Herald Volume LXIII Issue 9

The Yale Herald Volume LXIII, Number 9 New Haven, CT Friday, Apr. 7, 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 9 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Apr. 7, 2017

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

Hey Babes, I’ve never played intramural sports at Yale. I used to love sports—especially basketball—but in high school, as a closeted, self-hating lesbian, I distanced myself from them. When Caltech tried to recruit me for basketball in ninth grade, I quit the team in fear that such an association would out me. Five years later, I am now a proud lesbian, and I never grew past 5’3” so I couldn’t have even played basketball anyway.

In this week’s front, Jacob Sweet, HC ’18, turns his attention to some people who haven’t shied away from their basketball prowess—or lack thereof. Sweet’s piece explores the booming subculture of intramurals at Yale and what it means to embrace your mediocrity.

Speaking of mediocrity, check out the review of Khalid’s unexceptional new album, American Teen, by Gabe Rojas, MC ’19.

And speaking of American teens, Jack Kyono, PC ’20, writes about marijuana usage and legalization in Connecticut. Elsewhere, in Culture, Elizabeth Miles, JE ’17, explores the YUAG’s Modern Art from the Middle East exhibition, which presents a side of the region that’s too often overlooked.

I love you, Hannah Offer Features 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

“My job is to shoot a lot of bricks and play pretty poor defense.” Members of Yale’s intramural subculture confide their wins—and losses—in Jacob Sweet, HC ’18, and reflect on what they’ve learned in the IM community.

Kendrick Lamar

The Compton native drops his album today, giving recreational athletes everywhere another set of pump-up tracks to bump before demonstrating why their basketball careers ended in high school.

Outgoing

6 VOICES Robert Newhouse, HC ’19, watches out the window of Willoughby’s on York.

Dimitri Diagne, BK ’18, writes of the earth beneath a wheel.

Sports Bars Now that March Madness is over, sports bars everywhere are bracing themselves for months of slow business and are looking ahead to August, when sports that people care about are expected to resume.

8 OPINION Heads up, detergent pod lovers: Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, is down with it, but Emma Chanen, BK ’19, has some, erm, choice words for you.

SCHEDULE Saturday

Spring Day of Service 9:00 a.m.

Dwight Hall

Saturday

Stanford Robber Barons x Sphincter 8:00 p.m.

Silliman College

Tuesday

The Politics, Law, and Economics of US Immigration Policy 6:00 p.m.

Evans Hall

Friday

Ante-Fling 9:00 p.m.

Toad’s Place

FEATURES 10 16

Why is everyone so energized about Verb bars? Find out with Tracy Chung, PC ’19.

Jack Kyono, PC ’20, talks to Deepak D’Souza, Yale professor and outspoken opponent of legalizing marijuana.

18 CULTURE Elizabeth Miles, JE ’17, speaks with the masterminds behind the YUAG’s Modern Art from the Middle East, which offers a fresh look at art from a misunderstood region.

Also: Cameron Koffman, DC ’19, recommends being a sports fan, and Emma Keyes, PC ’19, shares what the Internet has done to film criticism.

20 REVIEWS Chris Capello, SM ’17, finds a lot to laugh at, if not always appreciate, in Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy.

Olivia Burton, MC ’18, enjoys the easy, breezy “Heatstroke.”

Jaclyn Price, BK ’19, celebrates the beautiful female friendships of Big Little Lies.

Throw back to highschool with Gabe Rojas, MC ‘19, and American Teen.

Apr. 7, 2017 – 3

CR/D/FAIL: SUMMER OPPORTUNITIES FOR COLLEGE BROS

Cr/ Help high schoolers with college apps

Have you ever wanted to start your own cult? With admission rates to elite universities dropping like Econ 115 students during midterm season, this is your chance to lead anxious high schoolers into the light. College admission season is chaos: a world full of creaming, flying transcripts, and high-achieving 11th graders roaming the streets like acne-riddled wolves. But, there is a solution to the bedlam: YOU, Yale student! (Cue heavenly thunder) Hundreds of thousands of collegeconfidential.com members need your expertise in becoming the 6%. This quest is like the Hunger Games because children get no food until their SAT scores reach 2320! You’re not only their mentor; you’re their literal god because this is a cult, okay? Benefits include as many lamb carcasses as you like sacrificed at the altar of higher learning aka your Cambridge-Oxford apartment.

Potential drawbacks may include tiger mothers putting a bounty on your head should their kid not actually get into HYP.

You know what’s one step up from getting #turnt in Cambridge at Harvard-Yale? Doing coke at Cambridge.

Welcome to LSE: Let’s See England! The experience includes all of the things one does in classes, except it’s summer, people find your American accent endearing, and you’re out an additional 10,000 dollars. While it might be a steep cost, your dad can pay for it, and the cultural ~worldliness~ you can now put on your resume is beyond worth the cha-ching. Tea-time? More like T-HC time! We kid (JK Rowling); sadly, pot is not above the law in the UK. But you know what IS legal in England? Prostitution.

That’s right, go beyond your wildest imagination and breach those sexual horizons. Come back with a weird affect in your voice and infinite stories about that one time you asked a woman about her crumpet. Cons include having to call the toilet the loo and the fact that stray animals probably harbor diseases besides rabies.

F/ Work for Stephen Schwarzman

D / STUDY AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Do you love being a part of Yale Undergraduate Diversified Investments? Well, take YUDI, subtract Yale, women, and regulations and add MORE cocaine than is present at a Skull and Bones open tomb party. Finance!

This could be your summer: fathering Powerpoint presentations, snorting addy, and comparing girths with your analyst class! Some people complain about the lack of sleep, but what we’d be nervous about is the literal Black Stone treatment: a pathway of coals that non-closers have to shame-walk on. Of course, if you make it past Excel training, Stephen Schwarzman will also give you a personal laydown of the llumi-naughty, his stripdance group for go-getters over 40. Employee benefits are access to a company car, a ten-dollar lunch credit, and talking about stimulating growth in the private sector in your Tinder bio. Downsides include leaving this summer with a raging upper addiction and possibly getting knifed by Goldman bros for your exit opps.

- Vicki Beizer

4 – The Yale Herald

THE NUMBERS John Kerry’s visit 2017 - the year when, in the fall, Mr. John Kerry is to be a Distinguished Fellow of Global Affairs at Yale and oversee the Kerry Initiative.

1 - the number of hours before Distinguished Fellow Mr. John Kerry was to bless Yale with his words and dashing good looks, when Eventbrite informed me that the event would not occur due to “inclement weather.”

36 - other people in the U.S. named John Kerry 36 - people I called to come to campus and give a last minute talk and save the John Kerry legacy, and prove that he is the Distinguished Fellow we all know he is.

66 - Distinguished Fellow Mr. John Kerry’s class year; also, the number of house I will wait in line at Barnes and Noble to get him to sign my copy of his forthcoming memoir, “A Fellow Distinguished Among The Rest” Sources: 2017: YDN, 1: Eventbrite, 36: howmanyofme.com/people/John_Kerry/, 36: my phone records, 66: Yale Alumni Registry - Gian-Paul Bergeron

Top 5 things to do on campus before you graduate 5 Figure out where TD is 4 Pee on some kind of statue 3 Get added to the orgy panlist 2 Get kicked off of the orgy panlist 1 Respond in great detail to one of Susan Cahan’s “What are you doing today?” emails

– Evin Henriquez-Groves

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

oriana.tang@yale.edu

VOICES

Under the wheel

by Dimitri Diagne To the sky its circle and the wheel its arc below the dead haze a smooth terrain corn maze fingers spread through the two-mirror hall each clod raising a whisper as the ground accustomed to a touch of cold in the air, the once-rained-upon forest great jade at night in the coming of trees that cover the walls none of this to measure geologic time the compression of loess hills, not bales scattered by a wind the white lead of the eye that opens in the dark the flanks to the fury of the weather this damn eye whose mountain fire springs from a pool of ash

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 6 _ The Yale Herald

Willoughby’s window watching

by Robert Newhouse

Paint splattered jeans worn fitting the hat, too, too small, slipping off head, wisp-sprinkled, wan, waning face, cigarette chic: a tortured subtlety— a sad kind of angst tipped with emptiness, a yearn, a pull to know, struts memorizing our gaze— our attention, our respectful jealousy.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Apr. 7, 2017 – 7

OPINION

OPINION

For the love of pod

by Mariah Kreutter

I

f I were a 32-year-old suburban housewife with two toddlers and no hobbies, maybe I would join the crusade against laundry detergent pods. Sure, they leave a viscous, mucus-like residue behind in the washing machine. And sure, they’re extremely dangerous when ingested by small children. But you know what? I have neither a washing machine nor a child whose well-being I’m responsible for. And detergent pods are unquestionably the laundry method most suited to my current needs.

The primary advantage of pods, of course, is how gosh-darn convenient they are. No guessing how much to use, no spilling detergent everywhere because you have jittery, nervous hands that once caused you to fail a lab practical, and no lugging an entire gallon-plus jug of the stuff to the laundry room. That last one is important—I already have to cross a street and take a flight of stairs to do my laundry, toting an overstuffed sack of dirty clothes and a backpack full of homework all the way there. With all this baggage, it’s infinitely easier and more pleasant to slip a single pod into my pocket rather than carry another unwieldy and heavy object in my weak, doughy arms.

