Herald Volume LXIII Issue 8

The Yale Herald Volume LXIII, Number 8 New Haven, CT Friday, Mar. 31, 2017

EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-Chief: Oriana Tang Managing Editors: Emma Chanen, Anna Sudderth Executive Editors: Tom Cusano, Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, David Rossler, Rachel Strodel, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Luke Chang, Marc Shkurovich Features Editors: Hannah Offer, Eve Sneider Opinion Editors: Emily Ge, Robert Newhouse Reviews Editors: Mariah Kreutter, Nicole Mo Voices Editor: Bix Archer Insert Editor: Eli Lininger Audio Editor: Will Reid Copy Editors: Jazzie Kennedy, Meghana Mysore

From the editors

ONLINE STAFF Bullblog Editor-in-Chief: Marc Shkurovich Bullblog Associate Editors: Lora Kelley, Lea Rice Online Editor: Megan McQueen

Volume LXIII, Number 8 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Mar. 31, 2017

DESIGN STAFF Graphics Editor: Joseph Valdez Design Editor: Winter Willoughby-Spera Executive Graphics Editor: Haewon Ma

Morning, Sunshines, Welcome back from the thirty-minute-nap-turned-two-hour-slumber that is Yale’s Spring Break. Whether newly-rested or ready to snooze your way to summer, here we are: back to work, back to Partners, back to the roof of Phelps (shh, don’t tell YPD!), back to asking for funding—back, for better or worse, to Yale.

And for us at the Herald, back to content. In this week’s issue, you’ll find a cover story dedicated not only to the vital role women play in journalism on both Yale’s campus and beyond, but also to the variety of limitations and pitfalls folks have faced in their careers, young and old. On campus, former New Journal editor-in-chief, Elena Saavedra Buckley, SM ’18, advocates the importance of torch-passing. Sarah Stillman, YC ’06 and a staff writer at The New Yorker, reflects on how her experience of writing at Yale prepared her for a career in journalism. All in all, this compilation is at once a celebration of women who have already found their place in journalism and a call to action to others who have yet to find, or been allowed, theirs.

From the editorial board to the backboard, join Sarah Holder, SY ’17, as she recounts the Academics of Hillhouse High School’s A+ 20162017 athletic season. And speaking of academics, read Héctor Ricardo Hernández’s, BK ’19, take on the unique and necessary role of students of color in Directed Studies.

If you’re just searching for a story to peruse from the cross-campus bench you’ve planted yourself on for the afternoon, check out Culture’s blurb salad on the it’s-always-at-least-a-little-personal process of housing, a piece whose varied accounts can be connected by the through line traced by Nic Harris’, BR ’18, when he writes, “All in all, everyone gets through the housing process alive.”

Let’s hope.

To ~living~ Robert Newhouse Opinion Editor

2 – The Yale Herald

BUSINESS STAFF Publisher: Patrick Reed Advertising Team: Alex Gerszten, Garrett Gile, Tyler Morley, Bedel Saget, Jr., Harrison Tracy The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2016 - 2017 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 oriana.tang@yale.edu www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2017 The Yale Herald.

Cover by Joseph Valdez YH Staff

THIS WEEK’S ISSUE 12 COVER

Incoming First-years The administration replaced the term “freshman” with the gender-neutral “first-year” just as Yale College released admissions decisions for the Class of 2021.

Outgoing Atmospheres President Trump’s rollback of Obama-era climate change regulations spell doom for the Earth’s gaseous outer layer, meaning winters in New Haven will be milder than ever.

SCHEDULE Saturday

Just Add Water Extravaganza 8:30 p.m.

Sunday

Camp Kesem Color Run 10:00 a.m.

Monday

Isaiah Rashad 8:00 p.m.

Wednesday

50 Most Beautiful Launch Party 10:30 p.m.

“It depends on the situation, of course, but I found I was likelier to encounter a majority-women space than a majority-men space.” This week, Herald staff talk to women, on campus and off, about their experiences in journalism.

6 VOICES

With a pork bone in hand, Catherine Yang, TC ’19, translates a dream onto the page.

Michael Holmes, PC ’20, writes of air travel and growing up.

8 OPINION

Yvonne Ye, BK ’19, examines the problematic nature of Yale’s heritage language tracks.

Clink glasses with Héctor Ricardo Hernández, BK ’19, as he toasts the health and enduring relevance of Directed Studies.

10 FEATURES

Shoot some hoops with Sarah Holder, SY ’17, as she catches up with Connecticut’s winningest school.

18 CULTURE

’Tis the season for housing, and the Herald reflects on the ghosts of suitemates past, how to be a snake in room draw, and what home means to us.

20 REVIEWS

Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, lives the emotions and experiences of The Magnetic Fields and explores the enchanting strangeness of 50 Songs Memoir.

Lydia Buonomano, DC ’20, relives her childhood with Beauty and the Beast.

Joe Kuperschmidt, HC ’17, appreciates Kong: Skull Island for what it is.

Mere mortal Marc Shkurovich, BK ’19, tells us how he feels about American Gods.

Mar. 31, 2017 – 3

YALE SECURITY PSA To the Yale Community, As you may have heard, jaywalking on Elm St. between College St. and York St. is now a misdemeanor. Numerous Yale students have already been ticketed for this offense. In light of the success of the new measure in cutting down such behavior, Yale Security has decided to roll out a list of new regulations intended to make Yale a safer place for all of us.

1.) Jaywalking on Elm St. is now a misdemeanor. Offenders will be ticketed.

2.) Texting ‘U up?’ to a fellow student is now a misdemeanor. Offenders will be given remedial romantic coaching.

3.) Asking uncomfortable questions about the jaywalking ban is now a misdemeanor. Offenders will be ticketed.

4.) Volunteering that you are in Directed Studies is now a misdemeanor.

Offenders will be forced to major in Computer Science.

5.) Lying that you are in Directed Studies is not a misdemeanor. It is merely very, very sad.

6.) Refusing to tell Susan D. Cahan, Associate Dean for the Arts, what you are up to this weekend is now a misdemeanor. Offenders will be executed, then ticketed.

7.) Kidnapping Peter Salovey and transporting him to an electronics factory in Tianjin, China, is now a misdemeanor. Offenders will be afforded leniency if they come forward and tell us just how they got him into that packing crate.

8.) Lending your Beats to someone in Sterling is now a misdemeanor.

Offenders will be sufficiently punished by the indignity that arises from spending all their time in Sterling and from owning Beats.

9.) Writing a list of newly-created misdemeanors is now a misdemeanor.

Offenders will be punished by being forced to work for the Herald.

Sincerely, Chief Ronnell A. Higgins

- Sahaj Sankaran 4 – The Yale Herald

THE NUMBERS The Yale Corporation 6 - Yale trustees confused to discover that the Schwartzman Center will not contain the world’s largest cape shark aquarium.

35 - number of commemorative shovels held

by Yale Corporation board members in the last calendar year.

0 - number of non-commemorative shovels (or tools of any kind) held by Yale Corporation board members from 1701 to 2017.

2 - newly vacant seats on the board after financiers William Kennard ‘81 and Lei Zhang ‘02 learned that the Yale Corporation was not, in fact, an investment vehicle for its trustees.

9 - trustees ticketed for jaywalking across Elm during the Yale Corporation’s last meeting.

1 - protest staged against the Corporation in order to expedite the formation of the Sasha Pup Replacement Committee.

Sources: 6 - definitely not a cape shark 35, 0 - a disgruntled shovel-holding instructor’s tell-all memoir 2 - closed caption footage showing 9 - police log from February 18th 1 - an angry press release from a tearful student activist

- Alexander Vidal

Top 5 ways to pregame a midterm 5. Drink every time you hear someone in Bass crying.

4. Email your TA to introduce yourself and to ask why you have a 0 for section attendance—take a drink every ten minutes until she responds.

