This WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012

THIS WEEK

THE BALANCING ACT // BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH, PAGE 3

ACTION

B5

COMPLAINTS

B9

THE SYNDICATE

SEECLICKFIX

A history of activism at the Beinecke Plaza and its present day.

The future of civic engagements in New Haven may or may not involve Yalies.

CABARET

B11

RISK//TRANSFORMATION//AND MORE...

What’s to come in the wold and wondrous season of the Yale Cabaret.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OK

WEEKEND VIEWS

AGAINST APOLOGY // BY CINDY OK Which led me to spend those 20 minutes exonerating her from the lateness and from her own guilt — basically, to my consoling her.

Apologies, it seems to me, are almost always more for and more about the apologizer than the apologized-to. They are ultimately a defense, some more ridiculous than others. The finest I’ve ever heard was in high school from a girl who’d been slacking on a project we were working on together.

When confronted about her sloth and her negligence (we were second-semester seniors, to be fair), she apologized for her only partially connected frontal lobe. Apparently her still-developing brain made the task of

paperwork simply UNbearable (all adolescent brains have partially connected frontal lobes, Katie). The late diner’s excuse has even less to do with physiology, but her apology was equally self-indulgent. Is there some kind of veritable relief to hearing so many times that “it’s okay, it’s really okay, honestly don’t worry about it”?

This year, I’m on a (solo) camp a i g n a g a i n s t apology. Well, against meaningless a n d /o r self-serving apology.

Don’t b e

The lamest semester ever spent was a Summer spent in New Haven // BY CAROLYN LIPKA

I spent my summer with Yale not because I didn’t get enough during the school year, but because I had had enough. I had sophomore slumped all over my classes and desperately needed to fulfill a language credit. As a result, I found myself in L1/L2 French over the summer.

Five weeks in New Haven.

Five weeks in Paris.

I had heard rumors my freshman year of the New Haven summer, with the campus transforming into something like summer camp: Yale-only Toad’s and parties galore! The reality was very, very different. I made the first mistake of living on campus. As anyone who has ever lived in a residential college knows, the buildings have no air-conditioning and dining hall food isn’t exactly gourmet. Unfortunately, the fact that Yale Summer Session treats its students like children exasperated

THE WINTERLESS NEW HAVEN WAS NOT THE CITY I HAD GROWN TO KNOW AND LOVE DURING THE TRADITIONAL SCHOOL YEAR my already fragile summer state of mind.

Apparently, being a legal adult and living on campus for the past two years without so much as an RA is very different from living on campus in the summer (maybe it’s the heat?).

I suddenly found myself with a counselor, another Yale student, only two years older than me. The campus is officially dry over the summer. As I was reminded many times, the first strike with alcohol means immediate expulsion from Summer Session.

Parts of the Pierson basement were accessible to students, like the buttery and the washing machine, but the gym was “strictly off-limits,” and a flood of emails informed me that any use of the gym would result in a $50 fine for everyone.

We also weren’t allowed to prop our doors open. That was also a $50 fine for everyone in the suite.

This was not the summer of debauchery and frivolity I had expected.

Still, it was only five weeks, and suddenly I was lugging around two maximum-weight suitcases through Gare Du Nord and up the steps to my Parisian host family’s home.

Let me be clear: Paris was incredible. The

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 7

people in my class got very close (sometimes we still eat crepes together) and my teachers were awesome. However, these facts are in spite of the Yale marker on the program, not because of it.

While everyone in the class had virtually the same command of the French language, that doesn’t automatically mean that everyone has even remotely the same interests in after-class activities. Yale Summer Session ignores this, and mandated “excursions,” which occurred daily the first couple of weeks. These “excursions” took us on threehour-long guided tours in the middle of the day through areas of the city that about half the class was interested in: a scavenger hunt in the Jardin du Luxembourg and an activity where we traced the steps of the characters in French In Action, a French language learning series used in the class. On our weekend trip to Normandy, Brittany and Mont Saint-Michel (which are great in concept), our class was joined by the L3/L4 program to sit on a bus for 15 hours. We had two hours at the D-Day Museum and one hour at Omaha Beach and the American cemetery (5:1, not a great ratio).

My 10 weeks with Yale Summer Session weren’t like 10 weeks at Yale at all. Where on campus we’re used to being treated like adults, or at least young adults, I felt like a middle schooler who’s every minute needed to be planned by the school. When I signed up for a class with Yale, I didn’t realize that it meant I was also signing up for a whole summer of Yale-mandated funtivities.

The winterless New Haven was not the city I had grown to know and love during the traditional school year. The buzz of the school year is gone, but the stress isn’t. I figured that some time alone with the buildings couldn’t be too bad (I mean, look at them), but instead of the liberation that usually comes with the season, I felt cornered. Harkness turned into a looming, oppressive presence, a constant reminder that I was a liability. Indeed, we are coddled and told from our first week at Yale that we are special. We have money and opportunities thrown at us to the point where we are overwhelmed with privilege. The summer program, by contrast, felt harsh and abrasive. I felt more bound by rules as an incoming junior than I did as an incoming freshman.

For me, the Yale of summer is a very different creature than the one of our school year, and not in a good way.

Contact CAROLYN LIPKA at carolyn.lipka@yale.edu .

FREE WINE TASTINGS AT THE WINE THIEF 181 Crown St. // 5-8 p.m.

Free wine? Need we say more?

KAHOE & MADISON

LIPKA

The deal with punctuality at Yale (by which I mean the deal with the lack of punctuality at Yale) goes something like: 95 percent of us are 10 to 15 minutes late, 90 percent of the time. The delusional entitlement that leads to the lapse in the Yale clock is similar to the situation in L.A., except that here you can’t genuinely blame traffic all the time.

You have a group lunch Friday in Pierson at 12:15, so at 12:22 you pack your bag for the day and head out. I get it; you were finishing up a reading response. You stop and chat a couple times on the walk there, okay, okay. That’s all fine. And this is coming from the person who gets to the college common room at noon sharp with that week’s copy of the Yale Herald (jokes!) (Cindy Ok making fun of the Herald, JOKES!).

I was even understanding when a friend arrived 37 minutes late to a one-on-one dinner in Berkeley last fall. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last; my friends are busy people (soooooo busy).

Still, 37 minutes late to a 20-minute dinner is not an awesome show of friendship. And you know what? I would happily forget about the tardiness, except that she spent those 20 minutes apologizing.

Copiously.

Repeatedly.

Gratuitously.

sorry that you were late, or mean, that you forgot a birthday or cheated on your girlfriend; just don’t do it next time. In the meantime, take responsibility for your mistake. It was your decision to take a nap so close to dinner, to get drunk so close to the girl you have a crush on. You’re not sorry you did it, you’re sorry it had to hurt somebody, which are very different sentiments (the second completely unthinking to express).

You’re 18, or 20, or even 24 if you took a gap year and were old for your grade to begin with. Everyone runs into her freshman-year roommate on the way to class, everyone has to take the long way to Edgewood when there’s construction in the Pierson shortcut once in a while. If you’re making excuses, then everybody should get to, and that’s not the kind of world any of us are tryna build. Anyway, no one thinks it’s your fault that you spilled the coffee, so chill out and just help clean it up.

Sometimes the circumstances

are outside your control (choosing to lose your mental faculties for the night does not count for this one, sorry). “My professor let us out of class 10 minutes late” will do perfectly fine, and is not a situation that warrants 15 “I’m sorry”s in a row. Let’s let that phrase keep its meaning.

Contact CINDY OK at cindy.ok@yale. edu .

The Search Committee for Rick Levin’s Successor (SCFRLS) // BY CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON

Dear students, As you all know, our beloved University president, Richard Levin, will be stepping down at the end of this year after 20 years of service to the Yale community.

As the co-chairs of the Search Committee for Rick Levin’s Successor (SCFRLS), or scerfulls, as we affectionately call ourselves, we consider it our duty to keep the student body informed of our decision making process. With this in mind, below is the current lineup of possible successors to President Levin along with the statements submitted by each candidate. Please take this list seriously, as it represents both the months of hard work by the committee and the welfare and future of this University.

N. Ferguson and Co. Deans of Administrative Functionality Police Chief Ronnell Higgins: To the Yale Community: I write to let you know that I officially announced my candidacy for the office of President of Yale University this evening at Elm and Temple Streets at approximately 6:30 PM (Click here to view the incident’s location). My wife, who is not a member of the Yale community, was approached by two members of the search committee who carried briefcases and asked of my whereabouts. No injuries were reported.

If you wish to express any support for my candidacy or should observe any suspicious activity on the part of other candidates, please call the Yale Police at 203432-4400 or text your anonymous tip to 67283.

As a general reminder, please be aware of who the President is at all times, talk about me to the committee when possible, avoid displaying valuables, note the location of emergency Blue Phones, and make use of security services, including shuttle services and door-to-door rides after dark.

Sincerely,

Ronnell A. Higgins, Chief of Police Andrzejek Kzrlsatkpjk, President of Yale University, Grudzi dz, Poland: Greetings to America. I, Andrzejek Kzrlsatkpjk would like very much be President of Yale, you know? As President of Yale University at Poland, I make many good things happen at Yale University at Poland. We increase double size of Natural History Museum collection from 5 rocks to 8 rocks. Our hit cat with stick team come in second place every year (louses at Warsaw University cheat. Hit very small cat with very big stick). We renovate many place at Yale University at Poland.

We put ceiling on every dormitory (well, not every dormitory), and no more forced octuples (well, some forced octuples). If I am Yale President, every student make for only 3 homework classes per week! Thank you.

I THINK I WOULD BEST FILL THE ADMITTEDLY GIGANTIC SHOES OF SOON-TO-BEFORMER-PRESIDENT LEVIN Shrick Shlevin: I would like to offer my services in continuing the hard work and success of Yale’s greatest President, Rick Levin. Although you don’t know me (I’m a total stranger to the Yale community), I think I would best fill the admittedly gigantic shoes of soon-tobe-former-President Levin.

Shmick Shmevin: Wow, that Shrick Shlevin character sounded pretty smart.

We should listen to him.

A. Real Personson:

Boy, that Shmick Shmevin said some pretty cool stuff. His ideas sounded pretty groovy to me!

Joseph Stalin: It has recently come to my attention that there is a new Yale University regulation requiring all off-campus parties for more than 50 people to register with the Dean’s office. In the motherland, 50 people is a get-together!

Seriously! I had 5 million people at my birthday party, and we had a great time. I mean, like for realpolitik. What is this? Soviet Russia? Ha haha ha … but seriously, if more than 50 people have an offcampus party, I will throw you in a gulag.

The Yale Pundits: Oh boy, do we have some hilARIOUS ideas for being the President of Yale. Like, what if we changed all the silverware in the dining halls to PLASTIC! Wouldn’t that be RICH!? Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces when they grab a plastic fork instead of a metal one! Wait, or what if we sent out an email that announced that Fall Fest was actually happening in SPRING! Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces when they read that email! Priceless.

Fareed Zakaria: Fareed Rafiq Zakaria: born January 20, 1964) is an IndianAmerican journalist and author.

From 2000 to 2010, he was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International. In 2010 he became editor-at-large of Time. He is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” [1] He is also a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, trade and American foreign policy.[2] Contact CODY KAHOE at f.kahoe@yale.edu and CALEB MADISON at caleb.madison@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush This perennial British classic never got the play it deserved in American, but that’s okay because now we’re bringing you back to 1978/1848. Just try to get it out of your head after you’ve heard it once.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

Y http://www.yale.edu/sis/ Apple Inbox (3,954) -

Yahoo!

Google Maps

yale academic calendar YouTube

Wikipedia

University - CalendarClasses*v2: Gateway Student Informati (27) Facebook Bluebook - Search Daily News - The

YaleStation, the Y

BALANCING ACT // BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH

I

s shopping period over yet? Nine classes are still hanging around on your OCS schedule worksheet. Hitting the refresh button on your Gmail isn’t revealing anything about that wait-listed seminar. And on top of all this, someone may need to call a search and rescue unit to track down an advisor to sign your schedule, however hazy the final product may be.

Shopping period is about scheduling more than classes.

There’s the attempt to get ahead on the reading — maybe — after you finally “get the meal” that never happened last semester.

