I want you to think about the last truly stupid decision you made. How bad was it? Bad? Well, don’t worry. Whatever you did, I’m sure the contestants on Netflix’s Back with the Ex did worse. The show, which premiered last month on the streaming service after airing in Australia in spring 2018, gives four couples three weeks to try getting back together after time apart. Each pair spends a few nights in a fancy hotel room outfitted with champagne and rose petals, then takes turns cohabitating in each other’s homes, and finally takes a vacation to a swanky destination, like Paris or New York, before deciding whether or not to make it official and get back together.

If this sounds painful to watch, well, it is. Back with the Ex is one of many reality shows that garners views by guaranteeing audience members the chance to watch someone else do something truly uncomfortable. From its clickbait-ey catchphrase (“What if the love of your life was also the one that got away?”) to the assorted tasks the couples undertake that are clearly engineered to stir up drama, the show is a tacky rendition of every reality show trope in the book. Its saving grace, then, is actually the squirmy, awkward feeling it elicits in viewers. The sheer discomfort the couples inspire, plus their occasional and much-needed heartwarming moments, ground a show that might otherwise seem choreographed down to the last cutaway. Back with the Ex’s absurdity makes it almost worth the watch.

Of the four couples, two are periodically entertaining but mostly forgettable. First up are Jeremy and Meg, who dated on-and-off for seven years before Jeremy literally fled the country to escape the relationship. They’ve been separated for four years now, but given that Meg had to take a break to go hyperventilate in the bathroom during their initial reunion, those wounds definitely seem fresh. Then there’s Cam and Kate, high school sweethearts who broke up three years ago after Kate cheated. Both pairs are kind of insufferable and kind of fine. We’ll leave it at that.

The other two couples, though, each offer a story wild enough to single-handedly carry the show. Diane and Peter are an intercontinental duo — she’s American, he’s Australian — reuniting after 28 years apart. Each has raised children and been through a divorce but admits to having thought of their relationship in the many years since they dated in their twenties. They are obviously the most lovable pair of the bunch, not least because they are the oldest and by far the most sexually active. (A verbatim quote: “We also spent a lot of time horizontal… and vertical! And upside down!”) Their giddiness at being with each other is undeniable, infectious, and genuine. Their story alone keeps the show from feeling entirely canned.

At the other end of the spectrum, watching the final couple, Erik and Lauren, is like watching a car crash or listening to a couple argue on an airplane: shocking, nauseating, and completely engrossing. They started dating 12 years ago and averaged a breakup per year for six years before Erik dealt the final blow over text. Now, Erik is the one who wants Lauren back. He is an emotionally manipulative chauvinist pig, she is woefully blind to reality, and their sex life is weird weird weird. At times they are hard to watch, and not in a fun way. But the show’s most curious and interesting moments occur between the two of them, as the audience watches the power dynamics of their relationship invert when Lauren learns to use her own voice and maybe (maybe!) stop herself before she makes another phenomenally poor decision. Here, Back with the Ex veers into what could qualify as bad-good television — funny, infuriating, and the sort of thing you only have to feel a little guilty about having watched later.

Back with the Ex was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first time I heard Sweetener, I was barrelling down I-80 with my best friend from high school, who loves the rich, pop-inflected vocal stylings of Ariana Grande almost as much as I do. We’d read rave reviews of her new album, and it seemed an obvious choice for the days of nonstop driving that lay ahead. But when we took the plunge and pressed play, I was wholly underwhelmed. The album’s sound is smooth and heavily produced in a way that feels very of-the-moment but does absolutely no justice to Grande’s truly extraordinary voice . In the words of my friend and listening companion, “The first time we heard it, we were like NO.”

But because we’re masochists, or maybe because road trips can be long and frequently dull, we resolved to give it a second try the next day. The rules: we would listen to each track in full and in order. Forty-seven minutes later, as “get well soon” — the lilting and lovely final track — drew to a close, we decided it wasn’t so bad after all. We’d been too quick to judge. But just to be sure, we had to listen to Sweetener one more time.

So it goes with Grande. One listen turns to two, then three, and before you know it you’ve gone from being unenthused to pronouncing your unwitting but shameless devotion. It’s true that Sweetener is occasionally lackluster and fails to showcase Grande’s talents. But it’s also an absolute delight. Much like Grande herself, it is nuanced, amusing, and commanding when you least expect it.

Sometimes, Grande’s music is all three at once. Many of the album’s best tracks are dreamy and hypnotic, suitable for getting lost in even as they address challenging moments in Grande’s personal life. On “everytime,” Grande navigates the rocky terrain of an on-again, off-again relationship. But if the song’s gentle groove is any indication, it’s rolling hills, not steep cliffs, that she’s traversing. And in “better off,” she says goodbye to her troubled partner. “I’m better off without him / I’m better off being a wild one,” she croons softly, a gentle, melodic tune once again belying the inner turmoil her lyrics suggest.

Elsewhere, though, Grande’s undeniable aplomb and groovy beats align perfectly on the album’s most certifiable bangers. On “God is a woman,” one of Sweetener’s biggest hits, as bass thumps in the background, Grande announces to a partner that after he’s been with her he’ll “believe God is a woman.” The song is sexy, cool, and confident, and we believe her. While on “borderline” and “blazed,” Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, respectively, offer fun, harmonic star power that elevates each song to solidly danceable territory. You’ll be listening on loop before you know it.

Still, this isn’t to say that every track on Sweetener hits the ball out of the park. The title track, for one, is a slog to get through. “Hit it, hit it, hit it, hit it,” Grande commands, but all I really want to hit is fast forward. The verses and chorus are dissonant, like an odd couple who don’t make sense together. Other inexplicable moments include Grande’s decision to use lower-case titles for all but two of the album’s 15 tracks. What must have looked cool in the recording studio is tacky and distracting on the track list, like she’s trying to make a creative statement but doesn’t quite know what it is. Each time a new song title scrolls across the stereo screen you’re left scratching your head.

In discussing some of Grande’s more befuddling moves, it would be hard not to address her image in the public eye. But I’m making an intentional decision here to not discuss her appearance or her romantic life. If you opened a tabloid once this summer you’ll know plenty has been said about both. It’s easy to reduce Grande to the way she presents herself or to the men she drapes across her arm, especially in recent months. But the preoccupation with what she wears and, in particular, who she dates is distracting and ends up derailing the conversation we should be having about Grande’s tremendous vocal and emotional range.

What’s most surprising and delightful about Grande is the way she has managed to pay homage to the divas of yore while simultaneously poking holes in the stereotype. If her go around the press circuit to promote Sweetener proved anything, it’s that she’s not afraid to make fun of herself and to have fun doing it. Skip to minute seven of her “Carpool Karaoke” segment with James Corden, and you’ll see what I mean. Corden mentions that he once read Grande insists on being carried everywhere. Grande dispels the myth with a smile. But when the two step out to grab a snack at Starbucks minutes later, she jumps on Corden’s back and announces to the unsuspecting barista and gathering crowd, “Hello, I’m Ariana Grande, and I must be carried.” No one can keep a straight face.

In her music and out of it, Grande commands the attention of a rapt audience. She is silly, sharp, and hugely talented, even if she sometimes misses the mark. Her voice demands that you listen and then listen again.

Sweetener was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last month, in the span of 48 hours, 95 people overdosed on the New Haven Green. First responders arrived at the Green to treat one overdose, then another, and then another. Paul Bass wrote in the pages of the New Haven Independent, “For a day or two, the New Haven Green became a scene out of the Night of the Living Dead.” As the news circulated, community members were left wondering what could have caused the chaos on the Green.

The drug to blame for the overdoses was K2, a synthetic cannabinoid that is unregulated and whose chemical composition varies dramatically from batch to batch. In an email to the Yale community, Ward 1 Alder Hacibey Catalbasoglu, DC ’19, wrote that an individual was reportedly handing out free samples of the drug, hoping to acquire new clients. While no one died, the incident put all eyes on the Green.

The first day, Aug. 15, there were 76 overdoses. While many rushed to the Green to provide help, another more official meeting was underway nearby. The Committee of the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Lands of New Haven (also called the “Proprietors of the Green,” or, more often, just the “Proprietors”) had come together for what was supposed to be a routine conference.

The Proprietors make up a group even older than Yale. They are a private organization and a committee of five, serving life terms and electing their own successors. Their organization has only one role, but it’s a role that the Proprietors, the City, and its residents have been parsing and refining almost since the group’s inception: the Proprietors own the New Haven Green.

At present, the Chair of the Committee is US District Judge Janet Bond Arterton. The other Proprietors are former Albertus Magnus College President Julia McNamara, retired banker Robert B. Dannies, Jr., social justice advocate Kica Matos, and Anne Tyler Calabresi, a philanthropist and descendant of Theophilus Eaton, one of the founders of New Haven.

On Aug. 15, the Committee was meeting to discuss some amendments to their official Regulations Governing the Use of the Green — they fixed some phrasing here and a typo there, and added a clause prohibiting smoking. Typically, they meet every six or weeks, according to Arterton. That the timing of their meeting aligned with what Arterton called the “Great K2 Catastrophe” was an unexpected and ironic twist. In that meeting, and in the ensuing weeks, “Our level of dismay was huge,” Arterton said. “How did this happen?”

