. “It’s tough. You are narrowing the pool again to get the best athlete. But we are at Yale University,” he continues.

For an Ivy League school, beating the odds takes a lot of work, determination, and dedication. In 2004, Princeton made it to the Final Four. And I am sure no one on our team can forget 2005 (since there is not a week where Coach does not bring it up); that year, Yale was

ranked 13th in the nation with a win against Duke under its belt. Eleni Benson, the captain at the time, graduated with the best GPA on the team and went off to play with the Greek national team in the women’s World Cup. During her Yale Career, she helped lead YWS to win the Ivy League Championships and enter the NCAA tournament.

I am happy to say that I was a part of the shake-up of 2010. In our season opener we faced Penn State, then 16th in the nation. Shaking with anxiety, we had no idea what to expect from our preseason preparation—and Penn State strolled in unfazed, ready to crush an Ivy. But when the whistle blew, I felt a raw energy in the air, and my chest burned with nerves and excitement. The exhilaration rose when we realized we were dominating the headballs, dribbling through defenders, and tackling dangerous plays. On the bench, we stood up chanting “Let’s go Blue!” with zeal. In the game’s last half hour, Becky Brown ’11 slotted one in on a breakaway, and all the Bulldogs on the sideline jumped up, screaming, hugging, and laughing. The game ended: 1-0, Yale. We all took scissors to the Yale Daily News article the next day to post that large picture of the team running to embrace Becky on our Walls: Elis pulled off the upset of Nittany Lions, earning the program’s first win against a Big Ten team in school history.

From that tremendous high, we stumbled through the next few games, but every day, we kept Penn State in the back of our minds, never forgetting what we knew we could

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Profile accomplish. We longed for the Ivy League ring—the mark of an athletic championship win amongst eight schools known for their academics.

“Student-athletes that come here don’t make the decision to come to Yale lightly,” says teammate Miyuki Hino ‘12. “There are athletes that choose not to come to Yale because

learned that the important things are not having the most championships, but maintaining a constant love for the game surrounded by a family (the team),” explains Natalie Romine ‘11.

Yale Women’s Soccer is about the team. For athletes and non-athletes alike, the best times in college are not those spent in lecture halls or

a little nervous,” he told us. “Whew.”

He lifted his instrument to his lips and began to play “My Heart Will Go On.” A slideshow started. Pictures of the seniors faded in and out as Rudy’s music brought us to tears.

When the slideshow finished, Rudy played Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” with CD accompaniment, and we

When it comes to baseball, we’ve stepped up to the plate. At basketball, we’ve got a slam-dunk. For football, we need no Hail Mary.

Soccer, however, is a whole different ballgame. it’s too much academically, and they’d rather go somewhere they can coast through their four years while focusing on sports. It’s often overlooked, but it’s a rare breed that is willing to compete academically with non-athletes,” she explains.

On YWS, we came to Yale with a drive for academics and thrive on soccer’s fast-paced competition.

For this reason, Rudy says, “We train 4-5 times a day like a professional team anywhere in the world. Obviously they have class everyday but people are working hard to achieve their goals. I am preparing kids to be productive.

The Yale name can only take you so far if you are not productive.”

Under the pressure of Division I competition, we learn to push ourselves through game-time, midterms and papers. We want to win against the other Ivies--Brown, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard. Even Princeton matters.

When the season moved to Ivy-League play, however, we were disappointed by loss after loss. On occasion we would pull a win, but things would never quite work when it mattered. Finishing fifth in the league did not reflect our hard work or our capabilities. Win or lose, we are very grateful for everything YWS has given us. “After playing for four years, I’ve

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the bent over textbooks—our social interactions are most important.

Be it on the field, on the stage or in the newsroom, challenges bring us together. On YWS, we bond over high competition in soccer and school. Says teammate Emma Mullo ‘12, “Playing three seasons, I am blessed to say that I got exactly what I was looking for—an extremely rigorous academic setting and immensely competitive athletic world. I could not ask for more out of my experience. I love my YWS family here. I have learned more from being part of this team than anything I could have learned in books,” she shares.

Senior day—for reasons perhaps more social than athletic—was the pinnacle of our season. Senior Day is the last home game of the season— it’s always marked by speeches and celebration for our oldest players. Our game was scheduled after the men’s game, but theirs went into overtime, and we had to wait. The women’s team sat in the locker room as Rudy gave the pre-game talk. Suddenly, Rudy said “I have a surprise for you guys.” We looked at each other and shuffled our cleats in anticipation.

