The lobby of the Yale University Art Gallery on Thurs., Feb. 25 didn’t buzz—it warbled like someone was blowing into a bottle and thumped like a techno club. As I walked in, I bumped into a woman with a basket of bagels on her head. The normally staid museum entrance was in full sensory swing by the time I arrived. The Dada Ball was underway.

Some immediately obvious features of the Dada Ball: a cheese sculpture shaped like a Jean Arp lithograph, green mocktails meant to resemble absinthe, a collective poem being passed around on an iPad, and a photo-booth where people of all ages were striking silly poses in bright costumes.

The event was entirely antithetical to my conception of museums (don’t touch, don’t talk too loud, don’t eat ice cream, definitely don’t dance). Which was, of course, the point. The Dada Ball was the opening event of the “Dada Un-Symposium,” a series of programs and performances that will take place over the next few months in conjunction with the YUAG’s new exhibit— Everything Is Dada.

***

So what is Dada, besides everything? I posed this question to the curator, Frauke Josenhans, right before we entered the exhibit the day before the Dada Ball. She paused and laughed. “Well, it’s not a movement that is easy to define or explain. It’s full of contradiction, it’s playful and provocative, there’s visual shock, unusual materials,” Josenhans said.

The movement does have a defined beginning moment. Dada was started in 1916 in Switzerland, at a nightclub called Café Voltaire. Artists staged shocking performance art shows, featuring dance, music, spoken poetry, and puppetry, that aimed to break all the existing conventions of art. The movement spread. It was anti-authoritarian, experimental, sometimes political, sometimes simply playful. There is no defined endpoint to Dada, Josenhans told me; though its rise occurred in the ’20s and ’30s, it had a resurgence in the ’50s and ’60s. “And many artists today still use techniques and ideas that come from Dada,” she said.

So the YUAG exhibit isn’t ordered chronologically, but around sections that each highlight a different aspect of Dada. “Everything and Nothing is Art” focuses on the “anti-art” aspects of Dada, like the inclusion of found objects. Josenhans and I lingered in front of a delicate curved white sculpture. She pointed to the title: Lampshade. It was quite literally an unfurled lampshade, repurposed by American Dadaist Man Ray. The “Irreverence and Social Criticism” contains more political works, like George Grosz’ oil painting Inside and Outside, which depicts a harsh division between patrons of a fancy restaurant and shadowy figures outside. “Exploring the Subconscious” features dreamy, sexual drawings, and watercolors by Beatrice Wood, hidden behind a red curtain. In the “Sense and Nonsense” section, Jean Arp’s lithographs combine aspects of everyday objects. There is, for instance, “Mustache-clock” and “Navel-bottle.”

Perhaps the most striking section of the exhibit is “Dada is Design.” While the rest of the sections feature works from the YUAG’S collection, this specially-designed gallery space is something totally new. Christopher Sledoba, Director of Graphic Design, worked with Yale MFA students in the Graphic Design program to design this space. It has black walls covered in white font and drawings. There are word puzzles, and symbols. The word Dada snakes across the walls in new forms—with the big D of the Disney logo or hidden in the Hebrew letters of Yale’s crest. There are stacks of newspapers for the taking with headlines like “DADA ZOO” and “LANGUAGE LAUNDERING.” Two old-fashioned telephones play Dada sound poetry—a hodgepodge of nonsense sounds.

“We wanted the exhibit to be as interactive as possible,” Josenhans told me. “Dada was not just about the visual art, and I wanted to incorporate other elements as much as possible.” Near the entrance to the exhibit, behind a curtain, a selection of short, silent Dada films flicker in black and white.

This interactivity extends into the Dada Un-Symposium, a series of talks, lectures, and performances, and the brainchild of the YUAG’s Assistant Curator of Programs, Molleen Theodore. “When we thought about programming for Dada, which was planned very much in conjunction with the exhibit, the idea of a symposium with academic lectures didn’t totally fit,” Theodore said. “So we thought of the un-symposium, which calls to mind the idea of the scholarly approach and then totally upends it. In the end, though, I think it will provide a full and thorough examination of this movement, and its effects across the disciplines.”

Hence the Dada Ball.

***

Perhaps the most exciting part of the Dada Ball was what was happening in the gallery. After my arrival, I discovered that the Ball wasn’t confined to the lobby. Upstairs in the gallery, a group of registrars posed next to the Jean Arp lithographs that they were dressed as. A woman wearing white face paint and cardboard collages glued all over her body told me that her costume was, “Absurdity.”

Warbling bubbly noises drifted through the gallery—something like underwater classical music. I assumed that there was a speaker somewhere, but when I peeked into the film room, I realized that the music was live. Hans Bilger, BR ’16, was playing the double bass and Gideon Broshy, CC ’17, was using synthesizers to improvise along with the score. People were drifting in and out, listening, absorbing, moving. Throughout the whole night, more than 500 people came through the exhibit.

In some ways, Dada can seem like a series of negations: an anti-art movement that rejects a defined ideology. Sometimes, maybe, Dada is nothing. But also, Dada is visual, sonic, tactile, participatory. So sometimes Dada is everything. And at the Dada Ball, it felt like a celebration.

David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker since 1998 and is the author of six books. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Lenin’s Tomb, about the final days of the Soviet Republic. He also wrote a biography of President Obama that focused on issues of race, published in 2010. In his Thurs., Nov. 12 Master’s Tea, he admitted to sleeping five hours a night. He sat down with me after the talk in Branford Common Room to talk about race at Yale, the media’s portrayal of recent events on campus, and his terrible band.

Yale Herald: What do you think of the dichotomy that’s been set up between free speech and the discussion of race on campus?

David Remnick: Because of who I am, and the job I do, I’m as close to being a first-amendment absolutist as it’s possible to be. As far as I can see, this is a false argument. Was that scene at Missouri edifying? No. Particularly the faculty member was, to say the least, disappointing. And I found a great dignity in that photographer not giving an inch, saying why he was there repeatedly, and not losing his cool, which is very hard to do. But I also know that free speech is not the issue. The issue is, as I understand it, that there are both institutional racist aspects of these institutions, and individual acts that are repulsive. I think everybody would agree that, at Yale, you want your diversity of faculty to be much better than it is.

