Not Off the Presses

Sidewalk Stencils? Not in Chicago

2010-08-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

published in the New York Times on Friday, July 30.

Until last week, Christian Jurinka had never heard complaints about the stenciled advertisements his agency sprays on the sidewalks of major cities. But when neon pink-and-yellow ads for a Brazilian brand of flip-flops landed on the North Side of Chicago, they immediately drew the ire of a Lincoln Park stroller.

The pedestrian, Bruce Beavis, 51, complained to the police, his alderman, Vi Daley of the 43rd Ward, the news media and Mr. Jurinka’s business partner, who promised to send a cleaning crew to remove the advertisements the next day.

“We tell all our clients that this is an activity that some communities have no problem with, and other communities frown upon,” said Mr. Jurinka, the co-founder of Attack, a provider of guerrilla marketing services, who said they would not to stencil ads on Chicago streets again. “The law is somewhat cloudy.”

But Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, said Chicago’s policy on sidewalk stenciling was not ambiguous.

“We have zero tolerance for people who would use the public way for their promotions,” Mr. Smith said, “and will go after them any way we can.”

Companies may think they are going to gain an advantage, he said, “but instead they could be drawing a lot of negative publicity and fines.”

That is what happened to IBM in 2001, when it hired an agency that spray-painted ads across walkways in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco without obtaining permits. The company was fined tens of thousands of dollars.

Russ Kellogg, director of sales for ICE Factor, another marketing agency that uses unconventional strategies, said the extensive permit process in Chicago was a disincentive to marketers.

“You either ask for permission or ask for forgiveness,” Mr. Kellogg said.

RACHEL CROMIDAS

A version of this article appeared in print on July 30, 2010, on page A17A of the National edition.

Got Available Ground? Want Free Vegetables?

2010-07-17T05:24:00.001-07:00

By RACHEL CROMIDAS for the Chicago News Cooperative
pub. July 16, 2010 in the New York Times

In return for vegetables rather than money, some Kenwood residents are letting their properties be used by community gardeners — many of them strangers — who are strapped for space.

This so-called urban sharecropping has also been growing in popularity in Austin, Tex., and Portland, Ore., thanks to networking Web sites.

Kenwood, known for its arts-and-crafts mansions and President Barack Obama’s house, is considered a natural place for the partnerships because thousands of square feet of lawns dot the blocks between 47th and 50th Streets.

“It’s an unusual relationship,” said Deborah Hammond, a gardener who tends to 300 square feet behind a three-story mansion. “I’m not a service provider, I’m not a friend of the family, but I have a key to the back gate.”

Her use of the land has involved negotiating with the homeowner over who would pay for topsoil (they do), and plants (she does), and what to grow.

Video Compilation: Jon Burge Found Guilty on All Counts

2010-06-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

Jon Burge Found Guilty on All Counts - June 28, 2010 from Chicago News Cooperative on Vimeo.

Jon Burge Found Guilty On All Counts (VIDEO)

2010-06-29T12:29:00.000-07:00

For Dateline: Chicago

By KATIE FRETLAND and RACHEL CROMIDAS

June 28, 2010

Jon Burge, the former Chicago Police commander at the center of the city’s decades long police torture scandal, was convicted today on federal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. He faces up to 45 years in prison

Burge, 62, was expressionless as the verdict was read. He was found guilty of lying under oath in a 2003 civil court case about the torture of African American police suspects in the 1970’s and ’80’s. The jury — seven men and five women, including one African American– began deliberations at 3 p.m. Thursday. Their verdict marks the first criminal conviction of a cop in the police torture scandal. A report of a suspect being tortured by Chicago police first surfaced in 1973.

Juror Gary Dollinger, 31, said the testimonies of a former detective who was granted immunity and a convicted killer who died while in prison were crucial to his vote for conviction.

“I think it was first there was an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to the fact that he was lying on his statements and there was some torture going on at Area 2 to coerce statements, between Andrew Wilson and Mike McDermott’s testimonies … those were the two biggest things that really pushed me over the top,” Dollinger, the CEO of an IT consultancy, said.

McDermott, Dollinger said, “he gets on the stand he looks a little scared when he’s up there, he’s got a lot on the line, they’re threatening to cut his pension, cut his health benefits lose his job.”

McDermott is a former police detective who testified he saw Burge point his gun in the direction of the area where a suspect was and that he saw Burge hold something to the suspect’s face. McDermott was an unhappy witness, who said he feared being charged with perjury and obstruction of justice if he did not recall details of the 1985 incident as the prosecution wanted him to.

McDermott’s testimony was inconsistent with his grand jury testimony.

“He changed his statement, but he never said no, there was no brutality,” Dollinger said. “[Burge] still pointed a gun and something plastic over his face.”

“All people who care about justice had a major victory today,” said Flint Taylor, an attorney for many of Burge’s accusers.

Burge attorney Bill Gamboney said he was “very disappointed and somewhat surprised” by the verdict.

“We’re starting to muster our resources together for a motion for a new trial and ultimately an appeal if it comes to that,” Gamboney said.

Burge supporter Jim Knightly, a retired Chicago police captain, vented his disappointment with the verdict.

“That they would take the word of convicted felons over a highly-decorated police officer,” Knightly said. “I’m sure Flint Taylor, the liberal attorney who has been hounding him for years, is happy. I hope he can sleep at night.”

“I’m glad it’s over,” said Ald. Ed Smith (28th), who sat through much of the trial. “This has been a great concern for a lot of people. It’s a case that has caused a black eye on the city.”

Smith said that the verdict should open the door for the release of Burge accusers who are currently imprisoned.

More than 100 people have accused Burge and officers under his command of torturing them during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The men said they were electroshocked, suffocated with plastic bags, subjected to mock executions, beaten and burned. The allegations contributed to the decision to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and Chicago agreed to a nearly $20 million settlement to four men who were pardoned.

Prosecutors never filed charges of assault or attempted murder and the statute of limitations has since run out.

Mark Clements, 45, cried in front of reporters in courthouse lobby Monday. He said detectives under Burge pulled on his genitals until he confessed to four murders and an arson. He served 28 years.

“I was 16 years old and these people stole my [expletive] life,” he sobbed. “I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day. Today is a victory for every poor person. I was 16 years old. This is America. Sixteen years old. What are we gonna do about other people who are sitting in those prisons.”

More than 20 people who claim they were tortured remain incarcerated in Illinois.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the jury’s decision was a measure of justice, and that it was sad that it took until 2010 to reach a criminal court of law.

“What’s clear is that the jury necessarily found that torture occurred in Chicago police stations at Area 2 in the 1980’s and it’s a disgrace that in this city in the 1980’s people could be subjected to abuse and torture ranging from guns to the face, guns in mouths. Suffocating, electric shocks, radiator burns and that sort of thing.”

“We need to have it on the record that this happened,” Fitzgerald said. “We need to treat it as a fact that it was proved and recognize that it was an awful thing before we can move forward.”

During the past month’s trial, federal prosecutors called four men to the witness stand to testify they were abused in an effort to prove the perjury and obstruction charges. The jury also heard testimony from Andrew Wilson, who died serving a life sentence for the killings of two police officers.

The defense argued that the police torture claims were fabricated by career criminals for the purpose of getting out of jail, and Burge broke years of silence to testify in his own defense, denying each allegation brought against him during the trial. His lawyers played up his dedication to police work — that he often went out on the street with his officers, looked in on interrogations and spent days working without going home on the case of the killings of two police officers. Burge, ill with cancer, broke down crying on the witness stand talking about that investigation.

Burge joined the police department in 1970 and two years later was assigned as an investigator at Area 2, where many of the alleged victims said they were brutalized by police.

A doctor who saw one man’s injuries in 1982 wrote a letter to then-police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking for an investigation into a case of possible police brutality. Brzeczek forwarded the letter to Mayor Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State’s Attorney, but charges were never brought against any officers.

Daley’s name was not mentioned during the trial.

The Chicago Police Board fired Burge in 1993, three years after a report by the police department’s Office of Professional Standards sustained Wilson’s accusation that Burge abused him and found evidence of systemic abuse at Area Two.

Taylor said men who worked under Burge could still be prosecuted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. As of May, a grand jury was hearing matters involving detectives who worked under Burge at Area Two in the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to documents filed in the Burge case.

Fitzgerald declined to comment on that investigation.

Judge Joan Lefkow found that eight people could take the Fifth Amendment and not testify in the Burge case. They are former assistant state’s attorney Larry Hyman and retired police officers Michael Hoke, Thomas McKenna, Ronald Boffo, James Pienta, John Paladino, Dave Dioguardi and Leonard Bajenski.

Clements said he will never get back the time he missed with his daughter.

“My daughter is 29 years old,” he said. “I missed all those years with my daughter sitting in a prison cell for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge. I do not feel sorry for him.”

Fitzgerald: Burge Verdict is a 'Measure of Justice' from Chicago News Cooperative on Vimeo.

Both Sides Rest Cases in Burge Trial

2010-06-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Latest Burge coverage from the CNC's Dateline: Chicago.

Food Vans to Aid Hungry Children

2010-06-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

Also from Dateline: Chicago:

By RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 18, 2010

With food stamp enrollment at a record high in Illinois, the Greater Chicago Food Depository is expanding its programs to reach the children of low-income families that struggle the most with hunger in the summer months.

Starting Monday, the first day of summer break for Chicago Public Schools, the depository will send two vans with sandwiches and crackers to community gatherings and Chicago Park District day-camps at lunchtime in Chicago Heights and Little Village/Lawndale–two communities with the highest number of under-served children, according to a recently released report by the depository.

“There are these great enrichment activities in [the Park District],” said Kate Maehr, the executive director of the food depository, “and it is a tragedy that there are kids coming to learn how to dance and play sports and be better readers with empty stomachs.”

As of July 2009, more than 500,000 children in Cook County received subsidized breakfasts and lunches during the school year through federal government-sponsored programs, but the summer meal program for these children run by the United States Department of Agriculture reaches fewer than 30% of children in need, according to Diane Doherty, director of the Illinois Hunger Coalition.

Though more children are needy over summer break, Ms. Doherty is skeptical of the lasting reach of food delivery vans.

“My concern about mobile vans for children is that they pull up, provide [children] with food, and then they leave,” she said.

DuPage Struggles to Handle Increased Need for Public Aid

2010-06-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

(My latest from the CNC, published in today's New York Times Chicago insert:

By DIRK JOHNSON and RACHEL CROMIDAS

Not far from million-dollar homes in DuPage County, a line of people spills through the doors of a public aid office in Villa Park, now the busiest branch of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

As many as 900 county residents come to the office every day looking for food stamps, emergency financial assistance and vouchers for medical care, said Phyllis Baxter, the site’s administrator.

The surge in suburban poverty reflects the economic collapse for people who had been solidly middle class, including former homeowners with college degrees. It also underscores the changing demographics in some older commuter cities, now home to more Spanish-speaking immigrants and working-class families fleeing tough city neighborhoods. The state’s second-busiest Human Services office is in Blue Island, just south of Chicago in Cook County.

Requests for help at the DuPage County office have soared by about 60 percent in the past five years, Ms. Baxter said. “They come through those doors,” she said, “and they’ll say, ‘I lost my job. I need food. I can’t pay my medical bills.’ ”

The state, which is some $13 billion in debt, has been unable to increase the size of the office’s 81-member staff, which leaves caseworkers scrambling to manage increasing workloads. “The stress level is off the charts,” Ms. Baxter said. “And, remember, plenty of our people have also got somebody in the family who has lost a job.”

Hue Tran has worked as a caseworker in DuPage County for 32 years. She said she had never seen anything like the overwhelming demands of the last two years.

“I just have to work faster,” Ms. Tran said. “The phones are ringing, people are lining up, they’re demanding to know why they’re not getting benefits.”

Ms. Tran and other social workers said many suburbanites, who were living comfortably not long ago, were upset that they now had to beg for help.

“Sometimes they get angry and then they apologize,” said Ms. Tran, who said she had counseled many people who had started crying. “I just tell them: ‘I understand. It’s not your fault.’ ”

Other caseworkers say they feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time on clients. Ebony Martin, 32, said that four years ago, when she came to the DuPage County office, she had a caseload of about 900. Today she has more than 2,300 cases.

“I made a color-coded chart that tells me these are the people that I must — absolutely must — get to today,” Ms. Martin said.

Kara Murphy, the executive director of Access DuPage, a nonprofit group that helps uninsured people find health care, said enrollment in the program had jumped 55 percent in the last two years, to about 11,600.

The sharp increase in the need for services has strained the social infrastructure in suburban areas like DuPage County, which for a long time served chiefly as bedroom communities for prosperous commuters and their families. DuPage County, which has nearly one million residents, is the region’s second-most-populous county, after Cook. It has the area’s highest median household income, more than $73,000, according to a 2007 report by the Heartland Alliance. The unemployment rate has grown to nearly 9 percent in 2010, nearly triple the rate of the early 1990s, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Services for the working poor and the jobless can be scarce in the suburbs. Candace King, executive director of the DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform, said cities provided more programs to address poverty, like health clinics and food pantries. Housing costs tend to be higher in the suburbs, Ms. King said, and it can be difficult to rely on the smaller mass transit system.

“It is far better to be poor in Chicago than poor in DuPage,” she said.

Human Services officials say the 60 percent growth in caseload in DuPage County in five years has far outpaced the statewide increase of about 20 percent.

At a time when the suburbs have an increased need for programs for the poor, Ms. King said the state was so broke it could not afford to offer new services in places like DuPage County. “We’re trying desperately to keep the ones that are here alive,” she said.

Ms. King estimated that 15 percent of the county’s families earned less than $44,000 but more than the federal poverty level of $22,000. She said it is within that earnings range where aid organizations see families struggle. These people have “too much to get help, but not enough to get by,” she said.

Despite the dearth of social programs in DuPage County, many poor people have been leaving the city for the suburbs, according to demographers like Kenneth Johnson, a former Loyola University sociologist now at the University of New Hampshire. In many cases, parents of small children say they left Chicago to flee gangs.

LaTanya Chase, 28, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, but moved to the Austin neighborhood before settling in Glendale Heights four years ago. Ms. Chase, who works 24 to 30 hours a week at a CVS drugstore, learned quickly that she could not depend on suburban mass transit and would need a car.

But it was still worth moving to the suburbs, she said, because she does not have to worry about her 8-year-old daughter being caught in gang cross-fire while playing in the front yard.

“I’m here because I was looking for a better place for a child to grow up,” said Ms. Chase, who goes to the Villa Park office for food stamps and a health-care voucher. “It’s as simple as that.”

The growing racial and ethnic diversity in DuPage County are changing the clichés about white havens for the country-club set. Census Bureau figures show particularly strong growth among Hispanics, about 12 percent of the county’s population in 2008, up from 9 percent in 2000.

Officials at the Human Services office in Villa Park say its caseload of people who speak Spanish as a primary language has doubled, to about 15,000, over the past five years.

Joshua Drucker, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the collapse of the home-building industry has hit Hispanics especially hard. Many Hispanic men do drywall and roofing work. Those jobs, Mr. Drucker said, which paid relatively well, have largely evaporated in the last two to three years.

The collapse of housing jobs sent Graciela Martinez, 37, to the Human Services waiting room with her four young children to receive food stamps. Much of the talking for the family was done by her oldest child, Amel — “I’m almost 8” — who wore a University of Wisconsin T-shirt and said he wanted to be a doctor.

Ms. Martinez said her fiancé, the father of the children, was a roofer whose work hours had shrunk to almost nothing. It became impossible to pay the rent, she said, so the family moved in with her sister in suburban West Chicago, an old railroad town with perhaps the longest-standing Mexican-American community in DuPage County.

One recent day at the Human Services office, people stood at the back of the long line on an asphalt parking lot that was baking in the sun. Later, when the skies darkened and the heavens opened, some people pushed inside to keep dry; others simply stood in the rain.

Ms. Baxter, the administrator, said the sense of despair among the clients could be heartbreaking.

“We’ve got to be able to give them some hope,” said Ms. Baxter, who sat behind a beige metal desk piled high with case forms. On the bulletin board, she had pinned the phrase, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

“You see a lot of shame and embarrassment,” she said. “You see it with people who used to have money and now they’re maybe losing everything. And you see the shame in people who have always been dirt poor, too.”

She said she told caseworkers to give people time to work through their emotions. “I know we’re in a hurry,” she said, “but we’ve got to give them time to talk it out.”

She shook her head and lifted her eyes.

“Because they’re hurting,” she said. “And they’re so scared.”

Jon Burge to Take the Stand

2010-06-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

This story came from the Chicago News Cooperative blog, Dateline: Chicago. I spent the day in court filling in for my co-worker, Katie Fretland. Early next week I will try to attend and cover the trial's verdict.

By RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 16, 2010

An attorney investigating allegations of police torture under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge gave testimony Wednesday that contradicts earlier statements from a Cook County Commissioner. The defense plans to call Burge to the stand Thursday.

Attorney Thomas J. Reed testified that Commissioner Larry Suffredin did not recall any abuse allegations when the two spoke in 2005. Suffredin, who was the public defender for alleged torture victim Anthony Holmes, testified earlier in the trial that Holmes told him he had been tortured.

“Mr. Suffredin told me he could not recall any allegations of abuse,” made by Anthony Holmes, Reed testified. Reed said that Holmes’ other former lawyer, William Murphy, did not recall any allegations of abuse during their interview. Reed did not keep any notes from the interviews.

On May 27, Suffredin testified that Holmes, a former high-ranking member of the Black Gangster Disciples, told him through sobs that he had been shocked with electricity and smothered with a plastic bag by Area 2 police trying to force a murder confession in 1973. Suffredin did not file a motion to suppress Holmes’ confession in the original case.

Reed interviewed Suffredin and Murphy as part of a special prosecutor’s investigation into claims of police torture, abuse and brutality under Burge’s watch from 1971 to 1983 Area 2.

The defense brought in two expert witnesses to address allegations that Andrew Wilson, convicted of killing two Area 2 police officers in February of 1982, was electrocuted and burned by a radiator in an Area 2 office while in custody.

Timothy Powell, an operating engineer for the City of Chicago, said the radiators on the second floor of the Burnside Community Center at 9059 S. Cottage Grove, which was once the Area 2 offices, are 2.5 inches apart. The marks on Wilson’s chest were closer together.

Michael Baden, a New York-based physician, forensic pathologist and medical examiner who was paid close to $27,000 to be an expert witness at the trial, said the marks on Wilson’s chest and face featured in the government’s photographic evidence could not have been caused by the radiator. The chest marks were too close together, too old and already scarring by the time the pictures were taken to have been caused within the previous three days, he said.

However, Baden did agree that the injury on Wilson’s thigh was a 2nd degree burn and could have been caused by contact with a radiator, even through the fabric of Wilson’s pants. Baden also agreed that Wilson’s ears exhibited puncture wounds that may have been caused be an alligator clip, but that it was not likely that the alligator clips had been electrified. “There would be burns on his ears,” he said.

Prosecuter David Weisman then had an alligator clip placed on his ear to demonstrate that such clips could stick to part of an individual ear without additional support after Baden speculated that it could not. Just “don’t hook it up to an electrical current,” Baden joked.

A Cook County State’s Attorney who took a homicide confession from an alleged police torture vicitim testified Wednesday that the man said he was treated well by police.

On October 30, 1983, shortly before 2 a.m., Dean Bastounes, now an attorney in private practice in Chicago, answered a police call to Area 2 to take a confession from Gregory Banks, who had been in custody since Oct. 28. (Police are allowed to hold a suspect in custody without charges for a maximum of 72 hours.) Banks testified earlier in the trial that he was tortured by Area 2 police.

“I asked him how he’d been treated by the police. Have you been treated well? ‘Yeah, I been treated well,’ he said.” Banks also said he was given coffee, according to Bastounes.

Bastounes then called a court reporter, Michael Hartman, to record Banks’ statements. According to the court report, which Bastounes read for the jury, Banks told him and Hartman that before the shooting happened, “We was gonna commit a robbery.” He and an accomplice crouched in bushes before Banks jumped a number of passersby and fired his gun. He then ran to 56 West 95th St. and hid the gun on the roof of the building. According to the report, Banks revealed where the gun was hidden to police officers when he was arrested. He told Hartman and Bastounes that he was not forced, coerced, or bribed by police officers to obtain his confession.

When asked if he trusted what the police officers had told him about the crime, Bastounes said his policy is, “Trust but verify. If the police told me something I couldn’t substantiate,” he said, he would ask for more evidence. Bastounes said he did not ask to see the gun or fingerprints as evidence in Banks’ case.

“I think it was fair to say that we [state’s attorneys in the felony review unit] would trust the police,” he said. Bastounes said he never “felt the need” to speak to Banks privately during the interview, and noticed nothing remarkable about Banks’ demeanor during the interview. Banks’ arms, back and legs were covered by a long sleeve shirt and pants.

“I guess common sense would tell me that if someone had been beaten I would tell them they had the right to remain silent. Maybe someone would blurt out ‘I’ve been beaten!’, maybe they wouldn’t.” Bastounes said no one had ever suggested to him that they had been the subject of police abuse.

The second witness of the day, Kathleen Warnick, who also worked as an Assistant States Attorney in the early 1980s’, testified that she visited Area 2 on Feb. 14, 1982 to assist her supervisors in obtaining a court reports on the shooting of two police officers. Warnick denied witnessing any violent acts or screams of horror while in Area 2. She said didn’t see Andrew Wilson or Jackie Wilson being taken out of the building.

Katie Fretland contributed reporting

Building Bridges (From the College Site)

2010-06-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

My latest story up on the College site:

Second-year Caitlyn Kearney knows the challenges of town-gown relations firsthand. As one of the founding administrative coordinators for the Woodlawn Collaborative (WLC), a burgeoning community center located inside Woodlawn’s First Presbyterian Church, Kearney works to expand University of Chicago students’ roles in neighboring communities.

This is the mission of WLC, a center where activist and public service groups from inside and outside the University community can come together. The organization is three years in the making, according to Wallace Goode, director of the University Community Service Center.

“WLC has brought the church a whole new level of life and energy because it fills a space that used to be fairly empty,” Goode said. The church’s building “was sorely under-used. They once had a food pantry and a pre-school with over a hundred kids enrolled in it.”

Goode expects the student leaders behind Woodlawn Collaborative to help restore that vitality to a neighborhood that suffers from a lack of retail outlets and community spaces.

“Imagine Art in Action on steroids,” said Goode, referring to the annual spring block party run by members of the South Side Solidarity Network. “That’s what WLC could be, but it is much more challenging to sustain activity in that space year-round.”

So far, WLC hosts an Open Mic Series that runs on the third Friday of every month, a Print Studio, and several youth programs, including a free music school led by second-year Noah Moskowitz. In addition to planning regular events and classes in the church, WLC’s student leaders are in charge of the minutiae of running a community center, from securing funding and insurance to ensuring safety in the space.

“This is a project that really represents students trying to be truly appreciative of our neighboring communities,” Kearney said. “We don’t have all the answers, but there’s a lot that both [the University and Woodlawn residents] can bring to the table.”

On a more personal level, “this is the most educational, real-world experience I’ve received [at the University],” she added. “It gives me so much confidence to work on this project and see things start to come together. And at the same time I’m getting out of the U. of C. bubble.”

Kearney has been tutoring elementary school students in the Woodlawn community since her first year. She joined WLC out of a desire to make her relationship with the neighborhood more than a string of one-time commitments.

Third-year Cat Greim echoed Kearney’s enthusiasm about branching out from typical on-campus activities, especially in the face of historic University-Woodlawn tensions.
“I love getting to work with some people who live in Woodlawn in a really collaborative way. I think WLC has been different because it is in our mission and goal to be that way.”

Maya Elliott, a member of WLC and a Woodlawn resident for the past four years, says that getting to know the University students has been one of the highlights of working with WLC. Elliott said students bring a fresh eye to community issues, but that there is still much to learn about what is important to the neighborhood.
“We all come from such different backgrounds and different perspectives on things, so it’s always good to get their perspective, and for them to hear ours, too,” she said.

Collegiate Scholars provides ‘college inspiration’

2010-06-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Another article of mine, this time from the University of Chicago News Office:

When first-year Fabiola Salazar started classes at the University of Chicago, she had already attended Humanities classes in Cobb Hall and science labs in the Biological Sciences Learning Center—and she knew her way around her dormitory like a returning student.

In a sense, she already was one; Salazar’s introduction to the campus came four years ago, when she enrolled in Collegiate Scholars—a University program that places high-achieving Chicago Public School students in summer classes with University professors on subjects ranging from hip-hop music to the Illinois political system, in addition to internships and college application workshops.

Inspired by College Life

Salazar said being exposed to college life as a sophomore in high school, while spending part of the summer in the Max Palevsky dormitory alongside college students, inspired her to make ambitious goals for her college career, including applying to the University. Now she is an economics major, and plans to pursue an MBA.

Salazar also arrived on campus with a friend: fourth-year Roderick Baker, who also graduated from the Collegiate Scholars Program.

“Being on campus and away from home is overwhelming,” Salazar said, “So for me Roderick was the helping hand that guided me through the ins and outs of the University. He’s teaching me what he wishes someone had told him as a first-year.”

Mentoring Relationships

Collegiate Scholars prides itself on the mentoring relationships that develop between alumni at colleges around the country, according to Kim Ransom, the program’s founding director.

“We’re able to create a community of diverse students who love learning that crosses racial, social, and economical lines.”

Ransom said the program, which fields nearly 700 applicants for 45 spots each year, is unique in its ability to connect these students with distinguished University professors like Paul Sally Jr. and Herman Sinaiko.

Top-College Bound

Collegiate Scholars “really gets students thinking, I’m not just going to a college, but to a top college, because I’m a top student,” Baker, a political sciences major, said.

Omar Mesina, a senior at Whitney Young Magnet High School, said he made sure to take as many science classes as possible while on campus.

“I want to go to medical school in the future, or pursue bio-chemistry—Collegiate Scholars as definitely allowed me to expand on that,” he said. Mesina took summer courses in chemistry and biology, and last summer studied Nutritional Science alongside University students in summer school.

“Collegiate Scholars really allowed me to take sciences beyond the scope of what was offered to me at my school,” he added. He expects this preparation will serve him well when he begins attending Harvard University in the fall.

David Williams, a senior at the University of Chicago Charter School in Woodlawn, said the value of the program extends far beyond campus, from an East Coast college tour to cultural outings to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He plans to study Philosophy and Psychology at Carleton College.

Williams, who attended the programs first-ever college tour, said the experience was unmatchable. “We went to New York and saw Hairspray [the musical]. We went to Time Square. It was ridiculous.”

A Fresh Oasis Thrives in a Chicago Food Desert

2010-06-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

My latest article at the Chicago News Cooperative, published in Sunday's New York Times.

Willie Montgomery and his well-worn Ford Crown Victoria have become an unlikely sign of progress in solving Chicago’s long-standing problem of so-called food deserts.

Mr. Montgomery charges grocery shoppers up to $8 for rides home from the Food 4 Less, a full-service grocery store that opened four years ago in Englewood. He rests on a handicap cart at the front of the store, waiting for cashiers to send him shoppers who traveled there without a car.

Mr. Montgomery, a retiree who will not give his age, said patrons rode with him because they did not want to worry about having their grocery bags stolen on the bus, and because they couldn’t buy what they needed from corner stores closer to home. They live in food deserts, poor areas that are dotted with vacant lots, dollar stores, and liquor marts, but bereft of fresh-food grocers.

“Shopping at a corner store is too expensive,” said Shirley Slatton, a student at nearby Kennedy-King College, who had piled a half-dozen bags of food and toiletries into the trunk of Mr. Montgomery’s car. “And they don’t sell stuff every day, so you have to check the dates on the cans to make sure you get fresh items.”