3. Find out what building the class meets in and drink in the classroom.

2. Take a shot for every lecture you didn’t attend.

1. Drop the class and go to Woads— DJ Action is spinning.

- Simon Sharp

sarah.holder@yale.edu oriana.tang@yale.edu

oriana.tang@yale.edu

VOICES

How to go on vacation

by Michael Holmes

T

he problem is, the airport isn’t supposed to be nice. It’s a place between places, somewhere you go to get somewhere else. Remember that as you drag your ragged blue suitcase behind you, threading your way between coffee-chugging office drones, screaming children, and impatient travelers. Follow Mom and Dad through the terminal; maintain some distance, so that it’s plausible that you are a college student traveling on his own.

When your parents arrive at the wrong gate, make a show of pulling out your boarding pass and examining the number. Say “But doesn’t that say 27?” or “Gee, I didn’t know we were going to Denver,” or some other smart-ass thing.

They’ll both check their watches even though there’s plenty of time left until the flight; planning is their forte, unlike directions.

At Gate 27, pick a seat by the window, where the sun bakes the back of your neck, but at least you aren’t stuck next to the old man who smells like eucalyptus. If your parents go to use the bathroom or get coffee, they’ll ask you to watch the bags. Cross your legs over your backpack and slide the other suitcases to form a wall around your seat. Make awkward eye contact with the fat guy in the next aisle just as he pours the powdery remnants at the bottom of his UTZ bag into his mouth. Try not to listen to all the conversations around you. Listen anyway. If the seats next to you are occupied, fold your legs up onto your seat and put in your earbuds. Flip back and forth through the pages of apps on your phone, opening and closing several games and inboxes before turning the phone off. For double points, open a random email and stare at it with your brow furrowed as if it really draws your attention.

When your parents get back, it’s your turn to get food or use the bathroom. If it’s the former, meander slowly up and down the terminal. Try not to get annoyed when those little kids on leashes almost trip you. If you get McDonalds, try to stand in line in a way that suggests you don’t eat there a lot. Take a long time to find the line or stare blankly at the menu boards as if you’ve never heard of a Big Mac in your life. If you get Panda Express, grab a pair of the chopsticks instead of a fork, so you don’t feel like you’re betraying your Asian ancestors too much. Try not to imagine a score of them scowling at you through the steam of your sesame chicken. If you get Chipotle, avoid the guacamole, because you

once saw someone puke on a flight to Bermuda when you were seven, and the vomit was the same color as a ripe avocado. At any of the three aforementioned restaurants, try to pull out your money without unfolding every single bill in your pockets. Fail. End up with a crumpled handful of ones. Shove the handful back into your jacket. Take a quick look around for pickpockets and then remember that this is the airport, not Victorian London. Still, make sure the money pocket zips. Mistakes do not need to be made. When you get your food, if you’re feeling grown up, eat it quickly at one of the tables in the food area. Take off your jacket to display your UVA t-shirt, even though you only got it because your dad works there. Or if you want, take the food back to the gate.

By the time you return, Dad will have his travel brochures out again and he’ll be flipping through long exposures of the beach and glamorous pictures of the food at the hotel where you’ll be staying. Watch planes take off and land through the window with your mom. Give both of them fries even though they say they aren’t hungry; they are. One of them will bring up plans for next year; they do more frequently now. “Next year, you’ll be flying home to visit,” they might tell you. Mom will mention the time you threw a cup of apple juice on a Delta flight, when you were little. Put your jacket on over the UVA shirt and remember that you’re not quite ready to be on your own.

When the plane begins boarding, don’t rush to finish your food. You’re not little enough to be counted for pre-boarding and you’ve never been a platinum or silver member of anything besides the Marvel Comics Spiderman Kids Club.

Finally, when group C is called, sling your backpack over your shoulder. Maybe stretch like you’ve been cooped up for hours, even though it’s only been forty minutes.

On the plane, try to sit next to the girl that you made eye contact with in the gate. When you fail, search for somebody who won’t spend much time talking to you. End up between the elderly man with a stomach bug and a kid who keeps screaming for his juice box. Watch the tarmac through the sliver of window that you can make out over the elderly man’s ailing stomach. Sit back, plug in your earbuds and close your eyes. Remember that your vacation is only just beginning.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 6 _ The Yale Herald

Going to sleep on an empty stomach

by Catherine Yang

T

onight, my family lives on the streets. We crouch on the bend of a dirty road, never looking up or around our perch. The corner of the street is crowded with other bums like us, including a girl whose face I don’t recognize but whom I know is my friend.

One day, without explanation, there are huge bowls of fatty pig in front of us. Right on that street corner, we break up the flesh with our hands and pass it around, gorging and laughing on the dirty sidewalk as people saunter past. My friend doesn’t eat much, just stares off with wide eyes, face pale and gaunt. I ask her what’s wrong, and she looks past me with an empty gaze.

“I’m jealous,” she says. I turn to look over my shoulder. She’s been staring at the pretty young couple all along, the one that glided by arm-in-arm minutes ago. The man is dressed in soldier’s garb and the woman twirls in her skirt. They enter a large gray marble building, faces obscured the whole time. I turn back to my friend, taking another bite out of the pork, and ask why she’s jealous. I tell her that she could just as easily have the same thing — so what if all we’ve ever done is sit dirty and cross legged on the streets? She just look at me with those wide eyes and says it’s because she’s hungry. She holds her stare, and I fall silent. Minutes later amidst the feasting, I’m still eating fatty pork bone with my bare glistening hands, but beside me she sits still, hands cold and dry.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Mar. 31, 2017 – 7

OPINION

OPINION

Both sides of the hyphen

by Yvonne Ye

Y

ou guys didn’t do as well on this midterm as I’d hoped—well, I always hope someone will get a perfect grade…”

My midterm lay abandoned to one side—not a perfect grade by far, but I’d planned on taking this course Cr/D since the beginning of the semester anyway. I paged lazily through my notebook, tuning the professor out.

“Even the Chinese heritage students didn’t do so well, but you know, it’s harder for our three non-heritage students anyway, so to tell the truth, I gave them five extra points on the exam. Some of the mistakes people made were really strange, I’m not sure how you came up with this...”

He continued, pointing out misused phrases in fill-in-the-blank questions. I was now afraid to look up. None of the other students seemed to have noticed the fact that the professor just said he’d adjusted the grades based on race.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a professor explicitly favor non-heritage language learners in a Chinese class at Yale, and I suspect it won’t be the last. My professor’s perception is this: non-heritage students are plucky and courageous for confronting the daunting prospect of studying Mandarin Chinese, whereas heritage students in the class are just there to get the language requirement done.

I can see where my professor is coming from—Chinese can be intimidating to learn and grants few mercies to those who take it on as a second language. However, the assumption that the study of Chinese literature comes instinctively to heritage speakers is faulty and dangerous, a symptom of the larger phenomenon of the negation of Chinese-American identity.

Chinese-Americans occupy a liminal space on the battlefield of ethnicity, identity, and nationalism because they are ignored by both sides of the hyphen: China and Chinese nationals don’t consider Chinese-Americans to be a distinct or different group. To them, Chinese-Americans are simply Chinese people who happen to live in the United States, a distant land where the One Child Policy doesn’t exist and everyone has cars. ChineseAmericans can return to the homeland at any time; thus, they are still functionally Chinese. Meanwhile, from the American side, Chinese-Americans are still fresh off the boat, forever alien, and can be neatly summed up by stale archetypes presented in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. And really, that’s all you need to know about the Chinese-American narrative: the angst of not fitting in, the eventual coming-to-terms with one’s heritage, perhaps returning with the motherland or learning the governmentsanctioned Mandarin language in order to tearfully connect with estranged tiger parents. After Chinese-Americans embrace the exotic side of their

doubled identity, their stories end. Presumably, nothing of note happens once their cultural dissonance is resolved.