YH: One thing that’s come out of this debate is the idea that certain national media outlets are taking things out of context. What does it mean to take something out of context? To some degree, of course, all journalism is taken out of the context of the original situation.

DR: It’s a matter of degree. People who think that there is proper context and improper context are deluding themselves. But there are matters of degree. If somebody loses their cool—really loses their cool—but it was preceded by a precipitating reason, then it’s a better and deeper thing to have a broader sense of what happened. Then there’s the historical question of context. Why are we having this discussion in the first place? Why are we talking about Halloween costumes? There’s a reason for it. I want to read that full story.

YH: As someone who’s written extensively on the subject, what do you perceive as the greatest misunderstanding about race in America today?

DR: For starters, a lot of people my age are under the misbegotten notion that we’ve solved the problem because they have a distinct memory of the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath. Because of legislation and other advances, people think: problem solved. But, you know, we live in a country that is constantly being formed. If you just allow that to be a cliché without meaning, then it’s all too convenient. Being formed means there’s pain all along. The assertion that nothing’s changed since 1960 is just demonstrably wrong. But to rest on those laurels is worse than wrong. It’s tragic, it’s stupid, and it’s cruel. In this country, any number of states and state legislatures are determined to limit the black vote. To limit the franchise of African-Americans through all kinds of voting rights infringements. The Supreme Court of the United States has encouraged this. The election of Barack Obama was a fantastic advance, and I think it can only serve as an inspiration to other minorities, and young African-Americans, about their own sense of possibilities, but at the same time it has unearthed layers of racist feeling and resentment that could not be more manifest.

YH: In college newspapers across the country—and in the Yale Daily News and the Herald—there’s been a movement towards the personal narrative on certain issues. What do you think of the use of “I”-driven pieces to address sexual assault, or racial harassment?

DR: Let’s take sexual assault. I think that’s an excellent example. Are there instances in which somebody gets falsely accused of sexual assault? Yeah, yes. But the emphasis on the false accusation is a way of dismissing the larger problem. The larger problem is: how do we describe it? Is a more dispassionate way of describing it a different avenue and an effective avenue? I think so. Does that discount personal testimony? No, it does not. There are different ways of describing things and they all have their potential value.

YH: In the vein of the “I”, why doesn’t the New Yorker have comments enabled on its website?

DR: Mostly because they tend to be dominated by very few people who then go off on their own tangents, and it’s of limited value. And we’re not the only ones. I think you’ve seen this all over the internet. There’s been a cutback in them. I can see the danger, and I can also see the value. One only has so much energy and if we’re going to expend it on the policing of comments, maybe that’s not the best use of our time.

YH: What do perceive as the audience of the New Yorker? When he founded it, Harold Ross said, “It’s not for the little old lady in Dubuque.” Is that still true?

DR: I’d be happy for little old ladies in Dubuque to read us. I think he said that in a day when the New Yorker was a comic weekly for Jazz Age Manhattanites. This is at a time when New Yorkers probably thought that everywhere else was Nowheresville. John Updike once said that people who live in New York think everyone else is vaguely kidding about where they live. I don’t think that. I think the country is far less provincial, and I’m grateful for every reader we have. Of course, nothing can be for everybody, and if we tried to be for everybody, we’d be a radically different publication. There are things in this life that try to be for everybody. McDonald’s, for instance. I have no beef—no pun intended—with McDonald’s. But that’s not who I want to be. And I know what the criticism of that is: elitism. But no one is blocking the gate to your reading this. No one. Any more than anyone is blocking the gate to somebody reading any book or watching any movie. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. If we’re missing things then we should be open to new things, but you can’t be all things to all people, and if you are then you’re a very different kind of product.

YH: I can’t really imagine anything that is all things to all people.

DR: Certain bars of soap. Water.

YH: You mentioned in the Master’s Tea that your work is fairly consuming, and you don’t collect stamps on the side. Do you have any hobbies that aren’t stamp collecting?

DR: I do have one. I play the guitar very, very badly. I take lessons and I’m in a horrible band. Tomorrow night we’re playing at Bowery Electric. It’s going to be a catastrophe. A catastrophe.

Birthright of Greater New Haven feels a little like a grandma’s parlor, except for the small plastic models of fetuses on display. There’s a green velvet couch, flowers on the center

table, and a poster of Mary and Joseph. There are pictures of babies everywhere. Then there are three plastic “Stages of Life” models which show a baby’s development before birth. And on one wall, there’s a rainbow-colored rendering of overlapping fetuses.

The center is wedged between a travel agency and a parking lot on Whitney Avenue in Hamden, Conn. The window features a display of a teddy bear, a ceramic angel, and a bouquet of roses. A sign in the window advertises “practical support to the pregnant woman in crisis.” On Tues., Oct. 13, an elderly woman named Alfreda, who says she’s been volunteering at the center for “too many years to count,” welcomes me inside.

She hands me a pamphlet whose cover reads, “Are you pregnant? Scared?” It details a number of services Birthright can offer: free pregnancy tests, education on pregnancy, prenatal information, information about medical help and financial assistance, adoption referrals, maternity and baby clothes, and friendship.

Birthright of Greater New Haven is one of the 27 Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Connecticut. There are about 3,500 CPCs nationwide. The centers are non-profit, usually Christian organizations that counsel women who have unplanned pregnancies. Alfreda told me, “We provide love and care to all women who come to us. We help women recognize their options.” Abortion is notably absent from those options, though.

Birthright International states that one if its goals is to “attempt to effect, in every possible way, a decrease in the number of abortions by encouraging pregnant girls and women to have their babies.” When I asked her about abortion, Alfreda said that they don’t provide abortions or abortion referrals, because “we don’t believe in that.” While pro-life lawmakers try to restrict women’s access to abortions by squeezing funding from Planned Parenthood and passing legal limitations, CPCs engage in the war over women’s reproductive rights on a local, personal level.