There are those tempting flyers advertising THIS COOL EVENT NOW, with pizza, and THAT THING LATER, free Ashley’s. All the world seems to be buzzing around the hot and hectic, aren’twe-the-chummiest-group-ofthem-all, battle royale of panlist sign-ups called the Extracurricular Bazaar. There, the countless activities Yale boasted about during the admissions tour come back to haunt us, and hunt us out.

A new semester offers the chance to figure it out again. To decide how much time you can devote to section, a job, Bass, the treadmill, or analyzing your suitemate’s new love interest. As Yale students try to move the golden scales towards a healthy “worklife” balance, we find ourselves in one of the most overloaded and tense times of the year.

Although each Yale student makes an individual choice when it comes to balancing life’s demands and desires, each choice is taking place within this practice round for adulthood. What we learn here about work-life balance will be influential when the work portion comes, hopefully, with a paycheck.

“WASTING TIME EVERY ONCE AND A WHILE”

In order to talk about “worklife”

balance, we must define it. The very term “work-life balance” implies that there is an inherent separation between what is “work” and what is “life.” An interpretation of the term “worklife” could be stretched to imply that when one is “working,” one is not quite “living.” Of course, in many cases, the same kind of pleasure experienced in the “life” end of the bargain can be drawn from activities categorized under “work.”

Issa Saunders ’15 wrote in an email, “I feel like at the moment my work and my life are intertwined. I don’t think they oppose each in a way that would constitute a “balance.” I think Yalies do what they love and love what they do. At any given time, any one aspect of what we do can feel like “work” but I think overall we just enjoy our lives.”

In the same way that work can be fun, fun can become work.

Jessica Lopez ’15 gave important advice that should be obvious, but often isn’t.

“You should pick extracurriculars that are fun, because that’s the point,” she said. “At the same time, I wish I had more time hanging out and doing the social thing. But, I don’t want to just be sitting in my suite doing nothing.”

Lopez explained that when she became more involved in extracurriculars the second semester of her freshman year, she became anxious that she would become stressed. Like many other students interviewed, she discovered that being busier made her more productive.

“I did better in my classes, and hung out more with my friends.

When you need to get stuff done, you do it faster,” she said.

On the other hand, Lucia Huang ’14, President of the Women’s Leadership Initiative and Chief Marketing Officer of Smart Woman Securities, explained that she has to allow herself to “waste time every once and a while.”

“For example, just last night I ended up having a two-hour conversation with my suitemates about life. Even though we all knew that we had readings and emails and problem sets to do, I think it was healthy for us to ‘waste’ time and just enjoy each other’s company.”

Students suggested that scheduling got easier as they got older. Sathian said that she has modified her priorities as she

approached her senior year. “I think the biggest thing that I started doing is trying to just have unstructured time with friends.

It is easy to schedule meal or coffee and it is harder when you don’t have an end time.”

WORKING HARD, PLAYING HARD

In a survey of over 500 undergraduates conducted for this article, an anonymous participant commented, “Shopping period is not a good time to ask people how anxious they feel about their schedules. It will not accurately reflect the normal stress levels of the student body.”

Jane Fisher ’14, a member of YaleDancers, a student employee at the Film Studies Center and a program assistant at the McDougal Center, spoke to this point.

She said that planning rehearsals alongside class time and work shifts makes for one of the most difficult parts of the semester.

Berenson ’14, “I think I try to do a good job balancing fun and work.

I know I need some time to relax and I think I do that better than the general campus. I still work like anyone else.”

Perhaps the discrepancy can be attributed to a knee-jerk reaction to the question of comparison.

When asked in person, people immediately compared themselves against the extreme cases, pointing to those who have practically sold their souls to this very publication, or adversely a fratstar neighbor who only seems to leave FIFA for the occasional trip to Viva’s.

The survey suggests that students are aware that even in extreme cases everyone is navigating through what Bryan Epps ’14, events director for the Yale College Council, called Yale’s “work-hard play-hard environment.”

“It’s easy to say, ‘Wow, that person really has it together.’ But,

EVERYONE’S GOT IT FIGURED OUT, ALMOST. Yet the survey results suggested a different story. Only six percent of respondents said they felt “very anxious” about their daily schedules. About fifty percent responded that they were either “somewhat anxious,” with the rest feeling “neither anxious nor relaxed” to “very relaxed.”

It seems like most students are somewhere in the middle of the road — certainly not lounging around, but also not terrified of the coming semester.

These responses make sense, given that participants’ evaluations of their own success in finding a work-life balance were generally positive. Additionally, most students indicated that they observed other Yalies in general to be “somewhat” to “very successful” in managing a work-life balance. Everyone’s got it figured out, almost.

These were the results from an anonymous survey. Many students interviewed expressed the opinion that they managed to set a healthy schedule, while they felt the general population was overbooked.

“We certainly have a lot of overachievers here,” said Te s s a

you don’t know the methods people have for doing the things they do. My guess would be that everyone has an attempt at balance and everyone does their own thing,” said Sanjena Sathian ‘13, former editor of the Yale Globalist, “There is a huge chunk of time that you don’t see the people that go out every weekend. You don’t see the hours they spend studying at lunch, maybe at odd times during the week. We do not see this because it occurs in their private spaces.”

HIGHER STAKES

When considering the culture of “work-life” balance for Yale students, it is important to take into account the influence of the faculty’s example and Yale’s policies on an administrative level.

This is especially true when considering questions of work-family.

Yale’s residential college system is unique in that some of our administrators, our masters and deans, live among us. Students become familiar with the sight of faculty’s children and grandchildren riding their tricycles in the courtyard or skipping through the dining hall. A master or dean’s professional and family lives are often fundamentally mixed given their living situation.

Many college websites proudly display photographs of the deans’ and masters’ children.

In most cases, children are included in the long list of a master or dean’s accolades.

SEE BALANCING ACT PAGE B8

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 7

“CARIS PEACE” AT ISEMAN THEATER

1156 Chapel St. // 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

This documentary about an actress with a brain tumor might make you cry.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Michelle Obama’s Arms

She’s smart and educated, a great mom, wife and advocate, and Monday’s speech proved she could be a politician herself. But let’s be honest: those buff biceps are the real reason we tuned into the DNC.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

CHOOSING LIFE, BUT WITHOUT THE SPARK // BY PATRICE BOWMAN Even after the Rep. Todd Akins debacle, I wasn’t too embarrassed to call myself a pro-lifer. A safe pro-lifer; “I don’t believe in abortion except if it’ll harm the mother.” Okay, that may not be accurate. What about rape, illegitimate or not legitimate? How trustworthy were adoptions and foster care?

And what about mothers who, if they did have the child, would make Joan Crawford look like June Cleaver?

Last Sunday, Choose Life at Yale, a pro-life undergraduate organization, held a screening of “Bella,” a film that follows a young pregnant woman’s blooming friendship with a brooding young man. The freshmen and their lanyards didn’t pour in as I thought they would. Oh well. Perhaps the digital images would solidify my pro-life stance, I thought.

Or not.

The CLAY members stayed close together in that seminar room, chatting enthusiastically about the new school year and the new “converts” it would bring. It’s a shame that the safety buttons, kettle popcorn and polite conversation had to bookend “Bella.” The food and talk were more convincing recruitment tools than the film.

The film opens with a brooding Jose (Eduardo Verástegui) surveying a little girl playing on a beach. His heavy beard announces that he is a man with a dark secret. A single accident has halted his soccer career. Now he works as a chef at his brother Manny’s (Manny Perez) restaurant. Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a nervous wait// CREATIVE COMMONS

‘Bella,’ shown by CLAY.

ress at the same restaurant, has an unplanned pregnancy and no support network. The film explores a single day in both of their lives as their paths intersect.

In a little over 24 hours, Manny fires Nina after her morning sickness makes her late one too many times, Jose gets himself fired by chasing after her for an unexplained reason, they ride around, they’re accepted into another job but don’t work there, Nina breaks down in an abortion clinic, they visit Jose’s family, Jose confesses his past tragedy, and Nina decides that she should give her unborn child to Jose. Mellow guitars and wispy vocals accompany this drama. Happily ever after, ignore the mess.

With such an over-stuffing of events for two main characters who barely know each other, the film should move quickly.

But Jose and Nina are the protagonists.

Jose’s tragic beard and reckless kindness complement Nina’s lonely dilemma and ultimate transformation only to relay the thin message and nothing more. The supporting cast comforts, yells or jokes when required.

The characters talk, but the camera wants to watch people frowning on a train, or cement trucks churning, or skyscrapers rising. Director Alejandro Monteverde isn’t discovering anything new about New York City here. But when he and writers Patrick Million and Leo Severino capture snippets from Hispanic life in the City, the film obtains an additional dimension — only to flatten it. Manny takes advantage of undocumented Hispanic immigrants.

Jose, a man from a close-knit Mexican family who still knows the language, doesn’t want

Nina, who is far removed from her roots, to get an abortion. So, would a closer cultural connection curtail the high abortion rate among Hispanic women? I don’t know if the film has dived that deeply.

The film did elicit good discussion from CLAY. One freshman relayed her own account of her experience as an adopted child. With a tale involving real parents taking financial advantage of good, adoptive parents, it was clear that “Bella” had simplified a tricky matter. Movies are streamlined and stylized versions of our lives, but they don’t have to turn into fairy tales.

As I watched the film and talked to members of CLAY, I couldn’t help but wonder: where did God go in a discussion that — like some other issues in America (the death penalty, gay and lesbian rights, gender equality, etc.) — has some footing in religion? CLAY is irreligious in order to avoid internal conflict and, as CLAY president Travis Heine ‘14 said, to better “spread pro-life ideologies to convert others.” The organization provides emotional support to pregnant women and maintains a network with a variety of pregnancy centers (such as Sisters of Life) while being sure, as Heine clarified, “to avoid the moral high ground.”

Kelly Schumann ‘15, a member of CLAY, placed “Bella” within the tradition of its genre like this: “Some of these message films are hokey. But this one was nice.” Yes, nice. As if to say, something bland yet inoffensive.

Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at patrice.bowman@yale.edu .

‘Robot,’ endearing, frankly a bit much // BY PAYAL MARATHE

There’s a lot to love about “Robot & Frank.” Maybe a little bit too much to love.

The new indie flick takes place sometime in the near future, in a time when robot butlers abound, to much reverie by the younger generation. Unfortunately, the protagonist is an aged, forgetful, lonely man named Frank (Frank Langella). He’s gifted a robot — programmed to maintain the old man’s health — by his son Hunter (James Marsden), who is tired of the responsibility of looking after Pop. The premise of the movie makes the plot seem deceptively simple. Robot and Frank get off to a rocky start, but slowly warm up to each other, their relationship lending itself to questions of where humans can find unlikely friendships and what it means to be emotional versus mechanical.

Frank’s daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) takes a stance against the use of robots as slaves, bringing politics into the mix. On top of that, Frank is a divorced exconvict and has tense relationships with both of his children, calling for some exploration of familial bond and obligation. As Frank and Robot begin planning robberies, justified as mechanisms of mental stimulation, the film touches upon treatment for dementia in the elderly and the often blurry line between delusion and reality for patients suffering memory loss.

To some, such interwoven complexities might seem appealing. After all, the storyline offers something for everyone, whether it be futurism, controversial technologies, the emotional

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 7

strife of estranged family members or the ethics associated with dementia. For me, the effect was more disappointing. I felt overloaded by overlapping themes.

I walked out of the theater confused as to the film’s intent and what I should have taken from it.

There’s undoubtedly plenty of thought-provoking material to indulge in, but it’s almost too much.

“Robot & Frank” suffers from being stretched too thin. It tries too hard to be interesting and complicated, instead coming across as overwhelming for the casual movie-goer.

Still, I can’t call it a bad movie, because it’s far from unentertaining or tedious. I meant it when I said there’s a lot about this film to really love.

It showcases some brilliant first-time film writing by Christopher D. Ford, who has paired the emotional themes of family, identity and aging with an unexpected flair for dry humor in the characters’ dialogue. The robots respond to questions like “How are you doing?” with answers like “I’m functioning normally,” and these moments are reason enough to sit through 90 minutes of winding plot.