And as for their relative efficacy, or lack thereof, I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t care. As long as the clothes come out demonstrably cleaner than they were when I put them in, I’m happy. And frankly, I can’t be bothered about the varying degrees of spotlessness that are supposedly achievable with quote-unquote “real” laundry detergent. In my book, clothes are clean or they aren’t. They’ve been washed, or they haven’t. Me trying to

differentiate between subtly stratified levels of cleanliness would be akin to me trying to tell the difference between Baroque and classical music: real, grown-up people I greatly respect have told me they’re not the same thing, but that really doesn’t matter to me at this stage of my life. I’m not trying to impress anyone with the quality of my laundry skills. I’m just trying to show up to class without discernible food stains on my shirt.

That said, if you’re a liquid detergent devotee, more power to you. Have fun with your superior housekeeping skills, and I mean that sincerely. But for the rest of us—those who barely know how washing machines work, who still sometimes forget to use any kind of detergent at all, who are honestly just muddling through this nebulous kind of adulthood called “college” while trying not to fail any classes or get any incurable STDs—pods are, respectfully, the way to go.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

Pod is dead

by Emma Chanen

A

nyone who knows me knows I love pods… podcasts, that is.

Anyone who knows me should also know but may not know that I hate detergent pods. You know the ones—the little soap sacks wrapped in a supposedly disintegrating plastic that you toss in with your laundry, no pouring or measuring necessary. Yeah, those are the absolute fucking worst. But they’re so convenient, you say? Let me flame you. Is it really that time consuming to dump a little liquid detergent in with your laundry? Or into the specific chamber they literally design laundry machines to have so that you can eyeball your detergent and have clothes that are clean and not covered in half-disintegrated plastic goo? Tell me. Is it? Fine, I’ll answer for you. No it’s not. You’re lazy. Roasted.

But actually, though. It’s time to make the change back to liquid detergent, college students, and here’s why: laundry pods are a lie.

Their allure is that they’re colorful and convenient, but let’s unpack that (and get to the heart of the matter in a way that laundry pods never seem to be able to). According to a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics that I found cited in an article from CBS News that was linked in an article I found on Aol., 17,230 children under the age of six swallowed, inhaled, or suffered skin or eye injuries from laundry pods between 2012 and 2013. That’s a child per hour suffering at the hands of laundry pods. They’re too tempting, too small, and too colorful. The babies can’t resist. Do you like dead kids? No? Then you should hate detergent pods.

And almost worse, quite honestly, is the fact that they don’t even do what they’re supposed to do. Whenever I pull my wet laundry out of the moldy basement washing machines, I always find a semi-disintegrated detergent sac adhered to my joggers. It’s like a giant lump of mid-cycle discharge: it’s sticky, shaped like a small tumor, and stains your clothes. It leaves a streak of blue or orange across sheets and white t-shirts. Plus, the fact that it’s not entirely dissolved means that for the whole cycle of washing,

it was dispersing soap, rendering any rinse cycle totally moot. You end up with soapy laundry covered in discharge and the blood of dead children, and you couldn’t spend the extra 20 seconds it takes to pour your detergent?

Perhaps our generation’s misguided affection for laundry pods stems from a deeply rooted sense of laziness. I mean, it cannot possibly be that we are trying to optimize our time because I know we all watch the Tastemade Snap story pretty much every day, which takes a lot longer than putting detergent in a machine once every three and a half weeks. But this is one thing that we simply cannot be complacent about anymore. We have to put the effort into bettering ourselves and our lives because no one is going to do it for us. And if you can use real detergent, maybe you can start using dryer sheets, which I promise will change your life.

I won’t lie—at the beginning of college, I bought laundry pods in bulk. I was young. I was naïve. I thought they would suit the college lifestyle. I didn’t consider the drawbacks. And now I have so many. (Seriously, if anyone wants to take them off my hands, you can have them.) But know that as soon as they’re gone, when you see me strutting through the Berkeley basement with my “hip hugger” laundry basket and messy bun, I’ll be an adult, with real liquid detergent and dryer sheets. And when you see me and think, “God dammit. That girl is better than me,” take comfort in knowing that for the first time in your life, you’re right.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Apr. 7, 2017 – 9

FEATURE

Conjugating the verb Get caffeinated with Tracy Chung, PC ’19.

* O

n any given weekday morning, Cross Campus is quiet, sparsely populated with the regular crew of natural early-risers (I’ve been told they exist) and unfortunate souls with 9 AM lectures (I’ve appointed myself their leader). On March 30, after a morning midterm that was eager to ruin my post-spring break high, I was meandering back to my room when I noticed an abnormal ruckus on the Cross Campus lawn. A single table was set up in the usual spot, the go-to for Woads ticket sales, panlist sign-ups for Fossil Free Yale, or Yale Banner photo campaigns. Keep in mind, it’s still around 9:45, well before most students start pouring out of Berkeley and Hopper, makeshift breakfast in hand. And yet, a buzzing, gradually growing crowd begins to gather around, excitedly chittering above nondescript dance music playing from a speaker behind the table. I passed by, sneaking a peek at what could possibly have triggered this singularity.

As it happens, March 30 was the official launch date of Verb, the caffeinated energy bar enterprise begun by Yale students, and I was just out of the loop. Of course, in retrospect, this wasn’t the first I’d heard of it. Beginning in May of last year, I’d seen the Bass Café campaigns, the well-edited photos of the Verb bar above an East Rock sunrise popping up on my timeline as it was shared by Facebook friends. Elena Conde (DC ‘19), one of my personal Verb-impassioned Facebook friends (who may or may not have two Verb bars in her bag at any time), describes Verb the way one might describe a wildly reliable best friend: “Verb pulls through when you think you can’t keep going anymore. When it’s 2 AM and you have 10 lecture slides to go before that midterm in 7 hours, eat a Verb and you’re good to go. When it’s 3 PM on a Friday afternoon and you have one section left before the weekend, Verb is there to help you out!” Verb has even recently traveled its way up Broadway to the GHeav cash register. GHeav employee Joshua Han puts it bluntly, “Everybody knows these bars. Everybody knows that these are Yale students’.” However, as Verb has recently begun to really make its presence known,

10 – The Yale Herald

they’ve also attracted the amped up curiosity of students beyond the core group of true believers.

Who began it? Where do they manufacture? And, the most pressing and prevalent question of all, why this product? Why the hype?

THE ORIGIN STORY IT BEGINS WITH A PASSIONATE FISHER. MATT Czarnecki (DC ’18), after a long day of fishing, realized that he had a need for sustenance, a snack to keep him going while he fished that could prevent seasickness, a fisherman’s fuel, if you will.

Spurred by this thought, Czarnecki set out to create just that—only to find that a bar just like this was already being sold in grocery stores. Surely, this was disappointing, but it also served as an impetus, a force that got the ball rolling toward what would become the Verb bar. Czarnecki would go on to become the CEO and co-founder of Verb Energy, Inc., with a team of three other undergraduates— Bennett Byerley (CFO/co-founder, SY ’19), André Monteiro (CTO/co-founder, DC ’18), and Isaac Morrier (creative director/co-founder, BR ’17). Their vision: an energy bar that tastes good, is natural, and is relatively inexpensive, something they felt did not currently exist on the market. Although the very beginning of the venture’s history began with a bar, Byerley states that “we didn’t set out to make a bar company. We were just unsatisfied with our energy options.”

Their mission began in earnest in the spring of 2016, after the concept of this caffeinated energy bar had been validated by a group of expert judges through the pitch competition of Yale Launch, a fairly new entrepreneurial club on campus. The team began cranking out versions of what would become Verb, trying over a hundred recipes in a variety of residential college kitchens. After all this work, they finally settled on a concoction that they wanted to bring to the people. They rented out local bakeries to produce the bar for an event in Bass Café in hopes of introducing the bar to studious, but potentially exhausted, individuals in the under-

ground library. Armed with the feedback of newlycaffeinated Yalies, the Verb team spent the summer reconfiguring and improving their bar, preparing to formally launch.

Their resurgence has definitely proved successful by the numbers, clearing 1500+ bars in just one month of sales last semester, and, at their event last week, selling 100 boxes of 10 bars each in the first twenty minutes. Verb’s website boasts “good energy for every day” and “healthy ingredients & amazing taste,” claims that Verb enthusiasts clearly believe in. Although I’m not sure if it’s good marketing or a frequency illusion after my first run-in with Verb, I have been noticing Verb bars everywhere on campus—students munching on them during physics lecture, someone deciding to buy one at GHeav as a last-minute addition to their egg sandwich order, a half-second glimpse of the wrapper when you accidentally look into the trash can as you’re throwing something away. More and more people are getting on the Verb train, partaking almost every day.

“Originally we thought we had like a Redbull, Five Hour Energy thing,” says Byerley, “but we realized that we made something that’s better for use every single day, if you want. You don’t have to be jumping off mountains or, like, doing backflips to enjoy our bars.”