Pro-choice activists are fighting back. They accuse CPCs of providing false medical information, using deceptive advertising, and emotionally manipulating women in crisis. This past June, NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, a non-profit advocacy organization, published a 32-page report that slammed the state’s CPCs for their tactics. And on Fri., Oct. 9, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Reproductive FACT Act, the first legislation that regulates CPCs at the state level.

Both sides claim that they are working towards “choice” for women. The staff of CPCs say their goal is to provide as many options as they can to women facing unplanned pregnancies. They use the language of choice in their missions and advertising: “providing alternatives,” “options counseling,” “helping women decide.” One center inMiddletown, Conn. is named A Better Choice Women’s Center.

But Stacy Missari, board chair of NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, told me that the organizations hinder choice through their singular goal. “They’ve presented themselves as health centers giving unbiased information about pregnancy, but they have one agenda, which is to dissuade women from considering all their choices, including abortion. Their deception is in the hidden nature of their mission.”

***

I sit in the waiting area of Carolyn’s Place in Waterbury, Conn. on Fri., Oct. 16. One corner overflowed with children’s toys and books. I leaf through some informational leaflets from the front office. I pause on one whose cover reads, “This is NOT your only choice,” featuring a picture of woman holding up an open palm. On her hand in pen are the words, READ THIS. So I did.

It details the evils of abortion. Under the heading ABORTION HURTS (Physically. Mentally. Emotionally.) it lists uncited and unsubstantiated claims. It quotes a woman named Ann Marie saying, “Abortion changes you forever…it held me in bondage to feelings of regret, remorse, depression and despair. My soul became a slave to self-hatred and worthlessness.”

It goes on to claim that women who terminate pregnancies have suicide rates that are 10 times higher, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, and a long list of psychological traumas. The pamphlet categorizes them as symptoms of “after-abortion trauma.” The American Psychological Society and the American Psychiatric Association have both issued statements debunking the myth that abortion is linked to mental health.

This misinformation has been widely documented by pro-choice groups. Missari sent me photographs of several others pamphlets from Connecticut CPCs. One, which she said came from Saint Gianna, the closest CPC to Yale’s campus, claimed, “Women who have abortions are twice as likely to die in the following two years.”

Elina Anderson, who worked as an undercover investigator for NARAL’s report in North Carolina, visited 27 CPCs in 2011. She told me that the medical misinformation she received was startling. Most centers she visited claimed that abortions caused breast cancer, a claim that has been widely refuted by scientists and doctors, notably the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute. Almost everyone she spoke with told her that abortions affect mental health, and also counseled her on “natural birth control methods” when she told them she was married but not trying to have children. “Condoms and birth control were never options,” Anderson said. “It was always pulling out, or the rhythm method, which are obviously ineffective.”

This sort of deception can be traced to the founder of the first CPC in the U.S., Robert Pearson. He was point-blank about his tactics. In 1967, Pearson, who was formerly a building contractor, opened the first center in Hawaii—six years before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, but just after Hawaii decriminalized it. Pearson later moved to mainland U.S. to create a foundation to start more CPCs there. His manual, published in 1984 and titled How to Start and Operate your own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center, describes how CPCs should manipulate women out of terminating their pregnancies.

It instructs centers to seek listings in the Yellow Pages alongside abortion clinics so that women might confuse them. He encourages founders to have two names for their centers—one to attract women who are seeking abortions, and another to attract pro-life donors. His manual tells staff members never to counsel women in favor of contraception, and instructs them not to state that they are pro-life organizations over the phone. While most centers offer only drugstore-grade urine tests, Pearson wrote, “Tell her it’s a refined form of the old rabbit test. This usually satisfies them. At no time do you need to tell them what you’re doing.”

Pearson justified these lies by claiming that he was saving lives. In a 1994 speech, Pearson said, “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan… A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby. Therefore, when she calls and says, ‘Do you do abortions?’ we do not tell her, ‘No, we don’t do abortions.’”

NARAL’s report on Connecticut’s CPCs—entitled, “The Right to Lie”—paints a portrait that aligns with Pearson’s tactics. Between February 2012 and June 2014, undercover investigators visited 21 of the 27 centers in Connecticut and pretended to be women concerned about unplanned pregnancies.

The statistics detail a deception of dramatic proportions. According to the report, one CPC volunteer told an investigator that birth control pills are W.H.O.-classified carcinogens, and that having a medical abortion is like “taking poison” because of its equivalence to a massive dose of birth control. Another told an investigator that she didn’t need to see a doctor during her pregnancy because pregnancy is “common sense,” and that she should just eat more fruits and vegetables.

The report claimed that 80 percent of CPCs incorrectly stated that abortion leads to breast cancer. Ninety percent claimed that abortion would lead to mental health problems. Ninety-five percent offered incorrect medical information about abortion. Seventy-five percent provided misleading information about birth control and emergency contraception.

The NARAL report in Connecticut does not point to specific CPCs, referring instead to “one CPC” or “a different CPC.” According to Missari, “the intent was not about wanting to attack a specific CPC, but to talk about them as a whole. They vary so greatly, but our original intent wasn’t to vilify one center, but to broadly address the deception of CPCs.” But the fact that the attacks on CPCs were semi-anonymous undermines the credibility of the report.

It’s unclear if most of the quotes came from one or two CPCs, or all 21 that investigators visited. I visited five Connecticut CPCs. I was never a patient, and so my ability to assess the medical information they provide was limited to what was publicly available. There was the pamphlet I picked up in Waterbury; and then there was “Before You Decide” from Care Net of South Eastern Connecticut in New London, a more honest approach to women’s health options.

***

Care Net feels like a doctor’s office when you walk in, and it is. It’s the only medically licensed CPC in Connecticut. There’s a sparse waiting room and a window for check-in. Picture ID is required. The baby clothes and religious iconography are notably absent from the waiting area,

as are informational leaflets. As a licensed outpatient clinic, their function is also more advanced. Rather than the self-administered urine tests that the other CPCs use, nurses administer medical-grade tests and ultrasounds. The medical staff recently received Department of Health training to become a certified HIV testing center.