As with many things where the Green is concerned, it is hard to say. Practically by definition, a privately owned public space creates situations that are logistically complex and without legal precedent. As Arterton herself is quick to point out, “although five proprietors hold this land in trust for the public, that’s what we are — five people.” The Proprietors work closely with the City and rely on it to tidy, care for, and police the Green. In essence, the arrangement between New Haven and the Proprietors hinges on treating the Green like a public park. At the same time, though, both parties must readily acknowledge that it isn’t one.

This set-up is not without its faults and convolutions. The news of last month’s overdoses and the resulting conversations make this an opportune moment to revisit the history, both recent and distant, of how the Green has fit into the fabric of the city. For, as lawyers, city officials, and the Proprietors themselves will all tell you: there is no other arrangement like this in the country.

In 1638, minister John Davenport, merchant Theophilus Eaton, and around 500 other colonists arrived at Quinnipiac land on the shore of the Long Island Sound and decided to call it their own. As Leonard M. Daggett, a New Haven lawyer and a Proprietor himself, wrote in his 1942 history of the Committee, “The Proprietors’ Committee of New Haven,” these men “came by consent of the Massachusetts Bay but so far as I know without any reservation of jurisdiction or control in that company. They simply chose their home and settled here.”

According to Daggett, the Quinnipiac people “asserted in their recitals that they had an absolute and independent power to give, alien, dispose, or sell the lands.” That said, he wrote, they noticed that other native communities living in close proximity to colonists enjoyed secure alliances and protection. For this, they agreed to sell the land for what amounted to pocket change. On Nov. 24, 1638, a written deed confirmed the purchase of the New Haven Colony.

The same year, Davenport and Eaton laid out a design for the village at the heart of the colony: the famed Nine Square Plan of New Haven. The story goes that Ezekiel’s Israelite Encampment in the Bible inspired Davenport to create an ordered, symmetrical, utopic city — a square of squares, each identical in size. Eight squares ring one 16-acre plot in the center, what we now know as the New Haven Green.

As more colonists came to New Haven, the eight outer squares and the land surrounding them were divided up and settled by newcomers. As Daggett explained, people with some claim to the land — i.e. male members of the Church — would set up their home lots on one of the squares and then allot plots in the outlying fields. The land that was not divvied up, including the central square, was deemed “common and undivided” and was owned jointly by all of the landowners in the colony.

“As we use the term, ‘proprietors’ were the original grantees or purchasers of a tract of which they and their heirs or successors and those whom they admitted afterwards to their privileges held absolute ownership and control,” Daggett wrote. However, as ownership of the common and undivided lands was passed down from generation to generation, the number of owners became unmanageably large. In 1805, the many owners voted to put together a self-perpetuating committee of five that would be responsible for maintaining and preserving the common and undivided lands — the Green chief among them — as open, common space. Five years later, the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut officially recognized Jeremiah Atwater, Levi Ives, Abraham Bishop, Francis Brown, and Thomas Painter as the first Committee of Proprietors.

In colonial New England, most town greens had a similar proprietary model. What sets the New Haven Green apart is that it has remained in private hands since its establishment more than 300 years ago. “Most New England towns had commons when they were colonies but all have been subsumed into city ownership” except New Haven’s, Arterton said.

As such, the City’s distinctive arrangement has long induced head scratching. When Daggett wrote his history of the Proprietors in 1942, he did so in an attempt to explicate and legitimate the group’s existence. “Mr. Burt, Examiner of Public Records, asks what authority our Committee has, stating that no such committee exists in any other town of the State and that he cannot find authority for our Committee,” he offered as an explanation of his purpose.

Even today, it seems, aspects of the Proprietors’ history are mysterious or ambiguous even for those most intimately involved in the Green’s affairs. The regulations that govern the Green were initially adopted in May of 1973, and it is unclear what, if any, guidelines were in place before then. Arterton said she’s not even sure what the impetus or context for drafting the 1973 regulations was.

“There is no other piece of property in the United States that is similarly managed and maintained. It is a unique land use,” Norm Pattis offered as he leaned back at his desk chair, long gray ponytail swinging behind him. With a laugh, he added, “And when you said earlier that you had difficulty understanding it all, I still do, okay?”

This is a strong statement coming from Pattis, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney who has been practicing in New Haven since 1993. More than anyone else, he is aware of the legal oddities surrounding the Green, as the only person to ever bring a case against the Proprietors.

On Oct. 15, 2011, a group of Occupy New Haven protesters established a tent city on the upper Green. To the surprise of many, the tent city persisted through winter. Just as springtime thaw began, the City and the Proprietors jointly sent a memorandum to the thirty-odd protesters requesting that they pack up and leave on Mar. 11. The note concluded: “Both the City of New Haven and the Proprietors of the Green appreciate the dedication you have brought to the cause of economic justice, and we wish you well as you move forward elsewhere.”

From there, new questions arose for the protesters, who had no intentions of leaving. “Clearly if the city owned the property, it could ask the people to leave,” Pattis pointed out. “But what if the city didn’t? And then who had the authority to make decisions about the Green? And regardless, didn’t the First Amendment protect the right of tent cities to exist as a [form] of symbolic speech?” The more Pattis read about the Proprietors (whom he called “a secret society that is repulsive and obnoxious”), the more he wanted to take them to court. He even found reason to dispute the legitimacy of the proprietors’ claims of ownership in general. “I’m a sucker for a David versus Goliath fight,” he said. “I want to be standing next to David throwing pebbles.”

Pattis represented the protesters in a case they brought against the city, then-Mayor John DeStefano, then-Police Chief Dean Esserman, and the Proprietors. In the end, both the US District Court and the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the City and the Proprietors. Pattis’s clients’ tent city was forcibly dismantled on Apr. 18, just in time for Yale’s Commencement. As Pattis wryly noted, “there’s always this great Potemkin exercise in the spring.” Arterton, for her part, said the Proprietors appreciated the protesters’ right to free speech but eventually became concerned about the delicate trees their tents sat atop. Plus, she said, after four months the Occupy protesters had become “not altogether law-abiding.”

In theory, the protesters could have requested a permit from the Proprietors and the city to continue their work, although this would no doubt have required them to do away with their tents and stick to daytime hours. Instead, most chose to take their fight to new places. Pattis said there was talk of bringing a case against either the City or the Proprietors “to determine once and for all who owns [the Green], and what the responsibilities were.” But Pattis had poured hours of pro-bono work into the Occupy case, and didn’t think he could do that again. “That was not a fight that I was willing to take,” he said. “I don’t know if someone else has.”

No one has taken up that fight, at least not yet. Despite the eventual outcome, the decision of the late Judge Mark Kravitz at the District Court makes an interesting attempt at picking apart some of the confusion surrounding the ownership of the Green. Kravitz did his part to acknowledge, on paper and in a court of law, some of the contradictions inherent in the Green’s dual public-private status.

In particular, he parsed the arrangement whereby the City is expected to help enforce the Green’s regulations even though they differ from those of public parks. “These are, admittedly, murky matters,” he said in the decision. “It is one thing, legally, for the Proprietors to establish rules governing the use of land they claim to own. It is another and more troubling thing for a private group to require a public official to enforce those regulations and, especially, to do so in a manner and on a schedule decreed by the Proprietors.”

The Occupy case may not have interrogated the existence of the Proprietors. But it identified the importance of thinking and talking more concretely about their relationship to the City, and to day-to-day life on the Green.

When John Rose, Jr., LAW ’66, assumed the role of Corporation Counsel for the City in 2015, he quickly realized his law school connections were going to come in handy. At the time, he said, Mayor Toni Harp was hoping to apply for money from the state to make improvements to the Green. Drew S. Days III, LAW ’66, former Solicitor General, was then a professor at Yale Law and the Chair of the Proprietors. The hope was that Rose would be able to reconnect with a former classmate and thereby mobilize the City’s capital improvement plan.

It worked out just as planned. Together with the Proprietors’ legal counsel, Rose wrote a Memorandum of Understanding between the City and the Proprietors. When it was made official on Sept. 30, 2015, the Memorandum marked the first time the relationship between New Haven and the Committee had been formalized on paper, according to Arterton. Among other things, the document states plainly, “the Green has historically served as a public park and has been administered as such by the city.” Importantly for Arterton, it “confirmed the Green as a private space [where] we have approval authority on what would go where.”

The main objective of the memorandum was to ensure the support and cooperation of the Proprietors during each stage of the city’s improvement plan, for which New Haven received $1 million from the state. So far, Arterton reported, the Green’s electrical and sewer systems have been redone, and wifi has been set up for the first time. But, there are other plans whose status she was unsure of; there was talk of appointing a permanent project manager for the capital improvements but, she said, “I’ve never heard about him since.”

And while the memorandum may have clarified the relationship between New Haven and the Proprietors in writing, it did not eliminate the challenges that arise when two organizations are each overseeing different aspects of the same space. Rebecca Bombero, Director of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees, explained, “obviously the Proprietors would like to see more maintenance on the Green, but we have to balance what we can do in relation to the other spaces that we manage.”

