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(04/30/14 4:46pm)
As a kid, my favorite food and drink were spaghetti bolognese and Coca-Cola. Yet, after indulging myself in the richness of cakes, Cheese pizzas and meatball spaghettis for five months the dining halls, I’m starting to crave my mother’s meatbone soup.
To me, the taste of Chinese food tends to be three-dimensional: we are better at preserving flavor. For one, Chinese food enhances its taste with a strong aroma. One obvious difference you would find between American and Chinese stir fry is that the Chinese use woks (giant and slightly conical frying vessels) which give it a strong aroma. With the help of the chahn, high fire and dynamic stirring by the cook (to demonstrate the dynamisms of the motion - the verb chahn is sometimes combined with the use of Cantonese swear words), a strong savory aroma of the stir fry can be conjured. There is a method to our choice of ingredients as well. To soak up the juices of the stir fry we add turnips or mushrooms, which preserve the taste of each ingredient within the dish.
I think the reason that Chinese broths (we have very few chowders and heavy soups) are so multi-layered in flavor is because we boil our ingredients for such a long time, that their essences dissolve into the soup. This method of cooking is named the “old fire soup.” Although we use similar ingredients as some other cuisines, such as carrots, pork, vegetables and strong herbs such as cilantro and ginger, the flavor of the soup is much more full-bodied and savory.
While typical European food that I have tasted in America, such as meat dishes, pastas, and cream soups tend to be heavier, the Chinese developed lighter food with sharper flavors and scents. While America has the more versatile ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and salt, we augment our tastes with strong smelling shrimp pastes, fish sauce, a variety of chili oils, scallions, ginger and pungent fermented tofu. We also use more unusual ingredients, including a huge variety of mountain herbs and mushrooms, snakes, “the thousand year old egg,” durians (a large fruit with a strong odor and thorn-covered husk), fried larvae, scorpions and masked palm civet (an animal similar to a raccoon which lives in South-East Asia).
Like how canned food was invented for war or sausages for preservation through winter, cuisine is shaped by our environment and historical events. One explanation I have for Chinese use of such marginal ingredients and strong flavoring is that it is our way to adapt to hunger. How else could we have discovered how tasty fermented tofu is? The taste of strong condiments overwhelms hunger, and chili, traditionally used in the spicy cuisine of the Northwestern parts of China, is thought to help one warm up from the cold.
While Chinese food is flavorful, I associate European food here with a sense of comfort and orderliness. I love how rich and satisfying Mac and Cheese is, how bread is measured and orderly, divided into neat slices. I am fascinated by the sense of order associated with baking: how all ingredients are meticulously measured by specific utensils and measuring units and executed step by step carefully. The fact that you can indulge in the richness of spaghetti bolognese or a chocolate cake but not drown in the deluge of overwhelming scents can also be nice. Sometimes, these scents can be intrusive and distracting, should it come from someone else. I wonder whether this has to with the greater respect to privacy in the Western world, where every individual is divided with a separate serving on their dish in formal meals.
As I’ve grown older, I have learned to the savor the cold bitter melon and green tea of Chinese cuisine. There is a saying in China: “the days will be long if you are half-full or half-hungry.” Because of the fullness of flavor and having less smell and scent, Western food sometimes feel generic and too perfect. I long to taste food that is simple and spare. I guess my change of taste shows that I am starting to appreciate the subtler joys in life.
(04/24/14 1:02am)
EatReal has made strides in recent weeks toward bringing sustainable food to the College’s dining halls. Founded in 2013, EatReal aims to raise awareness of “real” food and match the national Real Food Challenge’s standards by increasing the proportion food that falls into at least two of the following categories: local, fair-labor, ecologically sound and humane with regard to the treatment of animals.
This week, EatReal is hosting the second annual Real Food Week. When the event was held last year, over half the student body signed a petition to dedicate a larger portion of the dining budget to purchasing real food. In a meeting between EatReal and Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Patrick Norton this past fall, Norton said that he was pleased to see student support for real food, but made it clear that more was needed before funding would be approved. In order to prove the need for an increased budget, EatReal was tasked to find out how real the food already was.
“There wasn’t much clarity as to the state of food sourcing at Middlebury,” Ben Clark ’16 said. “Most institutional dining facilities, including Middlebury, source their products from distributors.”
Mass distributors rarely reveal where their food comes from, which makes it hard for the College to know it is purchasing “real” food. As such, EatReal has been working to collect data on the sustainability and sources of food purchased by the College now.
An Environmental Council Grant allowed EatReal to employ four student-interns to spend 2014 J-term categorizing all dining hall ingredients into the four real food categories. The project analyzed meals served in the dining halls in October 2012 and March 2013, which EatReal deemed “representative months” because local summer produce allows for more real food during the warmer months, but the opposite is true in the winter.
Preliminary results suggest that the College spends approximately 20 percent of its dining hall food budget on real food, which is in line with guidelines set by the Real Food Challenge. When it was founded, EatReal sought to lead the College to devote at least 20 percent of its dining budget toward real food by 2020.
“We’re moderately happy with those results, but we think we can do a lot better,” Noah Stone ’16.5 said.
“We think it’s a realistic goal to increase our quota to 30 percent [by 2016],” Clark said.
Clark cited the University of California at Berkeley and University of California at Santa Cruz as leaders in the quest for “real” food. Both schools are hoping to spend 40 percent of their food budget on local food by 2020.
Clark noted that although they are much larger than Middlebury, both schools have the great advantage of being located adjacent to the enormous resource of the California central valley, which grows fresh produce year round.
In March, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz and Norton challenged EatReal to address the problem of overconsumption as part of their report on food at the College — a component of the J-term study expected to be completed later this month.
Old Chapel voiced concerns regarding dish loss and exorbitant amounts of food waste at the College.
Clark cited the forthcoming swipe system as an example of how waste can be reduced.
“As it stands right now, the dining halls have very few ways of measuring anything. [The swipe system] is a great opportunity to cut down on operational costs and offset that with an increased food budget that allows for more real food,” he said.
Ultimately, however, Clark believes that “it comes down to what people are thinking and seeing [when they decide what and how much] to eat.”
As such, EatReal is planning to continue the Weigh the Waste campaign that lost steam in the middle of the fall semester, and is also working with Dining Services to create a more detailed food labeling process, which is expected to be implemented soon.
At the end of the month, EatReal will meet with Old Chapel to present their complete research findings. With this report, they will ask for a 10 percent increase in Dining Services’ food budget, equivalent to roughly 370,000 dollars, by 2016. These additional funds will cover the costs of more expensive real food replacements for current ingredients.
Clark emphasized that increased dining hall funding will not turn into a zero sum game — spending more money on food will not take away from financial aid or other departments.
“I really believe that we are on the cusp,” Clark said. “In a month from now, I think we could say yes, we have the funding for more real food.”
Through this year’s Real Food Week programming, EatReal hopes to update the College community on the progress of the Real Food Movement and address some broader issues. A discussion about local migrant workers and a keynote speech by Abbey Willard of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture will emphasize the enormous community benefits that real food can have.
“If you’re a farm or small producer in Vermont, signing on with an institution like Middlebury is the best thing that can happen to you,” Stone said.
Global Food Studies Coordinator Sophie Esser Calvi, who serves as an advisor to EatReal and other food-related student organizations on campus, emphasized the necessity for the College to diversify the sources of its “real” food.
“Local farmers just don’t produce the quantities that we would need to serve our students,” she said.
(04/16/14 5:06pm)
Bill McKibben
Schumann Distinguished Scholar
It's never been a huge problem for me. I grew up writing for newspapers, and that tends to cure you of perfectionism: you know that half the job is to get it done on time. I think sometimes you have to say: I'm going to write as well as I can right now, and when I wake up I'm going to go over it again to make sure it's good. Making sure the first time through can be a little daunting.
Marion Wells
Associate Professor of English and American Literatures
When I hit a roadblock in writing I have a few techniques:
1. Make a cup of tea. This can take a while, done properly and gives the mind a chance to mull things over.
2. Just start writing – even if the structure and organization of the piece as a whole are still elusive, writing a "core" piece of it can be very helpful
3. Leave the writing alone and think about teaching instead! Using a different part of the brain can help unlock the issues causing the block.
Christopher Klyza
Stafford Professor of Public Policy, Political Science and Environmental Studies
My writing in the years since I've been at Middlebury (I arrived in 1990) has primarily been aimed at an academic audience. I've written and edited several books as well as articles, book reviews and book chapters. In general, I don't get writer's block. But I do sometimes have a hard time getting started on a new project. When that is the case I make myself start writing — it could be something from the middle of the paper (such as a case study) or a description of the theoretical framework I will use rather than the introduction. I also don't worry so much about the quality of the writing, knowing that I will go back and revise it. At the end of the day, having 4-5 pages of text often primes the writing pump for future productivity. I also tend to think about the overall project better when I have done some writing.
Kathryn Kramer
Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures
Have a baby. There’s nothing like knowing you have only two hours of child care to focus the attention. (A descriptive, not a prescriptive, remedy.)
There are many devices and prompts, like imagining that the world is coming to an end in twenty minutes and what you write will be the sole remaining record, or writing without ever using the letter e, for example. But as it’s generally construed, writer’s block (which Gilbert Sorrentino calls inspiration’s “idiot brother”) has probably most to do with not wanting to write what you think you want to write, like a term paper or a letter of recommendation. There’s some dishonesty, either of intent or execution. So it’s interesting to figure out what that’s about.
Michael Sheridan
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College
I think that the key to overcoming writer's block is to start writing and let yourself write junk. Now that you've gotten started, you can keep going and later go back and either fix or delete the junk. The other trick I often use is that I make myself explain whatever it is that I'm supposed to be writing about in ordinary non-specialist language, as if I was giving an overview of what I'm trying to write about to a patient, sympathetic and wholly ignorant friend. That sketch becomes the first paragraph (which may be junk, and that's OK). The second strategy for curing writer's block is to make your writing something that you need to do for other people, not just for yourself or the text itself. For example, I often propose a paper for an academic conference on a topic that I haven't written about yet, and then the conference becomes both a deadline and group of people depending on me to deliver. Finally, chocolate never fails to motivate me. One page done means I can have one piece, no exceptions.
Julia Alvarez
Writer-in-Residence
When the writer William Stafford was asked the same question, he replied that he never suffered from writer's block, all he had to do was lower his standards. I don't think he really meant that he would settle for schlock, just that part of the block is that the writer is getting in the way of the writing by worrying too much about performance, and measuring up. At that point, just forget about achievement and write to limber up, write as finger exercises, write in a journal, write a letter. (Whoever does that anymore? I do!) The point is to keep up the agility, the flexibility, the practice of the craft. Writing, all creativity, I think, should have an element of play, self-forgetfulness, fun.
On the other hand, times when I'm forcing it, I realize that the balance is off. I need to get out, get involved in the things I care deeply about, issues in my community and beyond. We are writers in a context, storytellers in a tribe. To quote another great, Charlie Parker, the jazz musician, said, "If you don't live it, it ain't going to come out of your horn."
So there are a few prescriptions for writer's block, courtesy of Dr. Alvarez, via Drs Stafford and Parker: Keep Doing the Writing but forget about the performance/measurement, and when all else fails: go out there and get involved in life itself – fall in love, plant a garden, save a forest, work in a soup kitchen, teach kids to make balloon animals and then take them over to the local assisted living facility.
Christopher Shaw
Visiting Lecturer, English and American Literatures; Associate Director, Program in Environmental Journalism
“Work every day without fear or expectation.” (Somebody said that.) Always show up at the desk or notebook, or, god help us, computer screen. In fact, if you are stuck I suggest returning to the basic and essential physical act of making words on paper with a pen – or maybe a piece of burned charcoal from a fire. Don't judge, at least for a while. Keep going. Put it aside. Then go back and see what you have, if a structure or a point seem to be emerging that you can begin building on. Some days it works and some days it doesn't. Don't judge. Go back and work again.
It's different for school work and creative work, of course. Deadlines are useful even without an assignment. Desperation often breaks the log jam.
Stop fighting, stop judging, stop comparing yourself to the great. The writing NEVER turns out the way it gleams and beckons in your mind. In the draft stage you need to accept being terrible. As an editor, I have worked with some of the best full-time deadline writers and I can tell you their first stabs are gobbledygook. But you need to start. Don't wait.