GROWING STRONG FOR GOOD REASON, THE FOOD INDUSTRY IS ONE of the most expansive and regulated industries to break into for any beginning venture. The facilities must be up to code, the food handlers must be certified, the ingredients must be assessed—think of anything that might have an ancillary role in the production of something that could sit on a grocery store shelf and you’ll surely find the plethora of guidelines and red tape. And, at the beginning, the Verb team (like most college students) knew little to nothing about the food industry. They started out by putting together funds to pay lawyers to make sure they were within these strict food guidelines. Fast forward a year, and now the energy bars are manu-

factured at a co-packing company in Spokane, WA, a way to produce Verb on a large scale while ensuring the labor and facilities are in line with standards. To get there, Verb needed some funding, resources, and connections. Enter the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute.

For those who’ve wondered what happens in the mysterious office above Gant, the YEI is a university department that acts as an incubator and accelerator for new business ventures by students of all schools at Yale. They host a variety of programs, of which Kassie Tucker serves as director, to aid such initiatives, including the Venture Creation Program, the YEI Innovation Fund, and the YEI fellowship, the last of which Verb has been awarded for 2017. The fellowship is described as an “intensive summer bootcamp for incubating ventures” and includes support in the form of a $15,000 stipend, access to potential partnerships, and workshops for “starting a new high-growth venture” on campus and beyond.

Verb credits the entrepreneurial environment at Yale for many of its impressive connections, including Kevin Ryan—internet entrepreneur, founder of Business Insider and Gilt Groupe, sitting member of the Yale Board of Trustees—and Barry Nalebuff—co-founder of Honest Tea and professor at the School of Management. “Yale has provided an important group of advisors and mentors that help us navigate and maneuver the business,” says Byerley. The fellowship at YEI has contributed to the dramatic development of student-run undertakings in previous years. Both Re-Harvest Foods, a company that encourages sustainable snacks made from the “Ugly Fruit” that grocery stores won’t sell, and PreemieBreathe, a low-cost product that helps newborns breathe when suffering from respiratory illness, were part of the cohort of 2016 Fellowship teams. Both have begun to garner national attention, moving to sites beyond New Haven—to different states or, in the case of PreemieBreathe, to another continent, as they recently tested their device in Ethiopia. As the cohort of 2017 Fellowship teams start gearing up for the

summer, all the ventures, including Verb, hope to capitalize on this growth potential.

ONWARD EVEN WITH THIS VALUABLE SUPPORT, THE small business scene at Yale is still burgeoning. In the last ten years, “entrepreneurial opportunity” did not commonly follow “Yale” in rapid-fire word association. We don’t even make it onto U.S. News and World Report’s list of undergraduate entrepreneurship rankings. However, with heavy-handed encouragement from the university in the form of more competitions and opportunities for assistance, as well as new student-run organizations like Yale Launch, Yale is definitely on the up and up. For Byerley, creating and leading a small business is a way to make your own place, especially at Yale where students may feel inclined, or even obligated, to fall into a predetermined niche. “I really didn’t like being told what to do and fitting into a stagnant model that you couldn’t create. [. . .] Yalies should do more entrepreneurship. Not just for the sake of doing business, but whether it’s starting non-profits or starting social enterprises or starting government initiatives, people should take it upon themselves. We don’t all have to take the same job at graduation. We don’t all have to follow the same trajectories.”

Verb is one of the most recent entries in a growing history of student business endeavors (other newer additions include CHOPS Beef Jerky and SunUp). But, with these start-ups, it seems that the magic ingredient isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking idea, a windfall of funding, or an excess of media connections and coverage. What they require is people who believe in them, gusto from the ground floor, a core group of true believers.

Every movement, local or global, highly-specific or grand-sweeping, caffeinated energy bars or international policy change, needs to start at the community level because this most intimate rung is vital to growth—forgoing this relationship only breeds contempt, distrust, and backlash. Lo-

cal supporters have no interest in investing their energy in a group that hasn’t taken the time to cultivate a conversation with them; jilted individuals weaken the base of any following. I am no business major, but I’m sure this is Entrepreneurship 101. Build your base market as a solid foundation for the future. But, the process of cultivating local enthusiasm is still overlooked by many start-ups, even on college campuses where the entrepreneurs should, theoretically, be most able to reach their peers.

Fortunately for them, The Verb team has not forsaken the students that have been with them from the beginning; in fact, just the opposite: “We don’t think of them as customers. We think of them very much as people who’ve been with Verb all the way through [. . .] They’ve shaped the way that it is now.” Joshua at GHeav articulated the mutualism best: “other Yale students know [the Verb bars] are from Yale students, so they buy them and support them. It’s good for everyone.” Verb may be the product, but student support has really made the venture. As their rapid growth has shown, if you can garner a critical mass of fans on Cross Campus in the wee hours of a cloudy spring day, you’re off to a good start.

Graphics by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Apr. 7, 2017 – 11

COVER

Light & choops Jacob Sweet, HC ‘18, follows Yalies as they shoot their shots.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 12 – The Yale Herald

M

ichael Menz, PC ’17, may not even be six feet tall, but he is a basketball champion. Menz is not on the varsity basketball team. He’s not on the club team either. Nor is he on A-hoops or B-hoops, the two highest levels of intramural basketball. Menz is a choopion.

After four years of flawless choops attendance, Menz, in his final year at Yale, got what he coveted: a choops championship for Pierson College.

Choops is the lowest level of intramural basketball. The quality of play is subpar. According to Menz, you can break down the people who participate into two categories: “people who have never played a sport and like basketball,” and “people who are really, really small.” If you know anything about basketball, you’d know that these things—athleticism and height—are important. You will not find any good player who is neither tall nor athletic. If you’re really tall, you can get away with being not that athletic, and if you’re really athletic, you can get away with not being tall, but never both.

Except in choops.

Success in choops is one of the few things in this world that is almost one-hundred percent dependent on effort. In MATH 120, no matter how hard you study, you are going to get a lower grade than the kid that did every homework assignment in five minutes and destroyed the curve so badly on both midterms that you cried. In choops, the playing field is level. No one is good.

The only thing left to do is show up and give it your all. After that, nothing is important.

Menz is far from the only Yale student who has made intramural sports a huge part of his college experience. There are dozens of people from across the colleges who love IMs. Menz and his fellow choops teammates bring passion to Pierson College, one of the consistently mediocre IM performers.

In Berkeley, fresh off its first Tyng Cup win in decades, Josh Hayden, BK ’17, Andy Hill, BK ’17, and Sara Metzger, BK ’17, cultivate a culture that may bring another championship to the college. In Hopper College, freshmen upstarts Josh PerezCruet, HC ’20, and Vikram Shaw, HC ’20, seek to turn the college from an IM laughing stock into a hotbed of raw IM fervor.

Though their numbers are few, these people, fighting for nothing but college pride and relative athletic supremacy, are the true champions of Yale culture.

I AM NOT AN ACTIVE INTRAMURAL PARTICIPANT. IN ALMOST three years at Yale, I have participated three times: two times for choops and once for ultimate frisbee. This year, I haven’t been to a single one.

I always assumed that everyone was as ambivalent about intramural sports as I am. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about intramural sports in Hopper College. Hopper is currently dead last in intramural standings. It’s considered a success if any given game does not end in a Hopper forfeit. The article was supposed to be about the potential for IM greatness that the name change—from Calhoun to Hopper—could possibly provide. I thought it would end up being somewhat of a joke.

There was no way that changing the name of college would do anything to wake we Hopper students from our collective intramural slumber. At first, everyone I talked to said pretty much the same thing: “IMs seem fun, but I don’t really have time for them.” Some people had played an IM or two and others had never played an IM at all. With a million different things to do, IMs fall by the wayside.

These were all people who, at the surface, seemed capable of competing at an intramural level. Relatively in-shape people within one standard deviation of mean athletic giftedness.

When I was a pre-frosh, I expected these people to be the ones voraciously competing for intramural and college glory.

During my Yale tour, both the tour guide and the admissions officer who led the information session made it seem like everyone at Yale just ran around, loudly expressing love for their colleges. I imagined this would manifest itself in intense intramural competition. It would be like summer camp. People would get worked up over the most meaningless things, but in a charming way. They would put on their college t-shirts, rush on to athletic fields, and fight for college supremacy. If I got into Yale, my college would be objectively the best. I was so inspired by this expression of enthusiasm that I re-wrote my college essay, molding it into the story of how I led the clarinet and bassoon sections to victory in a music camp boat race.

As you might guess, I was a bit disappointed when I started freshman year. Yale, for the most part, is made up of the type of student that skips their homecoming football game to participate in a science fair or play in an orchestra concert. Nowhere was this mentality more apparent than at “Yale Up!,” Yale’s weak attempt to make freshmen peppy and enthusiastic about sports. People seemed confused as to how they ended up in a big basketball gym and were further confused by the songs that they would sing once, and possibly never again. I didn’t think Yalies cared about sports—especially intramurals.

It seemed very not Yale-like to care so deeply about something that seemed so insignificant.

As it turns out, this wasn’t entirely true. The notion that all Yale students are sociopaths who don’t care about anything but their ascension into the ranks of the Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company is false. Some Yale students play IMs. INTRAMURAL SPORTS MAKE CHAMPIONS OUT OF THE students most committed to seemingly trivial athletic competition. Josh Perez-Cruet and Vikram Shaw— Hopper freshmen—are the shining stars of intramurals in a college that seems to sometimes forget that intramurals exist. The two are not only passionate about playing intramurals, but changing the whole culture around them.