Bombero understands the wishes and workings of the Committee of Proprietors better than most. In her role as Director, she also serves as their point person at City Hall, attending meetings and working closely with the five Committee members. Arterton urged that the Green “needs [its] priorities to be taken care of when there’s an extreme shortage of money.” But, as Bombero pointed out, budget cuts and a shrinking staff (the department currently has half the employees it did in 2001), make even everyday tasks a challenge.

It is also worth noting that, while the Proprietors collaborate on and assist financially with many projects each year, the cost of maintaining and policing the Green falls on the City’s shoulders. “They have not supplemented our operating dollars at all,” Bombero said. Arterton pointed out that the Committee regularly meets with the Engineering and Parks departments.

The Proprietors also works on supplementary projects, many of which focus on beautification. They have spearheaded planting initiatives to enhance the Green’s springtime bloom. They bought wrought iron trash cans for the Green because the white plastic ones that had been there were, she said, “singularly ugly.” And this year, they will set up lighting for 14 trees on the upper Green. In the words of Arterton, “[We’re] using our trees as sculpture.”

At the moment, however, the City, Proprietors, and New Haven community members must deal with more than just making the Green beautiful. They (if we’re being honest, we) have to think carefully about how to make the Green safer and more livable for all. In the wake of August’s overdoses, this would be a tall order even without the Green’s complicated ownership.

In the last month, the Proprietors have been brainstorming and crowdsourcing new ways to invigorate the Green and make it a better public space. The Mayor and the Police Chief have agreed to have six permanent officers just for the Green, according to Arterton. And Bombero added that one of the main goals of the Proprietors going forward will be to increase events on the Green. “They’re going to be working to program the Green with more positive activity,” she said.

In the seven years since she became a Proprietor, Arterton said the way the organization functions has changed dramatically. When she was first appointed, they met four times a year; in recent years, they’ve been meeting every six weeks. And, she added, “we have become more active, inviting many representatives of organizations and the community to our meetings.” She said the Proprietors see themselves as catalysts to get people thinking about their community space. After all, “looking at five people for blame or ideas is limiting and limited.”

She’s right. But given that the Proprietors really are just five people, one can’t help but wonder why New Haven needs them at all. Pattis has his own theory about the Committee’s continued existence. “The city has never made a takings claim to the Green as it should and could, and I suspect that’s because it doesn’t really want to own it,” he said. That way, “it can avoid ownership of some of the problems that might occur there.” As for the Proprietors, Pattis said, “[their] interest in continuing to manage this as a public space struck me as quaint and bizarre.”

Paradoxically, that’s one thing Pattis and Arterton can agree on. “It’s archaic,” Arterton said of the Committee. But, she added, the organization “has a purpose, and that purpose has maintained the Green as an open urban space for a long time.” As she sees it, the Green would have been built up and commercialized long ago were it not for the continued existence of the Proprietors. Whether you see the Proprietors as integral or vestigial, attentive or insidious, the sentiment she is trying to get us to agree on is true. 16 acres of untouched, green land can be hard to come by in any city.

To Have or to Hold was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re anything like me, you don’t spend very long looking at paintings in museums. A minute or two, three tops. I like art; I find it interesting, but there’s only so much I really feel I need to see. Orawan Gardner, NUR ’18, is the same way. Raised nearby in Guilford, Conn., she came to the Yale University Art Gallery often growing up, “a hundred times, maybe.” One painting she recalls fondly is Edward Hopper’s Western Motel. She says she likes visiting galleries, enjoys looking at artwork, but rarely looks at one thing for very long.

In 2015, during the fall term of her first year at the Yale School of Nursing (YSN), Gardner revisited the Gallery with her classmates. In small groups led by trained docents, they examined the artwork she had seen so many times before. They arrived at Western Motel. The nursing students spent 10 long minutes looking at the painting in silence. The forest green car, the sun-blanched Western landscape, the stately woman looking dead ahead, and the blue pants draped neatly over the armchair in the corner.

Gardner found herself thinking in terms of colors: blue, green, red, brown, blonde. “Color is so thematic in the painting,” she points out. When her group came together after the allotted time and each student shared their own observations, Gardner was struck by the things her classmates pointed out. The time of day, the way the light is angled, how the woman’s hand grips the edge of the couch. In the many collective minutes she had spent looking at Western Motel over the years, she had never noticed these things before.

According to Linda Honan, a longtime professor at YSN, this is a pretty common phenomenon: people do not see the same way. And while this has few implications on a leisurely museum visit—so what if you missed the hand?—for nursing students this isn’t a day off. It’s a required part of their first year of professional school.

Nursing is traditionally a profession rooted in scientific knowledge and thinking. But at YSN, the integration of arts and humanities is helping students learn to see, hear, feel, and understand their patients, their people, more completely.

I. Seeing

In 1999, Linda Friedlaender, the Curator of Education at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), and Irwin Braverman, a professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, found themselves talking about how Braverman’s students weren’t doing a very good job of describing their cases.  As Friedlaender put it, “We decided that medical students in particular needed to learn how to look more slowly and more carefully when they are working with patients, and we thought that if we brought them to an art museum and we had them look at paintings they had never seen before and don’t know anything about” then that might help them hone their observational skills. Enhancing Observational Skills, the flagship Yale program between the YCBA and the School of Medicine, was born.

When medical students arrive at the YCBA to participate in Enhancing Observational Skills, a mandatory part of the School of Medicine curriculum, they begin by dividing up into small groups of four to six students, each with its own trained volunteer docent. Together, the group sits in front of a preselected painting, its accompanying placard concealed by a post-it, and for approximately 10 minutes they observe in silence. Notepads are available for taking notes or sketching what they see, but they aren’t required to write anything down. The only thing they need to do is look closely.

After this period of silent observation, the group comes back together and the students are asked to describe everything they see; to take inventory of the painting, if you will. How many people are in the painting? How many objects? What colors do you see? There are three things they cannot do: state opinions, draw conclusions, and make interpretations. For instance, if a student looking at a portrait says, “This looks like a woman who is very sad,” the docent stops them. “Sad” is an interpretation of her facial expression. Instead, Friedlaender says, she might ask the student, “Tell me what you see that makes her look sad without using the word sad.” In turn, they might cite her droopy eyes, or the fact that the corners of her mouth are turned down.

Once the medical students have completed taking an objective “inventory” of the painting, they move into the subjective phase of the exercise. Now, they are asked to take all of their observations, all of the visual information, put it  together, and craft a narrative for the painting. “What we’re trying to do is to get them to find the words to articulate what it is they’re looking at,” Friedlaender tells me.

In Enhancing Observational Skills, the medical students then gather in a classroom, where they look at and discuss photos of patients; for example, those with skin lesions. The effects of the day are instantaneous. “What we found is that there’s a common vocabulary,” said Friedlaender. “They talk about the color of the rash, the texture, is it raised, is it flat, is it scaly, is it smooth, and these are the same kinds of words they can use to talk about the paint on the canvas that they’re looking at, or the colors.” The goal is to identify and closely examine details. By looking at images of patients immediately after their gallery visit, the medical students can see the relationship between their conversation about art and that about diagnoses right away.

Enhancing Observational Skills was the first program of its kind when it began in 1999. Friedlaender and Braverman first did a three year controlled study in which they found that students who spent three hours in the galleries with the program had far better observational skills than those who did not. These results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, and in the years since, at least seventy other medical schools and museums have implemented similar programming, according to Friedlaender. From the start, she says, the program has been required for every first-year medical student at Yale. These days, they also work with residents and fellows from different departments, and even faculty from the School of Medicine who want to be able to reinforce the ways of looking that medical students are taught at the YCBA.

***

While the program enjoyed early success with medical students, it really found its home with the School of Nursing. It all began with a lecture on musculoskeletal trauma. Linda Honan was discussing the lasting effects of breaking one’s pelvic bone on the body, when one of her students piped up and asked, “Did you ever think about using an image of Frida Kahlo to talk about that?” At the time, Honan says, she did not even know who Kahlo was. (On the day Honan and I meet, she is wearing bright red socks with Kahlo’s portrait on them, a gift from her students.) But after class she made a visit to the YUAG to look at Kahlo’s artwork. “Frida Kahlo had fractured her pelvis and lived in pain, and drew images of what she saw as her internal organs around her head,” Honan points out. This got her thinking about the use of art in teaching nursing.

Honan had heard about the work that Friedlaender and Braverman were doing, teaching what she calls “the practice of deep looking,” so she went to Friedlaender and floated the idea of developing a program specific to nursing students. They called it “Looking is Not Seeing.” While the program for nursing students is similar to that for doctors, both Honan and Friedlaender mentioned a few key differences. Doctors typically see patients when they make rounds in the morning and at the end of the day, and perhaps somewhere between if a problem arises. Nurses work on a shift, seeing the same group of patients all throughout. As such, they have a very different relationship. Often, nurses are the ones who notice subtle changes over the course of a day.

“I want [my students] to look at the entire palette of the patient,” Honan tells me. “We don’t want to ignore other symptoms that may not seem to cluster with a diagnosis.” In other words, observe everything closely before drawing conclusions about what the diagnosis is, rather than observing with a particular issue already in mind. Honan calls this a “differential diagnosis.” Following their time in the galleries, the nursing students, who participate in the program during the fall of their first year, go back to a classroom with Honan and practice their deep seeing on actual patients with disease processes. Gardner remembers, with a laugh, how Honan included a photo of her own perfectly healthy father, to see whether she could trick her students into diagnosing him with something he didn’t have.