When food deserts became a public-policy issue five years ago, few retailers had developed big stores in poor neighborhoods. Chad Broughton, a researcher at the University of Chicago, said shoppers felt getting to the stores would take too long and be unsafe. Although a few grocers have opened in city food deserts, it is still common for Chicagoans in some rough neighborhoods to travel several miles to buy produce.

But steady traffic and revenues at the 63,000-square-foot Food 4 Less at 7030 South Ashland Avenue — as well as Mr. Montgomery’s thriving transportation business — are providing city officials and researchers with new clues about how far residents are willing to travel to stores and how much grocery chains are willing to spend to do business in poor neighborhoods.

Food 4 Less’s foray into Englewood also adds a new dimension to the political debate surrounding Wal-Mart’s effort to build a second store within city limits. The giant retailer has submitted proposals for stores in Pullman Park and Chatham on the South Side, but those efforts have been stalled by negotiations with labor unions, which want workers to be paid more than the minimum wage.

Mr. Broughton, a senior lecturer at the university who just released a survey of food access in four South Side neighborhoods, including Englewood, said that the ideal grocery store for food-desert residents is a large, chain supermarket, because such stores can stock fresh food more readily than corner stores, and at lower prices.

“For residents the obvious answer is a big supermarket with inexpensive items and more variety,” he said. If fresh produce does not sell before it rots, he added, “then it’s not profitable, and there isn’t much incentive for corner stores to stock it.”

But some community organizers balk at seeing profits and better-paying jobs leave their neighborhoods.

“To get into the grocery industry is probably one of the hardest things to do,” said LaDonna Redmond, an urban farmer and founder of the Graffiti and Grub restaurant and community center in East Englewood. “Aldi can purchase food and sell it for pennies on the dollar. Myself, if I open a grocery store, I can’t move that kind of volume.”

Ms. Redmond is a proponent of efforts to make fresh food more available, like accepting food stamps at farmers’ markets and providing grants to help corner stores stock fresh produce.

“If we have entrepreneurs from the community working with the community, I think we’d see something a little bit different,” Ms. Redmond said.

As one of only two full-service grocery stores within the nine square miles of greater Englewood — whose borders extend from 55th Street south to 75th Street, and from Western Avenue east to State Street — the Food 4 Less benefits and suffers from doing business in a food and retail desert. The store boasts the third-highest profit margin of the 15 Food 4 Less outlets in the Chicago region, but also has the highest security expenses, said Carrie Cole, the store director.

Englewood is one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In East Englewood, 43.8 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level, according to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. In West Englewood, 32.1 percent live below the poverty level. The Chicago Police Department ranks East Englewood sixth and West Englewood eighth in robberies among city community areas.

Safety concerns “limit the window in which people can feel comfortable going out and getting food if they don’t have a car,” Mr. Broughton said. “People will re-arrange their work schedules just so that they can have a window during a safe time of day to get food.”

But Ms. Cole said the relative success of the store sends a message that it can pay to develop in Chicago’s low-income communities, which generally suffer most from a lack of fresh-food grocers. The store opened almost four years ago, and was followed by an Aldi store at 76th Street and Western Avenue.

“A lot of these stores do quite well because there’s not a lot of competition,” said Mari Gallagher, a food policy consultant and researcher who wrote a landmark study on Chicago food access in 2006 and a follow-up study in 2009. But the majority of areas labeled as food deserts by Ms. Gallagher’s study do not mirror Englewood’s growth.

“These stores are really important for public health,” Ms. Gallagher said, particularly because residents of communities without green grocers have higher risks of developing heart disease, cancer and kidney failure. “But the grocer has to make a profit, too.” She said the key for the city will be understanding what is going to help make the market place stronger and attract other types of stores.

The Englewood Food 4 Less sees close to 19,000 customers per week, Ms. Cole said, and each spends an average of $30 per visit. Those numbers have remained steady despite the recession. Although the company’s corporate office did not respond to questions about average store traffic in the Chicago area, four other Food 4 Less outlets in various city neighborhoods said they attracted between 16,000 and 20,000 customers a week.

Ms. Cole said that her store had done well because more people shop at discount food marts in hard times. “The recession has done us a lot of justice,” she said. “We’re probably one of the only chains to have seen an increase in sales.”

That is encouraging for the city, which has been financing new programs to increase fresh-food options in food deserts since Ms. Gallagher’s research group released its study on the correlation between residents’ health risks and distance from grocery stores, said Chris Raguso, acting commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Community Development.

The department has been giving grocers “every incentive we possibly can,” she said, to develop in these blighted areas by waiving required commercial inspections and streamlining the process for them to request building permits.

“It’s no secret that it’s an economic issue for grocery stores,” she said, “and it takes a long time to bring these large-scale developments into order.”

At Museum, ‘RoboSue’ Roars to Life

2010-05-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

Up now on NYTimes.com, a story I helped my Chicago News Cooperative co-worker write. He's going to have an awesome TV piece tonight on WTTW about it!

By ASH-HAR QURAISHI and RACHEL CROMIDAS

The Field Museum of Natural History this week will open an exhibit that features a reincarnated Sue — the museum’s iconic Tyrannosaurus rex — as a lifelike animatronic creature that turns its head to track visitors’ movements and lets out a loud roar.

The exhibit, which opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the museum’s debut of Sue, the largest and most complete T. rex fossil yet discovered. The imposing, and somewhat unsettling, replica was created by Kokoro, an animatronics company based in Tokyo, and KumoTek, a robotics company, based in Texas. (John Canning Jr., chairman of the board of the Chicago News Cooperative, is also the chairman of the board of the Field Museum.)

Hilary Sanders, the museum’s project manager for exhibitions, said that when she first saw the robotic dinosaur, called RoboSue, it “made my skin crawl.” Ms. Sanders said she was eager to see how children, only those 4 and older will be admitted, would react.

Matthew Fisher, the founder of KumoTek, said that when there is no one around, the robots are doing what appear to be random behaviors. “But once the target or the human comes into play,” he said, “then the robot immediately engages that person.”

Establishing how dinosaurs would move and react to humans was tricky, said Pete Makovicky, the curator for the Sue exhibit.

“It’s really hard to decipher behavior from the fossil record because behavior doesn’t usually leave a trace,” Mr. Makovicky said. “So when it comes to the individual actions of the dinosaurs in the exhibit, a lot more of that is based on the general study of how animals react — what is plausible given what we know about the anatomy and frame of a T. rex.”

Gabe Lyon, whose foundation teaches paleontology to students, said that the scientific accuracy of the animatronic model is doubtful. “They’re not going to tell us anything real about how dinosaurs behaved, any more than ‘Jurassic Park’ is going to tell us that dinosaurs hunted in packs,” he said.

Monica Post, the director of MPR Museum Consulting, said the “wow” factor of RoboSue may help draw more people into the learning experience that museums offer. “Today, we expect so much more. We are the X-Box generation,” Ms. Post said.

RoboSue is scaled to three-quarters the size of an adult T. Rex, which in Sue’s case is more than 40 feet long and 13 feet tall at the hip.

Sue, a 67-million year-old fossil discovered in 1990 near Faith, S.D., was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in 1997 for $8.4 million.

Troll 2, Mr. Vampire bring students together Sunday nights

2010-05-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

My latest article is up on the University of Chicago Arts Page:

Residents of Snell-Hitchcock take part in a decade-long tradition called Bad Movie Night.

Among the residents of Snell-Hitchcock Hall, third-year Mandy Stafford is the girl with the endless mental catalogue of some of the worst movies ever produced. She uses this knowledge to preside over a decade-old tradition known as Bad Movie Night.

Stafford screens a film every Sunday night in Snell-Hitchcock’s Rec Room; though they are no cinematic masterpieces, for her and the 10 to 20 students who gather for the event, they are far from a waste of time.

“The point is once a week everyone can just do something stupid,” says Stafford. “I don’t think that’s something people get to do enough at this school.”

First-year Jen Woolley agrees. “They’re so bad that they’re good to watch,” she says. “Some people bring schoolwork; I knit.”

Stafford’s choices range from the fantastical to the truly absurd. Upcoming screenings include Troll 2 and Mr. Vampire.

Second-year Levi Foster, who stopped by for the showing of High School Musical, 2, quips in here: “Wait a minute, Mr. Vampire is a legitimately good movie. It’s campy as hell, but a legitimately good movie.”

One subject of debate among the group of regular viewers is what makes a movie “bad.” Twilight and High School Musical, for example, were box-office hits; but neither escaped Stafford’s bad movie line-up. “They’re both bad enough to be funny, and that’s important for bad movie night. Some movies are literally unwatchably bad, and we don’t screen those. The favorites year after year are the ones that people find quirky and ridiculous.”

Clearer rules govern the movie selection-process, which Stafford inherited from Margot Spellman, AB ’08: The movies should be “earnestly bad,” she explains, unless “you can tell the film knows it’s bad, and yet still comes out even worse than [the directors] intended—like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”

In contrast, “there’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The director thinks it was the greatest thing ever committed to film, but it was just awful.”

There’s also Wild Zero, a film Stafford struggles to summarize concisely: “Aliens turn everyone in the world into zombies. The protagonist is the biggest fan of the band Guitar Wolf. Does that make sense?”

The answer doesn’t matter, as long as the film has achieved a necessary combination of unintentional humor and notoriety. But Stafford does have her limits:

“One movie I refused to play this [school] year was the Star Wars Holiday Special. People always come out to it en masse, but it is just an abomination. Truly the most horrifying thing ever committed to film.”

Stafford speculates that Bad Movie Night has remained a dorm tradition because it is low-commitment, and convenient. “You just come to a movie at 10 p.m. on Sunday in the Rec Room, and it’s been like that since the beginning. Week nights are hard nights to hold events because people are actually doing homework, and on Friday and Saturday people want to go out in the city.”

Pilsen Railroad Strike Will Be Re-Enacted

2010-05-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

By RACHEL CROMIDAS
Published: May 2, 2010 in the New York Times

Paul Durica wears many guises as a historical tour guide to such places as Haymarket Square and the Kenwood haunts of the 1924 thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. On Sunday he and a group of historians-turned-artists will re-enact the 1877 scene of a Pilsen railroad strike and a clash between laborers and the Chicago police.
Related

A staging of the Battle of the Halsted Viaduct will take place at 3 p.m. on the corner of South Halsted and West 16th Streets. Attendees will be invited to participate as mobsters and policemen, said Mr. Durica, the founder of the irreverent Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

Period dress is encouraged, and a horse-drawn carriage, live music and foam bricks - in case the audience gets rowdy - will be provided, Mr. Durica said. The free event concludes the Version Festival, a springtime convergence of local artists and musicians that is in its 10th year.

Representing Chicago: Media Burn Archive

2010-04-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

New Chicago Studies article!

Media burn represents Chicago with innovative online archive on Thursday, May 6 at Film Studies Center
It was 1970, and Sony’s Portopak had just become the video camera of choice for a growing number of Chicago’s underground filmmakers. When Judy Hoffman wanted to interview garbage collectors, waitresses and aldermen to capture the images and sounds of a “different city” than what was shown on television, that camera made it possible.

“It was called Guerilla Television,” Hoffman, now a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, explained. “You couldn’t get anything seen on TV that wasn’t produced in a studio, but we started playing around with this new technology … to change how film was produced and received.”

Much of this independent work would be in danger of vanishing, Hoffman says, if not for Media Burn - a project to share the city’s most valuable independent films for free online. Hoffman sees Media Burn’s archive, which boasts hours of footage with city luminaries and everyday citizens - among them the legendary author and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel - to be a resource to students and researchers studying Chicago’s intricate cultural and political history.

Results of Media Burn’s six-year online archiving project will be shared with the University on May 6 at 7:00 p.m. in the Film Studies Center in a presentation called Representing Chicago: Experimental Video and Television at the Media Burn Archive. In addition to screening videos from the collection, the presentation will walk viewers through the Media Burn digital archive and discuss the particular role media plays in making Chicago’s people, politics, and culture accessible.

“The type of work you find in this archive doesn’t exist anywhere else—it’s totally unique. This is because it was done on a medium that was very looked down upon,” says Hoffman, who is using the archive to teach a spring course on Chicago’s film history.

Sara Chapman (AB 04), Executive Director of Media Burn Digital Archive, echoes this sentiment: “The type of work that came out of this movement is not easy to categorize. It does not at all resemble the feature-length documentary movies that are distributed in movie theaters, featuring voiceovers and archival photos or anything like that. The work is often very personal, and it is usually made by a small group of people, maybe a single individual or maybe a handful of people.”

But the material is extensive: Famed Alderman Vito Marzullo; former owner of the White Sox Bill Veeck; eight of the working-class men and women interviewed for Studs Terkel’s book Working.

And then there is Studs Terkel himself, who donated his own collection to Media Burn. Hoffman and her collaborator Tom Weinberg, Media Burn’s president and founder, shot him after their final Working portrait was finished. Hoffman describes the experience of working with Terkel as “tremendous,” as he flowed easily between the roles of mentor and subject.

“He respected people, and was thoroughly passionate about social justice.” Pair that independent spirit with a revolutionary new form of videography, she says, and: “There were no rules. We were about making [our own] rules, and making change.”

That particular film made it onto PBS. But Hoffman insists that what remains of the footage she and other independent filmmakers shot throughout the 1970s would not be available without Media Burn’s extensive efforts to digitize and share the work.

According to Chapman, the archive houses over 6,000 videotapes in total, and spans 40 years of video work from all over the world, including footage of the U.S. invasion of Panama and illegal art collectives in Moscow, Russia.

“Over one-third of the collection has a direct connection to Chicago, whether documenting the early video movement here, the arts, politics, or daily life,” she adds. “Nowhere else can students find these kinds of portraits of our city and its people, politics, and neighborhoods.”

Representing Chicago: Experimental Video and Television at the Media Burn Archive will be at the Film Studies Center (Cobb 307) on Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 7 pm. For reservations, call (773) 702-8596.

One image stands out among fourth-year Cela Sutton’s Orientation Week memories: a black-and-white photo of the Checkerboard Lounge, a famous South Side spot for jazz musicians in the mid-1970s.

Sutton has been thinking about that jazz club a lot lately.

The photomontage was part of You Are Here, a documentary about the University of Chicago’s historic relationship with its neighboring communities that has been shown to incoming students since 2006. Now, Sutton has been tasked with researching and producing a sequel to the film with the goal of introducing students to the issues that shape their new community.

Sutton is partnering with Ben Kolak, AB’06, the creator of You Are Here, to produce the updated documentary, to be called You Are Here Too. The pair will follow the structure Kolak created in his original film by selecting case studies to exemplify larger social and political issues, from urban education to health care.

Just as photos of the historic jazz club illustrated a story about the complex struggles facing community development leaders, Sutton plans to produce a broad picture of life on the South Side that addresses current matters, from the developments at Harper Court to the birth of the Logan Arts Center.

“The original version of You Are Here has a superb historic perspective and ends with one current example of University of Chicago involvement in the community: one charter school,” according to Wallace Goode, Director of the University Community Service Center, who is Sutton’s project manager.

“Since then, we’ve added three more charter schools, we have doubled our number of Community Service RSOs, we have established the Woodlawn Collaborative and developed Chicago Studies—these are just a few examples of how the University has in the last four years expanded its civic engagement within the city of Chicago.”

To cover this range of topics, Sutton said she is dividing the film into four areas: education, health, community development and the arts.

“We’re trying to make each [story] transition into the other. You Are Here ended with a snapshot of one of the Charter schools, so we’re opening up with the charter schools and the Urban Education Institute,” she said.

The film will touch on local arts organizations such as the Hyde Park Art Center and the Little Black Pearl, as well as the University’s decision to build the new South Campus Residence Hall in Woodlawn, the neighborhood directly south of campus.

This means interviewing everyone from Vice President for Student Life Kim Goff-Crews to Wardell Lavendar, the self-described “Mayor of Woodlawn.”

Sutton is rising to that challenge.

“My main goal is to show a balanced piece, and a key piece that wasn’t in the first documentary was the student leaders who are involved in these issues,” Sutton said. She says Project Health and Art Should, both RSOs that work with community members, will play important roles in the film.

“Most students who come here aren’t from Chicago, or even from Illinois, and especially not from the South Side, which is totally different from any other part of Chicago,” Sutton explained. “We want students to take advantage of living in such a diverse and interesting place.”

The Pulse: Making Farmers’ Markets More Accessible

2010-04-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

By RACHEL CROMIDAS
Published: April 10, 2010 in the New York Times.

A Woodlawn farmers' market has been accepting Illinois food stamps for double their value, and now it is helping three more markets to do the same.
Related

Only 3 of Chicago's 39 farmers' markets had the system needed to process the stamps, which in Illinois are redeemed using debit cards called LINK cards, because most of the markets accept only cash. The Woodlawn market at 61st Street and Dorchester Avenue was the only one to double the cardholders' buying power, said David Rand, a farm forager for the city and the Green City Market.

Dennis Ryan, the Woodlawn market's manager, is taking his LINK system to the Englewood, Lawndale and Bronzeville farmers' markets for their May openings. The program at all four markets is being paid for by a grant from the Wholesome Wave Foundation.

For these South Side neighborhoods, "there are very few if any options to purchase fresh produce," Mr. Ryan said. "We have to make sure it's financially accessible to everyone."

Learning From the Pros

2010-04-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

My latest article from the College Page

Evan Garrett can’t help but feel a little starstruck.

His dormitory, Max Palevsky Commons, is just steps away from Court Theatre, one of Chicago’s most critically acclaimed theater companies. And as a Theater and Performance Studies Major, Garrett has been given an inside view of the theater world from Court’s directors and dramaturges.

Garrett’s theater studies are about to get even better.

He and five other undergraduates have been selected to perform a never-before-seen short play by the award-winning playwright Tony Kushner in a staged reading on April 8. Kushner will be on campus to discuss the play, But the Giraffe, and his other works, as part of the ArtSpeaks fellowship program and speaker series on April 6.

In the meantime, Garrett is taking a class on Kushner and rehearsing around the clock under the guidance of University Theater staff and Court Theatre directors, including Court’s celebrated artistic director Charles Newell.

According to Heidi Coleman, Director of TAPS, UT owes Kushner’s upcoming visit to its strong partnership with Court Theatre.

“These kinds of collaborations really come out of the ideas that bounce back and forth between UT, TAPS and Court,” Coleman explained. Newell and UT’s staff “really make it a priority to come up with projects that we might both be interested in.”

Coleman says that the partnership between Court Theatre and UT is a natural, given the theaters’ locations and resources. Still, it is rare for universities to regularly collaborate with professional theaters to this degree.

“It’s all about the relationships for us. Charlie [Newell] is invested in students in very real relationships, not just lip service,” Coleman says.

Garrett agrees. “To have an hour and 20 minutes where the artistic director of Court is directing you is amazing. There are not that many places in the world where you get a critically acclaimed director and such an acclaimed playwright working with undergraduates,” he says. “That’s exactly what is happening with But the Giraffe.”

Garrett especially appreciates the connection he’s been able to establish with Newell and Court Theater via a class he took in winter 2010: The Theatrical Illusion: Corneille, Kushner and the Baroque, co-taught by Newell and Prof. Larry Norman. The course coincides with a run of Kushner’s adaptation of Corneille’s L'Illusion Comique at Court.

Newell says the class he is co-teaching is a rare opportunity for students in the College to work closely on a theater production with professional artists. “Not only are we talking about the coming theater production, but the students have been visiting the rehearsal hall and working with the actors in the company,” he says. “Hopefully this will inform and challenge and inspire students in their own work at UT.”

According to Newell, Court Theatre had a long history as Hyde Park’s only community theater until it became a part of the University and later a professional company in the mid-1970s.

“Jump to 2010, and [with] the collaborations we have been able to form with TAPS and the extraordinary activity going on at UT,” Newell says, and Court has found a variety of opportunities to bring students through its doors to watch rehearsals, and speak to actors and directors. “But the Giraffe is just one of those win-win cross-pollination opportunities that Court and UT have been finding.”

Garrett, for one, regularly takes advantage of Court Theater’s discounted student tickets, and tries to tie what he’s learned from their productions to his own work whenever possible. Court’s Radio Macbeth, for example, serendipitously aligned with a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on campus last year.

Garrett was taking a class at the time taught by Kate Peterson, a dramaturge at Court. Peterson introduced him to Anne Bogart, director of the reimagined Macbeth production. He has also attended Court Theater rehearsals, most recently with his class on Kushner’s works.

“It really speaks well to the University that we are able to do this,” he adds. “We hear about the Nobel-prize winning physicists all the time but not so much about the arts; UChicago is really working hard for the arts.”

Student bassist discovers a new world of music

2010-02-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

The broad musical perspective that third-year Kirsten Paige gained from her orchestra’s winter tour of China began with her fellow musicians in the bass section.

Seated around Paige in the double bass section of the World Orchestra were students from Belgium, Colombia, Brazil, Spain, Slovenia, and Italy. Together they puzzled over musical scores, managed their way through an eight-city tour, and even found time for a New Year’s Eve jazz jam with other musicians in a hotel lobby.

Their success in melding diverse voices should serve Paige well as she pursues her BA in Music History and Theory. After three fast-paced weeks of touring, including stops at the Great Wall and a performance for the Chinese prime minister, Paige found lessons to apply in the classroom as well as the recital hall.

“The group taught me that there is really an infinite number of ways of approaching musical problems, both performance-oriented and theoretical,” Paige says.

At UChicago, Paige is combining her interest in music theory and history—especially opera—with a passion for music performance that started at age 10, when she began playing bass. She auditioned in January 2009 for the World Orchestra, a group of 75 musicians aged 18 to 28. Less than a year later, the students met and rehearsed for a week before embarking on their tour along China’s coast, including stops in Shanghai and Beijing.
Lessons From All Over the Globe

As one of five American students in the group, Paige learned the universality of music, whether during rehearsal, concerts, or the group’s impromptu jam sessions.
Become of a fan of UChicago Arts on FacebookBecome a fan of UChicago Arts on Facebook

“It is unlike any other orchestra that you could find anywhere,” Paige says. “Professional musicians have been playing for decades and already have their individual styles. But everybody in the World Orchestra is a student, and still developing in this way.”

While touring through the winter holidays, the orchestra’s revelry always led to music.

“A couple of students were really good at jazz, so for our New Year’s party they smuggled instruments into the hotel restaurant—we basically took over. While they were playing, everyone started dancing,” she says of the students who danced in the styles from their native Latin American countries.

Between visits to national museums and the Great Wall, the group learned it would be playing for China’s prime minister while in Guangzhou. That evening, they performed for him and an audience of more than 2,000.

For the musicians and many audience members, the orchestra bore an uplifting message about the ability of diverse cultures to connect and build something new together, Paige says. When conductor Josep Vicent needed his worldly crew to change their tone, he described the image of a candle flickering to represent the warmth he wanted their music to convey.

“Once, somebody had a question about phrasing, and everybody had a different idea about how to answer it,” she says. “The product that resulted from all these different approaches was really colorful and varied, in terms of textures and emotions.”
Musical Love Turns to Opera

Paige started playing bass in grade school after her parents encouraged her to pick up an instrument. She studied at the Juilliard School of Music and became enthralled with opera when her bass professor, Tim Cobb of the Metropolitan Opera, suggested she attend a performance at the Met.

“Opera immediately excited my interest. It just grabs me,” Paige says. “I’ve only played a couple of operas. I get distracted when I play opera—I want to pay attention to what’s going on on the stage.”

Opera immediately excited my interest. It just grabs me.”
—third-year Kirsten Paige

The strength of UChicago’s program in music history and theory drew Paige to the University, she says.

“We basically have an all-star faculty in the Music Department. Whenever I tell anyone I go to UChicago, everybody knows our department.” She says the department has a small number of undergraduate majors, making it easier for students to seek out professors, including her BA advisor—Philip Gossett, the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor in Music, and one of the foremost experts on Italian opera.

Paige is currently working on a BA paper about several of Giuseppe Verdi’s later works. On the performance side, she recently played in the University Symphony Orchestra’s production of Peter Tchaikovsky’s works on Jan. 30.

She still plans to pursue a graduate degree in musicology, though Paige says the China experience left her somewhat torn between her interest in opera and the excitement of playing for new audiences.

“Playing in the World Orchestra is incredibly inspiring,” Paige says. “Regardless of what I decide to pursue as a career, music is going to be the focus of my life.”

By Rachel Cromidas, third-year in the College

What I learned in 2009

2010-01-12T20:52:00.000-08:00

2009 has been a truly transforming year for me. I realized this when the boyfriend and I stepped off the University's free shuttles to downtown (meant to take students to Taking the Next Step, an alumni networking and career preparation event) and took several steps away from the event to spend the day together running errands instead. A year ago I was in those Marriott conferences rooms, begging alumni for some shred of hope that the financial crisis hadn't dealt any fatal blows to my future in journalism, and Washington Post columnist Bob Levy first told me about the Alicia Paterson Foundation, and the general notion that one could fund investigative projects via independent grants.

Like the Summer Action Grant, which I went on to apply for and receive later that year, and used to run, jump, throw myself into (and many other sports metaphors apply here) covering Chicago's Olympic Bid. Now I'm 20, and have my first byline in the New York Times. Damn things change; this much I am thrilled with. But how can I not be overwhelmed by the notion that I really am as capable as people say I am, that maybe I don't have any excuses not to be doing exactly what I want to do with my life, starting now. So I'm 12 days late in the New Years reflection department, but how's that for making up for lost time?

Without further ado, I give you What I Learned in 2009. Some of it's frivolously cosmetic, some of it has completely changed the way I view my place in this world:

1) Life always looks better after you’ve been on a jog and written a blog post, article or journal entry.
2) When I was in third grade I decided that I looked chubby with shoulder length hair, and demanded my parents allow me to grow it out. This summer, I hacked half of it off. The verdict? Short hair does not make you look fat. And I'm cutting it even shorter—will report back with more not-fat results next year.
3) When in doubt, go out. There is more to be accomplished outdoors, with friends, up late, on the North Side, than there ever could be at home in bed with an orange and the books (no, not all the books at once). Though the latter is a comforting prospect...
4) The only way to get real work done is to do so in isolation. But the time you spend not getting working done with friends is much more valuable.
5) Writing the way I do is never a bad idea, though some people will try to tell you it is.
6) The only time people are willing to tell you about themselves is at 11 pm after pancakes. Be prepared.
7) Physics majors are like football players for the least disenchanted of UChicago nerds. So don't hesitate to ask them to move your furniture/suitcases, etc.
8) Sometimes you may feel overwhelmed; your life may seem to hectic; your internal monologue may start to sound like one of those TV sleeping pill ads. You will fall asleep, give it time.
9) Not every ache and pain is the downfall of civilization in your brain. You have no Achilles toenail, tooth, etc.
10) You can count on Ben for much more than you’d ever believed.

Failed Olympics Bid Leaves Neighborhood in Flux

2010-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

The secret's out! Through that special combination of luck/busting my ass, I wrote a story for the Chicago edition of the New York Times—specifically, for the Chicago News Cooperative.
Chicago News Cooperative

By RACHEL CROMIDAS

For much of Shannon Fischer’s 20 years, community change in her Bronzeville neighborhood has come in the form of a wrecking ball.

First, the Ida B. Wells housing projects fell, then the Robert Taylor homes, and now, within view of her apartment at 33rd Street and Cottage Grove, Michael Reese Hospital is coming down. Destruction can often lead to reconstruction, but hopes that Bronzeville might be revitalized as the site of an Olympic Village died in October when Chicago lost its bid for the 2016 Summer Games.