The movie also boasts a stellar performance by Frank Langella, who plays his role with a subtlety that cannot go unappreciated. He curses with masterful comedic timing, displays the rugged exterior of a man obdurate in preserv-

ing dignity and independence and assumes the nuanced expressions of a confused elderly man.

He does this all in proper balance to make his character incredibly likeable and sympathetic.

I could go on naming the various merits of this indie flick. For one, it’s an indie flick. It presents a certain enjoyable whimsicality.

It has James Marsden. It’s relatively fast-paced, avoiding the overly drawn-out, cheesy ending scenes. It features some adorable old-age flirting between Frank and local librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon).

It is with good reason that “Robot & Frank” is a Sundance prizewinner. It truly is a beautifully executed movie with remarkable cast performances — a worthy watch for anyone normally excited by the genre.

Of course I could have done without quite so many clashing themes. Madison is a particularly futile character, and less of her political mumbo-jumbo would have probably improved the film as a whole, if only by eradicating one confusing, unnecessary side story. But I’ll still maintain that on the whole, Robot, Frank and “Robot & Frank” are all pretty lovable.

Contact PAYAL MARATHE at payal.marathe@yale.edu .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Robot & Frank is playing at the Criterion.

UNDERBROOK COFFEEHOUSE PRESENTS: PLUME GIANT ALBUM RELEASE SHOW

Saybrook Underbrook Theater // 7 p.m.

Yale’s folky favorites come back to rock the Underbrook with a few new tunes.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Not taking “Introduction to Congress” at Harvard

When 50 percent of a class is caught cheating, you know someone has some REAL problems to sort out.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND UNITES

STUDENT ACTIVIST GROUPS PLAN BAZAAR // BY CORA LEWIS

In the declining light of this past Monday evening, standing in a semicircle in front of the war memorial at Beinecke Plaza, approximately 50 students were — they recited each in turn — pissed off.

“At Yale, in America, in society in general, social concerns are increasingly subordinate to economic concerns … The way the University treats its workers and its city … The Global Left’s inability to mobilize around concrete and tangible goals … The CEO of Pepsi will choose [Yale’s] next president … I ran out of bread this morning.”

The grievances voiced ran the gamut: international, local, domestic; psychological, linguistic, desirebased. “I’m pissed off that I find it so hard to talk about why I’m pissed off,” one person present self-critiqued.

“I’m pissed off, and I’d like to change that,” another said.

The improvised meeting, called by a non-hierarchical, consensus-based progressive working group calling itself “The Y Syndicate,” had begun with contradictions.

“Everyone go around and say your name.” “No, everyone, say your names all at once.” “Say your name, and one reason you’re pissed off,” the conclusion was reached, sparking the above litany, as well as other claims. (“Ninety percent of campus publications are fascist,” was followed by both laughter and nods of agree-

‘WE ALL LIVE IN A TELEVISED GOLDFISH BOWL’ KINGMAN BREWSTER, JR. FORMER PRESIDENT OF YALE

ment.)

The Syndicate has yet to hold an official organizational meeting (it will today, Friday, September 7th, at 4 p.m. at the war memorial), and so affiliated individuals have so far declined to speak to the press on the record.

But this relatively anonymous collective is only one example of activist efforts currently taking place at Yale and within the city of New Haven, and these somewhat fragmented groups are increasingly coming together to form a more organized and inclusive network.

This coming Monday, an “Activist Bazaar” will be held on Cross Campus, attended by organizations including Students Unite Now, the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven, People Against Police Brutality, the Yale Student Environmental Coalition and Broad Recognition. Organizing material for the event calls attention to a distinction between activism and community service, in that activism seeks to change the current “social or political state of affairs” in a way that community service, while important and valuable in its own right, may not.

Though the Syndicate hasn’t explicitly laid out an agenda for the near future, people present at the event have independently described interests in a set of progressive causes that range in urgency. Among these are multiple concerns with the current methodology of choosing the next president of Yale and versions of disquiet about the university’s presence in Singapore. Individuals present also spoke of a general dissatisfaction with existing platforms for students (such as the Political Union, the Class Council, community service opportunities and involvement in national political parties), because, in their views, these institutions do not themselves challenge or disrupt existing hierarchies and structural problems currently in place.

ON JARGON

This article quotes no one individually by name. In doing so, it seeks to respect certain qualities of the stillamorphous, nascent organization it describes.

I attended the first Syndicate meeting primarily as a sympathetic and curious participant, so this article necessarily contains value judgments and a subjective viewpoint.

Also a fair amount of jargon. Sorry about that.

ON THE PLACE

In June of 1989, a Yale alumnus, visiting campus for an alumni weekend, set fire to a makeshift shantytown, which had been enacted in front of the war memorial in protest of Yale’s refusal to divest from companies in apartheid South Africa.

According to an AP article about the event, the man, a doctor from West Palm Beach, “was apprehended blocks away by another alumnus who said he was jogging when he saw [the man,] dressed in a suit and tie, fleeing the burning shanties.”

The arsonist, a Vietnam veteran, said he started the blaze because of the shanties’ proximity to the war memorial. An intrinsically charged location, the site was also once the locus of draft-card burnings during the Vietnam War. The Syndicate used one photograph from another rally in its first email to potentially interested students.

On Tuesday, when former Republican Pennsylvania senator and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum spoke in Woolsey Hall, a group of twenty to forty students handed out flyers and staged a walkout, an act partially conceived at the Syndicate’s first assembly this past Monday.

And just a couple of weeks ago, Yale welcomed 21 students who will be participating in the newly-returned

ROTC program with an instantlyiconic photograph in Woolsey Hall, adjacent to the memorial.

The space immediately invites students into an existing historical narrative of participation in and protest against military and other institutions. The stone itself is dedicated to the memory of men who “gave their lives that freedom might not perish from the earth,” but the events that have taken place surrounding the cenotaph complicate its physical message.

// SYN

The war memorial in Beinecke Plaza has previously been the site of a variety of protests.

ON THE (YALE) PRESIDENCY

In the past thirty-odd years, Yale students have also staged protests against for-profit prisons, employers that violate workers’ rights, changes in financial aid structure, police brutality in New Haven, Yale’s refusal to recognize a graduate student union and a culture, both on campus and more broadly, that leads roughly 25 percent of students who graduate with jobs to join the ranks of consulting and I-banking firms.

Some present at the Syndicate’s first meeting stated that they see the search for Yale’s next president as a particular energizing moment, an event that can help focus some of the organizing efforts of various activist groups and call attention the University’s priorities.

ONE PRESIDENT PAST

In the spring of 1970, then-University President Kingman Brewster ’41 oversaw a faculty meeting concerning student protests related to the trials of members of the Black Panthers. For the rest of the semester, class attendance was voluntary.

Brewster served as president from 1963 to 1977, and in May of 1972, when Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State William Rogers was invited to speak at the YPU, Brewster published a statement on the front page of the News saying that he would understand and “expect” demonstration and picketing. He urged students who opposed the government’s policy to wear black armbands.

Among his other quotations, both obtuse and pithy, are, “Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure,” and “incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.” Make of these what you will.

Contact CORA LEWIS at corinna.lewis@yale.edu .

// TIME

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 7

WOMEN’S CENTER GAME NIGHT The Women’s Center // 8 p.m.

Go play games with our favorite feminists!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The library’s new Scan and Deliver service

It’s too soon to tell if this will actually be useful, but it’s so fun to sing to the tune of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” Scan and Deliver, we’re yours.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEM BER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND SAFEPLACE

Imperfection in a knot garden // BY BAOBAO ZHANG

When I tell my friends about the hedge maze behind the School of Management, they imagine an English garden trimmed by a fastidious maintenance crew year round. Instead, they find a short, scraggy arrangement of shrubs. The hedge maze attached to Skinner House (now the International Center for Finance) is not even a proper hedge maze. It is a “knot garden,” a diminutive cousin. The shrubbery, no more than two feet tall, form two squares one inside another. A circular patch of grass forms the knot garden’s center. Not exactly the most impressive hedge display.

But to me, just a summer ago, the knot garden seemed perfect. After working five-hour shifts scanning books in a dingy corner of Rosenkranz Hall, I would nap in the knot garden. The grass beneath me felt like a wool blanket, warm and scratchy. As I watched the clouds above, I imagined that’s what Tom Sawyer or Alice’s imaginary universe are like: a time and place outside of adult responsibilities and concerns. Or I imagined it was like Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester

Dancing at the Women’s Table

Meadow, where one, “flower-lulled in sleepy grass,” can “Hear the cool lapse of housrs pass, / Until the centuries blend and blur.” In the knot garden, I felt a contentment I had never enjoyed at Yale before.

Then school began. Although I tried to nap or read in the knot garden between classes, the place lost its appeal. (Maybe it was the quizzical stares from SOM students who passed by.) When summer turned into autumn, the grass, shrubbery, and flowers yellowed. I put on a jacket and hurried back to my dorm room immediately after each class. Falling leaves buried the knot garden; homework buried me. Spring brought a scattering of wildflowers to the knot garden.

For a while, I continued my summertime ritual of napping there on afternoons. Blowing on dandelions, I’d daydream about the short stories I planned to write. Then one week in late April, three full days of rain turned the knot garden into a trench. Bits of dead dandelions protrudes from the mud and grass like skeleton fingers. I turned away in

disgust.

Nothing seems perfect at Yale, even my favorite place on campus. Over the summer, while studying abroad at Cambridge University, I read the poetry of the WWI poets for my history class.

While I wanted to enjoy Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sasson, again and again, I returned to Brooke. Brooke’s England was “Washed by rivers, blest by suns of home” — a paradise worthy of young men spilling their blood in foreign fields.

But he died of an infection in 1915 on his way to the Gallipoli Campaign, without witnessing the horrors of Anzac Cove. I envy Brooke for his unwavering love for a place because I never can. Because we, our generation — cynical and lost and anxious — can never say “For Country, For Country, For Yale” with full conviction nor enjoy our bright college years without thinking about the uncertain future ahead. // ANNELISA LEINBACH

Contact BAOBAO ZHANG at baobao.zhang@yale.edu .

The importance of pathways

// BY YANAN WANG It was a night in late spring, just at the end of exam period, when my friend Caroline and I bought takeout from Gheav and ate it on the Women’s Table. We sat on the small ledge where the sphere of the fountain meets the dry hardness of the black platform. We had ventured to East Rock earlier that day, gotten lost, and found a small cabin in the woods where an old woman kept a vegetable garden and three large dogs. As we ate, we commented on how nice the crisp evening air felt against our sunned skin, how strange it was that freshman year was over, how beautiful the reflection of Sterling Library looked on the table.

When architect Maya Lin arrived at Yale as an undergraduate in 1977, she was a part of the University’s ninth class of women. And while the ethnic and sexual makeup of the faculty was changing by the 1980s, I can only imagine the fears and uncertainties Lin suffered alongside her female classmates, whose presence at the institution had been unwelcome a mere decade earlier. The women I’ve

met here are equal parts intelligent and audacious, and it chills me to think that there was a time when the administration believed otherwise. That’s why Lin later designed the Women’s Table, I guess — to remind us that injustices linger not too far behind.

I don’t remember everything that Caroline and I talked about that night, but I do remember feeling content. There were no more final exams and papers to worry about, and the summer loomed joyously: four months seemed to me then an endless span of time. Time to read all of the books I hadn’t touched during the school year, time to reacquaint myself with childhood friends, and time to think.

The act of thinking wasn’t what the women before me were denied from, but rather everything that it should entail. They didn’t have a forum in which to share their thoughts, and what are thoughts if they are not heard and enriched by others? My English professor, Margaret Homans, told the News that she recalls being one of three women in a

seminar filled with “ferocious” boys. “It was still the era of the ‘1,000 male leaders,’” she said, “and at that time I did not have a feminine vocabulary to express my unease.”

Now Professor Homans teaches “Feminist and Queer Theory,” a testament to just how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

One of the first nights of this semester, my friends and I wandered our way to the Women’s Table. We had come from one of those joint-suite birthday parties where there is little room to breathe, let alone to dance. Cross Campus seemed a far better alternative, with its couples too engrossed in one another to notice that there were three sophomores blasting Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” from their iPhones. We danced, and while we danced, we stepped on all the zeroes that circled the edge of the table, on all the severe, old men who had once told us “no.”