Though Perez-Cruet, a Michigan native who wears shorts in the middle of winter, says he “sees IMs as a study break or incentive to get work done,” it is clear that they occupy a much larger part in his life. In all, I talked to him about intramural sports for about an hour. He has four copies of the same edition of the Yale Daily News on his dresser—the one containing my article about Hopper intramurals and his hope for athletic redemption.

Perez-Cruet has a long term vision for the future of intramural sports in the college, a future that he and Shaw play a vital part in. He didn’t let a rejection from the intramural coordination position in Hopper weaken his love of the game.

“I’m not skilled in any specific sport, but I have a lot of hustle and I’m really competitive,” Perez-Cruet said. During the winter intramural season, Perez-Cruet usually goes to between three and four games a week. His appetite for victory is insatiable and his reputation has been cemented even as freshman. Calling him competitive is an understatement. In broomball, he is known to check people, testing the patience of the referees who do not want to see someone get concussed

Apr. 7, 2017 – 13

during an intramural sport. Shaw, the other member of the duo, usually joins. Often, they’re the only ones to show up from the Hopper side, and the team has to forfeit. In some sports, however, two is enough. They once went on a badminton tear, winning several games in a row when no one else from Hopper College showed up. “I had never played badminton before and we won every game,” Shaw said.

The two are both invested in changing intramural culture both within Hopper and throughout Yale. They maintain that to improve IMs, two changes have to be made: IMs that are played on the athletic fields should be moved onto campus, and the rule requiring a minimum number of students to show up to matches should be abolished. “I would be able to play by myself against five people and put up points,” Perez-Cruet said.

But this kind of drastic change is hard. Tom Migdalski, the coordinator of Yale undergraduate intramurals, is doing his best to reduce forfeits and increase participation. “As everyone gets busy with academic commitments and many other obligations at peak times of the year, we all would like a shorter commute to our outdoor athletic complex,” he said. “But we obviously can’t move the fields any closer to campus.”

“I THINK WHAT YOU HAVE TO EMPHASIZE IS HOW BAD I AM AT BASKETBALL. THAT’S KIND OF THE KEY POINT.” Michael Menz, PC ’18, choops champion

Migdalski, along with the other leaders of intramural sports at Yale, including coordinator Kellie Finn and Head IM Secretary and Webmaster Adam Jenkinson, PC ’17, have made several changes since the summer of 2015, a time “when [they] wanted to bring Yale Intramurals up to the next level,” said Migdalski. Among these changes was the addition of three new sports: broomball, spikeball, and indoor soccer. Unlike sports like football and ultimate frisbee that require a trek over to the athletic fields near the Yale Bowl, these sports are all played on campus. The shuttle buses, which used to drop students off at the varsity field house, now drop students off right at the fields.

IM referees and supervisors also received new t-shirts. It’s now very official. But still, there’s work to be done.

“Over the last couple years, we’ve struggled with keeping participation consistent and high. We’ve had more forfeits than we wanted and some discouraged players and teams,” said Jenkinson, the student IM coordinator. He says that the organizers are all listening and doing everything they can to improve Yale IMs

14 – The Yale Herald

as a whole. For Jenkinson, the effort pays off. “When someone, even from a college that I just played against in an IM game, comes up and says they had fun and can’t wait for the next matchup, that’s what makes the job worth it.”

Perez-Cruet and Shaw are hopeful that IMs will improve both in Hopper and at Yale overall. “We’re gonna remember these interviews when we win the Tyng cup,” Perez-Cruet said.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING THINGS ABOUT IMS IS THAT colleges located just a few yards from each other have drastically different intramural cultures. Berkeley, the current possessors of the illustrious Tyng Cup, and Hopper, currently last in the standings, are opposites.

It is probable that Hopper and Berkeley have nearly identical innate levels of natural athletic talent. After all, each college is supposed to be a microcosm of Yale’s diverse student body. Microcosm is the admission office’s favorite word. Chemistry majors, thespians, and intramural savants should be distributed equally.

But if you walk into the dining halls, this does not seem to be the case. Berkeley’s dining hall is filled with athleticlooking people wearing athletic-looking Berkeley gear. There are even stairs in the dining hall, giving Berkeley students an opportunity to work out while eating. But Hopper’s dining hall, especially when compared to Berkeley, is severely lacking in intramural spirit. While it is understandable why the college didn’t want to invest thousands of dollars into a wardrobe of Nike Dri-Fit (registered trademark symbol) shirts emblazoned with the name of a man who enjoyed buying and selling human beings, the lack of apparel is still kind of demoralizing. How are we supposed to compete without t-shirts?

For both colleges, intramural leadership starts at the top.

When freshmen see seniors participating, they get that the sense that they too should be involved. Menz, who has unblemished choops basketball attendance, got started because every time there was an intramural game, he’d receive a text message from one of the Pierson FroCos. The seniors in Berkeley are similarly aggressive. Oftentimes, they’ll pick freshmen as captains, urging them to get their friends together to form a team. “We’ll message them throughout the day asking how numbers are,” said Andy Hill. “We spam a lot of GroupMes and group messages.” The Hopper seniors, used to failure, don’t try as hard.

Berkeley also receives strong, consistent showings from IM captains across the board. Sara Metzger, another IM secretary, is a well-known star, helping facilitate dominant spikeball, football, and volleyball performances. Aaron Hillman, BK ’18, leads the dodgeball team, sending weekly emails with stunning displays of emotional depth. “Tonight we humble the Morse dodgeball ‘team’ with our merciless service of flaming spheres of fluff,” one email says. He also leads the team during the match. “One time, Aaron showed up to IM dodgeball in a cutoff t-shirt and a straw hat,” said Josh Hayden, an IM enthusiast.

“We didn’t win. It was a tragic loss. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much fun losing a game, though.”

Berkeley also has the most hype intramural sports video of any of the residential colleges. The two-minute video, shown to all Berkeley freshmen, switches from sport to sport—from inner-tube water polo to cross country to dodgeball in two minutes of awe-inspiring action. “For glory. For Berkeley. For the

Thundercocks. For the Tyng,” the video concludes. What the yells about picks. Bharadrwaj is by far the team’s best player. featured athletes lack in visible athletic talent, they make up “He can actually dribble and shoot the ball,” Xu said. for with an unprecedented level of focus and glowing Berkeley Led by Menz, the team smashed through the regular seapride. In the end, the video was effective. For the first time son, losing only one game. After earning a first round bye and since the 1950s, Berkeley won an IM championship. winning the semifinal game, it was time.

But even in colleges like Pierson, a perennial bottomIn the IM championships, everyone that showed up for dweller in the standings, there are bright spots. the sport throughout the season is allowed to come, and You don’t have to be athletic to play choops. In fact, they all did. Fourteen players showed up. Fourteen unyou are required not to be. A-hoops, the highest level of skilled, poor-shooting Yale students. But somehow, they IM basketball, is occupied by varsity athletes, club bas- caught fire. “We shot like 50 to 55 percent from beketball kids, and kids who played basketball in high yond the arc in the championship game,” Hedin said. school, according to Hill. B-hoops is a step below. If “Splash, splash.” you’re pretty tall or can kind of shoot, B-hoops is for you.

“Silliman was talking a big game before the championship,” Choops stands alone. And right now, Pierson College is said Green, the team’s coach. “But they just weren’t ready home to the choops champions. for the buzzsaw that is Pierson choops.” Basically, the team Among computer science majors, Menz is in the top per- made a bunch of questionable threes. Silliman had no answer. centile for both trap and tricep size. He looks like he’d be at With Dr. Davis, the Head of Pierson College on the sideline least decent at basketball, but he assures me this is not the alongside dozens of Pierson and Silliman supporters, Menz case. “I think what you have to emphasize is how bad I am at and his teammates won their first intramural championship. basketball. That’s kind of the key point.” His dribbling is not IMs are not about athletic talent. They’re not about stratso good. His basketball IQ is low. Once he gets a rebound, he egy, and they’re not even really about winning. They’re about spends a few seconds thinking about what he should do next. realizing you’re not very good and still showing up. SomeHe’s strong, but not particularly agile. These things are not times, that gets you a championship. important. His real role on choops is as a strong rebounder “Would I call it the culmination of my Yale experience? I and the setter of “vicious picks.” would,” Menz said. “I definitely would.”

Though Menz may be consistently bad, he is also consistently there, no matter the strength of the team. His freshman year they made the playoffs but were bounced in the first round. The next two years, they didn’t make the playoffs once.

But Menz and his teammates—Emmet Hedin, PC ’17, Zachary Jacobs, PC ’17, David Hatch, PC ’17, Narahari Bharadwaj, PC ’19, and Acer Xu, PC ’17—don’t give up. Hedin doesn’t let several concussions stop him from driving hard into the paint.

Xu doesn’t let his poor shooting prevent him from jacking up ill-advised threes. Evan Green, PC ’17, the team’s coach, doesn’t allow the fact that a coach is completely unnecessary stop him from standing on the sideline with a clipboard during the team’s most crucial games.