Timothy Billings
Professor of English and American Literatures
I asked that question of William Stafford once when he came to give a reading at Pomona College many years ago when I was an undergraduate there, and his immediate answer was: ‘Lower your standards and keep writing.’ What I love about that advice is that it recognizes that “writer’s block” is nothing but your internal editor harrying you, saying that what you are about to write is not good enough – and that what you most need to do is to trust yourself. The downside is that Stafford’s many wonderful books contain not a few mediocre poems written no doubt when he would otherwise have had writer’s block. And yet without those poems – which many people have enjoyed, I’m sure, even if they didn’t do much for me – he might never have written the truly extraordinary poems that knock my socks off. Stafford certainly wrote more books than I ever will. For a certain kind of person, I think that’s still probably the best advice there is, but I’m just not that kind of person. What works best for me is to stand up and start talking. Whenever I find myself paralyzed because my sentences are becoming tangled and intractable, I stand up and start talking to myself. I pace back and forth and gesture with my hands (probably looking a bit loony, to be honest) exactly as though I were explaining the issues to an interested group of fellow scholars or students. Somehow the language comes to me that way because if I imagine an audience sitting in front of me I can’t just stand there – I’ve got to say something – and the exercise gives me focus. I then lean over my desk and type in what I have just said, sentence by sentence, and keep pacing. (It helps to be a good talker, but one becomes that by writing.) So my alternative advice is: when the words on the page feel intractable, return to your voice; when the ideas in your head feel tangled, remember your audience.
Vendela Vida
Keynote Speaker (April) and Class of '93
If a scene’s not working or giving you trouble, it can help to think about how you’d approach it if you were telling the story in a different medium. That is, if you can’t figure out how a scene works in prose from, how would you write the scene if it was a film, or a play? I find this technique can help me a lot when I’m stuck.
Another remedy: try writing first thing when you get up in the morning. Before e-mail, before anything. If you write right away, before your doubts or second thoughts awaken, you can keep them at bay.
(04/16/14 3:58pm)
I watched a video recently of a trio of prominent philosophers discussing what’s been termed as the “linguistic turn” in contemporary philosophy. In a nutshell, the linguistic turn marked a movement, beginning with Nineteenth-Century German philosopher Gottlob Frege and culminating in the work of the Twentieth-Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, where philosophers got pretty bent up over the new idea that mind, consciousness and pretty much every other metaphysical topic philosophers deal with can only be rightly understood as an aspect of our linguistic lives. Our monopoly on rationality, that special human characteristic (the consensus on which has pretty much been on the books since the Greeks), became attributed to our status as users of language that stemmed from thought which mirrors or represents some logical structure.
What’s shown by a New York Times online article from last week, however, might help illustrate some of the research being done that’s starting to challenge these preconceived notions about whether or not there’s reason to be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. New work done with crows, which required the animals to learn and then apply tasks like picking up stones and dropping them into tubes filled with water to raise water levels, allowing them to obtain rewards. The crows were able to learn to differentiate between different variations of the test, including instances where they were presented a choice between tubes filled with sand instead of water, objects that sank or floated, and solid or hollow objects. Sometimes the crows weren’t quite as savvy, as when they were unable to learn how to deal with instances where part of the testing apparatus was hidden or how water rose more quickly in a smaller tube. The takeaway from the study is, however, that the crows were seemingly conscious of the consequences of their actions – in a sense, the crows were cognizant of the causal relationships that were at play in their actions and the tasks they faced.
Now while these results don’t conclusively prove that there’s anything exactly like the dynamics of human intelligence or human mind at play in the heads of corvids, they might make us ask whether or not our standards for admitting that mind and language exist outside of human interactions are a little too strict. Obviously, one of the defining aspects of human language is that it puts us in touch with those outside of us in such a way as to make it apparent that they have minds. When we speak with someone else, there seems to be an aspect of immediacy provided by the commonality, in a way that makes meanings and intentions available in a way that might not appear to seem possible with non-language users.
Yet at the same time, if we can acknowledge that corvids can perceive something like our own notions of causality, would it really be as controversial to make the maybe-not-so-far-fetched claim that there’s some aspect of representation going along with that perception? Two weeks ago, when Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Tyler Burge came and spoke about primitive forms of mind, it seemed as though he was more than willing to admit that some animals might be capable of rudimentary forms of perception. When asked whether or not these same animals could be said to have a mind like we do, he denied the possibility.
But if we’re willing to concede that non-human animals can interact with one another socially, or even with us socially, why are we still so hesitant to allow that these interactions might constitute some primitive form of language? Now I never had any pet more complex than a fish or two, but believe me, I’ve seen how you dog lovers out there interact with your animals. Is the way we train dogs to respond to calls or live in a house all that different from the way we teach our children how to act? The way we intuitively act about and live with our pets seems to suggest that we think that there’s meaning in those relationships; at least one thing those three philosophers I spoke of earlier were able to agree upon was that meaning can’t exist outside of language. So, it might seem relatively straightforward to there conclude that if there’s meaning in an interaction, there needs to be language.
We still, however, seem hesitant to want to admit that there’s language or mind out there in the world beyond the one contained in human heads. I think so long as we’re so unwilling to admit that there are experiencing creatures beside ourselves, we’ll struggle to rationalize acting morally towards non-human life. If you ask me, it’s an unfortunate bit of hubris.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(04/09/14 9:59am)
Emma ’14 first snorted Adderall halfway through sophomore year.
A friend took the orange 20-milligram (mg) pill and crushed it into a light powder with the bottom of a mug, before guiding the mass into four equal lines with a credit card and instructing Emma to get a tampon. She removed the applicator and blew her first line, beginning a recreational use that continues to this day.
“It was almost euphoric, it felt like I could do anything.” she said. “But the next morning, I had the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life.”
More than two years later, Adderall has become a constant companion to Emma’s academic and social life.
“Recreationally, I wish I never tried it in the first place. Freshman year and the beginning of sophomore year before I tried it, I really liked just being drunk, and that was fine with me. Now in my friend group, that’s never enough. We can’t just all hang out and drink and go out. Someone always wants to do Adderall to take it to the next level.”
Emma’s story is one of an increasing number that point to a new reality across colleges and universities nationwide, as a wave of high-performing and highly stimulated students strive for top grades and are willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
Over the past 13 months, the Campus has followed numerous current and former students — all of whom requested anonymity and were given pseudonyms and, for some, different genders for legal and social reasons — as they grappled balancing their relationships with the powerful psychostimulant with academic, social and societal expectations. The Campus also interviewed experts on the frontlines, from psychologists prescribing the drug to neuroscientists studying their affects on the brain.
Data on psychostimulant use at the College is hard to come by. In a student-led study last spring, 16 percent of Middlebury students who responded to the anonymous survey reported illegally using the drug, slightly above the 5 to 12 percent estimated nationally. Of that percentage, only 4 percent reported having prescriptions. While the data is scarce, the stories of use and abuse paint a complicated picture, in which the line between prescribed use and illicit self-medication is murky at best and farcical at worst.
Whether Adderall is a life-changing medicine or an unfair performance enhancer depends on whom you talk to. What is clear is that we are now living in the Adderall Generation, a reality that is rarely talked about but apparent just below the surface. You may not have a prescription or snort the drugs on weekends, but psychostimulants are here to stay, and they have the potential to affect nearly every aspect of life at the College.
...
When Emma was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in grade school, her parents refused to give consent for psychostimulant medication, instead resorting to behavioral therapy and tutoring. But when she got to the College, the workload became too much. After struggling to keep up as a first-year, she was prescribed Adderall as she went into her sophomore year.
“I remember the first day that I took it,” she said. “I felt really uncomfortable in situations other than doing work and didn’t really know what to do with my hands or where to look with my eyes, but when I was doing work it felt like I was in that movie Bruce Almighty when he’s typing on the computer really fast.”
She was first prescribed two 10mg fast acting Adderall a day. When she did not feel anything, the dosage was upped to 20mg three times a day. Her doctor told her to only take two pills a day, but prescribed her three to make sure she did not run out. Because Adderall is a schedule II controlled substance, Emma cannot fill her prescription across state lines in Vermont.
While Adderall has only been around since the late 1990s, psychostimulants have been ingrained in American culture. First discovered in 1887, they had no pharmacological use until 1934 when they were sold as an inhaler for nasal decongestant. Once the addictive properties of the drug became known, psychostimulants became a schedule II controlled substance in the early 1970s.
“If you look at the history of amphetamines, it was a miracle chemical, but they didn’t know what to do with it,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology Rebecca Tiger. “It couldn’t just be thrown on the open market, so they called it a drug, but then they needed to find a disease for it to treat. Amphetamines have been racing around looking for a disease because people want to use them.”
Psychostimulants regulate impulsive behavior and improve attention span and focus by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved in natural rewards such as food, water and sex. Depending on the dosage, psychostimulants can boost dopamine levels 2 - 10 times more than a natural reward.
Put simply, dopamine is a key driver of happiness. The chemical is the key to many popular drugs — from opiates like heroin to amphetamines like MDMA. The release of dopamine in the brain after taking psychostimulants causes the euphoria users often feel. But when you constantly feed your brain dopamine, it can diminish your ability to make it independently.
While her grades shot up during her sophomore year, Emma felt the full force of the side effects. Growing up, Emma was outgoing and vivacious, but the Adderall made her reserved and quiet. As a result, she was often forced into a zero-sum game between academics and basic social happiness. Adderall often took precedence.
“I tried to avoid hanging out with people when I was on it, but that’s hard since it lasts a pretty long time, and then coming off it at night, it would make me really emotional and sad. It was really hard when I was coming down off of it to tell myself this is the Adderall and I shouldn’t actually be sad about whatever I was feeling.”
The sadness Emma felt after coming down from her Adderall is called anhedonia, or the loss of pleasure from things we naturally find rewarding.
As her relationship with the drug evolved, she learned basic parameters of what she could and could not do with Adderall. If she took it too late in the evening, she wouldn’t sleep. If she did not take any for a few days, she had to take it early in the day or risk insomnia. But when finals rolled around, all bets were off.
“Especially during finals, it got kind of aggressive. I would take it at like 10 p.m., work all night, go to bed at 4 a.m., wake up at a normal time, take another one, and continue doing work.”
...
There are more than a dozen different medications currently on the market to treat ADHD. While there are slight differences between medications, Adderall and Ritalin have become the poster children for psychostimulants. Emma has tried both.
If the College has an expert on the psychostimulants, it is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Clarissa Parker. Before arriving in 2013, Parker spent 10 years studying genetic risk factors associated with drug abuse and dependence, including sensitivity to the reinforcing effects of psychostimulants such as methamphetamine in mice. Parker said one of her main concerns is younger and younger ages at which psychostimulants are prescribed.
“For me, the problem lies in the fact that so many people take it during a time when their pre-frontal cortex is still developing,” she said. “We know this part of the brain continues to develop into the mid-20s. When you combine that with the age group that is most likely to abuse drugs — high school and college — it’s dangerous.”
For big pharmaceuticals, stimulated minors means major profits. In numerous articles, the New York Times has reported on how the industry has lobbied heavily to push for medication over behavioral therapy.
“Studies have shown that there isn’t much long-term difference between Adderall usage and behavioral therapy for treating ADHD,” Parker said. “There are other ways to get the same effect, they just aren’t as immediate.”
Parker was quick to draw a line between people who take the drug responsibly under medical supervision and those who take it without a prescription, those who crush and snort their medication or those who take more than prescribed, repeatedly clarifying that the negative side effects affect those who abuse it. But Tiger thinks that line has little to do with medicine.
“The line you draw between people who need it and people who don’t is a cultural construct,” she said. “My interest is in who draws that line, and what their interest is in drawing it. People rarely use drugs the way they are supposed to, so in a way we are all abusing these drugs.”
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Besides attending the College and taking Adderall, Max ’15 and Emma have little in common. A third-year lacrosse player, Max never encountered psychostimulant use while in high school, but quickly found it at the College.
“I remember when I was a first-year, and I was in this kid’s room, and he was crushing up pills. I didn’t know what they were doing until he just told me ‘doing homework.’ They called it skizzing.”
With the stress of midterms building four months into his college career, Max took Adderall for the first time.
“I wrote a five-page paper in an hour,” Max described. “That’s when I realized, ‘this is nuts.’ There are a lot of athletes on different teams that can’t do work without snorting Adderall. Anything that requires putting your mind to: Adderall. That’s what steered me away from taking it a lot. I couldn’t get like that.”