Thirty-seven // BY JORDI GASSÓ

Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

T A E C A L P E T I R O V A F T Y M

. . .

S I E L A Y

he Lipstick. Cross Campus. Branford Courtyard.

Bass (JK). Some are obvious, others less so. The following WKNDers reveal the places at Yale that have challenged them, comforted them and made them feel at home.

Solace in a bathroom

SEPTEMBER 8

Edgerton Park // 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Free food, lots of art and a venture to a park far away from campus? Count us in.

own, it belongs to me. My library weenie bin, my bunker, my haven in New Haven.

Then I can step outside, out to partake in our Wednesday night traditions, or to talk about the origin of language with Max, or to dice the potatoes for family dinner. We chew the fat, we dance, we mix cocktails, we joke about poop. We make plans that are carried out — trips to Trader Joe’s! — or that never come to fruition — still waiting for that Aaliyah shrine. No worries though: at least for this month, our patron saint is Kate Bush.

Perhaps we do have a shared singularity, a common denominator. For starters, the same roof. A fondness for Wine, Wenzels and Words. An aversion to tufthunters. A fascination with “Hoarders.” A love of porch stooping. 37 is a metonym, and the answer to the original question.

“Oh. Um, it’s 37 Lynwood. It’s the friends’ house!”

freshmen playing Frisbee, sitting under trees, reading on picnic blankets, talking on benches — all as the New Haven sun cast a brilliant autumn glow on the variegated leaves speckling the still (miraculously) green grass. It sounds Arcadian, but anyone who has experienced freshman fall on Old Campus knows that this description is not too romanticized. The scene inspired me with hope — hope that, although my four-cornered world was changing in new ways, it would someday settle as a mature entity I could be pleased with. In other words, it struck me that it might all work out just fine.

My dad liked to call my side of the room my “little corner of the world.” That’s what it was, but, two years later, I understand that it was also my little entrance into a new world, a world at times daunting and at times exhilarating but always, always something worthwhile.

I always leave my room exactly two minutes later than I should, no matter where I’m going.

It’s fine, I reason, since I really do walk quite quickly. I can finish this episode of Modern Family. I can skim the last six pages of my reading.

They used to be the objects of my loathing, the pathways here. The uneven flagstone alleys and the stained sidewalks tripped me up and kept me from getting from one monumentally important place to another. I’m a busy lady. (Kind of.) I have things to do. (Kind of.)

You might have tried to convince me that the scenery made those rushed, tedious walks worth it, or maybe you would have argued that what matters is the journey, not the destination. I would have scoffed discourteously.

But last week, I reevaluated why I despised these pathways so much.

For the first time in a long time, I gave myself adequate time to get from the fifth floor of Davenport to the second floor of WLH: I set out at 8:45 a.m. for a 9 a.m. seminar. Maybe the setting of my epiphany could have been more picturesque than trying to dodge a courier van as I jaywalked across Elm Street and skirting a group of tourists outside of Sterling. Mornings in New Haven are busy, I thought absently, dipping my fingers past the water’s surface on the Women’s Table. But my sleep-addled brain didn’t have much of a place to go from there.

Awkwardly, I lunged down the lengths of the dreadfully spaced steps to Cross Campus, and that was when the doubts crept in.

Because I had left ten minutes early, because I wasn’t rushing somewhere, because the too-long or too-short steps (I can never figure out which it is) forced me to slow down, the normal frantic thoughts assessing where I’d just been and anticipating where I was going were absent. Without those clogging up the works, I was at the mercy of my masochistic subconscious, which took the opportunity to remind me of my every insecurity and confusion. I took a shallow breath and tried to keep the questions nagging at my every word and deed at bay.

In that moment I was finally aware of why I spent so much time running on and away from the paths and sidewalks of Yale. Being in transit and being without consuming thoughts of what happened back there and how late I’m going to be getting here allow me the chance to secondguess myself, and I’m terrified of those moments and terrified of maybe, possibly coming to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong about this, that, everything.

But when I felt myself breathing easier a moment later, having dispelled all of the vague and the specific doubts, I think I knew the importance of that chance for introspection. We all work really hard around here to make it seem like we know what we’re doing and where we’re going.

Maybe I need those pathways and those minutes of just being in transit to embrace and decode those doubts, and really make sure I’m going the right way. (I’ll still probably leave two minutes too late, anyway.)

Contact ARIELLE STAMBLER at arielle.stambler@yale.edu .

Contact AMANDA SHADIACK at amanda.shadiack@yale.edu .

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at jordi.gasso@yale.edu .

// BY ARIELLE STAMBLER

In the thick of exams to take and papers to write and friends to see and emails to send, a special place to go and unwind can be a valuable thing. When my friends and I talk about the places we go to find peace on campus, I hear of mystical places. Of hidden libraries that require lock picks to access, of candlelit meditation sessions in Battell Chapel and of rooftops with nighttime views of New Haven. When it is my turn to share my place to seek calm, I falter. Sadly, mine is about as unglamorous as it gets — the family bathroom in the basement of Calhoun College.

Do not get me wrong — the beauty of Yale’s campus has not been wasted on me. I recognize the architectural beauty around me as well as anyone else, but this bathroom still has a special place in my heart. During my very first midterm season as a college freshman, this bath-

CONNECTICUT FOLK FESTIVAL AND GREEN EXPO

“What house is this?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“What group lives here? An improv troupe? Crew team?”

I am confused. Why should a place have a name, an identity?

Why not just an address? 37 Lynwood Place. 37 for short.

Six housemates, six bedrooms, four floors, two kitchens, one living room, one basement. A dwelling of happenings. A veritable mice problem. A decoration project in progress. A landlord from hell (lookin’ at you, Pike International). All in all, a home.

My home. Our home.

Located on the first floor, my room enjoys its own bathroom and gargantuan closet. I moved in this semester after returning from a gap year, and I still need to buy my posters, put up the usual tchotchkes, paint the room “Sparrow” — that’s lingo for light grey. The place is chaos, for now. Two different colors of fitted sheets currently cover the queen size bed. I need to Swiffer at some point. Despite its ragtag state, the space is perfect. It is my

My little corner of the world

// BY JOY SHAN

S AT U R D AY

// BY AMANDA SHADIACK

room was where I sought solace during my very first midterminduced stroke of panic. It is private, it is roomy. There is a mirror that you can stare into as you chant words of encouragement to yourself (or as you scold yourself for not dropping that math class). There is a sink with a faucet, perfect if you are one of those people who finds the sound of running water comforting. The temporary lack of phone reception will block the temptation to check your ever-growing amount of new text messages and emails.

The fact that it is a family bathroom means you don’t have to worry about people coming in to wash their hands and then wondering what you are doing. Yes, the wallpaper in the basement is orange, but the lighting is pleasant and there is plenty of room to pace. Best of all, the traffic to use this bathroom is pretty light, so it is usually available in my hours

of need (here is where someone could make a joke out of the saying “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” but I’ll refrain). Hopefully this state is not jeopardized by my disclosing of this information.

But chances are, the bathroom will remain vacant. The beauty of these Quiet Zones is that they are individualized to the user. Be it a particular desk in the Sterling stacks or the family bathroom in a college basement, the place’s familiarity is what is comforting. Arriving at a new place and experiencing its new set of sights, sounds, and stimulations, a routine or just something constant can be a reminder that not all will be swept up in turbulence. And it just so happened that, for me, this is a 7’ x 4’ room with a toilet and a sink.

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Knowing that you ain’t too proud to beg

It’s the second week of shopping period, and you’re getting desperate. Dispense of whatever self-respect you once had and get into that class, whatever means necessary.

My favorite place at Yale can now only be accessed through memory, so pardon me if I romanticize it. If only I were a peer liaison or a froco, I could go back and see how it has changed. But alas, the swipeaccess doors of Durfee are closed to me forever.

My freshman-year double in Durfee was overwhelmingly purple and teal.

Purple because I had decided in second grade that that was slightly girlier than blue and slightly less girly than pink and so should be my choice for favorite color.

Teal because everything at Pottery Barn is teal. The yellow Target poster of Dwight Schrute’s life-size head and his top seven best quotes on “The Office” clashed with those colors but it was too important to me to not put up.

That purple and teal bed shoved into the corner between my wall and my desk supported my ever-so-slight heartache at realizing that life as I had known it ended when my parents left me to my own devices the Sunday of Move-In Week-

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 8

end. The first fact I knew concretely was that the goodbyes to home — those done in person, over the phone, and over Skype on my padded mattress — would only get more frequent from here on out. Life was changing from a staid, square existence as a “student” and “daughter” into a turbulent rollercoaster ride as a “more specialized student,” “confidante,” “roommate” and other new identities. In that room, my world turned into a mess of sticky floors, diminished privacy, and ear-shattering bass radiating at an impressively constant rate through the ceiling from the suite above.

But it also turned into much, much more. On my roommate’s side was a windowsill big enough for one person to sit on. The window had no screens, so on particularly warm fall days, I would sit on that sill, open the window and breathe in the fresh air. It felt so much more precious all the way up on the fourth floor. Below me a scene straight out of Yale’s viewbook would be playing out: happy gaggles of

“BACK TO THE FUTURE” SCREENING

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

The Yale Film Society brings this 1985 classic into the future via playing it in the future.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Weed’s Cafe on Dixwell Ave. We swear this is a real place.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEM BER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND SAFEPLACE

Imperfection in a knot garden // BY BAOBAO ZHANG

When I tell my friends about the hedge maze behind the School of Management, they imagine an English garden trimmed by a fastidious maintenance crew year round. Instead, they find a short, scraggy arrangement of shrubs. The hedge maze attached to Skinner House (now the International Center for Finance) is not even a proper hedge maze. It is a “knot garden,” a diminutive cousin. The shrubbery, no more than two feet tall, form two squares one inside another. A circular patch of grass forms the knot garden’s center. Not exactly the most impressive hedge display.

But to me, just a summer ago, the knot garden seemed perfect. After working five-hour shifts scanning books in a dingy corner of Rosenkranz Hall, I would nap in the knot garden. The grass beneath me felt like a wool blanket, warm and scratchy. As I watched the clouds above, I imagined that’s what Tom Sawyer or Alice’s imaginary universe are like: a time and place outside of adult responsibilities and concerns. Or I imagined it was like Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester

Dancing at the Women’s Table

Meadow, where one, “flower-lulled in sleepy grass,” can “Hear the cool lapse of housrs pass, / Until the centuries blend and blur.” In the knot garden, I felt a contentment I had never enjoyed at Yale before.

Then school began. Although I tried to nap or read in the knot garden between classes, the place lost its appeal. (Maybe it was the quizzical stares from SOM students who passed by.) When summer turned into autumn, the grass, shrubbery, and flowers yellowed. I put on a jacket and hurried back to my dorm room immediately after each class. Falling leaves buried the knot garden; homework buried me. Spring brought a scattering of wildflowers to the knot garden.

For a while, I continued my summertime ritual of napping there on afternoons. Blowing on dandelions, I’d daydream about the short stories I planned to write. Then one week in late April, three full days of rain turned the knot garden into a trench. Bits of dead dandelions protrudes from the mud and grass like skeleton fingers. I turned away in

disgust.

Nothing seems perfect at Yale, even my favorite place on campus. Over the summer, while studying abroad at Cambridge University, I read the poetry of the WWI poets for my history class.

While I wanted to enjoy Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sasson, again and again, I returned to Brooke. Brooke’s England was “Washed by rivers, blest by suns of home” — a paradise worthy of young men spilling their blood in foreign fields.

But he died of an infection in 1915 on his way to the Gallipoli Campaign, without witnessing the horrors of Anzac Cove. I envy Brooke for his unwavering love for a place because I never can. Because we, our generation — cynical and lost and anxious — can never say “For Country, For Country, For Yale” with full conviction nor enjoy our bright college years without thinking about the uncertain future ahead. // ANNELISA LEINBACH

Contact BAOBAO ZHANG at baobao.zhang@yale.edu .