Honan studies every educational initiative she tries out, and the results of “Looking is Not Seeing” have been staggering. After three hours of looking at art, she has proven that nursing students’ observations become more objective and they are able to write more of a differential diagnosis. They are less likely to rush to judgment, and to really see the people they are working with.

Honan believes that using the arts to teach nursing has been particularly effective at a school like YSN. Yale’s nursing program was the first one to have no prerequisites required for admission. As a result, Honan says, 78 percent of the students at YSN, on average, come from non-science backgrounds. Gardner is one such student. After graduating from Vassar with degrees in film and philosophy, she spent time working in film and television before she “got interested in doing something more meaningful.” Though she was admitted to other nursing programs, she chose Yale’s because she wanted to study alongside people from diverse educational backgrounds.

Generally, prerequisites for nursing school are science-based—anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and such. Honan praises a BA background because, unlike the often-deductive scientific model of reasoning, students in the arts are encouraged to think inductively. And, after all, a patient never presents with just one issue at hand. A diagnostician must consider biological problems and psychological ones, issues of access, sociological implications, and more. They need to think broadly. For this reason, Honan says an arts degree is “a perfect background for nursing.” Her students come in with the right ways of thinking already in place. Her task is to figure out how to teach them the information they need to know, and it has helped her to get a little bit creative.

II. Hearing

The success of “Looking is Not Seeing” got Honan thinking further about how else she could make use of her students’ creative backgrounds. Learning to listen to the body’s sounds, a fundamental part of nursing, can be incredibly challenging. Often, it takes years just to learn to hear a heart. Eager to accelerate this learning process, Honan emailed then-Dean of the Yale School of Music (YSM), Thomas Duffy, and paid him a visit. “I told him I had an idea, and my intuitive sense was this is going to rock, but I had absolutely no funding. He said, ‘Okay, no money, good idea, I’m in!’”

Honan’s vision was to create a program, in collaboration with Duffy, in which her students would learn how to hear heart, lung, and bowel sounds better by learning to hear from a musician. Duffy recalls that when Honan first played him a series of heartbeats with anomalies, he told her, “The dumbest person in my marching band could hear the difference; this is low-hanging fruit!” For this reason, working with musicians was a natural move for Honan. “Why wouldn’t we go to expert musicians or music scholars to say, ‘How do you figure out things?’” she asks. “Aren’t body sounds music in some way?”

The program, called “Listening is Not Hearing,” is conducted during the first fall of nursing school, much like “Looking is Not Seeing.” In it, Duffy provides nursing students with “a visual, spatial, oral, and intellectual approach to what rhythm is and how we measure and divide the passing of time.” Rather than fixating on technicalities or terminology, he provides them with the fundamental tools to hear carefully and thoroughly.

Bowel sounds, Duffy tells me, are the first he teaches because they are relatively straightforward. There are only three: normal, hyperactive, and hypoactive. The difference between the three is partly their pitch, but mostly it is a question of how many times the bowel clicks per minute. A normal bowel clicks between five and thirty times in a minute, where if it is hypoactive it might click only once. Lung sounds come next. Learning to hear these means paying attention to timbre and variations in sound, but rhythm is pretty unimportant. After all, lungs are binary: inhale, exhale. Duffy teaches heart sounds last. They’re the most complicated rhythmically, and require that one pay attention to timbre and pitch as well.

Once nursing students have learned about each individual sound, Duffy also instructs them in picking one out of a chorus—simulating a real human body. Duffy synthesizes artificial samples of the bowels, lungs, and heart and plays them all at once, forcing his students to, as Honan puts it, “swim in and find the lungs,” or whichever body sound they are being asked to look for. Duffy remarks that these masking exercises are somewhat akin to listening for the voice of one’s spouse at a party “amidst the nonsense.”

As with “Looking is Not Seeing,” the effects of Honan and Duffy’s collaboration have been remarkable. For every three hours nursing students spend with Duffy, bowel sound recognition goes from 10 percent to 75 percent, heart sound recognition from 20 percent to 40 percent, and lung sound recognition from 30 percent to 60 percent. Duffy recalls that after they released the results of the study, the control group insisted on getting the same training because it had proven to be so effective.

Most nurses learn to hear the body well only after years in the field. But until you reach that level of proficiency, what do you do? Often, nurses end up ordering tests or taking x-rays when their patients are perfectly normal. So, Duffy says, if nursing students can learn to hear body sounds better and more quickly, “we can cut the time in half or a third,” and save a significant sum of money that might otherwise be spent running unnecessary tests. Honan agrees that poor hearing skills cost money. More importantly, it’s not a hard fix. Right now, she says, most programs are “not training you to use what God gave you!” Especially given that many of her students will go on to work in underserved communities that might not have the funds, time, or technology to run unnecessary tests, Honan sees this training as essential.

***

Duffy works with Honan and her students at YSN on his own time. It’s not exactly in the job description. But his work has been incredibly important. The “Listening is Not Hearing” program—in Duffy’s words, the Duffy-Honan Intervention—has gotten rave reviews from everyone involved. Developing it is “the first time I kind of felt that I had a primary impact on improving people’s lives,” Duffy tells me.

Being able to hear a body well isn’t just a question of saving money, or even of diagnosing the patient more quickly and accurately. It’s also integral to developing the physician-patient relationship. If we have machines that can record and analyze body sounds, what’s the use of a regular old stethoscope? A doctor at the medical school told Duffy that the reason one uses a stethoscope is that “by moving in, we put our hands on people, and we get inside their personal space and break down that boundary.”  “If we’re going to do that,” Duffy says, “let’s teach people how to do it better.”

This fall, “Listening is Not Hearing” was integrated into the curriculum at  the medical school as well. Honan and Duffy have also travelled and given talks together, bringing the program to other schools. Thanks to the Yale-China Association, they even flew to Xiangya to conduct a three-day seminar. Over the next year, students there will start learning their beginning stethoscope skills with the Duffy-Honan Intervention. And hopefully, with more funding, Duffy and Honan will be able to expand the program further. Recognizing conditions associated with slight changes in pitch and mucus-related lung sounds are among the things that Duffy is looking to focus on next. “I’ve got to figure out how to do all of that stuff and see if we can make it more efficacious,” he comments, earnest to the core.

III. Feeling

Beyond expanding the hearing program, Honan is also looking to complete the trifecta with a new initiative: “Touching is Not Feeling.” Her vision is to improve tactile clinical observation, specifically learning to feel and palpate heartbeats. We have pulses all over our bodies, she points out. “We even have little ones down [in our feet] that are really important for you to learn how to palpate.” Research shows that traditional methods of teaching palpation are woefully ineffective. This, in turn, means that clinicians enter the profession with “inconsistent skill levels and unpredictable clinical exposure.”

So, in the fall of 2015, Honan teamed up with students in “MENG/BENG 404: Medical Device Design and Innovation,” an advanced Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering undergraduate course in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In the class, “interdisciplinary teams of students [work] with physicians from the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital to address unmet clinical needs,” according to the course description.

Honan’s vision was to create a device that would help students in nursing and medicine to practice feeling for pulses at different grades while also mimicking the color and temperature changes that accompany each pulse. Once the students in MENG/BENG 404 decided to take on her project, she brought them to the anatomy lab to see where the pulses that need to measured are on the body. Then, she took them to the trauma unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital and had them feel pulses on real patients. Once the engineering students felt people who “either had so much swelling they had to learn how to dig deep [to get the pulse], or had really poor circulation,” they understood how difficult it is to learn these tactile skills.

At the end of the semester, after working extensively with Honan and some of her nursing students, the engineering students presented the BeatBox. The box “features a silicone sheet to simulate skin and a speaker to simulate the pulse,” and there is also “a layer of hydrogel to simulate all the tissues and fat that can make finding a pulse difficult,” according to the class’s website. There are four different grades of pulse that students can practice with. Zero is no pulse, 1 is barely there, 2 is normal, 3 is full and bounding, and 4 is “for those kids whose fingers really need a drum for them to feel it,” says Honan. Students can connect their smartphones to the BeatBox to practice feeling these different pulses.

This year, Honan is testing the efficacy of the BeatBox on her nursing students. She pre-tested all 105 of her first-year students in the first week of the school year, asking them whether they could feel a pulse. Half of the class then has two hours to go practice with the BeatBox by themselves, whenever they want to. In June, she will test all 105 students again and see whether these two hours on the machine made a difference. “When it finishes, then we really will have a curriculum that is tested and reliable for improving the perceptive ability of clinicians. It’s cool!”

IV. Telling

Honan has already revolutionized seeing, hearing, and feeling, but she is as committed to nurturing the whole person when it comes to her students as she is with her patients.  In Honan’s time at YSN, there is one other interdisciplinary initiative she has been instrumental in developing: creative writing. For a long time, Honan has urged her students to keep journals of their experiences. To this day, she says, she is haunted by some of her former patients, perhaps because she no longer remembers what their stories were. She does not want her students to be haunted in the same way. “I tell them I will do everything I can to help them be successful,” but in return “they will go out and get a 99 cent notebook, and they promise me that if they have nightmares about something that happened, or they’re even walking down the street and they smell their patient that they took care of seven hours before,” they’ll write about it.