The lights dimmed and a projector lit up the white board. Rudy sat down in a chair at the front and pulled out a saxophone. He shifted his chair a little and drew deep breaths. “All right, I’m

all danced. It was like a live band was right there just for us— we just hopped, skipped, and boogied with not a care in the world. I sweat with these girls everyday—it felt good to let loose in celebration. We rode the high enthusiasm from the dance party into the game versus Columbia. We celebrated our first goal with a group dance on the field. The energy we’d had in the Penn game was back. We beat Columbia, 2-0. And it wasn’t the best part of the day.

The Critic An evening of scenes with scenes from the life of David Koskoff ’61 LAW ’64, Yale undergraduate theater’s biggest fan.

By Jacque Feldman

TNJ

Adele Jackson-Gibson is a sophomore in Calhoun College.

The New Journal

B

efore I met David Koskoff ’61 LAW ’64 and his wife Charlotte Koskoff, I sat behindthemduringanundergraduate performance of Tom Stoppard’s RosencrantzandGuildensternareDead this October. Mr. Koskoff was the oneleaningoverandexplainingajoke to his wife, loud enough that I could hear, too. I had seen the pair in many Yaleaudiences,buttheywerenoone’s parents or professors that I knew.

Curious, I found them after the play, and Mr. Koskoff confirmed proudly that he and his wife see between

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one and three undergraduate shows every weekend. Eager to share his thoughts on these shows, he invited me to dinner at their apartment on York Street in New Haven.

Though the Koskoffs’ interest is in Yale theater, I’ve never appeared on a Yale stage, so when I e-mailed, hoping to establish my credentials, I dropped the name of the play I was directing that opened in December. “We are definitely looking forward to your show,” Mr. Koskoff wrote back cordially.

“Though I don’t think we have

prior familiarity with your work…”

T

heKoskoffsspendonlyweekends at their York Street apartment, where they’ve lived since September 2009. They spend the rest of the week in in Plainville, Conn., where Mr. Koskoff recently retired from his law firm. Also a writer, he has published three nonfiction books.

One, Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times (1974), made the front page of the New York Times Book Review. He still has the clip. He is currently at work on a biography

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of Tom Dodd, the former U.S. Senator from Connecticut.

Mrs. Koskoff, also a lawyer, teaches at Central Connecticut State University, serves on the Plainville Board of Education, and has run for U.S. Congress twice. They have no children, and shouting through the house, they call each other “love.”

As Mr. Koskoff tells the story, he and his wife were just “casual theater consumers” until a 1989 production of Sweeney Todd converted the pair to selfdescribed “Sondheads,” traveling cross-country to see productions of Stephen Sondheim’s work in Chicago andSanFrancisco. By 1998, theyweremeetingadevotedgroup of fellow Sondheads for dinner before a production of Sondheim’s Follies in New Jersey. Today, Mr. Koskoff bemoans Sondheim’s popularity, saying, “the public has snatched him away from us,”but he still dates his and his wife’s passion for theatergoing to this period.

Now, according to Mr. Koskoff, “living on York Street, at the edge of the Yale bubble, is the very best place for a theater buff to be.” He and his wife prefer the intimacy of Yale’s undergraduate theater to professional plays at the Yale Repertory Theatre or the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. In every student show, he says, they find at least one actor’s performance worthwhile— sometimes breathtaking.

Mr. Koskoff rattled off a list of names of stars to watch.

However, before I arrived at their apartment for dinner, I knew none of this. I knew only that the couple I’d seen were faithful followers of Yale’s undergraduate theater—a scene often considered insular.Undergraduatetheatergoers

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Charlotte and David Koskoff in their York Street apartment. tendtobetheaterpeoplethemselves, and while some plays generate considerableexcitementwithintheir community,thatbuzzrarelyspreads across campus. True audience members—people who see plays not out of obligation to friends, buttobeentertained—arerare,too.

“O

h, you didn’t have to bring flowers!” Mr. Koskoff shouted, as he opened the door to his apartment that night. But his wife would love them, he added.