Whether the Chinese-American voice is an oppressed one or simply just quieter than others, the fact remains that it is continually overlooked and ignored. We see this in Hollywood, where production studios and distribution companies, faced with declining audience numbers in the states, fiercely court the lucrative Chinese market. Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) reanimated the mouths of characters to reflect the oral shape of Mandarin dialogue for release in China; The Great Wall (2017) shamelessly drew on Chinese starpower in casting Lu Han and Andy Lau while recruiting Zhang Yimou to direct. Disney, in its upcoming live-action remake of Mulan (2018), is going over the heads of Chinese-American actresses and straight to China to cast the titular role, English-speaking abilities be damned.

Chinese-Americans are outraged. Chinese-Americans are also being ignored, because their voices aren’t loud enough, aren’t strong enough, aren’t numerous enough to be factored into decisions being made by the global powers on either side of the hyphens.

But systemic whitewashing and casual racism in Hollywood is sadly no longer newsworthy; in fact, it’s part and parcel of the regular state of affairs, especially when we’re so racist to ourselves. I’ve lost track of the number of times that I have been told by a professor of Chinese that I am less impressive or less important than my non-Chinese-American peers; I smile and nod when another language instructor gushes over the progress of her non-heritage, non-Chinese-American students over lunch at the Chinese language table. I am not noticed. That is fine. I am not important.

That is fine. I am not worthy of consideration because I, as a heritage language speaker, have an innate advantage when it comes to studying this language—as if I don’t also impose English grammar structures onto Chinese sentences by accident. As if I don’t also mispronounce words or miss cultural references. As if I don’t also have difficulty learning Mandarin Chinese because English is, in fact, my primary language.

Is it a wonder, then, why Chinese-Americans throw themselves more toward one side of the hyphen than the other? Why some say proudly, “I don’t know any Chinese, but I do know French?” Until the Yale Chinese department recognizes the existence and uniqueness of a Chinese-American identity, it will be impossible to assess heritage students on their own merit. And until professors stop calculating my worth as a student by the color of my skin, there is no way I can feel at home studying a language that is supposedly my own.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

The next 70 yearsby Héctor Ricardo Hernández

T

his Saturday, the Directed Studies program will celebrate its 70th anniversary. Alumni from DS classes as far back as possible will reunite around a seminar table and relive their principal academic experience of freshman year. I, too, will have a seat at this table. I also expect to be one of the few Latin American students present this weekend. For me, this is no honor. Rather, it is an opportunity to witness, and, in effect, lead the long-awaited and long-demanded globalization of DS. Directed Studies turns 70, and I, a Colombian citizen hailing from Bogotá, a student of color, toast that it may live 70 more—not for the demographic of students who have always benefited from the program, but rather for other students of color, who are distinctly shaped by the Western Canon.

In December of last year, Down Magazine published an article titled “Abolish DS.” The piece criticized how DS’s syllabus features mostly white male straight thinkers, arguing the implications of the establishment of such a canon function to reenact intellectual violence.

Yet what struck me was not the content of the piece. Rather, it was the article’s thumbnail picture: it depicted three of my friends and classmates, mid discussion. Although the demographics of DS were but a tangential point of the article, all three students pictured were white men. But I wasn’t simply absent from the picture in the abstract sense that there was no Latin American representation in this image of DS. My absence was literal; I used to be in the picture. In the original, uncropped version of the photograph, (found today on the DS website) another student of color and myself flanked our three classmates that did, if you will, “make the cut.” Confused and irate, I was left to appreciate the brutal irony of cropping people of color from an image introducing an article that critiques the homogeneity and exclusion facilitated by DS’s syllabus.

The picture was soon replaced by a one of an empty WHC auditorium.

Yet regardless of the change and the actual content of the article, what first circulated among DOWN readers, primarily students of color, was the picture with the title “Abolish DS.” If the goal was to inspire student-wide discomfort with the program, the edited picture was probably an effective way to do it. Moreover, by presenting an image of DS that excludes DOWN’s main audience—thereby reinforcing existing preconceptions of the demographics of a DS seminar—the article succeeds in making Directed Studies even more unpalatable to students of color. At that rate, the picture will become reality, and there won’t be a need to crop anyone out next time.

While in DS, I realized that I only do two things in class: I listen, and I think. I don’t speak, really. Not even when participation is a nontrivial portion of my grade. Yet when faced with an article that effectively denied that I have a place in DS, I listened, I thought, and I realized that this time, silence would be unacceptable.

For this reason, I will tell 70 years’ worth of DS alumni that I, too, did DS. I will do this simply by attending, by engaging—on equal footing and with equal need—to understand the texts that have shaped my country and culture. As an expatriate, I’ve wondered my whole life why Colombia is the way it is, and why I am here instead of there. Issues that are viscerally relevant today in Colombia, Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World did not develop independent of GrecoRoman-German texts; on the contrary, they are the product of readings, actions, rereadings, and counteractions of the ideas those texts contain.

The groups that are excluded from the canon are the most affected; to do anything but turn away from these texts while simultaneously trying to understand them is to doom oneself to having an incomplete picture, no cropping required.

DS covers both too much material too quickly, and not enough. Yet an exposure, however brief, to Aristotelian logic, political theory, and teleology helps begin to explain Latin America’s current struggles to understand its indigenous populations. An awareness, however glancing or superficial, of Lockean notions of property, and a later Marxist rejection of those notions, provides the necessary contextual depth to appreciate the 1960s for the Global South. And even a survey of Western Canon literature is of immense value to identify, and then trace, the values that European expansion and imperialism imposed across the world. From Argentina’s idealization of Europe to Haiti’s repudiation of the same, and from Machiavelli’s fear to Fanon’s love and violence, the ideas in DS remain relevant for many more groups than just the heirs of its authors. They are real, they are current, and they are urgent, above all for the student of color.

For me, the study of the Western Canon is not about universals or about “Great Books.” It is about understanding the formation of a culture that has shaped my part of the world. A culture that is so well documented, I had the chance to study it as a conversation between disciplines, writers, and centuries, so that I could then step back and attempt to understand it outside of itself, in its extra-canonical, global influence. This may not be how my classmates, last year or this Saturday, approach Directed Studies. So be it. It is the way I, in my typically reserved silence, do.

Directed Studies is in no risk of dying a septuagenarian; quite the opposite, DS is only now finding its fullest value and only now getting started, because it is only now that it has me and the small but growing subset of students I represent.

And if it is dying, I’ll be the first to jump to perform CPR. Kant’s, of course.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Mar. 31, 2017 – 9

FEATURE FEATURES

Threepeat * Sarah Holder, SY ’17, holds court with New Haven’s champions.

T

he art of the “threepeat” usually involves one charmed sports team winning three major championships in a row. But what if three different teams from one same school win three different state championships, all in the same year? It’s not a 90’s TV show plot-line—it’s Hillhouse High School’s 2016-2017 season.

In December, The Academics won the Class M football state championship, shutting out St. Joseph in the last 24 minutes of the game to win 4221. In February, The Academics won girls’ indoor track states by breaking a 47-47 tie with their final event, a 4:10.89 4x400 relay. And then finally, on Friday, March 17, in front of a crowd of over 8,000 fans, The Academics won the Class LL men’s basketball state championship, defeating East Hartford 78-58. This lucky confluence of events is a big deal: the first triple-win in recent memory.

On Wednesday afternoon, all three teams are invited to the WYBC office to be honored, on-air,

by WYBC’s host Juan Castillo. The basketball team trickles in first, slowly taking formation on the couches at the center of the room with long legs splayed, their numbers dominating the room. Next come a few football players, bulkier, here as representatives for the rest of the team—“We couldn’t bring all the boys here,” laughs Coach Reggie Lytle.

“They wouldn’t all fit.” Also notably absent are the women of track—after the girls won states in the indoor arena and the boys came in fifth, both teams immediately began their outdoor season, and are busy competing in another meet.