The neighborhood’s residential market took a severe hit, and developers have put off major investments. Few developers, it seems, can get serious about new projects in Bronzeville until the City of Chicago reveals plans for the landmark Michael Reese site, 37 acres at the heart of a potentially promising lakefront neighborhood.

Ms. Fischer remains optimistic. Even though the blocks in her neighborhood alternate between new condominiums and empty lots, foot traffic is sparse — and the only shopping center consists mostly of convenience stores and an auto repair shop — she believes greater Bronzeville will have its day.

“I think the neighborhood will continue to grow, considering there’s different people, different races and age groups moving in,” Ms. Fischer said.

Bronzeville was once a thriving “black metropolis” with hundreds of black-owned businesses and a booming night life. Its population swelled during the great migration of Southern blacks seeking jobs after World War I.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks lived there, and in 1945, her first book of poetry — “A Street in Bronzeville” — brought her instant critical acclaim. Other notable residents included Richard Wright, the author of “Native Son,” and the jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong.

The area’s decline began in the 1950s as it gradually lost its middle class and businesses started to close. Though Bronzeville is unlikely to reclaim its golden era, developers like Keith Giles see the potential for new growth, only he does not expect to reach it any time soon.

Last year, Mr. Giles’s firm, Kargil Development, told the city that it was interested in developing the Olympic Village. The project would have helped Olympics promoters realize their vision of a new neighborhood that could bridge the gap between the resurgent Bronzeville community and the South Loop.

“It was an exciting development opportunity for an international event,” Mr. Giles said.

But with the Olympics impetus gone, banks not lending and no other financing in sight, Mr. Giles does not expect action soon on a Michael Reese site that might cost $1 billion to redevelop.

“The development business right now is on sabbatical,” he said.

While Mr. Giles’s company considers another project nearby, it doesn’t expect to see change soon.. “Unfortunately, most everything has stopped,” Mr. Giles said. “There’s new developments on one block, and you go across the street and there’s a burned-out building.”

Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, whose Fourth Ward includes the Reese campus, expects the city to release its plan for the site early this year. She said that a developer might be selected by the end of the year, but that the first buildings would most likely not be completed until 2012.

Ms. Preckwinkle also said developers would “prefer a clear site” around Michael Reese, casting further doubt on the efforts of preservationists who are fighting to save nearby buildings designed in consultation with the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the influential Bauhaus School.

Bernita Johnson-Gabriel, executive director of the Quad Communities Development Corporation, a neighborhood group that serves the Kenwood, Oakland and Douglas neighborhoods that make up greater Bronzeville, said hurdles to development included concerns about crime that are rooted in racial stereotypes.

“We are a neighborhood of color,” Ms. Johnson-Gabriel said. “There’s a perception of crime that obviously doesn’t quite exist here the way it is portrayed.”

Indeed, crime in the Douglas and neighboring Oakland neighborhoods fell steadily over the past decade, according to Chicago Police Department reports. Statistics show a 67 percent decline for Douglas — to 1,074 crimes in 2009 from 3,290 in 1999 — while Oakland’s number fell by more than half, to fewer than 300 from 611.

Some of the city’s larger development groups are pushing ahead despite a lack of clarity about the city’s plans. One, Draper and Kramer, is proceeding on a 70-acre development just south of Michael Reese that it began planning three years ago. In addition to 2,000 high-rise apartment units, the Lake Meadows project will feature renovation of existing rental units and condominiums, construction of single-family town homes and expansion of a small shopping center on the corner of 35th Street and Cottage Grove.

The firm will keep a close eye on the city’s plan for the Michael Reese site.

“We are very interested because it’s a large development and right next door to our property,” said Donald Vitek, vice president of acquisitions and development for Draper and Kramer.

While some residents and developers want officials to move quickly on the city’s plans for the Reese site, Mr. Vitek said a slower pace made sense. It will allow time to survey current community needs, he said, and possibly wait out a soured housing market.

The Douglas neighborhood’s new condos and town homes are selling for as little as $125 a square foot, a steep discount from similar South Loop properties. But Mr. Vitek predicted a steady increase in demand once the market improves.

An Olympics aftershock is hitting the market for existing homes in the neighborhood, too. Pam Dempsey, a real estate broker for Bronzeville Properties, said home sales came to a standstill during the Olympics bidding process, as property owners waited for the decision on a site. Only after the bid failed did they look to sell.

“They’re now entering into a down market,” Ms. Dempsey said. Prices for single-family homes in the area have declined to $100,000 to $200,000 now from $200,000 to $400,000 in mid-2007, she said. A high foreclosure rate has made the Bronzeville downturn worse than what has hit the South Loop or Hyde Park.

“We’ve experienced a lot of really, really deeply discounted foreclosures,” Ms. Dempsey said. “You’ll have a house that needs a ton of work going for maybe $35,000.”

When development does come, she said, Bronzeville will benefit most if the retail part appeals to the same kind of newly affluent residents as those who have moved into the South Loop and Hyde Park.

“Not the fast-food stuff we already have around here,” Ms. Dempsey said, “but nicer retail, like the stuff that came to the South Loop over the past 5 to 10 years. A wine shop or a cafe or bookstores — these things will keep people in the neighborhood.”

Joseph Schwietermann, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University, warned against easy comparisons between Bronzeville and the Hyde Park and South Loop neighborhoods. He attributes a combination of poor post-World War II urban planning and Bronzeville’s history of slow growth as factors that have made Bronzeville less successful.

“It’s easier to invest in housing with the hopes that retail will follow,” Mr. Schwietermann said. But, he added, “you can’t assume that if you build it, they will come.”

In October, contractors hired by the city began tearing down the first of seven buildings on the Michael Reese campus slated for demolition. The timeline for development is not urgent, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Community Development said, because the city will not begin making mortgage payments on the property until 2014.

The department envisions a large-scale residential and retail complex with a mixture of affordable and market-rate housing, in addition to dry cleaners, coffee shops and other staple businesses of neighborhood life. Its stated goal is “to build a community from scratch,” and stimulate redevelopment on the lakefront south of McCormick Place.

Byron Lindsey, manager of an auto repair shop, has seen little retail growth around the garage he has managed for nearly 20 years in what is now the Lake Meadows shopping center.

But his business is down only slightly despite the slow economy, Mr. Lindsey said as he juggled a phone in each hand and spoke to customers from behind the counter. He has perceived an influx of higher-income residents over the past five years, which he expects will contribute to a comeback once the economy recovers.

Redevelopment of the Michael Reese property could be the key.

“It could really determine whether the community gets a kick-start on its way back,” Mr. Lindsey said.

Rachel Cromidas is a Chicago freelance writer. Ben Goldberger contributed reporting.

By Me

2010-01-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

This blog has been silent all week, the first week of classes, but I've been working pretty hard. You could say I've been leading a double-life of sorts, one in which I'm a full-time student at the University of Chicago, and the other in which I'm a freelance journalist, sneaking off to the bathroom during class to answer phone calls from my editors.

Tomorrow, my 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. work-week is starting to pay-off, and I'm thrilled. Here's a hint:

Yup, all 14 letters of me, and 1,200 or so words more to come Sunday morning!

Gardening for Peace

2010-01-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

New story about two awesome UChicago alumns and their aid work in Africa—they helped farmers build a sustainable vegetable garden in a village with limited fresh food access:

Rebecca Thal began gardening in a small herb patch in the backyard of her childhood home. But she never imagined that her hobby would help improve the lives of villagers in South Africa’s Limpopo province.

Thal and Aliza Levine, both AB ’09, headed to South Africa in the summer of 2009 to create a sustainable community garden for the residents of the Hamakuya village as winners of the Davis Projects for Peace prize.

Davis Projects for Peace was started three years ago by philanthropist Kathryn Davis, who provides $10,000 each for 100 projects devised by U.S. college students. The University of Chicago is one of 90 colleges and universities to participate in the program, according to Jen Bess, a college adviser. Applications for the 2010 program are due January 8, 2010 at noon.

“The goal of our project is to increase food security in the region,” Levine said. “Part of the reason food security is so important is because of HIV rates. It’s important that people who are taking antiretrovirals or have symptoms get adequate nutrition.”

Levine and Thal partnered with David Bunn, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, whom they met while studying abroad in Cape Town in winter 2008. Bunn is the co-founder of Tshulu Trust, a non-profit organization that studies ecological resources in communities surrounding Kruger National Park, like Hamakuya.

Though the trust had been working to set up small businesses and create jobs in ecotourism for the community, it did not have the resources to create a much-needed indigenous plant garden. “We just asked them how we could help,” Thal said.
Cape Town study abroad

Levine and Thal received their first introduction to Hamakuya when they stayed in a village compound during the Cape Town study abroad program, where they studied anthropology and African civilizations.

“I think a lot of anthropology [views the world] through a distancing mechanism. One of the reasons the Cape Town program was so great…was that just being in the new environment prevented that from happening,” Levine said.

For Thal, the quarter abroad not only exposed her to a different part of the world, it helped her define her studies back on campus as well.

“The Cape Town trip was the most intense and the most rewarding part of my time [at the University],” she said. “It changed my intellectual engagement with the world.”

The Davis Project caught Thal’s eye when she returned. “I was looking for any way I could get back to South Africa,” she said.

The committee from the College that selected the nominees for the Davis Projects for Peace prize was particularly impressed with Levine and Thal’s proposal.

“We wanted to see that students had been thoughtful about how their proposal connected to the idea of peace, and [Levine and Thal] did a nice job of tying that to the issue of food security,” Bess said. “It’s hard to have a life of peace when you are desperate for basic necessities like food.”
Unfinished business

After her first experience in South Africa, “I wanted to see more, not just of the political life but the day-to-day life in the rural parts,” Thal said.

The pair wanted to experience more of village life in Limpopo. But they also felt they had unfinished business with the community and the Tshulu Trust, which hadn’t been able to start up a food security program by the time they left.

“We saw firsthand how food was integrated into everyday life, and the lack of diversity of food sources,” Levine said.

To address these problems of public health and food access in South Africa, Thal and Levine spent 6 weeks in Hamakuya in July and August. For their primary project, they helped four farmers construct a vegetable garden with a sustainable irrigation system called circle farming.

Thal and Levine found the support of community members invaluable to the success of their project.

“We thought we would get over jet lag on day one and then start the project on day two,” Thal said. “But it took something like three weeks for us to build relationships and get a strong foothold in the community.”

The nearest village had only a dozen households, and Thal and Levine were among the few residents with a car. “We kind of became a taxi service, giving people rides when they asked,” Thal said.

Other locals gravitated to them out of curiosity, or a desire to help.

“One older man took on this informal advisory role for us. He would come by with his dogs and say hello; [he] told us what he’d seen and heard and taught us some of the language. Just hearing what [neighbors] wanted to get out of it helped us refine our approach. We didn’t put shovels in the ground until much later.”

Levine believes their work could have a lasting impact on the community. “There is very little rainfall, so their growing season is very short, and that makes it difficult to have long-term food security,” Levine said. “But the farmers were excited, and the best thing is this [method] is easy to replicate—the farmers have already made a commitment to show others in the community.”

How to Hack Christmas

2009-12-24T07:32:00.000-08:00

Creative solutions for a girl who doesn't quite get into the Christmas cheer

Christmas is a cultural script we know well, from the mall Santa's red cap and beard right down to the toasty roasted chestnuts and fuzzy stockings hanging on the mantel. Picturing it could just send shivers through my snow-boots ... except I'm in Southern California.

1. Food and Drink

For many, Christmas is a time for the tacit celebration of overabundance—and a reprieve of Thanksgiving—or the supermarket's second chance to sell off the last of its frozen turkeys and pies. Not for Tristam Stuart. Stuart has long decried food waste in the U.K. and internationally, and as the Financial Times reported today, last week this self-professed freegan fed 5,000 people in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate just how far food can stretch and still satisfy.

As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot: "people were queuing up [on December 16, at the Square] and taking away bagfuls of free groceries. And when they got to the front of the line – it’s just a joyous sight – people were saying, ‘What’s wrong with this? Why was this going to be wasted?’ I didn’t need to say any more. Exactly.”

How does Stuart's theory bear on your Christmas holiday or mine? It's fundamentally about rejecting the notion that we must consume or purchase more than we need in the spirit of the season. And if you really must have that whole, roasted turkey (like my mom did) then make sure it doesn't go to waste—I can promise you there's going to be a lot of turkey broth, turkey lasagna, and turkey enchiladas from now through New Years'. That's the price you pay.

And ethical consumption is not just about reducing food waste. It also means laying off the eggnog, or else taking yourself off the roads entirely on Christmas Eve, when drunk driving accidents and rates soar.

2. Company

The holidays are about family, love, joy, and togetherness. This is a beautiful farce that leads plenty of otherwise functional people (like yours truly) to contemplate sitting in bed with a bowl of popcorn watching a celebrity match-maker show. But not you.

As Dan Savage so brilliantly points out in his podcast this week, "I guarantee you that bars and nightclubs in the town on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are packed with other people who ...needed to get away and are also single, like you! So put the iPod down, put the cookies down, go to a bar, have a drink, flirt, and get yourself some Christmas fucking." Thank you always, Dan, for your unflinching lucidity.

And not me, either. I am spending my Christmas weekend with other Jews, heretics, and maybe a couple of Christians who have fallen off their parents' church-going bandwagon. We're cooking and watching movies together (tonight was the Matrix, hence allusions to hacking a system built on comfortable lies)

3. Gifts
And speaking of comfortable lies, I give you gift-giving! I'm a college student, who works 15-hours a week and dreams of working in a bankcrupt industry, so obviously I enjoy what financial help I can get. But I don't think Christmas is an appropriate occasion for anyone to help me get one step closer to financial independence from my parents.

But with money tight for everyone these days, I more than appreciate NY Times columnist Nick Kristof's take on the adage, "it's the thought that counts." Yeah, why not put that cashmere scarf back on its shelf and send a little something the way of Deworm the World, or the World Wide Fistula Fund?

4. Family, hope, and all the trappings of the season

It would be wrong to leave out any mention of my family from a post on how to fix Jesus' birthday for non-believers, as though after all this talk of charities and slow-cooked tomato broths, a reader could only picture my family gathered around a fireplace, holiday-sweater-clad, arm in arm. In truth, Christmas has not been much of a family affair since before I was a teenager, and it's even less so this year.

My parents' house (my house? This I've been less sure of for more than a year now) is full of unease this year. It's usually filled with the busy hum of people whole-heartedly committed to their individual routines: my dad in the backyard watering the plants, my mom folding laundry, my brother in his room slouching over his laptop. the devotion to efficiency.

But today is different, because my 16 year-old brother spent the past year battling colon disease. He missed out on most of his sophomore year of high school and a period that is by many accounts the capstone of the teenage years, and we're still waiting to learn whether or not he has really beat it. Some bad symptoms resurfaced yesterday, sending both our parents into all their rituals of worrying.

I want to be supportive, but there are so many limitations. Chief among them is a year-long conflict between my parents and me that I only I am now beginning to overcome. It's about my identity and my ability to make decisions as an adult, 20 years old, and how at this age their so-called protection could be hurting me. It's tough stuff for a parent to stomach, I'm told, but it isn't easy for me, either, to think that even though I have achieved personal successes and dreamed dreams that make me the happiest I've been in my life, I'm a disappointment to them.

But it's Christmas, a holiday so glittery and cheery that it could make anyone without a turkey drenched in cranberry sauce on their table feel a little lonely, so here I am; making soup that maybe nobody will want to eat, renting DVDs and hoping that this house will allow itself some happiness—and feeling more than a little guilty that I get to leave for my home again in just another week.

Hitting the Books in Harper

2009-12-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

I tried to make finals week in Harper Memorial Library into an interesting story. Hey, news is slow in December, okay?

When Alex Gleckman really wants to focus on his schoolwork, he paces up and down the center of the Harper Library reading room.

"I think he looks ridiculous," his friend Jean-Michel Hoffman teased, as the two spread out their notebooks beneath one of the many desk lamps illuminating the room.

Since the University of Chicago renovated Harper Memorial Library, it has become an increasingly popular study spot for students like Gleckman and Hoffman, both first-years, who want to bury themselves in their readings or problem sets. The University closed Harper Library over the summer to begin its transformation into a 24-hour study space and café. When it reopened in September, the worn carpeting and threadbare chairs were gone, replaced by plush seating and improved lighting.

Four months later, at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday of finals week—with just 20 hours left until the end of exams—the new study space is humming with activity.

Gleckman and Hoffman are hard at work, studying for a morning calculus exam. "I'll be here for a while," Gleckman speculated. "Probably until 9:30 a.m."

"That's just him; I can't do that," said Hoffman, a first-year who has pulled "some pretty late ones" for his Human Being and Citizen class, but no all-nighters to date. They both turn back to their textbooks with grim determination.

The mood is livelier (and more caffeinated) in Common Knowledge, a new student-run coffee shop next to the library's reading room. The dozen students who populate the cavernous vestibule-turned-café have their books and laptops open. A graduate student is conducting office hours at a corner table. All have coffee. Two friends greet each other with a quick embrace in front of the bar. "Hey! I haven't seen you...or any other humans, really."

That sentiment may be common among the library denizens four and a half days into their final exams, but third-year Matthew Carville, his finals long completed, is going home to play video games after his shift at the café is over.

Carville, assistant manager of Common Knowledge, says Harper's atmosphere—with its gothic architecture and a pastry selection that evokes afternoon tea more than late-night cram sessions—is the reason he forgoes other student-run coffee shops like Cobb and Hallowed Grounds.

"This is such a beautiful place," he said. "I think students come here to get a break from going at it in the main room."

Carville says the library is now his first choice for "going at it." "[T]he new reading room is really wonderful," he said.

And he isn't the only student to add Harper to his routine.

"We can see by our returns that [the café] gradually got more and more popular, and more and more people bought stuff as the quarter went on," he said. "And the fact that we were one of the only coffee shops open during reading period meant a huge boost in sales."

These days, the library and café are frequented by a combination of undergraduates with morning classes in the classrooms below, College advisors with offices throughout the building, and graduate students, who third-year Liz Kerr claims are infamous for their coffee habits.

"All the graduate students come up at the same time in the afternoon. They ask us what time we're open until"—1:00 a.m.—"and they say 'Great, I'll get three shots of espresso,'" said Kerr, another café barista.

But fourth-year Emily Chase doesn't come to Harper for the coffee.

"All through college, I spent pretty much every night in the Reg," the political science major explained, reluctantly pulling herself away from a research paper on the evolution of the United States' wilderness policies. "But now I spend maybe 80% of my time in Harper. This is my last year here, so I really thought I should enjoy the architecture of this great space while I still can."

The City is a Laboratory: Chicago Studies Winter Courses

2009-12-14T08:08:00.000-08:00

What I like best about Winter Break is the three weeks of joy I can experience over choosing my classes, unadulterated by the notion that once the quarter gets underway I will be too busy/stressed/freezing cold to tell the difference between Phy-Sci Core and Spanish Literature anyway. So on that note, let's get excited about the new crop of Chicago Studies courses being offered this Winter:

This winter, UChicago students will advise local non-profits, drive along 100 miles of the Michigan-Illinois Canal, and study the community organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky.

These are just a few of the topics covered in next quarter’s Chicago Studies courses. The classes will allow students to engage with the city of Chicago through everything from geography to philosophy.

According to Bart Schultz, the director of the Civic Knowledge Project and the teacher of next quarter’s “What is Civic Knowledge?” and “The Chicago School of Philosophy” the city of Chicago is a critical resource for students of political and social movements.

Schultz is team-teaching “What is Civic Knowledge?” a special course in the Big Problems department, with Margot Browning, Assoc. Dir. of the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

“We’re not interested in teaching ‘here are the three branches of government.’ [“Civic Knowledge”] is about the actual basis for community organizing, civic friendship, a healthier and more participatory democracy,” Schultz says.

“We really range across the history of Chicago and the history of the University of Chicago from the original settlements in the Pottawattamie to looking at future plans for 2020 and 2040,” he explains. “We read a lot of absolutely wonderful material, everything from [President Barack] Obama’s Dreams From My Father, to classic Chicago authors with an emphasis on political mobilization.”

In Debra Schwartz’s class, “The Business of Non-Profits,” students will do more than study community activism. They will consult with and advise local non-profits, then present their work to the rest of the class, she said. Schwartz will also bring local non-profit leaders to speak to the class, which is limited to members of the RSO-branch of the non-profit consulting group Campus Catalyst.

Like Schultz, Schwartz links her course material to Chicago’s rich history of public service work and University research.

“Some of the most influential leaders were Jane Addams and her colleagues, some of whom were on our faculty. One of the great insights they had at the time was that Chicago was tremendous urban laboratory. [This city] gives us the opportunity to really see upfront the kinds of problems we’re trying to address through social policy,” Schwartz explains.

“I don’t think you can get quite the depth of experience without this hands-on piece, if you want to really understand the role that a nonprofit plays and how difficult it is to do nonprofit work well,” she adds.

The non-profits range from the Hyde Park Art Center to tutoring and childcare organizations. Because of this diversity, Schwartz said the class attracted a broad range of students, including Economics majors, as well as Public Policy, Art History, and Physics students. “I think it’s great, because the kind of organizations we work with have diverse [services and goals],” she says.

Judy Hoffman is also bringing inspiration from the city to her Documentary Film Production class. As part of this two-quarter-long sequence, students will work in groups to document either a portrait of a Chicagoan, a social issue, or an historical narrative.

“This is a cinematic social inquiry, using the city as a laboratory for investigation,” Hoffman says. “I try to encourage [my students] to get off campus and look at the city and its people, to figure out what really needs to be said.”

Past projects have ranged from profiles of Chicago political figures to more experimental meditations on the city’s landscape. Hoffman considers her students fortunate to have the entire city as inspiration and stomping-grounds for their documentary shooting.

“Chicago has I don’t-know-how-many ethnic groups, around 140; so it’s an opportunity to clearly to explore the landscape of the city and how a built environment informs how people live. Ranging from Mies Van der Rohe to the Chicago Housing Authority, there’s a lot of different ways to look at the city,” Hoffman says.

Chicago’s diverse landscapes also inform Michael Conzen’s upper-division class, “Urban Geography.”

According to Conzen, the course will examine the role cities play in national and regional urban networks. He will lead students to the Regenstein library to view its collection of historical Chicago maps and documents, and on a hundred-mile field trip along the historical Illinois-Michigan Canal.

Why make Chicago a focal point of the course? Conzen says the benefits are clear.

“Being a geographer, I believe very strongly that the visual landscapes around us [help students] put their book learning on the line; they see what works terms of the consequential landscapes and environments that have been created as a result of the forces that they’re reading about.”

Martha Nussbaum talks marriage, revulsion, and wearing leather

2009-12-13T06:21:00.000-08:00

Professor Nussbaum (of the Law School, the Philosophy Department... anywhere in the University that can get its hands on her) has an interview with Deborah Solomon of the New York Times this week.

It looks like she has a book coming out in February about sexuality, disgust, and the opposition to same-sex marriage!

Your inquiries have lately revolved around the politics of physical revulsion, which you see as the subtext for opposition to same-sex marriage.

What is it that makes people think that a same-sex couple living next door would defile or taint their own marriage when they don’t think that, let’s say, some flaky heterosexual living next door would taint their marriage? At some level, disgust is still operating.

In your book “From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law,” which will be out in February, you draw a distinction between primary disgust and projective disgust.

What becomes really bad is the projective kind, meaning projecting smelliness, sliminess and stickiness ontoa group of people who are then stigmatized and regarded as inferior.

I don't have a lot to say right now about her theories on the relationship between revulsion and bigotry, but I am really excited to get this book because I think it could help me flesh out my B.A. topic. Currently, I'm planning on writing an extension of that research paper I wrote last Spring on the VA court case Bottoms v. Bottoms—a custody battle between a lesbian and her mother. What fascinated me about this case was how the courts conflated sexuality with one's ability to parent a child—when one would logically seem to me to have nothing to do with the other. Likewise, a certain negative association against any non-normative sexuality can lead people to demonstrate prejudice in the working world, the family/legal arena, and virtually all walks of life.

Earth Gaze

2009-12-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

According to some historians, the publication of the first image of from outer space transformed the way Americans viewed their place on our planet. Once we could gaze back on the Earth from the moon, Earth no longer seemed like a place of abundant resources, but a small and finite dot suspended in a vast emptiness, entirely responsible for its own continuation.

That shift, according to "Earth Days," a documentary currently screening at the Siskel Film Center in the Loop, spurred the modern environmental movement that has been questioning how, and at what cost, we fuel our cars, heat our homes and feed our families, since the 1970s. Weighing the short term gains and long term consequences of everything from spraying DDT and other pesticides to placing solar panels on the roof of the White House, has led to some amazing innovations, and understandably, the sobering realization that "healing" the planet will take a lot more work still.

The environmental movement was one strong voice among the readings I was assigned in Losing the Farm: the Globalization of Food Production in the 20th century, and will inform my final paper for that class.

A photo I took of farmer Steve Tiwald, founder of the Green Earth Institute, with a row of dino-kale, while on a Losing the Farm field-trip. I love kale!

Are we chemists, taming the natural world with new technologies like genetic modification that can increase yields and farm efficiency and cheapen the cost of mono-cropping, or is it time to "make peace with nature," as President Richard Nixon (who surprisingly signed the Clean Air Act into law) advocated in early 1970s?

Is a new era of innovation just around the corner, promising to increase the urban standard of living by exponential degrees, or is the future of a prosperous and healthy human race actually tied up in the trope of the New England village, where everyone knows their neighbors, has a real stake in community affairs, and strives for communal sufficiency?

These are a couple of the very difficult conceptual questions this movie and my class are concerned with. Answering them is a tall order (made taller still by the pressing issue of over-consumption--Uh, can I super-size that conceptual question?) I'm writing my final paper about the farmers' market as a tool to reconcile the community, environmental and personal health benefits of receiving locally-produced goods with the autonomy of the urban sprawl. To have your city, and eat your farm too, so to speak. I'll post my findings later.

Regardless, I took away from this movie that it's time to change the rhetoric of sustainability from "Stop what you're doing, you bad person, you!" to one that is constantly and non-judgmentally suggesting alternatives, suggesting that yes, you really can drive an electric car around the world; yes, we really can reduce air and water pollution without sacrificing our quality of life.

It amazes me how much I am, especially at the University of Chicago, limited by institutional imagination, or lack thereof; there are so many aspects of life directly tied to mental and physical well-being here I would change if I could, but how often do I question that they don't necessarily have to be so? For example, I have a lot of criticism about the Core curriculum, which I hope to write about after finals week. Well, Femmaj, one of the RSOs in which I'm involved, is starting a campaign to change diversity in the Core, which we believe is riddled with tokenism and unimaginative curricula for engaging with big picture concepts like "Power, Identity and Resistance." What made me think I couldn't criticize this before now? What makes me think there are other parts of this University that are immutable, like the almost-universally decried dining hall food?

A University with this kind of intellectual clout, money and resources should not be stuck with archaic practices, like the mass-waste generated by 3 inefficient dining halls that serve low-quality, conventional produce and over-processed frozen foods. Could change really be as simple as standing up and suggesting an alternative?

"Arrr, Matey!" Cascade students dive in

2009-12-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

Cascade program offers public school students quirky classes on everything from Batman to pirates.

Submitted by Rachel Cromidas, Class of 2011 | New Media Editor

"Today we are gonna go a'pirating, and you are all sea dogs," second-year Amy Woodruff said to her classroom of 30 high school students. The kids took turns applying temporary tattoos of skull and crossbones while she explained their plan to raid another classroom.