Like any championship team, each player on Pierson choops has a role. “My job is to shoot a lot of bricks and play pretty poor defense,” Xu said. “At some point we thought about assigning positions and realized none of us were good enough to justify that.” Menz’ role is to stand under the basket, grab rebounds, and throw up layups until they go in. Hedin drives strong to the basket, daring God to give him yet another concussion. Hatch takes some absurd jumpers and

Apr. 7, 2017 – 15

FEATURE

Not the hero we weed right now Jack Kyono, PC ’20, shines a light on efforts in Connecticut to legalize marijuana

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n a winter morning, after a snowstorm blanketed campus earlier this term, Yale students woke up to exciting news: the crew team had built an igloo on Cross Campus! Campus romantics were immediately swooning—how wholesome. But within hours, the igloo had already been declared the choicest spot on campus to hot-box.

Today, weed culture is an intrinsic part of life on almost any college campus. But these days, weed is appealing to a broader audience. In November’s election, four more states—Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, and California—voted to legalize recreational marijuana, bringing the tally of similar states to eight.

In addition to legislative progress, the public perception of marijuana is also shifting steadily.

In just one decade, the number of Americans who favor legalization has increased from 32 percent to 57 percent according to the Pew Research Center. Ilana Glazer of the wildly popular Broad City told The New Yorker that she smokes pot every day.

There are even photographs of President Obama lighting up in his youth.

If you look anywhere on social media, pro-legalization outlets are churning out content: an article about a child with epilepsy whose parents want to avoid the steep costs of cannabis oil by growing their own plant; a clip of a dispensary donating part of its profits to a public school; a video of a priest and a rabbi sparking up together.

The tide of legalization is now washing up in Connecticut. Recently in Hartford, four separately introduced bills have cannabis proponents pushing for legalization. Even on campus, Yale’s chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy is lobbying the administration to change their approach to marijuana enforcement.

Yet one Yale School of Medicine professor is pumping the brakes.

Dr. Deepak D’Souza is a Professor of Psychiatry who has spent the last twenty years conducting research on cannabis and cannabinoids. He has also spent twenty-five years working within the VA

10 – The Yale Herald

* Connecticut Health Care system. And on Mar. 23, D’Souza gave an emphatic warning in his testimony before the Connecticut State Legislature: do not legalize marijuana.

In a legislative session actively focused on improving Connecticut’s economy and crafting a balanced budget, Senate Bill 11, “An Act Concerning the Legalization and Taxation of the Retail Sale of Marijuana,” seems promising. Legislators have reason to be hopeful: In 2015, after legalizing recreational marijuana, Colorado saw over 18,000 new jobs and over $2.4 billion in economic activity flood into the Centennial State. And given a 2015 Quinnipiac University poll which reported that over 63 percent of Connecticut’s residents are in favor of legalization, Hartford is taking this opportunity very seriously.

Throughout the five-hour-long public hearing, a series of state lawmakers, medical marijuana patients, and other expert witnesses brought research and opinions before a panel of State Senators.

When his turn came, D’Souza, arms crossed before the Judiciary Committee, brushed aside a volley of endorsements from liberal lawmakers. For him, legalization means an attack on the youth.

“It’s pretty clear: States that have legalized it for recreational or medical, have much higher rates of cannabis use among their youth than states that haven’t.”

That D’Souza focuses his argument on young people is fitting. More than any other group, the millennial generation has driven the march toward legalization. According to the same Pew Research Center poll, today over 71 percent of millennials want recreational marijuana to be legal. But by D’Souza’s insistence, it is the youths who are most at risk.

The crux of his argument against legalization rests on both addiction and performance.

The common perception that marijuana is not addictive is one of the go-to arguments for legalization that any casual proponent will use. D’Souza, and his two decades of research, disagree.

He reports, “About 10 percent of those who try cannabis will become dependent on it, i.e., they will have difficulty functioning without it.

In those who use cannabis daily, 30-50 percent will become dependent.”

He further explains what dependence looks like: “The individual spends too much time and/or money procuring the drug, getting high, recovering from it or attempting to quit. The person may have to use larger amounts of the drug over time to get high, as he/she becomes more tolerant to it, and when he/she attempts to quit, he/she may experience withdrawal symptoms. The person may also use the drug in situations that are potentially dangerous, e.g., operating a motor vehicle.”

Many of us have known friends, acquaintances, perhaps family members to which the following will apply: glib mentions of “needing” to smoke; humblebrags of having exorbitant tolerance; stories of erratic behavior or willingness to do anything to find a dealer. Often, and reasonably, we laugh and don’t take it seriously—they’re just our stoner friends, right? D’Souza wants us to recognize them as addicts.

Still, even those willing to accept D’Souza’s conclusions about the addictive nature of marijuana would likely have reservations about the degree to which it affects users. Isn’t marijuana dependency much less harmful than alcoholism, which might lead to violent and aggressive behavior, or addiction to cigarettes, which kills almost half a million Americans every year? The DEA is the first to admit that no one has ever died of a marijuana overdose. But D’Souza’s research does recognize the comparisons often drawn between marijuana and other drugs.

“In general, cannabis may be less addictive than alcohol and clearly less addictive than cocaine and opioids. But the bottom line is it is addictive.”

D’Souza predicts that the state of Connecticut post-legalization would face many challenges that have gone largely unacknowledged, especially given the positive narrative that states like Colorado happily broadcast. When asked what measures the state must take in the event of the bill’s passage, D’Souza

told me: “If cannabis is legalized in CT, the state needs to provide all the necessary tools to our police to keep the roads safe. That includes the tools to test those suspected to be DUIC (driving under the influence of cannabis).”

The dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol are well known—the massive amounts of money spent on anti-drunk driving advertisements, driver’s education curriculums and of course, actual police enforcement have alerted the whole population to the risks of driving drunk, both to self and to others.

Driving while high is more complicated, and much less discussed.

D’Souza has called for education about its dangers, but what is scarier for him is the virtual inability for any sort of enforcement.

“The capacity to test at the roadside exposure to cannabis in biological fluids—saliva, breath, urine or blood—and importantly, accurately interpret the test in order to differentiate current use (at the time of the accident or being pulled over) from remote use – we don’t yet have such a test.”

D’Souza’s concerns carry the weight of twenty years of research. And very likely, his position is unwelcome among cannabis supporters. But in a time where the culture and visibility of the pro-marijuana contingent blocks out everything, sharp, fact-based criticism like that coming from D’Souza ought to have a seat at the table.

Many recognize that Senate Bill 11 may not even make it out of committee; “It’s clear at this point that there isn’t support on the committee for it,’’ Rep. William Tong told the Hartford Courant on Apr. 5. But legal marijuana in Connecticut is likely in our future, if not

this year than in the years to come. Senate President Martin Looney, who introduced the bill, remains hopeful. “At a time when our state budget is in need of new sources of revenue, I doubt this will be the final conversation on the topic,” Looney told the Courant. If and when Connecticut does decide to legalize marijuana, what will D’Souza do?

“I have been doing research on cannabis for the past 20 years—and that will continue regardless of whether CT or the US legalizes it or not. My research is not driven by whether cannabis is legal or illegal, but by more fundamental questions about the effects of cannabinoids and the mechanisms underlying their effects.”

As he has for two decades, Dr. Deepak D’Souza will forge ahead with his research. But in the immediate future, I asked the Professor if he has any message for Yale students who plan on participating in the 4/20 festivities.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a message! My hope is that we all carefully consider the science and make decisions about our future that carefully weighs the risks and benefits.”

Graphics by Jason Hu YH Staff Apr. 7, 2017 – 11

CULTURE

CULTURE

Spelling Allah in neon: naturalizing narratives in modern Middle Eastern art

by Elizabeth Miles

T

he most universal image in art—a mother and in traditional Islamic art history, pre-1750, arose from child—now appears in oils on wood, on the religion, Rizvi feels “we’re in a new Islamic world” of third floor of the Yale University Art Gallery. art now, requiring its own analysis.

“Motherhood,” a work by Egyptian female artThe curators also wanted to stay away from buzzist Inji Efflatoun, depicts a rural woman cradling her words and headlines. Rizvi and I spoke of the recent infant. In the mid-1800s, a sculptor whose work is exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Works far better known in the United States than Efflatoun’s by Iranian, Iraqi, and Sudanese artists were displayed also took inspiration from those everyday scenes of the next to wall text reading: “This work is by an artist fellah, or rural laborers. Before sculpting the Statue of from a nation whose citizens are being denied entry Liberty, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi took a trip to Egypt. to the United States, according to a presidential exTo mark the new Suez Canal, he proposed an 86-foot ecutive order issued on January 27, 2017.” The mutall female statue, in the traditional Arab clothing he seum seemed to be making a statement: given the first had seen, called “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia.” major step taken by the Presidential administration, a Unsuccessful, he lifted some inspiration from his “travel ban” primarily affecting several Muslim-majority Egyptian proposal when the French made their gift to nations, art from the region mattered. But according the Americans in 1886. to Rizvi, it has mattered since the post-9/11 era. BeEfflatoun’s 1950 painting is one of 19 works in the cause of the YUAG’s strong pedagogical mission (four exhibition Modern Art from the Middle East, at the fleets of students trooped through the exhibition in the YUAG from Feb. 24 through July 16. Co-curated by 40-odd minutes we were there), Rizvi has focused on Yale’s Frauke Josenhans and Kishwar Rizvi, and Man- the impact of looking at the Middle East as a complex dy Merzaban, the Founding Curator of the Barjeel Art region. We agreed that responding to the political flareFoundation, the exhibition is composed entirely of ups of the moment through art can be powerful, but works on loan from the Foundation. Based in Sharjah, also constrains public discussion of that art to the moUnited Arab Emirates, the Foundation is the brainchild ment’s debate. “I don’t mean to critique my colleagues of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, a UAE commentator and at MoMa, but there are ways to do it that can be a bit collector. Al Qassemi also provides almost all the fund- more synthetic, that you can tell certain types of stoing. His venture is one of only a few public collections ries, and ultimately that can have more of an impact of this scale in the region, and a key player in a revival than just the political gesture.” for modern Middle Eastern art.