Max does not have a prescription and estimated that he takes it five times a semester. Across athletics, he estimated that 60 percent use psychostimulants as a tool to get schoolwork done. When asked how easy it would be to obtain five pills, he took out his phone – “one text.”
In the 2013 survey, conducted by Ben Tabah ’13, over 20 percent of males reported experimenting with psychostimulants compared to only 10 percent of females. When asked about the difference, Parker noted that in animal models she had worked with, there were no sex differences in psychostimulant usage.
“You can teach a mouse to self-administer drugs, and there aren’t sex differences in the amount they administer stimulants like cocaine and dexamphetamine (an ingredient in Adderall) which suggests to me the issue is not about sex, but more about gender,” she said.
Social constructions around Adderall are apparent beyond just gender usage. Cocaine is often viewed as a whole different class of drug socially than Adderall, despite their similar chemical makeups, effects, and legal classification.
“Coke is scary to me,” Emma said. “It seems more intense to me because it is illegal and it could be cut with anything.”
“Coke is different than Adderall,” Max said. “The fact that [Adderall] can be prescribed to you means it’s not as harmful. The only downside is that you don’t sleep. That’s the only fight you face when taking it. If the amount of people taking Adderall were doing Coke, it would be considered a huge problem.”
Max is exactly the type of student Executive Director of Health and Counseling Services Gus Jordan is worried about.
“There is the notion that it is a quick fix, and that it’s safe because it comes in prescription form, but you are really playing the edge if you take these drugs without proper supervision,” he said. “We know that if you crush an Adderall pill, and snort it, it hits your brain in ways akin to cocaine, and with similar risks for dependence. This is such a powerful and potentially dangerous medication, that once it gets into a community and used in uncontrolled ways, people get hurt; you’re participating in that by selling or giving it away, and you don’t know if you will really harm someone down the road.”
In his 17 years at the College, Jordan has served in a number of student life roles and taught clinical courses in the psychology department. He said that psychostimulant use and abuse has only really come onto his radar in the past five years.
“Right now, it’s the hype about how great Adderall is that everybody seems to be listening to. But we don’t really know what happens when this drugs is used recreationally or without a prescription. I suspect that there are a lot of darker stories that aren’t being told, especially about the addictive qualities of these drugs, tragic stories that are buried out there.”
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Asking Emma whether or not she would do it all over again is an impossible question for her to answer. Her views on Adderall are as complex as her usage. On one hand, she vehemently attests that without the drug, she would not be at the College. But she is acutely aware of the power the drug has, from sleepless nights to unwrapping tampon applicators time and time again.
“I think my path was necessary, but I don’t know if it was the right one in hindsight. I wish I didn’t have to take so much, but from trying all the other doses, nothing else really worked.”
Her parents know about her use because they pay for it, but have no idea about the recreational use — “they would be shocked and really mad.”
When asked whether or not she would let her kids take Adderall, she quickly said no before retracing her steps.
“Not until it got really bad, and not before the end of high school or even college. I think it’s going to get banned, or at least prescribed a lot weaker, just because it is addictive and being prescribed so ubiquitously,” she said. “It’s just going to end badly.”
Listen to Kyle Finck discuss this series on Vermont Public Radio.
Additional Reporting by ALEX EDEL, Layout Assistance by HANNAH BRISTOL, and Photos by ANTHEA VIRAGH
(03/19/14 5:14pm)
A blizzard raged outside the Robert A. Jones ’59 House last Wednesday evening, but inside, the conference room was filled to its capacity of 100.
Students, faculty and community members had braved the biting wind, driving snow and deeply blanketed roads and sidewalks to attend this year’s Scott A. Margolin ’99 Lecture in Environmental Affairs: Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity, Kieran Suckling. The Center for Biological Diversity is a unique non-profit that works primarily through the Endangered Species Act and the judicial system to meet conservation goals. Suckling established and oversees the nation’s most extensive endangered species list.
In his talk, “Saving Life on Earth: A Moral Rejoinder to the Anthropocene,” Suckling spoke about the literally earthshattering impact humanity has had on the planet with our cities, agriculture and waste overpowering natural forces, and how this has precipitated the idea of calling our geological period the Anthropocene.
Suckling opined that the most egregious and unethical environmental consequence of human activity is the rapid mass decline of species that, before the nineteenth-century, had persisted through millions of years of great environmental flux. He drew attention to the fact that thousands of species are currently on the verge of extinction at rates up to 10,000 times the natural rate. He warned that the earth is heading toward its sixth-mass extinction, an unprecedented catastrophe because one dominant species, Homo sapiens, are its sole instigators.
The speaker argued that naming this geological age after ourselves would intensify anthropocentricism, exacerbating mankind’s sense of exclusive entitlement over the earth. Suckling pointed out that referring to this era in human terms is not an innovative answer to ecological destruction, but an excuse for reinforcing and exerting human superiority.
“Anthropocene thinking is the cause of the extinction crisis, not its solution,” he said.
Suckling stressed that enormous population growth will rapidly increase biodiversity loss in the near future as development to accommodate the increasing number of people pushes further into dwindling wild habitat. He emphasized the prime moral imperative of preserving natural spaces and the nonhumans that inhabit them. He stated that because animal agriculture is the most ecologically harmful human activity, the most effective step to counter environmental degradation as an individual is to renounce meat.
“Forget the Prius; buy a Hummer and eat a carrot. You’ll do a lot more for the planet that way,” he joked.
Before his presentation, Suckling had met with a group of environmental studies faculty and staff, and dropped in on Klyza’s American Environmental Politics class. The professor expressed his satisfaction with the speaker’s visit to campus and the turnout at the event despite the difficult weather.
“Suckling had a full and good visit to campus—even in the midst of a major snow storm! It was a great testament to our students,” Klyza said.
The biggest takeaway for conservation biology major, Jeannie Bartlett ’15, was Suckling’s perspective on reconciling conservation with the needs of marginalized human groups in the face of land scarcity created by corporations.
“He encouraged us to reframe the perceived conflict so that both conservationists and indigenous people work together against the corporate power structures that have pitted those groups against each other,” she said. “We have already begun to see that kind of collaboration in resistance of the Keystone XL Pipeline where climate activists and First Nations people in Canada and the U.S. have recognized their shared goals and formed a powerful movement.”
Bartlett was, however, hoping for more insight into how the Center for Biological Diversity operates.
“I would have liked to hear more about how his organization actually pursues its work, because from what I’ve read they are very strategic, tenacious and successful,” she said.
Suckling encouraged the audience to think about the repercussions of human dominance over homes of species we are encroaching upon. We left with a profound appreciation for the fundamental reality that our own survival hinges on theirs. He set the stage for a discussion about what we must actively do to curb this ecological disaster, beyond merely playing with new names to characterize an urgent historical problem.
(03/13/14 1:31am)
On Monday Mar. 10, Community Council met to discuss the proposal of the new Chromatic Social House, continuing last week’s discussion. During the meeting, the Council passed the motion to recommend the approval of the house to Ronald Liebowitz, President of the College. This new organization will reside in Prescott House, the former location of Delta.
After the disbandment of Delta last spring, the Residential Life Committee decided to offer it as either a social house or a superblock for the 2014-2015 academic year, and reviewed applications for both. Doug Adams, Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life, discussed the process through which the committee reviewed the applications.
“The final debate process took place overlapping the social house applications and the superblock applications in determining what the best fit is for the campus, what will add to the social scene of the campus and what will diversify the social scene of the campus,” Adams said.
The new Chromatic House will focus on promoting student arts. It will provide more practice and performance space for music students as well as a space to display student artwork. The organization had already been approved by the Student Government Association and the Residential Life Committee when the Community Council meeting took place.
Many members of the Council thought that the house would enrich the social and especially art scene at Middlebury.
“One thing I really see at Middlebury is this desire to create a dichotomy between ‘this is me and this is my resume and this is what I do after class’ and the party scene, which looks so disparate,” said President of the Student Government Association Rachel Liddell ’15. “I think it’s a good message to say your interest as a person can be connected to how you spend a Friday night. […] It’s nice to recognize that this type of socialization is social.”
Luke Carroll Brown ’14, Co-Chair of Community Council, holds a similar view.
“When I came to Middlebury, and for many of my friends, there is this understanding that social houses represent that college scene we saw in movies like Animal House,” Brown said. “That is not at all what it is when you ask the house members, but it is an anticipated understanding of how you act in these circumstances and places … I see broadening our understanding of social houses to be a very good thing, something that might help current social houses that have a more of a fraternal feel and for those that don’t.”
A few members of the Council, however, felt that making the house a social house would not work so well.
“I think this house is a great idea […] but calling it a social house would, in my view, be a real loss,” said Professor of American Studies and English and American Literatures Will Nash. “There is a special interest here, which is tied to the curriculum, and that is not what the social house scene is about. […] There is a mechanism for us on campus for us to have people who want to live together who have a common interest that the curriculum serves, and that mechanism is the special interest house.”
Chris Thompson from the Department of Public Safety also voiced his concerns.
“How many nights are you going to have live bands playing down there where people are going to be strolling in with alcohol?” Thompson asked. “Then you have all these artworks on display … The last thing you want is getting someone’s artwork getting destroyed because there are a bunch of kids going down there with alcohol to listen to live music.”
The Council moved to vote on the motion to recommend the approval of Chromatic House as a new social house to President Liebowitz. The motion passed with sixteen in support and one abstention. If President Liebowitz approves the house, it will gain social house status in the fall.
(03/12/14 6:55pm)
This past Sunday, a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Global Warming? Not Always” made the claim that “the scientific evidence does not support an argument that human-induced climate change has played any appreciable role in the current California drought.” To support his argument, NOAA climate scientist Martin P. Hoerling writes that droughts of this magnitude are nothing new to Californians — similar, or even more severe, droughts have occurred in California in the 1930s and 1970s, suggesting that the recent dearth of rainfall in California might fit in perfectly with the observed historical precipitation and climate patterns. In turn, Hoerling concludes that we can’t lay claim to the knowledge that the draught is the product of an anthropogenically changed climate; my concern, however, is whether or not the claim to such knowledge should be all that important to us.
In contemporary philosophy, the standard account of knowledge — that is, the criteria that must be met in order to claim we “know” something — is tripartite, consisting in “justified true belief.” In short, we can say we know something if it is a belief about the world that we actually hold, when that belief accurately represents what is the case out there in the world, and that belief is held appropriately or with good reason. So while it might seem that I’ve just said the same thing twice in a row, there are actually important delineations that can be drawn between these three criteria that I won’t go into here. What’s important to us here is that we might take the claim Hoerling makes in his article to assert that in terms of empirical evidence, our claim to knowledge about whether the droughts in California were caused by anthropogenic climate change in some way fails the tripartite test. I’m now going to propose that we shouldn’t care whether or not it does; or, in a somewhat milder sense, that it doesn’t make much difference.
A recent joint publication produced by the National Academy of Sciences and British Royal Society outlines what, according to climate scientists, is our best evidence supporting the notion that humans are in fact changing the climate. The executive summary: we now, maybe more than ever, know we are. Our understanding of physics, climate models, and fingerprinting of climate change patterns has shown us that there is no realistic way that global temperatures and carbon levels could have increased the way they have without human involvement as it’s played out since we’ve industrialized.
The natural processes that have helped bring about the 0.8 degree (C) warming of the atmosphere are complex and multifaceted, such that I think it would be hard for us to deny that they are the same processes aggravating the conditions in California. Warmer weather means a longer growing season, which leads to increased water usage in commercial food production, as well as in the residential sector. While recent research might propose that “recent long-term droughts in western North America cannot definitively be shown to lie outside the very large envelope of natural precipitation variability in this region,” we might be able to make a claim to other important pieces of knowledge: that if global warming trends continue, human life as we know it will have to change dramatically and struggle more and more to respond to droughts like this one, we won’t be able to bring carbon levels back to pre-industrialized levels in any time-scale smaller than that of millennia, and countless species of plants and animals will go extinct. Fortunately, the NAS and Royal Society agree.
We might also make a different kind of claim — that it would, for one reason or another, be morally wrong for all of the above mentioned things to take place, if we can prevent their doing so. There’s also a funny thing about moral propositions: our criteria for saying that we know something to be true morally often differ from those things we claim to know empirically. Moral knowledge, at least in ordinary cases, seems not to request from us the same standards for empirical truth or justification. We might simply say that it would be a grave injustice for people to be marginalized by water shortages or biological diversity to be sacrificed for economic profit because we believe it to be so.