The "sea dogs" were enrolled in Woodruff and second-year Brooke Slawinski's class on "Pirate Culture and Democracy" for Cascade, a seven-week program in which University of Chicago students teach ninth through twelfth graders.

Cascade is run by an RSO called Splash!, based on an MIT program of the same name. The one-day Splash! program was so successful that the organizers decided to create the seven-week Cascade program. The majority of Cascade's roughly 60 students are enrolled in public schools in Kenwood, Hyde Park and Woodlawn. Cascade's eclectic courses have ranged from an introduction to neuroscience to a class on Batman called "The Dark Knight Abides."
That 'wow' experience in the classroom

Slawinski and Woodruff say their class was inspired by Asst. Prof. Shannon Lee Dawdy's course on pirates last spring. Their offshoot class explores how pirates across history have organized their crews and communicated with each other.

Though the high schoolers were batting each other playfully with foam swords, the scene wasn't too foreign from a University of Chicago seminar class. "We're not going to just tell you where the treasure's at," Woodruff and Slawinski insisted, sounding like professors who probe their students with questions rather than simply giving them answers. "You're going to have to find it yourselves."

After a pop quiz on the Golden Age of piracy, Slawinski led her students out of the classroom and toward the lecture hall that harbored fourth-year Amy Estersohn's journalism class. "Ahoy! Avast!" they chanted.

The pirates burst through the doors, cheering. Estersohn, ready to make the outburst into a learning experience, calmed them down. "We ask that in return for disrupting the journalism class, we get to interview you about your pirate practices."

The journalism class immediately began to lob questions at the pirate crew—Why did you become a pirate? Why are you wearing an eyepatch? The classroom material regularly becomes a backdrop for these kinds of hands-on experiences, according to Estersohn, and that's what keeps the students engaged.

She said Cascade owes its success to passionate teachers and volunteers who prefer to teach with projects rather than lectures. "We've all had that 'wow' experience in the classroom, we've all had that teacher who inspired us. We love learning, and want to share that with others," Estersohn said.
An introduction to college life

The proof of Cascade's success is its ability to bring enrolled students back for classes week after week, even though no one is taking attendance or handing out grades. "We get emails from parents thanking us, because they see the long-term investment we've made here," Estersohn said. Parents know that Cascade is more than an after-school activity—it's an introduction to college life.

"A lot of these students might not be familiar with [the University of Chicago], but this is a terrific opportunity for them to feel less intimidated by the idea of college," Estersohn explained. "They walk through our hallways, they have pizza with us, and they get to know who we are."

The University has supported Cascade in many ways, according to Estersohn. In addition to providing equipment and meals for Cascade students, the University has opened up classrooms for Cascade. "We've used Ryerson for an astronomy class, we've used the [Biological Sciences Learning Center]. It's so terrific that the University's resources are open to students," she said.

Thanks to this support, Estersohn added, Splash! and Cascade can provide programming to high school students at no cost. "Whenever I talk to guidance counselors, their jaws drop. They ask, 'Where's the application, what's the cost?' I tell them there is no application, no cost, and they almost can't believe the University of Chicago and its students do this."

Autumn 2009 Midway Review, with my article about the Olympics

2009-11-29T11:54:00.000-08:00

The 2009 Midway Review is out, but unfortunately not up on our website yet. Here's a photo of the cover for now, and a re-posting of my article on the aftermath of Chicago's Olympic bid:

NO LITTLE PLANS: CHICAGO’S NEXT OLYMPIC MARATHON WILL BE REVITALIZING THE SOUTH SIDE

I.

It was humid, the first Tuesday of July, and President Zimmer was sharing his lunch break with a bullhorn and a crowd of protesters.

A handful of South Side residents, University of Chicago students, and representatives from the Illinois Single-Payer were marching against the closing of a University of Chicago Medical Center Clinic on 47th St. The protest, led by South Side Together Organizing for Power on the corner of 58th and Ellis Ave, was typical: The marchers chanted, "health care is a human right!” and circled the Administration Building while University employees darted in and out of the front entrance.

But one set of small, black and white posters carried a slightly different message: “Better clinics—No Olympics Games.” This slogan became incorporated into another chant as the group continued to pace along the street.

The protest was primarily about criticizing the Medical Center for disregarding poor people—this much was clear. But less obviously, it also implicated the city's Olympic bid—and the bid's potential cost for taxpayers—as a big part of the problem of Chicago’s health care disparities.

The protestors won’t be using this argument anymore; Chicago lost the Olympic bid last month with a surprisingly low number of votes from the International Olympic Committee, and the city has not indicated that it will pursue another after garnering last place against Madrid, Rio de Janeiro (the winner) and Tokyo.

But for those who opposed the Olympic bid this summer, the Games became a proxy for all of Chicago’s public works ills: the failing school system, the broken transit model, gang violence, health care disparities. The colorful Chicago 2016 banners adorning Washington Park loomed over these South Side community issues leading up to the Oct. 2 bid decision, and continued to hang somberly for sometime after the city’s loss, begging the questions, When will the park district take them down? And What will the city do next in this beautiful park, and the dismally low-income neighborhoods at its borders?

In Chicago’s failed quest for the Olympic bid (a loss Mayor Daley blames partly on “dart-throwing” nay-sayers), the opponents asked, “how can we fund an Olympics when our public schools are failing? How can we send thousands upon thousands of tourists into South Side communities that we’re afraid to enter ourselves?” while supporters championed the injection of private money into the veins of the city’s transit map and business corridors. With the Games behind them, I want to see these two groups come together, because they have a lot in common. Both want Chicago to prosper and be worthy of global acclaim, and both understand that this won’t happen until we reverse the trends of heightened gun violence, failed schools, crowded clinics that unfortunately under girded the city’s aspirations.

II.

For Tom Tresser, the No Games Chicago member who brought the "Better Clinics..." posters to the July 2 protest, the issue of poor medical services and the 2016 Olympics were inextricable.

Tresser has been a community activist and “angry tax-payer” for the past decade, first as the founder of Protect our Parks, and now with No Games. When he learned of the city’s plans to place major Olympics venues in public parks, he said his background fighting for public land compelled him to get involved in the anti-Games efforts.

"We have the same goals," he said of his organization and the amalgam of South Side and healthcare activists and Hyde Park residents gathering outside of the University bookstore. "We're trying to make the city better from a grassroots level, and one of the things [No Games] has been saying all along is that we want better trains, better schools, better clinics—and not the Games."

But if you ask many disappointed supporters of the city’s bid, the Olympic Games would have been exactly the financial stimulus to make those improvements—and revitalize the South Side communities that have historically been forsaken by public programs in particular—far more than Chicago could have on its own.

In fact, without the promise of international tourism, private donations, and the millions of dollars in federal spending to improve the city’s security and transit systems past Olympics host cities received, Chicago seems to be back at the starting line, with little more than a bruised ego to show of it, or so one would think. But it is wrong to assume that the Olympics would necessarily have brought to the city, along with inspiration and global notoriety, the impetus for sweeping social improvements. One obvious reason is that the money raised to fund and insure Chicago’s bid came from a different pool—one of private businesses, zealous citizens, and friends of Mayor Daley—than the money that the University of Chicago Medical Center or the Chicago Transit Authority are likely to receive.

But the Olympics have already forced Chicagoans to see the South Side in a different light, even as the IOC plots the path of the Olympic torch through Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, as disappointed or celebratory as we may be over the outcome, we must not forget that Chicago’s near South Side exists; it is a cluster of low-income, high-crime neighborhoods surrounding one of the city’s largest greenscapes, a gorgeous park designed by urban planning legend Fredrick Law Olmsted, and caught in a century-long economic decline. If citizens on both sides of the bid are serious about making Chicago an even safer and more prosperous place to live, and a hot-spot for international tourism, they won’t take down their 2016 banners or protest fliers, but remember what they stand for—and what communities they effected most.

III.

Take Washington Park, the small neighborhood of roughly 13,000 residents and a median household income of $15,000 according to the U.S. census, located just west of the proposed sites of the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Center.

If you talk to Brandon Johnson, his neighborhood has forgotten how beautiful it is. With its 372 acres of park land and 20 minute train ride from the Loop, it’s little surprise to community leaders like Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium, that the neighborhood attracted international attention as the proposed site of the 2016 Olympic stadium in Chicago’s bid.

“Now that we’re getting attention from some famous people,” Johnson said in an interview in June, “the neighborhood is remembering it’s attractive again.” Johnson was not just talking about members of the IOC. He expected Mayor Daley and other North Side-dwellers to recognize Washington Park’s potential as more than a blighted neighborhood; more than a wilderness dotted with vacant lots dividing Hyde Park and the El Trains.

True, the bid committee had serious improvement plans for Washington Park tied to the Olympic bid, including an 80,000-seat stadium, that now must be discarded. And the city would probably have pumped thousands of public dollars into a redevelopment of 55th street between State St. and Cottage Grove, the thoroughfare that thousands of spectators would have taken on their way to the stadium.

But Washington Park has plans of its own, drawn up over the summer by community activists and Alderman Willie Cochran’s office, and dubbed the Quality of Life Plan. This proposal details on how community members want to see their home develop over the next decade, and was created in partnership with the non-profit community development organization Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC) and a steering committee of neighborhood volunteers that began brainstorming back in the late 1990s. It was quietly unveiled last May, while debates over how the Olympics would be funded began heating up in City Hall.

The plan has little to say about the spectacle of the Olympics, besides expressing hope that the Games would bring skilled jobs and visibility to the community. Instead, it stresses after-school programming for neighborhood youth, bringing businesses to Washington Park’s main streets, and planting community vegetable gardens in now- empty lots.

If Chicago’s businessmen, cultural leaders and Mayor Daley can get behind vegetable gardens the way they got behind gymnastics, the Olympics may yet leave a legacy in Washington Park. And Woodlawn, Bronzeville, South Chicago, Grand Crossing—not to mention other pockets of urban poverty that were counting on the Olympics to remind Chicago that it has more to offer than the glistening Lake and bustling Loop.

They asked for affordable housing in Woodlawn and Bronzeville, where gentrification slowly threatens to push poor people out of their homes; more-widely accessible transportation to connect the city’s north and south; stronger clinics to support residents who can’t afford primary care. We couldn’t bring the Games to Chicago for all our banners or the support of President Obama, but this city has an Olympic-sized task ahead of itself still. Community revitalization is more of a marathon than the sprint and stumble Chicago took toward Oct. 2, but I don’t think there is anyone in this city who wouldn’t benefit if Chicago actively played that game, starting with the near west and south sides.

The bid committee often invoked a famous phrase, uttered by Chicago’s urban-planning legend Daniel Burnham, to demonstrate that Olympian aspirations were in the city’s history: “Make no little plans…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” Why shouldn’t this advice still ring true?

Sex: Old News and Youthful Problems

2009-11-26T19:01:00.000-08:00

What is who supposed to want when? That's the convoluted question the two subjects of this post are trying to answer. This holiday weekend I was [too lazy] too busy, to get much studying done, but I did read an excellent NY Times article by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, and watch a video posted by Maymay, who is among other things a sex-positive activist doing a lot of good, interesting work.

In "When Desire Fades," Bergner discusses the pathology and treatment of low sex-drive in middle-aged women. As sexologist Lori Brotto demonstrates how increased mindfulness can help women feel more sexual, Bergner's intimate writing-style meanders between the growth of Brotto's own interest in sex research to the unique and often discomfiting cases of her patients. I read Bergner's book on sexuality over the summer, and likewise found the sympathy and candor with which he treated each case-study, which included a pedophile and a foot-fetishist, as much dangerous and off-putting as the stories were enlightening. Likewise in this article, I first wonder, with a little bit of embarrassment and prudishness, why he must mention a patient "who lost her virginity in her 50s" or an artist who becomes aroused from painting, before I am grateful that he takes those risks. Addressing desire is dangerous enough in an academic or journalistic setting (see this eye-opening interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for more on the stigma surrounding such endeavors); addressing lack of desire, and "what women want to want" should be all the more difficult, but Bergner does it with finesse.

On a different note, in the video posted below, maymay addresses the fear of youth sexuality at KinkForAll Washington DC. Though the demographic at issue for him is a far cry from the middle-aged women Bergner and Brotto interview, maymay hits upon several common themes surrounding the damaging way society presents sexuality information:

Sexual Adultism - KinkForAll Washington DC from maymay on Vimeo.

I'm interested in the ways both of these news items highlight the precarious position the idea of sex holds in today's popular imagination. Bergner's essay notes that the DSM's description of hypoactive sexual desire disorder fails to "reckon with women as complex sexual beings,"—instead using false and limiting assumptions about how women should be sexual to judge disorder—and maymay's lecture demonstrates how youth are denied access to positive cultural assumptions about sex and sexuality solely because of age and a strong culture of sexual protectionism.

Though the dichotomy between the desired and the taboo is old news, sex has only recently (slowly, over the last 40 years) become something that people young and old are expected to be having, and expected to want to be having— but not talking or thinking too hard about. We all know the script; it's supposed to be charming, breathy, seamless, steamy, and, if you talk to a rapper or the writers of Gossip Girl, there's supposed to be a lot of it. And though maymay's points are prescient, youth are not altogether restrained from information about sex. In fact, information is everywhere; it's just that the only message being consistently conveyed is, to paraphrase one particularly inappropriate grandfather of popular culture, who embodies enough social stigma against desire and age on his own: "Fuck a lot of women."

So why is it that only now (and with a lot of push-back from conservative opponents of everything from comprehensive sex-education to erotica and non-normative sexuality), that we are beginning to talk about the spectrum of issues that can constitute or deny satisfaction? Possibly because we now know that the script breaks down, and as Bergner and maymay both argue, it breaks down in the predictable places where we have a gap in collective knowledge about what we want and why. It's gap stretched even further by the willful denial that variety exists, that people's wants and needs can and should vary, and the tendency to pathologize what we are afraid to accept, and medicate what we are afraid to explain.

Cheers to the journalists and activists who want to change this culture.

UPDATE: The solutions to these problems might just be in the kitchen! ...Probably not, but just in case, here's the cover of the cutest holiday gift I bought yesterday for someone special when he gets back to the States (Shh, don't tell!)

"Yes, I'm writing this all down..." I interview Allan Sekula and the Renaissance Society's Hamza Walker on new photography exhibit

2009-11-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

Renaissance Society introduces Sekula to Chicago arts scene

Photographer Allan Sekula struggles to document a place that doesn’t exist. In his new series, “Polonia and other Fables”, on display at the Renaissance Society, Sekula travels from the University of Chicago’s Pick Hall to a Polish pig farm to trace the co-mingling of national identities, capitalism, labor, and globalization in America and beyond.

Hamza Walker, director of the Renaissance Society, says that Sekula and his challenging social photography make him a perfect candidate to exhibit at this contemporary art museum space.

“Allan Sekula is one of the foremost photographers working in a social documentary vein,” says Walker. “But he’s very under-represented in the United States [and] he’s never had a show in Chicago.”
Renaissance Society: ‘An artist’s museum’

Though the Renaissance Society does not have a permanent collection, Walker says the Society’s chief role in the contemporary art world is to contextualize the works of living artists about art historical-movements the way a museum might; this distinguishes the Society from other galleries. “Our exhibitions represent a critical first-response to these works.”

But Walker is wont to share the Society’s methods for selecting artists: “It’s a secret process that involves incense, oddly weighted bronze coins, very thin leather straps, and a little bit of rice. Those things are deciphered on a platypus pelt, but the freshness of the pelt is also very important… are you writing this down?”

Platypus pelt or not, Sekula rose to the challenge of exhibiting in the Renaissance Society’s unique gallery space. “Because [the gallery] is free, people can come back if they’re on campus, and you can expect that people will spend time in your exhibit maybe not during a continuous period, he says. “I think of the whole installation as a work in itself, so I’m always thinking about the specific quality of the space. The hallways and entry way are really key to me.”
‘Discourse on the value of a humanities degree’

When visitors enter the gallery, they are met with the photo of a young woman—an art student—on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. According to Sekula, wrapped up in this single image, the exhibit’s opener, is a discourse on the value of a humanities degree, the intersection of the art world and finance, and the state of capitalism in the wake of the recession. “She spoke to me because she had some background in photography. She could have been one of my students, working to make a living here…”

Other works in the exhibit more opaquely address the other keystone of Sekula’s series—“Polonia.” Polonia, says Sekula, describes both the locations where Polish immigrants settle outside of Poland and the imaginary embodiment of their country. Because Poland wasn’t recognized as an independent nation until 1918, and suffered colonial domination throughout its history, Polonia has arguably existed for much longer as the locus of Polish national identity.

“Poland hasn’t had its own history—there are these blanks, periods where the language was outlawed,” and episodes of Polish diaspora during the nation’s communist and post-war periods, Sekula said.

But in addition to documenting “Polonia” in and out of the United States, Sekula’s photos speak to the universality of the immigrant experience. “Part of American history is the history of immigration, especially in the Midwest and Chicago. Today you have people coming to work in the industrial jobs that the Poles worked in. I wanted to show who is falling into the roles once occupied by the Poles, and playing them today.”

To do this, Sekula sought inspiration in Chicago—and on campus.
Sekula’s Chicago inspirations

One photo in the Eastern corner of the gallery depicts what Sekula and Walker both call a peculiar campus ritual—University students and staff gather around to watch the high-noon shadow of Dialogo, the bronze sculpture by Virginio Ferrari in front of Pick Hall on May 1, which is rumored to form the shape of a hammer and sickle.

“That event with the shadow is just ready-made irony,” Sekula said. “People come to see that rumored apparition of the hammer and sickle at noon on May Day. Some look to be more conservative, some to be more hip, young, politically liberal or left. I like to look at it as a physiognomy of the University community,” he said; in that sense, the piece puts the University’s conservative and liberal personas in tension, and suggests its role in global economic affairs.

The statue may not cast the exact shadow of a hammer and sickle, Walker adds, “But it’s near enough to activate wishful thinking, which can’t be discredited. Who would show up for this rumored event?” On the opposite wall is a photo of the 2009 May Day Parade in downtown Chicago. “You’ve got this working-class protest going on at exactly the same time—and you can see that the issues of immigration and labor rights are hopelessly intertwined.”

“Documentary is often equated with the quest for social justice. But is that idea that you can point a finger at a very clear wrongdoing even possible anymore?” In Walker’s interpretation, Sekula’s images suggest that, thanks to globalization, no one can view injustices with the distance of a photographer anymore.

“Sekula’s work is also an indictment of that ethical lens,” he says. “That’s what makes Sekula extremely important—his reflection on the genre.”

By Rachel Cromidas, third-year in the College

Welcome to the College[.uchicago.edu]

2009-11-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

Baby needs a brand new website.

I've signed on with Susie, my awesome co-worker from the News Office, and one other student journalist to bring the College of the University of Chicago a re-vamped homepage with regularly updated articles and profiles about student life. Like the story that's up now—my article on the recent, student-driven campaign to invite Michelle Obama to campus. I've copied the text below. We're looking for more student contributors (and I'm looking for ways around the limit on how many hours a student may be employed... let you know how that works out!), so please contact me for information. As you may see from my unfortunate little foray into photography on the College site, we are particularly in need of students who are skilled behind the camera.

--

Dear Mrs. Obama...

Organization of Black Students and Student Government hope video-letter campaign will bring Michelle Obama back to Hyde Park.

When second-year Edward James met Michelle Obama, he was struck by how tall she was. They took a photo together at a campaign event in his hometown of Sarasota, FL, in 2008, and "she towered over me."

Last Wednesday, James got the chance to record a personal video to the First Lady, inviting her back to Hyde Park, her former home. "I told her that I’ve grown since that time," he said, "and it would be really nice to stand next to her again."

James is just one of several dozen students who issued Michelle Obama a personal invitation to speak on campus as part of a video-letter campaign they dubbed "Ask Michelle Obama out to Homecoming!"

The Organization of Black Students (OBS) and Student Government (SG) sponsored the event, held Oct. 29 in the Reynolds Club. OBS hopes the video messages will convince Mrs. Obama to deliver the 2010 George E. Kent Lecture.

The Kent Lecture is named for the late George E. Kent, a professor of English Language and Literature. The annual lecture has featured many African-American luminaries, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and, most recently, sociologist William Julius Wilson.

According to James, the OBS political chair, Susan Sher, the First Lady’s chief of staff, told the organizers that it would take an invitation of epic proportions for Mrs. Obama to visit. OBS began its efforts last spring, when organizers sent Mrs. Obama a letter. Sher, a former administrator at the University of Chicago Medical Center, responded, suggesting that the group share more of "what students have to say."

"It became clear that sending a letter was not enough," said fourth-year Chris Williams, the SG vice president for student affairs. "We needed a unique and loud message from the University community." Williams cited the 1,000 Valentine's Day letters that University of California, Merced students wrote to invite the First Lady to speak at their commencement last year as evidence that the campaign would work.

Michelle Obama was a natural choice to deliver the lecture, according to James. James said OBS is inspired by her work to connect the University to the South Side community as founding director of the University Community Service Center.

"Michelle Obama is big on community service, big on giving back, whether that’s going to public schools in D.C. and reading to children, or planting an organic garden in the White House," he said. "Now it’s not uncommon to see [college] kids mentoring in the Kenwood, Bronzeville, and Woodlawn areas. These are neighborhoods that have in the past had an antagonistic relationship with the University, but through her help and her great work we are becoming better stewards of our community…[Mrs. Obama] is a beacon of hope for a lot of people, including this community."

Though the Kent Lectures are facilitated by University students, James added that the event is always open to the public, and usually packs Rockefeller Chapel with students and people from all over Chicago. Besides exposing the student body to influential public figures, the Kent Lecture series has often brought together the University and its South Side community—a goal Michelle Obama pursued during her time in Hyde Park, James is quick to point out.

He said one video message to Mrs. Obama stood out in particular because it was made by a student who grew up on the South Side. "She said Mrs. Obama had been a role model to her. I think that’s great, to have somebody [like Michelle Obama] whom you can relate to, somebody who can see the world from your vantage point."

Students build repertoire of theater skills

2009-10-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

News Office article:

Building on his theater experience in this year’s Summer Incubator program could help second-year William Bishop land his summer dream job next year at Scotland’s largest theater festival, Fringe.

Bishop is one of five College students who got a two-week crash course in theater management and production during this summer’s Theater and Performance Studies/University Theater residency program. It provides select students with hands-on theater experience, while sharing University resources with local emerging theater and dance companies.

Students acquire skills that can lead to future opportunities, said Heidi Coleman, Director of University Theater. “Students help with drafts, they hang lights, they do everything,” said Coleman. “We’ve built destructible pianos and chairs that are really trampolines,” she added.

Bishop now has a growing repertoire of theater skills—building stages and sets, working on lights and sound, and being a general go-to man. He often spent his days hanging lights and cleaning UT’s three theater spaces in the Reynolds Club and Bartlett Dining Commons, but in the evenings, Bishop would work with the directors and actors, supplying them with anything from a half-dozen sofas to an elaborate banquet of fake food.

In total, six Chicago-based companies inhabited the University’s theater spaces, workshopping their latest pieces with the help of UT senior staff and student interns. This year, Summer Incubator welcomed Teatro Americano, Vintage Theater Collective, Caffeine Theatre, Cabaret Vagabond, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, and Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre.

A ‘Place to Create, Perform, & Brainstorm’

Bishop said Summer Incubator is all about giving local artists a place to create, perform, and brainstorm to further develop their ideas.

“They’re using the same theater spaces where we put on UT shows, and that’s what makes it so exciting. The night is the most exciting part for me because that’s when the actual theater goes on,” Bishop said. “I get to see the dynamics of how professional theater works. Now I know that I want to go into theater professionally.”

And thanks to Summer Incubator, Bishop believes he has a good chance of getting that coveted position at the Fringe festival next summer.

“Summer Inc is a good introduction into the ABCs of being a theater tech, from opening and closing a show to knowing the lighting and creative aspects of producing one,” added Alicia Graf, a third-year in the College and a program staff member.

Alumna Evelyn DeHais (AB’09) agreed. DeHais was an intern in 2008, and said the Summer Incubator experience informed her acting and directing as a member of TAPS/UT this year.

Director 101: Learning How Things Work

“A lot of people who are in the arts and want to be directors or actors don’t necessarily know how things work,” she said. Through Summer Incubator, “I basically came to really understand the spaces I wanted to do my art in, and understand their limits.”

DeHais has directed several shows for TAPS/UT, including the quirky “rock opera,” Prozak and the Platypus. “I directed two very big shows that had to be lit very strangely, and I was able to speak intelligently to my designers about what I wanted. I knew my technical details, and that’s unusual for a director.”

Another student intern Ben Schapiro also has been called upon to set up lighting for a photo-shoot and work a soundboard. But he particularly values the chance to watch the theater groups rehearse.

“The scene was five people in an apartment after a funeral,” Schapiro said, describing one rehearsal that stands out in his mind. As the actors ran through their lines, which described their relationship with a recently deceased friend, he paid attention to the director’s notes. “The director would say, ‘why did you do this?’ And the actors would say, ‘well, my character really wants to do this.’ They speak in terms you don’t really hear college students use. It was a great way to learn how director’s think.”

Schapiro, a College third-year, has orchestrated lighting and sound for various TAPS/UT productions and even gave a tap-dancing performance during his first-year. Like his co-interns, Schapiro embodies the diversity of personas UT students must take on when they create a production.

And Coleman knows the learning process won’t end with Summer Incubator: “After college, a lot of people think, ‘I’ve got these friends—let’s start a theater group.’ [Summer Inc] is demonstrating the logistics behind the romance of that. For students, the program fits into the whole of the year.”

...And sometimes a journalism student really can't have hope

2009-10-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

The New York Times will Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs at the end of this year.

45 reporters will receive buy-out offers later this week, according to the company.

At least the newsroom wasn't the first place to face cuts, Richard Perez-Pena reports:

The paper has made much deeper reductions in other, non-newsroom departments, where layoffs have occurred several times. But the advertising drop that has pummeled the industry has forced cuts in the news operation as well. The newsroom already has lowered its budgets for freelancers and trimmed other expenses, and employees took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year ... The Times’s news department peaked at more than 1,330 employees before the last round of cuts. The current headcount is about 1,250; no other American newspaper has more than about 750.

It's a small consolation to an aspiring journalist who all but idolized the NYTimes's institutional model a few years ago.

I witnessed newspaper buyouts first-hand as an editorial intern with the San Diego Union-Tribune last summer. The paper was on the verge of going up for sale, and offered buy-outs to close to 30 staff members—mostly older reporters and editors with long careers at the paper. My editor proudly declared, "I will go down with this ship!" posted lyrics to a Titanic song in his cubical, and hunkered down to weather the "economic thunderstorms" (as Bill Keller called the staff cuts in his open letter to NYTimes staffers) by starting a blog with the bleak name "threatened journalist"; one columnist took the buy-out and left without another word, refusing to finish out his month. The already somber newsroom was awash in whispers. Small, impromptu gatherings around the water-cooler turned into long-winded musings on the downfall of the newspaper industry, and more than one stranger walked by my desk to say "get out while you can, kid—it's not too late to change majors."

If they took the buyout offer, the U-T reporters' reasoned,they would be leaving familiar jobs where they have established reputations and credibility; but a buy-out is in many ways more attractive than the possibility of staying only to face lay-offs further down the line. Younger reporters who recently started at the U-T had no option, but became aware of their more-seasoned colleagues dilemma, and we all wondered if the U-T had reached a dead end.

The New York Times does amazing work, and I wish the reporters a lot of luck making this decision.

What old media can learn about doing good journalism in the twenty-first century from Voice of San Diego

2009-10-17T07:18:00.001-07:00

An alternate title to this post could be: Why Emily Alpert rocks.