In her curatorial choices with Josenhans, Rizvi “We probably wouldn’t have had this show 10 years sought to “naturalize narratives.” The YUAG’s exhibit ago,” sighed Rizvi during our gallery tour. In the past would not, then, focus on visual tropes. Instead of a ten years, she has seen a tremendous surge of pub- veiled woman, Inji Efflatoun’s portrait depicts an Egyplic collection and scholarship on modern art from the tian mother—ironically related to a source of inspiraregion. Al Qassemi began collecting in 2002, but tion for the Statue of Liberty, the icon that many prolaunched the Foundation quite recently, in 2010. Last testers referred to during the fight over the travel ban. week, on Mar. 31, the YUAG, the History of Art Depart- Another work, “Erotic Composition” uses a few fine, ment, and the Council on Middle East Studies jointly blurry lines in pale pink and orange to depict a female organized a symposium titled “Writing/Curating the nude form.

Middle East.” There, Linda Komaroff, Islamic art curaThe exhibit would also choose not to focus on the tor at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opened “refugee crisis,” perhaps the single most recurrent a panel discussion by acknowledging that she herself headline of 2015 and 2016. Yet, in Marwan Kassab used to believe there was no connection between mod- Bachi’s “The Three Palestinian Boys,” a hauntingly ern art and Islamic art. A scholar of the latter, she forced perspective causes the viewer to look up with wonders now why it took her so long to question the the subjects, expectantly, towards nothing at all. popular “end date” in the field—roughly mid-1700s, Though the work is from 1970, it’s difficult to shake Rizvi told me. Many survey art history books on the the echos of last year’s photos of young men from the topic abruptly end around then, when the era of colo- Middle East migrating along the train tracks of Eastern nialism began.

Europe towards uncertainty.

When Rizvi and Josenhans began contemplating Two works depict the construction of the Aswan their selection for Modern Art from the Middle East, High Dam in 1960, built as part of Egypt’s modernizing they quickly decided to define new chronological and thrust led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Although geographic boundaries. The works come from artists artists had been commissioned to depict it, the works working only in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria be- cannot be categorized as pure propaganda. Abdel Hadi tween the 1950s and 1980s—encompassing the rise El-Gazzar’s “Untitled” conveys an enchantment with of nationalism after the collapse of colonial mandates, the new technology in its intricate ink diagram of a and the subsequent rise of pan-Arabism. After the 80s, fantastical machine. It’s gobbling up scraps and outRizvi says, art begins to depict the rise of Islamism—a putting order—a new industrial nation. It leaves the “whole other story.” Though much of the work studied viewer, though, with a sense that if one wire snapped,

the whole operation would hit the skids. Similarly, Effat Naghi’s “The High Dam,” a monumental blast of layered black acrylic, exudes vitality. It’s almost a celebration, but I had to agree with Rizvi: “You can see it as building something, or something falling apart.”

When you enter the exhibition from the YUAG’s permanent collection of modern art, you don’t immediately see the wall text to your left, titling the exhibition, along with a helpful map of the Middle East. It’s clever.

Any ordinary visitor wouldn’t know they had stepped into a highly focused selection. At a show in Tehran in Nov. and Dec. 2016, the same effect was deployed.

In The Sea Suspended, Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art displayed 40 works from Iran, and 40 from the Arab world, on loan from the Barjeel Foundation.

One room showed only Arab art, one room only Iranian works. One room showed both together. It was seamless, remembers Sultan Al Qassemi, the founder and financial backer of Barjeel. “That’s exactly the kind of theme, the kind of art, the kind of setting that we should be looking at.”

Rizvi has encountered many private collectors in the region, and considers Al Qassemi’s public collection quite unique, especially considering the cost and labor required to loan out the collection. “It’s reorienting the whole story of the Middle East just now,” said Rizvi. “It can’t be always just about refugees, death, and destructions. It’s there, it’s important, but it’s not what the culture’s produced.” In addition to bringing this message beyond the Arab world, Al Qassemi also plans to focus on more regional exhibitions. He wants to bring modern art from the Arab world to the Arab world. For the Iranian exhibition, he made a specific request that the 40 non-Iranian works include several from neighboring nations with a history of tension, including Saudi Arabia. With 20,000 visitors in seven weeks, the exhibition was a stunning success.

The Barjeel Foundation collection stems from Al Qassemi’s personal collection. His dream, however, is to empty his home and warehouse of his acquisitions through loans. “In terms of accessibility, we’re definitely out there,” he says. Catalogs, essays, and interviews can be downloaded from the Foundation’s website. The Foundation has 19 exhibits and 914 works available on the Google Arts and Culture platform, and regularly posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Al Qassemi himself is perhaps best known on Twitter, for translating speeches and news from Arabic to English during the Arab Spring, outstripping major news outlets. “All my students knew him from his Twitter feed, nobody knew him as a collector!” Rizvi said during our gallery tour.

Al Qassemi founded Barjeel in March 2010, before the Arab Spring impelled him to commentate through the Twittersphere. He considers the pursuits as different mediums, with the same message. “It’s translating the Arab world, it’s making the Arab world accessible, whether it was my work as taking Arabic language speeches and news into English, or allowing people to view works of art online.” In the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, Barjeel bought a piece from Egypt, called “The people want the downfall of the regime.” The gallery in Cairo refused to ship it. The owners feared accusations of exporting the revolution to the Gulf. Barjeel had the piece, done in neon lettering, shipped in four pieces, one for each word in Arabic: The People / Want / The Downfall / Of the Regime.

Four different crates arrived in Sharjah in 2013. The piece has not yet been shown.

Al Qassemi knows that had he bought all his pieces without the intention of showing them, he could have bought twice, even three times as much work by avoiding the costs of insurance and shipping. But that isn’t his philosophy. “Owning them really isn’t an achievement, it’s showing them—that is an achievement.”

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 18 _ The Yale Herald

There’s a dearth, Al Qassemi says, of institutions like his. “And there’s a hundred thousand that do the same thing for European art. We have so much to catch up with.”

Komaroff, of LACMA, told her audience at the symposium, “The Middle East has become best known for things other than the contemplative beauty of art.” And perhaps new exhibitions such as the MoMa’s have caught public interest because the Middle East has a greater, tragic urgency. But Modern Art from the Middle East seeks to draw the eye to a subset of the region

without losing sight of the rest of it. The Barjeel Art Foundation seeks to spread that perspective across the world.

Ten years ago, Komaroff would never have bought works of Islamic art in neon or video. Now, the LACMA’s collection boasts a set of music video inspired works and the word, Allah, done in neon calligraphy, reflected on and on in an “infinity box” of mirrors. For modern and contemporary artistic depictions of the Middle East, it’s a brave new decade.

For love of the game

by Cameron Koffman

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his past Mon., Apr. 3, was one of the biggest days in the sporting world’s year. First, most Major League Baseball teams opened up their regular seasons and began their 162-game grind after a long off-season.

Second, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels and the Gonzaga University Bulldogs squared off in the NCAA men’s basketball championship game. Depending on who you hang out with on Yale’s campus, you might have known this and been looking forward to this day for weeks. As a huge college basketball fan, I was particularly excited to see Tar Heels attempt redemption after losing on a buzzer beater in last year’s national title game. While this day had been on my calendar for months, many Yalies probably had no idea of its significance until they saw a braggadocious Facebook post on their newsfeed from some high school friend who attends UNC, the champions. In some social groups at Yale, there is an incredibly vibrant sports fan culture; others are totally oblivious to even the most significant sporting events.

Some members of the Yale community turn to Greek life to best experience fan culture. Spencer Marks, DC ’19, watched the NCAA title game at the Sig Ep fraternity house with many of his brothers. Marks said that he “really enjoyed it because [even though] there were a select few who had personal stakes in the outcome—rooting hard for their home

team, or their bracket was on the line—the vast majority of guys shouted at the TV and bit their nails because they loved watching a close game.” In Marks’ case, the fraternity house provided sports fans with a sanctuary where they can watch big games with other similarly passionate fans.