Honan eventually decided to ask her students to write her a story at the end of the year instead of filling out a course evaluation. Eventually, she had hundreds of stories. Catherine Gilliss, then-Dean of YSN, discovered this student writing, and she and Honan decided to make a point of celebrating creating writing and nursing. They first began recognizing students’ writing in 2003, and in 2004 three students were presented with the first Yale School of Nursing Creative Writing Awards.

Every year since, students and faculty from YSN, and others, have come together on a Thursday in April for the presentation of these Creative Writing Awards to the top three writers at YSN, as well as an accompanying keynote address. A chapbook of the noteworthy entries is put together, and the three winners receive a cash prize. This year the keynote speaker will be Mary Catherine Bateson. One hundred and nine nursing students have submitted their writing to the contest.

Beyond the annual contest, there are also voluntary creative writing workshops twice a month at YSN, facilitated by hematologist-turned-writer Lorence Gutterman. Gardner has not submitted to the contest, but has attended some of Gutterman’s classes. He has even emailed her with prompts to respond to on her own time, like “I walked into the patient’s room and heard…”

Lisa Rich, NUR ’18, one of the winners of the Creative Writing Award in 2016, remarks that “the act of writing helps me to process a lot of the feelings that being a health care provider brings up.” On Honan’s advice, Rich began keeping a journal while in her first year at YSN. Her award-winning piece was an excerpt from one of those entries. “If I’ve had a bad day at work, it’s because someone else has had one that will profoundly change the rest of their lives… I think part of it is definitely that those of us who go into these fields do so because we are ‘helpers,’ and inherent to that type of personality is this kind of taking on the mantle of other people’s problems.”

***

Writing can help the students parse the difficult moments but also reflect on the deep connection they can feel with their patients.  “The intimacy in our profession is sometimes more than between two lovers. Yet you’re a stranger,” Honan remarks. At its heart, nursing is a profession rooted in examining, understanding, and relating to people. As Gardner points out, “Your patient isn’t just somebody who is a set of symptoms. They’re a person with a whole complex presentation that you have to interpret, and then you have to treat them as a person.”

At YSN, the understanding that patients are people is fundamental. Gardner adds that while doctors treat the disease, nurses are the ones who treat the patient. “I think the idea that we’re getting people from many different backgrounds speaks to that ethos,” she says. Training nurses to see like an artist sees the way the light hits, to hear like a musician hears a sonata, or to feel a beating heart, is brilliant in its obviousness.

“I also think it’s great for the public to hear our stories,” Honan tells me. “You stay with us, do you know that? Do you know that your stories live on in us, and are used to either teach the next generation or learn from to be better? I don’t think you know that.”

[“Erlkönig,” Schubert] (all songs sung by Richard Lalli)

EVE SNEIDER: This is Richard Lalli, MUS ’86, noted musician and Yale professor, singing his favorite song, Erlkönig…

RICHARD LALLI: …which is a German song by Schubert describing a young boy who’s riding with his father on a horse, but feels something grabbing him, and feels sick. And what happens at the end of the song is that death has come along and killed him. […] It’s a great song! It’s a toe-tapper. So in this song the singer takes on the roles of the father, of the little boy, and of death. And also a fourth role of the narrator. That’s one reason I like it so much. As you perform it you get to become four different people.

ES: Erlkonig is an art song, a composition where a poem is set to music for a solo voice and piano accompaniment. Art songs are the subject of the seminar Lalli teaches in the undergraduate music department…

RL: Music 222, sometimes just called “Lalli.”

ES: They were also his first introduction to music, alongside folk songs.

[“The Cuckoo,” Benjamin Verdery]

RL: Folk songs are similar, they just don’t involve the piano usually. But when I was in high school at Interlochen, the summer camp, I was taking voice lessons, I sang in the choir first time I ever sang, then I got a solo, and then I took some voice lessons and that’s where I usually assign an art song.

ES: Interlochen was a watershed moment for Lalli. Born and raised in a small town outside of Chicago, attending the summer arts camp and, later, the accompanying arts boarding school in northern Michigan introduced him to a world of music he hadn’t known existed.

RL: That, for example, was the first time I ever saw a flute. My hometown was that remote, that there weren’t flutes around.

[“A Paris, ce vendredi,” Berg]

ES: After Interlochen came the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where Lalli earned a BFA, and then the Yale School of Music, where he received a Doctorate in Musical Arts.

RL: I was an opera singer. And then I stayed on when I graduated in 1981 to teach various things. The first year I taught I got paid $2,000 to teach one course on diction for singers, and then it snowballed into a number of things.

ES: A number of things is something of an understatement. In the 38 years since Lalli first came to Yale, he has been involved in founding many of the pillars of the undergraduate music program as we know it. There is the Opera Theater of Yale College, known as OTYC, Yale’s student-run undergraduate opera company, which was founded in 1992. Then, in 2007, came the Yale Baroque Opera Project, YBOP, which culminates each year in a full-scale professional opera production starring Yale undergraduates. And then there was the Shen Curriculum, Yale’s sequence of musical theater classes offered for undergraduates, the only program of its kind in the Ivy League.

ES: Lalli has enjoyed a colorful performance career, singing everything from fun popular songs to art songs, chamber music to new compositions. He has recorded four solo CDs, in addition to many more performances with ensembles and on commercial recordings, even earning a Grammy nomination for his recording of Yehudi Wyner’s The Mirror. Among his other work, it is noted on his website, is a collection of classic American popular songs he recorded with pianist Gary Chapman for his mother’s 70th birthday in 1990.

[“Tel jour telle nuit,” Francis Poulenc]

ES: Other accolades of Lalli’s include a Distinguished Alumni Award given by the Yale School of Music in 2010, and the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities at Yale University, which he was awarded in 2006.

RL: I’ve always been a teacher. In fact, I remember when I was in like the second grade, my friend, Jacob Hiab was doing poorly in arithmetic, so I made a little booklet for him of quizzes and exercises. I just did that instinctively, and I’m still doing it for Yale students. It’s an impulse. It’s a natural inclination, or gift, that I have, I think, for explaining things to other people.

ES: His pupils definitely seem to agree. In Music 222, or “Lalli,” students—who are admitted by audition only—must learn around six songs in languages ranging from Italian to French to German, Russian to Hungarian to Spanish.

RL: So in addition to learning how to sing them, they study the languages, study the poetry, study the musical customs of the time that they were written, study the composers’ lives and the poet’s lives, and try to integrate other information into a finely polished performance.

ES: In class, students must perform in front of Professor Lalli and each other. While this is, perhaps, daunting, even for a class of well-versed performers, Lalli’s teaching style keeps things fun. As Rachel Kaufman, TC ’19, puts it…

RK: …he comes up with these hilarious, strange strategies during classes in which you have to place your hands above your head—he always did that to me—or you have to run in place, or you have to sing the piece with this absurd characterization. Like, you’re singing over a tombstone, but just take these crazy personas and insert them into pieces to make them more lively and more interesting and also probably to get you out of your head as you’re singing. Class is just so entertaining and hilarious, and he’s sassy and goofy but also cares about all of his students and has such good insight into what they need and what coaching will help them.

ES: Jack Lindberg, PC ’19, adds that…

JL: …he doesn’t ask people to totally transform how they sing or how they learn music or how they interact as a musician overnight, but gives you some tangible steps you can take to start improving, which is more important than being like, here’s the gold standard, here’s none of the steps of how to get there.

[“Seeing a woman as in a painting,” Richard Pearson Thomas]

ES: When he’s not teaching music, Lalli enjoys other creative pursuits on his own. In recent years, he has rediscovered an old love for the visual arts, too.

RL: I painted a lot as a kid. And then I gave it up because my high school teachers at Interlochen said, you’ve got to stop doing that and practice more! So I stopped. And then when I was 52, I saw a sign on the wall at Willoughby’s coffee shop advertising a summer workshop in watercolors. So I just signed up for it because I knew I got bored in the summer time. And I fell in love, again, with painting, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

RL: Most of the painting I do is totally by myself, in fact I hate doing it when other people are around. It’s my little private time. Singing I usually do with other people. Although, as a young professional singer I would spend maybe four hours a day singing by myself. But singing is a much more social activity, it’s a performance art. Whereas painting is not a performance. They’re both creative expressions, they both involve a lot of feeling and beauty. All those wonderful things that the arts offer us.

ES: Lalli cannot sing any more. After a severe brain hemorrhage in 2008, he can no longer use his vocal chords or breathing apparatus the way he used to. This impacted his painting, too; he can no longer handle a delicate brush. Instead, he works with things like sweet potatoes and cucumbers, using them as stamps. His paintings are vibrant, colorful, full of life and gusto. Lalli says that there is much overlap between his discussion of painting and of singing.

RL: Control, contrast, color, high points, low points. Those are all important in both art fields.

ES: Music, too, is colorful.