Alpert, a UChicago alumn, shared stories from her recent days reporting in Oregon, Gilroy, CA and now in San Diego at a revolutionary local non-profit, with students in the Chicago Careers in Journalism Program yesterday afternoon.

Here are some of the thoughts she left me with on the benefits of a non-profit, investigative journalism model like Voice of San Diego, the web-publication where she serves as the education reporter. I'm excited.

*Problem with the old media model: Daily beat reporters are pressured to produce copy every day, and as a consequence have less time for deeper, long-term projects.

Solution at Voice of San Diego: What's different about this web-only publication from a paper like the San Diego Union-Tribune (where I interned last year) is not content per se, but the method of delivery. With the internet, Voice can break news immediately, rather than waiting for publication.

*Problem: How to find new and unlikely sources and story ideas in a mid-sized community like San Diego?

Solution: Reporter Blogs. With her Voice of San Diego blog, Alpert said, in addition to breaking news quickly to her audience of parents, teachers and school administrators, she can have ongoing conversations about education issues via the readers' comments. She told one story about the photo editor, who snapped a photo of a weird, blackened object on the beach and posted it to his blog, asking readers, "What is it?" The mystery brought dedicated readers back to the blog as people offered suggestions and asked the photographer for more information. Eventually he learned that it was a dead sea urchin—and that environmental scientists in San Diego are trying to figure out why many are dying on the coast. This little blog post led to a
feature interview with a scientist about the topic, and people came back to read it.

Alpert also holds contests to illustrate a particular issue around education in the city; recently, she asked readers to submit the best, and worst, classroom worksheets in the school district.

*Problem: A paper like the Chicago Tribune is trying to cover the whole world, but no one is covering everything in Chicago.

Solution: "If we can't do it better than anyone else, we won't cover it," Alpert says of Voice, which has a handful of staff members, but no pressure to be every paper for everybody in the city. Rather than cove the same story everyone else is doing, try to add value to the cache of stories on a topic. She keeps a rolodex of people she's met, with notes like "parent who was angry about such and such."

InQue(e)ry: So, we queered Ida Noyes and tied people up; Now what?

2009-10-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

I would not have attended Que(e)ry two years ago.

In fact, I probably would not have taken one iota of interest in the "radical, queer, arts convergence"- radical-anarchist-radical-takeover of Ida Noyes Hall that took place in all its glittery, gender binary-shattering (did I mention radical?) glory last Saturday. I just didn't care what anyone had to say about gender and sexuality—These categories just exist, okay? I get it, enough!—And especially not someone with a pink mohawk. Also, I hate wearing make-up and glitter. But that's just me.

But a lot has changed for me since high school, when I was embarrassed to admit I was studying "Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Literature" at UC San Diego; when less than a year ago a certain sociology professor prodded me to justify why I thought "Problems in the Study of Sexuality" would be a useful addition to my Autumn Quarter course schedule, and I lied to my parents that I was actually taking "just an introductory English course" to fill my fourth slot and prevent more awkward conversations.

Now I conspire to get people tied up in the Third Floor Theater and eat vegan food with my hands on occasion. Go figure.

The thing is, I've thought about this a lot, the "where do desires come from?" question, and "why do I expect people to relate to each other in cerain ways?" and "what in me wants to be normal?" I don't have any good answers of course; but since I landed here as a freshman, many personal events, friendships and other experiences outside of academia have led me to appreciate these questions and recognize that the many possible answers are far from obvious—no where near as simple as we might have them be.

I think gender and sexuality are enormous, and enormously important, concepts that we should all pay more attention to. I am dying to hear more people my age talk about the assumptions that we all make about the way men and women should appear, behave, dress, make love to each other—assumptions about sexuality that go beyond what is heterosexual and what is homosexual to include a clusterfuck of kinks, fetishes and preferences.

We don't spend enough time acknowledging that desire exists, power exists, relationship categories are varied and changing, "normal" is a fallacy... If you have to stage an impromptu performance or sit people in a make-up chair and paint their faces to examine gender, to examine behavior, then please do it.

I'm not saying my peers need to drop their Adam Smiths and their Platos and take up reading Gail Rubin and Michael Warner, though these are theorists I have come to love by happy accident. They can just hang out with me and my queer, kinky friends sometime...

But much about Que(e)ry would put off the average UChicago student (let's face it, guys, it takes a lot of dessert food to get us out of our study caves on a given night). First of all, it was an all-day event conceived of, produced, organized and unorganized by a small group of campus activists who emphasized anarchy, art-making, veganism, and using the adjective "radical" every other sentence, as forms of resistance. This broad take on how to resist norms was its strength, but also made the party inaccessible to the people I most want to talk to, who don't already believe these concepts are discussion worthy.

With workshops on "BDSM as Bio-political Resistance" (I didn't attend, but I heard the presenter read a little Foucault out loud, and screamed a lot) and "Radical Cheerleading," the event was like a big inside joke; a ritualistic prank against all sorts of social conventions just a few steps above TP-ing the president's house, that only the iniated could understand. In fact, if you weren't laughing and screaming along, you might develop the uncomfortable feeling that you just don't get the punch-line.

Some workshops were more productive than this (and by productive, I mean accessible to a wide audience not already versed in the ethos of sex positive, queer and kink communities. Other attendees probably had different definitions of productive, or didn't make being "productive" a priority at all): "Practical Non-Monogamy," by Scathe, a presenter I really respect, was one of them. My boyfriend's praise sums it up: "He didn't assume that we all wanted to be polyamorous... he didn't try to convince us that open relationships are great for everybody, if we would only get rid of our hang-ups, which is an argument I've heard. They're not!" it was practical. It didn't make any assumptions.

I wanted people to stop assuming things because I'm a girl; dating a boy; really bossy; don't wear makeup; etc. etc. But this means I, and the sex positive communities around me, need to stop assuming that people share in common the same social leanings and political agenda, or would if only they spent the afternoon with us, some pot and some Judith Butler. If I want everyone to take gender fluidity and alternate sexuality seriously, then I'm going to have to start explaining this stuff to them where their understanding stops, rather than ask them to make the mental leap all the way to an anarchist arts convergence, and what it takes to feel comfortable in such a space.

The workshop I organized with two lovely, lovely people, Vincenza and Wren, possibly had one of the tamer titles descriptions: you can look it up, it was called "Intro to Bondage." What we like about rope, what you might like about rope. Some practical, hands on demonstrations. Hopefully some fun. I didn't ask anyone to hog-tie the patriarchy or wrap their heads around Foucault's biopower or Agamben, and I'd like to think that's why we had close to 30 attendees.

I'd also like to think that this practical ethos will serve future sex positive, kink positive events on campus well, if we can get some started.

Thanks, Que(e)ry, for making me feel more supported than ever before on this campus; now, any suggestions to keep the inquiries going?

Convocation ceremony stresses substance over pomp and circumstance

2009-10-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

Another News Office article by me is up! Here it is.

“Today you must face the fact that you are not educated people.”

When Cyril Orvin Houle, Professor in Education, began his convocation address with these words to the Winter Quarter graduating class of 1948, he paid homage to the academic notion that one’s education is never complete, and the University of Chicago tradition of educating its community through the graduation ceremony.

Since the University first celebrated its accomplishments under founding president William Rainey Harper in January 1893, 499 convocations have taken place. Though past speakers have ranged from Professor Janet Rowley and legendary chemist Robert A. Millikan, to President Bill Clinton and a student who made a hastily arranged address against the Vietnam War, convocations all share a common purpose: to foster academic inquiry, stir up debate around pressing social and political issues, and, above all, honor the intellectual clout of the University’s faculty.

Martin Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Divinity School, will deliver the 500th convocation address on Friday, Oct. 9 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel―in fewer than 15 minutes, he is quick to point out. “At many universities’ commencements, it takes 45 minutes just to get through the introduction. At UChicago, you have to say it briefly, or it doesn’t get said.”

Marty’s speech, titled “Laying Siege to Problems,” will celebrate the University’s propensity to make discoveries and its intellectual spirit. “Discovery is our business at this University, and I always have been impressed by the way our faculty always talk about how interesting something is,” regardless of their academic field.

In the past, the convocation speaker has alternated between foreign dignitaries, professors and University presidents (in fact, during his tenure, President Robert Maynard Hutchins insisted on giving an address at least once a year). The convocation speeches thus have a tradition of discussing anything but the graduation itself―with subjects ranging from the state of the University to contemporary political issues.

Another hallmark of the convocation is the bagpipe procession, a trail of graduating students, bagpipers and the University Marshal that wends across the Main Quadrangle toward Rockefeller Memorial Chapel or Harper Court.

“There’s a certain sort of old-style, Oxford attractiveness to the convocations in Rockefeller Chapel,” recalls Lisbeth Redfield, AB’09, who was a Student Marshal as a College third-year and earned the honor of ushering graduates and attendees at two ceremonies. The combination of marching across the Quad in a long stream of robed students, and the sound of bagpipes playing ‘Scotland the Brave,’ she said, “makes it feel like a special ceremony to me.”

According to University archivist Dan Meyer, Harper wanted to establish the convocation as a special ritual for graduating students, distinguished faculty and visiting speakers and recipients of honorary degrees.

“Most universities refer to their graduation as a commencement,” explained Meyer, “but Harper chose ‘convocation’ to indicate that this wasn’t just a routine ceremony. It means a gathering together; a coming together to share an event.”

Although convocation typically employs a faculty speaker, one graduating student was asked to speak in place of a professor in June 1969―the only time a student has given the address.

On the heels of a massive student protest against the Vietnam War, Paul Brown, AB’69, MD’75, PhD’75, was given four minutes to address the controversy and reflect on his time at the University. Though he was not a leader of the protest, he had some harsh words for the University administration.

“It was a pretty radical address,” said Brown, who is now a physician. “We got a standing ovation from the students, but I don’t think the parents cared for it very much.”

What Brown would say if he could address the University again?

“I would want to talk about the life of the mind, the importance of a liberal education. Those are the kinds of things the University has always stressed, and have always appealed to me.”

“I had a great time at UChicago,” he said. “If I hadn’t gone there, I wouldn’t have all these multiple interests; I wouldn’t be reading everything in sight.”

―Rachel Cromidas

Project Exploration mentors CPS students, teaching value of science

2009-10-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

New article of mine up on UChicago's webpage:

When Sara ElShafie was asked to explain “scientific method” to a classroom of teenagers, she started talking about Supercrocs. They’re the prehistoric crocodiles whose fossil remains were discovered by University of Chicago professor Paul Sereno on an expedition to Niger in 2000.

“You’ve seen the Supercroc skull—it’s 6 feet long,” she said. “We don’t have the entire animal, but Dr. Sereno was able to say that it was probably 40 feet long. How did he do that?”

The group of 14 Chicago Public Schools students receiving a crash course in paleontology as part of Project Exploration’s Junior Paleontologists field program was silent. “Sereno studied measurements of living crocodiles,” ElShafie said, and he found a ratio between head size and body length that he was able to apply to the Supercroc. “You have to have solid evidence like this. And only then can you present your data to other scientists,” she explained. “I love that fact.”

According to ElShafie, a third-year in the College studying biology, students first must learn the importance of scientific assumptions before getting their hands dirty as part of the nonprofit science program called Project Exploration.

Project Exploration programs for middle and high school Chicago Public Schools students met on the University campus throughout the summer. The Junior Paleontologists is a three-week program that starts in Chicago and culminates with a weeklong expedition with researchers at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, S.D. After the summer portion of the program, Junior Paleontologists participate in Project Exploration science programs and mentoring—and stay in touch with budding scientists like ElShafie—year round.

Sereno, Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy, co-founded Project Exploration in 1999, with his wife, Gabrielle Lyon, AB,’94, AM,’94, after realizing the science announcements that were traveling around the world were barely reaching students at area elementary schools like Fiske Elementary, where Lyon was teaching.

Since 1999, Project Exploration has brought nearly 1,000 Chicago minority youth and girls together with scientists from around the country in after-school, summer and weekend programs. Many of those programs have launched from the University of Chicago campus.
Learning by Doing

Sereno and Lyon share a passion for teaching unconventionally. Lyon credits her years as a teaching assistant in the University’s Neighborhood Schools Program for showing her the value of “learning by doing.”

“I was personally interested in public education, school reform, social justice, and equity. My work-study job [at NSP],” she said, “gave me hands-on, real-life experience working alongside real teachers in a school.”

To the teaching duo, the hallmark of Project Exploration is its ability to inspire teenagers with hands-on experiences alongside caring adults, many of whom are scientists.

“A lot of these kids will travel outside of Chicago or Illinois for the first time through our programs. In the Junior Paleontologist program, students actually excavate and study real fossils, basically participating in a formal dig program as guest interns,” Sereno said.

ElShafie said volunteering for Project Exploration has helped her realize her love for teaching, and she wants to pursue academia after graduation.

She said the program’s hands-on activities and mentorship make the program effective. “I have no idea where these kids are coming from or what their grades were before this program, but it doesn’t matter: When they come back [from South Dakota], I know they will see the world differently and have a sense of purpose in their lives.”

ElShafie is one of dozens of enthusiastic undergraduates, graduates and faculty scientists who have participated in Project Exploration programs, trainings and outreach efforts in the past nine years. Many of them get connected with Project Exploration through Sereno’s Fossil Lab and the University Community Service Center.
Journaling the Fossil Hunt

Though Rey Alcala had only been on campus one week, his field journal already held pages of notes about the mammoth site, where he and his peers would later be digging for bones.

“We put a big emphasis on journaling,” said Kristin Atman, Project Exploration program director. “These kids will only have five days at the site to record in their journals what they see. We want them to build skills like reading, writing and sharing what they observe.”

Sereno and Lyon are sketching out larger plans to expand the program and establish a permanent community center, where local youths, families and University faculty can come together to make discoveries.

“It would be like a community center focused on science and science activities,” Sereno said. “As the South Side continues to develop, Project Exploration can be a real bridge between the students, their communities and the University community. It’s so clear that this personalized approach has a huge impact, and this kind of model doesn’t yet exist anywhere else in the country.”

By Rachel Cromidas, third-year in the College

UChicago in the news: some tidbits from my job

2009-09-04T10:59:00.001-07:00

One part of my summer internship in the University of Chicago News Office that I have been loath to mention here (it's mostly grunt work) is the Daily Clips Blast. Basically, I or my awesome co-worker Susie will take a couple hours each day to search for all the recent news articles that substantively mention the University of Chicago or quote a professor or administrator, archive them, and mail out the top 7-12 stories to about 200 University personnel.

Lucky for me, this means I get paid to read the news, and today's clips blast was chock-full of cool stories. Here are a few that I enjoyed:

*Dr. Stefano Allesina discusses the algorithm he devised to study food webs, based on an algorithm Google uses to order pages in its search engine.

*Former Dean of Admissions Ted O'Neill answers questions about applying to college. I couldn't get enough of articles like this one when I was applying to College three years ago, and I wish I had known that it was okay, even expected of me, not to have a major! I arrived on campus 2 years ago—minus a week or two—the quintessential type-A kid, with everything in its right place from my resume to my course-schedule, and it stressed me out to no end that I was missing The Perfect Double-Major program. Since then, I've obviously bounced from Spanish Lang. and Lit. to Art History to Law, Letters and Society and Gender Studies, and I don't think I'm too worse for wear, do you?

*Prof. Jens Ludwig examines Chicago Public School plan to combat youth violence. 320 CPS students were shot last year—that's a huge figure. This plan is definitely worth keeping an eye on, since it would identify at-risk kids and give them more attention, in the form of job-training and mentoring.

*Sr. Lecturer Allen Sanderson criticizes a recent survey on the economic impact of Chicago's Olympic bid. When I interviewed Allen Sanderson for my other blog, No Small Plans, he said he was incredulous about the economic impact survey and was certain that the consultants Chicago 2016 hired were the only people who would have produced such a stellar prognosis. I wish I could talk to consultants at other firms to create a comparison.

Heirloom tomato soup and roasted chili-lime acorn squash

2009-08-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

It's true. I haven't done anything this summer except work, work some more, and cook vegan food that can make even the most dedicated carnivore (namely, my boyfriend), ask for seconds. Just doing my part to make Mr. Mark Bittman and Mr. Michael Pollan proud.

Heirloom Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
1/4 cup chopped red onion
1/4 cup chopped sweet onion
4 medium heirloom tomatoes, peeled
1-2 large peeled cucumbers
1 large, Sweet Banana pepper (they're white and long; if you can't find one, red, orange and yellow work about as well), peeled
1/2 cup vegetable broth
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon white vinegar
juice of 1/2 a lime
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil to taste
optional: 1/2 cup stale bread, crumbled; Gives this otherwise deliciously light soup a heartier, creamy texture

How to make it: Combine all the ingredients in a pot and blend until smooth. Makes 4-6 generous servings.

(Alternatively, you can just pepper the squash with loads of cinnamon, as shown above)

Roasted Chili-Lime Acorn Squash

This recipe is adapted from one of my favorite blogs, and arguably your best shot at finding truly appetite-stimulating food porn short of kidnapping Rachael Ray, Smitten Kitchen.

Ingredients:
2 teaspoons chili powder
2 limes, juiced
1 medium-sized acorn squash
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

How to make it: Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Slice the acorn squash into fourths with a strong, sharp vegetable knife. Continue slicing into 1/4-inch-thick slices, following the arc of the squash. Remove seeds; wash and set them aside. Combine chili powder, salt, pepper and lime-juice in a shallow bowl. soak each slice in the mixture thoroughly, then spread them out evenly on an olive oil-greased baking sheet. Soak the acorn squash seeds in the remaining chili-lime mixture, then spread those out on a greased baking sheet as well. Bake for 20-30 minutes, switching your pan(s) between the top and bottom racks half-way through cooking. squash should be tender but not burnt; likewise, seeds should not be burnt, but should be crispy enough to bite through with ease.

I made this side dish for my boyfriend's family when I visited his grandmother's summer house in Michigan last week. Now isn't that darling?

Oh, Hyde Park, or "FML!"

2009-08-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

Someone

Stole

My

Bike

Chicago cops mentor teenage boys who lack male role models

2009-08-05T15:19:00.000-07:00

My latest article out of the news office:

Cordell Taylor was ready to speak. Cordell, 14, an incoming freshman at Chicago’s Dunbar High School, recited his name for the 30 boys and seven police officers gathered in Stuart Hall, with plenty of enthusiasm for someone who had been awake since 6 a.m.

His less-alert neighbor was drooped over his desk until a policeman’s stern voice brought the teenage boy’s attention back to the meeting. Instead of the economics and linguistics classes usually taking place in Stuart classrooms, this was a meeting of the Chicago Youth Leadership Academy, a flagship program for local teenagers that the Chicago Police Department administers in collaboration with the University of Chicago and the New Communities Program in Woodlawn.

For one week, the teenage boys —all Chicago Public Schools students and residents of Woodlawn or neighboring South Side communities—experienced college life first-hand and got to know 3rd District police officers as mentors, not rivals.

Temporarily living in the Max Palevsky residence hall and eating their meals in Bartlett dining hall, the boys were challenged both physically and mentally with training exercises in the morning and leadership seminars in the afternoons. The activities made for an exhausting and an enriching week.

“Are you tired?” Lt. Bennie Bowers, a Michigan state police officer and the program’s creator, bellowed at his students during a group reflection. “How you feel right now is how I felt several times in college. I was tired, 700 miles away from my home, away from my mom and dad, and just 17 years old. And I didn’t go to class because anybody told me to get out of bed. Not like you the other day,” he said pointing at the front row. “You had me banging on the door telling you to get up.”

Bowers, who brought the academy to Chicago for the first time this summer, doesn’t mind the mundane parts of his job, waking up the boys and reminding them to brush their teeth. In fact, he says the chance for Chicago police officers to support and bond with local youth outside their normal roles as law enforcers is exactly the point.

“The intimacy of the residential stay helps provide a bond that goes beyond the classroom setting,” Bowers explained—something particularly important for the students, most of whom do not have fathers in their lives. “It allows us to say to them, ‘we’re adult men, professional men, and we’re concerned about your well-being.’ These boys are 13, 14, 16 years old, and half of them are the oldest man in their homes.”

Besides chaperoning the students on campus, the police officers led day trips to the lakefront and to visit Michael Jackson’s birth home and memorial in Gary, Ind. They met the CPD’s mounted and canine units, and the officers also provided the boys with an opportunity to talk with Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis.

“I told their parents, for one week you don’t have to worry about your kid being shot, shooting someone, or getting harmed,” said Chicago Police Officer Charles O’Connor, the program’s team leader. “And that’s a real concern for those parents … some were actually crying because they were so happy for their child.”

Deonte Lemons, 16, a junior at Dunbar, couldn’t believe how quickly he grew close to the officers. “I thought I didn’t like police officers,” he said over a lunch of chicken nuggets and fruit in Bartlett dining hall. “But these guys have really influenced my life in this one week’s time,” says Lemons. The officers fostered those bonds by encouraging long discussions about school and home over meals and in the classrooms, and by sharing the struggles they faced growing up.

O’Connor knows it can seem unusual to see police officers eating lunch with teenagers who aren’t getting in trouble. He recalls a woman and her young daughter walking by the line-up of boys on 56th Street earlier in the week. “She said: ‘Those kids are bad, so they have to clean up out here.’ And I said, ‘that is not true.’”

Once O’Connor described the academy program to the residents passing by, they were enthusiastic. But he wishes the program were better recognized for its positive influence on the teens, who do not necessarily have other activities to keep them busy in the summer months.

He and Bowers are hoping that in coming years the CPD will be able to fund similar academies in other neighborhoods, for girls and boys.

The Chicago Youth Leadership Academy “gives the students something to aspire to; it shows them that there is another life besides gangs, drugs and violence [on the South Side],” said Rudy Nimocks, the University’s Director of Community Partnerships.

“In that sense, it is the perfect opportunity for the University to reach out to and share its resources with Woodlawn.”

Bigger plans for "No Small Plans"

2009-07-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder, you can visit my other blog, No Small Plans, for original reporting on South Side community issues and the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid. The latest story is about a planning meeting in Washington Park, the neighborhood just west of the University of Chicago.

Blow-up advertisement for the 2016 Olympics in Washington Park, proposed site for a stadium and aquatic center

Finally, a clip! Or, Rudy Nimocks brings deep local knowledge to new job

2009-07-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

Here's my first clip as an intern with the University's News Office: Enjoy, and please visit the original site to watch the former chief of UCPD give a video tour of Woodlawn!

Watching Rudy Nimocks drive his bright-red Mini Cooper to a recent neighborhood redevelopment meeting, you could trace the arc of his career from policeman to the University’s Director of Community Partnerships.

Nimocks once helped provide security at the meeting place, the Gary Comer Youth Center in Grand Crossing, when the Comer Foundation first broke ground on the building. Now he is a leader in the University’s efforts to help grassroots groups revitalize neighboring communities.

The transition to neighborhood ambassador seems natural for Nimocks, who says outreach was always part of his police jobs, first with the Chicago Police Department, where he retired as a deputy superintendent, and then as chief of the University of Chicago Police Department.

“Part of being a police chief means you can hardly separate yourself from the community you serve,” Nimocks says. “You have to be innovative and try to discover ways you can be helpful and increase the public safety.”

Photo by Jason Smith, for the University News Office

One thing that hasn’t changed is Nimocks’ restless energy. The Grand Crossing meeting begins at 8:30 a.m. By lunch, he will have met with the director of the Woodlawn New Communities Program and the organizers of two on-campus summer programs for high school students, and helped coordinate Mayor Richard Daley’s visit to Woodlawn for an anti-violence rally.

But a slower pace wouldn’t suit Nimocks, who sets his watch 35 minutes fast and “relaxes” by driving a motorcycle every summerto Fairbanks, Alaska, playing Louis Armstrong or Antonin Dvorak on the bike’s radio.

“I’ve been getting by on five, six hours of sleep for a long time,” Nimocks says. “When I was a homicide detective [with the CPD], I’d just climb up on a table and sleep for a little while, then get up and get back to work. And that was for three or four days at a time.”

Unique Perspective on Local Development

A resident of the nearby Woodlawn neighborhood for more than a half-century, Nimocks seems to know a story for every building he passes on his frequent drives through the community. One new apartment building summons memories of his days with the CPD, when he worked with local residents to drive drug dealers from that spot. Driving down 63rd Street, he describes how the area has changed for the better since the city tore down the El tracks that used to hang over the strip.

Such street-by-street knowledge of local neighborhoods gives Nimocks a unique perspective, says Ann Marie Lipinski, Vice President for Civic Engagement.

“Rudy is both a community and University treasure,” Lipinski says. “He has an enthusiasm for his work that is contagious, and he is tireless in looking for ways to connect the University with its neighbors. I've learned a lot from Rudy and feel very fortunate to have him working in this new role.”

His background also helps Nimocks understand how South Side communities view the University—an interaction that has been difficult at times. Nimocks says the relationship has changed for the better since his days as a homicide detective in the CPD, when Woodlawn, Grand Crossing, and Washington Park faced worsening local economies and rising crime rates.

A key lesson of that time is that a lack of engagement hurts both the University and nearby communities, Nimocks says.

“In the ’50s and ’60s, these were very desirable, stable neighborhoods,” Nimocks says. “But with riots going on all over the city, violence and drugs were able to degrade them,” and the University withdrew more from its neighbors.

Part of Nimocks’ current job is rebuilding the trust that was damaged in those previous decades. He says there’s a special value in programs that take College students into the community or bring local students to the campus for learning opportunities.

“I think the greatest asset the University has is worldwide expertise—bright students and programs that can reach into neighborhood communities,” Nimocks says. He cites the University’s Collegiate Scholars program, which offers summer enrichment classes to Chicago Public School students, as one example of how the University is extending its resources to local youth.

A Community Ambassador

The role of ambassador suits Nimocks well as he greets familiar faces at the Gary Comer Youth Center in Grand Crossing, southwest of campus. He and close to 50 community members have assembled to hear the findings of 12 researchers from the Urban Land Institute, who spent the week in Grand Crossing observing the neighborhood and writing recommendations for a community revitalization proposal.

The team of urban planners and academics recommended that Grand Crossing redevelop local parklands into a vibrant community center, and find other ways to increase community spirit in the small neighborhood through community gardening and educational youth programs.

After the researchers finished their presentation, Nimocks stood up and offered the group a word of advice:

“Based on my experience as Chief of Police for UCPD, I can tell you that when you see a neighborhood start to redevelop along the lines that you have outlined here, you will see public safety increase dramatically. The two go hand in hand.”

Nimocks has tried to live his own advice in his off-duty life by joining the boards of community organizations like Blue Gargoyle and the Woodlawn New Communities Program.

Arvin K. Strange, director of WNCP, noted Nimocks’ dedication in their late-morning meeting. “Rudy is really an unsung hero here in Woodlawn … and I’m very sure Washington Park and Kenwood feel that way as well.”

Soon Nimocks was off to Grove Park Plaza, a housing development where he is working to bring children to campus for another summer program. In the long run, he believes, such efforts can help local kids view the University not only with trust, but with hope.

“That’s what a university can do in a neighborhood—get its kids to think differently about their future.”

Dan Savage puts the media in its place

2009-07-01T05:49:00.001-07:00

I know this story is old (pub. June 10), and I know this blog does not exist solely as a Dan Savage lovefest, but I just re-read his open letter to CNN and I have to thank the man for asking the media to own up to their bigotted coverage of actor David Carradine's death.

Thanks for making sense, Dan, even if it takes some vulgarity to get your point across:

I don't expect CNN to drop the story. But running in circles shrieking "OMG!!! HE WAS A FREAK!!! KINKY!!! TIED UP!!! ASKING FOR IT!!!" isn't helpful.