While some Yalies get their sports fill through Greek life, other Yalies use residential college events and funds to create their own campus sports fan culture. The sports culture of these residential college gatherings is not too different from that in the fraternities (minus the booze, of course). Yalies from across the country are still huddled together around the television, intensely watching the big game, and the atmosphere is just as passionate. In Davenport College, people gathered in the Dive to watch the National Championship game. Often the Davenport College Council organizes events for big games like this, but Monday night’s watch party was completely organic. Grant Richardson, DC ’19, attended the gathering and enjoyed the break from academic routine: “It was refreshing to watch the championship game in the Dive, where fellow Yalies set aside their studies to hoot and holler for their favorite teams.” Although the event was a positive experience, Richardson does believe that Yale has a dearth of a sports fan culture. He described Yale as a “campus with sports fans few and far in between.” Richardson hit on a

point that resonates with me and with many of my friends on campus. Sports serves as our daily dose of cultural consumption. Many of these athletes, who perform daily at levels we could only dream of attaining, inspired us as kids and continue to amaze us now. Furthermore, sports brings its consumers a strong sense of social inclusivity. Sports fans often refer to their favorite teams as “we,” since they view the fanbase as an extension of the team itself. Even for someone with little vested rooting interest, just bearing witness to an incredible sporting accomplishment is enough to make you feel included—soon, sports fans will talk about where they were when they watched the Patriots complete the most epic comeback in Superbowl history It makes sense that sports have brought me and my suite mates closer together. Almost every night, there is someone watching a game on our common room couch. I enjoy sitting down with them (or being joined by one of my suitemates) as we decompress from a long day by watching one of our favorite teams. While this campus may not have the largest number of sports fans and may not even be surrounded by great sports bars to watch games at, for people like Grant, Spencer, and me, there are still outlets to share our sports passion with other Yalies—even if a good portion of the campus may be oblivious to it.

Film criticism in the modern age

by Emma Keyes

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his Monday afternoon, Apr. 3, about thirty people film criticism; Frodon does not see bloggers as film critics. showed up to the Whitney Humanities Center audi- People have always talked about movies with their friends torium to hear four film critics talk. Though all four and, with the advent of the Internet, moving that discuscritics were male, and did not address the gender sion into a more visible sphere is easier than ever. Jackie imbalance, their discussion presented a healthy difference Ferro, BR ’17, a Film and Media Studies major agrees that in opinions as they debated the state of film criticism today. “anyone with a Wordpress account can self-identify as a The panel, organized by Yale film professors Dudley Andrews critic.” Your blogger suitemate probably cannot provide the and Charles Musser, was split into two parts: one focusing on same insight or scope that a professional critic can, though. international cinema and one focusing on American cinema. “People rely on criticism to cut through the impossibly dense The first section was a lecture given by Jean-Michel Netflix feed,” Ferro says. Frodon goes even further, in his Frodon, a French film critic and former editor-in-chief of Ca- belief that because the Internet has made many films more hiers du cinéma, the most important film journal of the sec- accessible than ever, film criticism is more important today ond half of the twentieth century. Inappropriately titled “The than in the past.

International Situation: Iran and China in Focus,” Frodon The second section was more of an actual panel. Titled had quite a bit to say about the current situation in film “The American Situation,” it featured Wesley Morris of the criticism, but didn’t speak about Iran or China at all. Instead, New York Times (and formerly Grantland, may it rest in most of Frodon’s commentary focused on his native France, peace), Bilge Ebiri of the Village Voice, and Gerald Peary and its strong historical tradition of film criticism. Specifi- of The Arts Fuse. Both Morris and Ebiri graduated from Yale cally, he reflected on his tenure at Cahiers du cinéma and his College in the 1990s, and Peary has been a film critic for attempts to bring it smoothly into the 21st century. various Boston publications since 1978.

Frodon emphasized the need to distinguish between writTheir discussion focused on the role of film criticism in ing that critiques film and the actual profession of a film American culture and the ways that criticism is changing in critic. Very few people manage to make a living giving their the 21st century. Unlike France, the US has never had an opinions about film, but many more people write amateur all-consuming collective passion for cinema, so film criticism

has never held an integral cultural role. Nonetheless, they agreed with Frodon that the Internet makes it easier than ever to write about film and have people see it, but harder than ever to get paid for that writing. Morris specifically focused on the ways the social media now allows for greater interaction between critics and readers. All three agreed that aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes are just one aspect, and not the be-all end-all, of film criticism in this decade.

A number score eliminates the nuance on which the best, thoughtful film criticism thrives. Even great movies have flaws, and even terrible movies usually have some redeeming qualities, but numbers cannot illuminate them for us; only critics can.

The consensus in the room seemed to be that film criticism is alive and well, even if, as Ebiri said, “staff film critics at print papers are like the Supreme Court. There are like nine of them and all you can do is wait for one of them to die.” For all the aspiring film critics out there, the going is tough, but not entirely hopeless. As Peary said near the end of the panel, “Critics are the canary in the coal mine for America.” There is value in expertise and there is value in passion. Film criticism will keep moving forward as long as people still care about film.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff Apr. 7, 2017 _ 19

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Pure Comedy is an infinite test

SOURCE: howlandechoes.com

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rony is a defense mechanism. Anyone with a sibling remembers the mocking jeers of a brother or sister parroting back their anguish after the sibling has committed some childhood transgression. A plaintive declaration of the fact—you destroyed my block castle!—is perverted into a sneer: “You destroyed my block castle.” What could you say to that? It was an admission with a wink, signifying: yeah, I sure did, and by investing the boundary that I transgressed with meaning, you have subjugated yourself to me. Loser.

An irony not much more sophisticated than this suffuses Pure Comedy, the third album from California songwriter and provocateur Father John Misty, née J. Tillman, who invented his current po-mo persona in 2012 after a decade of awfully sincere (and just generally awful) solo releases and a brief stint drumming for Fleet Foxes. Since 2012’s Fear Fun, which christened the project and announced Tillman’s new intentions, each album has surpassed the ambition of its predecessors. 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear wedded Tillman’s newfound ironic lens to the theme of love, resulting in a perplexing but surprisingly moving paean to finding someone who shares every facet of your worldly disgust. That album was notable particularly for “Holy Shit” and “Bored in the U.S.A.,” two Randy Newman-esque satires that set the stage for Pure Comedy.

Throughout this sonically gorgeous, thematically sweeping, often frustrating, and deeply corny new album, Tillman targets his barbs at the whole host of human experience—“the comedy of man,” as he puts it in the title track’s first line. Nobody is spared from his mordant critique, and in case you might think, “gee, this is all a bit grandiose,” fear not! He has plenty of barbs reserved for himself as well. Because self-awareness excuses everything.

Are you irked by the self-righteous sanctimony of “Pure Comedy,” with its Richard Dawkins-tier hectoring about “risen zombies” and “celestial virgins”? Look no further than “The Ballad of the Dying Man,” whose subject wonders about “all of the pretentious, ignorant voices that will go unchecked” once he dies. Do you find yourself thinking, somewhere around the halfway point of the thirteen-minute “Leaving L.A.,” that the song could be a little more concise, or at least more varied? Stick around for verse eight (of ten), where Tillman prophesies the end of his career in the form of “some ten-verse chorus-less diatribe.” Tillman recognizes these faults—indeed, he occasionally seems to include them for their ironic correspondence. Nor does this irony remain strictly within the purview of the album’s lyrics: Tillman has written songs for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, but speaks openly in interviews about how pop stars are like “prisoners” to their labels and handlers. He espouses the insidious nature of electronic media, but maintains a notorious internet presence. And most broadly, perhaps, he sings about ugly things— “mascara, blood, ash, and cum,” as he put it on I Love You Honeybear—in an utterly rich, decadent musical setting, and with the kind of soaring, mellifluous voice that you might expect to hear from, well, a band like Fleet Foxes.

For me, Tillman’s insistent metacommentary and self-negation actually makes this a fun listen, sort of like being on the side of your obnoxious sibling as he savages a third party. But I sympathize with those whose tolerance for this sort of thing has been reduced rather than strengthened by the supersaturation of irony in our increasingly omnipresent online culture. It might be worth sticking around, though, for the sheer pleasure of the musical experience, which often bolsters the album’s cutesier (and less

20 _ The Yale Herald

by Chris Cappello YH Staff lyrically strong) moments. The title track swells and sighs with such grace that you can almost restrain a groan at the dancing Trump Pepe that heralds the chorus in the music video. Nearly all of the songs are mid-tempo ballads anchored by delicate keys, and the analog recording lends a palpable warmth and texture to the string arrangements that accentuate “Leaving L.A.” and “A Bigger Paper Bag,” as well as the rich horns and fullon gospel choir of “Total Entertainment Forever.” On “Things That Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution,” Tillman’s falsetto wrings real emotion out of a line about post-apocalyptic “visionaries...developing some products”—a line he could have easily sold with a sneer.

But pretty arrangements and clever jokes can’t cover up a dearth of content, and while Pure Comedy is rich with big ideas, Tillman’s articulation is often too vague, too clunky, or too reliant on one-dimensional references to his source texts. If the idea of a techno-political behemoth of postmodern art called Pure Comedy sounds familiar to you, it’s because most of these ideas were laid down 21 years ago in Infinite Jest, which is a book that J. Tillman really wants you to know that he’s read, or maybe doesn’t, because then you’d realize that he’s aped half of his bleeding edge hot takes from a novel eight years older than Myspace. “Total Entertainment Forever” ends with an image lifted straight from Wallace’s novel: dead bodies, “plugged into our hubs,” basking in the titular entertainment’s glow with rigor mortis smiles. And “Pure Comedy” paraphrases a famous scene from the book in its climax: “How’s this for irony? / Their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs / That they never have to leave.” This was a groaner back in ‘96; now it provokes a double cringe.