Today is not the first time many of these boys have sat together in this room. Last year, the basketball team was honored here after winning state, triumphing over Weaver-Hartford 94-83 in double-

10 – The Yale Herald

overtime. “The food was better last year,” basketball player Byron Breland observes, in between bits of barbeque chips. Across from him, teammate Tyler Douglas picks the onions off a deli meat sandwich.

“Last year they had fried chicken.” (The football team won State this year for the first time since 2012, so the meal options are fresher.)

All the guys know each other, joking about their shared, newfound success. That’s partly because they attend the same small high school in the same small city, and partly because many of them play sports with multiple teams: Derrick Simms, one of the captains of the football team, also does 55 meter hurdles for track, and other football players are absent because they’re stuck at the outdoor meet.

Of course, the camaraderie fostered between teams pales in comparison to the bonds these boys share within each team. The basketball team likes to call themselves “House Family.” “The House is for Hillhouse, and the family...it’s cause we’re family,” explains Assistant Coach Paul Henderson. “And we don’t just talk about it. We be about it.” Most of these boys have been playing together for only the three or four years they’ve been in high school, but enduring practice together two hours a day, every day, plus playing home and away games, means that “most of the time, they’re around each other.”

The coaches, too, sit side by side, sharing in celebration. “We talk to each other; feed off each other,” says Lytle of the dynamic between Hillhouse coaches. “We all have very different strategies, but we learn a lot. We all try to keep the train going, and get the kids to buy in.”

Everyone gets quiet all of a sudden. A few basketball players have entered the recording studio, and their voices are being broadcast into the WYBC

lobby. When the team’s banter is replaced by the sound of a Hyundai commercial, football players Sims and Billy Oliver reflect on their own win. “We had a winning mentality, but we never take the games lightly,” Sims says. “It was bittersweet, especially as a senior,” Oliver, an offensive lineman, adds.

For coach Lytle, the Hillhouse family and the collective 2017 wins are also particularly significant.

He’s been coaching for seven years, and finishing his fourth as head coach, but he also played on the Hillhouse football team back in 1985. That was the year Hillhouse won their first state final, the year they were the best team in the northeast and ranked eighth in the country. “So this was big for me,” Lytle beams. In a New Haven Register article published earlier this week, he considers broader implications of the win. ““It’s big for the city,” he’s quoted there as saying. “I’m just happy for the city.” *** Basketball player Byron Breland slides next to me on the couch, slouched, arms crossed confidently. “He’s famous now,” his teammate whispers, nodding at Breland. “Ask him. He’s famous.” To be fair, they’re all famous in this city—front page news on the local papers and their voices soon to be broadcast via radio, city-wide—but Byron has become a hero around whom the city has rallied especially enthusiastically. “Tell her,” he prods again.

It’s not that Breland is a phenomenal athlete, even though he is—Breland has been playing basketball since first grade, and is now ranked first in the state of Connecticut. No: Breland didn’t score even one basket in the championship final. The star was banned from playing after receiving two techni-

cal fouls and being ejected from the semifinal game the previous Wednesday. He wasn’t even allowed to sit on the bench, instead watching from a hotel room television, cheering his team on from afar as they scored 78 points in rapid succession.

He shows me the video of his first foul, when an opposing player jumps up on him and falls to the ground. It’s not clear from the video who’s at fault, but when the referee gets involved, Breland says he got heated and yelled back at him. “I learned my lesson,” he says, nodding his head.

While Breland’s absence could have resulted in fewer baskets, it ended up turning into a rallying point for the rest of the team. They emblazoned the words “Not Me, Not Tonight” on the fronts of their warmup jerseys, reaffirming their commitment to focusing on the game. The backs of their shirts bore Breland’s number, 22.

“The kids really came together: it made them stronger, more committed,” says Head Coach Renard Sutton. “We’d already played missing guys, so they were familiar on how to make the adjustments.”

Senior Joe Casperzyk, also called “a star” by the coaches, described the day as quiet, focused. “We knew what we had to do,” he says. Others share his calm confidence. “Well, our plan was to win,” teammate Douglas says, raising his eyebrows.

“We were thrown into the fire,” a junior teammate across the room adds. “That prepared us to win.”

Breland is also only a junior, so while missing the final game was a blow, the team can look forward to having him back on the court next year. Maybe by then people will forget the fouls, and focus on his lay-ups. “He has a mix-tape of his shots,” Coach Henderson says. “It’s like hip-hop: his dunks are like a mixture of everything.”

After much convincing, Breland pulls out his phone to show me the infamous highlights reel. Two balls of fire slash across the screen, and then the video fades into Breland dribbling down the court, laying up, swishing. We watch in silence for a minute. He stops and rewinds, last year’s ring glinting a little under the fluorescent lights.

“See? Famous,” his teammate smiles.

All three winning teams are done with their respective school seasons, but they’re all looking towards the future: juniors will continue to court and be courted by recruiters, seniors will secure scholarships and solidify college choices. And come fall, the next generation of Hillhouse High School teams will keep practicing hard, keen to defend their legacy.

Coach Sutton doesn’t want to jinx anything, but he’s hopeful for another season of good basketball. “We just play one game at a time,” he says, shaking his head superstitiously at the mention of a possible personal threepeat. “But we’ve got a strong group of kids coming back.”

Assistant Coach Henderson surveys the group of athletes scattered around the room, glowing. “This is their city,” he declares. And today—this year—it is.

*** When Basketball coach Tyrese Sullivan sits on the couch, sandwiched between a Hillhouse junior and senior, you can barely tell them apart. Sullivan is a young coach, who played for Hillhouse himself before going to the University of Rhode Island on a basketball scholarship. Immediately after graduation, Sullivan returned to New Haven to coach the team on which he got his start. “I bleed blue and white,” he says, shrugging. “Hillhouse means everything to me.”

It’s that same spirit—the compulsion to give something back to the community that shaped him—that Sullivan tries to foster in his players today. In 2014, he started the Sullivan Academy, a summer camp for New Haven children (around 250 boys and girls, ages 5-16) that teaches them basketball skills and life lessons. Everyone on the basketball team works there as counselors over the summer, offering mentorship and support to the next generation of New Haven ballers. “I want them to know that you’re never too big to give back,” Sullivan says.

He means big in both senses of the word. To celebrate their win, the Academics have had photo shoots and radio spots; done interviews for city papers, TV news shows, and Yale publications who herald their success; and will be getting shiny new rings for their fingers. But in the next few weeks, what Coach Henderson is most excited about is their upcoming visit to Lincoln Bassett Middle School. “It’s not a pep rally, it’s a ‘Prep Rally,’” he explains.

Lincoln Bassett students got the highest grades in the state last year, and to recognize their success, the whole basketball team will pay a visit, offer congratulations and help with more test prep and mentorship. “The complaints [in the city] are often that kids aren’t learning. But these kids are learning, and that should be recognized,” Henderson says. “It’ll be the Academics meeting the academics.” *** When the last group of players shuffles out of the interview room, and the door shuts behind them, they share high fives, and murmurs of support. And then, together, each team of Academics stands up and huddles in for a group picture.

Graphic by Claire Sheen YH Staff Mar 3, 12017 – 11

COVER Elena Saavedra Buckley, SM ’18, former Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal

In recent history, The New Journal has been somewhat of a matriarchy. Isabelle Taft and I, who until recently were the creative nonfiction magazine’s editors in chief, took the torch from two women, and we recently passed it to two women again. We’re lucky to say that this isn’t very surprising—women, especially on Yale’s campus, are damn good leaders. Many Yale women are also damn good journalists. It’s strange, then, to read the Women Media Center’s 2017 statistics on women in the journalism industry, which were released last week. The WMC reports that women report 25.2 percent of the news, signaling about a seven percent drop in the past two years. Women reporters of color, at Yale and in the profession, represent an even smaller slice of the pie. This, somehow, is also unsurprising.