The importance of pathways

// BY YANAN WANG It was a night in late spring, just at the end of exam period, when my friend Caroline and I bought takeout from Gheav and ate it on the Women’s Table. We sat on the small ledge where the sphere of the fountain meets the dry hardness of the black platform. We had ventured to East Rock earlier that day, gotten lost, and found a small cabin in the woods where an old woman kept a vegetable garden and three large dogs. As we ate, we commented on how nice the crisp evening air felt against our sunned skin, how strange it was that freshman year was over, how beautiful the reflection of Sterling Library looked on the table.

When architect Maya Lin arrived at Yale as an undergraduate in 1977, she was a part of the University’s ninth class of women. And while the ethnic and sexual makeup of the faculty was changing by the 1980s, I can only imagine the fears and uncertainties Lin suffered alongside her female classmates, whose presence at the institution had been unwelcome a mere decade earlier. The women I’ve

met here are equal parts intelligent and audacious, and it chills me to think that there was a time when the administration believed otherwise. That’s why Lin later designed the Women’s Table, I guess — to remind us that injustices linger not too far behind.

I don’t remember everything that Caroline and I talked about that night, but I do remember feeling content. There were no more final exams and papers to worry about, and the summer loomed joyously: four months seemed to me then an endless span of time. Time to read all of the books I hadn’t touched during the school year, time to reacquaint myself with childhood friends, and time to think.

The act of thinking wasn’t what the women before me were denied from, but rather everything that it should entail. They didn’t have a forum in which to share their thoughts, and what are thoughts if they are not heard and enriched by others? My English professor, Margaret Homans, told the News that she recalls being one of three women in a

seminar filled with “ferocious” boys. “It was still the era of the ‘1,000 male leaders,’” she said, “and at that time I did not have a feminine vocabulary to express my unease.”

Now Professor Homans teaches “Feminist and Queer Theory,” a testament to just how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

One of the first nights of this semester, my friends and I wandered our way to the Women’s Table. We had come from one of those joint-suite birthday parties where there is little room to breathe, let alone to dance. Cross Campus seemed a far better alternative, with its couples too engrossed in one another to notice that there were three sophomores blasting Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” from their iPhones. We danced, and while we danced, we stepped on all the zeroes that circled the edge of the table, on all the severe, old men who had once told us “no.”

Thirty-seven // BY JORDI GASSÓ

Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

T A E C A L P E T I R O V A F T Y M

. . .

S I E L A Y

he Lipstick. Cross Campus. Branford Courtyard.

Bass (JK). Some are obvious, others less so. The following WKNDers reveal the places at Yale that have challenged them, comforted them and made them feel at home.

Solace in a bathroom

SEPTEMBER 8

Edgerton Park // 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Free food, lots of art and a venture to a park far away from campus? Count us in.

own, it belongs to me. My library weenie bin, my bunker, my haven in New Haven.

Then I can step outside, out to partake in our Wednesday night traditions, or to talk about the origin of language with Max, or to dice the potatoes for family dinner. We chew the fat, we dance, we mix cocktails, we joke about poop. We make plans that are carried out — trips to Trader Joe’s! — or that never come to fruition — still waiting for that Aaliyah shrine. No worries though: at least for this month, our patron saint is Kate Bush.

Perhaps we do have a shared singularity, a common denominator. For starters, the same roof. A fondness for Wine, Wenzels and Words. An aversion to tufthunters. A fascination with “Hoarders.” A love of porch stooping. 37 is a metonym, and the answer to the original question.

“Oh. Um, it’s 37 Lynwood. It’s the friends’ house!”

freshmen playing Frisbee, sitting under trees, reading on picnic blankets, talking on benches — all as the New Haven sun cast a brilliant autumn glow on the variegated leaves speckling the still (miraculously) green grass. It sounds Arcadian, but anyone who has experienced freshman fall on Old Campus knows that this description is not too romanticized. The scene inspired me with hope — hope that, although my four-cornered world was changing in new ways, it would someday settle as a mature entity I could be pleased with. In other words, it struck me that it might all work out just fine.

My dad liked to call my side of the room my “little corner of the world.” That’s what it was, but, two years later, I understand that it was also my little entrance into a new world, a world at times daunting and at times exhilarating but always, always something worthwhile.

I always leave my room exactly two minutes later than I should, no matter where I’m going.

It’s fine, I reason, since I really do walk quite quickly. I can finish this episode of Modern Family. I can skim the last six pages of my reading.

They used to be the objects of my loathing, the pathways here. The uneven flagstone alleys and the stained sidewalks tripped me up and kept me from getting from one monumentally important place to another. I’m a busy lady. (Kind of.) I have things to do. (Kind of.)

You might have tried to convince me that the scenery made those rushed, tedious walks worth it, or maybe you would have argued that what matters is the journey, not the destination. I would have scoffed discourteously.

But last week, I reevaluated why I despised these pathways so much.

For the first time in a long time, I gave myself adequate time to get from the fifth floor of Davenport to the second floor of WLH: I set out at 8:45 a.m. for a 9 a.m. seminar. Maybe the setting of my epiphany could have been more picturesque than trying to dodge a courier van as I jaywalked across Elm Street and skirting a group of tourists outside of Sterling. Mornings in New Haven are busy, I thought absently, dipping my fingers past the water’s surface on the Women’s Table. But my sleep-addled brain didn’t have much of a place to go from there.

Awkwardly, I lunged down the lengths of the dreadfully spaced steps to Cross Campus, and that was when the doubts crept in.

Because I had left ten minutes early, because I wasn’t rushing somewhere, because the too-long or too-short steps (I can never figure out which it is) forced me to slow down, the normal frantic thoughts assessing where I’d just been and anticipating where I was going were absent. Without those clogging up the works, I was at the mercy of my masochistic subconscious, which took the opportunity to remind me of my every insecurity and confusion. I took a shallow breath and tried to keep the questions nagging at my every word and deed at bay.

In that moment I was finally aware of why I spent so much time running on and away from the paths and sidewalks of Yale. Being in transit and being without consuming thoughts of what happened back there and how late I’m going to be getting here allow me the chance to secondguess myself, and I’m terrified of those moments and terrified of maybe, possibly coming to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong about this, that, everything.

But when I felt myself breathing easier a moment later, having dispelled all of the vague and the specific doubts, I think I knew the importance of that chance for introspection. We all work really hard around here to make it seem like we know what we’re doing and where we’re going.

Maybe I need those pathways and those minutes of just being in transit to embrace and decode those doubts, and really make sure I’m going the right way. (I’ll still probably leave two minutes too late, anyway.)

Contact ARIELLE STAMBLER at arielle.stambler@yale.edu .

Contact AMANDA SHADIACK at amanda.shadiack@yale.edu .

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at jordi.gasso@yale.edu .

// BY ARIELLE STAMBLER

In the thick of exams to take and papers to write and friends to see and emails to send, a special place to go and unwind can be a valuable thing. When my friends and I talk about the places we go to find peace on campus, I hear of mystical places. Of hidden libraries that require lock picks to access, of candlelit meditation sessions in Battell Chapel and of rooftops with nighttime views of New Haven. When it is my turn to share my place to seek calm, I falter. Sadly, mine is about as unglamorous as it gets — the family bathroom in the basement of Calhoun College.

Do not get me wrong — the beauty of Yale’s campus has not been wasted on me. I recognize the architectural beauty around me as well as anyone else, but this bathroom still has a special place in my heart. During my very first midterm season as a college freshman, this bath-

CONNECTICUT FOLK FESTIVAL AND GREEN EXPO

“What house is this?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“What group lives here? An improv troupe? Crew team?”

I am confused. Why should a place have a name, an identity?

Why not just an address? 37 Lynwood Place. 37 for short.

Six housemates, six bedrooms, four floors, two kitchens, one living room, one basement. A dwelling of happenings. A veritable mice problem. A decoration project in progress. A landlord from hell (lookin’ at you, Pike International). All in all, a home.

My home. Our home.

Located on the first floor, my room enjoys its own bathroom and gargantuan closet. I moved in this semester after returning from a gap year, and I still need to buy my posters, put up the usual tchotchkes, paint the room “Sparrow” — that’s lingo for light grey. The place is chaos, for now. Two different colors of fitted sheets currently cover the queen size bed. I need to Swiffer at some point. Despite its ragtag state, the space is perfect. It is my

My little corner of the world

// BY JOY SHAN

S AT U R D AY

// BY AMANDA SHADIACK

room was where I sought solace during my very first midterminduced stroke of panic. It is private, it is roomy. There is a mirror that you can stare into as you chant words of encouragement to yourself (or as you scold yourself for not dropping that math class). There is a sink with a faucet, perfect if you are one of those people who finds the sound of running water comforting. The temporary lack of phone reception will block the temptation to check your ever-growing amount of new text messages and emails.

The fact that it is a family bathroom means you don’t have to worry about people coming in to wash their hands and then wondering what you are doing. Yes, the wallpaper in the basement is orange, but the lighting is pleasant and there is plenty of room to pace. Best of all, the traffic to use this bathroom is pretty light, so it is usually available in my hours

of need (here is where someone could make a joke out of the saying “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” but I’ll refrain). Hopefully this state is not jeopardized by my disclosing of this information.

But chances are, the bathroom will remain vacant. The beauty of these Quiet Zones is that they are individualized to the user. Be it a particular desk in the Sterling stacks or the family bathroom in a college basement, the place’s familiarity is what is comforting. Arriving at a new place and experiencing its new set of sights, sounds, and stimulations, a routine or just something constant can be a reminder that not all will be swept up in turbulence. And it just so happened that, for me, this is a 7’ x 4’ room with a toilet and a sink.

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Knowing that you ain’t too proud to beg

It’s the second week of shopping period, and you’re getting desperate. Dispense of whatever self-respect you once had and get into that class, whatever means necessary.

My favorite place at Yale can now only be accessed through memory, so pardon me if I romanticize it. If only I were a peer liaison or a froco, I could go back and see how it has changed. But alas, the swipeaccess doors of Durfee are closed to me forever.

My freshman-year double in Durfee was overwhelmingly purple and teal.

Purple because I had decided in second grade that that was slightly girlier than blue and slightly less girly than pink and so should be my choice for favorite color.

Teal because everything at Pottery Barn is teal. The yellow Target poster of Dwight Schrute’s life-size head and his top seven best quotes on “The Office” clashed with those colors but it was too important to me to not put up.

That purple and teal bed shoved into the corner between my wall and my desk supported my ever-so-slight heartache at realizing that life as I had known it ended when my parents left me to my own devices the Sunday of Move-In Week-

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 8

end. The first fact I knew concretely was that the goodbyes to home — those done in person, over the phone, and over Skype on my padded mattress — would only get more frequent from here on out. Life was changing from a staid, square existence as a “student” and “daughter” into a turbulent rollercoaster ride as a “more specialized student,” “confidante,” “roommate” and other new identities. In that room, my world turned into a mess of sticky floors, diminished privacy, and ear-shattering bass radiating at an impressively constant rate through the ceiling from the suite above.

But it also turned into much, much more. On my roommate’s side was a windowsill big enough for one person to sit on. The window had no screens, so on particularly warm fall days, I would sit on that sill, open the window and breathe in the fresh air. It felt so much more precious all the way up on the fourth floor. Below me a scene straight out of Yale’s viewbook would be playing out: happy gaggles of

“BACK TO THE FUTURE” SCREENING

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

The Yale Film Society brings this 1985 classic into the future via playing it in the future.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Weed’s Cafe on Dixwell Ave. We swear this is a real place.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

Y http://www.yale.edu/dining/ Apple PubMed - Hom

Yahoo!

Google Maps

new haven train station YouTube

YouTube - Broadca Yale University At Amazon.com: O

Wikipedia Google Calend

WolframAlpha: C Tangorin Japane

Pandora Internet

WORKING, LIVING, ETC. BALANCING ACT FROM PAGE B3 “Things work best when [work and life] are as seamless as possible. For instance, we love to share the joy of our grandchildren with the Silliman community,” Master Judith Krauss wrote in an email.

“Many students know the children by name and will stop by to play with them in the courtyard.

Some students know that I’ve been struggling to help my aging mother adjust to a new living situation. I think students appreciate seeing me and my husband as real people, embedded in multiple communities, and working to balance it all.”

Facilitating the families of its employees is a Yale administrative priority. In both 2010 and 2011, Working Mother magazine named Yale as one of the “100 Best Companies” in the nation.