This article was not intended to lay out any kind of formal argument about the conditions we deem necessary to make claims for knowledge, or whether or not moral knowledge is the same kind of knowledge as empirical scientific knowledge. I think it’s obvious that the two should inform one another. “Knowing” whether or not one catastrophic drought was connected to anthropogenic climate change shouldn’t affect our decision to take the actions necessary to move towards a sustainable, resilient future.
(03/12/14 6:53pm)
I don’t know how many months I spent at Middlebury before more than just a few people knew that I hunted. It wasn’t that I was expecting a negative response to my hobby — it was just that no one on campus ever talked about hunting. No one discussed their plans to head to the woods for the weekend in November like a handful of students did every year where I went to high school in Wisconsin. When I touched the subject as I got to know people on campus, I was met with a variety of responses: curiosity, disinterest, bewilderment and shock were some of them. A few people claimed, “You killed Bambi!” Anyone who has seen the movie knows that Bambi makes it out alive.
As I learned to predict a variety of responses to sharing this part of my upbringing, I became more comfortable with the subject. I had stories to tell if anyone wanted to hear them, I had arguments as to why I hunted and I had reassurances that I still voted Democrat (though the fact that this would even be necessary is problematic as well). To clarify, hunting every year since the age of twelve was my own independent choice, one that my dad offered to my brother and I once we were old enough. In that sense, I consider hunting to be my personal lifestyle choice, much how like some of my friends choose to pursue a vegetarian diet (I know it will raise a few eyebrows to compare the two at all). While I have only gone back home once for hunting in four years at Middlebury, I still consider it to be part of my identity. I enjoy knowing where my meat comes from, and I like feeling responsible for my consumption of it.
Sometimes, I enter a conversation in which my choice to hunt is stigmatized — to be fair, this does not only happen at Middlebury. For some reason, it carries political weight. It identifies me as a gun-touting animal hater who doesn’t respect nature. While any outdoor enthusiast (be it a hunter, a hiker or a kayaker) is capable of disrespecting the surrounding environment, in general, one who spends time outdoors gains a sense of responsibility and stewardship. What draws me to hunting more than anything is that connection with nature: it is a physical and mental challenge that I consider to be a sport in its own right.
My goal is not to promote hunting as a lifestyle that everyone should pursue; instead, I am merely pointing out that it is a lifestyle practiced by a sizeable handful of Middlebury students, faculty and staff. So is vegetarianism. So is a person’s own choice of diet in general. I have the right to be honest about this particular aspect of my culture, and I also have the right to defend it.
My argument about hunting boils down to the meat itself; as many vegetarians argue that a meatless diet is more environmentally sustainable, I argue that hunting for one’s meat is the most sustainable way to procure it if one chooses to eat meat (provided that the game population is sustainably controlled). Anyone who consumes meat is responsible for the death of that animal, plain and simple. Our distance from the source of the meat as consumers is problematic in our understanding the sacrifice of life that makes this form of nourishment possible. When I hunt, I know that the animal has lived a relatively happy and healthy existence, no massive amount of carbon was expended in its lifespan, and all of the meat is local. For me, it is a way to exercise simplicity and ownership over what I eat (however rarely I get to indulge in the treat of venison at this point).
Yes, as humans have developed more accurate firearms we’ve gained a greater advantage over deer, grouse, turkeys or whatever we choose to hunt. But humans are wired to create and manipulate tools, and from experience I know that no matter how advanced our weapons and tools are, we will never understand the woods the way that the animals do. Through at least 95% of human history, we have subsisted on foraging and hunting (yes, many human cultures are also vegetarian and yes, our teeth are designed for us to eat more vegetables than meat, but the body gains nourishment from the occasional protein of a successful hunt). Given this, I wish to see hunting as a lifestyle that has space for celebration and expression on campus. I have argued that it is a sustainable way to supplement the consumption of meat as well as a cultural practice that students should feel comfortable bringing with them from home. While hunting may not be the most common activity Midd kids bring from home, a handful do, and we are excited to share this part of our lives with those around us.
ADAM LANG '14 is from Milwaukee, Wis. Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(02/26/14 6:56pm)
The discipline of political science has come quite a long way since Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the classic work in the study of politics, which asked and answered questions about our nature as political animals. Whereas Aristotle’s methods in that book were primarily observational and logical, academics working in the study of politics today have rigorously developed and tested analytical and empirical methods at their disposal to “define, describe, explain and evaluate [political] phenomena.” However, beyond a descriptive account of why political phenomena play out the way they do, one might wonder what exactly an empirically-minded political science has to contribute to ventures of a more pragmatic type, especially when we’re presented with normative problems.
If the political problems that help give rise to environmental crises are primarily problems of action — that is, questions that require a particular answer that prescribes action in a given situation — then it seems like answering questions about how groups respond (or might respond) to a given political action should be useful, at the very least. That, maybe uncontroversially, might be what political science can be said to do. The graphs and tables displayed in journal articles and book chapters offer metrics (think changes in GDP, voter approval ratings, and the like) that give us supposedly objective means of looking at how various political events are caused. If all we wanted the study of politics to do was tell us what percentage of states a candidate needed to win in order to win the presidency, or tell us how Congressional spending rates have changed over time, then descriptive and analytical methods might be able to tell us the whole story.
Unfortunately, describing the way our government works isn’t the only project political studies have facing them; we might remember that the primary concern of Aristotle’s Politics was to identify the best type of state and how citizens in an ideal state might behave. As critical as the positive study of how humans interacted with one another was, his ultimate task was normative; the primary object of inquiry was to provide us with an idea of how the state and its citizens should act. Nearly everything that concerned the ancient study of politics centered around notions of the good — a far cry from the subject matter of today’s political science.
Maybe an obsession with power politics is why we’ve yet to find a political solution to the environmental problems we face on the local, national and global level. Is the study of the good too far removed from what we call political science? Commentators have criticized the methodologies political scientists use for a number of reasons.
In a 2012 New York Times article Jacqueline Stevens, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, writes (rather harshly) that “Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp” and that her discipline has picked up the nasty habit of “mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.”
New York University’s Bertell Ollman, is somewhat less critical of the discipline’s methods, but more so of it’s motives – “… with a few honorable exceptions— [Political Science] presents a view of society that either misses, or dismisses, or at best trivializes the fact that the political game is rigged.” While not wholly dismissive of departments’ attachment to Karl Popper’s scientific method, Ollman derides the discipline for perpetuating an impossibly one-sided dialogue centered around the desires of those in power.
And finally, an anonymous contributor to The Economist, Ripton, Vermont’s “MD,” while commentating on the efficacy of attempts to model the outcomes of presidential elections, points out that the kind of retroactive tweakings frequently made to predictive political theories don’t typically help validate the scientific methods employed in crafting forecasting models. If political scientists continue to ask for research dollars to develop models and other predictive tools that might help reaffirm its methods as “scientific,” then the ideal should be to strive for real scientific rigor.
Unfortunately, scientific rigor is only one of a number of tools that we’ll need to advance goals related to climate change, conservation and other environmental problems. Another large substantial of the equation concerns ironing out what precisely we think the best way of living on this planet is; what I’m suggesting is that while models might help us in making decisions by providing us with an idea of how political moves may be responded to, they can’t tell us much about how the masses should respond, and what they should demand of government. Environmental problems ask us for right action that considers more than just power interests — they ask that political power be exercised justly.
(02/26/14 4:46pm)
This weekend at the Middlebury College Dance Theatre, masks were worn, washed off and fashioned as the Dance Company of Middlebury, under the direction of Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown, performed “The Meaning of the Masks.”
The performance began unravelling cultural “masks” of convention before viewers even settled into the theatre. House lights remained lit and ushers pointed people to seats as the audience gradually became aware of the nearly immobile forms of the dancers who had appeared onstage. With eyes closed and faces painted various shades of white, grey or green, the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury — Hai Do ’14, Amy Donahue ’13.5, Cameron McKinney ’14, Jill Moshman ’14, Rachel Nuñez ’14, Isabella Tudisco-Sadacca ’13.5 and Chelsea Chuyou Wang ’16 — glided around the stage, each step slowly dragged forward.
The audience, conflicted between the cultural expectation that they should be silently attentive of performers onstage and the confusion that the show was not supposed to start for another few minutes, settled into an uncomfortable silence as the last few audience members shuffled into the remaining seats of the dance theatre. This initial upset of what is understood culturally as the beginning of a performance raised the question for the evening: What is cultural convention, and how do we mask ourselves to conform to or break from such convention?
Under this frame of mind the first piece, “Fly Catching,” choreographed by visiting artist Shizu Homma, could be interpreted as an escape from the confines of conventional working life. The dancers, sporting painted faces, closed eyes and office attire, moved as puppets directed lethargically forward until the strings began to be cut. Dancer by dancer, body part by body part, the imagined lines went slack, and the dancers slumped a shoulder, a hip or a torso. Occasionally, the lines tightened again and the dancers righted themselves, until finally the strings were severed and dancers fell to the ground. The remaining few strings unsuccessfully attempted to revive them, but eventually all dancers collapsed. Once all the strings were cut, all seven dancers rose and began to laugh hysterically as they skipped around the stage — in this writer’s interpretation, freed from their puppet existences.
This puppet segment created a lasting image of all the dancers standing in a line facing the audience after righting themselves from various slack movements. McKinney stood as an exception, raising his head last. As the only movement onstage, the audience was invited to focus on that incrementally slow motion, somehow making the movement incredibly personal.
Once free of their puppet strings, the dancers presented a fascinating contrast between primate rituals of grooming and their human parallels. Moving as primates, the dancers pounded the ground and picked imagined insects off of each other’s backs; in the human parallel dancers offered each other fruit and fixed each other’s make-up and clothing.
“Are rituals, games and structured society really culture, or more complicated systems of animal instincts and hierarchies?” Homma asked in her choreographer’s note.
The second piece, “Paperdoll,” choreographed by Ayo Janeen Jackson, smoothly transitioned from the first, but began distinctly with a bathing ritual. Wang got into a metal tub and cleansed herself of her paint mask as McKinney and Do brought out water and poured it over her. She chose a red sheet of butcher paper out of several red dresses that the female dancers presented to her. Performed by Moshman and Nuñez for the Saturday matinee and evening performances, respectively, on Friday evening Donahue lay down on the paper to perform the solo, clad only in nude underwear.
The piece clearly became one of bursting through a self-created mask as Donahue traced her body onto the paper and fashioned herself a dress out of it with scissors and duct tape — notably, with a tail. Her fiercely determined movements were lent a defiant and powerful feeling by Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” pounding through the theatre, with empowering lyrics such as ‘Nobody’s gonna stop me now’ emphasizing Donahue’s actions.
As the song shifted to “Hurricane” by Grace Jones, Donahue embodied the force of a hurricane with stunningly executed spins in the air reminiscent of a figure skater’s jumps. The leaps and repeated falls seemed to become more painful as Donahue kept on, until at the close of the song she wrapped her paper tail around her neck — and it snapped.
She ran from the stage as McKinney entered wearing ragged, dark strips of cloth and exploring a movement that felt richly primitive in its honesty. The rest of the dancers soon joined McKinney onstage for the beginning of “Collecting Carnival,” choreographed by Brown as “a movement menagerie of the African Diaspora,” according to the program.
As the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury moved together onstage, the connection between this group of artist-creator-performer-dancers felt vibrant and richly satisfying to witness.
The dancers gradually pieced together their personal masks as the work progressed, each donning intricate individual costumes of feathers, black paint and colors and a particular movement quality that they chose in order to expose a part of themselves. In what Donahue called in the program “experiential performance practice,” the dancers explored how their chosen masks allowed them to delve into experiencing a part of themselves not otherwise obvious or exposed — and raised the question for the audience to wonder about their own masks as well.
Near the conclusion of the Carnival piece, all the dancers moved in sync in a stationary running motion with their arms pumping but their feet firmly planted on the ground.
“It is the human race and an individual race,” Brown said, referencing our own masks of cultural conformity.
As students, we have much to gain from reflection on the topics explored through dance in “The Meaning of the Masks.” We all wear many masks to conform and blend in with the flow of our culture as students and as members of our various individual cultures, and those masks are not necessarily a negative part of our interactions. However, to understand what lies beneath those masks and what influences their formation, perhaps we should take the time to explore ourselves behind the masks.