RL: The different tones of the scale have different colors to some people’s ears. So you’re always dealing with this variety of colors in a melody, and also especially in chords… within the music, the words evoke certain colors, so your voice, you try to give the impression of that emotion. Like death, which is a very common theme in songs. Love. Spring. Desire. Hate. These all have different feelings and tone qualities which are comparable to the colors of painting. I love color. I always have. I remember walking home once when I was in grade school and seeing this beautiful autumn sky sunset. And I thought, God, those colors. So I ran to the art store and got some pastels in those colors and that was one of my many discoveries along the way: color.

Hey folks,

Earlier this week, I watched a couple make out on Cross Campus in the middle of the afternoon. They were sitting on a bench across the quad from me, and they were really going at it. I wonder whether they realized I was watching them. I suppose it is a fact of life on a college campus that you are constantly privy to other people’s private moments, in public.

In this week’s front, Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, breaks down her theories on the public/private divide, specifically as it relates to celebrity. From a history of the paparazzi to Kylie Jenner’s ubiquitous snapchat presence, she examines the nature of life in the public eye.

Elsewhere on social media (and in this issue), Emma Chanen, BK ’19, condemns slacktivism and the self-righteous slacktivist police on Facebook. Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, introduces you to Lenny Paquette, a man learning from the loss of his niece. And if eroticism and thrills are what you’re after, check out Mariah Kreutter’s, BK ’20, take on The Handmaiden.

I guarantee there’s something in here for you. Take a seat somewhere comfy (maybe not on Cross Campus) and give it a read.

Hugs but not kisses,

Eve Sneider

Reviews Editor

My mother likes telling me that she used to put soda water in my baby bottle. Before I was eating solid food I was sipping that bubbly. Recent psychological studies have found that a child’s personality is fully developed by the time they reach first grade. You’ve got to start them young, and that’s exactly what the Sneiders did. As a little girl, I preferred sparkly water to sparkly dresses. It was infused in every part of my upbringing, an irrevocable element of family life.

Sunday afternoons meant making “Mixies”—Tropicana orange juice and soda water—with my sister and father. Visits to my grandparents on school breaks meant waiting excitedly at the dining room table while my grandmother concocted her famous chocolate sodas. Forget hot chocolate—seltzer with swirls of Hershey’s syrup and vanilla ice cream was the ultimate holiday treat.

These days, finding a fellow seltzer-lover is like meeting someone from my hometown. Those of us with a die-hard allegiance to effervescence are in a class of our own. We can discuss the mouthfeels and flavors of various carbonated offerings with the kind of technical jargon generally reserved for theoretical physicists. Last year for my birthday, my sister bought me a water bottle more accommodating of fizz than my battered, blue plastic standby. While other college students spend their extra dining dollars on pints of Ben and Jerry’s and large boxes of Wheat Thins, my friends and I reserve our surplus meal swipes to gorge on Schweppes’ black cherry flavor, or occasionally Polar’s cranberry-lime. And I am proud to announce that I have enjoyed many a bonding moment in front of the soda water tap in the dining hall. While some rookies hit the seltzer button by accident, I know exactly what I am getting myself into. Occasionally the person behind me in line will mutter, “You know that’s not water, right?” I reply firmly: “Believe me, I know.”

Lately, soda water has been making a comeback. In the States, seltzer sales have more than doubled in the last five years, perhaps as part of the move away from sodas with enough sugar (or, even worse, aspartame) in them to shock a horse. But as Rob Engvall wrote in his article “A Millennial’s Guide to Seltzer” (printed in the pages of hipster food mag Lucky Peach), “You don’t get a whole wall dedicated to yourself at the new Whole Foods in Williamsburg by being ‘healthy’—you get it because you’re cool.”

But for the real fanatics, bubbles are more than a passing fad; they’re a way of life. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the “Seltzer Enthusiasts” thread on reddit. “Hey, glad I found you guys,” one comment reads. Another recent post advertises one man’s new online venture: a website for seltzer reviews and a way for him to “catalog [his] seltzer journey.” Limited-edition flavors and more classic varieties are rated on smell, subtlety, intensity, title to flavor, and refreshment level, with a write-up to boot. I could not make this up if I tried.

I have always felt, perhaps irrationally, that my own fondness for fizz is in my blood. Seltzer is my parents and grandparents. It is burps and laughter after a large meal. Jessica Leshnoff sums it up on her now-defunct personal blog, “lunch at 11:30”: “the JSG (Jewish seltzer gene) makes no sense to me, since Jews by their very nature are a) gassy… and b) complainers. We have very sensitive systems and complain about everything. Why would we be inexplicably drawn to a beverage that will not only gives us gas but compels us to complain … about how gassy we are? It seems wrong. And yet… we just can’t stop ourselves.”

It is a connection that, at first glance, makes little sense. Seltzer may be hot and trendy right now but to many it still connotes deli culture and Litvaks and old-world Jewry. And yet, it is hard to imagine my ancestors sipping on soda water in the heart of the shtetl. For much of recorded history, sparkling water has been a luxury beverage, found in mineral springs and enjoyed by those with an appetite for grandeur. But in the 18th century Joseph Priestly, the English theologian better known for discovering oxygen, thought to mix water with carbon dioxide, making manufactured bubbles a possibility for the masses.

The Jewish tie to seltzer didn’t come until a century after Priestley worked his alchemic magic. Jews arriving on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s quickly took to soda water, the cheapest drink on the market that wasn’t plain old fizz-free. It even earned the nickname “Jewish champagne.” In the words of Jessica Edwards, the filmmaker behind the documentary Seltzer Works,  “[seltzer] refers to a time and place we don’t have anymore.”

My mother says that seltzer takes her back to her childhood, even though she didn’t like the taste much growing up. Her father would always drink the Canada Dry variety, which came in tall, heavy, glass bottles. When he asked my mother to fetch him the seltzer, she had to carry these bottles with both hands. As she recalls this, she describes the glass’s slight bluish tint, laughing a little. “I feel this profound connection to it even though I didn’t really drink it,” she tells me. “It was corned beef, it was lox, it was seltzer. Seltzer was a refrain. It was one of those quiet Jewish cultural things. It wasn’t done with any intention; it was just who we were.”

My father’s parents didn’t drink soda water when he was young. “Maybe they were too assimilated,” he remarks off-hand. But when I ask him for childhood memories of seltzer, they come to mind instantly. One such recollection: a family friend, Dick Rabinowitz, a lawyer who wore impressive glasses and “looked like a mad scientist.” No matter what anyone else had to drink, Dick only ever had seltzer. For my father, too, the drink was wedded to old-world Jews, their heavy, greasy food, and schmoozing around the table.

My parents returned to their carbonated roots around the same time they met each other. My mother thinks she first acquired a taste for it when trendy imported waters hit the scene in the eighties. For my dad, Tab came first: “I wanted a tasteless bubbly experience.” Before long, both were drinking seltzer by the gallon. Much like my mother, my older sister and I grew up toting glass bottles to the table as we set it for dinnertime. Ours were Suntory brand club soda, four for the four of us. For both my sister and I, childhood memories of Suntory soda are plentiful and vivid: the satisfying sound of untwisting a metal cap, or how, in her words, “a freshly-opened bottle sort of burns when you drink from it.” She too cites the baby bottles and the Mixies.

It can be confusing when something well-worn and beloved to you is hip and cool to everyone else. It is exciting to share a bottle of soda water with the uninitiated, to acquaint them with my old favorite. But in the same moment there’s an impulse to point out that I was there first. To me, seltzer will always evoke the bygone time and place documentarian Jessica Edwards remarked on. It is a hereditary condition. But the seltzer bottle has gone the way of the bagel. Like most everything from days of yore, it is being reframed and newly understood. If I wanted, I could even make a Mixie in the nearest college dining hall.

12 years since Starbucks started selling pumpkin spice lattes

106 pumpkin scented products available from Bath and Body Works

1 year since Starbucks started selling PSLs made with actual pumpkin

2,145 pounds, the weight of the heaviest pumpkin in North America

13 mini pumpkins I stole from the Founder’s Day celebration to decorate my common room

Sources:

1 – The PSL’s very own Wikipedia page

2 – My middle school’s locker room

3 – A reluctant press release

4 – The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth (you know, the GPC) of the Cederburg, WI Wine and Harvest Festival

5 – ‘Tis the season, bitch

At 1:30 a.m. on a warm night last May, Moutoni-Marie Ngaboyishema and her son Fabior Naurellio got off the Metro North at Union Station. The trip took more than a decade.

It began in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Marie lived with her family until eleven years ago when, faced with violence and instability, they fled to neighboring Rwanda. There, ten family members lived out of one tent in a refugee camp for eleven years. After making it through a screening process that often takes two years to complete, Marie, her husband Jean, and two other relatives, James and Anitha, made preparations to come to the United States.

On Apr. 26, 2016, Jean, James, and Anitha arrived in New Haven. There, they were met by members of the Jewish Community Alliance for Refugee Resettlement (JCARR) who would be sponsoring them and facilitating their transition to life in the United States. But Marie and two-year-old Fabior were sent to Indianapolis instead. JCARR was tasked with reuniting the family stateside.  On the night of their planned reunion, Jean Silk, coordinator of JCARR, looked forward to a celebration. Instead, she faced a logistical nightmare. She found herself racing around into the wee hours of the morning, calling on anyone who would listen to help her locate Marie and Fabior and deliver them safely to New Haven.