Working Mother praised Yale for its employee benefits and aspects of Yale’s Worklife Program. Worklife, a program run by the Department of Human Resources, exists to “help faculty and staff to balance the multiple responsibilities associated with work, academic, and personal life,” according to the program’s website. Worklife offers classes ranging from Yoga classes to parents’ reviews of New Haven schools.

also make sure that they teach on alternating days.

“That way, one of us is not going to have to cancel class to take to our son to the doctors. You can’t really do that with other professions. A doctor or a lawyer can’t just be on call Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our situation is really ideal in some ways, [for] a two career family.”

Professors Feimster and Botsman once taught in the same department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

There, faculty meetings were held in the afternoons and consequently, she and her husband had to make clear to the department chair that they would take turns missing meetings. Professor Feimster pointed out that faculty meetings in the African American Studies Department and the Program in American Studies at Yale are around noon or lunchtime to accommodate for family life.

“Every week we look at the schedule and if there are more than two days in the week that the nanny has to stay until five, then we make different choices.

Sometimes I miss dinners with my colleagues. But, sometimes it’s nice to just be home with my kids. I like to be able to give my kids a bath and put them to bed,” Feimster said.

Feimster said that over the past

FOR THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, THE LIFE THAT I’M EXPERIENCING AT YALE WILL HOPEFULLY BECOME MY “WORK” DOWN THE ROAD. “As a professor in public health, I have found Yale’s policies to be supportive of work-life balance,” Branford’s Master Elizabeth Bradley wrote in an email.

“I have had wonderful department heads and deans, who have allowed flexibility in my facetime hours and in total hours at different times of my career.”

“When I had small children, I remember that reducing the number of days I worked was completely acceptable, and when I wanted to leave at 3 p.m. to pick up the kids at school, no one blinked an eye. The registrar even rescheduled my teaching, so it would occur all on a couple of days when I had family to watch the kids.”

Crystal Feimster, the mother of two sons and director of undergraduate studies for the African American Studies Department, has also had a positive experience as a working mother on the Yale faculty. She said that although balancing her family and her career can be a challenge, she is lucky that her husband is committed to equal care.

Her husband, Daniel Botsman, is a professor in the Department of History and chair of the Council of East Asian Studies.

She explained that as a team, the two are committed to at least one parent being home by midafternoon to pick their son up from school. Therefore, they try to schedule classes, meetings with students, and faculty meetings in the mornings. They

decade, universities in general have become better about parental leave, especially the inclusion of paternity leave. For example, Professor Tamar Szabo Gendler, chair of the Philosophy Department, said that when her now 15-year-old son was born, she did not get parental leave from her job at Syracuse University.

She said that she has observed relatively flexible parental leave policies at Yale. She attributed the difference not to the schools policies per se, but to a change in attitudes over time.

Like Professor Feimster, Professor Gendler’s husband is also a professor at Yale. The two work hard to coordinate schedules for their children. Now that her children are older, Professor Gendler says they spend time on Yale’s campus. She said she has tried to create an atmosphere within the Department of Philosophy that simultaneously remains professional and allows for graduate students or professors to feel comfortable bringing their children if it makes them more able to participate.

Both Feimster and Gendler pointed out that professors don’t just have to juggle their work and family life. Many faculty members have different demands, such as caring for aging parents o r

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 8

other commitments within the community.

“Academics can be workaholics,” Feimster said. “For me, work-life balance is about family. Not everyone has a family, but that doesn’t mean that one should be working 24 hours a day. Work-life balance is not just family-centered but can center around creating a healthy life.”

Students interviewed generally said they were not having conversations about work-life balance with their professors, but had positive responses to professors who opened up the “life” side to their students.

Liana Epstein ’14, on the varsity women’s cross country team, wrote in an email, “I think the best professors I’ve had are not those that just talk about their research and are excited about their “work” in isolation … The strict academics who one might assume spend little time with their families, pursuing hobbies, or relaxing, are undoubtedly brilliant, but less successful at invigorating their pupils.”

“The most important lesson is probably that things are rarely “in balance” and we all need to learn to set priorities and make adjustments,” Master Krauss wrote.

“We also need to take time for ourselves doing whatever brings pleasure and stress reduction…

The hope is that students see us living our lives and take something from that.”

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

This summer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor at Princeton and a former Obama administration official, wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” an essay in The Atlantic that saw much buzz across the Internet.

Drawing much controversy, she argued that society’s structure makes it impossible to be doting mothers and top professionals simultaneously.

Raising children is an unthinkable responsibility compared to the varied commitments of the average Yale student. Yet Slaughter’s article brings up interesting questions about how much one can handle, even with smaller stakes.

“I think Yale is preparing me really well to deal with the stresses of the real world,” Berenson said, “Here we get to try it out and try out own organizational habits, and with relatively little pressure.”

“I think college is where we learn a lot of the extremes of our personality because we are in extreme conditions,” Sathian said, “If I’m ever in a career that is really high paced, it is good to know that I can still have friends and be mentally and physically healthy in as an intense environment as school.”

Caroline Smith ’14, Junior Class Council President, said she believes that the kind of blend between work and play that happens on campus is also happening within careers. “We seem to be moving into a culture where what we do with our careers is fundamentally in line with what we believe in a n d

PUB NIGHT AT GPSCY

204 York St. // 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Who cares that you’re not a grad student? GPSCY is poppin’ this year.

what we love,” she wrote in an email Alex Ratner ’14, who sings in the Duke’s Men, wrote of a similar hope. “I think that for the immediate future, as well as in my 20s, the ‘life’ that I’m experiencing at Yale in terms of theater/ music will (hopefully) become my ‘work,’ and so ideally I won’t feel too much of a separation between ‘work’ and ‘life’ down the road. I don’t anticipate having to choose between a career and a family — I want both.”

Although a vast majority of students surveyed demonstrated that “work-life” balance would be very important to future professional lives, the survey shows that most students “somewhat anticipate” having a job that will make it difficult to fulfill personal and familial commitments.

However, when asked directly in interviews about the possibility of managing a family and professional life, students often responded that they had not considered these questions yet.

“I haven’t thought much about a family life. Part of being college age is being very selfish, so it’s not something I have started to consider,” Epps said.

“It is hard to picture because I can’t see myself with a family because I am so young. It is so hard to choose a hypothetical family over all the things you want to do,” Lopez said.

The fact that both males and females are not extremely worried about the work-family balance indicates a fairly recent change. In 2006, a controversial story ran in the New York Times, largely based on the author’s assertion that many young women in the Ivy League anticipated leaving a career to become mothers. In response, Christine Slaughter and Tina Wu wrote a piece for the YDN titled “Kids, career trade-off remains a hot topic.” They wrote that the Yale Undergraduate WorkLife Balance Survey had found that “no difference was found in the degree to which male versus female undergraduates value both family and career.”

Today, the recent survey leads to similar conclusions. However, the topic of family-work life balance has seemed to cool off, a problem looming in a far off future.

Daryl Hok ’14 said that when he starts a family depends on the demands of his career. “If I don’t have time for the family, then I wouldn’t start a family.”

“I do foresee that choice in the very distant future. Even though women have made great strides in the workforce, I think the career versus family struggle still exists,” Lucia Huang wrote in an email. “I tell myself that if I work hard enough now and make the right

career choices, that when the time comes for a family, I’ll be in a career where I’m in the position to have some flexibility with my schedule for my family and that I’m in a work environment that supports that.”

Many students said that their ideas about their future options are often based on the examples of their own parents.

“I definitely anticipate choices.

The biggest example I have is from my own life. My mom put her career as a professor on hold when she had me. Now she is up for tenure. If she had stayed fulltime, she would have already gone through the process a long time ago,” Fisher said. “Having babies is obviously always a huge time commitment when it comes time to have a family. It’s going to have to come at a certain cost to my career.”

Berenson sees it differently.

Although her mother became a stay at home mom, she believes that she will be able to find a compromise within her career.

“My mom has always been a stay at home mom. I’ve always assumed I would be because that’s what she is. It wasn’t a hard decision for her. I really value having my mom at home,” Berenson said. “It is not something I’m worried about. It is balancing two good things. A career I love, and a family.”

So we put down this paper or our laptops and choose between something a little less lofty, beginning the first problem set or another Youtube video.

The Blue Book does not offer Time Management 101. We learn that from example, from our own trial and sleepy error. But maybe the ways in which we learn to fill the shortest, gladdest years of life will help us to fill in the rest of them.

“Balancing the commitments and obligations of being a Yale student is a unique challenge,” Fisher said. “Classes are not one monolithic thing. Each class is its own beast. I hope this is the busiest I’ll ever be. Who knows if it is sustainable?”

Contact CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH at caroline.mccullough@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Trying out for improv, even if you’re not funny

We’d like to bet that the awful auditions are wayyy more memorable than the good ones.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND CITY

SEE-CLICK-FIX: For citizens, for New Haven, for Yalies? // BY JORDI GASSÓ

It all started with graffiti on a wall.

Ben Berkowitz, a New Haven native, noticed it on the side of his neighbor’s building. He called City Hall to file his complaint.

“At some point in the phone call, I realized there was no way to connect,” he said.

As a new way to cut through this red tape, SeeClickFix.com was born. Co-founded by Berkowitz in March 2008, the site allows citizens from any city to report non-emergency issues in their communities to their city officials. The process is self-explanatory: residents SEE a problem, CLICK and upload it to the website (dialogue ensues) and, ideally, the city FIXES it.

While its original purpose was to shine a spotlight on basic infrastructure

problems, and to eventually get them resolved, SeeClickFix’s goals have expanded in the past four years to include a question-and-answer service through which users can ask local authorities about public information, such as library hours or how to obtain a marriage license.

SeeClickFix has helped to open up the relationships between citizens and their local governments, making communications and grievance processes much more transparent in various cities around the globe. The site’s success derives in part from its New Haven origins and the city’s civic

framework, an accomplishment that has little to do with the prominent presence of Yale University (excepting the handful of Yalie interns SeeClickFix has enlisted in past years).

While residents in and outside the Elm City have embraced the SeeClickFix phenomenon as a novel method of civic engagement, the most transient of New Haven denizens — Yale students — have yet to make the most of the website.

“I think Yalies underutilize [the site],” said Hans Schoenburg ’10, a SeeClickFix. com user and one of its mobile app developers. “More importantly, they underestimate its power.” *** In the beginning, SeeClickFix focused on forwarding users’ non-emergency requests to the appropriate municipal department. If you saw a run-down playground, the parks and recreation division would be notified of your complaint; if there was a need for a new crosswalk, it fell under the Department of Transportation’s purview.

At present in New Haven, City Hall is not only receiving emails about these grievances, but SeeClickFix entries are now integrated into the city’s complaint records and work order system, Cityworks.

This assimilation, said New Haven’s chief administrative officer Rob Smuts ’01, arose from SeeClickFix’s popularity among residents, which outpaced usage of the original 3-1-1 program, a telephone number used to access non-emergency municipal services. While Cityworks still serves its purpose as an archive of complaints, Smuts added, SeeClickFix has come forth as an alternative reporting mechanism. Essentially, a two-way street has been unlocked: both complaints l o d g e d

directly to City Hall and to the website are i m p o r te d into SeeClickFix. com.

As a result, the volume of issues reported to the New Haven government has significantly increased, Smuts explained, prompting city officials to take a closer look at how the grievance system can function more efficiently.

“That’s really been an ongoing process. I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get there; it’ll be an ongoing process we’ll be working on.”

The process of integration includes a new smartphone application, through which users can locate and record an issue via photo or video, report it in real time and incorporate it into the city’s workflow. Once the issue has been fixed, the original complainant can be notified of its resolution. *** “Can you draw me a map of the city?,” asked Brandon Jackson ’13, who formed part of the team that developed the mobile application.

I choked — it was one of those questions I thought I

knew how to answer.

This reaction, Jackson said, is symptomatic of a larger affliction many Yale students tend to share: lack of involvement in New Haven and a reputation for being disconnected from their urban setting. SeeClickFix aims to curb this trend, but it’s unclear how much it has influenced campus behavior thus far.

Yale counts as its own “watch area” on the site, a geographically distinct region monitored by its citizens. Some complaints in this “watch area” have been funneled to University departments, namely Yale Police and Yale Transit. After protests on the website about the fast speed of Yale shuttles, Berkowitz told me, the problem was addressed and settled, resulting in slower buses.