“Would you like a glass of bad white wine?” It’s truly awful, he said, but Mr. Koskoff used to own

a bar, and when it closed, he was stuck with this. “I inherited it,” he said, sweeping me into a side room he called his study, past a spacious living room with a crowded bookcase, a massive potted rosemary plant, and coffee tables topped with David Sedaris books—and then Mr. Koskoff cut to the chase. From his massive desk chair, wine glass in hand, he looked me in the eye and said: “I largely select shows based on people that I know, and here’s a question for you. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone, you have Allison Collins [’11]—who is the best

The New Journal

among her crop—and HunterWolk [’12]—and Jeremy Lloyd [’12]— how is it that someone like you, who doesn’t have many credits to your name, got such good people?”

I started to squirm and stammer out some answers: they’re my friends, it’s a fun play. But from the way he talked about Yale undergraduate theater, I knew Mr. Koskoff wouldn’t be so easily convinced of my authority. When his wife arrived, his monologue turned to the play they saw last weekend, in the theater in the basement of Morse College.

“You know,” said Mr. Koskoff, “I’d never seen Will Smith [’12] before last weekend in Julius Caesar.”

“No,” called his wife from the kitchen, “we’ve seen him in lots of things.”

The Koskoffs see plays every weekend with the help of the website of the Yale Drama Coalition, which offers showtimes and tickets for all undergraduate performances. “I told two or three people about it,” said Koskoff of the site, “and then thought, no, no, if all the AARP people come, they’ll have to close the shows except to Yale and Yale family.

So we don’t talk much about it, but we bring people—once in a while.” They also show guests a DVD of the 2009 production of Cabaret directed by Kate Berman ’11, which Mr. Koskoff said he obtained through Berman’s mother. It’s a perennial favorite.

“Everything about it is wonderful,” he said. “And Jason Perlman [’11] plays the spymaster.”

“It’s like going to Yale without the papers,” said Mrs. Koskoff, who makes a habit of seeing undergraduate singing performances as well. Mr. Koskoff

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occasionally sits in on movie screenings for introductory film courses, but comedy shows, he complained, are too late at night. “We still haven’t made the Masters’ Teas,” said his wife, “and I want to do that.”

They tried renting an apartment in New York, Mr. Koskoff explained, then settled instead for this pied-à-terre in New Haven precisely because it offers everything the big city does—

“Living on York Street, at the edge of the Yale bubble, is the very best place for a theater buff to be,” says Mr. Koskoff. except here, he crowed, they can walk everywhere. The Koskoffs used to go to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year, but now that they’re in New Haven, “every weekend is the Edinburgh Fringe!” Mr. Koskoff and his wife can readily recall dozens of plays they’ve seen; a favorite, Amadeus, “was such a wonderful production that they could have lifted it up and taken it straight to Broadway.”

“We’ve seen such wonderful things,” cooed Mrs. Koskoff, “Only every fourth show,

or fifth show is disappointing.”

“That’s not true,” interrupted Mr. Koskoff. “We’re often disappointed.” After all, his standards are quite high.

He frequently e-mails student directors about their projects, often to complain that the plays they’ve chosen are too depressing. “For some reason, a lot of these Yale undergrads like these real downers,” he puzzled.

“Did you see the play with Cooper Lewis [’11] a month ago?

A virtuoso performance,” he said of Lewis—but the play, Home Free, about an incestuous brother and sister, was another downer.

Recently, Mr. Koskoff e-mailed Michael Knowles ’12 to ask about Phantoms Go Down, a play by Ariel SheperdOppenheim ’10, which Knowles directed. “What’s the plot line of Phantoms?” Mr. Koskoff wrote simply. To Knowles’ response, Mr. Koskoff wrote: “I am a great admirer of Julie Shain’s [’13] and also of Jeremy Lloyd [’12], but my wife and I are still depressed from Cornered and Home Free, and as your show sounds like a real downer, I’ll probably pass on it.” Mr. Koskoff explained that he finds it easy to contact Yale students because of our formulaic e-mail addresses. Last year, he e-mailed Elizabeth SuttonStone ’10, who was directing a production of Measure for Measure, to demand a reason to see yet another Shakespeare play.

Knowles’ play was one of the shows Mr. Koskoff turned down the night I had dinner with him. Instead, he chose War in Times of Love, a play directed

by Danielle Tomson ’12, saying he always enjoys actors Peter Kaufman ’12 and Timmia Feldman

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ENDNOTE ’12, “that little girl with the same name as you.” As Mrs. Koskoff readied herself for the YalePrinceton Glee Club concert, Mr. Koskoff and I left to get good seats.