The director, Lisa Maloney, shows me “Before You Decide,” the publication put out by Care Net that staff members show women during their decision-making process. “We’re here to help women make informed choices,” Maloney says. “There are essentially three options for a pregnant woman: abortion, adoption, and parenting. We give equal time to all three choices.”

I ask Maloney what counseling they provide on abortion, and she flips to a page that lists abortion risks. “If you go to the Planned Parenthood website, you’ll see the same risks. All of the information here is cited. It’s from the Center for Disease Control and the Guttmacher Institute,” Maloney says. “We’re using their information.” The risks listed do match up with the ones on Planned Parenthood’s website—allergic reaction, blood clots in the uterus, failure to end pregnancy, infection, injury to the uterus, and bleeding. The only difference is in the framing. While Planned Parenthood devotes only a bulleted list to potential risks, “Before You Decide” devotes a paragraph to each.

Anticipating my next question, she says, “I know one of the things pregnancy resource centers get hit for is saying that abortion causes breast cancer. You’ll notice that’s not in here.”

Maloney strongly denies that Care Net in New London uses deceptive advertising or medical misinformation. “We get lumped in with a lot of scary stuff,” Maloney says. “But we’re a licensed outpatient clinic. We provide women with an honest assessment of their options.”

Medical licenses for CPCs—or the lack thereof—are currently a hot topic. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which has been in effect for 20 days, requires unlicensed centers that provide pregnancy-related services to disclose that they are not licensed providers. It also forces licensed health clinics to state that California has public programs that provide free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services, prenatal care, and abortion.

Two clinics have sued California Attorney General Kamala Harris over the FACT Act. Their claim is that the posted notices violate first amendment rights and that the law unconstitutionally requires centers “to speak messages that they have not chosen, with which they do not agree, and that detract, and distract from, the messages they have chosen to speak.” Similar laws were struck down in Baltimore and New York City for violations of first amendment rights, but one was upheld in San Francisco. This is the first statewide legislation that regulates CPCs.

When the legislative session begins in January, NARAL will push for similar legislation in Connecticut, Missari said. She named Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal as an ally in this push—he came out strongly against CPCs after NARAL published the report. She argues that because no clinics are licensed family planning providers—even Care Net is licensed only as an outpatient clinic—the lack of clarity can be harmful to women.

“If I were someone who didn’t study this, I would reasonably assume that if this is a place where I can go and get a pregnancy test, they would also do all the other things that a comprehensive family planning clinic would do—information about possible complications, preexisting conditions, prenatal information,” Missari said. “This is not going to happen at any of these clinics, even the more medicalized ones.” Based on the services most CPCs offer, Missari is right.

And the consequences can be serious, she continued. “So it’s very dangerous, actually. Women who are early in their pregnancy don’t know that they’re supposed be doing certain things because these centers don’t tell them.”

A representative from Senator Blumenthal’s office said that he is not currently working on legislation related to CPCs, but he acknowledges the urgency of the issue. “Crisis pregnancy centers that pose as a source of reliable medical advice—especially in vulnerable situations—are a threat to women here in Connecticut and across the country,” Senator Blumenthal wrote in an email. “Women need and deserve access to honest, professional medical advice and care.”

Although only a small number of the country’s CPCs have medical licenses, others are moving in this direction. The National Institute for Family and Life Advocates is hosting their “medical and legal summit” on Nov. 13-14 in Fredericksburg, VA. The panels seek to provide medical information to directors and staff of CPCs. Their mission states that one of their goals is “to provide legal resources that enable PRCs [another term for CPCs] to convert to medical clinic status.”

Several medical ethicists with whom I spoke raised questions about the ethics of the medically licensed centers. Benjamin Doolittle, a doctor and a pastor who heads Yale’s program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion, said that while there is no need for pro-life doctors to perform abortions, they are ethically obligated to provide a referral. “If I as a provider were categorically against abortion and the patient felt that they needed an abortion, I would refer the patient to someone who would give them an abortion,” he said.

Back at Care Net, Maloney shows me a form that women sign when they come into the Care Net facility. At the bottom, in bold, it reads: “Care Net does not offer annual exams, birth control, mid-life services, abortion services or referrals, mammograms or breast screenings, in-vitro fertilization services, pre or post natal care, treatment of infertility, or treatment of reproductive tract infections.”

Perhaps their bias runs too deep. Susan Yolen, Vice president of public policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, wrote in an email, “We have never pushed to require these organizations to become licensed because it legitimizes them inappropriately.” Licensure could make them eligible for government funds as community health centers under Title X. Currently, no CPCs receive government funding in Connecticut, though 11 states fund them directly through “abstinence education” grants.

Even if licensed centers provide correct information, and are upfront about their ideological bias, the issue of that bias remains. A center that has a moral opposition to abortion is unlikely to provide women with an unaffected assessment of abortion as an option.

***

The most nebulous—but perhaps the most serious—charge against CPCs is that they emotionally manipulate women in crisis. This emotional manipulation can include using graphic descriptions of abortion, videos of the procedure, and testimonials about emotional regret from women who’ve had abortions. The presence of baby clothes, toys, and pictures can be construed as manipulation of a subtler form.

Anderson, the researcher in North Carolina, said she was surprised by the negative emotional impact of the experience. “At first I was pretty blasé about it. I just thought, okay, I’m going undercover and it’ll be kind of fun, in a way,” she said. “For a little while it was, and then it really gets to you. I didn’t realize how dogmatic these folks would be and how angry they would be. I started having nightmares about it, and I was doing this as a student and a researcher.”

She described one clinic where a woman made her watch a graphic video about abortion, and then pulled out a machete and told her that this was the tool they used for abortions.

I found no machetes, but I did encounter the verbal equivalent in the pamphlet from Carolyn’s Place.

Some quotes: “In [vacuum aspiration abortions]…the baby is torn to pieces as he or she is pulled through the hose.”