(02/26/14 4:36pm)
If my childhood friend group is any indication, there are a few distinct and mutually exclusive ways to play with Legos. There is the rule-follower, who builds the thing on the front of the box per instructions. Next, there is the engineer who ignores the instructions in favor of his own plan, carefully constructing something really cool that will make everyone else jealous. And then there is the final category, to which I belong, whose members collect piles of random pieces and throw them together, creating wholly nonsensical conglomerations of blocks that never last more than a good 15 minutes. The Lego Movie’s approach is definitely that of the last category. Pieces seem thrown about everywhere and the result is ridiculous, often chaotic, but extremely fun and funny throughout.
In a world composed exclusively of Legos, one man – that would be one “Mr. Lord Business” to you – has become president and now controls TV, music, “all the history books” and as the movie opens, has just gained possession of the “Kragle” a kind of super-weapon that could end the world. Indeed, the creativity inherent in Legos has fallen under an authoritarian regime – Mr. Business effectually wants the whole world to be “rule-followers.” Our protagonist/everyman Emmett lives as a mild-mannered construction worker and has initially fallen prey to the endless rules and instructions imposed on by Mr. Business. All Emmett wants is to be an ordinary guy and part of a friend group, but it becomes apparent that he is trying much too hard to be normal and consequently has trouble making friends. The Lego Movie quickly becomes about the divide between being ordinary or unique; what makes The Lego Movie’s approach different is that it acknowledges how painfully difficult it is to actually try to be normal, and the amount of work it takes to follow perceived societal instructions that limit one’s personality.
Emmett was of course never going to be ordinary – the movie’s opening scene gives us the story of a prophecy calling for a “Master Builder” to liberate the Lego world from Mr. Business. It turns out that Emmett’s mind is so “prodigiously empty” that he makes a fine choice for the job. This is all you should know of the movie before going in – the last 1/3 of the movie turns the entire concept on its head, making this something greater than a series of well-conceived gags.
There is an uncanny level of self-awareness in The Lego Movie that makes it more and more charming as it continues. It understands the way people use Legos and marvelously captures the way I remember my experiences playing with Legos. At the same time, it is able to poke fun at itself, roasting a few common kid-movie clichés and to some extent the whole concept of the Lego Universe. The fact that Legos can be made of anything and anyone makes this akin to Shrek, with appearances by the lego-likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, Blackbeard, Shakespeare, the 2002 NBA Champion Los Angeles Lakers, and on. Tonally the movie is also somewhere between the satire in Shrek and something sillier like SpongeBob. It has a faster pace and a greater number of action sequences than both, always remaining amiable and coherent.
The Lego Movie does contain a few easy, tired jokes here and there but I can’t criticize this stuff too much without feeling like a particularly pessimistic Grandmother. This is the third impressive comedy from Phil Lord and Chris Miller after 21 Jump Street and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; they’re young and very talented, and it’ll be exciting to see where they’ll go from here (aside from the inevitable 2nd and 3rd Lego Movies). And the voice-acting cast alone is impressive, with names like Morgan Freeman and Will Ferrell. I’m not sure if these names necessarily enhance the movie, but it’s always a good time hearing Morgan Freeman cast as an aloof wizard.
This is a movie about Legos and it made me happy. If a movie about Legos sounds good to you, The Lego Movie will almost assuredly make you happy also. If such a movie sounds targeted outside of your demographic, I think you’ll be surprised with how much there is to like in The Lego Movie. It couldn’t possibly be executed with more wit or charm and it sets a standard for the rest of the year’s comedies, animated and family friendly or otherwise. If nothing else, this is some kind of phenomenal marketing tool for Lego.
(02/19/14 6:48pm)
Hey kidiots! Does that start us out on the wrong foot? These days I’ve been feeling like my social filter is made out of Swiss Cheese, holes punched through with the heavy artillery of being “totally over it.” I am frustrated with how seriously we take each other and bummed with how we casually we dismiss our own influence over each other. You are kidiots! And scummos! But also fragile Jenga towers of Babylon! And leavers of invisible legacies! And so am I. We are Taylor Swift-esque with the power to be a milli things at once. We are simultaneously gross and arrogant and insecure and great and isn’t that pretty cool?
I want to introduce you to this column about anything that loosely has to do with this ambiguous idea I’ve termed “fake science.” A boring example: I take my coffee with milk. The only reason I do it is because once my mother told me that I’d get an ulcer without a splash of milk to protect the lining of my stomach. Not true. I realize now that she said it because she takes milk and kind of liked the idea of us taking our coffee the same, or just because she likes correcting me, but since then, I have taken milk in my coffee. It isn’t out of some sort of familial loyalty, but because I half-secretly-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye believe that I’m actually engaging in a kind of ulcer-prevention. Often our decisions are not based on any generally accepted truths, but are tics and tendencies and coping mechanisms motivated by irrational reasons buried in our formative years or rootless whims.
Fake science is folklore, magical thinking, misrememberings, superstition and myth: the correct cadence of spelling a word aloud, the order of your morning routine, fear of certain animals, debatable pop trivia remembered as fact. It is small versions of what Danny Loehr articulated in his February Celebration address this past month: the stories we tell ourselves become our reality. We adopt them and drop them, not realizing their groundlessness until years later. Sometimes they stick and continue to manifest themselves in our preferences, actions and expressions in the long run.
Sometimes we are endearing. One of my friends used to insist on only wearing cute pajamas every night in case there was a fire and she would have to evacuate the house in the middle of the night and the cute neighbor boy would see her out in the street. Sometimes our fake science is sinister. A different friend used to obsessive compulsively knock on wood to ward off danger; another had convinced herself that her eating disorder was a vegan diet. Locating your irrationalities does not always end in exorcising them—the aim is simply to be more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is critical because, believe it or not, someone out there is learning how to live by observing you living out a fake science, through your words or emotions. It is a very frightening and exciting responsibility. Trust me when I say: You have an effect on other people.
I didn’t make up “kidiots.” It was the name of a blog active in 2010 run by some funny Middlebury students, one who is still a friend of mine. On the Kidiot blog, she wrote a short piece about turning 20. I recently saw her and she’s doing really well; she owns a pet hedgehog in Brooklyn and has really healthy chakras, which were somewhat shaken when I shyly mentioned how much that old piece meant to me and thanked her. She hadn’t expected anyone to be reading.
The site where we make a legacy that sticks to someone’s brain will not be where we expect it to be, and it is happening all the time. It won’t be what we wanted to have been remembered by, and it will not be by the people we care about the most. We won’t even notice all the micro-legacies we leave and collateral damage we cause for the most part, unless that person is moved to tell us about it. So that’s what I’m interested in here — the awareness of our own absurdities, the way they effect our community and the effort to reach out and make the stakes feel real for someone, even for a second.
This column isn’t Mythbusters. I’m not going to always talk about how we are dumb kids and what it is we’re getting wrong or right. I just want make some hazy observations and opinions on the intersection of “culture” (which is what exactly?), college students and the way we live. Most of these articles are inspired by nightmare notes I wrote to myself in the middle of the night or Gchat conversations or visions that come to me when I’m lying on the floor of my thesis carrel underneath my coat, reading Joan Didion. I’m just your neighborhood neurotic, popping an anti-anxiety Rx in Proctor and admiring your hair from the next table over. Humans! We’re so crazy! It’s so great, right? Lets talk about it until 4 a.m.
(02/13/14 12:10am)
On February 14, the Center for Careers & Internships (CCI) will unveil the inaugural UpNext speakers series, a faculty-moderated career panel that brings Middlebury alumni from different industries to campus to share their work experience with students. This week’s event focuses on media and entertainment.
Jeff Sawyer, CCI Director of Employer Outreach and Development, says the series is unlike any other in that it “brings three constituencies together, as students, faculty and employers converse about topics and common interests within a single industry.”
The panel on Friday will be moderated by Professor of English and American Literatures Timothy Billings and will feature a diverse lineup of alumni panelists, including Katherine Davis ’87, a Political Science and French major and current 60 Minutes producer; Rick Holzman ’87, a Political Science major and Executive Vice President of Programming and Strategy at Animal Planet; Richard Coolidge ’87, a Political Science/French double major, and ABC News producer; Beth Levison ’91, a Geography/Italian major and documentary filmmaker; and recent alumna, Christine Schozer ’13, an Economics major and production assistant at Peacock Productions, an NBCUniversal production company.
Although the first UpNext event centers on careers in media and entertainment, Sawyer wants Middlebury students to look beyond the common perceptions of the industry.
“The series – and Friday’s panel – is intended to build awareness in students so they have a nuanced understanding of the various components of the career paths they might pursue,” Sawyer said. “I want students to envision the breadth of jobs in the media industry: there are careers beyond the two obvious jobs of production and journalism.”
Similarly, Schozer ’13 – a production assistant for Peacock Productions in New York – notes the importance of keeping an open mind when searching for internships and eventually jobs.
“I started off as an Economics major with an interest in finance, but chose not to travel that path,” Schozer said. “I began to consider marketing and production, given that many of the jobs intertwine my organization and planning strengths. After reaching out to alumni through MiddNet, I found an internship at NBC during my junior year, which really sparked my interest in production. To me, the “UpNext” series is a great opportunity for students to realize the opportunities that exist and create interest networks within media and entertainment companies.”
Recently, Schozer has worked on variety of projects including NBC’s “The Making of the Sound of Music Live!,” and “Skywire Live!,” a Discovery Channel live event covering Nik Wallenda’s walk across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. Gretchen Eisele ’90 was executive producer of “Skywire Live!,” which had 21 million viewers and won a 2013 Emmy for Best Live Performance.
“During The Sound of Music documentary, I got the opportunity to interact and listen to people who truly excel in their industry, such as with Neil Meron, the executive producer, David Chase, a top musical director on Broadway, Beth McCarthy Miller, a Saturday Night Live television director, and Rob Ashford, a renowned broadway director,” Schozer said.
When asked what advice she would give students interested in pursuing internships and career paths, Schozer encourages students to identify their strengths and interests. “If you don’t know what you want to do, try something that fits your skill set. If you don’t try, you don’t know.”
Susan Walker, Associate Director of Career Services at the CCI, urges students to use the UpNext series as a comfortable setting “to put themselves forward to alumni as a means of motivating the career discovery process.”
Similarly, Sawyer encourages students to question what exactly employers are looking for in order to effectively apply for and take advantage of opportunities.
Friday’s signature UpNext event will be held at 5 p.m. in Axinn 229. Students are also welcome to attend additional information sessions about working at NBC Peacock Productions and Discovery and an informal lunch – by RSVP on MOJO – with the alumni panelists on Saturday in Ross’ Fireside Lounge.
“[Future UpNext sessions will likely be] a robust cross-section of industries that touches all corners of the student body,” Sawyer said. “With a focus on industries such as social and human services, the scientific aspect of healthcare services, government, and education.”
(02/12/14 9:43pm)
The Olympic conversation at lunch the other day turned to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Someone mentioned that Russia is attempting to ban GMOs outright (check out the Feb. 3 article on the Russian news site RT under the headline “Total ban on GMO food production mulled in Russia”). There was much head shaking around the table over the fact that, in the United States, the government is struggling to even get GMOs labeled. Someone commented that it seemed wrong to be messing with the plants and animals that make our food in the laboratory, conjuring images of pipettes and test tubes and 75 percent ethanol.
It is interesting to note the strong emotional response many seem to have to GMOs. I routinely get emails from Food Democracy Now! Similar to this Jan. 24 plea:
“Dear Will, If you haven’t heard, apples are the single most popular fruit served in school lunchrooms across the U.S. and a fruit so iconic it was the fruit that inspired Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity and the heartbeat of the phrase, ‘as American as apple pie!’
“Tragically, a Canadian firm has created a new GMO apple, using a new “gene silencing” technique that could interfere with the expression of genes in humans, even silencing vital human genes, potentially causing serious health problems.”
Of course, my immediate emotional response is: how could anyone possibly let a company sell such an apple? But then, the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry major in me pauses; what is this new “’gene silencing’ technique”? And how does it work? And what vital human genes does it silence? And where is all of the research that proves these claims? Where is the data?
Some quick Google work reveals that the company in question is Okanagan Specialty Fruits, which strives “to develop new commercial tree fruit varieties that offer exciting benefits to the entire supply chain, from growers to consumers,” according to their website.
The genetically modified apple in question is a strain that the company has created called Artic® apples. The company claims that the apples do not brown from “bruising, cutting, or biting.”