“W

hen I go to Sudler shows, it’s like crashing a wonderful party,” confided Mr. Koskoff, as we walked down York Street. We entered Morse College, passing three girls in costume, and Mr. Koskoff shouted, “Are you in the play?” He found two middleaged women outside the theater and approached them, asking: “Got someone in the show?” In fact, Mr. Koskoff was delighted to learn, one was the mother of the director, Danielle Tomson ’12.

He complimented The History Boys, the last play Tomson directed, gushing: “It was the high point of last year’s theater!”

I excused myself for a moment and returned to find Mr. Koskoff rubbing elbows with another adult couple—one actor’s parents,hehaddiscovered.Wewere stillfiveminutesearly,andthedoors hadn’topened.“Thestudentsalways get here late,” said Mr. Koskoff, “but I always get there right on time, so they don’t give my seat away.”

(Normally, house managers of Yale shows don’t close the theater’s doors until 10 or 15 minutes after the play’s scheduled start.)

As Mr. Koskoff had learned from the Yale Drama Coalition site, this was the North American premiere of a Kosovar playwright’s work—and even by Yale standards, the play, billed as a comedy, was weird. Some scenes occurred with the lights completely off. An actor dressed as a bride ran up an aisle screaming; later, she married a snake-man. There was nudity, murder, waxing of hair.

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Always, a television flickered in the background, showing singers, war footage,burningfilm.Itwasatypical example of the undergraduate theater that Mr. Koskoff called “too cutting-edge” for his tastes.

At one point, an actor addressed the audience, and coming close to where we were sitting, she focused on Mr. Koskoff. I snuck a glance at his face. While another watcher might have looked away uncomfortably, Mr. Koskoff was holding her gaze contentedly— unfazed. He had seen it all before.

A

s the play ended, Mr. Koskoff turned to me. “I don’t know where they get off calling it a comedy,” he said. A true critic, Mr. Koskoff respects the efforts of these undergraduates enough to expect professionalism, while parents and friends will simply smile unconditionally and congratulate the cast. Audience members with an understanding and appreciation as acute as Mr. Koskoff’s are unusual at these plays. As he and I stood to go, the producer asked the audience to recycle our programs, returning them to a bin for use the next night.

In spite of his critique, Mr. Koskoff ignored the producer’s request. When we left, he was still holding his program. I asked if he would keep it. “I always keep them,” he said, and we walked out of the Morse College basement, programs in hand.

TNJ

Jacque Feldman is a junior in Davenport College and a managing editor for The New Journal.

By Sanjena Sathian

Join the distinguished ranks of TNJ alums: Neela Banerjee, New York Times Emily Bazelon, senior editor, Slate Magazine James Bennet, editor-in-chief, Atlantic Monthly Richard Bradley, editor in chief, Worth Magazine Dana Goodyear, staff writer The New Yorker Jay Carney, Washington Bureau Chief, Time Magazine Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, senior editor, Foreign Affairs Steven Weisman, New York Times

Office of Recruitment, Ivy League Division Generic Consulting Group, LLC 10 Times Square New York, New York 10036

Dear Mr. Recruiter, A sophomore English major at Yale University, I write to apply for a summer position at your firm, where its inspired mission statement and premium on teamwork and bold investment across the market makes me think that you will perhaps not read the end of this sentence wherein I fail to say anything because I will have succeeded so admirably at distracting you with the corporate sounding words at the beginning of the sentence.

At Yale, where I go, I was told as a freshman that all I needed was the Yale name to distract from my lack of practical competence. In addition, I have gained a number of skills that will be useful in an office environment. The large amount of reading assigned at Yale has trained me to be efficient (Hello, CliffsNotes). Additionally, having mastered the art of snapping after something particularly wise has been said, I am accustomed to a reward-and-incentive-system that would allow me to function well as a team player at your firm. Through my additional experience in classes, such as “Major English Poets,” I have developed the skills to read, memorize, and recite large amounts of unpleasant Middle English, which speaks to my ability to perform unpleasant tasks for unspecified reasons. So I’ll definitely be o.k. with getting you coffee, anytime.

You may notice that I haven’t listed any “work experience” per se thus far, but please be advised that I have an enormous amount of experience with investment from my own personal life, in which I quite enjoy increasing efficiency and otherwise streamlining processes.

Additionally, once in my freshman year at Yale, I took an economics class, in which I learned to draw graphs and unlearned eighth-grade algebra.

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Daniel Yergin, Pultizer Prize winner

All best, Sanjena Sathian B.A. English 2013 Yale University

Andy Court producer, 60 Minutes thenewjournal@gmail.com

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