“I don’t think a woman is ever prepared for the effect abortion has on a family. I couldn’t even look at my living children after I chose to abort their sibling.”

Under the headline, RAPE & INCEST (Abortion Isn’t The Answer): “I was raped and got pregnant. Nobody told me abortion would hurt more emotionally than the rape. —Maya”

But when I go see Therese Richie at Hope Pregnancy Center in Cheshire, Conn., it’s hard to square these tactics with her warmth. Hope Pregnancy Center is located next to Christ Community Church (with which it was formerly affiliated) and the Cheshire Public Library. The center is in a white wooden building. Outside, there’s a sign advertising free pregnancy tests.

Therese is a blonde mother of four wearing a bright blue sweater, a long blue and white skirt, and dangly earrings. She reminds me of a fourth-grade teacher: sunny, vivacious, and engaged. She was hired as director only a year ago, though the center has a big sign outside advertising 30 years of service in the community. “Every day here is eye-opening and heart-opening for me,” she says. “Every story is different. What I do is listen. That’s the most important thing I do in this job.”

She tells me that this is not a place of judgment. “The door here is always open, to anyone,” she said. “A woman will walk in and ask what we do here, and then a few minutes later she’ll be telling me that she had an abortion 15 years ago and she hasn’t stopped thinking about it.”

Therese is expressive, concerned, when she talks about the women she works with. “I don’t think that any woman’s first thought when she finds out she’s pregnant is, ‘I want to have an abortion,’” she said, shaking her head. “I think it’s, ‘I’m scared. I need help.’” She says she wants to provide that help.

She gives me a tour of the center, and we linger in the back room where there are baby clothes, bassinets, cribs, car-seats, mobiles. She lingers over particularly cute items, holding up a purple onesie. “And look at this—it’s a diaper-wipe heater,” she says, pointing. “Sometimes we get really nice stuff, too.” All of what Hope has on hand is donated. Women earn items through the “Earn While You Learn” program—they take parenting classes through the center, and earn one baby buck each time. With the baby bucks, they can purchase items of varying degrees of expense.

At the end of our interview, Therese asks if I’m life-affirming. I tell her that I’m not, that I think abortion is a morally complicated issue but that I think it should be woman’s choice. She nods. “When a woman comes in here, I always see the woman first. Not her baby, but the woman,” she said. On the way out she hands me a bottle of water for the road, and a gold pin shaped like little feet. It’s mounted on a piece of paper that reads, “The exact size and shape of a 10-week unborn baby’s feet.”

I wonder, driving back to Yale, how I would feel if I had been pregnant and come to Hope Pregnancy Center. Comforted, maybe. Confused, definitely. My insight into what women feel when they visit these centers is limited—I have only the NARAL investigators’ perspectives, several lawsuits filed against the centers, and patient evaluations from Care Net.

When I visited, Maloney showed me a number of client exit questionnaires from women who had had ultrasounds. Overwhelmingly—with two exceptions in the roughly 30 that I saw—patients said they were very satisfied with their care. They felt that the ultrasound technician was sensitive to their values. Towards the end of the form, the patients are asked whether the ultrasound helped them in their decision about their pregnancy. Some checked, “no” and wrote that they’d already decided. But most checked yes. Next to this box, one woman wrote, “I decided to keep it!”

On Care Net’s national website, a large banner claims, “469,089 Lives Saved.”

***

Crisis pregnancy centers operate at a number of crossroads—at the intersections between science and religion, loving advice and manipulation, and the various avenues of a woman’s choice about her unplanned pregnancy. In the minds of many who work at the centers, they also operate at the crossroads between life and death for an unborn child.

While legislation can help regulate CPCs, there is no clear solution for the deeper issue, the stark divide about conceptions of when life begins. Abortion is the most divisive social issue in the U.S. today. A Gallup poll in May 2015 showed that 50 percent of Americans identified as pro-choice, and 44 percent as pro-life.

I do not pretend to be outside of this divided sphere. At Christmas one year, my parents gave me $100 to give to a charity of my choice, and I chose Planned Parenthood. In visiting CPCs, I expected to encounter deception and scare tactics that I associate with the pro-life movement.

But the division is, I think, more complicated: “choice” and “life” are not diametric opposites. They may even be misnomers. It is possible to be pro-choice and believe that life begins at conception. But is it possible for a pro-life counseling center to really provide a woman with comprehensive choices?

I left my visits feeling like CPCs do offer possibilities to women, especially women who are not seeking abortions. There is no doubt in my mind that women have come to Hope Pregnancy Center and found Therese Richie to be an invaluable guide through a difficult time.

But still, the entrenched ideology of CPCs limits and manipulates choice. Sometimes this happens in obvious, dramatic ways: medically inaccurate information, deceptive advertising tactics, the wielding of a machete. But I also encountered more subtle interferences: the refusal to refer to abortion providers, the presence of baby shoes in a waiting area, a pin that is “the size of an unborn baby’s feet at 10 weeks.” These subtle manipulations were sometimes hard separate from my own emotional responses.

One morning, as I left Saint Gianna center, I even had my own crisis of faith. I texted my friend, “Remind me why I don’t think abortion is wrong?” She reminded me and I reminded myself. My own moral position aside, I have always been committed to a woman’s right to make her own judgment. My confidence wasn’t shaken for long, but it was telling. Even I’m not impervious to the tactics CPCs use to influence women’s choices.

I came to driving late in life—or, at least, later than any of my friends. My excuse was always: I’ve only lived in cities! I walk everywhere! I love my bike and public transport! But the truth is that driving intimidated me. Watching other people do it was nerve-wracking enough. Why do it myself?

But my parents eventually insisted, and I enrolled in driving school. I alternated between two instructors, both named Boris. After two years of lessons, near-collisions, yelling in Russian, and two failed tests, I successfully parallel-parked, backed up, and three-point turned. As of August, I’m licensed to drive, but I still sometimes forget that I no longer have a student driver sign on my car.