Duh, America.

Make No Small Plans

2009-06-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

School's been out for a week and I haven't so much as touched this blog—but don't think I'm lying on a beach somewhere.

Nope, I've been working on a grant project; I'll be reporting on Chicago's 2016 Olympic Bid for the South Side and the University. I want to keep people up-to-date on what Mayor Daley and Chicago 2016 are up to, and do some original reporting on how community members, local organizations, and academics are responding to the prospect of this city getting the Games.

I'll eventually be collaborating with the Chicago Studies Program (In the vein of my coverage of the Obama Inauguration). Until then, you can follow my reporting at No Small Plans: Coverage of Chicago's 2016 Olympic Bid.

Bear with me please; I'm just getting started and not entirely confident how this will work out.

Bus stop at the corner of 57th and Cottage Grove in Washington Park, proposed site of the 2016 Olympic Stadium.

Brain Art

2009-06-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend Ben and I went to see Art at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater a couple weeks ago. As per my last post, I am swamped with finals (8 pages down, 10 pages, 20 pages, and one take-home exam to go). But here are a couple highlights from the play, which is one part interrogation of the quality and value of contemporary art, and two parts a painful deconstruction of a friendship between three men, Marc, Serge and Yvan, built almost entirely on lies and self-absorption. Ben and I decided he is slightly more like Yvan and I am slightly more like Marc. Enjoy

Marc (to Serge): "If I am who I am because I am who I am and you are who you are because you are who you are then I am who I am and you are who you are, but if I am who I am because you are who you are and you are who you are because I am who I am then I am not who I am and you are not who you are."

Serge (after Marc comments on his latest acquisition, a white canvas with white stripes): "What do you mean 'this shit'? ... I don't care how fantastic you think it is, I don't care if you laugh, but I would like to know what you mean by 'this shit.'"

How much would you pay for a white painting?

Blogging Fail

2009-06-07T18:54:00.001-07:00

I have finals!
Good luck everyone. Talk to you in a week.

Why the California Supreme Court Decision Might not Be so Terrible

2009-05-27T19:46:00.001-07:00

My high school friends and other acquaintances from California hometowns are maddened by the state supreme court's ruling on Proposition 8 yesterday, and rightly so—but I don't think all is lost for gay residents and allies who want to see the legal regime of heterosexuality reversed in marriage. In fact, after reading sections of the decision, I think the court leaves more loopholes than a wedding ring shop.

First of all, the court's reading of proposition 8 confines the amendment to a much narrower definition of marriage recognition for the state than I would have expected—and thus allows California to uphold the 18,000 that it has already issued to its residents, and possibly recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states as well (though the Court did not explicitly address the later issue in its decision).

Though Proposition 8 reads: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” but rather than completely strip same-sex relationships of the legal status afforded to straight couples, the court says this constitutional amendment only "carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage.” It is merely the name "marriage,"—albeit significant to advocates of equal protection for same-sex couples who, like me, can't help but compare this ruling to "separate but equal" hypocrisy—not the rights it confers, that this measure alters.

Though I agree that this amendment violates the ethos of the equal protection clause, both in California and in other states with similar constitutions, that's tough to argue, as advocates and dissenter Justice Carlos Moreno are finding. I wasn't expecting the court to bite the revision argument, which suggested that Proposition 8 constituted such a change to the constitution that it would require a 2/3 majority vote in the state legislature, and I'm willing to accept that this was the best outcome the court would offer supporters of marriage equality like me.

More heartening, the court has left room for another ballot initiative to come up and reverse this amendment—something that activist supporters are already working on for 2010. In liberally affirming the amendment process by which Proposition 8 became law, the decision implicitly suggests that, should a pro-gay marriage initiative were to be on the ballot and pass with a majority vote, it would be found constitutional too.

We just have to keep fighting to push this state over 50% next time.

The Spring Quarter Midway Review is Out!

2009-05-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

The quarterly magazine I edit, the Midway Review, is out this week. Please pick one up on campus or take a look at the online version.

Below are a couple of engravings illustrating this quarter's issue (the hare is called "How to Skin a Hare" from the Joy of Cooking). Enjoy!

A couple of real live published and edited news articles

2009-05-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

...by yours truly:

1)UCSC Says "Thank You for Service" to students at annual awards reception. (You have to scroll down)

2)Academic edge in science, math garner Goldwaters-->Two college students win prestigious Goldwater Scholarships.

Have a good weekend!

Spring in Hyde Park Means...

2009-05-17T06:10:00.000-07:00

Tulips, (click to enlarge)

Lots and lots of Tulips...

Wacky wacky Easter decorations...

Nights on the quad...

...And Scav Hunt (fuckin' yeah!)

You'd almost forget about that 20-page paper you haven't started...

Students Challenge Maroon Column as Insulting to Women

2009-05-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

One adage of good journalism says: cover the news, don’t be the news. And it looks like the Maroon is having a bad week for news.

University of Chicago students are stamping their feet over Maroon columnist Luke Dumas’s recent op-ed, “A Springtime Strip.” The piece, which was printed on Tuesday and later retracted on the Maroon website, criticized the way students, particularly women, dress when the weather is warm.

According to the Maroon’s retraction, the op-ed was “intended as satirical” but came off as discriminatory against female students. Although most of the offensive material has been removed from the online version, the article has netted more than 50 comments that both criticize and defend Dumas’s piece, some calling for him to be fired as a columnist. (The Maroon does not pay its writers, but editors have the authority to remove students from their staff. FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a former Maroon reporter, and I was asked to leave the paper’s news staff after I accepted an internship with the University’s News Office last quarter.)

One student, Ali Feenstra, took her concerns further, and stamped “This Insults Women” stickers on the front page of hundreds of Tuesday’s Maroon papers after they were distributed around campus. Though Feenstra is a member of the Feminist Majority, a Registered Student Organization that addresses women’s issues, she said she was not acting on behalf of the group.

“The premise of the article is problematic, and its use of words like “skank” and “tramp,” Feenstra said in an interview. “I talked to a lot of people and said we should sticker as many Maroons as we can… It’s to warn people who were picking it up about the kind of materials that was inside. I could have just thrown all the Maroons away that I could find, but being destructive was not my intent at all.”

“Good comedy could deconstruct “skank” and “tramp,” but this is an incredibly shame re-producing article,” Feenstra, a third-year, added. “The [lead story, about civil liberties on campus] talks about free speech and how we have to create a climate for safe and respectful debate to occur. This article is totally antithetical to that. It seals off certain people from being viewed as students… and tells boys you can’t be a real UChicago student unless you’re ashamed about your body.”

Alumna Dana Snitsky agreed with Feenstra’s criticism of Dumas’s satire. “He never hints at the fact that he doesn’t believe these very scary things he’s saying, like that women being present in classrooms makes it very hard for men to concentrate. That was a big argument that people actually have made.”

Supriya Sinhababu, editor-in-chief of the Maroon, wrote a retraction and apology for today’s paper, calling the decision to publish Dumas’s piece “gross editorial oversight.”

“Opinions expressed in Viewpoints inevitably spark controversy from time to time; never offending anyone is not a realistic or intelligent goal for a newspaper. But “A Springtime Strip” was not merely controversial. While it made claims that were intended as satirical, the article read as discriminatory toward female students. The MAROON retracts these remarks, and the article has been amended online at chicagomaroon.com to reflect this action.”

By Thursday, bright green stickers with the phrase “This paper can do better. We'll make that happen.—CM” had begun appearing on copies of the Maroon alongside Feenstra’s stickers. Sinhababu declined to comment on the decision to retract the article, and I could not confirm if the Maroon was responsible for the new stickers. Dumas also declined to comment.

Chicago says: Bisphenol, Eh?

2009-05-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

If you drank from a plastic water bottle, ate lunch from a take-out container, or nuked yesterday's leftover lasagna in a plastic bowl, you may have ingested some bisphenol-A. Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is a chemical compound commonly used to line food containers and harden the plastic used to make baby bottles, sippy cups and other consumer goods. But yesterday Chicago became the first city in the U.S. to ban the sale of baby feeding products containing the chemical.

I wrote an article about bisphenol-A leaching into San Diego's oceans a couple of years ago, and part of that story hinged on environmentalists' and surfers' concerns over the hormone-like effects of chemicals in plastics:

... the plastics used to make bags, clear bottles and food packaging contain controversial hormones like Bisphenol A, a chemical that mimics the sex hormone estrogen, and whose health effects are disputed by scientists and the plastics industry. Some animal studies have shown Bisphenol A to cause certain types of cancer, affect brain functions and cause miscarriages and infertility, but FDA regulators have found it to be harmless at the levels found in plastic packaging. Nonetheless, Moore charged that Bisphenol A and similar chemicals leach from plastic debris into the ocean and put surfers' health at risk.

The controversial nature of these chemicals drove me to purchase my much-loved aluminum Sigg bottle (now on its third incarnation thanks to my carelessness), which now replaces the four to six plastic water bottles I went through each week of high school. I commend the City Council for their decision, which signals the usefulness of more critical inquiry into the health effects of consumer goods.

Of course, the American Chemistry Council has already released a statement deriding the new law as "contrary to the global consensus on the safety of BPA" and charging that the Council ignores the expert evaluations that have deemed the compound safe. This argument too thoroughly to privilege studies of chemicals and consumer products conducted for the purpose of legitimizing products of dubious safety, so it really heartens me to see a governing body put the question of public awareness and consumer safety over the product.

Earth gets its week in the sun on campus

2009-05-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that appeared this week on the University's homepage. Please check it out-- there's even a cool video for which [you can't tell that] I interviewed people.

Claire Feinberg’s unofficial job as an intern for the University of Chicago’s Sustainability Council is to turn off the lights and encourage other students to do the same.

“My biggest pet peeve is when people leave [my dorm’s] laundry room lights on all the time,” she says. “It seems so absurd to me to have the lights shining on your laundry while no one’s there, so I always turn that off.”

Feinberg, a first-year in the College, is already well versed in the discipline of green living. Besides hitting the lights when she leaves a room, Feinberg air-dries clothes in her dorm room and carries her food without a tray at the dining hall. These may be only baby steps down the long road of conservation, but fostering simple habits like these in students is a goal of the Sustainability Council.

The council shared its message on green living through a week of campus activities during the University’s annual observation of Earth Day. This year, the University hosted a series of eco-conscious activities that began Saturday, April 18 with volunteer work in community gardens and area parks sponsored by the University Community Service Center.

Highlighting Greener Choices

Earth Week 2009 culminated Friday, April 24 on the Main Quadrangle with “EarthFest”—an outdoor party with music, organic food, and information about what students and community members are doing to “green up” their lives.

Registered Student Organizations and community groups set up tables with information and freebies to raise awareness about sustainability practices, and to spark conversation and new ideas.

In April, the Office of Sustainability launched Sustainable Actions for a Greener Environment, a new campus-wide initiative to offer “SAGE advice” for how to be both green and smart in making everyday choices. Students manned a table for the office and shared some of their ideas.

Earth Week 2009 offered workshops and lectures on raising worms for composting, growing culinary herbs, issues in urban agriculture, the environment in United States law, and sustainable urbanism and green buildings. Speakers included Sadhu Johnston, Chief Environmental Officer for the City of Chicago; Doug Farr of Farr Associates, which specializes in construction of LEED-certified buildings; Esther Bowen, a graduate student in Geophysical Sciences and teaching assistant for the course “Feeding the City;” and Cecelia Ungari, Director of Education and Outreach at Healthy Green Goods.

A collaborative effort among the Office of Sustainability, the University Sustainability Council, the University Medical Center, the Green Campus Initiative, the Program on the Global Environment, the College, the Civic Knowledge Project, and several student organizations, Earth Week 2009 helped students think about their role in promoting sustainability.

“It’s our one opportunity to make people who normally wouldn’t be interested in environmental initiatives take notice,” says Feinberg.

"What do Women Want?" by Kim Addonizio

2009-05-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

Please enjoy one of my favorite poems while I work on midterms!

What do Women Want?
Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Marooned

2009-04-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

I almost changed my mind on Friday, when a student asked me "who are you writing this for?" while I was researching an article on a student-run lecture series. I didn't know how to explain that I had left the Maroon, but was still writing articles at will. For who then, this blog? It seems like a compulsion, not a job, when I'm asking people questions with no strong idea where to publish them.

Oh yeah, to reiterate; I quit the Maroon last week.

I've wanted to be a journalist since high school, when a friend of mine and not- so-secret crush helped found a quarterly opinion journal. After that I interned with a local weekly newspaper, the La Jolla Village News. I liked feeling immersed in the News, the What Was Going On in my community, city, neighbors' front yards—The short version of the story is the same for every writer, I think: A few bylines, and I was hooked. The best part was going jogging on Thursday morning in my beach-side community and scanning the freshly rolled papers in the driveways for my name peaking out above a rubber band.

This is to say, I have much less sentimental value for the Maroon than I might otherwise. They didn't teach me how to self-edit, how to beg someone over the phone for Just a minute! or how to habitually write ledes on my way to classes. But the Maroon is the first place I wrote alongside and was edit entirely by my peers, and I disagreed with a lot of their editorial decisions. There are good journalists at the Maroon, this I'm sure of, but if there's a place on campus to do good journalism, this probably isn't it.

It would be in poor form to re-hash the problems I've had with my editors, especially when I have so much to be proud of: Like this feature story about dormcest on campus, and a story on the Kuvia Winter Festival that meant waking up at 4:30 in the morning last year. With so many deadlines I learned how quickly one could change the content and character of a piece by removing a quote or re-arranging a lede, and get lots of people very angry.

I have some new projects to get to work on; I won a grant to report on the 2016 Olympic Bid and its impact on the South Side, and I have another issue of the Midway Review coming out by the end of the month. You can also look for more of my writing on the Universitys' homepages, through my freelance work with the News Office.

But for now, as this blog post suggests, I'm all alone—unprotected by the Mastheads that I will continue to insist are essential to journalism even in this digital world.

Hopefully the Maroonatics will keep doing their homework, because I'll be reading—and writing, too.

Coursework inspires ice cream innovation

2009-04-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

My latest feature for the University of Chicago News Office; it's about an awesome ice cream store in Wicker Park:

When alumnus Jason McKinney enrolled in the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he assumed he would pursue banking or consulting after graduation. He never imagined he would become a pioneer in the ice cream business until he worked on a group project with Cora Shaw, a student who insisted they could turn air into ice cream—and turn a profit.

Today, the duo owns iCream Cafe, which combines science with sweets to create a bevy of made-to-order, instantly frozen desserts, from blackberry sorbet to chocolate pudding—and even goat’s milk ice cream upon special request—with the help of one not-so secret ingredient: liquid nitrogen.

The cold smoke billowing from iCream’s gleaming blenders is more evocative of magic tricks than cooking, but according to McKinney, the science is simple. iCream stores liquid nitrogen—a colorless, tasteless gas—in tanks suspended from the ceiling at about minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit. When it contacts the churning milk, the mixture freezes in seconds into a consistency somewhere between hard- and soft-serve ice cream.

Three years ago iCream was little more than an idea for a class project at Chicago Booth. But since re-opening March 9, McKinney, MBA’06, Shaw, MBA’07, and their unique frozen confections have again become a hit in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. iCream originally opened for a week in August 2008, but closed shortly after due to equipment malfunctions.

“Some of the skills we learned during that 10-week class [have been useful],” McKinney says, “like, how to evaluate ideas and risk—you have to really be ready to make sacrifices.”

More Than a Class Project

Their original assignment in Prof. James Schrager’s New Venture Strategy Class was to create a business plan for a new concept, and a Food Network segment about creating ice cream using liquid nitrogen inspired Shaw.

“I loved the idea, and I had a couple of parties where friends came over and everybody got to make their own ice cream. It was like a small-scale version of this [store],” she says. But when she first proposed the idea to her group, which included McKinney, they were skeptical.

At the culmination of their project, Shaw and McKinney mixed enough ice cream for their 60 classmates to eat.

“No one believed it would work at first,” says Shaw. “I said, ‘OK, if we can make the ice cream for the whole group, and it works, will you agree?’ And they really liked it.”

McKinney worked as a trial lawyer in the Loop, while Shaw held jobs in teaching and retail management before they matriculated to Chicago Booth.

Shaw always envisioned owning a business, which Schrager encouraged after seeing her group’s presentation.

“There’s never a bad time to start a new business. In the toughest economic times it’s often the job that you figured out yourself that will be the best job for you,” he says. “I think that the kind of unique treat that they’re attempting to put together has a market in any climate.”

Thousands of Possibilities

Unfortunately, a week after the business opened in early August, the liquid nitrogen dispenser, which was designed to pump freezing cold, smoking air into the mixing bowls, couldn’t adequately freeze the ice cream, Shaw says.

The ice cream store has only been reopened about a month, but so far, McKinney and Shaw say they have had no problems making lemons into sorbet.

“It’s really impossible to try every combination of ice cream, with all the different flavors, toppings, sugar, and fat content choices,” McKinney said. “There are literally thousands of flavors.”

Shaw recommends the Nutella and mint chocolate chip-flavored ice cream. McKinney’s favorite is white chocolate with Heath bar. But the possibilities are endless.

“You can get soy, organic, light, ‘fro-yo,’ non-fat, or low fat, and still have every single flavor available to you,” Shaw explains. “[On the day we opened,] a man came back again and again and bought four things because he was so excited to have ice cream that was sugar-free.”

Customers can choose what they want in their concoctions, including flavors, mix-ins, toppings, and color—even if it’s not on the menu.

My coffee-flavored sorbet

According to Shaw, one regular customer brings goat’s milk from home for the staff to mix into ice cream. “As long as you bring it in a sealed bag, we’ll make virtually anything you want.”

Busy Weekend Pumpkin Empanadas

2009-04-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

This recipe takes about half an hour (okay, if you're efficient), and the empanadas will last you all week. As the title suggests, I made them for the first time on a very busy Sunday, and it was worth it. ¡Salud!

*1 bag of Trader Joe's Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
*All-purpose flour to cover hands and table

*Filling:
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup sugar
Generous amounts of cinnamon and powdered ginger to taste
1 cup canned, unsweetened pumpkin

1) Pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees
2) Lightly grease a baking sheet
3) Roll a small (about the size of half a fist) ball of dough onto a table in the shape of a circle.
4) Mix filling ingredients together in a bowl; spoon two table spoons of filling into each dough round.
5) fold each round of dough in half, and pinch at the seams
6) Bake for 15-25 mins.

**Makes 6-12 empanadas of varying sizes.

Dude, it's complicated!

2009-04-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

In Dude, you've got problems, Judith Warner offers some fascinating, if depressing, insight into the ways teenage boys are using sexual IDs as pejoratives; It turns out, Warner says, "Your so gay" doesn't actually mean anyone thinks your gay.

I’m only partly talking about homophobia, which, though virulent, cruel and occasionally fatal among teenagers, is not the whole story behind the fact that words like “fag” and “gay” are now among the most potent and feared weapons in the school bully’s arsenal.

Being called a “fag,” you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay.

It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature. It’s similar to what being viewed as a “nerd” is, Bennington College psychology professor David Anderegg notes in his 2007 book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them”: “‘queer’ in the sense of being ‘odd’ or ‘unusual,’” but also, for middle schoolers in particular, doing “anything that was too much like what a goody-goody would do.”

This article brings up some of the same issues of behavior and identity among boys and men that my class on Masculinity in America, Past and Present looked at yesterday. Why do we so readily peg physical strength, authority, and overt displays of violence as inherently masculine traits? In sociologist Eugene Genovese's landmark book on slavery in America, Roll Jordan, Roll, he describes how this conflation of masculinity and physical force in the 19th Century produced a society in which (1) white [male] slaveholders felt the need to assert their control over male slaves by treating them like children who merited strict rules and worse punishments, and (2) male slaves felt compelled to abuse the women around them to compensate for the emasculation they experienced as slaves. In other words, social stature and brute force were the two most secure ways to demarcate your manliness, in that order.

Today, it this same line of thinking that leads us to associate "gay," "fag" and other terms with impotence and submission—to reiterate, not "manly" traits to have at all. I worry what that does for us as a culture, and for adolescents in particular who want to defend their masculinity, regardless of where their sexual preferences lie?

One commenter on the blog who goes by the name Nancy sums up my concerns well:

"Domestic violence hotlines have experienced increased call volume as economic times have worsened. There’s a trickle-down effect. Parents feel less in control these days and want to have more control on the homefront and in general. Powerlessness leads to anger, anger leads to aggression. Kids absorb this and follow suit."

My name is Rachel, I'm 19, and...

2009-04-17T10:15:00.001-07:00

Who am I again? I've spent the past couple of weeks wrestling with various forms of the verb to be, (Wittgenstein would not be happy with me!) and shame on me for failing to even find the time to write a blog post. I may not have written all of it down, but I've been on a series of pretty involved searches for a summer job, an apartment to sublet with the boyfriend (found!), and places on campus and in Chicago that are thinking of sexuality and activism in the same ways as me. UChicago's student feminism group, Feminist Majority, has already pleasantly surprised me with some events on porn and communication that are all about getting people talking outside of their preconceptions.

In lieu of writing ten blog entries, here are four things I did this week that I promise to update readers on in the future:

1) Applied for a University of Chicago Summer Action Grant to spend the warmer months researching and reporting on the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid and its impact on South Siders. Wish me luck—it's $1,500.

2) Interviewed for a summer job at Backstory Cafe. They needed to hire someone right away, so that didn't work out for me (you know, with the whole four classes and one part-time job thing going on) But this place is cool! By far my favorite coffee hang-out on the South Side, Backstory follows a sustainable, community ethos that translate into tasty soups and sandwiches made from scratch, and interesting program ideas like movies and board-game nights.

3) Baked a delicious set of pumpkin empanadas. Yum. Recipes to come.

4) Scheduled the first University Community Service Center Book Club and potluck for Friday, May 1st from 7 to 9 pm. We're reading Gang Leader for Day, and all are welcome.

------------

And with that out of the way, Here is a pair of articles from the week that do everything for me but answer the question I posed above (Come on, neither of us really thought it was that easy):

*This just in! David Carr says Journalism is Dying! Really, we mean it this time. The NYTimes Media Equation columnist evaluates the state of the newsroom, again.

*In, "Tempest in a Compost Pile," Hyde Park Progress blogger "chicago pop" de-mystifies the ridiculousness behind the University's decision to close the 61st St. Community Garden. He tells it better than I could.

And lastly, I hope everyone here in Chicago enjoys the 70 degree weather.

South Side students say to IOC: "No Games!"

2009-04-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

Please visit the Chicago Studies Blog that Works to ready my latest entry on the International Olympics Committee's visit to Chicago!

A couple topics of interest...

2009-04-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

A big thank you to Dan Savage of Seattle's The Stranger for writing about the horrible death of New York journalist George Weber in last week's column. It's something I was afraid to write about the day I saw it up on nydailynews.com on my parents' computer. The alleged details of the meeting (between Weber and a 16 year-old, self-described "Satan-lover"), which you can read about at the NY Post, the NY Daily News, Fox, etc. but I have no desire to link to because I think they're badly reported, cast a severely negative light on internet dating and alternative sexualities in general, and they shouldn't.

I don't know how to argue this right now, but I know they shouldn't. It only disturbs me to think that there can so much going right in the world at the same time so many things are going horribly wrong. But I'd like to think that working to banish fear and ignorance a la Dan Savage is one way to go about creating a society where sex like that doesn't happen (note, I did not say where internet hook-ups and kinky sex don't happen), and fortunately he's not the only person out there trying to accomplish this.

Newly-appointed Argonne director Isaacs to work towards alternative energy storage

2009-04-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest Maroon article on the new director of Argonne Labs, Eric Isaacs. I had a lot of fun writing this piece, though it doesn't entirely show in the finished product, which reads more or less like a straight-up announcement of Isaacs's achievements and plans. Though not the most exciting pieces to actually sit down and write, I can't get enough of assignments like this one that put me in contact with fascinating, talk-your-ear-off experts in their fields.

In the span of twenty minutes Isaacs tried to explain the fine points of X-ray science, semiconductors and supercomputers to me (a student of the humanities who avoids academic physics like the plague). Did you know Argonne has a supercomputer than can calculate data close to a million times faster than the average laptop? I sure didn't. Take a look at what else stands out about Argonne, and how Isaacs plans to take the laboratory to the next level in these scientific fields:

By Rachel Cromidas
Published: April 3rd, 2009

Eric Isaacs will take the position of director of Argonne National Laboratory on May 1, President and Argonne Board of Directors Chairman Robert Zimmer announced last month. Isaacs, now a physicist at the University of Chicago and the deputy director of Argonne programs, plans to put Argonne, which oversees research on pressing energy and national security issues for the Department of Energy, at the cutting edge of research in X-ray science and energy development.

“I was honored and thrilled to be asked by the University to become the director,” Isaacs said. “Argonne is a leading U.S. Department of Energy lab focusing on fundamental science and applications of that to the big energy problems.”

Isaacs will be replacing current director Robert Rosner, who will return to teaching at the University as a professor of astronomy and astrophysics when his term concludes this spring, according to Argonne officials.

“[Isaacs] was out there as deputy of programs and leading the effort to create a strategic plan for the lab,” said Don Levy, chair of the selection committee. “We saw what he thought was important for the lab, and we liked his vision.”

Isaacs studied magnetic semiconductors at MIT and received his Ph.D. in 1988. Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a fellow at Bell Laboratories, studying X-ray science, a field widely researched at Argonne.

“I ended up at Chicago for a few reasons,” Isaacs said. “Of course, the physics department here is one of the best in the country, if not the world. It was really a great honor to come to Chicago and work with great people in the University.”

Isaacs also cited the University’s invitation to have him create and direct the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne.

“[Nanoscale science is] a very multidisciplinary science that includes chemistry, physics and biology to control materials only a little bigger than an atom,” Isaacs said. “We hired 60 people and built a $100 million facility.”

Since assuming his deputy position last May, Isaacs has worked to define Argonne’s strategic goals for research programs on alternative energy, X-ray science, and nanotechnology.

“What will the materials of the future be? We’re constantly looking at these horizons 15, 20 years out. Argonne’s is basic research, but it’s in the context of a mission and that mission is energy,” Isaacs said.

According to Isaacs, a main concern of Argonne’s is the development of alternative energy sources and storage methods.

“Illinois is just 60 percent nuclear,” Isaacs said. “Imagine [if] you added solar energy to that power source. You need much larger storage capacity to accommodate that need, and we are really not there yet. We at Argonne are thinking a lot about that, and the answer’s not obvious.”

Class Time

2009-04-01T05:40:00.001-07:00

I am enrolled in six classes this quarter. No, this is not an April Fools joke.

I can't make up my mind which classes to take for Spring Quarter, and the reason isn't just because they all look so good. After taking what I think are far too many disorganized, uninteresting and just plain difficult classes (and any rising third-year like myself will tell you, there are many out there), I want to pick my battles carefully. But this time I'm just stumped.

I attended three classes on Monday, and five on Tuesday. Below I will explain what I liked and didn't like about each class. But first, let me define what constitutes a "good class" from where I stand now: A good class will engage my mind, both in discussions/lectures and in the assigned readings. Papers and exams will challenge me, but reflect concrete material directly from the course. I should leave class each day feeling that thick, energizing, "I learned something today" feeling that I feed off of. And if it's no good, I want an easy A. (Though most students here will tell you that such grades for all intents and purposes don't exist.)