En route, Marie and Fabior made it all the way to New York City before running into trouble. Port Authority bus terminals can be overwhelming even for the American-born and English-speaking, and as soon as they stepped off the bus, the last leg of their journey became—like the rest of their voyage—roundabout. With Marie and Fabior disoriented and scared in the confusion of the terminal, it became an unexpected team effort.

There were the Port Authority police officers who kept an eye on them until an escort from New Haven arrived. One, who introduced himself to them as Officer Collins, even drove them to Grand Central in his police car. Local authorities, passers-by, and JCARR volunteers all played a role in Marie and Fabior’s safe delivery. “Even the security guard at Union Station was excited about their imminent arrival. Exclaiming in awe over the emotions of the moment, he took pictures, shared our tears of joy, gave me his phone number and offered to help JCARR at any time,” Silk recounts. She says that this night, though harrowing for all parties involved, demonstrates what America can offer: “an endless chain of people who went out of their way to ensure [the family was] safe, comfortable, and eventually, reunited.”

Now more than ever, America and Americans are responding to the global refugee crisis. Across the nation, resettlement agencies work to provide those in need with access to that sort of endless chain. In the last year, New Haven in particular has lived up to its name, resettling more refugees than even New York and Los Angeles.

***

JCARR is a community co-sponsor group, one of fifty in Connecticut trained by and affiliated with New Haven’s Integrated Refugee and Immigration Services (IRIS). IRIS was founded in 1982 as a program of the Episcopal Social Service of the Diocese of Connecticut; today, it is an independent nonprofit that works with two national resettlement agencies, Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) and the Church World Service (CWS).

Around the country, there are 350 local agencies—among them various faith-based groups, charities, and nonprofits, including IRIS—that are on the ground supporting and working with newly resettled refugee families.  Each agency at this level is connected to at least one of nine national voluntary agencies. None of these are public programs, but all nine work closely with the State Department to resettle refugees. The State Department allocates cases, which they then delegate to local organizations.

There are an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide. Just last month, while Yale students were starting the fall term, the U.S. reached its goal of resettling 85,000 refugees in the 2016 fiscal year, of whom 10,000 are Syrian. Around 850 refugees of the 85,000 came to Connecticut, where close to 500 were resettled by IRIS. These numbers are impressive, even shocking, when compared to those of previous years. As recently as 2006, IRIS was resettling only 70 refugees a year. By contrast, they welcomed 68 refugees just last July, including 51 Syrians. In the last year, their resettlement rate has increased by 100 percent.

According to Chris George, the Executive Director of IRIS, these statistics were made possible by increased community interest due to a surge in coverage of the global refugee crisis. At that time, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security were sending more people and resources to refugee camps to help with screening, or what George calls “the most rigorous vetting process in the world.”

Once cleared, IRIS receives two weeks’ notice that a refugee family has booked a flight to the United States (usually financed by loans). Its case managers are the first people these families will meet upon getting off a Greyhound bus or Metro North train. These families will come home to New Haven apartments that IRIS has rented and, with the help of donations, furnished. During their first ninety days in the United States, IRIS works under federal guidelines to get each family settled. The kids must be enrolled in school. They must receive a health assessment within thirty days of their arrival. They must get an employment assessment within fourteen.

IRIS provides other services, too. Its modest East Rock office, awash in brightly colored maps and multilingual signage, is the home base to teams dealing with many of the intricacies of newly resettled life. Ashley Makar, outreach coordinator, wrote that “one visitor described [the IRIS offices] as Goodwill meets National Geographic meets the DMV.”

There are daily English lessons. There are citizenship classes. There is the ever-active Employment Services office, which helps new residents build resumes, practice interviews, and find jobs. There’s a women’s group, a food pantry with halal meat, and even wellness sessions. As its storerooms—crammed floor to ceiling with dishware, mattresses, and microwaves—will attest, IRIS has long relied on the support of volunteers (as the organization’s website delicately puts it, it receives only “modest” federal funding). And regardless of the devotion and wherewithal of its staff, there are limits to how many families IRIS can support.

The IRIS office is much like IRIS itself: awe-inspiring in its breadth, but a little concerning by the same token. Laurel McCormack, IRIS’s Acculturation Programs Coordinator, remarks that between green card and naturalization applications, reuniting family members left behind, and handling international travel, the legal team has “more than they can handle.” McCormack herself makes this comment while racing between various classrooms and offices, hugging young mothers in headscarves and laughing with their smiling husbands along the way.

***

The limitations IRIS faces as a small and minimally funded organization, coupled with an outpouring of community interest and support, led its leadership to revitalize the co-sponsorship model. IRIS defines co-sponsorship as “a shared commitment between IRIS and a community group to help a refugee family resettle in Connecticut and become self-sufficient.” In essence, the co-sponsor group assumes most of the responsibilities an IRIS case manager would normally. A typical co-sponsored family lives outside New Haven, in the same town or community as its co-sponsor group. According to George, “the classic co-sponsorship is that they’re in a separate school district, a separate employment environment, a separate community where they’re being resettled.” In the beginning, the family depends on the volunteers, but gradually they adjust and become self-sufficient. Ideally, “before you know it, the relationship really evolves into one of friendship and just helping your neighbor, not so much financial support,” he says.

This model has been around for years, but it has only recently become a keystone of IRIS’s operations. When George started working at IRIS eleven years ago, the office was moving away from co-sponsorship. “The director, my predecessor, thought it was more trouble than it was worth, that co-sponsors were going off on their own and doing anything they wanted to do,” George said. “She was fed up with it. So I went out and talked to people about it, and I learned that most of the problems were the result of the co-sponsors just not being trained and selected properly.”

As Executive Director, George has worked to revamp co-sponsorship, making it a viable option for refugee families and IRIS alike. Groups who are interested must apply, be vetted, and prove that they fit the circumstances IRIS requires of its community groups. It is not a quick or simple process. One question from the “Housing” section of IRIS’s co-sponsor application reads as follows:

a. Identify 2-3 neighborhoods in your vicinity where there are affordable apartments (2 bedrooms for about $1,000/month; and 3 bedrooms for about $1,400/mo; or less)

N.B. Please find housing outside of New Haven City Limits, unless most of your group is based in New Haven. And please research both 2br and 3br apartments.

b. What are the names of these neighborhoods? Please describe them, especially in terms of safety (check crime records), general upkeep, number of abandoned homes, and diversity.

c. Talk to a few people in these neighborhoods (residents walking down the street, people working in local businesses.) Ask them how safe they feel and how welcoming the neighborhood is. Ask how they would feel about having refugees from the Middle East and Africa as neighbors. Jot down some of their responses.

d. Familiarize yourself with the rental market in these neighborhoods. Talk to landlords. Ask: Would you be willing to rent to a refugee family? Would you consider a 6-month lease? Jot down some of their responses.

e. If the landlord requires a co-signer on the lease, would your group co-sign?

N.B. do not make any rental commitment until you are assured of the arrival of the family (by IRIS –– we usually get 2 weeks notice or less from our national affiliates.)

Beyond location, there is the question of funding (can your group raise between $4,000 and $10,000, or enough to provide three to six months of assistance?) and that of language (do you have access to a translator? what about English classes for adult speakers of other languages?). Above all, the group must be, as George puts it, “large and strong.”

Once approved, the co-sponsor must work its way through IRIS’s 43-page co-sponsor manual and attend training sessions with case managers before arrangements are made to pair it with a family. Often, it’s the minutia of case managers’ own experiences that proves most helpful to groups in training. Advice can be as simple as, say, reminding co-sponsors to bring water and snacks when they go to meet their family late at night when they first arrive. If a Connecticut Limo is dropping a family in New Haven, but their co-sponsor group is from all the way out in Danbury, little details like pretzels will ensure a smooth and easy last leg of the long, taxing trip. This, too, is a crucial element of the job of co-sponsors. Beyond logistical assistance, they aim to provide a community and facilitate a comfortable transition once a family arrives in America.

From 2012-2014, IRIS worked with two or three co-sponsor groups each year. In the 2016 fiscal year, this figure rose to fifty. The explosive surge in community interest and support led George and his team to take a risk and tell Washington to send them twice as many refugees in 2016, the same year President Obama vowed to increase the number of refugees taken in by the United States by 15,000. It was a huge decision. But, George jokes, “at one point, before the State Department agreed to send us any more refugees, I was saying in a kind of strange, joking way, saying we might not have enough refugees to go around and satisfy the need of these community groups.”

As it turns out, he had nothing to worry about. Of the 500 refugees resettled by IRIS in the last year, more than 200 were placed with co-sponsors.

***

Silk describes the decision to form a co-sponsor group as a kind of “swooping together.” It began at a meeting last fall. IRIS, inundated with phone calls from people looking to help amid the Syrian refugee crisis, arranged an information session for interested groups and volunteers. As Silk put it, “I looked around the room and I knew all the Jews!” Given the monumentality of a co-sponsor’s responsibilities, they decided to band together.