In this week’s cover article, Sophie Dillon, DC ’17, takes us back to driving school. Her profile of her driving instructor will resonate with anyone who has struggled with wide right turns or cried over a failed DMV test. And it’s really good writing.

Driving is one of the most significant cultural markers of time passing in our lives. But other writers ask us to understand what happens with the passage of time, too. Read “The Dead Shall Be Raised,” an essay by Clara Olshansky, MC ’18, in Culture. Elsewhere, for straight fun, check out the interview with the artist behind “Who Let the Dogs Out” in Voices.

Finally, read the brave piece in our Opinion pages. Diana Orozco, ES ’16, speaks out about her sexual assault. She hopes that others will share their stories to improve the sexual climate on our campus.

So read it, think about it, and talk about it. Keep this conversation going.

All my love,

 Sophie Haigney

Voices Editor

It isn’t Jimmy Carter, and it isn’t Hallowoads, and it isn’t even Herald Crush—by the way, do we still have that party?It’s when the petting zoo comes to town! Or rather multiple petting zoos, to your residential colleges. You think it’s a regular spring Sunday, and then all of sudden you encounter a cooing crowd of students. And you’re like, oh it’s probably some children but you hate children so you keep walking. But then, out of the corner of your eye, you see something strange. It’s a girl insta-smiling and holding up…a baby bunny? In Stiles courtyard?

For whatever reason, residential colleges are overrun one day a year by pigs, chickens bunnies, kittens, goats, and emus. And it’s fucking awesome. You can pet them, pose with them, roll around with them, whatever—for three solid hours, you get to frolic with furry friends.

The koala.

My first AIM screenname was koalagrl1212 and my password for everything since fourth grade has been some version of “koala.” Is it a bad idea to put that on the Internet? Maybe, but if you know me, you probably already know that. I have a collection of stuffed koalas dating back to childhood, and there are 62 of them. I have a dance move—my only dance move—called “the koala hands.” It is cool. Was I the person who stole the koalas from the San Francisco Zoo on December 28, 2000? Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. Actually, I was five, but I heard about it on NPR and I started plotting. Little-known fact: I am a koala.

Here are some good facts about the koala. Koalas are not bears. This is a common misconception, and I take great offense at the term “koala bear.” Koalas have opposable thumbs, which is proof that they might take over the world from humans one day. Koalas eat eucalyptus, but they do NOT eat all types of eucalyptus—they are fussy eaters. Koalas are feisty as fuck. You might think they’re just cuddly little creatures, but look up “Koala fight” or “Very angry koala” on Youtube. Think again. Koalas do sleep 18-20 hours a day, which is dope, and the other six hours they mostly spend eating. Baby koalas are the cutest animal on earth, and if you think otherwise I would maybe fight you. Remember: I am a koala. Scared?

So, it’s the Friday before The Game. The good news is that you’ve painstakingly organized a party bus, or car, or moped, or whatever, to get you to Harvard that night. And you’ve got your ticket to the game on Saturday (okay, maybe you actually don’t, but let’s assume you do). The question now: what do you do in between the time you get dumped in Harvard Square and the absurd hour you start drinking on Saturday?

Well, you probably want to drink on Friday too, but I can’t help you there. The only time I ever went to a Harvard party I got kicked out, so I don’t have tips. But eventually you’ll also need to sleep somewhere. As our resident Bostonian, if that’s a word people say (read: my parents live there and I know a few street names) I’m here to provide your guide to finding housing at Harvard this weekend.

Your first option: be part of an organization that has a pair organization at Harvard and pair up! Like, be in an a capella group or sketch comedy group or German literature society that has a counterpart, and then email them asking if you could maybe please sleep on their futons. This requires you to have some talent, like singing, or sketch comedy, or German literature, and also the organizational skills to reach out to your Harvard counterpart. It also means you’re sleeping on some rando’s floor and you’re going to have the awkward internal do-we-need-to-hang-out-all-night debate that you had on Bulldog Days.

Option two—if you went to prep school, hit up one of your 25 former classmates who goes to Harvard. Two serious drawbacks: this only works if you went to prep school, and it also means you have to hang out with your prep school friends. This makes you lame, because it’s COLLEGE.

The third option is not for the faint of heart. Lamont Library is usually open 24 hours during the week, but only until 10 pm this Friday. That said—there are plenty of places to hide in a 24-hour library. Yes, there might be cameras, and yes, it will limit your drinking options at night if you’re on lockdown starting at 10 pm. But it’s probably worth it for the street cred, and who said libraries and drinking were mutually exclusive?

Fourth and foremost: make out with someone and take over half of their twin-sized bed (or more than half, because fuck Harvard). Flirting should be easy because all you have to do is pretend to be lost, or actually be lost, approach a Harvard student and say, “Harvard sucks!” This is witty banter, so you will probably make out shortly thereafter. Housing problem solved.

Or just like, make some friends in Boston. I’ll be sleeping in my bed on Friday.

I’m afraid because I don’t know if that’s the right word. Even if I’m talking about rape as it’s legally defined, should I say sexual assault? Should I say sexual misconduct? I’m honestly still not really sure, so sometimes I’m afraid to talk about it. I’m even more afraid to write about it because a verbal misstep is one thing, but if I mess up in print, it sticks. Two weeks ago I wrote a cover story in this newspaper on this subject, and I felt myself struggling to find the right words.

This isn’t just a question of semantics. It’s actually an important debate and a conversation that demands our attention. The definitions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct are different but often overlapping. The legal differences between these terms are tough to parse through, further complicated by differing personal definitions. The connotations of the words make it even more confusing. “Rape” has violent roots—the word comes from the Latin verb “rapere,” meaning to “seize” or “take by force.” The word grabs your attention. But it also implies a violence that might instill fear or inaccurately reflect some experiences. So should we say rape?