Over 100 Yale email addresses are registered on SeeClickFix.com, Berkowitz said, though it is near impossible to quantify the actual number of Elis who use the website.

One of these Yale users has been Brian Tang ’12. In Tang’s view, the site has grabbed a mighty brass ring — it cuts the middleman, streamlining and enabling a new kind of city involvement that was otherwise unfeasible before.

“While I don’t think SeeClickFix is the singular answer that will make the public process work so much better, I d o feel our ex i s t ing assumpt i o n s about how the public reaches out to governments is pretty lacking, and it could be a lot more meaningful,” Tang said.

Yet the possibilities allowed through SeeClickFix are not only limited to civic i n te ra c tions,

and the site’s potential could be harnessed and scaled down to meet more specific Yale interests.

For instance, Schoenburg suggests applying the SeeClickFix interface in residential colleges so students can self-report issues affecting their own facilities. And although Yalies can be their own watchdogs inside their dorms and off campus, they often become the source of grief on SeeClickFix.com.

Issue #225390.

“Lux et Trash,” regarding 36 Lynwood Place: “The sidewalk is overflowing with household trash discarded by students,” reported by Schoenburg himself on August 27, whose user profile labels him as a “municipal avenger.” “It covers both sides of the street and much of the sidewalk. Talk about bringing down the neighborhood.” *** In the 1950s and 60s, New Haven became a laboratory for pioneering urban renewal strategies, which included the construction of connectors and parking garages, the launch of new cooperative housing projects, and the renovation of neighborhoods such as Wooster Square.

The city’s adaptive attitude toward public policy suits the nature of SeeClickFix, Jackson said, even if the start-up scene here is not as vibrant as those in Silicon Valley or New York City.

“SeeClickFix is a very rare exception,” he told me. “It’s ability to launch in other places was very dependent on New Haven because the city had a lot of faith in the website. That’s a powerful endorsement.”

Now, municipal administrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are implementing the site’s platform. Tens of thousands of communities use it to document their infrastructure issues, and additionally, the company has about 80 clients who pay for enhanced features tailored to their needs, including collegiate costumers such as Southern Connecticut University.

For Berkowitz, New Haven is both a home and a sandbox, a fitting breeding ground for a new generation of empowering civic initiatives.

“It’s a small enough city that you can test something and actually make an impact,” he said. “But it’s also big enough that the impact is treated with credibility by others looking in.”

The website has enhanced New Haven’s ability to address the work order system, Smuts explained, dramatically improving the city’s ability to get back in touch with citizens and close the loop. On a different note, police officers in New Haven also receive direct alerts on their cellphones from citizens reporting crime issues within their “watch areas,” allowing for quick arrests.

As for the bond between Yale and SeeClickFix, it’s a matter of mentality. Students see New Haven as an extension of Yale, and not the other way around, Tang noted. If Yalies are to truly engage with the city in any capacity, be it online or not, they must first begin to consider New Haven as something more than just a college town.

“As citizens, we have rights and responsibilities,” Tang stated. “This is where I live; this is home now. I am a New Havener.”

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at jordi.gasso@yale.edu .

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 9

JASHAN BHANGRA TEAM AUDITIONS

5th floor of Payne Whitney // 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Even if you can’t do bhangra, think of how fun it is to watch people who can!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Spending the weekend in your own house or suite

Snuggle up to your best buddies! We give you permission to stop pretending you don’t hate those people (you know which ones we’re talking about) and just spend time with the people who matter!

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

HOWE TO PARK IN NEW HAVEN The night noises this fall haven’t changed much from previous years. Falling asleep with the window open, I still drift off to Dopplered police sirens, snippets of late-night drunk talk, motorcycles drag-racing down empty streets and ’90s pop ballads murmuring from a party nearby.

But this year I wake up to garbage trucks rather than lawnmowers or jackhammers. Coming home after class, I’m more likely to hear the whining of the colicky baby a few doors down than the muted rant of another Berkeleyite through the fire door. And in the evenings when I’m getting ready to go out, the smell that wafts in underneath my door is one of strong curry from a neighbor’s dinner instead of the cheap marijuana of the football players downstairs.

These new sensations aren’t better or worse — just different.

But what is better is that this year, finally, I am living off campus.

Before classes started, one of my oldest Yale friends came over for dinner. It’s a short walk from his house on Park to my apartment on Howe. Over improvised spaghetti and a little too much wine, we congratulated ourselves on eschewing the dorms in

KALLI ANGEL NEW HAVEN NORMAL exchange for the semi-adult high life and commiserated over the epic journey required of a grocery store run. “I was looking at places on Dwight,” I told him, “but that was a little too far from Yale for me.”

He laughed and said, “You’re brave. I thought Park was almost too far.”

I laughed too and didn’t think much of it until Ronnell Higgins informed the Yale community about an “incident” just a long block from my apartment outside Pierson and I realized that I feel safer in New York’s East Village at three in the morning than I do on Edgewood at nine o’clock at night.

I’ve joked to my boyfriend about learning Krav Maga.

But it’s not all bad. In Chapel West, my new neighborhood, there are five discrete coffee shops that are all closer than Starbucks. There’s a jewelry and home goods boutique on Chapel that’s far better for buying birthday presents than Laila Rowe or Urban Outfitters on Broadway.

There are two bars with decent

happy hours and great craft beers on tap, and in less than one block I can find falafel, sushi and Indian food.

And, to be honest, it’s not as if I moved across town. Here’s a little perspective: According to Google Maps, it’s a 10-minute walk from my apartment to Sterling. Cross Campus to Science Hill is about 12 minutes, depending on where you’re going. And on a half-hour jog round trip, I made it all the way up to Prospect and Canner before turning back to go home.

For contrast, I commuted 35 minutes this summer in morning traffic to get to my job in downtown Charleston, and the summer before I spent 40 minutes (if I was lucky) on the New York subway to arrive at my Upper West Side internship.

So to me, 10 minutes is nothing. Ten minutes is a Metallica song. It’s the average amount of time you have for a problem on a MATH 220 midterm. It’s about how long you wait for your drink during reading period at Starbucks.

The truth is that we Yalies rarely wander off campus.

Admittedly, we have little need to, what with the dining halls and the dorm parties, the a cappella

From Aliens to Pringles concerts and the shows. In fact, there is so much to do on campus that each year seniors find themselves composing long bucket lists of Yale traditions to check off before they graduate.

But I’m starting my own kind of bucket list because, less than 10 minutes away from Yale’s borders, there is an entire city to explore and in just nine months, I’ll be leaving that behind too.

Shortly after Camp Yale as a freshman, I had a lightbulb moment that I still remember viscerally. I was walking up College Street to an early German class on one of those crisp fall mornings before the leaves start turning.

It was beautiful and breezy and I must have passed a sign somewhere that put the words in my head because I started thinking about what “New Haven” really meant. Not the proper noun, but the words themselves.

New Haven, I promised myself, was going to be my new safe place, my refuge, my home.

After three years, with pepper spray in hand and Yale Security on speed dial, I’m finally making good on that promise.

Contact KALLI ANGEL at kalli.angel@yale.edu .

A Case for Cinematic Style No one reads “Fifty Shades of Grey” for its superior writing style. The same can be said for most of the books on The New York Times’ Best Seller List. People read these books simply for story. When one wants to truly sink her teeth into literature, she turns to pieces with not only a good plot, but with the additional element of style. She turns to Twain’s twang and satire, Hemingway’s terse descriptions or Kafka’s surrealism.

The same can be said for films, both classic and modern.

Although the studios continue to put their money into big-budget, plot-driven narratives such as “Moneyball,” “The Help” or “Inception,” smaller studios, with their stylistically creative ventures, continue to win the Oscars. The Weinstein Company’s “The Artist” (2011) won not for its narrative, which featured the humdrum boy-meets-girl structure and the classic eternally loyal canine. Instead, what won the day was its ability to tell its story and elicit emotion through black-and-white, silent structure, proof that we don’t need the flashy extras of the modern movie age to properly enjoy a film. Summit’s “The Hurt Locker” (2008) could have been just another war movie, but its harsh cinematography and editing pushed its audience out of the theatre and into the battlefields of Baghdad.

My favorite films have always been those that rely more heavily on style than the twists and turns of narrative. While I enjoy and understand the appeal of “The Godfather,” I prefer the added voiceovers and editing quirks of “Goodfellas.” Although many of my friends walked out of Sophia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” complaining that its languid plotline lacked structure or intrigue, I could watch the costumes and listen to the music, which combine and compare the excesses of Marie Antoinette’s France and America of the 1980s, over and over again.

Although “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Avengers” took summer box offices by storm, two other films caught my eye.

Not surprisingly, both struck me for stylistic reasons.

The first of the two films was “Moonrise Kingdom.” Sitting in the back of a packed theater,

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 9

BECCA EDELMAN FILM I was enthralled by the idealistic story of young love, with children’s earnest whims overcoming the real-life woes and demands of the older generation. Like many film lovers, I would gladly rank Wes Anderson as one my favorite young directors of the 21st century. His canon is small but cohesive, maintaining, except for his first film, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), a general stylistic unity. Anderson masks adult plotlines within storybook worlds. His colors are often muted and his costumes often conservative, reminiscent of illustrated schoolbooks like “Fun with Dick and Jane.” The films sometimes feature narrators or chapter titles, blatant, metatextual reminders of their literary quality. Anderson’s stylistic choices compliment his self-written plots, which often feature basic realism interrupted by moments that seem more incredible. In Anderson’s first film, “Bottle Rocket,” he neglected to compensate his fantastical plot with the style typical of his later films. In these later films, unrealistic moments don’t seem like plot flaws, for Wes Anderson’s style creates a fairy

tale — a world in which realism is a luxury rather than a necessity.

In “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson seems to have finally reached the apex toward which his past films have been aspiring.

By inserting children as the protagonists within his storybook, Anderson has found the ideal romanticism. The adults, each struggling and mildly pathetic, must give in to the whims of their children. In doing so, the adults do not quite reclaim the film, but they certainly begin to come to terms with Anderson’s fantasy.

My other summer favorite, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” came not as an episode in a filmmaker’s series, but rather as a starburst of new energy and flavor. The film was created by new filmmakers, drew from actors with no former training or experience, and explored a part of America few had seen before.

Beasts dives into the nits and grits of The Bathtub, a New Orleans slum a far cry away from the green pastures and neat Boy Scout camps of “Moonrise Kingdom.”

Though “Beasts” has received much critical acclaim, reviewers barely mention the film’s plotline. Instead, they focus on the delight and despair of The Bathtub’s world. It boasts the mixed qualities of an idyllic indepen-

dent community and a povertystricken hellhole. The film uses magical realism, incorporating the beasts of The Bathtub’s communal folklore as actual figures that arrive just as the town reaches disaster. Although some criticized “Beasts” for lacking a straight-forward plot, the film’s style matches the world of The Bathtub, a place that can only be understood as beautiful if one believes in its magic.

The success of “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with summer art house audiences had little to do with dramatic plot twists or surprise endings. It was their style that captivated, bringing audiences into new worlds of romance and magic. Although the success of these two films at awards season remains to be seen, I firmly predict, and even more aggressively hope, that films with such definitive styles will win the day.

Contact BECCA EDELMAN at rebecca.edelman@yale.edu .

CREATIVE COMMONS

“Moonrise Kingdom” directed by Wes Anderson.

OUT OF THE BLUE SINGING DESSERT

INTERESTED CITIZENS CAN DOWNLOAD PROGRAMS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THESE PROJECTS WHEN THEIR COMPUTERS AREN’T IN USE So-called supercomputers are, at heart, simply very, very, exceedingly, mind-meltingly, brain-bendingly, noggintobogganingly fast computers.

We’re talking quadrillions of arithmetic operations each second, here — more than enough power to get a decent Diablo III frame rate. But what are supercomputers used for? Well, back in the ’90s, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer was built with the noble goal of putting humans in their place by beating the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. Deep Blue lost, so IBM’s team worked on it some more, and the next year Kasparov was finally defeated (though he claimed IBM secretly had humans help the machine).