Silk, who had just been laid off from her job in cross-cultural education at Yale, was “looking for a new challenge.” Following the info session at IRIS, she spoke to the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven about stepping up to spearhead a new Jewish Community Alliance, a job for which she is paid “really a tiny bit of money.” Five congregations in the greater New Haven area hopped on board, along with the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation, and then the application process could begin.

This process of forming coalitions of groups is something IRIS encourages, according to Liese Klein, IRIS’s Development and Communications Director (those involved with outreach at IRIS are accustomed to playing matchmaker). JCARR is one of many co-sponsors that started as several different groups. As the leader, Silk brought together members of these separate communities. In particular, she worked to create different task forces to deal with various aspects of resettlement.

“Our Housing Team finds an apartment; our Household Team furnishes, supplies, and sets up the apartment; our Welcome Team meets them upon arrival, shows them around their home, tells them how things like the stove and shower work, and provides a warm, culturally appropriate meal for their first evening,” Silk explains. And then there is the Education Team, the Healthcare Team, the Transportation Team, the Finance Team. JCARR even has a Cultural Orientation Team to “help them learn all the essentials to living daily life in our culture, from grocery shopping and banking to watching fireworks on the Fourth of July to going swimming in the summer.” And the Odd Jobs Network helps family members practice skills that will improve their employment prospects. Recently, they cleaned up graves at a local Jewish cemetery.

As evidenced by the number of task forces alone that Silk has set up, she understands the importance of volunteers. She has come to see who is reliable and will do what they say, and has settled on a trusted team of close to thirty active community members from a long list of 130 volunteers. And the level of community engagement has inspired her time and time again. “The day we were moving furniture into the apartment,” Silk recalls, “I counted at one moment 25 volunteers in the house including some children, even a little boy scrubbing the bathtub, and it was emotional beyond my expectations just to see what a group of people can do.”

The co-sponsor group through Yale’s own Saint Thomas More (STM) boasts similar numbers. Jenn Schaaf, an assistant chaplain, explains that while the core team is technically comprised of twenty community members and three STM staff members, there are more than seventy people on their volunteer list, and more than 100 people who have donated funds or supplies.

And yet, one of the trickiest parts of co-sponsorship is realizing that at a certain point it shouldn’t take a village anymore. Part of the definition of co-sponsorship is helping a family become independent. As Silk sees it, while a volunteer feels the urge to do as much as possible for the family, “that’s dealing more with our needs than theirs.” For example, it took JCARR volunteers two months of driving the family everywhere to realize that in the long run this was counter-productive. “We turned our attention to accompanying them on the bus until they became confident about using public transportation to get where they need to go,” she said.

Silk describes JCARR’s current phase as, “we’ll help you if you ask us for help.” The goal with all co-sponsor groups is that eventually resettled families will go from being dependents to simply being community members, even friends. Both Silk and Schaaf were quick to point out how much they have enjoyed learning from and about their families’ backgrounds. And looking forward, there is hope that these families will help the ones that follow. According to Silk, JCARR has plans to resettle three families a year, one at a time. “I could see [our current family] helping with grocery shopping or adult education,” she notes.

***

Across the nation, it is mostly churches that use the community co-sponsor model. JCARR and STM alike cite religious reasons in their decision to become co-sponsors. For Jenn Schaaf, Pope Francis’ request that Catholics take in refugees was a major contributing factor. For Jean Silk, it was the Jewish tenets of tzedakah, or giving back to the poor as an act of justice, and tikkun olam, which means world repair.

Religious groups have been a major proponent in refugee resettlement in Connecticut. “When I give a talk at a church or a synagogue, some of the older people in the congregation will say, ‘I remember when we resettled a family from Southeast Asia.’ Or, in a synagogue they’ll say, ‘Yes, we resettled Soviet Jews who fled persecution from the former USSR,’” George remarks. Both Klein and George explain that while they encourage any sort of community group to get involved in co-sponsorship—as George put it, “We can’t let religious people have all the fun!” —it happens that most co-sponsors are faith-based groups.

Faith-based groups aren’t the only ones with a history of helping refugees resettle in a city that terms itself a Sanctuary City. Silk cites this legacy, mentioning the Elm City Resident Card program as something that marks New Haven as a leader in immigrant rights. “Continuing that tradition feels right,” she says.

In a recent statement, Mayor Toni Harp ARC ’78 stated that, “New Haven will continue to welcome new residents from other countries and embrace their positive contributions in our community.” As her Director of Communications, Laurence Grotheer, says, “Mayor Harp often points out that with the exception of native Americans, every single New Haven resident has ancestry from outside the United States, is descended from immigrants, and cedes the high ground trying to deny entry to new immigrants.”

This commitment to immigrants places New Haven at odds with those who are less keen to take in refugees. Last November, for example, Chris George and his team at IRIS agreed to take in a Syrian refugee family at a moment’s notice after Governor (and now, potential vice president) Mike Pence barred them from coming to Indiana, where they were originally to resettle. An article published in the Connecticut Mirror on Nov. 18 referred to the family as “unwitting pawns in a national post-Paris ideological argument.”

Yet on the other side, the voices of Mike Pence and others opposed to opening the United States’ doors are louder and more vehement now than ever. A letter to the editor printed in the New Haven Register not three weeks ago, on Sept. 7, argued that taking in more Syrian refugees is ill-advised for many reasons, among them that “we are currently witnessing… Islam’s mandatory migration for purposes of waging jihad.”

***

On a recent sunny afternoon, the corner in front the IRIS office teems with chatty men and cigarette smoke. Laurel McCormack stands on the stoop. “Yalla, guys!” she calls out, gesturing for the men to come inside. “And don’t smoke! It’ll kill you!” It is time for the day’s Cultural Orientation (CORE) session to begin.

The two and a half days of CORE sessions are part of the government’s requirements for resettlement. Families resettled in the last two months by co-sponsors and IRIS case managers alike crowd into a small classroom for today’s class, which will cover education, child abuse, and employment. Small children reach for the Chex mix while their parents pick at rice from styrofoam takeout boxes, and exactly twelve minutes behind schedule the session itself begins. Three translators and two instructors work sentence by sentence with the families, most of them Syrian, to discuss the basics of sending your child to school. This is what a school break is. This is how the school bus works. Sometimes you need to write a note for your child, here is what it should look like.

It takes a while to get through the material. The classroom is cacophonous; the students all chatter. There are babies crying and children running around and the rustling of near-empty bags of Famous Amos cookies. Each sentence from a translator triggers a stream of questions. The parents lean forward in their seats and scribble notes. A few rush up to the instructors during the fifteen minute breaks. What if the bus doesn’t stop very close to our house? What if my daughter gets sick? What if my son needs help with his schoolwork?

The room is abuzz with confusion—about the finer points of raising children in America, and also about where the second package of graham crackers went. But there’s a calmness, too, evident in the way one couple holds hands atop the table, or in how a young man swings around in his cushioned swivel chair.

After the first break, the CORE instructors move into discussing the challenges children will face in the coming months. Adjusting is hard, they emphasize; it takes time. As they speak, a young girl runs in from the children’s playroom, tears in her eyes. Her father scoops her up, kisses her cheeks, sets her down on his lap. Then he returns to his notes.

Some people are very good at packing. I am not one of these people. Upon dumping the contents of my overstuffed duffel bag onto the floor of my room in Durfee last September, I felt overcome with a sense of dread. What had I forgotten? What was I going to miss? Plenty. With that in mind, allow me to offer a few words of completely unqualified advice.

First and foremost, I cannot overstate the importance of creature comforts. You live here now! This is not the time be spare; if there are things that will make your room feel more cozy or cluttered or familiar, then that’s reason enough to bring them. The purple furry rug I bought on impulse right before I moved in was a colossal pain to clean, but I swear it measurably improved my quality of life. Rugs, lamps, succulents, your Hair: The Musical poster, your collection of limited edition Cabbage Patch kids—leave no stone unturned. You’ll be glad for it (even if your roommate isn’t).

Speaking of comfort, be prepared for the elements. And I’m not just talking about potential polar vortexes come winter. These days, you could be wearing a ski jacket in April or breaking out your bikini to tan on Old Campus in mid-January. This is a good thing to bear in mind. Climate change is no joke, and neither is sweating through all your sweaters because you burned through the three t-shirts you packed without time to do laundry.

That’s the thing, in the end: packing is about preparedness. Which is why I’d advocate for holding onto that headlamp from FOOT (and maybe the whistle too, while you’re at it). You will, at times, be eating and drinking. Utensils are easy enough to come across but bringing a cup is not a terrible idea. Some people may say that shot glasses are a college must-have, but to my way of thinking mugs are much more versatile and conveniently double as a great way to highlight your personality. My personal favorite is the one my grandparents bought me on vacation with a funky manatee in a tie-dye t-shirt on the front. It shows people I’m an animal lover with a wild side. Also: paper clips. Say what you will, these are of paramount importance. You don’t need them until you do, at which point it will be so nice to have them around.

I recognize that overpacking is not for everyone (especially not by the time May rolls around). But I do hope you’ll heed my advice as you zip up those suitcases and shove the last few loose items in the trunk of your parents’ car. My cardinal rule is this: if you think you want it now, you’ll definitely want it when it’s not at your disposal.

(Except for Ethernet cords. Who knows how those ended up on the freshman packing list.)

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