I’ve spent this year watching those damn-good, female Yale journalists, including myself, question their abilities as they approach that industry. These women write investigative, witty, impressive, educational, and revealing pieces in Yale publications, but many wonder if they can do the same after graduating. How do we work against that mismatch? We can start by reconsidering our concepts of journalistic “success,” which seems to currently filter out too many talented female writers. We should start doing this on campus. We should demand a lot out of ourselves and our fellow women reporters; we should support each other’s work—that means really reading it rather than vying for likes or editorial positions. We can also consider the ways in which publications at Yale are poorly structured to solicit work from women who don’t currently write. We female editors have to look for writers outside of the I-was-my-high-school-newspaper’s-editor-in-chief pipeline. And, while we’re all students, we need to be each other’s teachers. Pass the torch.

Inspired by the skewed gender ratio of our own editorial board, the Herald checks in with leading women in journalism, at Yale and beyond.

WOMEN IN JOURNALISM

As a first year, I was very privileged to come into a space where womxn made up the majority of the editors, contributors and Editor-in-Chiefs of DOWN Magazine. DOWN Magazine is still extremely fresh and new, so we’re still cultivating ourselves as a place of journalism and of community. Luckily, we’ve established ourselves as an inclusive community that supports the different intersections of race and gender, race and class, race and disability, etc.

As Voices editor, I have had the honor of working with a lot of creative women of color to bring their perspectives to light. I feel empowered by the work DOWN Magazine does and look forward to its evolution as a influential body on Yale’s campus.

Ashia Ajani, TD ’19, Voices editor of DOWN Magazine

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 12 – The Yale Herald

At my first full-time writing job, there were so few women working in the office that I would very often not have a single interaction with another woman over the course of a workday. Having said that, I’ve generally had wonderful, respectful colleagues and bosses, who were often very sensitive to gender imbalances in the workplace. (Which is not the same thing as fixing those things, but hey.) The times when I’ve felt the gap most acutely have been while out reporting, particularly when I’m working on a sports story or talking to people who don’t usually interact with reporters—you do get a fair amount of “whoa, girl reporter!!!” stuff.

When I was in college, journalism seemed totally opaque to me—I remember looking at writers I admired and just having no idea how to do what they were doing. But, you know, everyone is on Twitter, and everyone has email, and everyone is a bozo who was once starting out, too. And editors also are desperately trying to find fresh content to hurl into the maw of the internet at basically all times, and if you email them with a halfway relevant idea there’s a good chance your stuff can be that content. Don’t be shy; no one ever knows what they’re doing.

Claire McNear, staff writer at The Ringer

I have never been one of few women reporting or writing for a publication at Yale. When I was on the sports desk, we had more female beat reporters than male reporters, which hadn’t happened for a while. However, I interned on the sports desk of a mid-size metro paper last summer and was not only the lone female sports intern, but one of two women on the almost-20 person desk.

Maya Sweedler, ES ’18, Managing Editor of the Yale Daily News

Isis Davis-Marks, JE ’19, staff-columnist for the Yale Daily News

I felt that it was a difficult to begin writing when I first got to Yale; I came from a school that was mostly focused on math and science, so I don’t feel that I was really trained to write well. I realized that I had to learn a lot more about syntax and grammar in order to write well. A lot of this is related to race and class; it is more difficult to write in a particular style if your school isn’t as strong in the humanities. I mostly write for opinion; I’ve written a few pieces for the Herald in the past. When you write for opinion it’s hard to gauge how many women are writing at once, because you just come in to edit once every couple of weeks. However, I always felt like there were at least a couple of women on staff. There were usually more disparities in terms of race; I wasn’t necessarily the only woman on staff but I was usually the only BLACK woman, which is a key difference.

It is hard to write as a woman of color for multiple reasons; people will often write abusive comments online. At one point I wrote an article about Next Yale last year and someone said that I’d end up 40 and jobless. There are definitely hurdles to becoming a journalist/ writer as a woman of color. However, I keep writing because I truly love to write.

I don’t think that I would have realized this if I hadn’t come here.

Mar. 31, 2017 – 13

I have worked as a staff writer, photographer, Copy Editor, and Advertising Manager for Yale Scientific Magazine, but most of my favorite moments have occurred while working with Synapse, our outreach branch. One of our initiatives, Science on Saturdays, allows kids to have hands-on involvement in scientific demonstrations. For some of the children who attend our events, career titles like “scientist” or “engineer” already seem out of reach, so giving them a chance to learn how to build a circuit and then try it out for themselves helps show them that they can be scientists, too. I know that we are doing something worthwhile whenever an excitable young girl starts dismantling and reassembling circuit elements or a young student’s eyes light up when I tell her that she could be an electrical engineer.

This year, Yale Scientific’s masthead is 68 percent female, and I am proud to be a part of that. Yale Scientific is more than scientific journalism to me. It’s a way to show young girls that not only can they, and should they, be scientists, but there is a community waiting for them at places like Yale and beyond.

Kendrick Moss Umstatttd, BK ’19, Yale Scientific Magazine

When I first traveled to Iraq to report, it really struck me just how hard it is to survive as a freelancer, from a financial perspective; my flight and body armor alone cost about as much as I was making in those days! Another thing that stood out to me, at first, was the frustration of not being taken seriously by high-ranking sources; only half-way through my time in Iraq did I realize what a huge asset that was, for an investigative reporter. It allowed me to be a hardly-noticed fly on the wall, and to dig in places that more established reporters might not have been able to dig without people paying attention.

I learned more than I can possibly sum up from the writing courses I took at Yale: how to use public records to investigate a complex story; how to think about craft at the micro-level of the sentence; how to ensure that the voice and structure of a given piece suit and amplify its substance.

After graduating, I got a taste of how much persistence it really does take to make a writing life come together. That’s something you hear about in undergrad, but you never quite think it’s going to apply to you—or at least, by some magical thinking, you hope it won’t. I spent a few years freelancing overseas, including trips to The Gambia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and found that the work entailed pouring a lot of time and care into things that might not ever see the light of day. I think, or at least I hope, that it taught me not to conflate rejection on a given story with being a complete and total failure as a journalist.

Sarah Stillman, YC ’06, staff writer at The New Yorker, visiting scholar at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, winner of MacArthur Genius Grant

14 – The Yale Herald

Chloe Tsang, TD ‘17, Features rep

If you love music, then b are a woman who loves music ing. This isn’t to say that wom industry—making your voice of digital media, is difficult n found myself struggling with and “fangirl” culture, it can to prove that their critiques a sona, but on genuine insight This double standard can Yes, it sucks—female music yond just to prove that their often (read: pretty much alw their stuff. Setting high stand knowledge of the music indu So, to all of the women inter piece of advice is this: stay but don’t let it make you com about music each day, and tu cause there’s no better feelin some damn good music in th

I think that journalism, like any in always improve to become more incl valid to say that maybe in the past “boy’s club”, but in my years working college I have been consistently blow of female reporters and editors—an don’t think that intense gender divid fortunate to have so many great fem chors to look up to as role models in lowing the news is arguably more im I couldn’t be more excited to see al continue to do such important work a

Rachel Treisman, MC ’19,

porter at Metro.us

being a music journalist can be awesome. If you c, then being a music journalist can be challengmen are the only ones who face obstacles in this heard, especially in the infinitely crowded space no matter who you are. But as a woman, I’ve often h the idea of credibility: in the face of “groupie” feel like women in music journalism are forced are based not on a musician’s looks or public perand a serious love for the art. n be frustrating, but it can also be empowering. c journalists shouldn’t have to go above and beopinions are substantive. At the same time, this ways) means that women in this field really know dards for my writing has pushed me to expand my ustry and therefore become a stronger journalist. rested in pursuing music journalism, my biggest confident in your abilities as a critic and writer, mplacent. Challenge yourself to learn a little more urn your skeptics into a source of motivation. Beng than proving someone wrong (and listening to he process).

ndustry or extracurricular, can lusive and diverse. I think it’s journalism has been sort of a g for papers in high school and wn away by the incredible work nd that of guys as well—and I de persists as strongly. We are male journalists and news ana time when covering and folmportant than ever before, and ll of my talented female peers at Yale and beyond.

beat reporter for the Yale Daily News

I’ve always been a pretty quiet person and never really engaged much with strangers until I started getting involved in student journalism. Suddenly I found myself coldcalling and emailing people I didn’t know, asking them questions that ranged from curious to critical. Writing and editing for The New Journal has made me feel more connected to Yale and New Haven, through the people I’ve talked to and the stories I’ve read, and through taking a more thoughtful approach to both of those.