Apparently, scientists at Okanagan Specialty Fruits stopped the browning process by suppressing production of the enzyme polyphenol oxidase (PPO). The technique was developed by Australian researchers in potatoes. The technique used to silence the production of PPO is called RNA interference. I won’t go into details here, but it’s a fascinating technique.
Where is the research demonstrating that the act of eating a fruit expressing PPO suppression RNA can have dangerous effects on human health? Entire books have been written on the subject. It is vast, complex and intricate, and there is no easy answer to the question of the safety of GMOs.
So, what’s my point? I find the strong emotional response to GMOs expressed by individuals, non-profits groups like Food Democracy Now! and governments intriguing and disturbing. Though, for the record, I find the actions of biotechnology companies like Monsanto equally disturbing.
When an email about GMOs starts with a fact about school lunchrooms, I see an emotional and populist appeal that demonstrates a complete lack of willingness to dig deeply into the issue of GMOs and critically examine its many facets. In twenty minutes with a computer and Internet access – hardly deep digging – I found an entire semester-worth of work. Anyone receiving Food Democracy Now! presumably has both a computer and Internet, and could come to the same conclusion.
To my lunchmates the other day and to the campus at large, hear my plea: There is lots of work to be done around the issue of genetically modified organisms and their place in society. Please don’t jump to emotional conclusions. Start reading, thinking and questioning. It’s the only way we’ll ever arrive at a rational, reasonable solution.
(01/23/14 12:34am)
On Jan. 13, seven students from the class of 2013.5 auditioned to be the student speaker at their graduation at the end of the month. While only one student, Danny Loehr, will be delivering his speech at the ceremony, the following three students submitted their speeches to the Campus.
It is not without a bit of irony that I write this. To be honest, I didn’t choose to be a Feb. I had barely heard the word until the admissions office called me during June of my senior year of high school, just a few weeks before my graduation. “We can let you in off of the waiting list,” I was told. “You’ll be a Feb”. “Great!” I said enthusiastically, and hung up the phone. Almost immediately, I realized that I had no idea what I had just done. “Wait…what’s a Feb?”
Over four years have passed since that day, and I still haven’t figured out the answer to that question—at least not in a way that I can present pithily to you now. I’m sure you all have your own ideas as to what the essential Febness is, but for every such conception there is an exception. At the 2010 Feb celebration, it was rather famously suggested that Febs are the people who show up late to the party and are then left at 3am, still dancing around the room to Michael Jackson, alone. I think the truth, for better or for worse, might be that not all of us quite fit that bill. Some of us got too drunk or too tired and went to bed. Some of us stayed in to do some studying or watch TV. Some of us turned off the Michael Jackson and put on Blink-182.
But, of course, to focus on that would be to miss the point. Setting aside all generalizations about what being a Feb is or isn’t all about, we will gather together in just over a week because we share a common experience. That simple act of taking an extra semester, regardless of how or when that semester was spent, means that by definition we haven’t quite followed that “plan” that is the standard operating procedure these days. It might seem insignificant on paper, but for us, there was a slight glitch in the plan. You had to explain it to your high school friends, to your aunt at Thanksgiving dinner, to the boss you bailed on after a few months of work. Perhaps understandably, no one really got it. Some probably felt sorry for you. One of my friend’s moms sent me a care package during finals week that fall just so I wouldn’t be left out. It was nice, but kind of weird.
Well, being a Feb is kind of weird. And I don’t necessarily mean weird in that cool, quirky—dare I say Febby—way that we love to talk about so much. I also mean it in a different way: uncomfortable, awkward, unsettling. As fashionable as it can be, showing up late to the party can also lead one to feel a bit out of sorts. I think almost my entire hall during that first semester knew me only as “The Feb”, though the closer friends at least called me “Mike the Feb”. I tried to embrace it, but was never sure of exactly what I was embracing.
But that’s all part of the Feb experience, isn’t it? We don’t discuss those particular aspects a lot, but there’s a reason that they come about. When you break from what’s expected, there are certain consequences. You might have to rely on yourself a little bit more than you were prepared to. You might have to go out of your way to make things happen, instead of waiting for them to come to you. I’m sure we’ve all felt that at some point or another during our college careers. Over the past month, reflecting on those experiences—everything from taking forever to make friends, to sitting alone in the dining hall, to constantly getting hosed on class registration—has made me realize how important they are in the context of today.
That is because February 1st, our college graduation, marks the end of that part of our lives whose structure was predefined. Everything up to this point has been more or less laid out for us. I do not mean to say that we haven’t worked to get where we are—merely, that most of us have been on a path through relatively charted waters. Most of us have always known that we would go to high school and college, and that we would probably do pretty well there. Few of us have had a concrete plan beyond that.
That last bit is equal parts exciting and terrifying, but what I want to point out is that our college lives were a bit more uncharted than most others. And therein lies the greatest thing about being a Feb, besides getting to ski down the Bowl with our caps and gowns on. That weirdness that I’ve talked about, as hard as it’s made things sometimes, it’s meant that Febs have developed a tendency to make their own way through Middlebury. That is invaluable preparation for whatever is coming next. Amidst all of those big, inspirational ideas about changing the world that we find in Ted Talks and Upworthy posts, our postgraduate lives will inevitably bring us a day-to-day existence marked at various times by uncertainty, ambiguity, banality, and loneliness. So let’s embrace it, just like we embraced our Febness for the last four years—without always knowing what we’re embracing or exactly why we’re embracing it. Let us welcome and even encourage discomfort. Life is about so much more than fitting in.
I don’t know an easy way to explain what a Feb is. I do know that the graduates that will sit in Mead Chapel on February 1 are some of the most intelligent, engaging, and challenging people I’ll ever know. I know that we came into this place at the same time and that we’re about to walk out, together, four weird years later. And I know that we’re ready. Wherever we go, let’s take a piece of this place with us. We are Febs, and we can do whatever we want. Let’s get out there and do it.
MIKE GADOMSKI is from Moorestown, N.J.
A little over a year ago, I was sitting in my car outside Munroe, hands shaking on the steering wheel. It wasn’t because of the temperature, although it was bitterly cold. I had just returned from a semester abroad in Australia and had last seen Middlebury amid the greenery and blooming trees of May, during the two weeks out of the year when the campus becomes alive before we disappear for the summer. It wasn’t that I hadn’t talked to my friends since then – in the world we’ve grown up in, the people we talk to on a daily basis are decided not by geography but rather by choice – but nonetheless, I was nervous, unsure of how it would feel to be back at this place, experiencing the lives of my friends and vice versa without the filter of carefully curated pictures uploaded onto the internet. At the time I was working at home, and I figured that I could catch up with what I had missed while still setting aside some time to do work. Needless to say, I was terribly wrong.
I was wrong both about the work and about being able to catch up on what I had missed. The amount that goes on here over J-term is really incredible for a place that we tend to often complain is isolated and sleepy. I went to talks about energy and to Two Brothers, panels about Divestment and parties at Palmer. I skied at the Snow Bowl and sang “Like a Prayer” at Karaoke night and enjoyed the best that the dining hall had to offer: taco day (Please, President Liebowitz, if you do nothing else in your remaining months at the helm, make the dining halls have more taco days. For the sake of the febs who will follow us). I had the best of the Middlebury experience in a week, and so of course I did nothing productive. I was too busy “seizing the day” and “only living once” and so on and so forth.
But that week could have been very different, as far too many are.
I know that I am not alone here in saying that I have lost entire weeks of my life to absent-minded scrolling through information that is not relevant to either my success or personal happiness. On good days you might click through the New York Times” and the Atlantic, but more often than not it ends up being “23 Goats Who Cannot Believe They’re Really Goats,” “17 Animals Who Just Found Out Columbus Was A Terrible Person,” and “36 Things That Are Going to Make You Feel Ancient.” Did you know, for instance, that “Mean Girls” came out more than a decade ago? And those are all just from a single site whose name I am sure you could guess.
The defining challenge of our age is the constant flow of interrupting information and the ease with which we can satisfy our every curiosity and need for entertainment. This is certainly less of an obstacle than attacks by saber tooth tigers, mass starvation, or global thermonuclear war. It is, at its core, a “first-world problem.” But the fact that new information is constantly beeping its way into your head at every moment of every day is still an important phenomenon. Where our parents once had to hunt for information on shelves and through pages, for us the trail never goes cold. The challenge is not that we have too few variables, but far too many. After all, it is easier to watch somebody hit a massive ski jump on television that it is to learn how to do it yourself; easier to read every blog post on the subject than to actually talk to the proverbial Proctor crush. The challenge is to know when to stop taking in new information and to jump.
Especially in the freezing days and the never-ending nights of winter, this presents a dangerous trap. One of the greatest things about Middlebury is that the quality and even the quantity of the real distractions exceed the virtual ones. But in other places where the alternatives might be harder to find and the people further away, the temptation to stay inside and scroll can become overwhelming. With the internet, you have on your computer or in your pocket every word ever written down by Thucydides or Hawking, Shakespeare or Fitzgerald. You have the words of every great leader, the movies of every great filmmaker, and the sounds of every great musician. But you also have Rebecca Black, Ylvis, and every season of Scandal. It is not as much that we struggle to manage our time as it is that distractions spring up to make us forget that it exists until it has already slipped away.
The reach of ideas has never been further and the rewards of success have never been greater. One of the most amazing realities of this time is that the spread of a song, a speech, or a slam poem that makes us feel something in our core is constrained only by the speed with which we are able to pass it on to those with whom we believe it will resonate. But, like the Harlem Shake or The Fox, this success often proves fleeting. And the punishment for an accident or an ill-considered action forever stick to your name, plastered across Google for all to see: the future employer or the potential girlfriend, the angry young men in their armchairs at home or the grandmother who just signed up for Facebook and likes every single thing that you post. We live in a world without a delete button, in a giant town square where humiliation has become more public than ever.
This is not to say that technology is evil or that pop culture isn’t worth your time. But it has become incredibly difficult to separate what is actually meaningful or useful from the cascade of interruptions and quick alternatives. It is hard to muster the presence of mind to read a whole book when your pocket keeps buzzing with snapchats, text messages, and emails from Bob Smith about intermural sports. In the competition between the information that improves our lives and that which merely satisfies our brain’s addiction to dopamine, the trivial content has a home field advantage.
So what is there to stop us from giving into the temptation to binge watch another season of House of Cards instead of making the changes we fantasize about? Mostly, I think, our overpowering fear of missing out, or, as it was labelled during orientation, “FOMO.” FOMO is a powerful force, and not necessarily a bad one. It is what gets us out of bed and to that party that friend is having. It is what drives us to the mountain despite the bitter cold of the polar vortex. It is what compels us to plaster the names of our crushes on the walls of Proctor, if just for a few days.
On the Campus newspaper, we like to joke about how we come up with the headlines for our editorials. If you are one of the dedicated few who glanced at more than a couple during your time here, you might have noticed that they all follow the same format: don’t do this thing, do that thing instead. So here’s my version of that template: don’t get over your fear of missing out. Do the things that you’ll remember later. Don’t give in to information paralysis; take in the facts that you need and then move on. Don’t give into clickbait and mindless scrolling. Take advantage of the fact that we live in an era where knowledge is free and unfettered.
For when you are at a party and it is two a.m. and “Like a Prayer” comes on, there is no time to sit back and think about whether you have worked out recently or how many layers you are wearing, or whether it is actually an appropriate occasion. If you spend too long thinking about it, the song will be over. But here is what is great about Febs: That song is ancient; it was big when our parents were in college; it is practically Bach. But every time it comes on, it’s as if it is the first. So you tear your eyes away from your phone and your fingers away from the keyboard. You join your friends in the excitement of that moment, with that same grin on your face that each and every one of us had on day two of orientation running around in the February sun at the snow bowl. You jump, and that is the moment that you never forget.
ZACH DRENNEN is from Canandaigua, N.Y.
I will always remember the day I got my acceptance letter to Middlebury in the mail. I was so excited it took me about a week to realize I had been accepted as a Feb. To this day, I believe I checked the September only box. When I realized I was accepted as a Feb I felt semi-rejected. You can imagine my surprise when I arrived for orientation only to learn that most people specifically check the February-only box. Little did I know that I would soon come to realize how accepting to be a Feb was the greatest decision I could have made in my academic life. Having just lost my mother the summer before my senior year of high school, my aunts were very concerned with my future going in the direction she would have wanted. They feared I would go away somewhere, fall in love and never come back. This may be because my mother often went places, fell in love and was only convinced to come back because a sister was getting married. I am definitely my mother’s daughter, but I knew that college was not something to give up, no matter how in love I thought I was during my Febmester.