Does Tillman think that we’re all so dense and uncultured as to not pick up on these signs—or worse, does he expect a pat on the back for having skimmed the syllabus of R. John Williams’ Intro to Media course? Time after time the album chokes on its own throwaway references, not just to postmodern literature and media theory, but to figures from antiquity: Oedipus, Narcissus (who “would have had a field day if he ever got online”—ugh), Plato, Ovid, et al. This vague engagement with high culture makes the album seem not just “pretentious,” like the subject of the Dying Man’s critiques, but kind of embarrassing. In that song, Tillman satirically portrays a figure we all recognize: a person whose digitally mediated experience comes close to replacing his real life. Just before he dies, he “checks his newsfeed to see what he’s about to miss.” This is hilarious and poignant! The tossed off reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave, which closes the song, is neither.

I once read that Wallace had planned to preface Infinite Jest with a Moby-Dick style section of epigraphs about “addiction,” but that his editor urged him against it. The editor made the right call, because that would have hit readers over the head even harder with its serious literary heft than the finished book does. Pure Comedy needed an editor, too—someone who’s read a little more (or more deeply) than J. Tillman has. Which, consequently, is less than he wants us to believe.

Big Little Lies

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f you had told me that a TV series about suburban moms trying to navigate the intricacies of life in the one percent would leave me shaken by its profundity I would have said I’ve already seen Desperate Housewives, but thanks.

HBO’s limited series Big Little Lies, created and written

by David E. Kelley and based on Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, does so much right: it’s a showcase of brilliant acting, a testament to the power of womanhood, a sobering picture of domestic abuse, a classic whodunit mystery, an aesthetic masterpiece. But mostly it’s just a damn good show.

What lies behind the striking beauty of the cinematography is a dark, twisted truth. At every point, Big Little Lies confuses the line between appearances and realities forcing viewers to fall in love with the imperfect women of Monterey in all their complexity.

From the moment Madeline Martha Mackenzie (Oscarwinner and Executive Producer Reese Witherspoon) takes the mysterious new mom in town, Jane (a grown up Shailene Woodley), and her son Ziggy under her wing en route to their first graders’ first grade orientation, Big Little Lies hits the mark. Along with the elegant, raw Celeste (Academy Award-

winner and all-around goddess Nicole Kidman), these women make a powerhouse trio. They dominate the eerily microcosmic world of their kids’ classroom drama with fiercely loyal Madeline at the helm, who quickly becomes Jane’s guard dog as a classroom schism emerges over Renata Klein’s (Laura Dern) daughter implicating Ziggy as her school bully. But Big Little Lies doesn’t just play out in these elementary school car circle scenes, turning also to flashbacks and a school-fundraiserturned-murder that reveal the dark underbelly of the series.

Indeed, the women’s subplots reveal the ubiquity of violence against women. Madeline navigates the dick-measuring contest between her well-meaning but mostly-creepy second husband and her ex, who has started a new life with the enviably laid back and hip Bonnie, played beautifully by Zoë Kravitz.

We learn that Jane has brought her son to Monterey to start a new life. She sleeps with a gun under her pillow as she relives memories of Ziggy’s conception, a violent rape at the hands of a man she had just met and who left her for dead in a hotel room. And, most strikingly, we witness the unexpected hidden life of Celeste—a woman who seems to have it all. A former accomplished lawyer and the now-housewife of Perry (True

Blood’s Alexander Skarsgard), she wears long sleeve shirts to hide the bruises he leaves on her, a reality she keeps similarly concealed. Celeste’s struggle to accept her own vulnerability plays out in the room of her therapist-turned-exclusive-confidant. The depth that director Jean-Marc Vallée and actor/ co-producer Kidman bring to Celeste’s character stands out in what was already a brilliant series.

In the series’ culminating moment, the women unite to prevail over their abuse. It is this dramatic final incident that drives home the genius of Big Little Lies. After the murder, we are left with an image of the five women, carefree and playing with their children on the California sand, no husbands in sight. Even at their best, the men in this series couldn’t hold a candle to the fortitude of these mothers. Big Little Lies was always more about the power of female solidarity than the murder that first introduces us to Madeline, Jane, and Celeste.

Turns out that the biggest little lie is that they needed the men at all.

beat it up, Beat Pills right now” (great product placement) and “Eighty thousand dollar Birkin bag in the Porsche” (very nice!) are my favorites. “Yellow diamonds on you like a glass of lemonaaaade!” he wails. It’s pure fun, and it doesn’t need to be anything else.

Even though Calvin Harris plays it safe—perhaps disappointingly so, considering the number of heavyweights featured on the track—“Heatstroke” is still a successful transformation of Harris’ heavier EDM days (think: “Sweet Nothing,” featuring Florence Welch) into a tropical-pop EDM more along the lines of Kygo, Matoma, and Klingande. The new sound offers a more relaxed escapism through sunshine rather than strobe lights and vague positivity rather than angst.

Is there anything wrong with forgetting who we are for a little while and becoming a struggling actress with a quirky lover in LA or the kind of person who casually leaves $80,000

bags in a Porsche? Not really. Both La La Land and “Heatstroke” find their appeal in glamour and fantasy, but the feelings they invoke, though ephemeral, are real. When Pharrell tells Ariana Grande, “I think I’ve just been inspired,” in the chorus, we’re not sure exactly what he’s talking about, but we can at least share the feeling.

makes up for blunt lyrics with his mellow voice. Songs like “Saved” highlight his impressive vocal delivery, something that I think can only improve with refined lyrics and growing maturity in future productions.

American Teen’s influences are easy to uncover. Most of the songs have a minimalistic beat repetition that resembles Frank Ocean’s work on Blonde. Though Khalid makes attempts to experiment with tempo, pace, and unorthodox audio samples, he unfortunately doesn’t commit to it, sticking instead to safe pop melodies for most of the album. “Therapy,” my favorite song of the 15, is exactly what I wanted more of from the album, and I’m disappointed in Khalid’s lack of confidence to follow through on other tracks. The song reminded me of Frank Ocean’s “Be Yourself” and “Close to You,” although without the melody variations that Ocean can pull off. On the other hand, Khalid should avoid expanding on songs like “Young Dumb & Broke,” which would leave him a contemporary R&B’s Taylor Swift analog, singing uncreative, happy-go-lucky lyrics redeemed only by instrumentals.

No, American Teen isn’t especially praiseworthy, and it’s far from being a polished album. But Khalid does showcase budding talent. All in all, this album can be a playful summer playlist for those poolside kickbacks and late night car rides. I’m excited to follow Khalid’s development as he musically matures. Will Khalid Robinson be Frank Ocean’s successor in the minimalist pop scene? Probably not, but he’ll be a fine accompaniment to the scene.

by Jaclyn Price

“Heatstroke”

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roducer Calvin Harris is clearly vying for 2017’s summer anthem with his latest single “Heatstroke.” Like La La Land, another recent mainstream hit invoking LA cool, the song is pure musical escapism (unless you consider the title an allusion to climate change, but if our president doesn’t care about it, why should you?). “Release, let go, and have a good time,” croons Pharrell. When the ice caps melt, we’ll listen to this song on our yachts.

“Heatstroke” is a mash-up of tropical house and riff-heavy EDM that relies heavily on the star power of Young Thug, Pharrell Williams, and Ariana Grande. But Pharrell and Ariana fade into the background on what is clearly Young Thug’s song. The wind chimes and Marley-esque drums that bring in Young Thug’s first verse set a relaxed, perhaps even aggressively cool tone for the song. This is Young Thug on a beach vacation: all rhythm and not much content. “I’m tryna

by Olivia Burton YH Staff

American Teen

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merican Teen is probably how you remember high school being: rushing highs, insecure lows, and some memorable adolescent moments amidst lots of forgettable lulls as you navigated cliques, classes, parents, and significant others. Khalid’s latest release brings out all of these memories in a 15-song tracklist that would make a wallflower teen smile and sway contentedly from side-to-side in rhythm. The 19-year-old from El Paso, Texas, provides a glimpse of his potential with a debut album that’s worth looking out for.

Aptly titled American Teen, the album is unified by a thread of teenage love that runs smoothly throughout.

This persistent theme buoys the lyrical immaturity of the album with an overall cohesiveness. I won’t criticize Khalid too much for lyrics like “Shake away all the stress off my shoulders / Gonna have a good day / A good day / Because I’m eighteen / And I still live with my parents,” in “8TEEN.” Again, Khalid’s only 19 years old, so I don’t expect complex lyricism from his debut album. But he

by Gabe Rojas YH Staff

Apr. 7, 2017 _ 21

OR IA

NA .TA NG C @ ON YA TA LE CT .ED : U

a

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST being stood up for a phone interview

I dressed up for you

WHAT WE HATE THIS WEEK

soggy socks

oui oui mon ami

the royal “we”

not nearly as good as soggy cigs

Eli’s gone soft. how will I get into my seminar?

letting in 7 percent assassins

low yield can I live? if i invite you to my orgy i want you to come

if you don’t get me that fine shit, I’m calling off the wedding

coarse china

captivity

free Fiona

Apr. 7, 2017 _ 23