Natalie Yang, ES ’18, Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal

In general as a freshman I found every publication I was interested in pretty accessible, welcoming and willing to provide feedback so I could improve.

Sometimes I was intimidated at pitch meetings or nervous about interacting with an editor but I think that’s kind of just my nature (and also Yale has a ton of incredible writers, reporters and editors so being intimidated sometimes is pretty reasonable).

I never found I was one of few women reporting or writing for a publication.

In my experience, my nonfiction writing classes and publication staffs I was part of (I was a beat reporter for the YDN and an editor for The New Journal for three years) were pretty heavily women. It depends on the situation, of course, but I found I was likelier to encounter a majority-women space than a majority-men space. As long as I’ve been at Yale, The New Journal, which always has two editors-in-chief, has only had one man in that role.

Isabelle Taft, SM ’17, former Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal

What’s important to me about being a woman and being queer in journalism is that you really can get to the heart of things that aren’t real. To be a straight cis man is to really believe in things that are entirely constructions, like masculinity and the meritocracy, but to be a woman and to watch people talk and watch events occur, you can really get to the heart of what’s spin and what’s bias and what’s closest to what actually happened, and you can infer these things that people who don’t personally understand the unreality of social constructions can’t get at. So at DOWN we really try to capitalize on what makes each of our points of view unique and valuable, and who should be the voice of reason in what area and what subject. I really hope this can become a model for journalism as a pursuit—journalists often act as if everyone can think the same way if they really try and use a perfectly strict style guide, but that’s just not true. The reality is we all have places we’re more useful or less useful in than other people, and I’ve really enjoyed figuring out how I can be the most useful.

Ellie Pritchett, SY ’19, Editor-in-Chief of DOWN Magazine

Mar. 31, 2017 – 15

CULTURE Housing is part of what makes Yale unique. Some enjoy the ambiance of residential college living for all four years, others bolt off campus as soon as they can. Every spring, the colleges start buzzing with plans for the next year. Who is rooming with whom? Which is the hippest and jivest of the off-campus streets? We’ve gathered some stories about and reflections on the highs and lows of Yale housing.

S

uitemate A received a Nerf gun for Secret Santa and would lie on a futon taking target practice at us whenever we walked into the room. One day, suitemate B opened the door and took a bullet right in the chest. Unfortunately for him, his reflex to protect his vital organs ended up injuring him more, since he was carrying two cups of coffee (he has an addiction). While a foam cylinder might not hurt, spilling two pints of hot liquid all over oneself definitely does.

B may have suffered minor burns from the coffee, but it was tea that broke his heart. One night, suitemate C was brewing some tea in the electric kettle that, in our great foresight, was left on the floor in the middle of the common room. When C walked by on his way back to his room, he kicked the kettle over, spilling hot tea all over B’s laptop, which of course was plugged into the same power strip on the floor. Suitemate B, summoned by some tug at his heart, rushed into the room to see C stooped over his steaming laptop. So began one of the great love stories of our time. After reviving the laptop with cooling tears, B realized that, with its battery damaged by the tea, his beloved laptop only functioned when plugged into its charger. For months, B could be seen cradling his laptop at the one place on the futon that his charger could reach. He doted over that laptop, wrapping tape over his charger plug to keep the IV in place.

He never gave up.

- Luke Chang YH Staff

A

hh the housing process at Yale! While rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are Game of Thrones fans will best understand the parallels between Yale during (what other, more hospitable regions call) spring, and their favorite HBO show’s milieu, even those disinclined towards swords and dragons eventually learn the true meaning of Ned Stark’s fateful words, “Winter is coming.”

It starts out innocently enough, with a, “Hey, have you thought about housing next year?” to which you inevitably respond, “No, not really yet,” a boldfaced lie. You’ve been thinking about this since that time this past fall when your suitemate tried steaming his shirts in the bathroom—by simply shutting all the windows and doors and turning on the sink as hot as it could go (<3 NBH). No, this time you’re going to assemble the perfect, steam-free suite, and nobody is going to stop you.

But wait! It’s not so simple: your serpentine “friends” have been lying in the weeds of group chats, waiting until forms are due to finally strike; they are the Sand Snakes of Dorne vying for the Iron Throne you covet.

And so you shift your allegiances accordingly. Now, what was a coalition of five becomes eight becomes six, and you pray to the Old Gods and the New (last one, I promise) that no one gets wise about the spacious closets in entryway O. All in all, everyone gets through the housing process alive. But if one round proves more than enough for you, you may also brave the other side of your college’s Wall (promise broken), though there’s no telling if you’ll ever make it back.

- Nic Harris

18 _ The Yale Herald

F

or me, the idea of “home” is not so much a building as a sense, a group of people, a collection of memories, a feeling that you hold within yourself. To my parents’ great frustration, I started referring to my dorm room as “home” a couple weeks after I arrived at Yale, and I’m even quicker to call a hotel or borrowed couch “home” when on vacation. Home base, maybe, is closer to what I mean when I talk about places, and I thought that would be particularly true during college—moving every year, straddling two coasts, and generally feeling rootless, in a good way.

When I moved into my apartment, I grounded my college life in a particular space and combined that sentimental home with a physical reality. A friend told me that moving off-campus made her feel like a person who goes to classes as part of her life rather than a student. I entirely agree—coming home to this apartment lifts my actual life out from a primarily school-focused mindset, which I can slip off with my shoes at the door. Home is still the moments, but now the moments are making poached eggs as snow falls outside my window, building myself a dresser, and carving pumpkins with friends to put on my fire escape. The collection of the objects in this apartment, whether from my summer trips to IKEA or my roommate’s aunt’s storage unit, provides a physical record of the things I care deeply about and tells the story of the life I’ve built.

- Claire Goldsmith YH Staff

I

’m so excited to start my college experience. What I’m most excited for about coming to Yale is my future suite and residential college life. Though my uncle was in Davenport, and my sister was in Berkeley, I’m going to get sorted into the college I’m destined for, just like they do at Hogwarts—I know Northwestern says their library looks like Hogwarts, but Yale’s architecture is the most magical of all.

When I toured, the tour guide told me that 84 percent of students live on campus, but that’s because 50 percent of the student body, freshmen and sophomores, have to live on campus! I did the math (the only math I’m gonna do at Yale! I hear econ counts as a “QR”) and it turns out that only 68 percent of juniors and seniors live on campus. But I don’t understand why anybody would move off campus. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a gym, laundry room, and buttery below me. I won’t mind if I get a room on a high story—it’ll just a bit of extra exercise, how bad could it be?

I don’t want to live on Old Campus my freshman year, because my sister told me that “L-Dub” sucks, and there’s no air conditioning. A top-tier university like Yale has got to have top-tier climate control. And I also hear that bad things happen to Saybrook College. That’s why I really hope I get one of the new colleges. If I had to pick, it would be Franklin College because the abbreviation is gonna be FC, and then we can get sweet jerseys for our IM teams that just say FC on them and mess with people who are wondering what the team name actually is. The New Colleges are also in a great location—only 15 minutes from the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, where my sister used to study before she became a Political Science major. It would also be so sick to have a view of the graveyard from my window—talk about tradition!