Is this the definition of a U of C-student pipe dream? Maybe. But here is a short list of my very best classes:

*Introduction to the Humanities with Larry McEnerney and Kathy Cochran, Autumn 2007-Spring, 2008

*20th Century Art with Christine Mehring, Winter 2009

*Intervention and Public Practice with Theaster Gates Spring, 2008

*Problems in the Study of Sexuality with Stuart Michaels and Anthony Todd, Autumn 2008

*Legal Reasoning with Dennis Hutchinson, Autumn 2008

*US-Mexico Borderlands with Gilberto Rosas, Winter 2009

*The Holocaust and the Visual Arts with Lawrence Michael Tymkiw, Winter 2009

It should be noted that only one of these is a core class. I probably should save elaboration for another post, but I have massive problems with the fantastical chimera known as the Core that is paraded around the University of Chicago by admissions reps and certain tenured professors like a carnival attraction. At its best, the core curriculum is something fun to look at; at worst, it's a rip off.

I am almost finished with the core curriculum, a heady mixture of Plato for Physicists and Science for Somnabulants (sorry social scientists). I didn't get into Global Warming this quarter, a 250-seat class in the Kent lecture hall into which more than fifty students tried to transfer on Monday. I also had little luck with Art of the East: China, too, a 50-seater survey course for my prospective Art History major. But the rest of my prospect look all too good:

Monday, 1:30 pm, I attend Writing Law. This course is a requirement for my other major, Law, Letters and Society, and it's taught by possibly my two favorite professors, Kathy and Larry. We will almost entirely be writing and workshopping briefs and memos, meaning the class has a distinctly "un-U of C" practical component to it (which I love). But the theoretical question that concerned and consumed my First-year Humanities class is still the same: How does language shape the way we think?

3:00 pm, I attend Legal History: Race, Sex and Sexuality. And am I ever intimidated. Co-taught by Amy Stanley from the History department and Mary Case from the Law School, this course interweaves primary sources and court cases to address the ways diversity has been addressed in society and the law. The class is roughly 1/3 law students, 1/3 LLSO majors like me, and 1/3 gender historians. We will be required to write one 20 page paper by 10th week. Oof.

Tuesday, noon, I attend the Politics of Mass Incarceration with Jessica Neptune. She informs me and at least ten other students at the start of class that the wait list is already fifteen students deep, basically nixing our chances of getting seats. I hop down the stairs of Cobb Hall to my scheduled noon class, America in World Civilizations with James Sparrow. I'm required to take this class for the Core, but I don't mind. After introductions, Sparrow spent the class leading us students through a close reading of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" as an introduction to American attitudes toward 19th century imperialism. I hope the next classes will engage us with the material this thoroughly.

1:30 p.m. I sit in on Ralph Ubl's Theory of Collage, a three-hour seminar crammed to capacity with grad students and upperclassmen in the Art History major, for just long enough to snag a syllabus filled with Rosalind Krauss and Clemente Greenberg readings. Then I sneak across the hall to Art of the East: China, taught by Wu Hung, only to learn that I am competing against at least 15 other people for five open seats.

3:00 p.m. I am actually enrolled in this class—thank goodness. It's Masculinity in America, Past and Present with Anthony Todd, another favorite professor of mine from last Autumn.

This blog post reads like a mini-course catalogue, and I still have to choose between two Wednesday classes: Performance Installation or the Mexican and Argentinian Press.

Everything but the kitchen garden

2009-03-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

Imagine I am making a ricotta cheese omelet for lunch. I beat a couple of eggs in a bowl before pouring them into a pan already heating on the dorm kitchen's stove. And while scooping a chunk of ricotta, I realize I'm out of basil.

But I don't have to do without—I lower the heat on the stove, and pop upstairs; I'm back in a minute, fresh leaves in hand from the small herb and vegetable garden growing on the Snell-Hitchcock lawn.

These fresh ingredients and front-yard convenience are exactly what I and my friend Cameron envision for the Snell-Hitchcock Garden. Inspired by the locally-grown food movement and Michelle Obama's White House Garden, this communal garden would ideally keep the dorm's pantries stocked with basil, savory stalks, and maybe a pepper or two come Autumn.

It will be a lot of work, most of which I'm not entirely sure of (Cameron's the environmental sciences major), and I'm hoping the two houses will each contribute some money for soil and seeds so we can get started this season. If all goes well, next fall we can start making individual plots. My mouth is watering just reading about the possibilities: (from the New York Times article on the White House garden)

"The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatillos and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter, Charlie Brandts, who is a beekeeper, will tend two hives for honey.

The total cost of seeds, mulch and so forth is $200, said Sam Kass, an assistant White House chef, who prepared healthful meals for the Obama family in Chicago and is an advocate of local food. Mr. Kass will oversee the garden.

The plots will be in raised beds fertilized with White House compost, crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, lime and green sand. Ladybugs and praying mantises will help control harmful bugs."

Students find treasures at the Brown Elephant

2009-03-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

I featured the Brown Elephant, a cool little thrift store in Lakeview, this week on the Chicago Studies Blog That Works. Please take a look!

Thank goodness David Brooks is not my editor...

2009-03-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

The Maroon printed a trippy re-imagination of the University of Chicago undergraduate's trajectory yesterday in Grey City, the Maroon editors' pet "magazine" project. Books, gargoyles and diplomas taunt the wayward columnist as he describes his meanderings through a "pseudo-prestigious university"—UChicago, of course. Oh, and the columnist himself? Yeah, it was David Brooks, circa 1982.

The bloggers of Gawker think Brooks was on a lot of acid back then. But I'm more convinced this column was the product of one too many all-nighters in the Reg—he's just lucky he printed this piece in the Maroon instead of handing it to his Hum professor.

Blogged down with work

2009-03-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

Please pop over to the Chicago Studies' Blog that Works to see my first post, plus a link to my Maroon article on real estate in Woodlawn!

University holds discussion with Jewish students to address recent bias concerns

2009-03-03T12:21:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest installment in a series of articles regarding the controversial Crisis in Gaza Panel--enjoy:

By Rachel Cromidas
Updated: March 3rd

U of C administrators clarified the University’s role in high-profile political events at a meeting with Jewish students on campus in response to charges of anti-Semitism stemming from a panel on Israel-Palestine relations last month.

The meeting was part of a series of smaller talks with Deans of Students Susan Art and Bill Michel, including a meeting with parents and alumni in New York City. “There’s a range of opinions on the topic of what’s been happening in the Middle East,” Michel said. “When talking on certain topics where there are such diverse opinions as there are on this campus, we need to work together to make sure everyone can express those opinions…and learn from each other.”

Chicago Friends of Israel (CFI) President and third-year Hila Mehr and other students voiced their concerns February 19 in an open forum with Deans Art, Martha Rothe, Mark Hansen, and Elizabeth Davenport; Director of the Hillel Center Dan Libenson; and Rabbi Yossi Brackman of the Chabad Center. About 40 students attended the event.

Mehr said the meeting addressed what some view as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel events on campus. She pointed in particular to a panel, “Crisis in Gaza,” featuring former DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein, writer Ali Abunimah, and professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby. The February 5 event was marred by an altercation between audience members and a flag decorated with the Star of David, crosses and a swastika that one attendee displayed before being escorted out of Mandel Hall.

CFI members took issue with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ decision to associate itself with a politically-charged event. Michel said that it’s not uncommon for an academic center to cosponsor an event with RSOs.

According to Mehr, administrators addressed event sponsorship at the meeting. “Does it mean endorsement, giving money, or putting your name on it but not supporting those views?” Mehr said, expressing her own views. “I think it’s an important debate that the whole community can have.” Though she understood the discussion to be primarily about Jewish life on campus, she said it was open to all students.

The purpose of the discussions, said Michel, was to create an environment where deans could hear directly from students and parents. Michel also said he is working with Roth, Davenport, and Hansen to rethink exactly what message event sponsorship sends.

To Davenport, when an academic center chooses to co-sponsor an event, it is simply a matter of giving money. “It doesn’t mean they endorse everything said at the event,” she explained, “though I do understand that it may feel to students as though the University itself [is facilitating the event].”

But according to Mehr, sponsorship wasn’t the only issue the group visited. “One concern was about anti-Israel and other sentiments [in the classroom] that may make students uncomfortable, and how the University plans to deal with this,” she said. Mehr cited Divinity School office 310B as an example of politics converging with academia; until recently its door was adorned with a poster of the Israel flag and the phrase, “Terrorist State Since 1948.”

“When addressing concerns like this one, we are guided by the principles highlighted in the policy on Civil Behavior in a University Setting,” Michel said. “As Elizabeth Davenport and I said…any students who have concerns about issues related to statements made by others on campus should either talk directly with that person…or con tact their area dean of students.”

Michel directed students at the meeting to the Kalven Report, a set of University guidelines on political action written to determine what action, if any, it should take in response to the Vietnam War. The report restricts the University from taking stances that could jeopardize its climate of free and balanced academic inquiry.

First-year Robert Henderson, who attended the meeting, was hoping for a more swift response from the administration regarding these issues, “given that the [Gaza event] took place five weeks ago,” he said.

“My biggest concern is an academic arm of the University endorsing events that suggest an Israel and Jewish conspiracy to commit genocide that evokes age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes,” Henderson said. “I think the issue is this is tarnishing the University’s reputation.”

Davenport echoed Henderson’s concerns. “We are a place that above all values free inquiry. And all sides of a contentious issue should be open to discussion in the classroom,” she said. “Sometimes a student may come with pre-formed opinions that they don’t want to revisit, and that might cause some discomfort there…That is not the same as being unable to express an opinion.”

Edits

2009-02-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

This post might be old news for most, but the Chicago Maroon staff elected Supriya Sinhababu as our new editor-in-chief, and I couldn't be happier about it. Supriya is a strong writer and Voices section editor with a work ethic that can hopefully see the paper through another year.

But I'm not interested in singing any praises here—not when public opinion of the Maroon on campus ranges on a given day from apathetic to enraged. As the candidates eagerly pointed out in their speeches last Sunday, we have a lot to improve upon, and many chances to grow stronger in the next year:

*One of the strongest components of Supriya's platform was her call to expand the Maroon's web staff to the size of any other section (i.e. News; Viewpoints; etc), especially since budget issues may require us to relegate some articles to "Web Only" status to save paper.

*Matt Barnum presented a series of ideas for boosting traffic to the Maroon website by adding multimedia content. Though the logistics have yet to be hammered out, I would eagerly get behind any initiative to teach reporters to shoot videos and record podcasts of interviews and panel discussion. Of course, the success of this plan would rely upon collaboration with the entire Maroon Staff, not just the editors—whether they're goofing around or recording hard, engaging news content.

*Claire McNear asked the staff to focus on the Maroon's endowment in her speech, alluding to both the growing financial pressures on the paper and a University-wide push to tap into our alumni resources. And like Matt, she also wanted reporters to reach beyond their writerly roles, possibly by taking more photos and posting fliers to publicize the paper.

Left largely unanswered was the question of how to scale back the paper's production costs. Staffers on both sides of the podium suggested initiatives from banning homework-related printing to firing our current distributors and asking students to pass out the paper. I actually think this is a great idea—maybe this way I'll actually have a Friday paper in my hand before 5 p.m.

The Maroon certainly has a lot to sink its watchdog-teeth into here. But when the new year is over, it won't matter so much to me who was elected last week. Rather, I'll want to know that we didn't simply file away these fantastic ideas from our candidates (all current section editors) during the daily grind of college journalism. And here's news for you, team: it will take more than just Supriya, Matt, Claire, Mike, Sara, etc. to finish the story on the paper's web-content and finances.

No Time for a Break at the Border

2009-02-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

U.S. students have a couple more reasons to be cold this winter: Arizona Universities advise spring breaks south of the border should be avoided. Universities in Tuscon, Tempe and Flagstaff have all issued various travel advisories and warnings to students, in the wake of an upsurge of violence and crime in Tijuana, Juárez and Nogales.

“Mexico's drug cartels are waging a bloody fight for smuggling routes and against government forces, dumping beheaded bodies onto streets, carrying out massacres and even tossing grenades into a crowd of Independence Day revelers - an attack that killed eight people in September.”

More from MSNBC:
"In just the past week...

- In Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, the police chief of Mexico's largest border city quit after cartel hitmen started killing police officers and threatened to kill more until he resigned. Police went on high alert, travelling in groups with pistols in their hands.

- In Reynosa, across from McAllen, at least six people died in running battles between soldiers and gunmen armed with grenades and bazookas.

- In the state of Chihuahua, which includes Juarez, gunmen opened fire on the governor's convoy, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring two others."

Taking these articles as examples of two types of media coverage of this border-war-zone, I think they show a really strange lack of concern on behalf of the U.S. of the killings so geographically close to us, and even at times spilling over the border and into Phoenix. Is it the drug trafficking in and of itself that brings violence to the border, or can we look deeper into the escalating conflict and question how the U.S. and Mexico have been policing the border?

Law School dean Saul Levmore announces 2010 retirement

2009-02-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

By Rachel Cromidas
Updated: 2009-02-20

Saul Levmore announced that he will be resigning his position as dean of the University’s Law School in an e-mail sent to students and faculty on Tuesday.

Levmore joined the Law School faculty in 1998 and assumed the position of dean in 2001. In his announcement, Levmore said that eight years is “about the longest a dean should serve” and that he plans to officially leave the deanship in 2010 in order to give the University time to search for a replacement. Levmore also said he will likely return to a full-time faculty position after stepping down.

His tenure as dean has at times come under criticism, especially when several tenured faculty members left the law school , including Cass Sunstein, who accepted an offer from Harvard earlier this year and now serves as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration.

But Levmore did not dwell on the specific successes or challenges of his tenure in his announcement, citing the Law School’s academic work over the past decade.

“It is all too common in these announcements to list the buildings renovated, the capital campaigns completed, the faculty hired, and the programs launched. We should be proud of such things, but I prefer to associate myself with the terrific and important work done by faculty colleagues and with the great students who have blossomed here during my time as dean,” Levmore said.

Levmore received praise and criticism for cutting off wireless internet access in the Law School’s classrooms in an attempt to prevent students from distracting themselves during class last year. He also rejected pressures to change the school’s complex letter-grading system, even after peer institutions such as Harvard and Stanford changed theirs to a pass/fail system.

“Saul has provided successful and energetic leadership for the Law School,” University president Robert Zimmer said in a press release. “In the months ahead there will be a number of occasions to recognize Saul’s many achievements as dean and to thank him for his leadership and service.”

To law professor Martha Nussbaum, Levmore’s biggest achievement was fostering the Law School’s unique intellectual community.

“I don’t think any other law school has a community like ours,” Nussbaum said. “[Levmore’s] created a community here that’s both very challenging and like a family. It crosses political lines, but [the faculty] have complete respect for opposing views—very rare in the academic world,” Nussbaum said.

Thanks to the Law School’s relatively small size, Nussbaum said, Levmore was able to encourage departments to interact with each other through weekly lunches and workshops.

Law professor Brian Leiter, whom Levmore hired from the University of Texas last year, hopes the University will keep its intellectual culture in mind while searching for a new dean. “The University isn’t like other places that have subgroups [of professors] who don’t talk to anybody else. [The new dean] will have to understand our institution,” he said.

Leiter also stressed that the new dean should make sure the University stays competitive with its peer institutions, especially in light of the financial crisis many are facing.

“I think a big issue is the competition for faculty and students,” Leiter said. “Our situation is better off than [others’]. But whoever is coming in will have to have some vision to adjust.”

Blood Orange Yogurt Cake (Happy Valentine's Day)

2009-02-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

V-Day has come and gone, and I am still deep in the bunkers of the Reg, warring against my 9 page paper on maquiladora workers and the production of gender in Ciudad Júarez. Still, I think this recipe is one thing about my weekend worth getting jealous about:

Blood Orange Yogurt Cake with Blackberries and Chili Powder

(I adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from the Barefoot Contessa, who originally called it a lemon cake? This cake bears absolutely no resemblance to anything you've seen before, I'm sure.)

*2 cups of teff flour (you can use regular cake flour or whole wheat flour, but teff is the high-fiber and protein powerhouse I do all my baking with)
*1/2 cup AP flour
*1+ cup of plain yogurt
*a couple tablespoons of baking powder
*1/2 teaspoon chili powder
*1/2 cup sugar
*1/4 cup of orange rind
*a handful of finely chopped blackberries
*the freshly-squeezed juice of 4-6 blood oranges (for taste)
*1/4 teaspoon of orange extract (optional; this stuff's expensive, and I can't find any other uses for it)
*1 tablespoon salt
*4 eggwhites or 2 whole eggs
*vegetable oil to grease the loaf pan

Mix wet ingredients, mix dry, then combine; etc. etc. (I don't like baking, okay?)
Bake at 350 degree heat for about 30 minutes. I actually think this sounds much too short, but that's honestly how long it took.

Blood Orange Glaze:
1) Squeeze the juice of a couple more blood oranges into a wok pan coated with vegetable oil.
2) Pour half a cup of sugar into the pan, and then add water as necessary to even out the mixture
3) Cook on medium/low heat for 5 minutes until the sugar and water combine to form a bright pink syrup.

optional: Call me and complain that I give impossibly horrible directions for this impossibly delicious and healthy cake!

After midterms and a bad cough/cold...

2009-02-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

...Comes 62 degree weather and more midterms! That's the University of Chicago for you. While I'm either too sick or busy to update this blog regularly, here are some articles to read instead:

*Thinking about shipping your kid off to Princeton to become a high-salary I-banker? Think again: "As Pipeline to Wall Street Narrows, Princeton Students Adjust Sights," details the struggle two Princetonian princesses are having trying to find work out of college. The problem is no less dire here at UChicago, I suspect. But before the Econ-majors all have an existential crisis (perhaps decide to pick up philosophy?) I think they should consider putting what will still be an extremely useful degree good use in the public sector. I wrote a short piece on finding internships with non-profit organizations for the University Community Service Center Newsletter a couple weeks ago. Also, check back next week for my co-worker Mutisya Leonard's piece on finding grants and fellowships for summer/post-graduate work.

*"Twilight Zone"—this Washington Post article addresses one of the very problems my midterm on U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is about. The author, a self-described border rat, details the changing climate of the third country that is "20 miles long and 2,000 miles wide." He says:

"Nowhere does the change in border dynamics appear more striking than in Ciudad Juárez, a city of about 1.5 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Juárez, which in recent years has seen a string of unsolved sexual assaults and murders of young women, was once the swingin'-est town on the entire frontier. Here, at the crossroads of NAFTA, terrific literature, quality artisan crafts, foreign-owned assembly plants and dance halls galore, the erosion of border life as it existed for generations is almost complete. Juárez awoke one day last December to learn that four policemen had been killed within a half-hour, one of them decapitated. It was the worst carnage of that week, but it numbed rather than outraged. Juárez experienced more than 1,500 homicides last year, which, along with daylight carjackings, occasional kidnappings, random street robberies and plain vanilla extortion, made for a population fearful of the new year."

Que Tengas Precaución

2009-01-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

Baghdad sí, Tijuana no. These are the commands being given to U.S. Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in SoCal, many of whom are used to spending their leisure time in the Mexican border city's bars and night clubs.

According to a USA Today article, "The limits were first put in place for the Christmas holiday. Last week the commander extended the order indefinitely."

Growing up in San Diego, CA, I remember older friends and classmates running Ssuth for the weekend, seeking beaches, bars, and other fun where the legal drinking age is 18. So it is a shock that 2008 was the bloodiest year ever for Tijuana, with 843 killings compared to 337 in 2007, owing predominately to the narcotics trade.

Here's the USA Today article about it: Tijuana off-limits to U.S. Marines

On campus, inauguration is must-see TV

2009-01-20T19:53:00.000-08:00

Staffers take break from daily routines to watch ‘history in the making’

By Rachel Cromidas

CHICAGO — “I’ve got to go—I’ll call you later,” Stella Manns said, hanging up the phone at the front desk of Snell-Hitchcock Hall.

“That was another desk clerk, from Maclean. We didn’t want to talk too much, we don’t want to even take our eyes off it for a minute.”

Like students, faculty, and staff all over campus, Manns and dozens of other housing and dining staff members took a few moments Tuesday morning from their jobs checking ID cards, preparing food, and keeping house. Whatever attention could be spared went to dormitory televisions and desk computers showing the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

“I’m speechless,” Manns said, splitting her attention between the Channel 9 news and the students running through the dormitory front door. “I knew one day this would happen, but I never thought I would live to see it.”

Manns, a resident of the Chatham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, has been working for the University for 31 years. She started out as a cashier in Hutchinson Commons, and later at International House, before joining the housing staff.

“They just went to church,” she said, tracking the Obamas on television. “There goes Al Gore, and his wife, and [George] Herbert Walker Bush. Did you know he walked with a cane? Barbara looks good.”

“I’m going to watch the inauguration the whole time,” she added. “And it won’t interfere with my work. It’s history in the making.”

Chicago Studies is a project of the College in partnership with the University Community Service Center. Chicago Studies is funded in part by the Women's Board. © 2008 The University of Chicago

I'm on NYTimes.com!

2009-01-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

Um, yes, self-explanatory title.

Please click here!

UPDATE: See if you can find the other photo I submitted.

Volunteer’s tale: Day of Service

2009-01-20T06:04:00.000-08:00

Check it out! Student journalists (like me) will be giving you coverage all day of Inauguration events at the Chicago Studies webpage.

Here's my first piece:

CHICAGO — Rev. C.T. Vivian wanted the crowd to know about a “mighty force” that has the power to decide what congressmen will do, a force that is able build more houses than any architect.

“It’s not God,” the Baptist minister and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech over MLK Weekend.

And it isn’t Barack Obama either, he said. “Obama wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for this mighty force. He wouldn’t have even been a senator.”

Vivian was talking about the spirit of volunteerism—the same force that assembled hundreds of volunteers, including 120 from the University of Chicago, at the United Center at 8:30 on Saturday morning, to prepare for a day of civic engagement through service.

Chicago Cares, a non-profit group that organizes volunteer projects throughout Chicago, organized the Jan. 17 Day of Service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Chicago Cares also arranged for Vivian, a champion of King’s message of non-violent action, to speak to volunteers the morning of the service project.

Just as Chicago Cares asked volunteers across the city to set aside time for community service, Brooke Fallon, a fourth-year in the College, asked University students to set aside their textbooks and spend the day painting classrooms and building bookshelves at nearby Fiske Elementary School.

“I am really impressed with the fact that so many students care enough about the community to take a full day out of their schedule, wake up early and come do something like this,” said Fallon, the University’s Day of Service coordinator. “The library isn’t going anywhere.”

Fiske, a prekindergarten through eighth-grade school located at the corner of 62nd Street and Ingleside Avenue, is just blocks away from campus and several dorms. But it may as well have been in a different world for the some University’s volunteers making their first foray into Woodlawn, a high-poverty neighborhood with historically tenuous University relations.

For fourth-year Stephan Skepnek, the Day of Service provided the perfect opportunity to spend his day outside of Hyde Park, and away from students’ usual off-campus haunts.

“One of my biggest regrets after having spent the last four years in Chicago is that I don’t know most of the city. It’s just so easy, once you get comfortable in Hyde Park and develop a close group of friends, to become insulated. But I think getting out into the city and exploring is really a part of what being a college student is,” he said.

Skepnek attended the Day of Service with his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Though the Day of Service honors King’s memory, Skepneck had President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration at the front of his mind. It was hard not to—several classroom walls featured cut-out news articles about Obama and a collection of student essays titled “If I Were President…”

“[Obama] inspired a lot of youth to really get proactive, so hopefully he can just keep it going,” Skepnek said. “I didn’t begin volunteering because of Obama, but I think he has gotten me to step back and think about my relationship to the community.”

Chicago Studies is a project of the College in partnership with the University Community Service Center. Chicago Studies is funded in part by the Women's Board. © 2008 The University of Chicago

Saddlebacking all the way to D.C.

2009-01-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

My favorite advice columnist and queer Dan Savage recently proposed another sex-act-naming contest, this time to commemorate the word "Saddleback." As both the name of the Reverend Rick Warren's church and a term just too suggestive to pass up, Dan's seven reader-suggested definitions for saddlebacking can be found here. Go vote for your favorite.

I'm not sure how I'm voting yet (though leaning towards 5), but these are my thoughts on the choices:

(1) I agree with Dan; "sex" should by default suggest the use of a condom in today's speech, and doesn't need another term.

(2) This suggestion only half makes sense to me; Obviously in a consenual relationship, having "submissive/masochistic tendencies" is not dark or nefarious, and using the term to apply to any kind of unreciprocal sex act wrongly implies that two people can't at the same time enjoy something like oral sex. I think Dan knows better than to offer this suggestion up to readers. However, I do like the example of the word in action: 'I don't know why Obama is letting Rick Warren saddleback him into presiding over his inauguration.'" Perhaps tweak this definition a little to describe the act of intentionally hijacking a sex act to suit your own fantasies while disregarding your partner?

(3) Aside from the gory description, I like how this suggestion references "barebacking," a term already in use.

(4) "To saddleback is to rail against gay sex in public while secretly indulging in the same in private. Ted Haggard? Total saddlebacker. Larry Craig? Saddlebacker. Rick Warren? Probably a saddlebacker." Ha ha ha. It's funny now, but I'm not picking this one because I think the joke will get old too fast.

(5) Yes! This one looks like the most appropriate choice so far because it directly speaks to the hypocritical, misinformed understanding of sex someone who goes through Rick Warren's idea of "sex-ed" would have.

(6) Like number 3, I think it works, but I think Dan should be looking for something more.

(7) Rick Warren probably loves the idea of "saddlebacking" as it is defined in this choice. That's reason enough not to pick it.

What do you think?

How did we miss this, UChicago?

2009-01-13T19:43:00.000-08:00

5 people shot outside Chicago high school.

Swastika flag and name-calling mar Gaza panel

2009-01-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

Gaza panel organizer: Altercation and offensive flag distract from the real political debate

By Rachel Cromidas
Updated: 2009-01-13

Some students were troubled by incidents that preceded a panel last Thursday on the Gaza conflict. The talk, entitled “Crisis in Gaza: the U.S., Israel, and Palestine,” featured former DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein; writer Ali Abunimah; and professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby, a controversial critique on Israeli–U.S. politics.

A middle-aged man not affiliated with the University hung a flag decorated with a Star of David, crosses, and a swastika on the balcony in Mandel Hall. The man was asked to remove it by Director of Student Activities Sharlene Holly, and he did so, carrying it away and leaving before the event began.

In an unrelated incident, a self-identified Israel supporter was called a Nazi by a man standing in line, prompting the supporter to knock the man’s glasses off, according to a University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) report. UCPD officers escorted the supporter out of the Reynolds Club.

A member of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a group that helped organize the panel event, who asked that his name be withheld, said that this incident was peripheral, was resolved swiftly and immediately, and did not detract from the tone of an event largely received as a successful informational forum for scholarly discourse.

Holly said the banner was not removed because of its message, but because its size presented a safety hazard.
“UCPD likes us not to allow large scale signage,” Holly said. “If there were to be any immediate crowd movement or there was a fire, they’re unsafe. It was brought to my attention because of its content, but that’s not why I asked him to take it down.”
The MSA, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and the student chapter of Amnesty International co-sponsored the event. It was primarily organized by Ali Al-Arian, a first-year in the college who said he is not affiliated with those organizations.

The event’s purpose was to “discuss the reasoning and ramifications of the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza,” according to Al-Arian.

“The mainstream U.S. media hasn’t exactly been truthful in its reports, so I wanted to bring three distinguished scholars to speak about it,” he said. “Everything they presented was backed by facts.”

Although Al-Arian said he had heard rumors about the flag and name-calling, he did not observe either incident himself.