Yes, I think—after you carefully consider what you’re trying to say. That said, I’m still afraid to say “rape,” and I’m afraid it to write it, even after I look up legal definitions and etymologies; this is part of the problem with discussions of sexual climate on campus today. I feel uncomfortable entering discussions because I’m afraid that the stakes for a verbal or written slip-up are too high. This fear isn’t just mine. It’s something I’ve observed in the conversations I’ve had about this over the past month. It leads to a reliance on abstract language that prevents us from saying what we mean. This has been particularly visible in the “It’s On Us, Yale” campaign, a White House initiative that the YCC brought to campus this fall. We’re scared of making people uncomfortable, of sounding insensitive or offensive. So we keep these thoughts to ourselves, and we lose the potential to deepen conversation. We find ourselves having repetitive discussions dominated by platitudes and language that’s often meaningless. Our maybe controversial, maybe wrong thoughts go unsaid and uncorrected.

It’s not just fear of saying the wrong word. It’s fear of expressing an idea that might be offensive. I’m complicit. I’m sometimes guilty of thoughts that border on slut-shaming. When someone makes a joke about a girl hooking up with “too many” guys on the same sports team, my split-second instinct is sometimes, “Well, why did she hook up with so many guys on the same sports team?” And my second instinct is, “Wow, did I really just think that? That’s messed up. I probably shouldn’t tell anyone.”

I believe that she should be able to do whatever she wants, with whomever she wants, as long as it’s consensual. He should be able to, too. There shouldn’t be any shame for anyone involved. My seconds of unchecked slut-shaming prove that I am a product of a negative culture where this shame still exists. But I’m afraid to say so.

This fear comes from a good place. It comes from recognizing that what we say is really, really important. That a rape joke perpetuates rape culture. That what we say can constitute sexual misconduct. That words are incredibly powerful and we should choose them thoughtfully. We should be careful and conscious when we speak and write. There are lines that we should never cross. But being overly careful and conscious inhibits conversations that could actually make a difference. When we talk about improving sexual climate, we need to be specific.

These discussions have been happening more frequently on campus, thanks in some part to the “It’s On Us” campaign. The conversations, hosted by student groups around campus, are ideal places for honest discourse, but I’m afraid that much of the discourse is affected by anxiety about verbal and written mistakes. Thirty seven student groups have posted photos on the Facebook page so far, featuring a “vision statement” and a series of concrete steps that the group plans to take towards that vision. (This newspaper posted one last week.) But the tone of the pledges tends towards the abstract—cautiously edited affirmations of “supportive community” and “empowerment.” The word “rape” has yet to appear in any of them.

Maybe it doesn’t need to. You could argue that, as a community, we recognize that rape is wrong and that the word actually alienates people or scares people, instead of working towards an ideal—which is the point of “It’s On Us, Yale.” But I would argue that the abstractions can be alienating too. They lack specificity; they’re difficult to unpack and understand. They also confine the discussion to a limited window of terminology, a reliance on the cliché—“constructive conversations,” “looking out for each other,” “empowerment.”

But what does “empowerment” actually mean? It comes up 14 times in the pledges. The “We Will” section, which is supposed to be concrete—and in the case of some pledges, it succeeds in that goal—falls more often into abstract territory. Even though I Iooked up its definition, I still don’t know what the term “empowerment” points to besides a notion of confidence. How do we achieve “empowerment” for a community or individual? What does it look like? I don’t know. Still, I say it and I write it because I know it’s a good, safe word. I know it’s a word that knowledgeable, socially conscious people use.

We can’t change anything if there’s a linguistic barrier to participation in conversations about sexual climate, especially if people are afraid to express themselves and fall back on terms that they know are safe. If, in conversations that are supposed to be open, we’re censoring ourselves into obscurity before we speak or write, we lose the opportunity to let others edit us. We lose the opportunity to have our thoughts challenged and our minds and culture changed.

So, next time you’re talking about sexual culture, be conscious but don’t censor yourself. If you think that rape is the right term, don’t be afraid to say it. Don’t be afraid to ask if it’s the right term. If it’s the wrong term, you can learn why it’s wrong, and if it’s the right term you can use it without being afraid to. When you think, “I definitely couldn’t say that out loud,” say it out loud and ask people what they think. Allow people to challenge you, and challenge other people. Don’t use a word that seems safe just because it’s safe. Using the right words is important, but don’t be afraid to use the wrong words first.

That’s what I’m trying to do now. In writing this piece, I struggled a lot with my words. I wasn’t sure how to communicate which conversations can stimulate change and which ones are regressive. I wasn’t sure which language I could use. I found myself slipping into vague terms because I was afraid to mess up. But I’m doing my best to push back against that fear. I’m still not sure I used the right words, but I’m going to try.

We start in Burgos but I really start in Madrid. I spend a honey afternoon in the Parque del Buen Retiro, waiting for Alex’s flight and drinking caña. This is an exotic name for regular beer. I sit on the grass and write postcards to people I half-miss about the white marble and eating olives and feeling nothing at a bullfight. I tell them I’m about to start a pilgrimage in Spain. The word pilgrimage feels a little absurd, and it reminds me that I don’t have a good reason to be here. I settle on a sentence that sounds good: Yeah, so at some point me and Alex just kind of looked at each other and said, fuck it, let’s walk across Spain. This is more or less true and it is more or less what we’ll tell people when they ask along the way. That’s how it happened, but it isn’t a real answer.

***

We have 25 kilometers to go. We do not yet know what a kilometer means, in terms of distance or in terms of distance before breakfast, or in terms of distance in the heat. But we cross a bridge over a river, look back at a hulking Cathedral. It shrinks behind us. It’s almost 6:00 in the morning, and we know that we have 25 kilometers to go. We look for signs and they go fast while we discuss Jackson Pollock paintings and her cousins in Israel and Goldman Sachs. At the top of a hill I see the gradations of color in a single wheat field that unfolds below—red and green and gold. Blue, almost. Only five kilometers to go. The land falls—we see a thin spire in the distance. That must be our town, I say, or she says. We walk with the spring of knowing that we will get there soon, and we get there soon, but it is not our town. Our town is three more kilometers, and we learn what a kilometer means when it is unexpected. It means we become angry and thirsty and things get blurry in the heat.We learn then never to say, I think we’re close. Never say, only five to go. All the towns in Spain look the same from a distance—a spire, some stones, a shady lane of trees. So never, ever say: that must be our town.