At orientation I was overwhelmed, I found out I had pneumonia the night I arrived and I had a cast on my hand. Not the best setup for a winter orientation. I remember hearing stories of people traveling in Senegal, trekking the Himalayas, teaching photography classes in Rwanda, living in Paris, adventuring in Laos, or working at home—wherever that was. I was amazed by how different the past three to six months had been for all of us, but how together we managed to feel— how together we wanted to be. That night as we walked from Ross dining hall through the candles of our Feb leaders into Mead Chapel I ended up alongside a girl who would end up being my best friend for the next four years.
After just a few days of orientation we had begun to form the bonds we were told we were destined to create. Within two weeks of being on campus we were skinny-sledding down the mead chapel, taking our shirts off every “Like a Prayer” we heard, and I learned the words to “Wagon Wheel” real fast so I didn’t feel so left out when everyone decided to start singing it. They say that the great thing about coming in as a Feb is that you create an instant community that follows you throughout your college years. I think that while our Feb class has gained a few members and lost a few—while we have all explored different social groups on this campus and made new friends along the way—at the end of the day a Feb is a friend you can always count on. Just like family, there will always be the cousins with whom you get along best, or the siblings with whom you feel you can share the most, but regardless you have a fundamental love that will always be there for one another. I believe that even though many of us have drifted in our own directions, it is just a reflection of us truly trying to find ourselves here. I can still look around this room today and say genuinely that there is not one of you I wouldn’t want to be there for.
I came to Middlebury as this young girl from Tucson, Arizona. I’d had one snow day in my life and it lasted until 10am. I had never experienced daylight savings because we don’t do that in Arizona, it wouldn’t make a difference. I knew cold as 60-degree weather. And although I still don’t know what is going to happen when I attempt to ski down at the snow bowl today, in my four years here I have done more than my fair share of streaking in mid-winter, I have cross country skied from the Mill to the Bunker, I have gone swimming in a frozen over pond at the snow bowl, and gone sledding down Mead Chapel every year, and I have my fellow Febs to thank for all of that.
Another great thing about being a Feb is although we feel pretty old by the end, we experience the greatest amount of people leaving and coming in to this school. We know things that no one else here knows but us. We were here for the very first screening of the Midd Kid music video. We lived the days of Asian carp and avocados, language tables in Atwater, and take-out cups from proctor. We know about MiddTwit, and know the founders of Middbeat. We know what the real Purple Jesus tastes like and we know how good a DJ Officer Chris is. We brought Dominique Young Unique to campus before she became a big deal. We knew Frank Sweeney before The Real World. We started spontaneous percussion during midnight breakfast and choreographed an amazing flash mob for the Hunt. We have lived through the ADP apocalypse, which has been more traumatic for some of us than others. I personally really enjoyed dancing in those window-frames.
We, as Febs, are thrill seekers and passionate believers. We may have felt a semester behind at times, but we have lived so much more than everyone else that showed up on time. And for those of you who have joined us along the way, you too have made choices in your life to redefine the path of what we are taught college is supposed to look like.
Now we get to redefine what the path of post-college is supposed to look like. Graduating from an institution like Middlebury gives us all a great responsibility to do something meaningful and successful with our lives. However, that does not need to be as stressful as we are pushed to believe. Whether you end up at Medical school, consulting in DC, bartending in San Diego, starting a farm in Vermont, or opening up a cupcake shop, success is about so much more than your starting salary or lack thereof. If I have learned anything these 22 years, it is how painfully short life can be, and how beautifully intense love can feel. Once we understand these things, we understand that a fulfilling life comes from choosing how we built it rather than just reading a manual.
For me, success is always living the adventure. Success is giving yourself fully so your loved ones know how much they mean to you. Success is looking yourself in the mirror everyday and always smiling back. Mostly because “we woke up like this” but also because no matter what happened the night before or what awaits us tomorrow, we have been doing the most we can to do our lives justice. For me, we make a difference through the people we choose to love, sing, laugh, and dance with. We are successful when we know ourselves well enough to be so fully there for the world around us.
I think that Middlebury, along with giving us a degree from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country, has also given us the opportunity to figure out who we are and what we want most. We have been given access to professors, who are not just great because of how they do their job, but because of the people they are and the life of knowledge they carry. We are more than just the grades we earn, the internships we’ve had, the important people we’ve met or attempted to meet—we are kids in our twenties who began this adventure of college in our own way. We are friends, and lovers, and family, and what we have learned from each other is just as valuable as what we have learned in the classroom.
Today I want to leave you with part of a poem from spoken word artist Anis Mojgani. This poem reminds us that whether we initially “chose” to be Febs or not, whether we identify today as a Feb or not, no matter where we begin or end upon leaving this college, we must never forget that we are Febs. For above all, we have learned that feeling set apart from others is not at all a negative experience, but rather a thrilling gift that opens us to all the endless possibilities which lie ahead. We must remember that sometimes the uncertainties presented to us by life, are the beginnings of the best adventures we’ve had yet.
So in the words of Anis Mojgani:
“You have been given a direct order to rock the (fuck) out.
Rock out like you were just given the last rock and roll record on earth and the minutes are counting down to flames.
Rock out like the streets are empty except for you, your bicycle, and your headphones.
….
Rock out like you’ll never have to open a textbook again.
Rock out like you get paid to disturb the peace.
Rock out like music is all that you got.
Rock out like you’re standing on a rooftop and the city’s as loud and glowing as a river flowing below you.
Rock out like the plane is going down, and there are 120 people on board, and 121 parachutes.
Rock out like the streets and the books are all on fire and the flames can only be extinguished by doin’ the electric slide.
…
Rock out like your eyes are fading but you still got your ears. But you don’t know for how long so rock out like 5 o’clock time, meant pop-and-lock time.
Rock out like you got pants full of tokens and nothing to do but everything.
Rock out like you are the international ski-ball champion of the entire universe.
Rock out like you just escaped an evil orphanage to join a Russian circus.
Rock out like your hero is fallen and you are spinning your limbs until they burst into a burning fire of remembrance.
…
Rock out like your dead grandfather just came back to take a drive with you in your new car.
…
Rock out like the walls won’t fall but, (dammit), you’re going to die trying to make them.
…
Rock out like it’s raining outside and you’ve got a girl to run through it with.
Rock out like you’re playing football! Football in the mud and your washing machine is not broken.
Rock out like you threw your window open on your honeymoon because you want the whole world to know what love is.
…
Rock out like a shadow of a man passes behind you, drops you to your knees. You’re buckling in sweat, cold metal’s pushed to your forehead, the trigger’s pulled and the gun jams.
Rock out like you got an empty appointment book, and a full tank of gas.
…
Rock out like the mangos are in season. Rock out like the record player won’t skip.
Rock out like this was the last weekend, like these were the last words, like you don’t ever want to forget how.”
Thank you all for loving, singing, laughing, and dancing with me these past four years. I know that no matter what our respective futures hold, we will find success in the earth beneath our feet, the music in our eyes, the hope in those around us, and the stories we hold in the palms of our hands.
Middlebury Class of 2013.5
Let’s Rock Out.
BELLA TUDISCO-SADACCA is from Tucson, A.Z.
(01/16/14 12:35am)
The New Year always provides an opportunity for reflection. While BuzzFeed is littered with lists looking back at “14 Animals who Melted your Heart in 2013” and “33 Times Joseph Gordon-Levitt Charmed your Pants Off in 2013,” we have decided to look forward to 2014, with these six headlines we would love to see in the next year.
JusTalks Mandated for all First-Years
Throughout the fall, our editorials advocated for critical engagement in campus issues and better listening to a diversity of perspectives. JusTalks presents a proactive solution for this challenge through a full day of large and small group activities and discussion facilitated by other students to encourage students to think about their own identities, as well as the identities of their peers.
Now at the end of its second occurrence — and the first time it was limited to first-years — JusTalks has proven its ability to draw a crowd and provide a meaningful curriculum. From its inception, JusTalks was meant to be mandatory for students in their first J-term, meaning first-year regs and sophomore febs. J-term provides the ideal space for such an event. By J-term, students have been at Middlebury long enough to be comfortable and have an identity on campus, but not so long that they are fixed in their ways. If events like “Middlebury Uncensored” during Orientation are any indication, this kind of program can help students better understand and engage with their peers and even make new friends who they otherwise may never have met.
To conclude a year that has been dotted by the need for dialogue, from the 9/11 flag incident to Chance the Rapper to the Amy Wax lecture, the administration would be wise to implement a program that mandates the discussions we need to reflect as a community and as individuals when controversy arises.
Students Take Larger Role in Deciding Next President
President Liebowitz’s announcement that he is stepping down in 2015 has sparked discussion about the role of our next President. What qualities should our next President embody? What background is needed? Where could he or she fill in existing gaps? What should be prioritized?
As students, we have a hard time answering these questions because process to select and qualities required for a president are a bit of a mystery. When Liebowitz was selected in 2004, the 16-person selection committee had one student representative: the student co-chair of Community Council. While the co-chair is a student-elected position, one student on a committee of 16 seems to preclude an important stakeholder in this process.
Liebowitz was selected in part because of his strong rapport with the student body, and we are hugely impacted by the College’s decisions in most areas. We would like to be included in this process in a more significant way than we were last time, both directly in the decision process and through transparency along the way. We want to have informed opinions about the kind of President the College needs next, but the administration must keep us in mind along the way in order to meaningfully account for the student voice.
Dish Loss Cut 50 Percent by Collection Program
Dish removal still causes huge monetary losses for the College and showcases a troubling lack of respect for our hardworking staff. If we ever want to be able to eat cereal for breakfast, we need to stop stealing the dishes. It’s disrespectful both to the dining hall staff and to our fellow diners. We need to bring back bowls so we can enjoy our meals without eating oatmeal off a plate.
A new program should require every student group to do a dish collection every year. Tavern has the right idea and should serve as a model for other organizations. The top 28 student organizations by membership should be required to each do a dish retrieval sweep from dorms once a year. That breaks down to one per week. It’s time to mandate this program.
Battell and the Mods Demolished; New Housing Built
For those of us unlucky enough to live in Battell our first year, this issue hits particularly close to home. The converted lounges across campus confirm that we need more housing. Moreover, we need more housing that was not built in the fifties, and preferably are not designed by a prison architect. The risk of student rioting seems substantially lower than when Ross was built. We would prefer housing that allows for the communal living seen in Gifford and other dorms with suites.
Similarly, the Mods were slated for demolition in 2003. While their popularity hinges on the option of communal living without having to enter room draw, they should be replaced with something more permanent and perhaps a little easier on the eye.
We know buildings are expensive, and plans for new first-year housing were slashed with the recession, but the endowment has since recovered and our quality of life is hugely impacted by our living situation. Plus it is expensive to heat and maintain old buildings, particularly buildings with asbestos problems. The speed at which gastro flew around Battell two
years ago is enough of a sign that we need better and more options. That dorm was supposed to be gone by 2015; it is not too late.
Field House Opens on Schedule
It’s been a rough winter for some of our sports teams. Teams are practicing outside long past when it’s usually too cold. The Track team has been frequenting the pool for aqua jogging. Unfortunately, they can’t all cross train in our brand new squash courts, so we need the new field house to open soon too. So far, it appears that construction is going as scheduled. The Squash Center’s timely opening is a good sign. But we know construction often is delayed, and our athletes shouldn’t have to endure another winter of driving to Burlington for proper facilities. We are excited to see what will replace the bubble and will be even more excited if we can see it on schedule.
AAL Credit Changed to be Geographically Balanced
In order to graduate, we are required to meet four “Culture and Civilizations” requirements: NOR focusing on some aspect of northern America (United States and Canada), CMP focusing on the process of comparison between and among civilizations or of the identities of groups within cultures or civilizations, EUR focusing on some aspect of European cultures or civilizations, AAL focusing the culture and civilizations of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. That’s right, we have two requirements for Western civilizations and lump the rest of the world into an acronym for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Until 2007 it was called “other,” but since then we have changed nothing other than the name. While the NOR requirement can be justified by our institution’s location, the emphasis on European culture over all other cultures trivializes the importance of these cultures and their global impact. For a college that claims to teach students to “engage the world,” we are falling short.