“The event was about so much more, and in my opinion these are distractions… from what the real issues are,” he said.

“I’m sure the students who are complaining about these issues didn’t really agree with the topic of the event,” he added. “And they’re just trying to find an excuse.”

Hila Mehr, president of Chicago Friends of Israel, said panel organizers told her “they would do a very good job [with] security and making sure that the event wouldn’t get out of hand. I think that a lot of students were concerned about the event and made that clear to officials,” she said.

Mehr said she thought the panel was unbalanced, but added, “I want to stress that I didn’t think the event was anti-Semitic itself. But I did think some of the incidents that occurred there were.”

A representative from CMES was not available to comment.

Students who attended found the events to be a minor distraction from an otherwise successful lecture.

“I personally found [the flag] offensive and inappropriate,” said Danya Lagos, a first-year in the college who attended the discussion. “I believe the University was correct in making him put it away.”

Fourth-year Justine Kentla also noticed the man with the American flag outlined in the shape of a swastika. “I thought that was a little bit strange, but other than that, I didn’t feel that the event was biased at all. Very informative,” he said. “I think I learned a lot more about the issue than just from watching CNN or reading the news.”

Wiped Out

2009-01-09T12:36:00.001-08:00

Not me—it's only first week!—but my hard-drive. I lost everything on my computer last night after the "genius" at the Apple store tried at least three times without success to restart my computer. It crashed on Tuesday afternoon, and since then I've been getting by checking emails and printing course readings at my work computer, all the while hoping this was just a minor setback and before long I would have my job applications, college essays, diary and calendar back. I clearly am being too optimistic for winter.

Now I don't even have Microsoft Office. That application, along with Adobe Creative Suites and my iTunes library are completely gone. And I'm left to gather together the system I spent the past two years building, and not backing up, on this fragile piece of equipment.

Wish me luck.

The Importance of Breathing

2009-01-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

It’s the first day of the quarter, and two of my classes have already run me into the ground. Granted, they’re both P.E. classes, and that ground is cushioned by a yoga mat during one of them.

In addition to a full course load (four classes; two for the core and two for my majors), I will be spending my Monday mornings and evenings in the Ratner Athletic Center’s dance studio, first for a yoga class and later for Modern Dance—not exactly in sync with my apparent lack of flexibility and rhythm.

Our instructor calls it Hatha yoga; my friend said it was the best nap he’s had in a long time. It’s the most common form of yoga practiced in the States, at home in health centers, hotel spas and living rooms alike. According to Wikipedia, “The 2005 "Yoga in America" survey, conducted by Yoga Journal, shows that the number of practitioners in the US increased to 16.5 million with the 18-24 age group, showing a 46% increase in one year,” and making it symptomatic of the health food and lifestyle fads popping up across the country faster than a class doing the Upward-Dog. Even our instructor said she had only been practicing for a year.

Why am I taking a yoga class? There are myriad professed health benefits, including increased flexibility and “centeredness,” which I suppose is the ability to spend longer amounts of time hunched over my computer in the Reg. But what really convinced me was the explanation our instructor had for breathing techniques. (And no, I don’t mean the part about find our “third eye,” though that sounds cool.)

“You should be inhaling and exhaling through your nose,” she said, weaving between students and their yoga mats, “not your mouth. In fact, the only person who should have to open her mouth during yoga is me.”

An hour solid of daylight with no talking, just breathing? Count me incapable. I can’t sit still, let alone lie face-up on a mat; I don’t like to relax (I am from the University of Chicago); and I love to talk. Which makes me think this is exactly the class for me.

So we practiced breathing. Breathing with our hands on our stomachs; breathing with our knees raised; breathing with our pelvic bones in the air. I was ready to go back to the dorm and sleep by 10:30 a.m. Anyone who has told you that UChicago will eat your soul has never been to the dance studio.

I was ready to go again by 4:00 p.m. This time, I was the yoga mat, wiggling and rolling my joints around on the floor per the teacher’s instructions until I could unfurl and contort as easily as exhaling.

Modern dance is not what happens at high school dances, for starters. It’s better, at least if the teacher’s “Your body is perfect just the way it is” mantra holds any relevance to the act of throwing your limbs into space to the beat of a live drummer sitting the studio’s corner for 45 minutes.

I almost felt like a real dancer—until my cell phone went off, filling the studio with my generic, vaguely hip-hop/techno ringtone.

What I’m Reading on the Plane

2009-01-03T20:29:00.001-08:00

…You can bet it won’t be the articles on U.S.-Mexico border policing I just printed out for one of my classes. At least, not when I have a ton of wonderful books I received as holiday presents:

*True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman. This book is an excellent non-fiction account of writer Mark Salzman’s time teaching a creative writing class at a juvenile detention center in Los Angeles. His students are just teenagers, but the crimes they are charged with are so severe they are being tried as adults. And regrets about there cases, the gangs and families waiting for them in the outside world, and the choices they made that led them to prison consume the vignettes the boys write during Mark’s visits.

My boyfriend gave the book to me for the holidays and I couldn’t be more pleased with it—I’m about half way through the it now, but I would finish it all tonight if I didn’t have to pack. He joked that the book was an apt answer to the question “Why write well?”—a Raymond Pettibon quote written on a popular UChicago t-shirt—but I am impressed by how the boys’ honest, unadorned language answer the question “Why write at all?” in the first few chapters, both for themselves and for Mark, who portrays himself as shallow, quick to stereotype and afraid of Central Juvenile Hall’s inmates in the first chapters.

The next two gifts are both art books—which reminds me how absent visual art has been in my life since I provisionally nixed an Art History major in favor of Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. I’m taking an Art History class this quarter, but these texts should hold me over until then:

*Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews with Mel Bochner, 1965–2007

I worked at the San Diego Museum of Art for almost two years in high school, giving tours and teaching children about art during Family Weekends. One of my favorite exhibitions (and probably the most challenging to tour) was of Mel Bochner, a conceptual artist who played with language, transparency and representation in very monochromatic, symmetrical and patterned drawings and installations. Like Bochner, I am fascinated with the question “How do we articulate what we think about what we see?” or in other words, how do we use language to express how we feel, think and live from an intellectual premise? The book opens with one piece that I think exemplifies this conundrum: “Language is not Transparent,” (1970) a phrase written in chalk on a wall of the L.A. County Museum of Art, is an installation which explores how writing and art lend immediacy to an abstract and not at all transparent idea.

I’ve only skimmed the book so far, but I’m already pleased to read about Bochner’s relationship to the philosopher Wittgenstein who examines similar concepts in Philosophical Investigations, a text I keep returning to since I arrived at the University.

* Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917-1933
ed. By Roland Doschka

Klee is just fantastic; I don’t have much to say here besides awe over this full-color volume of some of Klee’s best works—a mix of abstract, German expressionism, and witty, swirling images that don’t quite fall into any one art movement. I’ll have to visit the Art Institute of Chicago this winter to see some of his paintings and etchings up-close again. What, a girl can’t read all the time?

"First Things First" (1957) for January First

2009-01-01T22:09:00.000-08:00

Here is "First Things First," a poem by W.H. Auden that I read about two years ago and noted in my diary on Jan. 1, 2006.

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only too often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
-So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer- putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Resolve

2009-01-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

The funny thing about New Years resolutions, I’ve always thought, is how little they have to do with making real changes. Change is an obvious consequence of the progression of time, and if you live in the U.S., it’s next year’s political catch-phrase; but I have trouble associating it with the moment when Dec. 31 becomes Jan. 1. I’ve made countless resolutions—most of them between the ages of seven and fourteen, before the holiday had lost much of it’s confetti-speckled luster, and when I still stayed up until midnight… and then didn’t fall asleep until 5 a.m. for no better reason than because it was new—and I can’t remember a single one of them.

I thought about making a few resolutions this year. They would amount to largely physical changes, like using dental floss between meals (some friends will surely ask if I could floss any more often than I already do), not mooching food off of my boyfriend’s plate at the college dining hall, or writing a blog post every day (which has already been difficult during Winter Break, but will become near impossible). I’ve already broken my yell-less resolution. My boyfriend kindly pointed out to me yesterday that a resolution that sounds like “Do less of X” is ambiguous at best.

Exercise more. Check Facebook less. These are the kinds of resolutions you’d expect to hear from college students like me. But there are some less tangible resolutions I’m going to try to make this year too:

1.) Read more articles like this one, by Nick Kristof. And write more articles like it too. I began following Kristof when he first started making trips to Africa with aspiring journalist and humanitarians, like Will Okun, a Chicago-based photojournalist and school teacher who spoke at UChicago last year, and I have always been inspired by his portraits of some of the most egregious human rights violations in the world, such as the sex traffic addressed in today’s column. This is exactly the kind of socially responsibility I want my own writing to embody.

2.) Declare myself … or at least a minor. Technically, I declared two majors last year: Law, Letters and Society (LLSO), and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. I know, it is sounds like six majors, and it was too much to juggle. Both are intensely interdisciplinary and together appealed to my desire to study law, politics, rhetoric, sexuality, irony, thinkers like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Plato—the list goes on. I dropped the latter major at the end of Autumn Quarter, and I’m still not sure if it was the right decision. But I know that if I stay with LLSO I will have my work cut out for me, with 13 classes spanning the sociology, public policy and English departments, and a 30-page B.A. paper. So when I get back to campus I’m filling out a “consent to complete a minor” form for Art History. (More on that later-it's not cognitive dissonance, it's just a lot of U of C work.)

3.) Keep fewer secrets. One of my closest high school friends got me a copy of PostSecret the collaborative art project-turned internet sensation-turned book; a collection of anonymous postcards adorned with testy and teary “secrets,” such as “I hate people who reply to all on emails” and “I hated my childhood.” Ironically, the collages have made me more upbeat than melancholic, but it also reminded me of how painful secrets can be. Several of the people closest to me came out last year, showing me how difficult it is to share something about yourself that you don’t even want to know at times. In 2008 I saw and heard people respond to our secrets in sometimes unexpected, sometimes loving and sometimes immensely negative, judgmental ways.

I want to have the courage in 2009 to banish some of the shame that keeps me “righteously indignant,” on behalf of those anonymous secret-writers, yet uncomfortable sharing more than this broken link in a blog with my name on it.

And with that, here’s to 2009.

Will Safire's Office Pool, 2009

2008-12-29T17:36:00.000-08:00

Will Safire has released his annual office pool in which he invites readers to predict how some of the year's biggest news stories will play out in 2009.

Here are my picks:

1. In Demo-dominated D.C., post-postpartisan tension will pit:

(a) lame-duck Fed chairman Ben Bernanke against Fed chairman-in-waiting Larry Summers and Fed chairman-of-Christmas-past Paul Volcker (a k a “The G.D.P. Deflator”) over an “imperial Fed”

2. Springtime for G.M. will lead to:

(b) a “pre-pack bankruptcy” auto rescue sweetened by federal pension protection and guarantee of new-car warranties

3. Toughest foreign affairs challenge will come if:

(a) Afghanistan becomes “Obama’s War” or “Obama’s Retreat,” and

(b) Iraq backslides into chaos after too-early U.S. withdrawal

4. Oil selling below $50 a barrel will:

(c) be the equivalent of a huge U.S. tax-cut stimulus

5. Best-picture Oscar goes to:

(b) “Slumdog Millionaire”

6. The non-fiction sleeper will be:

(d) “Losing the News,” by Alex Jones, and

(e) “Ponzi Shmonzi: The Bernie Madoff Story,” crash-published by a dozen houses

7. The don’t-ask deficit at year’s end will be:

(c) $1,393,665,042,198 and no cents. (Why so specific? A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion. That’s 10 to the 12th power, or 1 followed by 12 zeroes). I'm kidding about this pick, I would much rather (a) "under $1 trillion, thanks to the new administration’s cutting of waste, fraud and abuse, as well as tax-soaking of the remaining rich" be the case. —Rachel

8. In Congress:

(c) among Senate Democrats, Judiciary chairman Pat Leahy’s influence will rise because Supreme Court nominations will take center stage, while Harry Reid’s clout dissipates because of home-state weakness

9. Post-honeymoon journalists and bloody-minded bloggers will dig into:

(b) suspicion by conspiracy theorists about the unremarked lobbying that led to the expensive renaming, after 72 years, of the Triborough Bridge to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge just in time for Caroline Kennedy’s campaign for anointment to an open Senate seat

10. The Supreme Court will decide:

(e) that in al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, a legal U.S. resident cannot be held indefinitely at Guantánamo

11. Obama philosophy will be regarded as:

(a) proudly liberal on environment and regulation and

(b) determinedly centrist on health care, immigration and protectionism.

12. Year-end presidential approval rating will be:

(c) sinking but 30 points higher than that of Congress and the news media

Visit http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29safire.html to see the options, and Safire's picks.

Righting Journalism

2008-12-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

Regret the Error.com has come out with it's yearly round-up of 2008's most embarrassing, egregious, and regretful media mistakes. This site, edited by author Craig Silverman, is really worth checking out!

Here are a few particularly ludicrous errors: (all information is taken from regrettheerror.com)

*Spiegel Online,the website for German newspaper Der Spiege published a "wildly exaggerated" article claiming that furniture manufacturer IKEA routinely named its most inexpensive items after Danish towns, while reserving Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian names for its high-end objects.

*The Washington Post's "Kid's Post" poetry contest published a poem titled "Horrible, Just Horrible" on April 29 and credited it to a child, but it was actually written by acclaimed children's poet Shel Silverstein.

*Jody Rosen of Slate.com exposed the rampant plagiarism of the Bulletin, a weekly Texas paper that regularly reproduced content from other news outlets, such as Rolling Stone and USA Today, supposedly written by staffer Mark Williams. "Uncovering these [plagiarized] sources," Silverman commented, "is a matter of choosing the right phrases to dump into Google, not a difficult feat for anyone moderately attuned to writerly rhythms."

New Year's is as good a time as any to reflect on the harm plagiarism, sloppy reporting and sloppier editing cause, not just to the victims of misinformation or plagiarism, but to all journalists. The press cannot afford to further damage journalistic credibility at a time when internet watchdogs and the public are rightly questioning traditional news outlets.

Sauron in Santo Domingo

2008-12-26T18:56:00.000-08:00

What, you didn't know the U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic twice in the twentieth century? "Don't worry," says Junot Diaz, author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, "when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either."

I just finished reading this fantastic novel about the struggles of a RPG-playing otaku Dominican adolescent from New Jersey and the family he swears was cursed during the dictator Rafael Trujillo's regime. The book was number one on Time Magazine's list of the ten best books of 2007, and the New Yorker published a 15-page version in 2000. I've owned the book since September of last year, when a class on Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Literature at UCSD left me craving post-modern works like those of Elena Poniatowska, G. G. Márquez, and Rosario Castellanos, but I hadn't started reading it until winter break. Sometimes I wonder if a college student shouldn't have the time to read more.

Fortunately, this book has exactly the right mix of history (the story is peppered with footnotes detailing the political escapades of Trujillo and his followers ), unrequited love and cheeky, know-it-all first-person narration to keep me far away from my winter quarter course syllabi. It follows the brief life of Oscar de León, "a smart bookish boy of color...weighing in at 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often)," whom his college dorm-mates nicknamed "Oscar Wao,"( a Spanish corruption of the name Oscar Wilde) for his prodigious bouts of novel writing. The story also pieces together bits of his sister Lola's coming of age and the tragicomedic life of their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral.

But you can expect a lot more from this book than a fierce excoriation of one Latin American dictator through the lens of a complicated and intensely likeable Dominican-American family, though Diaz does have a lot to say about "Trujillo, also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface." As Díaz describe him in a footnote characteristic of the whole book's tone: “At first glance, [Trujillo] was just your typical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator.”

What makes this novel truly delightful, and distinguishes it from other Latino novels that get their culture and color from weaving English, Spanish slang and spanglish phrases, is how it takes advantage of an even more mysterious language: the language of fanboys, role-playing gamers and Lord of the Rings buffs—essentially, the world of sexually-frustrated supernerds like Oscar who our narrator, his roommate Yunior, swears will only be getting game from fantasy characters.

What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? Oscar asks himself, trying to make sense of how his Dominican identity and not so hombre demeanor fit into the world. In one anecdote, Yunior recalls with sarcasm and affection the time when Oscar informed "some hot morena, 'if you were in my game I'd give you eighteen charisma!'" Qué muchacho, what a guy.

I think it's moments like this that make the novel just magic, and right in-step with the concerns of American-born, globally aware and intensely self-involved children of the twenty-first century like Oscar, Yunior and Lola. I'll add in some of my favorite quotes to this post as I find them.

*"At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron's evil was taken away by "a great wind" and neatly "blown away," with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after his death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok--fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo's son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, an orgy of terror funeral goods for the father from the son."

A journalist always takes good [foot]notes...

2008-12-22T14:08:00.000-08:00

I was hoping to let this one fly past me, but after listening to On the Media's take on President Bush's shoe attack, I can't help wanting to retread this ground for a bit. (Okay, maybe that was too much even for me.)

Since deftly removing his shoes and hurling them at President Bush during a press conference in Iraq, Muntazer al-Zaidi has been branded both a symbol of Iraqi discontent over the U.S.'s occupation and a disrespectful dissident—no one should throw shoes at anyone's president, whether or not he ushered a period of sectarian violence and civil disarray into the country. Besides his major-league baseball potential, one characteristic of al-Zaidi that has at times been sidelined by the media's coverage and the resulting viral video: He is a journalist, not a terrorist, political activist or lunatic trying to get attention. Simply a journalist.

And where one might expect people in the latter category to leap to action, slinging shoelaces and curses Bush's way, the journalist is perpetually sidelined for impartiality's sake; never quite a part of the fray, even if a tape recorder or notepad is the only thing separating them. Journalists are discouraged from expressing any political opinion in public. Some political journalists choose not to vote in elections at all—especially if they've been covering the candidates involved.

I think most members of the news media will agree that it's okay, if not inevitable, for a journalist to hold opinions. The question al-Zaidi's antics raise, however, is to what extent a journalist owes it to himself to take action when he sees injustice. In other words, when should a journalist put down his pen and pick up his shoe (for lack of a better object, I suppose)? And what to do when this decision becomes a choice between the trust of his readers and his own moral compass?

Bob Garfield:

Not even the most pernicious media filter, its own triviality, could filter out the real story. The tape told it plainly.

A working journalist – not a Baathist insurgent, not a Shiite cleric, not a foreign Jihadist, but a journalist – was finally so outraged by the blood and chaos visited upon his country that Muntazer al-Zaidi lashed out at the most powerful man in the world at who knew what cost to his career and personal safety.

Maybe he guessed that he would become a hero throughout the Arab world, but he could just as easily wind up a martyr. His family has said he’s already been severely beaten in prison. What would make him risk everything?

I want to become a journalist because I think there is little that is more important than the task of informing people. The story is king, even if that means digging around and reporting on the ground, whatever risks involved. But maybe there's something even more risky than reporting a story, and more important that Muntazer al-Zaidi hit on with that shoe last week.

Journalism for the People: Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders

2008-12-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

Good journalists always have their audience in mind, and whether they are writing to businessmen or movie-buffs, they tailor the article's content and tone accordingly.

But some journalism doesn't alert entrepreneurs to the goings on at Google, doesn't point book clubs to the 10 best books of the year or parents toward Shrek: the Musical—sometimes an article really is written for everyone, to remind us in a crisis why it is so important that we care.

This is what T. Christian Miller of the investigative non-profit Pro Publica did on December 13, in collaboration with the New York Times’ James Glanz. their article details a 513-page federal history of America's reconstruction efforts in Iraq, and how the U.S. government released inflated numbers to exaggerate the region's progress.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed. …

… Titled "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," the new history was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general's office who have read the draft, but are not authorized to comment publicly.

Like David Carr said today, it takes a scandal to remind us that investigative journalism is here to stay.

Finally...

2008-12-09T17:59:00.000-08:00

I am kicking myself for leaving this blog silent for two weeks now... Finals Week and the mess of sorting out my majors has me more than bogged down with work, but I promise to resume writing with a renewed fervor as soon as the week is up.

I know life goes on outside of college; for starters, the governor of Ilinois is embroiled in an embarassing corruption scandal, and the Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy! It's almost a relief for me to burry myself in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling , fretting over how Abraham could be the father of faith and at the same time intend to murder Isaac, rather than face a world that seems to be breaking down around me.

My current preoccupations are "of peculiarly local concern" as Chief Justice Harlan Stone might say. I'm studying up for a Legal Reasoning final exam on constitutional law, and worrying that I might be turning into a mini Antonin Scalia (talk about fear and trembling). I just finished a 10-pager about radical feminism and violent pornography. I'm dropping one of my majors, Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. Oh, and I made a kick-ass dinner tonight with lentils, couscous and sweet potato soup.

I leave for San Diego on Saturday morning, and I will be spending the weekend of the 18th in Los Angeles with the boyfriend. I miss my friends, and I'm dying to see my little brother, who's been sick for about a month now. It's been raining all day, and my sneakers are soaked because I went running this morning. Outdoors. I hate to say it, but these things are on my mind a lot more than the thought of the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune going up in a pixelated cloud of smoke.

I don't want to make any promises, but hopefully I will be able to share more of my thoughts on some of these issues soon.

God Between the Sheets, or “How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!”

2008-11-23T20:14:00.000-08:00

Something about sex and marriage, they just seem to go hand in hand...
Texas Pastor’s Advice for Better Marriage: More Sex, More Often: I just think this is a really amusing article: Rev. Ed Young of the evangelical Fellowship Church entreats his parishioners to strengthen their marital bonds by taking the Seven Day Sex Challenge. You guessed it—he told spouses that having sex once a day for a week would bring them closer to each other and closer to God, and "double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage. And when I say intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub.”

Maureen Dowd actually writes a good opinion piece for the New York Times on the new Gus Van Sant biopic, "Milk," the story of the murder of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in American history. He served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with Sen. Diane Feinstein.

With Same-Sex Marriage, a Court Takes on the People’s Voice: A pretty interesting article published a couple of days ago about more of the legal issues surrounding California's gay marriage ban Prop. 8. The state supreme court will probably rule on Prop. 8's constitutionality early next year. If you don't have time to read it all, atleast read the chunk below:

“The California Supreme Court has never articulated criteria for what makes something an amendment versus a revision,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. “So I don’t think you can predict anything because there is so little law.”

Supporters of the ban say legal history is on their side. “Whenever an amendment or an initiative has been challenged, almost always the court rejects that and upholds the people’s initiative power,” said Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for backers of the proposition, citing past state bans on the use of race, sex or ethnicity in college admissions and caps on property taxes. “These are major policy changes that the court has recognized are fine,” he said.

But Jennifer C. Pizer, a lawyer with Lamdba Legal, which represents one of the petitioners, said that Proposition 8 “essentially nullifies the equal protection guarantee” of the Constitution and sets a dangerous precedent, something that has been cited by several minority groups who asked for relief from the court.

Code Green: Thomas Friedman puts America on the Alternative Energy Alert

2008-11-18T05:35:00.001-08:00

The Midway Review, the journal of politics and culture I edit and design, is out on campus today, and here's a copy of my article. The whole magazine can be found at midwayreview.uchicago.edu as a PDF.

Hot, Flat and Crowded:
Why We Need a Green
Revolution—and How
It Can Renew America
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
448 pp., $27.95

If you ask Thomas Friedman, thanks to climate change, globalization and climbing population rates, the earth looks hotter, flatter and more crowded than ever before. It also looks like a self-indulgent scene out of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hieronymus Bosch’s fifteenth-century triptych of excess and greed decorates the cover of Friedman’s newest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, suggesting that the way the United States has been tearing through global resources is finally catching up with us.

In the first half of his book, Friedman recounts the development of the global energy crisis. In responding to the crisis, he claims, the United States has done more to isolate itself from the rest of the world and deepen its dependency on foreign oil than promote innovation. Meanwhile, Denmark’s booming wind turbine industry, Brazil’s emphasis on ethanol production, and Japan’s high fuel efficiency standards are each propelling their respective nations into the future a lot faster than we Americans can manage, even with the help of our high powered SUVs. And if we don’t pull our heads out of the ground, where no doubt we’ve been poking around for oil.

Friedman warns that we as a nation risk falling hopelessly behind in technological innovation. In particular, Friedman fears the convergence of three global he says, for which he coins the mnemonic “hot, flat and crowded.” In the next fifty years, he claims, the world’s population will swell 45%, from 6.7 to 9 billion. Outsourcing of business will likewise increase, causing the numbers and spending power of the world’s middle class to rise in turn. Meanwhile, fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas will add CO2 to the atmosphere and fuel global warming. These developments together will produce a greater strain on the Earth’s ecosystem than it has ever felt before.

The thesis isn’t new. Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, walked his American readers through the leveling of the economic playing field in his bestseller The World is Flat, and cautioned them not to rest on the laurels of the business and political tactics that served us so well through the 20th century. And writers as diverse as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Al Gore have been decrying the culture of over-consumption for years. But this time, Friedman is hoping to lure the audience of entrepreneurs he snagged with The World is Flat into thinking about the environment, even if their concerns have more to do with profit margins than polar bears.

So what’s different about Friedman’s solution? First, it does not sound much like “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” or any other magazine features telling consumers what cars to drive or light bulbs to buy. Friedman knows going green won’t be easy, simple, or fun for the nation, and insists that only drastic changes in policy can make a lasting impact.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for Friedman, green is no longer synonymous with Birkenstocks and tofu. In one of the many anecdotes that punctuate Friedman’s arguments, he explains how even the U.S. Army has cause for concern: at one point an officer observed that transporting oil across the Iraqi desert puts men needlessly at risk of enemy attack. As he says, “[alternative energy] is now a core national security and economic interest.”

Friedman is calling for U.S. business and governments, and not just hemp-wearing, hybrid-driving consumers, to lead a “Green Revolution.” In doing so, he hopes the United States can set an example for developing nations like China and India, who tend otherwise to envy the U.S.’s trajectory of industrialization, despite its history of utter disregard for environmental matters. This process would involve imposing serious gasoline taxes like Denmark’s to encourage consumer restraint, building masstransit systems to rival Europe’s, and trading in our present dependence on dirty energy for cleaner biofuels and more efficient power plants.

Friedman borrows a number of suggestions from the “Carbon Migration Initiative” proposed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, both professors at Princeton University: replace 1,400 large coal-fired electric plants with facilities powered by natural gas; double the output of today’s nuclear power facilities to replace coal-based electricity; increase wind power eightyfold to make hydrogen for clean cars; double the fuel efficiency of two billion cars from thirty to sixty miles per gallon.

Again, not the kind of prescription you’ll read in Working Mother magazine. To accomplish all this, Friedman wants to tap into a history of American ingenuity—the panache for self-reinvention that made Americans the pioneers of global industry, put a man on the moon and invented the Internet. He wants green to mean more to the country than the color of Jay Gatsby’s light, but knows it will take the leadership of an FDR or JFK to make this happen.

But just as Ronald Reagan stripped the White House of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels when he took office, it is doubtful whether twenty-first century Americans will take heed should the government tell them to green up their lives. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Friedman applauded America for successfully spurring itself to surpass the U.S.S.R. in space- exploration. But after the events of September 11th shook America to attention again, in a way much more immediate and devastating than the threat of communism had ever been, the opposite happened. Americans were encouraged to spend more, travel more, and ignore the fact that their nation was at war.

Friedman mocks the low-impact, consumerist trends that have made Green a glamorous color in niche markets. But there is one central question he doesn’t fully answer: How readily will Americans, so accustomed to free-market-forces, support this dramatic shift in federal policy, when they could just as easily switch from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs and call it a day?
Only the next ten years will tell. I’m going to hold on to that article, “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth,” just in case.