Playing chess may sound unimportant, but IBM’s website assures the public, “Behind the contest, however, was important computer science,” going on to list a handful of noble applications like financial modeling and medical drug development that Deep Blue probably should have been doing instead of trouncing Kasparov.

(After the chess matches, Deep Blue was dismantled, lest it be put to any legitimately beneficial use.)

Fortunately, other supercomputers have worked for humans instead of against them. Supercomputers crack cryptographic codes, model complex molecular and nuclear physics, detect overlooked oil and natural gas deposits in old sonar readings and analyze stock markets. A supercomputer was used for much of the special effects in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, and (in case you thought they were always good) a supercomputer is responsible for the weather

JACOB EVELYN THE FUTURE forecasts you see on the news.

Proctor & Gamble even used a supercomputer’s airflow simulation to make their Pringles potato chips more aerodynamic so they’d stop blowing off the assembly line.

But although supercomputers are much cheaper and more widespread than they used to be, not everyone can afford one. Some groups have instead turned to a different solution: instead of having one enormous computer do all the work, why not split the task up into little jobs that many computers can do? This is the theory behind distributed computing projects; interested citizens can download programs that contribute to these projects when their computers aren’t in use.

One example is SETI@home, a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project where average home computers are used to search radio telescope data for narrowbandwidth signals from space, which would be evidence of technologically advanced alien life. The Folding@home project models protein folding for disease research when you’re not using your computer. DistrRTgen does the same for studying password security, eOn models theoretical chemistry on long time scales, the Quake-Catcher Network detects earthquakes and Electric Sheep mathematically evolves trippy animations that double as screensavers.

Afraid you’re being made obsolete? Fear not! Some similar projects actually require human interaction! NASA’s Clickworkers project, for example, relies on humans to identify specific geological features in photos of Mars. When data from many “clickworkers” are combined, NASA gets an accurate mapping of the locations and sizes of craters. Similarly, Duolingo combines many novice human language translations of text to produce highquality translations for articles and websites.

It’s always nice to see how humans are still relevant in our age of machines. There are some things humans will always be better at, like playing soccer and learning languages, right?

(This list used to include driving cars and playing chess, too. And remember John Henry?) So go out and take part in one of these awesome projects that put you or your computer to use for the public good. Just don’t be surprised when you’re no longer needed. This is probably around when your vacuum cleaner will finally beat you at chess.

Contact JACOB EVELYN at jacob.evelyn@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Sudler Hall // 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Go for the desserts, stay for the popcappella.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “computer.” A sort of magical electro-abacus, the computer is capable of performing dozens of calculations per second and may one day fit inside a modestly-sized living room.

Indeed, computers are used for everything from statistical calculations and word processing to playing text-based games or sending electronic mail to colleagues. But what about supercomputers?

A$AP Rocky

He’ll be at Toad’s on Sept. 23, so now is a good chance to fall in love with this cutie’s Pitchfork-labeled “codeine fever dreams.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND THEATER

Risk//Presence//Transformation//Inclusivity//Purpose: Announcing the 45th Season at the Yale Cabaret // BY ANYA GRENIER This year the Yale Cabaret will take you straight from 1928 Russia to 2012 New Haven, and then ask how you feel about dying. And after that? “All the shows are being created from the ground up,” said Yale Cabaret managing director Jonathan Wemette DRA ’13. “I couldn’t really tell you what the rest of the season has in store.”

Wemette can, however, guarantee that it will be full of theater “wildly unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else.”

Each play is submitted and created in its entirety by Drama School students, and each week of the season will hold something different, with anything from puppets and mime one week to one man talking alone on stage the next, according to the Cabaret’s artistic director Ethan Heard DRA ’13.

This complete change of both physical and emotional scenery is emblematic of the Cabaret’s risktaking spirit. Heard said the theater itself is “a laboratory for drama students,” adding that those involved “strive to transform the space completely every week.”

The Cabaret prides itself on doing shows that are extremely interactive, and which utilize the Cabaret’s immersive and intimate space to the fullest possible extent. The small dinner theater in the basement of 217 Park St. is a place for experimentation, said Dustin Wills DRA ’14, where students of the Yale Drama School can let go of their classroom training and curricular assignments and put on their “passion projects.”

The Yale Cabaret values its accessibility and inclusivity for audience members as much as it does artistic experimenta-

// ZOE GORMAN

The Yale Cabaret’s newest season will include mimes, Russia and death.

THE YALE CABARET VALUES ITS ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVITY FOR AUDIENCE MEMBERS AS MUCH AS IT DOES ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION.

tion, according to Heard. With this spirit of inclusivity in mind, the Yale Cabaret is launching a “University Ambassadors” program this season. The Theater will have a representative in each of Yale’s graduate schools and in the College to promote its shows and recruit new audience members.

The season’s opening show, “The Fatal Eggs,” is adapted from a novella written

by Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s, which was adapted for the stage by Wills and Ilya Khodosh DRA ’14, who also translated the text from the original Russian. It is also narrated by an ostrich.

The story begins with a scientist who discovers a ray of red light capable of reproducing organisms at a fantastically rapid rate, only to have his discovery fall into the hands of the Soviet government.

What follows is equal parts absurd satire and horrifying commentary on both Soviet Russia and today’s world (no spoilers, but there will be gigantic exotic animal puppets featured in this production).

“The Fatal Eggs” also has seven actors playing 62 roles. The production’s incredibly rapid turnover of actors creates a feeling of “anxious movement,” said Wills, which conveys “a time in Russia when it really felt like the world could collapse from under you.” While Wills said that the show has not been “updated,” and remains loyal to its time and setting, its message about a society in the grips of media-fueled hysteria still contains many complex themes that remain relevant,

“especially in an election year.”

The next production, “This,” is an ensemble piece based on interviews and emailed stories submitted by members of the Yale and New Haven community.

“What’s really vulnerable and exciting and dangerous about the show is that someone next to you in the audience could have submitted one of the stories you’re hearing on stage,” said Heard. The production, said Wemette, is a perfect metaphor for the Cabaret’s constant attempts to “break down the wall between audience and actor, and [to] make the stage a more porous place.” The show is a way of making people feel that they matter, because their stories are being told, said associate artistic director Benjamin Fainstein DRA ’13, adding, “It’s a true offering to our audiences.”

The third show that has been announced thus far, “Ain’t Gonna Make It,” is still very much in the midst of its creation process, according to Wemette.

It is a look at dying, but one that is going to be “very rockabilly, musical, vibrant and celebratory,” in Wemette’s words. He also said that there are two designers at the helm of this particular show, meaning one can expect it to be both “visually spectacular” and to tell the story “through images in a way shows don’t always do.”

Going to the Cabaret, said Fainstein, “is a risk not only for the artists on stage but also for the individual audience members.” There is something uniquely communal about both the logistics and the purpose of the Cabaret’s space, he added.

By being a dinner theater, he said, it allows audience members to first “engage in the ancient ritual of sharing food and drink and talking to one another,” before the play even begins. “It’s an event and not just entertainment.”

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

S U N D AY

YALE TANGO CLUB PRACTILONGA

SEPTEMBER 9

We don’t know what a practilonga is, but it sounds sexy. WEEKEND likes sexy.

GPSCY // 8 p.m.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: The lunch buffet at Zaroka

For just 8.95, you can have all the Indian you can eat. The lighting’s a little strange, but you’ll be so stuffed you won’t care.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

AMALE ANDRAOS & DAN WOOD

// WORK ARCHITECTURE COMPANY

Spunky, Fast-Talking, Lovers of Nature // BY NATASHA THONDAVADI

A

male Andraos and Dan Wood are the principal architects at WORKac, a New York-based architecture firm known for its cutting-edge urban designs incorporating nature into the life of cities. On Thursday, Andraos and Wood spoke at the School of Architecture about their architectural philosophy, discussing both their academic contributions and their building projects. Entitled “Nature-City,” the talk culminated in a walk-through of their firm’s design by the same name for a recent Museum of Modern Art competition tackling the urban landscape in the wake of the housing crisis. Their winning design reinvents a 225-acre portion of Keizer Station, Ore. in an attempt to create a sustainable community. In attempt to redefine the suburban landscape, the project offers a possible solution to the lack of resources and massive energy consumption of many American communities today. Andraos and Wood have also been involved in other conceptual urban projects such as a reimagination of the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn. To combat the food deserts still prevalent in the area, the two architects mapped potential bodegas and urban farms. For instance, they suggested that fish — which are capable of survival without exposure to light — could swim underneath the city streets in a series of pipes, enabling patrons at neighborhood stores to catch live food. Andraos and Wood have also worked extensively with chef Alice Waters on urban food projects, even designing an edible playground at a public school in Brooklyn.

AA. Clearly we’re kind of conscious of the environmental condition of the world today and are interested in projecting possibilities for the future. So rather than simply focusing on the built or architectural environment, which is more typical, we are more interested in expanding beyond. We want to really look at architecture in relation to the city, and the city to the agricultural and natural, trying to find new relationships.

DW. We’ve always been inspired by the idea of having a country life and a city life of the old aristocracy, and how we can actually bring that to the city and countryside in a way that the two poles don’t necessarily need to be so totally separated.

Q. You talked a lot in your lecture about how living environments need to both be more dense and contain more open space — a paradoxical idea at first. How do those concepts go hand in hand?

AA. I think that’s an unfortunate result of the current suburban settlement. It really was a dream of living close to nature, but actually you have to connect all these houses with roads and infrastructure, and this sprawl actually ends up reducing the amount of green space due to private yards. Instead if you densify and compress the housing together, you’ll start to liberate many more collective green fields.

DW. And also, by bleeding out any form of diversity from the suburbs — and I don’t just mean racial diversity or income diversity which there isn’t as well — but by outlawing any retail activity, any possibility to work or any public space from parts of the city, from the suburb, you really create a very strange social condition. I think if you look at the most dangerous places in the country, they’re much more suburban-looking than urban-looking. And the one thing everyone complains about when they move to the suburbs from the city is that they miss seeing people, and being able to walk places and go out.

AA. And part of our interest is to show that not all densities have to be Manhattan densities. We want to explore densities that can afford an incredible amount of green space without being as low as a suburban density.

Q. Then are the areas you’d redevelop in an ideal world more suburban than what we traditionally think of as urban?

DW. Places like Keizer [Station, Ore.] are very interesting in that there is this idea of density through the [governmentmandated] urban growth boundary. It was very interesting for us to look at the suburbs. There was an earlier life where we said, “It should be cities or it should be rural,” but to look at the suburbs is to see why people really want to live in those conditions. If you look at density like Nature-City, it’s quite sustainable. It especially works in edge conditions, like the exurbs and places where going any further is really untenable. Even now, with people driving an hour and a half to get to an urban center, we’re trying to pull

that boundary back and create a new edge of density with relation to the downtown.

Q. You spoke about the importance of working within restrained budgets and design using pre-

AA. I think it’s about always trying to be strategic. It’s not just bigness for bigness’s sake — the bigness of infrastructure is an investment in the future, whereas bigness in other ways is not and can be more wasteful. For example for our new Holland Island project, the last winner of that competition was Foster and Partners, which had designed a very large-scale intervention. Instead we were trying to be very strategic in combining intervention with infrastructure to minimize the impact on these structures.

DW. And even when we ran the numbers on the Nature-City project, we actually saved money

in infrastructure because to lay pipes out to every single suburban house outside the city is much more expensive. And then the sustainable infrastructure like large composting facilities that can create power are at the edge of what’s doable right now, but once that becomes viable, investment in that would repay itself over time — let’s say the interest is in a 40-year investment, or even a 20-year investment. So we actually took out those numbers because we assumed someone would invest. Where do you see yourselves going next?

AA. Our next big project is in Gabon, in West Africa.

DW. We’re literally going to Gabon.

AA. But after that, I think, though we live and work in New York and feel very much a part of it, we’re interested in exploring more global possibilities.

Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at natasha.thondavadi@yale.edu .

“

THERE HAS TO BE A RHYTHM TO THE SENTENCE AND YOU MUST ALSO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VELOCITY IN WHICH IT READS.

“

Q. How did you develop your focus on nature?

existing spaces, especially in today’s economic conditions, yet many of your proposals seem radical in terms of how much you would need to build. Where do those two concepts meet in the middle? What do you hope to design that can actually be executed?