The College, therefore, should adopt the proposed recommendation of a recent petition on “We the MiddKids,” which suggests replacing the AAL and EUR requirements by requiring two courses that focus on some aspects of the cultures and civilizations of AFR (Africa), ASI (Asia), LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean), MDE (the Middle East), or EUR (Europe). In a nutshell, all other regions would be considered their own region, and you could chose to take classes in two of six geographic regions instead of separate credits for Europe and then other regions. Not only would this change better reflect the diversity of backgrounds that exist on this campus and expose students to a wider range of cultural impacts, but also it would encourage students to think beyond and question the Western-centered perspective that prevails in many circles we will encounter after graduation.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(12/05/13 3:18am)
“Human beings in a mob / What’s a mob to a king? / What’s a king to a god? / What’s a god to a non-believer who don’t believe in anything?”
The haunting Frank Ocean hook in “No Church in the Wild” from Watch the Throne played through my head as I read Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s article, “When Mice Mislead” in the Nov. 22 News Focus section of the Science magazine website.
Couzin-Frankel writes about recent waves made in the animal research community by those questioning current drug-trial models in animals. One of those wave-makers is Ulrich Dirnagl, a German researcher who is calling attention to the negative aspects of the practice of cutting animals out of a results set without justification.
Couzin-Frankel writes, “Dropping animals from a research study for any number of reasons…is an entrenched, accepted part of the culture [in animal research]. ‘You look at your data, there are no rules. … People exclude animals at their whim, they just do it and they don’t report it,’ [said Dirnagl]. That bad habit, he believes, is one of several that plague animal studies.”
Animal studies have been used to explore potential drug therapies for decades. And during all those years, “researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans.”
Why is that the case? Is human biology so dramatically different from animal biology as to make animal models irrelevant? Many have asked that question, and “much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people. But Dirnagl and some others suggest there’s another equally acute problem,” according to Couzin-Frankel, and one that has less to do with different biology and more to do with how the studies are conducted.
Malcolm Macleod from the University of Edinburgh analyzed variations in experimental technique in animal drug trials and found a general lack of randomization and blinding, both of which increase experimental objectivity, that has resulted in skewed data.
In the studies analyzed, “many of these authors likely didn’t recognize what Macleod perceived as lack of rigor in their studies because their mentors, and their mentors’ mentors, had not [conducted randomized, blinded trials],” he writes.
There’s a sort of institutional inertia in the animal research community – passed down from mentor to mentee – that has resulted in a pervasive lack of built-in checks to ensure objectivity.
How did the scientific community allow such a lapse in objectivity to occur?
I would like to propose an answer, for what it’s worth. Reading Couzin-Frankel’s accounts of mice dropped out of data sets at greatest convenience, it struck me that the real issue at play is a lack of curiosity.
The scientists leaving data out of studies have lost sight of the purpose of scientific investigation: to gain some knowledge and insight into the workings of the world. Instead of investigating why the data – the whole data set, not just a piece – appears the way it did, these scientists are choosing to shape the results to match their bias, a bias influenced by ego, funding sources, institutional inertia – a whole host of factors.
Bias is a problem in the scientific endeavor because it is the first step toward doctrine. Biased reporting of results contradicts the fundamental tenet of science: that any and all theories are open to be modified or turned on their head if enough significant evidence presents itself.
Science is not a biased doctrine. It is a mindset, a humble attempt to understand the unknown, the other, the wildness of this world in which we live. The scientist must be a “non-believer, who [doesn’t] believe in anything,” Couzin-Frankel said, in order to construct her understanding of the world from objective observation and from her understanding, construct a meaningful narrative.
(12/05/13 1:50am)
Too often, our politics is corrupted by advocacy, leaving no time for reflection or critical thought. Every new piece of information serves only to bolster or refute an argument we were already trying to make. The danger of such an approach to politics is evident: it is close-minded and simplistic. Literature, when it is read honestly, forces us to think more carefully. Like any literary work with racial overtones (and, alas, many other books too), Othello is often politicized. Too many high school classes are wasted talking about whether Shakespeare is racist. We should not, however, let the inanity of this question and its attendant conversations dissuade us from considering whether the play might have something to say about how societies and individuals treat race. Although it provides no definitive answer, Othello questions the extent to which race matters. As it does so, it reveals that questions about race are hardly particular. They involve something much greater, something universal.
For Othello himself, race is of utmost importance. He believes himself shackled by his race, interpreting everything through the prism of his otherness. Indeed, Othello does suffer the injustice of racism. But the central tragedy of Othello results from his misinterpretation of the significance of visual stimuli, from the famous handkerchief to his own skin color. There are racists in Othello, but they do not bring about our protagonist’s downfall. His death is the culmination of a series of communication and comprehension failures committed by Othello himself. Of course, we sympathize with Othello. We recognize that his predicament reflects our own. He must take responsibility for his actions on the basis of imperfect information and flawed understanding. Yet as much as we wish to put full blame on Othello’s nemesis, Iago, we are compelled to condemn Othello as well.
What to make of Iago? He frustrates our progressive sensibility because his is a pure and incomprehensible evil, and the progressive does not want to believe in pure evil. Every action has a cause. Evil comes from somewhere. It can be explained. Or so we tell ourselves. Iago’s realness – his completeness as a character — challenges the progressive, who cannot discard him no matter how hard she tries. Surely Iago must have just cause. So, without making a serious attempt to solve Iago, we call him a racist and leave it at that. If he has no clear personal motive for bringing down Othello, then he must just hate the Moor for his skin color and allegedly crude speech.
There is the rub. In an attempt to fit Iago to our conception of what it means to be rational animal, we write off his central human element. Inexplicable evil is as much a part of man as rational thought is. Our insistence on asking “why?” until an answer presents itself is as childish as it is noble.
Iago introduces metaphors — about race, falconry, and more — which come to form the basis of Othello’s understanding of events. Othello thinks his skin color is more important than it is, and thus makes it as important as Iago wants it to be. He regards race as though it were more than an observation. Thus, even in a fictional Renaissance-era Venice we can see echoes of contemporary American society. Race can and will only matter as much as we think it does. Until we understand this truth, we can never be “post-racial.”
When liberals talk about race, we often overlook the problems Othello reveals. Ascribing conditions solely to structural issues, we eliminate the possibility of individual agency. Even racism — which is, of course, cultural — is traced to economics and politics. Wealth disparities and rights disparities cause hatred and bigotry, we aver. Just as we seek to deny Iago’s humanity, we deny the psychological roots of racism.
Most of us do not really believe these things. Most of us acknowledge the reality of human error. A materialist — effectively Marxist — account of human affairs is intellectually unsatisfying. We would do well to explore this discomfort. We desperately need a smarter liberalism, one that accounts for human freedom and responsibility, is not afraid to acknowledge that culture matters, and can articulate an understanding of human nature which retains a sense of wonder, humility, and compassion. Luckily for us, an intellectual tradition which includes these elements already exists. It can be found in books like Othello. For the sake of the future, we should spend more time reading them.
(11/20/13 11:27pm)
In response to criticism that he could only write for men, playwright David Mamet penned the farcical “Boston Marriage” in 1999, following two Victorian era women as they explore their relationships with each other and the people who surround them. The play enjoyed a Nov. 14-16 run in the Hepburn Zoo, delighting audiences with its careful presentation and razor sharp wit.
Members of the audience may have been expecting a scene out of a Jane Austen novel when they walked into the Zoo, greeted by Victorian furniture and harpsichord music playing overhead. Many were happily surprised by the vibrancy with which they were greeted over the next 90 minutes. The senior acting work of Christina Fox ’13.5 and Meghan Leathers ’13.5, turned the play “Boston Marriage” into a comic piece, examining relationships between gender and class through a fresh, playful lens, engaging the audience from the first quip to the final bow.
After much deliberation, Fox and Leathers departed from typical theater department productions and the roles they have filled in their time at the College to chose a play recommended to them by Assistant Professor of Theatre Alex Draper.
“It’s hard to find a comedy featuring two female protagonists that aren’t full of angst or misery,” Leathers noted. “The leads in this play are fantastic – they’re exciting and great and strong and absurd, and it’s been really challenging and fun to play with.”
“Boston Marriage” is built around the protagonists’ dynamic dialogue. Anna, played by Leathers, is the narcissistic, impossibly witty mistress of a wealthy man and a friend of Claire’s, acted by Fox, a woman visiting to tell the news of the new love of her life – a young woman. The emotional and physical tension between the leads is instantly recognizable, Anna sporting her lovers’ family heirloom emerald necklace, touching its garish size to reinforce its representation of all she has acquired. The necklace proves to be the key to the development of the plot, Claire’s lover stealing away to Anna’s residence only to find her father’s necklace sitting on a strange woman’s neck. Both women are potentially ruined financially and socially, and they turn to each other for comfort and complaining.
Anna and Claire are in a Boston marriage, a term used to refer to two single women living together in Victorian times with possible sexual implications. They curse each other’s faults, often likening one another to some sort of farm animal, only to be driven together by moments of affection and desire.
The two women are delightful to watch, with members of the audience jealously wishing that they too could join the action. The deliciously wicked gleam in Fox’s eye as she counters Leathers’ practically perfect comedic timing, along with Leathers’ revelling in the depth of her character, delivering line after line of complex, nuanced dialogue, is truly a treat for the audience.
Mamet does not give Claire as many bracingly funny lines, and in the wrong hands she could appear to be a weaker, more subservient version of Anna, but Fox breathed vibrant life into Claire with a graceful, realistic subtlety that revealed her character’s power over the duration of the show.
The only other character who appears in the play is Anna’s maid, Catherine, who finds herself in her own difficult situation as she must grapple with the possibility of pregnancy and the power that men hold over women in Victorian society. Charlotte Michaelcheck ’15 quickly became an audience favorite, charming with her character’s accent and tendencies for emotional outbursts (as well as, I suspect, Michaelcheck’s extremely expressive eyebrows and facial expressions).
Though the Irish – no, Scottish – maid has intimate access to Anna and Claire’s lives, in many respects she holds, like the audience, the role of an objective viewer, separated by class, nationality, and her love for men. Seemingly oblivious and occasionally rendered incompetent by nervousness, Catherine surprises the audience and the women she serves with an unassuming, profound wisdom that even the clever and confident Anna and Claire do not possess. These bits of wisdom interrupt a role that, if possible, provided even more comic relief to the play than the two characters already displayed.
Indeed, some in the audience were simply giddy in anticipation of the next laugh, gasping between breaths and nervously waiting for one of the three characters to continue the comedic rhythm.
Costume designer Elisabeth Harmor ’16 provided Leathers and Fox with beautiful wardrobes, supplying them each with two intricate Victorian period outfits, as well as accessories for a game of psychic dress up that did not disappoint.
Overall, the show had a vitality of spirit that radiated into the audience.
Director Jake Schwartzwald ’14 has been following Fox’s and Leather’s thesis play production process since last year, first agreeing to direct another play that the pair had selected before transitioning to “Boston Marriage” this semester.
“We sought Jake out because we knew we wanted to do a comedy and Jake is a comedian and we knew he could work with us and guide us in that comic spirit,” Leathers said.
Indeed, Leathers, Fox and Schwartzwald enjoyed an ease in each other’s company over casual lunch that transferred into a fluidity of performance onstage. It takes a lot of effort to appear at ease, and Leathers, Michaelcheck and Fox performed gracefully and naturally under Schwartwald’s direction.
The audience responded so well to “Boston Marriage” because it made them laugh, and after they finished laughing, they realized that Anna, Claire and Catherine were more relatable than first appearances may have allowed.
“Though this play is so different from Mamet’s other works, it’s very much the same in dealing with wealth, appearances, personal gain and the emptiness that can create,” Fox said. “There is timelessness to romantic relationships and the competitiveness within them.”
“Anna and Claire are competing for and with each other,” Schwartzwald succinctly noted.
“Boston Marriage” speaks to lives left behind and sacrifices made to search for better days, whether one is leaving a homeland to serve wealthy women or rejecting passion for a female friend to find financial security in a man. The audience left satisfied, connecting with each of the characters through their humor and pain, relating to women seemingly worlds away.
Some of the plays put on by the theatre department are thought-provoking, disturbing, subversive and puzzling, and those plays need to be shown to an audience of college students that may not usually be exposed to that certain brand of theatre. It is important to also remember that sometimes people go to plays to at once forget their troubles and be reminded that they are not alone, and that this is equally important, as “Boston Marriage” showed. As Anna sagely notes, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