***

I read Anne Carson at night, and she writes about the Camino in stunning photographic stills. I try to copy her in my notebook, and at breaks I write fragments. Frómista, June 22: Slow morning. Café con leché, 2.50. Alex tells story about magical school. Dehydrated. Anne Carson is in France and everywhere there is water. Here there is no water, we are obsessed with the lack of it. She sees a drowned dog. I see no drowned dog, but as we walk into Carrion de Los Condés, parched, we see a dead cat with its entrails spilling out like a ball of fleshy pink yarn. Alex says she hates this place. We stay in the albergue with the singing nuns. That sounds pleasant but the place is strange. The nuns are young, from South America. They do not stop smiling and trying to help us with things. I tell Alex I feel sick and one of them appears with broth. I do not know why but I hate her. We gather with other pilgrims to sing songs in different languages. I hate the voice of the nun with the guitar. I hate the voice of the old Italian man next to me. Everything sounds like a low whine.We go to mass because someone says it’s Corpus Christi tomorrow and we’re doing a Catholic pilgrimage so we might as well. My dad was an altar boy. He still crosses himself in airports, but he says he hates church. I used to beg to go to church. My mom made me watch a documentary about the evils of organized religion instead. Today, religion feels disorganized—maybe because it’s in Spanish. I understand the part where they talk about the body and the blood. Tomorrow they will take the body and the blood and parade it through streets scattered with flowers. Today they invite us to share in la sangre y el cuerpo. I don’t. I think about the sun-dried cat carcass.

***

Outside Léon, a maze of overpasses and car factories disappears into Alex’s family tree. I learn everything. Her aunt Petra’s bangles clang and her cousin Diana is losing her hair in big clumps. Her grandfather ate diamonds in South Africa and took them in his stomach to Israel. He still rises at 5 a.m. and writes his plan for the day in cursive. He likes figs. She was a chess prodigy. I used to play soccer. She misses chess but I don’t miss soccer. I had trouble with my mom in ninth grade. I still have some trouble with my mom, but less. We talk about that. I have some trouble with my dad. We talk about that. We list all our kisses. We walk into Léon and heat ripples, heat ripples. Sweat drips off my skin onto the dust and I wonder—is there any verb for heat besides rippling?

***

In Léon, Alex sleeps and I sit alone at a bar with my book. An Irish guy sits down with me. He buys me a glass of wine and asks what my luxury item is. I tell him peanut butter and he laughs. His item is a copy of The Corrections. I am also reading Jonathan Franzen. He asks me if I have seen love on the Camino and I say no. He has, and he tells me stories about people writing messages on walls and walking backwards for each other. I decide on the basis of the wine and The Corrections that we will fall in love on the Camino. But it is already 9:00. I ask if he will be in Hospital del Orbigo the next night. He says yes. I say, see you soon. He is not there the next night, or the next. I think maybe he’s a day behind, or a day ahead.

***

After Léon: Trobajo del Camino. La Virgen del Camino. Valverde de la Virgen. We practice self-denial, make it our art. We give up wine and chocolate and soap. Three days without coffee. We want to say: we did this. We walked across Spain, and it wasn’t the coffee. We joke about doing penitence like medieval pilgrims for the excess of our college lives. We are both on intimate terms with gluttony, so we try to out-walk him. What we learn: gluttony keeps pace with us, in new forms. We do not eat chocolate or drink wine, so we gorge on warm milk and bread. We eat three bread baskets near Palas del Rei and try to hike after lunch. Alex almost throws up. The heat stays still.

***

The day with the Roman Road breaks us. 33.5 kilometers. We leave at 4:00 and hike in the dark with a cell phone flashlight. By 10 we are hungry, an irritating belly hunger for bread and peanut butter, and there is no town because the Roman road only goes through ruins. They do not even look how ruins should—just stones on the side of a regular road. Some tracks and the whistle of a passing train remind us how slow and small we are.It rains. Finally, the water we were desperate for, except now it comes in floods. We bicker about breaks. My toes ache cold. There is a town—a spire, some stones—but it is not our town. We do not even walk through it. I can’t do this.Alex’s blister pops. She sits down on the side of the road and I am afraid she will cry and add tears to all this water. She doesn’t. She says, Sophie, why the fuck are we doing this? We get there. There means a hard bed, and we sleep.

***

I have a hard time expressing affection, which is something we talk about, but in Triacastela it is easy. We eat raspberries and the sun is intoxicating. Alex is strikingly beautiful and sometimes I am jealous but not now. She laughs with her hands and knows how to make people feel comfortable and tell stories well. I take a picture so we won’t forget the table where we’re sitting and reading but mostly not reading. The clothesline, the grass, the raspberry stains. It’s almost too sweet, but I do remember to tell her I love her just then, and think that I should remember more often.

***

When we arrive in Santiago we don’t even realize that we’ve arrived. We come to a side door of the Cathedral and it looks like any other church. The front is covered in scaffolding, so it looks even worse. We have no cash, which in the morning seemed poetic and is now just problematic. My blister pops. We are too late for seats at the pilgrims’ mass. Somehow, we find ourselves laughing because we never cared much about Santiago anyways. So we go to an ATM, and sit down in a café.We eat vegetarian food and drink coffee with thick whipped cream. And then we ask each other why we walked across Spain to get to a church we didn’t care about. 500 kilometers. 311 miles. We have walked roughly the distance from San Francisco to LA—my hometown to hers. This is also the exact distance zebras migrate each year across Namibia and Botswana, the longest terrestrial migration known to man. But the zebras are going somewhere. We are at yet another café.But there’s something. Later I will try to write what it is—thousands of words about the fog in the morning, the insides of churches, praying in gardens, our blisters popping, Hungarian folktales, things moving forward, true tiredness. But in this café it’s laughing with Alex and coffee with whipped cream.

Jigsaws