- an earnest prefrosh who wants to be in Franklin College

Herald on housing

by YH Staff

I

’m big on conflict avoidance: that’s why I’m terrified of strategy games and Black Friday. My suitemates’ two favorite things, however, are strategy games and Black Friday. So most of my suitemates will name last year’s housing draw as our greatest accomplishment at Yale—depending on who you ask, it’s possible that time slowed down, inspirational victory-lap music played, and game theory was finally proven to have useful applications.

Berkeley sophomores are offered a variety of suites ranging widely in their shittiness. Our dream was a first floor sextuplet—a trivially-designated “quiet” suite with two singles and an incredible square footage-per-inhabitant ratio. With our low lottery number, we were realistically looking at cozy three-double suites or a fourth floor rectangle of dimly-lit gloom next to the Dean’s Apartment, undesired despite its four singles. But after intense intel gathering and more than one frantic chart, we realized there was a way. All we had to do was convince another suite to choose either a triple-double or the Gloom Room.

How do you get six freshmen boys—our targets—to opt for the shittier suite, and think they did it voluntarily? 1. Deploy the “screaming” newborn living in the Fellows’ Suite above the spacious first floor option 2. Lament the supposed horrors of living in a quiet suite (silence 24/7 and no suspicious smells!) 3. Marvel over how the triple-double suites are nice enough to warrant having a roommate again 4. Do all of this so coolly that you don’t expose your game. I didn’t excel at this (“man, you’d have to be really careful about odors” is something I tried to say casually), but my suitemates thrived. By decision night, I watched six freshmen boys—unwitting puppets in a much bigger game—confidently choose one of the triple-doubles. My suite couldn’t suppress our cheers. Some teared up. Housing was a DIY crash course in Grand Strategy that gave me an ulcer and sent my suitemates on a power trip (from which they’ve yet to fully come down). We’re still adrift for housing this year, since BK’s annexing is still unannounced, but I’ve decided to ignore my imminent ulcers and let my Machiavellian suitemates figure it out.

- Nicole Mo YH Staff

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Mar. 31, 2017 _ 19

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Selections from 50 Song Memoir by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant critic

SOURCE: tinymixtapes.com

(Note: What I’ll be reviewing is not the full two-and-a-half hour album, but the 16-song sample available on Spotify. This is terrible practice for a critic, but I’m a broke college student who already pays for Spotify Premium and I’m certainly not going to pay another $9.99 a month for Apple Music, or drop $35.99 on the five-disc CD. So partial, prejudiced, and ignorant is what you’re going to get.)

T

he Magnetic Fields are a weird band. Structurally, compositionally, musically, thematically—nothing about the project has ever been typical. A quasi-orchestral 14-person collective that nonetheless centers around one man (the inimitably sardonic songwriter Stephin Merritt, once called “the most depressed man in rock” by Husker Du’s Bob Mould), the group takes its name from Andre Breton’s surrealist novel Les Champs magnétiques. Their work spans genre from gospel to synth pop. All of their albums are concept albums. The accordion player is Lemony Snicket.

But a band that could easily be lost in its own strangeness—its own carefully cultivated quirk—is saved by a habit of producing art that is genuinely emotionally resonant.

69 Love Songs, the band’s late-nineties magnum opus, is exactly what it sounds like: 69 (!!) hauntingly beautiful songs about love, sometimes mournful, sometimes satirical, ranging from simple acoustic melodies like “Asleep and Dreaming” to buzzy pieces of abstract audio art like “Experimental Music Love.” It’s an album I was raised on by my post-ironic Gen X parents, and these days, it’s the album I always return to when I’m feeling heartbroken.

Now, with 50 Song Memoir, the band has returned to the multi-disc epic after almost two decades of more standard-length releases. Once again, the album is exactly what it sounds like: 50 songs correlating to the 50 years of Merritt’s life, each in some way autobiographical.

It’s a project that could easily veer into the self-indulgent, but doesn’t: the album is as interested in time and place as in personal experience, preventing any sense of myopia. Many of the songs explicitly reference the music of the period, such as “‘81: How to Play the Synthesizer,” which unsurprisingly employs a lot of synthesizer in a matter-offact new wave track full of nihilist instructions like “Modulate the pulse width / nobody will care.” More somberly, the AIDS crisis looms large in the background of songs like “92: Weird Diseases,” which lists all the diseases Merritt (who is gay) has experienced, AIDS significantly absent and hauntingly spectral.

The album hits the tongue-in-cheek bleak tone the Magnetic Fields do so well, with no shortage of wry, dark humor. In “‘68: A Cat Called Dionysus,” Merritt mournfully recounts his unrequited love for a childhood pet who “hated me / cause I loved him” over a jangly, layered melody. “‘74: No” is gospel as sung by an atheist, using the choral backing and strummy guitar of the genre to support lyrics like “Is there a man in heaven looking out for you? / Is there a place dead loved ones go? / Is there a source of wisdom that will see you through? / Will there be peace in our time? / No.” The irony of the absurd cynicism comes when you realize that, in 1974, Merritt was nine years old. “‘13: Big Enough for Both of Us” shows that love ballads and dick jokes aren’t necessarily incompatible: the song contains smirk-worthy lines like “First time I saw you, I could feel a stir / Down in my special body part / I would like you to take it in your hand / But please be careful, it’s my heart,” but the somber minor-key melody and resignation in Merritt’s gravelly bass voice can just as easily sell line such as “Maybe you’d learn

20 _ The Yale Herald

by Mariah Kreutter YH Staff to like just being loved / Even learn to love me in some way.” It’s the only conventional love song out of the 16 I sampled, perhaps understandably for an artist that might very well be love-songed out. There are, however, numerous odes to locations which are no less tender—”’01: Have You Seen It in the Snow” is the love song to New York City that anyone who’s lived there wants to write, while “02: Be True to Your Bar” honors the sacred yet underappreciated relationship between an artist and the places they work.

Ultimately, 50 Song Memoir is all the better for focusing on the small moments found in everyday life rather than quote-unquote “milestones.” It feels reflective without being inaccessible; it also represents a new direction for a songwriter who revels in the literary. Merritt’s earlier work features narrative in spades, but always driven by invented characters—few of his songs have been personal, until now. The album is compositionally experimental as well, full of complex layers of harmony and cacophony. One can almost picture the garage full of instruments that must’ve been used to achieve the album’s sound: perhaps a banjo leans precariously against an autoharp, while an accordion tumbles from the top of a pile of synthesizers. Overall, it’s heartening that the Magnetic Fields are still experimenting and pushing their sound to new places, even after more than a quarter-century of making music.

So does 50 Song Memoir dethrone 69 Love Songs as the definitive Magnetic Fields album? From what I’ve heard, no. None of the songs I sampled quite reached the perfect, emotive, effortless heights of the best offerings from the latter. But I freely admit that this might be a function of my excessive familiarity with and affection for Love Songs, while I’ve yet to settle into Memoir. We’ll see which songs I keep returning to, and which ones grow on me—an album as sprawling and ambitious as this one takes some time to get to know. Regardless, 50 Song Memoir is a triumph, the kind of release that it’s hard to imagine any other band attempting, much less succeeding at. It’s the best album the Magnetic Fields have released in this millennium, and whether you’re a die-hard fan or a curious newbie, it’s absolutely worth a listen.

Beauty and the Beast

A

n entire generation of 90s kids may be approaching this film out of nostalgia, but thirty minutes into the runtime, viewers of any age will be thoroughly entranced by a cinematic experience that owes little of its appeal to the familiarity of the plot. A masterful expression of themes both timeless and surprisingly modern, the 2017 live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast satisfies a universal appetite for enchantment that originates in childhood and hardly lessens with age.

Director Bill Condon chills and delights by turns with a bold visual style that mirrors many iconic shots from the animated original, paying tasteful homage to the movie’s origins without sacrificing the latitude for new visual material afforded by live-action. The film’s musical numbers best display the interaction between these two stylistic pressures, notably by incor-

porating the trademark choreography of an animated musical.

Audiences get a taste of this as early as the first scene, where secondary characters move with improbable synchronization in support of Belle’s vocals. The beloved number “Be Our Guest” is at once the most reminiscent of its animated predecessor and the most visually innovative as well. Ultimately departing from any semblance of realism, the scene lapses into a highly energized, brilliantly colored fractal display of dancing kitchen implements rendered all the more enchanting by the masterful employment of CGI techniques.

Fortunately for fans new and old, the 2017 adaptation preserves the wit and whimsy of the original 1991 version with faithful renditions of the songs we once loved, delivered by powerful modern voices. To their credit, the producers cast Audra MacDonald of Broadway fame in the role of the enchanted castle’s operatically-inclined wardrobe. However, the big-ticket actors and actresses chosen for their non-musical attributes, including Sir Ian McKellen and the lovely Emma Watson, contribute in their own right towards a soundtrack every bit as spellbinding as we

could have hoped (not to mention perniciously catchy). Without exception, every audience member left the theater humming about a tale as old as time in cautious vibrato under their breath.

Just the same, die-hard Disney fans may take umbrage at the new additions to the soundtrack that appear in the second half of the film. “Days in the Sun” is a lamentation tinged with hope, representing the perspective of the Prince’s servants who were implicated in the curse. Striking a similar tone, Belle sings “How Does a Moment Last Forever” in mourning for her childhood, and later the Beast sings “Evermore” while longing for his lost love when he finally sets her free to return to her father. The addition of these tunes likely represents a bid to adjust the emotional caliber of the plot in order to appeal to a wider demographic. Whether this decision delights or offends is a matter of preference, but the quality of the compositions, from a musical standpoint, is quite high. Faithful enough to its origins but never constrained by them, Condon’s reimagined fairy tale is a new, vivid expression of old truths, delivering the classic “love is blind” trope by way of a fresh and captivating aesthetic experience.

by Lydia Buonomano YH Staff

American Gods The STARZ Original Series American Gods will premiere on April 30, approximately a month from now. Premium TV networks can do whatever they want, because the series is obviously based on Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, which I read over break. To summarize the plot without losing the fun bits: Shadow Moon starts the novel in prison; his wife dies in a car wreck right before he gets out (turns out she was cheating on him with his best friend, who was going to employ him, but died in the same accident); Shadow Moon is reeling until an enigmatic old dude named Mr. Wednesday recruits the reluctant Shadow to be his do-everything henchman; but (SPOILER ALERT) Wednesday turns out to be Odin, who seeks to recruit the neglected Old Gods, drawn from sundry mythological pantheons, to fight a final battle for survival against the uppity New Gods—who are incarnations of contemporary popular obsessions like the media and freeways; naturally, Shadow gets caught in the mix.

At its best, the novel is a singular interpretation of the personalities behind deities (haven’t you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped Anubis into the Midwest?). At its worst, the novel is a repetitive road trip with spurious stakes

and unlovable characters. When you think hard about what you’re reading, American Gods devolves into fantasy for fantasy’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, I adore fantasy—I grew up on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series—it’s just that the things that connected me to Rand al’Thor (that series’ protagonist) are entirely missing from this novel; after all, who wants to root for the henchman? Shadow isn’t even an antihero; his most memorable qualities, Gaiman tells us repeatedly, are his size and his silence. He’s a character built for stoic suffering, and suffer he does—but only so he can serve as a proxy for the reader’s acquisition of information. Rand al’Thor’s setbacks teach him lessons that he internalizes, in the process changing as a character. At the novel’s climax, Shadow pulls off the improbable: he saves the day. But all that’s changed—what empowered him—is what Shadow knows, not who he is. Maybe that’s what Gaiman meant to do by naming his protagonist Shadow: the most corporeal characters in the novel are gods, not people. And I think gods are cool, but I can’t relate. A fantasy novel is supposed to threaten the destruction of the world as we know it, but this one restricts potential damage to the world of

the gods, to whom we have access only through the eyes of a man it’s hard to care about.

Another reason why the book felt distant to me: its geography doesn’t align with mine. Neither do fictional universes, but location is central to this book: Gaiman wrote a story that enacts a thought experiment: What if gods moved around in the real world? Gaiman selects the part of the real world in which to anchor the gods consciously and explicitly: American Gods is meant as an ode to Middle America, to the unnoticed places and people that are the corpus of the country. He avoids cosmopolitan ritz (even when Shadow and Wednesday visit Chicago to rob a bank, Gaiman lets us know they ate a $4.99 lunch buffet). Major events occur at (real, named) roadside attractions and natural landmarks, places I’ve never been and to which I will most likely never go. Don’t worry, though, there’s enough violence and sex to ensure that the STARZ series will do just fine.

by Marc Shkurovich YH Staff

Kong: Skull Island As far as movies go, Kong: Skull Island is an Entenmann’s donut. There’s no denying its plasticky look, and its scent is equal parts stale and intoxicating. It’s been designed, manufactured, and tested to ensure satisfaction. And yet, there must be some art to it because—if you can excuse the unnatural sheen, the mechanical formulation, and the absence of substance—isn’t it delicious?

Those familiar with the classic King Kong, or any of the major remakes, will recognize in this 70’s-set reboot the ape and little else. Taking significant departures from the original story, Kong: Skull Island sends a cadre of scientists, government agents, and soldiers to survey Skull Island, one of the last uncharted places on planet Earth. As happens in this sort of movie, government official Bill Randa (John Goodman) and his geologist protégé (Corey Hawkins) assemble a ragtag team: an uncompromising Army Lieutenant Colonel (Samuel L. Jackson), a suave British hunter-tracker (Tom Hiddleston), an anti-war photojournalist (Brie Larson), and about a dozen others—too many to keep tabs on. Each topbilled star gives a convincing performance, but once Kong makes his ferocious entrance, smacking down helicopters and annihilating half of the film’s ensemble, it’s hard to re-

main invested in such inane human activity as Brie Larson’s excessive photography.

One of film history’s earliest and most enduring monsters, King Kong symbolizes cinema’s power to inspire wonder, and the creators of Kong: Skull Island seem to understand that.

This Kong, a massive feat of CGI filmmaking, doesn’t just look stunning; he has a life force beneath his 19 million masterfully rendered hairs. He carries himself with an undeniable swagger, and in quiet moments, like one that has him snacking on a giant octopus, Kong has as much personality as his living, breathing co-stars. Human standouts like American castaway Hank Marlow (an exuberant John C. Reilly) give the beast some competition, but Kong owns the screen With a wordless ape as its centerpiece, the film benefits from a spare plot. Most of the convoluted reasons that bring this group to the island fall away once they discover the hellish creatures that live there. What remains is a story of survival and escape, a routine monster movie with some mildly interesting ideas thrown in about war and national identity.

The plot of Kong: Skull Island, as the second entry in Legendary Entertainment’s attempted MonsterVerse franchise (following 2014’s Godzilla), really only needed to provide a

reason for Kong to reappear on the big screen. That the film is often engaging and sharp feels like a bonus.

The idea of a King Kong movie in 2017 reeks of corporate greed. Kong: Skull Island already has a connected theme park ride at Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure, and a 2020 sequel, Godzilla vs. Kong, has been on the books since 2015. Although not itself exceptional, the film owns its franchise identity, and somehow, Kong: Skull Island, a breezy, clever two-hour romp, justifies the giant ape’s cinematic resurrection, provided you aren’t on the market for fresh baked goods.

by Joe Kuperschmidt YH Staff Mar. 31, 2017 _ 21

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST dressing up for phone interviews

if they knew, they wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hire you

WHAT WE HATE THIS WEEK

infidelity sorry, I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get a meal, I might cheat on my wife!

when is too early to start using retinol? it could cost you ten bucks, or it could cost you your life

the time it takes me to decide on new skincare products

asexual tension

jaywalking

childbirth not interested, still awkward

when your cervix dilates ten cm

welcome class of 2021!

rejection

promises of immunity

lies and slander

Mar. 31, 2017 _ 23